Die a Little

  Their mouths are open, Lois’s lewdly, like a wound.

  Though their bodies and faces are tinted a rosy shade, the photographer hasn’t bothered to tint the insides of their mouths, so instead of red or pink, the mouths give way to a gray-blackness like something has crawled inside them and died there. Like their insides have rotted and the outside has yet to catch up.

  Suddenly, I hear stirring in the bedroom. Before I know it, I’ve palmed the card, shoving the rest of the pack back in the drawer.

  Mike Standish is standing in front of me, trousers pulled up, suspenders hanging rakishly.

  I am still kneeling on the floor, fortunately holding the phone book by way of explanation.

  “I’ll take you home,” he says with a casual yawn. “Sorry I fell asleep, King. Bad form.”

  “All right,” I say, looking up, knees brushing painfully into the carpet.

  He holds his hand out, and I grab it, and as he lifts me to my feet, I feel like the sin could never be greater. Who is this man? And—his hand now casually curved around my lower hip, my buttocks—what have I fallen into, eyes half open or more?

  • • •

  That night I think about the picture of Alice and Lois for a long time. I think about telling Bill. I think about asking Alice. Or Mike. But I know I will do none of these things. I know I will hold on to it, hold on to it tightly. The strangest thing of all is how unsurprising it is. It has a haunting logic. I suppose Alice had been desperate for money. Hadn’t she always been desperate for money? How can I know what it was like? I don’t know how bad things may have gotten before she had Bill to turn to. I don’t even know if the photos were doctored. I don’t know anything. But I know I will hold on to the card, tuck it in my drawer under three layers of handkerchiefs, just in case.

  Within two weeks, I’ve banished the thought. After a few awkward encounters, I can finally see Alice again without the image shuddering before me, raw-boned, grimy black and a stark, sweaty white. But I don’t forget it.

  One weekend, Bill and Alice canceled plans with me at the last minute to go to Ensenada. They came back glowing, brown as café con leche and with a duffel bag filled to bursting with mangoes, melons, passion fruit, ripe and fleshy. Bill pretended to be mad that Alice had snuck the fruit through customs while he, a member of law enforcement, no less, sat beside her. He spoke to her sternly and refused to melt at her lippy pout. But when she made her signature ambrosia dripping with honey and coconut, spelling his name with cherries on top, he ate heartily, pulling her onto his lap and kissing her with a sticky mouth.

  A few weeks later, Alice suggests a weekend getaway to Baja, Bill and Alice and Mike Standish and myself.

  “You know Bill hasn’t quite warmed up to Mike, and I think this would be a good opportunity for everybody,” Alice says to me in a confiding tone.

  “Bill doesn’t like Mike?” I say plainly, wondering what she knows.

  “I wouldn’t say that. I’m sure it’s hard for a brother. No man is good enough for his sister, right?”

  “It’s not as though we’re serious,” I say carefully. “He’s just someone I can go out with.”

  “All the better.” Alice smiles. “No pressure, then. Wouldn’t it be divine? Swimming, dinner at the waterfront restaurants, dancing.”

  “It sounds expensive.”

  “Mike can afford it. He’s got pockets full of dough.”

  “What about Bill?” I say, purposely light.

  “Oh, he needs to splurge more. He’s too careful. His work is so stressful. It’s important that he have fun.”

  “I don’t know if Mike . . . we see each other during the week. I think he has more glamorous commitments during the weekend. I wouldn’t feel comfortable asking him.”

  “I’ve already asked him. He wants to go. And don’t worry”—she grins at me sidelong—“I’ve booked separate rooms for you two, to keep up appearances.”

  “Alice,” I say, with a feeling of dread. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “Many, many reasons. And you know.” Because, in truth, I know Bill doesn’t like Mike Standish. I can tell by the careful way he speaks about him and to him, or the freighted tones with which he asks, “How was your evening with the publicity man, Lora? Did he see you home after the party, Lora?” Once I heard him say to Charlie Beauvais, “What kind of man wears a pink shirt, anyway?” And Charlie laughed, and Bill, rubbing his bristle cut, did not.

  “What do I know, Lora?” Alice says blankly but with a faint glimmer in her eyes.

  “You know. Let’s not go through it all.”

  “I don’t know what the problem is. I’m suggesting a lovely weekend trip. You should be thanking me,” she says with no apparent guile, only a pretty Alice-smile.

  “Bill will not want to do it, Alice.”

  “True, at first. He didn’t want to, at first.” Alice smiles. “But then he settled down about it.”

  • • •

  And then we are on the highway, in Mike’s convertible. Alice is playing Louis Prima loud on the radio and holding her wide-brimmed straw hat to her head, ribbons blowing behind in the breeze. There I am, watching Mike and wondering why we are all here. A cigarette hanging from his mouth, sunglasses shielding his eyes, he smiles lazily at me, as if getting a kick out of the entire improbable thing—what a gas. Here he is with a cop and his schoolmarm sister, two squares who should be sitting on some porch swing in Pasadena, twiddling their thumbs.

  • • •

  It starts with mai tais. We girls are drinking mai tais on the long deck that wraps around the hotel. The sun is setting, burnishing everything, and the rimy drink sets our teeth on edge, and we are leaning back and the drink is churning slowly and warmly inside.

  The men have ordered Scotch, which they are nursing quietly. They are trying to find things to talk about. UCLA football. The best way to get to San Diego. Mike’s new coupe.

  But Alice is skilled at making it work. She beams at Bill and brings up “topics” and laughs at all Mike’s jokes. She tells a long, funny story about a dress she worked on for Greer Garson. She’d had to take it out, and out, and out. They kept sending the dress back, saying the actress was “er, retaining” and needed more “room to move.”

  Mike has a second Scotch and begins to swap studio gossip, and he places his hand on my leg under the table and it is fine and relaxed.

  There is a lengthy discussion about where we should eat and where the best seafood is supposed to be and when is the best time to go.

  A sloe-eyed torch singer takes the stage in the bar and begins crooning. Suddenly, there are more mai tais and I notice myself giggling and can’t remember why I’ve begun.

  There are two men in panama hats at the table across the aisle who are playing cards.

  A trio of couples behind us are arguing raucously about moral rearmament.

  A man in the far corner is moving closer and closer to his date, a young Mexican girl who looks uneasy, her thin-slitted eyes darting around.

  “Is anybody hungry?” Bill is saying. But the rest of us don’t seem to answer, and then there are more drinks and Mike’s arm is around my waist, fingers grazing my midriff.

  “Don’t forget that actor who was sweet on you.” Mike is laughing.

  Everyone looks at Alice, who stares blankly.

  “Don’t you remember? That English fellow who kept saying, ‘Measure the inseam, darling. The inseam.’ ”

  Alice smiles noncommittally, not meeting Bill’s gaze.

  “Remember how he made you run the tape measure?” Mike chortles, and Alice suddenly laughs, too, despite her efforts. I think maybe I laugh, too.

  “I’m glad you don’t have to do that anymore,” Bill says, determinedly lightly.

  “They called her the Girl with the Tape.” Mike sighs. “And they meant it fondly.”

  “Oh, Mike,” Alice says dismissively. “Where should we eat?”

  “Let’s
dance,” I find myself saying, the music from inside swelling sweetly.

  “Wonderful!” Alice clasps her hands together. “Why eat when you can dance?”

  “Shouldn’t we eat first?” Bill says. “These drinks must be falling hard on you.”

  He is looking at Alice, but it is Mike who laughs. Laughs as if Bill has made a hilarious joke, and turns to me and holds out his hand and I take it. I take it.

  And the next thing I know I am pressed against him on the small dance floor, the orange-gold lights of the bar cloaking us, tucking us closely together. The music is so beautiful I think I’ll never hear such beautiful music again.

  • • •

  Later, I won’t remember what was playing. But I remember one lyric buzzing hot in my ear over and over, “It was a night filled with . . . desperate.”

  Later, the lyric won’t make sense.

  Later, I’ll try to remember how it went. But I can’t match it. Can’t make it work. Can’t make the words hang together right.

  I’ll just remember that we danced and then he seemed to know everything about me and seemed to see everything and he was so limited, such a horribly limited person, but that night he seemed like he knew everything and I would take it. Who was I not to take it?

  • • •

  At just past midnight, Mike deposits me at my door and says good night to us all. My brother and Alice, arms around each other, walk into their room, and I walk into my adjoining one. A few minutes later, I stumble into the shared bathroom. Holding on to the sink, dizzy with drinks and dancing, I laugh at my own reflection, its frenzied gaiety. How has all this happened?

  Alice comes in a few minutes later, dress half off, hanging in front of her like a silky bib. I resist the sudden flash before my eyes of her, laid bare, on the dirty playing card. Dizzy with drink, I literally shake my head to knock the image out.

  Giggling and hiccuping, she walks toward me, arms out. “Help me, Lora. Bill’s all thumbs.”

  Five minutes of giggly fumbling, of her buttons going in and out of distended focus, and I undo her.

  She tugs the top half of the dress down to her waist and shakes her arms free, facing the mirror. After a long look at herself, she reaches past me to my cold cream on the counter.

  “I always wash the makeup off,” she stresses, waving past my face. “No matter how smashed I am. If I can barely stand—if I have to hang on to the sink with one hand to see the mirror—I still do it.”

  I nod gravely and watch her scoop the cream with two fingers.

  Suddenly, we both hear a knock from my adjoining room.

  “Someone’s at my door,” I say. Alice’s eyes widen. Then narrow.

  “Honey, you’d better get it,” she says in a whisper, turning back to her reflection with a faint grin.

  “Is it Mike?” I ask as she covers her face in white.

  “Go get it, darling,” she says, her red lips still visible. “I won’t tell.”

  Vaguely, I want to tell her she has the wrong idea, that I haven’t invited Mike Standish back, that I don’t know why he might be there, and that there is no secret to keep. Tell whom? But I can’t form the sentences. It seems too exhausting. I manage only “Maybe it’s the bellboy . . . room service by mistake . . .”

  She keeps looking straight into the mirror, her face a big blank now. I walk back into my room, closing the bathroom door behind me. My left shoe dragging in the carpet, I make it to my room’s front door and say, touching the blond wood lightly, “Who is it?”

  “Little Jack Horner,” Mike says.

  I open the door partway.

  “Is that the one with the thumb and the pie,” I ask.

  “Sure, baby.” He reaches a hand from behind him and shows me a bottle of champagne. “Nightcap, room 411, five minutes or, if you’d like a personal escort, presently.”

  When he speaks, his eyebrows rise and his round shoulders tilt forward and I stare at him for a moment, leaning hard against the rough edge of the door, and then I extend my hand without thinking. And I take his arm. And my hand doesn’t even seem to make it halfway around its thickness. And his smile is so loose and so easy and only a half smile really, and I don’t even stumble because, you see, he wouldn’t stumble. He never stumbles at all. And as we walk along the red and tan diamonds on the carpet, the sconces releasing only a soft golden shadow for us, I think this might be all right.

  Two hours later, staring up at the shadows of the banana leaves on the ceiling . . . This is the end of everything. The phrase rings out and shoots through the air and quavers tightly, suspended, and does everything but dive into my chest. Could six words ever sound so ominous?

  • • •

  The following night, after a long day at the beach and the markets, we enjoy what becomes a nearly endless dinner on a commercial yacht anchored a few miles from shore. The service is so slow that it is two hours before the food arrives and, along with those at nearly every other occupied table, we become unintentionally fuzzy with drink.

  I have never seen my brother drunk before, and he is very charming.

  We eat lobster tails and drink champagne, and Mike pays for it all by charging it to the studio. Bill is too softly intoxicated to notice.

  Later that night, we end up at an old cantina with Wild West doors. Their feet gliding along the sawdust-covered floors, Mike and Alice dance to a thrumming mariachi band, and Bill and I lean back in rickety chairs and recover from the flush of the dinner.

  Somehow, although the music is roaring, we can hear each other perfectly and we recall—together and in impossibly great detail—a favorite Fourth of July from our youth, from the hornet bite on my throbbing leg to the splattery fireworks to the splinters Bill got from skimming along the boat dock as he ran, feet first, into the lake.

  • • •

  —I’m a little drunk, so don’t listen to me.

  —You’re a little drunk, I smile and listen anyway.

  —I’m a little drunk, Sis, and feeling like I want to tell you something.

  —Anything, I say, chest suddenly, strangely pulsing, rippling.

  —You know, right, even if I don’t say it, that I’d do anything for you. Anything.

  —I do know, I say slowly, solemnly, so he’ll know I mean it.

  —We’re each other’s family and I feel

  (His eyes luminous, severe, relentless: saying, Listen to me now because I may never be able to say this again, may never be able to tell you like this what I feel—what I feel and live every day and you do too.)

  —I—I’m yours, Sis. You know that, right? I’m all yours and I’m responsible for you and that’s what I want.

  —I’m glad, Bill

  is all I can say, all I know how to say.

  He tilts his head against mine, like when children swinging hammock, and gripping hands hard.

  And it is there, and happening, and then it is over, gone.

  But it breaks my heart it is so beautiful.

  • • •

  I will never forget it.

  It is in the middle of that same long, messy summer, before we even know she is pregnant. Amid all the fun, even with its dark edges, Charlie and Edie Beauvais slip unnoticeably off the dance card. We are all too busy to see, to stop for a second. And now, this:

  What could be sadder than seeing Edie Beauvais there, white fluffy cloud of hair against the pillow, eyes like two fresh wounds?

  I take a long time arranging the lilacs in the vase, unsure what to say.

  Her arms lay flat out in front of her, palms facing up, a tissue crumpled in one hand.

  “I’m awfully sorry, Edie. I know how much you and Charlie . . .”

  “Hmm,” she says noncommittally, staring out the window.

  “If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  “Thanks.”

  “Would you like me to get you a movie magazine? The new Photoplay?” I offer weakly.

  She looks over at me without moving or even turning her hea
d.

  “Will they let you leave soon?”

  “Day or two. I lost a lot of blood. You should have seen it. It was everywhere.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be back to your old self in no time.” I don’t bring up what Charlie has told me, about her not being able to get pregnant again.

  Such a little blond thing wasn’t meant for this, like wet snow on the pillow, sinking fast and nearly disappearing.

  But as I look at her, she all of twenty-three, I wonder what she will do for the next forty years of her life. I know she too is seeing her future spread out before her, years and years of Charlie working long hours and growing older and saggier, and she decorating and redecorating and gardening and going on long drives through the hills and fine lines etching in the corners of her bright eyes and watching other women with their baby carriages and their toddlers and long-lashed schoolchildren and awkward, shiny-faced teenagers and eventually downy, glassy-eyed children of their own. She will have none of this. It will not be hers. And her life feels over at twenty-three. How could one possibly fill those years, days, hours? One sharp slash and her future shriveled up into itself. How could one fill one’s life?

  This from a man so impeccable. But there it is, in the tipped-over bag Mike has left for the laundry, an effluvium of white sheets with a long, hot streak of fuchsia lipstick. I can picture a swirl of candy-colored hair pushed face-first into the bed linen. My stomach turns.

  Mike is fast behind me, scooping up the sheets and shoving them into the bag and yanking it closed with one swift gesture. Like a magician.

  I had been about to light a cigarette, even though I don’t really smoke. He had already pulled his lighter out of his pocket. And there it is, or was.

  I feel something slip inside me, fast and hard, and then suddenly regain its footing before hitting bottom. The shaking hand, cigarette loose between fingers, that had seemed about to move to my face returns instead to my side. Then, a second later, am I really leaning casually against the wall, managing even to finish lighting the cigarette, lifting my head to the still outstretched lighter?

  He snaps the lighter shut, looking down at me with watchful eyes. Then, he slides the lighter into his pocket and leans against the wall too.