All About Lulu

He cocked a brow.

  “Well, okay, once,” I conceded.

  “Once?”

  “Yeah, once, so what? It’s not a numbers game. At least it was fucking amazing.”

  “Who with?”

  “Just a girl from school.”

  “Just a girl from school? And it was fucking amazing? C’mon, who with?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Do I know her?”

  I began to blush.

  “What?” he said. “I know her? C’mon, who is it?”

  “It’s nobody!”

  “C’mon!”

  Then I saw the realization creep into his face, and he almost looked a little frightened by it, but I never felt that he was judging me, and I’ve got to say that I love him for that.

  “Whoa,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s . . . whoa, that’s a trip.”

  I always thought “that’s a trip” was letting me off easy, and I guess that speaks to my own guilt more than anything else. But then, how could Doug know the unnatural depths of my longing, or guess at the torture I caused Lulu? The simple fact that she was my stepsister was nothing beside that. Still, I can’t tell you my profound gratitude and relief at having confessed my knobby old secret and not suffered for it. It made me want to shout it to the world.

  “So, what about you?” I said, spearing a cold new potato. “It’s not like you’ve ever had a girlfriend. What’s your excuse?”

  Doug burped, but not like he used to burp; he didn’t broadcast it, he just let it die on his lips and blew it out the side of his mouth. “I’m gay,” he said.

  I dropped my new potato. For a second I thought he was joking. But after a long hard look in his silver eyes, I knew that he wasn’t. And when he knew that I knew that he wasn’t joking, he smiled.

  “You? ” I said.

  “Yup.”

  How was it possible that people eluded my expectations without fail? Ross I would’ve believed, I’d had suspicions all along, but Doug? Never.

  “And Ross too?”

  Doug waved it off. “Nah. He’s not gay. Believe me, I’d know. Ross is just . . . free-spirited. A little insecure.”

  Ross soon returned, a confirmed heterosexual, patting his belly and smiling.

  “Wow,” he said, plopping down in the booth. “Can anyone say mudslide ? Lordy. You guys ready to load up again?” When nobody answered, Ross knew something was wrong. “What’s up?”

  Doug and I exchanged blank looks.

  “Not much,” I said. “Doug’s gay and I had sex with Lulu.”

  Ross looked at us both in disbelief. We looked back at him, eager for acceptance. He began to shake his head.

  “Duh,” he said finally. “Was I born yesterday, or something?”

  “You knew?” said Doug.

  “How could you know?” I demanded.

  “I’m not fucking stupid,” he said.

  Doug was suddenly tense. It didn’t occur to me that it was a very different thing for him to divulge his secret to me than it was to divulge it to Ross. I see now that by blurting it out like that, I stole something from him, but I can’t say what.

  “Does Dad know?” said Doug.

  “Hell no. He’s clueless.”

  “What about me? Does he know about Lu?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it. It’s not that big of a deal, right? It’s not like it’s incest or anything. She may as well be anybody, as far as that goes.”

  “Does Willow know about me?” Doug wanted to know.

  “Doug, the cable guy knows, okay? You weren’t fooling anyone with all that homophobic bullshit. Well, apparently you were fooling somebody.” He looked at me like I was a knucklehead. I never had a twin look at me that way before. “I mean, c’mon, Doug,” he pursued. “That kinda stuff is just as obvious as walking around in a feather boa and humming show tunes.”

  Poor Doug must have felt pretty transparent. I know, because Ross turned his gaze on me, and I felt like a fishbowl.

  “And what about you?” he said. “Following Lulu around like a puppy dog, worshipping the ground she walked on. All your little talks, and spats, and lovers’ quarrels. I don’t know why you guys couldn’t just figure that stuff out. You might have had something good.”

  At what point did my nineteen-year-old brother surpass me in wisdom? He, who so recently, it seemed, had been padding around in diapers gnawing on frozen corn dogs, whose hair had measured a staggering twenty-one inches in height his junior year. He, who had not studied philosophy but real estate, and women’s footwear. At what point in time did he fill that gigantic melon of his with wisdom and insight?

  “So, are you guys ready to load up again, or what?” he wanted to know.

  Doug and I looked at each other.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure,” said Doug.

  And that was the last anyone said on either subject. Everyone had bigger things on their plates.

  Brothers Against Brothers

  Troy finally called me near the end of June. He was apologetic and a little nervous, like he’d been putting me off as long as possible, and we both knew it. He’d been busy preparing for his move to Seattle, he explained, tying up loose ends, making arrangements up north, and so forth. He sounded rather unsure about it all. I wondered whether I was a loose end. And if I was, did I even deserve that much?

  We met for breakfast at Norm’s on a Sunday morning after my show. I was eight minutes early. I took a window booth by myself and waited, sipping burnt coffee and watching the lights change on La Cienega. Troy was twenty minutes late. I ordered without him. I was already at work on my omelet by the time he arrived, listless and a little blotchy about the face.

  “Sorry,” I said, indicating my plate. “I thought you spaced.”

  He plopped down on the bench with a poof of forced air. “My bad,” he said. “My alarm didn’t go off.” He flagged the waitress. “Better late than never, I guess. Good to see you. I keep meaning to listen to your show. Lulu told me you’re on the air now, in the middle of the night or something. I quit drinking, so I hit the sack pretty early these days.”

  It looked to me like he hadn’t been hitting the sack much at all in recent days. He looked drawn. There were dark circles under his eyes. But maybe it was just early.

  “That’s overnights for you,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess so. Oh well, you gotta start somewhere.” Then he turned to the passing waitress. “Whatever he’s having, and coffee, thanks.” He turned back. “So how’s the hot dog biz?”

  “Really good, actually. I’m clearing over a hundred a day.”

  “Hmm,” he said. He didn’t hoist an eyebrow, didn’t even flinch. “How many days?”

  “Six, sometimes seven.”

  “Ooof. Ouch.”

  I felt my face color. First my beautiful show had been dismissed as a starting point, now my hundred bucks a day had been disregarded completely, as though it were fifty a day, or thirty-eight. I was a peasant all over again: still working too hard, still greasing the wheel, still eight minutes early. And here was Troy, princely in spite of his blotchy complexion, twenty minutes late, unconcerned, tying up loose ends before moving on to something bigger and better. Something bitter began rising in my throat.

  “You look terrible,” I said.

  “Do I?”

  “Yeah.”

  He slouched a little in his orange seat and issued a sigh. “I feel terrible, Will. Awful.” The edges of his voice were ragged. He was trying hard to elicit my sympathy. He wanted to talk about it, wanted me to commiserate like always. But how could I commiserate when we weren’t in the same boat? His boat was destined for Seattle, and the most exotic locale of all, Lulu’s embrace.

  “When are you leaving?” I said.

  He diverted his atte
ntion to the empty creamer. “Tomorrow morning, I guess.” It was almost an apology.

  “Good for you. Wow.” I couldn’t look at him. I gazed instead across the dining room past the register toward the waitress station, where a line cook snatched an order off the chrome carousel.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said plaintively. “Really. I wish it were. God, I wish it were.”

  “I don’t think anything,” I said. At the register, our waitress was scratching the small of her fat back.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  “Believe what?”

  “That you don’t have the wrong idea about—”

  “Believe it.” I pinched the phrase into a sharp little bullet. I don’t know what I wanted from Troy. An unconditional surrender, I suppose. In the deepest part of my heart, in the pampas grass and mashed potatoes part, I knew that Troy had no claim to Lulu’s heart, and therefore nothing to forfeit. Still, he was one more obstacle between us. What was my friendship with Troy in proportion to Lulu?

  “I suppose you’ll be fucking my sister some more,” I said.

  “She’s not your sister.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Anyway, I doubt we’ll be sleeping together.”

  “Fuck her. See what I care.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “Doubtful that I won’t care? Or that you’ll fuck her?”

  “Both.” Troy produced a folded letter from his jean jacket and passed it to me. “Go ahead, read it.”

  I tried to pass it back.

  He wouldn’t take it. “I’m asking you, read it for yourself, Will. What does it mean? Help me understand. I’m so fucking tired of secrets, so tired of trying to fit life together like a puzzle when there’s all these missing pieces. Why do I bother? Why do you?”

  “Okay, okay, spare me the soliloquy. I’ll read it.”

  The letter was indeed well-worn with Troy’s anxiety.

  June 25, 1991

  Troy,

  Sorry I hung up on you last night, I was confused and exasperated. Forgive me for being such an arbitrary and ungrateful excuse for a friend. You don’t deserve me, and I certainly don’t deserve you. I know I must seem like a complete basket case most of the time. I feel like one. I’d tell you all of this over the phone, but I’d only start not making sense again or hang up. I’ve been acting erratic for years, as you well know, but lately more than usual. Sorry about all the crying and the shouting. As for the crying after sex, you must not take it personally. Certain things happened to me. If I were made of stronger stuff, if I were a better healer, if I were someone else, if I were who I wish I was, these things would probably be resolved already. I’m not angry, exactly. Sad, maybe. Regretful. Maybe even a little guilty.

  Also, there are other unresolved things I can’t explain, which aren’t your fault either. They are complex and unfair and hopelessly entangled with other people’s lives and decisions. They are lies, and I hate them, but there’s nothing I can do to change anything. These lies are part of my very fabric, like scabs that have grown through the cloth. Don’t ask me to pick them, or explain them, because I won’t—not now, maybe not ever. Just know that I’ve been conflicted about a number of very basic things since the time I was fifteen, and that I’ve struggled every single day to do what I was led to believe was the right thing, suspecting all along that it was the wrong thing. And trust me when I tell you that there’s no chance for my redemption.

  What’s done is done. That’s what my dad would say. But like my mom always said to my dad, there are some things you can’t put behind you, the best you can do is to put them beside you. And with these things beside me, I find that I can’t take comfort in nostalgia, I can’t seize the moment. Whatever consolation the future might offer, it will only be that, a consolation.

  So here I am: the daughter of a grief counselor and a muscleman, unequipped to move forward, and too weak to carry my own burden. I’m not sure which one I want to run from most: the past, the present, or the future. Maybe the present, as I’m facing some of the toughest decisions of my life, and I can’t run from them, they’re too fast. I’ve been running a long time and you’ve been trying to catch me, and I’m very tired. I don’t mean to sound hunted. I don’t mean to discourage you. I know you’re excited about this move. I know you have a picture in your head of what the future is going to look like—in fact I know you have many pictures of the future—and I know I’m probably in all of them, and that’s a lot of pressure. Please don’t count on me, Troy. I can’t be counted on. Please, let’s take things one day at a time. The apartment is a bad idea. I need space. It wouldn’t be fair to you. I’m sorry. I can still give you the money if you need it, the deposit and first and last and the rest of it, and I promise we’ll see each other and go out to dinner and hang out like always. But that’s all I can promise, and I’m not even sure how good my word is.

  I know you feel a need for definition. I don’t blame you. You’ve asked me time and again what you are to me, and what you are to me is somebody I’ve loved. Somebody I still love. There’s continuity there. I know that’s not enough. Maybe my heart is missing some specialized faculty to arrange or categorize, but I can’t define you any better than that. I’m sorry. I hope someday you’re okay with that. Call me about the money when you get to town, or if you need help moving into your apartment.

  Love,

  Louisa

  I folded the letter and handed it back to Troy, who was straining to read my thoughts. I was poker-faced, though behind my facade a riot of fragmentary thoughts were at work, spinning and refracting and fanning out in kaleidoscopic fashion.

  “What is she talking about?” pleaded Troy. “What happened?”

  “It’s none of my business,” I said.

  “She was raped or something?”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “What’s all this unresolved stuff ? What are these lies? What is she talking about? What is part of her fabric? Is she dumping me?”

  “Really, it’s none of my business.”

  “I’m worried about her.”

  “Maybe you should worry about yourself.”

  “Jesus, what’s wrong with you? This is Lulu we’re talking about.”

  I took a bite of my omelet, though I could feel the rest of it wanting to creep back up my throat. “Exactly,” I said. “I’m done with all of it.”

  Troy slumped. He looked miserably out the window. I felt his anguish. It was my anguish. After Vermont, once I could no longer inhabit Lulu, or even gain access to her, I built my life like a scaffold around her and circled her endlessly, peering through her windows into darkened rooms. And yet at the end of the day I knew nothing about her—nothing of the immutable events that shaped her past, her present, and ultimately determined her future in a single terrible flash of inspiration. Had I even guessed at Lulu’s immediate future, had I possessed the slightest intimation of how sudden that future would play out, you can bet I would’ve done something differently. But how could I, when I knew nothing of her fabric, or of the forces that caused it to wear so thin?

  Sizzler

  On the Fourth of July, 1991, Lulu broke Troy’s heart one more time. He phoned me the following evening, not two hours after Willow had called with the news about Lulu.

  “Just calm down,” I told him. “Start from the beginning.”

  According to Troy, his tireless will to understand Lulu had finally overexerted itself. It happened over a late dinner in Lulu’s kitchen—a menu that included frozen raviolis, bagged salad, and cheap merlot—as Troy pressed her for answers regarding her enigmatic past.

  “She just kept evading me,” he explained. “She started growing impatient, and finally she stopped responding at all. But I kept pushing her, Will. I kept pushing and pushing her! I was just so sick of all the mystery—sick of feeling like the
re was all this stuff going on that I didn’t know about, all this stuff she wouldn’t tell me. Jesus, Will, this is all my fault.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said.

  “It is. I know it is. I promised I’d let it go. And I meant to, I swear. But I just kept pushing her. It’s like it all welled up in me for so long that I finally just burst.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Nothing. She just sort of glazed over. It was like she no longer saw me. Like I’d completely disappeared off the face of the earth. She cleared the table, and talked to the cat, and just went about doing stuff like I wasn’t even there. I’m telling you, I actually started to feel invisible.”

  Finally, without so much as a word, a gesture, or a glance in his general direction, Lulu scooped up Esmeralda and retired to the bedroom with an Utne Reader and an issue of Cosmo. Troy heard the box spring protest as she plopped down on the bed and clicked on the lamp.

  Troy sat at the table for half an hour listening to Lulu’s fingers leaf through the pages. Eventually, the flow of his thoughts slowed to a trickle. He felt his heart beating in his brain. Around ten o’clock he began to hear the distant mortar blasts of fireworks from Lake Union. When he finally summoned the will to leave, he found that his legs had fallen asleep. He left gradually, like a sunset, pausing one final instant before closing the door. Troy returned to his desolate new apartment on Eastlake where, surrounded by cardboard boxes and disembodied dresser drawers, he spent the remainder of the night on his back in the living room, searching for answers in the nubby constellations of his plaster ceiling. He dreamt of empty boxes and disembodied drawers.

  In the morning, Troy returned to Lulu’s place, determined to rewrite their ending. This time there would be no dialogue, only action. Clutching two vanilla lattes, he knocked on the door, but Lulu didn’t answer. He knocked some more. Nothing. He rang the bell. It gave a death rattle. He rang it again. Still, she didn’t answer. Troy set the coffees down and checked the door. It was locked, but he knew she was in there, avoiding him. He leaned out over the handrail and peered between the slats of the Levolors, where, through his own ghostly reflection, he spotted Lulu instantly. She was balled up in the mouth of the hallway in a slant of dusty light. She wasn’t moving. He could see little paw prints all around her, like they’d been stamped in ink upon the gray wood floor. The cat was nowhere to be seen. Troy said he got a sinking feeling right away. Pressing his face still closer to the pane, he tapped on it, but she didn’t stir. He rapped his knuckles on it to no effect. He hollered. His appeals only fogged up the glass.