Expiration Date (15 page)

He lit a cigarette now and wondered if Sukie really had, actually, killed herself.

Remotely he remembered how close the two of them had become—after their father

died

when they were seven years old—during the years they’d spent in several foster homes. They had never had a “psychic link” or anything like that, but the world was so coldly divided between
us two
and
all of them
that the twins could read each other’s moods instantly, even over the phone, and either one of them could unthinkingly and correctly order for the other at any restaurant, and the random letters on passing license plates would always suggest identical words to each of them.

Now Sukie was probably dead, and still his first response to the thought was
Good riddance
. He was surprised and uncomfortable with the vehemence of the thought.

The twins had begun to differ when they were going to Hollywood High School, and it had become clear that the money their father had left them would be used up before they would finish college in about 1974. Sukie had never been interested in boyfriends, and she resented Pete spending money and time on things like dances. And the girls Pete went out with always dumped him before long, so the whole effort of trying to pursue romances really had seemed like a costly waste.

E
EVENTUALLY HE
had got a clue to why the girls had always dumped him.

H
E AND
Sukie had supported themselves through their last years in City College with jobs at pizza parlors and miniature golf courses and pet stores, but even after they’d graduated and got hired by Loretta deLarava for substantial salaries, they had continued to be roommates. Sukie continued to have no interest in the sex that was opposite to her, and Pete had continued to have meager success in pursuing the sex that was opposite to him.

And then in the summer of ’86, Pete had got engaged.

Judy Nording was a film editor who had done postproduction work for deLarava since the late seventies, and Pete had got into the habit of drifting past the editing rooms when she would be working. Somehow he had known that he’d be wise to do this visiting when Sukie was off on some solo errand.

Judy had been two years younger than Pete, but she had made him feel naive and stodgy and
incurious
—she not only knew everything about editing and mixing, but also knew nearly as much as he did about lights and colored gels and generator trucks and on-site electrical problems. And she was tall and slim, and when he strolled into her office she had a casual way of shoving her chair back and throwing one long
blue-jeaned leg over the editing bench, with her ankle between the rewind posts, and the tight denim that sheathed her calf glowing in the glare from the light well. Her long blond hair was generally tied back in a braid.

He had been fascinated when she’d shown him things like the xenon-gas projection bulbs that worked under eight atmospheres of pressure, and that burned so hot that they reconfigured ordinary air into ozone which had to be piped up through the ceiling by exhaust fans; and she had taken him down to the wide Foley stage in front of the screen in the projection room, and shown him the dozen floor-sections that could be lifted away to expose yards-wide movable wooden trays, so that the actors who were dubbing English dialogue onto foreign movies could audibly plod through sand while they spoke their lines onto the new soundtrack, or walk clickingly over marble, or even, if the last partition was lifted away, slosh noisily through a pool of water.

She had lived with half-a-dozen other young people in an old three-story Victorian house off Melrose, near the studio; even in ’86 the house and yard had been fenced in with chain-link and barbed wire. Eventually Judy had given Pete a key to the front gate.

Sukie had been furious when he first spent the night there—but as it became clear that her brother and Judy Nording were actually likely to get married, Sukie had apparently changed her mind about the woman, taking her out for “girl-lunches” and shopping expeditions.

Pete had been naively pleased that the two women were getting along, and he was seeing Judy every night.

Then one evening at Miceli’s, an Italian restaurant off Hollywood Boulevard, Judy had been inexplicably cold and abrupt with him; he had not been able to demand or plead or wheedle the reason from her, and after he had sulkily driven her home and gone back to his and Sukie’s apartment, he had shut himself into his room with a bottle of Sukie’s Wild Turkey bourbon and had laboriously and painstakingly written a maudlin sonnet to his suddenly hostile fiancée. At about two in the morning he had opened the door, thrown all the drafts of the sonnet into the kitchen wastebasket, and lurched off to bed.

The next morning he had been awakened at about ten by intermittent laughter, and a harsh voice droning on and on, outside his bedroom window, in the alley; but he had not, opened his eyes and dragged himself out of bed until he had recognized the lines the voice was reciting. Then, his face cold with nausea and disoriented horror, he had reeled to the window and squinted out.

Apparently Sukie had taken out the trash.

Some ragged old man had found the drafts of Pete’s sonnet in the Dumpster and, in mock-theatrical tones and with exaggerated grimacings, was reading the verses to an audience of about half a dozen unkempt men and women, who were bracing themselves on their shopping carts to keep from falling down with laughter.

Pete hadn’t been able to work up the peremptory tone to tell them to go away, and neither could he bear to go back to bed and listen to more of the recital, so he had defeatedly set about showering and shaving and making coffee. He had eventually got to deLarava’s studio at about noon—to discover that Judy Nording had quit. When he rushed to her house he was told that she had packed up her bed and stereo and books in a U-Haul trailer and had simply driven away. By nightfall he had established that none of her friends, nor even her parents in Northridge, would admit to knowing where she might have gone.

Upon hearing of it, Sukie had denounced Nording as a teasing, fickle bitch and probable sociopath; and under her indignation she had been obviously pleased and relieved.

In November, Pete had located Judy Nording—she’d been working for a news station in Seattle, and he had flown up there and surprised her on her front doorstep one rainy evening when she was returning from the studio. She had burst out sobbing at the sight of him, and he had walked her to a bar across the street. Over a calming gin-and-tonic she had stiffly apologized for disappearing the way she had done, but insisted that she had had no choice, after finding out about his previous marriages, and his children and his bisexuality. Sukie had told her all of it, Nording had assured him—Sukie had taken her to one last lunch and had shown her the wedding announcements, pictures of the many kids, and had even brought along a man who’d been one of Pete’s ill-treated gay lovers: Sukie, Nording explained, had felt that she ought to know.

N
OW, SITTING
on the narrow bed in his van six years later, Sullivan winced as he remembered that
he had not been able to convince Nording that Sukie’s stories had been lies
. It hadn’t really mattered anymore for Nording was by that time involved with some guy at the station, and Pete himself had begun dating a young woman who worked in a Westwood restaurant—but though he had laughed, and spoken earnestly, and shouted, and thrown a handful of change onto the table and waved at the telephone, during the course of a long half hour in that Seattle bar, he had
not
been able to convince Judy Nording that he really was single, childless, and heterosexual.

Pete had been glad Sukie hadn’t gone on to attribute to him something like heroin dealing, or murder, for Nording would probably have believed those things too, and called the police on him.

He had flown back down to Los Angeles later that night. Nothing about the scene he’d then had with Sukie in their shared apartment had gone the way he had indignantly planned. Sukie had cried, and told him why she had chased Judy away, and, hanging on to his jacket sleeve as he struggled toward the front door, had kept on telling him.

H
E GULPED
the last of the hot coffee, and decided against another cup. Sukie had always had a couple of cups of coffee first thing in the morning, and then followed them with two or three cold beers “to keep anything from catching up.”

He could see now that Sukie had been an alcoholic by the time they’d got out of college in ’75. By the early eighties, when the twins had been working for Loretta deLarava for a while, they had been known to some of their friends as “Teet and Toot”—Pete was “Teet,” for teetotaler, and Sukie was “Toot” for off-on-a-toot.

He was sure that he must have tried on a number of occasions to talk her into at least cutting back on her drinking, but this morning he could remember only one time. During a break at a shoot somewhere in Redondo Beach, years before she would wreck his engagement to Judy Nording, he had timidly suggested that one more slug from her bourbon-filled thermos bottle might be enough for the day, or at least for the rest of the morning, and she had said, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” She had given him a strange look then—a sort of doubtful smile, with her eyebrows hiked up in the center and down at the outer edges, as if affectionately forgiving him for having asked a naively rude question, one that could have elicited a devastating answer.

He stubbed his cigarette out in a little tin ashtray on the narrow sink, then stood up and pulled his pants on. Later today he’d have to get a shower in some college gym, but right now he wanted to find some early breakfast at a place with an accessible men’s room…and then have a look around the city.

He put on his shoes and a shirt and ducked between the front seats to pull back the windshield curtain. The windows of the houses on this street were still dark, though the dawn was beginning to fade the orange glow of the flares crowning the Naval Fuel Reserve.

As he sat down in the driver’s seat and switched on the engine, he was suddenly, deeply certain that Sukie had indeed killed herself three nights ago. His heartbeat didn’t speed up, and all he did was light another cigarette as he fluttered the gas pedal to keep the cold engine running, but quietly and all at once he had realized that for decades she had been wanting to be dead—maybe ever since their father died, in 1959.