Green Tea Won't Help You Now! (17 page)

"Why?"

"Code Red. — Tish, listen, he should be with you in eight hours or so. Try not to do anything stupid until he gets to you. Is there anybody who can stay with you? The man who's with you now?"

Since Drake was still holding the phone to my ear, he could hear her loud and clear. He nodded.

"Yes..." I whispered.

"Good. Here comes Ryan. He wants to talk to you."

"Laetitia?"

I wailed. I wanted to murder him but at the same time I was so glad to hear my big brother's voice.

"You told him!" I shrieked in way one can only shriek at family members.
 

"Wha— Oh, good God, I think I understand where this stems from. The wily bastard. Tricked me alright."

"Buhuuhuuhuuu..." I wailed and sobbed.

"Honey, I'm coming right away, okay? You just hold on. I come and fetch you and we'll make it all go away."

I wailed and sobbed even louder. "You can't make it go away, nobody can make it go away."

"Hush, hush, now we'll see about that, pet. Myrtle's waiting for us in Miami and she has magical healing powers. She's the shaman among yachts. I return you to Poppy Jude. I have to get dressed."

"Darling, you'll be fine. We'll figure something out. We— "
 

High pitched howling interrupted her. "Shit, Tam's awake. She wreaks havoc until she gets fed. Bloody babies."

I sniffed. "Okay. I'll wait for Ryan. Drake's here."

"Good." The howls became more furious. "See you as soon as you get here. Bye, darling."

"Bye."

Drake passed me the water again and this time I drank.

"Laetitia? Gulfstream? Yacht? I think you're not quite who you'd like to be, huh?"

I shook my head and drank some more.

He sat down next to me. "Want to talk about it?"

At first I thought I did not, but before I knew what happened, it came pouring out of me. I told him everything. The story of my life. Who I was, who my family was. About my dead brother, about my sick mother, about my aborted Olympic ambitions, about Sebastian and Kyle and the drugs, about Arizona and Berlin and India, about how I came to LA, about Alex and who he was, how this had all come about. I must have talked for hours.

Drake listened intently and with great understanding. When I was finished, he made us two cups of green tea.
 

Then he told me the story of his life. How he had come to America from Greece as an orphan with nothing but a pretty face. How someone in New York had told him he should go to Hollywood. How he had lived on the streets of LA, how he had worked as a male prostitute, how he had once been ordered by a Hollywood magnate who made him his toy boy and gave him his first role. He was not gay but it was his only chance. When his lover died, he was free and made it into trashy movies, even some porn, until he had finally reached an age where there were more roles for him to play. He got rid of his accent and at last he was cast as Dr. Logan Moore. He told me how relieved he had been to find out he was not HIV positive. He told me about his marriage to another actress with whom he had a son he never saw because they left and moved to Hawaii. He told me how he lived in constant fear of capricious screenwriters who might decide from one day to the next that Dr. Logan Moore was to be the next victim of soap opera death.

Once there was nothing more to tell, he helped me pack a suitcase.

"Do you think you'll be gone for long?" he finally asked.

"I don't know... I don't know if I ever want to come back."

"I'll take care of this place. Your beautiful garden should not go to waste and I'll protect the studio from Linda Bloomberg."

I laughed wearily. "Has she tried to lure you away from me?"

"Oh yes, plenty of times." He smiled his toothpaste smile.
 

Strange, I thought, what could sometimes lie beneath the surface. How badly I had misjudged him, how vain and shallow I had been to think he was in love with me. He came to my studio because he did not want to be alone, because yoga helped him to come to terms with his existence, because he could be with happy, positive people.
 

The sound of a car outside made us both look up. For a moment I had the demented hope it was Alex who had returned, but when Drake went to the door to open it to the arrival, he said, "Ah, you must be the brother."

"Hi, yes. You must be Jake? I'm Ryan, how do you do."

"I'm Drake, how are you."

 
"'s she in there?"
 

"Yes."

Ryan, as always dressed to perfection, sauntered into the studio. I ran to him and flew into his arms and the tears started to flow again.

"Oh, hush now, pet. We'll be going right away. I would offer to drive up to Hollywood Hills and beat the chap up, but I doubt there would be any justice in it, I'm afraid we're the bad guys this time. I also believe him to be much stronger than me."

I howled.
 

"I'm sorry, darling. You know me. I'm a cynical man."

"I'd better be going," Drake made himself heard from the door.
 

I let go of Ryan, ran to Drake and gave him a hug as well. "I don't know how to thank you, Drake."

"You don't have to thank me, Trixie. Don't you know how much joy you have brought to my sad, sad life? You deserve all the happiness in the world and if I can be part of it, it's reward enough for me."

The poor man,
I thought—being cynical is a family trait—
he can't get out of his soap opera dialogues.

He continued. "I'll tell you now what you once told us in class: It is always permitted to smile. — You have my number, keep me updated on your whereabouts." He gave me a fatherly kiss on the forehead and made a stage exit through the door.

"Right," Ryan took hold of my two suitcases, "off we go."

Off we went.

Twenty-Four

On our way to Long Beach airfield we stopped several times to supply ourselves with food. I said I did not want any, but Ryan bought toffee cake, cookies, ice cream, various sandwiches and wraps, vitamin water, baby food, smoked salmon, caviar and several bottles of green juices. He loves shopping for food.

"I don't do stewardesses anymore," he explained.

"I hope so, you're married now."

"Duh, duh, duh."

Everybody in the family owned a private jet with a range of 7000 nautical miles because we went back and forth between London and Buenos Aires, but Ryan was the one who had practically lived aboard a plane for decade. When I got on his Gulfstream, I noticed several differences. It was not a business jet anymore, it was a flying home.

"It's a new one."

"I thought you and Poppy Jude wanted to live the simple life of first class airline flights."

"She hates commercial planes. She hates every plane except this one. She likes to lie down and...well, be diverted."

"Aha." My mind felt rather dull.
 

"Why don't
you
lie down and watch a movie?" He opened the door to the bedroom.

"When was the last time you diverted her in here?"

He rolled his eyes. "We have a two-month old baby. There's no diversion whatsoever. The only nasty spots you'll find are infant vomit. Although sometimes we— "

I coughed.
 

"Yes, uhm, bed linen are fresh."

"Thank you."

"Is that a ski jacket you're wearing?"

"So what?"

"Nothing."

"Have you cleared out the booze? I don't want to be tempted."

"It's all in the front."

I watched Avatar and I ate the toffee cake and the cookies. I did not like ice cream anymore. You can guess why.

When the movie was over, I walked back into the "living room" to see what my brother was up to. It was dark outside and the cabin lights were on.

He was playing cards with the pilots and they had clearly been nursing a bottle of red wine.

Wait, do not be alarmed. They were the pilots who had flown the jet to LA. There was a different set of pilots in the cockpit operating the machine. They would bring us as far as Miami with a pit stop in New York to pick up Jude, Tamzin and the dogs. (Yes, dear reader, Lotta and Aaron, my brother's completely retarded "goldie" and "flatty" are so well jet trained, they can go potty on a cat toilet when times are rough. They even have their own piece of grass and a flowerbed on Myrtle's middle deck, in case the next port is too far away. It used to be the putting green. Talk about eccentricity...)

"Apart from Avatar, are there any movies which do not play on Wall Street? There's Wall Street One and Wall Street Two, there's The Wolf of Wall Street, there's American Psycho, Margin Call and Inside Job. Why do you like to watch movies about yourself?"

"There's another drawer with Poppy Jude's stuff."

"Where's the rest of the toffee cake?"

"Fridge."

I returned to the bedroom and romped around a bit, looking for the movies. The choice was not much better. There was Pretty Woman, Notting Hill, Steel Magnolia... My sister-in-law was undeniably a Julia Roberts fan.

It hit me brutally.

"I love you..."

"Right, Alex."

"I mean it, I do, I want to— you're the only one I want to be with right now. I'm thinking of taking the next flight out."

"No, you mustn't. You have to celebrate with your people. Won't your friend Mark be there too?"

"Yes, yes. They're all here. My guys have booked a restaurant and table dancers and an oil tanker full of champagne."

"You go to your party, then you'll sleep and tomorrow you'll be back here and we can celebrate on our own."

What if I had told him to come home?
 

If I had not told him to go to his godforsaken party, none of this would have happened.

The pain in my chest drove new tears into my eyes and I rolled myself into the duvet and the tremors of my despair threw me into spasms.

Twenty-Five

Pink Pebble Cay is paradise.

Lush, green vegetation and bright flowers, white sand and the famous pink pebbles, sweet water grottos and turtles. The perfect place to sink into a deep and dark depression.

Fortunately, it could be arranged for Lilly and Mia to join us earlier than they had planned. Lilly worked every trick in the book to make it as easy for me as possible, but grief has its own agenda. So had self-reproach. The "what if's" and the "why's" were my constant companions.

One night, not long after we got to the island, I could not stand it anymore and dialled Alex's number. He had blocked me. Pointlessly, I blocked him back. It granted me five minutes of self-satisfaction.

The following night, I used the house phone and he said, "Yeah?", but he hung up the moment he heard my voice, leaving me feeling sore and defeated.

Still, I am proud to say, I did not once feel tempted to drink alcohol or to take sleeping-pills.
 

There was a price to pay for it, to tell the truth. Like she had done in Berlin, Lilly brewed disgusting herbal teas and forced them down my throat. Not literally.

As for the rest, life on Pink Pebble's was idyllic. Mia built castles in the sand and floundered about in the water with the dogs. Little Tamzin did what babies of her age do: she slept in the shade, she cried, she drank, she pooped, she puked and slept again. Oh, and she laughed and shrieked when her daddy took her into the pool. She was still too small for seawater. Ryan was her number one human outside of mealtimes, anyway, and Jude was not too upset about it because Tamzin demanded up to twenty mealtimes a day.

"I hope she inherited the Corvera-Fabergé ability to eat as much as she likes and never get fat," her mother told me one day in mid-December after a long yoga session on the terrace.

"It's the thyroid."

Jude's eyes went wide with dread.
 

"It's nothing bad," I hastened to assure her.

"Puuh."

"At least you have tits," I said. "Look at me, I haven't owned a bra in my life."

"I like your tits, they're firm and they're never in the way. Mine will be sagging down to my knees once I stop breastfeeding."

"Couldn't you continue by feeding Ryan?"

She laughed. "I'm sure he'd like it. — Hey, Tish, I've been meaning to ask you, how are you doing? I hardly get the chance to talk to you alone."

"Perfectly shitty. But it'll pass, always does, doesn't it?"

She braided her white blonde hair and her light green eyes examined me curiously. "Have you thought about trying again? To contact him?"

"Actually," I sighed, "I've called him once, but he hung up faster than I could say hello."

"Ouch. Well, at least it proves he still has an emotional reaction, not the worst sign."

"You mean, Anna Litovskaya could have picked up the phone?"

"For example. — There must be something you can do, I reckon; you or somebody else?"

"No, I don't think he would ever consider talking to me again, he's very fair and he hates to be treated unfairly. I told him so much bullshit."

"Your motives were honourable."

"Yes, but I don't even think he would see it that way. I can't say, really, I don't know him that well, you see, it's been only two months, but from what I
have
seen, he's the type who always 'owns up to his mistakes'."

"How unappealing. Are you sure he's not too boring for you?"

"No. He's too good for me."

"Pfff... I promise you, that's not the case. They never are."

"But I'm a slut and a liar. I've been a liar all my life."

"Yes, so have I, so has Lilly. If your brother only knew half of what I've done... anyway, you're
not
a slut. Well, not anymore. You were at school."

"At least I did not screw the French teacher, I didn't screw anybody while I was at school, only Sebastián Farley-Mendoza."

She grinned mischievously. "And who can blame you? Who wouldn't screw
him
?"

"Whom would you screw?" Ryan asked, carrying a nagging Tamzin towards his wife who reflexively lifted her shirt.