Happy Family (30 page)

“My life is insanity,” Taya says, plopping down next to Cheri at the table. She makes desperate hand signals to the new nanny, like she's a baseball catcher and the nanny's the pitcher, as her kids hurl themselves into the horde of toddlers in the playground in front of the café. Cheri has been waiting for her for the past twenty minutes, watching nannies wipe snot and donkey diaper bags while casually beautiful parents check out the casually beautiful shops and wave at their progeny. Was there really a time when such a sight warmed the cockles of her heart? It all feels far away. She can't imagine what it would be like now if she'd had a baby with Michael. Yet there's a part of her that's still sad they didn't. “Sorry we're late,” Taya rushes on. “The old nanny didn't show up to train the new nanny. Do you see who that is over there? She's adopted two more kids from Cambodia or Mali; I guess brown is the new black. Waiter! We need bread and butter immediately. I kept my poor friend waiting here forever. She's starving.” Taya pulls up her shirt and grabs a roll of belly, which she shows off to anyone within eyeshot. “And, as you can see, I'm desperately in need of carbs.” The waiter trots off. “So you are in trouble, CM. My friend Janet said she called you and wanted to take you to some wine event around here, and you didn't even call her back.”

“Must have slipped my mind,” Cheri says.

“I don't know why you came to LA if you're just going to stay holed up in Malibu—you could have stayed in Chicago if you wanted to be housebound. You have to call Janet back.” Taya jumps up and chastises the new nanny for something, then makes a point of telling her to order anything she wants for lunch. “Oh, is Skipperdee okay?”

“Great,” Cheri says, wondering if she's put out food in the last day or two.

“Waiter?” Taya signals to a harried-looking man. “We need to get one of those pizzas right away, what she's eating—what is that, peach and burrata? Yum.” She turns back to Cheri. “Okay, sorry. Enough about me. I'm just glad you're here. And, listen, this is important. I've been thinking about the whole ashes thing. My friend Rick Gould had his first wife's ashes put into a book, like those hollowed-out books people used to put drugs in back in the day? When he got remarried, his new wife didn't want the dead wife's ashes around, so he gave them to his friend to keep for him until he could figure it out. Cut to ten years later, and the friend is moving, forgets all about the ashes, and donates the book with a bunch of other stuff to charity. Rick finds out that his wife is now in Rancho Cucamonga, of all places, at some Christian Science Reading Room, and their whole friendship blows up.”

“Your point is?”

“You never know what you might find at a Christian Science center! No, but seriously, people should be buried, it's less complicated. Just bury Michael's ashes when you get home and be done with it.”

“I'll put that into the suggestion box,” Cheri says. Easier than saying his ashes are in the glove compartment of her rental car.

“I just want you to be able to get yourself a new career or a new man, preferably both. You're brilliant, CM. Forget the university, you wrote a book—which is more than I can say for myself. Write! Write about the museum looting. It's a total detective story—right up your alley. And you have the personal angle because of the tablets. Great for PR! Call it
Baghdad Boondoggle
! Don't look at me like that—forget the name; it's a genius idea.” Thankfully, the tiny pizzas arrive at the same time as the frantic nanny and sandy toddlers. An older woman in too-tight jeans whom Taya introduces as Honey whisks Taya away to meet her boyfriend. One of Taya's kids puts french fries in his nose. The older one tries to wedge them in with her fist. Time for an adult beverage.

It's a revelation to Cheri how she can do nothing in a day and look up and the sun's gone down. How did she ever manage to work? It doesn't seem like anyone in Malibu works. They're all in organic coffee shops or going to or from yoga. Is this who she will become, a member of the gainfully unemployed, living off her inheritance? She'd found a way to say yes to get here. Her mind wants to lurch forward to
What if this is it?
Or go backward to the tipping point, to Richards and anger. But she's supposed to be here. What did she think would happen? It wasn't as if life comes along like the arm in the bowling alley, sweeping away the dead pins and putting in fresh ones nice and neat. Roll again.

She begins venturing out of the keep. Her rental car's got old-school vroom, and if she travels at off-hours—it would be easier to decipher the Phaistos Disc than understand LA's traffic—she enjoys taking it out for sorties, listening to Johnny Cash because he's the best of Taya's CD collection and she's too lazy to download music. Johnny and June, along with Morticia and Gomez Addams, had always been her shining examples of true love. She gets lost and then found and then lost again. She gnaws on beef jerky as she winds through the canyons, descends the craggy coastline, purrs through streets lined with minyanim of gnarled oaks. She avoids the claptrap of suburbia with its prefab and McMansions, the malls and discount oases with inflatable air dancers. The road less traveled, the brackish water, this is what's always interested her. Instinct is the ultimate survival weapon—it leads her to an inn that declares it was Al Capone's love nest and a biker bar featuring drag-queen bingo but is silent on the question that crooks its finger everywhere she goes:
Does this say Michael?

Besides a scattering place, Cheri is looking for a good gun shop. She stumbles across Walter's Second Amendment Guns, which proves to be ridiculously well stocked. A Texan array of fully automatic weapons is the big draw, but what catches her eye is a sweet .308 Palma rifle and a Benelli M2. She leaves with both guns, plenty of ammo, and the address of an outdoor rifle range, courtesy of the redneck salesman with an
Only God Can Judge Me
tattoo on his arm whom she talked into not charging her tax if she paid cash. Gusmanov's rules for being a gentleman: Always carry plenty of cash, mints, and an umbrella. “A man arrives without these three things…date over.”

She drives to the gun range with the box of Michael in the backseat. Next thing she knows she'll be turning into her mother and talking to him. She's crossed over into crazy land; this is what happens when you have too much time to think. Thankfully, there's the turnoff for the range. It doesn't matter if she's in Bakersfield or Ireland; give her a target and a gun, and time telescopes. All worries slough off like dead skin. She focuses on nothing but her shot. And somewhere in the middle of it all, Cheri realizes that she was looking for something when she went out that first time to Pro-Maxx and she's looking for it again here. She wants to reclaim a part of herself she gave up for Michael.

Not all of her forays are equally successful. Sometimes the best of the worst is a Christmas Store open 365 or a dive bar with nothing but sad, bleached-out strippers and tourists in backward baseball caps. Cars crash into each other or into electrical poles along the Coast Highway, shutting down access to Malibu for miles. It's on one of those days that she decides to fuck taking a canyon in bumper-to-bumper traffic just to get out of the house, and she turns the car around and heads home. As soon as she walks in the door, she smells it. Shit. Cat shit, on the white carpet and dribbling along the kitchen floor. She narrowly avoids stepping in it. Fucking cat. That's going to take some scrubbing. While looking for cleaning products, she spies the fucking cat staring at the kitchen floor. “Hey, Skip, are you okay?” Are cats supposed to blink? Because he's not. His pupils are dilated. Catatonic. He won't drink water. She doesn't know jack shit about animals. No point calling Taya and getting her all worked up, and she's pretty sure that Laura, the non-housekeeper, said something about going out of town. Now Cheri does step on something. It's brown and vegetal, and what is that underneath the wine cooler? She kneels down and runs her hand along the bottom; it's moist, and she snags a few scraggly mushrooms. Out of the recesses of her memory she pulls up a genus and species:
Agaricus xanthodermus.
If her long-ago mycology lessons with Zia Genny serve her, they're poisonous.

“Say that again,” the girl behind the desk at the vet clinic says. Skipperdee's head sticks out of the towel she's thrown around him so it looks like he's wearing a babushka. Cheri juggles him while she fishes a plastic baggie out of her purse.

“
Agaricus xanthodermus.
Here's the sample. I told the guy who answered the phone all of this already, and he said the vet would take him right away.”

“You would have spoken to me, and I've been here the whole time. Are you saying you spoke to me without my knowing it?”

“We're not really going to argue about this, are we?” It's looking like they might when a guy with a shaved head and full-sleeve tattoos interrupts: “It's okay. I spoke to her. So this is the shroom eater?”

“Yup. I think I gave you all the info. Should I leave him with you and you'll contact me?”

“No, no. I can take you back right now.”

“Animals are required to be on leash or in a carrier. She should have brought him in a carrier,” the receptionist says, twisting her red kabbalah string.

“At ease, Jenna,” he says, “I got this.” The guy, who is dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, comes around from behind the counter and takes a look at the bundle of Skipperdee in her arms.

“He's my friend's cat—I'm just kind of visiting,” Cheri says to the guy.

“It will be okay, little dude,” he says, taking him gently from her. “He's in shock. Good thing you came right in.”

Cheri follows the guy into a room, where he puts Skipperdee on a metal examination table. “Do you know how long he's been like this?” he asks. She's about to answer when a long-haired surfer dude with exceedingly white teeth and scrubs walks in, extending his hand: “I'm Dr. Rick. Nice to meet you. Let's take a look at Skipperdee.”

“You're in good hands,” the guy says, touching Cheri's shoulder as he walks past. Dr. Rick says he's seen it all—dogs who've scarfed a batch of pot brownies, a whole soccer ball, a bottle of antidepressants. The patient is whisked away to be hydrated, fed activated charcoal, and monitored for the next twenty-four hours. Cheri forks over her credit card and checks the boxes to say she authorizes and will pay for whatever is needed. “You don't have to call me first, just get him back to normal.”

Outside, released from the smell of disinfected piss in the clinic, Cheri reaches for a cigarette only to find her pack is empty. “Impressive knowledge of mycology,” says a voice over her left shoulder. She turns to see the guy with the tattoos proffering a cigarette and a light. “I Googled it. Think you nailed it.” He smiles with just enough curve to be genuine but also to say there's more to him than being a whatever-he-is at the vet's.

“Thanks.”

“Don't worry. Doesn't look like you'll need to go find another Scottish fold to pass off as this one to your friend.” She can't deny that the thought had occurred to her.

“Good to know.”

“It's pretty scary seeing animals so helpless.”

“I'm not really an animal person.”

“Okay, then. Drive safely, just-kind-of-visiting lady.” He stamps his cigarette out on the ground. She notices just then that his eyes are the color of tide pools—she wants to jump in.

She's too wired to head home. She hits the firing range again, then an über-dank dive bar with wannabe punks (everything old is new again) called Sinners and Saints. By the time she checks her phone, she's three Jack and Cokes lighter. Dr. Rick informs her that Skipperdee is doing well. If he doesn't convulse overnight he can go home in the morning. A bullet dodged deserves another drink. She flags down the bartender, who says his name is Chad but everyone calls him Rico.

“You didn't say if you're coming or going,” Rico says, pouring her drink.

“In between,” she says.

S
omeone is ringing the doorbell. It takes a minute for the sound to register and then Cheri thinks it's her phone. She picks it up. It's one in the afternoon. How did that happen? How many Jack and Cokes have there been? It's not her phone. It's the door. She's wearing one sock, underwear, and her shirt from last night. She throws on sweatpants. “Stop that fucking dinging. It's hurting my head. I'm coming.” She swings open the door.

“Land shark.”

“What?” Cheri is too blinded by the sunlight to determine what she's seeing.

“Land cat.”

“Is this a joke?”

“Don't tell me you're too young to get an
SNL
reference.” Cheri vaguely recognizes that this is the guy from yesterday with all the tattoos before he says: “It's Sonny…from the vet. You remember this little dude?” Skipperdee's face peers out from behind the grate of a cat carrier.

“Haven't you heard of the phone?” she says, realizing she's not wearing a bra.

“That was plan A. You might want to check your…”

She looks down at the phone clutched in her hand and discovers her ringer is off. “Oh, shit. I'm sorry. You didn't have to come all the way out here.”

“I live right down the beach, so it's no big deal.”

“Come in. I'm a bit disorganized at the moment. What do I owe you for this?”

“I don't work at the clinic. Dr. Rick's my oldest friend. I stopped in to see him yesterday and randomly picked up the phone just to irritate GI Jenna. That girl cannot get enough of me.”

“So you deliver cats for community service?”

“Only tripping ones,” he says, opening the carrier and letting Skipperdee out. “Go forth and multiply, little dude. Or not, given you don't have the equipment. He's probably going to be super-thirsty so put out lots of water. Oh, and don't freak out if his shits are black for a while. From the charcoal.”

“Good to know.”

“Nice place. Very white.”

“Not my house.”

“Or cat. Got that.” He takes in her appearance; she knows he's seeing the crumbles of yesterday's mascara dotting the top of her cheeks, her hair in a knotted mess. He gives her a half curl of a smile. “Rough night?” Cheri straightens her shirt. Skip wraps himself around her leg; she makes a point of petting him. “Hey, I'm the last one to judge,” Sonny says. Even while pretending to like the cat, she can't help notice that Sonny's got a great skull, marble smooth. She suddenly understands why bald men are sexy. His face is lined enough to say he's lived loudly but not so much that it gives away his age. Maybe he's younger than she is.

“You want coffee? I think I've got some of those cup things left.” After leading Sonny to the kitchen, she reaches into one of Taya's mile-high cabinets to get the individual pods for the coffee machine and realizes she didn't tie her sweats. While her midsection is exposed, she thinks she catches Sonny checking out the tattoo on her hip. She sucks in her stomach as she discreetly pulls her pants up.

“No thanks to the coffee,” he says, “but you can have dinner with me.”

“Excuse me?” She spins around to face him.

“Tonight. You. Me. Red meat. You do partake of dead cow, don't you? I've got some beautiful T-bones and big Italian reds that need to be drunk before they go bad. If you can't think of a reason to say no by seven thirty tonight, come over.”

“You want to cook me dinner. I don't even know you.”

“Perfect way to get acquainted. It's just a walk down the beach, so you've got an easy exit if my grilling skills fail to impress. You can't miss the house; it's got a green-and-white-striped awning. Here's the address.” On his way out, he turns and says: “Nice ink, by the way.”

As soon as he's gone, she thinks,
Did he just ask me over for a date?
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and she was single, she'd played away games only. Going to a guy's place gave her freedom to get up and leave whenever she wanted with some excuse like having to feed the dog she didn't own. She has no idea what it would feel like now. She hasn't been with anyone except Michael for almost twelve years.

She takes her cup of coffee and sinks into the big purple paisley pillows on the huge bed that Taya had insisted she sleep in because it had the best view. Taya had gone on to add, “And do not, I repeat, do not hesitate to fuck in it. You of all people need to get laid.” Cheri isn't sure she even remembers how to kiss someone. She hasn't had an inkling of sexual desire since long before Michael died and wonders if all of her parts still work. She'd gone into the bedside-table drawer looking for a pen one night and found a huge Rolling Stones tongue vibrator. In fact, sex toys turned up in virtually every cabinet she opened. Her hand wanders idly over her stomach. It always looks so flat lying down. Was her gun tattoo the only thing Sonny had been checking out?

“I like my animal flesh short of blue but far from black,” Sonny says, brushing butter on the steaks. He's doing it with a bundle of herbs tied to a wooden spoon. “Hope you're not too cold out here. I should have warned you, it's a bit spartan. Fire pit's built in, so nobody can sell that.” Cheri had noticed the For Sale sign when she parked in front of Sonny's gray concrete modern house. What's left of the contents of the house are either in boxes or labeled for auction.

“I'm fine,” she says, sipping on a glass of red wine. “I thought you had to leave the appliances if you're selling a house.”

“You do, but tell that to my sister. On divorce number two, I guess she figures, fuck it. She sends e-mail updates listing the indignities. Today's was how could her ex drive his new girlfriend around Brentwood in her beloved Jag? I'm not kidding, she used the words
beloved Jag.
Good to know she's got her priorities straight.”

“What are you cooking in that?”

“Potatoes,” he says, lifting a lid on a cast-iron pot. “Not much you can't do with a grate and fire. Can you pass me those tongs?” He puts the meat on. There's a way that he fully inhabits his body that makes her think he'd be good at just about anything he did with it. It makes her a bit nervous. The flames surge, then die down with a spit and sizzle. “So…how's our shroom friend doing?”

“Glad you warned me about what to expect in the litter box. Other than that, he seems fine.”

“Animals and kids. Down one minute and up the next.”

“Oh, no. I forgot to bring your cat carrier.”

“No worries,” he says, “I can pick it up later.”

“Are you always so helpful?”

“This is an aberration. My family has accused me of being a selfish prick. They weren't always wrong.”

“Packing up your sister's house sounds pretty selfless to me.”

“It's payback. She's let me crash here since I've been between houses, so to speak. You like the wine? It's cheeky. Got that cherry bite, a bit of pepper.” He holds up his glass.

“To cheeky wine,” she says. His shirt grazes her arm and she feels her hair stand on end.

“You're cold, let me run inside and get you something. If it flares up again, just move the meat to the side.”

“No, really, I'm good.” He's disappeared behind the sliders. The air is a combination of sea, grilling meat, and damp night air. Delicious. She closes her eyes and listens to the lapping of the waves.

“You
do
smile,” he says, returning and draping a blanket over her shoulders. She watches him press the steaks with his finger to test if they're done. “Almost there.”

“So what exactly is it that you do?” she asks.

“Well, I guess you could say I'm in hiding.”

“Hiding as in
out
? Like from the law or the IRS?”

“From myself, mostly. But I'm getting better at that. I'm a Valley boy. Grew up in Van Nuys—went to high school with Dr. Rick. Dropped out of Cal Arts with a half-finished degree in sound engineering and worked my way through the music business. Last seen as a manager. Lived most of my life out of suitcases, catering to overblown egos, fueling my own sense of self-importance, and popping, snorting, and drinking anything that came my way. Until I crashed. I quit drugs thirteen months ago. And you, just-kind-of-visiting lady, what are you hiding from?”

“I didn't say I was hiding.”

“You didn't have to.”

They eat themselves into a meat coma spiked by wine and easy conversation. Although Sonny managed rappers, he knows his punk rock. He tells her stories about being a roadie for the Circle Jerks and about his first engineering gig, for the Dickies'
Killer Klowns.
“The Dickies were a bubblegum Ramones rip-off,” Cheri says, and they debate West and East Coast bands. They both extol the virtues of Klaus Nomi, and Sonny goes online and finds a video of his performance with David Bowie on
SNL
. It's not quite as great as either one of them remembers. They easily confess to the trivial—she has never heard of In-N-Out Burger, and he admits to owning and wearing, on occasion, a kilt. “The last perk,” he says, cracking open a collector's Macallan. He wipes out their wineglasses with a napkin. “God, did I love the liquor sponsors, especially these folks. I gave this to my sister and her now-soon-to-be-ex for Christmas one year and found it shoved in the back of a closet behind his third-best set of golf clubs. Can you imagine?” The taste, with notes of chocolate and tobacco, has her in a leather armchair in front of a fire. “It's pretty fucking good, isn't it?”

Pretty fucking good. And, wow, the moon is bright. It has an otherworldly halo that shines bright against the ocean's blackness. They sit on the bottom step of the wood deck with their feet in the sand getting cold. He lights two cigarettes and passes her one. She feels the warmth of whiskey and smoke in her chest. “You miss it?” she asks.

“Miss what?”

“What you used to do,” she asks, thinking of her career, what she may be in the process of giving up. “It sounds like you were good at it.”

“Price of admission ended up being too high. At first I barely noticed how much of myself I gave away. A little cut here; it's just a flesh wound. That's nothing. I'm still in it for the right reasons. You rationalize the things you do and the people you do it with as being the cost of doing business. After all, drugs and the industry go hand in hand. And when you're up, you're master of all that exists. Limits? That applies to other people. When I partied, I pushed the edge farther and farther. I actually broke in and stole doggie morphine from Dr. Rick. And people followed me, thinking they could hang. Until crazy shit happened.” He looks at the ocean and then turns and looks at her. “Someone I actually cared about—not that I had done a great job showing I cared—a young, talented kid I was working with got killed. Ran into the middle of a busy intersection, high on drugs
I
gave him. And, somehow, I stopped myself before I went over the cliff. My toes were hanging off. I was doing one of those backpedal things with my arms, but I stopped. Other people were like, ‘I'm fine…aaaahhhh.' They went over.”

Cheri wants to say, I understand. More than you think.

“That's tough,” she says.

He stops to stub his cigarette out in the sand. “Mistakes, I've made a few. But do I miss making music? Every fucking day.” In the moonlight, with the smoke in his eyes, he looks like a damaged priest. Why is it that the broken are drawn to each other, grasping at one another like drowning swimmers?

“Here's some trivia for you: Did you know that whiskey comes from the Gaelic
uisge beatha
?”

“‘Water of life,'” she says. He looks shocked. And pleased.

“Didn't take you for a Gael.”

“I've got a knack for languages. Especially ones nobody uses anymore.”

“And do you use them?”

“Sometimes.”

“Other than to impress me?”

“You impress easily.”

“No,” he says, “I don't.” He lights another cigarette and takes a deep drag. “My last vice. Really good whiskey and really good wine don't count.”

The wind blows her hair in her face.

“Do you mind, I wouldn't presume to know to tuck or not to tuck.” She goes to push it away and she's trapped in his eyes. He puts his hand on the side of her face to brush back her hair. The kiss is inevitable. Lips have memory. She feels the first parting then the surge from entwining tongues, gentle and deep. Her hand grasps the perfect dome of his head; it is, as promised, silken, cool from the night air. His lips, soft as ripe plums, kiss her neck. Her body shivers in compliance. When they've made out until they're breathless, and sand is in their hair and jeans from buckling to the ground, rolling on top and then beneath, he holds his hand out. She lets herself be pulled up. Feels the curve of his biceps as he holds her like he means it, no hesitation, no fear.

He leads her into the empty cavern of the house, their footfalls echoing. Everything that is on comes off. They explore each other's bodies like blind people. Each touch is a revelation of hard and soft, wet and cool, smooth and rough. His body is taut and more sculpted than she'd thought. He traces his tongue down her belly. Her animal body is awakened; she can leave her mind and rise in reaction. Their urgency makes them rough. She bites his shoulder as they grapple on the floor, first him on top and then her. Knees and backs chafe from the carpet. They rise together; her legs wrap around him; his hands cup her ass. He carries her like this, lips and hips locked, and releases her onto a platform bed minus the platform. His hand covers her face, his fingers redolent of her. Then they are in her mouth. She's in the curl of pleasure, riding it, no hands on the rail. He says something like, “God, you are lovely.” Later she will think she imagined it. Time stands still or moves so fast they can't grab hold of it. It is as if their bodies have reached a singularity and everything else is left behind.