How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (18 page)

Story of My Life

I'm like—I don't believe this shit.

I'm totally pissed at my old man, who's somewhere in the Virgin Islands, god knows where. The check wasn't in the mailbox today, which means I can't go to school Monday morning. I'm on the monthly payment program because my dad says wanting to be an actress is a flaky whim and I never stick to anything—this from a guy who's been married five times—and this way if I drop out in the middle of the semester he won't get burned for the full tuition. Meanwhile he buys his new bimbo, Tanya, who's a year younger than me, a 450 SL convertible—always liked the young ones, haven't we, Dad?—plus her own condo so she can have some privacy to do her writing. Like she can even
read
. He actually believes her when she says she's writing a novel, but when I want to spend eight hours a day busting ass at Lee Strasberg it's like
another one of Alison's crazy ideas
. Story of my life. My old man's fifty-two going on twelve. And then there's Skip Pendleton, which is another reason I'm pissed.

So I'm on the phone screaming at my father's secretary when there's a call on my other line. I go hello and this guy goes hi, I'm whatever-his-name-is, I'm a friend of Skip's, and I say yeah and he says I thought maybe we could go out sometime. And I say what am I, dial-a-date?

Skip Pendleton is this jerk I was in lust with for about three minutes. He hasn't called me in like three weeks, which is fine, okay, I can deal with that, but suddenly I'm like a baseball card he trades with his friends? Give me a break. So I go to this guy, what makes you think I'd want to go out with you, I don't even know you, and he goes Skip told me about you. Right. So I'm like, what did he tell you? and the guy goes Skip said you were hot. I say great, I'm totally honored that the great Skip Pendleton thinks I'm hot. I'm just a jalapeño pepper waiting for some strange burrito, honey. I mean,
really
.

And this guy says to me, we were sitting around at Skip's place about five in the morning the other night wired out of our minds, and I say—this is the guy talking—I wish we had some women, and Skip is like, I could always call Alison, she'd be over like a shot, she loves it.

He said that? I say. I can hear his voice exactly, it's not like I'm totally amazed, but still I can't believe even
he
would be such a pig, and suddenly I feel like a cheap slut and I want to scream at this asshole, but instead I say, where are you? He's on West Eighty-ninth, so I give him an address on Avenue C, a rathole where a friend of mine lived last year until her place was broken into for the seventeenth time, and which is about as far away from the Upper West Side as you can get without crossing water, and I tell him to meet me there in an hour, so at least I have the satisfaction of thinking of him spending about twenty bucks for a cab and then hanging around the doorway of a tenement and maybe getting beat up by some drug dealers. But the one I'm really pissed at is Skip Pendleton. Nothing my father does surprises me anymore. I'm twenty-one going on gray.

Skip's thirty-one and so smart and so educated—just ask him, he'll tell you. Did I forget to mention he's so
mature?
Unlike me. He was always telling me I don't know anything. What I don't know is what I saw in him. He seemed older and sophisticated, and we had great sex, so why not? I met him in a club, naturally. I never thought he was very good-looking, but you could tell
he
thought he was. He believed it so much that he actually sold the idea to other people. He had that confidence everybody wants a piece of. This blond hair that looks like he has it trimmed about three times a day. Nice clothes, shirts custom-made on Jermyn Street, which he might just casually tell you some night in case you didn't know is in London, England. (That's in Europe, which is across the Atlantic Ocean—oh, really, Skip, is that where it is? Wow!) Went to the right schools. And he's rich, of course, owns his own company. Commodities trader. Story of Skip's life. Trading commodities.

So basically, he had it all. Should have been a Dewar's Profile. I'm like amazed they haven't asked him yet. But when the sun hit him in the morning, he was a shivering wreck.

From the first night, bending over the silver picture frame in his apartment with a rolled fifty up his nose, all he can talk about is his ex, who dumped him, and how if he could only get her back he would give up all of this forever, coke, staying out partying all night, young bimbos like me. And I'm thinking, poor guy, just lost his main squeeze, feeling real sympathetic, and so I go, when did this happen, Skip? and it turns out it was ten years ago! He lived with this chick for four years at Harvard, and then after they come to New York together she dumps him for some Rockefeller. And I'm like, give me a break, Skip. Give yourself a break. This is ten years after. This is nineteen eighty whatever.

Skip's so smart, right? My parents never gave a shit whether I went to school or not, they were off chasing lovers and bottles and rails of blow, leaving us kids with the cars and the credit cards, and I never did get much of an education. Is that my fault? I mean, if someone told you back then that you could either go to school or not, what do you think you would have done? Pass the trigonometry, please. Right. So I'm not as educated as the great Skip Pendleton, but let me tell you something. I know that when you're hitting on somebody you don't spend the whole night whining about your ex, especially after like a decade. And you don't need a Ph.D. in psychology to figure out why Skip can't go out with anybody his own age. He keeps trying to find Diana, the beautiful, perfect Diana, who was twenty-one when she dumped him. And he wants us, the young stuff, because we're like Diana was ten years ago. And he hates us because we're
not
Diana. And he thinks it will make him feel better if he fucks us over and makes us hurt the way he was hurt, because that's what it's all about if you ask me—we're all sitting around here on earth working through our hurts, trying to pass them along to other people and make things even. Chain of pain.

Old Skip kept telling me how dumb I was. You wish, Jack. Funny thing is, dumb is his type. He doesn't want to go out with anybody who might see through him, so he picks up girls like me. Girls he thinks will believe everything he says and fuck him the first night and not be real surprised when he never calls again.

If you're so smart, Skip, how come you don't know these things? If you're so mature, what were you doing with me?

Men. I've never met any. They're all boys. I wish I didn't want them so much. I've had a few dreams about making it with girls, but it's kind of like—sure, I'd love to visit Norway sometime. My roommate Jeannie and I sleep in the same bed and it's great. We've got a one-bedroom, and this way the living room is free for partying and whatever. I hate being alone, but when I wake up in some guy's bed with dry come on the sheets underneath me and he's snoring like a garbage truck, I go, let me out of here. I slip out and crawl around the floor groping for my clothes, trying to untangle his blue jeans from mine, my bra from his Jockeys—Skip wears boxers, of course—and trying to be quiet at the same time, then slide out the door laughing like a seal escaping from the zoo and race home to where Jeannie has been warming the bed all night. Jumping in between the sheets and she wakes up and goes, I want details, Alison: length and width.

I love Jeannie. She cracks me up. She's an assistant editor at a fashion magazine, but what she really wants to do is get married. It might work for her, but I don't believe in it. My parents have seven marriages between them, and anytime I've been with a guy for more than a few weeks I find myself looking out the window during sex.

I call up my friend Didi to see if she can lend me the money. Her dad's rich and gives her this huge allowance that she spends all on blow. She used to buy clothes, but now she wears the same outfit for four or five days in a row, and it's pretty gross, let me tell you. Sometimes we have to send the health department over to her apartment to open the windows and burn the sheets.

I get Didi's machine, which means she's not home. If she's there she unplugs the phone, and if she's not she turns on the answering machine. Either way it's pretty impossible to talk to her. I don't know why I bother. She sleeps from about noon till like nine or so. If Didi made a list of her favorite things, I guess cocaine would be at the top and sunlight wouldn't even make the cut. So she can be hard to get hold of.

My friends and I spend half our lives leaving each other messages. Luckily I know Didi's access code, so I dial again and listen to her messages to see if I can figure out where she is. Okay, maybe I'm just nosy.

The first one's from Brian, and from his voice I can tell that he's doing Didi, which really blows me away since Brian is Jeannie's old boyfriend. Except that Didi is less interested in sex than any of my friends, so I'm not really sure. Maybe he's just starting to make his move. A message from her mom—Call me, sweetie, I'm in Aspen. Then Phillip, saying he wants his $350 or else. Which is when I go, what am I, crazy? I'm never going to get a cent out of Didi. And if I do find her, she'll try to talk me into getting wired with her, and I'm trying to stay away from that. I'm about to hang up when I get a call on the other line, my school telling me that my tuition hasn't been received and that I won't be able to go to class until it is. Like, what do you think I've been frantic about for the last twenty-four hours? It's Saturday afternoon. Jeannie will be home soon and then it's all over.

By this time I'm getting pretty bitter. You could say I am not a happy unit. Acting is the first thing I've ever really wanted to do. Except for riding. When I was a kid I spent most of my time on horseback, showing my horses and jumping, until Dick Tracy got poisoned. Then I got into drugs. But acting, I don't know, I just love it, getting up there and turning myself inside out. Being somebody else for a change. It's also the first thing that's made me get up in the morning. The first year I was in New York I did nothing but guys and blow. Staying out all night at the Surf Club and Zulu, waking up at five in the afternoon with plugged sinuses and sticky hair. Some kind of white stuff in every opening. Story of my life. My friends are still pretty much that way, which is why I'm so desperate to get this check, because if I don't there's no reason to wake up early Monday morning and then Jeannie will get home, and somebody will call up and the next thing I know it'll be three days from now with no sleep in between, brain in orbit, nose in traction. I call my father's secretary again, and she says she's still trying to reach him.

I decide to do some of my homework before Jeannie gets home—my sense-memory exercise. Don't ask me why, since I won't be going to class, but it chills me out. I sit down in the folding chair and relax, empty out my mind of all the crap. Then I begin to imagine an orange. I try to see it in front of me. I take it in my hand. A big old round one veined with rust, like the ones we get down in Florida straight from the tree. (Those Clearasil spotless ones you buy in the Safeway are dusted with cyanide or some shit, so you can imagine how good they are for you.) Then I start to peel it real slow, smelling the little geysers of spray that shoot from the squeezed peel, feeling the juice stinging the edges of my fingernails where I've bitten them.…

So of course the phone rings. Guy's voice, Barry something. I'm a friend of Skip's, he says. I go, if this is some kind of joke I'm really not amused. Hey, no joke, he goes. I'm just, you know, Skip told me you guys weren't going out anymore, and I saw you once at Indochine, and I thought maybe we could do some dinner sometime.

I'm like, I don't believe this. What am I—the York Avenue Escort Service?

I don't know where I get these ideas, but sometimes I'm pretty quick. I go, did Skip also tell you about this disease he gave me? That shrinks this Barry's equipment pretty quick. Suddenly he's got a call on his other line. Sure you do.

Skip, that son of a bitch. I'm so mad I think about really fixing his ass. First I think I'll call him up and tell him he did give me a disease. Make him go to the doctor, shut down his love life for a few days.

Then the phone rings and it's Didi. Unbelievable! Live—in person, practically. And it's still daylight outside.

I just went to my nose doctor, she goes. He was horrified. He told me that if I had to keep doing blow I should start shooting up, then the damage would be some other doctor's responsibility.

What's with you and Brian? I say.

She says, I don't know, I went home with him a couple of weeks ago and woke up in his bed. I'm not even sure we did anything. But he's definitely in lust with me. Meanwhile, my period's late. So maybe we did.

She has another call. While she takes it, I'm thinking. Didi comes back on and tells me it's her mom, who's having a major breakdown, she'll have to call me back. I tell her no problem. She's already been a big help.

I get Skip at his office. He doesn't sound too thrilled to hear from me. He says he's in a meeting, can he call me back? I say no, I have to talk now.

What? he says.

I'm pregnant, I say.

Total silence.

Before he can ask I say, I haven't slept with anybody else in six weeks. Which is totally true, almost. Close off that little escape hatch in his mind. Slam, bam.

You're sure? he goes, sounding like he's just swallowed a bunch of sand.

I'm sure.

He's like, what do you want to do?

The thing about Skip is that, even though he's an asshole, he's also a gentleman. Actually, a lot of the assholes I know are gentlemen. Or vice versa. Dickheads with a family crest and a prep-school code of honor.

I go, I need money.

How much?

A thousand. I can't believe I ask him for that much, I was thinking five hundred just a minute ago, but hearing his voice pisses me off.

He asks if I want him to go with me, and I say no, definitely not. Then he tries to do this number about making out the check directly to the clinic, and I say, Skip, don't give me that shit. I need five hundred in cash to make the appointment, I tell him, and I don't want to wait six business days for the stupid check to clear, okay? Acting my ass off. My teacher would be proud.