John Shirley - Wetbones (6 page)

She was proud of the little cafe she'd picked on Central Park west, a yuppie coffee shop with Santa Fe style decor, specializing in salads, or "salades" as the menu had it, and she talked of
discovering
it until Prentice dutifully said, "Yeah, it's a great little place." Then she launched into an interminable complaint about having been asked to illustrate a line of science fiction books, a field she knew nothing about, resulting in her attendance at science fiction conventions, "where a lot of married fat guys with homemade swords and wide belts and medieval hats" made clumsy passes at her. She bitched about the abysmal taste in cover art at the paperback house she was working for. She droned

a bit, when she was nervous, nasally stretching out the syllables; afraid of gaps in the conversation. The gaps, Prentice thought, were his favourite part, at this point.

That's when Amy slammed through the cafe doors, wearing a Walkman and the only miniskirted raincoat Prentice had seen this side of 1968. Amy was willowy, with a kind of blueblood prettiness that would only have been blurred by makeup. Her hair, hennaed cedar-red in those days, was pinned up so you could see the sweep of her long neck. Her earrings were little onyx bats.

Amy paused just inside the doorway, looking around with quick movements of her head, taking her time putting the Walkman in her pocket, closing her umbrella, letting everyone get a good look at the sweep of long legs in their dark purple pantyhose.

Spotting Amy, Gloria stiffened, looking as if she wanted to bolt, then sagged with a kind of polite despair when Amy spotted her and made a bee-line for the table. "Glorie-uh!" Amy chirruped, going on with machine gun rapidity, "I knew you'd be in one of these grotty places, where everything costs at least two dollars too much. Gloria, I have great news."

"This," Gloria said wearily to Prentice, "is my roommate Amy Eisenberg. Amy, this is Tom Prentice."

"God it took you long enough to introduce me, ooh he's a big one isn't he, I didn't think you liked big ones, big men I mean, I mean big physique"

Gloria stammered, "Amy - did you, uh, need something?"

Amy kept her eyes on Prentice as she talked, looking him up and down. He smiled as neutrally as he could. Her wet umbrella was leaning against his chair, dripping on his pants leg. "Your address book, sweetie. I need Polly Gebhart's phone number, I lost it -"

Gloria snatched up her purse, yanked it open, muttering, "Why don't you get an address book and
organize
yourself, Amy?"

Amy took the address book. "I going to, I
have
to now, that's my news, - there's a producer who's hot for me, for me as an actor I mean -" She made a conscious policy of pretending to stumble over sexual innuendoes, Prentice later learned. "- and he's having me do a call-back, it's for an off-Broadway show, a really happening show that half of Hollywood is trying to get the rights to -" She turned abruptly to Prentice, as if thunderstruck. Looking at Prentice but speaking to Gloria. "Hey is this that screenwriter you told me about that you were -?"

"I'm only barely a screenwriter," Prentice said modestly. A kind of pseudo modesty that was really a way of confirming his status. "Just one credit." He'd just had his first script produced,
Fourth Base
. First script? First one he sold. Fifth one he wrote.

"Amy, if you've got what you need," Gloria said, brightly "we -"

"Don't you listen to her," Amy said to Prentice, "it's her quaint way of asking me to join you. But only for a minute." She pulled a chair from the next table, and sat herself on it with the air of a guest on a talk show who's just been asked to sit and tell the host what her newest project is. "This is my first real break, this part in
Sweet Fire,
but I did that thing at Summer Stock with Julie Christie, you remember that, Gloria?" Gloria, who had sullenly lit a cigarette - she was one of those people who saved smoking for expressing anger - nodded briskly and blew smoke at the window. A waitress caught Gloria's eye and shook her head, and Gloria stabbed the cigarette out in her coffee cup. Amy hadn't

waited for Gloria's answer. She went breathlessly on, "- And I think the Connecticut gig got me this job because Ervin - Ervin's my agent, Tom - Ervin got this producer a videotape of me working with Julie Christie, who played my mother . . . Maybe I'll just have a capuccino." She grabbed the waitress's apron as the woman sped by, smiled sweetly into the glare this got her, and said, "Could I have a capuccino with lots of chocolate sprinkles? I'd be infinitely grateful. Thanks."

Gloria groaned and didn't bother to muffle it. Prentice shrugged and winked conspiratorially at her, as if to say, We'll wait her out and then we'll get back to our lunch.

But Amy stayed for an hour, giving a sort of informal resume of her bit parts and commercial walkons and her part-time gig as a back-up singer in a rock band (surprising Prentice by mentioning that she played the accordion with them, too). She was too amusing to be tedious, but then Prentice's viewpoint on that might have been muddled by the sheer erotic magnetism Amy gave off. She could be quite funny, too, and despite everything, he was glad she'd showed up.

Finally Gloria had to go to a meeting with the director of an art department. Prentice paid the check and they put on their coats; Prentice opening his mouth to offer Gloria a drop-off from his taxi, when Amy said, as if just thinking of it, "Tom, I have to walk through Central Park to go to my agent's office and - and I'm kind of scared -"

"You scared you might hurt someone?" Gloria said, with savage sarcasm. "Amy, it's broad daylight, Central Park is perfectly safe now."

"It's never safe, don't give me that. I thought if Tom wanted to walk me -"

''We could drop you off in the cab," Prentice said. "It's too rainy to walk."

That wasn't the graceful way out after all, because once they were in the cab Amy and Gloria jockeyed to see who would get dropped off first. Gloria had to give in: her office was on this side of the park.

When she got out of the cab, she slammed the door. "Gloria takes life too seriously," Amy said, and laughed.

By the time Prentice had dropped her off at her agent's building, he found he'd asked her to go to a jazz club with him that night. And he'd begun to suspect that she was loaded on something.

When he picked her up to take her to the club, she offered him some of the drug. She called it "X", which was short for Ecstasy, also called MDMA, a neurotoxin variant on speed that produced animated friendliness in people. In Amy it only made her more the way she already was when she was in her hypomanic stage.

Amy was manic depressive. She preferred the term "Bipolar". Something the hospital in Culver City had completely failed to diagnose.

Now, remembering that wet day in New York, and her astonishment the same night when he'd told her he didn't take drugs and didn't want any X, he thought: Yeah, it was probably drugs. Some other drug, like Buddy said, probably crack, methamphetamine, or some new designer drug that ate her up. Left a mummy in a file drawer.

But there was something else, too. Some
one
. Who gave her a Gold Card and two hundred dollars. She hadn't been working, he knew that for a fact. Someone. Some son of a bitch. Some bastard.

Probably some goddamn producer.

LA. County Juvenile Detention

Lonny went yelling for' the supervisors, the first time he ever went to them for anything, trying not to cry and trying not to be sick, bringing them back to the room, swearing at them for their slowness. Showing them Mitch.

Mitch was just sitting there. Sitting awkwardly, legs out-thrust like a baby, his face infant-innocent: a baby sitting in a pool of blood. Red strings hanging out of the ragged openings in his left arm - pieces of muscle. Leg sawn open and in one place you could see the bone. Mitch shaking and still working at himself, the knife carving his right thigh, working its way up, getting close to his groin. Mitch smiling distantly, as his eyes went in and out of focus, pupils widening and shrinking, widening and shrinking. And then he saw Lonny and the guard and his connection was broken and he stopped cutting himself, and said, "Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh fuck it's starting to hurt. Oh no."

But he didn't take the knife out of the wound.

Culver City, Los Angeles

"God DAMMIT did you see that!" Jeff shrieked, making Prentice jump half out of his seat. "He had it, he HAD the motherfucking ball and he DROPPED it!"

Prentice slumped back in his chair, and cracked another beer. "Yeah. He probably feels bad 'cause he can hear you at Dodger Stadium, too, Jeff."

Had the ball and he dropped it. It was beginning to sink in to Prentice: he blamed himself for Amy's death. He'd dropped the ball.

He'd' known the relationship was going to go

somewhere the third time he dated her. The first date had been convulsively sexual; the second time a bit rocky, both of them defensive, unsure, her manic jitteriness making it worse.

After the second date, parting with a brittle politeness, Prentice didn't think they'd see each other again. He'd told her she was childish to talk about herself all the time; she'd said his conversation was nothing but jokes, and she had to talk about
something
real.

But two days later she surprised him, again, by inviting him over for dinner. Very sweetly. Another mood swing maybe. Get into a relationship with a girl prone to wild mood swings and you were, to paraphrase President Bush, in deep doo-doo.

But he went. She was a good cook, though afterwards her kitchen looked like hurricane wreckage. And she left the mess for two days. The stir fry was great, her raspberry mousse was exquisite, but before he'd quite finished it she pushed the little table aside, strode across to him, and straddled his lap facing him. Reached down for his zipper. He could taste mousse and brandy on her tongue. She wasn't wearing panties.

The first time they made love, that particular night, was a prolonged spasm, starting on the chair and ending on the rug. But when it happened again, in bed, it began languorously, and veered into an ecstatic mutual searching. He quickly learned to maintain a steady, pistonlike rhythm, once he was inside her, to counterbalance her bucking and thrashings. It was exactly what she needed, his rigid organ the axle for her wild torquing, and it brought them to that rare confluence of desire, mutual orgasm. In the moment of orgasm, the timing was right: they both flung their

emotional doors open; they opened their eyes and saw one another. Knew fleetingly that until that moment, their skilled and very modern sexuality had been only a way of using.

Suddenly, all the pretenses were dropped, and isolation was gone, and they embraced for the first time: the first time it was real.

"Jesus Christ," he breathed, amazed at the intensity of his feeling.

After that, she didn't have to talk about herself, her outsized ambitions, the people who'd "validated" her. At least, not so much. They could sit quietly in the windowseat, holding hands, talking sometimes and sometimes not. Watching people on the street. Both of them perfectly happy. And he'd thought: Finally. I can stay with this one.

For twelve years, since he began dating at eighteen, he'd never had less than two girlfriends at once. It was a constant juggling act. And he was constantly on the look-out for more pins to juggle. Knowing all the time the performance was commanded by some undefined insecurity. Completely unable to fight it; and maybe having too much fun to want to fight it.

But, now and then, he felt the lack, too. No commitment meant no real closeness.

Amy's sheer intensity had overwhelmed his insulation. Maybe something more: some quality of underlying familiarity about her, as if she were someone he'd always known. It made him feel close to her at the roots of his personality.

And it felt good that she needed him
deeply
. He was a writer, a humourist, a freelancer, something of a rake, but compared to Amy he was as stable as the Rock of Gibralter.

It took time, though. The morning after that third date, Amy was resoundingly depressed. "It's not you," she said, huddled in a corner of her bedroom with a cup of coffee. "It just happens. It just comes. I'm up and then I'm down. It takes me a long time to talk myself back up again . . .

Prentice had talked Amy into seeing a psychiatrist. It wasn't easy; she wouldn't consider it at all when she was up - and when she was down she was sure that therapy would turn out to be a dead end, "Like all 'solutions"'.

They gave her medication and it worked. She stabilized, without losing her vivacity. Prentice felt safer: he asked her to marry him. They moved in together; had a small, informal summer wedding on the roof of his apartment building. People in t-shirts, drinking wine on the roof of the adjacent building, applauded and yelled "Go for it!" when he kissed her. Amy had laughed and yelled at them to come over for champagne.

She stayed on the medication until the last three months of their marriage. Until then, everything went swimmingly. She was getting some work in an independent film production shooting in New York. He was riding high on the good box office for Fourth Base. Everything was great. Amy was growing up. She could go hours without talking about herself sometimes, and she wasn't compulsively competitive with other women. And then at the bottom of the emotional ninth inning, Prentice dropped the ball. He had an affair with Nina Spaulding, a rather pretentiously arty and very full-figured young dancer, and Amy found out. Maybe on purpose, Nina left an indiscreet message on the answering machine. Amy's fragile self esteem couldn't

take it. She went off her meds and back on the wrong kind of drugs. Three months later, three months of near constant argument with Prentice, and she left him: and left New York for L.A. . . .

The ballgame on Jeff's TV was winding up. The Dodgers were doomed. With the fickleness of the L.A. sports fan, Jeff swore at them, gave the screen the finger, threw Doritios at a shot of the Dodger's pensive manager. "The hell with you lamebrains! You had the playoffs and you let the Padres, my God, the
Padres
take it from you, do you know what kind of average those guys have got? It's fucking humiliating."