Little Blue Lies (16 page)

“Great. I will meet you there, at four. I'll pick you up and take you home with me.”

My delight at saying this is too obvious for my own good.

“Maybe we should think about getting a dog of our own,” I add.

She closes the passenger side door and leans back in on the window.

“You know we're just playing house, O.”

“But what a house, huh?” I say, pointing at her.

“And what play, huh?” she says, pointing back. She's probably just being kind. I probably don't care.

I drive away, bobbing my head along with a jazz radio station my mother apparently likes, my smile and my agenda firmly in place.

•  •  •

I knock on the door.

“Malcolm, what the hell are you doing here?” I say.

He stares at me.

“You look like a fool, boy,” I tell him.

He stares at me.

“In training for that gig you've always dreamed about—tennis star in the daytime and gangster doorman at night?”

In a snap Malcolm disappears from my sight, yanked out of the way as Ronny appears.

“And you want . . . what?” he says.

“What were you doing at my house last night?”

“What were my women doing at your house last night? And today?”

“Is something atrocious going to happen to me if my answer is ‘Demonstrating good taste'?”

He smiles. The smile of a man who does not wish one good tidings.

“You got friends, little man. That's nice.”

“You'll find that most good people have friends.”

“And you will find that no matter how many friends you have, if you make
one more
wiseass remark to my face, on my doorstep, I don't care what happens, you're gonna wind up with your nuts in your mouth.”

I thought I had something going there. I actually felt ascendant.

He leans my way, stares bug-eyed. “Response?”

I take a deep breath. Fortunately, my wiseass just broke.

“Leave Junie alone.”

Even the air has come to a standstill here.

“Rules must be followed. Respect must be paid. If your little girlfriend is too ignorant to work that out, then she'll pay some other way. She'll get no grief from me. But she'll get no help from me neither.”

He makes a washing-hands gesture, then spits, on his own step, between my feet, before slamming the door in my face.

•  •  •

I smell incense mixing with the usual flowers as I walk up the path to my house. That same jazz station is filling the air inside.

I walk around inside quietly, just to see what I can see without being seen.

I see Maxine asleep on the couch, so I don't bother her. I go from living room to kitchen to dining room, where I find an absolute riot of artwork. Sketches, pastels, watercolors, some
tacked up on the walls, several canvases propped on easels, some charcoal drawings laid out, on different sheets, lined up like moveable puzzle pieces on the dining room table. Much of this work is recognizably Mom's, but much of it is way, way outside the regular track. It's figurative, and not, and it reminds me of the Leonardo Da Vinci Grotesques exhibit Mom saw a couple years ago and raved about for . . . a couple of years. She spoke about it with admiration and awe and excitement and abject fear. Never, to my knowledge, attempted to go there with her own art before. I get a full-body chill and have to leave the room.

I look out the kitchen window, and there, side by side in the dirt, are Mom and Leona, gardening.

“I'm never leaving here,” Max says, making me nearly leap through the window with shock.

“Jesus, Maxine.”

“I love this place. Love, love, love your mom.”

“You know you have part of a tuna sandwich stuck to the underside of your arm?” I say.

She doesn't even move it. “I love tuna,” she says.

“Are you stoned?” I ask, laughing.

“No,” she says firmly, smiling. “I'm blissed. And blessed. This place is blessed.”

I walk past her, heading up to my room to get a few things. She follows behind.

“It does have a certain vibe, I guess,” I say, “though I'm not sure it was exactly here before you guys showed up.”

“Good. How's June?”

“June is aces. She is just working for a few hours, and then I'll be picking her up again.”

“Working? Aw, Christ, not the dog thing. I'll tell you what, if it turned out she did win the lottery and was still picking up animal shit with her hands, I would personally beat her to death with a rawhide bone.”

I pause from stuffing clothes and toiletries into an overnight bag. “There's that vibe again, huh?”

“Seriously, though. The vibe exists. Maybe when things cool down, bring June back here. We'll all live here—you, me, your mom, my mom, Junie. It'll be like a commune. Like a true feminist paradise, and the men can just all go to hell.”

I zip my bag closed with all the manly gusto I can manage.

“I'm going to go now,” I say.

•  •  •

I drive back downtown, back to the hotel. As I pull up and the doorman rushes right over, greets me like an old pal, yet a superior one, takes my money and my keys, I have to confess I am feeling this.

Without that thing that June Blue brings to this situation, a thing I suppose some might call perspective, others might call shame, I start to enjoy this position I'm in.

I take my modest little bag toward the elevator, then have a brilliant thought. I go to the desk for a very crisp and lean conversation, like I was born doing this kind of thing.

“Flowers?” I say to the man.

“Excellent,” he says and smiles. “Roses?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Color?”

“What are the choices?”

“More than you might think.”

I shrug. “A variety?”

“Yes, sir. Would you like a dinner reservation?”

“Uh . . . don't think so. Don't want to push it. We'll find something.”

“Subtlety is a gift, sir. Beautiful summer day, though, is it not?”

“It is.”

“Have we considered a harbor cruise?”

“We have not, but we are now.”

“Time?”

“Um, what time is sunset?”

“I will check, and I will book, and I will have the confirmation sent to your room.”

I am excited enough to really give myself away here. I must calm down.

“Where have you been all my life?” I say to the man.

“Right here behind this desk the whole time, Mr. O'Brien.”

“Ha.” I shake his hand and sashay on up to my room.

•  •  •

I am standing at my big window, staring out over the breathtaking bay, looking at all the fine watercraft coming and going, one of them coming for us. This is
it
, isn't it?

“Are you
nuts
?”

I am thinking it, and saying it out loud, as if to prove the nutsness, as if it needs more proving.

Pointless ostentation, yup, that is the surest way to the heart of this woman. Show her the shallowness she has always expected like a trapdoor waiting to open onto the bottomless world of greed and awfulness.

But it's a
boat
.

And flowers. Don't forget flowers.

Okay. I do not know what I am doing. I am flailing, is what I am doing. I am so desperate to have Junie—the live and unharmed and
here
version of her—in my life, and all the way in, that there isn't a notion so crazy that it doesn't at least get to the interview stage.

But even if I interview them all, tomorrow is still coming. And when it does, what is all your money going to—

Jeeee-zuz.

What a moron. What a solid-gold, triple-A-rated fool have I been to not figure out the straightest, simplest solution to the
source of everyone's happiness, when it has been waving its aromatic tail feathers under my nose all the time?

That is a rhetorical question.

Some ideas are just too right, too perfect, to stop and think about them.

I hit the marble floor running, skittering across the lobby, out the front doors, left, and left again toward the financial district, through throngs of power-suited dopes and dopettes. I am sweating like a plow beast when I reach the front doors of my dad's office building.

I take the elevator up to Dad's floor, step off, and grin like a maniac at his receptionist, who tells me he is on a conference call, if I want to take a seat. I do not want at all to take a seat, because I am too anxious, so I go straight into nutty pacing mode, which is not nutty at all for me when I am feeling this way in my own house, but here and now, with me dripping sweat all over the nice burgundy carpets and practicing what I want to say to my father, surely has this poor woman on the verge of triggering whatever security gizmo she has back there, when my father comes out probably just in time.

“Oliver!” Dad says, genuinely surprised and thrilled to see me. We hug, and he hauls me down the hall to his office.

I should be able to do small talk here, or large talk, or at least humanity-based father-son talk, but I am a maniac on a mission.

“I have to ask a favor, Dad.”

“Oooo,” he says, leaning back in his chair, not serious, exactly, but definitely attentive. “You don't often—”

“Ever,” I point out quickly, figuring this point may become rather vital.

“Pretty much never,” he says. “So, you've got my attention, Son.”

“Money,” I say.

“Money,” he says.

I nod. Nod, nod, nod, nod.

“All right,” he says, laughing. “Money. So . . .”

“Could you, if I needed you to, transfer some money into my account, like instantly, so I could write a check on it?”

I have no idea what is in this account, because I have never needed to know. Never wanted to either. I have one account that I can get cash out of with my bank card, that I consider
my
account. And then there's the other account that he manages for me that is some kind of convoluted checking-savings-investment-interest-bearing spaceship of a thing that orders Chinese food for itself and keeps my room clean. I carry two of those checks folded up in my wallet for absolute-absolute emergencies, and otherwise we have nothing to do with each other.

“Well, not instantly exactly, but fairly quickly. Are you going to tell me what for?”

I smile and blink at him all coy and realize how lucky I am to be an only child so that this kind of thing might still work on him. Sisters would surely have killed this for the likes of me by this point in my life.

“Not if you don't force me to.”

It's not the coy. It's because he loves me.

“No, I won't be forcing you to. Are you going to—God help us—give me the figure? Agreeable as I would like to be, it would be hard to do this without that.”

I swallow hard, hear myself gulp, which makes Dad laugh sympathetically.

“Can I have that?” I say, pointing to his cube of notepaper with its own pen holder.

“That bad, huh?” he says, pushing it across the desk.

I take the pad, and I write down the figure I'm thinking of. As I push the pad back across the desk, I say, “But before you look, I want you to know the bright side. This is just a loan. You can take it back gradually. Out of my paycheck.”

He has the pad right under his nose now, but doesn't look. He looks across at me and goes all wide-eyed silly, like an older version of my dizziest self.

“Really?” he says.

I nod.

“Son.” He gasps a tiny bit. “Son, I am so happy. I will teach you everything, and I mean everything.”

“I am crap with numbers, Dad.”

“Pfft,” he says. “I can't even count. We pay people for that. I can't ever pay somebody for the trust, the trust I will have in you. I will show you. You will shadow me. You will be my shadow, and this will begin the greatest . . .”

He looks at the figure.

“You'll pay me back out of your pay.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Uh-huh. For the next twenty-five years?”

My heart sinks. I feel sick, I feel humiliated.

He looks up at me, grinning. “Jeepers, O, you're not going to cry, are you? Don't spoil everything now. I am thrilled that we're going to be working together. You and me. Forever. Take that look off your face. For the love of God, you're going to make
me
start bawling.”

He crumples up the paper and throws it into the waste-basket.

“You're not going to make the transfer?” I say.

“No,” he says.

I nod. I stand up and offer to shake his hand. He refuses to take it, because he is not finished turning me inside out.

“There's no need, because the money's already in there.”

I
fall
back into my chair.

“The money is
what
?”

“In there.”

“Are you
kidding
me?”

“No.”

He gets calmer the more wigged-out I get.

“That much money? Is, and was, in my account.”

“Sure,” he says. “Hey, just because you don't want to be taken care of doesn't mean I can't take care of you if I damn well please.”

We are in one of those rare cosmic moments when two people with wildly different outlooks are converging on something and making each other very, very happy over some uncommon ground.

“You are really enjoying this, aren't you?” I say.

“Uh-huh,” he says. “And admit it, so are you.”

I want to defend myself and tell him,
Well, I am enjoying something unseemly but for a very good reason,
but that would require a discussion of the reason, which would not be good, and the fact is, the basic truth of his statement is beyond dispute.

“For this moment,” I say, standing up and shaking his hand, “I am enjoying your money.”