Namedropper (24 page)

“ …
after the boys of summer have gone
…”

I was so embarrassed, I had to pretend that I was abused as a child and that something had just triggered a bad memory. That it was that, and not a Don Henley song, that had made me break down. He all but carried me back to the room, where he drew the curtains and started running me a bath. I managed to mumble that I couldn't because of the tattoo, but he said that we were being overcautious, he'd done it before and it would be fine. I made him have one too and he did, but in the other bathroom. He filled both tubs with bubbles and opened the two connecting doors to the living room so that we could talk and see each other whilst we bathed.

I sank underwater and counted to ten. When I came up for air, he was calling, “Viva! Viva!”

I blew my nose on a hand towel. “What?”

“Tell me something about you that I don't know.”

“Anything? But, honey, there's so much to tell!” Well, there was and there wasn't. There's so much to tell, unless you edit your memories without sentimentality or vanity. Absolutely everything looks significant if you remember it. In fact, you remember the least important bits. I can count to ten in French. I'd rather be able to talk about Truffaut in French and once upon a time, for about a day, I believed I could. The next day I forgot, and nothing could bring it back. That's when I realised French was a lost cause.

“Okay, here's something. I saw
Carrie
when I was eight. I didn't realise until four years later that I was scared. One day I woke up and just collapsed back in my bed and cried for a whole morning because I was so frightened.”

He yelled back, “That's nothing. I slept in my parents' bed for a whole year after I saw
Evil Dead
.”

“Euw. Now you tell me something else I don't know yet.”

He told me that he thought Sissy Spacek had one of the most beautiful faces he'd ever seen and I made a mental note: not good.

“Everyone knows who your top beauty is.” He started to caw in a high Southern accent: “I'm alive! Maggie the Cat is alive!”

“That's true. I love Elizabeth Taylor because she is a short girl with a weight problem who is torn between being highly sexual and wanting to settle down and get married. I feel a bond, but so what? You love Bob Dylan because he excuses your foibles.”

“Do tell.”

“It's obvious. He's a not very attractive man with a whiney voice who got incredible fame and fortune and slept with hundreds of beautiful women.”

Dillon let his foot drop with a splash. “I'm not very good-looking, am I?”

I stroked my calf with a razor. “Your skin is very soft.” When Manny is trying to be nice about someone and he can't think of anything else to say, he says they have nice handwriting.

We dried off, put fresh knickers on, and got in bed. I touched his cheek and he pulled me close and didn't let go for a long time. Then he kissed me. Afterwards I wiped my mouth.

“What did you do that for?”

“Boy germs.”

We snuggled for a bit. I imagined I was a cat and prodded his chin with my head. Then I climbed on top of him and poked a finger into his chicken chest. “You haven't tried to have sex with me.”

“I know. It's not that I don't find you attractive. I think you're gorgeous. But I don't feel like I want to jump on you and have rampant rumpy-pumpy.” The sweating, pumping beast that was Treena and Ray flashed in front of my eyes. Dillon continued, “I just want to hold you and kiss you. I don't get a chance to do that very often. You don't mind, do you?”

I loved it. I loved that he hadn't tried to put his hand down my pants or any of the other terrible, embarrassing things that Treena had always warned me about. It was as if we didn't exist between the hips and the knees. Even though we spent every night that week with our legs wrapped around each
other, the middle part was invisible, like in a science-fiction movie.

Earlier I had dragged him into Tower Records and made him buy
Darkness on the Edge of Town
by Bruce Springsteen. I padded over to the hi-fi and put it on. He said it made him think of his father and cried, and I secretly fantasised about what his father might look like with no shirt on. I pictured a short, stocky man with an overbite, curly, thinning hair, and biceps like Popeye. He cried quietly and, a little cruelly, I said, “See. Now do you get it? Bruce is the new Bob Dylan, not you, you daft bastard.”

The next day we decided to dress up as Bob and Liz and imagine what kind of relationship they might have had. I felt two things: one, that I was five years old, tipping over the dress-up box; two, that I might have just found my soulmate. We planned it over breakfast. I was going to be
Suddenly, Last Summer
–era Liz and he was going to be “Don't Look Now” Bob. We wouldn't see each other until that night at dinner, like the groom can't look at the bride before the wedding. Dillon didn't have a whole lot of dressing up to do. Dark shades are easy-peasy to buy in Vegas.

But I had to find a medium-length black wig, a low-cut white dress tied ruthlessly at the waist, high white pumps, and a scarf for my hair, all of which I did. The difficult thing was the wig. I had to go by bus, way out into no-man's-land, and find a really tacky, out-of-date five-and-dime where they thought the nineties had not yet started. I knew it was a promising sign when I saw a big poster of Madonna in her “Get into the Groove” era getup. It was worth it. Dillon said I was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. He had teased
his hair into a Jewish Afro and had drainpipe trousers and wrap-around shades.

He looked stoopid, with two o's. Indeed, the mood was so deliriously stoopid that he persuaded me to take some of his coke. We spent our evening tearing around the casino, placing money on the black, the red, and the red, white, and blue for all we knew. There are no locks and no windows in Las Vegas casinos, so that you get disorientated and spend money for three days straight. We had no idea what time it was when we collapsed under Mick Jagger.

Here are some things Dillon said to me that night:

“When you close your eyes, you look like a vulnerable little girl, but when you open them, I feel like you can see through my soul.”

“You have the most perfect lower back I've ever seen.”

“You're dangerous: that body combined with that brain is very frightening.”

“When I first saw you, I was so jealous of Ray for being with you. I hoped and prayed I'd bump into you again.”

Here are some things he said during the day:

“Stop jumping on the bed, I feel sick from last night.”

I managed to wake him at four and drag him to the nearest mall. We bought Simpsons' trading cards from a comic-book store and went to see a scary movie that was supposed to be post-modern and ironic, but that was really just scary. We thought there was a killer in front of us—he was the only one there apart from us, and kept breathing much too loud—but when the lights came up, we saw that he was mentally disabled. Taxi fares in and out of the Strip were ludicrous, at least twenty dollars a throw. I felt bad that Dillon was paying for it,
but he didn't. He has this Liverpool thing about girls not having to pay. Feminism goes out the window when you find yourself in Vegas on a whim. Ray paid for things—he brought me to L.A., after all—but he always made such a big deal of it. Dillon let on that the first thing he had done when he made it was retire his parents, who are real Irish peasants, to a farmhouse.

He took cocaine all week long, in larger amounts the closer it came to Skyline's showcase gig. He didn't spend much time with the band—joining them, occasionally, for one drink at the bar, then making his excuses and trotting along the corridor after me. Still feeling lousy from the night before, we crept back to the room, but were stopped by two painted girls who wanted Dillon's autograph. They couldn't have been more than fourteen, but were wearing matching Lycra mini-dresses, scarlet lipstick, and garish blue eye shadow. He chatted pleasantly to them and they, as if I wasn't there at all, started asking if they could come back to his room. He said he was feeling tired. To my horror, the girls began to paw each other, caressing their tiny breasts with their bitten fingernails. “C'mon. We're only fifteen. You should look after us. You should teach us.” They looked like a freak show. I started giggling and unlocked the door. Dillon brushed them away and followed me, latching the door behind him.

I tried to string a sentence together. All I could come up with was, “That was … weird.”

Dillon turned on the TV and sniffed. “Not so weird. All female fans just want to be fucked until they bleed.”

I slapped him so hard that he fell sideways. I had no idea where it had come from, but come it did, at ninety miles an
hour. He was on all fours. I was so embarrassed that I had to lean out of the window.

“What was that about?”

“I don't know.”

“I don't like that. I was slapped around as a child. And I don't like that.”

“I'm sorry.”

The next morning he said he had to go to the conference room and do an interview with
Spin
magazine. I tried to kiss him and blow in his ear but he didn't respond. So I showed how much I didn't care by pretending to write in my notebook. What I wrote was:

He started to get dressed and as I was telling myself “
Act cool
,” I found I was clinging to his leg. He looked down and smiled like I was a disappointing child who had promised to put herself to bed and was up watching TV.

“Please give me a hug.” He leaned down halfheartedly and pressed my sides like I was an easy-squeeze ketchup bottle, not a proper English one made out of glass. Then he pulled away and I grabbed his arm and beseeched him, “Please, Dillon. Tell me a story.”

It was a very poor story, about a princess in a tower. I told him it was a silly story, but he said that was the best he could
do, and continued dressing. I thought of Ray becoming bored with me in the car on the way to Brighton. I saw that Dillon had now had his fill too. And I hadn't even put out. Apart from dancing in my underwear, spitting out of windows, gambling, dressing as Elizabeth Taylor, getting a tattoo, and slapping him round the face. I had fit a five-year relationship into five days and now he wanted back his real five-year girlfriend, with whom he had done none of these things.

Drew had never once been bored by me. Partly because he disappeared from my life before Viva overkill could kick in and partly because he was never interested in the first place.

Dillon came back from the interview saying how great the journalist had been, how sexy she was. We slept in the same bed that night, but far apart. I watched him, tried to memorise his tattoos (one fresh and one mouldy), his every freckle and hair, all the while forgetting what his face looked like. I lifted the cover from the bottom end of the bed and looked at his feet. He had dancer's feet, with all the toes practically the same length. I smelled his hair. It reeked of cocoa butter and I saw that I had made him smell of me. He didn't have a smell of his own.

I kissed his forehead and wept the silent, self-loathing tears of a mother leaving her child for a new life. She knows no one will be as good to her little boy as she would. No one will love him as much. She knows that he will be looked after but that he will never again encounter anyone who understands him as well. Thank God, the little boy doesn't know that. Dillon from Skyline slept peacefully, dreaming of lipstick prints on tissue, chips in vinegar, patent-leather shoes, Sissy Spacek, waterbeds, and
Blood on the Tracks
.

I kissed him but I knew it was all finished and we hadn't even had a love affair. I didn't think we had, although I wasn't sure. He snored and I watched him for a while longer, kneeling in front of his face so he could only possibly be breathing in my breath. Then I called a cab and went to the airport. I cashed in all my traveller's cheques and managed to get a flight direct from Vegas to Heathrow. As I waited in departure, I noted that it was only ten hours until Skyline's big sold-out gig. They would go down a storm. He would meet a nice girl to spend the night with. I cried a lot on the plane. Because I was in economy, and nothing I said could get them to upgrade me. Because I knew now that it was Dillon and not Drew who was the love of my life and he had never even been my lover. Because we had had so much fun. And because I had never really especially liked him in the first place. Because it was he who liked me and pursued me and made me feel so much better about myself. And because things change. I wasn't sorry that I had the tattoo on my tummy. The lights were dimmed and I leaned my head against the shutter.

A little voice inside my head said, “Don't look back, you can never look back.”

I realised that just because someone likes some of the same films as you, it doesn't mean you're going to live happily ever after. It was the films he liked that I liked, rather than he himself. It's overoptimistic to think that your soulmate marks himself out by having heard of your favourite movie. All men can be educated. Dillon just happened to have a head start. So he had seen
Suddenly, Last Summer
. It could have been anything. He was an empty vessel. It might have been football. Indeed, when he was with the rest of the band, or singing for
the fans, he pretended it was. It could have been ballet that he knew about, or cheeses of the world, or Russian history. With these thoughts came the sneaking suspicion that I was a real live grownup. It wasn't as terrible and traumatic a feeling as I had imagined it might be.

I thought of him, with his feet in the Chateau Marmont pool and his fork in a carrot cake. He was just a little kid. I was upset at what I had introduced him to, the records and films he didn't already know. I felt like a mother who had left syringes around the room and let her baby get hooked on hard drugs.