Randall #01 - The Best Revenge (9 page)

Laguna Beach
looked like a movie set of a quaint English village, except for the palm trees. Most of the buildings were fake Tudor, or ivy-covered stone with leaded window panes. However, the house on Cypress Drive was just a typical southern California stucco box, painted pink and smothered in bougainvillea.

Camilla looked for a doorbell or knocker, but finding none, opened the screen door and knocked on the flat wooden door behind it. There was no response. She knocked again, with more force.

Maybe she had the wrong house. She compared the number again with the one written in her address book: the same. This had to be where Plantagenet lived, and he had to be home, since he had been talking on his telephone. It was very rude of him not to have a proper doorbell.

In desperation, she bent over, removed one of her Amalfi sandals and hit the door with its stacked leather heel.

It resonated nicely. She hit the door again, and then a couple of times more, in a jazzy sort of rhythm. She pulled back for one more bang when the door swung open.

There stood Plantagenet, looking tanned, fit, and a bit irritated, wearing nothing but an Yves St. Laurent towel.

“Camel! Camilla, darling!” He clutched tightly at the towel. “What a surprise to see you! And your lovely shoe!” He grabbed the sandal in her raised hand. “You’d regret it, darling. Blood does terrible things to Italian leather.”

“Oh, Plant!” She threw herself onto his lovely, familiar shoulder.

“Do come inside,” he murmured after a moment. She could feel his arm encircling her as he gently patted her back with the side of her sandal. His other hand still held his towel.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “My shoe.” She started a laugh, which somehow turned into a sob before it got out.

“Please don’t cry.” Plantagenet steered her into a pretty, airy living room as she continued sobbing. “It makes conversation a bit difficult. And we have so much to talk about. Like what you’re doing in California. Sit down—make yourself comfortable.”

Camilla sank onto a mauve couch covered with dozens of Wedgwood blue throw pillows and looked up at Plantagenet’s beautiful, familiar face. He handed her the shoe. She cradled it helplessly. She had no idea where to begin.

“Why don’t you put it back on your foot, darling? Nothing looks as lonely as one, solitary shoe, does it?”

The image of loneliness didn’t help her efforts to stop the flow of tears. Desperately, she grabbed a throw pillow and buried her face in it.

Plantagenet gently placed her sandal in her lap and disappeared for a moment. When he returned, he was carrying a roll of mauve toilet paper, which he presented to her with careful ceremony.

“I’m afraid I can’t find a handkerchief, darling. I can’t remember where I put anything. I’ve just flown in from Pago Pago.”

She blew her nose on a square of mauve paper.

“I know,” she said. “I read about it in the newspaper.”

The newspaper. How could she begin to tell him about Jon-Don? About the party? About missing work? Words didn’t come. But more tears did. She could do nothing but hold her arms up to him, like an exhausted toddler who wanted to be picked up. She wanted to kiss him, hold him, cling to him, to make up for all the comfortless months since they parted.

“I think we’d better have glass of wine, don’t you?” He kissed her forehead and adjusted his towel as he got up from the couch. “Then you can tell me all about it.”

She heard a noise from the back of the house.

“Oh, no.” She wiped the remains of her eye make-up from her cheeks. “Do you have roommates, too?” She wasn’t prepared to meet a bunch of people.

“Not exactly.” Plantagenet’s cheeks reddened as he glanced toward the source of the noise. “I’ll—uh, get that wine. It’s in the kitchen.”

Camilla felt her own face burn as she watched Plant’s nearly naked figure retreat toward a half-open door. She should have realized he would have a lover.

So much for her silly fantasies about his feelings for her. That crazy night in New Jersey was just that—crazy. Plant was gay. That wasn’t going to change. Which was fantastic. She began to feel a flood of relief. Things could go back to normal.

“Oh, good,” Plantagenet said, reappearing with two glasses of wine. “A smile is a good sign.” He handed her a glass of white wine but did not sit down.

Then came an awkward silence.

“Shouldn’t you get one for your friend in the bedroom, too?” Camilla said.

Plantagenet gave his wine a nervous sip.

“Yes. Wine. In the bedroom. I’ll—I’ll be right back.” He started, but turned after a couple of steps. “Camilla?” he said.

“Yes?” She smiled at him again.

“I really am awfully glad to see you.”

“Me, too.”

She sipped the dry, oaky chardonnay, thinking how infinitely preferable it was to light beer, as she listened to the low murmur of voices from the bedroom. She hoped Plantagenet’s new lover wasn’t an old fussbudget like Edmund. She looked around the room. It was spare and could use some foliage, but at least it wasn’t an over-decorated furniture showroom like Edmund’s loft.

The door opened. Plantagenet had put on a pair of white linen slacks.

“Camilla,” he said. “I’d like you to meet—Angela.”

Angela. A woman. An extraordinarily beautiful woman.

Camilla couldn’t keep her hand from shaking as chardonnay dribbled on her Mary McFadden. Edmund’s crazy drunken rant must have been true. Plantagenet wasn’t gay any more. Could that happen?

The woman wore a burgundy velour man’s bathrobe, but the robe was the only thing masculine about her. Her thick black hair, parted in the middle, fell almost to her waist, and she had the sort of hourglass figure that generally existed only in the minds of swimwear designers.

As Camilla tried to form the word “hello,” she mopped wine from her soaked lap with a wad of the toilet paper.

“Hello,” Angela said. Her voice was deep and rich.

“You don’t like the chardonnay?” Plantagenet made a feeble attempt at a laugh.

“It’s excellent. Lots of oak. Rich, floral nose.” Camilla made another swipe with the damp mauve lump. “It’s just that I’ve had kind of a bad day and I haven’t been able to find you for so long, and well—the phone was busy, so I—I shouldn’t have, I guess.” She shut herself up by draining the last of the wine in her glass.

“Oh, you poor thing,” Angela said. “Plant, go and get Camilla a paper towel or something. I hope the wine hasn’t ruined that beautiful dress. Here, give me your glass. I’ll pour you some more.” Her graceful fingers close around her glass. Plantagenet disappeared into the kitchen. “So you’ve had a bad day, dear?” Angela’s voice was soothing and rich—and familiar. The “landlady.” Of course.

Camilla took a deep breath and tried to imagine how her mother would handle it. Never give more information than necessary. No Mother/murderer nuptials. No taking drugs with dead television stars.

“It’s my job,” she said with what was probably inappropriate sunnyness. “I’ve lost it. I’ve been fired, sort of.”

“So you’ve come to commiserate with Plant?” Angela smiled as she handed Camilla the replenished glass. She had little crinkles around her eyes. That was something.

“Commiserate?” Camilla said. “Oh, yes. Plant was fired, too, wasn’t he? I saw it in the paper. That’s how I found out he was back. He and I were good friends—back in New York.”

Angela gave another warm smile.

“Of course, dear, Plant has told me all about you. He said you’re his closest friend. But we had no idea you were here in California.”

We. She used the word “we.”

Plantagenet reappeared, holding a box of paper coffee filters.

“I can’t find any paper towels, but I thought these might do. I’ve used paper towels when I’ve run out of filters, so I thought…” He made a sudden stop to his ramblings and looked directly at Camilla “Camel, darling, how did you get here?”

She tried to organize her recent ordeals into words.

“I drove up. From San Diego. Ocean Beach. After I drove from Connecticut. Well, from Virginia, really. But I’ve been living in OB since June, with my friend Waverly Nelson. And her friend Jennifer. I’ve been working at the
San Diego
Union.”

Plantagenet still held the coffee filters in his extended hand, looking wildly uncomfortable, so she politely accepted them.

“But she’s lost her job,” Angela added as she sat in a queenly white wicker chair. Camilla noticed with a certain amount of pleasure that her hair was streaked with gray.

“Camilla, I’m so proud of you!” Plantagenet said.

“For getting fired?”

“Of course not. Not that. But for moving out here; for being on your own; for escaping the clutches of that harpy mother of yours.”

“The
San Diego Union
is one of the most right-wing papers in the country. If you annoyed them, it’s probably because you’re too good at your job,” Angela said.

Plantagenet gave another nervous laugh.

“Angela has her leftist image to keep up, you know.” Plant sat in the chair next to Angela’s.

Leftist image. Harpy. The words swam around with the wine in her brain.

The voice. Finally she could place it. This woman was Angela Harper, the folk singer, the one that people called “Angela Harpy” because of her outspoken radical politics. The one who had been helping the Sandanistas—who was involved with that horrible
Guardian
reporter Jonathan Kahn.

When Camilla was about eight, her dad had made her throw out all her Angela Harper records because he did not want “an agent of Ho Chi Minh” influencing his daughter. Ever since then, she had always felt a little wicked when she heard anyone sing “Greensleeves” or “Mr. Froggie Went A-Courting”.

Now she was sitting in the woman’s house, weeping into her mauve toilet paper.

Angela tossed her shining hair.

Plantagenet laughed at something she said.

Angela looked stunningly beautiful. This couldn’t be the same woman. Those albums were recorded in the 1960s. Angela Harper would be as old as her mother.

“Camilla is too young to remember those days,” Angela said, as if she had been reading Camilla’s mind.

“Are you Angela Harper, the folksinger?” Her curiosity won out over tact.

“Of course she is, darling,” Plantagenet said. “We met years ago when the cast of
Boadicea
did a recording for Vanguard, and we happened to bump into each other again when I was job-hunting last winter. I guess I didn’t do those introductions very well, did I? Bad case of jet lag. Would anybody like more wine?”

Everybody did.

“Camilla is much more of a celebrity than I am these days,” Angela said. “I’m something of a museum piece in these repressive times. But I’ve seen Camilla all over the press this last year. And you’re even prettier than your pictures, dear.” Angela crinkled her eyes in a half smile.

“Oh, my goodness,” Camilla said, absently shredding a coffee filter, “I didn’t know I’d been mentioned in any California papers.”

“I read the New York
Guardian
,” Angela said. “It’s the only major newspaper in the country that publishes anything but the same old Reagan crap. Or it used to be.”  Angela crossed her legs and her robe opened to reveal an expanse of creamy thigh.

“Camilla, darling, have you had dinner?” Plantagenet said, leaning over and closing Angela’s robe again. Angela grabbed Plantagenet’s hand and kissed it.

Camilla could bear it no longer. Plantagenet was supposed to be gay. How could the world have gone so topsy-turvy? Her heart banged in her chest. Her head felt about to explode. She stood up and stiffly handed Plant the box of coffee filters.

“No, thank you. That’s lovely of you, but I have—a previous engagement.” She imitated her mother’s most opaque smile. “Must run.” She glanced at her watch. “Oh, will you look at the time! I have to fly. Wonderful to see you, Plantagenet. Nice to meet you, Angela. Good-bye.”

Camilla walked out of the house as quickly as she could in spite of Angela’s murmured protests and Plantagenet’s startled expression.

Once out the door, she broke into a run. As she climbed into her car, she heard Plantagenet behind her, calling: