Secret Sins: (A Standalone) (5 page)

I’d been so clueless about how close they were and how lonely they were.

I always assumed I was brought into this world fully formed. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I didn’t understand people the way I thought I did. I chewed on that then forgot it, because it only turned up the heat on a cauldron of stew that had everything and nothing to do with the Bullets and Blood boys.

Indy leaned forward and pointed at a locked gate closing off a road into the foothills of the Palisades. “Up here. Code’s fifty-one-fifty.” He turned to me, and I could feel his breath on my cheek. “Wait until you see this place.”

“It’s nice up here,” Lynn said before cracking her gum. She was in a black lace corset and tiered skirt. Red, red lips and black, black eyeliner.

“This is the ass-end though,” Yoni chimed in. “It’s the Palihood.”

“Yeah, anything east of the park.”

“South.”

“East.”

I rolled my eyes.

Strat ignored them. “He can’t afford it.”

“We just got a quarter-million dollar contract.” Indy leaned back and kicked Strat’s seat.

Strat shook his head. “Have you read it?”

“You don’t read Greek either.”

Driving up the hill under the clear spring sky, the fact that he’d read the contract and understood it made me look at Strat’s arms, his music tattoos, the muscles of his legs, and respect him with a sexual heat.

We pulled up to a house made of glass and overhung with trees and surrounded by tall bushes. When we got out of the car, the shade was a welcome respite from the blasting sun, and the birds cut through the white noise of the freeway.

“It’s nice,” I said.

“And I can afford it.” Indy pointed at Strat as he headed for the front door.

“Fuck you can,” Strat muttered.

Yoni and Lynn had no interest. They’d started bantering about the coyotes in the hills, bouncing with excitement, as we went up the cracked steps onto the pocked flagstones.

“Ye of little faith.” Indy opened the door. “I have the down payment next week. Made escrow already.”

The black linoleum floors shined, and the sightline went through the house, over the west side, and to the ocean. Yoni and Lynn were already checking out the bean-shaped pool in the back.

You’d think a musician on the cusp of fame wouldn’t want to be tied down to a house. He’d want to ride the tour bus and fuck a few hundred girls. That was the norm. But Indy stood in the empty space between the front door and the horizon and lit two cigarettes before handing me one.

“I can move in next week.”

“Dude,” Strat said.

“Dude,” Indy snapped.

Strat turned to me, hands out, pleading. On the whole ride up, I’d wondered why they brought me, and I feared at that moment that they’d gone to the library or talked to their lawyers and found out who I was. Now they were going to ask me for money, and I couldn’t give it to them. There was no other reason to put me in that car.

I liked them, but that house had to cost two hundred grand.

Would they threaten to tell Daddy things? The poker? The bra? The smoking? Would they tell him I drank and I kissed? Or that I was a cocktease?

When I brought the cigarette to my lips, my hand was shaking. I didn’t know which scenario terrified me most. I inhaled the nicotine and blew out rings as if I had control of this. Whatever this was. It was my first cigarette of the day, and it made my palms tingle.

“Why the fuck am I here?” I asked.

Strat stepped forward, finger pointing at me then Indy. “Keep me from killing him.”

“Fuck you,” Indy retorted.

I didn’t have anything much more intelligent to offer. “It’s a nice house. Needs work. Get an accountant to tell him if he can afford it.”

“Let me give you the short version.” Strat’s comment was directed at me but meant for Indy. “Two fifty minus fifteen percent to WDE. Two twelve and a half. Eighty-three grand. Minus three points to our producer. Two-oh-five. And by the way, we, you and me and Gary—the
band—
we have to recoup
their
points.”

“We will. I’m telling you.”

“Two-oh-five divided by three? Sixty-eight thousand dollars for a three-year contract. And you haven’t even paid your taxes yet.”

I rolled my eyes and looked at the ceiling. If Strat and/or Indy noticed me acting my age, they didn’t say anything.

“There’s income, fucktard.” Indy patted his pockets and found a thick marker best suited to sniffing and writing graff. “I need a napkin. Fucking find me a napkin. An envelope. I gotta write on the back of it.”

“Fifty grand for the studio we gotta pay back,” said Strat the Sensible. “Recoupable. Producer. Recoupable. Equipment rental. Re—”

“Stop it!” I shouted.

I’d had it with the two of them. I didn’t know much of anything. I didn’t know how to run a business or how to make money, but I knew how to think like a rich person. Maybe that was why they’d brought me.

“You guys. You’re so cute with your middle-class shitsense. You act as if it’s money to spend. It’s not. It’s money to make more money. You.” I pointed at Strat. “You move in here with Indy. You take your sixty grand, and you set up a studio in the garage or the living room. I don’t care where. You.” I pointed at Indy. “Get a commercial loan. You lay down the next record here and collect the fifty grand instead of paying it in recoupable expenses. You rent it out to your other musician friends and let them pay your mortgage, and you pay down that fucker because at eighteen percent interest, you’re getting killed.”

I took a pull on my cigarette. It was so close to the filter that my fingers got hot. Jesus, figuring that out felt good. Whether they did what I said or not, putting it together had been damn near orgasmic. “I need a fucking beer.”

1994

The San Fernando Valley, Van Nuys in particular, was a hell of parking lots and freeway-width avenues. Everything looked new yet coated over in beige dust. Drew and I had split right after the meeting, slipping down the back elevator. It was like the old days when I had a ten o’clock curfew I ignored.

We pulled into the back of Audio City, where the entrance was. Drew put the car into park and leaned back.

“You gonna open the door?” I asked.

“I haven’t seen these guys in a long time. Give me a minute to think.”

“Get back into your rocker head?”

He smiled, and something about that made me feel really good. “Yeah.”

I switched my position so I was kneeling on the seat, facing him. I yanked on his lapel. “Take this off. You look like a fucking lawyer.”

“Right. Okay.” He wrestled out of his jacket and tossed it in the back. His shirt had light blue stripes and a white collar, and his tie was just skinny enough to be stylish without crossing the line into new wave.

I grabbed it and let it go so it flopped. “Come on, take this off.”

He undid it. “I forgot how bossy you are.”

“I still can’t believe you even remember me.”

“You’re not forgettable.”

“Please,” I said. “There were hundreds of girls.”

He yanked at the tie, slipping it through the knot. “I was obsessed with you the second you opened your mouth. You scared the fuck out of Strat. He thought he was going to lose me to you.”

He leaned his head back on the seat, raising his hand languidly and touching my chin. My eyes fluttered closed, because I’d been too busy to let a man touch me in years, and this man knew how to touch. He ran his finger along the edge of my jaw, down my neck, and I grabbed it before it could move lower.

“We’re working.”

“What happened to you?” he asked in a whisper.

“I went to law school.”

“Before that. You split. We couldn’t find you. Strat hung out outside your house. We went to all the clubs. Your friends didn’t know where you were.”

He didn’t know what he was asking. He thought he was going to get some reasonable, sane answer, but there wasn’t one.

“It had nothing to do with you,” I lied. It had everything to do with him. Every single thing.

“What did it have to do with, Cin?” His voice dripped sex and music, and I wondered if that was just his way of getting back into character.

I reached for his collar and ran my finger under it, revealing the stand of tiny white buttons. “The collar comes off.”

“You need to tell me where you went.”

“I took a trip.”

“We waited, and you never showed up.”

He moved his fingertip down my shirt. My breath got short, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of his lips.

“Sorry. I flaked. You guys were too intense for me.” I didn’t know why I had to make it obvious that it was more than that. I could have kept my voice flat and subtext-free, but my inflection got away from me. If he couldn’t tell I was hiding something, he was an idiot.

And he wasn’t an idiot. That was shit-sure.

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” he said.

“No.”

He took his hand away. Relief and disappointment fought for dominance inside me as he flipped his stiff collar up and unbuttoned it.

“We had a good time,” he said. “Good coupla months.”

“Seven weeks.”

“I wasn’t even thinking about how long it was going to last. But I was so fucking stupid anyway. Strat was smart. He played at being a reckless musician, but man, he was sharp and fifty years older in his mind. He told me to chill out. He told me the thing we were doing was temporary, and I argued with him like a moron.” He shook his head at his stupidity and got the last button undone, snapping the collar away from his neck.

“Looks better,” I said, smoothing down the Mandarin.

He took my wrist and sucked me in with the tractor beam of his gaze. “I thought I’d be the one to lose my shit when it ended. But it was him.”

I pulled my hand away. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t care for another second. “What happened?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“You could.”

But he didn’t, and I opened the door to end the conversation.

1982 – After the night of the Quaalude

Rich family. Pig rich. Six nannies, two cooks, and a cleaning staff rich. Multiple estates. We were our own economy. My dad wouldn’t experiment with losing a chunk of it for another twenty-plus years.

My father had two brothers, and my mother had a sister she barely spoke to. She’d never said why. She never said much that was worth listening to. She hadn’t seemed young to me until the autumn of Bullets and Blood.

This realization happened at a party. We had two hundred people in the house for my parents’ anniversary. String quartet. Black tie staff. Open doors to our swimming pool with lotus blossoms and candles floating in it. Attendance was mandatory, so I had to tell Indy and Strat to get their laughs elsewhere.

All the family and business partners were there, all the wives clustered around the couches and most of the men hovering around the bar. Except Aunt Maureen. She never hung around the women. She was my “cool aunt” who ran a business and told the guy she’d been with for the past ten years that she saw no point in getting married. She was talking to my dad and a few guys in suits I knew by sight but not name. I was close by, hanging on every word, when I heard her say something about negotiations with a blue chip company. It was a bunch of numbers and percentages I understood because I remembered everything the adults in my family said about business. But at the end, she laughed.

The sound had a clear, tinkling quality her voice usually lacked. She sounded so young.

Wait. She
was
young.

She was eighteen years older than me. A little less, give or take. And that made my mother fifteen and change when she’d had me.

Over the ice sculpture and through the floral arrangement in the center of the ballroom, I looked at my father and did more math.

I almost laughed at the symmetry of it.

But it wasn’t funny. It took me too long to realize what had gone on, but I told myself I wasn’t going to be like my mother. I didn’t hate her, but I didn’t respect her either. She was from a good family. She was beautiful and smart. But she was nothing. She did nothing. Her life was a vacuum that purpose had fallen into, never to be seen again.

I wasn’t going to be that, but I was already on the way.

Me in my blue dress and little gold hoop earrings, dressed like a prim little miss. A chiffon-and-silk lie I let them believe. I felt sick.

I was thrown off balance by the impact of a small child. Fiona was five, and she had her arms wrapped around my legs. The others followed. Deirdre and Leanne hugged my legs too. Carrie and Sheila, at nine and eleven, stayed close, looking excited. I was only missing Theresa, who was a year old and had started walking two weeks ago. They looked up at me with eyes in varying shades of blue and green, hair from strawberry-blond to dark brown red. That was what happened when a redhead married a redhead, and my insides curdled like milk on the stove.

“Who’s watching you guys?” I was talking about everyone but directed the question at Carrie, the oldest of them and most likely to put together a coherent sentence.

“Everyone’s outside. Are you having cake or not?”

How long had I been staring into the middle distance?

Long enough for everyone to move to the garden, leaving a few clustered stragglers by the French doors. I let my little sisters lead me outside, where sibling hierarchy was determined by proximity to the cake. I’d lost any will of my own and hung behind all of them. I didn’t really want cake. I’d been sick to my stomach for days, fighting a headache, feeling tender everywhere, but I had a compulsion to act as if dessert mattered.

My mother and father stood behind the cake, smiling for the professional photographer. He wore an
LA Times
press pass. The camera was nowhere near me, but I felt exposed. They’d want a picture with me, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I could stay relatively anonymous in the world, but people read the pages of news about the Reagan presidency, Beirut, Studio 54 closing, and Hollywood celebrities. After those, but before the stock ticker, came the society page. Weddings. Anniversaries. Deaths of monied men.