I leave the table and go to the men's room. The door is locked and above the sound of the toilet being flushed repeatedly I can hear Raymond's sobs. I knock. "Raymond—let me in."
The toilet stops flushing. I can hear him sniffling, then blowing his nose.
"I'll be okay," he calls back.
"Let me in." I'm twisting the knob. "Come on. Open the door."
The door opens. It's a small bathroom and Raymond is sitting on the toilet, the lid closed, beginning to cry again, his face and eyes red and wet. I am so surprised by Raymond's emotion that I lean against the door and just stare, watching him bunch his hands into fists.
"He was my friend," he says between intakes of breath, not looking up at me.
I'm looking at a yellowed tile on the wall for a long time, wondering how the waiter, who I am positive I had asked not to put garbanzo beans in my salad, actually had. Where was the waiter born, why had he come to Mario's, hadn't he looked at the salad, didn't he understand?
"He liked you . . . too," I say finally.
"He was my best friend." Raymond tries to stop crying by hitting the wall.
I try to lean down, pay attention and say "Uh-huh."
"Really, he was." Raymond keeps sobbing.
"Come on, get up," I say. "It'll be all right. We're going to the movies."
Raymond looks up and asks, "Will it?"
"Jamie really liked you too." I take Raymond by the arm. "He wouldn't want you to act like this."
"He really liked me," he says to himself or asks.
"Yeah, he really did." I can't help but smile when I say this.
Raymond coughs and takes some toilet paper and blows his nose, then he washes his face and says that he needs some pot.
We both go back to the table and try to eat a little but everything's cold, my salad already gone. Raymond orders a good bottle of wine and the waiter brings it, along with four glasses, and Raymond proposes a toast. And after the g asses are filled he urges us to lift them and Dirk looks at us like we're insane and refuses to, draining his glass before Raymond says something like "Here's to you, buddy, miss you a lot." I lift my glass, feeling stupid, and Raymond looks over at me, his face swollen, puffy, smiling, looking stoned, and at this still point, when Raymond raises his glass and Graham gets up to make a phone call, I remember Jamie so suddenly and with such clarity that it doesn't seem as if the car had flown off the highway in the desert that night. It almost seems as if the asshole is right here, with us, and that if I turn around he will be sitting there, his glass raised also, smirking, shaking his head and mouthing the word "fools."
I take a sip, cautiously at first, afraid the sip is sealing something.
"I'm sorry," Dirk says. "I just . . . can't.”
3
THE UP ESCALATOR
I'm standing on the balcony of Martin's apartment in Westwood, holding a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and Martin comes toward me, rushes at me, and with both hands pushes me off the balcony. Martin's apartment in Westwood is only two stories high and so the fall is not that long. As I'm failing I hope I will wake up before hitting the ground. I hit the asphalt, hard, and lying there, on my stomach, my neck twisted completely around, I look up and focus on Martin's handsome face staring down at me with a benign smile. It's the serenity in that smile—not the fall really or the imagined image of my cracked, bleeding body—that wakes me up.
I stare at the ceiling, then over at the digital alarm clock on the nightstand next to the bed, which tells me it is almost noon, and I uselessly hope that I have misread the time, shutting my eyes tightly, but when I open them again the clock still reads that it is almost noon. I raise my head slightly and look over at the small, flickering red numbers glowing from the Betamax and they tell me the same thing the hands on the melon-colored alarm clock do: almost noon. I try to fall back asleep but the Librium I took at dawn has worn off and my mouth feels thick and dry and I am thirsty. I get up, slowly, and walk into the bathroom and as I turn on the faucet I look into the mirror for a long time until I am forced to notice the new lines beginning around the eyes. I avert my gaze and concentrate on the cold water rushing out of the faucet and filling the cup my hands have made.
I open a mirrored cabinet and take out a bottle. I take its top off and count only four Libriums left. I pour one green-and-black capsule into my hand, staring at it, then place it carefully next to the sink and close the bottle and put it back into the medicine cabinet and take out another bottle and place two Valiums from it on the counter next to the green-and-black capsule. I put the bottle back and take out another. I open it, looking in cautiously. I notice there is not too much Thorazine left and I make a mental note to refill the prescription of Librium and Valium and I take a Librium and one of the two Valiums and turn the shower on.
I step into the big white-and-black tile shower stall and stand there. The water, cool at first, then warmer, hits me in the face hard and it weakens me and as I slowly drop to my knees, the black-and-green capsule somehow lodged in the back of my throat, I imagine, for an instant, that the water is a deep and cool aquamarine, and I'm parting my lips, tilting my head to get some water down my throat to help swallow the pill. When I open my eyes I start moaning when I see that the water coming down at me is not blue but clear and light and warm and making the skin on my breasts and stomach red.
After dressing I walk downstairs, and it distresses me to think of how long it takes to get ready for a day. At how many minutes pass as I wander listlessly through a large walk-in closet, at how long it seems to take to find the shoes I want, at the effort it takes to lift myself from the shower. You can forget this if you walk downstairs carefully, methodically, concentrating on each footstep. I reach the bottom landing and I can hear voices coming from the kitchen and I move toward them. From where I stand I can see my son and another boy standing in the kitchen looking for something to eat and the maid sitting at the large, wood-block table staring at photographs in yesterday's Herald-Examiner, her sandals kicked off, blue nail polish on her toenails. The stereo in the den is on and someone, a woman, is singing "I found a picture of you." I walk into the kitchen. Graham looks up from the refrigerator and says, unsmiling, "Up early?"
"Why aren't you at school?" I ask, trying to sound like I care, reaching past him into the refrigerator for a Tab.
"Seniors get out early on Mondays."
"Oh." I believe him but don't know why. I open the Tab and take a swallow. I have a feeling that the pill I took earlier is still lodged in my throat, stuck, melting. I take another swallow of Tab.
Graham reaches past me and pulls an orange out of the refrigerator. The other boy, tall and blond, like Graham, stands by the sink and stares out the window and into the pool. Graham and the other boy have their school uniforms on and they look very much alike: Graham peeling an orange, the other boy staring out into water. I'm having a hard time not finding either one of their stances unnerving, so I turn away, but the sight of the maid sitting at the table, sandals by her feet, the unmistakable smell of marijuana coming from the maid's purse and sweater, somehow seems worse and I take another swallow of the Tab, then pour the rest of it down the sink. I begin to leave the kitchen.
Graham turns to the boy. "Do you want to watch MTV?"
"I don't . . . think so," the boy says, staring into the pool.
I pick up my purse, which is sitting in an alcove next to the refrigerator, and make sure my wallet is in it because the last time I was in Robinson's it was not. I am about to walk out the door. The maid folds the paper. Graham takes off his burgundy letterman's sweater. The other boy wants to know if Graham has Alien on cassette. From the den the woman is singing "circumstance beyond our control." I find myself staring at my son, blond and tall and tan, with blank green eyes, opening the refrigerator, taking out another orange. He studies it, then lifts his head when he notices me standing by the door.
"Are you going somewhere?" he asks.
"Yes."
He waits for a moment and when I don't say anything he shrugs and turns away and begins to peel the orange and somewhere on the way to Le Dôme to meet Martin for lunch I realize that Graham is only one year younger than Martin and I have to pull the Jaguar over to a curb on Sunset and turn the volume down and unroll a window, then the sunroof, and let the heat from today's sun warm the inside of the car, as I concentrate on a tumbleweed that the wind is pushing slowly across an empty boulevard.
Martin is sitting at the round bar in Le Dôme. He is wearing a suit and a tie and he is tapping his foot impatiently to the music that is playing through the restaurant's sound system. He watches me as I make my way over to him.
"You're late," he says, showing me the time on a gold Rolex.
"Yes. I am," I say, and then, "Let's sit down."
Martin looks at his watch and then at his empty glass and then back at me and I am clutching my purse tightly against my side. Martin sighs, then nods. The maitre d' shows us to a table and we sit down and Martin starts to talk about his classes at UCLA and then about how his parents are irritating him, about how they came over to his apartment in Westwood unannounced, about how his stepfather wanted him to come to a dinner party he was throwing at Chasen's, about how Martin did not want to go to a dinner party his stepfather was throwing at Chasen's, about how tiredly words were exchanged.
I'm looking out a window, at a Spanish valet standing in front of a Rolls-Royce, staring into it, muttering. When Martin begins to complain about his BMW and how much the insurance is, I interrupt.
"Why did you call the house?"
"I wanted to talk to you," he says. "I was going to cancel."
"Don't call the house."
"Why?" he asks. "There's someone there who cares?"
I light a cigarette.
He puts his fork down next to his plate and then looks away. "We're eating at Le Dôme," Martin says.
"I mean, Jesus."
"Okay?" I ask.
"Yeah. Okay."
I ask for the check and pay it and follow Martin back to his apartment in Westwood where we have sex and I give Martin a pith helmet as a gift.
I am lying on a chaise longue by the pool. Issues of Vogue and Los Angeles magazine and the Calendar section from the Times are stacked next to where I am lying but I can't read them because the color of the pool takes my eyes away from the words and I stare longingly into thin aquamarine water. I want to go swimming but the heat of the sun has made the water too warm and Dr. Nova has warned about the dangers of taking Librium and swimming laps.
A poolboy is cleaning the pool. The poolboy is very young and tan and has blond hair and he is not wearing a shirt and he is wearing very tight white jeans and when he leans down to check the temperature of the water, muscles in his back ripple gently beneath smooth clean brown skin. The poolboy has brought a portable cassette player that sits by the edge of the jacuzzi and someone is singing "Our love's in jeopardy" and I'm hoping the sound of palm fronds moving in warm wind will carry the music into the Suttons' yard. I'm intrigued by how deep the poolboy's concentration seems to be, at how gently the water moves when he skims a net across it, at how he empties the net, which catches leaves and multicolored dragonflies that seem to litter the water's gleaming surface. He opens a drain, the muscles in his arm flexing, lightly, only for a moment. And I keep watching, transfixed, as he reaches into the round hole and his arm begins to lift something out of the hole, muscles momentarily flexing again, and his hair is blond and windblown, streaked by sun, and I shift my body in the lounge chair, not moving my eyes.
The poolboy begins to raise his arm out of the drain and he lifts two large gray rags up and drops them, dripping, onto concrete and stares at them. He stares at the rags for a long time. And then he makes his way toward me. I panic for a moment, adjusting my sunglasses, reaching for tanning oil. The poolboy is walking toward me slowly and the sun is beating down and I'm spreading my legs and rubbing oil on the inside of my thighs and then across my legs, knees, ankles. He is standing over me. Valium, taken earlier, disorients everything, makes backgrounds move in wavy slow motion. A shadow covers my face and it allows me to look up at the poolboy and I can hear from the portable stereo "Our love's in jeopardy" and the poolboy opens his mouth, the lips full, the teeth white and clean and even, and I overwhelmingly need him to ask me to get into the white pickup truck parked at the bottom of the driveway and have him instruct me to go out to the desert with him. His hands, perfumed by chlorine, would rub oil over my back, across my stomach, my neck, and as he looks down at me with the rock music coming from the cassette deck and the palm trees shifting in a hot desert wind and the glare of the sun shining up off the surface of the blue water in the pool, I tense and wait for him to say something, anything, a sigh, a moan. I breathe in, stare up through my sunglasses, into the poolboy's eyes, trembling.
"You have two dead rats in your drain." I don't say anything.
"Rats. Two dead ones. They got caught in the drain or maybe they fell in, who knows." He looks at me blankly.
"Why . . . are you . . . telling me this?" I ask.
He stands there, expecting me to say something else. I lower my sunglasses and look over at the gray bundles near the jacuzzi.
"Take . . . them, away?" I manage to say, looking down.
"Yeah. Okay," the poolboy says, hands in his pockets. "I just don't know how they got trapped in there?"
The statement, really a question, is phrased in such a languid way that though it doesn't warrant an answer I tell him, "I guess ... we'll never know?"
I am looking at the cover of an issue of Los Angeles magazine. A huge arc of water reaches for the sky, a fountain, blue and green and white, spraying upward.
"Rats are afraid of water," the poolboy is telling me.
"Yes," I say. "I've heard. I know."
The poolboy walks back to the two drowned rats and picks them up by their tails which should be pink but even from where I sit I can see are now pale blue and he puts them into what I thought was his toolbox and then to erase the notion of the poolboy keeping the rats I open the Los Angeles magazine and search for the article about the fountain on the cover.
I am sitting in a restaurant on Melrose with Anne and Eve and Faith. I am drinking my second Bloody Mary and Anne and Eve have had too many kirs and Faith orders what I believe to be a fourth vodka gimlet. I light a cigarette. Faith is talking about how her son, Dirk, had his driver's license revoked for speeding down Pacific Coast Highway, drunk. Faith is driving his Porsche now. I wonder if Faith knows that Dirk sells cocaine to tenth graders at Beverly Hills High. Graham told me this one afternoon last week in the kitchen even though I had asked for no information about Dirk. Faith's Audi is in the shop for the third time this year. She wants to sell it, yet she's confused about which kind of car to buy. Anne tells her that ever since the new engine replaced the old engine in the XJ6, it has been running well. Anne turns to me and asks me about my car, about William's. On the verge of weeping, I tell her that it is running smoothly.
Eve does not say too much. Her daughter is in a psychiatric hospital in Camarillo. Eve's daughter tried to kill herself with a gun by shooting herself in the stomach. I cannot understand why Eve's daughter did not shoot herself in the head. I cannot understand why she lay down on the floor of her mother's walk-in closet and pointed her stepfather's gun at her stomach. I try to imagine the sequence of events that afternoon leading up to the shooting. But Faith begins to talk about how her daughter's therapy is progressing. Sheila is an anorexic. My own daughter has met Sheila and may also be an anorexic.
Finally, an uneasy silence falls across the table in the restaurant on Melrose and I stare at Anne, who has forgotten to cover the outline of scars from the face-lift she had in Palm Springs three months ago by the same surgeon who did mine and William's. I consider telling them about the rats in the drain or the way the poolboy floated into my eyes before turning away but instead I light another cigarette and the sound of Anne
's voice breaking the silence startles me and I burn a finger.
On Wednesday morning, after William gets out of bed and asks where the Valium is and after I stumble out of bed to retrieve it from my purse and after he reminds me that the family has reservations at Spago at eight and after I hear the wheels on the Mercedes screech out of the driveway and after Susan tells me that she is going to Westwood with Alana and Blair after school and will meet us at Spago and after I fall back asleep and dream of rats drowning, crawling desperately over each other in a steaming, bubbling jacuzzi, and dozens of poolboys, nude, standing over the jacuzzi, laughing, pointing at the drowning rats, their heads nodding in unison to the beat of the music coming from portable stereos they hold in golden arms, I wake up and walk downstairs and take a Tab out of the refrigerator and find twenty milligrams of Valium in a pillbox in another purse in the alcove by the refrigerator and take ten milligrams. From the kitchen I can hear the maid vacuuming in the living room and it moves me to get dressed and I drive to a Thrifty drugstore in Beverly Hills and walk toward the pharmacy, the empty bottle that used to be filled with black-and-green capsules clenched tightly in my fist. But the store is air conditioned and cool and the glare from the fluorescent lighting and the Muzak playing somewhere above me as background noise have a pronounced anesthetic effect and my grip on the brown plastic bottle relaxes, loosens.
At the counter I hand the empty bottle to the pharmacist. He puts glasses on and looks at the plastic container. I study my fingernails and uselessly try to remember the name of the song that is floating through the store's sound system.
"Miss?" the pharmacist begins awkwardly.
"Yes?" I lower my sunglasses.
"It says here 'no refills.' "
"What?" I ask, startled. "Where?"
The pharmacist points to two typed words at the bottom of the piece of paper taped to the bottle, next to my psychiatrist's name and, next to that, the date 10/10/83.