Wit's End Page 6

  The car curved between the ocean and the lake, which, Rima had recently learned, most people called the lagoon in spite of the beach’s being Twin Lakes State Beach. The moon was behind them, round and white as bone. Martin pointed it out to Rima, framed in the back window above the heart-print underwear. “Wolf moon,” he said. He howled and shook out his hair. “Damn, I’m in a good mood. Is everyone in a good mood?”

  Silence in the car.

  “Then you get in a good mood,” he said. “I can’t do this alone.” He stretched his arm along the backseat so that his fingers were near Rima’s neck. He drummed them briefly. “Addison’s your godmother,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Rima.

  “Your fairy godmother,” and Rima didn’t know where Martin was going with that. It seemed to her there were multiple possibilities, none of them meant to be nice, even though he was smiling nicely at her. She decided not to respond.

  They tried three parking lots before they found a place down by the river, and then had to walk several blocks through the downtown. They passed the Santa Cruz clown—a man in pink clown shoes, pink clown pants, and twirling a pink umbrella. His cheeks were painted with pink circles and he had an extremely unsettling smile on his face. No one but Rima appeared to notice him, though he would have been very eye-catching in Cleveland.

  Everyone else was dressed as if it were cold out. Scorch and Martin found themselves in absolute, delightful agreement that it was crazy fucking cold. Scorch gave Martin her hand so he could see how cold that was, and Martin put her hand on his chest inside his jacket—it was so cold, he said, he was afraid fingers would be lost if drastic measures weren’t taken—and then, partly because Cody was looking off to the side and saying nothing, Rima told them both to go to Ohio for a winter and cowboy up.

  The bar was upstairs in a building with no sign on the street to suggest it. They passed through a lobby of faded gaud with gold-flecked red wallpaper, a dusty chandelier, and a wall of headshots—a bouquet of Miss Santa Cruzes from the 1930s, the 1940s, the Marilyn Monroe 1950s. Rima followed Scorch’s shoes—metallic gold sneakers with green laces—up the stairs and into the heat of the crowded bar.

  Scorch and Cody were greeted by name. They produced no IDs, and none was asked for, while Rima’s and Martin’s were examined with care. Before she was allowed inside, Rima was tested on her birth year, which fortunately she did know, and then they all got to stamp their own hands with a stamp of their own choosing, though the selection was limited to moody pigs. Scorch’s pig was wistful, Rima’s was angry. Martin’s was lovelorn. Cody’s was the same as Martin’s, only on his hand it looked conspiratorial.

  Over Rima’s protests, Scorch insisted on paying the cover for everyone. The room was noisy enough to make talking difficult, and it smelled of hops, pot, and sweat. One seat at the bar was vacant. This was given to Rima while Cody went to see if there were any empty seats farther in. Having failed, he returned and bought Rima a glass of red wine, a Tanqueray Collins for Scorch, and something on tap for himself and Martin. He stood, leaning against the bar on one side of Rima. Martin and Scorch were on the other, Martin so close to Rima that her head was touching the green corduroy sleeve of his jacket.

  There was live music—a band called Control Your Dog with a throaty female vocalist and a powerful bass—so the rest of the evening took place in shouts between songs. “If I’ve got it coming, give it to me,” the vocalist sang. “Don’t take me something something down to something you.”

  Final chord, sustained finish, and then Martin leaned across Rima to Cody. “You in the doghouse, man?”

  “He knows what he did,” Scorch said. There was loud laughter in another part of the bar. “You can all go fuck yourselves,” someone was saying at a table to Rima’s left, while the man on the other side of Cody said something about love, which he thought was either unconditional or wasn’t, Rima couldn’t hear enough to know. Later in the evening she would realize with surprise that he’d been talking about God.

  “Just tell her you’re sorry,” Martin said. “You’re better off being wrong than being right.”

  “Like an apology just fixes everything. Like it’s some fucking delete button,” and Scorch was still talking, but Rima couldn’t hear any more of that either, Control Your Dog was revving up for another song. “Dorsal pie down on a quiet street,” the vocalist sang, or maybe Rima had misheard the words.

  (2)

  Several songs and a drink later:

  Martin was talking into Scorch’s ear. Cody had joined the conversation on the other side of Rima, the one about unconditional love, but Rima couldn’t hear it, so it probably was about something else by now. Someone at the table on the left was being told to fuck himself, but in an affectionate way.

  When Martin saw that Rima was watching, the music fading, he raised his head and his voice. “It takes money to make money, is what I’m saying,” he told her. “Fact of life. Sad fact of life. You’ve got to have some kind of stake to start with. Maybe it doesn’t have to be money. Something. Take Addison. With a little initiative she wouldn’t even have to write her own books anymore. She could get someone else to write them, share the profits, cash the checks. All because she’s got the stake to begin with.”

  Scorch shook her head so that some of her hair landed on Martin’s shoulder. In the bar light, her red hair was black and her pink hair silver. “She’s very fussy about Maxwell Lane,” Scorch said. “She’d never let anyone else have him,” and then there was another song, a song in which someone Rima was never able to identify killed himself with car exhaust, which you would think would be a quiet song, but wasn’t, and when it ended, Scorch picked the conversation right back up as if there’d been no interruption. “Like she’s always going nuts about the fanfic. Especially the sex stuff.”

  It was the evening’s first mention of sex, and it came in a shout and it came from a sexy young woman. Those men close enough to hear stopped their own conversations. The air thickened. “What sex stuff ?” Rima asked.

  “Oh my god!” Scorch said. As she’d drunk and danced and drunk some more, she’d been shedding clothes. There was a small pile of them now under Rima’s stool, and Scorch was down to a backless tank top, her shoulders and the tops of her breasts sparkling. She was dressed for ice dancing, except for the shoes. “You haven’t read it? Maxwell Lane sex fantasies. Written by fans and posted like all over the Internet. Tons of them. Very explicit, but sort of soft-focus too.”

  Rima had never heard of fanfic, but she could see how Maxwell would prompt fantasies. As a young man, he’d been an FBI informant and done some things that haunted him; betrayal and bad faith were his particular issues. There he was, all alone, so tortured by his past. Addison was practically begging for it.

  “I hear it’s all written by women,” Martin said. “So I don’t get why so much of it is man on man.”

  “I think it’s often written by gay women,” Scorch said.

  “But see, that doesn’t clarify things.”

  “A ton of it is Maxwell and Bim,” Scorch said.

  It was the evening’s first mention of sex with Rima’s father. Rima’s glass was empty. She waved the bartender over, but it took too long, so when Martin wasn’t looking, she helped herself to his beer, just until her own drink came.

  Second set, three drinks down:

  “Until the cat walks in,” the vocalist sang, or maybe, “Only the fat wax on.” Followed by, “You love you love you love you.” Scorch was talking to Martin, fast, the way she usually talked, but with an excess of enunciation clearly aimed at Cody. “So he’s taking this class in primate behavior,” she said, “and suddenly we’re all laid bare, you know, everything we do, he knows what it means. What it really means, not what we think we’re doing, not what we mean to do, god no, it’s all status and display or alliance or intimidation or accommodation. And I’m sorry, but it’s fucking annoying, is what it is. So tonight, I’m getting dressed, and I ask him, Am I a high-status
female? He’s been going on about high-status females, so I ask, Am I one of those? Of course, it’s not really, Am I a high-status female? so much as, Do you, my so-called boyfriend, do you see me as a high-status female?”

  “Dude.” Martin turned to Cody. “I’m surprised you could get that one wrong.”

  “I didn’t,” Cody said.

  “That’s what he says now. That he said yes. That he said definitely, definitely yes. But first he laughed. That was his very first answer, that was his real answer, spontaneous laughing.”

  Cody seemed to Rima to be the sort that, in a fight, outlasted rather than overwhelmed. “You’re so far above me, baby,” Cody said. “I can’t even see you from where I am.”

  Scorch set her drink down and turned to Rima. “You want to go dance?”

  “Alliance-building with a high-status female,” Cody said. He put a hand over his mouth. “Whoa. That just slipped out.”

  “Rima?” Scorch’s voice was hitting the high notes now. “Rima is a high-status female?”

  “Look how she has the only seat,” Martin said.

  (3)

  Two songs later, still drink three:

  Rima had given Scorch her chair and taken the place next to Martin. He leaned into her. “You think Addison will leave you her money?” he asked.

  Rima was so startled she spilled some of her wine onto her pants. She could feel the dampness spreading down her thigh, and sometime during the last set, she’d torn her cocktail napkin into tiny strips for no reason at all. Someone at the table on the left was being told to go fuck himself.

  Martin reached across her to grab a napkin. There was the brush of corduroy on Rima’s cheek, the smell of him, smoke and eucalyptus and fabric softener, and his hand pressing on her leg, soaking up the wine. “My mother can get that out,” he said. He spoke directly into her ear, his breath warm. “She has something for red wine stains, something for white. She’s just a wiz at all your pill-and booze-related laundry disasters.”

  If Rima turned to him, her mouth would be an inch from his. “Why would Addison leave me anything?” she asked.

  “Why is, who else does she have? You and my mother.”

  “Friends. Dogs. Causes. I hardly know her.” Rima took another sip, slow this time and careful. Martin’s hand had remained on her knee. She shook it off and he straightened up, grinning at her.

  “So when did you start listening to me?” the vocalist sang. “Something, something, something me.”

  “I already have an inheritance,” she told him. Control Your Dog was beginning another song, apparently a favorite; the opening lines were greeted with applause. Even with their heads so close together, Rima had to repeat herself twice. She had to shout it before he heard.

  “You are so fucking lucky,” Martin said.

  Drink four or maybe five or maybe, in a better world, still the end of three:

  The singer was getting hoarse, but in a good way. “Something something something,” she sang, all raw emotion, all open wound. “Something, something.” Rima’s head was light, and her ears hurt from the loud music. Her throat hurt from all the shouting after talking to almost no one for weeks, or else she was catching Scorch’s cold. The night continued in disconnected bursts. Apparently Cody had gone outside to get some air, though Rima hadn’t noticed he was gone, and apparently someone he didn’t know, someone who hadn’t said a word, had shoved him and then taken a swing as he was going down. He hadn’t been hit hard, but there’d been a fist with a ring on one finger. Cody’s chin was bleeding just slightly. Scorch wiped it with a napkin and disinfected it with vodka and Red Bull.

  “Why?” Rima asked. Apparently the question had already been answered, and surely with a longer explanation, because the only parts Scorch was willing to revisit made no sense.

  “He’s tall,” she said. “Guys like to brag how they took a big guy down, and Cody’s tall, but he doesn’t weigh so much, so he’s a big guy, but not a scary big guy. He gets hit a lot.” She took the napkin off Cody’s chin to look at the cut, then put the napkin back. “Of course, it could be racism.”

  Someone was surprised at the suggestion. It might have been Rima. She might have said so.

  “He’s black,” Scorch said. “You mean to tell me you don’t see that?”

  “I see it.” Rima felt oddly guilty, as if there would be something racist in not recognizing a black man when you saw one. She looked at Cody again. He had dark eyes, teeth so white that in the dark bar they were faintly green. His arms were wrapped around Scorch and there was a Chinese ideogram tattooed on the back of his left shoulder. He could have been a lot of things. Black wouldn’t have been her first guess. Rima thought they needed to talk more about the fact that someone had, just out of the blue, hit him in the face, but now Scorch and Cody were kissing, open-mouthed, tongue to tongue, so that some of her sparkly body lotion had rubbed onto his face and hands, plus the next song was starting and there was just no way.

  Not so much later:

  Martin’s voice, dipping into Rima’s ear. “Has anyone ever told you you have cat’s eyes?”

  Rima turned and was surprised to find his eyes looking so directly into hers. “Okay, then,” she said. “Martin. You have to stop flirting with me. I have a little brother your age,” and the minute she said it, she remembered it wasn’t true. She started to cry, and it was not the silent-tears-on-her-face sort of crying, but the great gulping, full-body, nose-running sort everyone was bound to notice.

  Scorch had been lost in the music. Now she gave Martin a look designed to turn him to stone. “What did you say to her?” she asked, and if he was sharing that bit about the cat’s eyes, Rima didn’t hear it.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Jesus.”

  “Come on,” Scorch told Rima, who took one step in her direction, the toe of her shoe hooking the sleeve of Scorch’s discarded coat. Instead of catching herself, she panicked and capsized completely. She landed in the arms of some guy she didn’t know, but later she thought she remembered that he’d tried to pick her up earlier in the evening.

  Careening drunkenly into his lap was a classic mixed signal.

  Chapter Seven

  (1)

  In a good bar, toilets are second in importance only to the liquor itself, and there should be lots of them. This bar had just two, though there were more downstairs, or so Scorch shouted through the door on the many occasions over the next twenty minutes in which someone knocked. Rima was sitting on the toilet lid blowing her nose. Scorch stood at the sink, putting her hair into lots of small braids, pasting the unruly ends together with soap from the dispenser.

  Rima was trying to explain about Oliver, how her dad’s death had been horrible, of course, but expected and, by the time it came, something of a relief to both him and her. When she was younger, he’d traveled a great deal. In those days, he seemed less like family and more like the circus coming to town. After her mother died, he’d come home to stay and been a good father, an involved father, a dependable father. Even so, family to Rima would always be Oliver.

  The night after her mother’s death, Rima and Oliver had to stay with the Whitsons, neighbors across the street, because their father had been covering a trial in the Netherlands and couldn’t get home any faster. Rima remembered how, when her father had arrived with his suitcases, his eyes red, his face unshaven, she and Oliver had been sitting at the Whitsons’ breakfast table. “Are you staying for dinner?” Oliver had asked, meticulously polite, as if he didn’t care about the answer at all. He’d been eleven years old then.

  Mrs. Whitson hadn’t let them sleep together—they were too old for that, she said—and she’d made Oliver stay in the TV room all by himself while Rima took Becky Whitson’s bed, with Becky in a sleeping bag on the floor. Becky was four at the time, and she’d cried because Rima not only wouldn’t play Chutes and Ladders with her the way she did when she babysat, but told her that she hated Chutes and Ladders, had always hated it, that she would never, ever p
lay it again.

  Which she never did, exactly, except that when Oliver was fourteen, he made a whole new board (but used the old spinner) for a game he called Shaker Heights High Chutes and Ladders. There was a chute for mean girls in the hall, one for a pimple on the end of your nose, one for a stupid question you asked in class that made everyone laugh. But most of the chutes involved your father’s saying something sadly quotable about you in his newspaper column; there were so many of these that the game was all but impossible to win.

  This was mere solidarity on Oliver’s part. When he did appear in their dad’s column, he appeared as he was—high-spirited, generous, original. No doubt Rima also appeared as she was. Whose fault was it that Rima as she was looked so much worse than Oliver as he was? She missed her father desperately, but she didn’t miss the columns in which she’d starred, saying things she hadn’t said, or sometimes had, only they’d been horribly misunderstood or else they were accurate but meant to be confidential. Now there was only Rima, private citizen. Now only Rima lived to tell the tale. If there could be said to be a bright spot anywhere, this was it.

  The Shaker Heights High board was still in a closet in her father’s house, with the Sorry and Parcheesi and Trivial Pursuit. Someday Rima would have to deal with all the things in all those closets.

  None of this was what she told Scorch. Instead, in the moments between people’s knocking on the door, she said that her father’s death, being what it was and pretty awful all by itself, had also reminded her of Oliver’s death—too painful to be comprehended at the time and therefore still seeping in slowly, even though four whole years had passed. “Everything was better with Oliver,” Rima said, and she was crying again, because, unbelievable as it sounded, the rest of Rima’s life had to be lived in its lesser, no-Oliver form. No one would ever call her Irma again unless she made them. “The thing people don’t understand about grief,” Rima said, “is you don’t just feel sad. You feel crazy.” She was choking on her own breath when she said this, so there was no way she didn’t sound as crazy as she felt.