When It Happens to You (9 page)

“What the fuck is your problem?” he said.

The cop reddened in the face and advanced toward him. “You want a ticket?”

“No, I don't want a ticket.” The man stepped in front of his dreadlocked girlfriend. “I want to know why you have to be such an asshole.”

His girlfriend, so thin that the bones of her clavicles stuck out like butter knives, tugged at his collar and tried to get him to lift her suitcase.

The cop pulled out his pad and began writing the ticket just as Peter heard Lindsay beep her horn.

His sister sat in the worn leather driver's seat in a white vintage Mercedes convertible with the top down. “Hey, Pumpkin-eater!” She smiled at her brother. He tossed the cigarette in the gutter, threw his small bag in the backseat, and hopped in the front.

She was wearing an off-white bohemian sundress with the collar embroidered in black. It looked like something that he'd seen on a Greek island or on Ibiza, where he had spent one marijuana-infused summer flush with his first-year earnings from the show. Her arms were tan, and her long, dark curly hair had fewer silver streaks running though them than his had.

He leaned in to kiss her on the cheek.

“Welcome to L.A., honey,” she said. “I'm glad you're here.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Glad to be here. Glad to be anywhere but New York right now.”

She glanced in her rearview mirror and merged into the traffic. “You smell like an ashtray,” she said.

Peter rummaged around in her glove box for a mint or gum.

“Do you have one?” she said. “I've been dying for a smoky treat all day.”

“Oh. I thought you quit.”

“I did,” she said. “That's why I don't have any, silly!”

Peter closed the glove box and leaned back. “Sorry, I bummed one from a lady out front.”

“
Tant pis,
” Lindsay said. “Hey, did I tell you? Didier is really looking forward to seeing you.

Peter nodded, uncommitted. Didier was Lindsay's boyfriend going on ten years now. The Frenchman did not wish to marry his sister, claiming that marriage was “
beaucoup trop bourgeois.
” He also chose not to have a green card, so that he never legally had the right to work in the country. Instead, he took pictures for obscure publications in France for little to no money and lived off Peter's sister, alternately adoring and despising her, depending on the fluctuations of his ego. Infuriatingly, his sister remained inexplicably devoted to him. Peter suspected that Didier had become an accessory of sorts in her fashion-driven lifestyle. He looked good in the slim bespoke suits that he had tailored for himself when he was required to leave the country every three months, stopping in either London or France for a week before returning to the U.S. on another three-month tourist visa. His ties came from Charvet in Paris, his suits from Henry Poole, a Saville Row tailor with a self-professed connection to royalty, and his monogramed, made-to-order shirts from Brooks Brothers. Peter had to admit that for all of his sister's money that Didier invested in his wardrobe, he somehow managed to never look as though he was trying.

“So he's in town this week?” Peter asked as they accelerated onto the freeway ramp.

“Just got back from Paris last week. He picked up these amazing Charlotte Perriand sconces from this lady downstairs from his mother. Crazy. She had no idea what they were.”

Peter nodded. He had no idea what they were either—neither the designer nor the word “sconce”—but he figured that in Lindsay's world of style and design, this was a big deal.

Peter grinned as the hot Los Angeles air flooded the car. Feeling warm for the first time in months, he stretched out and closed his eyes.

“Tired?” Lindsay asked.

“Mmm,” Peter murmured.

“Hey, I wanted to ask if you mind, but I'm having a few people over for dinner tonight. Not a huge deal.”

Peter opened his eyes. He felt the startling surge of discomfort he often felt when confronted by the prospect of being around successful people. Lindsay weaved her car in and out of traffic, cutting off at least three cars. A hybrid Honda honked its horn at her and its driver flipped her off.

“Sorry!” She waved her ringed hand at the driver and blew him a kiss.

“What kind of people?” Peter asked her.

“What kind of people where?” she said.

Lindsay was conspicuously forgetful. Peter had been alternately amused and annoyed by this since they were kids.

“The party that you were talking about less than thirty seconds ago?”

“Oh you know, a mixture. A potpourri,” she said. “All good.”

Peter didn't feel particularly buoyed by her description, but he also knew that Lindsay's parties were a part of her work and didn't feel that he had the right to refuse. He was a guest in their home—at least until he moved to a hotel, which now seemed inevitable.

“I might duck out, go see a movie or something, if that's all right with you.”

Lindsay frowned at him and almost missed braking as the Subaru in front of her abruptly slowed down.

“Don't do that, P. I'm having this party for you!”

“For me? Oh God. Why didn't you ask me? Or give me a day to—”

“To what, to decide you hate it here and run back to New York? I want to introduce you to people. People you should know.”

By the time they had pulled off the freeway onto the Pacific Coast Highway and Peter had breathed in the ocean air, managing to catch a glimpse of the great ball of sun as it sank behind the water, he had forgiven his sister for attempting to reinvent him. It was her business, after all, to help make people look better than they were, so why not him?

 

Lindsay's house had changed significantly since the last time Peter had seen it. He had given her the money for the down payment a decade ago, after
Peter & Pooka
had just become a phenomenon. Lindsay was just beginning her career and chose a tear-down in Venice, California, at the perfect time—pre-dating the enormous gentrification of the area, perhaps even helping to initiate it. Rather than destroy the house entirely, Lindsay had modified it so that, though practically unrecognizable, it kept certain key elements: wavy old windows, exposed beams salvaged from an old Venice pier. She even left an enormous old fig tree that grew in what was originally the front yard of the house, building the additions around it. The concrete floor had drains in it so that when it rained, the water channeled through the floor and into a complicated watering system that cycled into the garden.

Peter lay down on the bed in the guesthouse and closed his eyes. People would be arriving in a couple of hours for the party, but his eyes burned with the pull of sleep. He knew that if he fell asleep now, there was little chance he would be able to rally for tonight, so he forced himself out of bed and dropped to the floor, halfheartedly attempting push-ups.

He was fifteen into his set when the unmistakable odor of a cigar wafted through the open window. Peter parted the shade and there was Didier reclining in a chair under an umbrella reading
Le Monde
, puffing on a cigar. The thought of having a conversation with Didier was unappealing, so he backed away from the window to finish his push-ups and shower, hoping Didier would be gone by the time he was finished.

Under the showerhead, he let the water beat down on his head and shoulders. The pressure was good and went a long way to wash away the flight experience that he imagined as a film covering his body. He was about to get out of the shower when the thought occurred to him to masturbate; briefly he debated whether it would wake him up for the party or lull him further into somnolence. By then his hand had absently begun the task so he attempted to conjure up an image that would get it done. His ex-girlfriend, Sue Ming, flickered in his mind. She was a child-development researcher hired by the network to make sure that the show followed certain guidelines, and she spent a lot of time on the set peering at notes on a yellow legal pad through blue vintage cat-eye glasses. For years he had been wildly attracted to her, but as soon as they slept with each other for the first time, her allure all but evaporated for Peter, and he found himself having to think of other women and situations in order to perform. It was strange now to have Sue and her glasses come to mind almost two years after they had said good-bye. He tried to picture her in the gray tank top and little lacy boy-shorts that she used to wear to bed, but almost simultaneously, he remembered her face after she let herself into his apartment, when she found him asleep next to a woman he had met the night before at a bar in Greenpoint. What was her name? Karen? Kelly? It was a “K” name for sure, but everything else was hazy. He woke up and Sue was standing in the doorway with coffee and croissants from the café down the street, while the mascara-smeared K girl slept naked next to him, drooling on the pillow.

“I don't understand,” is all Sue said. “I don't understand.” And she really did look confused.

He was confused as well, not really sure how he and the girl had ended up at his place after he had given Sue his key only the week before. He vaguely remembered something about roommates and a college dorm, and after all the tequila shots he had ordered for everyone at the bar, borough hopping had seemed unappealing. So they stumbled to his apartment in Park Slope, drank more tequila, and he remembered little else.

There was no scene. Sue simply set the bag with the croissants on the bureau along with the coffee and walked out. She mailed his key back to him the following week.

The thought of Sue Ming, her glasses and her pained, incomprehensive expression did little to advance the situation at hand, so he switched to the memory of a porn film that he had seen when he was thirteen years old. The woman had frizzy hair, enormous natural breasts—or so he assumed, since it pre-dated the proliferation of everything fake—and her face wore a permanently lascivious expression. He saw her open her legs and stare up at the man who, if memory served, was wearing a doctor's coat and horn-rimmed glasses, and said in a voice that sounded incongruously sweet in comparison to the sexy sneer, “Don't you want it?”

Peter closed his eyes and concentrated. He switched places with the doctor and walked toward her. “Yes, I want it,” he said. Putting his hands on her knees he pushed them wider, and then in the shower the water ran scalding hot. “Fuck!” he yelled and jumped to the side. He waited for a moment and then tentatively ran his hand under the shower to see if it had cooled. Stepping back under the shower, he tried to envision the scene once again. “Don't you want it?” the woman said. But this time something was different. Her hair was in a twist instead of loose. He readjusted to the change and coaxed himself back up. “Yes,” he said as Dr. Peter. He unzipped his pants and watched her eyes grow large in a gratuitous expression of appreciation—and then the water ran cold. He stepped to the side, trying desperately to keep the fantasy in play. Back under the showerhead, he resumed, stepping toward her as she lay back in anticipation, but just as he finally entered her with a moan, the water ran blistering hot again.

“Fuck, fuck, FUCK!” he screamed. He jumped to the side, and his left foot landed on a bar of soap that had softened. As he fell, his legs landed in some version of a split, and in a panic his arms flailed upward, managing to knock over all of the bottles of shower gel, shampoos, and conditioners lined up on the ledge. One of the bottles shattered and a shard of glass embedded itself in his big toe. He turned off the shower, grabbed a towel, and wrapped it around himself. Hopping across the room on one foot, he sat down on the bed and attempted to remove the shard without tweezers.

“
Ça va?
” He heard Didier's voice calling from outside. “Everything okay?”

He managed to remove the glass, cutting his fingers in the process, and then opened the door for Didier, who looked up from his paper with bland interest.

“I heard you crying,” he said.

Didier often mixed up his verbs in English, usually just choosing the one that sounded closest to the French.

“Your shower's got a problem,” Peter said. “I just about killed myself in there.”

Didier nodded. “
Oui.
I've been telling your sister that she needs to have a
plombier
come, but she forgets.” He puffed on his cigar and exhaled slowly, admiring the smoke as it dissipated in the air.

 

The guests began to arrive at dusk, one by one at first and then all at once. Peter stood alone under an outdoor heater. He noticed how much color everyone had and how healthy and smiling they seemed. He felt very wan and pale in comparison and wished that his sister had waited at least a day to throw the party. But Lindsay had always been overly enthusiastic and impatient. He remembered the year that she talked him into opening all of the Christmas presents in advance that their mother had stashed in the back of their parents' closet. “Come on, you know you want to,” she baited him. “What difference does it make if we know now, really?” They were eleven years old, and even now he was impressed by the simplicity of her argument. Not, “Why don't we check, and that way you'll know if they got you the Atari?” followed up by “How are you going to know what to hint for?” Lindsay's argument was brutal in its simplicity:
What difference does it make?
It seemed irrefutable at the time. He was dumbfounded at having experienced his first existential crisis. By stating that it made no difference if they opened the gifts then or on Christmas Day, or any other day, it stood to reason that nothing mattered. If Christmas was like any other day, then what about Halloween? The Fourth of July? What about the day he was born? He looked at his sister's face, flushed and bright at the prospect of the espionage, and agreed to do it. So they opened every present, and then immediately and painstakingly wrapped them all back up afterward, feeling solemn and depressed. Lindsay had looked on the edge of tears that she had ruined their Christmas, but Peter told her it was okay. He vowed then, the first of many times, never to be controlled by her impatience. And yet here he was again.