"I thought you said the cabana blew away."
"It did, shortly after that. By then I think Malcolm's crew had repaired to the house with the trophies, probably to plot their renewed assault on you."
She was defenseless, handicapped and half-frozen, but she still could not get the missing shotgun out of her mind. "I'm cold."
"Christ, Price, give the girl a fucking break, will you?" Michelle was the only woman in the room who would deign to give a direct order to the like of Price. She had brought Lorelle's house clothes out of the bedroom, and dropped them on the sofa next to her. "Like I said, I'm sorry," she told Lorelle. "I didn't want this. We'll be out of your hair soon, I promise."
Price swigged, let it happen without comment.
Then he resumed a seat that kept him center stage in Lorelle's field of view, but with a light behind him. It was a trick executives used during meetings: sit against a big window flooded in daylight, so the illuminated subject-you-has to address a vague silhouette behind a desk. Lorelle thought of office design, of the intimidation of corporate feng shui. Execs always sat in hard, straight chairs while inviting you to take a place on a sofa-and you sank into quicksand cushions while the person in charge kept his head higher than yours, forcing you to look up.
Price toyed with his stun baton. It looked like a nasty black sex device. "All weekend, you know what I haven't had? An intelligent conversation. You'll excuse me for making the most of this little drama, won't you, Lorelle? Like the lady says, we're sorry."
"Then why the fuck are we still here, when we've got a goddamned tank out there to drive away in?" Dina slammed her empty beer bottle down on the kitchen counter; it made a distressing glass clink, but did not fracture.
"We wait till there's no storm," said Price. "Don't act stupid-it hurts the perceived image of all models, you know. There's no place else to hole up, right now. At least, no place with amenities.'' He snapped his fingers and extended an open hand in her direction; Dina placed a fresh beer in his grasp and he took a long pull, spelling himself. "Cigarette me, love.'' She lit one of her slender poos and delivered it after one puff.
"Then how long is this going to take?" she said, just a bit petulantly. She probably had a hair appointment she did not want canceled on account of catastrophe and killing.
"Would you rather sit in that tank, D, out in the storm, or enjoy Lorelle's accoutrements?" said Price. "You should spend more time appreciating this place. It was Art's Sistine Chapel ceiling… and it's roomier than the Humvee."
Mention of Art's name still had the power to physically coldcock Lorelle, to freeze her in place like a house pet subsumed in terror.
Like a limping bunny in the meadow. Art. Art. People had called her that, played along. Others had called her that, not knowing or caring, in a whatever-world where gender was no longer assigned to many names.
Price had said "conversation," but he seemed more focused on monologue. "Over and over, the question that recurs to you is why?" He had obviously prepared for this topic. "And because I respect you, I'll let you in on a little secret. I've always wanted to achieve a delusional state as pure as yours. An altered reality that is unforced, and comes with its own checks and balances. It becomes the dominant urge, and so rearranges the world around it until everything suits. It's survival-oriented in an intellectual sense-it saves your mind from going off the cliff. But you can't control everything, and you can't keep the world out. I'm the goddamned world and look how easily I just walked in."
Price's voice was becoming an insectile drone in Lorelle's pained head. "Okay, Price," she said. "You win. You got me. You've flayed my psyche down to a raw nub. What's next? When is this idiotic game over?"
When Price replied, "I don't know," Lorelle got a scary glimpse of the man's devilishly contracted pupils. Price was redlining. "I'd hoped that maybe I could retreat into your little world of make-believe.''
"That's not the only thing you wish you were inside," said Michelle.
Price grabbed his chest, near his heart. "Owww, stung by the matriarchy! You want to play balls versus slots?''
"You'd lose."
"Not necessarily. I may be outnumbered but I'm not outclassed. And I've still got the dog on my side, gender-wise. Come to think of it, I've got Lorelle, too." Before Lorelle could protest, he turned back to her. "Tell me: Did you go through all that egregiously moony shit about not being able to survive being torn apart? Typical bifurcated rationalization. Whatever you can't bear, you assign to your, ahem, better half. Now you can accomplish murder without guilt. Now you are suited and predisposed to violent action. Now you can get away with it… you just can't be sure of which person you are. Overall, I wouldn't worry; you've got the important stuff locked."
Suzanne had repaired to the master bathroom, presumably to work some cosmetic miracle. Dina had probably taken up a post on the bed, readying another dose of self-hatred. Michelle tended to stay in Price's vicinity, sometimes as far away as the back of the kitchen, sometimes as just a ghostly presence behind the sofa, always in nervous motion like an errant satellite.
"What happened to Luther?" said Lorelle.
"We cleaned up while you were sleeping," said Price. "You're a gal who likes things neat. If this storm ever stops, they'll be scooping bodies out of the beach for a week."
Translation:
No one was accountable
.
Suzanne headed for the kitchen to advantage food or drink or both, pausing long enough to say, "Bathroom's clear. You still need to pee?"
Codicil: Price was going to make Lorelle wriggle a bit before allowing her to relieve herself in that bathroom.
"Tell me something," said Price. "What did you think of those people you saw at the party?"
"All lost, or all losers," she said. "Makes me wonder why you'd have anything to do with them; what they could possibly offer someone like you."
Price grinned, all snaky. "You're being way too kind. Most of those dazzled idiots had nothing to offer me except closure. I'd except Luther, and Michelle. But you smelled the talent of the room. Most of them were the sort of arrested adolescents who are still looking for a free ride at twenty-five. Beautiful people who are only beautiful when they're on a junk nod. So they stick holes in themselves and ink up their flesh like a rest-room wall, and bead until they look like iguanas, and when that stops exciting their dead nerves and deader emotions, they go back to jamming shit inside themselves, because the biggest thing they fear isn't the storm, or loss of love, or their own shallowness-it's the fear they might actually make it to age thirty or forty or fifty, and realize they've still got a fucking life-size squirrel tattooed on the back of their head. Like you said: lost and losers. Talk about your self-renewing state of denial. Better they should perish in a storm, an act of God if you will, than in the ignominious way most of them will burn out anyway."
"You're saying all those people were junkies?" said Lorelle. "That doesn't seem possible."
"Yeah, I know, to look at them you'd think otherwise. If they weren't humping one kind of dope, it was another. Crack, black tar, yayo, speed, diet pills, M&M's, money-what's the difference? Goddammit, I hate junkies. They waste my oxygen and their bodies are so polluted they don't even make good fertilizer. They were all losers, and I felt the urge to jettison them. Hence, closure. Before you throw something away, you always check one last time to see if the item has any residual worth. Voila, party time."
"So you solved this big problem by giving them more drugs?" Lorelle tried to will her legs to cross and got one to twitch, bonelessly. That jive about a fifteen-minute recovery period from a stun gun was obviously sell-copy from some brochure.
"I made them honest," said Price, leaning forward so Lorelle could see his eyes in the wavering lamplight. "A lot of them, for the first time ever."
"You just… threw them all away."
"Very empowering. You should learn that lesson, my dear, about trash. Garbage. The things you throw away." In the absence of an ashtray, Price flicked his ashes on the floor. Drafts caught most and swirled them.
"I couldn't do that to somebody I really cared about," said Lorelle.
Price snorted. "Neither could I, love.
"Once, I was working on this piece," he went on. "Call it a story. There were all these pages. It just kind of poured out of me onto paper like I was channeling it. And I started thinking it was important enough to type up. So I typed from the pages, adding stuff as I went, changing stuff, deleting stuff; I'm sure you know how it goes."
And Lorelle did. Becoming Art had mandated the development of some sort of design aesthetic, if for no better reason than it would make her story more convincing.
"As drafts came and went, the notes got used and went into the trash with all the other spent paper. The trash went into a Dumpster out back of this place I had in Walnut Creek. Well, come trash day, I cut across my alley and what do I see but my pages, my notes, dead drafts, all spread up and down the street like lost homework for anybody to just pick up. It wasn't finished, it wasn't ready, it wasn't right that anybody should see that stuff that way. After that, I shredded everything. Burned the shreddings. Do you know how many people just throw away their junk mail? You might as well print up flyers with your credit info, your Social, all your numbers, and just hand it out on the street. More to the point, Ms. Lorelle Latimer, you should really be more careful about what you dump in your trash can."
***
The Thursday ritual: Collect the mail shipped in from the nice Japanese lady in San Francisco. Sort it at the trash bin and jettison most of the junk.
Anybody with half a brain could outfox the locks on the mailbox, the trash bins.
Derek, Art's visiting best friend of three days prior, forever ago, probably would have liked the Lorelle backstory better if it had been more sordid. Playing the death card was an expeditious way to keep people-everyone-from asking too many of the questions that hurt even now. Questions about how you failed, or how you lost, or why.
Denial was something failures, and losers, indulged in every waking moment.
One morning she rolled over and said, "I think we need to see other people," Derek had said. She hung around most of the day hut it was clear all she wanted to do was run.
Had Lorelle retrofitted her personal disaster to come out of Derek's possibly-imaginary mouth, with the proper degree of flamboyance added?
The only thing Art had not left behind was a lame note. Too soap operatic. He left his clothes, his bathroom stuff, his family pictures, his plans and drawings and sketches, all ahang, with no end to their story, either. Whenever Lorelle thought about all the particles of Art still lingering in the house-skin flakes, strands of hair behind the sideboard, molecules-she tended to crack, and cry.
He had strolled out of her life like someone leaving a dull movie before the credit roll.
Lorelle had never actuated the divorce process. The waivers would need Art's signature, and thus, painful contact; the no-fault statements she had typed up were entombed in a file in the office deceptively labeled finance. Given the choice between gangrene and amputation, most sane people opt for slow decay, buying time on credit, hoping some external event will relieve them of the burden of responsibility. You had to suffer the slow rot, the stench of your own parts betraying you, to learn the value of the quicker alternative. Most people did not learn, or resisted the lesson anyway.
Derek, again. Her whole life had been smash-and-grab, chase-and-run, trade on her looks, slip through the cracks, and as soon as she stabilized and got a tiny bit of security, of permanence, I think it scared the shit out of her.
Lorelle had set about finalizing the herculean task of their dream house like a woman on a quest. The house was an achievement, bedrock in an impermanent world. It would have left Art free to do whatever he wanted, and that freedom had become a cage to him.
Cages require escape, and Art had eventually discovered another way out. According to a tilt on their original plan, he found other things to do, new things.
Back to one,
as Derek might have said.
True, that maybe love was based on banal things. Romance was the attraction. Magnetism yields magic. With the attraction satiated, the romance, the pull, was bound to diffuse a bit, since its job was done. It got replaced by other important things, more reliable things. But people don't permit you to get under their skin and root around through what you find, if you're going to reject them.
Art had been so angry that many of his newer designs had been lumbered, misunderstood, or rejected, by an outside world, which wanted things simplistically easy and unimaginative. Which, in turn, was a rejection of his whole life, from which Lorelle could not rescue him. Art, who had never done violence to a person other than himself, extracted himself. It had been like pulling away the fundamental support in a house. Sometime in the middle of the night, it all just caves in at once.
Lorelle stayed, as though manning an outpost. She drank and drugged, nearly flushing her life. The only way up out of the pit was to make that Lorelle dead. In her head, the murder was easy. Bricking up the crypt she had built for herself was even easier. Easier still, to commence memorializing her in the most glowing terms possible, as the guy who would know. Art was very creative. He had trophies to prove it.
Somewhere along the line, the house had become her cage, too.