“Not exactly
Architectural Digest,
but at least we'll all fit,” he said. “I'll bring flowers.”
“Thank you.”
I had menus spread out across the top of my worktable, lying over stacks of cut-up magazines and propped up against pots of gesso. I was marking them up with a black Sharpie, trying to pick my favorite dishes from each restaurant. It was harder than I thought it was going to be. Food tasted so much different now. I had missed out on a lot over the years.
Brandon read over my shoulder for a minute before bumping my arm with his. “Why didn't you tell me sooner?”
I turned my face up to his and kissed him on the cheek. It's easy to love people you need nothing from. “There was nothing you could do.”
“I would've been a better neighbor,” he said.
“You're a perfect neighbor. You cut my hair for free and bring me furniture.”
“I have loud sex.”
I smiled and circled the fried chicken.
“Really? I never noticed.”
He crossed his arms and affected a pout. “I don't know how to take that.”
“Don't be late for dinner,” I told him. “I'm counting on you for eye candy.”
He left, and I called Jenny, who was picking up the food. “Do you have a pen? Write this down.”
The boyfriend, Ray, didn't stay, which saved me the trouble of asking him to leave. He came up with Jenny to help carry the bags. He had black hair and dark skin of indeterminate origin, which made him her physical opposite.
“I saw you in the
Times,
” he said.
I made a noncommittal noise.
“I don't do art on command or commission,” he said. “I think a piece done that way should be more rightly called a craft. Don't you think?”
I put my hands in my pockets and cocked my head. “I think I was in the
Times
and you weren't, so I don't really give a damn what you call it. But since you were trying to be insulting, I think you should apologize to Jenny. It was just as much her craft as mine.” I nodded toward the kitchen. “You can leave the food over there.”
The red blush bloomed out from under Jenny's collar and rushed up her neck to her cheeks.
“No offense,” Ray said to me.
I didn't reply, and he didn't make the apology I'd asked for.
He left the paper bags on the counter and left without kissing Jenny.
Shortly after, Jeremy, my favorite professor, came and brought his new husband, Mark, and two bottles of wine, a red and a white. Jeremy beamed at me through his round, black-framed spectacles.
“W-w-w-will you show me what you're working on later?” he whispered.
I promised him I would.
Jenny was in the kitchen plating appetizers, and I took the wine in to her and set it on the counter. Her hair was falling out of the clip again. I refilled my glass from an already open bottle of very good pinot grigio and fixed her hair.
She looked up and blinked.
“Don't worry. I'm not hitting on you,” I told her. “And that steak tartare is for Chuckles.”
I picked up a lobster dumpling topped with crystal clear threads of shark fin and left her standing there holding the takeaway box from a high-end Chinese place downtown.
Brandon came in without knocking, holding a bouquet of flowers that looked like something out of Lewis Carroll. Dusty purple cabbage roses as big as your fist with cattails and something pink and furry that might have been an artichoke but wasn't. He set the whole thing down in the middle of the table.
“Where's my drink?” he asked no one in particular.
Mark handed him a glass and shook his hand. I raised an eyebrow at him. He either didn't see or pretended not to.
Annabelle was late, no doubt on purpose. She wore a strapless black jersey dress that went all the way to her feet, letting only her tan, painted toes peek out. We hugged and kissed and kissed again. She smelled like vanilla as always.
“Where's the husband?” I asked while her arms were still around my waist.
“Work,” she said. “We're better off without him.”
She was the last. Richard wasn't coming. Maybe I was being punished. Maybe he, too, really did have to work. Maybe it was Sheila.
I shooed Jenny out of the kitchen and picked up serving plates to carry to the table. The light was low. Marvin Gaye was playing. People wandered to their seats carrying their glasses. Annabelle and Jeremy were laughing. Jenny smiled at them. I could tell she wanted badly to fit in.
I'd ordered all my favorite foods from all my favorite restaurants. This was it. Not my last meal but what a last meal should be. I set down the corn fritters with spicy aioli and the watermelon and mozzarella skewers drizzled with syrup-thick balsamic vinegar. I stayed standing while everyone else settled into their chairs and conversation naturally fell away and eyes came to me.
“As some of you know by now, I'm very sick.”
Jenny looked down at her plate, and Jeremy put his fingers to his mouth.
“Sick with what?” Annabelle asked.
Half the table threw her a look for interrupting.
“Cancer,” I said. “In my brain. There's no use fighting it anymore, so I'm discontinuing treatment and throwing myself a party instead.”
The corners of mouths and eyes twitched downward. Everyone looked as though they'd all been fired. Jenny for the second time.
“I have, in my own way,” I continued, “been throwing it for three weeks. I've done what I wanted in just the way I wanted, and I'm going to go right on that way until it's time to stop. So stop looking at me like that. It's depressing. I have right here all my favorite people, all the best wine, and all the best food. So cheers, motherfuckers, cause there's nothing left.”
I held up my glass to toast.
Nobody knew what to do. They sat there with corn fritters cooling in front of them, waiting for someone to take the lead. Marvin seemed to get louder in the silence, and a stone formed in my stomach.
Then there was a scraping of chair on polished concrete, and Mark stood up and raised his glass. After a moment, Jeremy stood up and Jenny and Brandon and Annabelle.
“Cheers, motherfuckers,” Mark said.
“Cheers,” the others echoed.
We drank, and then we ate. And the more wine we poured the easier things got. We ate roasted marrowbone and crispy pig ears, frisee salad with bacon and poached egg, barbecued ribs, macaroni and cheese, and fried chicken with hot sauce. I said I didn't want to talk about being sick, so we argued about art and who was good and who wasn't. Jeremy asked Jenny what she thought. Annabelle asked to see Jeremy's work, and someone brought up sex because someone always does.
“All art is about sex,” Annabelle said.
“All of everything is about sex,” Brandon hollered across the table.
Everyone laughed, and Mark called out a “Hallelujah,” which made Jeremy blush.
Marvin gave way to the
Best of Motown
and then to Ray Charles, who is the best of everything. We polished off another bottle of wine, and I dropped it into the recycling bin, which threatened to fall over and tip out all the other bottles.
After dinner, I made everyone help clean up, and when they left, everyone wrapped their arms around me an extra long time. Jeremy told me not to give up, and Jenny looked as if she didn't know what to do with her arms. After they had gone, I went to bed in my underwear, feeling tipsy enough to give walking my full and undivided attention.
Chuckles hopped up on the bed. He had a tiny bit of tartare stuck to the fur on his chin. I touched it with the tip of my finger. He pulled his smooshed face back, stuck out his tongue, and licked it off. Then licked again and moved on to licking other parts just in case there was something else he'd missed.
“Good night, Chuckles.”
I woke up looking at my alarm clock. It was notable, I thought, to be down to single-digit days. It was energizing and looming and too soon and too far away, and all of those feelings were strangely remote, as though they were happening in a movie. I empathized with that character but soon would get up and go home, leaving my popcorn bucket and half-f cup of soda behind for someone else to clean up.
I got out of bed. I had a big day ahead of me.
At ten o'clock, I opened my studio door and, failing to find anything convenient and heavy to prop it open with, ran a loop of duct tape around the door handle and secured it to the wall. I marked everything that wasn't for sale with blue painter's tape: all the art and supplies, enough dishes and clothes to get me through the next week, my bed, the litter box, and just in case you were thinking about it, my toothbrush.
By ten thirty they had started to trickle in. I got college students moving into first apartments and hipsters either broke or finding authentic angst by living as if they were. I sold the sofa to a Swedish couple living in the States for two years and unwilling to purchase nice furniture they'd only abandon. I had to assume IKEA was closed or possibly destroyed by fire. A middle-aged man in starched jeans bought my toaster. Other customers browsed but not him. He went straight for the toaster and snatched it up as if there might be a run on them. I sat on one of the blue stools at my worktable, which someone had tried to buy out from under me but I had refused to sell. I had to sit on something, and I'd already lost the couch. I counted change and sketched in a notebook and barked at people who tried to peek behind the drop cloths I'd draped over my paintings.
“Not for sale!” I snapped. For a while, I did it in a fake Chinese accent, which is the sort of thing you do after four hours of watching people paw through your things.
One woman chose the dress I wore to Annabelle's party.
“You may want to have that cleaned,” I said, as I reached for the cash.
She changed her mind.
An older woman in comfortable shoes was interested in my cookware, some of which, including a Bundt pan, I didn't know I owned. We perused my cabinets together with an equal sense of discovery and newness. Either some of that stuff had been wedding gifts or I was robbing Bed Bath & Beyond in my sleep.
“So,” she asked, after we'd agreed on a price for an assortment of pots and pans and a never-before-used cheese grater, “are you moving?”
“No,” I said. “I'm dying.”
“Me, too!” She exclaimed it with great joy, as though she'd just discovered we both collected Beanie Babies or had attended the same Weight Watchers meetings. “I'm going to use these to cook up all my favorite foods. Everything fried and with cheese.”
She held up the grater.
“Good for you,” I told her, and we waved good-bye.
People came and went in waves. There were lulls in between, and when another lull hit at four o'clock, I decided I was done. I'd sold enough, enough to make it easier on whoever came and cleaned up afterward. Richard, maybe, if he wanted the job. I sold the dining room set out from under my computer, and then the laptop itself. I'd sold the television, my nightstand, and half the clothes. The small kitchen appliances were all gone and so were most of my books. I'd made a little over a thousand dollars in cash, which was interesting in the way that the average temperature in Antarctica is interesting. Nice to know, but it's not really going to be applicable.
I picked up the landline, which had a bit of blue painter's tape stuck to it, and dialed Elaine's number.
“Let's get naked.”
Elaine gave me an address in Topanga, which is a squiggle on a map where I don't go. L.A.'s urban sprawl is limited only by the surrounding mountains. Topanga sits on its wild edges. There's one main road both in and out that winds in tight S-curves through what is mostly state park land. Mule deer that hop like rabbits and have ears like donkeys live there, along with quail and rattlesnakes and spiders the size of dessert plates. Topanga has creeks that fill up, flood, and wash out roads; boulders that fall from the sky; and once every few years wildfire rushes through to blacken the ground and eat all the houses. Joni Mitchell lived there along with a few of the Doors and some people Hollywood kicked out during the Red scare. It had a nudist colony for years; although I hear they sold the land and bought pants. Most Topanga residents are vegan and smell like patchouli. It is, in short, far more dangerous than South Central ever dreamed it could be.
It also gets dark fast there. The sun dips below the mountains and the wooded, narrow roads have no more lighting than the headlights of your car. Something scurried in the underbrush, and I remembered that one of Charles Manson's victims lived here. I drove slowly, squinting as I approached each small road sign marking a narrow turnoff. I took one of the roads and slowed further as my tires bounced across a steel and wooden bridge not more than eight feet long across a dry creek bed. I started to gain elevation and began to pass driveways with gates and arches that led to houses too far off in the woods to see.