“Told him?”
“That we’re serious, you and me.”
“I see,” says Matt. “Is there … let’s be clear about this. Is there anything else I should know?”
“No. Definitely not.”
“You’re sure now? To recap: I may be the father of your child. A guy who actually wants to be the father of your child may be lurking homicidally outside my door. That it?”
“I’m not saying
homicidally,
I’m just—”
“That it?”
“Yes.”
“Right, okay. So let’s sort this out.” Matt springs up, strides across the room and—no chain—throws open the door. “Who died?” says Zane.
“Who …?”
“This place. Isn’t it a little pricey for you?”
It suits him, the lean new physique. He looks good, Zane does, he looks hot for about the first time in his life—gaining beauty, it would seem, even as he prepares to let it go. Or what if the virus is a hoax? He’s thinned down a bit, sure, but that’s because he’s been hitting the gym, cutting the calories. Matt has the urge to quick-jab him in the tummy, check out those abs.
“Yeah, thanks, I’d love to,” says Zane, shooing Matt backwards into the room.
Maybe—here’s a thought—maybe Zane looks good because he
is
good. He’s a movie man, after all, and in the movies goodness and beauty go together. How do you pick the hero or heroine out from all the extras? Same way you pick the saint or saviour out from all the sinners in some old masterpiece—it’s the grace, it’s the glow, and Zane’s got these things nowadays. Okay, so he’s also got those half-moon bruises under his eyes, but beautiful people are cultivating that look, aren’t they? The urban goth thing, sexily strung out?
“Zane,” says Zane.
Or what if he’s doing this to himself on purpose, for a role in one of his own movies? He’s emaciating himself for the
part
of an AIDS guy, bucking for an Oscar. It worked for Tom Hanks in
Philadelphia,
didn’t it? Thirty pounds, probably worth losing that to take home the hardware. So maybe he’s—
“Kate,” says Kate, rising from the couch.
“Oh yeah, sorry,” says Matt. “Kate? This is Zane. He’s killing himself.”
Zane nods. “Nice to meet you.”
“Zane? This is Kate. I may have knocked her up.”
Kate dips him a curtsy. “Yes, you too.”
Zane settles into one of the massive chairs around the conference-sized coffee table. Settles? Slumps. Subsides. “Funny thing, Mariko didn’t … Oh, sorry.”
“No, that’s all right.” Matt waves a hand in Kate’s direction. “No secrets here.”
“Okay, I was just going to say, Mariko didn’t mention you knocking anybody up. She didn’t mention Kate at all, actually.”
“So that’s how you tracked me down? You called Mariko?” Matt resumes the couch. Kate hesitates, then joins him.
“After I tried your dad.” Zane shakes his head. “Guy got kind of irked with me, I’m afraid. When I kept insisting you were there.”
Matt groans. That chest pain seems to be coming around again, wouldn’t it suck to die right now?
“Yeah,” says Zane. “I even made him go look for you.”
Matt gives the coffee table a smack. “Jesus Christ, Zane.”
“Well, what was I supposed to think? You didn’t bother telling me you weren’t staying with him. You didn’t tell me much of bloody anything before you hightailed it yesterday, like some … Like some what?”
“Like some huffy high school girl,” says Matt.
“Like some huffy high school girl,” says Zane. “Thank you. Anyway, he wasn’t gone long, just had a quick look around. I don’t think he ever figured out who I was.”
“Well that’s just—”
“Cameron,” says Kate.
Matt swivels to face her. “Cameron?” he says. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve been working on names. See, I want one that’ll work whether it turns out to be a boy or a girl. You’re naming the
person,
right, you’re not naming the sex? So I’ve been trying to think of movie star names that work like that.” She prods Matt’s thigh with a stockinged toe. “Movie star in your honour.”
“So like Cameron Diaz,” says Zane.
“Right.”
“What about Cary?” says Matt. “Cary Grant.”
“Glenn Close,” says Zane.
“Pat Morita,” says Matt.
“Drew Barrymore,” says Zane.
“Lee Marvin,” says Matt.
“Lee,”
says Kate. “Lee, I like that.” She strokes her tummy. “Lee, are you in there?”
Is it possible, actually, to picture a person who doesn’t exist yet? Matt’s often tried to envision the baby he and Mariko might cook up together. Actors, when they’re creating new characters, are supposed to splice together bits of different people they’ve known—Johnny Depp crossing Keith Richards with Pepe Le Pew for his pirate in
Pirates of the Caribbean,
sort of thing. Matt’s conjured a creature half-goofy (that’s his bit) and half-sublime. The result is almost beautiful.
He actually saw a baby once who seemed to qualify. This was a couple of years ago, just after he and Mariko quit trying. He (she?) was pale, but there was something Pacific about him too. Polynesian? Matt’s length, Mariko’s curious green eyes. They were on a trip to Washington, DC, to visit her dad, Mr. Kuul himself. The infant and his mum were behind them in the security line. As Matt scooped up his keys and his coins he watched them inch through the arch and then, since they beeped, get swept with the baton. Mum held baby out at arm’s length (she might have been a grossed-out dad in a sitcom) while he submitted to his exam. There was something about the look on the baby’s face at that moment—an antsy fuddlement?—that reminded Matt precisely of himself.
As for a baby he and Kate might concoct? Matt hasn’t yet begun to imagine.
They stir at the same time, all three of them. Matt sighs, and he hears the others sigh too. There’s Kate, fetal at the far end of the couch; there’s Zane, slumped over in his chair like a baby in a backpack. Weird, how they all zoned out at once like that. They’d been gabbing in a dopey, desultory sort of way and then
poof.
Some primitive stress response, three panicky possums.
“Hey,” Matt whispers, sliding his foot under Kate’s tush.
“Hey yourself.”
“What if it doesn’t work out?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if neither one takes? Not me, not the baster?”
Zane wriggles upright. “Hey you two,” he whispers, “it’s rude to whisper.”
“Kate’s getting artificially inseminated too,” Matt whispers. “If she has a baby it might be mine, or it might be some other guy’s. There’ll be no way to know.”
“Actually,” Kate whispers.
“Actually?”
“It won’t be that much of a mystery, I know stuff about the other man too.”
“You get to choose?”
“There’s a catalogue. Donor 1508, he’s a phys ed teacher but he has a masters in math too. Hobbies, sailing and jazz. Outgoing, adventurous. Tall. Medium build.”
“Yeah, but I still don’t see how—”
“Black.”
The Happy Heifer, tacked onto one of the family-type hotels just down from the Starlight, is diner style. Leatherette booths, Formica-topped tables. You flip through the menu in a phony jukebox on the wall. Each booth is brooded over by some dead movie star, a James (Cagney or Dean), a Hepburn (Audrey or Katharine). Bogart, obviously. Bacall. Here and there they’ve stretched to include a Victor Mature, a Hedy Lamarr. Oh, and this is gratifying, a shot of the original King Kong, all eighteen inches of him, blow-dried fluffy in his rabbit fur. He peers amorously at the empty left paw into which Fay Wray will later be rear-projected.
The three settle under the baffled gaze of Spencer Tracy.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,
end days.
“Sidney Poitier?” says Zane. “Thanks.” He gulps from his just-delivered water, cubes pleasantly clacking. “He was so
fertummelt
to be working with Tracy and Hepburn he had to play the big scenes to empty chairs.”
“Fer-what?” says Kate.
“Big man with his Yiddish,” says Matt.
“Oh,” she says. “And they cut out the kisses, right, the black-on-white action?”
“Hey, who’s a goddam film expert here and who isn’t?” says Matt.
She sticks out her tongue.
“And then he died,” says Zane. “Spencer Tracy. Have you been there? He’s got a little rock garden in this cemetery in LA.”
“No, but I was at Al Jolson’s, Mariko and I. Statue of him down on one knee, all set to sing ‘Mammy.’”
Zane shakes his head at whatever he’s about to say. He’s got a half-grown goatee going too. Without the moustache it looks almost exactly like Bowie’s on the cover of the umgirl’s magazine. And then of course the mismatched eyes, the blue and the brown—it stays weird, this feature, never quite gets familiar. The endless asymmetry of it. Which came first, the odd eyes or the odd guy behind them? “Mercedes thinks I should turn myself into a diamond.”
“What?”
“We’re mostly carbon, right? And what’s a diamond? So you pay them to crush you. All this”—he indicates his body with a two-handed
mamma mia
kind of gesture—“and you get about a half-carat.”
Matt says, “Who would you give you to?”
“Well that’s the thing.” In this light, in the glare of this fluorescence, you can start to see it. A hint of the AIDS face, the skull asserting itself beneath the flesh. New concavities of cheek and temple.
Shanumi sleeping on a woven mat, pale light glinting off the coal-dark jag of her jaw
… Is it
possible
for a person to choose this? “I’ve already given Mercedes a wedding ring. Mum and Dad wouldn’t want it. You?”
“I’d have to get pierced,” says Matt. “Ear, do you think?” He pinches the little flap where the umgirl had her new one. “Lip? Nose?”
This was one of Matt’s meditations in the early days: be a diamond. Meditating was a desperation move back then, almost an act of vengeance. Erin had gone crazy over her swimming (and over her swimming coach of course, the scuzzy Mr. Skinner) and you couldn’t talk to her anymore. Zane had gone crazy over his camera. Not movies yet, just stills, gorgeous grainy black and whites: a bike leaning against a brick wall, a cheerleader with a shiner half hidden by her pom-pom, a close-up of a whorled fingertip.
So Matt needed something to go crazy over too. He got his cue from Mr. Kumar, the Buddha thing you’d see him doing right there on the school grounds, the way it lifted him up above the ridicule. Matt got a couple of books out of the library, and before long he was at it on the floor beside his bed late at night, lotus-posing in his blue polar bear pajamas. His mum would poke her head in—“For pity’s sake at least put on some socks, you silly boy”—and then leave him alone. There was something called the Diamond Sutra which said that everything’s empty, that there’s no essence to anything, no ego, no self, and that recognizing this is enlightenment. It said that just getting yourself enlightened isn’t good enough, that it’s your job to lift everybody else up with you, and that the way to do this is to realize you’ve never been separate from anybody else anyway.
Wild stuff. Matt concocted his own system whereby he’d picture himself as a diamond, pure and translucent. Empty, so everything could pass
through.
He kept at this practice pretty much nightly until Erin died. Then—wasn’t this the very moment it should have been prepping him for?—he gave up.
“What can I get you folks?” No doubt she’s an actor too, this waitress, looking to be up on the wall someday. Pretty, but not pretty enough.
Kate’s been laying more of her fancy physics on them. River’s fancy physics. “The universe has ten dimensions, but we only get to experience four of them. What happened to all the others? Where did they go?”
“Up Matt’s ass,” said Zane.
“Fuggoff,” said Matt.
“You fuggoff.”
And so on.
“Clubhouse,” says Matt, and the others go diner as well, Denver sandwich, chicken caesar.
“Hey, Matt?” says Kate. Switch in tone here. “If it’s yours?”
“Mine?” says Matt. “Oh.”
“I mean no matter … I’m good at taking care, is what I want to say. Really good. I’ve been practising for this, even though I didn’t know it.”
“Terrific.”
“It’s like I’ve been pregnant for years. And I’m not going to, you know,
come after
you. That’s not why.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“I think so.”
She smiles. She frowns. “It’s a lot to let go of. I know that.” And she’s up and off to the loo.
So, just the two of them. It’s weird. Is it weird? Craning over his shoulder at Kate’s retreating form Zane says, “She’s nice.”
Matt shrugs.
“This must be strange for you.”
“Master of the under fugging statement.”
“Hey, Mercedes says to say sorry.”
“Yeah?”
“I guess she ragged on you pretty good the other day. She feels like a bitch.”
“She is a bitch,” says Matt.
Zane puts up his dukes. “That’s my wife you’re talking about there, fella.”
“But she was right, I haven’t been good enough. And Nico, I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah.” Zane extracts a vial from his hip pocket, tips a pill into his water glass, watches it fizz. “I wish it’d been the other way around. I wish he’d made
me
sick.”
“Right.”
“It wasn’t even sex, that’s not how I got it.”
“Seriously?”
“It was that time out west.” Zane sips from his water, wincing at its effervescence.
“But you just said it wasn’t sex.”
“Who did the killer turn out to be? Remember that movie I was working on?” Zane’s got the knee-jiggle thing going bigtime.
“Yeah, so anyway.”
“That basement suite of yours, what a dump. And you were raving about this woman.”
“Mariko.”
“She was the one, you just knew it. You’d planned not to see her, which was sweet, but I didn’t want to cramp your style. Nico and I had just met too. He was into me but I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure about much of anything at that point.” Zane picks up the Clark Gable salt shaker, the Vivien Leigh pepper. He taps them together, kissy kissy. “So I went out and met a guy. Narfi. Do you think that can have been his real name, Narfi? My one and only one-night stand.” Vivien gets Clark down on his back, starts bopping up and down on top of him, obviously into it. “Sweet guy, and he had condoms and everything but he wanted me to shoot up with him first. He was so insistent, he wanted me to feel that, what that’s like, to do it when you’re different.” Clark and Vivien have switched places now, Clark looking pleased with himself on top. “I knew it was stupid but I let him stick me anyway.”