Beyond the Pale Motel (6 page)

“Abs now, Rickster.”

“Aww, Scotty, really?”

“You need to get that six-pack going.”

“Let's see yours,” I teased Scott. “Show us how they're supposed to look.”

“Yeah,” Rick chimed in.

Scott shook his head. “Nah. I'm not in the best shape right now.”

What? That wasn't like Scott. He always enjoyed the opportunity to show off his muscles. I frowned at him but I didn't say anything. My head felt a little light. Maybe I just needed water? Or to go home and get in bed. Try to touch myself while fantasizing about Skylar's new coach, use him to keep visions of Dash away.

Rick finished his set and huffed off.

“Hey, Catt.” Scott reached for my wrist and I stopped the treadmill, wiped sweat from my face with a towel, and turned to him. There were dark circles under his eyes, just visible beneath the rim of his Harry Potter glasses.

“You okay?” I asked. But I asked too casually, I know that now. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but what good does it do you?

“Yeah, I think I'm coming down with something. It's no big deal. I wanted to talk to you.”

I was always so comfortable around Scott, but for some reason I felt the desire to back away. “Sure. What is it, honey?”

“I just … I really want you to have everything you deserve,” he said. “I want you to be happy.”

“Thanks, Scotty. Me, too.”

“No, seriously.”

“Okay. You sure you're okay, though?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I'm fine. I'll be fine.”

“I'm going to make you some Chinese soup with lots of ginger and garlic. Can you come by tomorrow?”

“Thank you. And then maybe I can show you my new space.” Scott had moved out of his girlfriend Emi's apartment a few weeks earlier. I still didn't quite understand why he had broken up with her. They'd met when she applied for a job as a trainer at Body Farm, although she'd turned it down because she didn't want to work for Big Bob. She was only in her midtwenties and Scott had alluded to some sexual issues between them. I didn't know if she was just shy and inexperienced or if it was something with Scott. In some ways he was a mystery to me. Not that I thought he was gay, but it felt like he was hiding a part of himself, holding himself back. We had flirted when we first met at Body Farm, he was my best friend besides Bree, we loved each other, but there was always this distance. And it had grown worse in the last year. I'd thought it was Emi, but now that they'd broken up, he was just as remote, if not more so.

Big Bob was at the door with the hot new girl. Her name was Leila Reynolds; Scott had introduced us. He had been training her at first, until Bob saw her and decided she was his. I wondered if Dash's new girlfriend looked like that, except with tattoos and piercings probably. “Looking good, Catt,” Bob said. “Losing some weight there?”

He hardly ever talked to me. I stared at him blankly. “Thanks.”

“Tell Bree to come see me,” he said.

Something about him reminded me of taxidermy—the sewn back face-lift, the dead glass eyes. I realized that without Dash I was much more afraid of just about everything and everyone, which made no sense. I told myself then that I should have been afraid of Dash all along.

*   *   *

The next night Scott came by for soup and homemade spring rolls, which we ate on the couch, sitting cross-legged facing each other, wearing our socks. We hung out awhile and then drove over to Scott's new apartment. It was just a studio in a French Normandy building on Franklin, and he'd sold almost all of his furniture. I asked him why he'd downsized so dramatically.

“It's a fresh start. I need to be ready for change.”

“What kind of change?” I asked. “You're not going on some big trip without me or something, are you?”

“Maybe.” He smiled and walked over to me, his hands in his sweatpants pockets. “But it won't be forever.”

Scott was a big homebody so I had no idea where he'd go. His family lived in Ohio but he rarely visited them. He didn't get along with his dad (who was sure Scott was a “queer, living out West with the queers, the Jews, and the Mexicans”), and he worried that if he had too much contact with his mom, she would have to deal with her husband's anger. Scott had told me how much he worshipped her, though. I'd seen pictures and we'd talked on the phone once or twice when I was over visiting him; she looked like a mom in a TV show and had written a bestselling vegetarian cookbook called
Corn Fed
.

“Scott,” I said, “did I do something wrong? I already blew it once with Dash. I can't lose you, too.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. It had been a while since he'd touched me and I calmed down immediately, the way Pinkie used to when I pet her, before the seizures started. “Of course not. You're perfect. Dash was a loser. I love you. End of story.”

“So what do you mean about going away?”

“Maybe I'll go to paradise.”

I kissed his cheek and he blushed where my lips brushed him. “You mean LA's not paradise?”

“Hell no.”

“Yeah. Especially now,” I said. And thought of Dash. Los Angeles had once been our city of quartz, of Chandleresque lakes, Didion's highways, and Westian bungalows. I'd written about it in
Love Monster
as our Garden of Eden, where wild parrots nested in flowering trees, sidewalks glittered with mica, and you could smell the ocean even all the way to the east when the winds were right. When I got sober, it was imperative that I made myself see magic everywhere, but now I was struggling to find it. Without Scott it would be even harder. “Don't you dare leave me, too.”

“Well then, you have to help me make this place livable,” he said. The walls were white stucco, the carpet cheap and gray. The only furniture was his futon, a table and chairs, a chest of drawers, a very small bookcase—he was using Kindle almost exclusively now. Various ashtrays reminded me of the medical marijuana Scott smoked for the pain he sometimes felt in his leg. The flat-screen TV was mounted on the wall. Scott usually had it tuned to ESPN.

“You've given everything away. How am I supposed to make it livable? Do you want to go shopping? We could get you some candles and pillows.” Candles, pillows, and flowers were my solution to most problems. At least decoration problems. I wished the problem in my heart were as easy to fix. It felt like an empty room in my chest. Caving walls and splintered floors. “A cat would be nice, too.”

“No. I can't take care of anybody. But I'll take Catt with a capital
C
and two
t
s. For as long as possible.”

*   *   *

Bree had dragged me out of the house on a Thursday night. I would have much preferred to hang with Skylar while she went, but it was one of those rare occasions when Baby Daddy had him and she insisted.

The excuse of staying home and fantasizing about her son's baseball coach or crying about Dash wouldn't have worked. Even though I didn't say anything, she knew what I was thinking because she told me I needed to get a life.

“It hasn't been that long.”

“Long enough. We aren't getting any younger. And you look like a widow,” she said.

I felt like one. “At least I don't look as fat in black.”

“You are not fat.”

She wore her over-the-knee, studded boots and a T-shirt with a lavender unicorn on it. I had dyed her hair three graduated shades of light blue. Ombré, the latest trend. We pulled up in her Jeep, parked, strutted out. Or she did; I could never imitate that strut. We were going to have a few sodas, hear some music, maybe hit on a couple of guys, Bree said. I had no intention of hitting on any guys, but it wouldn't hurt to distract myself.

Bree swore to me later that she had no idea that Sliver Lake was playing at Outer Space that Thursday and I believe her, but it was too late by the time Dash came onstage. Surprise guests. I felt my dinner backing up into my throat. Bree and I had eaten tacos from a food truck.

I grabbed her wrist, digging my nails in. “We have to get out of here.”

Dash—slicker than I'd ever seen him in leather pants and biker boots, shirtless on the small stage under the low ceiling. He looked like he'd been pumping iron; his abs were a neat sixer. Even as I was trying to leave, I checked around for the girlfriend; she had to be there. The strobe lights falling over me felt like eyeballs cascading from the sky. Cold air on the back of my neck. Outside there was some big paparazzi moment going on. A limo had pulled up and a girl got out. As she walked in, the lights flashed so it was hard for me to see her clearly. Just long, bare legs and a short dress that looked like it was made out of thousands of tiny silver safety pins hanging off of her collarbones and shoulders. There was so much light it hurt my eyes. I wanted to be home in the dark bungalow watching the city lights from a distance, as if I could control them, put them out with a pinch of my fingers.

“Darcy London,” Bree said, nodding at the girl.

“Who?”

“The starlet du jour. That cable crime show she's on is a joke. It's called
Cold Cut
or something.”

I'd heard of it; Dash had recorded a song for the sound track, but he'd told me they'd only used a tiny clip and that the show was trash.

Bree rolled her eyes. “Seriously?” she asked no one in particular, or perhaps some invisible network executive.

It was such a hot night, way too hot for April. The cruel month. The brief rain that had brought Cyan to my door was over, and you could smell the fires that were raging through the hills. Burnt brush and possibly flesh. They'd evacuated the museum on the hill that day. I wondered casually about all the art. And the animals. Sometimes fire drove wild things down into our yard. My yard. Once Dash saw a coyote watching him through the glass of the back door. Leering at me, he'd said. I wondered if animals leered or if it was only people.

When Bree dropped me off (she was going to meet her latest conquest, the Vampire, who had been elevated to semiboyfriend status), I wanted to open all my windows, but thoughts of Mandy Merrill and Adrienne Banks made me keep the windows locked. The rooms steamed like a glass hothouse. I undressed, took out my pink Rabbit vibrator, put on my headphones, and pretended Skylar's coach, Jarell, was there with me. I lay naked with my legs spread for him, touching myself, watching as he unzipped his jeans. Then he flipped me over; my ass was in the air. He was stroking me from behind, tugging on my hair, parting my lips, sinking his fingers in, prepping me, saying, “Not Kitty Cat. Maybe I'll call you Pussy, baby. My nice, juicy pussy. Man, my dick's going to like it in here.” In the fantasy Dash sat on the armchair in the corner naked, watching us, jerking off. I looked up at him, squeezing my breasts and arching my eyebrows, wriggling my now small round ass for Jarell. In the fantasy Dash was pale—deathly—and he was crying with jealousy and humiliation.

The sight of him in my mind made my clit retract and it hurt to touch myself anymore. Eyes tearing with frustration, I dropped the vibrator, causing Sasha to dart out of the room, and I rolled into a ball on the bed, rubbing the insides of my thighs to alleviate the tension.

The next morning I went online to read some celebrity-gossip shit about Darcy London, as if a masochistic instinct had driven me there, so it was really my fault that I found out the way I did. If I hadn't been wasting time like that, I would still have found out, probably from Bree, but at least I wouldn't have been alone with the news. That sick feeling of falling through cyberspace by yourself. Everything there is so cold.

It was an article about Darcy London's baby daddy. She'd lost all the baby weight in two short months and looked fantastic. How did she do it? Yoga, Pilates, raw, vegan food, green-tea supplements, too! The baby had big blue eyes and a round, pale head. I just stared at the picture. Darcy London wore a pair of tight, faded cutoffs revealing the lost baby weight and a necklace made out of Barbie-doll parts over her bare chest. Her breasts were huge with milk. The baby lay in her arms like an expensive gift she had just received. I was surprised it didn't have a Tiffany blue bow stuck to its head or under its chin like a bow tie. The article said, “I'm not ready to share his name yet because when we met, he wasn't really able to commit himself fully for various reasons, but since Python's been here, well, he's just taken to fatherhood so naturally. It's a beautiful thing to watch, really. I still can't reveal who he is, but I will say that we met when he recorded a song for
Cold Cut
.”

Cold. Cut. I felt a bang of blood in my head. Like I'd just had to put on the brakes to avoid running over a dog in the road. Except the dog was me. I was already run over. Dead meat. One down and eight to go would make the total of Catt's lives nine.

The baby looked like Dash.

I called Bree. “Did you see that article on Darcy London?”

She was quiet. “You saw it?”

“Yes, just now.”

Silence like the line was dead. You know that feeling when a call drops and you're just talking and the other person doesn't say anything, and you think maybe they are mad at you or you said something stupid, and finally you say their name and the line is dead and you are sort of relieved and also sort of ashamed?

“Yeah,” she said. “You okay?”

“So you think it's his, too?”

“Should I come over?” Bree asked. “I'm just here with Vampire Doctor but—”

“No,” I said. “Really, I'd rather be alone.” I couldn't see Bree. I couldn't look at anyone. My husband had never wanted a child with me; now he had found a woman he loved enough. There was no longer the possibility of denying that he was irrevocably gone

And what was more gone was our baby. The fetus curled up inside of me, his alien profile shadowy in the ultrasound photo on the refrigerator door. His newborn face scrunched against my breast. His milk-filled belly warm in a blue terry-cloth onesie, as he slept in his crib in the room painted with clouds.