Die a Little (26 page)

"Are you going to try to find her? Take a leave of absence?"

His expression stiffens, in his eyes something distant and unbearably close at once. "No. No, she'll come home when she's ready."

"Of course she will," I say, pouring him his morning cup of coffee.

His eyes float over to the window above the sink, as if she might suddenly appear there.

What is he thinking happened? That she, feeling abandoned by him when he didn't show up at the dock, has disappeared as a way of punishing him?

He never says a word about the telegram I sent in her name (Darling--I couldn't bring this upon you too. Stop. It's better this way. Stop. I can start over and you can go on. Stop. I love you. Stop.

Alice. Stop.).

I like to think that somehow he knew everything I had done, knew and understood. That this is ultimately, secretly what he wanted, too.

He is free now, free of everything she brought and everything she drew out in him.

I hate to think that we can never speak of it, that both of us hold and will continue to hold and hold secrets so dark that to ask questions of the other might risk contaminating everything.

But standing there beside him as he waits for me to finish filling his coffee cup, standing there in the sun-drenched kitchen so white it glows, I feel that in an instant everything can be erased, that we are, in a quick breath, born anew and time has disintegrated and then Die a Little -- 168 --

rebuilt itself and a new world has formed that is the same as the old, the world before the accident, that awful collision and everything it brought.

I have one last, strained phone conversation with Mike Standish. He is gentlemanly about the jaw and the split teeth. And he says he won't ask me any questions about it.

"I guess I don't want to know, King. I imagine you're probably glad that Alice split."

"It's been very hard for my brother."

"I'm sure it has. But, you know, I bet you're taking awfully good care of him."

"I'm trying to," I say, ignoring something strange in his tone.

"So is this it? You're through with me?"

"Aren't you through with me?" I say.

He pauses briefly, as if deciding.

Then, "I don't know, King. Last night I read a book. What do you make of that?"

I feel something knock loose inside me, I feel his face in front of me, eyes on me and silky hands warmer than they should be, than they have any right to be.

"Your world ... it's so dirty," I whisper, as if to him in the dark, as if to myself. "How do you live in it?"

I hear him laugh softly to himself, and in that laugh are things that are tender and things that are harder, meaner, truer. It is both at once. Always both at once.

"Lora," he says. "One last thing."

"What?"

"Didn't you ever think that maybe I was just trying to protect you?"

"From what?" I shot back.

"Never mind. Never mind." His voice trails off, and then I hear the receiver click. I hear it click over and over again. I think I held the phone in my hand, pressed to my ear, forever.

The letter is forwarded to me from my old address. It is postmarked the very day the ship was to leave dock. She must have mailed it on her way to meet my brother. I read it three times very fast and then I tear it up and then

Listen, Lora, when I told you what happened with Lois, it wasn't to boast and it wasn't to come clean, to confess. I told you because I wanted you to see. It was time for you to see.

Die a Little -- 169 --

You never trusted me, not once. How could you, given what your brother is? Who could be good enough, special enough, worthy enough, righteous enough for a man like your brother? God, he could make me shudder long after no man could make me shudder.

I guess I can tell you now: I started working you right away. I knew what I was up against. I was careful how dark my lipstick was, how low I'd wear my neckline, how I hung the drapes, made his dinner, danced with him at parties, and looked at him across rooms, across oceans, across crowded cocktail parties. I was beyond reproach.

But then I saw that you liked my dark edges. Here was the surprise long after anyone could surprise me. You liked it.

You liked the voile nightgown you saw in my closet, touched it with your milky fingers and asked me where I'd gotten it. When I bought you one of your own, your face steamed baby pink, but you wore it. I knew you'd wear it.

From there it was simple. I can't deny the kick I got out of putting you and Mike Standish together. The giddiness at the thought of you being wedged between the same corded elbows I was. She'll never know he's such a bad lay, Lois growled at me. After me, he was better, I said, not wanting to feel it, not wanting to enjoy it so. What would Bil l... I turned hot with shame. I was obscene.

Of course, I had to be careful, had to watch. Was I letting you see too much? How far was too far? How much too much? Would I know?

Please understand. Trying to sleep all these nights, I'd lie in bed and think: There are things you can never tell these people. Things they can't hear. Things like what you will do if you have to, if your back is against the wall. Men you'll open your legs to. The open cash-box. Please. And if everything around you is runny and loose and awful, why shouldn't you take that hard shot of tight pleasure, that dusty tablet, that loaded bottle? A little inoculation, ward off the stained mattress, the time clock, the mother feeding you rancid mush?

How could I tell you and your brother any of that?

Always huddled together, all flax and Main Street parades, pressed against each other on the patio steps, always so absorbed, so caught up in your own blood-closeness that you can't believe anything--anyone--else exists. Oh, there's a lot to be told about that. And then there was me, this damaged thing.

Die a Little -- 170 --

The things you can't tell--well, most of all, it's this: The hardest thing in this world is finding out what you're capable of.

My hands in your yellow hair, helping you get ready for a party, every party, I felt this was a sister, my sister, and I loved you, even your terrible judgment (on me, no less!) and, still more, your own terrible weakness. When I touched you, dug my fingers into your hair, it was as though you were a part of him, even smelled like him, all great plains, fresh grass and prairie. Because he was mine, so were you.

And so we shared everything, didn't we?

The main thing, darling: When you get this, your brother and I will be gone. It's best this way even if you can't see it. Try to understand. You must know you can't possibly give him what I can. And you know damn well why.

I won't say what I want to because you won't believe me. You can't see it and wouldn't see it. Not even when I showed it to you.

I guess I understand because maybe I wish I didn't see everything, all the time. Even now, writing this, I can see your flat gray eyes. They're his.

Alice

Die a Little -- 171 --

[?]*[?]

Several weeks later, I drive to the Los Angeles Public Library and spend the day scouring newspapers from the previous month, crime beat stories in newspapers throughout the area.

Stories of mutilated starlets, scorched bodies, pregnant suicides, lost girls leaping, falling, and being pushed, strangled, shot, stabbed, and set in flames. All of them somehow in flames.

When I have nearly given up, my eyes catch a small headline in the Santa Ana Register. It reads, UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN FOUND

DEAD IN RAVINE.

The article notes that the woman's body was virtually unrecognizable from having lain in several inches of standing water for so long. The only clue to her identity was a small card, an identification card of some sort, with the text nearly completely effaced by the water. All that remained were the letters L o.

L o

The irony is so rich as to be painful. Whose identity--Lois, Lora, Lora, Lois--had Alice planned to wear, and did it matter?

Her face faded away, erased by water, cold and dark and I can see them both down there, one face wiped clean, made new, and one split apart, turned inside out. If I could, I'd give them back their faces, like in the solemn, lurid photograph lying on the carpet, the photograph that gives them tawdry life still, their twin faces turning out to face, always turning out to face me and say Die a Little -- 172 --

[?]*[?]

Months before, before everything, this ...

It was at Calisto's, after two hours of sidecars at a tiny table in the corner, Mike Standish with one arm around each of us, king of the castle, smoking and laughing.

Alice and I standing side by side in front of the mirror in the powder room, packed with primping women, music scattering through the door with each entrance and exit.

Suddenly, as she stained her lips hot red, Alice seemed struck by our matching images. She stopped and watched, as if transfixed.

Then:

"Do you ever feel like you're being followed?" It was a bullet shot in my ear.

"What? What?" I said, tucking a stray strand of hair behind my ear and then tucking it again as it slid out, and then again once more.

She stopped and smiled dreamily, ashamedly. "I'm sorry. I'm drunk, Lora. So drunk."

"What? But what did you say?" I said, standing straight.

She looked around at all the preening women. "Come on," she said, scooping my arm in hers and pulling me out into the hallway, and down past a clanging kitchen toward the open door to a back alley.

"Alice, I ..."

"It's okay. You don't have to pretend with me."

"Pretend what?"

"That you don't like it. All of it and more still. Darker still."

"I never think about it," I said, even as I didn't know what she meant, or what I meant. "I don't like it. I never thought about it once."

She put her face close up to mine, peering hard at me. Heavy and confused with liquor, I thought she might somehow be able to know, to read my thoughts by staring hard enough, to know things about me I didn't even know.

"You don't have to talk about it, but it's something we both have, Lora. It's something we've both got in us." She rapped her chest, her decolletage, glaring at me.

"I don't have it in me," I found myself saying with sudden fierceness as the music swung mightily around us, pouring out loudly from the club, kicking up suddenly with the tempo, and the crowd swarming.

Die a Little -- 173 --

"I don't have it in me," I said louder, trying to rise above the cacophony.

She said nothing but kept staring, her hand resting on her chest, her gaze unwavering.

"I don't have it in me."

I don't have it in me.

I could feel my face contort, my voice rise and crack, fighting the band for all it was worth, fighting the street sounds streaming through from the alley, the clattering dishes from the kitchen, those hard eyes boring through me.

I don't have it in me.

Not at all.

Die a Little -- 174 --

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