Lunch (7 page)

 

Chapter 6

N
ick is in the shower of the small bathroom, washing off the grime from a night shoot gone overlong, cool needles stinging him into wakefulness, his desire for Olivia far more potent than his need for the oblivion of sleep.

I am standing in the hyacinths, wavering with fatigue.

“You read a lot, don't you, Major?” Olivia says, coming to stand by me.

I nod yes.

“What's this one?”

I turn it over to show her.

“Germinal,”
she says. “I didn't think you were one for Zola. Not that . . . I mean—­”

I know what she means. It is a constant cause of tittering on the set, the Major's classic taste in reading, as the crew sees me engrossed in Balzac, Trollope, and Dickens and wonders why. I have always been a reader, at first to save myself from all the downtime on sets, but then discovering how losing myself in the comfort of words, savoring them, alone and at peace, helped diminish the endless stretching hours of my solitary nights.

“You should write someday, Major,” Olivia says, covering her embarrassment.

I look at her, genuinely surprised. We had only really spoken to each other once before, at lunch. She smiles at my bewilderment.

“I mean it,” she says, “because you like to watch.”

“How do you know I like to watch?” A nervous tingle of dread starts to climb up my shins even as my face remains a blank.

“Because of how you talk, when you do talk.” She is teasing, and I relax imperceptibly. “And you look, yes, I've seen you. I told you this already, didn't I? I'm sure I did. I meant to, anyway.”

Of course you did, I want to tell her, you told me in the restaurant when you said you liked my face and I didn't believe you. I hear you speak, I listen, inhaling your words, and I remember everything you say.

“You look at ­people as I look at them,” Olivia is saying, “but you don't imagine them as I like to, a fantasy sketch in my head, a few blobs of color, a myth or a fairy tale and a dream of a painting, of how I might try to capture their character.

“When you
do
talk,” she goes on, pausing to find the right words, and I realize that she has responded only to me, my behavior, not Nick's, and I push the fear out of my body, “you have an uncanny knack for getting right to the heart of things. Maybe because you say so little. It's what I want to do when I paint, but it takes so long to come to me. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“Do the scars make it painful to talk?”

They did, I want to tell her, no one asks me that, no one looks at me with an observant eye and such sweet concern as you do, they'd hurt unbearably, and for such a long time that I became accustomed to the silence of the disregarded.

“They're not as bad as you think, you know,” she says.

I shake my head no. Not to me. “Not to Hollywood,” is all I can tell her.

“Is that why you're so taciturn, then?”

How can I tell her the truth?

“You said I like to watch,” I finally say.

She pushes her hair back in that familiar gesture of impatience. “No, I'm serious,” she says. “I'm not asking just because you know more about Nick than anyone, and he's closer to you—­but because I'm curious. I can't figure you out.”

“I've never much liked to talk about myself,” I manage, and then an image flashes into my head, of my mother, no it wasn't my mother, I never knew my mother, it was some other woman, and there was something I wanted to tell her and she was smacking me with the metal beater from the Mixmaster she'd picked up out of the sink where she was washing it, and then the image flashes as quickly away, buried back with others long forgotten.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry,” Olivia says, turning away. “Forgive me for asking. It's none of my business.”

“It's okay.”

“No, it isn't. It was really thoughtless. If I'm going to ask any questions, I should ask them of Nick, besides, I usually want ­people to talk when I work. It relaxes them.”

I nod in agreement. I wish she would stop being so nice. So perceptive.

“But I wanted to talk to you, anyway,” she says, “to thank you.”

“Thank me for what?”

“For being here because I asked you. It must be hard to sit there and have to see all this.” She clasps her hands together, the diamond catching the light in a sudden spurt of clarity. “I might not look like it, but I am very aware of your presence, and the weird thing is I like it, you watching us. I was worried at first—­not about you, about me, and all the rules I impose upon myself to make me be able to work. But it was really selfish to need you because I was afraid—­” She stops, and I see her blush.

“You don't have to tell me this,” I say.

“Yes I do. It's the least I owe you, making you sit here.”

She can't imagine how easy it is for me to sit and watch, how I do it all the time.

“It's not just Nick,” she says, moving over to examine the hyacinths. “It's me, painting, and feeding off that energy, yours and Nick's. I know what can happen during these sessions, how much you want to connect into that unconscious state where you're doing, you're
creating,
but totally unaware of your being. It's like watching two ­people fall in love. It's happening to them, not you, you can be happy for them, sure, but you feel this energy all around you and you're not ever going to be part of it. It can make you terribly self-­conscious and terribly lonely.”

I want to sit down, I want to go away, I want her to keep talking to me as if I really mattered.

“It's like that at rehearsals sometimes,” I force myself to say, “when the actors use each other to make things happen. Or at least to try and stay in the reality of the moment.”

She smiles, relieved. “I knew you'd understand. And I am glad you're here. I hope you believe me.”

Nick steps out into the room, his hair damp and curling, and I am spared having to answer.

S
HE IS
painting now, she is loquacious, animated, teasing Nick, their easy flirtation flying, keeping him awake.

“Okay, let me ask you a question,” she says.

“Sure.”

“What really happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how you two met.” She looks over at me. For half a second I panic, again, wondering how she could possibly know, but her face is shining only with simple curiosity. She'd told me she would ask questions of Nick, but I didn't think she would ask this one so soon.

Nick shifts position, turning his head away.

“Don't move,” she says.

“I can't tell you that.”

“Why not?”

He looks at her, steady. “Because it's done with.”

“That bad?”

He shakes his head, drooping. “Don't ask me.”

“It's all right if you can't talk about it.”

He smiles sadly. “It doesn't matter.”

“Well, it does matter.” Her embarrassment pleases him. He has played this unexpectedly touching scene perfectly. “Still, I'm glad I asked, because I want you to not move a muscle. You've got just the look on your face I want.”

He nods imperceptibly. For Nick, posing is a snap. He can sit, unruffled, sit as I am accustomed to, motionless and inscrutable. He knows Olivia's thoughts are focused on him, his life, what really happened, she is wondering what was so horrible, what secrets is he hiding, and he sits, so still, his expression far away and giving every impression of being tinged with the pain of recollection although his thoughts consist of nothing but tearing off her clothes and tumbling her to the floor, pinning her, plunging into her, making her say his name over and over and over again.

I am the one who remembers.

I
WILL
say only this: We were young, too young, way too young to have been on our own as long as we had. I first met Nick in Dallas. He'd hitched there from Pittsburgh, and all I needed was one look at his face to know he'd fled from whatever house was meant to shelter him for the same reason I'd left mine, and we became brothers, closer, even, because we were young and strong and streetwise, and we pumped gas to appear legit and we turned tricks if we had to and we learned quickly where the real money was. I headed the gang and I had all the girls because I wasn't tempted by a quick high, no, I knew what kind of price you'd pay if you let yourself lose control. There were fights, constantly, we lived for the sweet quick thrilling rush, we lived for the cover of darkness because we were young and strong and indomitably good-­looking, but this one last fight was different, nothing like a cop show on TV or
West Side Story,
there were too many others, attacking wildly for what they perceived as honor: an adolescent's delusion.

We were outnumbered, and we lost. Nick was like a madman, but we could not beat them back. My face was slashed and then there was some hideous burning pain bringing me to my knees, and all I could see through the blood and my screaming was Nick, down, for an awful instant I thought he was dead, curled next to two other inert dark bodies frozen in the death grip he'd given them. My pain disappeared when the raging surge of adrenaline uncoiled my fists and I stabbed wildly at the others still on their feet with the Swiss Army knife Nick had pinched for me, useful, he'd said sarcastically, to clean my nails. I kept on stabbing, blindly, plunging the small silver blade into the boy who'd slashed me, and because I could not see I stabbed two other dim figures, shocked by the gaping wounds on my face, who tried to intervene. I could not have known they were cops, working undercover, poor lucky fools, their lives saved only by the blood that fogged my eyes.

Nick was not so badly hurt, after all, and he hauled me out of there, threw me in the basement, and found a Chinese doctor who for the requisite baksheesh glued my face back together. Such perfect blank clarity illuminated his features as he examined me, the depth of the injuries rendering them temporarily numb, that I remembered only the color flooding from the face of one of the boys now dead in a heap, the ruddy flush of superiority dissolving into a pale shadow, a prematurely triumphal sneer locked permanently on his lips, and not the grim determination of the Chinaman who stanched the flow of blood that soaked through the filthy mattress, dripping from the bedsprings onto the cement floor below it.

We hid for weeks in the basement. Nick nursed me as I licked my wounds, incoherent with pain; buying food, forcing me to eat, bringing news, finally loading me into a car in the middle of the night and driving for hours, slowly and carefully because he was too young for a license and too poor to own the car we had stolen and repainted months ago. On and on he drove, stopping only for food and fuel and a few hours' rest in the shadows of the semis in the truck stops, their hulking girth aligned in perfect rows like giant black wombats, fitfully dreaming the dreams of the unloved, driving until he could drive no more because the highway ended at the sea.

After that journey our relationship shifted. Rival brothers, leader and follower, reversing quietly, subtly, to master and his savagely scarred majordomo.

I could not forget that he had saved me, and he knew I would never say what he had done with his knife, like a madman.

It was easier this way. I did not want to need anymore; I sought only the simple demands of being needed, and some tangible purpose. Nick was pleased with my quiet acknowledgment of this new reality. I had healed slowly, and badly. Moving any muscles of my face was excruciating. Nor could I bear to feel the weight of eyes upon me in my mute agony.

Nick made me get up, get out, and face life, because there were things that wanted doing, mindless at first, and then increasingly involved. My face had changed, obviously, not with the scars but with what lay behind it. It was as blank as I could make it, as impenetrable as the Chinaman's, the same empty gaze. Rage and fear and nearness to death had molded it. ­People shunned it; I smelled of it. It made me very useful later on, when Nick's fame threatened to become a nuisance. Only Nick had no fear of my blankness, or my temper. It was buried, buried deep, buried with the agony I had already endured.

From then on he always called me the Major. Who I'd been and what I'd once allowed myself to dream of was slashed away with the straight, once eye-­turning angles of my face, and was now meaningless, no more substantial than a ghost. Nick knew I preferred the simplicity of his commands to the pain of the irredeemable. Don't ask questions. I will do what you say, I will make myself indispensable. Just don't ask me to feel.

And so I did whatever he said, annoying sometimes, or stupid, but never complicated. I did what he wanted and then he could do what he wanted, it was so easy, and as his fame swelled like the silk of a hot-­air balloon it became too easy to slip into nastiness, because no one ever said no. Once Nick felt secure in the patterns that had quickly shifted into habits, he was clever enough to admit that his increasingly twisted desires could never be so facilely indulged without my help. Especially when I watched. He always wanted it more if I could watch.

For the small satisfaction of knowing that Nick needs me more than I need him, although he will never admit it, I am grateful, and silently acquiescent.

There is no question of my leaving, of where I might go and what I might do. For any other person, mine is not a desirable presence. Nor have I any real skills except as an organizer or a bodyguard. What binds us is that vivid knowledge of the other, what we have seen each other do in abject despair, and what we vowed, silently, never to reveal to another living soul. We are so used to existing in this symbiotic stasis that we have grown complacent, denying the rage percolating beneath the surface of our world like the viscous brew in a witch's caldron.

We belong together, brothers in blood, partners in complicity. Family. He who is and he who watches. He who exploits and he who aids and abets, writing the scenes Nick performs in daily life, the procurer, linked together by the curses of fate and the raised pale skin of unhealable scars.