On a Night Like This (15 page)

He knew as soon as he said it that he wanted the kid. That he’d take back the wife. That somehow they’d stumble through some new version of life together for the sake of this child. He thought about his father for a moment—and he remembered this: His father came into the garage one Sunday while Luke was making a bowl on his new lathe. His father asked what he was doing and Luke looked at him, surprised by his sudden interest. “It’s really cool,” he told him. “I’m not very good at it, but I’m learning how to turn a bowl.”

“I’m leaving,” his father said. “Marian—you met Marian on the boat that day—she and I are going to live together in Sausalito. I told your mother already.”

Luke kept his hands on the warm wood and felt it breathe into his skin. After a moment or two his father turned and left.

Amanda was quiet while Luke drove. Her foot beat out the rhythm to the song.

They pulled up in front of the school. There were kids hanging out on the steps—they looked like street people, homeless, wasted.

“What’s your school like?” Luke asked.

“Just like your pretty prep school,” she said.

“Right.”

Amanda opened the door.

“Come over at three-thirty,” Luke said.

Amanda hopped out of the truck and slammed the door without looking back at Luke.

He watched her walk up the steps of the school. She didn’t talk to anyone. She walked through the front doors. Luke remembered Blair, a completely different version of this girl, walking the halls of his school, not talking to a soul.

When Luke unlocked and opened the door to his house, he saw Emily sitting on the floor, Sweetpea in her lap, licking her face.

Fickle dog,
Luke thought.
Choose your woman.

“Sorry about that,” Luke said.

“Who’s the girl?” Emily asked.

“I told you. A friend’s daughter. They got attached to Sweetpea.”

“A girlfriend?”

“Someone I met a few days ago. Someone I fell for, because my wife had left me.”

“And now what?”

“You tell me.”

“I get to make all the decisions around here?” Emily asked.

She pushed Sweetpea off her legs and stood up.

“You’re the one carrying our child,” Luke said. “Your child. Someone’s child.”

Emily turned and walked toward the kitchen. She put a pot of water on the stove and pulled the coffee beans out of the freezer.

“Our child,” she said.

Luke stood in the doorway watching her. In the middle of the night he had rested his hand on her belly, now slightly rounded. He kept his hand there for a long time, willing it to be his own.

“Or Gray Healy’s.”

“Fuck Gray Healy.”

“That’s your job.”

The glass coffeepot slipped from Emily’s hands and crashed to the floor.

“Don’t move!” Luke shouted. Emily was barefoot—already a line of blood appeared at the top of her foot where a piece of glass landed. She stood frozen in place, glass shattered around her feet.

Luke ran to the closet and pulled out a broom. When he turned back to Emily, he saw that she was crying.

“Are you hurt badly?” he asked.

“No,” she said, shaking her head.

“Scared?”

“Of you,” she said.

“Why?”

“You’ve never been mean to me before.”

“You’ve never left me before.”

“I’m back, Luke. Can’t we start from there?”

“No,” he said.

He leaned down and picked up the largest shards of glass, starting with the one in her foot. It was not a deep cut, leaving only a trace of blood on her white skin. Luke touched the cut, then wrapped his hand around her thin ankle.

“I need you,” he heard her say.

“Now,” he said.

“Always,” she said so quietly, he could barely hear her.

He stood and brushed the glass into a paper bag. “Let me clean up,” he told her.

Chapter Seven

B
lair left the doctor’s office and stopped at the first water fountain in the clinic to swallow a Vicodin. She didn’t need one, at least not for physical pain.
Psychic pain,
she thought.
I deserve a dozen.

The doctor had suggested a very experimental form of chemotherapy. Not that it would help. Her words, not his. His words were long and complicated, but when she asked him to translate, he said she was going to die.

Fuck chemo, she said. Not in those words. She was oddly polite to the good doctor, as if good manners would get her good results. An extra year to live. Maybe he handed out years like lollipops at the end of the visit.

Well, at least he was handing out Vicodin.

She’d top it off with a scotch. There was a bar around the corner from her cottage that was open and safe. Weird guys, weirder women, but they didn’t bother anyone. She didn’t want to be bothered.

She walked from the clinic through the heart of the Haight.
How many people are dying here?
she wondered.
Certainly many of the homeless souls must be signing off soon. AIDS, drug overdoses, street rot.
Two well-dressed women passed her on their way into Starbucks.
Breast cancer? Crossing the street and getting hit by the bus next week?

Who do they leave behind? Who cries for them? Who has to put together a life without them?

She thought briefly of Luke, of his body wrapped around hers in bed, and she pushed the thought away and reached in her pocket for another Vicodin. Kept it tucked in her hand to take with her first splash of scotch. Like a rabbit’s foot, wrapped in her palm.
Wish me good thoughts.

A woman with no legs begged from an open alleyway. Blair put the Vicodin in the woman’s cup, smiling conspiratorially at her. She pulled another out of the bottle in her pocket for herself. She’d just have to call the doctor tomorrow. Tell him the pain is extraordinary.

“Why don’t I have much pain, Doc?” she had asked.

“You will. You’re lucky.”

“Lucky,” she had said, and he apologized.

Poor choice of words.

“I’ve been lucky,” she told him. “In life. I’ve got one helluva kid.”

He nodded, knowing too much. Knowing the helluva kid was going to have a helluva shitty experience. Coming soon to a theater near you.

“You’ll need someone to take care of you at the end,” the doctor had said. Gently.

“I can take care of myself,” she had countered.

“Not then,” he had explained. “No matter how tough you are.”

She winced. Tough girl. A lifelong occupation. She wasn’t about to give up a good thing just because the going got rough. Though she remembered the months after she was raped, when her mother quit work, though they could barely afford it, and stayed home with Blair, urging her out of bed, back to school, back to life.

“There’s hospice,” he told her. “Why don’t you read these brochures, and we can talk about it next time.”

“How soon until I can’t take care of myself?”

“We don’t know. We can’t tell you that.”

She remembered visiting a friend of Daniel’s a few weeks before he died of AIDS. He was bedridden, covered with sores. She couldn’t breathe in his room. He and Daniel told bad jokes for an hour while she sat beside Daniel, holding his hand, trying not to cry. Tough girl. Maybe she was never any good at being tough. Once her parents died, she just didn’t have any other choice.

She thought of Luke again, his hand running along the side of her body. Who falls in love with a dead woman? She must have been a fool to let herself believe that he wanted more than good sex. To let herself want more than good sex.
Screw you, Luke Bellingham. And your dog, your movies, your sweet kisses.

She turned the corner and beelined for the bar. One-thirty
p.m.
She’d join the other derelicts in a good afternoon stupor.

When she opened the door of the bar, she couldn’t see a thing in all of that darkness. Then her eyes adjusted and she could make out a man huddled in the corner of one booth, too lost to notice her entrance. The bartender—a young goateed guy with eyebrow, nose and lip piercings—nodded at her and wiped the bar clean, waiting for her order.

“Scotch, double,” Blair told him.

“I don’t know you,” he said, eyeing her.

“You now know everything you need to know. Scotch. Double,” she repeated.

“I’m on it,” he assured her.

She swallowed the second Vicodin with the scotch. She hated waiting for the edges to blur. She drank quickly, urging on her high.

Her high was low.
I’ll turn into a maudlin drunk,
she thought.
Misty-eyed at the prospect of my own demise.
She remembered one other time she had contemplated death. After the rape, after the three men had fucked her and beaten her, they left, thinking she was dead. She had feigned unconsciousness, then found it a better place to be. Her eyes closed, her senses numb, she eventually lost time and place—but not memory. She could open her eyes and begin her life again—with a rape, with a ravaged body, with a ruptured heart. Or she could die—and surely she must have been close. As she lay there, thinking but not feeling, she felt it would be so easy to slip on over to the other side.

But somehow she opened her eyes. Bugs crawled over her bloody body. She felt nothing. She pushed herself up, found a blanket to wrap around herself, began to move slowly to find someone to help her. And as she moved, she began to feel—the pain in her limbs, in her vagina, in the center of her soul.
Why not die?
she had wondered later, for weeks, lying in her bed, unwilling to get up and get moving.
Why not?

Amanda.

She ordered a second scotch. Double. She was seeing twos of everything: Vicodin, double scotches, women in Luke’s life.

Screw his wife, too.

He’ll be screwing his wife tonight, while I sleep alone.

The bartender slid a bowl of peanuts in front of her. She was suddenly ravenous. She ate handfuls of the stuff and then looked up, saw the bartender looking at her.

“I didn’t eat lunch,” he said. “If you want, I’ll get us both a couple of sandwiches from the deli next door.”

Blair shook her head. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’m drunk, and I’m hungry. Big deal.”

“Listen. I offered to help out with the hungry part. Come to think of it, I’m helping out with the drunk part, too. Might as well let me offer a full-service operation here.”

“I’m not sleeping with you,” Blair said.

“Good,” the guy said. She couldn’t look at him—her eyes seemed to catch on his lip piercing and stay there. Was that a stud in his tongue, too? “What do you want on your sandwich?”

“Ham and cheese. Mustard. Chips if they have them.”

“They have them.”

The bartender picked up the phone and called in two orders. When he hung up, he poured himself a beer.

“OK,” Blair said, “so you’re my guardian angel. I could use one.”

“What else can I do for you? I don’t pay bills, so just forget about that wish.”

“How many wishes do I get?”

“Only one. Make it good.”

“Well, it’s tricky,” Blair said. “I’m gonna die. Cancer. Let’s not get into it.”

She checked his expression—he just listened.

“You’d think I’d want life. Long life. Kill the cancer. But, I don’t know, I never counted on long life. I never counted on much of anything. I kind of floated through most of my time here on earth.”

He waited, not pressing her. She drank the rest of her scotch.

“I want to take care of my daughter for the rest of her life,” Blair said finally. “She doesn’t need much caretaking. She’s the most independent kid in the world. But I don’t want her to go it alone. I want to be there. Watching from the sidelines.”

“Maybe you will be,” he suggested.

“You mean Heaven,” she said, shaking her head. “Doesn’t do it for me.”

“Maybe part of you lives on—in her.”

“Not good enough,” Blair said.

“Maybe you’ve already taken care of her enough. She’ll be OK for the rest of it.”

Blair looked up at him, lifted her glass and clinked his beer glass.

“A wise man,” she said.

The door of the bar opened, and light spilled in, surprising them. Blair looked toward the light and saw a young kid carrying a bag. He tossed it on the bar and high-fived the bartender. Then he left, and when the door closed, they were cloaked in darkness again.

“Do you do this for all your customers?” Blair asked.

“Only the really fucked-up ones,” the bartender said.

Smiling, he pulled sandwiches out of the bag and placed Blair’s in front of her.

“Eat,” he told her. “It’ll do more for you than wisdom.”

“I give in,” Blair said. “I’ll have sex with you.”

He laughed and shook his head. “You need sleep, not sex,” he said.

“Luke. I need Luke,” she murmured.

“Who’s Luke?” he asked.

“Too late. I only get one wish.”

Blair ate the sandwich, the most delicious sandwich she had ever eaten. The bartender served her a Coke, and they shared the chips. Before she left, she leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

Outside, the air was terrifyingly bright, as if the ozone had burned away. Blair found sunglasses in her backpack, and she still squinted. She walked unsteadily toward her cottage. The Vicodin was kicking in, taking her someplace softer in the world.

Casey sat outside in his lawn chair, sunbathing.

“I met an angel today,” Blair told him.

“I could use an angel,” Casey said. “What does she look like?”

“She’s a he,” Blair said. “Don’t you do anything? I mean, all day. You just sit here.”

“I’m a lucky guy,” Casey said.

Lucky,
Blair thought.

“When I die, can Amanda still live here? Can I figure out how to pay you for the next year and a half until she goes to college?”

“It’s too nice a day to talk about death.”

“Answer me, Casey. Can Amanda live here?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now I’m going to bed.”

“Can I come?”

She looked at him. She thought of Luke; she thought of the heat of their bodies together. “Yes,” she told Casey.

He followed her into the cottage.

“When are you going to die?” Casey asked. He was already undressing, dropping his clothes on the way into Blair’s bedroom.

“Is there anything you care about?” Blair asked. She watched him a moment, standing in the doorway.

“Sex,” he said.

“Is there anyone you care about?”

“The woman I’m having sex with.”

“Is life that simple?”

“I wish it were,” Casey said.

He flopped back on the bed and sprawled across Blair’s bedspread in his tall, lanky glory. His penis lay languidly across his thigh.

“What happened to you, Casey?” she asked.

He ran his hand through his thinning hair. She could imagine him twenty years ago, handsome, his eyes clear, his body strong.

“You mean, how did I get so sexy?” he offered, grinning.

“Something like that.”

Blair watched him. He sat up in bed, so exposed and so unselfconscious.

“I don’t know. The girls love me at night. And they leave me in the morning.”

“It’s the girls’ fault?”

“Would you want to marry me?”

“Not on your life,” Blair told him.

“Exactly.”

“And all you want,” Blair said, moving toward him, pulling off her tank top and dropping her jeans to the floor, “is a wife.”

“A wife. What a thought. I’d take a wife. As long as she loves sex,” Casey said, watching Blair.

“My angel wouldn’t sleep with me,” Blair told him.

“Angels wouldn’t be very good in bed,” Casey assured her. “They’re too airy, too ethereal.”

“Unlike you.”

“I’m made of earth and fire.”

“I don’t know anything about you,” Blair said. “I don’t know where you come from or how you live without money or who your friends are.”

“You know my body,” he said, smiling at her.

“What is it, Casey? Why do you love sex so much?”

She walked toward the bed, sat on the edge, rested her hand on his penis. He sighed.

“Lie down on top of me,” he said. “Cover my body with your own.”

She lay on top of him. He closed his eyes, and a smile spread across his face.

“Who are you imagining I am?” she asked.

He kept his eyes closed.

“You’re part of me.”

She pressed her body onto his.

Blair was trashed when she got to work. The Vicodin, alcohol, sex and sleep had pulled her too deep, too far from the confines of her body. Hours later, her hands were still shaky, her movements in the kitchen awkward and ungainly. She’d reach for a pot and watch her hand follow moments later. She moved to place the salt back on the shelf and watched it drop before it even reached the shelf.

“Go home,” Daniel said. “You need to rest, darling.”

“No,” Blair told him.

“You’re screwing things up. I’ll take over,” he insisted.

“No,” she told him. She urged her fingers to wrap around the whisk. “See,” she said. “I’m fine.” The eggs splashed around the bowl.

“Pain?” Daniel asked.

“No!” she barked. “I can’t feel a goddamn thing!” she yelled. And finally she started to cry.

“Go,” Daniel said, his hands at her waist, moving her from the heart of the kitchen to a stool in the corner. “Sit here,” he instructed her gently. “Cry, for Christ’s sake. Scream. Yell. Just promise me you won’t cook.”

“I won’t cook,” Blair whimpered.

Daniel kissed her forehead. “Rest,” he whispered. He moved into place at the stove. When Philippe entered the kitchen with an armload of dirty dishes, Daniel called out to him, “I’m cooking. Take over the front. We’re through the first seating anyway.”

Philippe shot a look at Blair, blew a kiss, flew back out to the dining room.

“I’m sorry,” Blair murmured.

“What’s up?” Daniel asked.

“Luke went back to his wife,” she said.

“Oh, Christ,” Daniel said. His fingers flew from pot to pan to bowl. “Luke Bellingham never left his wife. She left him.”