Tall Cool One (5 page)
“I don’t know if I can. . . . I mean, we’re at a party. On a public beach. Anyone could see us.”
Ah. Now she got it. It was cute, in a way, how he was so worried about being caught.
“Trust me. That’s part of the fun.” She gave him a lingering kiss on his cheekbone. And then headed for his neck. But he pulled slightly away.
“Uh . . . Cammie? My body doesn’t agree with that opinion.”
Okay. Fair enough. It was the right time, but not the right place. She could deal with that. As long as she knew he wanted her.
“It’s not important. We’ve got all the time in the world,” she whispered, giving him another kiss.
Then he wrapped her leather jacket around her slender shoulders and held her as they listened to the gentle waves. It felt good, both to be in his arms and to understand what was going on. Adam was an intimidated probable virgin. But now it didn’t faze her, because she knew exactly how the story would end.
“I
’m sure Susan will get in touch with us eventually,” Anna told her parents. Not because she believed it, but because she thought it was what they needed to hear.
“It’s Susan,” her father cautioned. “You can’t be sure about anything with her.”
All the way back home in the car, they tried everything they could to figure out where Susan could be. Called Sierra Vista. Called Delta. Even called the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Susan had taken a bungalow on her last visit to Los Angeles. Anna had tried her cell again numerous times. Nothing. It was like Susan had disappeared into thin air.
In a way, Anna found it upsetting. In another way, it was just . . . Susan, who never did things the normal way and had taken the fast route to the bottom of the slippery slope so many times. But she always managed to land on her feet. More or less. Anna was reasonably confident that this was just going to be another one of those bizarre Susan Percy episodes.
Now they were once again in the living room of her father’s mansion, two hours after they’d left LAX. The martini pitcher had been refilled—one of the maids must have done it—but no one was drinking.
Jonathan drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Maybe we should try the police.”
“And report what?” Jane asked in a low voice. Anna knew that the decibel level of her mother’s voice dropped in direct proportion to her level of unhappiness. And when she started picking invisible lint off her skirt—like she was now doing—it meant that Jane Percy was on the verge of fury. “That our adult daughter didn’t meet us at the airport when she was supposed to? That she didn’t have the common decency to inform us of her alternate plans? Jonathan, I’m ready for a cocktail.”
As Jonathan poured an icy martini into his ex-wife’s glass, Anna closed her eyes for a moment and recalled what it used to be like in the Percys’ town house on the east side of Manhattan, back in the long ago days before her parents had divorced. It had been a sort of Upper East Side WASP version of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Her parents had all the drinking, the bickering, the loathing. But unlike the characters in the Albee play, they never yelled. Anna had learned well that a whisper could cut more sharply than a knife.
By the time Anna reached middle school, Jonathan and Jane had reached what they called “a civilized arrangement”—they’d spend most of their time apart and come together when social niceties required that they be a presentable couple. This had worked for a year or so. After that, they headed straight for divorce court.
It all made Anna wonder about the idea of one man, one woman, forever. Was marriage just another kind of peculiar institution? Maybe it was impossible to expect to love someone forever. Just because Jane Austen and Tolstoy and the Brontë sisters waxed poetic about eternal love didn’t mean that such love really existed; it just meant that they were excellent writers. Unfortunately, literature was not life. Right?
Jane sipped her martini and sighed. “Evidently, our elder daughter will never take responsibility for her own life.”
“We should find out what happened before we—” Anna was interrupted by the chime of her cell phone. She took it from her jeans pocket. “Hello?”
“Don’t freak, Anna, it’s me.”
“Susan!” Anna saw her mother sit forward on red alert while her dad sagged back on the couch in relief.
“Where
are
you?” Anna asked her sister. “We came to meet you at the airport. You weren’t there!”
“I’m on another plane. Using the air phone.”
“You’re
what?
”
“On my way to Albany.”
“Albany
, New York?
” Anna asked.
“No. Albany, Georgia,” Susan snapped. “Of course Albany, New York. I got off the plane in L.A. and got on a different flight twenty minutes later.”
Anna was completely bewildered. “Why?”
“Because fucking Dad
and
Mom are with you, that’s why,” Susan declared. “I just couldn’t do it, Anna. Don’t be mad at me. I’m trying to protect myself.”
“Hold on a sec,” Anna told her, and put a finger over the mouthpiece of her cell. “She’s on a plane. She’s going to Albany, New York. Mom? She knows you’re here. Somehow.”
Jonathan looked sheepish. “I told her doctor I’d get Jane to fly in—it was his suggestion, after all.”
“Your sister has still not dealt with her issues,” Jane stated. “Don’t let her blame it on the rest of us.”
Anna exhaled slowly. No wonder Susan had changed destinations. Then she spoke into the phone again. “Sooz? Why Albany? There’s nothing up there.”
“I’m going to the Berkshires. I’ll rent a car and drive across.”
“What’s in the Berkshires?”
“The Kripalu Yoga Institute.”
Anna knew the place she was talking about. It was a yoga retreat perched on a hillside above the Stockbridge Bowl, directly across from the Tanglewood concert grounds. Kripalu catered to spiritually minded visitors.
On the hierarchy of places where Susan could have been headed after rehab, with a crack den in Philadelphia at the bottom and her grungy apartment on New York’s Lower East Side someplace in the middle, Anna thought Kripalu was actually not a bad option. At least they weren’t selling glassine bags of smack on the nearest street corner. If only Susan had chosen to announce her destination in a somewhat more conventional fashion.
“That’s nice,” Anna said guardedly. “How long do you plan to stay there?”
“Forever, maybe. I got a job. Working in their kitchen.”
Anna had to let that one sink in. Her sister had a lot of interests, but yoga and Eastern religion had never been among them. Nor was she a particularly spiritual person, except when it came to distilled alcohol. Plus Susan had an eight-digit trust fund. She didn’t need to work, period.
“This guy Raji I met at SV turned me on to it,” Susan continued. “He said it’s the perfect place to be after SV. He was a cook there.”
“You don’t know how to cook.”
“So I’ll peel a few potatoes or something. I was going to go there after L.A. anyway. I’m just moving up the timetable. And don’t worry. I’m alone. Raji went home to Bombay.”
“I wish you’d have stopped here first,” Anna said. “To let us know. At least at the airport.”
“I just couldn’t, okay? Dad triggers me. Mom triggers me. Mom and Dad together, it’s like stepping in front of a machine gun with a fucking target on my chest.”
“Uh-huh,” Anna replied, just to keep her sister talking while her parents looked at her pleadingly. They were desperate for some information. But Anna stayed focused on Susan.
“Anyway, Raji says Kripalu totally changed his life.”
“Then why was he in rehab?” Anna asked.
“Hey, chill on the judgments, Anna,” Susan admonished. Then her voice softened. “People like Raji, like me . . . there’s this thing inside us that we’ve got to fight our whole lives. Sometimes we don’t win that fight.”
“I understand.”
Anna didn’t, really, but God knows she was trying.
“Understand what?” Jane asked impatiently. She held out a slender arm. “Give me the phone, Anna.”
Anna shook her head at her mother. “You do what you have to do, Sooz.”
“I can think up there, Anna. I think. I hope.” Susan laughed nervously. “Hey, listen, do me a favor? Can you explain to Mom—?”
“You should talk to her, Sooz. She came all the way from Italy.”
“Forget it!” Then Susan softened. “Later. I promise, Anna. Tell her that. I’ll call you in a week or so, okay? And them, too.”
“Okay. I guess.”
“Love you, baby sis.”
“Love you, too.” Anna clicked off, turning to her parents. “She said she promises to call you guys in a week.”
Her mother rubbed her temples with elegant French-manicured fingers and sighed. “Her promises are meaningless, Anna. Surely you know that by now.”
“If that’s how you feel, then why did you bother to come?” Anna asked her. Defending her big sister was habit. Anna had always been the dependable one, Susan the flake. But even at her flakiest, Anna still loved her.
Jane’s chin jutted upward. “I was willing to give her another chance. Are you going to fault me for that, Anna?”
“No,” Anna replied, chastised.
Jonathan patted his ex-wife’s arm. “I’m glad you’re here, Jane. Why don’t we just give Susan a little time to sort things out?”
“Sure. Why not?” Jane asked rhetorically. But Anna could see that she wasn’t at all convinced.
Tired from the surfing and the drama, Anna dozed off on her bed. Her cell rang a couple of times; she tried to ignore it. But when she couldn’t get back to sleep after the second time, she decided to check her messages.
The first one made her snap wide awake.
“Anna, hey. It’s Ben.”
Ben. His voice always managed to hit her somewhere south of her navel. She’d been glad when he’d returned to Princeton. But hearing him now gave her instant second thoughts.
“So, I’m calling from Princeton. I waited, you know, a long time to call. But I think about you. A lot. You were right, though. About school. It was a good idea for me to come back. I was all fucked up, I know. Too much pressure, maybe. The whole thing with my dad and all.
“Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I haven’t forgotten about you. If you come back east, let me know. And if I come home for spring break—I don’t know, I might go skiing at Jackson Hole. Maybe you’d want to come. We could be together away from all the insanity, you know? So . . . that’s it. I’m still thinking about you.”
His voice still made her heart pound. Maybe she and Ben were star-crossed lovers, like Anna and Vronsky in one of her favorite novels,
Anna Karenina.
That story didn’t end very well—her namesake fell head over heels for the Russian count but was much more in love with him than he was in love with her. In the end, she died under the wheels of a train barreling down the tracks. If that wasn’t a Freudian notion, what was?
Ben. Their lust on an airplane had quickly turned into . . . so much more. But it couldn’t be love, could it? Wasn’t love something that happened over time when you really got to know the other person? Everything with Ben had been so tumultuous and had happened so quickly. Maybe they were a fire destined to burn each other out, intense lust masquerading as more.
Honestly, Anna didn’t know.
“W
hat is this place?” Cammie asked as Adam led her into the open-air square that was teeming with people. “And what smells so good?”
“Watch and learn,” Adam told her with a grin. “You wanted to eat, right?”
“Yeah. But I was thinking the Beverly Hills Hotel.” Cammie looked around the crowded plaza, which Adam had told her was the Buddhist temple complex of North Hollywood. There were many Asians and hippie-looking American kids who probably professed to believe in the principles of the Buddha. But the crowd was by and large eclectic. The plaza had a few redwood and metal tables, but most folks had set up picnic blankets in the shade of the big eucalyptus trees nearby.
“Think outside the box, Cam,” Adam told her as he led her to a money-changing booth, where people were lined up to exchange their American dollars for the plastic chips that were apparently the sole approved currency at the venue. An old man with craggy skin and an impossibly long last name on his name tag supervised the operation.
Cammie looked ashen. “Don’t worry,” Adam said, tapping his daypack. “I’m completely prepared. You’ll dine like a princess.”
A princess who dines at a place like this must have had her kingdom overthrown,
Cammie thought. But she didn’t say it. Because, God help her, she wanted Adam to like her. More than like her.
When they’d parted the night before, Adam had suggested they meet for Sunday brunch; a good sign. He couldn’t be too upset or embarrassed about their little incident in the sand if he wanted to be with her the very next day, right? Cammie had suggested a couple of possible restaurants, the Beverly Hills Hotel at the top of her list, with Encounter (located in an ultra-modern structure above LAX, it had an amazing view of arriving and departing jetliners) being a close second.
But Adam had insisted on surprising her, promising that it would be well worth it. So he’d brought her to the Wat Thai Theraveda Buddhist temple in North Hollywood. He explained how, during the week, this temple complex served much of Los Angeles’ sizable Thai community. But on weekends, it was transformed into an oversized outdoor food court, with a good percentage of all sales going to the upkeep of the temple. Adam was no Buddhist, but he’d come here with his parents a few times and loved it.
Cammie was actually impressed. Not because she was about to dine in some multicultural mosh pit, but because he hadn’t been too embarrassed to admit that he’d eaten here with his parents. She entwined her fingers with his as they waited to change their money.
As for the nonevent on the beach, she had no doubt that he’d be ready for a rematch at the soonest possible moment. Every guy Cammie had met since eighth grade wanted to get his hands on her. Adam might be a great guy, but he was still a guy.
“I don’t know anyone else in Los Angeles who would have brought me here,” she told him.