The Girls From Corona Del Mar (22 page)

Lorrie Ann looked over at Portia, studied her face in the dawn light, unsure how to take her words. It was impossible not to look at Portia, really. Her hair was a mess of rich, brown curls, but her eyes were a light, watery jade and slightly too wide set, making her look at all times like a questing woodland creature.

“I can’t tell whether or not you are serious,” Lorrie Ann said.

“I’m very serious,” Portia said. “People are so afraid of their own flaws, but I’m not. I am also very lazy, I have a poor memory, I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t like animals, and I am materialistic to a fault. But I know all of these things, and this is power, no? I am not running from myself.”

“I’m running from myself,” Lor said. They were walking toward a clump of sleeping cows. Lor had never seen so many cows in her life before she came to India. She had never realized before how beautiful they were. Should she stop eating them? She hadn’t eaten any beef since coming to India, obviously. But maybe she would continue this, consciously.

“Why?” Portia asked.

“I tried my whole life to be a good person and nothing ever worked out for me.”

“Oh, so do you want to cry about it?” Portia asked.

“No, I don’t want to cry about it,” Lor said, stiffening.

“You can cry on me,” Portia said, and held out her arms in a strange pose, like Jesus on the cross. “Cry on me!”

Lor just stared at her.

Portia burst out laughing. “Oh, you are so serious! You get your feelings hurt so easily! It must be horrible to be you, like being covered in open sores! The lightest touch of a lover must feel like a torture!”

“I should go back,” Lor said, and started to turn.

“No!” Portia shouted, grabbing her by the hands. “Come on! Get in the water with me!”

“You want to go swimming?”

Portia dropped her hands and quickly tugged her bikini bottom down. With a whoop, she pulled off her top.

“Take off!” she said, reaching to pull up the hem of Lorrie Ann’s dress.

Lorrie Ann raised her arms, obedient as a child, so Portia could strip the dress off her, but she blanched when Portia began to tug at her panties.

“Look at this,” Portia said, touching with her red painted fingernail the long scar from Lorrie Ann’s emergency cesarean.

“I always hoped it would fade more,” Lorrie Ann said. But this was a lie. Secretly, she believed that she was part of some sort of rapidly growing cult of women marked by the same scar: women who had been cut open by men for their own good.

Portia started to pull Lor’s panties down.

“No!” Lor said. “I’ll go in like this.”

Portia shook her head. “No, you won’t.”

Lor grabbed the waistband of her panties with both hands and tried to look fierce.

Portia leaned in and kissed her then, and while Lorrie Ann was distracted, she unhitched Lor’s bra, tugged it off, and then reached down and pulled Lor’s panties down around her knees. Lor scrambled to cover her breasts and her pubis with just her two hands.

“Come on, you sad, sad girl!” Portia called, and ran like a crazy thing straight into the sea.

Even as Lorrie Ann recounted her titillating, quasi-scandalous adventures for me at my kitchen table, I was plagued with impatience. Clearly, this Portia character was no good, and no amount of Lor’s admiring description could make me feel otherwise. She was some kind of Eurotrash whore who enjoyed meaningless partying and was living her life according to dice theory like it was a fucking Joan Didion novel. That was all fine and well for ex-models, but not for Lorrie Ann.

Besides which, even I, having heard only the bare bones of the story, could have told you everything that was to come: Lorrie Ann would wind up leaving Arman and traveling with this woman, they would have wild parties and Lorrie Ann would experiment with her nihilistic side before eventually deciding Portia was nuts and leaving her, only to be found, barefoot and bleeding, by me in Istanbul. Wasn’t that what she had said? That she was traveling with a friend, but that the friend
turned out to be crazy? How long had it taken Lorrie Ann to figure that one out? Anyone who left an Indian discoteque with a legless Armenian and a blond American girl so stoned they can barely talk was not exactly high on my list.

I also, of course, wondered when Franklin would come home. With every word Lorrie Ann spoke, my muscles became tighter, the nerves of my spinal column practically prickling as I strained to hear Franklin coming up the stairs and down the hall to our home, where he would discover me harboring Lorrie Ann.

Franklin had spent so many hours listening to stories of Lorrie Ann that he had confessed to me he was terrified of meeting her. I had stressed to him all that was incredible, almost godlike, about Lorrie Ann: her ethics, which were mysteriously sourceless and possibly a true example of spontaneous generation, her incredible swimming ability and adorable nose, her saintly love for her child, her unending cheerfulness in the face of horrible sacrifice, her Vermeer sensuality, her wasted intellect, her bravery, above all: her bravery. Here was the goddess I had so championed, right there at my kitchen table.

And she was a junkie.

I wanted to hide her from his eyes as though she were my own rotten self.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

After their swim, Lorrie Ann loaded Portia into Dillip’s cab, and then returned to the room where Arman was still slumbering. Something about his heavy sleep and his mouth breathing made her faintly disgusted with him, and so after snorting a whole pill to herself, she went out on the veranda and had breakfast alone with Rinoo. They talked about the possibility of a trip to the ruins at Hampi.

“It is a magic place,” Rinoo said. “Real magic.”

Lorrie Ann wanted to go, but she knew that it would be a lot to request of Arman because the trip would be hard on him. He was best when he could sit at regular intervals, and she had found he was most agreeable in situations where these intervals came up naturally so that he didn’t feel he was being pandered to. As though he could read her mind, Rinoo said, “Maybe Baba G can stay here and Princess of the West can go alone?”

“Maybe,” Lorrie Ann said, reaching down and picking up the little pug dog that was begging to be lifted into her lap. “Good morning, Rosa,” she said.

“Very bad dog, that one,” Rinoo said. “She got into the refrigerator during the night and ate almost a half kilo of butter.”

“No!” Lorrie Ann exclaimed, turning the happily panting Rosa to face her. “Did you eat butter? Did you eat a lot of butter?”

“You think it’s cute, but now I am going to have to put boxes in front of the refrigerator every night!”

“She really gets it open?” Lorrie Ann asked.

“She does! I don’t know how, but she does it!” Rinoo smiled, his eyes crinkling, as though he were secretly proud of the little pug with her lame back leg and her fierce love of butter. He was glad that the little dog was a little dog, and that included being glad that she was difficult and got into the butter.

“How did you end up in India?” she asked.

“I was a hippie,” Rinoo said, crinkling his eyes again. “I was bumming all around and then I found Mandrem and I said, Here is pretty good!” He gestured wide with his arms at the river and the palm trees all around them.

“It is pretty good here,” she agreed.

There was a silence then. Lor felt sick. She was in paradise and all she did was take drugs so that she wouldn’t have to feel anything.

“She’s going to have puppies,” Rinoo said suddenly.

Lorrie Ann looked wonderingly at Rosa, who was still in her lap. “You are?” she asked the little dog.

“Yes,” Rinoo said. “In maybe … one month. You will still be here?”

“Maybe,” Lor said, but she prayed she wouldn’t be.

Lorrie Ann did not realize she was considering taking a trip to Hampi until she mentioned it to Arman a few days later.

“You could just stay here, if you wanted. Have some adult fun or whatever. Go to Anjuna again.” She was surprised at herself for offering this. Always, Arman had maintained that an open relationship was necessary, not just for his own sex drive, which was frankly not difficult to satisfy, but because it was the only rational arrangement between a man and a woman who were not intending to bear children together. Lor could understand and even agree with the logic of his argument, and she tolerated his dalliances with other girls, even though they always hurt her. Now, she realized, the thought of Arman with someone else didn’t bother her at all. She experimented, forcing herself to graphically imagine it, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

“What do you want in Hampi?” Arman asked.

“Rinoo said the ruins were really amazing. That it’s just this very special, ancient place.”

“Ruins of what?”

“I don’t know,” Lorrie Ann said, turning over on the sand. They had bought new towels from a persistent child that morning and the dye had not been properly set in the fabric, so now the whole front of her body was dyed red and blue swirls. “Do you think this will come off in the water?” she asked, rubbing at her thighs.

But Arman said nothing, just stared at the horizon without changing his expression and then took a sip of his beer.

Later that night Arman became horribly drunk. They had eaten at what was supposed to be a Chinese restaurant, but where the food had tasted suspiciously like Indian food fried in a wok, and then they had bought a bottle of vodka and drank it sitting out on the beach. Lor did not understand how hard Arman had been hitting the bottle until he spontaneously threw it into the sea.

“What?” he said. “It was empty.”

Lor sighed. Arman had a hard time walking on sand anyway, but he was much worse at it when he was hammered. It was going to be a long walk back to their room, and she was tired.

“Let’s start back,” she suggested.

“No,” he said. “It’s nice here.”

“Baby, I’m tired,” she said. “Let’s go back and we can get a candy bar or something if the store’s still open.” Lorrie Ann did not particularly like sweets, but Arman loved them. He never seemed to be aware of how often she used rewards of chocolate or candy to get him to do things. It always struck her as bizarre that he didn’t notice. But it worked again, and he clambered up and, leaning on her, made his way back to the path that led to the store.

She bought him too much candy at the store, but she couldn’t help it.
He got so excited by trying the new ones and because they couldn’t read any of the Hindi packaging they had a relatively high fail rate at finding things he liked. “Just get one of everything,” she suggested. Arman grinned, a little sheepish, but happy. He was so much like a little boy sometimes that it made her heart ache, a strange mixture of pity and love. She thought of the way Portia had announced all her flaws. I like people with problems worse than my own, Lorrie Ann thought. She was amazed that she felt better after allowing herself to form the words in her own mind. She felt like she could actually breathe. I use them to feel better about myself, she continued, astounded by the sudden lightness in her heart.

In the room, Arman curled up, his legs off, around his pile of candy. He kept trying to make her taste the ones he liked, but she wouldn’t.

“I don’t really want any more,” she said.

He stared at her, and his eyes filled with tears. “Why?” he wailed. “Why won’t you try it?”

Lorrie Ann was alarmed. Arman was not prone to crying. “What’s wrong?”

“You don’t love me anymore,” he sobbed.

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course I love you.”

“You’re going to go to Hampi and leave me! Please don’t leave me!” Arman was sobbing hard now, nearly choking. “You were going to go and just not come back, and I knew it, I knew I’d just wait and wait here and you’d never come back!”

“Don’t be silly,” Lorrie Ann said, reaching out a hand and smoothing the fabric of his T-shirt over his back in circles. She kissed the top of his head. “I would never do that.”

But the idea of doing so slowly blossomed in her like a rose.

“You weren’t thinking that?” Arman panted.

“I wasn’t!” Lorrie Ann said. “I promise! I would never ever do that to you.” She kissed him again and his crying slowed. She scooted closer to him, nudging the pile of candy out of the way.

“I feel sick,” he confessed.

“I know,” she said.

And a little while later she held the tiny trash can of their room for him as he threw up all the chocolate he had eaten.

Lor was worried that he would die in his sleep, but he didn’t. She knew that it was very dangerous to mix painkillers and alcohol. It was Arman himself who had taught her that. They drank beer all the time, or had drinks, but he had always stressed to her the importance of not getting hammered, though he did not actually follow this rule himself. Perhaps a part of her was hoping he would die. She didn’t know. She only knew that when she woke up and discovered that he was still breathing steadily, she felt an overwhelming desire to get out of that room. She packed a purse for herself with cigarettes, loaded Starbursts, and her sunglasses, scribbled him a note on the back of a brochure, and left him sleeping in the room. She didn’t even stop to have breakfast with Rinoo. She just went out on the main road and rented a moped and drove herself to Arambol.