The Girls From Corona Del Mar (23 page)

She parked on a side street near the beach, and, after waiting for a group of chickens to get out of her way, made her way out onto the main drag, where she bought a chai from a chai-wallah on a bicycle and began to browse the stores. The moment she saw the STD ISD shop, a uniquely Indian institution that was an entire store full of international pay phones, she knew she had come to Arambol to call her mother. She hadn’t used an STD ISD shop before except once to call her bank and tell them to take the hold off her debit card, so she was nervous when she walked in, but the boy at the counter just motioned her to a phone.

“How much?” she asked.

“You pay after,” he said. “You pay after.”

“Do you know the country code for the United States?” she asked him.

“Zero one one.”

“Thank you.”

The shop smelled of warm plastic and black licorice and sweaty bodies.
There was a pile of pineapples in the corner and a cat sitting on top of them, licking its paws. She dialed 011, then a 1, and then her mother’s cell phone, and it rang for what seemed like an impossibly long time. Lorrie Ann decided that what she was calling her mother to announce was that she was coming home. It was over. It had been stupid, and now it was over. This decision brought her almost unspeakable relief.

When Dana’s voice mail picked up, she listened attentively to her mother’s voice, fully intending to leave a message, but then, when the beep came, she found that she couldn’t. She opened her mouth, but nothing would come out. She was frozen for a moment, then found herself slamming the receiver down in its holster, as though she were angry.

A little embarrassed, she edged out of the booth and got out her money to pay the boy.

“No, no,” the boy said, waving her off. “You come back and try again later. Not pay now.”

He waggled his head at her and smiled.

“Okay,” Lorrie Ann said numbly, then stumbled out of the shop and into the bright sun of the boulevard, where she promptly ran smack into Portia.

“My friend,” Portia cried, “I was hoping to see you again! Are you hungry?”

“I don’t know,” Lorrie Ann said. “Maybe.”

“You don’t know?” Portia laughed, and she dragged Lorrie Ann down the street and into a café where she ordered them dosas, huge thin curls of some kind of dough with a consistency between a fortune cookie and a pancake.

“Where is the gimp?” Portia asked, breaking off a piece of dosa and dunking it in a little dish of tomato chutney.

“At the hotel sleeping it off,” Lorrie Ann said.

“You say this like he does it too much.”

“Maybe he does,” Lorrie Ann said, but it wasn’t really true. Arman didn’t often sleep in. He didn’t often get too drunk. She was only experimenting with her own disloyalty.

“I was thinking,” Portia said, “that I wanted to invite you on a trip. Some of my friends are going to Dubai. Do you want to go?”

“What are you going to do in Dubai?” Lorrie Ann asked. “I had been thinking about asking you to go to Hampi.”

“Where is this?” Portia asked.

“Some famous ruins. East of here.”

“I would go,” she said, “but only if then you go to Dubai with me.”

Lor flagged down the waiter and asked for a lime soda. “I’ll have to ask Arman,” she said.

“Oh,” Portia said. “I can only bring you. I should have said that. My friends have this incredible apartment in Dubai. If I bring a girlfriend who shares a bed with me, this is okay. But not to bring a strange American couple. No one would understand this.”

“Hmm …,” Lorrie Ann said.

“Please come!” Portia cried. “It will be so much more fun if you are there! They are all models and they never eat. Won’t you eat with me?”

“Let me think about it,” Lorrie Ann said.

“This means you want to come but you are trying to figure out how to get rid of him?”

Lorrie Ann sputtered as she took a sip of her lime soda.

Portia laughed. “It’s okay. I will help you. We will make a plan!”

The plan was, roughly, that Lorrie Ann would go to the bank and get Arman a cashier’s check for a thousand dollars, which was half of what they had left. She would write him a letter. Then she would go home, spend the rest of the day with him, and sneak out in the middle of the night, leaving the letter and the cashier’s check, but taking half the pills, and go to meet Portia in her hotel in Arambol. Dillip would drive her. She would pay him extra not to tell Baba G where she had gone. The next morning, she and Portia would be on a bus bound for Hampi.

After Hampi, they went to Dubai. There they partied with an entire circus, a literal circus, and Lorrie Ann made out with an acrobat while
Portia had sex with a dwarf. After that, they went to Bangkok, then Barcelona and Ibiza. They ran into Leonardo DiCaprio in Tel Aviv, where they partied with all of Portia’s model friends. They were briefly incarcerated in Berlin, but only for a night, and it was some kind of misunderstanding.

Of course Lorrie Ann’s own money had run out soon enough, but Portia was loaded and Portia was generous. Further, the two ladies almost never paid for drinks or for dinner or for the hotel suites. Often, they flew on private jets chartered by whatever group they were traveling with. Lorrie Ann discovered that she had, without realizing it, lost a lot of weight, and was easily able to fit into all Portia’s size 2 couture clothes. The only thing she couldn’t borrow was shoes, and she bought a pair of black sandals that could be worn with almost anything. Portia was green with envy over Lorrie Ann’s tiny feet, but Lorrie Ann pointed out that Portia was almost six feet tall and that if her feet were any smaller she would become structurally unsound. “You should see my mother’s feet,” Lorrie Ann said. “She’s the one with really perfect feet.”

In Hvar, a count, also a multimillionaire, had asked Lorrie Ann to marry him one night and she had even said yes, but then in the morning he didn’t seem to remember it and she didn’t bring it up, in part because a sloth, which had been rented from the zoo for the party, had somehow died during the night and the entire morning was like an extended game of Clue, all of them trying to piece together how the sloth had ended up floating in the pool with the side of its head bashed in. One of the girls, a former Playboy bunny, had had some kind of emotional breakdown over the sloth and did nothing but sit on a deck chair, cradling its wet, dead body all morning as she wept into its fur. Finally, it had to be taken from her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t listen to any more of this.”

Lorrie Ann stopped short. She had been enjoying telling me all this. She glowed as she mentioned Leonardo DiCaprio and counts and the
names of exotic cities. These were her adventures and I was telling her to stop.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

Her hands were folded on the table in front of her, as though she were a child at school. What did she think? How on earth was she justifying it to herself?

“Say it,” she said.

“Nothing,” I said. I did not want to say things to Lorrie Ann that I couldn’t take back. I wanted to think it through.

“I know you’re thinking it—just say it. Say it.”

“He’s all alone!” I cried. “He’s alone in a nursing home and you’re fucking doing blow in nightclubs throughout Europe!”

Lorrie Ann smiled as though I had said exactly what she expected. “And it makes you sick,” she said. “It makes you sick to think of him suffering while I have a good time.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry, but it does.”

“Tell me, how much of my life would be enough? How much am I supposed to be willing to give up? All of it?”

“No, obviously—I’m not talking about that,” I said, unsure what I really was asking of her.

“You want me to be a martyr? Is that the idea? Motherhood equals martyrdom. There isn’t supposed to be any limit to the amount of suffering you can voluntarily endure?”

I felt that she was twisting things, making this about something else. “No, but you can’t be partying in this frivolous, gross way while he’s suffering. Doesn’t his suffering matter to you at all?”

“How is it any different than you enjoying your life with Franklin here in Istanbul, having the gall to do something as useless as translate an old fucking poem, when there are women being raped and dying every fucking day in the Congo, men slaughtering one another, children becoming soldiers. They rape the women with guns. Did you know that? After they are done raping her themselves, they sometimes put a gun up her and pull the trigger. So tell me, how is it different?”

“He’s your son!” I said.

Lor sighed, as though I were offering her the most pedestrian and boring of arguments.

“We’re all brothers and sisters, Mia. Every ounce of human suffering is equal to every other. Zach’s suffering is not more than a child’s in the Congo just because we are genetically related. That’s just … obviously fallacious.”

When had Lorrie Ann started using words like “fallacious”? Was it Arman and his collection of strange books that was responsible? When had she begun living according to general principles so abstracted from reality? It was almost as though Zach were an idea and not a person. But then, I realized, she had approached the decision about whether or not to have him in the exact same abstract way. I sensed dimly that all of Lor’s life had been this same kind of grueling march back to the Chevron to return that wilted ten-dollar bill. It was a mathematical goodness, without spontaneity or heart.

She covered her face with her hands for a moment, then sighed and resettled herself at the table. She spoke as though earnestly trying to explain to me the simplest of factual things: “If the general idea is to decrease human suffering, then it is unethical for me to seek suffering. If I thought I could make Zach’s suffering less, I would do it, because then it would balance out. But my choice was that either both of us should suffer unspeakably or only he should suffer unspeakably. If I were making the choice regarding someone other than myself, the answer would be clear. If I had to decide: either Mia and Zach can both suffer unspeakably or only Zach can suffer unspeakably, obviously, the right thing would be to choose that only he suffer. But somehow when I make the same decision regarding myself, it is considered selfish instead of sane.”

It was just a math problem to her. I thought about the way Zach looked at her, with wonder, with such awestruck love.

“But obviously,” I said, “seeing you would make his suffering less! You know that. You know he loves you and he’s scared and he’s all by himself in a strange place.”

Lorrie Ann sighed. “I have come to believe,” she said, as though she were finally confessing the truth, a truth she had wanted to shield me
from, but now had no choice but to reveal, “that what they are doing is morally wrong.”

“They?”

“The doctors. The hospitals. The social workers.”

“In what way?”

“They keep him alive—that’s the only definition of goodness they know, so they don’t care what the cost of life is, they want life and only life at any cost. They discount his suffering, they discount his misery. They even refuse to give him painkillers because they want him to live longer. It is beginning to seem to me like Mengele. Like science without any human feeling. It is the way robots would run things, creatures without any feelings.”

“But—”

“They do it for dogs, Mia. For dogs. For dogs, we believe in kindness over life. Put them out of their misery. Once their lives become agony, we end it.”

“But who has the power to decide that for another human being? Zach can’t decide. You can’t decide.”

“I should be allowed to decide. I love him more than anyone else. I should be allowed to decide. Now it is a doctor who decides. A doctor who doesn’t care about him at all.”

Honestly, I could understand her outrage. I knew exactly how much medicine had betrayed Lorrie Ann: the My Little Pony eye shadow nurse, the doctors who used ulcer medicine on her without worrying. She didn’t trust these people and why should she?

“In your particular case,” I said, “I agree. I would want you and not some doctor to have control over whether Zach lives or dies. But would you really want every mother to have that right?”

“Yes,” Lorrie Ann said quickly. She’d clearly already thought about it. “I think mothers should be allowed to kill their children.”

“Across the board?”

“Across the board. From in utero until, I don’t know, until they are eighteen?”

“Eighteen!”

“All right, maybe twelve. Until they can decide for themselves. If they can decide for themselves. If the child is mentally incompetent, it is the mother’s job to decide.”

“What about the father?”

“Fuck the father,” Lor said.

“Are you serious?” I was completely stunned. And yet, to be completely honest, I was enjoying the argument. I loved to argue; I loved the activity itself, of forming arguments and then rebutting them, finding holes in the logic.

“Jim never had the same kind of connection to Zach that I had. I could feel what Zach needed in my gut. I knew when he had a dirty diaper, when he was hungry, when he was just overtired. Jim loved him, but he didn’t feel Zach inside his own mind—he didn’t have that intuitive connection.”

I put on the kettle for more tea, but then it occurred to me that what we really needed to do was clean up Lorrie Ann’s bloody feet. I kept the kettle on, but got down a big plastic bin from on top of the fridge and filled it with hot soapy water. “But,” I said, “I would never, ever have wanted my mother to have the right to kill my brothers. I feel like I should have had that right—but not her! Can you imagine?”

“Your mother was bad,” Lor said, “but she wouldn’t have killed your brothers.”

“But what if she did?”

“She wouldn’t have. You have to trust women. We rarely kill unless we have to. We are very reasonable.”

“You say ‘we’ as though women were some kind of unified body.”

“We are,” she said. I put down the tray of soapy water in front of her and knelt down. I had used dish soap, so it smelled like lemons. Lor hissed with pain as each foot went in.

“People are people. Some of them are insane, most of them aren’t. But women aren’t all one way, and men aren’t all another way.”