by CD Reiss
“We will. I’m telling you.”
“Two-oh-five divided by three? Sixty-eight thousand dollars for a three-year contract. And you haven’t even paid your taxes yet.”
I rolled my eyes and looked at the ceiling. If Strat and/or Indy noticed me acting my age, they didn’t say anything.
“There’s income, fucktard.” Indy patted his pockets and found a thick marker best suited to sniffing and writing graff. “I need a napkin. Fucking find me a napkin. An envelope. I gotta write on the back of it.”
“Fifty grand for the studio we gotta pay back,” said Strat the Sensible. “Recoupable. Producer. Recoupable. Equipment rental. Re—”
“Stop it!” I shouted.
I’d had it with the two of them. I didn’t know much of anything. I didn’t know how to run a business or how to make money, but I knew how to think like a rich person. Maybe that was why they’d brought me.
“You guys. You’re so cute with your middle-class shitsense. You act as if it’s money to spend. It’s not. It’s money to make more money. You.” I pointed at Strat. “You move in here with Indy. You take your sixty grand, and you set up a studio in the garage or the living room. I don’t care where. You.” I pointed at Indy. “Get a commercial loan. You lay down the next record here and collect the fifty grand instead of paying it in recoupable expenses. You rent it out to your other musician friends and let them pay your mortgage, and you pay down that fucker because at eighteen percent interest, you’re getting killed.”
I took a pull on my cigarette. It was so close to the filter that my fingers got hot. Jesus, figuring that out felt good. Whether they did what I said or not, putting it together had been damn near orgasmic. “I need a fucking beer.”
Chapter 9.
1994
The San Fernando Valley, Van Nuys in particular, was a hell of parking lots and freeway-width avenues. Everything looked new yet coated over in beige dust. Drew and I had split right after the meeting, slipping down the back elevator. It was like the old days when I had a ten o’clock curfew I ignored.
We pulled into the back of Audio City, where the entrance was. Drew put the car into park and leaned back.
“You gonna open the door?” I asked.
“I haven’t seen these guys in a long time. Give me a minute to think.”
“Get back into your rocker head?”
He smiled, and something about that made me feel really good. “Yeah.”
I switched my position so I was kneeling on the seat, facing him. I yanked on his lapel. “Take this off. You look like a fucking lawyer.”
“Right. Okay.” He wrestled out of his jacket and tossed it in the back. His shirt had light blue stripes and a white collar, and his tie was just skinny enough to be stylish without crossing the line into new wave.
I grabbed it and let it go so it flopped. “Come on, take this off.”
He undid it. “I forgot how bossy you are.”
“I still can’t believe you even remember me.”
“You’re not forgettable.”
“Please,” I said. “There were hundreds of girls.”
He yanked at the tie, slipping it through the knot. “I was obsessed with you the second you opened your mouth. You scared the fuck out of Strat. He thought he was going to lose me to you.”
He leaned his head back on the seat, raising his hand languidly and touching my chin. My eyes fluttered closed, because I’d been too busy to let a man touch me in years, and this man knew how to touch. He ran his finger along the edge of my jaw, down my neck, and I grabbed it before it could move lower.
“We’re working.”
“What happened to you?” he asked in a whisper.
“I went to law school.”
“Before that. You split. We couldn’t find you. Strat hung out outside your house. We went to all the clubs. Your friends didn’t know where you were.”
He didn’t know what he was asking. He thought he was going to get some reasonable, sane answer, but there wasn’t one.
“It had nothing to do with you,” I lied. It had everything to do with him. Every single thing.
“What did it have to do with, Cin?” His voice dripped sex and music, and I wondered if that was just his way of getting back into character.
I reached for his collar and ran my finger under it, revealing the stand of tiny white buttons. “The collar comes off.”
“You need to tell me where you went.”
“I took a trip.”
“We waited, and you never showed up.”
He moved his fingertip down my shirt. My breath got short, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of his lips.
“Sorry. I flaked. You guys were too intense for me.” I didn’t know why I had to make it obvious that it was more than that. I could have kept my voice flat and subtext-free, but my inflection got away from me. If he couldn’t tell I was hiding something, he was an idiot.
And he wasn’t an idiot. That was shit-sure.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” he said.
“No.”
He took his hand away. Relief and disappointment fought for dominance inside me as he flipped his stiff collar up and unbuttoned it.
“We had a good time,” he said. “Good coupla months.”
“Seven weeks.”
“I wasn’t even thinking about how long it was going to last. But I was so fucking stupid anyway. Strat was smart. He played at being a reckless musician, but man, he was sharp and fifty years older in his mind. He told me to chill out. He told me the thing we were doing was temporary, and I argued with him like a moron.” He shook his head at his stupidity and got the last button undone, snapping the collar away from his neck.
“Looks better,” I said, smoothing down the Mandarin.
He took my wrist and sucked me in with the tractor beam of his gaze. “I thought I’d be the one to lose my shit when it ended. But it was him.”
I pulled my hand away. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t care for another second. “What happened?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“You could.”
But he didn’t, and I opened the door to end the conversation.
Chapter 10.
1982 – After the night of the Quaalude
Rich family. Pig rich. Six nannies, two cooks, and a cleaning staff rich. Multiple estates. We were our own economy. My dad wouldn’t experiment with losing a chunk of it for another twenty-plus years.
My father had two brothers, and my mother had a sister she barely spoke to. She’d never said why. She never said much that was worth listening to. She hadn’t seemed young to me until the autumn of Bullets and Blood.
This realization happened at a party. We had two hundred people in the house for my parents’ anniversary. String quartet. Black tie staff. Open doors to our swimming pool with lotus blossoms and candles floating in it. Attendance was mandatory, so I had to tell Indy and Strat to get their laughs elsewhere.
All the family and business partners were there, all the wives clustered around the couches and most of the men hovering around the bar. Except Aunt Maureen. She never hung around the women. She was my “cool aunt” who ran a business and told the guy she’d been with for the past ten years that she saw no point in getting married. She was talking to my dad and a few guys in suits I knew by sight but not name. I was close by, hanging on every word, when I heard her say something about negotiations with a blue chip company. It was a bunch of numbers and percentages I understood because I remembered everything the adults in my family said about business. But at the end, she laughed.
The sound had a clear, tinkling quality her voice usually lacked. She sounded so young.
Wait. She was young.
She was eighteen years older than me. A little less, give or take. And that made my mother fifteen and change when she’d had me.
Over the ice sculpture and through the floral arrangement in the center of the ballroom, I looked at my father and did more
math.
I almost laughed at the symmetry of it.
But it wasn’t funny. It took me too long to realize what had gone on, but I told myself I wasn’t going to be like my mother. I didn’t hate her, but I didn’t respect her either. She was from a good family. She was beautiful and smart. But she was nothing. She did nothing. Her life was a vacuum that purpose had fallen into, never to be seen again.
I wasn’t going to be that, but I was already on the way.
Me in my blue dress and little gold hoop earrings, dressed like a prim little miss. A chiffon-and-silk lie I let them believe. I felt sick.
I was thrown off balance by the impact of a small child. Fiona was five, and she had her arms wrapped around my legs. The others followed. Deirdre and Leanne hugged my legs too. Carrie and Sheila, at nine and eleven, stayed close, looking excited. I was only missing Theresa, who was a year old and had started walking two weeks ago. They looked up at me with eyes in varying shades of blue and green, hair from strawberry-blond to dark brown red. That was what happened when a redhead married a redhead, and my insides curdled like milk on the stove.
“Who’s watching you guys?” I was talking about everyone but directed the question at Carrie, the oldest of them and most likely to put together a coherent sentence.
“Everyone’s outside. Are you having cake or not?”
How long had I been staring into the middle distance?
Long enough for everyone to move to the garden, leaving a few clustered stragglers by the French doors. I let my little sisters lead me outside, where sibling hierarchy was determined by proximity to the cake. I’d lost any will of my own and hung behind all of them. I didn’t really want cake. I’d been sick to my stomach for days, fighting a headache, feeling tender everywhere, but I had a compulsion to act as if dessert mattered.
My mother and father stood behind the cake, smiling for the professional photographer. He wore an LA Times press pass. The camera was nowhere near me, but I felt exposed. They’d want a picture with me, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I could stay relatively anonymous in the world, but people read the pages of news about the Reagan presidency, Beirut, Studio 54 closing, and Hollywood celebrities. After those, but before the stock ticker, came the society page. Weddings. Anniversaries. Deaths of monied men.
My father tapped his glass with a spoon. He was over six feet tall and looked every bit the oligarch he was, with a full head of dark-red hair. My mother was more strawberry, and she held her head high when he was nearby. On that night in particular, she beamed a little brighter.
The guests quieted, and even the photographer put his camera down when Daddy raised his whiskey.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, projecting to the back of the room, “thank you for coming. I hope you’re all having a good time celebrating this, my anniversary with my beautiful bride.”
A chorus of tinkling rose as more spoons met glasses.
A great sound, I thought. They should try it in the studio.
My sinuses filled up, and I almost started crying, but my father kissed my mother quickly and went back to his speech.
“We have an announcement!”
Let’s hear it, Declan!
Hear! Hear!
“Eileen is about to make me a father for the eighth time!”
“Get off her, for Chrissakes!”
The shout from the back ended in uproarious laughter and cheers from everyone but the children, who didn’t understand it.
Except me. But I wasn’t a child. Never was, and never would be.
The photographer started snapping again. Dad and Mom indicated we should come behind the table so we could all smile in dot matrix patterns for tomorrow’s paper, and I couldn’t.
I’d hit my limit. I was going a hundred miles an hour, and the brick wall had appeared inches in front of me, without warning.
I’d taken a pregnancy test that morning. I’d put it away without looking at it and decided I wasn’t going to think about it. Not until after the party. Pretending bad things weren’t happening wasn’t like me, but then again, nothing bad had ever happened to me.
I’d bought it as almost a joke because my period wasn’t that regular. But it wasn’t funny.
The compulsion to look at the results weighed like a rock in my chest, exploding in slow motion. I had to hide before the shrapnel shredded me from the inside.
My room was a good three-minute expedition across the house, and I took it at a run, slipping on the marble and righting myself. I was crying hard by the time I reached my hallway. Somewhere in the journey, I’d let it go. Everything.
Oh god oh god oh god
I was a sensible person. I knew I had options, and the first step to exploring them was to know what was happening. The nausea and headaches. The tender breasts and belly. The feeling at the root of my hips that something was happening. I had to scratch pregnancy off the list so I could move to the next possibility, but I knew I wasn’t scratching shit off any list. I just knew.
And when they’d announced Mom was pregnant (again), I couldn’t wait another second.
When I got to my room, breathless in my pale blue dress, I slapped open the medicine cabinet where I’d left the little plastic jar. If the liquid was one color, I could forget the whole thing. If there was a brown ring at the bottom—
“Are you all right?”
I spun at the voice in the doorway, leaving my back to the open cabinet. My father stood in the doorway, still thrust forward from his run up the stairs.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Your mother thought you’d take it hard. I told her you were made of steel.” His smile was one hundred percent pride.
“I just ate something that didn’t agree with me.”
I spun and snapped the medicine cabinet door closed, but it bounced back, leaving an inch of the inside exposed. I turned back to my dad, hoping I wasn’t disrupting the liquid. Taking the test with eyedroppers and test tubes, I’d felt as if I were in lab class. I didn’t want to do it all again. And I didn’t want Dad to see it. And I didn’t want to be pregnant. And I wanted to rewind the whole thing, so I didn’t stupid my way through life.
“You’ve been so busy with your extracurriculars, your mother is worried.” His eyes left mine and went to the medicine cabinet. He wasn’t looking in the mirror. They traced the edge, moving up and down.
“I’m a little tired. Can I skip the cake?”
“Be back down in half an hour for pictures.”
His sharp expression meant that was an order. I could be green around the gills, and I’d be expected to smile for the camera.
“Okay.” I wanted him to go away.
He looked from behind me to my face, scanning it. I felt made of thin blown glass, hollow and transparent. Too fine. Too delicate. Worth too much to be broken without everyone I cared about getting upset over the loss.
I tilted my head down and went around him, to the doorway, where the promised comfort of my bed waited. He’d have to follow me out and leave me alone for thirty minutes. I could do a lot of calming down in half an hour.
I’d just stepped onto the carpet in my room. It was mauve and grey. And by the second step, the colors became a woolen blur as I was pulled back and spun around.
Dad’s face was beet red. He held a clear plastic vial in his left hand as he gripped my arm with his right. “What is this?”
“You’re hurting me.” I tried to squirm away, but he only gripped me tighter.
“What have you done?”
I was so scared I could barely think. My father had never raised a hand to me, but I’d always known there was an ocean of violent potential under his smooth veneer. A cold, deep sea that remained placid but was ever-threatening.
“It’s negative!” I shouted, not knowing if that was true. I hadn’t gotten a look into the vial before he stepped in.
“This?” He turned the vial toward me, open top to my face.
The yellow liquid had been slipped d
own. At the bottom, a brown ring of thicker membrane slid down, going elliptical before drooping into a line of accusation.
I didn’t have an answer. Not an excuse or reason. Nothing but an explanation of what I’d been doing with my free time, which I was sure he didn’t want to hear.
“Who is he?” Dad growled.
Wasn’t that the question of the year.
“Let go!”
“Were you raped?”
“What?”
“I’ll kill whoever did it.”
“Dad! No!” I was crying now. I hadn’t had enough time to process what I’d done to myself. I felt the spit and tears as if they were someone else’s. Dad’s face was lost in a wet, grey cloud, and my breath came in hard sobs. I choked out what I thought was a bit of reassurance. “It wasn’t rape.”
He twisted me around until I was facedown over my white footboard, the thin wood painful on my abdomen. While I was trying to navigate around that and the tears that flowed with the force of a storm, I felt a sharp pain on my bottom.
A strange clarity cut through my sobs, and my crying stopped as if I’d skidded to a stop at the edge of a cliff while the tears dropped to the bottom.
Dad spanked me again, and the impact turned breaths into grunts. I tried to turn, but he held me and whacked me again. I was confused, pinned. I looked around at him. His hand was raised with fingers flat, and elbow bent to strike me again, and he was looking at his hand as if it had done something he didn’t understand.
Then in that split second, he looked down at me, and we made eye contact. He saw me but didn’t. I didn’t know what he saw. I didn’t know what math he was doing in his head. The violent sea within him didn’t calm. It didn’t drain into a huge funnel and gurgle away, but the tide changed and moved like a lumbering beast, receding over the horizon to a place I couldn’t see.
He let me go. I slumped over the footrail. I took two deep breaths, and only the first one was an incomplete hitch.
