The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes

by David Handler

  “That was a long time ago. We were kids.”

  “You and Merilee Nash used to be married, didn’t you?”

  “Right up until she divorced me.”

  “Are you two still involved?”

  “We’ll always be involved.”

  “But not you and Reggie?”

  “No, it’s good and over between us.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “You’re not alone. Merilee doesn’t either. How about you? Are you still in love with Patrick?”

  “I don’t see how I was ever in love with him. He’s a no-good lying prick. But he can also be very charming. He’s incredibly good at that.”

  “There’s a reason why they call them actors.”

  We fell into silence for a moment. It was so quiet there on her patio in the early evening darkness that I could barely hear the chirping of the paparazzi out on Rockingham.

  “Reggie and I got along fine when we were girls,” Monette recalled. “We looked out for each other. We had to, because Mom and Dad weren’t Mom and Dad anymore. They’d become different people. Stoned people. Would you like to hear something crazy? I’m now the same age that Mom was when she threw herself off that roof. My own children are nearly as old as Reggie and I were when it happened. Being a mother, I still can’t accept what she did to us. I can’t imagine abandoning my children that way. I’d do anything for my children, Hoagy. Anything except leave them.”

  “She had a lot of LSD in her system. That drug can do nasty things to people.”

  “You’ve taken it?” She studied me curiously. “What is it like?”

  “Sometimes it’s fabulous. Other times you get trapped inside of a loop and you can’t get out.”

  “Do you mean like a panic attack?”

  “Yes.”

  She nodded to herself. “I know what those are like. My life has been all about one frightening experience after another. And, I hope, imparting what I’ve learned so that other women will know they’re not alone. I should never have written Father Didn’t Know Best. But I was a desperate mess and my therapist—a complete fraud who ended up losing his license to practice—told me that I showed every sign of being someone who was repressing memories of sexual abuse. He urged me to embrace whatever fragments of memories, dreams or fantasies popped into my head. To stop fighting and believe them. And so I did. I kept a journal, also at his urging. The rest is history. Reggie never forgave me. But when I published Father Didn’t Know Best I genuinely believed that Dad had sexually abused me. And then, after working with a new therapist who wasn’t a quack, I genuinely believed that he hadn’t. So I wrote about that, too, which made Reggie even more furious. She called me a ‘soulless parasite.’ She never understood that I was simply trying to figure out who I was, and that I had a lot to learn. I still do. I’m always discovering new things about myself. It just so happens that I do my discovering in public. And now . . .” Monette let out a long sigh. “Thanks to Patrick and his pregnant teenager, I’m a national joke. Johnny Carson makes fun of me every night in his monologue. Not Patrick, not Kat, me. Why am I the one who’s being ridiculed?”

  “Because you’re rich, famous and beautiful. You’re Monette Aintree. Tell me, how are Joey and Danielle holding up?”

  Monette’s eyes flickered. “Danielle’s an absolute dynamo. A straight-A student, gifted pianist and an exceptional middle-distance runner. Last month she organized a food drive for a homeless shelter in Venice. She’s a special girl.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “She’s so determined that she scares me sometimes. Danielle has a Rolodex, can you imagine? What fifteen-year-old girl keeps a Rolodex? Whenever she meets someone at school who has a parent in the movie business she writes down their contact information. She’s planning to intern in Elliot’s office next summer. Always planning. I can’t remember the last time I saw her smile.”

  “And how about Joey?”

  “Joey’s exceptionally bright, but he’s flunking half of his classes and I practically need a crowbar to pry him out of his room. All he ever wants to do is sit in there with his nose buried in a book listening to that depressing music group, Nirvana. He’s turning seventeen on Saturday. When I asked him what he wanted to do for his birthday, he said he didn’t care. What boy who is Joey’s age doesn’t care about his birthday?”

  “Is he seeing someone?”

  “If by that you mean is he seeing a therapist, the answer is yes. A woman in Beverly Hills who came highly recommended. But he’s been very resistant. Hates going.” She tilted her head at me slightly. “I’m glad that you’re here, actually. It’ll be good for him to spend some time around a mature man.”

  At my feet, Lulu started coughing.

  Monette frowned. “Why is she doing that?”

  “Because she doesn’t know how to laugh. You may not be by the time this is over.”

  “I may not be what?”

  “Glad that I’m here.”

  “I’ll take my chances. You see, Hoagy, I already know something about you that you don’t.” That unblinking gaze of Monette’s grabbed hold of mine. In an ice-cold voice she said, “You’re not going to disappoint me. You wouldn’t dare.”

  The four of us ate at the big scrubbed-pine kitchen table under the exposed, hand-hewn chestnut beams with those bunches of herbs and dried flowers suspended artfully over our heads. Dinner was a Provençal-style beef stew served over buttered noodles with asparagus and a salad of romaine lettuce and red onion. We passed around the brightly colored serving dishes that Maritza had set on the table before she made herself scarce. Monette stayed with the Sancerre. I switched to the Côtes du Rhône that was offered. Joey and Danielle drank mineral water.

  “Those are impressive beams,” I observed, gazing up at them. “Where did they come from?”

  “A carriage barn in North Stonington, Connecticut,” Monette informed me. “My builder keeps an eye out for such things. Most of the paneling and molding came over from Cornwall, England. And those aged cobbles out in the driveway are from Philadelphia.”

  “How about the weeds in between them?”

  Joey snorted quietly, which constituted the first reaction I’d gotten from him since he’d come downstairs from his room and refused to shake my hand.

  “I don’t do that,” he’d said scornfully.

  “Because you’re making a statement or because you’re afraid of germs?”

  “I don’t believe in societal conventions.”

  “Good. We’ll get along fine.”

  “Dream on,” he’d said, before retreating into silence.

  Mostly, he kept his eyes fastened on his plate. After Maritza left the kitchen, that is. He couldn’t take his eyes off the pretty young housekeeper when she was moving around the table depositing the serving dishes. Given that he was about to turn seventeen I ranked his fixation as somewhere in between a schoolboy crush and raging hormonal lust. Maritza did nothing to encourage his stares. But she had to know. Women always do.

  Joey was a gangly, splayfooted kid with a melon-sized Adam’s apple, a generous assortment of pimples and a wispy see-through moustache. Pale by L.A. standards. He wore his stringy blond hair down to his shoulders and didn’t appear to wash it very often, which was a Kurt Cobain thing. So was his stoop-shouldered posture, rumpled flannel shirt, fraying T-shirt and baggy old jeans. He also wore a studied air of tragic disillusionment mixed with burning artistic purity and anger. Whole lot of anger.

  Unlike Joey, Danielle was extremely poised and polite, not to mention pretty in a tall, leggy, sun-kissed California-girl way, complete with long, shiny blond hair and big blue eyes. Grunge was absolutely not, repeat not, Danielle’s thing. She was done up all Ralph Lauren preppy casual in her blue oxford-cloth button-down, argyle vest, stonewashed jeans and suede loafers. Her short, upturned top lip gave her young face a slightly rabbity look. But it was the determined set of her jaw that I really noticed. That and her analytical gaze as she studied
me from across the table. Monette hadn’t been exaggerating. There was a complete absence of girlish playfulness in those fifteen-year-old eyes.

  “Joey wants to be a writer someday,” Monette said to me as we ate. “Mr. Hoag is a famous novelist, Joey.”

  “If you’re so famous how come I haven’t heard of you?” he demanded.

  “Actually, that says more about you than it does me.”

  “Oh, yeah? Like what?”

  “That you aren’t as well read as you think you are.”

  “Wow, what a witty put-down. Not.”

  “Mind your manners, Joey,” Monette scolded him.

  “Manners are for assholes.”

  “Have you decided what you’d like to do for your birthday?” she asked him, forcing a bit of good cheer into her voice.

  He heaved a suffering sigh. “Mom, how many times do I have to tell you? Birthdays are an outmoded ritual.”

  “We could have a pool party. You could invite some people.”

  “Like who?”

  “Your dad, if you’d like.”

  “You’d let him come?”

  “I would if it’s important to you.”

  “Dad can go to hell. I don’t ever want to see him again.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?” Monette pressed him. “Just sit in your room all day reading?”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said, shoveling stew into his mouth. His table manners tended toward slurpy.

  “Who are you reading these days?” I asked him. “Wait, wait, don’t tell me. You’ve transitioned out of your Asimov-Clarke-Bradbury phase, made a brief stopover at Vonnegut, whom you consider overrated, and now you’ve arrived at . . . Ayn Rand.”

  He blinked at me in surprise. “How’d you know that? I just finished Atlas Shrugged.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  “Simplistic, whiny crap. I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s brilliant.”

  “Hardly. You’re talking to the man who labeled her work ‘intellectual porn for bed wetters’ in the New York Review of Books. I still get hate mail from Alan Greenspan. That man never forgets. Have you read Kerouac yet?”

  “Jack Kerouac?”

  “No, Steve Kerouac. You need to read On the Road. How about Stop-Time by Frank Conroy?” On his blank stare I said, “He’s someone who’ll speak to you. So is Dorothy Parker. You need Mrs. Parker in your life, same as you need Frank Zappa and Warren Zevon. And you need to read poetry. Have you read your aunt Reggie?”

  He shook his head.

  “How about your grandmother?”

  Again he shook his head.

  “Your grandmother was a great American poet. And Reggie’s a stone-cold genius. How can you not be reading them? What about your grandfather’s novel? Please tell me you’ve read Not Far from Here.”

  “Well, yeah, in English class,” he said defensively. “Everyone does.”

  “And . . . ?”

  Joey shrugged his shoulders. “It was okay.”

  “Try again. Something a bit less lame this time.”

  “I thought it was corny crap.”

  “I thought it was sweet,” Danielle said. “The ending made me cry.”

  “That’s because you’re a sap,” he said to her. “You still get weepy over Shirley Temple movies.”

  “I’d rather watch Shirley Temple than those stupid monster movies of yours,” she shot back. “How many times have you seen The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms?”

  Joey ignored her, considering me from across the big table. “So what’s your deal? Are you banging our mom?”

  Monette let out a horrified gasp. “Joey, that was totally inappropriate! I’ve told you why Mr. Hoag is here.”

  “How do you feel about that?” I asked the two of them. “The possibility of your grandfather coming into your lives after all of these years. Are you looking forward to meeting him?”

  “Not really,” Joey said. “Why would I be?”

  “Well, I am,” Danielle said. “He’s a really famous literary figure. Almost mythical. And he’s my grandfather. So, yeah, I’d love to meet him.”

  “You’re just hoping he’ll write you a letter of recommendation to Yale,” Joey jeered at her.

  “What’s so wrong with that? He used to be a professor there. A recommendation from him would mean a lot.” To me Danielle said, “I intend to go to Yale when I graduate from Brentwood. It’s vital that I get into Yale. Sometimes I lie awake at night wondering what will happen to me if I don’t.”

  “You’ll go somewhere else and you’ll be fine.”

  She shook her blond head at me. “No, I won’t. I have to get in.”

  I studied her more closely. This was one tightly wound girl. “Your mom said you’re a middle-distance runner.”

  “Last spring Danielle ran the second-fastest four-hundred-meter time of any high school girl in the entire city,” Monette said proudly. “She’s running cross-country this semester. Wins every meet by hundreds of yards. The second-place finisher is so far behind you can’t even see her.”

  “That’s very impressive, Danielle. But all of that slogging over hill and dale can take the turbocharge out of your kick when you switch back to four hundred meters. Keep doing some sprints so your legs remember how to.”

  Danielle eyed me curiously. “You ran track in high school?”

  “And college. I was the first alternate on our mile relay team.”

  “What does ‘first alternate’ mean?” Joey asked.

  “It means I was our fifth-best quarter-miler.”

  “That’s not saying much,” he scoffed.

  “You’re right, it’s not. But it wasn’t my main event. I was a spear chucker. Third best in the Ivy League.”

  “Really?” Danielle’s eyes widened with newfound interest. “Where did you go to school?”

  “Cambridge.”

  “You went to Harvard? No way! Harvard’s a huge part of my career plan.”

  “You have a career plan?”

  “Totally. Yale for undergrad followed by an MBA from Harvard. After that I’ll go to work for a film studio to gain development and production experience, and then I’ll go out on my own. I intend to be producing my own movies by the time I’m thirty.”

  I set my fork down, dabbing at my mouth with my napkin. “Forgive me, but that doesn’t sound like a career plan. It sounds more like a sickness.”

  Danielle blinked at me in shock. “Why would you say that?”

  “These movies that you plan to produce—what are they going to be about?”

  “How should I know?”

  “That’s my point. You don’t know. You’ve left that part out.”

  “What part?”

  “The part where you figure out what really matters in life. You need to hang out at a sidewalk café in Paris drinking wine and thinking deep thoughts for at least a year. You need to see the cloud formations over the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Hebrides. You need to stroll arm in arm in Venice at midnight in the rain with some guy who you’re crazy in love with.”

  Danielle wrinkled her nose at me. “You’re weird.”

  “Thank you. That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in weeks.”

  “Actually, I’m starting to tolerate him,” Joey said grudgingly. “Mr. Hoag, would you like to bang our mom?”

  The lights were on in the pool house. I didn’t recall leaving them on. When I unlocked the door I discovered that Maritza had let herself in to tidy up. She’d washed out the fragrant remains in Lulu’s mackerel bowl. Brought me fresh, thirsty towels. Also absconded with my torn jeans, which were no longer hanging from the hook on the bathroom door. I hadn’t expected her to do any of this. Wondered why she had. Was she spoiling me or spying on me?

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and called my answering machine in New York. Nine more reporters had called me. So had Boyd Samuels—just to make absolutely, positively sure I was settling in okay.

  There was no message from Merilee
in Budapest.

  I took two more aspirin for the dull ache in my shoulder, got undressed and climbed into bed with Lulu and John O’Hara.

  That was when my phone rang.

  “Stewart Hoag? This here’s Patrick Van Pelt,” said the voice on the other end of the line. Not that he needed to identify himself. His folksy, regular-guy voice was instantly recognizable. “Did I get you at a bad time?”

  “Not at all. And I got your message this afternoon.”

  “What message?”

  “The one that you gave me at the Devonshire Grand Prix.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about, dude.”

  “You didn’t send me a letter asking me to meet you there?”

  “Nope. Sure didn’t.”

  “It was on Malibu High stationery. A studio messenger delivered it.”

  “I don’t know anything about it. Wasn’t me who sent it.”

  “Well, then who was it?”

  “How the fuck would I know?”

  “Do you know anyone who drives a black Trans Am?”

  He fell silent for a moment before he said, “It’s a popular ride.”

  “Does that mean yes or no?”

  “I was wondering if you and me could get together. I figure we should meet each other.”

  “Really, why is that?”

  “You’re working on a project with Queenie. You’re sleeping under my roof. I have an interest in what goes on there.”

  “Personal or financial?”

  “Exactly. We should talk about that. Dudes talk to each other. I’m a dude, you’re a dude. You are a dude, aren’t you?”

  “Was the last time I checked. Fine, let’s get together. How about someplace other than the Devonshire Grand Prix this time?”