“Thanks,” Camilla said, trying to give it back. “But I think I’ll eat something first. Besides…” She smoothed the sides of her skimpy dress. “I don’t have any pockets.”
“Put it in your bra.” Wave’s attention moved from the vial to Pinstripes, who pushed his way toward them with a beer in each hand. He was amazingly good-looking.
“Is that him, the TV star?”
“Don’t be a doofus. That’s our garbage man. Jimmy.” Wave blew the man a kiss. “You probably don’t recognize him without his uniform. I invited him on Tuesday morning. He was throwing our cans in the neighbor’s yard again, so I told him he could do something useful for a change and bring beer to our party. Cute, huh?”
“Is he here—that actor Don-Jon?”
“Jon-Don. Yeah. Somewhere. But he brought his girlfriend. Jennifer’s totally suicidal. Especially since Mike hasn’t even shown up.” Wave smiled happily and turned to greet Jimmy the garbage man.
Acutely aware of the vial in her hand, Camilla decided to head for the kitchen. But the kitchen was, if possible, even more crowded than the living room. She pretended to fiddle with her dress strap and hid the vial where Wave suggested.
Being in the kitchen reminded her that she hadn’t eaten since morning. Fighting through the crowd to the refrigerator, she managed to open it a crack, but found nothing but a huge quantity of beer and a few bottles of wine. She took a can of light beer and inched her way to the cupboard in search of something edible. After gobbling some stale Wheat Thins, she turned to survey the crowd. She didn’t recognize one person.
But with dawning horror, she realized she was terribly overdressed. In fact, hers was the only actual dress to be seen, and—except for Wave’s gym shorts and the vintage pinstripes worn by Jimmy the garbage man—the only outfit not made of denim.
She wondered if she should attempt the journey back to her room to change, but by now the crowd was impenetrable. She tried to look busy rearranging empty beer cans on the counter. Behind them she found the avocados from the hot tub as well as several others that had been sitting on the counter for days. No one had made the guacamole. She looked in the cupboard for a bowl. She had never made guacamole, but she had watched Wave whip up bowls of it many times, and it didn’t look very hard.
~
Camilla’s fingers were coated with green slime, and she was trying to mash the lumps with a bent fork, the only utensil she could find, when a deep voice spoke close to her ear.
“Guacamole?” the man said.
“Guacamole,” Camilla replied
“You must be Camel.”
“How do you know that?” She turned around to look. He was a thirtyish man of medium height with sandy-colored hair and bloodshot blue eyes. He needed a shave.
“Jennifer told me your name,” he said, leaning on the counter dangerously close to the green slime. “I asked her for the name of the lady with the nice cleavage.” He spoke with a lazy boredom, as if he were commenting on the weather. His eyes focused on the neckline of the Bob Mackie.
“I’m aware that I’m over-dressed,” Camilla said. “We dress differently for parties in New York.” She turned to resume lump-squashing.
“Yeah. Jennifer said you were from back east. Me too.” He stuck a finger into the green mush and tasted it. “Needs hot sauce,” he said.
“Of course it does. I haven’t seasoned it yet.” Why did men think that making critical remarks was attractive?
“Did you know that if you leave in a pit or two it won’t turn brown?”
“No, I didn’t.” She unearthed a bottle of Tabasco sauce from the cupboard.
“Here.” The man fished one of the pits out of the mess in the sink. He dropped it into the bowl. With a plop, it sent out a spray of green blobs. One hit Camilla in the mouth. He wiped it off with his finger.
“You have nice mouth,” he said, licking his finger. “Luscious.”
“The guacamole?”
“Your mouth. Haven’t you ever been told you have a luscious mouth?”
“As a matter of fact, I have.” She shook the bottle of hot sauce with vehemence at the thought of the Guardian article and the odious Jonathan Kahn. Unfortunately, the top shook right off and the entire contents poured into the bowl.
Just then, a skinny woman with deathly white skin and purplish-black hair emerged from the crowd and draped an arm around the man.
“Jon-Don, babe, we’re all out,” she said.
Jon-Don. The star himself. Camilla hid her burning face by busying herself with extricating the bottle top from the red and green goo in the bowl. She’d just made a stupid mess in front of the famous Jon-Don Parker. She stirred the bowl’s contents with the bent fork. It turned a repulsive shade of gray.
“Really into the hot sauce, huh?” Jon-Don said. The black and white woman seemed to have evaporated.
“I think I ruined it,” she said. “But maybe I can save the pit. I could stick three toothpicks in it and let it rot in a glass of water while I pretend it’s going to turn into a plant. I had a counselor at summer camp who used to do that.”
Jon-Don laughed. Now she could picture him in his pink linen jacket.
“You’re all right, Camel,” he said, patting her shoulder. “Hey, is there somewhere we can go and talk? It’s awfully noisy in here.”
“OK.” She was happy to move away from the disaster in the bowl on the counter. After that mess, it was probably OK for him to see her bedroom, which wasn’t too chaotic for once. And they’d be able to sit down. She grabbed a fresh beer.
The crowd parted magically as she led Jon-Don down the hall. Jennifer threw Camilla a lacerating look from her seat on the lap of a man with a chest full of muscles and gold chains.
“You said you’re from the East?” Camilla said to Jon-Don as she smoothed the bedspread on her unmade bed.
“Yup. Tulsa, Oklahoma.”
“Do you miss it?” she said after a pause. It was hard for her to grasp the California concept of “east”.
“Hell, no.” He plunked himself down on the bed. “Well, I guess at first I was kinda homesick, and I thought Californians were weird. But when I went home for a visit, everybody there thought I was the weird one. I’d turned into a Californian without knowing it.”
“I don’t think that could happen to me.”
“Sure it could. It’s like…” He leaned back on the bed. “Have you ever read Ray Bradbury?”
Camilla shook her head as she tried to decide whether to clear the clothes off her desk chair so she could sit in it or whether it was OK to sit next to him on the bed.
“In The Martian Chronicles, he tells this story about how Earth sends this expedition to Mars, and at first the colonists try to make Mars just like Earth, and they send lots of messages back home to tell the folks how they’re doing, but slowly, they get more into being on Mars, and they finally stop sending messages. Then a whole lot later, Earth sends out a new expedition to figure out what happened, but they don’t find anybody but Martians. The colonists had all turned into Martians, see?”
Camilla decided to sit on the bed.
“So you’re saying if I stay here too long, I’ll turn into a Martian?” She was trying to follow, but she didn’t much care for science fiction.
“Right,” Jon-Don said. He laughed loudly as if she had told a funny joke.
Camilla laughed, too, even though she didn’t get it.
He reached over and put a hand on her thigh.
“So. Are we gonna screw or what?”
She tried to remove his hand politely.
“I don’t think so. I mean—your girlfriend’s here and everything. Right?” She gulped beer. If she was dorky with Jon-Don, Jennifer would heap scorn on her forever and life here could get unbearable.
“True? She left with that guy Tooter to score. We’ve been partying for three days. You’d never believe the amount of toot we’ve gone through. It’s a good thing I’m rich.” His hand was back, inching under her ski
rt.
“You want a toot?” She jumped up, finally seeing her chance to ease out of the situation with a minimum of wimpiness. “No problem!” She reached into her bra for Wave’s vial. “Let’s go out by the hot tub. We’ve got works out there.” Outside, she could be magnanimous and let him take all the cocaine, and then she could disappear back into the crowd.
“Not to worry,” he said, taking the vial. He pulled from his jeans pocket a wallet-sized leather case, which he opened to reveal a small mirror, and gold-colored razor blade, tiny spoon and short metal straw.
She took a deep breath as she realized her plan had backfired. She watched him arrange a spoonful of cocaine into two neat rows. She let her breath out slowly and carefully, and prayed that whatever the drug’s effects are, it wouldn’t make her do anything embarrassing.
Jon-Don handed her the little straw and held the mirror. She put the straw to her nose and, since she could think of nothing else to do—inhaled, moving the straw along the line of powder the way Wave and Jennifer did. When she had inhaled the whole line, she felt as if she had no nose. She touched it to make sure it was still there. But nothing else happened. Maybe the cocaine was no good. She hoped Jon-Don wouldn’t be mad. She handed him the straw.
He inhaled the second line of powder. He seemed to think it was OK. She relaxed a bit as he closed the kit and put it back in his pocket.
“So. When are you going to get out of that dress?” he said. “We haven’t got all night.” He reached for her breast.
No. She’d been willing to take a stupid drug to be polite, but this was ridiculous.
“Listen, Jon-Don,” she said, inching away. “I think you’re really cute, but you’re here with another girl and my door doesn’t lock and there’s the party out there…”
“Are you turning me down?” Jon-Don’s face distorted with anger. “Don’t you know who I am? It’s not like I’m asking you to do anything kinky.”
“Of course I know who you are, Lieutenant Darrell.” She added a little Marilyn Monroe breathiness to her voice. “Do you think I’d be here with anyone else? It’s just that I don’t feel comfortable about the situation tonight.” She smiled the sweet-little-girl smile that once charmed horses, cars and trips to Europe out of her dad. “Listen, Jon-Don, I’ll give you my phone number, and you can call me any time. I’m not turning you down. You make me just melt. Really.” She managed to make herself kiss his stubbly cheek, and started to stand up.
But he grabbed her shoulders and, digging his fingers into her flesh, gave her a rough kiss—all slobber and old beer. As she pulled away, the strap of her dress ripped. She jumped up and grabbed a jacket hanging from the doorknob and threw it on to cover herself.
“Hey bitch, you’re supposed to be taking your clothes off, not putting more on.”
She barely avoided his second lunge by turning around toward her makeshift desk. She pretended to be looking for something.
“A pen,” she said, “I need a pen. See?” She found one under a copy of Vogue. “And some paper. I’ll give you my phone number. I’ll be so hurt if you don’t call…”
He wouldn’t call, of course. Men never did. She reached in the pocket of her jacket and found a scrap of paper. It had printing on it, but across the top was room for her to write “Camel—270-4571”.
He grabbed the paper and very quickly, his expression changed from anger and lust to something like fear. And embarrassment. He gave a nervous laugh.
“Hey, yeah. I’ll call you. Real soon. It was nice talking to you, Camel.” He started out the door. “I’ll call you,” he repeated, waving the paper scrap. “You bet.”
As he waved, she could read the words “Have You Heard About Jesus?” printed on the torn sheet. She stifled a giggle as she reached in her jacket pocket and pulled out the remainder of the cowboy’s pamphlet.
Jon-Don stuffed the paper in his pocket and pushed his way out the door.
Chapter 8—TV Sex See Page Six (A)
When Camilla woke the next day to the heavy Ocean Beach fog, she had a vague feeling that she had done something horribly wrong.
But she knew it wasn’t her fault the party had ended up such a disaster.
Not all of it.
OK, Jon-Don leaving, all freaked out by the religious pamphlet, kind of sent the party on a downward spiral. But that was because True, the girlfriend, who was too blitzed to notice Jon-Don making his hasty exit, threw a drama queen number and accused Camilla of hiding Jon-Don in her bedroom, and after a thorough search, threatened to “cut that bitch’s tits off,” if Jon-Don turned out to be hidden anywhere on the premises. That pretty much sent the more sober guests scurrying out the door.
But no matter how drunk they’d been, nobody could have blamed Camilla for the fact that when Jennifer’s other boyfriend, the sizable Mike, finally appeared, he was accompanied by another woman. A brunette in spandex with hair considerably larger than her brain—who made an ill-advised remark about Jennifer’s sexual habits.
And it was certainly not Camilla’s fault that Jennifer decided to have a hissy fit and make a dramatic exit on the arm of somebody with muscles and gold chains, who might or might not have been the breast-admiring Mr. Tooter. Camilla wasn’t sure. She’d had a couple of beers by then. But she did remember Mike taking off after them, in a growling Camaro, threatening everyone in his path with an untimely demise.
Wave and Jimmy the garbage man probably didn’t even know how badly things ended, since they took off in Jimmy’s car soon after that. They’d spent several hours on the couch looking like they were going to ravish each other then and there, so Camilla had been glad to see them go, even though it meant she was left on her own to evict the stragglers and clean up the mess.
Cleaning up had probably been the most enjoyable part of the whole night. She found herself flying around the house, picking up cigarette butts and beer cans, sweeping chips out of the carpet, washing dishes and even mopping beer off the kitchen floor, as if she’d been cleaning houses all her life. By the first light of morning, the house looked more presentable than it had in weeks, and her strange energy had waned enough for her to sleep.
So now why was she overwhelmed with unnamed guilt as she lay in her tidy bed, not even particularly hung over? When she rolled over and looked at the clock, she was shocked to see it was almost five in the afternoon. Half the weekend was shot. She pried herself out of bed, although she could have slept for days. Having a job had made her relish her time off. She hated to waste it.
Wave and Jennifer weren’t back, and the living room and kitchen were just as tidy as she left them. She settled onto the nearly clean couch with a cup of coffee and the TV Guide. She turned to channel six, which was supposed to be showing “Gilligan’s Island,” and was irritated to see a smiling man talking about bombs in Lebanon and welcoming viewers to his Friday newscast.
She switched off the set and counted the days on her fingers. With horror, she realized that it quite possibly could be Friday, not Saturday. This would mean she had missed work altogether. She hadn’t even called in sick. Not that it would have done any good. Her supervisor said that if she made one more mistake she was out. And this certainly was a mistake. How could she face the woman and say she thought it was Saturday? How could she face the woman and say anything? What good would it do?
She was out of a job.
She stared at the blank television set for several minutes. She could think of no reason to move. Finally, a calm, soothing vision appeared in her brain…
Chocolate pudding.
When she was small, her nanny, Mrs. Ritchie, gave her chocolate pudding when she had skinned her knee, or got a cold, or had cried a long time after her parents left on one of their trips. What Camilla really wanted right now was Mrs. Ritchie, who had been smiley and soft and ready with an answer for everything, but Mrs. Ritchie had died when she was nine. Chocolate pudding would have to do.
~
Camilla decided to walk the three blocks to the l
ocal supermarket, which had the unlikely name of the Big Bear, although she knew that Jennifer would laugh at her for not driving. Jennifer got her exercise at an expensive gym where she could wear her shiny leotards and Wave got her exercise playing volleyball on the beach, and neither of them ever walked anywhere. This seemed to be a kind of religion with them. But Camilla liked to walk, and today she thought she would be safe practicing the unfashionable habit.
She had only been to a supermarket a few times in her life, and the bright lights and crowds and syrupy music made her head hurt. She walked down endless aisles displaying almost everything but chocolate pudding, as her cart, which seemed to have a mind of its own, kept rolling sideways and bumping into displays of toilet tissue and slow-moving elderly ladies. Finally she found the pudding aisle and took five boxes of the chocolate. She also picked up milk; a package of Oreos and some butter almond ice cream.
She felt quite proud, if exhausted, when she finally escaped the Big Bear, heavy paper grocery bag in her arms. A plastic one with handles would have been easier for walking, but when the boy bagging the groceries said “paper or plastic,” he grabbed for the paper with such vehemence that she knew he had to be one of those ecology people, so she took the bag to avoid upsetting him.
Now she rested the bag on a metal newspaper vending machine to better balance its weight and wondered if maybe she should have driven the car after all.
As she picked up the bag again, she caught sight of a picture on the front of the evening newspaper. It was a photograph of Jon-Don Parker. Over the picture was the headline, “TV SEX SYMBOL FOUND DEAD IN BEVERLY HILLS HOME”.
She put a quarter in the machine with shaking fingers.
The paper said that Jon-Don Parker’s body had been found by his cleaning woman at 9:00 AM and that the police said his death was probably due to an overdose of heroin and cocaine—see TV SEX on page six, section (A).
She folded the paper quickly and stuck it into the grocery bag as she tried to ignore the roaring in her head. She hoped Wave and Jennifer would be back by the time she got home. She didn’t want to be alone any more.
Randall #01 - The Best Revenge Page 6
