When Price replied, "I don't know," Lorelle got a scary glimpse of the man's devilishly contracted pupils. Price was redlining. "I'd hoped that maybe I could retreat into your little world of make-believe.''
"That's not the only thing you wish you were inside," said Michelle.
Price grabbed his chest, near his heart. "Owww, stung by the matriarchy! You want to play balls versus slots?''
"You'd lose."
"Not necessarily. I may be outnumbered but I'm not outclassed. And I've still got the dog on my side, gender-wise. Come to think of it, I've got Lorelle, too." Before Lorelle could protest, he turned back to her. "Tell me: Did you go through all that egregiously moony shit about not being able to survive being torn apart? Typical bifurcated rationalization. Whatever you can't bear, you assign to your, ahem, better half. Now you can accomplish murder without guilt. Now you are suited and predisposed to violent action. Now you can get away with it… you just can't be sure of which person you are. Overall, I wouldn't worry; you've got the important stuff locked."
Suzanne had repaired to the master bathroom, presumably to work some cosmetic miracle. Dina had probably taken up a post on the bed, readying another dose of self-hatred. Michelle tended to stay in Price's vicinity, sometimes as far away as the back of the kitchen, sometimes as just a ghostly presence behind the sofa, always in nervous motion like an errant satellite.
"What happened to Luther?" said Lorelle.
"We cleaned up while you were sleeping," said Price. "You're a gal who likes things neat. If this storm ever stops, they'll be scooping bodies out of the beach for a week."
Translation: No one was accountable.
Suzanne headed for the kitchen to advantage food or drink or both, pausing long enough to say, "Bathroom's clear. You still need to pee?"
Codicil: Price was going to make Lorelle wriggle a bit before allowing her to relieve herself in that bathroom.
"Tell me something," said Price. "What did you think of those people you saw at the party?"
"All lost, or all losers," she said. "Makes me wonder why you'd have anything to do with them; what they could possibly offer someone like you."
Price grinned, all snaky. "You're being way too kind. Most of those dazzled idiots had nothing to offer me except closure. I'd except Luther, and Michelle. But you smelled the talent of the room. Most of them were the sort of arrested adolescents who are still looking for a free ride at twenty-five. Beautiful people who are only beautiful when they're on a junk nod. So they stick holes in themselves and ink up their flesh like a rest-room wall, and bead until they look like iguanas, and when that stops exciting their dead nerves and deader emotions, they go back to jamming shit inside themselves, because the biggest thing they fear isn't the storm, or loss of love, or their own shallowness-it's the fear they might actually make it to age thirty or forty or fifty, and realize they've still got a fucking life-size squirrel tattooed on the back of their head. Like you said: lost and losers. Talk about your self-renewing state of denial. Better they should perish in a storm, an act of God if you will, than in the ignominious way most of them will burn out anyway."
"You're saying all those people were junkies?" said Lorelle. "That doesn't seem possible."
"Yeah, I know, to look at them you'd think otherwise. If they weren't humping one kind of dope, it was another. Crack, black tar, yayo, speed, diet pills, M&M's, money-what's the difference? Goddammit, I hate junkies. They waste my oxygen and their bodies are so polluted they don't even make good fertilizer. They were all losers, and I felt the urge to jettison them. Hence, closure. Before you throw something away, you always check one last time to see if the item has any residual worth. Voila, party time."
"So you solved this big problem by giving them more drugs?" Lorelle tried to will her legs to cross and got one to twitch, bonelessly. That jive about a fifteen-minute recovery period from a stun gun was obviously sell-copy from some brochure.
"I made them honest," said Price, leaning forward so Lorelle could see his eyes in the wavering lamplight. "A lot of them, for the first time ever."
"You just… threw them all away."
"Very empowering. You should learn that lesson, my dear, about trash. Garbage. The things you throw away." In the absence of an ashtray, Price flicked his ashes on the floor. Drafts caught most and swirled them.
"I couldn't do that to somebody I really cared about," said Lorelle.
Price snorted. "Neither could I, love.
"Once, I was working on this piece," he went on. "Call it a story. There were all these pages. It just kind of poured out of me onto paper like I was channeling it. And I started thinking it was important enough to type up. So I typed from the pages, adding stuff as I went, changing stuff, deleting stuff; I'm sure you know how it goes."
And Lorelle did. Becoming Art had mandated the development of some sort of design aesthetic, if for no better reason than it would make her story more convincing.
"As drafts came and went, the notes got used and went into the trash with all the other spent paper. The trash went into a Dumpster out back of this place I had in Walnut Creek. Well, come trash day, I cut across my alley and what do I see but my pages, my notes, dead drafts, all spread up and down the street like lost homework for anybody to just pick up. It wasn't finished, it wasn't ready, it wasn't right that anybody should see that stuff that way. After that, I shredded everything. Burned the shreddings. Do you know how many people just throw away their junk mail? You might as well print up flyers with your credit info, your Social, all your numbers, and just hand it out on the street. More to the point, Ms. Lorelle Latimer, you should really be more careful about what you dump in your trash can."
***
The Thursday ritual: Collect the mail shipped in from the nice Japanese lady in San Francisco. Sort it at the trash bin and jettison most of the junk.
Anybody with half a brain could outfox the locks on the mailbox, the trash bins.
Derek, Art's visiting best friend of three days prior, forever ago, probably would have liked the Lorelle backstory better if it had been more sordid. Playing the death card was an expeditious way to keep people-everyone-from asking too many of the questions that hurt even now. Questions about how you failed, or how you lost, or why.
Denial was something failures, and losers, indulged in every waking moment.
One morning she rolled over and said, "I think we need to see other people," Derek had said. She hung around most of the day hut it was clear all she wanted to do was run.
Had Lorelle retrofitted her personal disaster to come out of Derek's possibly-imaginary mouth, with the proper degree of flamboyance added?
The only thing Art had not left behind was a lame note. Too soap operatic. He left his clothes, his bathroom stuff, his family pictures, his plans and drawings and sketches, all ahang, with no end to their story, either. Whenever Lorelle thought about all the particles of Art still lingering in the house-skin flakes, strands of hair behind the sideboard, molecules-she tended to crack, and cry.
He had strolled out of her life like someone leaving a dull movie before the credit roll.
Lorelle had never actuated the divorce process. The waivers would need Art's signature, and thus, painful contact; the no-fault statements she had typed up were entombed in a file in the office deceptively labeled finance. Given the choice between gangrene and amputation, most sane people opt for slow decay, buying time on credit, hoping some external event will relieve them of the burden of responsibility. You had to suffer the slow rot, the stench of your own parts betraying you, to learn the value of the quicker alternative. Most people did not learn, or resisted the lesson anyway.
Derek, again. Her whole life had been smash-and-grab, chase-and-run, trade on her looks, slip through the cracks, and as soon as she stabilized and got a tiny bit of security, of permanence, I think it scared the shit out of her.
Lorelle had set about finalizing the herculean task of their dream house like a woman on a quest. Th
e house was an achievement, bedrock in an impermanent world. It would have left Art free to do whatever he wanted, and that freedom had become a cage to him.
Cages require escape, and Art had eventually discovered another way out. According to a tilt on their original plan, he found other things to do, new things.
Back to one, as Derek might have said.
True, that maybe love was based on banal things. Romance was the attraction. Magnetism yields magic. With the attraction satiated, the romance, the pull, was bound to diffuse a bit, since its job was done. It got replaced by other important things, more reliable things. But people don't permit you to get under their skin and root around through what you find, if you're going to reject them.
Art had been so angry that many of his newer designs had been lumbered, misunderstood, or rejected, by an outside world, which wanted things simplistically easy and unimaginative. Which, in turn, was a rejection of his whole life, from which Lorelle could not rescue him. Art, who had never done violence to a person other than himself, extracted himself. It had been like pulling away the fundamental support in a house. Sometime in the middle of the night, it all just caves in at once.
Lorelle stayed, as though manning an outpost. She drank and drugged, nearly flushing her life. The only way up out of the pit was to make that Lorelle dead. In her head, the murder was easy. Bricking up the crypt she had built for herself was even easier. Easier still, to commence memorializing her in the most glowing terms possible, as the guy who would know. Art was very creative. He had trophies to prove it.
Somewhere along the line, the house had become her cage, too.
Her existence, and Art's, had become one of theoretical toughness.
But all the prep and armor on Earth cannot save you when a person decides to leave you behind.
Normal people did this every day. Normal people wanted others to think the best of them. You played to your strengths. If you were good at it, you could write your own version of history.
You told stories.
***
Sitting on the toilet like an invalid, Lorelle forced a few drops of urine that smelled vile, loaded with poisons decanted from her system. The door was cracked. If her captor, and his complicitors, thought she was moving her bowels, they might not watch her so avidly.
Luther's vial of Price's special all-black capsules was on the rack above the hand towels, feigning complete innocence, hiding behind a pharmacy label for sinus medication. Lorelle watched them and thought: The solution to my problem is right at hand.
Pop one or two of those babies and she would Hyde out, become reckless again, heedless of personal safety, blind to risk, coldly uncaring, and ruthless enough to engage these damned predators on their own emotional terms. The pills would make her more like them; they could swivel the advantage, and it would be ironic indeed to turn Price's own chemicals against him. The Bry-Guy had certainly learned a rude lesson about payback. Under the influence of the drug, Lorelle had screamed in his face, bashed him about, hurt him even more when he was tied up and helpless… and had done it all without hesitation or misgivings. Price wanted to wind up Lorelle, to see what she would do. Well, she thought, why not show the son of a bitch for real? The pills were the edge she needed, and the prompt to act. Swallow them, and you donned cape and boots and became capable of super-deeds.
Lorelle made her decision.
She stood up, wobbly but under her own power, and flushed the toilet, ignoring the pills. Dina and Michelle marched her back into the living room, slinging an arm each.
"Where's your fearless leader?" Lorelle said, trying to peer beneath the sofa as she was eased down, still seeing nothing.
"He's back in the Blue Room giving Suzanne her reward," Dina said.
Lorelle immediately sought Michelle's expression, her reaction to this. Michelle refused to be read.
"You don't completely understand about Price," Michelle said, weighing her words as though testing them for her own reasons.
"Once he noticed you, learned about you, you became a part of him whether you wanted to or not."
Lorelle let her next words go just as carefully, honing for impact, intending to goad for reaction. "So, he's like a pimp, then?"
Dina actually cut loose a monosyllabic laugh.
Michelle just smiled. "Or a God complex. You can't make me angry at him. He saved my life. He just saved yours, tonight, although I'm sure you don't see it that way."
Lorelle tried to even her breathing. Appear to settle in for another story. Buy time to marshal the returning ability in her limbs.
"I met him in New York," said Michelle. "Art, I mean."
Lorelle realized she was sitting in her own home less than a foot away from the woman for whom her husband had walked out the door. Their shiny, almost unbreachable, stainless-steel front door.
The whole west face of the house seemed to give a couple of inches as it was slammed. A stray huff of chilly air extinguished the candle someone had added to the remains of the coffee table; its flame jerked hard left as though slapped.
Memories of the party (only yesterday?) flooded back in a blast wave. Michelle saying So relax and tell me a little about yourself, when she already knew. Saying, It's nice to get a look at you at last, strange as that may sound. Now Lorelle knew what she had meant. Saying, I'm not attracted to you in that way, at least not yet. More oh a kindred spirit thing. We have a lot in common.
Lorelle's eyes had gone wide, white, bright with new tears. Her heart felt like a chunk of rust.
"He really put you on a pedestal," Michelle said, in the here and now. "By his own reckoning, he could never do better than you. He was satisfied and you weren't. So you had an affair with his closest friend."
The swashbuckling Derek had never come to the house. Not then, not more recently. That had been their ground rule-never in the house.
"Art met me." Michelle shrugged. "Then I met Price, because Art couldn't let go of you. He really did love you, not that that's something anyone values anymore. Everybody ignores love in favor of focusing on Doing Better."
Derek's gritty tale-about grabbing gun in hand and duly unplugging his own rival-was a fiction. In it, Lorelle recognized elements of her own wish fulfillment, the staircase wit of wanting to do something branding-iron hot and deliciously appropriate, too late.
"From what Price gathered, Art tried to contact you and you tossed his first letter into the ocean, a separate bottle for each page. He could have tried a suicide note, one of those cry-for-help things, but knew you wouldn't rise to that. He could have just slipped into a black hole, changed his identity, but he didn't. You knew what was best for him. You spoke when people called, and Art was covered. Since he didn't care about erasing himself, you took his life. Literally. You took his life along with the house and the dog. But he left that gap, for you to fill."
Art had been inside this woman, more recently than Lorelle.
Today, Art was off happily penetrating some lady journalist, as Price had divulged.
The world could not collapse any further. It had hit rock bottom and was tasting Jurassic sediment.
At the party, Lorelle had asked, But, Michelle, if it's on purpose, doesn’t it all seem a bit cruel? And Michelle had said, Sometimes, yes, I suppose.
There' seemed to be a tennis ball blocking Lorelle's throat. "I need to check on Blitz. He's hurt.''
"Sorry, hon, we're not opening that door.''
"Can I at least have some water?"
Dina rousted up another bottle in the kitchen and put it in Lorelle's hand, already open. She also had a Dixie Double Hex with the bottle cap still on. Derek would have said, Never trust a beer that unscrews. She did not open it. She held it by the long neck and swung it right into Michelle's head, the heel of glass hitting next door to her left eye. Lorelle could hear Michelle's neckbones crack as her face (and expression of total surprise) snapped to starboard for a close-up. Michelle fell across Lorelle's lap, still conscious, until Dina bonked her a
gain on the back of the skull, hard enough to make her still-damp hair jump.
"That's enough of that." Dina said, having not uttered a syllable during Michelle's entire discourse. She took the church key she had held in her other hand all along and opened her beer. It foamed over but she drew a long swallow anyway.
Drinking the beer helped allay Lorelle's unavoidable thought that perhaps she was next for a bludgeoning. Michelle was facedown in her lap. It was highly unlikely that Dina was going to suggest building a campfire and singing songs.
"We don't have much time," she said. "Can you move?"
Lorelle held one arm straight one and flexed her fingers. Then she hoisted the inert Michelle away to hang limply, half off the couch, terrible for the posture. One raven eye was slitted and gleaming in the lamplight but she was not seeing anything. They waited until they were sure they could see her breathing, faintly.
Lorelle rummaged around beneath the sofa. Sure enough, the shotgun was there. When she held it up, Dina nodded.
"I'll be right back," Dina said, and headed for the bedroom.
"Blitz!"
The dog's nose was instantly in her face, slurping. Blitz's bloodied breath was worse than maggoty pork, but his doggie contrition caused an ache in Lorelle that nearly brought another downpour of tears.
All she could hear from the bedroom was a yelp of surprise, and a lower, more basso protest from Price, words she could not interpret. Outside, the Wind insisted on taking them all away, jolting the barricades of the house and rendering all other sounds secondary, adulterated. Dina did not reemerge right away, and Lorelle thought, trap.
Another trick out of Price's sorcery bag was coming, surely, to take her between the eyes.
Lorelle held fast in the kitchen, low against the counter, shotgun ready, one arm wrapped around Blitz. "I'm not letting you go, buddy." Michelle remained non compos mentis in the living room.
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