A Clean Slate

by Laura Caldwell

  “So, how about getting a bite to eat?” I said, after our taxi had rumbled away. We were standing in the tiny lobby, Bob Marley music booming from the bar on the other side of the hut. I felt odd, making that social gesture toward Cole, almost like I was asking him out, but he was still too charged from the day to notice.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve got to make a few calls to U Chic, and I’ll meet you at the bar in half an hour, yeah?”

  I went back to my own bungalow, checking the phone on the off chance that anyone had called. The problem was that no one knew I was here. Laney, the person I usually checked in with before I went out of town, was off-limits to me. I’d removed myself from Ben’s life, and my mom, well, I didn’t want her to worry about hurricanes or other natural disasters. I’d call her when I got home. Naturally, I had zero messages.

  I changed into one of the sundresses I’d bought at Saks, pulled my hair back in a short ponytail and was at the bar in twenty minutes. It was a small space with a few white tables and a plank wall covered with pale seashells and fishnets. The stereo pumped out steel drum music. A group of stragglers from the beach had pushed two of the tables together and sat drinking beer, looking sandy and drunk and happy. I ordered a rum punch for myself, something that seemed tropical and refreshing, something that might erase the persistent pounding in my head, if only for a few hours until I could go to bed.

  The sugary-sweet drink couldn’t hide the one-two punch of the rum, but it went down smoothly. I was almost finished with the first one by the time Cole joined me at the bar, his hair wet from a shower, a purple Hawaiian shirt hanging over his black pants. I nearly spat out my drink at the sight of his shirt.

  “What is it?” he said, glancing down at himself, then back at my surprised face. “Right. It’s the shirt. I thought this was how people dressed here.” He glanced at the bartender, who wore a golf shirt, then at the beach group in bathing suits. “Maybe I should change. It’s rather embarrassing, isn’t it?”

  “It’s fine.” I pushed down my laughter and ordered him a rum punch.

  He took a stool next to me. “I wasn’t sure what to pack. I haven’t been to the Caribbean for a while, and to be honest, I can’t really remember those times.”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to be helpful. Many men could have gotten away with vacation gear like that, but Cole wasn’t one of them. He’d have looked more at home in S&M leather.

  “I suppose it hasn’t been that long,” he said, “but I, uh…I used to have some rather bad habits.”

  “You mean clothingwise?”

  He shot me a look. “I mean drugwise.”

  “Ah.”

  I slurped up the last of my drink and ordered another. I felt strangely giddy and slightly fuzzy from a combination of the punch, my headache and the fact that I was here with Cole, thousands of miles away from Chicago, just the two of us, with the sky outside turning a pinkish-orange. Maybe it was the drink or the odd intimacy that made me blurt out the question I’d wanted to ask for so long. “Is that why you had to leave New York?”

  His face muscles seemed to sag, just as they had that one time I’d asked him a similar question at his studio. But he didn’t snap at me now. In fact, he didn’t say anything for a long moment.

  Then he sighed, sipped his drink and finally shifted on the stool until he faced me. “Shall I tell you the whole story then, Kelly Kelly?”

  I wanted to say Yes, yes, I’m dying to know, but his resigned expression made me ashamed of my prurient curiosity. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “No, I ought to tell someone. Only a few people know, and none of them lives in Chicago. I’m getting a bit sick of carrying it around by myself.”

  I nodded, not wanting to break the spell.

  “You don’t write for the Enquirer on the side, do you?” Cole said with a small smile. “No family members at the Post or some such?”

  My stomach churned a little. “Actually, my mom works for The Biz.”

  “That crap television show?”

  “Yes, but I swear I never tell her anything, and I won’t tell her about this.”

  His eyes squinted a little, and he stared at me as if he could see inside my head and discover my true intentions.

  “Look, Cole,” I said, sorry that he had to be so wary about some incident that had obviously changed his life. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s really none of my business.”

  “No, it’s not, but as I said, I need to tell someone.” He drank from his rum punch. “Okay, here it is. It’s not really so big a deal, at least it wasn’t at the time, until I found out about her.”

  “Her who?”

  “I’m getting to that.”

  “Sorry.” I clamped my mouth shut and pulled my drink closer.

  “I don’t know what you’ve heard about me or if you know anything about what I was like in those days, but it’s all true, whatever you’ve heard. It’s the usual sad tale—I got too big too fast, and I never thought I deserved it. At the same time, I never thought that it would go away. It was as if my life was one big toy—a toy that wouldn’t break, and I could play with it as much as I liked. And so I did quite a bit of drugs.” He shot a sidelong glance at me, as if searching for signs of disapproval.

  I nodded silently.

  “And I drank too much, of course. Still do, really, but it was the drugs that fucked me up. I actually thought that I could shoot better when I was high. I suppose that might have been true for a while. It gave me a lot of ideas about how to approach a picture that I might never have had sober, but it began affecting my judgment. Ah, it’s pathetic, really. I started thinking I could do no wrong, not with photography, or with anything else for that matter. One day, I had a shoot with a model. Britania. Just that one name, like Madonna.” He rolled his eyes.

  “I remember hearing about her,” I said, “but she dropped out of sight, didn’t she?”

  He looked at me for a beat, but didn’t answer my question. “She was getting a lot of work back then, but that day was the first time we’d had a shoot together. It went late and everyone left, and well…How shall I put this? She stayed.”

  “Sure.” I thought I saw where this was going. They’d slept together, right? Probably like he had with many models? So what was the big secret?

  Cole sighed. “And then we had a drink, and then we had some other…things. And she just never left. We had sort of a lost weekend. Sex and drugs and all that crap.”

  He shot me another glance, as if to check my reaction. I made sure to keep my expression flat.

  “And so,” he continued, “that was it, you see? Or at least I thought so. Monday morning came, and she was gone, and I cleaned myself up and got back to work. But here’s the thing. Britania, who I thought was twenty-something, was actually not so old. She was—” he took a swallow of his drink “—fifteen, and her father was Morton Lankton.”

  I gasped. I couldn’t help it. Morton Lankton was a publishing magnate who owned a large number of glossy magazines, and I was sure it was precisely those magazines that had given Cole most of his work, and, therefore, his rise to fame in the industry.

  “Ah. I see you know who he was.”

  “Was?”

  “He died last year.”

  “Oh. And you didn’t know Britania was his daughter?”

  He shook his head. “Hardly anyone did. She was one of those kids who wanted to make it on her own.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I was served with a summons and complaint for a civil suit from Lankton’s lawyers. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that if I left town the case would go away. If not, I could expect a criminal action, as well.”

  “And you left.”

  “Of course I did. I was embarrassed about what I’d done. Sickened actually, even though I had no idea of her age. And I knew my career couldn’t survive something like that, not with Lankton owning half the town. He could easily dry up all my work, so it was either leave without
anyone knowing that I’d sexed and drugged a fifteen-year-old, or let everyone find out and lose my work, anyway.”

  “But if he’s dead now, doesn’t that change things? I mean, I hate to say it like that, but now that he’s gone, can’t you get back into that scene?”

  “I’ve been trying, Kelly Kelly, but there’ve been so many bloody rumors about why I left that everyone has been afraid of me. Until now. My mate Sam has been trying to get me a shoot like this for ages, and he finally came through.”

  “And what about Britania? What happened to her?”

  Cole’s head dropped. “She was shipped off to some detox hospital for a few months. Last I heard, she’d gone on to college.”

  “So that’s why you don’t date models.”

  He stared into his drink. “That’s why I don’t date at all.”

  “But you didn’t know. You can’t let that incident keep you away from the entire female population.”

  “Kelly Kelly, that incident nearly ruined my entire career.”

  “I understand, but you can’t stay single your whole life because of it.” I wondered why I was arguing that particular point. It wasn’t as if I wanted to date Cole. He seemed more like a pain-in-the-ass-yet-lovable older brother than a potential boyfriend. But I guess I was starting to think of Cole as a friend, and the fact that he’d confided in me made me want to help him somehow.

  “Perhaps I’ll stay single forever. The women that used to appeal to me simply don’t anymore, and I don’t make much of an effort to find any others. I did meet this woman once or twice—very briefly, you understand—but there seemed to be something special about her, a connection between us.”

  “Well, there you go! Call her!”

  “Kelly Kelly, enough about me. Since you’re such the dating expert, tell me about your love life.”

  Sitting there, elbow to elbow with Cole (a guy I couldn’t stand a short while ago), I told him the whole story about Ben and me. I told him about the way we’d met at work and the fun of those first few years. About the town house and the wedding plans, the ones I’d made and thought Ben had wanted as well. I faltered a bit when I got to my birthday and the way Ben had broken up with me. Should I admit that I couldn’t remember, or act as if I had no memory problems? Cole would never know the difference. I’d gotten the elongated version of the breakup from Laney, the one I’d told her myself, so I could have easily faked it.

  But there was something about the earnestness in Cole’s eyes, and the fact that he’d confided a major part of his own life, that was getting to me, particularly when he sputtered, “The bastard broke off with you on your birthday? I knew I hated that fucker!” I could see that he was honestly outraged, that he honestly felt sorry for me. The fact that he felt anything for me at all was touching. Cole and I seemed to have stumbled into some sort of unplanned, oddball friendship.

  “What did you do?” he asked. “Did you punch the rat bastard?”

  I laughed. “Well, since we’re telling secrets…”

  “You set his house on fire?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Just listen.”

  Cole pulled at an imaginary beard and crossed one leg over the other, looking like a talk show host.

  “The thing is…” Cole hadn’t cut me off this time, but I found it hard to find the right words, words that wouldn’t make me sound crazy.

  “What is it?”

  “What it is…is that I can’t remember Ben breaking up with me.”

  “Oh. It’s not problems like I had, is it? Coke, speed, maybe something harder, eh?”

  “Nothing like that. I don’t think so, anyway. The problem is I can’t remember five whole months of my life.”

  Cole’s eyes grew wide, concerned again.

  I told him that story then, from the episode with Beth Maninsky, to Laney’s saving me, to getting the job with him, to Ben and me hanging out again, and finally the fight with Laney. Getting it out felt like releasing the steam from a pressure cooker. And Cole, for his part, didn’t run screaming to phone a physician or intimate that I might be losing my mind.

  In fact, when I’d finished my story, he leaned back, looked me up and down and said, “Well, it doesn’t seem to have hurt you at all.”

  “No injuries that I know of,” I said, although that wasn’t entirely true. There were the headaches, the weird flashes of the two-freckled man, and that scary night in the bathtub when I couldn’t move my legs. And I needed to do something more for those headaches than just attack them with Advil and alcohol. Since the day Laney had brought me back to my Lake Shore Drive apartment, I’d avoided that cabinet in my kitchen, the one that held the prescription bottles of antidepressants and pain relievers. But when I got home from this trip, I might have to give the pain relievers a try.

  “I mean all around,” Cole continued. “Seems to me that you’re in a better position now than before your birthday. This Ben chap certainly wasn’t going to win any prizes, if you want my opinion. And that financial job wasn’t for you, was it? You’ve got real talent with the camera. You’re in the right field now.”

  I felt a wave of satisfaction at his words, then remorse hit. I didn’t know if I could afford this job much longer.

  I made a noncommittal sound, then tried to deflect his attention from my assistantship with him. “But Laney still won’t talk to me.”

  “Yes.” Cole waved at the bartender and ordered another round of drinks. “Speaking of Laney—your official friend—you’ll patch things up, eh?”

  I shrugged, afraid to say out loud that I truly didn’t know the answer to that question.

  “Well, say you do. Say everything is just fine. What would you think of me asking her out?”

  A piece of mango from the punch lodged in my throat. I coughed until it went down, grabbing for my glass of water. “You want to take Laney on a date?”

  “Possibly.” He looked like a kid caught stealing. “I mean, yes. But only if you think…I mean—”

  “Was that the woman you were talking about? The one you met once or twice but thought she was something special?”

  He gave a short nod, his eyes wary.

  “It’s fine with me.” I wished I could run to the phone right now. I’d call Laney and tell her that a boy she thought was cute liked her. Shades of high school, shades of a time when everything was perfect between us.

  “Yeah?” He sat up straighter.

  “Of course. You’d be a great date, I’m sure. And it really doesn’t matter what I think anyway, because I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen with us—if she wants to be friends anymore or not. It would break my heart if that happened, but I have to be prepared, I suppose. It’s just that life wouldn’t be much fun without Laney around. I can’t even imagine…”

  In the middle of my rambling, Cole put a rough hand on my shoulder. I looked at him, surprised.

  “It’ll be okay, Kelly Kelly,” he said, his voice soft. And then he pulled me off the bar stool and gave me a hug.

  21

  We’d rented a car, and it was my duty to collect everyone from the airport. The rental was a tiny Honda with a barely breathing air conditioner. I opened the sunroof and found some island music on the radio, turning up the volume as I made my first run to the airport on dusty, winding roads along the water. Everyone else drove a hell of a lot faster than me, and I drew a number of bleating honks from other cars. It was then I realized that I was on the wrong side of the road.

  “Left, left, left,” I chanted to myself but it seemed so wrong, so distracting, so dangerous.

  After the drinks with Cole the night before, I’d gone back to my bungalow and sat out on my deck, staring at the moon, the sea as dark as the sky. I was buzzed from the rum, but instead of feeling drunk, I felt introspective. And so, after thinking about my talk with Cole and everything that had happened since that day at the dry cleaners, I decided to view this trip as my last hurrah. I had to be an adult. I had to get my life back on track, fina
ncially and otherwise, and hopefully, I’d soon meet the perfect guy who wanted to have the perfect family with me. But since none of that was going to happen in the Caribbean, and God knew what would happen with Laney when I returned, I was going to treat this trip like spring break. It would be my last fling before I got serious again.

  And so now I waved at the angry drivers, mouthing “Sorry” but refusing to rush. I turned the music up even louder, singing along when I could pick up some of the lyrics.

  The airport was basically a landing strip with a squat little building beside it. The terminal was even stuffier inside than my car. The crew that Cole had hired from Chicago came through the doorway marked Customs. There was a Filipino hairstylist, Robbie, who wore a yellow rugby shirt over his broad shoulders and carried three large black cases of equipment. Francie, the makeup artist, was there, too, a petite woman whose tiny face was, of course, perfectly made up even after a six-hour journey from Chicago. Lastly, a stylist by the name of Chad came though the doorway, carrying duffel bags stuffed with what I assumed to be scarves and hats and beach balls and other props.

  I greeted everyone, gave them the schedules I’d typed out on the hotel’s computer and squeezed them all into the car, along with their luggage.

  Chad complained the entire trip back to the hotel. “Jesus, couldn’t they have hired us a limo?” he said from under the mound of duffel bags on his lap.

  “It’s a little island in the Caribbean, you idiot,” Francie said. “There are no limos here.”

  They must have worked together in the past, because after a few pointed comments from Francie about his snobbery, Chad stopped his grumbling. A half hour later, I dropped them off at the hotel with directions to call Cole, who would brief them on the shoot.

  I was a little more nervous for my next airport run, because even though I was starting to get the hang of the left lane, I was picking up the models, including Mella, who my mother had been writing that piece on about her alleged weight gain. As a celebrity, Mella had achieved mythical status lately and could be seen on everything from Victoria’s Secret spreads to the David Letterman Show.