by Deb Caletti
“Indeed,” he shouts.
I roll my eyes, indicating that we’re on the same team. Somehow, for some reason, it’s important to me to have him know that. To know that this is not my place. That his home, somewhere, an apartment maybe, with a wife and new baby and old Bob Dylan albums and leftover lasagna in the fridge is more my place, likely. But he is wary of me. I can feel it in his cautious smile.
“You’re not drinking,” Jason says. He has a glass of clear liquid with a lime in it, and Glenn and Melanie both hold martini glasses with olives skewered by miniature swords. Obviously, no one is carded on this trip.
“The brain is a terrible thing to taste—I mean, waste,” I joke. But I don’t know if he hears me. Jason just shrugs. We follow Glenn to the food table, which is lined with various items served by waiters in white. Glenn maneuvers us toward a living room table where we can set our glasses down.
“I’ve heard this band,” Glenn says. “Flying Something…”
Melanie nods. She looks nervous and uncomfortable, like the hostess of an unsuccessful party. She bites the edge of her nail, then remembers her manicure and stops. Three people sit on the couch next to us. The man in the Hawaiian shirt is there, along with another barrel-chested guy wearing tiny glasses, and a fifty-ish woman who is still aiming for the bimbo look. Allen appears at Melanie’s elbow.
“Having fun?” he shouts.
“Oh yeah, this is great,” Melanie says.
Wavy lines are coming off of him already. “Isn’t this the most amazing food? Let me introduce you,” he says. He turns and snags the first available audience, the three people on the couch. The woman is the wife of producer-somebody; Mr. Aloha is somebody-somebody; and the barrel-chested man with the tiny glasses is a photographer. I hear that part.
“His photos are amazing.” Aging Bimbo touches the barrel-chested man’s hand.
“Well,” he says.
“Really. That tomato,” she says.
“Tomato?” I shout to Jason.
“He photographs food. They just said—”
“Have any of you seen his work?” Bimbo says. “This tomato was unforgettable. Sitting on a white plate…”
“That red tomato?” I shout. “Is that the one?”
“You’ve seen it,” Bimbo says.
I feel a pinch on the fleshy part of my arm. Melanie. How dare she pinch me. She shoplifted a T-shirt. I don’t even want her hands on my arm until she goes back to that store and does the right thing.
“You just really captured its essence,” Bimbo says.
“Well, I try. It’s a matter of what Michelangelo says—about finding the character in the marble,” he says.
“You’re an artist,” Bimbo shouts.
“I saw the most amazing photographic display while I was in New York,” Aloha man says. “The most incredible you’ve ever seen. Nudes with pomegranates. I know about photography. I’ve seen the best exhibitions around the world, but this…”
“So much of it is having the right eye,” Vegetable Michelangelo says.
“And you do. You have such an eye,” Bimbo says.
“Well…”
“And blah, blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit”, Bimbo says.
Glenn is looking into the bottom of his martini glass. Allen has ditched us, veering off to refill his glass. I am beginning to see how it works. It is just like the Moore party. Everything and everyone is amazing. The best. And all you have to do is pat yourself and one another on the back, in some great big old narcissist backslapping orgy. These people—they are walking PR firms for themselves. Breathing human advertising. But this time I am here. I am inside, not outside. And I feel something about that. Something moldy and wrong.
“What about his cucumber?” I say to Bimbo. “It was amazing. So…green.”
“Nice to meet you all,” Melanie says. “We’re supposed to go say hi to some people.”
But they aren’t paying attention, anyway. Any words that aren’t self-reflected glory disappear into the din, mere lips moving.
“Green!” Glenn is busting up. “Fucking cucumbers.”
“Indigo, don’t,” Melanie says.
“The true art is seeing the inner tomato,” I say. “Of course, I always loved Michelangelo’s fruits and vegetables. He always did an amazing grapefruit.”
“I saw the exhibit the other guy was talking about. In New York. It wasn’t so hot,” Jason says. “Fucking naked people with pomegranates.”
“I thought you said Raw was going to be here,” Glenn says. Little wavy alcohol lines are starting to come off him, too.
“We’re going to go outside for a while, okay guys?” Jason says. “We’ll catch up to you.”
“We are?” I say. But Jason already has my arm and is steering me through the crowd. Another band starts up. We step outside two glass doors that lead onto the ship’s deck. It’s a little quieter out here. And this seems to be where all the performers are. You can tell—instead of aging-rich-people clothes and young-wives-of-aging-rich-men clothes, there are who-cares performer clothes. We-are-supposed-to-be-subversive-and-or-avant-garde clothes. And okay, sure, these are just other costumes, but I feel better out here, among the leather pants and pierced noses and vintage shirts that appear casually chosen but that were probably in and out of the reject/possibility pile same as Melanie’s.
“See anyone you recognize?” Jason says.
“Hey, aren’t you the drummer from Raw?” I say to him.
The ship has two floors, and we are on the upper deck. God, it’s beautiful out here. The black sea shines with moonlight; the sky has unfurled the stars. The city lights twitter and gleam in red and yellow and white along the shore. The air is just-right warm. Two and a half million dollars, though, could not buy the beauty of that sea, and the intoxicating temperature of that ever-slight wind.
Jason leans over the railing, and I do too.
“Light is amazing,” I say.
Jason laughs.
“No, really. It is. Look, it’s like light-magic out there. Light makes things magic. Think about it. Christmas trees. Fireworks. Glow in the dark stars. Fireflies. Phosphorous. Jet planes in a night sky.”
“I can sit in a dark room and just watch the lights of my stereo,” Jason says.
“Exactly,” I say. “And what about that dusky time of night when the hills turn pink and the trees turn yellow?”
“Well, they don’t really turn yellow,” Jason says.
“You know what I mean,” I say. But I’m not so sure he does.
“I guess,” Jason says.
We are standing very close together. Our arms are touching. Maybe it’s the way the breeze is blowing, I don’t know, but I notice something then that I didn’t notice even sitting next to him in the backseat of the car or standing beside him inside. It’s a smell—a familiar smell. Maybe I was too angry to smell or hear or see properly in the car, and maybe there were too many distractions inside, but here—yes, there it is. I know that smell. Jason—he smells like Axe. He smells like Axe, and it might have been funny, but suddenly it feels anything but that. It isn’t funny at all, because all at once it’s unbearably, overwhelmingly sad. I am here, and those people who I love, my family, my own Trevor, are somewhere else, under this moon too, but not here.
“Axe,” I say. I whisper. And my God, suddenly I just miss them so much. I can’t fool myself about it—the feeling is too large and whole, and the wall I have built against it just breaks down and I am alone with it, this missing. This monumental missing of the people who make me me. Absence is so much louder than presence. Axe. I swallow. Suddenly my eyes get hot with tears.
“Are you okay?” Jason asks.
I nod. But I’m not okay. I just…I want to be home. The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.
He turns to me and kisses me then. Jason, with these unfamiliar lips and this odd mouth that feels thin and wrong and moves in ways I don’t know. I remembe
r again how the body is more honest than the mind most of the time, because this kiss tells me one thing, and that one thing is that I don’t want to be kissing Jason Lindstrom from Malibu. I want to be kissing Trevor Williams from Nine Mile Falls, who understands the way I feel about twilight-yellow trees. You need someone in your life who sees trees the same way you do.
The kiss ends. Jason looks happy. “Wow, that was great,” he says. “I can’t wait to have more of where that came from. You thirsty? I’ll go get us something. Stay here.”
I stay. I watch the water beneath me, rushing past. I lean far enough down to feel the force of wind at my face. I need the waking up. I stand straight, take a deep breath, and SHIT! Inhale twelve thousand toxins from some asshole’s secondhand smoke! I turn around, and that’s when I see him. There he is, standing not three feet away from me, in the center of the deck.
Hunter Eden.
Hunter Eden, standing and talking to my friend, the blond woman with the upswept hair and red nails. Hunter Eden, with a cigarette pinched between his index and middle finger, sending black tar my way through its glowing orange tip.
I have to look several times to be sure it’s him. The top of his head comes up just under the woman’s nose. He’s short, that’s the point. He doesn’t look at all like he did in the videos. He’s thin; scrawny as the type of dog you see tied up to a streetlight outside a tavern. Even his ass looks different. Diminished. Small and human. It is NOT the ass I know from the cover of “Hot”—no way is that the same ass. No way. The woman says something that makes him throw back his head and laugh, and I can see his teeth, yellowed from nicotine. Maybe I just imagine them yellowed from nicotine. But I don’t imagine the woman’s voice.
“Your last album was amazing,” she says.
“Well…,” he says. “I was so stoned I could barely play. Thank the sound techs. Thank some kid they brought in to fill in where I fucked up.” He laughs. She laughs. He takes a drag from his cigarette, and two streams of smoke jets exhale from his nose. He coughs a phlegmy, gray-lunged cough. Spits a hunk of something over the rail, into the ocean. The woman doesn’t seem to mind. He’s famous, he’s rich, and so who he is doesn’t much matter.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I can’t. If I close my eyes and open them again, maybe I’ll see the real Hunter Eden. Because this isn’t Hunter Eden. This isn’t him at all. This is some guy you’d see in a 7-Eleven, buying a box of rubbers and a six pack. How could they do this to us, whoever they are? How could they give us something so false to want? He doesn’t even play all his own songs? I’d been had. I’d worshipped something that wasn’t even real. I’d wasted my time and my belief on a lie.
The Hunter Eden I knew? He was product marketing with a stand-in ass.
I want out of here. It’s too much. I’ve got to get out of here, away from Melanie and Jason, away from Hunter Eden, away from these people at this party. I ran from the wrong things, to the wrong things, and the realization makes me sick with shame. I’ve hurt good people. I need to make it right.
There’s one small problem, though, with this pressing, now urgent, need. I am on a ship. Cruising around the coastline. I am stuck here, at the mercy of these people at this stupid party, until they decide when and where I get to leave.
I go back inside. Decide to find a bathroom. A bathroom is a great place to hide. There is no good excuse for anyone to bother you there. On the way, I see Melanie, fixated on a bleary-eyed Glenn, who has one hand up the back of her stolen T-shirt. I head down a quiet hall, find a bathroom with a sink and a basket of little rolled-up towels. I sit for a while. I consider my options. I can stay in here, play Let’s Use All the Towels until I get bored. I could be in here for a good long while. Option two: go back out. Put myself in my own Indigo bubble so that nothing these people say or do can affect me until we get back.
Neither of these ideas is satisfactory. What I want, what I NEED, is to get off this boat. But I can’t exactly tell them I want off, right? These are important people, partying on a fancy yacht, cruising in the ocean, and I am only Indigo Skye, sitting on a fancy toilet, hiding in a bathroom.
A woman pounds on the door. “Is anyone in there? Can you hurry it up?” she says. And right then, for some reason, I think of Nick. Nick and his oatmeal with raisins. The True Value guys. I think of Leroy, and of Mom, and of Jane, whose circumstances make them feel smaller than they need to feel.
“Watch the flusher,” I say to the woman waiting outside. “It gets stuck. Took me forever to get it working.” And then I find one of the stewards, in his white uniform.
“Do these things ever stop? The boat. I mean, does it make a stop? Like if someone needed to get off?”
“Can you wait ten minutes?” he says. “We’re letting off a passenger in Santa Barbara. She’s not feeling well.”
Ten minutes. I can wait ten minutes, all right.
“Sure,” I say. “Thanks.”
The party carries on, as the boat slips into harbor. I feel two seconds’ worth of bad about ditching Jason. I don’t feel bad enough, though, because when the boat stops, I am waiting at the bridge with the ill woman and her husband, who holds her elbow.
“I never could do boats,” she says to me. She waves her hand in the air as if to dismiss the whole sordid experience. She has a diamond on her finger the size of a cannonball.
“Go on ahead,” the husband says to me when the bridge comes down. “We’re going to take it slow.”
And so I do. I go on ahead, because I, Indigo Skye, have the power to stop yachts. Well, maybe not quite stop yachts, but I have the ability to end things I don’t like and to say something isn’t okay when it isn’t okay. I have the power to insist on good and real things for myself. Most of all, I have the right to change my mind.
17
“Dad?” Dad is the one I call. Dad is who you call in a crisis.
“Indigo? Are you all right? My God, what time is it?”
“I’m sorry to be calling so late.”
“No, Indigo! Please. What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“I just…Dad?” I start crying. I am crying right here.
“Sweetheart, it’s okay. Okay? I’m here.”
“I broke my promise to Richard Howards,” I cry. “I’m becoming smaller, not bigger.”
“Where are you, In?”
“I don’t even know. Santa Barbara? I’m sitting at this boat dock. I’m looking at cars in the parking lot. Jaguar, Jaguar, Porsche, Lexus, Lexus, BMW. I’m sorry. I’ve been so stupid.”
“Honey. What’s going on?”
“I was on this yacht.” I sniff. I take a breath. I feel like I’m in pieces and parts. I feel like a Picasso. “At a party. I hated it. Like everything that was supposed to be beautiful was ugly. So I just got off. I just got off because I couldn’t stand it anymore. And now, here I am. I’m sorry I woke you guys. But I don’t have a car, and I’m not sure where I am and it’s late. I broke my promise. It was so easy to break, Dad.”
“I know, In.”
“I just got sucked right up.”
“I’m just going to call you a taxi, okay?”
“I haven’t even been gone a week,” I say.
“Long enough to find out what you needed to know,” Dad says.
“Tell Jennifer I’m sorry to wake her. She’ll probably be pissed.”
“In, don’t worry about it. She’s not even here. Let’s just worry about you.”
“What do you mean, she isn’t there?”
“This isn’t the time to talk about it, okay? Let’s try to figure out where you are.”
“Oh my God. She left. She left, didn’t she? Are you all right?” My heart is still. It holds its breath.
“Absolutely. It’s necessary. But now what’s really necessary is calling you a taxi.”
“It’s kind of a long way for a taxi,” I say.
“It doesn’t matter. What do you see where you are?”
“This big-ass camper. It’s got this
license plate that says ‘Captain Ed.’ A bumper sticker—‘Home of the Big Redwoods.’ Hey—it’s a Washington State plate.”
“Honey, okay. Do you see a sign of any kind?”
“Bel Harbor Marina,” I say.
“Perfect. In? I’m going to find out who to call and have them come, okay?”
“Okay. And then I want to come home,” I say.
“I’ll call you right back.”
I close my cell phone. I really do love this little phone. It is so helpful, like a tiny silver friend.
It is late when I get back to Allen’s house, but Melanie and Allen aren’t home yet. I know I should stay the night and go to the airport the next morning but I don’t want to wait. I don’t want to lay my head there one more night. Dad and I make a plan. I write a note to Mel.
Thanks for everything, but this is not my place.
I look in the fridge for some snacks to bring, but there is nothing but bottled water. A huge beefsteak tomato sits on a shelf, though, and at the last moment, I go back for it, place the tomato on my note to hold it down. Michelangelo would have approved.
The Porsche vrooms to life. I let my hair whip around my face. I let the giddiness of relief, of speaking my own truth, fill me. It’s the orange soda happy feeling you get when things are going right, or when you’re finally going to make them right again.
All I have to do is get on I-5 and go north. Straight north, until I get there. If Captain Ed could do it, so could I. I take Dad’s advice and when fatigue strikes, I get off at the first city I find. I turn in to the Holiday Inn off the interstate, in Redding, California. Nothing goes wrong at Holiday Inns. This is no creepy motel of sandy-feeling sheets and clingy, molesting shower curtains; this is a Holiday Inn where kids could swim in a pool and where there is always a place right next door that serves breakfast twenty-four hours.
It is very late, but I can’t sleep. I think about Dad and Jennifer. About Mom and Severin and Bex and Jane and the Irregulars and Trevor. All my people. I don’t want to call home this late, and so I put the TV on for company. Once I eliminate home shopping channels and crime shows, I’m stuck watching bird migration. Someone has stolen the phone book and Bible (so much for nothing going wrong at Holiday Inns), and the hotel service pamphlet takes me only two seconds to flip through. Finally, I hunt around in my bag for Dad’s Emerson book that I brought along. I open to the page he folded down, the essay “Self-Reliance.” It seems at first a sure cure for my insomnia. A long-dead guy talking long-dead-guy talk, fleur-de-lis language, words as curved and ancient and small as old-lady embroidery.
