by Ron Koertge
I shake my head. “I want to talk to the girls who get naked. Working in clubs is a whole other world, okay? It’s got to have rules and rites and all that stuff, just like high school. Like, how old can you be before you’re kicked out of the tribe? What’s the shoptalk like? Are the girls saving to go to college, or do they spend money as fast as they get it? There’s got to be, like, a thousand stories just in their dressing room.”
She leans closer, so she’s almost whispering. Her breath is warm and I can smell the patchouli. “If it’s stories you want, try this one: My mom knows this chick who lived with a schoolteacher, okay? Sweet guy. Taught third grade. Liked to cook. So, she comes home at two thirty a.m. with her little stripper purse full of ten-dollar bills, and he’s there with, like, lentil loaf and a glass of carrot juice. He’s been doing lesson plans, and there’s all these little maps and shit from his kids who adore him. I mean, she’s seen these kids, okay, gone to some play where they’re all dressed like dairy products or something.”
“How’d they even meet?”
“Supermarket. Some guy recognized her and wouldn’t leave her alone, so Mr. Super Teacher steps in. Chicks love that Sir Galahad shit.”
“This story isn’t going to have a happy ending, is it?”
She shakes her head. “Six months or so later, she takes up with some hard-core scumbag from the club.”
“Wow.”
“No kidding.”
Grandma turns off Colorado and into the parking lot. She says something to the nearest guard, who walks over and moves a big safety cone that had been guarding a primo parking spot.
Without being asked, Grandma says, “I called ahead. I’m on the board.”
Colleen whispers, “Unfuckingbelievable.”
We stroll up the steps and past the first of about two thousand guards. Grandma points to this big, black sculpture of six bronze guys and says in her docent’s voice, “The Burghers of Calais. It’s actually quite a lovely story. The English had cut off the town of Calais, and people were dying. Months with almost no food and very little water. So the richest men in town got together and gave themselves up as hostages. That way the others would survive. They’re dressed in those loose clothes because what they had on was basically their underwear or their pajamas. They didn’t want to go over to the English in their finery because they knew they’d be killed for sure.”
“So were they?” Colleen asks.
Grandma shakes her head. “King Edward’s wife, Philippa, was pregnant and, luckily for the mayor of Calais and his friends, superstitious. She thought it would be bad luck for her unborn child.”
Inside, Grandma and Marcie show their membership cards. Colleen takes in the scene: sculptures and paintings, busts and bronzes. And not all crammed together, either. The place is huge.
I’ve been here a lot. When I was little, Grandma would drive up all the time and “expose me to art.” Like art was some kind of dandy virus I’d be lucky to catch.
Colleen shudders. “I’d hate to polish these floors, I’ll tell you that.”
“Now, there’s an idea for a documentary,” I tell her. “If just being around great art is good for a person, are the janitors here happier than the average maintenance men?”
She pulls me toward the nearest guard, a guy in his twenties with a wispy mustache.
“Can I ask you something?” she says. “You’re here every day, right? Do you feel different when you go home?”
He looks at us both before he answers. “My feet hurt.”
“So art doesn’t, like, seep into your pores or anything.”
He shrugs. “It’s just a job.”
As we make our way back to Marcie and Grandma, I tell Colleen, “Except he’s not the only guy in his father’s white shirt and a blue blazer that doesn’t fit.”
She asks, “How do you and your little camera ever get people to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, anyway?”
“When I did that thing at school for the show at that gallery, it just took time. I mean, for every minute I could use, I probably talked to our beloved classmates for an hour.”
“It sounds like Wild Kingdom, you know? You lay there in the bushes forever just to finally catch a warthog taking a crap.”
“Making a documentary is totally like Wild Kingdom. You wait and you wait and you listen and you ask and then you have to be lucky. Like, I know there’s at least one guard here who’d say he’s kinder or more patient or happier or something just from being around all this beautiful stuff.”
“Well, I don’t feel a whole lot happier. This place gives me a headache.” She points to a portrait. Some nobleman with a huge wig and a simper. She drags me closer. “Painting’s hard — I get that. All the little hairs, the sun off his gold buttons. But why him? He’s probably humping the downstairs maid while his wife’s upstairs with her insides falling out from having one kid after another. Where’s his wife’s picture, huh? Or where’s the cook and the girl who does the laundry?”
“They can’t afford to have somebody paint their pictures.”
“Exactly! So why should I give a shit about him?”
My grandma knows a lot of people. She stops and talks to them for a minute, anyway, and introduces us over and over. All of a sudden, Colleen is having a hard time holding it together. She was okay outside and okay when we talked to that guard. Now she’s not so okay. She’s gone all pale and twitchy.
When I first met Colleen and started to hang with her, my grandma said she hoped I wasn’t one of those men who liked to rescue women. She said Colleen was just the kind of victim to bring out that tendency in me. My father was like that, she said.
Except it was Colleen who rescued me. Took me places I’d never have gone to on my own. Took off her clothes so I could see a real naked girl once in my life. Helped me off with mine and didn’t laugh or throw up.
I go and stand beside her. I put my arm around her and pull her toward me. I feel her breathe about a hundred times a minute.
“Take it easy.”
She nods. “I know. It’s just a little panic attack. No big deal.”
The concert is at the end of a long gallery on the east side of the building. A hundred and fifty folding chairs in a semicircle. A huge painting — as big as a trampoline — right behind where the musicians will sit.
“I don’t want anybody next to me,” she says, holding my hand tight.
“All right. I’ll tell Grandma my hip is bothering me. We’ll stand by the door.”
When I get back from passing around my little lie, Colleen is watching the musicians. They’ve been escorted in by two guards. God forbid some terrorists would capture a cellist.
They’re nervous, tuning their violins, fussing with their collars. Colleen hands me the program she’s been reading and I glance at the bios: Juilliard. The Eastman School. First violin for the St. Louis Symphony. Winner of a Ruth Cole Webber scholarship.
Just then Grandma hurries back to whisper, “Listen carefully to the adagio in this first piece.”
A minute later, the quartet passes us, and during the applause that starts at just the sight of them, Colleen says, “I have to get out of here.” And she bolts.
I can’t keep up, but I still follow her down the long hall, past the pears and the cheese in the still life, past the duke of something and his smug wife, past Virtue and Vice in a sixteenth-century slap-down, all the way through the big glass doors to the garden, with its huge, shadowy sculptures and shimmery pond.
I stand off to one side, watch her punch numbers, then bark into her cell phone, “I don’t understand your so-called Higher Power at all, okay? What kind of Higher Power would stick me with this life? And my boyfriend limps all the time, thanks to a bad hand God dealt him. That’s the God you want me to turn my life over to?”
The light is gorgeous — filtering down from big arcs on Orange Grove Boulevard, flowing out of the gallery and pooling on the crushed gravel. As Colleen paces, she kicks up a few lea
ves, and they somersault in her wake. Turning over a new leaf.
I slyly take out my camera. I don’t need to use the viewfinder. I can shoot from the hip.
“I know I was wrong,” Colleen says. “How many times do I have to say it? And I harmed people. I know that drill.”
I pan a little to the right. Half a dozen skinny poplar trees flank the pond. In the moonlight, the whole thing looks enchanted. It’s so pretty, it’s too pretty, and that’s what Colleen, in her dance-hall pants, does for that scene: she rubs it the wrong way.
“No,” she says. “I’m not going to use. I’m better. I just had a bad moment and you said to call. Really, I’m fine. I’m at a museum. Seriously. Thanks.”
I watch her dig in her purse again, this time for a cigarette. So I walk over and remind her, “You can’t smoke here.”
“Are you kidding? We’re outside.”
I shrug.
She’s holding a cigarette, which she snaps in two, and tosses it toward the water.
“This whole thing is really not my scene.” She waves her arm at everything. “The best part was when we came in and Marcie was cruising those two old guys by the gift shop. But then I have to stand by those snooty violinists who remind me I’ve wasted my life, and then Grandma What-a-Big-Mouth-You-Have has to come back and tell me what to listen for. I wanted to wring her scrawny neck.”
I tug at her. “C’mon.”
“I don’t want to listen to that classical shit. I want some guy with his shirt off to scream at me and then set his guitar on fire.”
“We can’t do that right now, but maybe afterward, if you still want.”
Then she turns to me. Or on me, maybe. “Don’t be too nice to me, Ben, okay? Just don’t. I know me, and I’ll just end up hating your guts. Understand?”
“No.”
She says, “You don’t know anything, do you?” Then she steps right up to me, pulls my face toward hers, and kisses me, shoving her tongue in my mouth and holding on to me so long that a guard finally comes over and tells us to cut it out or we’ll have to leave.
An hour later, I’m in my bedroom, hanging up my jacket, and wondering where Colleen went after we got back from the museum. She drove away about a hundred miles per hour. Maybe she’s right and I don’t know anything, but I’ll bet she’s on her way to get high.
Grandma knocks, then pushes the door open. She crosses the thick-as-tundra carpet, comes and stands beside me and adjusts some hangers so they’re all half an inch apart. She watches her hands like they aren’t hers. “Colleen never fails to upset me.”
“I know. Me, too, sometimes.”
“Has she asked you for money, Benjamin?”
I shake my head.
“Not even a little?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Well, I didn’t come in here to talk about her.” She wanders to my desk, lifts the ivory-colored keyboard, runs one finger under it, then looks for dust. “I came to say that I was chatting with Marcie tonight and I’ve decided that, in addition to the new camera, you may also have a Verizon account of your own.”
That makes me get to my feet. Or try to. “All right!”
“I’ll get a technician to come tomorrow afternoon. You should be here. If you have an engagement, cancel it. There may be technical things he’ll want you to know.”
“Thanks, Grandma. I promise I won’t prowl the Internet looking for pictures of naked girls holding Roman candles.”
She winces just a little. “Don’t promise. Marcie says boys your age can’t help themselves.”
“Are you and Marcie kind of tight now?”
“She likes you a great deal. She thinks you have enormous potential.” She comes over and pats me like I’m Ben the Wonder Dog. “Of course, I do, too. Your father was very, very bright.”
“It’s funny that’s he’s dead and we talk about him sometimes, but Mom’s alive and we never talk about her.”
“I’m willing,” Grandma says. “We can talk now if you want.”
I fall back on my bed. “Maybe tomorrow. I’m pretty tired.”
Grandma is halfway out the door when I say, “Why do you think she left without me?”
Grandma turns. “So we’re talking, after all?”
I get up to go to the bathroom. “No. Forget it. I need to brush my teeth.”
Ten minutes later, I get in bed and dial Colleen one more time. She doesn’t pick up. So I get to lie there in the dark and worry.
It’s a long day without Colleen, who’s absent again. AWOL. MIA. But at least Carlos the Verizon guy shows up right after I get back from school. It’s not that hot in the San Gabriel Valley, but the weather can’t seem to make up its mind, and the sky isn’t exactly clear, but it’s not exactly cloudy, either. Blurry, maybe.
None of it has put Carlos in a good mood, and it doesn’t help when Grandma asks him if he would mind taking off his shoes. Then she points to her moonlight-colored carpet.
He follows me to my bedroom. “Your grandmother must have a lot of clout,” he says. “She just called this morning.”
“She always knows a guy who knows a guy.”
“You’re telling me. The usual wait time is two weeks.” He looks the place over, then reaches into his tool belt. He’s got a panther tattoo high up on his right arm. His huge right arm.
I point. “Did that hurt?”
“Not bad. You thinking about getting one?”
“You saw my grandma, right?”
He finally looks at me and grunts. “She can’t stop you when you’re eighteen.”
“You want a Coke or something?”
“A Coke would be great, man. I’d really appreciate it.”
I meet Grandma in the kitchen, where she’s just hanging up the phone. “Everything’s fine,” she says.
I reach all the way in the back of the fridge, where it’s really cold. “Who said it wasn’t?”
“Thieves with technical know-how intercept the dispatcher, arrive ahead of schedule wearing polo shirts with the appropriate logo, then hit the home owner over the head, tie her up, and rob her.”
“‘Thieves with technical know-how’?”
“Better safe than sorry, Benjamin.” She reaches for the cold can of soda. “Let me put that in a glass.”
“No way. I’m not Jeeves.”
When I get back to the room, Carlos is down on his knees under the desk, so I set the can on a coaster Grandma makes me keep there. Then he gets up, pretty much collapses into my Aeron chair, and drains the Coke.
He’s wearing a wedding ring, and I wonder what it’s like to work eight hours at a real job, then take two good arms and legs home to your family.
Before Colleen, if some genie had offered me Carlos’s life or mine, I’d have taken his in a heartbeat. What did I do, anyway, but limp down the street to the Rialto Theatre? I spent more time in the dark than a bat.
If I had to choose now, I’m not so sure, because Colleen —
“What happened to you, anyway?” Carlos asks.
I know what he means. “C.P.”
He shakes his head.
I explain, “It’s, like, a birth defect.”
“So you’re stuck with it.”
I say, “Pretty much.”
“But your brain is okay.”
I just nod.
He looks at my framed posters (James Dean and Jeanne Moreau). He knows I don’t have to sweep the floor or clean my own bathtub. “And you’ve got money,” he says. “That never hurts.” He turns around in the chair and motions for me. I like it that he doesn’t stand up and offer me a seat like I’m some poor old guy with Velcro shoelaces and expandable pants. “Let’s get you online. You’ve probably got a lot of people you want to talk to.”
Only one, actually. But I don’t tell him that.
Ten minutes later, I follow Carlos to the door, Grandma appears and signs some paperwork, he and I shake hands.
When we’re alone, Grandma says, “I’m steaming broccol
i, Benjamin. My yoga teacher says everyone should eat broccoli every day. Is there anything else you’d like?”
I’d like to be six-two and 180 pounds of lean muscle. Oh, and I’d like Colleen to come in and kiss me like she’s never kissed anybody else, ever.
I settle for, “Maybe a baked potato?”
“That’ll take a while. Is that all right?”
It’s more than all right. It’s exactly what I want: time to compose an e-mail to Amy, the girl I met at the Centrist Gallery. Who loves movies. Who gave me her e-mail address and made me promise I’d write, while outside, Colleen was climbing into some stranger’s Firebird.
That’s how it is with Colleen: I’m dying to see her and she makes me so mad. And, as far as Amy goes, I wonder if she even remembers me. She could’ve handed out her e-mail to everybody at that gallery.
I find the piece of paper she gave me right where I’d hidden it and start typing. I remind her who I am (Ben Bancroft), where we met (on Melrose at that gallery), and what I brought to show that night (High School Confidential). I tell her that I remember her documentary (Roach Coach). I say that it’d be fun to get together sometime when she’s not busy and just hang out. Finally I hit Send. Then I lean back and take a deep breath.
Ten minutes later, while I’m looking at IFC’s movie lineup, I actually have mail! My first. And it’s from Amy, but it’s signed A.J. The message is two words — Call me — and a phone number.
I don’t even stop to think or worry about what I’m going to say. I just punch in the numbers before I lose my nerve.
“Amy? It’s me. Ben Bancroft.”
“Hi, Ben Bancroft. But it’s A.J. I just used Amy on that documentary because I wanted people to know it was made by a girl. But everybody calls me A.J. How are you?”
“I’m good. I’ve got e-mail. Obviously.”
“Cool. Nobody likes a Luddite.”
Then there’s silence. That silence. Where nobody knows exactly what to say. In the movies, couples don’t just wait for each other to say something. Like, in Notting Hill, Hugh Grant spills orange juice on Julia Roberts. Or two people are in a store, they both want an umbrella, and there’s only one left, so they fight over it. They’re like sour cream and chutney, oil and water, paper and fire. Total opposites. Until their eyes meet.
