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“I am and I won’t deny it,” he practically giggled.
He was referring, of course, to Dan Michaelson. My high school sweetheart. Though our breakup took place years ago, we have sustained a heinous feud. This feud spreads out over time and geography. It has invisible, toxic tentacles.
“You’ve got to admit it’s kind of ironic,” Andy laughed. “I mean, wasn’t the original plan for you and Dan to get married at the same time? To each other?”
“Yeah, when we were seventeen,” I said, starting to get itchy. I feel sick talking about Dan and Andy knows it. “Anyway, you just take that Dan shit and shove it. Now, promise you’ll really be one of my bridesmaids?”
“I promise, Doll. It’ll be a great honor.” He winked at me. “Want me to play ‘Jane Says’ for you?”
“Sure.” He thinks it’s one of my favorite songs because my favorite grandmother, my father’s mother, calls me Jane. She doesn’t like my first name at all. Dalton is actually my mother’s maiden name, and since my mom was an only child and had no cousins, there was nobody to carry it on in the traditional way. Grandma Jane said Dalton was an awful name to give to a cute little baby girl and she was going to call me by my middle name, and always. Grandma Mary, my mother’s mother, said there was absolutely nothing wrong with the name Dalton and that she would never understand why Grandma Jane had to be so hateful about it, especially because everyone got in on that Doll thing, anyway. Only a few people call me Dalton as it is. My mother when she’s very angry with me, my father when he’s very angry with me, and Roman. He says Dalton is a noble name and that he can’t say Doll with a straight face, it’s so ludicrous.
Anyway, it’s not one of my favorite songs, really. It’s just one of the only songs Andy can play and definitely one of the only songs he can sing without making you want to run for cover. Case in point—he finished singing “Jane Says” and started belting out “Everlong.” Oh. My. God.
I zoned and pretended that instead of an ICRA project director, Roman was a famous musician away on tour and I would soon be joining him. We would ride in a big bus all across the country with a hot tub in the back and drink champagne and when he gave a concert he would dedicate a special love ballad just for me as I watched from backstage. In the song he would refer to me as “My Girl,” just like Jim Morrison. When people asked about his love life in interviews he would say he would never dream of going anywhere without taking his girl with him. I would make tank tops out of concert T-shirts with the band’s name on the front and wear them with jeans and a leather jacket as I posed next to him for press photos. I would hang out with fashion designers and models. Fans and groupies would hate me and say they wouldn’t know what Roman even saw in me.
Jeremy showed up around midnight. Ava and Dylan had retired to her bedroom and Andy had joined everyone else outside. I didn’t know who half those people were. That happens a lot around here. They were being too loud.
“Wow, am I glad to get away from that,” he said, flopping down on the couch beside me.
“That being Pristina?” I asked.
He pulled his hands down over his face. “Her friends are such bitches. It makes me love coming over here.”
I gave him a skeptical look. “Why, because my friends aren’t bitches? Come on.”
“No, because nobody here cares. Anything goes and you may get shit for it, but nobody really minds. Around her friends I have to act totally different. I have to act all…I don’t know, like I have to carry her purse and shit.”
“Oh.”
“Do you mind if I go see who’s outside?”
“Go for it.”
I watched him leave the room. What a strange creature, really. And what a pushy broad, that Pristina!
Dylan came out of Ava’s room with hooded eyes and a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He put his hands on his hips and peered at me, shirtless. Dylan is not unattractive. He’s sexy the way all scoundrels are. He doesn’t work out, you can tell, but he has a solid, manly body. He has green eyes.
“Hey, would you ever carry a girl’s purse?” I asked him. “Like, if you were dating her?”
“Fuck no,” he replied. “What kind of sick dude would ever want to date a girl like that?”
My point exactly.
Jeremy returned with two bottles of Heineken and handed me one. I guessed the beer stash was dwindling because Jeremy knows I hate Heineken and will only drink it as a last resort. He turned on the TV to see if there were any good movies on.
I watched the way his shoulders hunched forward as he leaned onto his knees to change channels. His face was earnest as he observed the activity on the screen. I wonder if Pristina thinks she’s a lucky girl. I hope she does. I know I’m a lucky girl because when you strip away all of the foolishness and weirdness and constant bickering between us, it’s actually nice to have a friend like Jeremy. It’s nice to have a friend who would rather come keep you company than go home and be alone…even if to keep you company means that you’re both being adulterous.
We slept quietly in my bed that night, on sheets printed with fish, holding each other in a comforting embrace. Occasionally he would wake up and kiss my neck and stroke my hair. Sometimes that’s all you need—to have somebody there—to get you up the next morning and make you think about how sweet it feels to have warm blood in your veins and hot breath in your lungs and a whole life that’s all yours to live and live and live.
Chapter 6
After checking the mail each day for two weeks, I was excited to find a postcard from Cameroon waiting for me on a Friday afternoon. On the back it said simply, Love YOU! This was a sign that a package of strange foreign goodies would soon be coming my way, with a long handwritten letter.
Roman doesn’t send e-mails. He says that such casual communication is at the root of today’s relationship problems, because you just go ahead and type what you’re thinking. He says when you speak you stop to think about what you’re about to say. He says e-mail is cold and harsh. I ask him, Don’t you go ahead and write what you’re thinking with a pen? He says no. He says you carefully craft every sentence because there is no backspace, no delete, and so you don’t want to make a bunch of mistakes. Mistakes make a letter look messy.
And his letters are certainly beautiful. I feel like they should be read in a special place, so on occasion I have driven seventy miles up the coast to read them by the Point. It is one of my favorite seaside spots in all of California. I get out of the car and feel the Pacific wind on my face and smell the salty air that reminds me of being a little girl coming home from the beach, with wet towels in the back of the car and sand in my ice cream and a song on the radio about a girl named Peg done up in blueprint blue. Then I pop in on Lily and we go eat at Yolanda’s and make big cheesy pigs of ourselves and try to bargain for the big juicy black olive that comes on top of the enchilada plate. Then we go to Baskin-Robbins for a pint of mint chocolate chip, and take it home to her mother and Al, and her mother gives me a “cold soda for the road” which is never name brand because Kitty can be cheap like that, but it’s delicious all the same.
I decided to call him.
“Baby! Is everything okay?”
“Fine,” I replied. “I just got your postcard. Thanks!”
“Too bad you can’t send me yourself by mail like that,” he said. “It would make things a hell of a lot easier for me over here.”
“I could send myself by plane,” I joked, only half kidding.
“Yeah, but I’m so busy here you would never even see me. So how’s everything going, Dalton? Making wedding plans?”
“Yeah, I’m on it. Booked us a church and everything. Unfortunately, we have to go to marriage counseling with Reverend Nelson when you get back. Just once, though.”
“I think we can handle the critical cleric our way. Let’s get tossed before we go and then argue the whole time just for fun,” he suggested with a laugh.
“Now you’re talking!”
“Listen, Landon’s coming in on an early flight. He says we’re just having breakfast but I know he’s really coming to review me, so I have to get back to bed.”
“Okay. Miss you.”
“Miss you, too.”
That night I took Ava and Electra to the opening of a new club on Sunset, the reigning celebrity “It” girl’s Monaco. Charisma had put together the premiere party and the free alcohol flowed like an endless river. Sometimes I love this plastic town when I’m wasted. I love how everybody is somebody even if they’re nobody. I like painting on a whole new face and wearing black-on-black sparkles and teetering around in to-die-for shoes with to-die-by heels. I like how everybody’s pretty, and important, even if half the time they’re making shit up or really glamorizing their lives so they won’t seem inferior to anyone else. Everybody does it. Even me! It’s all part of the act.
Ava and Electra brought their new handbags, but I was without because Jeremy was with Pristina. If Pristina needed a transplant and I was a positive match, I would run away to Mexico and let her search for another one while I was wasting away in Margaritaville and loving every second of it.
He called around eleven the next morning. I was watching Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning and painting my toenails glittery green. Sometimes Jeremy and I prank-phone-call each other by leaving clips from our favorite horror movies on each other’s voice mails at work. These are like our love letters. Electra says we are sick.
“What’d you do last night?” he yawned into the phone.
“I got loaded.”
“Oh. I hung out with Pristina.”
Big news. “Oh, really, how was that?”
“Typical.”
“Figures.”
“You want to do something today?”
“If you want to come over, we’ll figure it out.”
He came over while the movie was still on and I was still in bed. I was wearing white flannel pajamas. He got in bed with me in his clothes and pulled me close. We were soft and warm together.
I closed my eyes and put my hand down his pants. He put his down mine. We didn’t say anything for the longest time. In the background people screamed and hollered as they were hunted down and murdered in innovative and amusing ways. He was wearing Woods by Abercrombie & Fitch. I turn into absolute jelly when he wears that.
“I was thinking about you last night…when I was with her,” he breathed into my ear.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.” He moved his hand down.
“And what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking about how Pristina always shaves.”
“That’s not thinking about me. That’s thinking about Pristina.”
“I was only thinking it because you don’t shave sometimes.”
“I’m not trying to impress anyone.”
He sighed into my neck. “I was just saying. I guess it’s okay how you don’t shave sometimes.”
“Thanks.” I ran my fingers up and down his back, underneath his shirt. “I really feel like I need your approval.”
“You’re so touchy sometimes, Doll. It’s a wonder I even stick around!”
He stuck to me, anyway.
“You ruined my pedicure,” I told him, after. I wagged a foot in his face so he could see. I was reclining against the headboard. I was smoking a cigarette. He was sprawled across the bed on his stomach.
“Tragedy.” He crawled over me. He picked up my nail polish off the nightstand. He flicked on the stereo. I’d last been listening to my favorite homemade eighties CD compilation. We’re talking some serious classics by the likes of Toto, Gerry Rafferty and Juice Newton.
“You have some seriously gay taste in music,” he told me. He took one foot and began painting.
“You’re so generous with your compliments.”
“That was probably the best sex I ever had. Now, hold still.”
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