“I just think it’s so interesting,” Mark said, “that she claims she would’ve quit high school to take care of her little invalid brother. Not that I’m interested in detecting ‘hypocrisy’ in a sixteen-year-old girl. It’s just interesting how this moral idea—this atoning, self-sacrifice idea—came along. Like her mom picking up highway litter. And how now Lotta is being so nice to him,” with a thumb over his shoulder.
“You mean nice to Bodie?” she said.
Bodie was the paraplegic drummer.
Mark was being unfair. The attentiveness to the disabled boy was more than charity. There was some kind of ardent admiration there. Sometimes, yes, he’d seen the dire glance of infatuation. The boy was—who knows?—perhaps impotent from the waist down, but from the waist up he was an Adonis, an athlete, with powerful arms and chiseled features, hair of gold, long and thick and wavy, and a cleft in his chin. He wrote his own songs, according to certain winning recipes. He sang about his ennobling environmentalist ideals, which were somehow avant-garde, and very strict, so that he turned off lights wherever he went, and he declined to take the “limo cruises” with the others and even chose his meals according to a personal menu that would conserve fossil fuels and protect animal species and preserve human rights worldwide. He was unfailingly polite among his inferiors the grown-ups, with all the discretion of his withheld power. When it was time for music, he would, with guiding biceps, glide on his wheels up to his space-age electronic drum set of levitating disks, set the wheelchair brakes hard with the heels of his palms, swing himself over onto his special drum throne, and pick up a pair of sticks and take real authority over the set. He smiled when he sang into the mic that poked at his face from its boom stand, smiled and closed his eyes; and when he sang, his already-thick neck got a lot thicker. The two kids’ long séance together last night in the bar, over decaffeinated soymilk drinks, was a new, deeper step in an intensifying relationship—which had started when Lotta tagged along to his first recording session so she could loiter like a groupie in the control booth, watching. After that, too, on the Second-Day Excursion to see the sights of Hollywood, she opted instead to go out with Bodie, on foot, pushing his wheelchair along the desolate, thundering downtown boulevards, rather than going with the rest of the gang in the Celebrity stretch.
Mark said, “Maybe that will have been an unexpected dividend of the ‘Fantasy Vacation.’ Maybe Lotta is living out the fantasy of being a warm, loving person. Good fantasy to experiment with. We all ought to experiment with that one a little more.”
Blythe made a smile, and looked down, and lightly petted the rim of her wineglass.
“Last night,” he said, “they stayed down drinking desserty things till two in the morning. She is pretending to be ‘in love,’ I think.”
He hadn’t actually thought so, not in such unambiguous terms, not until just this minute. Using the word love made the idea real.
Blythe’s facial expression, also, made it real—an expression (he associated it with therapists and shrinks) inviting further utterances while promising there would be no judgments, just an expectation that there might be a little more to say on the topic.
He said, “As you may know, Bodie is in trouble, over the long term, in some kind of awful way. Medically. Prognosis-wise. It’s some kind of terminal condition he’s got.” (Though the boy certainly did look robust.)
Blythe was, still, giving him the therapist’s nonjudgmental gaze.
“I just notice,” he said. “Interesting correspondence. After Noddy was taken care of, well, this boy Bodie is like a reincarnation. Of the defective Noddy. One who was not aborted.”
Blythe looked at him steadily, as if she were giving serious consideration to that insight. But she wasn’t, because she said, “I ought to tell you something,” and she leaned back and folded her arms. (They’d taken a table by the wall, and she was on the upholstered-bench side.) “Just while we’re all recovering from something.”
“I suppose you’ve got a terminal disease?” he joked. But it was a not-very-clever joke; it was a stupid joke, because what if she did have a terminal disease?
“No. Fortunately. What it is is . . . I didn’t tell you this before. It’s not the sort of thing you’d want to get into, right off. But my boyfriend? Rod? He’s actually dead. He died recently. I’ve mentioned him as if he were still alive, because it’s not—like—light conversation. But he died six months ago. So, you see, I have this thing of my own. Which I’m getting over. I’m rather close with Rod’s family, so that’s good.” She scoped out the rest of the restaurant, its murmurous depths. Then she pulled her water glass closer and watched her fingers as they turned it on its axis, its wet crystal facets.
No boyfriend. In this news Mark discovered a nice unholy gladness. Because the gaudy jacket of death was around her too. Maybe he’d sensed it. Or even been drawn to it. The scummy green of her eyes. The first glimpse in the airport. People may know little about their own inner depths; but about each other, subconsciously everything; for people are at every instant photographing silhouettes of each other subliminally, far below conscious notice. Maybe it was during the first ride out of the airport in her limo—maybe it was something in the set of her shoulder, or a dental-office smell rising off her skin, the shallowness of her gaze, so maybe death was the perfume from the start, and maybe she, too, was on the brink of the philosophic chill, so their little love this weekend was not a “love” at all, but a camaraderie, in a kind of afterlife they were coexisting in.
“Of AIDS,” she went on. “With mental complications. Dementia complications. He was loose on the street in the end. He loved escaping and getting out on the street and being homeless, so it was pretty terrible. We had to keep go-finding him. Now, I don’t have AIDS. Or HIV. But he sure did. It went on for years.”
As a first reaction, Mark came up with the response, “Wow,” which of course was insufficient, but it was meant to be an open gate for more.
She said, “So I’ve got something, too, I’m dealing with.” She smiled.
“You had to be a ‘Selfless Person’ for some while. Gee.”
Her eyes glided away. “Yup. Selfless Person. For a while. And got the Inappropriate Survivor Guilt you mention.”
“Well, Blythe, you. You feel guilty about everything. Leaving the airport on the 405, you were apologizing to us for other drivers’ cheating in the carpool lanes.”
How amazing. For a few years she’d been a “Selfless Person,” as he’d phrased it.
He started organizing his place setting—centering his water glass, aligning it vertically with his wineglass, restoring the silverware to perpendicularity, sheathing the knife blade and the tines of his fork inside the linen napkin out of sight, the way he preferred, because it always felt like good luck, not to have sharp, shiny points exposed—then gripping the table edge symmetrically to left and right. Meanwhile he was getting Blythe Cress into a better focus. There was a life-arc developing here. She’d gone to art school; and all the while, her Rod was a musician, so she and Rod, when they were starting out, would have been an “artistic” young couple beginning a heedless, carefree, bohemian life together. Then would have come the symptoms, the medications, the unreasonableness of the patient, the chores for the caregiver.
He took up his own wine, while receding. She led a complicated life. The media-escort job, for her, was only a sideline. She’d said she’d gone to the Rhode Island School of Design. Her real career was as an antique appraiser at some auction-house establishment. She was an expert on old textiles from Asia, kimonos and samurai outfits. She’d said she did appraising in other departments too—cloisonné, netsuke, woodblock prints, exotic textiles. Supposedly it amounted to a parttime job, occupying a carrel of her own in a warehouse building on Sunset Boulevard; the place was called Gladstons, handling old weavings and garments, assigning minimum-bid estimates