Been There, Married That (ARC)

by Gigi Levangie

  At the end of this “passage,” I’d look like a female Danny DeVito, without the career.

  Izzy would save me.

  “Are you under stress?” Izzy asked. He was adorable, a tiny doll of a man with a thick Israeli accent. He had a medical diploma from Tel Aviv University on the wall, so I guessed he was legit. Did I care at this point? No.

  “No more than usual,” I said, then started to cry.

  He jotted down a note, then pushed a box of Kleenex toward me.

  “Are you . . . more emotional? Quicker to anger?”

  “Why would you say that?” I snapped.

  He jotted. I sniffed.

  “Your period has stopped?”

  “Not yet; I just bought a sixty-pack of Tampax,” I said. “Not to brag.”

  “Do you want to keep menstruating, even when your period stops? We can do that for you.”

  “What? No! Is that a thing? I don’t want to be eighty years old stuffing a tampon up my—I’m not even sure I’ll know where it is. My God, I’m closer to eighty than twenty. How, how did this happen? I was just in high school, making out with Taylor Minkowski with the neck hair.”

  He ripped a prescription from his pad and patted me on the hand.

  “Dahlink,” he said, “I would get that filled right away.”

  Sid was in the waiting room, along with several elderly women on manufactured periods. Kotex should market a pad just for grandmothers. (Jot this down.)

  “I’ve got to get this filled,” I said.

  “Now?”

  “Now, okay, right now,” I said, spitting it out.

  * * *

  Prescription finally filled after intermittent tears to the pretty Pakistani pharmacist who said it might take an hour. I was rubbing estrogen cream onto my butt cheek in the CVS bathroom within fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, Sid had given up on exploring my childhood home and wanted to head straight to the belly of the beast, the dead zone. I’d texted Gabriela to take up the tape Coliti-Girl had laid down, dividing our rooms.

  We curved up our empty street, and I could see the driveway was blocked by an Eldorado. I felt the hairs on my neck stiffen.

  No, I thought. Not today. Not tomorrow. Definitely not this week.

  Not this lifetime?

  We drove up behind the Eldorado. A slender, golden figure with cornrows in her white girl hair, wearing cutoffs and a tank top, was standing outside the car, talking into the intercom, gesturing, her silver rings throwing the sun’s rays. An almond-skinned dude at the butt end of a lit cigarette, wearing worn nylon track pants, black horsetail to his hip, was slumped outside the passenger side. His stance told me he was bored and, probably, because he’d driven from whatever dirt patch hours away with this she-demon, at his very last breath of patience.

  “What the devil?” Sid said, giving a low whistle. “Do you know these people?”

  “Not for public consumption,” I said with a dash of salt.

  I hit the horn. Fin whipped around, squinting, her mouth in a kittenish snarl, bearing those straight white teeth. Her skin glowed the color of our favorite glazed doughnuts we’d scarfed as kids, her streamlined body every yoga guru in town coveted but couldn’t achieve, not even with fasting and raw food and poop tea.

  Prison looked good on her, but so did everything else.

  “That’s Fin,” I said. “My sister.”

  “You just got interesting,” Sid said.

  “Sid,” I said with a decades-old sigh, “you have no idea.”

  * * *

  “For your birthday,” Fin said as we stared at the Tiffany clock she’d positioned on our Steinway grand in the drawing room, an expensive piece of furniture with keys that no one played, like the art on our walls no one appreciated. A Warhol, a Richter, an Ed Ruscha. Nice, expensive, neglected objects. Like Hollywood wives.

  I’d moved Sid, against his myriad and creative objections, into the kitchen and instructed Caster to secure him by plying him with her smile and signature pigs in a blanket. Sid had to be starving after pretending he didn’t want to eat and driving around for hours.

  “My birthday was months ago,” I said.

  “Okay, it’s a thank-you gift,” Fin said. “For bailing me out.” She adjusted the clock. I glanced through the picture window at her Native American boyfriend smoking a cigarette by the pool while Pep stood over him, glaring and waving her hand in front of his face. In the Riviera, like all of the Westside, smoking was equivalent to murder, maybe worse. Pep had been fully indoctrinated into the smoking Gestapo.

  I’d forgotten, in all the divorce excitement, that Fin had depleted my bank account yet again. I thought about my last conversation with Jake Your Friendly Neighborhood Bail Bondsman (on speed dial).

  Fin tapped her ankle monitor. “You like my new jewelry?”

  “I forgot all about your shit,” I said. “My own shit has taken precedence.”

  “We’re on our way to visit Dad,” she said.

  “I don’t think he’s talking to me,” I said. “I had to skip Easter this year.”

  Fin walked over to the trophy case glass. “Hey, can I hold the Oscar?” she said. “Take a picture?”

  “It’s locked. I don’t even know where the key is.”

  Fin leaned in, slid her finger over the lock. “Hey, bud, hey,” she said to Oscar. “They got you all locked up in there, huh?”

  “He can’t hear you,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know what?” I asked.

  “Dad’s not talking to you,” she said. “If you don’t talk to him, how do you know?”

  “Don’t confuse me,” I said. “I’m under a lot of emotional strain.”

  “Okay, princess,” she said, raising her calloused hands in defeat.

  “I can’t take the clock,” I said.

  “She fits your big ol’ Steinway,” she said as she dropped onto the satin piano seat and slowly ran her fingers along the keys. Shocking to hear the room filled with music, as though we’d invited in a live tiger.

  “If it’s stolen, I could get in a lot of trouble, Fin,” I said. “I can’t afford trouble.”

  “Rich people don’t get into trouble,” she said, closing her eyes as she finished “Für Elise” and leaned into “Stairway to Heaven.” Fin would sit for hours at the standup piano our grandmother had given us, working out pieces by ear. No sheets, no teachers we couldn’t afford. Just Led Zeppelin and Beethoven, battling it out.

  I pictured Sid, who probably had his ear on the swinging door between the kitchen and drawing room.

  “Come on. Did you . . . steal it?” I asked, keeping my voice low as I slid next to her; her hips took up barely any space on the piano seat.

  “No,” she said. Her eyes opened, then closed again, her body swaying with the music.

  “Did someone else steal it?”

  She rocked back and forth as her fingers danced, her white trash homage to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page and misspent youth.

  “Fin,” I said. “Finley.”

  Last stanza. I looked outside. Pep was now engaged in serious conversation with the boyfriend, whose cigarette now hanging limp from his mouth, unlit. Why didn’t she talk to me like that? What could they be talking about?

  “An antique shop owner gave it to me in a trade,” she said. “I owe you. I pictured it right there, on that spot, last night. I dreamed it.”

  “Could you maybe dream about not going to prison again?”

  “Pep doesn’t recognize me,” she said matter-of-factly as we watched Pep’s expression dissolve into a laugh.

  “I’m lucky she recognizes me,” I said, batting away the moment. “She barely looks up when I talk to her.”

  “Can I get some gas money?” Fin asked, taking her long fingers off the keys. “We had enough to get here, but not to get back. Maybe something for Denny’s, too.”

  “You don’t have to eat at Denny’s,” I said. “I have food.”

  “I like Denny’s. Wh
en I was inside, I can’t tell you how many times I ordered that Rootin’ Tootin’ breakfast in my head.”

  “Sausage or bacon?”

  “Sausage, c’mon, sis,” she said, eyeing me. “So. That reporter dude. How long has he been off the stuff?”

  “What, Sid?” I asked, “You guys barely met. Caster’s running interference.”

  “He’s a tweaker,” Fin said.

  I blinked. “No way, no, I don’t believe it. He’s heartbroken. He just had a major breakup.”

  “He broke up with Mr. Meth,” she said.

  I thought about Fin’s “entrepreneurial” work in San Bernardino; she’d set up labs in various trailers, each one a boyfriend’s domicile. I called her Breaking Badass. She preferred Breaking Bitch.

  “Never question the master,” Fin said, then dove into Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Tiny Dancer,” and I felt a tug in my chest, primal and urgent.

  “How much you need?” I said as I wiped my nose.

  “Who’ve we cast?” I was hitting my stride on the elliptical between breaks every few minutes. Liz and I were planning a girls’ night dinner for Sid’s benefit. If the tweaker was going to bury me, I wanted to be in full hair and makeup, surrounded by friends and photogenic strangers.

  “Juliette, a.k.a. Stripper Tits,” Liz said into the speaker. “She’s introduced her new breasts at lunch at Citron, in a carpool at Briarwood. Oh, she’s having trouble sitting, but she’s ready to unleash the new-and-improved vagina in a few days.”

  “Karyn’s coming, not sure about Kwan, apparently still reeling from my marital un-status,” I said. “Oh, has Juliette decided her kid’s gender yet?”

  “The baby appears to be the bearer of what we call a vagina, but we’ll wait and see.”

  “Looking forward to the gender reveal party at forty,” I said, willing myself to elliptic once more.

  “We invited the actress who just released her memoir about her evil stage mother,” Liz said.

  “The new momoir,” I said. “Perfect.”

  I stepped off to catch my breath. If you exercise three minutes a day, how long before you’re in shape? Death?

  “I’m not serving alcohol,” I said.

  “What? Why not?”

  “I don’t want any glitches from my bitches,” I said. “This isn’t Real Housewives.”

  “Well, it ain’t real life,” Liz said. Right as usual.

  * * *

  Liz grabbed me right before dinner as I toggled between music choices on the home system—Soul or reggae? Soft classical or soft rock? Sitar or acid? I chose Adele; Adele’s like a white T-shirt—she goes with everything.

  “Karyn’s. Fucking. Jordan.” Liz said in a panic.

  “She’s fucking inside the circle?” I said. “You never fuck inside the circle!”

  “It’s the ultimate breach; it’s terrible,” Liz said. “And also, ew, why? Why Jordan? He looks like . . . a Jordan!”

  “How did you find out?”

  “She downed a bottle of honesty rosé at home,” Liz said. “She blurted it out while we were in the bathroom adjusting her personality.”

  “Juliette’s going to smother her.”

  “Juliette’s out of it . . . she’s in love with the ‘PercoCo’,” Liz sang, misquoting the O.T. Genasis song, “Oh, and apparently, that hot Vanity Fair photographer.”

  I glanced toward the bar. Juliette was hovering over the photographer, one butt pinch away from a sexual assault lawsuit. The doorbell rang, and the rest of our party showed up, including Sid, who sneaked in last, circles under his eyes, wearing head-to-toe black, a human misery tree with a sprinkling of angst.

  “Sid,” I said, greeting him as Liz fluttered by toward Juliette. “Dressed for my funeral? Let me get you a pomegranate faux-tini.” I remembered what Fin said about his possible drug use. Could I use that information somehow?

  I shook my head. I’d been in Hollywood too long.

  “Missus,” Gabriela pulled up behind me, “I need to talk to you. Caster, she not feeling good. She has to go home.”

  Caster was supposed to be serving.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She pinched her lips together and looked off to the side. “The chef,” she said. “They did . . . they, how you say, the thing.”

  “What thing? Oh!” Luis, our chef, had a web tattooed on his elbow, slicked-back hair, inky bun settled at the nape of his neck. And, oh, what a great nape. He was trouble with a capital whisk. But such good sauces! Caster had already gotten to him, beating out all the women at my dinner party willing to throw their hats (and La Perla panties) in the fling ring.

  “They fighting,” Gabriela said.

  I heard a glass shatter. I closed my eyes in silent prayer.

  “Can he still cook?” I asked.

  Gabriela nodded. “He very fast.”

  “Apparently,” I said as another glass shattered and Gabriela rushed back into the kitchen. I rubbed my hands together and headed into the war zone.

  Caster’s wailing during the salad course hit the same pitch as Mariah Carey giving birth, so I decided to let her go for the night—after I rubbed her back and dried her tears and admonished her not to screw anyone else I brought into the household.

  “Not Esteban?” she asked, choking through tears as we sat on the Victorian daybed in Pep’s room. Esteban, the gardener, wore a cowboy hat and boots, and now I understood why he displayed a swagger unusual in the massive Westside gardening industry.

  “Sleeping with men in their twenties is a no-no,” I said. “Every friend of mine that’s done it regrets the extra gyno appointments and vaccines. Besides, he’s young enough to be your—”

  “My what?” Her tears dried instantly.

  “Nephew?”

  Caster was ten years older than she looked. Black don’t crack and brown don’t frown.

  “Just wait, Missus Añes,” she hissed. “When you divorce, you’ll see.”

  “I’m going to sleep with Luis the Teenaged Chef?” I asked.

  “Don’t judge,” she said, shaking her finger.

  * * *

  We’d rounded third base into the dessert course. Luis, a fresh bandage over his eye, was torching the crème brûlée, bringing the sugar to a crisp brown. The house smelled like vanilla.

  “Never sleep with a Salvadoreña,” he muttered. “The hotter they are, the crazier.”

  “Duly noted,” I said. “Don’t bleed on the crème brûlée.”

  He pressed the bandage, checked his fingertips.

  “You want me to serve?” Luis asked.

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “Let’s get this party over with. I want to get back to my bubble.”

  * * *

  One of the girls we invited for decorative purposes (blond, vacuum-packed, perky) described her rehab affair during a Promises Malibu staycation with an actor named Christian she could’ve sworn was Bale but later discovered was the diminutive, less-but-still-talented Christian.

  “One of them is a Jewish Christian,” Liz pointed out. “I love that.”

  “How could you not know?” I asked the human décor. I set down the crème brûlée in front of Sid. His knees shook under the table. He hadn’t cracked open his moleskin in the last half hour.

  “You okay?” I asked, nudging his shoulder.

  “Fine,” he said, then coughed. He wasn’t fine. He was hanging on by a pharmaceutical thread.

  “If you need a little ‘put-me-down,’ check Juliette’s purse,” I murmured. “The girl with that new vagina smell.”

  “Put-me-down?”

  “Instead of a pick-me-up,” I said, then moved on. I placed a dessert in front of the actress. Then Karyn. Finally, Juliette. I glanced at my watch. Fifteen more minutes, max. Fifteen minutes and the trial would be over to make way for new trials. My insides danced in beat to Duffy.

  I’ve pulled it off, I thought. A dinner party and no mention of my upcoming divorce. I was almost safe, sliding into home base.


  “You want my crème brûlée?” Juliette asked Karyn.

  “No, thanks, love,” Karyn said. “I couldn’t eat another bite.”

  “I insist,” Juliette said, pushing her dessert across the table in front of Karyn.

  Karyn pushed it back. “No, thank you, sweetie.”

  “Take it,” Juliette said, tilting her head and smiling. “You took my Jordan, so why don’t you take my dessert, too?”

  She picked up the crème brûlée and flung it at Karyn’s head. Karyn, with the reflexes of a home-wrecking cat, ducked, the crème brûlée shattering all over Trevor’s Warhol on the wall behind her.

  “Oh, shit,” Liz said, her head in her hands.

  “I was so close!” I said, smacking the table.

  The crème brûlée slithered down Mr. Warhol’s handiwork.

  “You’re crazy!” Karyn screamed at Juliette, who scrambled across the table and lunged at Karyn with her dessert spoon. Karyn bobbed and weaved.

  “Yes, I’m crazy!” Juliette screamed. “You’re fucking my husband!”

  “Why do you care?” Karyn said, warding off the spoon, the earrings she’d tried to sell me flashing angrily. “All you do is complain about poor Jordan; you should be thanking me!”

  Juliette leaped onto Karyn, both of them rolling on the Turkish rug, Karyn girl-punching Juliette’s new breasts as Juliette cried out in agony.

  “Stop!” Liz said, jumping into the fray.

  “Juliette! You’re going to lose a stitch!” I said. “Karyn, stop!”

  In the corner of my eye, I spied Sid slipping away with Juliette’s purse.

  The girls rolled around. Screaming, spitting while Otis Redding played, poor Otis. I settled back in my chair, self-soothing through crème brûlée. Luis ran in from the kitchen, took one look, and circled back out. The hot photographer clicked away. Surely, this was excellent use of the Pulitzer he’d won for his Iraq War coverage.

  Sid slunk back into the room, stepping over the melee, and sat next to me, plucking my spoon from my hand and finishing off my crème brûlée.

  “This little affair cost you a cool million,” Sid said, tilting his head at the Warhol. Gabriela ran out and started dabbing at the painting with a wet towel.