“Then, you’re still—”
“No.” She tapped a cigarette ash into her cupped palm. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Neither did I. My ears were still ringing, and there was a bitter lump in my throat. I tried to swallow it, but it wouldn’t go down. “Does Dan know?”
“No. None of it.”
“Jesus.”
“And he won’t know,” she said. “There’s no use in telling him, now. There never really was.”
“What does that mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything.”
“Wasn’t it his ?”
“Of course it was his. Just drop it.”
The short endings, the brick walls; she was sounding more like Big Bill by the minute. The old Big Bill, that is. “I’m sorry, Lu.”
She didn’t say anything. She tapped another ash into her cupped palm.
“I’m sorry about the letter,” I said. “I’m sorry about not being there, or whatever.”
Lulu leaned over and snubbed her cigarette out on the windowsill. She scattered the ashes out the window, blew on the windowsill, and stuffed the butt and the matches in the pocket of her coat. “Whatever,” she said.
“You’re right. Okay? I don’t know why you have to be my everything, Lu. You just do. You are. You always have been. And I don’t know what happened. Because it used to be that I was everything to you, for a long time, and you can’t tell me that I wasn’t everything to you, Lu, you can’t tell me that.”
She looked toward the window. “You were,” she said softly.
“Well, then, what’s wrong with me? What did I do to you? Am I ugly? Am I stupid? Did I smother you? Was it my acne? Wasn’t I cool enough? Wasn’t I—”
“No. Stop.” Exasperated, she ran her hands over her face. “It’s not about you.”
“You mean, it’s about you.”
“No. It’s not. Goddamnit, it’s not. What do you want me to say? I love you? Okay, I love you! Now fuck off !”
My ears were ringing again. But this time it was a good ringing. My mind was racing. I was measuring, figuring: Okay, okay, TWO I love yous, and ONE fuck off, not bad, not bad. I can work with this.
“Well, goddamnit, say something!” said Lulu.
“I love you, too.”
“No duh, you jerk!”
“Jesus, Lu, am I supposed to thank you for loving me? Is that it? Because I am grateful, believe me. But don’t you get it? You don’t love me like you used to, you just love me because you have to. You love me because—”
“It’s not true.”
“Yeah, well, I just don’t see it,” I said, looking away. “I don’t believe it for a second.”
“Well, you don’t see the stupid stars every night, and you still believe in them, don’t you? Sometimes you have to have faith,” she said.
“You should be a politician.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I can’t even tell what the hell you’re talking about. You’re not saying anything. You object, you stall, you evade.”
“I said I love you. That’s not a filibuster.”
“Everything’s some fucking metaphor with you,” I said. “I’m talking about you and me, and you’re talking about the Milky Way! Why can’t you just admit it: You either love me or you don’t.”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“See, there you go!”
“Well, it’s not. And don’t start getting nasty again, either. Because I’ll walk right out of this room, and this conversation will be closed. Forever.”
“What kind of threat is that? This conversation never goes anywhere!”
“So, let’s not have it,” she cried. “Let’s go back to the beginning. Back to the part where you came to apologize for being an asshole.”
“I’m sorry.”
She sniffled, and put a hand on my knee. “Apology accepted,” she said. “But don’t start, because you’ll just find yourself apologizing again in five minutes.”
Lulu took a couple swipes at her running mascara with the sleeve of her blouse. She sniffled and started to sigh, but instead a little laugh escaped her. She finally surrendered to a smile. I wasn’t sure what all was written in that smile, but I thought I read an invitation. Before Lulu knew what hit her, I was smothering her with kisses, and her hair was in my fingers, and my tongue was in her mouth, and even though she was a little stiff, she wasn’t pulling away from me. She tasted like hot chocolate and cold cigarettes, and it was as though I could feel electricity surging down her spine as I ran my open hand firmly down the contour of her back. And I touched her with the strongest, most delicate touch in the world—like the thumb of God running down the spine of a baby bird, and Lulu arched her back and tilted her head back and gave a breathy, achy little moan, which in all my life I’ll never forget, because I could feel the force of that breath all through me like a tropical wind.
That’s when Dan poked his head into the room.
Lulu pushed me away and recoiled so fast that she rapped her knuckles on the nightstand and set the lamp to wobbling with her elbow. I’m not sure what Dan actually saw, but certainly he felt the urgent discomfort of poking his head into something unexpected, because he pulled it out again instantly.
“Oh God,” groaned Lulu, as Dan creaked down the stairs. “Fuck.”
“Shhh,” I said. “It’s okay.” And indeed, it was okay. Everything was okay. Because all I could feel was Lulu coursing through me, throbbing and tickling and making my heart beat like a bunch of hippies around a drum circle.
“It’s not okay.”
“It is.”
“No,” she said, turning away toward the window.
“He didn’t see anything.”
“It’s still not okay.”
“Get over it,” I said.
She spun around and shot me a look. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“I know exactly what I’m talking about. I don’t care who sees. What does it matter? You’re not even my—”
“Stop it,” she said. “Just stop talking.”
It was hard, but I stopped talking. The only problem was that about two seconds later, I was all over Lulu again, kissing and nibbling and sniffing my way closer to her mouth, which she scrunched up as she fought spiritedly to elude my advances. But I had her wrapped up so tightly that the best Lulu could do was wriggle and contort and bury her chin in her chest. Finally, she relented. At last I’d overcome her with sheer brute force. And for one miraculous, unfathomably huge, kaleidoscopic, sparkling, iridescent, rainbow-colored instant, Lulu stopped fighting me and permitted our tongues to loll around like a ball of serpents inside one another’s mouths, and that was one of the great moments of my life. It ended abruptly, however. Suddenly everything flashed red and my tongue was throbbing, and Lulu broke free of my hold and stood up. She straightened her ladybug skirt and took another swipe at her mascara. “You’re still an asshole,” she said flatly.
And she went downstairs.
The Land of the Lost
Somewhere between calling me an asshole and sitting back down at the dinner table, Lulu reinvented herself again. There was danger in her eyes. I could see it immediately upon resuming my own seat. Troy must have seen it, too. God knows he’d had enough practice. I don’t know whether Dan could see danger in Lulu’s eyes or not, probably his mind was still in the bedroom upstairs.
Aside from the spark in her eyes, Lulu betrayed no outward sign of the impending storm, or the disturbance that had preceded it. The runny mascara was gone. She was a portrait of composure. She ate her cold dinner matter-of-factly, like she was filling up a gas tank. She didn’t say anything.
Big Bill turned the conversation toward the Dodgers. Troy said something about the bullpen, and I said something ab
out the Guerrero trade, and somebody said something about Tudor’s first outing as a Dodger, and Doug said that the Dodgers sucked, and how even when they were good nobody in L.A. gave a rat’s ass, and for once he had a point.
Finally, Lulu said something and everybody listened.
“We should go out tonight,” she said. “I mean out. Drive to Malibu, or Canyon Country, or the desert. Or go see a movie, or . . . oh, I don’t know, do something.”
“You can borrow the Duster,” I said, so as not to look like a total asshole.
“No,” said Lulu. “You have to come. And Troy, too.”
Troy and I looked at each other uneasily.
“Can I come?” said Doug, looking up from his third helping of mashed potatoes.
“No,” said Lulu and I, in unison.
“Go where?” Big Bill wanted to know.
“I don’t know,” said Lulu. “Somewhere.”
After chewing on this offering for a moment, Big Bill rolled it around in his mouth, and ultimately swallowed it. Apparently the information sated his curiosity. “Mmm,” he said.
Troy and Dan and I would gladly have consented to go anywhere Lulu decided to lead us. No matter how she tortured, abused, teased, or tormented us along the way, we would have followed her to the edge of the earth.
“So, where am I going?” I said, pulling away from the curb. Troy was consigned to the front seat with me, buckled in tightly. Lulu and Dan sat in the backseat, but they weren’t exactly cuddling; they were separated by Dan’s guitar case.
“Let’s get a bottle of something,” Lulu said, looking out the window.
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
I piloted us to the Circle K parking lot, where we all fished around in our pockets for money. Dan climbed out of the Duster clutching a wad of rumpled bills, and soon returned with a half gallon of rum and a handful of change.
“Where to?” I said.
“Just drive,” said Lulu.
“Drive where?”
“Just start driving.”
“What, are you carjacking me? What does that mean? Where? This was your idea.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she sighed. “Somewhere. Get on the 10 and drive east.”
“To where?”
“East.”
I got on the 10, and started east. By the time we skirted downtown, Lulu had already hit the bottle two or three times, with Dan matching her slug for slug. I wasn’t drinking, just listening to the Dodgers on KWKW. Troy wasn’t drinking either, not yet. Nobody talked much, especially not Dan, who was morose in spite of a killer view of the skyline, though even in this state he was a bit fidgety. The Dodgers were playing Houston. It was the bottom of the fourth, one–zero Astros. Jaime Jarrin was bantering about something, I’m not sure what, something about Gibson’s hands, or maybe his mother’s hands, when the jumping beans came leaping out of Jarrin’s mouth with the name Gibson right in the middle of them.
“What happened?” said Troy.
“Gibson homered, I think.”
“You think?” he said. “Jesus, why don’t we listen on KABC, so we can understand what’s happening?”
“It’s better this way,” I said, turning the volume up.
“I agree,” said Lulu, from the back, a sentiment she punctuated with yet another splash of spiced rum.
“Whatever,” said Troy, folding his arms and gazing out the side window.
As per Lulu’s instructions, we forged east through the basin and into the desert until the lights thinned out, and the stars burned brighter, and as far as I could decipher, Davis scored on Bell’s single, or maybe it was a double, or maybe a giant carnivorous rabbit chased Davis around third, but somehow Davis scored in Houston’s half of the seventh, and Lulu opened her window, and I opened mine, and hot air thundered through the car like a stampede of buffalo, and the desert seemed wild with possibilities.
The bottle pacified Lulu, or maybe it was the desert air. She no longer gave any indication that a storm was imminent. Dan, too, seemed to be coming around with each slug of rum. He popped his window open and stuck his nose out into the hot wind, and when he pulled it back in, I could see, even in the dark, that he was smiling like a kid on a roller coaster. Indeed, he was on a roller coaster, the only question was how long until he chose to get off.
About twenty miles west of Palm Springs, our destination revealed itself on the horizon. A half mile ahead, two rather ominous concrete giants sprouted out of the arid plain against a backdrop of mountains.
“Whoa,” said Dan. “No way. Killer! Remember, from Pee Wee’s—?”
“Shhh,” said Lulu, as though Dan’s voice might startle the giants.
“Killer,” Dan repeated, in his indoor voice.
The Wheel Inn was closed, as was the gift shop in the belly of the brontosaurus. The parking lot lights, the footlights, the entire complex lay in darkness but for the beams of our headlights and a few queasy lights out back of the restaurant, illuminating a blue dumpster. When I killed the engine, the silence of the desert enveloped us. Only the distant guttural progress of a diesel truck somewhere on the interstate, and the drone of a billion chirping crickets, reached our ears. When we climbed out of the car, the stars flickered brighter and the crickets chirped louder, and the crickets seemed to give voice to the blinking stars.
We shuffled across the gravel parking lot toward the concrete dinosaurs. Lulu, still clutching the bottle, shuffled more than the rest of us. We paused beneath the brontosaurus to ponder its dimensions. Dan pressed his face to the glass and peered into the darkened gift shop. I surveyed the impressive length of the herbivore’s neck and gazed up into its face, which looked a bit like Michael Dukakis.
“Whoever built these was a total genius,” said Dan, with only a hint of sarcasm. “How awesome is this?”
“He died a few months ago,” said Troy. “I saw a thing on the news.”
“No,” said Lulu.
“Yeah,” said Troy. “I guess he was planning a woolly mammoth, too. And some other ones.”
“Awesome,” said Dan.
“He’s dead,” said Lulu, as though she couldn’t quite believe it.
“Lulu and I met him when we were kids,” I said. “His name was Clyde, I think.”
“Claude,” said Lulu.
“That was years before the tyrannosaurus was built,” I pursued. “He was just planning it then. He had sketches and models.”
“They said on the news it cost him something like a half million dollars to build just the tyrannosaurus,” observed Troy.
“What a nut job,” said Dan.
“What’s wrong with that?” Lulu wanted to know.
“Well, if you had a million dollars, would you build two fucking cement dinosaurs in the middle of Bumfuck, Egypt?”
“I know you wouldn’t,” Lulu said. “You’d do something obvious. I suppose you’d buy some cool car and some cool house.”
“I’d save it,” Troy chimed in.
“Of course you would,” said Lulu. Gale warnings were officially in effect. Lulu had another slug of rum.
Dan started battening down the hatches. “I didn’t say there was anything wrong with—”
But it was already too late.
“Have some respect,” said Lulu. “Just because somebody builds something doesn’t mean you have to tear it down. What have you ever built? Who here even has a woolly mammoth? Something we’ve charted out, worked for, something that if we died tomorrow, we couldn’t finish? If we had any guts, we’d be builders, not tearer-downers.”
“We all die with unfinished business,” I said.
“That’s not what I mean. That’s not even close to what I mean! I’m not talking about business ! I’m talking about actually doing something! Building something. Everything else is just pretending. We’re all just pretenders.”
“What about your painting?” said Troy.
“Pfff,” said Lulu. “That’s garbage. I don’t even like to paint. I’d rather clean houseboats. My paintings are terrible. Anyone who can’t see that is hopeless.”
With that, Lulu stumbled off toward the tyrannosaurus, crunching gravel along the way. We followed her, as though she were towing us. Her muscular ass was amazing underneath that ladybug skirt. Her boobs had grown, so that you could almost see them from behind when they bounced. She was wearing boots that stopped just below the knee. Her legs had grown shapely. But that’s not why I followed her. I followed her because she was the spark, the catalyst, the animator, the big bang. Because she was dangerous, and unpredictable, and passionate. Doubtless, Troy and Dan had their own reasons for following Lulu, and doubtless they were as compelling as my own. I suspect Dan followed her because she was brooding and mysterious and red hot, and because she looked good on his arm. I’m almost certain Troy followed Lulu because she was one of the few things in the world not within his grasp.
When Lulu reached the giant, she seated herself on its tail, which had a groove running down its length, so that if you let your butt slide back too far, you risked losing your balance. Inexplicably, there was cool jazz emanating faintly from the belly of the tyrannosaurus.
“Maybe he swallowed Kenny G,” I suggested.
Lulu laughed in spite of herself. So did Dan.
“You know,” I said. “It’s times like these that I’m absolutely certain God exists. The stars. The crickets. This fucking cement dinosaur playing cool jazz in the middle of the desert. That’s poetry.”
“Right on,” said Dan. “You’re funny, dude.”
I was starting to like Dan, just as I’d started liking Troy. That was my problem—that’s why I was destined to be a loser. Because I always liked the opponent.
“Screw the news,” said Lulu. “Screw anyone who thinks it’s silly. It was a sweet story, and you can’t ruin it.” Lulu straightened her skirt over her lap and looked away from the rest of us, out into the darkened flats. “When Claude Bell was just a little boy,” she said, “his father took him one Sunday to see a giant elephant statue in New Jersey. They drove halfway across the state in the rain to see the giant elephant, because the little boy wanted to see the giant elephant. You might think that’s stupid, a father taking his boy to see a big concrete elephant in the rain. But you’d be wrong, because there’s nothing stupid about it. And the whole time driving toward that elephant, the little boy imagined what it would be like—how big would it be compared to himself ? Was it bigger than a real elephant? Was it as tall as a building? He imagined and imagined, and he built up all these expectations. And when they finally got to the elephant, it wasn’t as big as little Claude imagined it might be, but it was still bigger than what he imagined a real elephant would be, or at least as big, and it was every bit as grand and exciting as all of the expectations he’d built up for it. So, in this way, little Claude built his dream before he ever started constructing it, before he’d ever realized it, in fact. He built it on expectations.” Lulu swiveled still farther away from us, until she was talking out into the desert, and we were looking squarely at her shoulder blades.
All About Lulu Page 15