by Laurel Doud
She forgot about it when she saw Marion at a standstill, awed by the structure and grounds in front of her.
“Wow,” Marion said.
“My sentiments exactly.” I always wanted to give you something like this. At least, I always thought I did.
They walked around the side to the kitchen. Katharine loved the fact that the Bennets didn't enter through the front door. In her childhood neighborhood, friends always entered one another's houses through the back door, no matter how long the driveway or how many windows they passed by.
Going to the back door somehow connected Katharine with this house.
No one was in the kitchen. Katharine went through the swinging door into the dining room and called, “Quince. We're here.” Then she heard the stereo upstairs. “I'll go get her,” she told Marion.
She returned with Quince, who was dressed in her finest down-and-out-in-Beverly Hills look, an oversized T-shirt, baggy jeans, and military-looking boots. They found Marion almost comatose in the living room, perhaps overcome by the warring perfume of the roses.
“Your house is very beautiful,” Marion whispered, as if she were in a museum.
This did not impress Quince, who, no doubt, would have preferred to hear that it was decadent and ostentatious. She grunted.
Katharine hustled the two girls quickly into the car, and the conversation on the way to Thisby's apartment was strained and stilted. Whose idea was this anyway? I must have been demented.
They parked in the garage, and Katharine put the top up while the girls gathered their stuff and waited over by the elevator. She kept an eye out for Hooker, as if he would drop down from the max headroom sign swinging across the exit. It made her feel faint just to imagine it.
When she joined the girls, Quince was exclaiming, “You mean you actually saw them? In concert?”
“In this small theater, the Circle K. It was so cool. I could practically touch Ted Logan. What a hunk. I'm sure he winked at me. I even got a guitar pick he threw out.”
Quince turned to Katharine. “Marion got to see Wyld Stallyns.” She swung back. “You're so lucky,” she said enviously, and the two girls proceeded to name-drop groups and concerts they'd been to.
“I went to Shoreline too,” Marion told her. “Which day did you go? Sunday? Me too. We could have seen each other. My brother took me.”
They were there? I could have seen them!
“Did you see that fight when Led Astray was playing?”
“Yeah, that was cool. The guy with blood all over his face. His nose was really busted.”
What fight? I didn't hear anything about a fight.
As it turned out, Katharine never did get a word in edgewise before the two left for the veterinary clinic, hardly waving to her as they went outside — Marion in her squeaky-clean catalog wear and Quince in her bag-lady couture.
Katharine was making the girls root beer smoothies after dinner. Marion sat on a kitchen stool watching her, and Quince was in the shower. Katharine poured a small amount of soda into beer mugs, then added the ice cream and stirred the mix into a thick pudding. Then she slowly poured in the rest of the root beer, stirring constantly.
“My mom did that.” Marion broke the silence. “She made smoothies like that.”
Katharine clattered the spoon against the side of the mug.
“It's funny. Sometimes you remind me of her,” Marion added.
Katharine stood still against the counter and looked into the grain of the kitchen cabinets until the lines separated and floated away. She closed her eyes wearily.
“I mean, you're not at all alike, but … oh, I don't know. You talk like her sometimes.” Marion paused a moment, then offered, “I don't think she would've liked you, though.”
I wouldn't? “She wouldn't?”
“Nah, I don't think so. For one thing, you're too different-looking.”
Katharine looked down at herself. She had never made it to the Goodwill to drop off Thisby's clothes. She found herself raiding the piles in the closet but didn't think she looked all that different. Yes, she had dyed her hair a couple of days ago, but it wasn't the flat black color Thisby's had been, but a deep, rich, glossy brunette. Katharine thought it looked good.
“She was weird like that. Anyone who didn't look, you know, right, she was suspicious of. She cared too much about stuff like that. It was hard on Obi — you know, my brother, Ben — because he didn't know what he wanted to look like.”
Katharine turned around slowly. “Do you miss her?”
You just keep flogging yourself, don't you?
“I have good memories of her when I was a kid. You know, taking us to the park, reading to us. My friends liked to come over to our house because we could pile cushions from the couches on the floor and dive on them. Our couches were really old and ugly, and my mom didn't care. Your house is beautiful, but it made me sad. I bet you guys didn't get to jump on the furniture.”
“No.”
“Then something happened when we got older. She got different. Nervous. She suddenly had all these rules, and we couldn't do anything right. We were always messing up something. It was like she was scared. Scared of our friends, of strangers lurking outside the door, of the music, the clothes … of us. I was okay with it. I mean, it didn't bother me all that much. But it bothered Ben, you know. I talked to my dad about it after she died, and he said when we were younger he was the one who worried, you know, about us climbing trees and running with pencils in our hands, and she wasn't. But then they made a switch, Dad says. He said it was because she didn't have much of a life when she was a teenager, and she saw a lot of people change with drugs and stuff. She grew up when there were hippies. Her best friend died while they were still in high school. OD'd and Mom didn't even know she was a junkie.”
Eve wasn't a junkie! Philip ought to keep his goddamned mouth closed, especially about things he doesn't know anything about. She wasn't a junkie. It was just that one time. That one damned time. It took only one time, and I lost her. And that's just it. Can't you see? If you mess up once, just once in a lifetime, you could die!
“Thisby, is something wrong?”
Katharine turned her physical attention back to the smoothies. “I lost a friend from drugs too. She wasn't a stoner, though people thought she was. She died — it was an accident — and suddenly people — her so-called friends — started talking about her. They said things like they knew she was a junkie all along. That was so much bullshit. She wasn't a junkie. They just liked being part of the rumor mill. Maybe it was the same with your mom's friend.”
Katharine could almost feel the offhanded shrug that Marion must have given. What did it matter to her? It was just some long-dead friend of her dead mother. It wasn't as if it meant anything to her.
I'm losing them — my children. No, I've lost them. I could have done real damage to Ben. I could have forced him on the very road I was so petrified he was going to go down. And this is probably as close to Marion as I'm going to get.
Act 4, Scene 3
I am almost out at heels.
— FALSTAFF, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1.3.32
Katharine drove resignedly from her appointment with Dr. Mantle to the restaurant where she was to meet True — and the rest of them — for dinner. True had called and explained to her that Philip — Marion's father, True added in case she didn't know who he was referring to — and Diana — his new wife, he inserted again — had invited Katharine out to dinner with them and the Dentons to thank her for entertaining Marion.
Katharine said yes, as if that were the only response left in her vocabulary. Hell, it doesn't seem to matter which path I take. They've all got out-of-control, well-fueled vehicles on them, and I'm the designated roadkill.
It had been such a strange day, noticeable even among so many strange days. And it started early.
Mulwray called in the morning, waking up Katharine and sending her heart into arrhythmia — calls at odd hours still held the panic of po
tential bad news regarding ailing parents and driving teenagers.
“What a surprise it was,” he began immediately, “to find in my operative's latest report that the very person who hired me to keep tabs on the family is spending time with the daughter right here in LA. Now how did this come about?”
“By accident most strange.” What does it matter? I'm paying you, aren't I?
“I thought you said you weren't going to contact these people.”
“It just happened.”
“It just happened,” he scoffed. “I'm nobody's fool, Miss Bennet. You're not the shining example you present yourself as. In fact, you've got yourself quite a little rap sheet. Several truancy, loitering, panhandling infractions in your teenage years. Three counts of possession with intent to sell within the last three years. Charges dropped. Inconclusive evidence. You seem to have a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or do you? Or do you think you're above the law? Is that it?” He paused. “Just what is your interest in the Ashley family?”
She twisted the phone cord around her hand like a garrote. “It's nothing bad. You wouldn't understand. If you're uncomfortable about it …” She pulled the cord tighter. “In fact, why don't we just call it quits. I don't think I need the reports anymore.”
He was silent, but Katharine could feel his annoyance and suspicion coalesce into anger. “If you change your mind, I'll charge you all the set-up fees again. Every single one of them.” He waited, but Katharine didn't respond. “I'll send you my bill,” he said in dismissal but then added, “If I hear about anything happening to the Ashley family, even remotely odd, you'll be hearing from me. And the police. On this one I'll make sure you'll be doin' time.”
Katharine was about to ask him if he would send her a copy of his file on Thisby when he hung up.
Katharine and the girls went down to Venice Beach later that morning. Katharine was trying to avoid thinking about her afternoon appointment with Mantle, and Marion was trying to be cool and not gawk. She wasn't very successful, her head snapping back and forth. “Did you see him? He was tattooed all over his chest. Look at her! She's got a bone through her nose.”
Katharine felt strangely at home. She didn't let the people in Venice bother her, anymore than they had bothered Thisby.
… it's so fucking great down there. Weirdos and pricks and crazies. Everybody's got a story. Musicians who were gonna make it big but some asshole stole their song or stole their lyrics or stole their voice.
The con artists, the showmen, the vendors — all ready to snap. Supposed to be so laid-back, but nobody is.
O brave new world peopled with such as these …
Thisby got the quote wrong, of course: “O brave new world that has such people in 't!”
Katharine let their cons and their makes and their curses roll off her like oil, the residue just building up a tougher hide; her skin was thickening exponentially.
The girls and Katharine had their fortunes told by an elderly Asian man with long, wispy chin hair, whose sun-bleached, brocaded jacket was too long in the sleeves, the frog buttons frayed and misshapen. He rubbed small, ivory-colored bones in his hands and rolled them out on a faded black felt square. Katharine wondered if this was the Chinaman who years ago had told Thisby that she would be dying young.
He wouldn't let them hear one another's fortune. “Tell each other later, if want.”
Both girls were surprisingly quiet about what the old man said. Quince, who had gone first, kept looking at him suspiciously while Marion sat there, hovering over the bones as if she could read them too. The only thing Quince offered was that his incense sucked. Marion came back, white-faced. Quince shrugged. “He just wants his money, so he says that all that good shit is going to happen to you.” Marion didn't respond.
It was Katharine's turn; the walk over to his cardboard table seemed to take a long time.
Will he see more than I'm willing to reveal? Reveal to him or even to Mantle.
The fortune-teller had her blow on the bones in his hands and then cascaded them onto the felt. He considered the pattern for a long time and then rolled them again. He stared at the bones even longer this time. He finally looked up and spoke past her left ear. “Too many paths. Very different fortunes on each path. Choose carefully.” He quickly gestured to the next person who waited.
“What'd he say?” asked Marion, who appeared to have recovered and was too curious to keep quiet.
“I have no fortune,” Katharine replied simply.
Or I have too many. What the hell.
On the way to her appointment with Mantle, Katharine drove Marion and Quince back to the Dentons'. The girls decided they didn't want to go out to dinner with the grown-ups, so they planned a fast food-videofest at home. Marion might have reconsidered if Puck had been invited, but he wasn't, and Katharine was glad all around.
She wanted to say good-bye to Marion before her father and stepmother arrived, and Katharine hugged her, perhaps a little too long for such a short acquaintance, but everyone thought it was so nice of her to be so sad that Marion was leaving. Katharine didn't know when she would see Marion next — school was starting soon — and didn't know how to arrange herself to be of importance. I am not her mother anymore.
She overheard Quince and Marion making plans to visit each other sometime in October or November, so she kept telling herself she would see Marion then. Perhaps she shouldn't have been so rash in firing Mr. Mulwray; it was painful to be around Marion, and knowing about her through Mulwray, despite his threats, might have been a less wrenching way to get information.
Hank Denton walked Katharine out to her car, even though she really didn't want his company. He stopped her before she climbed in and drove away.
“You don't remember me, do you?” he asked.
Katharine froze, her hand on the doorlatch.
“I didn't think so. It took me the longest time to place you too. I thought I knew you from somewhere when I first saw you in my kitchen, but I wasn't sure from where or when.”
Katharine just shook her head.
“Over a year ago? Downtown at the Cabaret?” he prompted.
Katharine continued to shake her head.
“It's okay.” He then looked at her stricken face. “Oh no, it was nothing like that. Nothing happened. Though we were both pretty drunk. We just talked. Maybe I talked you into a stupor, which is why you don't remember me.” His laughter sounded canned, and it didn't suit him.
Katharine tried not to bolt.
“I had just lost my sister-in-law, and I was pretty upset.”
Katharine stared at him incredulously.
He didn't seem to notice. “I talked to you because you seemed so sympathetic. You seemed so interested. You asked so many questions, and I talked so long. …” His voice trailed off, but then he seemed to collect himself. “I told you that evening that I was a little in love with her, you see. She didn't even know, mind you, but I took her death hard — harder, perhaps, than a mere brother-in-law should have, and I came out here to see if you ever did remember who I was and where you met me, and ask you not to say anything. You know, to Emily. She might not understand why I was crying in my beer in a downtown bar. Alone. She might not believe there was really nothing to it. That nothing ever came of it. She might not believe that.”
“It's okay,” Katharine barely croaked out. “I won't say anything. I believe you. Really.”
Hank nodded and let her go without another word.
Katharine pulled out into the street, barely missing the rear bumper of the car parked in front of her.
Thisby knew me? Thisby was interested in me? She didn't think I was just some boring middle-aged woman who died? Hank said she was sympathetic; she asked so many questions.
Thisby knew me!
She wanted to wrap her arms around Thisby and hug her.
. . .
Dr. Mantle had barricaded himself behind his huge mahogany desk for their meeting. He pointed to a chair an
d, when she was seated, pushed a business card across the expanse of desktop. Katharine leaned over and took it up — HELEN HUDSON, PH.D., PSYCHOTHERAPY AND CONSULTING.
Dr. Mantle sat up straight in his chair, playing leapfrog with his pipe and lighter on the desk blotter. He was good-looking, in a stuffy British sort of way, his thin, blond hair carefully combed across his forehead. He looked like someone who had prepared a speech and had been practicing it all morning — he was anxious to get it over with.
“I agreed to see you only because your mother called and asked me to. And only because I see most of her social peers and their children.” He pointed to the card in her hand. “That is the name of a colleague who has agreed to see you from now on. You can tell your mother that it was a mutual decision, that we decided it would be best for you to see someone who specializes in your kind of trouble. Dr. Hudson used to specialize in serial killers, some of the smartest psychotics out there, so your little tricks will have no effect on her. Try as you might.”
This sounds like a challenge.
“I fulfilled my part of the bargain. I owe you nothing more.” He tapped the bowl of his pipe on the desk and waited. “You have nothing to say to me?”
I'm sorry? No, I don't think so. Thisby would never want me to say that. “I'll just leave then.” She stood up.
Dr. Mantle stood up too, rapping his thigh hard against the center desk drawer. Katharine could tell that he didn't trust her to leave easily anymore than she had trusted Hooker to. His fingertips were on top of the desk, not resting lightly but seeming to force the desk to its knees. He breathed deeply, showing signs of anxiety that he valiantly tried to mask. “I will go to the police if you ever threaten me again. I have enough on you to make your life miserable too. I'll get you.”
Over my dead body.
Katharine thought she could imagine what Thisby had on him. Sex with a client. Perhaps with an underage one. Prescribing drugs she sold or shared or hoarded for herself.