by Ashley Ream
“Where’s the husband?” I asked while her arms were still around my waist.
“Work,” she said. “We’re better off without him.”
She was the last. Richard wasn’t coming. Maybe I was being punished. Maybe he, too, really did have to work. Maybe it was Sheila.
I shooed Jenny out of the kitchen and picked up serving plates to carry to the table. The light was low. Marvin Gaye was playing. People wandered to their seats carrying their glasses. Annabelle and Jeremy were laughing. Jenny smiled at them. I could tell she wanted badly to fit in.
I’d ordered all my favorite foods from all my favorite restaurants. This was it. Not my last meal but what a last meal should be. I set down the corn fritters with spicy aioli and the watermelon and mozzarella skewers drizzled with syrup-thick balsamic vinegar. I stayed standing while everyone else settled into their chairs and conversation naturally fell away and eyes came to me.
“As some of you know by now, I’m very sick.”
Jenny looked down at her plate, and Jeremy put his fingers to his mouth.
“Sick with what?” Annabelle asked.
Half the table threw her a look for interrupting.
“Cancer,” I said. “In my brain. There’s no use fighting it anymore, so I’m discontinuing treatment and throwing myself a party instead.”
The corners of mouths and eyes twitched downward. Everyone looked as though they’d all been fired. Jenny for the second time.
“I have, in my own way,” I continued, “been throwing it for three weeks. I’ve done what I wanted in just the way I wanted, and I’m going to go right on that way until it’s time to stop. So stop looking at me like that. It’s depressing. I have right here all my favorite people, all the best wine, and all the best food. So cheers, motherfuckers, cause there’s nothing left.”
I held up my glass to toast.
Nobody knew what to do. They sat there with corn fritters cooling in front of them, waiting for someone to take the lead. Marvin seemed to get louder in the silence, and a stone formed in my stomach.
Then there was a scraping of chair on polished concrete, and Mark stood up and raised his glass. After a moment, Jeremy stood up and Jenny and Brandon and Annabelle.
“Cheers, motherfuckers,” Mark said.
“Cheers,” the others echoed.
We drank, and then we ate. And the more wine we poured the easier things got. We ate roasted marrowbone and crispy pig ears, frisee salad with bacon and poached egg, barbecued ribs, macaroni and cheese, and fried chicken with hot sauce. I said I didn’t want to talk about being sick, so we argued about art and who was good and who wasn’t. Jeremy asked Jenny what she thought. Annabelle asked to see Jeremy’s work, and someone brought up sex because someone always does.
“All art is about sex,” Annabelle said.
“All of everything is about sex,” Brandon hollered across the table.
Everyone laughed, and Mark called out a “Hallelujah,” which made Jeremy blush.
Marvin gave way to the Best of Motown and then to Ray Charles, who is the best of everything. We polished off another bottle of wine, and I dropped it into the recycling bin, which threatened to fall over and tip out all the other bottles.
After dinner, I made everyone help clean up, and when they left, everyone wrapped their arms around me an extra long time. Jeremy told me not to give up, and Jenny looked as if she didn’t know what to do with her arms. After they had gone, I went to bed in my underwear, feeling tipsy enough to give walking my full and undivided attention.
Chuckles hopped up on the bed. He had a tiny bit of tartare stuck to the fur on his chin. I touched it with the tip of my finger. He pulled his smooshed face back, stuck out his tongue, and licked it off. Then licked again and moved on to licking other parts just in case there was something else he’d missed.
“Good night, Chuckles.”
9 Days
I woke up looking at my alarm clock. It was notable, I thought, to be down to single-digit days. It was energizing and looming and too soon and too far away, and all of those feelings were strangely remote, as though they were happening in a movie. I empathized with that character but soon would get up and go home, leaving my popcorn bucket and half-full cup of soda behind for someone else to clean up.
I got out of bed. I had a big day ahead of me.
At ten o’clock, I opened my studio door and, failing to find anything convenient and heavy to prop it open with, ran a loop of duct tape around the door handle and secured it to the wall. I marked everything that wasn’t for sale with blue painter’s tape: all the art and supplies, enough dishes and clothes to get me through the next week, my bed, the litter box, and just in case you were thinking about it, my toothbrush.
By ten thirty they had started to trickle in. I got college students moving into first apartments and hipsters either broke or finding authentic angst by living as if they were. I sold the sofa to a Swedish couple living in the States for two years and unwilling to purchase nice furniture they’d only abandon. I had to assume IKEA was closed or possibly destroyed by fire. A middle-aged man in starched jeans bought my toaster. Other customers browsed but not him. He went straight for the toaster and snatched it up as if there might be a run on them. I sat on one of the blue stools at my worktable, which someone had tried to buy out from under me but I had refused to sell. I had to sit on something, and I’d already lost the couch. I counted change and sketched in a notebook and barked at people who tried to peek behind the drop cloths I’d draped over my paintings.
“Not for sale!” I snapped. For a while, I did it in a fake Chinese accent, which is the sort of thing you do after four hours of watching people paw through your things.
One woman chose the dress I wore to Annabelle’s party.
“You may want to have that cleaned,” I said, as I reached for the cash.
She changed her mind.
An older woman in comfortable shoes was interested in my cookware, some of which, including a Bundt pan, I didn’t know I owned. We perused my cabinets together with an equal sense of discovery and newness. Either some of that stuff had been wedding gifts or I was robbing Bed Bath & Beyond in my sleep.
“So,” she asked, after we’d agreed on a price for an assortment of pots and pans and a never-before-used cheese grater, “are you moving?”
“No,” I said. “I’m dying.”
“Me, too!” She exclaimed it with great joy, as though she’d just discovered we both collected Beanie Babies or had attended the same Weight Watchers meetings. “I’m going to use these to cook up all my favorite foods. Everything fried and with cheese.”
She held up the grater.
“Good for you,” I told her, and we waved good-bye.
People came and went in waves. There were lulls in between, and when another lull hit at four o’clock, I decided I was done. I’d sold enough, enough to make it easier on whoever came and cleaned up afterward. Richard, maybe, if he wanted the job. I sold the dining room set out from under my computer, and then the laptop itself. I’d sold the television, my nightstand, and half the clothes. The small kitchen appliances were all gone and so were most of my books. I’d made a little over a thousand dollars in cash, which was interesting in the way that the average temperature in Antarctica is interesting. Nice to know, but it’s not really going to be applicable.
I picked up the landline, which had a bit of blue painter’s tape stuck to it, and dialed Elaine’s number.
“Let’s get naked.”
Elaine gave me an address in Topanga, which is a squiggle on a map where I don’t go. L.A.’s urban sprawl is limited only by the surrounding mountains. Topanga sits on its wild edges. There’s one main road both in and out that winds in tight S-curves through what is mostly state park land. Mule deer that hop like rabbits and have ears like donkeys live there, along with quail and rattlesnakes and spiders the size of dessert plates. Topanga has creeks that fill up, flood, and wash out roads; boulders that fall from th
e sky; and once every few years wildfire rushes through to blacken the ground and eat all the houses. Joni Mitchell lived there along with a few of the Doors and some people Hollywood kicked out during the Red scare. It had a nudist colony for years; although I hear they sold the land and bought pants. Most Topanga residents are vegan and smell like patchouli. It is, in short, far more dangerous than South Central ever dreamed it could be.
It also gets dark fast there. The sun dips below the mountains and the wooded, narrow roads have no more lighting than the headlights of your car. Something scurried in the underbrush, and I remembered that one of Charles Manson’s victims lived here. I drove slowly, squinting as I approached each small road sign marking a narrow turnoff. I took one of the roads and slowed further as my tires bounced across a steel and wooden bridge not more than eight feet long across a dry creek bed. I started to gain elevation and began to pass driveways with gates and arches that led to houses too far off in the woods to see.
Half a mile in, I saw the Asian-inspired, squared-off wooden arch I’d been told to spot. I turned on my blinker, signaling to the prowling mountain lions, and bumped onto the gravel driveway. Two ruts with a grassy strip down the middle guided my tires toward her house and studio, which, now that I was off the road, glowed like a campfire lantern in the near-full dark.
“I come in peace,” I said when she opened the door.
“That’s good. No one can hear me scream out here.”
I followed her inside. Obviously she knew that bit of Manson trivia, too.
“There’s a city just over those mountains,” I told her. “We have indoor plumbing and takeout.”
“Actually,” she said, “I like it here.”
The inside of the house looked like below deck on a sailing boat, all polished wood surfaces and built-in furniture. The recessed lighting bounced off the oak and made it glow like light passing through honey. A flat-screen TV hung over the fireplace, and through a doorway on my right, I could see chef-quality kitchen appliances.
My television, when I’d had one, had been two feet deep, full of vacuum tubes, and powered by a rat on a squeaky wheel. Probably I could’ve replaced it if I’d cared enough, but this was another level entirely.
“Where did all this money come from?”
It was out of my mouth before the full rudeness of it registered.
“Trust fund.”
“I thought those were an urban legend,” I said, “like people who have their kidneys stolen and wake up in a bathtub full of ice.”
I looked up. Even the ceiling was wood. There was a lot of art. Paintings and photographs on the walls, a little of everything, none of it hers. Mostly thirties- and forties-era stuff. Sculptures, too. Small-scale abstract pieces on the coffee table and tucked into bookshelves, built-in, of course.
It was such a crapshoot, wasn’t it? How differently her life must’ve gone from mine. I’d never thought about it before. We had the same job, showed at the same gallery. I never thought our lives—our day-to-day, taking-out-the-trash lives—would be so different.
“What did your father do?” I asked.
“Engineer by trade. He had some aerospace patents, started his own company.”
“Did your mom stay at home?”
“Until she died.”
“Died of what?”
“Ovarian cancer.”
“My mom died, too, when I was a kid.”
“I didn’t know that,” she said. “I’m sorry. What did she have?”
“A gunshot wound.”
She opened her mouth and then closed it again.
“It’s okay,” I said and pointed at the dispenser on the door of her refrigerator. “Does that make crushed ice?”
“Yes. Do you want some?”
“Do you have Coke?”
“With a cherry and a bendy straw?” she offered.
“Absolutely.”
She made my drink and pointed out a glass door to a small outbuilding twenty yards away. Lights were on inside it, and a flagstone path through a bed of gravel lit with ankle-height lanterns marked the way.
“I laid a robe out for you in the bathroom. Just come out when you’re ready.”
The bathroom was down the hall. It had a modern claw-foot tub and a hammered copper sink basin. I opened the cabinets underneath, but this wasn’t her private bathroom. There were no toiletries or medicines, only spare toilet paper rolls and hand towels. I peed and washed my hands. The soap in the dispenser smelled like honeysuckle.
I took off my clothes and folded them up in a pile on the marble tiled floor. It was good, I thought, that the bathroom mirror was hung high, and I couldn’t see anything in it from the nipples down. Otherwise vanity might have stopped me. The robe was white and fluffy like you might get at a high-end spa. I put it on and took my Coke with me.
Out on the flagstones, I shivered and hurried to the studio.
Inside, Elaine was setting up her materials. She had a handful of heavy, fibrous pieces of paper, off-white and with raw edges, alligator-clipped to a drawing board and set up on her easel. They were each two feet tall, and a hell of a lot more expensive than anything I’d have used for sketching.
She pointed to a stool ten feet away. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said. “Whatever position you prefer.”
There was track lighting above us with most of it pointed over her drawing space and my modeling space. It was like having a soft spotlight shining on you. It was warm in there. I didn’t really need the robe.
“I’m not usually so easy to get naked,” I said.
“Everyone’s nervous the first time.”
She was barefoot and wearing an embroidered peasant blouse over moss-green hiking shorts and was at a quarter profile to me. It was easy for her to shift her gaze to me when she needed without either of us having to stare directly into the eyes of the other.
“I’m not nervous,” I said.
She waited.
“Okay, I’m nervous.”
My stomach felt like I’d swallowed a handful of jumping beans, and I was thinking about how, after years of meds, I’d put on weight and my butt was dimply. I took off the robe quickly and tossed it toward the worktable, but only part of it made it and then the whole thing slid off onto the floor.
“I’m not going to ask you not to draw my butt fat because if someone asked me not to draw their butt fat, I’d probably decide the butt fat was the most interesting thing.”
“You won’t even be recognizable when I’m done,” she said.
I’d perched myself on the edge of the model’s stool, one foot on the rung and one on the floor. My hands were on the seat behind me, my elbows straight and locked. “If I’m not recognizable, you’ll have to talk about me a lot so people know I posed for you.”
She smiled with teeth. “You know I will.”
8 Days
“What the hell happened to all your stuff?” Richard demanded when I opened the door.
He was wearing long cargo shorts and a gray T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, nor, I suspected, had he showered before showing up at my place that morning. He had a Dodgers baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and didn’t look like he’d slept.
“I sold it,” I said, letting him in.
“Why?”
“It wouldn’t fit in the economy-size pyramid my slaves are building to guide me into the afterlife.”
He did not think that was funny. In truth, it wasn’t one of my better jokes, but I still thought I should’ve gotten points for trying.
“You haven’t called me about your appointments,” he whined. “I told you I wanted to go.”
“There hasn’t been a good time.”
“It’s never a good time. It doesn’t matter.”
“You have a life.”
“Sheila and I broke up.”
Well, there. Now we were getting to it.
“That’s too bad,” I said, because that’s what you’re supposed to say, and those sort
s of things just come out like farts and sneezes.
“Thanks.”
“What happened?”
Chuckles came over to rub the length of his body on Richard’s sneakers and then roll over on top of his foot to display both his shaggy stomach and his preference for my ex over me.
Richard bent down to scratch the cat’s undercarriage as directed. “You know how sometimes you fight about something, like who’s running up the electric bill, but you don’t even care about the electric bill?”
“So you broke up over an electric bill because you wanted to break up and that’s the best you could come up with?”
“Pretty much. She thought I was insane.”
“You are insane.”
“I was going to ask if I could sleep on your couch.” He looked at the empty and slightly cleaner spot on the floor where the couch had been. “Guess not.”
“I sold it to a Swedish couple,” I said. “IKEA was closed.”
We stopped at a taco truck, which was doing a brisk early lunch business with the construction workers who’d torn up a particularly inconvenient section of Santa Monica Boulevard. While we waited for our order, we listened to traffic, and I sipped a tamarind Jarritos and thought about how much time I’d spent hearing traffic in L.A. and how I’d never really noticed it before.
“You notice how L.A. is a city of sound more than smell?” I asked.
“What?”
Richard had a can of Diet Coke and was wiping condensation off the sides with a napkin. The truck gave out the sort of napkins you buy at the grocery store and use in your own house rather than the kind that come out of dispensers at diner tables.
“Some cities are all about the smell. New York is all about the smell. L.A. doesn’t really smell much, but it has this low-grade ambient noise all the time. Mostly cars.”
“The Santa Monica Library smells like piss,” said one of the workers waiting for his order. He had on an orange vest and was wearing long pants and sleeves despite the heat.