She saw God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit as she approached Heaven.
“Lord, I am crying,” she said. “Listen to my prayer, don’t listen to my lips for they have sinned. You are my hope, take my soul, I have no strength left.”
When her lips had fainted within her, she saw the path that the Lord had set for her.
Rising high on sheer spiritual spirals of new dawns, she transcended her dead corpse and in deafening silence she reached beyond the touch of light and time. Nothing really mattered. She never wanted to have anything to do with the outside world again. Her mind was quietly floating in God’s presence and that’s where she wanted to remain forever and ever, amen.
Sharon fell off her fabulous bed landing on her mahogany floor stone dead.
Chapter Seventeen
Alone, one morning, and bored, as usual, Kitty decided to go and spend some hours at the Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach. Though a serious drive from Brentwood, it was one of her favorite places where she could hang out when feeling down. Ever since Sharon’s overdose senseless suicide (Why did she do such a stupid thing? they all thought at her funeral), Kitty had found it difficult to fill her lonesome days. She woke up to a rich, cavernous house that seemed to echo strange sounds when she was alone in it, which was most of the time, since Claudio left for the office before she woke up. She was sure they were sounds from her past which nonetheless didn’t make them any less deafening. Real or imagined, the short circuited chatter in her brain was welcomed more than the dumbness of an empty house. From the moment she woke up, to the shower, to the coffee, to the vodka, for hours, her unconscious strangely reverberated that stupid song her daddy used to sing, ‘another day older and deeper in death …’
Other people sing Elvis in the shower but Kitty sang daddy.
Was it ‘death’ or ‘debt’?
She couldn’t remember as she dusted herself in ground aromatic powder.
It must have been death because daddy was never in debt. Daddy had been a renowned ophthalmologist in a private practice in Santa Monica charging four hundred dollars a visit while also selling his own brand of vitamins especially designed for eye health. Her daddy was an American visionary, a proud Lutheran who had ambivalent feelings about money. It was evil but definitely nice.
That’s why she didn’t want to stay alone in that house full of riches. All day long, between subliminal visits with daddy, she walked the unforgettable fields of her high school days. She happily would recall those days of inflated feelings of affectionate friendships, now disguised as grown up affectations, and impatiently she would charge her mind to more of the innocent same, if only she could go back. Mixed-up days of vodka effusive feelings of lovely emotions bolstered by the presence of best friends, Sharon, Robin, and Myrna, the best friends forever, if only they would last forever, which after Sharon’s suicide, she knew was an impossible wish. It’s easy to wish that nice things would last forever, but Kitty knew that they don’t. God damn days rushed like bridges under the water, or something like that, she didn’t want to think about the passing of time and the gratuitous accumulation of money thanks to daddy’s various trusts and Claudio’s grease.
A year after Sharon’s suicide, fear had paralysed the best friends. They had tried to recover, to continue their friendship but found themselves numb to each other’s touch. The open chasm created by Sharon’s absence had been filled with unexplainable feelings of guilt as if they had been responsible for her death. They tried to console each other during less and less get-togethers but strangely enough they didn’t feel the need for consolation; so the gestures fell by the wayside, as each looked the other way. And as the dark side of their obscured emotions continued to overtake their once youthful, sunny outlook, more emptiness invaded their hearts and no amount of booze could bring back the merriment that was once their foursome friendship. Their bonding, like all friendships, had been surreal, based on the seductive nuances of love and of everlasting youthful exuberance. One thing had become pretty obvious to Kitty: people, even the best of friends, at all times, do hide things from each other.
“Even best friends have secrets,” she mumbled to herself just so that she could equalize in her mind the stuff of reality.
Deep in her unpleasant thoughts, she was almost crushed by a trailer truck as she tried to exit to MacArthur Boulevard off the Interstate 405. She neither saw nor heard the massive truck brake hard when she changed lanes in her Mercedes 500. On automatic, she found her way to Fashion Island and parked in the one of the many familiar parking lots that she knew by heart: outside Nordstrom’s.
She walked the wide pedestrian areas of Fashion Island without aim. She needed nothing; she just wanted to be with people. Absentmindedly she gazed into the chic store displays for a while and then lethargically sat on one of the many benches strategically placed along the ways of the fantastic mall to catch the sun and ocean breezes of Newport Beach, alone in her dreamlike thoughts. Disconcerted by her thoughtless nothingness and oblivious to her fantastic surroundings, a gentleman approached her bench and sat next to her. He looked at her, took her hand and without much ado proposed to her that they try to retrace their lives back to their youth, “… let’s say to age six,” he said.
“Oh, much too early,” she replied.
He was very handsome and from the penetration of his eyes, his deep, dark sparkling blue eyes, he was obviously very intelligent. You don’t have blue eyes and not be highly intelligent. Unlike her uneducated husband Claudio, who also had blue eyes and blond hair but being Italian should’ve had dark hair and dark eyes, the man beside her had all the evidences of erudition and cosmopolitan sophistication. Instinctively she knew that he belonged to the hierarchy of the many centuries refined Northern European successful.
She shook her head trying to reject the illusion but the man would not go away. She thought the scene absurd, and feared that people might be watching, but found herself reaching out to him, for his arm, and she did intertwine hers with his. Surprised at how easily she had welcomed the cheery thought, she decided to find another more comfortable bench so that she could regain her sense of reality in the midst of the fantasy of Fashion Island but the illusion became even more delusional in the brightness of the Newport Beach sun as he began to talk to her and she to him.
“I didn’t mean that we should marry at the age of six,” he said, delicately holding her hand and exchanging child-like smiles with her.
“Maybe you mean that we should have had a torrid love affair at the age of six,” she said with a smile of reasonableness about her.
“It has been known that children sometimes do fall in love at a very early age and eventually marry and spend a lifetime together.”
If only it were so, she thought.
She had heard of such instances on television but it was difficult for her to believe such nonsense. Fall in love at six, make love at seven, she continued? Why not? Definitely intriguing. Who am I kidding?
“In any case,” he continued holding her attention, “right now I just want to impress on you that I am real, not some fancy of your imagination, and that as sure as the swallows return to Capistrano, sometime in the future I will find you, and I will marry you.”
This is the way it should always be, she thought, and caught herself not wanting to appear like a lonesome nobody.
“And I suppose until that day I’m supposed to remain a virgin, pristine from any other touch, faithful like a Holy Crusader’s long distance wife, until you claim me,” she smiled.
“Yes,” he squeezed her hand and smiled back.
“You’re crazy,” she said most emphatically.
Haughtily, he stood up to walk away.
“No don’t go,” she regretfully called out, not to the unsuspecting type walking by, but to her six year old lover manifestation.
“I beg your pardon,” said the unsuspecting, and he quickly moved a
way.
“Was he talking to me?” she said to herself.
She looked at one of the apathetic trees that are often planted in shopping malls. It was near her, alone, pretending to be part of a forest, and again he appeared and sat next to her as real as any tree. She touched her hair and smoothed out her skirt and her world was fine. It had been a very long time since she had felt so wonderfully happy; not since even before than when she had first met Sharon in seventh grade.
She made her way to Bloomingdales holding her secret affair hard within her hidden smile. The entrance opened to a huge glittering vestibule filled with a myriad of competing exotic perfumes diffusing from the many counters and glamorous salesladies everywhere, a familiar aromatic scene that never failed to make even Kitty drunk with pleasure. She was indulging in pubescent sensuality as she proceeded from counter to counter to fine spray her frail neck, and freshly dyed blond hair, and give relief to her stressed out armpits with the free samplers. She often bought expensive perfumes which she later didn’t recall she had done so, let alone why she had bought so much, thanks to daddy, and Claudio who also had made a lot of money recycling used, stinking, burned-out, killing, overly used, saturated restaurant oil fats and greases.
She felt refreshed and was aware that all the sales ladies and even other well to do customers were looking at her, wishing they had her money. It was like walking through a flowering park in May, and after trying out the finest of essences, she felt revitalized, like Hera bathing in her pristine, magic springs of yore. She was once again young, touched for the very first time by all the perfumes of Paris. She wickedly smiled and wished she didn’t have to leave Bloomingdales, but there were other surprises, so many more sweet surprises in Newport Beach’s Fashion Island than just perfume stores. So, out she went happy as a lark, a bird whose melody she had never heard, but knew that it sings longing songs in distant exotic lands, somewhere beyond the sea.
“The two worst things about getting old are age and poverty. You can’t avoid age, but damn it, you must do everything to avoid poverty. Even fuck your way out of it,” she recalled Claudio’s resolve against poverty, which was something that Kitty always admired about her immigrant husband. And on this shopping day, Kitty was determined to do her best against both age and poverty. And aren’t all malls intended to make you feel juvenile?
Next door was Neiman Marcus and every time Kitty went through its heavy doors she felt deep humility. For Kitty, shopping at Neiman’s was like praying in a cathedral: she walked the aisles slowly with respect; it was a necessary ritual to warm up to the celestial prices.
She bought some heavenly chocolates as a starter and sauntered to the ladies floor.
A classy-chic saleslady floated out of nowhere and offered to serve, and Kitty felt flattered. The lady was gym-tall, and thin, immaculately dressed, her complexion without blemish. It was hard to tell how old she was because she was a living mannequin.
“Can I help you, Madam? Are you looking for something special?”
“Do you have any suggestions?” said Kitty, well versed in the ritual.
“We do have some new pretty dresses that just arrived today …” she said.
Kitty did buy three dresses on this Neiman Marcus occasion: an evening gown for $1690.00, a leaf-print zip dress for $675.00, and a fancy dress for $3950.00. Kitty knew that even for her this was a lot of money, and that Claudio would never stand for it, as much as he loved her, but it made her feel good to make the trade knowing that within days she could return the dresses and get her money back without any questions from an establishment that above all prized its clientele. It’s only middleclass people who are afraid to make the deal, and Neiman doesn’t deal with middle class.
She felt exhausted and hungry as she proudly walked the smart ways of Fashion Island showing off her Neiman Marcus shopping bag. She took a booth at La Table and ordered a cup of bisque, and modestly, a diet coke. The bisque was always creamy lovely pink at La Table but this day it tasted like shit. It must be the coke, she thought and left unsatisfied, and looking for a hard drink. She settled for La Viande restaurant where one could always depend on a great Angus burger and an excellent Grey Goose martini. She requested an outdoor table, and the martinis were lovely, one preceding the juicy burger, and the second during it. Lovely luscious vodka to take away the pain from aching feet.
While sucking on her quarter pounder medium rare overly juicy burger packed with slices of tomatoes, onions, lettuce, and pickles, and not intending to stare, her eyes, unaccustomed as it were, travelled to a nearby table where sat a gorgeous thirtyish-something blonde lady eating by herself. There was something familiar about the scene. It wasn’t just the blond hair.
They’re all blondes in Fashion Island now days, thought Kitty; blondes with Spanish dark eyes, and modern-living blondes aimlessly floating among the TV waves of rich towns.
Kitty quickly re-focussed her eyes back on the gorgeous lady. She busted her brains trying to make the connection without being accused of staring. Finally, it was the beautiful actress Susan Kelly breezing the air all around her. Kitty decided right there and then that she loved Suzie, as all her fans knew her, because even while sitting, Suzie had statuesque class in her expensive clothes and blond hair. It was strange, though, that Susan Kelly was sitting alone, famous as she was. You’d think that there would be at least a couple of young beaux escorting her. Then she had this unkind thought about Suzie: rumour had it that she is like a London police station, dicks going in and out all the time, Kitty looked past herself.
She felt unkind. Even she knew that it was an old silly sixth-graders joke. She should have been more generous because today’s everyday shopping day had become a bit more glamorous special, thanks to Suzie’s presence.
What the fuck? Being cheeky is part of the business, Kitty keenly tried to show off her familiarity to the many Hollywood myths about the business. After all, living next door to Hollywood, she felt an affinity to the Susan Kellys of the business.
Back on the 405, she figured she would make it back to Brentwood by three pm, just in time to catch the Tom Hanks movie on HBO. She couldn’t recall the name of the movie but it didn’t matter because all of Tom Hank’s movies had the same title. She justified the long drive to Newport Beach because the shopping there was worth it and she loved the name, Newport Beach. It had all the right stuff: new and port, and beach, she thought, as she recklessly weaved in and out of the car pool lane on her way home. Besides, it was a nice way to kill time of which she had plenty of, and she half-heartedly yawned.
When she got home she felt the boredom still there. Nothing had changed since she had exited the house hours earlier in an attempt to escape it.
“Too much money and nothing to do,” she said to the house.
And always, the thought of being ‘out there’ scared the shit out of her.
After a quick shower, she made her way to the TV room that also included a wet bar and turned on the humongous TV that Claudio had bought for them and their friends. She thought that Claudio had said that it was nine hundred inches, or maybe that it cost nine thousand dollars. She found Tom Hanks on HBO and she tried watching the movie but on this day, just like the bisque, the movie sucked too. It was too unbearable, cute as Tom was.
She searched the waves for a more titillating affair and she was in luck. The affair involved a beautiful young American woman, twenty three, Kitty figured, travelling by her lonely self in Paris, of all places. The place was kind of mute though because she and her French lover, a man old enough to be her father, hardly ever left the bedroom. But the dashing actor, probably gay, thought Kitty, was barely believable as a likely lover only because the young woman was hot and he never promised her anything more than a few fucks a week. After a few scenes of he on top, she on top, with interruptions of maximal stares and minimal conversation, and lots of the same spoon yogurt licking, Kitty decided that the movie w
as one of those French comedies that pretend to be kind of porno but they never are because French male actors are not manly enough to keep a real woman interested, and invariably she fell asleep watching the boring slop.
*
“No let’s not go out to eat,” said Claudio.
He had found Kitty sleeping on the huge leather sofa in the TV room.
“But we never go out,” said Kitty.
“You’re out every day and you were out today too,” said Claudio who lovingly cupped Kitty’s breasts and then petted her on the head.
“But only for shopping,” she said and she happily accepted Claudio’s sloppy kisses. Kitty loved being made love to while half asleep. So they made love and forgot about dinner though there were all sorts of foreign cheeses and wines in the house that they munched on while watching TV together.
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