Woman No. 17

by Edan Lepucki

  “Is that edited out? That vitamin bottle?” Suddenly I felt very drunk. “I’m confused.”

  “Pregnancy Essentials,” she said. “Prenatals are the size of horse pills and they taste like salmon.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She rolled her eyes for the second time and I could tell she was annoyed that I wasn’t catching on quickly enough. Here she was, letting me in on a giant secret, and I was too dense or wasted to get it.

  “I was pregnant when the photo was taken,” she said.

  She pushed me aside and opened Karl’s top drawer, pulling out a Ziploc bag of what looked like the Vitamin E pills my dad takes: yellow and translucent, with a clear liquid inside.

  “Are those prenatal vitamins?” I asked.

  She laughed. “No, stupid. They’re GoldCaps. Pot? You swallow one and it gives you the best high—mellow, mild until it isn’t. Karl has a prescription.” She opened the bag and handed me a pill. “Take it.”

  My mom never mixed anything with her alcohol except carbs and spray cheese.

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “Do it,” she said, and I swallowed the pill without water or even Champagne. The bottle was empty anyway.

  “So you don’t want anyone to know you got an abortion,” I said.

  She shook her head and gave me a pitying glance.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “I had the baby.”

  “Dev?” I said, and looked back at the photo.

  “Karl’s not his father,” Lady said, “not his biological one anyway. I don’t need anyone knowing that.”

  “Except me.”

  “And Kit and Karl. Seth didn’t know I was pregnant. It was very early. Even as I was taking those horrible pills, I was considering not going through with it. Did I really want to be a single mother of two? I’d already fucked up one child.”

  “What made you change your mind?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I met Karl.”

  Suddenly it was weird to be standing in the closet, an empty bottle of Champagne and two empty glasses between us. I fished out my curl of lemon rind, gone soggy and slick at the bottom of my glass, and gave it a lick before flinging it back.

  “I’ve got more gin downstairs than a juniper forest,” Lady said in a squeaky noir voice. I probably gave her an odd look because she said, “If that sounds like a Karl joke, that’s because it is.”

  We hurtled downstairs with a speed that shocked me. We were drunk off our asses but not drunk enough to forget what we wanted, which was to drink more and more until her confession or my unspoken one, ourselves or each other, were wiped out, deleted. I imagined pouring the gin straight into my eyeballs, lubricating them and letting the poison drip to my brain, into every little gray, wormy crevice. Now I knew something about Lady that Seth didn’t, and I wanted to unknow it. Of all the things I needed in this world, another opportunity to betray a person I cared about was at the bottom of the list.

  Lady had these tiny metal shot glasses, painted a bright blue and flecked with white, the mouth of the cup curled over into a delicate tube.

  “Cool glasses,” I said.

  “I’m wearing contacts,” she replied, and we cracked up as we drank.

  The gin, or the weed, or the combination of the two, had turned us loopy. Lady put on a record of some cheesy 1970s band that Karl loved and I swayed to it as she stepped onto the couch and surfed its cushions. It was my first time hearing a record, and when I told her how cool the crackling sounded at the beginning of the first song, Lady had said, “You’re so young I want to vomit,” and we cracked up again.

  A second bottle of gin, or was it still the first, emerged from a teak cabinet, as did some tonic water, and we kept drinking. Milkshake trotted over to me and I began dancing with him, somehow the record had changed, it was Joni Mitchell now, and I rubbed my face into Milkshake’s warm silky neck, felt his tiny cold leathery nose, and let the singing go higher and higher; when would it stop, I didn’t want it to.

  “This is some real Ladies of the Canyon shit right here,” I said.

  Lady was across the room, sucking down one of Devin’s applesauce squeeze pouches, and she flashed me a goofy thumbs-up. I laughed and laughed. The whole house was lit up gold and I wondered how Devin could sleep in that halo, why he would ever want to.

  “Let’s go visit the Eavesdroppers,” Lady said then. The baby monitor had materialized, and she clutched it in her fist.

  She was outside before I could ask whom she was talking about.

  —

  The night was cooler and darker than I expected, the moon above as slender as a fingernail clipping, Joni still crooning from the open back doors. Lady danced to the edge of the yard and flicked a switch. Suddenly the pool glowed like a ghost.

  “Now we can start the show,” she stage-whispered. She had wrapped a serape over her and it fell off her shoulders as she pointed to the houses in the hills above us. “The Eavesdroppers.”

  “Why, hello!” I called. Milkshake was jumping around at my feet, scratching my knees with his tiny talons. “Doggy! Go back inside or you’ll get eaten by a coyote!”

  “Coyote food! Coyote food!” Lady started yelling, and I pointed at the monitor on the table nearby and hushed her.

  Lady snorted, then handed me the bottle of gin and a small jar. “Eat something or you’ll die,” she said.

  It was a jar of baby hot dogs. For toddlers, to be enjoyed cold; Devin loved them. I’d tried one before out of curiosity. They tasted like sucking on my own finger: salty skin.

  “Yuck,” I said, but then I thought, Siggy! I grabbed three.

  “One at a time,” Lady instructed.

  “My own mom eats like this and she’s so skinny.”

  “Ah yes, as my own mother would say: she’s one of the lucky ones. Simone also liked to announce, ‘A minute on the lips, a decade on the hips.’ ”

  “Clearly,” I said, and did my dance again.

  Lady hooted and now we were dancing together at the edge of the pool. The serape was in a pile at our feet. She grabbed my hand, and dipped me.

  “Who was the guy?” I asked, my head hanging behind me. I imagined it detaching and plopping into the water.

  “What guy?”

  “Devin’s biological—”

  She pulled me to standing and we broke away like two cells dividing. She started dancing circles around me. She was good at it, she wanted to be watched. Her hips swayed side to side like a ringing bell, her arms lifted, a soft, dreamy look in her eyes.

  “A patient at the doctor’s office I managed,” she said. “It was a one-time thing, a stress reliever for both of us. I would never want him to know. He never mattered—in a good way, I mean.” She stopped dancing. She looked so sad. “I hate when sex matters. Don’t you?”

  I reached down for the bottle of gin, which she’d set on the first pool step. I took a long glug, praying that she’d forget this subject by the time I was done.

  When I offered her the bottle, she asked, “Did I tell you that Karl and Seth do the special signs?”

  I was too drunk to remember if I was supposed to know what the special signs even were. Stop Drop Dead.

  “Those were ours and Karl knew it.”

  Lady took a sip from the bottle and I put a hand on her cheek.

  “Let’s swim,” I whispered. As far as I was concerned, my head was already sailing across the deep end.

  It wasn’t long before Lady was down to a nude bra and underwear, tasteful and sheer at the same time. I was still fully clothed.

  “Let me get my suit,” I said, already skipping to the Cottage.

  I opened the door a crack before Lady called out, “Wait! Here’s one.” She tossed me the suit she’d been wearing earlier and looked at me expectantly.

  “Turn around,” I said.

  She pshawed and dove into the pool.

  The suit was damp and it stuck to my skin as I tried to pull it up my thighs. I h
eard Lady splashing in the water, and then she was standing next to me, dripping wet. Her pubic hair was a prim dark line.

  “Let me help you.” She paused. “Wow, you have great tits.”

  “I do?”

  “The Eavesdroppers love your hips the best, though!”

  She yanked the suit up my body, nearly pulling me to the ground in the process.

  “Gentle!” I said, laughing. “You’re gonna hurt me! Is this how Mommy Simone used to dress you or something?”

  “Probably,” she said.

  “No way.”

  “I don’t remember.” There, again, was that ghostly sadness.

  Her head was at my midsection as she kept tugging on the suit. Careful not to lose my balance, I bent down until my mouth was inches away from her ear—pale and delicate. In the glow of the pool light, it was as iridescent as a pearl.

  “Why do you keep the photo?” I whispered.

  She didn’t move. “It’s how we met, why we met. He loves it.”

  “Do you?”

  She pulled at the strap and I stood.

  “Some things are hard to let go of,” she said.

  Once I had the suit all the way on, it was clear that it was too small. “You better give me a raise for this.”

  We both laughed and it was a real thing, the purest joy, a swim after dark. It wasn’t the drinks talking, or the weed, and it wasn’t the anger we had for everyone else, it wasn’t the secrets, they didn’t exist. It was us. Only us.

  44.

  I woke on the chaise lounge. A towel was flung across my chest and another was caught up in my legs. They weren’t the swim towels either, but the beige ones from the downstairs guest bathroom, and now they were covered with dew. I had to peel myself from the plastic chair—I could just picture the red welts puckering my back—and when I did I saw that I was still wearing Lady’s bathing suit. Now it was dawn, birds everywhere. It felt like a dentist had gone into my brain and sucked everything out with that little rubber sucking tube. I turned and threw up on the pavement.

  “Lady?” I croaked, but I knew I was alone out here.

  What had happened? But I knew. A blackout had happened, the one I’d been too chickenshit (or too smart) to meet before now. What I remembered from last night: Lady’s secret, the gin, the tiny cups, the dancing, the dog, the swim. I vaguely recalled, as if from a movie I’d seen half of on cable once, how we’d done handstands in the shallow end, and then I’d floated on my back with her palms under me, both of us chanting, Light as a feather, stiff as a board. It all collapsed after that.

  I stood. My mouth was sharp and sour with the taste of vomit. I needed water. I dragged myself to the hose, and when I put my mouth to the nozzle and turned it on I was surprised by how warm the water was, still heated through by yesterday’s sun. It was like drinking stale tea and I retched again.

  I stood and looked out at the pool. That’s another thing rich people get that the rest of us don’t: pools at dawn.

  Something white bobbed up and down in the deep end.

  “Fuck,” I said. “Milkshake? Please let that be a T-shirt.”

  I rushed to the other side of the pool to get a better look, the dread rising up to my throat.

  It wasn’t a T-shirt. Or the dog. It was Peter Rabbit. He was dead, floating like a pool toy.

  I put my hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t scream or cry out or throw up again. I looked away from his bloated body, to the sky. It was so white.

  45.

  I should have scooped the poor thing out with the pool skimmer, but the sky was perfect and it wouldn’t last for long. I could go shoot the portrait and be back before Lady woke up. She wouldn’t want to take Devin outside anyway; if her hangover was anything like mine she’d plop him in front of the TV while she went searching for an Alka-Seltzer and a breakfast sandwich.

  That’s what I did. Or not at first. First, I peed for approximately ten Mississippis, the urine in the toilet a problematic shade of fluorescent yellow. And then I packed my camera and tripod, and threw on the shirt I’d purchased, along with a new tube of burgundy lipstick. My hair wasn’t the right color, but I’d decided it never would be, even if I’d managed to buy the exact same shade of Manic Panic that Lady had been into twenty or so years ago. At least my hair was knotted and crusty from my night of debauchery, which looked closer to Lady’s textured wave than it ever did clean. I took one long look at my portrait of Lady and Marco before locking up the Cottage behind me.

  I avoided the pool on my way out—I just couldn’t face it. I’d taken Peter Rabbit from my mom for his own protection, and look what had happened.

  When I got down the hill I headed first to Astro Burger, one of Katherine Mary’s great loves. How fitting that it was right across the street from where I was headed. Sausage-and-egg sandwich in my hand, a medium fountain Coke between my thighs, I parked on Melrose. The heat was coming so I ate fast with the car still running. Within twenty minutes the sky would be blue and cloudless and I had to be quick.

  For all I knew, Lady had told me last night where she’d taken the photo with Marco. That, or the white sky had handed me a vision this morning: I would need to get away from the coast because the ocean air would look too viscous and misty on film. What I needed was a wall like the one Lady and Marco were leaning against. And I had that white sky. Or I did for a little while longer. I didn’t deserve it, I didn’t deserve anything, not even a bunny, but I wasn’t about to turn my back on the opportunity either.

  After all that grease and sugar my stomach was still sour. My head might explode into brain dust before I finished the shoot. I took one last look at myself in the car’s side mirror, adjusted my hair and applied the lipstick, and headed toward Paramount.

  The outside studio walls were a lighter shade of beige than the one in Lady’s photo, but it was a decent approximation and at this hour no one was around to tell me to move along, little girl. Down the block, the studio’s tall, rounded gates presided like the entrance to heaven, but here there was just an empty sidewalk and the smell of Astro’s fries wafting across Gower.

  I set up the camera on my tripod, right at the edge of the building. Above me, posters the size of billboards advertised whatever new shit show would get canceled midway through the season. Like the word LOVERS, they wouldn’t fit in the shot.

  “I love L.A.,” I said to myself in my best Randy Newman impression. Either I was still drunk or there was too much Katherine Mary in me. Or both. I needed to shove off enough of the goof to focus on the photo.

  I used the pink chalk I’d stolen from Devin to mark where to stand, and then I focused on the spot in the viewfinder. Once I had it, I righted the camera to frame the shot. It was a bitch photographing yourself—I’d never done it, not seriously at least. If I were going for authenticity, I’d use my old point-and-shoot from middle school, but I wasn’t trying to duplicate. I was interpreting. It was my failure to duplicate that was interesting. At least I wasn’t shooting digital.

  I wondered who had taken the photo of Lady and Marco. Seth and I had never discussed it, but he must have tortured himself with that question. If someday Devin found out that Karl wasn’t his real dad, would he obsess over the truth like Seth was doing now? Seth would do it for him.

  I set the timer and stepped to my mark like I was a stage actor ready for the curtain to rise. I was standing in the right place, but the camera clicked before I’d really thought about who I was. I closed my eyes and thought of the portrait. The way some of the paint had gummed up at the sleeve of Lady’s shirt; how I’d gotten the rosacea on her arm just right. The sad light—it was so obviously miles away from any ocean, any breeze, how could I have thought that would have worked? The devotion in her eyes. Her goddamned fear that it would end too soon. That’s what desire is.

  Lady had kept this one photo, despite the fact that it was evidence of who Seth’s dad was. Or because of it. And she’d even sent it into this project. Unlike Kit’s photo, she wanted to share
it. She hadn’t just invited me to make art out of it, she needed me to.

  I reset the timer and stepped to my mark. I imagined Seth’s dad—Marco, Mark, whoever he was—and I looked at that empty space where he was supposed to be. He was already gone. I was Lady, it was a long, long time ago, and my hope and desire and fear stretched like an invisible line from my head all the way to the unreadable sky. I didn’t see or hear the shutter open, but I felt it and let it capture me, again and again. I’m here, I’m here.

  I took a few more shots before my phone started dinging. Text after text. Finally I stopped to see who it was.

  Seth: You been hanging out with my mom?

  Seth: Shes your boss not your friend

  Seth: Answer me. I know your phone is on even when your sleeping.

  “What the fuck?” I said to no one.

  Me: Sorry I was working. WTF?

  Seth: Check her Twitter

  Me: What does it say? Just tell me.

  He didn’t answer. I could tell he wasn’t giving me anything more.

  I wasn’t on stupid Twitter but I’d seen Seth look up the account the other night. @muffinbuffin41. I scrolled down and read up from the bottom:

  I’m totally wasted with The Sitter.

  The Sitter might be 20 years younger but I look better in my own bathing suit.

  I’m snacking on tiny hot dogs while The Sitter times how long she can stay underwater.

  Now The Sitter wants to swim with the dog. I told her to get the bunny.

  Yep The Sitter has a bunny.

  How do you clean vomit off an iPhone? #AskingForAFriend

  The Sitter is my best friend.

  The last tweet, her most recent, made me smile.

  46.

  I was sprawled across the love seat, sipping my headache away with a Bloody Mary, when the land line rang. It was seven thirty in the morning, which meant it was either an East Coast telemarketer or someone with limited English frantically trying to reach Jose or Vlad. But nevertheless, there I was, at the receiver, saying, “Daniels Residence,” my voice hoarse and phlegmy, the drained Bloody Mary still in my hand.