Sam's stomach and bowels rumbled angrily. He waited for it to pass and gazed down at the feeble, foot-high surf. Here and there, a body boarder dawdled lethargically in the waves. The three young biking girls had joined a group of teenagers on the sand and were laying out towels and anointing themselves with suntan lotion. A handheld shot at two hundred fifty, f-stop eight, ISO two hundred. Except that, no one bought beach landscapes like those anymore. They were as clichéd as his mother Marge's favorite day-glow-velvet praying Jesus.
Louisville. Fucking Louisville.
Chapter 5
"Louisville? You told him Louisville?" Lydia massaged the dull ache in her forehead as she tried to make sense of it. "Jesus, Mac. My brother will kill him."
Mac stood at the sink in his kitchen, attacking a carrot with a peeler. A row of skinny orange and green sticks attested to his distaste for vegetable skin. No one peeled vegetables these days, but Lydia didn't feel like arguing. A pile of beef chunks sat on the counter next to a mountain of fat and gristle cuttings. By the time Mac ladled up his mother's Irish Stew, there would be nothing left but tepid water.
"Serve him right," Mac snorted with a thick gouge. "Not that he's gonna find out."
"How do you know that? How do you know he's not going back to Kentucky?"
"For you? Since when did he do anything for you? He don't give a shit about nobody."
Lydia turned away from her friend and faced out the living room window. She still hadn't got used to the idea of Mac the bartender owning this immaculate Palos Verdes palace. He had made enough money off boxing back in the day when the South Bay was still a collection of small towns and farm communities, before the 405 came through and turned it into a noisy, over-priced carpet of cars and people. Or so he said. The house once belonged to a Japanese family, who lost it in the war when they were illegally shoved out to Manzanar.
Lydia hadn't tasted a drink in four days. Mac wouldn't let her smoke in his house, so she had drastically cut back on that too. The waxy death shroud of a non-stop hangover had melted off her limbs and body, but left her with an invisible axe stuck in her forehead. "What did you say?" she asked.
"You asked what if he sees you in town."
"I did? When?"
"Two seconds ago! Are you okay?" Mac downed carrot and peeler and stared at her all wrong. "I just said, if you were staying at the rehab center, you wouldn't have to see him anyway. At least until you were ready to deal with it."
"Oh yeah, sure."
Was it the headache? The booze? Maybe she was just getting old? For some time now, Lydia had felt things slipping away. Missing words and phrases. Simple numbers on a grocery receipt that didn't add up right. Things she knew had happened—because she heard herself talking about them—but no longer remembered how they felt. When she was younger, she could juggle ten or fifteen ideas at a time. Now she couldn't remember what she was thinking about five minutes ago. What was she thinking about? Oh yeah—angry cows and horses roaming the countrified Palos Verdes hills, Mac beating out some stranger's brains to buy a stolen Japanese house.
Lydia eased herself off the stool. "I have to smoke."
Mac stopped torturing the carrot and pointed the peeler at her. "You're gonna do it, aren't you?" With his shirtsleeves neatly rolled, his forearms made enormous muscled tree trunks with hair for bark. Funny that he hadn't tried anything with her. Lydia had wondered more than once which way he swung.
"Do what?" she asked. He gave her a look that made her laugh through her headache. "Yes," she sighed. "I said I was, so I am. I'm doing the rehab."
"You sure?"
"You want to come and watch? Maybe you can take my place!"
Lydia grimaced at the consternation on Mac's face and let herself out the sliding glass windows. The breeze—at least she hoped it was that—blew a shiver through her. It was so damn gloomy and cold out here in the morning. You could hardly see the ocean for the fog. She lit a cigarette, sucked in half of it on the first drag, and thought of Sam.
She had read somewhere that women never quit trying to transform their men. Men, on the other hand, lived in terror of their women changing. It had never worked like that for Sam and Lydia. Even now, she desperately wanted the tough, funny, damn-it-all guy she had fallen in love with to re-materialize. The problem was, Sam no longer wanted anything at all.
Was Mac gay? When he first proposed taking her home, Lydia had wondered what he had in mind. She could use the sex. She hadn't been laid in six months—she hadn't been kissed since forever. Oh Sam, how could he let it go like this? The memory of her dumb brute of a husband ripping off her dress, wrenching at her bra strap and panties, and taking her on the floor of the studio, felt like a scene from someone else's life. Something she must have read somewhere.
God, she felt guilty. Fucking, fucking cancer. She lit another cigarette and forced herself to think about something else. Her brother Joe and Sam on the patch of lawn outside her mother's shotgun house in South Louisville. Lydia pronounced Louisville like a native—Looville—even though it never failed to crack up her husband. Sam pushing the doorbell, Joe coming to the screen, and the pair of Neanderthals facing off over her. Fisticuffs on the lawn, huge, sweaty beasts wrestling each other to the ground, while she hovered overhead, chirping false horror in a flowered print dress and pearls. Police arriving and pulling the two savages apart. The sweet taste of blood trickling down Sam's bristly chin.
The door slid open behind her. "Look at you!" Mac said. "Shouldn't you put on a coat?"
No, not really. At least when Lydia was freezing, she could tell she was still alive. She glanced at the steam rising out of the mug in his hand and shook her head. She would do the rehab, she decided. Not for Mac and his reforming soul, not for a crumb of respect from the family she hadn't seen in ten years, and especially not for the husband wallowing in the darkness of his own guilt- and cancer-ridden soul. But for herself. She would clean up her act and come back and beat her husband's brains out, until he did the surgery, the chemo, the radiation, whatever else it took to jolt him back alive.
"What?" Mac asked now. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
"For God's sake," she said before she could think about it. "Are you going to fuck me or not?"
Chapter 6
Rudy sat at the desk in the studio office, surrounded by gadgets, boxes, and bubble wrap. A pile of manuals and do-it-yourself books had slipped off and lay strewn across the floor. He didn't get any of this shit. It had taken him a half-hour just to figure out the battery charger thing, another half-hour to get what the memory card did and where to stick it. Now he had the camera assembled, sometimes the flash worked, sometimes it didn't. And the pictures he took—of gadgets, boxes, and bubble wrap—glowed a corpse-like shade of blue in the viewer on the back. It was beginning to seriously piss him off.
Rudy had asked around and heard that the best place to find photographic equipment was a place called Samy's on Fairfax up in Hollywood. Rudy had gone there and found four floors of this crap! It took him an hour just to find a clerk who didn't sneer down his nose for a living. The guy who eventually helped him, a professional photographer himself named White—and if he was such a fucking professional, what was he doing hustling cameras at Samy's?—at least had the class to play along with Rudy's pathetic imitation of a professional.
Play along, Rudy snorted to himself. Jesus! He was out ten thousand dollars! When he finally dropped the pretense and came clean, White shrugged his shoulders and said, "Hey, don't worry about it. We all started somewhere." Rudy could have reached across the counter and kissed the man. Instead, he wondered if maybe he let him fleece him.
But the strangest, most unsettling, thing occurred at the end of Rudy's little shopping spree, when he lifted the cool-looking green-and-black backpack on his way to the third-floor elevator. The counters were four deep with impatient customers and yelling sales clerks, and no one saw him casually add the backpack to the two huge plastic bags of equipment. What the fuck, h
e thought. With all he had spent, he deserved a discount. But by the time he reached the ground floor entrance, some infuriating inner voice out of God-knows-where shoved him to the counter and made him pay for it. As if Mister Fucking Professional Photography Studio Owner was too big for that shit now. What was the matter with him?
Rudy fished his cell phone out of the mess on the desk and punched the Send button. He knew exactly what was wrong. He didn't need to look up the phone number—he had called it ten times in the last two days.
"Yes Rudy. What is it now?"
Fucking lawyers with their superior airs. "Do you know how much this stuff costs? They had a camera, a Hassel..." Rudy checked the note he had scribbled on a piece of paper. "A Hasselblad, went to the Moon or something. Thirty-five thousand dollars!"
"Easy buddy," the smooth-talking sonofabitch soothed him, even though he was no buddy Rudy could recall. "That's what you're collecting the insurance for. You'll be able to buy all the Hasselblads you want."
"But—"
"Will you relax? I already told you. Another week or two and you'll be all set."
"I'm already out ten thousand of my own cash. You sure this guy—"
"How many times do I have to tell you? Yes, you own the business, and no, he can't take it back. It's all done, except for the final documents. What's the matter? You got something against good luck?"
Rudy's teeth ground silently. Good luck? Did the asshole say good luck? Rudy could spend all day explaining what good luck meant—it meant another fucking disaster lurking around the corner.
"Do me a favor and get out your keys," the attorney was saying.
"What?"
"Get out your keys!"
Rudy did as he was told. "What about them?"
"See that new brass door key on your chain? You're the only dude in the world has one like that, and no one can take it away from you. Just don't screw it up!"
Rudy threw the keys back onto the desk. "Don't you play superior with me, asshole! This isn't like bailing a hooker out of—" But the sonofabitch hung up on him. "Motherfucker!" Rudy screamed. He was so close to hauling off and killing somebody. Instead, he grabbed keys, camera, and the mumbo jumbo guidebook, and set off for Malloy's.
The afternoon sun baked the street and did nothing to lighten his mood. What was it with people, they took such pleasure out of looking down their noses at him? He had always known he had something. Some days he couldn't string two words together, but whenever he stopped and looked around at the world, he saw things nobody else did. He knew it by the dumb snorts and sneers they spewed at him whenever he tried to clue them in. He was a fucking artist, and all those motherfuckers could take their sorry opinions and shove them up their whatevers. He would show them all.
Outside the bar, Rudy hesitated. He had been putting this off for days. But what the hell—Malloy's was the only refuge in town for hip, young hustlers at their wits' end.
The bartender was washing glasses when Rudy walked in and found a stool away from the other customers. The giant took his sweet time, even though the place was half-empty. Rudy hadn't tried to come in here since the night he made a complete ass of himself while accidentally trading in a girlfriend for a photography studio. He hoped the man wouldn't recognize him in a wrinkled tee shirt and jeans.
"Can I help you with something?"
Fuck, Rudy thought, no chance. "Look, about the other night—"
"Can I help you with something?" the bartender repeated. The man was one stone-cold fish.
Rudy sighed. He heard himself say, "I'm sorry. It'll never happen again. Can I have a Tequila Sunrise, please?"
The bartender stared at him a good long minute before ambling off to the shelves. Rudy shook himself and opened the manual. By the time the drink appeared, he was already lost in something called Mode—Program, Auto, or Manual. He followed the diagram and found the switch on the camera. In all the technical crap, he at least figured out that he was already in Program Mode, where the camera did all the thinking for him. Fine by me, he decided. He already had too much on his mind.
Twenty minutes of puzzled studying later, he glanced up no wiser and found the ice melted in his untouched drink. Shit! What was it with him? He fingered the stubble on his chin, glanced around, and discreetly took a whiff of his armpits. And finally got around to facing the Big Fucking Picture.
After five nights sleeping on the desk in the studio, he looked and felt like shit, but just couldn't face going back to his empty apartment. What a cheese-eating wimp. Here he was, trying to wrap his mind around the most unwrappable event of his life, and all he could think about was a woman.
God, he had screwed that one up. He could figure out the camera and take pretty pictures from here 'til Sunday, and he would still feel like one god-awful loser. Sheri. They had never gone in for all the poetry crap, but in a way Rudy never could explain, Sheri was his ticket to a life that meant something. When she looked at him, he saw a reflection in her eyes of something he actually wanted to be. Her faith unnerved him maybe, scared him back into the black hole of ... whatever. All he knew was, he hadn't felt this lost, hadn't tasted this much self-loathing, since the last time he picked his mother off the floor, threw her needle collection into the trash, and waited for her to wake up and scream her favorite string of obscenities at him.
Rudy swallowed all of the bile in his skull, dropped a twenty on the counter, and walked out. The sun blinded him. He hardly noticed the cars and people around him on the long, ragged, four-block trek back to the studio. A hand was fumbling in his pocket for the keys, when he glanced up and found her standing under a nearby palm tree.
"I was going to break in," she said. "But I figured that was more in your line of work."
"What the fuck are you doing here?"
Sheri gazed at him evenly. "Just checking to see if you learned your fucking lesson. I guess not."
She started away, but Rudy leapt across and stopped her. "Just a minute, will you?" God, she could be a bitch when she wanted, although he knew better than to use that word within a mile of her.
"Give me that thing." Sheri took the camera from his hands, turned on the switch, and removed the lens cap.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm taking a picture of a guy who's too stupid to realize that he just screwed up the best thing he ever had."
Rudy sighed. He had never felt so weary. Sometimes with a woman, you had to just suck it up and come clean. "Well, that guy ain't me."
Chapter 7
Lydia vaulted out of sleep, her throat full of vomit. For a second, she couldn't breathe. She gasped back the panic and forced her swallowing muscles to do their job. The bile stung like burning bleach all the way back down. She coughed. It was the wrong thing to do, but she couldn't help it. Sweat lathered her skin. She had heard about alcoholics suffocating on vomit in their sleep. Horrified, she sank back to the pillow and held on, waiting for it to pass.
She shoved her mind elsewhere, but it refused to co-operate. Seven days now without a drink. She could smell the sweet, woodsy tang of the Bourbon in her imagination, the bottle on the table, the glass at her lips, smooth, spreading out like a wave of calm, oozing into her veins, pulsating through her body. Just one tipple, as Mac would have said. One tiny little drop on the tip of her tongue. She hadn't felt this strong an urge since...
Where was Mac, she finally got around to wondering. Why wasn’t he lying in bed next to her? A tiny voice cried out three cheers for that, but she suppressed it. She already felt guilty enough for leading him on. Until three days ago, she couldn't remember the last time she faked an orgasm. Now she was going for the record.
Out in the hallway, heavy stockinged feet creaked up the stairs. Lydia suppressed an involuntary groan. A faint clink of dishes told her Mac was bringing her breakfast. Another clink, then the fists that had pummeled a string of vicious prizefighters into submission set a tray delicately across her lap. Bangers and mash with boiling coffee at eight o'clock in the morni
ng. And she thought it was the English who did the cooking in hell.
"Good morning sunshine," Mac said, at his most irritating cheerful. Lydia attempted a smile, but couldn't find the words. This was so not working. Mac sat down next to her and did the impish thing, stealing a bite of soggy butter-saturated toast. Lydia wanted to scream. This was so not fair to him. And it didn't help that, behind the veneer of his good nature, she knew perfectly well that he was studiously—and accurately—reading her mind.
"I'm not doing the rehab," she blurted, as much to wrench them out of this play-acting as to issue a declaration of war.
"What do you—"
"I don't need it. I can kick this thing with AA. I'm not going off to Santa Barbara to wallow in a Jacuzzi with a bunch of Hollywood lushes who do it for a living."
"Bullshit. You'll never make it."
The shortage of booze in Lydia's system exploded out of her. "Fuck you, Mac! Who the hell are you to say that to me?" The tray cascaded off the bed. Mac leapt up and caught it, but the coffee cup evaded his grasp. The hideous black liquid scalded his hand. It didn't matter. Both of them froze in shock at the language out of Lydia's mouth.
She recovered first and murmured, "I don't believe I just said that."
"No shit."
Mac stood up to his full height. Lydia forced herself to look at him. But where she expected to find hurt, she found only anger. Why didn't he look hurt? It made no sense. He had spent the last six days tiptoeing around her like a doting old woman. Even his lovemaking—forget his lovemaking—what was going on? He had the look of a man with a mouth full of something he was dying to blurt out, and it wasn't his cooking.
"What?" Lydia demanded.
"Nothing."
"I said what!" she shouted.
Mac put the tray down on the floor and mumbled something into the wall next to it. She couldn't possibly have heard him right. "What did you say?"
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