Lovely You

by Jamie Bennett

  Klere was late for lunch, of course, but I had expected that. I sipped some sparkling water and prepared myself for another round of “Who Can Eat the Least?” It was a game we regularly played at my work during lunch and which I had played with my friends from middle school through college at every meal we shared together. I answered messages from Pascale, who was now out of the office but could never let go enough to stop contacting me no matter where she was; I calmed a concerned publicist about choosing accessories to go with one of our dresses; I listened to complaints from a local socialite that the sample gown she was supposed to wear that night was stained, and what was I going to do about it, etc., etc. There was plenty to keep me busy.

  As minutes turned into half an hour, and as the waitstaff got increasingly annoyed with me for taking up the table, however, I started to wonder if Klere had forgotten that we were meeting. Or if she had gone to New Australia instead of San Francisco. I decided that I would wait an hour, but then asked myself who I was kidding. I would sit on my ass and wait until she decided to show up.

  And after 45 minutes she did finally walk in, bringing a friend.

  “Klere,” I called, and she and the other woman drifted over to the table. Klere and I kissed cheeks and when I bent in, I discreetly sniffed her. She looked off, but all I smelled was some horrible patchouli. Both she and the other woman took the chairs at the table for two and Klere started eating bread from the basket, and then I knew something was very wrong. No one ate carbs at lunch.

  “I’m Scarlett Wolfe,” I said to Klere’s friend, as I borrowed a chair from another table so I could join them. The other woman looked up at me and I saw her pupils, which took up so much space that I could barely tell that her eyes were brown. The whites surrounding the enormous black dots were all disgustingly bloodshot.

  “Mary,” she told me. “I’m Klere’s friend.”

  Klere looked over at her and smiled, her own eyes glassy. “She’s my connection,” she explained. “Mary’s the best.” They were both as high as damn kites. Klere bent forward and kissed Mary over the table, which was just not where I wanted this lunch to go.

  “Ladies,” I said, trying to bring down the heat. Other diners started to stare as they got more into it, leaning over farther and knocking over a glass as they sucked face. “Klere. Klere!” I snapped.

  Both of them sat back and Mary wiped her mouth with dirty fingers. I kept the smile on my face. “How was your flight up?” I asked Klere.

  “What?”

  “Your flight here, from Los Angeles,” I explained. I paused. “You did come today on an airplane, didn’t you?”

  “It’s Scarlett, right?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I assured her. “I’m still me. It’s great to see you again. We’re all so excited to work with you as our fashion inspiration!” I kept my expression perfectly clear of derision and disgust as I looked at her clothes and nodded like I had really meant what I said. Her outfit today was a dirty t-shirt that looked like she had picked it up from the floor, maybe the floor of a public restroom, and baggy pants that hung from her bony hips. Her clothes inspired me to stay away from drugs, if only for what they would apparently do to my fashion sense. I had another memory of Nate, neat and tidy in his crisp shirt.

  Klere grabbed my hand and squeezed, hard. “I have, like, so many ideas for your brand. You know what I saw?” She waited. “Guess!” she prompted me.

  From the look of her greasy hair, it hadn’t been the inside of a shower stall. “Um…could you give me a hint?”

  “A hot air balloon. Like, floating.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Amazing.”

  She was nodding vigorously. “We should do a collection based on that. Flying like birds. Winter birds! Winter, summer. Summertime. Time, time, time.” She slapped her hand on the table and the cutlery rattled. “There are so many ideas!”

  Oh, shit. “Wow, that does sound interesting,” I agreed. ”You know what would be very cool? What if we went up in a hot air balloon in Napa? I can arrange that for this weekend. You should totally stay and hang out!” I exclaimed, per Pascale’s plan to showcase Klere in our clothes, having the time of her life (as narrated by me).

  “Nature.” She stared at me and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “There’s just so much nature!”

  “Klere, your nose is bleeding.” I gave her my napkin and she held it to her face. Mary, the friend, had put her head down on the plate in front of her. “You know, I think we should skip lunch and head over to the office.” I took out a wad of money and put it on the table, thinking it would cover the cost of my water, the bread basket, the plate with Mary’s forehead print, and the bloody napkin. “Where can we send your friend?” I asked brightly.

  I managed to maneuver Mary out of the restaurant and got her a car, and Klere and I went back to the studio. “I want to try on everything, everything new! And all the old stuff, too!” she told me as we pulled up and the driver pointed firmly at the car door to get her out. Klere had been playing with the windows and door locks. A lot. She was quite revved up. “Let’s go and take some pictures!” she exclaimed as she ran inside. There was a dried red smear under her nose and streaked across her cheek. I wondered how her social media “friends” would react to a post of her like that, bloody with wild eyes and filthy hair: #cocaine #justsayno.

  “Let’s clean up first. I mean, let’s run to the ladies’ room,” I suggested. She was as entranced by her reflection as ever, but she did manage to wipe off the blood, put on lipstick, wash her hands, and borrow my brush, which I threw out afterwards and then washed my own hands for a second time.

  Tempting Klere into doing anything that resembled work or serious planning was a joke. I tried to introduce the idea of a contract to her, but she was too busy dancing in the middle of our design studio floor, talking about baklava and Greek yogurt. Eventually, I understood that she was referencing her role as the muse of ancient myth, but the other employees didn’t appreciate her performance. I finally got her to come and lie down in my office, right on the floor, after I promised to go get some pot for us to smoke. Javier, our intern, peeked in as I covered her with a large fabric swatch.

  “What’s wrong with that woman?” he whispered as we backed out of my office and closed the door.

  “Drugs. Lots of drugs.” I sighed and rubbed my temples. What was I going to do with her now? Eventually, she would wake up. Fuck.

  “Are you really going to get pot?” he asked, eyes lighting up.

  “No, I’m not really going to get pot,” I informed him. But I was going to have to do something. After she came down and realized that she had spent the afternoon on the floor of my office, she would expect to go out and have more fun. Pascale, who had been gone since the morning and had missed the show, would expect progress with our Klere-driven social media campaign.

  Klere snored loudly enough that we could hear her through the glass wall, and Javier and I looked at her as she drooled onto my floor. I put my face in my hands. I had the urge to run out of the building and leave her there. What was I doing at this job? Nate and his dumb questions had made me start thinking about when I had last really liked doing it, if ever. I opened the door again to retrieve my laptop and phone so that I could go back to work.

  As I did, Klere took a deep, loud breath. When she didn’t exhale, I froze. Then she released an enormous belch and Javier started to laugh. “This is hilarious,” he said, and took a picture. He quickly looked at my face and stopped laughing. “Oh, sorry, Scarlett. I’m sure you’ll be able to fix this.”

  Sure I would.

  Chapter 8

  “I love this! Don’t you love this?” Klere asked me.

  That was what I thought she had said, but the music was too loud to hear her. I nodded and grinned like a chimp at her.

  I was experiencing déjà vu. Because yes, we were back at the same club we had been to before, sitting one table over from where we had previously sat. I had spent the afternoon wor
king at the reception desk and checking periodically on Klere so that she didn’t asphyxiate. She had curled on her side on the dirty carpet, cuddling my purse. “Wouldn’t it be something if she died on the floor of our office?” the receptionist had whispered to Javier as they both peered through the glass at Klere’s inert body.

  “She’s not going to die on my floor!” I snapped at them. I had looked closely again, just to make sure the fabric lying across her was still moving up and down.

  It was, and she hadn’t. Eventually, Klere had woken up and stretched. She drank an open can of soda that I’d had sitting on my desk for several weeks, threw up, and announced she needed to go to her hotel. Then she asked me where her luggage had gone, and since I had no idea, she thought it was a good idea for me to get a hold of Mary, because her suitcase and purse were probably at Mary’s apartment where she had left them after the drug buy. I thought if that were true, then Klere could probably kiss her things goodbye, but I did send Javier the intern over to Mary’s building to look for her stuff.

  It had not been a good experience for him. “Dogs! Big dogs chasing!” he exclaimed breathlessly when he got back. Eyes huge and with shaking hands, Javier had tossed a garbage bag with some items rattling around in it on the floor and that had been what was left of Klere’s luggage.

  “Fuck.” I sighed. “I’m sorry, Javier. Thanks for going.”

  He stared at me. “What?”

  “Thanks for trying,” I repeated and he had looked at me very strangely.

  “You’re welcome,” he had said carefully, like he was waiting for me to take it back.

  Klere took the loss of the majority of her possessions better than I would have expected. Better than I would have, anyway. She and the garbage bag had gone back to “freshen up” at the hotel, a process I hoped included a long, long shower with lots of soap. Because as Javier had noted in a quiet voice to the receptionist before his trip to the cocaine den, Klere stunk. And some of the recent vomit had gotten in her hair.

  I had gone home when she left for the hotel, since Pascale wasn’t there monitoring my work hours, and I really didn’t think I could take much more of the day. As I was leaving the office in my car, I got a message from the 808-area code, Hawaii: “Got the job. Be home tonight, late.”

  I felt myself smiling. He had let me know. I sent back my congratulations. When he didn’t immediately answer, I wrote, “I have to go out tonight w Klere and she puked on my floor at work.”

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  I read the screen and scoffed. What did he think I did? “Left as fast as I could.”

  “Are you driving right now?”

  Not currently because I was stuck in traffic. “No.”

  “You are. Stop texting me.”

  I missed getting through the intersection on the yellow light because I was busy wondering if he had told Ashley the medic, the one he had been screwing, about the job. I wondered how she had reacted. When I got home, Joey was there with Pia. I got dressed, trying to cover my resentment and anger about having to go out with Klere with makeup and perfect clothes.

  “You look beautiful,” Joey said when I came out to the living room to say goodbye. “It’s not fair to the other girls there.” He had kind of grinned.

  “Want to come?”

  “Nah. It’s not a good idea for me, all the noise and music, flashing lights,” he said. “It could trigger a seizure.” He had seemed a little down.

  I sat next to him. “Are you ok?” I asked. I scratched Pia’s ears and she put her head on my knee.

  “Yeah. I just feel real, real bad about this job thing.”

  “About Nate getting a job? I thought he wanted to.” He needed to, he had said.

  “He has a job,” Joey explained. “Back at home, he has his own business. But because he’s here with me, he’s has to find another one. I feel real bad about it,” he repeated.

  I patted his back like I did to Pia. “He wants to be here. I’m glad he’s here. I mean, I’m glad he’s here, for you.”

  “I’m glad, too, but that makes me feel worse.” He sighed. “I’m tired of people having to take care of me. I acted like a dick to Kiana for years. Because I needed her to help me,” he explained when I raised an eyebrow. “She did help me and I was awful to her because I resented that I needed it, that I couldn’t do what I had done before. Jedi’s trying to help me and I’ve been pissy to him because I feel so damn guilty. I feel like I’m just sucking up people’s time and energy. Yours, too. How long am I going to stay at your house, living off you?”

  That was a good question, but I found I didn’t really care. “I don’t mind. You’re not living off me. I would have to have an apartment if you were here or not.”

  Joey swept his arm around the room. “And all this stuff? You didn’t have anything when we got here. You’ve bought a lot since I came. When I first walked into this place, I thought you were just moving in or moving out. I didn’t know which way you were going.”

  I thought about that, as I sat on the banquette later that night in the horrible, awful club. Sat there again, I meant. I thought about which way I was going.

  Klere put her mouth down by my ear. “Let’s dance!” she yelled into it. The dance floor was already full of her legions of friends, all of whom were now drinking on my company’s tab. Whatever. I motioned to her to go, nodding and smiling and she swayed off, raising her arms above her head to pull up her shirt and show off her pointy hip bones and defined ribs. She was so thin, it looked like it hurt, but it did photograph well. I took a few pictures of her rocking out, because she was now wearing our clothes, and she no longer had vomit in her hair. It was kind of amazing how well she cleaned up. I quickly sent them to her with some suggested text for posts, #pleaseusethis, #mispellings.

  “Hi,” another voice said, also very near my ear, but this one I didn’t recognize. “You look lonely.”

  I looked up at a guy who was way too close to me. “No,” I mouthed back.

  “Can I sit down?” he asked, gesturing at the empty seats.

  “I’m married,” I said, as loudly as I could.

  He pointed at my bare finger. “Really?”

  “I’m a lesbian,” I yelled.

  “Can I turn you?” He grinned.

  “How about you just fuck off?” I suggested.

  “It’s Scarlett, right?”

  I froze. “How—”

  “You liked me before.” He kept grinning. “Don’t you remember me? How about a drink?”

  I got up and shoved him, hard.

  “Hey!” he protested, stumbling. “Bitch.”

  I left, leaving Klere’s bag, leaving Klere. All I wanted to do was get out of the club, away. I stumbled out into the night, my hand shaking as I got a car, my whole body shaking the whole way home.

  Pia ran up when I came in and I knelt down and hugged her, clinging to the dog.

  “Scarlett?” Nate called.

  I made myself let go of Pia and stood up. “It’s me,” I said. “I’m home.” I couldn’t go into the living room and sit there with him and Joey like everything was fine. I took off my shoes and walked quietly into the bedroom and shut the door, very softly. I sat down on the bed, feeling like the room was spinning. Maybe just my mind was.

  “Scarlett?” Nate knocked. His voice was only a little muffled through the thin door.

  I cleared my throat. “Yes. Here,” I said.

  He waited. When I didn’t say anything else, he asked, “What’s the matter?”

  “I’m tired,” I answered, and the door swung open and that seemed to rouse me. “What the hell, Nate? I didn’t give you permission to come in! This isn’t my grandmother’s house that you can just enter as you choose!”

  He ignored me and walked to the bed. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m tired!” I repeated, and stood, because he was so much bigger when I was sitting. “I just need to go to sleep.”

  “Go,” he suggested,
and pointed at the bed.

  I pushed him out of the way too, and got some pajamas from the pile of clothes on the floor. “Fine, I will. Get out of here!”

  I changed in the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I washed my face, then washed it again, and leaned forward to study every pore. I didn’t see anything yet, but maybe it was happening so gradually that I didn’t notice. Maybe one day soon I’d look in the mirror and not even know myself, when every bit of the truth showed all over my face, when I had pockmarks and bags, acne and drippy, pus-filled eyes. I ran my wet hand down the glass, smearing my reflection.

  When I opened the bathroom door, Nate hadn’t left. He was leaning against the one free space on the wall between my clothes racks.

  “Why are you still in here?” I demanded.

  “This place looks like a tornado went through it. How are you able to sleep in this chaos? Why do you have so many shoes?” He frowned at the pile on the floor of heels, flats, sandals, boots—even ski boots were thrown in there.

  I pointed at the door. “Get out!”

  “Go to bed,” he told me. “Go ahead, I’ll leave when you’re lying down. Let’s see it.”

  “Are you fucking crazy?” I waited, but he didn’t move a muscle, not even to blink. I threw up my hands. “Fine! I’ll lie down and you leave. You’ve gone out of your mind.” I lay on the bed and turned on my side, away from him, and yanked up the sheet over me. My hands clenched in fists. What in the hell was the matter with him? I was trying to keep my breathing normal, but it was coming faster and faster. It was just so hot in this room and the sheet was too tight around me. I wanted to kick it off but I made myself stay still.

  “Scarlett.”

  I sat up quickly and turned to look at him. “What? Why are you still here?”

  “Why do you have so much trouble sleeping?”

  “I don’t!” I flopped down, but then just as fast pushed back up to sit. “I’m not tired right now.”