Angels (11 page)

“It couldn't be more over now, because he's…with…”—I couldn't bring myself to say “sleeping with”—“someone else. I could never trust him again. Or forgive him.”

“I understand,” she started. “But it's because of the—”

“Please, Emily!” I started out sounding snappy but quickly moved to desperation. “It's over and I need you to believe me because I can't keep going through this.”

“Okay. Sorry.” She seemed glad to stop. She looked exhausted.

“So what would you like to do today?”

“Dunno.”

“I've got to see my accountant about my IRS returns this morning,” she said. “You're welcome to come with me, or I could drop you at the beach.”

I didn't want to be on my own. But how stupid would it be to sit in an accountant's office while Emily went through her tax returns? The sun was splitting the stones and I was a big girl now.

“I'll go to the beach,” I said, swallowing.

“How are you fixed for money?” Emily asked. “Not that I'm looking for any,” she added quickly.

“Well, Garv said he'd cover the mortgage for a month and I've got my credit card. No way of paying it off, though, until I get a new job.” For some reason this worry wasn't as potent as it usually was. “And I've a bit in my current account.”

In fact, my Ladies' Nice Things account was quite 78 / MARIAN KEYES

healthy. Though I'd been spending too much lately, I'd been doing it from our joint account and it struck me that maybe I'd been stockpiling money in my own account, somehow anticipating the split with Garv. It wasn't a comfortable thought. “Why are you asking me about money?”

“I was thinking you might like to rent a car while you're here.”

“Can't I get the bus?”

A funny noise made me look up. It was Emily, laughing.

“What did I say?”

“‘Can't I get the bus?’ Next you'll be offering to walk places.

You're a tonic!”

“I can't get the bus?”

“Not really, no one gets the bus. The service is beyond shit. Or so I'm told; I've never actually experienced it first-hand. You need a car in this town. There are some great pickup trucks for rent,”

Emily said dreamily.

“Pickup trucks? Do you mean Jeeps?”

“No, I mean pickup trucks.”

“You mean…like hillbillies drive?”

“Well, yeah, but new and shiny and without hogs sitting up front.”

But I didn't want a pickup truck. I'd been entertaining a pleasant vision of zipping around in a foxy little silver convertible, my hair flying out behind me, lowering my heart-shaped sunglasses and making eye contact with men at traffic lights. (Not that I ever would, of course.)

“Only tourists and out-of-towners drive convertibles,” Emily scorned. “Angelenos never do. Because of the smog.”

It was then that I remembered that Emily had picked me up from the airport in a huge Jeep-style, four-wheel-drive thing. She'd looked as if she was driving a block of flats and I'd almost needed a rope and crampons to get up to the passenger seat. “Pickup trucks are very now,” she advised. “And if not a pickup truck, then get a Jeep like mine.”

“But I just need something to get me from A to B.” And it was all right for her living in year-round sunshine, but when ANGELS / 79

would I get another chance to take the roof off my car and not get soaked to the skin?

“You see, your car is how you're judged in this town. Your car and your body. It doesn't matter if you live in a cardboard box, so long as your car is cool and you're in the terminal stages of anorexia.”

“Well, I think convertibles are cool. That's the car I'd like.”

“But—”

“My marriage has broken up,” I said, playing dirty. “I want a convertible.”

“Okay.” Emily knew when she was beaten. “We'll get you a convertible.”

Just before we went out, my mother called just to remind me that

“the entire seaboard could fall into the Pacific at any moment.”

“Is that right?” I asked.

“I'm only saying it for your good.”

“Thank you.”

“Is it sunny there?”

“Very. I have to go now.”

The beach was no distance; I could easily have walked it. If I'd been allowed. I rappelled down out of the car, and away Emily drove, perched high and tiny in her mobile block of flats.

The scene ahead of me looked like a postcard. Bathed in citrus light, lines of high, spindly palm trees brushed the jaunty blue sky.

Stretching far away in both directions was a wide expanse of powdery white sand, and beyond that was the glinting rush of the ocean.

We've all heard that Californians are gorgeous. That through a combination of good living, health consciousness, sunshine, plastic surgery, and eating disorders they're skinny, muscled, and glowing.

As I arranged my towel on the sand, I suspiciously watched other people on the beach. There weren't that many—possibly 80 / MARIAN KEYES

because it was a weekday—but there were enough to confirm my worst fears. I was the fattest, saggiest person on that stretch of sand.

Possibly in the entire state of California.

God, they were thin. And I was filled with resolve—tinged with despair—that I was going to start exercising again.

Two Scandinavian-looking girls took up a position far too near for my liking. Immediately I wondered if either of them was divorced; I was driving myself mad speculating about the marital status of everyone I met…

They whipped off their shorts and tops to reveal tiny bikinis, effortlessly flat stomachs, and golden thighs, shaped and curved with muscle. You never saw two people more comfortable with their bodies; I dearly wanted to shoo them away.

Their arrival meant that I couldn't remove my sarong. Time passed and when I managed to convince myself that no one had any interest in me, I slid it off. I held my breath, convinced that the lifeguard would jerk with sudden shock and break into a slomo, red-rescue-pack-under-his-arm, pounding-rock-sound-track run toward me and order, “I'm sorry, ma'am, we're going to have to ask you to leave. This is a family beach, you're upsetting folks.”

But no drama erupted and I slathered myself in number eight sunscreen and prepared to bake; skin cancer seemed like the least of my worries. God, I was white! I should have used my fake tanning cream before I came. Immediately this made me think of Garv—I always snapped on surgical gloves before applying fake tan and he used to say, “Oooh, nurse, a surgical glove moment!”

Oh God. I closed my eyes and eventually drifted, lulled by the rhythmic rush and suck of the waves, the yellow heat of the sun, the short-lived, skippy breezes.

It was actually quite pleasant until I turned over onto my stomach and found there was no one to put suntan lotion on my back. Garv would have done it. I suddenly felt very lonely and the feeling hit anew:
my life is over
.

ANGELS / 81

As I'd packed the night before I left Ireland, I'd told Anna and Helen the very same thing: “My life is over.”

“It's not.” Anna had been visibly distressed.

“Don't patronize her,” Helen had urged.

“You'll meet someone else; you're young,” Anna said doubtfully.

“Ah, she's not really,” Helen interjected. “Not at thirty-three.”

“And you're good-looking,” Anna struggled on.

“You know, she's not bad,” Helen admitted grudgingly. “You have nice hair. And your skin isn't bad. For your age.”

“All that clean living,” Anna said.

“All that clean living,” Helen echoed solemnly.

I sighed. My living wasn't that clean, it just wasn't as
un
clean as theirs, and my good-for-my-age skin was thanks to slathering on so much expensive night cream that I used to slide off my pillows, but I let it go.

“And…” Helen said thoughtfully. I leaned forward on the bed, all the better to be praised. “You have a lovely handbag.”

I sat back, disappointed.

“Funny that,” she mused, “I'd never have put you down as an expensive handbag kind of a girl.”

I tried to protest; I
am
an expensive handbag kind of a girl, I'm almost sure of it. But I wasn't getting into another fight with Helen, in which I tried to convince her that I was irresponsible with money.

Besides, as it happens, it had been Garv who had given me the lovely handbag in question.

“Give me a break!” Helen had chuckled. “You expect me to believe that that cheapskate would shell out over a ton for a
sac à main
.

That's French, you know. Anyway, you know the way your life is over? You won't be needing your handbag anymore, will you?”

But I wouldn't surrender it, which led her to remark suspiciously,

“Your life can't be
that
over, then, can it?”

82 / MARIAN KEYES

“Shut up, you're getting my car,” I said.

“But it's only for the month. And I have to share it with
her
.”

She jerked her head at Anna.

Then I heard something that catapulted me right back to the present.

“Ice-cream sandwich!”

I sat up on my towel. A young man was passing by, staggering under the weight of ice cream that he hadn't a hope of selling, not to this crowd of anorexics.

“Popsicles?” he called desolately. “Blue gelatos, cherry ices?”

I felt sorry for him. And hungry.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Give me an ice-cream sandwich.”

We conducted our business briskly, then he was once more on his profitless way. I wondered if anyone ever shouted abuse or threw stones at him as he plied his high-fat, high-sugar goods along the beach. “Go on—get away!” The way people do to stray dogs in other communities.

And then I was alone again. Suddenly I was very glad I was in California, because I could blame the horrible feeling of being out of step with the rest of the human race on my jet lag. It made it not my responsibility and I could always try fooling myself into thinking that I'd feel perfectly normal in a few days.

Watched hungrily by the two Scandinavian-looking girls, I ate my ice cream. Their expressions were so avid I felt quite uncomfortable. In fact I nearly offered them a bite.

I couldn't help feeling that if this was a book,
someone
would have invited me to join in a game of volleyball or at least struck up a conversation with me. The lifeguard or another sunbather, perhaps. But the only person who spoke to me all day was the ice-cream seller. And I suspected I was the only person who spoke to him.

LATE AFTERNOON EMILY
picked me up from the beach. When we got home, there was still no phone call from David Crowe. Her desperation filled the house.

“No news is good news,” I tried.

“Wrong,” Emily said. “No news is bad news. They keep the bad news from you and cover themselves in glory with any good news.”

“Well, call him, then.”

A bitter laugh from Emily. “It's easier to get an on-set pass to a Tom Cruise movie than to talk to an agent who doesn't want to talk to you.”

But she called him anyway. And he was “not at his desk right now.”

“I bet he wouldn't be ‘not at his desk right now’ if it was Ron Bass on the line,” she said gloomily.

I took it that Ron Bass was some hotshot screenwriter.

“I feel a strange but compelling urge to get crazy drunk,” she said.

“Could your jet lag handle going out this evening?”

“What do you have in mind?” Would I be forced to go out with a gang of girls and dance to “I Will Survive,” as always seemed to happen to women who'd just split from their men?

“How about dinner somewhere nice?”

“Lovely!” Relief that there would be no Gloria Gaynor made me sound more enthusiastic than I felt.

84 / MARIAN KEYES

“That's the spirit. You know what?” she said thoughtfully. “What you need to do is let your hair down a little.” Even though Emily was very fond of Garv, she'd always thought that I'd missed out on the necessary rites-of-passage high jinks by getting married so young. “Go a bit mad while you're here.”

“I'll see,” I said noncommittally. Jesus, little did I know…

“We'll call Lara. Lara likes a drink. And Connie. And Troy. And Justin.”

A quick round of phone calls, and then she went into her room and in no time got that really pulled-together look. Just bang-bang-bang, as if it's easy or something. The dress, the heels, the bag, the hair, all smooth and shiny, shiny, shiny.

Then she opened her wondrous makeup bag and shared with me some of her knowledge. Lotion was smeared on my lips, “to get that bee-stung look.” My eyelashes were curled with a little machine (I believe it might have been called an eyelash curler).

Then she produced a little tube and said, “This'll get rid of your jet-lag bags.”

“No need,” I countered smugly. “I have my Radiant Whatchamacallit.”

“Radiant, schmadiant. Wait'll you try this.” She dotted some cream under my eyes and—dramatically—I actually felt my skin contract.

“What is it? Who is it by?” I was all set to run out to a cosmetics counter and hand over the small fortune this magic gear would undoubtedly cost.

“It's Anusol.”

“Huh?”

“Hemorrhoid ointment. Five dollars a tube, works like a dream, all the models use it.”

Do you see what I mean about her always being ahead of the game?

Then a few seconds on my hair with the straightening tongs, some aloe vera on my ring finger—I'd burned the ten ANGELS / 85

der skin where my wedding ring used to be—and we were done.

She marched to the door, all snappy little sounds. The
tap-tap
of her heels, the
crack
of her handbag clasp, the
click
of her lighter, the
clack-clack
of her nails. I loved it.

We were going to someplace on Sunset, she said. The Troy person couldn't come, nor could Connie, who was up to her tonsils in wedding arrangements, but apparently Lara and Justin could.

“Are either of them married?” I asked casually.

Emily laughed. “God no. Both single.”

“Single single?”

“Is there any other kind?”

“Divorced single.”

With a sympathetic look she said, “No. They're single single.”

As we drove along, palm trees were silhouetted against the skyline. The sun was setting and the sky was layered with colors: pale blue low down, rising and darkening overhead to a deep luminous blue, in which the first stars twinkled like pinholes in fabric.