Angels (22 page)

“Woman sits alone in room,” I said resentfully. “Unhappy. Clearly abandoned by friends.”

Lara laughed but Emily replied, “Camera tracks her as she gets up, opens a couple of bags of peanuts, and fires them into bowls, in order to be helpful.”

I was sure that no one would arrive while they were out, but they'd been gone only five minutes when Troy walked in. “Hey, Irish!”

“Young man, casually dressed,” I said.

ANGELS / 171

Troy stood by the door, his poker face confused.

“Stands by door, looking confused,” I said.

“Crosses room,” Troy replied, quick as a flash. “Notices girl has had her hair done. Cute, he says.”

I laughed, delighted. His straight-line mouth quirked in acknowledgment.

“Coming right back atcha!” He threw himself into an chair and flung his leg over the arm with loose-limbed ease. “So how'd it go today?”

I sat on the daybed, my legs stretched out in front of me, and related everything that had happened in Mort Russell's office. All the time, Troy watched me, nodding intently when I mentioned anything good.

“Were they all lying when they said they'd read her script?” I asked.

“No. If they've seen a twelve-line summary, they honestly think they've read it. For real.”

“So what do you think?” I finished with, keen to hear something other than Emily's negativity.

“Could be good.” But he sounded more thoughtful than hopeful.

“Could be good.”

He lapsed into faraway silence and into the quiet I asked, “Where do you live?”

“Hollywood.” He pronounced it, “Hoh-hollywoooood,” and spread his fingers to sarcastically demonstrate the name in lights.

“Only the name is glamorous. Dicey neighborhood, which means rents are low.”

“And is that far from here? I've no idea where anywhere is in relation to anywhere else in L.A.”

“I'll show you.” He unfolded himself from his chair and came to balance on the bottom of the daybed.

“Okay, this is the ocean,” he said, demonstrating with a cushion.

“This is Third Street Promenade, and you live here.” He jabbed at a spot on the daybed. “Make a left onto Lincoln and drive, for oh,

'bout a mile.” He dragged his finger in a line along the fabric. “Excuse me,” he said, as his finger bumped up onto my bare shin.

“Until you get to the

172 / MARIAN KEYES

freeway entrance. Take the ten, going east.” His finger did an abrupt left turn and was no longer crossing my shin, but was whizzing up to my knee. I was a little surprised, but he didn't seem to think it was a big deal, so I took my cue from him.

He paused, his finger on my knee. “Then when you get to downtown, you change onto the one-oh-one, going north.” Now his finger was speeding up the bare skin of my thigh.

“To Cahuenga Pass, which is about here.” He paused, his finger resting unnervingly near the top of my thigh.

“Actually, no, more like here.” He moved his finger marginally higher.

“Then”—he took a breath, his expression determinedly innocent,—“you make a right.”

His finger curved into the soft, hidden skin of my inner thigh.

We both looked down at his hand, then quickly looked up at each other again.

“Just for a coupla blocks.” His matter-of-fact tone was confusing.

He was giving me directions, right? But his hand was between my legs.

“And I live right here.” He demonstrated his whereabouts by gently circling the tip of his finger on my tender white flesh.

“Just here,” he repeated, continuing to stroke the inside of my thigh.

“Thank you.” I was sure he could feel the heat coming at him from down there.

“You know what?” His smile was suddenly wicked. “I live pretty near the Hollywood Bowl, but if I showed you where it was, I bet you'd slap my face.”

It took a moment to understand what he was talking about.

“Prob'ly,” I managed, while a small, sweet spasm jumped from my Hollywood Bowl.

One final touch from his featherlight fingertip, a regretful look at my denim crotch, then he was getting to his feet. “Do you want a beer?” he called from the kitchen.

*

*

ANGELS / 173

Tons of people came. There wasn't even time for the obligatory standing around in the empty house, looking at the acres of liquor, feeling fearful and friendless, the way people usually do when they have a party.

One of the first to arrive was Nadia, Lara's new girl-friend. She was a lollipop girl, her head big with dark, swingy hair, her limbs shrunken sticks. I wasn't surprised by her sexy glamour—after all, meeting Lara had dissolved my subconscious preconception that all lesbians look like Elton John—but I was surprised by the instant dislike I took to her. Two seconds after being introduced, she snapped gum in my face and confided loudly, “Right this afternoon, I got me a
Playboy
wax. There is totally not one pube left on me!”

“Lovely!” I said, mildly mortified. “Will you have a peanut?”

She shook her enormous head, barely drawing breath before launching into an account of how she'd had to get on her hands and knees and stick her butt high in the air so that the beautician could properly get at her. Then she'd had to lie on her back and put her ankles behind her head. They'd tell you
anything
, these Angelenos. Compulsive disclosure disorder, that's what they had.

Then came Justin and Desiree, who brought two jockish men and three dogs with them. They'd all become friends when they'd gone to the dog park trying to meet girls. Next at the door was Emily's friend Connie, a short, strident, bandy-legged Korean American, sexy the way very-sure-of-themselves people are sexy.

She was accompanied by her sister Debbie, her friends Philip and Tremain, and her fiancé, Lewis, who barely spoke—I suppose she was such a great talker that his ability had simply atrophied. This was the first time I'd actually met Connie and I didn't want to; something to do with her imminent wedding. Emily had been my bridesmaid, and she was going to be Connie's too, and I felt on the wrong side of the being-married divide. Connie had a happy future ahead of her while my happy future was far behind me.

174 / MARIAN KEYES

Tendrilly Kirsty showed up and unsettled me by making a beeline for Troy. Mike and Charmaine showed up, as well as a load more people whom I didn't know from a plate of french fries. Even David Crowe dropped in briefly, charmed his way through everyone, then left again.

“He didn't stay long,” I remarked.

“Are you kidding me?” Emily grabbed Troy away from Kirsty and ordered him, “Tell her the joke. The agent joke.”

Deadpan, Troy began. “Man gets a visit from the cops. ‘We have bad news, sir,’ they say. ‘A man broke into your house and killed your wife and child.’ The man is distraught and says, ‘Who could do such a terrible thing?’ And the cop goes, ‘I'm sorry to have to tell you, sir, that it was your agent.’ And the man says, ‘My agent?

My agent came by my house? Oh boy!”

“See?” Emily said.

“I see.”

The house was full and the party had spilled out into the backyard, into the warm, twinkly-blue night, when I somehow ended up in conversation with Troy and Kirsty. Kirsty had just been to a two-hour power-yoga class and was extolling the benefits of exercise when I said vaguely that I really should go to a gym while I was in L.A. To my astonishment, Kirsty said, “That's a great idea.” She looked me up and down and concluded, “You could drop, say, five, six pounds. And”—she swept a critical gaze from my feet to my upper arms—“you could use some toning.

“It's worth doing,” she said, with utmost seriousness. “I mean, look at me. I work out and I”—she did a little wiggle of her little hips—“am in purr-itty good shape.”

Okay, so most of it was for Troy's benefit and it was probably all true. Nevertheless, I was speechless. I'd never before come across a woman who claimed, by her own admission, to be in good shape—I thought it was simply Not Allowed. That you say it about everyone else, whether it's true or not, while berating yourself for being a hippo/heifer/Jabba the Hutt, even if you've been on the grapefruit diet for the past

ANGELS / 175

month. All right, maybe it's dishonest, but it somehow seems less offensive.

In that moment, I hated Kirsty so much I wanted to hit her and, for the first time in ages, I got a stab of pain up into my back tooth.

Even though I'd spoken to her only to prevent her having a one-on-one with Troy, I had to get away. Muttering some excuse, I promptly got buttonholed by Charmaine.

She was nice, if a little intense. Yes, she stood just a teensy, weensy bit too close to me, so that whenever I moved back a little, she moved forward a little more, until my head was almost fully immersed in a lilac bush, with only my nose peeping out. But no one's perfect. And if she wasn't exactly a laugh a minute, I did get the feeling that she was broadly sympathetic to me. So I ended up telling her about me and Garv.

“Do you still love him?” she asked kindly.

“I don't know,” I said despairingly. “How would I know?”

“How did you know when you were sure?”

“Dunno. It just sneaks up on you, doesn't it?”

“No one event?”

“No.” But then I remembered something. “The snail,” I exclaimed.

“Huh?”

I explained. Garv, being a man, had been the one in charge of all insect removal: spiders in the bathtub, moths around lights, wasps on windowsills were all his department. I never used to lift a finger, just used to yell, “Gaaarv, there's a wasp,” and he'd come with his rolled-up newspaper and do battle. But he had a thing about snails, a bad thing; he was so grossed out about them, he was almost phobic. And when we'd been going out for about six months, a snail crawled up his car's windshield, then settled in for what looked like a long stay. (On the driver's side too, at eye level, just to make it worse for Garv.) In the end I reached over and lifted it off and threw it at a passing Nissan Micra, packed with nuns. I wasn't wild about snails either, but I did it because I loved him, and ever since then I'd been head of snail extermination.

176 / MARIAN KEYES

“So right now, would you remove a snail from his windshield?”

“Probably not.”

“There's your answer.”

“Right.” That made me improbably said.

Then—emboldened by liquor—I made some reference to Charmaine's reading of auras.

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you?”

“Yes,” she repeated.

“So what's mine like?”

“Are you really sure you want to know?”

Well, after that I
really
wanted to know.

“It's a little toxic,” she said.

All of a sudden I was upset, despite the fact that I didn't actually believe that I—or anyone else, for that matter—even
had
an aura.

“Toxic, that's bad, isn't it?”

“Good and bad are just labels.”

That old cop-out.

“You should learn not to be so judgement based,” she instructed, in a manner that sounded very judgmental.

I disentangled my head from the lilac bush and went back inside, to discover that the goatee boys had gotten wind of the party. A small group of them had commandeered the stereo—replacing Madonna with some Death Metal racket—and had formed an impromptu mosh pit in a corner of the front room. Luis, the small, dark, pretty one, showed a great aptitude for moshing. While all the others just ran straight at each other and violently bounced stomachs, Luis invested his moves with delicate steps and socket-defying hip swervage.

To my surprise, beardy Mike was in the thick of it, having what looked like the time of his life. I suppose he had the belly for it.

Every time he gave someone a good mosh, he sent them flying halfway across the room. A particularly enthusiastic bump scooted little Luis several feet and he stopped only when he crashed into a chair.

ANGELS / 177

Once they'd picked him up and established that he wasn't badly hurt, they tried body surfing, passing one of them over the heads of the others, but it all fell apart when they tried to hoist Mike up and found they couldn't.

They dispersed, to reveal the shaven-headed one, Ethan, in a corner, gloomily bent over the coffee table. Because he had the most hard-core goatee—a pointy Satanic beard and a long Zapata-style mustache that extended to his chin—I'd always thought of him as the leader of the other lads. Closer inspection revealed that he was playing with a penknife. He had his hand splayed, palm down, on the table and he was flinging the pen knife at the table, aiming between his fingers. Sometimes he missed his hand but, as evidenced by the cuts between his fingers, sometimes he didn't.

“Stop it,” I exclaimed.

“It's my hand, man.”

“But it's Emily's table!”

“I'm bummed out, man.” Mournfully he looked up at me. “This is what I do when I'm bummed out.”

“But,” I said helplessly, worried about the table. Then I had a solution. “If you want to hurt yourself, couldn't you try burning yourself with cigarettes?”

“Smoking, ew! Totally gross.” He sounded mortally offended.

It transpired that he was hurting because he'd tried to get it on with Nadia and she'd spurned him. But as soon as I told him she was gay, he brightened. “Yeah? For real? With Lara? Oh, wow, man. What do they do?”

Something I'd been wondering myself, actually.

“I don't know,” I said sternly. “And leave that table alone!”

Back out to the garden to check on Troy and Kirsty. They were still talking to each other.

Before I could decide how I felt, Lara and Nadia, arm in arm, skipped over to me.

“Having a good time?” Lara beamed.

“Yes…” I trailed off as Nadia snaked her hand under Lara's arm and began caressing her breast.

178 / MARIAN KEYES

“Hey!” Lara laughed. “Stop that.”

Nadia withdrew her hand but only to lick her finger and recommence stroking. Lara's erect nipple appeared through the damp cotton and I felt acutely uncomfortable. If a man did that at a party, everyone would loudly condemn him as a lech and an asshole, but because Nadia was a lesbian, I had to behave as if I was totally down with it.