Angels (34 page)

The raggedy shouting man was there, like he always was, this time roaring about police shoot-outs and heroes taking a bullet. I must have been giving off “Kick me when I'm down” signals because as soon as I got out of the car, he lit up, sprinted straight across the parking lot at me, and yelled, “Zoom!” right into my face.

My heart pounded with shock. Though Emily had said he meant no harm, he seemed out-of-control crazy. Skirting around him and his manic eyes and his bad smell, I hurried across the parking lot, trying to avoid the indignity of full-blown running. I was close to tears by the time I reached the air-conditioned haven of the supermarket.

Then there was the worry of how to get back to the car without being accosted by him, so when I finished shopping, half ashamed of my wussiness, I asked one of the bag-packing boys to escort me.

Just as well I did because as soon as we appeared through the sliding doors, the raggedy man yelled angrily at me, “You're supposed to be ALONE!”

“He's kinda harmless, really,” the boy tried to reassure me as we put our heads down and rattled the cart at high speed across the parking lot.

“Mmmm.” But I was no longer that concerned for my physical safety. It was what the madman had said: “You're supposed to be alone.” It sounded almost prophetic, and I was indescribably depressed by it.

“We've got a visitor,” Emily said as I staggered into the house with the shopping bags.

270 / MARIAN KEYES

I assumed it was Ethan. Since the night he'd slept on the couch, he was a regular guest, under some impression that he was welcome. He kept showing up, to hang out and watch television.

But it wasn't Ethan, it was Mike, armed with his smudge stick.

“Hey, Maggie.” He grinned. “Just clearing a little more of the toxic energy in here.”

“Good man,” Emily urged. “Get rid of it all so I'll get good news from the studio.”

“That's not how it works.” Mike gasped a little from his exertions.

“What it means is the right thing will happen.”

“And the right thing is that they'll buy it for a million dollars.”

“I keep telling you, be careful what you wish for,” Mike said, grinning.

When he was taking a breather from the dancing, he turned his attention to me. “And how about you, Maggie?”

“I'm okay,” I said unenthusiastically.

“Yeah?”

“Mmmm.”

He beamed at me, a full-on, beardy beam and said, “When you're in a dark place, you know what you gotta do?”

I shrugged. “What?”

“Hold your face up to the light.”

I hadn't a clue as to what he meant—I don't really get that woolly, mystical talk—but for the second time that day, I was a little tearful.

“Be kind to yourself,” he said.

“How?”

“Nurture yourself. Take time out to smell the flowers or listen to the ocean.”

“Um—”

“You'll know what's right for you. Maybe do a little meditation and listen to your own stillness?”

“Ah, okay.”

“Hey, if you girls aren't doing anything tonight, why ANGELS / 271

don't you come by? We're having one of our fable-telling evenings.”

Both Emily and I froze as we frantically sought some sort of excuse.

“Er, what goes on at this fable-telling evening?” I asked. It was the best I could do.

“Some beautiful people come by and we tell stories from our different cultures.”

“When you say beautiful people,” Emily said, “you're not talking about Gucci sunglasses, streaked hair, and speedboat-beautiful people?”

Mike laughed. “I mean beautiful on the inside.”

“I was afraid of that,” said Emily. “Anyway, asking me to come to a fable-telling evening would be like inviting a dentist over for dinner, then getting him to do a couple of root canals between courses. I'm telling stories all day long; it's my job.”

Mike shrugged equably. “I hear you.”

I shoved my feet into my mules. “Okay, I'm off.”

“Where?”

“I'm holding my face up to the light and I'm going shopping. I don't know how I didn't think of it before now.”

“Excellent!” Emily said. “Good for you.”

I took myself down to Santa Monica, where I spent an unexpectedly happy afternoon wandering along Third Street Promenade in the sunshine, popping in and out of Aladdin's caves of fabulousness.

So much was happening that I was once again glad to be in L.A.; a man with a clipboard gave me two tickets for a test screening of a new movie; I saw someone who might have been Sean Penn buying a roll of Life Savers; a man painted from head to toe in silver, juggling silver balls, was being filmed by a small crew. All the time the sun shone and the funny-knees-denim-skirt shop gave me a sympathetic hearing. “Why are you returning this garment?” the girl asked, her pen poised over the form (oh yes, you've got to fill out a form when you return things).

“It makes my knees look funny.”

272 / MARIAN KEYES

“Makes…knees…look…funny,” she said as she wrote.

Then she went to her manager to see if making knees look funny was worthy of an actual refund or just a credit. It was close, she told me, it had gone to the wire, but in the end the manager felt that as the garment couldn't actually be regarded as defective, I was due only a credit.

For the rest of the afternoon, I didn't even do my usual stunt of buying too much of the wrong things. Money changed hands only once—when I bought two little T-shirts with stuff written on them.

Emily's said “I Want, I Want, I Want” and mine said “Boys Are Mean.” Feeling miles better, I arrived home, where Emily professed herself to be in love with her new T-shirt. “I'll wear it tonight. Will you come out for a drink later?”

“With you and Lou?”

“Lou?” she said scornfully. “He can get lost with his flowers and his phone calls, does he take me for a total idiot?”

“So who's going out tonight?”

“Me. Troy.”

I managed a short, bitter “Hah!”

“Oh please, please don't be like that. Troy sleeps with everyone and he stays friends with them.”

“I'm obviously very old-fashioned then,” I said stiffly.

“Please come out with us.” She was a knot of anxiety.

“Who's inviting me? You? Or him? And be honest!”

“Both of us.”

“Didn't he say anything about me?”

“Um…”

“Don't lie!”

“No, I suppose he didn't.”

Hurt though I was, I could see some good in this; if he was planning to avoid me for the rest of my visit, it would cut down on opportunities for me to feel humiliated.

“You go out,” I urged. “Enjoy yourself, coou've been working all day. And before you ask again, I'm FINE.”

ANGELS / 273

Off she went, and though I had numerous invitations—the fable-telling evening in the house on one side of me or watching a digitally remastered
Rosemary's Baby
in the other—I parked myself in front of the telly, defiantly wearing my “Boys Are Mean” T-shirt.

To pass the time I planned scathing put-downs for Troy, unable to decide between maintaining a dignified silence or shrilly berating him for his alley-cat morals. It was extremely enjoyable.

At some stage the news came on, with a piece about the Irish peace process, and I got the fright of my life; for a moment I thought the color on the telly was broken. Everything was so gray, especially the pallor of the Irish politicians, as if their skins had never seen sunlight. And as for the teeth…

Oh dear. I'd crossed the invisible line: now I thought glowing skin and expensive dentistry was normal. With a sigh I resumed my imaginary conversations with Troy.

Some time later a car screeched to a jarring halt outside, a door was slammed, then came the clatter of heels on the path. I followed them, wondering where they were going and located them just as they burst into the room, bearing a mussed and distraught Lara.

“Where's Emily?”

“Out with Troy. What's wrong?”

“Oh my God!”

“A glass of wine?” I suggested.

She nodded and followed me into the kitchen.

“What's wrong?” I asked again. Had she been mugged? Or in a car crash?

“It's Nadia. She called me tonight and on my new caller-display panel her number came up as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Hindel.’ Can you believe it—Mr. and Mrs. Hindel! She's married. The bitch is married!”

I poured the wine faster and said, “It could be a mistake. She might have been married once, but they could be separated now.”

“Oh no, she admitted it all.” Lara caught sight of herself in the mirror and groaned. “God, I look like twelve miles of 274 / MARIAN KEYES

rough road.” In fairness, I'd seen her looking better; her lovely tan was mushroom colored. “She was totally up front about it, she was just a sexual tourist having an adventure.”

After a painful gap, Lara squeezed out, “She was just using me.”

And she began to cry in a contained, dignified way that brought a lump to my own throat.

“I really liked her.” She wept, the way women weep about men.

“It hurts just as bad when it's a girl.”

“I know, I know.” Well, I knew now, didn't I?

“I thought she was someone special.”

“You'll meet someone else.” I stroked her hair.

“I won't!”

“Shush, you will. Of course you will. You're beautiful.”

“I feel so bad.”

“You do now, but you'll get over it. She wasn't the one for you.”

“Yeah, you're right.” With a watery smile she said, “I'll give myself a week to obsess about her, then I'll get over her.”

“That's the spirit,” I encouraged.

“Thanks.”

Foreheads almost touching, we shared a rueful can't-live-with-them-can't-shoot-them look, and, all of a sudden, she was taking my face in her hands and kissing me softly on the lips. I was startled, but even so, I noticed that it wasn't unpleasant.

That was the moment, of course, that Emily chose to come home.

I saw her shock before I saw her face: white and appalled, it loomed through the nighttime window at me. In more of a hurry than usual, she burst into the house and looked, in confusion, from Lara to me.

“What's going on?” she asked.

“You're not going to
believe
this.” Lara began her tale of woe.

Both Emily and I listened intently to Lara, but we weren't meeting each other's eyes much. Not at all, in fact. We didn't even exchange words until eventually I said, “I'd better go to ANGELS / 275

sleep. I need my full fourteen hours.” Then Emily called after me,

“Troy says hey.”

“Does he? 'Night.”

I went to bed and shut my eyes, and for once I wasn't thinking about Garv. I wasn't even thinking about Troy. I was thinking about Lara.

THE NEXT MORNING
, in the time between chopping the bananas for my smoothie and putting them in the blender, we were informed of Emily's salvation—Larry Savage had bought her screenplay!

Naturally enough she nearly screeched the house down with relief.

And nothing, not the news that he was proposing to pay her only the Writer's Guild minimum, not even the proviso that she had to rewrite the script to include Chip the dog, could dent her joy.

“I'll change my entire cast to orangutans if he wants!” Emily declared. “So long as he gives me the money.”

“How much will you get?” I asked, feeling pretty uplifted myself.

“Writer's Guild minimum, the stingy bastard,” she said airily.

“It's nearly an insult!”

But an insult that ran to almost six figures. With the promise of half a million dollars if they actually made the movie.

The thing was, though—
would
they make it? I knew from my own small experience that this was impossible to gauge; no matter how enthusiastic a producer was, they still had to convince the studio executives and the green-light guy that it was a movie worth making. And that was easier said than done. But still, we wouldn't worry about that today…

Emily surgically attached herself to the phone and began ANGELS / 277

a ringathon; that night we were having another party, a
proper
party, and this time we really had something to celebrate.

Meanwhile, the good news was crisscrossing among her friends, and those who hadn't already spoken to her were calling, so call waiting was doing overtime. “Hold on a minute, that's the other line,” I kept hearing.

And one of those call waitings was Shay Delaney. I knew immediately: the air molecules around Emily seemed to rearrange themselves into a guilt-filled configuration. What a terrible pity he hadn't called the previous night and left a message, because I could have erased it and Emily would never have known. And what an even worse pity that I'd never have the guts to do something like that.

When the telephonic frenzy had played itself out, Emily approached me as I sought out a clean T-shirt in my suitcase.

“I invited Shay Delaney to come tonight,” she said apologetically.

“In the heat of the moment, it just slipped out. Do you mind?”

“Bit late if I do,” I said briskly, continuing to rummage in my suitcase.

“I could uninvite him.”

As if.

“I'll do it right now.”

“No, it's okay.” Tonight was Emily's long-awaited celebration, I had no right to spoil it. And Shay Delaney was ancient history. I needed to get over it anyway.

Emily decided the party should be catered, but I was doubtful—my only experience of caterers was of acquiring dozens of sample menus, taking six weeks to deliberate over them, then finally deciding it would be cheaper to pay my mother to make ham sandwiches and apple tarts. But in Los Angeles you just pick up the phone and say, “I want Vietnamese finger food, miniature pastries, and pink champagne for forty.” And four hours later three buff, out-of-work actors are efficiently transforming your house into a 278 / MARIAN KEYES

white-clothed, crystal-glinting venue, bursting at the seams with Vietnamese finger food, miniature pastries, and pink champagne.

As smooth and speedy as Formula One engineers changing a tire, they were, and the moment the last champagne glass was placed in the triangular configuration and the last sprig of coriander sprinkled on the pile of glass-noodle spring rolls, they were on their way again.