Crazy in Love (34 page)

Then we invented Vuarnet. Once when I went to Providence to visit them, we walked down Angell Street to the Rhode Island School of Design. The students there dressed like anarchists in black leather, skinny cotton shifts over black tights, white oxford-cloth shirts worn as dresses with studded leather belts, tight pedal pushers worn over plastic flip-flops. They had razor haircuts. They wanted to keep their skin pure white, so they wore sunscreen and walked on the shady side of the street. Margo and Lily told me the sunglasses they favored were Vuarnets and Ray-Bans, so we started calling that cool, new look “Vuarnet.”

I remembered that day perfectly. They took me to the graduate student show at the RISD Museum. There were mammoth geometric paintings that resembled daggers on one wall; narrow, meticulously drawn architectural-type renderings which, when carefully regarded, showed men in lewd positions with each other; a video segment in which a TV screen was set into a doghouse and, when the viewer pressed the button, an image of feet pacing a room would appear on the screen and a whiny voice berating its father for neglect and mistreatment would blare out. One student had hired a crane to hoist a brand-new white Lincoln Continental into an interior courtyard, and that was his project. There were ceramic vases, enameled jewelry, furniture including a teak bed suspended from the ceiling in the midst of matching dining room table and chairs. Its title:
Dining with the Invalid
.

One student was walking through the show with his parents. Margo whispered to Lily and me that the father reminded her of a coal miner from West Virginia: he was brown and wizened, as if he spent much time underground, and he wore a thin, short-sleeved, green nylon shirt with a pack of Camels showing through the pocket. His posture was stooped. He walked around the gallery scowling while his wife, a proud fat woman, walked ahead with her son. “How do you like it, Willard?” she asked the man, and he said, “Too many doodads.”

That cracked Margo up. She wanted to think of a school we could call “Doodad.” We tried to connect it with Dada, but nothing sprang to mind. It seemed to overlap Vuarnet too much. On the way to their apartment, I stepped on a wad of gum. By the time I noticed it, it had stones, hair, and grass pressed into it. “My RISD thesis,” I said. “Very Doodad.”

“Vuarnet,” Lily and Margo said at once.

Crossing the Brown Green, students recognized me from
Beyond the Bridge.
“Hey, Delilah,” some of them called. Some of them just stared, but many asked whether I was planning to marry Beck Vandeweghe, my star-crossed lover and editor of the Mooreland
Tribune
. One girl asked for my autograph and said she had planned her entire spring semester around the show. I was used to such attention. I signed the autograph, secretly pleased that my sisters should see me adulated, but one thought nagged at my mind. As Delilah, I had another family: my father, Paul Grant, and his scheming new wife Selena, my sisters Nicola, Stephanie, and Bianca, my half-brother Scott, and my illegitimate baby Jennifer. But walking across the green that day, listening to people ask me about the Grants, I thought of my own father who had died two months earlier, and whose ghost I had seen the week before at the Algonquin. I was walking between my two real sisters, but that meant nothing to my fans.

AT FIVE-THIRTY
, Lily and Margo came quietly into the apartment. They looked tired from working on the docks all day for the wages they stretched to cover their summer expenses. The sun, an orange ball over Newport Harbor, blazed through our west-facing windows. I was lying on the couch, with a smooth cotton sheet between me and the upholstery. Itchy wool upholstery.

“Hi,” I said.

Both sisters sat beside me on the floor. “Do you know you sleepwalk?” Lily asked.

“I wasn’t sleepwalking. Go into the bathroom—the paper’s on the floor.”

Margo walked out of the room, returning in an instant with a rumpled
Daily News
. “You sleepwalked up to Bellevue Avenue, bought the paper, came home and read it on the toilet, then sleepwalked down to The Yard.”

“Unie, Unie, Unahhh,” Lily said, throwing her keychain at my legs. “You couldn’t have seen Dad. Dad got cremated, and now his ashes are in the ocean. You weren’t swimming, were you?”

“Please don’t joke about it. He knew about Boom-Boom. He also knew about your birth-control pills, and I’m pretty sure he knows about the Wild One.”

Lily looked terrified for a second, but then she relaxed. The Wild One was a French sailor, extremely handsome in a dark, mysterious, sex-crazed way. He had black curls and hooded eyes. He was noted in Newport for his reticence and distance. Currently he was seeing Lily exclusively, and that did not go unremarked on the docks. Margo and I, and even Lily to some degree, regarded the situation with mild disgust. That a man known for his aloofness to women could be so compelling to Lily.

“Why do you think he knows about the Wild One?” Lily asked. She gave slight emphasis to the word “knows,” as though she wanted to convey true skepticism, but she was nervous. I could tell.

“Because he seems to know everything. It’s horrifying, if you think about it. He actually read my mind at one point.”

“What were you thinking?” Margo asked.

“About Boom-Boom.”

“God, to think that Dad could read our minds,” Margo said, shuddering. “After he died, I secretly hoped he would come back for visits. It seems lousy that he won’t know what we do for the rest of our lives. I mean, when Lily and I get master’s degrees, and when Una moves from the soaps to the movies. When we get married. In a way, I’d like to think that he could know about all that.”

“I’d like to think it too,” Lily said. “But it’s crazy. It cannot happen.”

“If that’s all there was to it, that would be fine,” I said, and suddenly my voice sounded as if it was blowing through a tunnel. “But he can read our minds. We’ll have to live practically like nuns.”

“Nuns can’t do anything, so they think the dirtiest thoughts,” Lily said.

“Una, are you dis or something?” Margo asked, peering at me.

“Dis” was a word we had created years earlier to mean disgruntled, dismayed, disenchanted, distressed, disgusted, disheartened, disengaged, distant.

“I think so,” I said. Prickles were racing around my lips and nose.

“Do you think we should call Mom?” I heard Margo ask Lily.

“No, we’ll keep her right here,” Lily said.

I heard that, and then I went to sleep for two days.

CRAZY IN LOVE

A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Penguin edition published 1988

Fawcett Crest / Ballantine edition published July 1989

Bantam mass market edition / February 2006

Published by Bantam Dell

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved

Copyright © 1988 by Luanne Rice

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-40612

Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Published simultaneously in Canada

www.bantamdell.com

eISBN: 978-0-553-90225-9

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