Losing Clementine (32 page)

I worried about Jenny. I had fantasies of what it would've been like if I had known about her. I had nightmares about the things she might have said to Jerry and Charlene. I wondered why I had hired her in particular. Did I recognize something about her? Probably I did. She was talented, but so were a lot of the people I interviewed. What she was was organized, and I knew that I wasn't. She yinged to my yang.

She was also apparently a wily, sneaky, snakelike secret-keeper to my slobbering, open-book, black hole of emotional need, which is not a particularly fun thing to realize, not on either end.

I wondered what I should do. I didn't know. I felt as if my limbs had been sucked into the bed. I slept some more. When I woke up, it was dark. I thought maybe the black monster was distracted, his hand a little looser around my throat. The thought gave me enough courage to make myself a sandwich.

The food got to my stomach and awakened it from the starvation coma I'd put it in for the past two days. It was angry, and it would not be assuaged by one mere sandwich. I emptied the bag the grocery boy had brought, which had been left sitting on the counter minus a small carton of orange juice I'd managed to shove in the fridge before returning to bed.

Because I like to think of myself as generous, I'd ordered a couple of cans of wet food for Chuckles and a bag of catnip treats. I popped the top on the food, which brought Chuckles running out of the bathroom as if his fur were full of flaming ants. He catapulted his body up onto the counter and shoved his head into the can before I'd managed to remove the lid the whole way. We had a dispute about this. I argued that he would cut his face cramming it in there with that sharp edge still exposed. He argued that I was a miserable excuse for a human being and an owner and perhaps I might like to kiss his fluffy white ass. I won but only by virtue of height. I held the can up above my head to peel the lid free while Chuckles stood on his hind feet and tried to scale my chest. He got as far as one foot on my chin before I got it open and set it down for him. He gave a meow to complain about the tardy service and then shoved his face into it. As his face was wide and flat and the can small, there were a few minor physics problems to be worked out, but he overcame them with sheer determination and a lack of dignity.

I reacted similarly to a bag of Fritos and a banana Whoopie Pie, which I didn't know still existed. Aunt Trudy used to bring them back with her by the case when she traveled with Bob on his business trips. I would sneak them, which would lead to loud screeches of “Who stole my Whoopie?!” which is just as funny as it sounds. It was one of the few bright spots of my years with them. Maybe there had been more. I wished I could remember.

“Who stole my Whoopie?” I asked Chuckles.

He didn't get it, but then again he had ground-up tuna meal not suitable for human consumption in his fur. So, you know.

I took the bag of chips and another pie with me to my worktable along with Chuckles's catnip treats. He didn't show much interest in them until I opened the bag. He wasn't used to getting treats but seemed to have some sort of ingrained desire for them lodged in his lizard brain. No doubt it lived next to the neurons that demanded he chase and consume any bug that got into the studio, no matter how poisonous the insect or how painful the subsequent vomiting. I wasn't judging. My lizard brain did that with tequila.

I gave him a nip treat and went back to work on what I was calling
American Centaur
. The sketching was already done. It had the body of a cow—a castrated bull, really—and the torso and head of the Marlboro Man. I started mixing paint.

By dawn, I'd finished the human bits. I filled in the shirt checks with small bits of red and blue I'd cut from my magazine collection. I'd redrawn the hands and face, so Marlboro Man was reaching up to tip his hat, and had painted in the skin. I didn't have what I wanted for the body of the bull, so I left it and concentrated on the background. I filled in a dilapidated barn that included a side covered in advertising I'd pulled from my vintage magazines. I liked it so much I looked for other places to put bits of discarded consumerism, then doubted myself and peeled them back off. I cut and pasted until my eyes blurred.

Chuckles, full of half the bag of treats, had long since passed the point at which he could be bribed for company and had found a corner to sleep it off. I put down my brushes and did the same.

There was a Barcalounger with the footrest flipped up in the courtyard. It looked like it had been rained on, which was only one of the indignities it had suffered. The building was two stories tall with a center island of grass onto which all the front doors faced.

“I didn't pay you better than this?” I asked when Jenny opened the door.

“It's rent-controlled.”

She was wearing blue-and-white-striped pajama bottoms and a light blue tank top, the same blue as UCLA's colors. UCLA was just a few blocks away. I was wearing a blue tank top, too, but mine was navy and covered with cat hair. I'd forced Chuckles into an undesired fifteen-second cuddle session before I'd left the house. I'd also given him another can of wet food that smelled as if something had died under the baseboards. He'd bitten me on the hand. I appreciated the irony. He did not.

Jenny's arms were crossed over her chest. She wasn't wearing a bra and didn't need one. I didn't like to think I did, either, but now that I was comparing, maybe I did. Maybe time and gravity had taken their toll. Her feet were bare. The toenails had been painted black, but it was chipping. She curled them under when she caught me looking at them.

We stood there having ourselves what you call an awkward pause.

“How angry are you?” she finally asked when I'd outwaited her.

“Angry is just one of the many things I am,” I said.

“You look like hell.”

“Sweet of you to notice.”

“I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I'm worried you don't look good. Did you have a bad night?”

“I worked all night. I didn't sleep much. Are you going to ask me to come in or should we continue this inquisition on the chair out here?”

“Homeless people sleep on that,” she said and stepped aside.

I'd never been to Jenny's apartment before. She had been my assistant. She had become my caretaker, and if you had asked me, I would've said she was my friend. I wasn't sure now that that was ever really true. It had been, in retrospect, an upstairs/downstairs relationship. I hadn't meant for that to be the case, and I felt some twinge of guilt that it was so. She knew almost everything there was to know about me, and I knew very little—and as it turned out even less than I thought—about her.

“Do you want something to drink?” she asked.

“I think I better,” I said. “It's gonna be a long day.”

“I'm supposed to meet some friends for lunch,” she said.

“Cancel it.”

There it went. Upstairs/downstairs. Or maybe now big sister/little sister. Bully/victim.

In any case, she didn't object. “I have soda. Mexican Coke.”

“The best kind.”

Mexican Coke comes in a glass bottle so thick and solid it's fifty-fifty whether or not it will break if you drop it on the sidewalk, which is only part of what makes it great. The rest is the real sugar that flavors it. No corn syrup. It's sweeter than American Coke with no aftertaste. It goes great with the kind of salsa that leaves a capsaicin burn down the back of your throat.

The front door of Jenny's apartment opened directly into the living room, which was less than ten feet long. I sat on the sofa squeezed in there and looked around. There was no dining area, which was fine as she didn't seem to own a table. The kitchen was to the right and just big enough for a refrigerator, sink, and stove. There was hardly any counter space, and the stove wasn't full-size. I doubted she could've fit a cookie sheet inside it. Her microwave was equally miniature and balanced on a small bar that formed the room's boundary. No wonder she cooked at my place.

There was one door that led into the single bedroom, and somewhere in there must've been a bathroom. I imagined it was no bigger than the airplane toilet I'd used a few days before. There was art on the walls that I would've bet was hers, but from art school days, not recent. She could do better.

All in all, it was a few steps above Irish William's rented room but not many, and it made me wonder about what life was like for young people in this city. Maybe it was too hard and wasn't good for them. Then I felt old for thinking the words
young people
. My first apartment in New York hadn't had a single closet, and the water sometimes ran brown out of the taps.

Jenny took the only other seat, a small rocking chair. It was next to a television the size of her microwave, which was sitting atop a folding TV tray meant for eating frozen dinners. She pulled her feet up into the seat with her and was waiting for me to take the lead.

I watched her face. Jerry had looked like Ramona, but Jenny did not. She favored her mother's side, which was both a relief and a little sad. “So tell me,” I said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything I don't.”

She looked overwhelmed by the question. I could understand that. The amount of things about my own family—or at least a small part of it—that she knew and I didn't went back twenty years. Then again, the things I knew about her family—or at least a small part of it—went back twice that long.

“Mom told me when I went to art school.”

“So I hear.”

“I wanted to just call you up, but she told me about your mom and your sister. She said I couldn't, that you wouldn't want anything to do with me. I understood.” She said that last part as though apologizing to me for bringing up my moral failing, my inability to forgive something I'd never had the opportunity to decide if I wanted to forgive or not. “But I was still, you know, curious. After graduation, I decided to come out to L.A. I went to the Taylor just to see your stuff in person. Carla was there. She was the one who told me you needed an assistant.”

Of course she did.

“It was like fate,” Jenny said.

“It was fate mixed with intention and manipulation.”

Jenny found a loose string on the hem of her pants and twirled it around her finger. “Dad stopped speaking to me for six months.”

Perhaps she was suggesting I punish her similarly, as though I were a parent saying to her child, “What do you think I should do about this?” And the child knows that whatever the punishment is, it will end, and she will be loved again as before. Clean slate.

It was my day for feeling old. That was for sure. I'd gone years without really thinking about our age difference, not really. Instead I'd thought about the difference in our experience. I had more connections, more shows, longer to hone my skills, to work through the parrot phase where every artist tries to paint like someone more famous. But what all of that really meant was that I was just a lot older.

So I told her about Ramona.

I told her because I knew more than she did.

I told her about the time I got sent to the principal's office for punching Kyle Streeter, who made fun of my sister for crying on the playground after our dad left.

I told her about the pet rabbit we had—God, did it smell bad—and the time Ramona tried to make it sleep in her bed with her, which only lasted as long as it took for our mother to come investigate the squealing.

I told her that Ramona's grades were always better than mine, that she was nicer than I was, so nice she shared her Halloween candy with me even though I almost never shared mine, unless you counted the kinds I didn't like, like Smarties, which taste like stomach medicine.

I told her all the little things I could remember, which weren't nearly enough. Thirty years was a long time for memories to fade, until what you had were the memories of memories. They weren't always reliable. It was like a game of telephone you played with yourself. But I told her what I could, because Ramona was Jenny's sister, too.

“And then she died,” I said, which was enough.

“Would she have been an artist, too?”

“No. She would've been something much more important. She would've saved the world.”

“Maybe she would've cured your cancer.”

“She absolutely would have,” I agreed.

I thought we might end there on that note. If I had written the script, we would have.

“What about your mom?” Jenny asked. “What was she like?”

“Overwhelmed,” I said.

“Is it true that—”

“Yes.”

I got up from the couch and set my empty Coke bottle on the floor next to a pile of DVDs.

“Where are you going?”

“Church,” I said.

“Why?” It came blurting out of her, and she looked as if she wished the words were on a string she could pull back into her mouth. I often felt that way, and I needed a very long string.

“I heard they keep God there.”