Lust, Loathing and a Little Lip Gloss (20 page)

“Kane has a high bed and it has a bedskirt,” he said. “Let me check to make sure the coast is clear and then you two hurry under there. When you hear us go down the stairs go to the door and listen for another two minutes. I’ll do everything I can to get him and keep him in the study. If I can’t do that, I’ll be loud about it so if you
don’t
hear anything after those minutes have passed you two run
quietly
downstairs and out the front door. Got it?”

“My, my, look who has an efficient side,” Marcus said with a cluck of his tongue.

“Yeah, I’m very efficient when it comes to basic survival. Stay here.” He cracked open the door and then slipped out and tiptoed to the bedroom door as Marcus and I peeked after him. After seeing that Kane wasn’t in the hall he waved for us to come out and Marcus and I crawled across the room and dragged ourselves under the bed. As soon as we were completely under, I stuck my head out from behind the bedskirt. “What does Kane want to do to my escrow?” I asked urgently.

“Later!” Scott whispered, and leaning down shoved my head back under the bed just as we all heard the sound of a toilet flushing in the distance. A moment later there was the brief sound of running water before a door opened and Kane’s voice carried down the hall. “Ah,” he said. “You’re done.”

“Yeah, I think I’m okay now,” Scott said. “Let’s go down to the study and look this stuff over.”

“Are you sure you’re up for that?” Kane asked, although I couldn’t detect any real or even fake concern in his tone.

“Yeah, I need to stay put for a little while anyway. Don’t want to be throwing up while on the road. Plus there’s no way I’m going to talk to Sophie about this new escrow agreement until you and I hash it out.”

My fists clenched at my side at the very mention of those papers, and Marcus put a hand on my back, as if to keep me from lunging out and attacking Kane’s ankles.

“There’s nothing to hash out. Either she agrees or she’s out.” Now his voice was getting fainter. Scott and Kane were moving farther down the hall. Marcus and I listened intently as the footsteps and voices moved down the stairs until we couldn’t hear them at all. A moment later Marcus and I rolled out from under the bed and crouched by the door, both of us silently counting the seconds until two minutes were up.

“Now,” Marcus said, getting up and pulling my arm.

I tried to pull away. “I want to grab one of his photo albums.”

“Are you crazy?” Marcus asked. “We don’t have time for this!”

“A second, Marcus,” I insisted, rushing over to the window and lifting the lid of the hope chest. “The pictures he has in here…I just need them.”

“Sophie, if you take anything from this room—”

“I have to do this, Marcus!”

“—Kane will think Scott took it and he’ll come after him.”

My hand froze on top of the album I meant to seize. These pictures were of my family! Kane had no right to them. But then there was Scott, the man who had screwed me over in more ways than I could count. The man who I had imagined torturing on more than one quiet night. The man who had just, to use his words, saved my ass. I withdrew my hand.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Let’s go.”

Without waiting another second, Marcus yanked me out of the room and down the stairs. Just then we heard a dog barking excitedly in the backyard and then Kane’s voice coming from the study. “Relax, Scott. I’m just going to find out what Avernus is upset about.” But it didn’t matter anymore, because Marcus and I were quietly closing the front door. And then we were running. Marcus jumped in the driver’s seat of his car while I quickly took my place beside him. With what must have been enormous restraint against adrenaline, he slowly pulled out of our parking spot and drove down the street. His speed was steady and inconspicuous. I watched Kane’s house get smaller and smaller in the side mirror. I was furious with Kane and relieved as hell to be away from that house.

And, to my great annoyance, I was scared for Scott. He was now alone with Kane, and Kane was clearly out of his mind. Scott’s well-being wasn’t my concern. Or rather, his lack of well-being had long been something I had hoped for, and yet now, when there was the real potential for danger, I only wanted Scott to be safe.

And perhaps that was the biggest danger of all.

17

Some people drink to forget. I drink in hopes of finding the courage to remember.

—
The Lighter Side of Death

MARCUS STARED MUTELY AT THE RAIN AS IT HAMMERED DOWN ON HIS
windshield.

“We did get out without getting caught,” I pointed out timidly.

“By Kane,” Marcus corrected coolly. “We were absolutely caught by Scott, and if he hadn’t decided to be decent for once in his life, we would both be wearing orange jumpsuits right now. Do you know what I look like in orange, Sophie?
Do you!
”

“But he didn’t turn us in.” Marcus was driving too fast now and the colorless buildings that lined California Street were a blur, indistinct from the gray sky that encased them. “He said he was sorry.”

“Are you going to get mushy just because he had the courtesy to vomit? Mother birds do that for their chicks all the time, and you know what they do the minute their chicks start looking old? Abandon them and get replacements. Don’t be Scott’s chick. Let him regurgitate on somebody else.”

“Please! I have no interest in being Scott’s chick! I’m just surprised, that’s all. I thought he…or that he didn’t…it doesn’t matter.” I pressed the base of my palms into my forehead in an attempt to press back the confusion. “What does matter is that Kane has been stalking my family for years. And I mean
years,
Marcus!” I told him about the pictures I had found. By the time I was done he was turning the car onto my street, his speed having decreased as if in complement to his dissipating anger.

“Honey, I know you love that house, but this Kane guy is mental. Like Manson-mental. Can’t you buy a different house? You know, sane people sell property, too.”

“I’m not leaving my—wait a minute, that’s Leah’s car.”

Marcus pulled up to my house and squinted at the two figures huddled inside the Volvo that was backed into my driveway. “She brought Mama Katz with her,” he said with a smile. “I smell a guilt trip coming.”

“Why would she spring Mama on me?” I muttered.

Marcus shrugged and leaned over to give me a kiss on the cheek. “As much as I’d love to catch up with your brood, last night’s darling little man only lives ten minutes from here and he’s a massage therapist. And after the stress of this afternoon, I need a good rubdown.”

“Lucky you.” I started to open the door, but stopped and turned to give him another hug. “What Scott did for me was nothing compared with what you did today. I know you didn’t want to go into that house, but you did, and you held me still when I wanted to spring out and kill Kane. You are the best friend a girl could ever ask for.”

“You’re just figuring that out now?” Marcus asked sarcastically, but I knew he was touched. He gently shooed me out of the car. “Your mother went through nine hours of labor to bring you into this world and now you keep her waiting? Did she raise you to behave like this?”

I smiled and waved as I slammed the door behind me and then rushed over to the Volvo where Leah, wearing an A-line hooded cloak, was already out and opening the door for Mama. She held an oversize black umbrella in place to protect our mother from the torrents of rain. The umbrella served more for effect than anything else since Mama was already bundled up in her cheery yellow raincoat, her wild, white curls tucked into a clear plastic bonnet. The look was the antithesis of chic and that bothered me some. My mother used to care about fashion when my father was alive.

Now the two women were standing there, looking at me with determined expressions. Instantly I knew I was in trouble.

“This,” Leah said, “is an intervention.”

My mind raced through the various addictions I had indulged over the last few months. I hadn’t had that much alcohol or sex lately, which meant there was only one vice left.

“Studies show there are health benefits associated with drinking five cups of coffee a day,” I said. “According to a recent Japanese study I could even kick it up to eight.”

“This isn’t about the caffeine, mamaleh,” Mama said and then clucked her tongue. “Look at you, you’re not even wearing a decent coat! You’ll catch pneumonia at this rate. Come, let’s bring this intervention business inside.”

Leah nodded sagely and she and Mama led the way up to my front door. As I fished for my keys I noticed that Mama’s hand was on the doorknob, her arthritic fingers caressing its curvature.

“Do you want to open it?” I asked, unsure why that might appeal to her, but nonetheless certain it would. She smiled and took the keys. It seemed to take an hour for her to twist it in the lock, although it was probably less than thirty seconds. As she opened the door she sucked in a sharp breath before stepping over the threshold. Leah and I followed her. Unlike my more practical relatives, I was wearing a totally-adorable-but-not-all-that-waterproof coat. It took considerable dexterity and strength to pull the waterlogged fabric from my body.

“For God’s sake, hang it over a shower rod,” Leah instructed as she put her own coat on the rack by the door. “It’s dripping so much that if you hang it in here you’ll have a river running through your living room and you’ll absolutely ruin these hardwood floors.”

That was all the encouragement I needed. I went to the nearest bathroom and tried not to wonder at my mother, who seemed to have gone into some kind of trance as she fixated on the darkened fireplace.

When I came back, Mama had moved on to the bookcase. “Such nice books you have here,” she said as she fingered the various titles by Alice Walker, David Sedaris and Chaim Potok. “I always told him these shelves were too pretty for academia. Such a waste that would have been.”

“You told who?” I asked, now standing only a few feet behind her. “Oscar? Did you know Oscar?”

“Okay, that is it!” Leah slapped her hands on her hips and positioned herself between us. “I always knew you were the master of repression, but this is unseemly. As your sister I insist that you pull it together and deal with your multitudes of issues. I have Jack with the Slaters’ nanny. She’s twenty-two dollars an hour and I’ve only budgeted forty-four dollars toward the task of making you sane.”

“Leah, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You have to remember this house!” she said, her voice rising in both volume and pitch. “I mean,
I
don’t remember, but I was too young. Plus,
I
am not the one who decided to jump through a million hoops to buy this place!”

“I told this story to your sister earlier today, and now I tell you.”

“Leah, you’re not making sense. Of course I remember this house. I live here!”

“So did we,” Mama said, her eyes twinkling now. “Surely this house was built from the wood of the tree of life, no? How else could it have made us all so vibrant?”

“Again, I have no idea what either one of you are talking about.”

She took a step forward and for the second time in three days I felt her wrinkled hands against my cheeks. “Sit down, mamaleh,” she said gently. “For once you’re going to let your mama do the talking.”

On any other occasion I would have taken that as a cue to remind her that she
always
does the talking, but not this time. Instead I let her lead me through my various boxes to the sofa, and I let her hold me as she told me the story of a past that I had chosen to forget.

The first part of the story was familiar. I knew about my mother’s first husband, Sheldon Kleinstein, although I never thought of him by that name. To me he would always be Mr. Decent. That was the only description of him I had ever really gotten. Her family liked Sheldon’s family and vice versa and they were all for the marriage, but what made up my mother’s mind for her was that she knew that Sheldon was the kind of guy you could count on. He made a decent living by running the family business in Brooklyn, and he would make a perfectly decent husband and eventually a perfectly decent father. All of that was true, except the latter. It wasn’t that Sheldon had some kind of deep-seated hatred of children, but no matter how hard they tried my mother couldn’t get pregnant. Every night before going to bed she would try to strike a deal with God. If only she could be
schwanger
(pregnant) she would start going to
shul
every week. She would keep kosher, light candles on Friday night, the works! But God was having none of it. So, eventually, my mother resigned herself to being a decent childless wife to a decent sterile husband, her only consolation being that she could still eat bacon and go to the movies on Friday night. Of course, my mother didn’t know decent Sheldon had a low sperm count. She thought the problem lay with her.

All this decency came to an end when Sheldon was struck down by a drunk driver at the young age of thirty-nine. My mother, who had never been truly in love with Sheldon, still mourned him. He had become a dear friend and deserved so much better. She also mourned the loss of her own prospects. At thirty-eight and presumably barren, what were the chances of her ever finding another husband? After a little too much Manischewitz she decided that without children to be a role model for, or a husband to provide a home for, the only thing left to do was to stop being so decent and go have a little fun. So that night she told her landlord she was moving, and less than a month later she was in San Francisco, which, according to all reports, was where people went when they wanted to have some indecent fun.

The men she dated in the city of love would never have met the approval of her friends back in Brooklyn, but that was just fine. Approval, shamoval, she was having a blast. And that’s when she met my dad. He wasn’t like her other San Francisco beaus; he wasn’t a Bohemian or an aged beatnik trying to fit in to the new hippy movement. This man was a smartie! A distinguished professor, at San Francisco State University no less! For a man of color to achieve such a position, surely he had to be a genius!

They came from totally different worlds, but they were able to join those worlds together, not in a melting pot, but in the way you would put together two pieces of a puzzle. Two different and distinct shapes that managed to fit together perfectly to make a picture. They had only been dating a few months when she became pregnant with me. She knew that it was a miracle. God wanted her to make a family with this man, and she was only too happy to oblige.

I knew that story. I tended to embellish the last part. In my version, she knew she was madly in love with my father before the pregnancy and he had already been shopping for a ring. But those details weren’t all that important, really. What mattered was that we all lived happily ever after until fate unjustly made my mother a widow for a second time.

“But mamaleh,” my mother said, when I offered her my conclusion. “This is not how it was. Life is not so easy.”

I pulled back from her slightly, slowly becoming aware of the flat-screen TV and energy-efficient lightbulbs that forced me out my revelry of the last century and into the new millennium. “What do you mean it wasn’t like that?” I said. “You and Dad made it. He embraced Judaism, changed his name from Christianson to Katz and you learned to love Otis Redding and soul food. It was a win-win for everybody and you two were totally and absolutely in love. What wasn’t easy?”

“It’s like I said, we were puzzle pieces. You know what happens to puzzle pieces when they get old? When you take them out and expose them to the elements? I tell you what, they start to curl up in the corners. They lose their shape. All of a sudden they don’t fit together so easily and when they are together the picture they create has faded. It’s not so brilliant anymore.”

“You and Dad were happy,” I said firmly. I looked over to Leah for support. She was standing by the window, looking out at the rain instead of at us.

“We were happy,” Mama assured me, leaning down to stroke Mr. Katz as he nuzzled her ankles. “But there were times that were not so great. We had so much to learn about one another. My family was not so happy that I married a black man, and his family thought I was a demon—a witch who could turn a gentile into a Jew! All this we could have dealt with, but still, it takes some getting used to living with a man from a different world and I didn’t always make it so easy for him, either!”

“Why are you telling me all this, Mama?” I asked, trying not to sound as uneasy as I felt. “What does that have to do with this house?”

“Always in such a rush.” She
tsk
ed.

“Well, seeing as this story is costing Leah twenty-two dollars an hour I thought a little rushing would be considerate,” I retorted, again, trying to catch Leah’s eye. She blushed slightly, though I only saw it in profile since she still wouldn’t look my way.

“Twenty-two dollars an hour is small potatoes,” my mother insisted. “The wisdom of a mother is worth a million! Now, as for me and your father, we went through some turbulence during the year after Leah’s birth. It had been hard before that, and after one too many fights we decided to call it kaput.”

“What!” I was on my feet now. “How could you have even considered leaving Dad? He was our center, he held our family together!”

“By the time you were in grade school, yes, he did. But when you were a preschooler? Not so much.”

“So what happened?” I demanded. “How did he talk you out of it?”

“Sophie,” Leah said, her voice sounding more tired than it had been in a long time, “she didn’t talk him out of it.
He
left.

He left willingly.”

“What are you talking about?” I have never considered myself a foot-stomper, but the moment seemed to call for it.

They were attacking my childhood memories and it would take childlike behavior to defend them! I glared at Mama, my arms tightly folded across my chest. “Dad didn’t leave us. He wouldn’t have done that.”

“Maybe not if I had asked him to stay,” Mama said quietly. “You were so angry, mamaleh. Barely four years old and you were filled with all this
molereziche.
All day long all I heard was
‘where’s my papa, when’s Papa coming home, give me Papa back.’
You visited him in his apartment all the time, but it wasn’t enough for you. Always the stubborn one you were. But that year you were also the scared one. You had been my brave little Sophie and all of a sudden you were afraid of the dark! It didn’t help that I got appendicitis on top of everything else.”