Randall #01 - The Best Revenge (8 page)

But he grabbed her shoulders and, digging his fingers into her flesh, gave her a rough kiss—all slobber and old beer. As she pulled away, the strap of her dress ripped. She jumped up and grabbed a jacket hanging from the doorknob and threw it on to cover herself.

“Hey bitch, you’re supposed to be taking your clothes off, not putting more on.”

She barely avoided his second lunge by turning around toward her makeshift desk. She pretended to be looking for something.

“A pen,” she said, “I need a pen. See?” She found one under a copy of
Vogue
. “And some paper. I’ll give you my phone number. I’ll be so hurt if you don’t call…”

He wouldn’t call, of course. Men never did. She reached in the pocket of her jacket and found a scrap of paper. It had printing on it, but across the top was room for her to write “Camel—270-4571”.

He grabbed the paper and very quickly, his expression changed from anger and lust to something like fear. And embarrassment. He gave a nervous laugh.

“Hey, yeah. I’ll call you. Real soon. It was nice talking to you, Camel.” He started out the door. “I’ll call you,” he repeated, waving the paper scrap. “You bet.”

As he waved, she could read the words “Have You Heard About Jesus?” printed on the torn sheet. She stifled a giggle as she reached in her jacket pocket and pulled out the remainder of the cowboy’s pamphlet.

Jon-Don stuffed the paper in his pocket and pushed his way out the door.

Chapter 8—TV Sex See Page Six (A)

When Camilla woke the next day to the heavy Ocean Beach fog, she had a vague feeling that she had done something horribly wrong.

But she knew it wasn’t her fault the party had ended up such a disaster.

Not all of it.

OK, Jon-Don leaving, all freaked out by the religious pamphlet, kind of sent the party on a downward spiral. But that was because True, the girlfriend, who was too blitzed to notice Jon-Don making his hasty exit, threw a drama queen number and accused Camilla of hiding Jon-Don in her bedroom, and after a thorough search, threatened to “cut that bitch’s tits off,” if Jon-Don turned out to be hidden anywhere on the premises. That pretty much sent the more sober guests scurrying out the door.

But no matter how drunk they’d been, nobody could have blamed Camilla for the fact that when Jennifer’s other boyfriend, the sizable Mike, finally appeared, he was accompanied by another woman. A brunette in spandex with hair considerably larger than her brain—who made an ill-advised remark about Jennifer’s sexual habits.

And it was certainly not Camilla’s fault that Jennifer decided to have a hissy fit and make a dramatic exit on the arm of somebody with muscles and gold chains, who might or might not have been the breast-admiring Mr. Tooter. Camilla wasn’t sure. She’d had a couple of beers by then. But she did remember Mike taking off after them, in a growling Camaro, threatening everyone in his path with an untimely demise.

Wave and Jimmy the garbage man probably didn’t even know how badly things ended, since they took off in Jimmy’s car soon after that. They’d spent several hours on the couch looking like they were going to ravish each other then and there, so Camilla had been glad to see them go, even though it meant she was left on her own to evict the stragglers and clean up the mess.

Cleaning up had probably been the most enjoyable part of the whole night. She found herself flying around the house, picking up cigarette butts and beer cans, sweeping chips out of the carpet, washing dishes and even mopping beer off the kitchen floor, as if she’d been cleaning houses all her life. By the first light of morning, the house looked more presentable than it had in weeks, and her strange energy had waned enough for her to sleep.

So now why was she overwhelmed with unnamed guilt as she lay in her tidy bed, not even particularly hung over? When she rolled over and looked at the clock, she was shocked to see it was almost five in the afternoon. Half the weekend was shot. She pried herself out of bed, although she could have slept for days. Having a job had made her relish her time off. She hated to waste it.

Wave and Jennifer weren’t back, and the living room and kitchen were just as tidy as she left them. She settled onto the nearly clean couch with a cup of coffee and the TV Guide. She turned to channel six, which was supposed to be showing “Gilligan’s Island,” and was irritated to see a smiling man talking about bombs in Lebanon and welcoming viewers to his Friday newscast.

She switched off the set and counted the days on her fingers. With horror, she realized that it quite possibly could be Friday, not Saturday. This would mean she had missed work altogether. She hadn’t even called in sick. Not that it would have done any good. Her supervisor said that if she made one more mistake she was out. And this certainly was a mistake. How could she face the woman and say she thought it was Saturday? How could she face the woman and say anything? What good would it do?

She was out of a job.

She stared at the blank television set for several minutes. She could think of no reason to move. Finally, a calm, soothing vision appeared in her brain…

Chocolate pudding.

When she was small, her nanny, Mrs. Ritchie, gave her chocolate pudding when she had skinned her knee, or got a cold, or had cried a long time after her parents left on one of their trips. What Camilla really wanted right now was Mrs. Ritchie, who had been smiley and soft and ready with an answer for everything, but Mrs. Ritchie had died when she was nine. Chocolate pudding would have to do.

~

Camilla decided to walk the three blocks to the local supermarket, which had the unlikely name of the Big Bear, although she knew that Jennifer would laugh at her for not driving. Jennifer got her exercise at an expensive gym where she could wear her shiny leotards and Wave got her exercise playing volleyball on the beach, and neither of them ever walked anywhere. This seemed to be a kind of religion with them. But Camilla liked to walk, and today she thought she would be safe practicing the unfashionable habit.

She had only been to a supermarket a few times in her life, and the bright lights and crowds and syrupy music made her head hurt. She walked down endless aisles displaying almost everything but chocolate pudding, as her cart, which seemed to have a mind of its own, kept rolling sideways and bumping into displays of toilet tissue and slow-moving elderly ladies. Finally she found the pudding aisle and took five boxes of the chocolate. She also picked up milk; a package of Oreos and some butter almond ice cream.

She felt quite proud, if exhausted, when she finally escaped the Big Bear, heavy paper grocery bag in her arms. A plastic one with handles would have been easier for walking, but when the boy bagging the groceries said “paper or plastic,” he grabbed for the paper with such vehemence that she knew he had to be one of those ecology people, so she took the bag to avoid upsetting him.

Now she rested the bag on a metal newspaper vending machine to better balance its weight and wondered if maybe she should have driven the car after all.

As she picked up the bag again, she caught sight of a picture on the front of the evening newspaper. It was a photograph of Jon-Don Parker. Over the picture was the headline, “TV SEX SYMBOL FOUND DEAD IN BEVERLY HILLS HOME”.

She put a quarter in the machine with shaking fingers.

The paper said that Jon-Don Parker’s body had been found by his cleaning woman at 9:00 AM and that the police said his death was probably due to an overdose of heroin and cocaine—see TV SEX on page six, section (A).

She folded the paper quickly and stuck it into the grocery bag as she tried to ignore the roaring in her head. She hoped Wave and Jennifer would be back by the time she got home. She didn’t want to be alone any more.

The house, however, was empty. She put away the groceries and mixed up a package of the pudding before she looked at the paper again. She really didn’t believe that the information in it would go away, but she hoped it wouldn’t seem so terrible with chocolate pudding.

But it did. In fact, a thorough reading of the unnecessarily vivid details under the heading TV SEX on page six make her wish there had been nothing in her stomach after all. She stared at the photogenic face of Jon-Don Parker as Lieutenant Darrell and tried to erase the memory of her irrational attacker of last night. She turned the page. There were several more pictures of Jon-Don, including a blurry one showing him with his arm around True.

“Fashion model True, believed to be the last person to see Parker alive, is being sought for questioning,” the caption said.

Camilla shuddered, wondering if what True and Tooter went out to “score” last night had killed Jon-Don. Putting down the empty pudding bowl, she flipped through the rest of the paper, wishing that Wave, or even Jennifer, would come home. She resisted the urge to turn on the TV news. She didn’t want to see Jon-Don’s face again.

But another picture of him grinned from the front page of the entertainment section of the paper. As she quickly turned the page, a small headline caught her eye: “SET OF SAMOA! A CONCENTRATION CAMP, SAYS FIRED WRITER.”

Camilla’s breath came in short gasps as she read on:

“Plantagenet Smith, the former Broadway
wunderkind
, who collaborated on the musical
Boadicea!
five years ago, arrived last night at LAX with fresh horror tales of the production woes of director Guido Malatesta’s
Samoa
,
now in its fourth month of filming on location near Pago Pago.”

“‘Malatesta would better be employed in law enforcement in a small South American dictatorship,’ Smith told reporters, echoing the sentiments of actress Brooke Shields, who at one time was slated to play Margaret Mead in the big-budget epic…”

Camilla dropped the paper, ran to the phone and dialed, only to get an unlikely busy signal. She redialed, more carefully this time, but the signal was still busy. She listened to the buzz for some time before she put down the receiver. A busy signal had to mean somebody was home. Plantagenet was home—in Laguna Beach.

Only an hour and a half from where she was right now.

~

She ran to her room and changed into a Mary McFadden afternoon dress that Plantagenet had always liked and tried to do something with her hair. She tried the phone number again, and it was still busy. After a few calming breaths, she went out to her car and found the map on which she had traced the route to Laguna Beach a dozen times. Turning the key in the ignition, she headed for the freeway and Laguna Beach—and the supportive, loving arms of her best friend.

Chapter 9—The Loneliness of the Shoe