Trouble (2 page)

I was so turned on by the sound of his voice in my ear, I could have raped him right there. I was feeling loose and wild and punchy. I had spent the past ten years, it seemed to me now, with my muscles clenched, eyes narrowed, shut up in a dark, too-small, sterile room, trying desperately but vainly to make it feel homey and capacious. The door out of my cage, my cell, had been right there all along and I had just flung it open; now that I could see outside to light, color, life, freedom, I felt that there was no closing it, ever again.

“Yeah,” I said, almost giggling like a kid. “I haven’t talked to her for a couple of weeks, but she said the thing with the new boyfriend is very hush-hush for some reason, and she wouldn’t tell me who he was, either. And she’s got a new album in the works. It’s her big comeback. Apparently, she’s put together an amazing band, and they’ve been in the studio all fall.” Raquel had also told me that she was getting a little sick of Indrani’s earnest, self-involved E-mails, but I didn’t mention that bit of news.

“Raquel Dominguez?” Mick asked.

“The very same,” I said.

He looked impressed, the starfucker. “How do you know her?” he asked.

“College,” I said.

“We were all three best friends,” Indrani added warmly.

I thought of what Raquel had just said to me about her and felt guilty and complicit, even though I was innocent.

In the fall of 1980, more than a quarter of a century ago, Indrani and Raquel and I had been newly arrived freshmen with consecutive alphabetical last names at a small liberal-arts school tucked away in a leafy suburban corner of a small northwestern city. Sensing a shared ironic yet romantic outlook, we had immediately formed a solid, seemingly permanent triumvirate. The three of us had rented a ramshackle old house together off campus. We majored unanimously in English, wore one another’s thrift-store clothes, cooked big meaty dinners, and threw parties at which we all took mushrooms or MDA and played the Talking Heads, the Specials, Elvis Costello, Al Green. We passed boyfriends around amicably and casually—at least two and sometimes all three of us had slept (but never at the same time) with Joe the chem major, Stavros the history major, Dave the anthro major, Jonathan the anthro major, and Jason the anthro major (we’d had a thing for anthropologists, for reasons we could never quite fathom). We never slept with one another. Straight girls sleeping together just for youthful sport was, we all tacitly agreed, a cliché, and of course we called ourselves girls, not women—feminist didacticism, along with earnest vegetarianism, was emphatically not our aesthetic, which set us somewhat apart from the majority of the student body, which suited us fine.

We’d known, with the absolute certainty of undergraduates everywhere, that we were all going to be famous. I studied painting as a sort of unofficial minor, avidly but with only the most obligatory encouragement from my teachers. Indrani ran the school newspaper, the
Quest;
and Raquel, who even then was a compelling, original singer and songwriter, fronted her own band, the Shitheads. Back then, she had been exactly the same singer she was now, as if she had been born singing that way. Her voice was at once raucously passionate and tenderly thoughtful, like an improbable, best-of-both-worlds cross between Janis Joplin and Keely Smith, both of whom had, not coincidentally, been her greatest formative influences. The Shitheads had started performing her sultry, inventive jazz/rock songs at coffeehouses and at the student union; then they’d played at a couple of Friday-night socials, then started getting gigs downtown at a club called Satyricon. In our senior year, they were signed to a recording contract with a local label; the summer after graduation, they went on tour with a few other bands on their label and became college-radio favorites. After graduation, Indrani and I moved to New York, Raquel to Los Angeles with her band.

Of the three of us, only Raquel, not surprisingly, had made it as any sort of artist. I, with typical pragmatic efficiency, instead of getting a shitty day job and using every spare moment to paint, which I wanted to do but knew I had no real talent for or future in, got my Ph.D. in psychology and became a shrink. Indrani, who knew she was too reserved and thin-skinned to be a journalist, had likewise gone for a Ph.D. and now taught English at Columbia.

Meanwhile, Raquel lived in Silver Lake in an airy bungalow with a view. Her name was as familiar as Bonnie Raitt’s or PJ Harvey’s. Every time we saw her photo or name in an online review or article, Indrani and I sent it to each other by E-mail, our messages often crossing in midair in cyberspace. Even though she had never won a Grammy, her first solo album,
Big Bad
, had gone platinum in 1992; two more albums had quickly followed, and, although she’d been lying low, to put it politely, for the past decade or so, she was still a rich and famous rock star who looked a lot younger than forty-five. Not that Indrani and I looked like cows, ourselves, and not that we did nothing whatsoever to maintain our own looks as far as possible past their natural expiration dates, but Raquel was expertly professional about it in a way Indrani and I didn’t have to be. She’d had Botox and Restylane injections and got regular facial peels and dermabrasion treatments; she ate a stringently ascetic diet and followed disciplined regimes of Pilates and yoga and strength training. She both needed and deserved to look as good as she did.

“Is she as crazy as they say?” Mick asked.

“Every bit,” I said. “She’s cuckoo.”

“Josie!” said Indrani, laughing.

“Well, isn’t she?” I said, laughing, too. “Not that we don’t love her. Not that she’s not smart as hell. But she’s a whack job!”

“You should know,” said Indrani merrily. “You’re the shrink.”

There was a very brief silence.

“Shrink,” said Mick. “I thought you were a painter.” “She’s just kidding,” I said without looking at Indrani. If I had said that to Raquel, she would have picked up on it right away.

But Indrani said, true to form, “Are you really still painting, Josie? That’s great! I thought you’d quit all that a long time ago.”

I looked directly at Mick. “I’m a painter manqué,” I said with rueful, flirtatious bluntness. “The closest I get to actually being one is telling fibs to handsome men at parties.”

“I accept the compliment,” said Mick, “but the necessity of fibbing puzzles me. A shrink, is it.” I could see by the glint in his eye that he was not puzzled at all.

“It’s a living,” I replied.

“Yes, I’m sure it pays far better than painting. It was a pleasure to meet you, Doctor.” And then he slipped off into the kitchen.

“What was that all about?” Indrani asked. “Is he afraid of therapists or something?”

“I think I’d better go,” I told her. “I’ve had too much wine.”

“Poor Josie,” she said anxiously, “but please don’t go. Do you want some seltzer or coffee?”

“I don’t think they’ll help,” I said. “I have a wicked headache. I’m sorry, Indrani, I just need to lie down.”

“Go lie down on my bed,” she said. “You can close the door. There’s Advil on the nightstand.”

“Indrani!” I said, laughing.

“All right,” she said. “I’m just disappointed that you’re going. I was looking forward to hanging out with you after everyone left.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Things are just a little tense at home lately.”

“All the more reason to stay here,” she replied, but she said it with a laugh, offering it as a joke about her own pushy neediness. “You can tell me all about it.”

“I will,” I said. It wasn’t her fault that I’d been caught in a stupid fib and just realized I had to leave my husband. “I’ll come and help you clean up tomorrow. My last client leaves at two, and then I’m free till the second week of January.”

She looked overjoyed at the thought of having company amid the dregs of her party. “That’s all right,” she said. “I know you’re busy. What about Wendy?”

“I’ll bring her along if she wants to come, but she’ll probably be glad to get rid of me. I’ll get here around three at the latest.”

“You think people had fun?”

“They’re still having fun,” I said. “It’s early.” I gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek, then went to find my coat and bag. I did not see Mick on my way out the door. Five minutes later, I was out in the icy air of Riverside Drive, heading down toward the subway stop at 103rd Street and Broadway. I inhaled the bracingly fresh air through my nose and hunkered down into my warm, sensible knee-length down coat, glad I’d worn it over my rather tight bottle green dress and thin tights. I tripped along the sidewalk, unaccustomed to heels. On Broadway, I considered hailing a cab, then thought about walking as far as I could until my feet gave out. Instead of either option, I suddenly swerved and ducked into a bar, pulled in by the inviting yellow-and-blue neon I’d glimpsed out of the corner of my eye.

Inside, it was festive, warm, and loud, a crowd of people drinking together. Whether or not they had arrived together or had known one another before, alcohol and holiday cheer had caused them to form a cohesive-feeling group. I took off my coat and slung it over my arm, then squirmed my way up to the bar and waited for the bartender to notice me. I could use another glass of wine before I head home, I thought. I almost never got to misbehave; I hadn’t had a night out by myself in who knew how long. Tomorrow was my last day of work before vacation. Who cared if I was hungover? I’d go to Indrani’s after my last client and have a hair of the dog. Then I’d go home and face Anthony, who’d be asleep when I got home and probably gone by the time I woke up. He often did radio talk shows in the early morning or went down to his office at the New School, where he taught political science.

I sensed, rather than saw, the man sitting to my left at the bar notice me and keep his eyes on my face. Hoping to discourage him from talking to me, I gazed fixedly at the bartender, a busty but skinny girl in a low-cut minidress.

“What are you drinking?” the guy next to me asked, shouting a little over the din.

I ignored him, for lack of any better option. The bartender, in turn, ignored me, but she had plenty to occupy her attention.

“Hey,” he shouted into my ear. “Lemme buy you a drink.”

I shook my head without making eye contact.

He slapped a ten-dollar bill down on the bar and hailed the bartender. She came right over and shot him an inquiring look. He jerked his thumb in my direction.

I leaned over the bar and yelled, “A glass of red wine, please, but I’ll pay for it.”

She raised her eyebrow at my new pal with a disbelieving smile and took his ten. I still did not look at him. When the bartender returned with my glass of red wine and three ones, he waved away the change. She flashed him a smile. No wonder she was on his side here; she knew I wouldn’t have tipped so well. I decided not to thank him; he had forced this on me. I took a sip of wine and tried, unsuccessfully, to forget about him.

“Merry Christmas,” he shouted, leaning in toward me. His rocks glass appeared in my peripheral vision; it held something amber, probably whiskey. The ice was crisp and fresh; the drink was almost gone. He was downing them fast.

With a sigh, I knocked my glass with desultory dismissal against his, then took another gulp of wine and fished my cell phone out of my bag, ostensibly to see whether I had any messages, but really, of course, to shake him off.

“Hello, darling, it’s your mother,” he shouted. “You never call! You never write!”

I kept a straight face, but inside I couldn’t help laughing; he was so unrelentingly obnoxious. I put my cell phone back into my bag and gave him my most professional stare. My brief impression of him was that he was a lot younger than I’d suspected. Why was he hassling me? There were plenty of girls there who looked like Columbia students. I picked up my glass and my bag and struck off through the crowd to find another spot farther down the bar. I stood near the pool table, watching two boys take turns shooting balls into pockets. I felt myself melt with the almost-forgotten pleasure of solitary anonymity in a close, noisy crowd. I had been tense and brittle for so long, I almost collapsed with this release, this softening. I finished my wine and turned around to catch the bartender’s eye. It took a while to get her to acknowledge me, but I managed to procure another full glass of red wine. I tipped her two bucks, then turned back toward the room and breathed the sharp, yeasty smell of my glass of wine and took a sip. It tasted harsher and not as good as the first one, the one my unwanted pursuer had bought me.

One of the boys playing pool noticed me and looked at me for a beat or two longer than necessary. The most flattering interpretation of this was that he was stunned by my foxiness, but he was probably wondering why someone old enough to be his mother was infiltrating his hangout. I looked back at him, and he dropped his eyes. It was just past midnight. Wendy was, no doubt, still awake, texting her friends on her cell phone under the covers, pretending to be asleep if Anthony checked on her, which he wouldn’t. This was because he was, no doubt, dozing in his chair, book fallen open facedown on his chest, whiskey dregs warming in his forgotten glass. The thought of our quiet apartment, the two of them isolated in their separate worlds, made the wine in my mouth taste bitter. If I were home now, I thought, I would be in my own hermetic cave, in bed with a novel and a cup of mint tea; I would get up and open Wendy’s door every now and then and listen to her faking being asleep, phone glowing under her comforter.

Throughout her childhood, I had done my best to love and be loved by Wendy. Anthony and I had brought her home from a Chinese orphanage when she was not quite a year old. As a baby, she was very bright, verbal, and curious. As a toddler, she developed strong opinions about what she did and did not want to do, eat, and wear, but she could be reasoned with and convinced to do my bidding with some effort. About the time she started school and realized there were other people in the world, teachers, friends, she began looking quizzically at me, evidently wondering why I was bossing her around like that. It was around this time that she seemed to become aware of me as someone she disdained and preferred not to be around. When she was six, I administered her first IQ test and learned that her IQ was 177. In first grade, she quietly, subversively began to challenge and resist my authority as her mother, but she had continued to tolerate me with a stoic reserve. The instant she’d turned eleven, it seemed, her ability to bide her time with me as her mother had dissolved and given way to a frank yearning to be away from me, out of my clutches, free at last. “I’m counting the seconds till I can leave,” she had told me flatly more than once. She was closer to Anthony, but only marginally, if only because he wasn’t me.