Blood Royal (17 page)

Since that time her mother had grown thinner, paler, her face a mask of depression. Marlowe tried to be supportive, but didn’t have her heart in it. Where was her mother when it counted?

Marlowe was about to ask the woman driving her to the hospital whether she could smoke, but instead just lit up without saying a word. No objection came from the woman.

That’s when Marlowe really understood her mother was dead.

*   *   *

H
ER MOTHER HAD BEEN
killed in a one-car accident, hitting a concrete freeway buttress at high speed. Her father wanted Marlowe to believe she went out of control after she was cut off by another car.

“She killed herself,” Marlowe told him.

In a six-month period, Marlowe had been to two funerals. She was seventeen and a half years old and only a dozen weeks from graduating from high school. But she couldn’t stay in the house or the town any longer—there were too many bad memories, too many ghosts. And too many tears.

She stood in her bedroom and looked around. It had been her bedroom her entire life. But she couldn’t stand it anymore, or anything else in the house. She left the bedroom and paused in the kitchen by the open door to the two-car garage that was her father’s shop. He was at the lathe making a wooden duck.

As she watched him, she suddenly realized what had antagonized Robbie about her father’s hobby of making wood ducks.

Wood ducks were decoys used to lure real ducks to be killed.

It was a cruel thing to do.

She didn’t say good-bye.

Marlowe had $612 in her purse when she arrived in San Francisco and bought a newspaper to hunt for an apartment and a job. The first shock she got from reading the classifieds was that she had a significant amount of money for Modesto, where she could rent a one-bedroom apartment for $100 a month—but in the city it was more than twice that for a studio apartment and it would take much of her nest egg to pay first, last, and security deposit. The manager at the first building she went to gave her more bad news. “You have no job, no credit history, no one is going to rent you an apartment. It’s supply and demand, hon, people beg for apartments in this town.”

She checked into the YWCA and spoke to a counselor about getting a job and apartment. One problem she didn’t share with the counselor—she was still nearly three months short of eighteen. She would have to lie about her age to get a job and hope she wasn’t asked for ID. And what kind of job could she get? She had no training, no vocational skills from school. She was supposed to have developed secretarial skills, but had dropped out of shorthand the first day and could hardly even type—she had long fingernails in her junior year when she took the class and had barely passed.

Technically, she was a runaway, but she knew her father wouldn’t report her missing or even come looking for her. There had been no angry words, no recriminations. Instead a silent indifference had settled between them. They had barely exchanged words since her mother had died. She rode to the funeral with a neighbor rather than be in the same car with him. After the funeral, when he had stopped by the open door to her room and saw her filling a suitcase on the bed, he left without saying a word and went to the garage to make decoys.

She recently heard a Jewish expression in a movie that fit her feelings about her father: “I’ve said kaddish for him,” the actress had said about a husband she was divorcing. She didn’t know exactly what the word meant, but she realized the woman was erasing the man from her life. And that was how she felt about her father. She didn’t love him or hate him, he just didn’t exist anymore.

The counselor told her, “You might be able to rent a room and get kitchen privileges, but the only places available will be in neighborhoods you won’t want to live in. The only jobs available will be minimum wage. Your best bet is to get a live-in job taking care of a working mother or couple’s children. You’ll get room and board and can save whatever you’re paid.”

The counselor gave her a list of three people who wanted live-ins. “Be careful of the men, some of them expect more than cleaning and changing diapers.”

The first man she spoke to had that kind of expectation. “My wife travels with her job,” he told her. “Our son’s six and pretty much takes care of himself. You’ll have very light duties.”

The house was a pigpen, the kid was a snotty-nosed little shit, and the man gave her a once-over—from bustline to butt line—and offered her the job.

She told him she’d think about it.

“I can sweeten the offer,” he said.

“I’d rather stick a needle in my eye,” she said to herself when she was a block away.

She liked the next house much better. “Cool,” she said when she got off the bus and trampled up Nob Hill to a building that reminded her of the Manhattan brownstones she’d seen in movies.

Dr. Sean Williams and Dr. Valerie Gilbert were the first interracial couple she had ever met. She couldn’t remember seeing a mixed-marriage couple in Modesto and had only seen one other such couple during the three days she’d been in San Francisco. A tall, slender man with short-cropped hair, large dark brown eyes, and smooth ebony skin, Dr. Williams—“Call me Sean,” he said—taught psychology. He wore a heavy gold necklace and had a tiny gold earring in his left ear. Dr. Gilbert—Val—was of medium build, about the same as Marlowe’s five-six and 128 pounds. She had pale white skin, faint freckles, red hair, and green eyes. She was also a psychologist, a family and marriage counselor with a private practice.

Marlowe had not encountered many female professionals and the Gilbert-Williams couple was the first she’d met who used their separate names.

It was all mind-blowing to a girl from Modesto. Everything about the couple was gold in Marlowe’s eyes.

Their apartment was a cultural—and counterculture—showplace, two stories decorated with artsy pieces from Africa and Asia, some of them risqué—a wood statue of an African warrior had an elephant-trunk penis.

Sean and Val were friendly and hip, and their son, Adam, was easy to care for because he was only six months old. Their previous nanny had married and moved to Seattle.

“We have a woman who comes once a week to do heavy cleaning,” Val told her. “You will be expected only to do straightening up, no cooking except for breakfast and lunch for yourself and Adam, mostly your weekends will be free. We’ll pay you extra when we need you to babysit Saturday nights.”

Perhaps the best thing of all was that the couple were worldly and sophisticated. Marlowe felt like a country bumpkin in comparison to them. She was a quick study when something interested her. She wanted to peel off her small-town cornhusk skin, and hanging around the Gilbert-Williams couple would be a perfect orientation to the world of intelligent chic. Marlowe felt as if she had died and gone to heaven.

She moved into a room on the first floor. The couple had a few friends over the first night. The mystic sound of South American flutes and the smell of high-quality cannabis came from the living room as Marlowe lay on her bed and read a fashion magazine. She had smoked pot once before, just a couple puffs off a joint that was passed among a group of kids hanging out back of the school gym during a dance, but it didn’t have any effect on her. After she bragged to Robbie about it, he told her the kids were so stupid, they probably were smoking alfalfa instead of marijuana.

The door to her room was at one end of the living room, next to the stairs that went up to the second floor. The guest bathroom, which was the one she used, was next to her room.

The baby had a crib in Marlowe’s room and also one in a room at the top of the stairs.

She got a glimpse of the two guests in the living room as she came down from replenishing her supply of diapers in the baby’s room upstairs. Like her employers, they were thirtyish, university types, dressed hip, both the man and woman wearing stylish jewelry. But she did a double-take when the woman opened her blouse to show the others her naked breasts. From the gist of their conversation, Marlowe picked up that the woman had just recently gotten breast enhancements.

What Marlowe found even more unusual was that Val had reached over and felt each breast.
Nothing wrong with that,
Marlowe thought. She’d heard that breasts felt different after they’ve been augmented, harder or firmer. And it was just a woman feeling another woman. That wouldn’t be proper in Modesto, but she was in Frisco now, Baghdad-by-the-Bay, these people were cool and hip, they weren’t constrained by all that hypocritical, puritan bullshit people in the valley mouthed all the time.

She put it out of her mind until she got up later to go into the kitchen and get a soda. The music had stopped and when she stepped out of her room, the living room was empty. She assumed the guests had gone home, but then she heard feet running and laughter coming from the bedroom area upstairs, and it sounded like there were more than two people involved. She assumed their guests were staying the night.

Nothing wrong with that,
she thought. But a nagging question stayed with her.

Just how hip and cool was the Gilbert-Williams couple?

Marlowe had been with the couple for nearly three months when Sean made an unusual proposition to her. They hired a babysitter and took her to the Tiki Room at the Fairmont Hotel, her choice for an eighteenth birthday dinner, to discuss the proposal.

She had gotten to know—and like—both of them, but had to admit that the two were not only strange animals by Modesto standards, they were not quite typical for the city, either. They had mostly a “don’t ask” relationship with Marlowe. She didn’t raise her eyebrows when guests disappeared upstairs with her employers and wild party noises flowed down, no explanations were offered when Sean was out of town and one of their friends stayed the night with Val upstairs—and it wasn’t always a male friend.

They didn’t bother Marlowe. While they never asked her to join them with guests, or serve food or drinks when they had guests over, they were very laid back and she knew they would welcome her if she decided to sit down and light up one of the joints that were neatly laid out on the coffee table when guests arrived.

There had been a couple of incidents when she went upstairs and had gotten a quick glimpse of Sean in his birthday suit as he wandered from his study to their bedroom, but it appeared innocent on his part and she simply averted her eyes and went into the baby’s room. Neither of them seemed to have much of an affinity for clothes once they reached the upper limits of their apartment—Val had walked butt-naked into the baby’s room once to ask Marlowe a question.

Marlowe’s imagination worked overtime wondering about the two, mostly about their sexual activities. From what she heard and read about group sex and the wild things going on at college campuses, everybody seemed to be doing it—except her. In Modesto, her sole sexual experience other than minor petting and making out was letting Billy Meter finger-fuck her in the backseat of his car at a drive-in. She had experienced pain and her panties had some blood on them afterward. Her girlfriend Betsy told her that his fingers had broken her hymen and that she wasn’t a virgin anymore. Like other girls her age, she hadn’t resisted going all the way because she lacked the urge, but out of the fear of getting pregnant.

She suddenly wondered what it would be like to have sex with Sean. The fact that he was of a different race made it a taboo subject for a girl from Modesto, but the forbidden thought kept sneaking into her head. Sometimes in bed at night she would fantasize walking into their bedroom and catching Val and Sean doing it, their skin glistening from sweat, a stark contrast between the white and black of their naked skin.

Pot seemed to be the drug of choice with them. Although Marlowe suspected that cocaine was occasionally used by guests, Val and Sean didn’t seem to be into it. Cocaine was an excited high, while they were looking for a different feeling, a lush low—pot went with the laid-back mystical music they liked, their Bohemian lifestyle.

She had learned a lot being around them, not the least of which was how diverse the world was. It wasn’t unusual in their living room for Buddhists to drop by and chant, an African drummer to pound a frantic beat, or a folksinger to drum a guitar while bemoaning the sounds of war coming from Southeast Asia. It was all interesting and sometimes exciting, but it wasn’t for her. As Sean jokingly put it when Marlowe had turned her nose up at raw fish at a Japanese restaurant, “You’ve come to us meat and potatoes, but we’re going to turn you into escargot.”

She turned her nose up at snails, too. “How can you eat those nasty, slimy, wiggly things? Without even gutting them? You eat their poop and all.”

“They’re fed cornmeal or something similar to clean their intestines before they’re cooked,” Val said.

“So you’re eating cornmeal-flavored shit?”

Marlowe noticed Val didn’t eat any more snails that night.

Sean broached his proposal when they were having dessert. “If you’re looking for extra money, there’s a project at school you might be interested in joining. Keep an open mind as I explain it.”

What they didn’t know was that she was looking for extra money to move out. She was tired of being a glorified babysitter and wanted the privacy of her own place. She was over eighteen, an employable age, and knew enough about the city to realize some jobs—being a waitress, clerking in a store—were low pay, but she could work hard and rise to better things. And after listening to the Gilbert-Williams couple talk about the benefits of an education, for the first time in her life she thought about college.

“Have you ever heard of psychedelic drugs?” Sean asked.

“I’m not sure, it sounds familiar.”

“You’ve heard of mushrooms that Indians eat and a drug called LSD?”

“Sure, they get hallucinations.”

“We don’t call them hallucinations, that’s what people who don’t understand them call the experiences. A hallucination would be a false image, something you’ve imagined but isn’t real. There are a number of groups who have studied the effects of the drugs, the most famous being a Harvard study headed by a professor named Timothy Leary.”