Die a Little (14 page)

"How did it get there?"

He leans back, setting his glass on his knee and spreading his arms along the back of the sofa.

"This is about your brother's wife. This is about you wanting to pin something on your brother's wife." He can't hide a smile.

"No. No," I say, reacting instantly to the strange allegation. What does he mean? What could he possibly mean? "I'm just trying to find out what..."

My mouth inexplicably goes dry. Pin something on my brother's wife? Why would I...

I hear some sound come from within me. My jaw begins shaking suddenly. It seems to be rattling.

He takes a sip from his drink, smile still suspended there. The glass has left a faint ring on the knee of his cream-colored pants. I stare at it, trying to regain my focus.

"I just want to know ..." It's hard to talk with my jaw doing this. I can't make the words sound smooth.

He raises his eyebrows expectantly, waiting for me to finish my sentence.

"... what it was doing there. I just want to know ..." I wonder, can he hear that? Can he hear how loud my jaw is? It seems so loud I can barely hear myself. A horrible rattling like a dying snake.

"Why didn't you ask your sister-in-law?" He smacks his lips ever so slightly, holding the glass with its still popping soda water. "Why don't you?"

"Maybe I did," I blurt, fixing my hand on my jaw to keep it in place.

"I don't think so." He smiles.

"No. I ... I just want for you to tell me. I didn't want ..." It's hard to answer because I don't know what the answer could be. To tell the truth, I'd never even thought to ask Alice. To tell the truth, it is as if, lately, as everything keeps surging forward, it is as if I am seeing her through glass, through dark water three feet deep.

"You wanted something over her?" he says, tilting his head.

He watches me squirm and shake my head fervently, but then his smile slips away for a moment, as if he has just realized something.

"How did you know it was mine, anyway?" My jaw finally settles a bit. If I clench it, I can speak.

Die a Little -- 86 --

"That doesn't matter," I say.

"I might decide that." His voice turns cooler. "You'd better just spill it all, Miss King." Then he says, "You, honest, don't know what you're getting yourself into." Then he says, "And I think you better give me the fucking book." Then, finally, "It's mine, after all."

I stand up, my drink nearly slipping from between my fingers as I press the book to my chest. I feel foolish. If he really wants it, my little grasp isn't going to stop him.

I set the glass down.

Things suddenly feel far more complicated.

And all the reasons for not bringing the book with me, much less coming at all, swirl through my head. I wonder exactly what I am doing here.

I turn on my heel, intending, I suppose, to get as far as I can.

Thinking, I guess, that it would be too embarrassing for him to overpower a woman.

But then thinking he might overpower a woman every day.

I can feel him watching me for a moment, then I see him, from the corner of my eye as I begin to walk to the door, calculatedly break into a shrug.

"You want it, you got it, Miss King," he says, standing, his thin-lipped smile hanging from one side of his face.

Then he adds, "I don't need it."

And finally, "It's been more than an even trade."

I open the door, and my hand is shaking like a string pulled taut and plucked hard.

On the drive home, my jaw buzzes, hums, nearly sings. I jam the heel of my hand underneath it, steer with one hand, and turn the radio as loud as it will go. The zing of the brutish jazz finally vibrates hard enough to drown it out.

Die a Little -- 87 --

[?]*[?]

My head clogged with incomplete revelation after revelation, I avoid Bill entirely. Any other time, he would be the one I would go to, would have long gone to, for help. But this time I can't.

Instead, the next night, unable to sleep, I end up at Mike Standish's apartment.

"You're awful dirty, Lora King. I wonder if anybody has any idea what a dirty girl you are."

I don't answer, don't like him saying it, even if I am curled against the edge of his bed, my knees on the floor, persuaded not to put my stockings on, persuaded to stay right where I am and look up at him, straight into his laughing eyes.

I sit there and I try to frame a question. But I can't.

"I'm going home."

"Why go home? No one's keeping tabs on you. Come on."

"You don't need me to stay." I reach for my stockings, pull them slowly from the tangle of sheets.

"I do." He sighs, stretching his arms above his head. "I really do."

"You like to sleep alone."

He seems--it is dark and hard to tell--to smirk a little before he says, "I think you should stay. You are the one I like to stay."

I almost ask why and then I don't ask why and my stocking, via my own slightly trembling hands, is streaming up my leg.

"Come on. I like you here and I like the way you smell. I like making you stay." He yawns.

Here he is, the man who knows things and who should want to help me. But it is so hard to bring up things with any weight at all to a man like this. A man like this doesn't have real conversations.

He is lying there whistling contentedly, and I just close my eyes.

For weeks, I've been deciding whether to ask him, ask him anything about what I've learned, or almost learned. Now, with what I have seen, with Joe Avalon and more and more questions, it seems I don't have anything to lose.

"I saw some pictures, Mike," I say, biting my lip a little, snapping my belt, adjusting my collar, feeling the need to straighten myself.

"It's all about pictures, King. Don't you forget it. It's my bread and butter." He reaches over and touches my belt lightly with a finger, leaning in and sending a shot of peppery cologne to my face.

"I mean specific pictures. Bad ones. Here in your apartment." I look at my gray shoes, pointy-toed and confident. Teacher shoes.

Die a Little -- 88 --

"I got pictures like that, sure," he says, and I realize, with regret, that he is scrambling, dancing.

"Pictures on playing cards. One of them, it was of my sister-in-law.

Of my brother's wife. And Lois Slattery."

He smiles. He nearly grins, but it's an effort. "Oh, right. Yeah, I really didn't want you to see that. Not--not because ... Frankly, King, I thought it would hurt you." The voice almost soft. "Because of your brother."

I can barely stand it. I honestly feel my knees buckle. There he is, this cold, rather limited man with--is it?--a distinct look of kindness in. his eyes.

"How did you get those pictures?" I manage, recovering.

"Lora ..." He sighs and sinks back into the bed.

"Tell me where you got those pictures."

"Listen ... listen, we live differently, in different worlds. Truly, Lora, your world, your world is kind of beautiful. Why bring my world into it? Why--"

"Tell me, Mike. You'd better tell me." I look down at him.

"She gave them to me," he says, firmly, deliberately, but unable to look me in the eye for long. "To show me. She wanted me to see, Lora. She wanted me to see."

Later that night I lie in bed and think about what he said and how far I was able to push him and the point at which I couldn't ask any more questions. Wanted you to see what? I wanted to ask, but didn't.

And did you? Did you see what she wanted to show you? Somehow I knew he had and now I had, too.

Die a Little -- 89 --

[?]*[?]

As the days pass, there is nothing else I can think about. I'm not sure when my suspicions about Alice slipped from the ambiguous to this, to an instinctive desire to know, to know what had found its way into our family, our life. But it happened, and not a few days later, I am back at Joe Avalon's neighborhood and then at his house.

I sit in the car, with Photoplay, Look, anything they had at the drugstore, knowing it could be hours before I see anything, if I see anything at all. I feel like Girl Detective from the serials, my Scotch plaid thermos filled with black coffee, a scarf over my head. Am I close enough? Am I far enough away? What if I do see something?

Would I know what to do? Could I follow another car, if I needed to?

What if I were spotted, what then?

It doesn't take hours, only forty-five minutes. The door to Avalon's bungalow opens, and I am watching as it happens. I see the pine green door open and see the woman come out with Joe Avalon's hand delicately on her back. With a quick verbal exchange, he disappears back into the house. The woman walks down the small path to the street, down the sidewalk, and on. Her gait is slow, strange, dreamy.

Although she is on the other side of the street, she is moving hazily in my direction, and I duck quickly as she walks past. Then, I turn around and get a better look as she continues her slow way down the street. She wears a navy and white suit, and a white hat with a large brim. Her handbag swings neatly, a fine circle of white patent leather hanging from her arm. A purchase from Bullock's that ran her nearly forty dollars.

I know because she told me soon after she bought it. I know because it is Edie Beauvais sashaying out of Joe Avalon's house and down Flower Street.

At a safe distance, I start the car and turn it around, moving slowly. Inching along, I watch her reach her own car, parked three blocks away.

I wonder how in the world Edie Beauvais could come to know Joe Avalon. Edie Beauvais, whom everyone knew was still suffering from "the blues" after her summer miscarriage, Edie Beauvais, cop's wife.

I don't wonder for long: the only possible link between this Pasadena housewife and this Los Angeles shark is Alice.

As she drives away, I follow her as discreetly as I know how for several miles, until it becomes clear to me that she has no destination. She takes me high into the hills and then down again, and finally straight to the ocean. As I drive, I consider whether Joe Die a Little -- 90 --

Avalon is Alice's lover or Edie's. Or how it came to be that Alice introduced the two.

I keep telling myself that she must notice me. There are too few cars on the road, it has gone on too long. But I can't stop myself. I follow until she finally pulls into the lot of a stucco establishment with a sign twice as big as the place itself: "Recovery Room Inn."

Apparently so named because a rundown charity hospital is across the street.

I know I can't follow her inside. The place is too small. So I wait.

This time for two hours.

It is nearly eight o'clock when she emerges, hat in hand, hair blowing in the breeze, pink smile wide as she chats with a tall man in a gray suit and a dark woman with the kind of high-topped veiled hat popular ten years ago. Well past tipsy, Edie and the man laugh heartily, hands to bellies. The veiled woman lights a cigarette and throws the empty pack into the street, tapping her shoe as if ready to go.

They wind their way to Edie's car, and the man gets in the backseat, and the woman sits beside Edie, who keeps laughing, hands on the steering wheel. At last, as the woman smokes long, slow, flat clouds, Edie starts the car.

It is getting dark, and I'm not sure how long I'll be able to follow, but I figure I'll try. It requires all my attention as Edie's car weaves and meanders and keeps accelerating and then slowing unexpectedly. Finally, Edie stops at a bungalow court on Pico Boulevard. The lot is too small for me to enter unnoticed, but by parking on the street out front I can see into the courtyard through its overhanging arch. All three suddenly appear underneath it and then seem to turn into one of the apartments.

I wait a moment and get out of my car. Walking over to the floored patio, I step under the arch and see a dozen apartments laid out in a rectangle. Along one side there are a series of mailboxes. I look over in the direction the trio walked and guess they entered either Apartment 3 or Apartment 5.

Then I move over to the mailboxes for a closer look. Apartment 3

has the name Chambers listed and Apartment 5 has the name Porter written in unconfident pencil.

Suddenly, the door marked 5 begins to open. Frantic for some excuse for my loitering, I remember in a flash that I have Alice's cigarettes still with me from a few weeks before, when her clutch was too small to hold them. Plucking the pack out, I fumble one to my mouth. Swiveling a little, I make large gestures of trying to look further into my purse.

The man from the car emerges from the apartment. He wears a tan suit, and his skin is very pale and looks clammy. He stands a moment and wipes his cheeks with a handkerchief.

Die a Little -- 91 --

Still stalling, I nearly shake the contents of my purse to the ground, pretending to be looking for a lighter or matches. This is a mistake.

"You need a light?"

I turn to him. He looks about thirty years old, with hair prematurely steel-edged. I try to fix his face in my mind, but there is little to hold on to: pencil-thin mustache, weak chin, twitching, blinking eyes.

"Yes, thank you."

We move toward each other, he with an extended hand. He holds a gold-colored lighter under my nose and flicks it. I puff anxiously, having smoked perhaps a dozen cigarettes in my life.

"You live here?" he asks.

I begin walking away. "I was just visiting a friend."

The thought that Edie might, at any minute, step outside, keeps flashing through my head.

He nods. "Me, too. I just needed some air. These apartments are sweatboxes."