Love Always (6 page)

E
DWARD
B
ARTLETT
greeted the morning by stretching through the motions of the Sun Salutation. He had brought his own juicer with him. That morning he had concocted, for the three of them, a mixture of fresh orange juice, lemon, Perrier, ice, bananas and protein powder. With his, he swallowed some vitamins in the shape of Flintstones characters. He washed Fred and Wilma down the alimentary and went out into the backyard to do aerobics. When he finished, he changed from his sweatsuit to his business clothes: khaki cut-offs, Nikes, and a recently purchased T-shirt that said:
VERMONT—CAN 339,000 cows BE WRONG?

Move over, Michelangelo: Edward Grant Bartlett III, born L.A., California, September 1, 1950; B.A. Cal State L.A.; M.F.A. Parsons School of Design; favorite hobby, dirt bike racing; last book read,
Foot Reflexology;
most admired American, Phil Spector; was (in the service of a major toy manufacturer) about to capture, for all time, on the sketch pad propped on his easel, the likeness of Nicole Nelson. Less than three months from this very day, the foot-high Nicole would be plastic perfect, dressed, boxed, and shipped—suitable toy or
objet
for any desirous child or dream-struck man who wasn’t into inflatables and who didn’t already have a paper dolly all his own.

As he sketched, Edward listened, through the earphones of his Sony Walkman, to a tape of conversational Swahili. As she stood in the yard, shielded by a striped beach umbrella, Nicole listened to Duran Duran through her earphones, keeping the beat by tapping the toe of her pink jellies.

Nicole had been in Vermont for two days, and already Lucy’s life was in a state of chaos. Jane said that only important people had been given the number, and they had been told to call only if it was essential. So far, this morning’s essential calls had come from Nicole’s broker, who wanted to say goodbye before he left for a Club Med vacation on Paradise Island, and Nicole’s agent, P. G. “Piggy” Proctor, who wanted to finalize plans for Nicole’s dangling from the rope of a helicopter with Bobby Blue over the beach at Malibu on behalf of a campaign to raise money for children afflicted with sleep apnea. The last call was a total fluke: a woman selling the World Book encyclopedia.

Lucy was writing her column. She had pulled a stool up to the kitchen counter. Out the window she could see Nicole under the umbrella. The sun was stronger now; Edward had put on a coonskin cap and rubbed zinc oxide over his nose. He wore sunglasses with rectangular black lenses. He looked clinically insane.

St. Francis had hollowed out a gully for himself in the patch of rhododendrons. Earlier, Edward had helped her put a stake in the ground so that they could chain him. He saw Lucy outside, sensed the potential for fun, and beat his tail like an otter. She went over and let him loose. He pawed the ground and ran in circles, then ran to Edward, who was still busily sketching Nicole. St. Francis did a double take when he saw the coonskin cap, obviously hoping to raise the tally on the daily death toll (so far it was at one; another frog). St. Francis sniffed the air in front of Edward, sat down, and looked up admiringly.

“So what’s the story with that guy Bobby Blue?” Edward said to Nicole, stepping back from his easel.

“His real name’s Bobby Bluestein. He had his nose done and his cheek bones pushed up. He’s a real mama’s boy. His nickname’s Bobby Blueballs, because he’s never with a girl.”

Edward smiled. “I like that,” he said.

“I think Derek McAndrew is cute,” Nicole said.

“He your fave rave?” Edward said.

“What’s ‘fave rave’?” Nicole said.

“They used to say that in the fifties,” Edward said. “It means the guy you’re really crazy about.”

“Nobody wants to care about a guy that much,” Nicole said. “Nobody’s into that anymore.”

“Come on,” Edward said. “You think a lot about McAndrew, I bet.”

“He’s good-looking, but he’s kind of dumb,” Nicole said. “He’s always saying how he’s going to quit the business and become a doctor. Sure he is.”

Edward went back to his sketching. “So who else besides McAndrew do you like?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Nicole said. She leaned over, running
her hands down her shins to her ankles, then straightened up again. “Don’t say any of this to a reporter,” she said.

“I wouldn’t,” Edward said. “I’m just curious.”

“McAndrew gets it on all the time,” Nicole said. She looked at Lucy, who was sitting on the grass, patting the dog, looking at her. “Not with me,” she said. “With Kate. She just got canceled from the show. They never ate lunch with anybody. They were always off getting it on.”

“Come on—she must be forty.”

“Why do you think she got canned?” Nicole said.

“What? They didn’t know how old she was when they hired her?”

“She won’t do anything to make herself attractive,” Nicole said. “I think she’s on some self-destruction kick. The studio sent her to that place in Sweden to get her face done, and she flew all the way over there and freaked out. She came back looking just the same, but she was walking around the set in clogs. Clogs are so gross.”

“Maybe she thinks she’s found true love if McAndrew wants to get it on with her all the time even though she’s old.”

“They’re making it because they’re on the show together. A lot of people get hung up on that for a while. I’ll bet now that she’s off the show, he’ll never see her again. I heard he was pretty weirded-out that she didn’t get her face fixed.”

“You go out with McAndrew?” Edward said.

“I don’t know. He calls me, and stuff. We’ve gone to a couple of premieres. We don’t really hang out or anything.”

“Too young for him?”

“Oh, gag me,” Nicole said. “You know, he’s in a lot of trouble with his agent for hanging around with Kate. I don’t know why they care if it gets out. It’s usually the parents who care if that stuff gets around, but he doesn’t even have any parents. He lives with his brother. His brother’s a real thug. I think he’s dropped too much acid. He got in trouble with the cops for smashing some woman’s face in—just some woman who hit his car from behind out at the beach. Everybody was teasing Derek, saying he wasn’t enough of a star for his brother’s name to make the papers.”

“You do acid?” Edward said.

“Acid’s gross,” she said. “Sometimes I like poppers.”

“Maybe we ought to suggest to the toy manufacturer that they stuff the Nicole Nelson doll’s purse with them,” Edward said.

Nicole laughed.

“Who else do you like?” Edward said.

“How come you don’t tell me who you like?”

“I don’t go out with anybody famous,” Edward said.

“Oh,” Nicole said.

In the house, the phone was ringing. Lucy decided to let it ring. Since Nicole was staying through July, she should have a separate telephone number. All of the people who called from the Coast simply began talking when she picked up the phone. At first she thought they might have mistaken her voice for Nicole’s, but that didn’t seem to be it at all. They simply assumed that she would relay the message—that, like a secretary, she was to pass the word along.

St. Francis was stalking a bird. Just as he got within pouncing distance, the bird flew away. St. Francis had a little temper tantrum, sniffing the ground where the bird had been, then digging up dirt until Lucy told him to stop. A jogger in green shorts passed by on the dirt road. It was a breezy day, but graying over as if it might rain. The sky, mottled with dark clouds, looked like an enormous x-ray that had been hung out to dry. St. Francis settled down in his gully beside the rhododendron bush and closed his eyes. When another runner came by, the dog sensed it and his head shot up. He dropped his head again as the runner panted by.

Edward made them tabouli burgers for lunch. He had brought these, frozen, in a cooler that said It’s Miller Time!, from Los Angeles.

Over lunch, he gave Nicole pointers on how to be popular. “First of all, if you’re lucky enough to be an object to people, you can’t go wrong. They just care about what you look like—they don’t want to hear what you have to say, and they don’t not want to hear what you have to say. So with them, you’re just talking to amuse yourself. I find that two things are very
useful when you want to put yourself across. The first one is to know about a dozen pieces of misinformation, and then to know what the correct information is. Take this for an example: Most people think that Humphrey Bogart said, ‘Drop the gun, Louis.’ What did he really say?”

Nicole frowned. “Lauren Bacall was married to him, wasn’t she?” she said.

“What did he say?” Lucy said.

“He said, ‘Not so fast, Louis.’ ” Edward looked at Lucy. “Now here’s what you do to make an impression. You work the conversation around to Humphrey Bogart, and when somebody comes out with a famous line—everybody loves to do their Bogart routine, so you’re usually in luck—you mention that he didn’t say that at all, but that it’s always misquoted. Say it casually, so you don’t seem like a snot. Tell them the right line. And this part is crucial: if they ask you where you found something out, never tell them. Make them think that you always knew it. You have to be nice about that, too, or they’ll think you’re a snot. Obviously, you can go wrong with this routine, so you’ve got to be careful.”

“Do you do this stuff?” Nicole asked.

“If I have to. To tell you the truth, it works better for women than for men. But the other thing I’m going to tell you will work for anybody. Everybody talks about the weather, right? And if they don’t, it’s the easiest thing in the world to make them talk about it. So what you do is you really know something about the weather. Say you’re with a bunch of people and a wind blows up. Or there’s no wind at all—you can still use it. You get the subject around to the wind, and then you mention the Worcester tornado of 1953. You lead up to it, actually, by not naming it so officially, so that people think you memorized some arcane information. You say, ‘This reminds me of that tornado in Massachusetts,” and of course somebody’ll ask what you’re talking about. Tell them the one that happened in the early fifties. That’s the trick. You let them draw you out, so that you become progressively more specific. Then whatever you say will have a real impact. Then you move in for the kill: you tell them the thing cut through Rutland,
Barre, and Worcester and killed more than sixty people. You don’t want to have too many facts. You don’t want to tell them how many were injured. Also, you don’t want to mention the weather more than once in one night. It can also make people very nervous.”

“I don’t know,” Nicole said. “Last year I had to memorize all these Shakespearean sonnets that didn’t make any sense. The guy had some good ideas, but he was always going off … it was like the teacher expected you to remember what some guy said when he’d tied a couple on. Now you want me to memorize things about tornadoes?”

“Forget education,” Edward said. “The difference between what I’m telling you and education is that this stuff will help you. Memorize it, then get loose, make it seem natural that you know about disasters.”

“Maybe being smart would distract me. I don’t want to be frustrated when I get roles and be like Kate and some of those people who think their characters never know enough, and they should be so intelligent and everything.”

“Hey, you’re playing the game,” Edward said. “You’ve got to know some things to talk about so you can stay on top. You’ve got to figure out a way to stay on top, whether you’re a phony or a real person.”

Well, Lucy thought, maybe this was, after all, just a strange version of summer camp she was running in the backyard, where the big kids gave the little kids pointers about proper behavior in deep water.