The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (35 page)

"His photos are amazing." Aging Bimbo touches
the barrel-chested man's hand.

"Well," he says.

"Really. That tomato," she says. "Tomato?" I
shout to Jason.

266

"He photographs
food.
They just
said--"

"Have any of you seen his work?" Bimbo says.
"This tomato was unforgettable. Sitting on a white plate ..."

"That red tomato?" I shout. "Is that the
one?"

"You've seen it," Bimbo says.

I feel a pinch on the fleshy part of my arm.
Melanie. How dare she pinch me. She shoplifted a T-shirt. I don't even want her
hands on my arm until she goes back to that store and does the right
thing.

"You just really captured its essence," Bimbo
says. "Well, I try. It's a matter of what Michelangelo says--about finding the
character in the marble," he says. "You're an artist," Bimbo shouts.

"I saw the most amazing photographic display
while I was in New York," Aloha man says. "The most incredible you've ever seen.
Nudes with pomegranates. I
know
about photography. I've seen the best
exhibitions around the world, but this ..."

"So much of it is having the right eye,"
Vegetable Michelangelo says.

"And you do. You have such an eye," Bimbo
says.

"Well..."

"And blah, blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit,
bullshit", Bimbo says.

Glenn is looking into the bottom of his martini
glass. Allen has ditched us, veering off to refill his glass. I am beginning to
see how it works. It is just like the Moore party. Everything and everyone is
amazing. The best. And all you have to do is pat yourself and one another on the
back, in some great big old narcissist backslapping orgy. These people--they are
walking PR firms for themselves. Breathing human advertising. But this time I am
here. I am inside, not outside. And I feel something about that. Something moldy
and wrong.

267

"What about his cucumber?" I say to Bimbo. "It
was
amazing.
So ... green."

"Nice to meet you all," Melanie says. "We're
supposed to go say hi to some people."

But they aren't paying attention, anyway. Any
words that aren't self-reflected glory disappear into the din, mere lips
moving.

"Green!" Glenn is busting up. "Fucking
cucumbers."

"Indigo, don't," Melanie says.

"The true art is seeing the inner tomato," I
say. "Of course, I always
loved
Michelangelo's fruits and vegetables. He
always did an
amazing
grapefruit."

"I saw the exhibit the other guy was talking
about. In New York. It wasn't so hot," Jason says. "Fucking naked people with
pomegranates."

"I thought you said Raw was going to be here,"
Glenn says. Little wavy alcohol lines are starting to come off him,
too.

"We're going to go outside for a while, okay
guys?" Jason says. "We'll catch up to you."

"We are?" I say. But Jason already has my arm
and is steering me through the crowd. Another band starts up. We step outside
two glass doors that lead onto the ship's deck. It's a little quieter out here.
And this seems to be where all the performers are. You can tell--instead of
aging-rich-people clothes and young-wives-of-aging-rich-men clothes, there are
who-cares performer clothes.
We-are-supposed-to-be-
subversive-and-or-avant-garde clothes. And okay,
sure, these are just other costumes, but I feel better out here, among the
leather pants and pierced noses and vintage shirts that appear casually chosen
but that were probably in and out of the reject/possibility pile same as
Melanie's.

268

"See anyone you recognize?" Jason
says.

"Hey, aren't you the drummer from Raw?" I say
to him.

The ship has two floors, and we are on the
upper deck. God, it's beautiful out here. The black sea shines with moonlight;
the sky has unfurled the stars. The city lights twitter and gleam in red and
yellow and white along the shore. The air is just-right warm. Two and a half
million dollars, though, could not buy the beauty of that sea, and the
intoxicating temperature of that ever-slight wind.

Jason leans over the railing, and I do too.
"Light is
amazing,"
I say. Jason laughs.

"No, really. It is. Look, it's like light-magic
out there. Light makes things magic. Think about it. Christmas trees. Fireworks.
Glow in the dark stars. Fireflies. Phosphorous. Jet planes in a night
sky."

"I can sit in a dark room and just watch the
lights of my stereo," Jason says.

"Exactly," I say. "And what about that dusky
time of night when the hills turn pink and the trees turn yellow?"

"Well, they don't really
turn yellow,"
Jason says.

"You know what I mean," I say. But I'm not so
sure he does.

"I guess," Jason says.

We are standing very close together. Our arms
are touching. Maybe it's the way the breeze is blowing, I don't know, but I
notice something then that I didn't notice even sitting next to him in the
backseat of the car or standing beside him inside. It's a smell--a familiar
smell. Maybe I was too angry to smell or hear or see properly in the car, and
maybe there were too many distractions inside, but here--yes, there it is. I
know that smell. Jason--

269

he smells like Axe. He smells like Axe, and it
might have been funny, but suddenly it feels anything but that. It isn't funny
at all, because all at once it's unbearably, overwhelmingly sad. I am here, and
those people who I love, my family, my own Trevor, are somewhere else, under
this moon too, but not here.

"Axe," I say. I whisper. And my God, suddenly I
just miss them so much. I can't fool myself about it--the feeling is too large
and whole, and the wall I have built against it just breaks down and I am alone
with it, this missing. This monumental missing of the people who make me
me.
Absence is so much louder than presence. Axe. I swallow. Suddenly my
eyes get hot with tears.

"Are you okay?" Jason asks.

I nod. But I'm not okay. I just... I want to be
home.
The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is
the loneliest of all.

He turns to me and kisses me then. Jason, with
these unfamiliar lips and this odd mouth that feels thin and wrong and moves in
ways I don't know. I remember again how the body is more honest than the mind
most of the time, because this kiss tells me one thing, and that one thing is
that I don't want to be kissing Jason Lindstrom from Malibu. I want to be
kissing Trevor Williams from Nine Mile Falls, who understands the way I feel
about twilight-yellow trees. You need someone in your life who sees trees the
same way you do.

The kiss ends. Jason looks happy. "Wow, that
was great," he says. "I can't wait to have more of where that came from. You
thirsty? I'll go get us something. Stay here."

I stay. I watch the water beneath me, rushing
past. I lean far enough down to feel the force of wind at my face. I need the
waking

270

up. I stand straight, take a deep breath, and
SHIT! Inhale twelve thousand toxins from some asshole's secondhand smoke! I turn
around, and that's when I see him. There he is, standing not three feet away
from me, in the center of the deck.

Hunter Eden.

Hunter Eden, standing and talking to my friend,
the blond woman with the upswept hair and red nails. Hunter Eden, with a
cigarette pinched between his index and middle finger, sending black tar my way
through its glowing orange tip.

I have to look several times to be sure it's
him. The top of his head comes up just under the woman's nose. He's short,
that's the point. He doesn't look at all like he did in the videos. He's thin;
scrawny as the type of dog you see tied up to a streetlight outside a tavern.
Even his ass looks different. Diminished. Small and human. It is NOT the ass I
know from the cover of "Hot"-- no way is that the same ass. No way. The woman
says something that makes him throw back his head and laugh, and I can see his
teeth, yellowed from nicotine. Maybe I just imagine them yellowed from nicotine.
But I don't imagine the woman's voice.

"Your last album was
amazing,"
she
says.

"Well ... ," he says. "I was so stoned I could
barely play. Thank the sound techs. Thank some kid they brought in to fill in
where I fucked up." He laughs. She laughs. He takes a drag from his cigarette,
and two streams of smoke jets exhale from his nose. He coughs a phlegmy,
gray-lunged cough. Spits a hunk of something over the rail, into the ocean. The
woman doesn't seem to mind. He's famous, he's rich, and so who he is doesn't
much matter.

I can't believe what I'm seeing. I can't. If I
close my eyes and open them again, maybe I'll see the real Hunter Eden.
Because

271

this isn't Hunter Eden. This isn't him
at
all.
This is some guy you'd see in a 7-Eleven, buying a box of rubbers and a
six pack. How could they do this to us, whoever
they
are? How could they
give us something so false to want? He doesn't even play all his own songs? I'd
been had. I'd worshipped something that wasn't even real. I'd wasted my time and
my belief on a
lie.

The Hunter Eden I knew? He was product
marketing with a stand-in ass.

I want out of here. It's too much. I've got to
get out of here, away from Melanie and Jason, away from Hunter Eden, away from
these people at this party. I ran from the wrong things, to the wrong things,
and the realization makes me sick with shame. I've hurt good people. I need to
make it right.

There's one small problem, though, with this
pressing, now urgent, need. I am on a ship. Cruising around the coastline. I am
stuck here, at the mercy of these people at this stupid party, until they decide
when and where I get to leave.

I go back inside. Decide to find a bathroom. A
bathroom is a great place to hide. There is no good excuse for anyone to bother
you there. On the way, I see Melanie, fixated on a bleary-eyed Glenn, who has
one hand up the back of her stolen T-shirt. I head down a quiet hall, find a
bathroom with a sink and a basket of little rolled-up towels. I sit for a while.
I consider my options. I can stay in here, play Let's Use All the Towels until I
get bored. I could be in here for a good long while. Option two: go back out.
Put myself in my own Indigo bubble so that nothing these people say or do can
affect me until we get back.

Neither of these ideas is satisfactory. What I
want, what I NEED, is to get off this boat. But I can't exactly tell them I want
off, right? These are important people, partying on a fancy yacht,

272

cruising in the ocean, and I am only Indigo
Skye, sitting on a fancy toilet, hiding in a bathroom.

A woman pounds on the door. "Is anyone in
there? Can you hurry it up?" she says. And right then, for some reason, I think
of Nick. Nick and his oatmeal with raisins. The True Value guys. I think of
Leroy, and of Mom, and of Jane, whose circumstances make them feel smaller than
they need to feel.

"Watch the flusher," I say to the woman waiting
outside. "It gets stuck. Took me forever to get it working." And then I find one
of the stewards, in his white uniform.

"Do these things ever stop? The boat. I mean,
does it make a stop? Like if someone needed to get off?"

"Can you wait ten minutes?" he says. "We're
letting off a passenger in Santa Barbara. She's not feeling well."

Ten minutes. I can wait ten minutes, all
right.

"Sure," I say. "Thanks."

The party carries on, as the boat slips into
harbor. I feel two seconds' worth of bad about ditching Jason. I don't feel bad
enough, though, because when the boat stops, I am waiting at the bridge with the
ill woman and her husband, who holds her elbow.

"I never could do boats," she says to me. She
waves her hand in the air as if to dismiss the whole sordid experience. She has
a diamond on her finger the size of a cannonball.

"Go on ahead," the husband says to me when the
bridge comes down. "We're going to take it slow."

And so I do. I go on ahead, because I, Indigo
Skye, have the power to stop yachts. Well, maybe not quite stop yachts, but I
have the ability to end things I don't like and to say something isn't okay when
it isn't okay. I have the power to insist on good and real things for myself.
Most of all, I have the right to change my mind.

273

***

"Dad?" Dad is the one I call. Dad is who you
call in a crisis.

"Indigo? Are you all right? My God, what time
is it?"

"I'm sorry to be calling so late."

"No, Indigo! Please. What's going on? Are you
okay?"

"I just... Dad?" I start crying. I am crying
right here.

"Sweetheart, it's okay. Okay? I'm
here."

"I broke my promise to Richard Howards," I cry.
"I'm becoming smaller, not bigger."