The Shards, page 17
“Or so he says,” I said.
“What does that mean?” Thom asked in an attempt to defend Susan.
“He’s a liar,” I said. “Obviously he lied to us. He’s lied to me.”
“About what?” Debbie asked, turning, suddenly paying closer attention to the conversation now that I had placed myself in the narrative.
“I saw him somewhere, here, in L.A., a year ago, at a movie theater,” I said. “It was absolutely him. And he denied it. He’s a liar. And he lied about Roycemore. And if he lied about Roycemore then he lied about the girlfriend—”
“I don’t even know if he was a full-time patient—” Susan said.
“He had a girlfriend in the mental institution?” I asked. “If he was discharged in May, Susan, that means he was a full-time patient.”
“It was the first time we met him,” Susan said. “He was probably nervous. He was probably embarrassed. What? He’s going to announce this automatically? I think we’d all couch the truth.” She stopped and then pointedly said, “It’s not like you haven’t made up stuff before.”
“Oh, come on, Susan,” I said, raising my voice, frustrated. “It’s not the same. I might embellish something but I don’t fucking lie. I might give things a spin but I don’t make up a girlfriend I didn’t have or lie that I wasn’t in a fucking insane asylum—”
“Oh, stop it,” Susan said. “You’re doing it now. Insane asylum? Give me a break.”
“Have you talked to him about any of this?” I asked. “So you could, y’know, clarify what he was in there for exactly?”
“No, I’m not going to ask him,” Susan said. “Croft told me not to mention it to him. And I’m not. There’s no point. If Robert wants to bring it up and tell us, fine. But he doesn’t know we know.” She looked at me sternly. “And I want to keep it that way.”
“So you don’t know how severe his problem was—”
“Bret, it’s just a party,” Susan said, pleading.
“No, it’s a validation,” I said. “Actually, Susan, it’s a validation.”
“I think it’ll be the cool thing to do,” Thom said, stepping in again.
“But we don’t know him at all,” I stressed hard.
Susan and Debbie started at the same time defending Robert, overlapping each other. “What are you talking about? What’s your problem, Bret? What’s wrong with you?”
“How did he move on to his senior year if he was in this developmental center and wasn’t discharged until May?” I interrupted. “How did he get into Buckley?”
“Croft told me that he had a tutor there,” Susan said. “And after he was discharged in May he went to summer classes and yes at Roycemore. And he worked hard. He caught up. He’s smart. I don’t know.” Susan stopped. “It’s not that hard to get into Buckley, Bret. And he’s smart. What?”
“I think a rather sizable donation was probably made, Susan,” I said. “Let’s not be more naïve than we already are.” I let out an exaggerated sigh. “Yeah, you can easily get into Buckley after spending six months in a mental institution. Right.”
“What is wrong with you?” Susan asked, staring at me. “I don’t get it.”
And then the table was silent again. I had turned the night around from where it was supposed to be heading—with friends ordering pizza from Santo Pietro’s and having fun planning a party, the music, the food, who else to invite outside of the Buckley circle—into what everyone now assumed was my own paranoid cave, creating a scenario that didn’t connect with the facts they thought they knew. I realized I had to defend myself, so I brought up what happened Tuesday afternoon on Ventura Boulevard.
“First, the guy lied about something to me that I know is real, and then he followed me like a maniac, fucking with me on Ventura Boulevard, and then he’s stalking girls at the Galleria—”
“He said you were following him,” Susan said quietly, interrupting me.
“What?” I asked.
“He said you were following him,” Susan said again but this time with an emphasis on those two words.
My gaze moved from Susan’s face and started scanning the room we were in: my parents’ house had an open layout and the entrance past the foyer led into an uninterrupted space, there were no walls, and off to the left was a huge living room, minimally decorated with floor-to-ceiling windows that constituted the entire side of the house overlooking the San Fernando Valley, and this space flowed into the kitchen, where we were sitting, and I could hear the music coming from the stereo in the living room—it was the Motels’ second album—and as I glanced at the half-circle of pizza I realized that Robert Mallory had spoken to Susan and obviously to Thom as well, which meant that Debbie knew this, too, about something I had supposedly done. Robert had already told them something I wasn’t going to tell anybody. They looked at me blankly, wanting me to confirm this or explain what really happened, what my version of events was compared to Robert’s. The information they had been given refuted my memory of that afternoon. But still, the worst thing was that Susan Reynolds and Robert Mallory had talked about me.
“What?” I asked again. “That’s not…true,” I said.
“He said you were following him first.” This was Thom’s voice.
“Yeah,” Susan said. “That you followed him from Buckley.”
“I was going to the Galleria,” I said. “I didn’t even know he was in the Porsche.” I fumbled around. “It was so aggressive on his part. It was so weird.” And then I asked, “Did he say he ran into me in the Galleria? That he followed me into the Galleria? And that he was stalking girls there?”
“He said that he went to Robinson’s to buy some clothes,” Susan said.
“Yeah, I-I-I know, he-he told me that, too,” I stammered. “But I saw him—”
“Look, are you with us?” Susan said, reaching a hand across the table. “It’s just a party. It’s not a validation of anything. It’s just a party, Bret.”
“He’s drunk,” Debbie said.
“I’m not drunk,” I said. “In fact I’m extremely sober.”
“Right.” Debbie snickered and leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.
I was stunned and yet I pretended not to be and I visibly relaxed as I took Susan’s hand in mine and squeezed it. “Yeah, of course, whatever you want.”
Thom grabbed my shoulder. “There he is,” he boomed. “He’s back! Bret is back!”
I turned and smiled at his handsome face, which was beaming and made me feel, foolishly, as if I had accomplished something by making Thom Wright happy. Everyone was suddenly relieved. You could feel the tension exit the space because I’d conceded or pretended to. I realized the only option was to get obliterated. “Anyone want to do shots?” I quickly asked, standing up, clapping my hands together. I had to push the slight panic I felt about Susan’s party and Robert Mallory and the conversation the two of them had about me out of my mind and discard it somewhere as far away as I possibly could or I was going to hurt somebody.
* * *
—
MY PARENTS ONLY DRANK tequila in margaritas, so we didn’t have any top-shelf brands in the house (nobody really did in 1981), but there was a bottle of Jose Cuervo on the liquor shelf in the wet bar off to the side of the living room. The girls wanted rum-and-Cokes—actually Debbie made herself a rum-and-Tab—and so I brought out a bottle of Bacardi hidden behind two Smirnoff bottles and filled up an ice bucket. Thom and I did shots and I sliced a lime and sprinkled salt from a shaker on the side of my wrist and licked it off. Thom usually didn’t drink alcohol but it was a Saturday and he didn’t have to get up tomorrow and Susan would only be having one drink and she’d be the designated driver even though Thom said he’d be fine driving if he only had just a shot or two but instead we got drunk fast and I was bringing out my records and soon Thom and I were blasting the Dickies (Chuck Wagon, who played keyboards and saxophone, had shot and killed himself in June; I had a crush on the bassist, Billy Club) in the living room while the girls watched as we air-guitared and moshed to “Stuck in a Pagoda with Tricia Toyota” and I remember at some point Debbie offered a couple bumps of cocaine so I could semi-clear my head and then Susan did a small line and so did Thom and the girls kept going outside to smoke while Thom and I played songs we wanted to hear, slightly wired by the small amount of cocaine we’d done, jamming out to tunes and lip-synching while I kept going back to the bar to do shots until the Cuervo bottle was nearly empty.
We started hopping around to the drumbeat of David Lindley’s version of “Mercury Blues” and then it was “Somebody Got Murdered” by the Clash, where we took turns singing the verses (I was Mick Jones and Thom was Joe Strummer) and as the song was ending I sung bug-eyed, “Sounds like murder!” and then Thom shouted out, leaning in to me, “Those screams!” and then we’d both sing “Are they drunk?” Beat. “Down below?,” which then led to an actual duet: “From a Whisper to a Scream” where I sang along to the Glenn Tilbrook vocal and Thom did Elvis Costello, both of us joining in on the chorus, and then it was “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors and “What I Like About You” by the Romantics and “Pretty in Pink” by the Furs and after that it was “Skateaway” by Dire Straits and after about twenty songs I staggered down the hallway to my bedroom so I could pass out. I was too wasted to have sex with Debbie, who draped herself on top of me, kissing my face and purring as the room spun and I was groaning and she thought it was from drunkenness but it wasn’t, because no matter how wasted I got I couldn’t erase the fact that someone was watching the house on Mulholland—had been watching me, in fact, all summer long—and that I had been targeted and the person who targeted me was the new boy from Chicago racing after my car on Ventura Boulevard, who spoke intimately with Matt Kellner and Susan Reynolds and was probably—and I didn’t have a doubt about this even though I had no proof—the person holding the flashlight in the library courtyard who desecrated the statue of the Buckley Griffin on the night before school began.
* * *
—
I WAS NAKED ON MY stomach under a sheet and someone was gently rubbing my back, purring into my ear, Debbie’s plush lips grazing the lobe, the familiar smell of rose oil acting like a smelling salt, an ammonia, helping me regain consciousness. I didn’t remember taking off my clothes before I fell into bed last night and I was so hungover that it took me a long moment to figure out where I actually was. I squinted at an unfamiliar wall I was facing and then saw the Elvis Costello poster hanging on it and realized I was in my bedroom. I slowly turned my neck and looked up at Debbie, who laughed softly, sitting next to me, as she tallied the damage based on my swollen face, my half-shut puffy eyes, the pained expression caused by the headache and dehydration.
“Poor baby,” she said, leaning down and kissing me lightly on the lips, and when I exhaled she backed off, waving her hand. “You still smell like tequila. You okay?”
I couldn’t say anything—I was paralyzed by the hangover. I never drank the way I had last night and I could only blame myself: not Robert Mallory or Susan, who was throwing a party for him, or Thom Wright, who I’d so badly desired last night while the girls were outside, or how I wanted to drown the actor I’d become who salvaged his relationship with Debbie Schaffer with one quick fuck yesterday afternoon. The clock on the nightstand said, inexplicably, it was one-thirty. I squinted back at Debbie, who looked completely radiant—she had washed and blow-dried her hair in my bathroom and put on light makeup and was dressed and she seemed so much more relaxed than yesterday afternoon, when she arrived at the house on Mulholland—she was drained of the rigid insecurity and the black frustration. She was calmed by the knowledge that I’d assured her about us and I was momentarily relieved.
I was unable to fully open my eyes and my mouth and throat were so dry I could only croak: “Where are you going?”
She was heading to Malibu to ride Spirit and she preferred Sundays in the late afternoon since she wouldn’t be going out that night to see a band or check out a club. It was still so incongruous: Debbie in a bikini teasing John Taylor by the pool at the Hilton while we were hanging out with Duran Duran last summer also owned a horse named Spirit and had for a number of years competed in equestrian sports—the disconnect always suggested a lingering innocence to me. She’d been riding since seventh grade and even though other interests had started occupying her—mainly music and concerts and bands and she had stopped competing—she could never shake off the pleasure she got from horseback riding—it was comforting, it touched me.
I was burrowing my head back into the pillow when she said, “Matt Kellner called.”
I knew Debbie was wrong. I knew this was an impossibility. The odds of this happening were nonexistent. In the fourteen months since we started having sex Matt Kellner had never called the house on Mulholland, not even once. It had simply never happened and it was unfathomable that he knew my phone number and picked up the receiver and dialed it that morning. But I became worried almost immediately, when Debbie repeated this, as I processed that Debbie wasn’t lying.
“You’re friends with Matt Kellner?” Debbie asked. “I didn’t know that.”
“Kind of,” I said. “Not really.” I paused. “Did you talk to him?”
“He seems a little strange,” Debbie said. “Yeah, I picked up.”
“Oh, yeah?” I said, trying to act casual. I sat up and winced. “Did he say what he wanted?” It seemed unreal that I was even asking that. “Are you sure it was Matt Kellner? You’re not getting him mixed up with someone else?”
“Yes, it was Matt,” Debbie said. “I just find it weird that you guys are friends and I never knew.”
“I wouldn’t say we’re friends exactly…” I started, and then realized that sentence could open two or three doors for Debbie and I wanted to keep them all shut. “I know him,” I said vaguely. And then I decided on: “Sometimes I buy weed from him.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “Anyway he just wanted to know if you were here but I said you were asleep.”
“Did he tell you I should call him back?” I asked tentatively.
“No. Nothing. Didn’t leave a message.” Debbie looked at her watch and then at me—she was relaxed and smiling. “I’ll talk to you tonight, handsome.” And then she left.
The moment I heard the front door open, then close, I hobbled into the bathroom and peed with a hard-on, splashing urine all over the rim of the toilet seat. Wincing, I walked quickly, gingerly, to the pool, where I simply fell into the deep end and sank to the bottom and stayed there until I couldn’t hold my breath any longer and pushed to the surface, feeling less pain and the horniness mildly abated. When I was slightly clearheaded, I hauled my body out of the cool water, but I stumbled where the concrete surrounding the pool met the grass, stubbing my toe, which seemed more painful than it actually was because of how sensitive I felt due to the hangover—everything, in fact, seemed heightened, dramatic, over-scaled. In my bedroom I dried off quickly and immediately threw on a pair of tennis shorts, a Polo shirt and my Topsiders and hurried to the garage, where I pulled the 450SL out of the driveway and made a left onto Mulholland and then another left onto Woodcliff and raced down the canyon to Valley Vista then to Haskell Avenue—it took maybe ten minutes.
* * *
—
I PARKED on the street, jumped out of the car, unlatched the side gate, and walked the pathway to the backyard directly to the pool and the guesthouse beyond it. The door was open and when I walked in I didn’t see Matt. I looked around an empty room—it seemed barren but that could have been because it was finally clean. My first thought: furniture was missing, and yet maybe the room was simply rearranged by Matt. The aquarium was now fully drained, the TV was on but the volume was turned down and fires raged silently somewhere in the distant hillsides, the room still smelled of weed but not as strongly as usual and there was no sign of Alex the cat. And then I looked at the Foreigner 4 poster above the hamper, which was neatly tamped down with clothes, and walked toward it: the record had been released in July and the poster was a simple black and white image of the number 4—frozen on the countdown of an old-fashioned film leader. The poster was completely minimal with the logo of the band’s name at the top in blood-red lettering. It was a large and mostly off-white-and-gray image except for the bold black number 4, which took up the center. As I moved closer I noticed that someone had drawn what looked like a star off to the left corner of the poster and it was large enough for me to know that the star hadn’t been there on Monday: it was a new decoration. But when I peered at it I realized it wasn’t a star: someone had drawn a pentagram. I remember Matt had told me he found the poster rolled up and sticking out of the mailbox—something promotional, and he didn’t know who had left it. I then looked over at the dolphin mounted on the wall, shellacked and dead-eyed—in my hungover daze I imagined it was staring at the boy standing in the middle of the guesthouse.
“I’m here,” someone said behind me.
* * *
—
I WHIRLED AROUND. Matt was reclining on the bed, propped against the wall, in the tight lime-green bathing suit he favored and a faded Dodgers T-shirt and wearing sunglasses. I hadn’t seen him when I walked in because the bed had been moved to the side of the room next to the entrance and I’d passed unaware that a person was on it. I just stared at Matt, not knowing what to say. He looked pale as he sat there unmoving, diminished somehow, less sexy than he’d been only a week earlier, but I suddenly desired him with a ferocity that was impossible to manage—the hangover made me desperately horny. I couldn’t help it—I became excited and started getting a hard-on since I solely associated the room with Matt and sex. The hangover was aiding in the arousal but so were Matt’s bare thighs, his biceps, the full-lipped mouth. For a moment I wished it away and focused on the pipe and the bag of weed sitting next to him on the bed. What had he wanted when he called that morning? I kept wondering, on the verge of panic. But he spoke first.
