The Fortunes of Indigo Skye (34 page)

"So there's a thing this weekend. Saturday
night? You can come--bring a friend," Allen says. "Just one, though. Tickets
required." He pats his jacket pocket.

"What kind of thing?" Melanie asks. She'd been
trying to figure out the DVD player, but ditches the whole effort when he says
this, as if she was unwrapping a stick of gum and has just been handed an ice
cream cone instead.

"Little party for friends of Two Heads Records.
Sunset boat cruise."

"Oh my God," Melanie says. She looks at me and
I look back because Slow Change, Hunter Eden's band, is part of the Two Heads
label.

"Can't promise who'll be there," he says, then
takes his bleary self down the hall to his room.

"Did I tell you?" Melanie says. She grabs my
arms. Her eyes are as shiny as grocery store paperbacks.

"Two Heads Records," I say. My heart gives a
little flop of anxious-excited. "You don't think he'll actually be there, do
you?"

"I told you, I saw him at one of these things
before."

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"You said you saw his
ass."

"Like anyone would not know that
ass?"

"Oh my God, it was probably some guy that works
with your father's ass," I say. But my voice is high and jazzed, speeding like a
Porsche with my own foot on the accelerator. High, jazzed, and a
wind-in-your-hair thrill, even though we're inside, just clutching each other's
arms and jumping up and down.

The day of the party we skip the beach, but
Melanie calls Glenn and Jason and asks them to come to the party that night. Mom
calls, but doesn't leave a message. A strange number appears on my call log, and
I hear the uncertain voice of Bomba....
miss you and hope you'll... Wait,
shit, there was a beep. Indigo? Did I press the right number? Can you hear this?
I hate these blasted cell phones. That's supposed to make your life easier? It's
Bomba, if you hear any of this. I miss you. Call me.
I picture the photo we
have of Bomba on our fridge at home, with her saggy boobs in her funny bathing
suit, sitting in a wading pool. I wonder what she would think of where I am
right now, in this house on the beach, with the housekeeper that makes every
dirty dish vanish as if nothing unseemly like eating has ever really taken place
here. I wonder what she would think if she knew that I am going tonight on a
yacht to cruise the coastline with the rich and famous. I feel a pang of
disloyalty. I'm an economic traitor.

We spend the day getting ready. Or rather,
Melanie spends the day getting ready and I splash in the pool and clear the
fridge of pine nuts and cheese and some flat bread crackers that are made with
spirolina, which sounds like it has the capacity to kill me. It is one of those
days when the day is just something to get through until night comes. One big
giant endless bowl of soup before the

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main course. I let Melanie take the Porsche to
go shopping, and when she gets home, she tries her hair in various styles and
shaves her legs twice. She wants us to get pedicures, but I'm sorry, people
buffing and painting your toes is just twisted.

Jason and Glenn are picking us up in Glenn's
Jaguar. I thought only old ladies with tanned purse-leather necks and golf
handicaps and aging husband CEOs had Jaguars, but apparently I was mistaken. I
sit on the leather couch to wait for them. Melanie hasn't appeared
yet.

"Melanie! Come on! I want to see what you
finally decided to wear!" Me, I'm just in my orange skirt and orange tank top.
Orange always makes me happy. An orange is a fine thing, itself, and there isn't
anything much nicer than having someone peel one for you. "They're going to be
here any minute!"

I'm in a fine mood, thinking about oranges and
wearing orange and being here starting a new life and getting to go on a yacht
and maybe seeing Hunter Eden. All the angst about leaving home is missing right
now. I'm having a is-this-really-my-life moment, but in a good way. Usually you
have those when you have the flu, or when you step in something the cat hecked
up, or when you leave your wallet somewhere when you are starving. But this--if
I'd thought it up, imagined it, if I'd wished on birthday candles on a cake, it
wouldn't be this moment. It was a moment I wouldn't even think to
dream.

And then Melanie walks in.

"What are you wearing?" I ask. I think I might
be seeing things, because I can't believe it. I really just can't believe
it.

"Indigo, don't give me any shit about
it."

I stand up. I walk over to her, because I think
maybe it's just the same color. Maybe it's just a different green T-shirt. I
take a

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pinch between my fingers. "It's that same
T-shirt," I say.

"Indigo, quit it. You're going to get it all
wrinkled."

"I cannot
believe
you would do something
so stupid," I say. I'm not mad. I'm still sort of in my happy-orange mood. I'm
not mad, I just think she's an idiot. You know, fine. Go spend seventy-five
dollars on a saltine cracker. Go spend it on a rubber band. Go for it. "What a
waste of good money," I say.

"Well, I didn't actually
spend
it," she
says. You can tell she knows she has made a mistake the second the words are out
her mouth. She actually looks over her shoulder, back down to her room where she
came from, as if she could reverse all this and try again.

"What?" It can't be that. She didn't mean
that.
"What do you mean?" But I'm afraid I know. Suddenly, I'm sure I
know. "Never mind. In? Never mind."

"Fuck never mind. You didn't actually spend it.
That's what you said. What do you mean? You didn't shoplift that, did
you?"

"No!" she says.

But she has those little lines around her
mouth. The sewn-up lines. And the thing about a conscience is, we're not the
full, single owners of it. We may think we hold it, like an orange, ours, in our
hands; we may think we can toss that orange away into a patch of blackberry
brambles. But we forget it is made of sections; sections that belong to the
people who love us and look out for us. Your mother has a section of that
conscience, your father, your family, and I have a section of Melanie's. Maybe
she could lie to Glenn, but she could not lie to me. Maybe because we most
successfully lie to the people who we don't care (never cared, no longer care)
if we disappoint.

"Melanie. You did. My God. You did! How could
you do such

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a thing? WHY did you do such a thing? You have
money to pay for that if you wanted it so bad." I look at Melanie, with her
silly green T-shirt and her jeans, her manicure, her hair straight and long, and
her wide eyes, still showing shock at the way her mouth has betrayed her, and
she looks so small to me. At home, she was large; in her circle of friends she
was loud and in command and so large. But here she is small. If this is her
place, it is a place that makes her small and faded and wrong.

"I just... I wanted it."

"You wanted it? So you just took
it?"

"I wanted it, Indigo, okay? There's no great
big psychological issue here. I just wanted it."

The doorbell rings then. And then too, a
bang, bang, bang,
as Glenn and/or Jason knocks on the door. I can hear
Jason say something that makes Glenn laugh. I realize Melanie is right about
what she said, and the realization makes me slightly sick. It disgusts me. There
is no great big psychological issue here. There is no contemporary-society
pseudo-psycho-sham explanation of
lack of self-esteem
or childhood wounds
or other such shit. The truth is much more simple. We think a lot about not
having. When we don't have and we think about not having, it's called dreaming.
When we do have and think about not having, it's called greed.

I sit with Jason in the backseat of Glenn's
Jaguar, and Melanie sits in the front. The back of her head looks guilty to me.
I feel the cringing tangle of electricity between Melanie and me, disappointed
energy that might as well be solid and real and not just air and feelings. I
could almost touch it, but it might burn my fingers. Neither Glenn nor Jason
seems to notice the fifth entity in the car.

"Do you think Twisted Minds will be there?"
Glenn asks.

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"I don't know, you know, there are no
guarantees," Melanie says. "I don't want everyone getting disappointed if
not."

"How about Raw?" Glenn asks.

"As long as Hunter Eden's there, that's all I
care about," Melanie says.

"Oh man, he's so gay," Jason says.

"That's what all guys say when another guy is
really hot," Melanie says. She may be right, but I'm in no mood to agree with
her.

Jason goes on to tell us about some gay surfer
he knew who dropped out of school, and then Glenn tells some story about his
sister dropping out of school and his parents going nuts, and then Melanie tells
some story about the time her mother freaked out and threatened to put her
brother in the hospital for depression if his grades didn't improve, and then we
are at the marina. There is a young Latino valet and Glenn hands over the keys
and says,
If you scratch it, you'll never say 'green card' again
to us as
we walk off, cracking up Jason and Melanie, and causing me to step on the heel
of his shoe on "accident."

"Hey!" he says.

"Oh, I'm sorry," I say. Asshole.

It's a beautiful night, that's true. The water
sparkles glittery white, and the marina boats are strung with lights, their
windows glowy and gold. The air shimmers with sound--laughter, and the slam of
car doors, and voices lifted with anticipation. There is a warm breeze that
makes the palm fronds sway and sing their
tick-tick-tick
song. Melanie
hands over our tickets. Her dad is supposed to be there already. We walk up the
ramp of the yacht. We, I,
walk up the ramp of a yacht.
Do you understand?
A yacht that looks like a yacht, long and sleek-nosed and demanding a
compliment.

Jason holds my arm. "You okay?" he
asks.

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"Oh, yeah," I say. "Fine."

It looks like a house inside here--a house with
paintings and furniture, jammed with people holding glasses of tinkling ice
cubes and... Wait a sec, someone I recognize. The blond woman in the upswept
hair. There she is, over by the stairwell, a portly man's hand around her waist,
and there she is again, in a black dress, getting something from the bar, and
there she is, pressed up against a guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt, his stomach
bloated and his gray beard full and bragging.

"Let's find the food," Jason says.

"Let's find the booze," Glenn says.

We are in a little clump, like ducklings who've
lost their mother. Even Jason and Glenn seem uncomfortable here. The boat begins
to move, the scene changing, sliding past, in the windows beyond. We follow
Glenn in a line, weaving in between men and women balancing cocktail napkins and
drinks, until Glenn reaches the bar. A band starts up, no songs I recognize, but
suddenly the sound is thick and the volume on the boat rises so that you have to
shout to be heard.

I smile at the bartender, a young guy who has a
goatee-in-training. This is his job, which means he is viewing it all from the
outside in, same as me. I'm a waitress, see? "Pretty crazy, huh?" I shout to
him.

"Indeed," he shouts.

I roll my eyes, indicating that we're on the
same team. Somehow, for some reason, it's important to me to have him know that.
To know that this is not my place. That his home, somewhere, an apartment maybe,
with a wife and new baby and old Bob Dylan albums and leftover lasagna in the
fridge is more my place, likely. But he is wary of me. I can feel it in his
cautious smile.

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"You're not drinking," Jason says. He has a
glass of clear liquid with a lime in it, and Glenn and Melanie both hold martini
glasses with olives skewered by miniature swords. Obviously, no one is carded on
this trip.

"The brain is a terrible thing to taste--I
mean, waste," I joke. But I don't know if he hears me. Jason just shrugs. We
follow Glenn to the food table, which is lined with various items served by
waiters in white. Glenn maneuvers us toward a living room table where we can set
our glasses down.

"I've heard this band," Glenn says. "Flying
Something ..."

Melanie nods. She looks nervous and
uncomfortable, like the hostess of an unsuccessful party. She bites the edge of
her nail, then remembers her manicure and stops. Three people sit on the couch
next to us. The man in the Hawaiian shirt is there, along with another
barrel-chested guy wearing tiny glasses, and a fifty-ish woman who is still
aiming for the bimbo look. Allen appears at Melanie's elbow.

"Having fun?" he shouts.

"Oh yeah, this is great," Melanie
says.

Wavy lines are coming off of him already.
"Isn't this the most amazing food? Let me introduce you," he says. He turns and
snags the first available audience, the three people on the couch. The woman is
the wife of producer-somebody; Mr. Aloha is somebody-somebody; and the
barrel-chested man with the tiny glasses is a photographer. I hear that
part.