The Good Life (20 page)

“It's not that easy,” I said.

“It's not that hard. Promise you'll call me tonight,” Lucy said.

“I'll be typing in data. I'm going to keep my hands busy so I can't pick up anything else.”

“Good tactic.”

“I learned it from you,” I said, hanging up before Lucy could start talking about happiness again.

 

For the next two weeks, the nights were unbearable. I had car keys, a fat wallet, and knowledge I could not make myself lose: the liquor store that was open late was three miles away, the one with the better selection, nine. One evening craving wrung me until I was on my hands and knees, room to room, abrading my wrists against the carpet to make a haze of pain that would block out—no, punish—my thirst. If Lucy had asked, I would have told her about this bit of drama. Perhaps she guessed.

She was calling five times a day, and I answered the phone every time. Fighting drink was like fighting quicksand, but fighting Lucy was combat—hand-to-hand, restorative. My gratitude was beyond words, which she knew. At the end of one of these conversations, I asked her how she was getting along with Byron.

“He changed my casting: I'm one of the Venticelli now. A speaking part. He watched me watch you at the party and was impressed with my emotive skills.”

“If you're about to thank me, please stop.”

“I'm just telling you. Luck crops up where you don't expect it.” Her voice sounded prissy and stiff. Before I could ask whom she was imitating, she went on. “By the way, Byron would like you to drop by his place. He told me to tell you. I told him to get lost.”

“And he said, ‘What, you can't trust your mentor to make decisions for herself?'”

“Bingo,” Lucy said. Byron had been right to give her a speaking role. In the silence between us rang the echo of her voice, a chiming chord of indifference, anxiety, and pleading.

I quit rubbing the carpet. “Is this about your new part?”

“I didn't ask him.”

“Can he bust you back down to Citizen?”

“He's the director. He giveth, he can taketh away. So you make up your own mind. I wouldn't have told you this if I didn't think you could figure out what you want to do.”

“I want to do a lot of things,” I said carefully.

“I know.”

“Are you asking me not to let you down?”

“You better believe it,” she said.

 

Byron's apartment was only a little bit shabby. The drooping palms in front of the window were dusty but still green, and canister up-lights behind the piano drew the eye away from the exhausted tan carpet. On the walls were tacked several playbills, photos, and a single poster—a reproduction of Magritte's
Ce n'est pas une pipe
. I'd forgotten how young Byron was.

“Wine or coffee?” He held a chardonnay bottle in one hand, a bag of coffee beans in the other.

“Coffee.” I followed him into the kitchen. “Thank you.”

“I wasn't sure where you were standing now.”

“Fifteen days sober? I'm not standing anywhere. I'm flat on the, ground, hanging onto a rock.”

“Good line,” he said. He pushed the coffee grinder's lever so that the noisy clatter briefly filled the space between us. “Good lines are your specialty. You told me so at the party.”

I felt an embarrassed smile hover at the corners of my mouth. “I talk when I get tanked. Then the next day I go around apologizing.”

“I liked it. You were spunky.”

“You make me sound like Shirley Temple.”

He snorted. “Shirley Temple played by Simone de Beauvoir. So who are you playing tonight?”

I was wondering that myself. I hadn't forgotten Byron's duplicity, but his hair rolled in a heavy blond wave over his forehead and his arms were smooth with muscle. Giddiness bubbled through me, mild at first. “I'm Lucy's friend,” I said.

“What else?”

“Let's see. I'm trying to make good. I'm missing my favorite TV show. I'm too old to be here.”

“I wouldn't say that.” He stood just a foot away from me. I would hardly have to raise my hand to touch him.

“Trust me,” I said. “You want some ingénue who won't cause trouble.”

“I like trouble.”

“You just think you do.” I glanced at the chardonnay bottle he'd left in the sink, its sides glistening with condensation. “Don't you want to put that back in the refrigerator?”

“In a while. Tell me about trouble.”

I shrugged. “Even though you know your lines, you decide to improvise. But then you need to keep talking, so you use whatever words show up in your mouth. You tell truths that don't need telling. And then it's too late.”

“Is that all? I must be in trouble every day of my life.”

“You didn't ask about frequency.”

He laughed. Sweeping a speck from the counter, he let his wrist brush against my arm.

“Your turn,” I said, not quite steadily. “Talk. Tell me something I don't know.”

“You're setting me up. There's nothing you don't know.”

“Smart answer,” I said, holding my hands an inch away from his. I danced back a step so he could follow. He was better at this than many men, leaving a gap that one of us would have to reach across. “I'm full of wisdom,” I said. “Just ask Lucy.”

The mobility of his face was wonderful; he shifted from desire to regret in a single beat. “I wouldn't try asking her right now. There was a party after rehearsal last night. We had to drive her home.” He glanced away from me and added, “Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

“She would have told me,” I said.

“She looks up to you. She told me so three times. Red wine.”

“That's not her drink.”

“She told me that, too.”

Turning to the cupboard to get coffee mugs, Byron presented his profile for me to ponder. He was almost certainly lying. Lucy never started drinking when her life brightened or when she had work. On the other hand, she might pick up a drink as a way to challenge her own good fortune. I knew the impulse.

“She respects your experience,” Byron said. “She talked to me about how much you've been through.”

I stepped toward him. His hair between my fingers was thick and soft as a fox's tail. I said, “You have no idea what I've been through.”

“You know what I like about you?” he said, motionless, his eyes closed. “You're not another drone or dumb actress. You have a real life.”

“You don't know many alcoholics, do you?” Just the one hand buried in his soft hair.

“I'm in
theater
. Everybody I know shuttles in and out of AA. But no one else is like you. You're special.”

He opened his heavy eyes, and I didn't draw my hand back, even though the moment grew spongy. I tingled, half humiliated and half exhilarated that this vain, untrustworthy man should understand me perfectly. Already his hands were lifted to catch me, the woman ten years his senior who had come to his house because he'd given her a drink. When the words rose into my mouth, I didn't try to check them. “Oh honey, I'm not a bit special. If I was special, I wouldn't be here with you.” I pulled away from him and picked up the chardonnay bottle from the sink. “Where's your corkscrew?”

His angry smile slid across his face like silk. “I'm not going to tell you.”

The corkscrew lay in the first drawer I opened, and I twisted it expertly into the cork, unpopping it with the sound that always meant celebration. I held the bottle up before him, gauging what would happen to his tense, expectant expression. Then I poured a little, wanting to drink it so bad that my hand shook, and emptied the glass onto the floor between us. Not much. The puddle would be easy to clean. I rubbed my wrist against the rough cotton of my pants.

“I guess you don't like chardonnay,” Byron said.

“I love chardonnay. Catch me at the right time, I'd be on my hands and knees, licking it up.” I skirted the puddle on my way back toward the front door, where I had dropped my purse and keys. Byron's damp footsteps padded behind me.

“Look, is it something I said?”

“Oh for Christ's sake, Byron, of course it's something you said.” I turned to face him and squeezed his arm. “Don't worry—I'll tell Lucy that you did some of your best work here tonight.”

“She must have lost the lottery on the day they were giving out friends.”

“She tells me that all the time.” I was pleased to be able to say something so nearly true.

He leaned beside the door, his eyes quick and tight. “So where are you going now? A bar?”

“Home.”

“And what do you do when you get lonely, Grandma?”

“Haven't you been paying attention? I call Lucy.” I leaned forward and kissed—hard—his lovely, parted lips. Then I went home.

 

 

 

“S
UE BETTEL: DANCER
.” We howled. She was our favorite topic, although we rarely said more than “Sue Bettel: Dancer.” Slung across the ripped, sprung dorm couches, mostly still wearing leg warmers and leotards, we would remind one another of “Sue Bettel: Dancer,” and laugh ourselves weak.

Not merely plump but actually broad, Sue had round arms and a round belly and a big, round rear; she gathered her wiry red hair into an untidy, roundish bush on the back of her head. Her red plastic-rimmed glasses flew off her face on turns, and her low forehead and steep chin gave her the look of an inquisitive finch. Lazy turnout, awkward arms: the best we could say was that she danced, somehow, with confidence. Still, she had gotten a scholarship, a fact that drove the rest of us crazy. At every party we could count on some skinny girl with sinuous arms imitating a heavy-footed, out-of-breath dancer. “I,” she would pant, “have a
scholarship!
”

Only once did Sue walk in on one of these imitations. Wearing a distracted, slightly cross-eyed expression, Janine Prienocski was blundering across the dorm lounge, her mincing bourrée steps, which had started off daintily, picking up speed as Janine lunged farther and farther off balance. We were yelling encouragement, and when Sue appeared in the doorway, wearing her birdlike expression, I was so embarrassed that I laughed harder, though the other girls fell silent. Janine, a pro, kept dancing.

Head cocked, eyes blinking, Sue studied Janine's wobbly legs, her thrust-out rear, the way her arms paddled the air. Then she jumped into place right beside Janine, tipping from side to side, thumping so hard that the lamps rattled. Sue had a gift for comedy. In fact, she was funnier than Janine, although I wasn't sure she knew she was imitating herself. After that evening I felt a slim tie to her, a vague admiration and a vaguer sense of debt.

We were all dance majors together at Padarette, a tiny liberal-arts college just north of Indianapolis, the only decent dance department for miles. Five years earlier a Padarette girl had been picked for American Ballet Theatre; her signed glossy hung near the department secretary's desk, and every one of us had studied that signature, whether we would admit it or not.

We cultivated what we imagined to be professional behavior: disdainful attitudes, spotless rehearsal attendance, developing what the ballet master, Georges, called body instinct. “The single position. No other,” he growled. “The body knows or it does not know.”

Mine sometimes knew; Janine's often knew. But Sue's never, ever knew. By our senior year I couldn't bear to watch her practice, although she chattered about auditions when we talked in the dressing room, conversations I myself started because I felt pity for her.

Not much effort was needed to talk to Sue. Her mouth was filled with observations—the widening isthmus connecting Georges's bald spots; the hangdog, lovesick looks shot by our pianist toward Clara Leekin's butter-colored hair; the lovesick looks shot by Georges to our pianist. I had never noticed Georges's hairline before, or at least not so clearly, and I certainly hadn't noticed the pianist. Janine stood behind Sue, opening and closing her hand like a beak, the gesture for “talk-talk-talk.” Sue pointed, named, talk-talk-talked.

With her voice in my head, I began to take walks around the tiny campus, seeing for the first time its halfhearted planter beds and the sandy brick of the four classroom buildings. Stains the color of new plums stretched underneath the ancient air-conditioning units. Afternoon light crashed against southwest-facing windows. Sidewalks rumpled like sheets over the thick, snaking maple roots. I wondered whether I could find a way to dance these clear, new details and then wondered who would want to see them if I did.

My dancing took on an edge, my turns snapping like whip cracks even when Georges called out to remember adagio, to feel the music. Probably my new speed was the result of the weight I was losing—graduation was nearing like a shipwreck, and all of us except Sue had lost our appetites. Nevertheless, during the long afternoon classes my mind, which should have been focused on nothing but the single position, was filled with plums and maple trees. I felt new to myself, strange, a strangeness that became darkly meaningful when, for the first time, I wasn't given a solo in the end-of-term recital. Sue had one, though.

Sue's feet were softer than ever, practically rippling on pointe, and she had put on weight around her waist and back. In arabesque her profile looked wadded. Right before lunch she would practice her long solo, set to a Gershwin medley, and she was apparently oblivious to the cluster of girls staring at her from the doorway. Always at least one of them—though I was never the one—would softly oink.

Hour by hour the level of outraged grumbling rose, and we went from wondering whether she was sleeping with a teacher to assuming she was sleeping with a teacher to fury that sleeping with a teacher should be so well rewarded. “Hell, I'd have sex with Georges if he'd give me
Rhapsody in Blue
,” I said, and the others laughed. I grinned, so they would think I was joking.