To Die For (5 page)

“You have a girlfriend?” she says. I say nobody special.

“Well why not?” she says. “Cute guy like you.”

I can’t think of nothing to say, so I just sit there with this boner that won’t quit.

“Don’t you ever go dancing?” she says.

I tell her I don’t know how to dance. “Well,” she says. “I could teach you.” By this time we’re at her what-do-you-call-it, condo. “Condom,” Russ used to call it. Funny guy.

She unlocks the door. I never been in a place like this. Furniture all matching. Pictures of waves and shit on the walls. Place smells like a fucking flower bed. Little dog comes over and starts jumping up trying to grab my balls. Alls I needed.

She takes off her shoes. The place has this carpet on the floor. I mean it’s so soft you wouldn’t need no bed to fuck in. You could do it anyplace. Which in the end we did.

She turns on the stereo. It’s more of Aerosmith or Motley Crüe maybe. I never listen to the words to songs normally, but you kind of felt like whatever it said right then, that would be her message to me. Which in this case was “Ten Seconds to Love.” Jesus Christ, I’m thinking. Is it my imagination or does this chick want to ball me?

But she’s just dancing. Not real wild. Just moving back and forth. Come on, she says. Try it. You’ll never get a girlfriend if you can’t dance.

So I take a step forward, then back again. Wishing Russell would hurry up and get here, only also thinking about what if he didn’t. What I could do. Crazy stuff.

“My husband won’t dance,” she says. “I mean, we used to, but now that we’re an old married couple he’s changed. I guess he doesn’t think he needs to anymore.”

“It’s funny,” she says. “I can remember thinking once a person was in their twenties they might as well be a million years old. And now I’m there myself. Only it feels like it was just the other day I was putting on my cheering uniform. I was a cheerleader you know.”

“No shit,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. Then she does this little routine. Right there in the middle of her living room. The splits and everything.

“We were division champions,” she tells me. “Third in the state finals. Really gross uniforms though.”

This is when I hear Russ pulling up out front. It’s easy on account of that car needed a muffler bad.

“Hey,” she says. “Where’d you get the tattoo?” She’s talking about this skull I got on my arm. Russ and me, we all got shitfaced one night and did it. Never believe anyone tells you it doesn’t hurt.

“Little Paradise Beach,” I tell her.

“I always wanted a tattoo,” she says, and then she kind of giggles, like she’s sixteen or something. That’s when Russ and Lydia walk in with the fucking pizza.

I
GUESS THIS IS
what you get for trying to give a few disadvantaged youngsters the opportunity to do something constructive for once. I mean, I’ve always been an idealist. I see the potential in a situation. I look for the best in a person. I’m one of those people that thinks the glass is half full, not half empty.

So to me, the way I saw it my high school life video was a great opportunity not only to prove my own abilities in my chosen field, but also to provide these youngsters with a true learning experience concerning the media. More than that even, I saw myself giving them what you might call a positive life experience too, by showing them a positive role model who cared about them and their lives. I was so excited to think about one of these kids maybe using this as the launching pad for a whole new way of life, where they’d reach for something better. Larry and I used to talk about how all it takes is one person who cares to turn a person’s life around. I thought maybe I could be that person.

That’s one reason why I brought the kids over to our place. I wanted them to see how some people live. Give them a lifestyle to aspire to, beyond spending the rest of their life digging clams and shacking up with their 250-pound first cousin. If you know what I mean.

Yes, I gave James a ride in my car. And went out and bought an air freshener the next day, just to try and get the smell out of my Datsun, incidentally.

The minute he got in the car, he started in with all this what I would call suggestive talk about his various girlfriends and so forth. It’s “F” this and “F” that. This is the kind of person we’re dealing with here. I guess just because I listen to contemporary music he got the idea anything goes. I set him straight on that, or tried to. Then when we got to my place—Larry’s and mine—he walked right over to our stereo and turned it on, without asking or anything. I had an Aerosmith CD in there I remember. To give him something to identify with, you know. Although to tell you the truth, the kind of music I prefer is more along the lines of Billy Joel. I saw Christie Brinkley once, incidentally. When I was in New York City, on a Women in Media workshop, and she walked right past me, just as I was coming back to my hotel. She’s every bit as gorgeous in real life.

Anyway. He took off his shoes, right there in the middle of my living room, and started dancing, I guess you could call it. With these very sexually explicit moves. I told him, “James, you need to remember we’re here to work on the video project.” He asked me if Larry and I ever went dancing. I made a point of telling him what a wonderful marriage we had, and that we did a lot of activities together on the weekends. Dancing being one of them.

He suggested that maybe I could teach him how to dance better. He’d seen a picture I have in my front hall of me in my cheerleading uniform. He said he figured from all my cheering experience I’d be a good dancer. I explained to him that cheering is more a precision sort of thing. People don’t understand how much practice and choreography goes into a single cheer. Where dancing is more loose and free. We were the division champions, the year I was captain. Third place in the state, in spite of those awful uniforms. Maroon and yellow, can you believe it?

But I have to admit I told him I’d give him a few pointers sometime. You have to reach them on their wavelength, you know. Reporters such as myself have to show our subjects that we’re people too, if we want our subjects to open up to us. I couldn’t seem so perfect that he just wouldn’t relate. It’s a fine line.

He had a tattoo on his arm. A skull or a devil, as I recall. I remember thinking we’d have to be sure he wore something that would keep it concealed, if we had him on camera. Something like that could really give viewers the wrong impression. I wanted people to sympathize with these kids, not write them off as a bunch of hoods, even if that is what they turned out to be.

But the point of the tattoo is how I came to see it. Because after he’d been dancing around my living room, he said he was sweaty, and he took off his shirt. Which is how I came to see the tattoo.

First he took off his shirt. Then he came up behind me, while I was putting something in the microwave. He grabbed me by the arm and turned me around, hard. Then he kissed me. And then Lydia and Russell walked in with the pizza.

T
HE FIRST TIME
I saw Mrs. Maretto I thought she must be a new student, not a teacher. If she was a student, she’d be homecoming queen for sure. She’d be the most popular girl in the entire school.

And her clothes. Everything was always perfect, not just for some special occasion, but just every day. Later on, after I got to know her, she taught me that’s an important trick all the newswomen know. You dress every day like you might be going to the White House. Because you never know who might be watching you. You never know when your big chance might come along, so you’ve always got to be ready.

Say she was wearing a peach-colored dress with little purple specks on it. You knew she’d have purple earrings on. Her shoes might be tan, but she’d have little peach-colored bows on them, or her stockings would have this pale, pale peach-colored tint. And if you looked close you’d see that instead of regular eyeliner, it was purple.

I never would’ve dared speak to her. But then she came into our health class and explained how she was going to be interviewing kids for this TV special she was taping, and she needed some volunteers to work with her. I wouldn’t have thought of it if they were looking for someone that had to be smart or pretty or anything, but they said they wanted just regular kids. It didn’t matter who you were. And I guess I figured it would be nice to just hang around her a little, maybe. I never dreamed we’d get to be friends like that. I figured someone like her would have a jillion friends.

Who she reminded me of was Princess Diana. Or that girl in Wilson Phillips, the skinny one. She had this certain way of pulling on her earrings when she was thinking about something. Or when she’d sit down, instead of crossing her legs like most people would do, or just sitting there like a total jerk, forgetting about whether anybody could see your underwear, like I might do, she always crossed her ankles.

You wouldn’t believe all the things she knew. Like did you know, when you put on makeup under your eyes, to cover up the circles, you always want to apply it in an upwards direction? “Just because we’re young doesn’t mean it’s too soon to start fighting gravity,” she told me.

Never cut your cuticles, or they grow back twice as thick as before. That was another one. There’s no such thing as drinking too much water. Keep a pack of Tic Tacs in your purse wherever you go. Whenever you have any doubt about your breath, pop one in. She was the one who told me I should bleach my freckles. I never would’ve thought of that. She even got me doing these exercises, to uncross my eyes.

“This is great,” she said, when I signed up to be in her video. She said she’d be working pretty close with this group for the next couple months and it would be good to have someone she could share some girl talk with.

I told her I never did anything like this before. She was so nice. She told me that was fine, at least I wouldn’t have any bad habits. She said she’d teach me everything she knew, like a big sister. She had this perfume on. In the end she gave me my own bottle, I loved the smell so much. Pavlova. They named it for a famous ballerina.

Of course I heard about Larry right away. For one thing, you couldn’t miss her ring. It was such a big diamond. Plus she kept their wedding picture on her desk.

And in the beginning she was always saying how great everything was. How lucky she was, what a romantic guy she married, how he was always bringing her flowers and presents and stuff. One time he surprised her over the weekend with a whole bedroom set. Another time it was a sheepskin cover for the driver’s seat in her car. Or they would’ve gone away to Atlantic City for the weekend. Or to some real romantic hotel in the mountains with a heart-shaped bathtub. They seemed like the perfect couple.

The only other people in the video were Jimmy and Russell. And they were always such total washouts. I mean, they’d show up stoned, or one of them would walk in and say something really dirty about some girl he was with over at Little Paradise Beach the night before. They’d slump into their chairs with their hands on their, you know, between their legs. There was Mrs. Maretto, acting like she was having lunch with a couple of senators, only it was Russell Hines and Jimmy Emmet sitting there instead, scratching themselves. But she always did what she told me. She acted like you never knew who might come in, who might be watching that might make a difference.

This video we were working on. The idea was to take some kids, meaning us, and get to know us and our inner feelings and stuff. So a big part of the time she wasn’t filming us or anything, because like she explained, first we had to really get to know each other, get to be friends. So this one day she invited me to come along with her to her aerobics class, just Mrs. Maretto and me. She let me wear this extra sweatsuit of hers that she said was too big for her, and took me into the special locker room in her health club and everything. We took our showers side by side, which made me feel kind of weird on account of how she was so skinny and I’m such a total mess. I held my stomach in, but still.

After the shower, we went in the sauna together, and then she brought me in this hot tub where you sit naked, just letting the water swirl over you. I’d never been at a place like this before.

All of a sudden I look over at Mrs. Maretto, and she’s crying. “Larry doesn’t understand why my work is so important to me,” she says. “I could never explain my career to him. I come home from a day like this, where we’ve done all this great talking, and I got such terrific footage. And he doesn’t even ask me how it’s going.”

Well I didn’t know what to do. Right in the middle of the hot tub, seeing Mrs. Maretto crying like that. She wasn’t going crazy or anything. I mean, she splashed some water on her face right away and that looked like the end of it. But after, in her car, driving me back to my house, it was like she became a different person. She starts telling me all sorts of stuff. How he never wants to party and go to clubs anymore. He just wants to stay home and watch TV. How he wants to have kids and she’s still on the pill but she can’t tell him because he says it’s time to start a family, and Joan Lunden has kids but look how fat she got for a while there, and besides, she was already famous when she got pregnant, so were Jane Pauley and Deborah Norville. Nobody has kids first.

I didn’t know what to say, but I didn’t have to say anything, she just kept talking. How it was all a big mistake, getting married. She didn’t know it would be like this. They used to have a lot of fun, but now she just felt like this old married couple, that their life was behind them. He wants her to be home. But if she’s ever going to get ahead, now’s the time she has to really hustle. She’s in a very competitive business and you can’t afford to lose time, when you’re twenty-five years old, and you’re still just doing cable. And how this video project was supposed to be her big chance, but the boys are such losers she’ll never be able to make anything of it, and even if she did, what difference would that make, because Larry would never leave his folks’ restaurant, even if NBC called up and offered her “The Sunrise Report.” You don’t know it, she says to me, but right now is the best time in your life. It won’t ever be any better than it is right now, when everything’s still ahead of you. Which made me kind of sad myself because how it was right then was not very great. But also, I felt so, you know, special. That she’d be telling me this stuff. That she would talk to me like that, you know. Just like a couple of girlfriends. I would’ve done anything for her after that.