“Now I feel terrible,” Paige said. “Maybe you should call her?” She reached back to unzip her pack and felt around for her cell.
“Don’t feel terrible, kitten. Nothing’s worth that. Where’s the inside light? Now there I go again.”
—
At the front desk of the Holiday Inn, a young blonde with three rings in each earlobe gave them a very-much-not-my-business smile. Her father asked for a room with two queens and signed them in as Charles Eckhaus and Paige Eckhaus. “And where would be a good place to eat?”
“A good place to eat?” The girl put a finger to her lower lip and pretended to be puzzled. “Maybe New York?”
“Now, what if I were a secret agent from the Greater Worcester Chamber of Commerce?” he said. “Let me rephrase. Where will they not poison us?” Paige saw him give his head that little twist to the side. Once, drunk, he’d let it slip to her that he knew which was his better profile.
“You could try Hot Biscuit Slim. It’s just down—I don’t know, I think three lights? On the left? At least they don’t overcook the pasta.”
“Well,” her father said, “I must say we’ve lucked out in meeting you. And do your gifts extend beyond food criticism?”
“You might be surprised,” she said, then gave Paige such a look: eyes full-on, then dropped as if demurely. Only rarely had Paige thought about other women. But this was a fetching girl. “Enjoy your dinner,” she said.
“What on earth was that?” her father said as Paige unlocked the passenger door.
“Every man’s fantasy, apparently,” Paige said. “She’s probably making up her own key card as we speak.”
“Ah, I doubt that. I’m old enough to be her father. Old enough to be your father.”
Hot Biscuit Slim turned out to have white tablecloths and a pink tulip on each table. The one objectionable thing was Old Glory push-pinned to the wall. That and the line on the menu about roast beef “in its own au jus.” And to be really bitchy, had one not heard enough of Kind of Blue?
The waitress set their drinks down, and her father made Paige clink her Jack Daniel’s to his martini. “Ah,” he said. “This and this alone.” He tapped a finger on the menu. “Have you made up your mind?”
“You are being double-edged,” she said. “Have you?”
“Well, one couldn’t come to Hot Biscuit Slim and not have the pasta. I wonder if they’d do just a simple olive oil and garlic. What about you, kitten?”
“Ooh,” she said. “It all just looks so good I can’t decide.” She made what felt to her like a Betty Boop mouth.
“Oh come now,” he said. “It’s not that bad. Remind me to call Abigail, will you?”
“Here.” She took out her phone. “If she star-sixty-nines you, you won’t have to explain why you’re shacked up at a Holiday Inn in Worcester.”
“You’re always thrusting that thing at me. Anyway, I doubt Abigail is that high-tech a person.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Paige said. She put the phone away and got out her makeup kit. “I have to hit the little girls’.”
“That’s not very nice, kitten,” he said. “Hitting little girls? If you see our waitress, hit her too.”
In the toilet stall, Paige sat, peed for form’s sake, took out her speed and her pretty salt spoon. Even in here, she could still hear John Coltrane reeling off those angry coils of notes. Another of Richard’s big favorites: all these men who went on and on and on. God, this stuff took hold in a hurry—like, how could molecules get to the brain so fast? Unless they penetrated right through like rays, without bothering to take the bloodstream? So embarrassing, though. If somebody heard her snorting away in here, they’d think she was doing coke like some spoiled little Eurotwat.
Back at the table, she raised her glass to her father and took another sip. What the fuck? This wasn’t Jack Daniel’s. She vibed the waitress until she made the bitch turn and look.
—
Driving back to the Holiday Inn, she spied a liquor store and pointed.
“Great minds,” her father said. “Still open, do you think?”
“Great minds are always open,” she said. “It’s their what-do-you-call-it. Hallmark.” She actually better not get much higher. “You know, we could just drive on from here to your friend’s,” she said. “I don’t really want to, necessarily.”
“If I call her again, she’ll think I have Alzheimer’s.” He coughed. “Would you get me a pint of, I don’t know, Tanqueray? No, actually, pints are for rumdums. How about a fifth? I can’t believe I even know the term ‘pint.’ That in itself is a bad sign.” He thrust three twenties at her. “This should be enough to get us each a little something.”
She plucked one. “We’ll go Dutch,” she said. “Speaking of Alzheimer’s. Actually, you know what I love? In Variety, when they say ‘prexy’? Like, ‘So and so, Sony Pictures prexy’?” She shook her head. “Whew. And with that.”
—
Lying on their beds, each propped up with two pillows, they watched Eyes Wide Shut on the pay-movie channel. Paige sipping Jack, her father sipping gin, the plastic ice bucket on the night table between them. The beauty of the ice cubes went to her heart: each cube with a tunnel going through and about ten colors clashing around and adding up to not any color at all. The beauty of the ice bucket too, let’s contemplate that: marbleized plastic, pinks and grays swirling, done very honorably.
Just as canker was a disease of plants and cancer one of animals, so methamphetamine was—well, something like “a vice of the lower classes,” but Paige couldn’t get the phrase to turn. She’d gone out to the car, supposedly to get her CDs, but in fact to sit in the passenger seat and have her really very modest two or three little hits of pot, which she might as well make half a dozen tonight. And good pot too, what Sally called “better living through hydroponics.” But wouldn’t her father smell it on her clothes? No, because she’d hung the hand holding the pipe out the car window and breathed the smoke out there too, into earth’s atmosphere. True, someone else might have happened by and smelled her at it. But the atmosphere was so vast. It was like, parts per million.
“Why on earth would you be reading Variety?” her father said. Nicole Kidman was pretending to be stoned by looking sleepy and speaking slowly.
Paige had to spit her ice cube into her palm to answer. “What are you talking about?” Cold. This was why they called them ice cubes.
“You said you’d seen something in Variety.”
“I did?”
“Well, I’m not imagining this. I hope.”
She dropped the ice cube back into her glass and wiped her palm on the weirdly smooth synthetic blanket that wetness didn’t seem to penetrate. “Oh. Oh oh oh. Sally? My friend Sally? She sold her book to the movies, and she emailed everybody this thing about it in Variety, and it had all these words like ‘prexy.’ Prexy. I mean, it’s hilarious, right?”
“Ah. See, I was imagining something quite different.” He poured more gin, and Paige heard his ice cubes snap, even with Nicole Kidman going on and on. This was the worst performance, bar none, she had ever seen, unless it was pretty good.
“Like what were you imagining?”
He coughed. “I had this nightmare vision of you turning into one of these pop-culture—whatever they call them. Cultural media studies.”