“About what?”
“That shot. It should have hit ten minutes ago. I didn’t know whether, whether-”
“Whether.”
“Whether he’d shot me with water, or whether I was dead.”
“You’re not dead,” I said. “No thanks to you.”
“Yeah, yeah. Must have been those pills. You know? The ones in the box.”
“How many did you take?”
“Six? Seven? Who knows. I was already loaded from what Doc gave me. Oh my golly, here comes some more.” And she sat up straighter and looked over at me.
“I remember you now,” she said. Her eyes were darting back and forth between me and the road ahead, and her words were only slightly slurred. “You’re the one who talked about Claudette Colbert.”
We were on the freeway by now, but not moving so fast that it was dangerous for me to glance over at Thistle. Her transformation was nothing short of miraculous, even if it was pharmaceutically induced: a shot of amphetamine, a couple of Percocets, fifteen minutes for her system to re-tune itself, and she was a new woman. Chemically elevated, then sedated to give her enough mass to keep her from detaching and floating away, she looked fit, alert, and ready for the balance beam. Feeling my gaze, she gave me a wary look and reached into her purse, bringing out the biggest, blackest pair of shades I’d ever seen. They were so big it looked like they should have a nose and mustache attached to them. When she put them on, they dwarfed her face. She turned away from me, looking over her far shoulder at where we’d been.
“You like Claudette Colbert?” I asked. “I’m surprised you even know who she was.”
There was an interval, perhaps a good, slow count of five, during which I thought she wouldn’t answer. But then she looked back over at me. She lowered her shades with an index finger and continued to stare at me, long enough to make me uncomfortable. Then she pushed the sunglasses back up, turned back to the windshield, and cleared her throat. It didn’t sound like anything significant, just somebody getting her voice ready.
“I used to love her,” she said. “I watched all her movies. Her and Carole Lombard and Katharine Hepburn.”
“Pretty old for you.”
“Actresses,” she said. “I watched actresses. I used to be an actress.”
“I know,” I said.
“I wanted to be good,” she said. “So I watched good ones. Bette Davis, too, but she didn’t like to be funny. She believed she wasn’t beautiful is what I think, and she thought people only took her seriously when she was being dramatic, so she was afraid to be funny. I liked the ones who weren’t afraid to be funny.”
“You were good,” I said. “I’ve seen you.”
She waved the remark away. “That line you liked? About the hat? That was from Midnight. I saw that about fifty times. I used to be able to get anything I wanted, you know? When I was on the show, I mean. Anything. I’d just ask somebody for it and they’d get it for me. I didn’t even have to say please. So I asked one of those people, the ones who were always around then, for those old movies, and I got a lot of them. I used to watch them at night, when I got home, when I was through being Thistle.”
“What did you like about her? About Colbert, I mean.” We inched toward the onramp for the Hollywood Freeway.
She twisted a strand of the pulled-back hair to see how wet it was and then folded her hands in her lap. It was an odd posture, demure and too young for her. “She was having so much fun. More fun than anybody. Everybody else was working really hard, knitting their brows and clenching their jaws and trying to look like they were used to wearing their costumes and everything. You know, you can always tell when an actor feels silly in his costume, like they don’t know where their pockets are or they wish they were wearing socks. So everybody else is all wrapped up in a sheet and feeling dumb but pretending to be Julius Caesar or whoever, really putting their backs into it, you know? And she was thinking, I’m a big movie star and this is just like fatally cool. There was always this glee in her eyes. You know glee?”
“I have a nodding acquaintance with it.” The morning sun was dazzling on the roofs of the cars, and I envied Thistle her sunglasses.
“People don’t talk about glee much any more. Why?” She turned to me, the hands still folded in her lap. It seemed to be a serious question. “Do you know? Do you know why are there so many more ways to say you’re unhappy than there are to say you’re happy? Maybe that’s why nobody’s happy any more.”
“What’s why?”
“The language” she said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “You know, English. It doesn’t give happiness equal time, does it? It’s like the hundred words for snow everybody talks about with the Eskimos, except we’ve got it for complaint. We’ve got it for misery and boredom and too cool to smile. And so you’ve got all these drips dressed in black and imitating each other, talking about how beamed it is to be down all the time. Talking about irony and black comedy. Starting fan clubs for serial killers. Making fun of happy endings. Like the world is just cinders and tin cans and there’s nothing to be happy about.”
“Are you happy?”
She pushed past the question without a glance in its direction. “If there was no word for sky,” she said, “I wonder whether anybody would look up.”
“Are you happy?”
She had been facing me, but now she shifted to give me her profile and look through the windshield. She put her feet up on the dash so her knees were practically at her chest. Then, making herself even smaller, she crossed her arms. After a full minute, she said, “When I’ve got what I want.”
“And what do you want?”
“Who made you Mister Question Man?” Her voice had scaled up slightly into the thinner, more querulous register I’d heard when she was talking to Doc in the bathroom. “We were having a good time talking about, umm, Claudette Colbert, and all of a sudden I’m in therapy.”
“Sorry.”
“Jesus. I was feeling okay, too. Just drive the car, isn’t that your job?”
“You can feel good again.”
“Yeah?” It was a challenge. “You got anything?”
“You can feel good on your own.”
“Uh-oh. Quick, somebody. Make a poster. You can feel good on your own. With a picture of the Olsen Twins, maybe. Put it next to the one that says I won’t come in your mouth.” She started picking at the sore on her lower lip.
“Don’t do that. It’ll get infected.”
“Yeah, and it’ll swell up and then my head will fall off. Leave me alone.”
“My daughter says you were sad when you were a little girl.”
“She did, huh? Where’d she get that insight? Some blog about ragged-out former celebrities? Snort.com, or something?”
“She got it from watching you. The show. She watches you all the time.”
“She should go out and play. Stop watching junk. Do kids still go out and play? Did kids ever go out and play?”
“Was she right?”
“Oh, who knows?” She drummed her fingers on one of the jack-knifed legs. “She was watching Thistle, not me. Maybe she was sad some of the time. Seems like she was. If she’d been happy, she wouldn’t-” She broke off and looked out the passenger side window.
“Wouldn’t what?”
Her face was averted. “You got anything or not?”
“No.”
She shifted onto her right haunch, turned three-quarters away from me and touched her forehead to the window. “Then leave me alone.”
I said, “It’s a long drive.”
“Go away.”
“You want some music?”
“There’s no such thing as music.”
“Fine.”
The traffic had picked up its pace, especially in the left lanes, and Doc turned on his indicator. I prepared to follow.