More and more, being beautiful took so much effort. Just the razor bumps would make you want to cry. The bikini waxes. Evie came out of her collagen lip injection saying she no longer had any fear of hell. The next worse thing is Manus yanking off your pussy strip if you’re not close-shaved.
About hell, I told Evie, “We’re shooting there tomorrow.”
So, now the art director says, “Evie, could you climb up a couple cars higher on the pile?” And this is wearing high heels, but Evie goes up. Little diamonds of safety glass are scattered on everywhere you might fall.
Through her big cheesy smile, Evie says, “How exactly did your brother get mutilated?” You can only hold a real smile for so long, after that it’s just teeth.
The art director steps up with his little foam applicator and retouches where the bronzer is streaked on my butt cheeks.
“It was a hairspray can somebody threw away in our family’s burn barrel,” I say. “He was burning the trash and it exploded.”
And Evie says, “Somebody?”
And I say, “You’d think it was my mom, the way she screamed and tried to stop him bleeding.”
And the photographer says, “Girls, can you go up on your toes just a little?”
Evie goes, “A big thirty-two-ounce can of HairShell hairspray? I bet it peeled half his face off.”
We both go up on our toes.
I go, “It wasn’t so bad.”
“Wait a sec,” the art director says, “I need your feet to be not so close together.” Then he says, “Wider.” Then, “A little wider, please.” Then he hands up big chrome tools for us to hold.
Mine must weigh fifteen pounds.
“It’s a ball-peen hammer,” Evie says, “and you’re holding it wrong.”
“Honey,” the photographer says to Evie, “could you hold the chain saw a bit closer to your mouth, please?”
The sun is warm on the metal of the cars, their tops crushed under the weight of being piled on top of each other. These are cars with buckled front ends you know nobody walked away from. Cars with T-boned sides where whole familes died together. Rear-ended cars with the backseats pushed up tight against the dashboard. Cars from before seat belts. Cars from before air bags. Before the Jaws of Life. Before paramedics. These are cars peeled open around their exploded gas tanks.
“This is so rich,” Evie says, “how this is the place I’ve worked my whole life to get.”
The art director says to go ahead and push our breasts against the cars.
“The whole time, growing up,” Evie says, “I just thought being a woman would be …not such a disappointment.”
All I ever wanted was to be an only child.
The photographer says, “Perfecto.”
Chapter 11
alf my life I spend hiding in the bathrooms of the rich.
Jump back to Seattle, to the time Brandy and Seth and I are on the road hunting drugs. Jump to the day after the night we went to the Space Needle, where right now Brandy is laid out flat on a master bathroom floor. First I helped her off with her suit jacket and unbuttoned the back of her blouse, and now I’m sitting on a toilet overdosing Valiums as steady as Chinese water torture into her Plumbago mouth. The thing about Valiums, the Brandy girl says, is they don’t kill the pain but at least you’re not pissed off about being hurt.
“Hit me,” Brandy says and makes a fish lips.
The thing about Brandy is she’s got such a tolerance for drugs it takes forever to kill her. That, and she’s so big, most of her being muscle, it would take bottles and bottles of anything.
I drop a Valium. A little baby-blue Valium, another powder-blue Valium, Tiffany’s light blue, like a gift from Tiffany’s, the Valium falls end over end into Brandy’s interior.
This suit I help Brandy out of, it’s a Pierre Cardin Space-Age style of just bold white, the straight tube skirt being fresh and sterile to just above her knees, the jacket being timeless and clinical in its simple cut and three-quarter sleeves. Her blouse underneath is sleeveless. Her shoes are box-toe white vinyl boots. It’s an outfit you’d accessorize with a Geiger counter instead of a purse.
At the Bon Marché, when she catwalks out of the fitting room, all I can do is applaud. There’s going to be postpartum depression next week when she goes to take this one back.
Jump to breakfast, this morning when Brandy and Seth were flush with drug money, we were eating room service and Seth says Brandy could time-travel to Las Vegas on another planet in the 1950s and fit right in. The planet Krylon, he says, where synthetic bendable glam-bots would lipo-suck your fat and makeover you.
And Brandy says, “What fat?”
And Seth says, “I love how you could just be visiting from the distant future via the 1960s.”
And I put more Premarin in Seth’s next coffee refill. More Darvon in Brandy’s champagne.
Jump back to us in the bathroom, Brandy and me.
“Hit me,” Brandy says.
Her lips look all loose and stretched out, and I drop another gift from Tiffany’s.
This bathroom we’re hiding in, it goes way the other side of decorative touches. The whole deal is an undersea grotto. Even the princess phone is aqua, but when you look out the big brass porthole windows, you see Seattle from the top of Capitol Hill.
The toilet I’m sitting on, just sitting, the lid’s closed under my ass thank you, but the toilet’s a big ceramic snail shell bolted to the wall. The sink is a big ceramic half a clam bolted to the wall.
Brandy-land, sexual playground to the stars, she says, “Hit me.”
Jump to when we got here and the realtor was just a big tooth. One of those football scholarships where the eyebrows grow together in the middle and they forget to get a degree in anything.
As if I can talk, me with sixteen hundred credits.
Here’s this million-dollar-club realtor who got thrown his job by a grateful alumnus who just wanted a son-in-law who could stay awake through six or seven holiday bowl games. But maybe I’m being a touch judgmental.
Brandy was beside herself for feminine wetness. Here’s this extra-Y-chromosome guy in a double-breasted blue serge suit, a guy whose paws make even Brandy’s big hands look little.
“Mr. Parker,” Brandy says, her hand hidden inside his big paw. You can see the Henry Mancini soundtrack of love in her eyes. “We spoke this morning.”
We’re in the drawing room of a house on Capitol Hill. This is another rich house where everything is exactly what it looks like. The elaborate Tudor roses carved in the ceilings are plaster, not pressed tin, not fiberglass. The torsos of battered Greek nudes are marble, not marbleized plaster. The boxes in the breakfront are not enameled in the manner of Fabergé. The boxes are Fabergé pillboxes, and there are eleven of them. The lace under the boxes was not tatted by a machine.
Not just the spines, but the entire front and back covers of all the books on all the shelves in the library are bound in leather, and the pages are cut. You don’t have to pull a single book to know this.
The realtor, Mr. Parker, his legs are still flat on the sides of his ass. In the front, there’s just enough more in one pant leg to spell boxers instead of briefs.
Brandy nods my way. “This is Miss Arden Scotia, of the Denver River Logging and Paper Scotias.” Another victim of the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project.
Parker’s big hand swallows my little hand, big fish and little fish, whole.
Parker’s starched white shirt makes you think of eating off a clean tablecloth, so flat and stuck out you could serve drinks off the shelf of his barrel chest.
“This”—Brandy nods toward Seth—“is Miss Scotia’s half-brother, Ellis Island.”