Almost half a million dollars is about twenty-five pounds of ten- and twenty-dollar bills in a box. Plus, inside with the money is a pink stationery note from Evie saying blah, blah, blah, I will kill you if I ever see you again. And I couldn’t be happier.
Before Brandy can see who it’s addressed to, I claw off the label.
One part of being a model is my phone number was unlisted so I wasn’t in any city for Brandy to find. I was nowhere. And now we’re driving back to Evie. To Brandy’s fate. The whole way back, me and Ellis, we’re writing postcards from the future and slipping them out the car windows as we go south on Interstate 5 at a mile and a half every minute. Three miles closer to Evie and her rifle every two minutes. Ninety miles closer to fate every hour.
Ellis writes: Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.
The electric window of the Lincoln Town Car hums down a half inch, and Ellis drops the card out into the I-5 slipstream.
I write: You spend your entire life becoming God and then you die.
Ellis writes: When you don’t share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.
I write: All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.
Jump to us reading the real estate section of the newspaper, looking for big open houses. We always do this in a new town. We sit at a nice sidewalk café and drink cappuccino with chocolate sprinkles and read the paper, then Brandy calls all the realtors to find which open houses have people still living in them. Ellis makes a list of houses to hit tomorrow.
We check into a nice hotel, and we take a catnap. After midnight Brandy wakes me up with a kiss. She and Ellis are going out to sell the stock we picked up in Seattle. Probably they’re screwing. I don’t care.
“And no,” Brandy says. “Miss Alexander will not be calling the Rhea sisters while she’s in town. Anymore, she’s determined the only vagina worth having is the kind you buy yourself.”
Ellis is standing in the open doorway to the hotel hallway, looking like a superhero that I want to crawl into bed and save me. Still, since Seattle, he’s been my brother. And you can’t be in love with your brother.
Brandy says, “You want the TV remote control?” Brandy turns on the television, and there’s Evie scared and desperate with her big pumped-up rainbow hair in every shade of blond. Evelyn Cottrell, Inc., everybody’s favorite write-off, is stumbling through the studio audience in her sequined dress begging folks to eat her meat by-products.
Brandy changes channels.
Brandy changes channels.
Brandy changes channels.
Evie is everywhere after midnight, offering what she’s got on a silver tray. The studio audience ignores her, watching themselves on the monitor, trapped in the reality loop of watching themselves watch themselves, trying the way we do every time we look in a mirror to figure out exactly who that person is.
That loop that never ends. Evie and me, we did this infomercial. How could I be so dumb? We’re so totally trapped in ourselves.
The camera stays on Evie, and what I can almost hear Evie saying is, Love me.
Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, love me, I’ll be anybody you want me to be. Use me. Change me. I can be thin with big breasts and big hair. Take me apart. Make me into anything, but just love me.
Jump way back to one time, Evie and me did this fashion shoot in a junkyard, in a slaughterhouse, in a mortuary. We’d go anywhere to look good by comparison, and what I realize is mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she’s so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she’s just like me. What I really hate is me, so I hate pretty much everybody.
Jump to the next day we hit a few houses, a mansion, a couple palaces, and a chateau full of drugs. Around three o’clock we meet a realtor in the baronial dining room of a West Hills manor house. All around us are caterers and florists. The dining room table is spread and heaping with silver and crystal, tea sets, samovars, candelabras, stemware. A woman in dowdy scarecrow social-secretary tweeds is unwrapping these gifts of silver and crystal and making notes in a tiny red book.
A constant stream of arriving flowers eddies around us, buckets of irises and roses and stock. The manor house is sweet with the smell of flowers and rich with the smell of little puff pastries and stuffed mushrooms.
Not our style. Brandy looks at me. Way too many folks around.
But the realtor’s already there, smiling. In a drawl as flat and drawn-out as the Texas horizon, the realtor introduces herself as Mrs. Leonard Cottrell. And she is so happy to meet us.
This Cottrell woman takes Brandy by the elbow and steers her around the baronial first floor while I decide to fight or flight.
Give me terror.
Flash.
Give me panic.
Flash.
This has to be Evie’s mother, oh, you know it is. And this must be Evie’s new house. And I’m wondering how it is we came here. Why today? What are the chances?
The realty Cottrell steers us past the tweedy social secretary and all the wedding gifts. “This is my daughter’s house. But she spends almost all her days in the furniture department at Brumbach’s, downtown. So far we’ve gone along with her little obsessions, but enough’s enough, so now we’re gonna marry her off to some jackass.”
She leans in close. “It was more difficult than you’d ever imagine, trying to settle her down. You know, she burned down the last house we bought her.”
Beside the social secretary, there’s a stack of gold-engraved wedding invitations. These are the regrets. Sorry, but we can’t make it.
There seem to be a lot of regrets. Nice invitations, though, gold engraved, hand-torn edges, a three-fold card with a dried violet inside. I steal one of the regrets, and I catch up with the realty Cottrell woman and Brandy and Ellis.
“No,” Brandy’s saying. “There are too many people around. We couldn’t view the house under these conditions.”
“Between you and me,” says the realty Cottrell, “the biggest wedding in the world is worth the cost if we can shove Evie off onto some poor man.”
Brandy says, “We don’t want to keep you.”
“But, then,” the Cottrell woman says, “there’s this subgroup of ‘men’ who like their ‘women’ the way Evie is now.”
Brandy says, “We really must be going.”
And Ellis says, “Men who like insane women?”
“Why, it plumb broke our hearts the day Evan came to us. Sixteen years old, and he says, ‘Mommy, Daddy, I want to be a girl,’” says Mrs. Cottrell.
“But we paid for it,” she says. “A tax deduction is a tax deduction. Evan wanted to be a world-famous fashion model, he told us. He started calling himself Evie, and I canceled my subscription to Vogue the next day. I felt it had done enough damage to my family.”
Brandy says, “Well, congratulations,” and starts tugging me toward the front door.
And Ellis says, “Evie was a man?”
Evie was a man. And I just have to sit down. Evie was a man. And I saw her implant scars. Evie was a man. And I saw her naked in fitting rooms.
Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.
Flash.
Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is exactly what it looks like!
Flash!
Evie’s mother looks hard at Brandy. “Have you ever done any modeling?” she says. “You look so much like a friend of my son’s.”
“Your daughter,” Brandy growls.
And I finger the invitation I stole. The wedding, the union of Miss Evelyn Cottrell and Mr. Allen Skinner, is tomorrow. At eleven ante meridiem, according to the gold engraving. To be followed by a reception at the bride’s home.
To be followed by a house fire.
To be followed by a murder.
Dress formal.