It should be Brandy I talk to, but I call my folks. What’s gone on is I lock my killer fiancé in the coat closet, and when I go to put him inside there’s more of my beautiful clothes but all stretched out three sizes. Those clothes were every penny I ever made. After all that, I have to call somebody.
For so many reasons, no way can I just go back to bed. So I call, and my call goes out across mountains and deserts to where my father answers, and in my best ventriloquist voice, avoiding the consonants you really need a jaw to say, I tell him, “Gflerb sorlfd qortk, erd sairk. Srd. Erd, korts derk sairk? Kirdo!”
Anymore, the telephone is just not my friend.
And my father says, “Please don’t hang up. Let me get my wife.”
Away from the receiver, he says, “Leslie, wake up, we’re being hate-crimed finally.”
And in the background is my mother’s voice saying, “Don’t even talk to them. Tell them we loved and treasured our dead homosexual child.”
It’s the middle of the night here. They must be in bed.
“Lot. Ordilj,” I say. “Serta ish ka alt. Serta ish ka alt!”
“Here,” my father says as his voice drifts away. “Leslie, you give them what-for.”
The gold saxophone receiver feels heavy and stagy, a prop, as if this call needs any more drama. From back in the coat closet, Seth yells, “Please. Don’t be calling the police until you’ve talked to Evie.”
Then from the telephone, “Hello?” And it’s my mother.
“The world is big enough we can all love each other.” she says, “There’s room in God’s heart for all His children. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered. Just because it’s anal intercourse doesn’t mean it’s not love.”
She says, “I hear a lot of hurt from you. I want to help you deal with these issues.”
And Seth yells, “I wasn’t going to kill you. I was here to confront Evie because of what she did to you. I was only trying to protect myself.”
On the telephone, a two-hour drive from here, there’s a toilet flush, then my father’s voice. “You still talking to those lunatics?”
And my mother, “It’s so exciting! I think one of them says he’s going to kill us.”
And Seth yells, “It had to be Evie who shot you.”
Then in the telephone is my father’s voice, roaring so loud that I have to hold the receiver away from my ear, he says, “You, you’re the one who should be dead.” He says, “You killed my son, you goddamned perverts.”
And Seth yells, “What I had with Evie was just sex.”
I might as well not even be in the room, or just hand the phone to Seth.
Seth says, “Please don’t think for one minute that I could just stab you in your sleep.”
And in the phone, my father shouts, “You just try it, mister. I’ve got a gun here and I’ll keep it loaded and next to me day and night.” He says, “We’re through letting you torture us.” He says, “We’re proud to be the parents of a dead gay son.”
And Seth yells, “Please, just put the phone down.”
And I go, “Aht! Oahk!”
But my father hangs up.
My inventory of people who can save me is down to just me. Not my best friend. Or my old boyfriend. Not the doctors or the nuns. Maybe the police, but not yet. It isn’t time to wrap this whole mess into a neat legal package and get on with my less-than life. Hideous and invisible forever and picking up pieces.
Things are still all messy and up in the air, but I’m not ready to settle them. My comfort zone was getting bigger by the minute. My threshold for drama was bumping out. It was time to keep pushing the envelope. It felt like I could do anything, and I was only getting started.
My rifle was loaded, and I had my first hostage.
Chapter 35
ump back to when I first got out of the hospital without a career or a fiancé or an apartment, and I had to sleep at Evie’s big house, her real house where even she didn’t like to live, it was so lonely, stuck way out in some rain forest with nobody paying attention.
Jump to me being on Evie’s bed, on my back that first night, but I can’t sleep.
Wind lifts the curtains, lace curtains. All Evie’s furniture is that curlicue Frenchy provincial stuff painted white and gold. There isn’t a moon, but the sky is full of stars, so everything—Evie’s house, the rose hedges, the bedroom curtains, the backs of my hands against the bedspread—is all either black or gray.
Evie’s house was what a Texas girl would buy if her parents kept giving her about ten million dollars all the time. It’s like the Cottrells know Evie will never make the big-time runways. So Evie, she lives here. Not New York. Not Milan. The suburbs, right out in the nowhere of professional modeling. This is pretty far from doing the Paris collections. Being stuck in nowhere is the excuse Evie needs, living here is, for a big-boned girl who’d never be a big-time success anywhere.
The doors are locked tonight. The cat is inside. When I look, the cat looks back at me the way dogs and some cars look when people say they’re smiling.
Just that afternoon, Evie was on the telephone begging me to check myself out of the hospital and come visit.
Evie’s house was big—white with hunter-green shutters, a three-story plantation house fronted with big pillars. Needlepoint ivy and climbing roses—yellow roses—were climbed up around the bottom ten feet of each big pillar. You’d imagine Ashley Wilkes mowing the grass here, or Rhett Butler taking down the storm windows, but Evie, she has these minimum-wage slave Laotians who refuse to live in.
Jump to the day before, Evie driving me from the hospital. Evie really is Evelyn Cottrell, Inc. No, really. She’s traded publicly now. Everybody’s favorite write-off. The Cottrells made a private stock offering in her career when Evie was twenty-one, and all the Cottrell relatives with their Texas land and oil money are heavily invested in Evie’s being a model failure.
Most times it was an embarrassment going to modeling look-see auditions with Evie. Sure, I’d get work, but then the art director or the stylist would start screaming at Evie that, no, in his expert opinion she was not a perfect size six. Most times, some assistant stylist had to wrestle Evie out the door. Evie would be screaming back over her shoulder about how I shouldn’t let them treat me like a piece of meat. I should just walk out.
“Fuck ’em,” Evie’s screaming by this point. “Fuck ’em all.”
Me, I’m not angry. I’d be getting strapped into this incredible leather corset by Poupie Cadole and leather pants by Chrome Hearts. Life was good back then. I’d have three hours of work, maybe four or five.
At the photo studio doorway, before she’d get thrown out of the shoot, Evie would swing the assistant stylist into the doorjamb, and the little guy would just crumple up at her feet. It’s then Evie would scream, “You people can all suck the crap out of my sweet Texas ass.” Then she’d go out to her Ferrari and wait the three or four or five hours so she could drive me home.
Evie, that Evie was my best friend in the whole world. Moments like that, Evie was fun and quirky, almost like she had a life of her own.
Okay, so I didn’t know about Evie and Manus and their complete and total love and satisfaction. So kill me.
Jump to before that, Evie calling me at the hospital and begging me, please, could I discharge myself and come stay at her house, she was so lonely, please.
My health insurance had a two-million-dollar lifetime ceiling, and the meter had just run and run all summer. No social service contact had the guts to transition me into God only knows where.
Begging me on the telephone, Evie said she had plane reservations. She was going to Cancún for a catalogue shoot so would I, could I, please, just house-sit for her?
When she picked me up, on my pad I wrote:
is that my halter top? you know you’re stretching it.