“How long have you lived here?” I asked, because I sort of wished we’d get along so when the others arrived we were performing our favorite number, “Just Two Little Girls from Little Rock,” Jade, a skinnier, angrier Marilyn to my unquestionably-more-flat-chested Jane Russell. But, much to my own disappointment, the odds didn’t look good for being bosom buddies.
“Three years,” she said distractedly. “Oh, where the fuck are they? I loathe when people are late and Black swore he’d be here by seven, the fraud,” she complained not to me, but the ceiling. “I’ll castrate him.” (Orion, the constellation under which we sat, had not had his light bulbs changed and thus he’d lost his legs and head. He was nothing but a belt.)
Soon the others arrived wearing quirky accessories (plastic bead necklaces, fast-food crowns; Charles wore an old fencing shirt, Milton a blazer in navy velveteen) and they stormed the room, Nigel crawling over the leather couch, hitching his legs on the coffee table, Leulah air-kissing Jade hellos. She only smiled at me, then glided to the bar, her eyes glassy and red. Milton wandered toward a wooden box on the writing desk in the corner and unlatched it, removing a cigar.
“Jadey, where’s the cutter?” he asked, sniffing it.
She dragged on her cigarette and glared at him. “You said you’d be on time and you’re late. I’ll hate you until I die. Top drawer.”
He chuckled, a muffled sound, as if he were being smothered with a pillow, and I realized I wanted him to say something to me—“Glad you could join us,” “Hey, Bluuue”—but he didn’t. He didn’t see me.
“Blue, how about a dirty martini?” Leulah asked.
“Or something else,” said Jade.
“A Shirley Temple,” suggested Nigel with a smirk.
“A cosmo?” asked Leulah.
“There’s milk in the fridge,” Nigel said, deadpan.
“A — a dirty martini would be quite nice. Thank you,” I said. “Three olives, please.” Three Olives, Please: it was what Eleanor Curd specified, the emerald-eyed heroine who caused men to shudder with hungry desire in A Return to Waterfalls (DeMurgh, 1990), pilfered from June Bug Rita Cleary’s gold leather purse when I was twelve. (“Where’s my book?” she repeated to Dad for days like a woman with mental illness who’d wandered away from her sanitarium. She searched our every couch, rug and closet, at times on her hands and knees, frantic to find out if Eleanor ended up with Sir Damien or they stayed apart because he believed she believed he believed he’d impregnated a vicious tattletale with an illegitimate child.)
As soon as Leulah handed me my martini, I was forgotten like Line 2 on a Corporate Headquarters Switchboard.
“So Hannah had a date tonight,” Nigel said.
“No, she didn’t,” said Charles, smiling, though he sat up imperceptibly as if he’d felt the prick of a needle in his seat cushion.
“She did,” said Nigel. “I saw her after school. She was wearing red.”
“Oh, boy,” said Jade, exhaling cigarette smoke.
They talked on and on about Hannah; Jade again said something about Goodwill and “bourgeois pigs,” words that startled me (I hadn’t heard the phrase since Dad and I, driving across Illinois, read Angus Hubbard’s Acid Trips: The Delusions of ’60s Counterculture [1989]) though I didn’t know who or what she was referring to, because I found it impossible to focus on the conversation; it was like that cruel little blurry line at the bottom of an eye chart. And I didn’t feel like myself. I was a swirl of Interstellar Material, a mist of Dark Matter, a case in point of General Relativity.
I stood up and tried to make my way to the door, but my legs felt as if they were being asked to measure the universe.
“Jesus,” said Jade from somewhere. “What’s wrong with her?”
The floor was transmitting in a wide array of wavelengths.
“What’d you give her to drink?” Milton asked.
“Nothing. A mudslinger.”
“Told you to give her milk,” Nigel said.
“I gave her a martini,” added Leulah.
Suddenly I was on the floor, gazing at the stars.
“Is she going to die?” asked Jade.
“We should take her to the hospital,” Charles said.
“Or call Hannah,” said Lu.
“She’s fine.” Milton was leaning over me. His tendriled black hair resembled squid. “Let her sleep it off.”
A tidal wave of nausea was starting to flood my stomach and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It was like the black seawater overtaking a crimson Titanic stateroom, as recounted in one of Dad’s favorite autobiographies of all time, the gripping eyewitness account Black in My Mind, Yellow in My Legs (1943) by Herbert J. D. Lascowitz, who finally, in his ninety-seventh year, came clean about his Machiavellian behavior aboard the legendary ocean liner, admitting he strangled an unidentified woman, stripped her body, donned her clothes in order to pretend he was a woman with child, thereby securing a choice spot for himself on one of two remaining lifeboats. I tried to roll over and stand, but the carpet and the couch swerved upward and then, as shocking as lightning striking inches from my shoes, I was sick: cartoonishly sick all over the table and the carpet and the paisley couch by the fireplace and Jade’s black leather Dior sandals, even on the coffee-table book, Thank God for the Telephoto Lens: Backyard Photos of the Stars (Miller, 2002). There were also small but identifiable splatters on the cuffs of Nigel’s pants.
They stared at me.
And this, I am ashamed to say, is where memory abruptly drops off (see Figure 12, “Continental Shelf Cliff,” Oceanic Terrain, Boss, 1977). I can recall only a few flimsy sentences (“What if her family presses charges?”), faces peering down at me as if I’d tumbled down a well.
Yet I don’t really need a memory here, because that Sunday at Hannah’s, when they were calling me Gag, Retch, Hurl and Olives, they each went to great lengths to give me their eyewitness account of what had happened. According to Leulah, I passed out on the South Lawn. Jade claimed I’d muttered a phrase in Spanish, something along the lines of “El perro que no camina, no encuentra hueso,” or “The dog that doesn’t walk, doesn’t find a bone,” and then my eyes rolled into the back of my head and she thought I’d died. Milton said I got “nekkid.” Nigel claimed I “partied like Tommy Lee during the Theater of Pain tour.” Charles rolled his eyes when hearing these versions, these “gross distortions of the truth.” He said I walked up to Jade and she and I began to make out in flawless reenactment of his favorite film, the cult masterpiece of French fetishist director Luc-Shallot de la Nuit, Les Salopes Vampires et Lesbiennes de Cherbourg (Petit Oiseau Prod., 1971).
“Guys spend whole lives wishing to see that kind of thing, so thank you, Retch. Thank you.”
“Sounds like you really enjoyed yourselves,” Hannah said with a smile, her eyes glistening as she sipped her wine. “Don’t tell me any more. It’s not fit for a teacher’s ears.”
I could never decide which version I believed.
It was after I had a nickname that everything changed.