But lie she did.
In the parking lot, she climbed into the sensible little forest green Toyota Gran had bought her for her seventeenth birthday last month. Gran was her best family friend now. Dad was off in California with his new wife. And Mom...
“I sure hate to see you come down with this stuff,” the nurse said sweetly.
She headed home. This late in the morning, the expressway traffic was heavy. The sometimes foggy March rain didn’t help, either.
Home was a nice Tudor in a small, upscale suburb of nice Tudors and nice Spanish styles and nice multi-level moderns. Mom had gotten the house in the divorce settlement. Dad made a lot of money at his law firm and he’d inherited quite a bit when his father died several years earlier.
Nicole didn’t stop at her house. She went down to the end of the block and parked behind a stand of pin oaks that was part of a small park-like area.
The cop-show phrase for what she was doing was “stakeout.” She’d heard her mother call in sick this morning — she was a far better actress than Nicole and had put on a breathtaking performance — and now Nicole wanted to see what her mother did all day. As she’d passed by the house, she’d seen her mother’s car in the drive. So Mom hadn’t gone anywhere. Yet. And if Mom did go somewhere, Nicole had a terrible feeling that she knew where it would be...
Mitch
“I really think Mamet sold out. You know, when he went out to La-La-Land.”
It was a good thing she had a lovely pair of breasts because otherwise Mitchell Carey would have kicked her ass out of the apartment as soon as he got done screwing her last night.
He’d picked her up at a cast party. A small theater group had put on an ancient Mamet one-act. It was the sort of theater group that attracted the worst kind of pretentious wannabes and the worst kind of cruising idle rich, the rich seeing theater groups (correctly) as being ripe with sex, drugs and just about any kind of octopus-like emotional entanglement a man or woman could want. It was from the idle rich, a few of whom were Mitch’s customers, that he’d heard about the play; so, having made the club scene earlier in the evening, having played his role as the handsome, fortyish Jay Gatsby to the disco and angel dust crowd, he decided to pop in on the theater folk. He’d stayed only long enough to meet Paula and woo her back to his den, whereupon he’d defiled her with great desperate pleasure. He hadn’t merely screwed her, he’d ravished her and it had been wonderful. Three times they’d made love before heating up the remnants of a Domino’s pizza lurking in his refrigerator. Then they’d found a great old Lawrence Tierney B-movie flick on a cable channel, “San Quentin,” and only after it was over and they were back in bed again with the lights out, only then did she start talking about herself (age 39, born in Trenton, New Jersey, three husbands, worked as a street mime and part of a comedy group a la Second City, had in fact come here to Chicago to get into Second City but so far no luck, look at Jim Belushi, she said, only reason a no-talent like him ever got in was because of his brother and everybody knew it) but by then he’d put a finger in his ear and switched the HEARING button to Off. By the time she got to voicing her plans to audition for the revival of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof at the Ivanhoe (“I lose a little weight, and wear violet contact lenses like Liz Taylor, and learn how to talk Southern, I think I’d make a great Maggie The Cat, don’t you?”) he was blissfully asleep.
But now it was morning and she was standing naked at the sink in the bathroom while he was toweling off from his shower. And she was talking about how Mamet had sold out. Like Mamet would really give a shit about her opinion.
Then he noticed the time on the face of his Rolex that he’d set down on the tiny hutch next to the towel closet. He bought the best, man. Noticed the time and remembered his appointment. He had a customer he needed to meet at eleven-thirty. And it was now a quarter to eleven.
“I’ve got to hurry,” he said. “I just remembered an appointment.”
She was putting on her lipstick. She had remarkable lips.
“I hope we’re going to do this again,” she said, still drawing the blood tube across her mouth.
“Absolutely.”
She glanced at him skeptically in the mirror. “For real?”
“For real.”
“I hate bullshit promises. I’d rather have you say you won’t be calling again than, you know, stringing me along.”
“I’m not stringing you along.”
“We did this Cole Porter show in Denver, you know? And anyway there was this guy and that’s all he ever did. We spent one night humping like bunnies and the rest of the run, he’d call me to make a date an then call me back to break it. I guess I should be happy he at least called to tell me he was standing me up.”
“You’ve sure had an interesting life.”
She glanced at him in the mirror again to make sure that he wasn’t putting her on. “Really?”
“Really.”
She seemed satisfied. “You know, I wouldn’t mind blowing you before we trundle off.”
“That’s all right. I really am late.”
He could never figure out why he felt so good at night with them in the bed and so bad — and so sad — with them in the morning when they were getting ready to go.
What he needed was some kind of new kick. Ennui was the word he wanted. Ennui was what he was suffering from. He made a nice living, he got all the ass a reasonable man could want, and yet he was a little bored. Something new was what he needed.
But there wasn’t any time for navel-contemplation this morning.
Had to hurry. He had an eleven-forty-five customer.
Kate
Thank God she’d been smart enough to take her watch along yesterday. Over noon, she’d hocked it. Place not far from the office where she worked in Lincoln Park. Guy with a glass eye and bad b.o. appraising both the watch and Kate herself. The watch he didn’t have any problem with. Knew the exact market value. What he could pay out, what he could take in. The exact market value of the woman standing in front of him was another matter. Tall, elegant, beautiful in a nervous, vulnerable way. But going fast. Probably no more than forty-three, forty-four or so but going fast. He seemed to know why, too. Four-hundred, she got. Four-hundred.
Their house is shrinking. That’s how she thinks of it. The last time after coming out of rehab and being a good little girl, the last time she fell off she hocked the TV, the stereo, the good china and the good silver. She’d had a good run. This was in the summer, Nicole visiting her father and his teenage-bride (Gwen is twenty-three, actually) for a month. Kate started hitting the clubs again, feeling good and young again. Sleeping around a little (always safe sex, of course), even developing a quick crush or two on younger men, the kind who used to be all over her, even when she was married, giving her ultra-conservative ex-husband one more reason to treat her like a whore. She could still remember the night a year into their marriage, that she’d told him about this little habit she had, which was where a lot of her household budget was going, and how he looked so dashed and doomed. It was almost comic, the way he looked right then, so shattered but self-righteous, too, as if it was impossible that anybody he’d even associate with could possibly be a junkie. A beautiful girl, the daughter of a powerful state senator, a Radcliffe grad, a suburban siren of stunning seductiveness, a coke head? There ensued eleven years — she had to give him that, he hung in there for eleven years — of one rehab program after another, trendy clinics and experimental programs all over the country. She’d gone as long as a year-and-a-half clean and sober, as they say. So much hope, so much anger, so much fear, so much despair, so much failure, hope-anger-fear-despair-failure, the same cycle over and over again. He never quite believed that she couldn’t help herself. At least that was how she saw it. He never quite believed that she truly tried to kick once and for all. Poor sweet Nicole, she believed. That’s why she was losing weight all the time and going into these terrible depressions (she’d been twelve when she took her first Prozac) and staying in her room practically every weekend when her mother was using. She could have joined her father in LA with his new bride but she feared for her mother, feared that if she went to California, her mother would die somehow. So she stayed. “You’re such a good girl,” her mother was always saying. Kate looked pretty good. The bones were the secret. She had good bones. Killer cheeks and a mouth that was erotic and just a wee bit petulant. Not enough to put men off. Just enough to intrigue. And the bod, even twelve pounds lighter than it should have been, the bod was good, too.