It would make a better story if there was some sort of “Rose for Emily” thing going on, if Moira had been left at the altar in her white satin and veil or seduced and abandoned by some neon hippie in an iridescent pink shirt and tie-dyed jacket, but that wasn’t it at all. She was just depressed. Afraid of the world. In need of control. “But what about you?” I said, searching Caitlin’s eyes. “You feel that way too?”
We were naked, in each other’s arms, stretched the length of the bed. She shrugged. “Sort of,” she said. “When we were girls, before we moved to New York, Moira and I used to watch TV, everything in black and white, Fred MacMurray, Donna Reed, Father Knows Best, and we had a game, a competition really, to see who could make her room like that, like the world of those shows, where everything turned out right in the end. I wanted white, but Moira was older, so I got black.”
There was more, but the next line—“Our parents didn’t like it, of course”—didn’t come from Caitlin, but her sister. Maybe I’d closed my eyes a minute, I don’t know, but suddenly there she was, all in white and perched at the end of the bed. Her mouth was drawn up in a little bow, as if the whole scene was distasteful to her, but she looked at me without blinking. “In New York, everything was pink, chiffon and lace, peach, champagne, the pink of little girls and blushing maidens. That was what Daddy wanted — and his wife too. Little girls. Normal, sweet, curtsying and respectfully whispering little girls who’d climb up into his lap for a bedtime story. I was sixteen at the time, Vincent; Caitlin was fourteen. Can you see? Can you?”
I pulled the black sheets up to my hips, trying to calm the pounding in my chest. This was an unusual situation, to say the least — as I say, I’d been around, but this was out of my league altogether. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t for the life of me guess what that might be. My right arm lay under the luxurious weight of Caitlin’s shoulders; I gave them a squeeze to reassure myself.
“Oh, it’s nothing like that, Larry,” Caitlin said, anticipating me. “Nothing dirty. But Daddy wanted an end to black and white, and we — we didn’t. Did we, Moira?”
Moira was staring off across the room to where the night hung in the windows, absolute and unadulterated. “No, Caitly, we didn’t. And we showed them, didn’t we?”
I felt Caitlin tense beside me. I wanted nothing in that moment but to leap up out of the bed, pull the ridiculous green jacket over my head and sprint for my truck. But instead I heard myself asking, “How?”
Both sisters laughed then, a low rasping laugh caught deep in their throats, and there wasn’t a whole lot of hilarity in it. “Oh, I don’t know, Vincent,” Moira said, throwing her head back to laugh again, and then coming back to me with a hand pattering at her breast. “Let’s just say that colors can get out of hand sometimes, if you know what I mean.”
“Fire is our friend,” Caitlin said, leaving a little hiatus after the final syllable.
“If you respect it,” Moira chimed in, and they both laughed again. I pulled the sheet up a little farther. Caitlin had lit a pair of tapering black candles when the sky had gone dark, and I stared into the unsteady flame of them now, watching the yellow ribbons of light die back and re-create themselves over and over. There wasn’t a sound in the world.
“And Vincent,” Moira said, turning back to me, “if you’re going to be seeing my sister on any sort of regular basis, I have to tell you you’re simply not white enough. There’ll be no more outdoor work, that’s out of the question.” She let out another laugh, but this one at least had a little life in it. “You wouldn’t want to end up looking like your surfer friend, would you?”
The silence held. I could hear the two sisters breathing gently, almost in unison, and it was as if they were breathing for me, and I’d never felt so tranquil and volitionless in my life. Whiteness loomed, the pale ethereality of nothingness, and blackness too, the black of a dreamless sleep. I closed my eyes. I could feel my head sinking into the pillow as if into the ancient mud of an untracked forest.
“Oh, and Vincent, one more thing,” Moria said, and I opened my eyes long enough to see her cross the room and dump the roses in the wastebasket. “Dye your hair, will you?”
(1997)
Death of the Cool
First there were the kids on the beach. What were they, fifteen, sixteen? Big ugly kids in big shorts with haircuts right out of a 1963 yearbook, all thatch and no shag, but what did they know about 1963? They were drunk, one-thirty in the afternoon, and they’d lifted a pint of tequila and a forty-ouncer from the convenience store or raided somebody’s mother’s liquor cabinet, and so what if he’d done the same sort of thing himself when he was their age, so what? — that was then and this was now. Drunk, and they had a dog with them, a retriever that had something else in it around the ears and snout and in the frantic splay of the rear legs. They were throwing a stick — an old scrap of flotsam spotted with tar and barnacles — and the dog was bringing it back to them. Every time the exchange was made and the stick went hurtling back into the ribbon of the surf, they collapsed with the hilarity of it, pounded each other’s freshly tattooed shoulders and melted right into the sand, because there was nothing under the sun funnier than this. Come to think of it, they were probably stoned too.
“You want to buy a dog?” they were shouting at everybody who came up the beach. “Cheap. He’s real cheap.”
They asked him — they asked Edison, Edison Banks — as he kicked through the sand to lay out his towel in the place tucked into the rocks where he’d been coming every afternoon for a week now to stretch out and ease the ache in his knee. He’d just had arthroscopic surgery on the right knee and it was weak and the Tylenol-codeine tabs they’d given him were barely scratching the surface of the pain. But walking in the sand was a good thing — it strengthened the muscles, or so the surgeon told him. “Hey, man,” the ugliest of the three kids had shouted, “you want to buy a dog?”
Edison was wearing a pair of shorts nearly as big as the stiffened shrouds they’d somehow managed to prop up on their nonexistent hips, and he had his Lakers cap on backwards and an oversized T-shirt and beads, the beads he’d been wearing since beads were invented back in 1969. “No, thanks,” he said, a little ruffled, a little pissed off at the world in general and these three kids in particular, “—I had one for breakfast.”
That was the end of the exchange, and on a better day, that would have been the end of the encounter and let’s turn the page and get on with it. Edison wanted to lie in the sun, shuffle through the deep sand above tideline for maybe a hundred yards in each direction, thrash his arms in the surf a bit and let the codeine work on the pain till cocktail hour, and that was it, that was the day he was envisioning, with dinner out and maybe a movie after that. But the kids wouldn’t let it rest. They didn’t recognize Edison as one of their own, didn’t appreciate his wit, his graying soul beard and the silver stud in his left ear. They saw him as a gimpy, pinch-faced old relic, in the same camp as their facially rejuvenated mothers, vanished fathers, and the various teachers, principals, deputy sheriffs and dance club bouncers who washed through their lives each day like some stinking red tide. They gave him a cold sneer and went back to the dog.