“Carmen, Ira,” said Doreen, “this is Jeff Freebone.” As Doreen introduced the handsome Mr. Freebone, all of the skin that was visible across her body colored a rich blood-orange red. Ira’s hand vanished momentarily into a tanned, forehand-smashing grip. Ira looked at Donna, hoping to see at least some hint of unimpressedness in her lesbian and often cynical gaze, but his cousin had the same shining-eyed sort of Tiger Beat expression on her face as Doreen and Carmen — and Audrey, for that matter — and Ira realized that Jeff Freebone must be very, very rich.
“What’s up, Ira?” he said, in a smooth, flattened-out baritone to which there clung a faint tang of New York City, and Ira recognized him, with a start, as the coarse man at the bar who had fired an unfortunate woman named Charlotte in her own bed.
“Jeff here used to work in the same office as Barry and me,” Doreen told Carmen. “Now he has his own company.”
“Freebone Properties,” Carmen said, looking more animated than she had all afternoon. “I’ve seen the signs on front lawns, right?”
“Billboards,” said Donna. “Ads on TV.”
“How was the wedding?” Jeff wanted to know. He went around Carmen and sat down in the chair beside her, leaving Ira to stand, off to one side, glowering at his cousin Donna, who was clearly going to leave him high and dry in this. “Did they stand under that tent thing and break the mirror or whatever?”
Ira was momentarily surprised, and gratified, by this display of ignorance, since he had taken Jeff for Jewish. Then he remembered that many of Donna’s Hollywood friends spoke with a schmoozing accent whether they were Jewish or not, even ex-cheerleaders from Ames, Iowa, and men named Lars.
“It was weird,” Carmen declared, without elaborating — not even Jeff Freebone, apparently, could draw her out — and the degree of acquiescence this judgment received at the table shocked Ira. He turned to seek out Sheila among the hundreds of faces that filled the Oasis Room, to see if she was all right, but could not find her. There was a small crowd gathered around the cathedral cake at the far end of the room, but the bride did not seem to be among them. Weird — what had been weird about it? Was Sheila not, after all, in love with her two hours’ husband? Ira tapped his foot to the music, self-conscious, and pretended to continue his search for Sheila, although in truth he was not looking at anything anymore. He was mortified by the quickness with which his love affair with the sad and beautiful woman of his dreams had been derailed, and all at once — the tequila he had drunk had begun to betray him — he came face to face with the distinct possibility that not only would he never find the one he was meant to find, but that no else ever did, either. The discussion around the table hurtled off into the imaginary and vertiginous world of real estate. Finally he had to take hold of a nearby chair and sit down.
“I can get you three mil for it, sight unseen,” Jeff Freebone was declaring. He leaned back in his seat and folded his hands behind his head.
“It’s worth way more,” said Donna, giving Carmen a poke in the ribs. “It’s a work of art, Jeff.”
“It’s a Hetrick and Dewitt,” said everyone at the table, all at once.
“You have to see it,” Doreen said.
“All right then, let’s see it. I drove my Rover, we can all fit. Take me to see it.”
There was moment of hesitation, during which the four women seemed to consider the dictates of decorum and the possible implications of the proposed expedition to see the house that Carmen hated.
“The cake is always like sliced cardboard at these things, anyway,” said Donna.
This seemed to decide them, and there followed a general scraping of chairs and gathering of summer wraps.
“Aren’t you coming?” said Donna, leaning over Ira — who had settled into a miserable, comfortable slouch — and whispering into his ear. The others were already making their way out of the Oasis Room. Ira scowled at her.
“Hey, come on, I. She needs a realtor, not a lover. Besides, she was way too old for you.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed the top of his head. “Okay, sulk. I’ll call you.” Then she buttoned her sharkskin jacket and turned on one heel.
After Ira had been sitting alone at the table for several minutes, half hoping his aunt Lillian would notice his distress and bring over a piece of cake or a petit four and a plateful of her comforting platitudes, he noticed that Carmen, not too surprisingly, had left her handbag behind. He got up from his chair and went to pick it up. For a moment he peered into it, aroused, despite himself, by the intimacy of this act, like reading a woman’s diary, or putting one’s hand inside her empty shoe. Then he remembered his disappointment and his anger, and his fist closed around one of the vials of pills, which he quickly slipped into his pocket.
“Ira, have you seen Sheila?”
Ira dropped the purse, and whirled around. It was indeed his aunt Lillian but she looked very distracted and didn’t seem aware of having caught Ira in the act. She kept tugging at the fringes of her wildly patterned scarf.
“Not recently,” said Ira. “Why?”
Aunt Lillian explained that someone, having drunk too much, had fallen onto the train of Sheila’s gown and torn it slightly; this had seemed to upset Sheila a good deal and she had gone off somewhere, no one knew where. The bathrooms and the lobbies of the hotel had all been checked. The cake-cutting was fifteen minutes overdue.
“I’ll find her,” said Ira.
He went out into the high, cool lobby and crossed it several times, his heels clattering across the marble floors and his soles susurrant along the Persian carpets. He climbed a massive oak staircase to the mezzanine, where he passed through a pair of French doors that opened onto a long balcony overlooking the sparkling pool. Here he found her, dropped in one corner of the terrace like a blown flower. She had taken the garland from her brow and was twirling it around and around in front of her face with the mopey fascination of a child. When she felt Ira’s presence she turned, and, seeing him, broke out in a teary-eyed grin that he found very difficult to bear. He walked over to her and sat down beside her on the rough stucco deck of the balcony.
“Hi,” he said.
“Are they all going nuts down there?”
“I guess. I heard about your dress. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s all right.” She stared through the posts of the balustrade at the great red sun going down over Santa Monica. There had been a lot of rain the past few days and the air was heartbreakingly clear. “You just feel like such a, I don’t know, a big stupid puppet or something, getting pulled around.”
Ira edged a little closer to his cousin and she laid her head against his shoulder, and sighed. The contact of her body was so welcome and unsurprising that it frightened him, and he began to fidget with the vial in his pocket.
“What’s that?” she said, at the faint rattle.
He withdrew the little bottle and held it up to the dying light. There was no label of any kind on its side.
“I sort of stole them from your friend Carmen.”
Sheila managed an offhand smile.
“Oh — how did that work out? I saw you dancing.”
“She wasn’t for me,” said Ira. He unscrewed the cap and tipped the vial into his hand. There were only two pills left, small, pink, shaped like commas — two little pink teardrops. “Any idea what these are? Could they be beta-carotene?”
Sheila shook her head and extended one hand, palm upward. At first Ira thought she wanted him to place one of the pills upon it, but she shook her head again; when he took her outstretched fingers in his she nodded.
“Ira,” she said in the heaviest of voices, bringing her bridal mouth toward his. Just before he kissed her he closed his eyes, brought his own hand to his mouth, and swallowed, hard.
“My darling,” he said.