“What can I do?”
“Come help me get into the bedroom. I want to get this place a little better before I put Jeremy down.”
Jake winced—he had always hated that expression, thinking it sounded ugly outside of a vet’s office.
She looked around. “And these booze bottles have to go. We could probably squeeze out enough to start a really good fire, and I don’t need to be around scotch right now.” She chewed her bottom lip. “I can’t speak for you.”
That had been a nice way to ask, he thought, and pulled her into his lap. “Haven’t even thought about it.” He smiled, tapped the breast pocket of his café racer. “Had a few smokes though. And I think I’ll have more.”
“You have smokes?” Her face twisted into the mock surprise of a blow-up doll, mouth round, eyes popped.
He pulled the Marlboros out. “Don’t get cancer on me. I love your playing too much.”
She tapped one out, smelled it as if it were a fine cigar. “Hmmm…fresh.” She patted around in his pockets, her hand finding the rigid lump of the lighter. She fired it up, taking a long haul and exhaling a clean stream straight up. “Fuck, that’s astounding. Keep these things away from me. No matter what I offer you.”
Jake’s eyebrows joined in a single helpless peak. “Sure. No problem. But you never play fair—it’s not in you. You’ll pull those out,” he said, nodding at her breasts, “and I lose. You have too much of an advantage. I declare unilateral neutrality.”
She pulled in another lungful and laughed it out in thin jets between her teeth. “Now, are you going to go all FBI on me and open that door so I can see what we have in the way of supplies? Let’s make sure we have enough bedsheets, water, and shotgun shells.”
“My dad’s room at the end of the hall?”
She nodded. “It’s barricaded like he’s Robert Neville.”
Jake shrugged. “I didn’t go in. Haven’t had time. Maybe it should wait.” There was a brittle edge to his voice, one she was unfamiliar with.
Kay pushed into him. Her flesh was warm and she smelled as good as she had on the beach, that faint whiff of papaya mingling nicely with the Mr. Clean and cigarette smoke. “For what?” she asked, and sucked on the Marlboro.
“For tomorrow. For next week. I don’t know. There’s plenty to do here.”
Her head swiveled around the vast nave of the living room. Beneath the dust and booze bottles were the bones of a once-beautiful space, like a garden left to time; overgrown neglect that hinted at a former order. “Jake, you never told me about this place, about what it was like growing up here. I mean, look at this.” She swept an arm across the room. “This is something.”
Jake knew what she was talking about. It was impossible not to be in love with this place. Yet he had somehow managed it. He didn’t say anything, but pulled her in closer, slid his hand over the curve of her hip, and rested it on her bum.
“You must have some good memories from here.” Half declaration, half sentence.
“I guess.”
“Don’t dismiss me. I’m being serious.”
He ran his mental fingers over the files in his memory banks. One of the dog-eared folders glimmered and he pulled it up, opened the dry cover. He felt his mouth curl with an involuntary smile and her fingers dug into the back of his neck with encouragement.
Grudgingly, he began. “One night, I guess I was about eight, it was—I don’t know, two, maybe three in the morning—and someone rang the doorbell. My dad’s off in the studio and my mom answers the door in one of her nightgowns—all feathers and silk, looking like a movie star. Andy Warhol’s standing there with this six-foot-five Scandinavian broad and a bunch of people spilling out of the limousine like it’s a clown car. After being thrown out of some club in Manhattan, they had sardined themselves into a Lincoln and headed for the one place they knew they would have a little fun. It was common knowledge that as dedicated to his work as my father was, he never said no to a drink or a good time. I crawled out of bed and my mom put me in a pair of her jeans and I spent the night painting with Warhol while his groupies smoked weed and my dad, the Grand Poobah, held court, discussing art and composition and the usual bullshit with people who couldn’t even begin to understand what he was talking about.
“We painted a cake with icing, and Andy insisted that it was art because I had created it. It wasn’t a matter of mechanics, it was a matter of origin.
“Andy was a soft, decent guy—at least to me. My dad called him the bitch but he made me feel pretty good for a few hours.” He paused, and felt his smile turn a little brittle. “My old man called the cake tasty crap art.” He shrugged. “Which was kind of a compliment coming from him.”
“See, Jake? That’s a fucking cool story. Remember what we learned in AA? Take the good out of a situation—not the bad.” She kissed his neck, then moved around so her mouth was inches from his. “Was that so hard?”
And all at once he remembered why he loved her so much; she pulled the good out of him, helped him reach in and find the stuff he thought was lost for ever. “Stop pissing me off,” he said, then laughed. “No, it wasn’t. Fuck. Thanks.”
Kay laughed, too, and pushed her breasts together, forming a deep crease in her wife-beater. “Here, you can stare at my cans. I know it gives you some kind of a perverse thrill. Go ahead, pay your respects.”
Jake eyed Jeremy out of the corner of his eye, zooming his fire truck through the air like a red machine of destruction, and when he was sure the boy wasn’t looking, kissed each of her breasts, making a loud MWAH! sound as he did. “Lady, if you had a dollar for all the respect I have heaped on these, you’d be a rich woman,” he said.
“Um, first off, it wasn’t exactly your respect that you were heaping on them.”
“All right…all right…Mrs. Potty Mouth, there’s no winning with you.”
“Hey, I thought letting you heap your…um, respect, on my cans was letting you win. Evidently I have been using the wrong philosophy.” She smiled, leaned over, and kissed him. “Are you going to help me get that rolling barricade away from the door upstairs or do I call Ready Demolition from Tucson?”
Jake thought about Dr. Sobel’s questions at the hospital. Anything out of the ordinary at your father’s house, Mr. Cole? Hell, no. Except for maybe the Alamo barricade. Oh, and the trash piled up to the rafters. Other than that, the place is as normal as a Seth Morgan novel. “Why not?” He began to push her off.
She searched his face. “Did your father always drink like this?” she asked, sweeping her hand around the room, her raised arm lifting her breast.
“Pretty much.” Jake closed his eyes, dropped his head back on the sofa. “When I was a kid, it just seemed to be fuel for work. He’d booze and play music and people would always be swinging by and he’d work and the paintings just seemed to magically roll out of the studio. Sometimes he slept out there. Sometimes I’d go in at bedtime to say goodnight and he’d be starting something, just lines and maybe a background layout penciled onto a big canvas. The next day, when I went in to say good morning, it would be done, some great big sweeping allegorical tragedy, only the tragedy turned out to be him, and the paintings were just incidental.”
“Don’t say that.” She punched his arm. “I don’t know your father, Jake—you barely talk about him—but he gave me the best thing in my life.” She leaned over, planted her cool lips on his forehead and kissed him. “You don’t have to babysit us, you know. If you need to be at the police station, I think we can handle it. What kind of trouble could me and Jeremy get into at a beach house?”