“I thought you were straight,” said Eric as they got out of the car.
“As an arrow.”
They drank and watched men dance. They were joined by a friend of Eric’s named Quinn. Quinn had some coke, and ten minutes later, Donny actually found himself on the dance floor, two-stepping with the boys. They had more drinks and more coke and he invited them back to Carcassonne Way. Quinn followed on his blue-and-white Harley.
Donny showed them around the house. When they got to the patio, Eric stripped off his things and jumped into the pool with a whoop. Donny asked Quinn if he was into cars, and they went to the garage.
The day Serena died, he brought the old Impala over and left it there, as if for a period of mourning — wild car of his youth back in the coop to pay its respects. Quinn ran a finger over the hood. Donny opened the door and climbed in. Quinn slid behind the wheel, shirtless. He asked if they could hear music and Donny handed him the key. Quinn turned the radio on then leaned over and kissed the agent on the mouth. His hand snaked into Donny’s pants.
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
“You’re Quinn,” Donny said, blankly.
“You’re married, right?”
“Uh, was.”
“Your wife has an angel tattooed on her butt, right?”
“Last time I looked.” The agent was curious now.
“I went home with you. You live in Laurel Canyon, right?”
“Jesus.”
“With the scarf, remember? That was pretty hot.”
“All in the family,” the agent said, unbuckling his pants. The old acquaintance got out a tiny tube of K-Y. Donny took it and greased Quinn’s cock. Donny asked if he’d tested and Quinn said, Every three months. Donny just wanted it inside him. They did some coke and the agent leaned back against the door, legs up in the air. The windows fogged and the Senior Veepee winced. Is this what his mother felt? This kind of cancer…A shape appeared through the misty glass. Bracing with his body, wet from the pool, Eric carefully opened the door, so the agent wouldn’t fall out. Donny arched, groaning as he rode up on Quinn. Eric braced Donny’s back and neck while Quinn scooted back like an insect, taking the stuck agent with him. Eric put his knees against the seat and his balls in Donny’s mouth. Donny twisted his head so that in his agony he could get at Eric’s prick. The agent was stoned enough that the twisting nearly made him black out.
When his father first bought him the car, Donny took Serena for a ride. She sat in the back and he chauffeured her to Linney’s, the deli on south Beverly Drive. When they got back home, she sat and wept. “You’re all I have now, Donny.” It would be years before he learned what she meant.
Eric watched like a naturalist as Quinn began fucking faster. The agent conjured his mother, sitting in back, staring past them; a coliseum-sized roar as Serena was torn from the prow, a whirligig Ursula taking her place, with Tiffany in tow — mascara of dirt and tears, firecracker eyes. Donny jacked himself, hand crushed by Quinn’s hard belly, Eric slowly pulling his own gummy head at the agent’s crown like a deep sea geiger; Bernie and Calliope before him, agent close to puking now, two-step funhouse vertigo, father’s B horror trailers — entrailers — blood hammering, hilarious vaudeville pneumatic sucking of Donny’s asshole; Katherine, love of his life. Donny beside her on the Laurel Canyon bed, Quinn fucking both like a piston, cold Thai on the counter, forgiving her beloved, forgiving him everything, never a bigger love, never bigger than theirs, never could be, staring at each other, Bonnie and Clyde just before the bullets but senses dead, no Pop poetics, Donny holding back the tears, awareness searching like a snail’s antennae for something to hold on to, something to hold him down, to ground him, he found it, the crazed wet smacking of the vinyl seat and the painful button at the small of his back kept him conscious. Then the beauty of the hood ornament glimpsed through mouth fog carried him over….
As soon as it was done, he could join his mother — wasn’t he all that she had? — under the house.
On weekends, Les put in time at the Venice free clinic. The Medical Board asked for two hundred hours; the six months he spent there revitalized him. He felt like a real doctor again.
Obie remained paralyzed and there was no improvement in her speech. Still, he understood her better than anyone. He painstakingly assembled something of a secret language, until one day he gained fluent trespass to the sandcastle’s sodden, crumbly rooms. Visitors and nurses alike marveled, though sometimes Obie’s requests, as channeled through Dr. Trott, were filigreed enough to elicit unspoken derision. The day she asked him to kill her, he immediately called Calliope. The psychiatrist warned of the consequences, legal and moral. Until he was able to separate Oberon from his mother, she said, his motives would be tainted. Luckily, Big Star pulled out of her depression — or seemed to, anyway. She stopped bringing it up.
He had a week of vivid dreams.
Most began at the Children with AIDS benefit but ended with the doctor on Sunset, standing over the familiar corpse. (The impingement of the carnival seemed to signal an end to the haunting of Les Trott.) At the pre-succubus open-air gala, the Duke of Dermis wandered through Big Star — manned booths, searching for Obie. The strange thing was, only civilians used a language Les could understand. Television actors spoke pidgin English unless they were cultural icons, which rendered them practically incomprehensible. Big Stars spoke “Catalan,” or its dream version — beyond translation. It was actually with relief that Les would find himself erased from that scene and propped in the middle of Sunset near the pink hotel, its refurbished, too-perfect grandeur and Disney World pastels suitable dressing for all manner of night terrors. As usual, the body lay ahead and relief turned to apprehension. Teeth shattered against curb and the demon seized upon him like always, fastening the cadaver to his back. Again, the instructions he’d heard time and again: burial before dawn in the yard of a house which of course, turned out to be his own. Les broke ground with the shovel, but this time was allowed to complete his chores before awakening. The body slid off him like a bangle into the grave.
It was Obie.
He floated up through inky waters, startled by his own sobs, his bed a set of dice, and then a lily pad. He was ravenous. He wolfed steak and eggs and began planning a cruise through the Suez to Safaga, on to Bombay and Colombo, Phuket and Penang, Kuala Lumpur. The Seychelles — the lagoons and atolls of the Indian Ocean, trade winds of an equatorial sky: Aldabra, Cosmoledo, Astove, Assumption. He’d invite a young man he met at the clinic. Thirty thousand apiece for Cunard’s “Owner’s Suite,” but Les could afford it. Calliope would think it a smashing idea.
Friday, the doctor was over-booked. He shot a lot of collagen and pimples, soothed a lot of Big Star egos. He worked late and went to a premiere. He came home around eleven, showered and threw himself into bed. It was only minutes before sleep that Les realized he hadn’t thought of her the entire day — not once. The feeling of the nightmare came back, but instead of fear he was suffused by a corny, esoteric nostalgia. He knew he’d never have that dream again.
All at once, it came to him. He would buy something for Obie before he left, something expensive, a brooch or diamond anklet. She’d love that. He smiled excitedly at the prospect. How fortunate he was, he thought, to be able to make such a kindness. He hugged a downy king-sized pillow and thought about where to shop. He was supposed to be in Santa Barbara tomorrow for a party at the Zemeckises’; the gift could wait till next week. He didn’t want to be compulsive about it — that was the old Les, the Les that needed to be loved, right now, right away, at any cost. Something silky, maybe, or something soft, like those eight-thousand-dollar shahtoosh scarves in vogue with Big Stars these days. Well, he’d think about it; had to be right. Besides, he could always get something on the cruise—that’s what he’d do. She’d miss him so while he was away. Les would have to break it gently, tell her the day before he put to sea. He’d give Edith-Esther exotic postcards with funny little messages from whimsical, imaginary ports of call, to read to her out loud. He’d buy Obie pearls — strands of duty-free black pearls. Docking in Long Beach at trip’s end, he’d limo straight to the hospital. He’d kiss her cheek and say he had a surprise, putting the necklace in her hand, wrapping it around the wrist like a rosary. Edith-Esther would tell everyone “Dr. Les got her those” and no one would doubt his love.