“I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole, the dishwasher. You probably don’t remember her, Michele.”
“Those women who worked in the kitchen were all old and fat!” she cried.
“Yes, they were,” Jack said. “Well—Mrs. Stackpole was, anyway.”
“You could have slept with me, but you slept with an old, fat dishwasher?” she asked, in a ringing voice. (She said dishwasher the way she’d said gold digger.)
“I was sleeping with Mrs. Stackpole before I knew I could sleep with you,” Jack reminded her.
“And your relationship with Emma Oastler—what was that, exactly?” Michele asked.
Here we go, Jack thought; here comes “too weird,” and all the rest of it. “Emma and I were just roommates—we lived together, but we never had sex.”
“That’s so hard to imagine,” Michele said, toying with the ring on the edge of her plate. “You mean you just masturbated together?”
“Not even that,” he told her.
“What did you do? You must have done something,” Michele said.
“We kissed, I touched her breasts, she held my penis.”
In reaching for her wineglass, Michele’s elbow came down on the edge of her plate; her mother’s ring went flying. The ring landed on an adjacent table, startling two models who were on a red-wine diet.
One of the models picked up the ring and looked at Jack. “Oh, you shouldn’t have,” she said, slipping the ring onto one of her pretty fingers.
“I’m sorry—it’s her mother’s ring,” Jack told the model; she pouted at him while Michele looked mortified.
“You don’t remember me, do you, Jack?” the other model asked.
Jack got up and went over to their table, holding his hand out to the model who was still wearing Michele’s ring. He was trying to buy a little time, struggling to remember who the other model was.
“I was afraid you’d forgotten me,” he told her. (It was one of Billy Rainbow’s lines—Jack had always liked it.)
It was not the answer the model had been expecting. Jack still couldn’t place her, or else he’d never met her before in his life and she was just playing a game with him.
The model who had Michele’s ring was playing another kind of game with Jack; she was trying to put the ring on one of his fingers. “Who would have thought Jack Burns had such little hands?” she was saying. (The ring was a loose fit on his left pinkie; Jack went back to his table wearing it.)
“Jack Burns has a little penis,” the other model said.
Jack guessed that she did know him, but he still didn’t remember her. Michele just sat there looking glassy-eyed. “I don’t feel very well,” she told Jack. “I think I’m drunk, if you want to know the truth.”
“You should try to eat something,” he said.
“Don’t you know that you can’t tell a doctor what to do, Jack?”
“Come on. I’ll take you back to the hotel,” he said.
“I want to see where you live!” Michele said plaintively. “It must be fabulous.”
“It’s a hole in the wall,” the model who knew Jack said. “Don’t tell me you’ve actually moved out of that nookie house on Entrada, Jack.”
“We’re much closer to your hotel than we are to where I live,” he told Michele.
“Did you sleep with that girl?” Michele asked him, when they were back in the Audi. “You didn’t look like you knew her.”
“I don’t remember sleeping with her,” Jack said.
“What’s a nookie house?” she asked him.
“It’s slang for brothel,” Jack explained.
“Do you really live in a hole in the wall on La Strada?” Michele asked.
“Yes, I do,” he admitted. “It’s on Entrada.”
“But why do you live in a hole in the wall? Why wouldn’t Jack Burns live in a mansion?”
“I don’t really know where I want to live, Michele.”
“My Gawd,” she said again.
Michele fell sound asleep on the Hollywood Freeway. Jack had to carry her into the lobby of the Sheraton Universal. He didn’t know her room number; he couldn’t find her room key in her purse. He carried her into the bar, where he was sure he would find a few of her drunken colleagues. Jack hoped that one of them would be sober enough to recognize Michele.
Another woman dermatologist came to Jack’s assistance; she was a homely, caustic person, but at least she hadn’t been drinking. Together they got Michele to her room. The other doctor’s name was Sandra; she was from somewhere in Michigan. Sandra must have assumed that Jack was sleeping with Michele, because she proceeded to undress Michele in front of him.
“Run a bath for her,” Sandra said. “We can’t let her pass out like this. If she vomits, she might choke. People who are dead-drunk often aspirate their vomit. It’s better to wake her up, and let her be sick when she’s awake.”
Jack did what the doctor said. Then he carried Michele to the bath and, with Sandra’s assistance, slid her into it. Naked, she was much too thin—emaciated. Like a woman who’d been recently pregnant, Michele had stretch marks on her small breasts; the skin there looked wrinkled. (It was the weight loss; she hadn’t been pregnant.)
“Christ, how much weight has she lost?” Sandra asked Jack, as if he were the one who’d put Michele up to it.
“I don’t know what she weighed before,” Jack said. “I haven’t seen Michele in twenty years.”
“Well, this is a wonderful way to see her,” Sandra said.
Michele had told him more about the stress-related eczema; it occurred on her elbows and knees. When it was bad, the eczema was the color and nubbly texture of a rooster’s wattle. Jack kept staring at Michele’s elbows and knees while she lolled in the bath; he half expected her mysterious skin ailment to suddenly appear.
“What are you looking at?” Sandra asked him. (Michele, even in the bathwater, was still out cold; Jack held her under her armpits so her head wouldn’t slip underwater.)
He explained about the stress-related eczema, but Sandra assured him that it wasn’t about to blossom before his eyes. “It’s not like time-lapse photography,” she said. Sandra looked at his hands. “Nice ring,” she commented. (Michele’s mother’s ring was still on Jack’s left pinkie.)
When Michele started coming around, she was unaware that Sandra was with them. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone. Just don’t let her throw up in her sleep,” Sandra said. “You seem to enjoy staring at her, anyway.”
“Did we do it yet?” Michele asked him. He heard Sandra letting herself out of the hotel room, the door closing on her harsh laugh.
“No,” Jack said. “We didn’t do it.”
“When are we going to do it, Jack? Or do you think you have the clap again?”
“I didn’t have it the first time. I just thought I might have it,” he explained to her.
“But you can’t even remember who you’ve slept with,” Michele reminded him. “And it’s not as if you drink or anything. You must sleep with an awful lot of women, Jack.”
“Not really,” Jack said.
He felt nothing for her but the kind of pity and contempt you feel for people who aren’t in control of themselves. (As a nondrinker, Jack would have admitted to feeling superior to people who drank too much—whatever the circumstances.) And the pity he felt for Michele was all caught up in those expectations she’d had—for their big night out on the town together; for her parents’ New York apartment, which the gold digger had stolen from her; even for her dead mother’s ring, which didn’t fit any of her fingers. (Jack took the ring off his left pinkie and put it in the soap dish above the bathroom sink.)