Dead Ex, page 28
I got my trio out the door and had just given them instructions on where to rendezvous in an hour—the swan pond, not under any circumstances the restaurant or lobby—when Simon came up behind me.
“Wollie.”
I turned. How beautiful he looked against the blue of the sky. He was wearing the brown Gianfranco Ferre silk shirt I’d given him for Christmas. Was it a flaw in our relationship that he always outdressed me? It happened in the animal kingdom, the males upstaging the females, the
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birds with their plumage, the lions with their manes. But we were humans, in Western civilization, and maybe Simon belonged with the Lucrezias of the world, their hair in French twists that implied a hairdresser on call or a talented housekeeper, and, of course, money.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
I wanted badly to tell him that Joey was missing. He’d know what to do, and what a relief it would be to let him do it. But Simon was sworn to uphold the law, and Joey was breaking it, running around with an un-licensed gun. She wouldn’t thank me for involving him, and neither would he, putting him in that kind of conflict. “Nothing of interest,” I said. A breeze stirred in the trees. I wanted him to open up his shirt so I could burrow into him and soak up his warmth. “How about you? Of all the gin joints in the world, why here?”
“I needed a place that served brunch. You’d said it was your favorite hotel . . .”
“I’m happy to have inspired you. Doesn’t it blow your top-secret cover to gambol about in famous places? Running into people who know what you do for a living?”
“Let me worry about that.”
“And what shall I worry about? Lucrezia?” I stretched out her name as far as it would go, Loo-creeeet-zeeeeee-ah, just to show I wasn’t frightened of it.
He looked around casually, hands in pockets. “I imagine this is hard for you.”
I put my hands in my pockets too. In case Lucrezia came waltzing out to check on our body language. I was about to ask him how hard it was for him when over his shoulder I spotted Charles coming down the path to meet me.
“Really, Simon, I have to go,” I said. “And you have to get back to work. I mean pleasure. Bon appétit. ”
“Wait. Did Joey ever mention that she had a juvenile record?”
Charles had spotted me. He stopped, waiting. He’d want to talk to me alone. “Uh—no,” I said, completely distracted. “I’ll ask her about it, though.”
“I’ll save you the trouble. It was an assault charge. In tenth grade, she put a boy in the hospital. Broke his nose and his wrist.”
“Oh, hell.” This made me want to cry. When was the news going to
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get better? “I’m sure she had her reasons.” I tried not to look at Charles, but I didn’t succeed. Simon glanced over his shoulder. “That man’s looking at you. Do you know him?”
“Yes.”
He looked back at me, eyes narrowed. “Are you all right?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not. But there’s nothing you can do about it at the moment except walk away.”
For a guy like Simon, whose instinct to rescue was so strong, those words were hard to hear. I could see it in his face. But after a moment he turned and moved off, back down the path. Part of me was sad to have caused him pain.
Part of me wasn’t.
F o r t y - s e v e n
C harles found us a stone bench in a secluded area dense with fo-liage, then went in search of coffee. I had a raging headache.
I might have been in another country, it was so extravagantly green.
Rushing water drowned out every mundane thought, and part of me
marveled at what money could create, this tropical rain forest in the midst of an urban desert. Another part of me just felt alone. How could I be lonelier now than when Doc had left me, months before, or when I’d moved out of Simon’s penthouse? It wasn’t just about Simon and the dreadful woman he was—whatever it was he was doing with her. It was that Joey was gone.
Joey was my foul-weather friend. Fredreeq too, but Fredreeq was a mother, with car pool and Little League and trips to Costco, and strong opinions on acceptable behavior. Joey was the least judgmental person I knew, which meant I could tell her anything.
She was also enterprising. If someone else had exited the 405 on foot, Joey would’ve found them by now. It wasn’t a situation that came up a lot. Nowadays. The Greeks, of course, were always running after one another. Menelaus going after Helen after she ran off with Paris, Jason chasing his Golden Fleece, Demeter following her daughter Persephone into the Underworld. And Orpheus going there after Eurydice, armed
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only with his lyre and his voice. Not many of those rescue attempts had happy endings.
Charles approached, carrying a single cup of coffee on a saucer.
“There’s more coming,” he said. “This is just to tide you over.”
I swallowed it with a couple of Tylenols. He said, “When did you last see Joey?”
I filled him in on the situation, not bothering to put a positive spin on it. Then I said, “Your turn. And your secrets are safe. As soon as we find Joey and keep her out of jail, I’ll forget them. I have a terrible memory.”
A waiter arrived. “I hope this will do it,” Charles said, and I didn’t know if he was referring to the croissants accompanying the pot of coffee or the promised information. The waiter asked if we’d like champagne to ring in the New Year and Charles asked what he had. While they discussed it, I studied him, trying to understand his appeal. Because he was appealing. Maybe it was the part of him that evoked his brother, making me feel I knew him well, even intimately, when I barely knew him at all. Maybe it was the beard.
“Sorry,” Charles said, after the waiter left. “Professional curiosity. I’m always doing research, seeing what sells. You know my wife and I have a vineyard?”
“Artemis. Yes, Agnes and I talked last night.”
Charles looked at his hands. “It thrived, once. Not so much in recent years. We had some bad luck. An earthquake. A fire. When we married, I tried to drag it into this century. Agnes’s family is old-school. They feel that if the product is good, it will sell itself. Our balance sheets show otherwise.”
“But you’ll do okay now, won’t you? I mean, since David left you—”
“Millions?” He smiled. “Yes. But he didn’t foresee the fallout, the scrutiny from the police and the insurance company. There was a theory afloat that Agnes and I hired someone to shoot David, but it’s fallen out of favor. Maybe they took a look at our truck. Last week we couldn’t afford a plumber, let alone an assassin.”
“And the fact that the gun came from At the End of the Day—I don’t see a professional borrowing a gun from a soap opera. Don’t they bring their own tools?”
“Never having hired one, I wouldn’t know.” He toyed with the crois-
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sant basket, then moved it aside. “Let me tell this backward. When my brother suspected he had cancer, he didn’t go to a doctor, but to an insurance agent. He took out a twenty-million-dollar policy—not an easy thing to do, by the way, even after he passed their physical. I didn’t know it at the time. At that point, David and I hadn’t spoken in nine years.”
“How could he know he had cancer before any doctors knew?”
Charles looked up. His eyes were David’s, a blue unexpected with the dark hair. “Pancreatic cancer can go undetected a long time. But David had intuition. That’s Joey’s theory. She says it’s an actor thing, being in touch with your body to that extent.”
I thought of David’s yoga and massages, his faith in vitamins and an-tioxidants and Chinese medicine. Alternating with heavy partying. “And is it your theory too?”
Charles shrugged. “I just keep thinking about his hypochondria. The headache you have? For David, that would be a brain tumor. Indigestion was an ulcer. That his cancer was really cancer is . . . ironic.”
The waiter appeared with champagne. Charles examined the bottle, then handed it back for the ritual, the steps done in the proper order, suspense building to the satisfying pop of the cork, and the deluge. The waiter was assured and self-possessed, and I wondered who he was when not waiting on the rich and famous. He poured, bowed, and retreated.
“David and I were close growing up,” Charles said, “but temperamentally different. Our parents had problems, which drew us together. David was very big-brotherly. Loved to fix things. If he couldn’t, or I didn’t take his advice, it enraged him.”
Joey would’ve driven him mad, I thought. She wasn’t much for taking advice.
“Giving made him happy,” Charles said. “And surprises. I didn’t know about the life insurance and rest of the estate until a few weeks ago. Joey talked him into telling us.”
A rustling in the bushes across the walk got my attention. Was there an animal in there? I imagined a mink waddling around the Bel-Air. Did minks waddle?
“Last night,” I said, “you implied that—look, I’m sorry, but did you or didn’t you have an affair with Joey?”
Charles studied his champagne flute. I tried to read his face, but his
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beard covered half of it, and hair is not very expressive. “It doesn’t matter. David believed we did.”
“While he and Joey were dating?”
He nodded. “Living together. One Friday, instead of Vegas, David invited several of us up the coast.” The rustling in the shrubbery continued. It had to be something big. A coyote? Charles noticed it too.
“We ended up in Big Sur,” he continued, “where he’d enrolled us all in a consciousness-raising weekend. A tantric sex seminar. Are you familiar with it?”
“Big Sur, yes. Tantric sex, no. Powerful stuff ?”
“No idea. The teacher came down with pneumonia. But there we
were—”
“Ouch. Damn it.” The creature in the bushes spoke.
Charles and I stood.
A man crashed through the bushes, shaking his head and brushing
something from his face with both hands. From his neck hung a video-camera on a strap. “Killer bees,” he said. “Are those killer bees?”
I don’t know killer bees from bumblebees and was about to say so, but Charles said, “They are. If you come into contact, you need first aid. See the concierge.” He pulled me away. “Reporters. Ever since Monday. Re-lentless.” He led me down a walkway, past a fountain. We passed a trio of men in tuxedoes. A New Year’s wedding.
“So,” I said. “Tantric sex.”
“Yes,” he said, slowing. “By Saturday night, David had been drinking heavily, and disappeared with a local waitress. Joey was understandably unhappy. She was going to hitchhike back down the coast, so I gave her a ride. She crashed at my place that night. And the next. For a week or so. I was new to L.A., and Joey became my first real friend.”
A woman hurried by, armed with two cameras and a light meter,
chasing not us but a bride, I guessed. “Carlotta!” she called to someone ahead.
Carlotta, I thought. Charlotte. And then I remembered. The woman in the photograph, from David’s birthday party. Charlotte. That was her name.
“Charles?” I said. “Who’s Charlotte?”
He turned to me and said nothing, watching me figure it out myself.
“Oh,” I said. “You were.”
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• • •
“You’ve never met a transsexual?”
“No,” I said. We were at the swan pond now.
“Male to female is more common than female to male.”
“Oh.” I realized I was speaking in monosyllables. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to reorient myself to the man next me, to picture him as a woman.
But there was nothing feminine about him except that his hands were small, and his feet too. Smaller than mine. But that was true for three-quarters of the world. “I’m sure you’re used to talking about this, but for me it’s a first-time conversation.”
“As a matter of fact, I never talk about it. In the transsexual community I’m strictly e-mail. Otherwise, almost no one knows. I left the East Coast after the surgeries, and started over here. Joey met me briefly as Charlotte.”
“Did you always know this about yourself?” I asked. “That you were—”
“It’s called gender identity disorder. I always knew. I did not find life easy as a child. David was alternately protective of me and frustrated by my social ineptitude. Once I stumbled onto a name for my condition and a therapist, and started to reconcile body and soul, David paid for all of it, including the surgeries. He felt guilty, being the normal one. As if the life of a child star is normal. But I didn’t begrudge him anything; I wouldn’t have been happy being him. I just wanted to be who I was.”
“So he was okay with it?”
The biggest swan—Homer, presumably—spread his wings, as if
threatening liftoff. Something appeared to be pissing him off.
“Initially, no,” Charles said. “He didn’t like losing his little sister. But he could put himself in my shoes; the thought of living in a woman’s body, for a man, is . . .”
Never having wanted to be anything but a woman, I tried to imagine that. I couldn’t. I tried the reverse, picturing myself caught inside a man’s body. Oh.
“Then it captured his imagination,” Charles said. “He began to see it as an act of invention. And he was very interested in the logistics of it.”
“I admit to some curiosity myself.”
Charles met my eyes and I saw David’s face again, and felt myself blush. He said, “I function sexually. Is it an experience identical to that
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of a man who’s had all his body parts from birth? No. Am I complaining? No. My life, relative to what it was, is a miracle. That’s not hyper-bole.”
I nodded. “So the weekend in Big Sur—?”
“I was Charles by then. And when he got back to L.A., David found out that Joey was staying with me. He drew his own conclusions.”
“I imagine he was upset.”
“He was enraged,” Charles said. “To think that I could be a rival, that Joey and I had something just between us, distinct from him. He felt—
not to sound melodramatic—that he’d created us. And we betrayed
him.” He stared at the pond. “He fired Joey from the soap, cut me off financially. I repaid him over the years. He didn’t cash the checks, so I sent cash. And letters, but he never responded.”
An image came to mind, of one hundred thousand dollars stuffed in a laundry bag. “That’s it?” I said. “That’s why he felt he owed you twenty million dollars?”
Charles nodded. “He said if he’d helped me years ago, we could’ve built up Artemis Vineyards to something spectacular. He didn’t owe me a thing, but he believed he’d ruined our lives—because he’d wanted to ruin our lives.”
“And Joey?” I said. “How was he supposed to have ruined her life?”
“If she’d stayed on the show, she wouldn’t have been working in
Canada the winter of that incident. He said he was responsible for the scar on her face.”
I shook my head and realized that my headache was gone. I looked at the swans, their necks like the letter S. I’d loved “The Ugly Duckling”
until I’d heard that swans are unfriendly. Now, thanks to Dr. Paolo Pomerantz’s Guide to the Pantheon of Greek Gods and Goddesses and Their Roman Counterparts, I’d learned that they’re sexual too. Zeus imperson-ated one to seduce Leda, who gave birth to Helen of Troy. Looked at that way, a swan was responsible for the Trojan War. “Charles,” I said,
“how—oh. There’s Agnes.”
She was walking our way, but she hadn’t seen us.
“Come on.” Charles took my arm, pulling me toward the far side of the pond.
“Okay, but why do we need to—”
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“Agnes doesn’t know.”
I struggled to keep up. “Doesn’t know what?”
He kept moving. “That I was once a woman.”
“What? That’s not possible.” I caught up to him.
“She was sheltered,” he said. “Convent school. I was her first boy -
friend. I knew she couldn’t handle it when we met, so I waited.” We were practically running now, as though just seeing me would reveal it all to Agnes. “I waited for her to notice things, to ask questions. She never did.
She was a virgin until our wedding night, so she had nothing to compare me to . . . and she didn’t want children, so that wasn’t an issue.”
“She knows,” I said, breathless. “She can’t not know.”
“It’s occurred to me. But if she’s not asking about it, is it right to force it on her? Even if she could accept it, her family couldn’t. So then she either keeps my secret or becomes estranged from them. For what? It’s a small sin, to protect her from that choice.”
“But is it a marriage?” The vehemence in my voice startled me. “I’m sorry. Obviously, it’s none of my business. But to have such a huge thing between you—”
He turned to look at me. “Have you ever been married, Wollie?”
Elliot had asked me the same thing. “No.” Was I socially deficient, having neglected to bag a husband? “So what it is that only married people understand?”
“Was that condescending? I’m sorry.”
“No, go ahead.”
“You take those vows,” he said, his arm in mine, leading me past a gushing fountain. “You shoot for one hundred percent honesty, or fidelity or kindness or whatever your ideal is, but you come up short. Everyone does. So then you ask, Do I live with that shortfall or do I cut my losses and look for something closer to the ideal?”
“But you’re living a lie—well, an omission. A rather large one.”
“No. Living all those years as a woman was the lie. This isn’t a lie.
This is me. How I got here, the story of that, that’s the only thing I’m withholding. The backstory, as David would say.”
