A Multitude of Sins (16 page)

“What about Vince?” Jane says authoritatively. Vince is ground that has been gone over several times before now, and carefully. Mrs. Argenbright, the girls’ therapist, has taken special pains with the Vince subject. The girls have the skinny on Mr. Vince but want to be given it again, since they like Vince more than their father.

“Vince is a guest of the state of Ohio, right now,” Faith says. “You remember that? It’s like he’s in college.”

“He’s not in college,” Jane says.

“Does he have a tree where he is,” Marjorie asks.

“Not in any real sense, at least not in his room like you do,” Faith says. “Let’s talk about happier things than our friend Vince, okay?” She is stringing bulbs now, on her knees.

The room doesn’t include much furniture, and what there is conforms to the Danish modern style. A raised, metal-hooded, red-enamel fireplace device has a paper message from the condo owners taped to it, advising that smoke damage will cause renters to lose their security deposit and subject them to legal actions. These particular owners, Esther has learned, are residents of Grosse Pointe Farms and are people of Russian extraction. There’s, of course, no firewood except what the Danish furniture could offer. So smoke is unlikely. Baseboards supply everything.

“I think you two should guess what you’re getting for Christmas,” Faith says, carefully draping lightless lights onto the stiff plastic branches of the rubber tree. Taking pains.

“In-lines. I already know,” Jane says and crosses her ankles like her sister. They are a jury disguised as an audience. “I don’t have to wear a helmet, though.”

“But are you sure of that?” Faith glances over her shoulder and gives them a smile she’s seen movie stars give to strangers. “You could always be wrong.”

“I’d better be right,” Jane says unpleasantly, with a frown very much like her mom’s.

“Santa’s bringing me a disc player,” Marjorie says. “It’ll come in a small box. I won’t even recognize it.”

“You two’re too smart for your britches,” Faith says. She is quickly finished stringing Christmas lights. “But you don’t know what
I
brought you.” Among other things, she has brought a disc player and an expensive pair of in-line skates. They are in the Suburban and will be returned back in LA. She has also brought movie videos. Twenty in all, including
Star Wars
and
Sleeping Beauty
. Daisy has sent them each $50.

“You know,” Faith says, “I remember once a long, long time ago, my dad and I and your mom went out in the woods and cut a tree for Christmas. We didn’t buy a tree, we cut one down with an axe.”

Jane and Marjorie stare at her as if they’ve read this story someplace. The TV is not turned on in the room. Perhaps, Faith thinks, they don’t understand someone talking to them—live action presenting its own unique continuity problems.

“Do you want to hear the story?”

“Yes,” Marjorie, the younger sister, says. Jane sits watchful and silent on the green Danish sofa. Behind her on the bare white wall is a framed print of Bruegel’s
Return of the Hunters
, which is, after all, Christmas-y.

“Well,” Faith says. “Your mother and I—we were only nine and ten—picked out the tree we desperately wanted to be our tree, but our dad said no, that tree was too tall to fit inside our house. We should choose another one. But we both said, ‘No, this one’s perfect. This is the best one.’ It was green and pretty and had a perfect Christmas shape. So our dad cut it down with his axe, and we dragged it out through
the woods and tied it on top of our car and brought it back to Sandusky.” Both girls are sleepy now. There has been too much excitement, or else not enough. Their mother is in rehab. Their dad’s an asshole. They’re in someplace called Michigan. Who wouldn’t be sleepy?

“Do you want to know what happened after that?” Faith says. “When we got the tree inside?”

“Yes,” Marjorie says politely.

“It
was
too big,” Faith says. “It was much, much too tall. It couldn’t even stand up in our living room. And it was too wide. And our dad got really mad at us because we’d killed a beautiful living tree for a selfish reason, and because we hadn’t listened to him and thought we knew everything just because we knew what we wanted.”

Faith suddenly doesn’t know why she’s telling this story to these innocent sweeties who do not need another object lesson. So she simply stops. In the real story, of course, her father took the tree and threw it out the door into the back yard where it stayed for a week and turned brown. There was crying and accusations. Her father went straight to a bar and got drunk. Later, their mother went to the Kiwanis lot and bought a small tree that fit and which the three of them trimmed without the aid of their father. It was waiting, all lighted, when he came home smashed. The story had always been one others found humor in. This time the humor seems lacking.

“Do you want to know how the story turned out?” Faith says, smiling brightly for the girls’ benefit, but feeling defeated.

“I do,” Marjorie says. Jane says nothing.

“Well, we put it outside in the yard and put lights on it so our neighbors could share our big tree with us. And we bought a smaller tree for the house at the Kiwanis. It was a sad story that turned out good.”

“I don’t believe that,” Jane says.

“Well you should believe it,” Faith says, “because it’s true. Christmases are special. They always turn out wonderfully if you just give them a chance and use your imagination.”

Jane shakes her head as Marjorie nods hers. Marjorie wants to believe. Jane, Faith thinks, is a classic older child. Like herself.

“Did you know,”—this was one of Greta’s cute messages left for her on her voice mail in Los Angeles—“did you know that Jack hates—
hates
—to have his dick sucked? Hates it with a passion. Of course you didn’t. How could you? He always lies about it. Oh well. But if you’re wondering why he never comes, that’s why. It’s a big turn-off for him. I personally think it’s his mother’s fault, not that
she
ever did it to him, of course. By the way, that was a nice dress last Friday. Really great tits. I can see why Jack likes you. Take care.”

At seven, when the girls wake up from their naps and everyone is hungry at once, Faith’s mother offers to take the two hostile Indians for a pizza, then on to the skating rink, while Roger and Faith share the smorgasbord coupons in the Lodge.

Very few diners have chosen the long, harshly lit, rather sour-smelling Tyrol Room. Most guests are outside awaiting the Pageant of the Lights, in which members of the ski patrol descend the expert slope each night, holding flaming torches. It is a thing of beauty but takes time getting started. At the very top of the hill a giant Norway spruce has been illuminated in the Yuletide tradition, just as in the untrue version of Faith’s story. All of this is viewable from inside the Tyrol Room via a great picture window.

Faith does not want to eat with Roger, who is hungover from his
gluhwein
and a nap. Conversation that she would find offensive could easily occur; something on the subject of her sister, the girls’ mother—Roger’s (still) wife. But she’s trying to keep up a Christmas spirit. Do for others, etc.

Roger, she knows, dislikes her, possibly envies her, and also is attracted to her. Once, several years ago, he confided to her that he’d very much like to fuck her ears flat. He was
drunk, and Daisy hadn’t long before had Jane. Faith found a way not to specifically acknowledge his offer. Later he told her he thought she was a lesbian. Having her know that just must’ve seemed like a good idea. A class act is The Roger.

The long, echoing dining hall has criss-crossed ceiling beams painted pink and light green and purple, a scheme apparently appropriate to Bavaria. There are long green-painted tables with pink and purple plastic folding chairs meant to promote an informal good time and family fun. Somewhere else in the lodge, Faith is certain, there is a better place to eat where you don’t pay with coupons and nothing’s pink or purple.

Faith is wearing a shiny black Lycra bodysuit, over which she has put on her loden knickers and Norway socks. She looks superb, she believes. With anyone but Roger this would be fun, or at least a hoot.

Roger sits across the long table, too far away to talk easily. In a room that can conveniently hold five hundred souls, there are perhaps fifteen scattered diners. No one is eating family style, only solos and twos. Young lodge employees in paper caps wait dismally behind the long smorgasbord steam table. Metal heat lamps with orange beams are steadily over-cooking the prime rib, of which Roger has taken a goodly portion. Faith has chosen only a few green lettuce leaves, a beet round, two tiny ears of yellow corn and no salad dressing. The sour smell of the Tyrol Room makes eating almost impossible.

“Do you know what I worry about?” Roger says, sawing around a triangle of glaucal gray roast beef fat, using a comically small knife. His tone implies he and Faith eat here together often and are just picking up where they’ve left off; as if they didn’t hold each other in complete contempt.

“No,” Faith says. “What?” Roger, she notices, has managed to hang on to his red smorgasbord coupon. The rule is you leave your coupon in the basket by the bread sticks. Clever Roger. Why, she wonders, is Roger tanned?

Roger smiles as though there’s a lewd aspect to whatever it is that worries him. “I worry that Daisy’s going to get so
fixed up in rehab that she’ll forget everything that’s happened and want to be married again. To me, I mean. You know?” Roger chews as he talks. He wishes to seem earnest, his smile a serious, imploring, vacuous smile. This is Roger leveling. Roger owning up.

“That probably won’t happen,” Faith says. “I just have a feeling.” She no longer wishes to look at her fragmentary salad. She does not have an eating disorder and could never have one.

“Maybe not.” Roger nods. “I’d like to get out of guidance pretty soon, though. Start something new. Turn the page.”

In truth, Roger is not bad-looking, only oppressively regular: small chin, small nose, small hands, small straight teeth—nothing unusual except his brown eyes are too narrow, as if he had Ukrainian blood. Daisy married him—she said—because of his alarmingly big dick. That—or more importantly, the lack of that—was in her view why many other marriages failed. When all else gave way, that would be there. Vince’s, she’d shared, was even bigger. Ergo. It was to this particular quest that Daisy had dedicated her life. This, instead of college.

“What exactly would you like to do next?” Faith says. She is thinking how nice it would be if Daisy came out of rehab and
had
forgotten everything. A return to how things were when they still sort of worked often seemed a good solution.

“Well, it probably sounds crazy,” Roger says, chewing, “but there’s a company in Tennessee that takes apart jetliners for scrap. There’s big money in it. I imagine it’s how the movie business got started. Just some hare-brained scheme.” Roger pokes at macaroni salad with his fork. A single Swedish meatball remains on his plate.

“It doesn’t sound crazy,” Faith lies, then looks longingly at the smorgasbord table. Maybe she’s hungry, after all. But is the table full of food the smorgasbord, or is eating the food the smorgasbord?

Roger, she notices, has casually slipped his meal coupon into a pocket.

“Well, do you think you’re going to do that?” Faith asks with reference to the genius plan of dismantling jet airplanes for big bucks.

“With the girls in school, it’d be hard,” Roger admits soberly, ignoring what would seem to be the obvious—that it is not a genius plan.

Faith gazes away again. She realizes no one else in the big room is dressed the way she is, which reminds her of who she is. She is not Snow Mountain Highlands (even if she once was). She is not Sandusky. She is not even Ohio. She is Hollywood. A fortress.

“I could take the girls for a while,” she suddenly says. “I really wouldn’t mind.” She thinks of sweet Marjorie and sweet, unhappy Jane sitting on the Danish modern couch in their sweet nighties and monkey-face slippers, watching her trim the plastic rubber-tree plant. At the same moment, she thinks of Roger and Daisy being killed in an automobile crash on their triumphant way back from rehab. You can’t help what you think.

“Where would they go to school?” Roger says, becoming alert to something unexpected. Something he might like.

“I’m sorry?” Faith says and flashes Roger, big-dick, narrow-eyed Roger a second movie star’s smile. She has let herself become distracted by the thought of his timely death.

“I mean, like, where would they go to school?” Roger blinks. He is that alert.

“I don’t know. Hollywood High, I guess. They have schools in California. I could find one.”

“I’d have to think about it,” Roger lies decisively.

“Okay, do,” Faith says. Now that she has said this, without any previous thought of ever saying it, it becomes part of everyday reality. Soon she will become Jane and Marjorie’s parent. Easy as that. “When you get settled in Tennessee you could have them back,” she says without conviction.

“They probably wouldn’t want to come back by then,” Roger says. “Tennessee’d seem pretty dull.”

“Ohio’s dull. They like that.”

“True,” Roger says.

No one has thought to mention Daisy in promoting this new arrangement. Though Daisy, the mother, is committed elsewhere for the next little patch. And Roger needs to get his life jump-started, needs to put “guidance” in the rearview mirror. First things first.

The Pageant of the Lights has gotten under way outside now—a ribbon of swaying torches gliding soundlessly down the expert slope like an overflow of human lava. All is preternaturally visible through the panoramic window. A large, bundled crowd of spectators has assembled at the bottom of the slope behind some snow fences, many holding candles in scraps of paper like at a Grateful Dead concert. All other artificial light is extinguished, except for the Yuletide spruce at the top. The young smorgasbord attendants, in their aprons and paper caps, have gathered at the window to witness the event yet again. Some are snickering. Someone remembers to turn the lights off in the Tyrol Room. Dinner is suspended.