Sweet Nothing (11 page)

“No,” I say. “Sure.”

He hands me the money.

“Get yourself one too, or whatever you want,” he says.

He's talking down to me again, but that's okay. He'll be shitting in the streets with the rest of us soon enough.

SOPHIE IS SITTING
at the same table she was last week, and that guy is there too, hunched over his phone in the corner by the window. He glances at me when I come in, then quickly looks away. I give Sophie a little wave and sit down across from her. She's dressed for work again, her hair pulled back. A tiny gold crucifix hangs around her neck. I didn't notice it last time, or that night at the club either.

“How are you?” I say.

“Fine,” she says.

“Everything okay?”

“Super-duper.”

I wasn't going to say what I say next. I'd decided to ignore my suspicions and give her the money even after I looked it up and found out that an abortion only costs five hundred dollars. It's a nasty procedure, and I was willing to throw in the extra for pain and suffering. She had to bring that guy, though. If it was just her, okay, but something about him sets me off.

So I say it.

“You wouldn't have any proof, would you?”

“Proof of what?” Sophie says.

“That you're pregnant,” I say.

Sophie's expression doesn't change as she reaches into her purse and pulls out a folded sheet of paper and hands it to me.

“I was wondering why you didn't ask last time,” she says.

It's a letter on stationery from a women's health-care center stating that Sophie Ricard is pregnant and has a due date of February 11 next year. I pass her the envelope containing the money, but I'm still not satisfied. I'm still disappointed in her.

I point at the long-haired guy, who's glaring at me like he'd like to tear my head off.

“Is that your boyfriend?” I ask Sophie.

“What's it to you?” she says.

“How do I know it's not his baby?” I say.

She slides the envelope into her purse.

“That's right,” she snaps. “How do you know?”

I stand and walk out without saying another word. I plan to leave with an angry squeal of rubber, but my car is parked in the sun, and I have to sit with the air conditioner on until the steering wheel cools enough for me to drive away.

HERE'S HOW I'M
going to think about it:
You dodged a bullet; be grateful.
And if I ever tell anybody the story, I'm going to say that the experience made me a better husband and father. I lift my gin and tonic to affirm this, salute the setting sun, the traffic roaring by, the ghetto simmering on the horizon.

The slider opens behind me, and Julie sticks her head out.

“Dinner's ready,” she says.

We're eating early tonight. She's going to a movie with someone, a friend.

“I'm coming,” I say.

She leaves the door open. I set my glass on the railing of the balcony and shake my hand like it's numb. Then I reach out and give the glass a nudge with my index finger, and another nudge, and another, until it falls. I lean over the railing and watch the glass shatter on the sidewalk below. Man, that was dumb, wasn't it? I could've hurt somebody.

“Daddy.”

Eve comes onto the balcony through the open door. I pick her up and hold her at arm's length.

“You know the rules,” I say. “You're not supposed to be out here. It's dangerous.”

“It's time to eat,” she says.

“All right,” I say.

We step to the railing, a man and a child—no, a father and his daughter. I show her the view.

“Do you see a helicopter?” I say.

“Mmm, no,” she says,

“Do you see a car?”

“There.”

She points down at the traffic on Wilshire.

The dark inside me begins to bray, and I fight back as best I can. “We're going to be okay,” I say, “we're going to be great,” but I can barely hear myself over the din.

MARYROSE DIES ON WEDNESDAY,
and on Friday Campbell dreams he was there when it happened. Tony said she passed out right after she fixed, slumped over on the couch, so that's where that part comes from. And then Tony stuck her in the shower to try to revive her, and that part's there too. In the dream, however, Campbell is with them, and Maryrose's eyes pop open as soon as the cold water hits her, and she shakes her head and yells, “What the fuck's going on?” “Nothing, baby, nothing,” Campbell replies, and—it's a dream, remember—they live happily ever after. But dreams are bullshit. Dreams break your heart. When someone's dead, she's dead, and when it's someone you loved, some of your world dies with her. The places Campbell went with Maryrose give him the creeps now. Everything that used to be fun isn't anymore. He can't bring himself to sit on their favorite bench in the park, and the tacos at Siete Mares taste like dirt. At least dope still does him right. Thank God for dope.

THEY MET AT
a cemetery called Hollywood Forever where movies were shown in the summer. Friends of his and friends of hers brought blankets and Spanish cheese and splurgy bottles of wine, and everybody sprawled on the grass to stare at Clint Eastwood in a cowboy hat projected onto the wall of a mausoleum. Campbell got up to have a cigarette after the big shootout, and Maryrose asked if she could bum one. They smoked together under a palm tree and made fun of themselves for being degenerates. Somehow they got on the subject of drugs. It was kind of a game. Ever done this? Ever done that? Maryrose surprised Campbell when she said yes to junk. “That shit'll kill you,” he said. “Well, yeah,” she said. “Someday.” A week later he moved into her place in Silver Lake. He hadn't had a craft services gig in over a month and working the door at Little Joy paid mostly in drinks. Maryrose told him not to worry about it because her dad took care of the rent. The apartment overlooked a storefront church, the kind with a hand-painted sign and a couple of rows of battered folding chairs. Services started every night at seven.
“O Dios, por tu nombre, sálvame,”
the preacher would shout.
“O precioso sangre de Jesús.”
Maryrose liked to get stoned and lie in front of the open window and listen to the congregation send their hymns up to heaven. “It's so beautiful,” she'd groan, tears as hot and bright as stars streaming down her cheeks.

CAMPBELL COPS FOR
Martin now and then, and Martin hires Campbell to help him and his brothers serve food to film crews on location. They're downtown today, where a sci-fi thing is shooting, and Campbell is handing out lattes and doughnuts to little green men and robot soldiers. He watches a couple of extras flirt and tries to see it as the sweet start of something but isn't feeling expansive enough yet. Since Maryrose died, anything not rimed with sorrow is suspect; anything gentle, anything hopeful, is as deceptive as a thirteen-year-old girl's daydream of love, a sugarcoated time bomb. Martin brings over one of the actors. He introduces him as Doc, but Campbell knows his real name, everybody does, he's that famous. “Doc likes to party,” Martin says, and everybody knows what that means too. “Can you hook him up?” An explosion goes off on the set. Campbell and Martin and Doc all jump and giggle, and Doc points out a flock of startled pigeons wheeling overhead, scared shitless.

MARYROSE DIES ON
Wednesday, and a week later her mother and sister show up at the apartment and kick Campbell out. He feels like a criminal, packing his stuff, the way they watch him to make sure he doesn't take anything of Maryrose's. “I blame you,” her mother says. “And I hope the weight of that crushes you.” He calls his own mother for money. She says no, and his dad doesn't even answer the phone. They hope he gets crushed too, but they call it “tough love.” Tony lets him stay at his house, the same house where Maryrose OD'd. At night, from his bed in the spare room, Campbell hears Tony telling the story over and over to his customers. “She was gone, dude, just like that.” To pay his way he makes deliveries for Tony, drives him around, washes his dishes, and takes out his trash. Then they get high and watch tattoo shows on TV. Tony is covered with tattoos, even has one with some of his dead mother's ashes mixed into the ink. “You know, she thought you were an idiot,” Campbell says one night when Tony's so fucked up that he's drooling. “Who?” Tony says. “Maryrose,” Campbell says. Tony nods for a second like he's thinking this over, then says again, “Who?”

SHE'D DROPPED OUT
of USC, dropped out of Art Center and dropped out of the Fashion Institute, and the six months her parents had given her to decide what she wanted to do with her life were almost up. If she wasn't back in school by September, they'd cut her off. Some days she was defiant, shouting, “I'm proud to be a traitor to my class!” Other days she was too depressed to get out of bed. She'd stream sitcoms from her childhood, the laugh tracks taunting her as she buried her head under her pillow. Campbell worried about her when she was like this. He asked other girls he knew for advice. “She needs a project,” one of them said, so he bought her some clay. They sat together in the breakfast nook and made a mess sculpting little pigs and turtles and snakes. “You're really good at this,” Campbell told her. The scorn that flashed across her face let him know she'd seen through him. She smashed the giraffe she'd been working on and locked herself in the bathroom with their last bindle of Mexican brown.

DOC WAS A
lifeguard before he was a movie star, and that's what he talks about when Campbell shows up at his house in Laurel Canyon with the dope he ordered. Martin is there too, and the three of them sit out on the deck, drinking beer and trying to pretend heroin isn't the only thing they have in common. “When someone is super close to drowning, they don't struggle or scream or splash,” Doc says. “What happens is, their mind shuts off and pure instinct takes over. They can't cry for help, they can't wave their arms, they can't even grab a rope if you throw them one, because they're totally focused on one thing: keeping their head above water and taking their next breath. What it looks like is climbing a ladder, like they're trying to climb a ladder in the water, and if you don't reach them within twenty or thirty seconds, they're goners.” Doc smokes his junk because he doesn't want marks, but he watches intently while Campbell and Martin fix. Afterward, Campbell lies on a chaise lounge and listens to the sounds of a party going on somewhere down-canyon, music and laughter riding on the back of a desert wind. He remembers a line from a book about Charles Manson, about how on the night of the Tate murders, which took place in another canyon not far from here, the same wind made it possible to hear ice cubes clinking a mile away. All of a sudden he's uneasy, imagining a gang of acid-crazed hippies sneaking up on them. He stands and walks to the railing, his heart tossing in his chest, and scans the hillside below the house for an escape route. A coyote trail crisscrosses the slope like a nasty scar, and if he needed to, he could scramble down it to the road and be the lucky one who gets away.

MARYROSE DIES ON
Wednesday, and Campbell finds out about it a couple of hours later, when Tony calls him at the bar. During the conversation Campbell goes from staring at some LMU chick's fake ID to sitting on the sidewalk. He slaps away any helping hands and shuts his ears to all consolation. His and Maryrose's thing was them against the world, and to let anyone in now would be a betrayal. He keeps waiting to cry but never does. The ground doesn't open up, the moon stays where it is in the sky. When his legs work again, he gets up and walks. Straight down Sunset toward the ocean. He crosses PCH early the next morning and collapses on the sand. The fog is so thick he can't see the waves, only hear them pounding the shore. Good. Nothing. Anymore. Ever. The cops show up later that day, after he's ridden the bus back to the apartment. The detective who does the talking is a tall woman with white, white teeth. Campbell answers all her questions with lies. He doesn't do dope, Maryrose didn't do dope, and Tony is a fucking saint. The woman and her partner move gingerly around the place, like they're afraid to touch anything, and when Campbell coughs, the woman winces and claps a protective hand over her nose.

THEY TALKED ABOUT
getting a dog, even went to the shelter to look for one. All they found there were psychotic pit bulls and shivering Chihuahuas, and the smell and the barking drove them out after just a few minutes. “Are you telling me normal people can deal with that?” Maryrose said. She liked to cook but forgot pots on the stove, left them simmering until the smoke alarm went off. Driving too. She'd wrecked a couple of cars, and the one she had when Campbell met her bore the dents and scrapes of a dozen close calls, a hundred little lapses, each a new wound to lick. When she was straight she wanted to be what she wasn't: productive and reliable, focused and stable. “Some people are just made messy,” Campbell told her. “Not me,” she replied. “I was born right and got twisted.” Whole days went by like that, where he couldn't crack her codes. When she was happy, though, when she was high, contentment oozed from her like sweet-smelling sap. She'd name the ducks in Echo Park, dance to the music of the ice cream truck, and press her lips to his throat and leave them there. When she was happy, when she was high.

DOC STARTS TEXTING
Campbell at all hours, stuff like
Hey, man
and
Ragin' tonight?
What it boils down to is he wants dope. Campbell tries to blow him off in the beginning, because dealing to a movie star seems like a good way to get busted, but then his own habit gets out of hand, and he has no money, and Doc pays double for everything and doesn't like to party alone. Campbell spends one night at the guy's house, a couple more the next week, and then he's practically living there. They sleep all day and order in from expensive restaurants. Doc's name is magic. A chef from one of the places actually delivers the food himself and puts the finishing touches on the meal in the house's kitchen. The girls who drop by every now and then aren't whores, but they'll take whatever they can get. Tall, leggy creatures, they know how to sit in short dresses and run in high heels, and all their conversations are in another language about some other world. Doc is always relieved when they leave for their parties and clubs, when it's finally just him and Campbell and the dope comes out.

One day they drive down to the Strip to eat lunch. Afterward a display of sunglasses in the window of a store catches Doc's eye. He goes inside and tries on a few pairs and makes Campbell try some too, sharing a mirror with him. “Those are hot on you,” he says about one pair. “Like Michael Pitt hot.” He insists on buying them for Campbell. Seven-hundred-dollar sunglasses. Campbell wears them later that afternoon when he makes a quick trip to the east side to replenish their stash. The bums look jaunty through the perfectly tinted lenses, the poor Mexicans happy. “How much do you think these cost?” Campbell asks Tony. “What the fuck do I care?” Tony replies. The sun is going down on his way back to the canyon, shining through the windshield at an annoying angle. With his new glasses he can stare right into it and take all the glare it has to give.

MARYROSE DIES ON
Wednesday. There's a funeral two weeks later, but Campbell isn't invited. He moves out of Tony's and in with a bartender from Little Joy. Everything is good until the guy finds blood spattered on the bathroom wall and a syringe under the couch and tells Campbell to pack his shit and go. “I've lived with junkies before,” he says. “They're nothing but holes that can't be filled. And they steal.” So it's back to Tony's, back to the house where Maryrose died. He continues to shoot up on the couch where she shot up and to shower in the tub where her heart stopped beating. It's a curse, having to relive the worst over and over, trying to breathe that air, and he knows that if he doesn't get away, he's going to die too.

The first step is to retake the reins of his habit, be a man about it. Without too much suffering he manages to taper off to two hits a day. What eventually derails him is some punk at the bar who knew Maryrose saying something stupid about “that's what happens when an angel dances with the devil” and then, later, a photo he happens upon while scrolling through the pictures on his phone. It's Maryrose the day before she OD'd, looking like a ghost already. And he's the one who did that to her. She was just chipping when they met, and trying to keep up with him is what got her hooked. It's not a new realization, but this time it hurts enough to serve as a reason for backsliding into a three-day bender that hollows out his head and scrapes his bones clean of flesh.
Oh, baby,
he thinks when he finally pops to the surface on a bright fall morning when the tree shadows look like claws grabbing at the sidewalk,
I can't come meet you there ever again
.

HE AND MARYROSE
tried to kick together after a bad balloon of what was supposed to be tar burned going in and made them both vomit their souls into the kitchen sink. This even after they'd been warned not to buy from that dealer by someone whose brother had ended up in the hospital just from smoking the stuff. If they were so strung out they'd risk shooting rat poison, it was time to quit. They threw some clothes into a suitcase, gassed up Campbell's Toyota, and headed out into the desert. Traffic on the freeway inched along, and the city stretched on forever. They stopped for lunch at Del Taco, but neither of them could eat. Then the army of windmills near Palm Springs freaked Maryrose out, the relentless turning of their giant blades suggesting an inexorability that was at odds with her lace-winged fantasy of bucking her fate. They checked into a desiccated motel on the shore of the Salton Sea. Even though the thermometer outside the office read 100 degrees, Maryrose wanted to walk down to the beach. It was covered with fish bones and scavenging gulls and had a stench that stuck in their throats. Back in the room they turned the noisy air conditioner to high and shivered under the thin blanket, unable to decide if they were hot or cold. Maryrose clutched her cramping stomach and kicked her feet. “My legs,” she moaned. “My legs.” She sat up, lay down, and sat up again. Gritting his teeth against his own agony, Campbell limped into the bathroom and drew her a glass of water. She drank it down but immediately vomited onto the linoleum next to the bed. Campbell placed his hand on her burning forehead and tried to mumbo jumbo some of her pain into him. He finally passed out for a while, waking near dawn.