“The house is full of traps and each one has a little mouse with a surprised look on his face,” she said. “You know what I notice? With every one of them, the tail is stuck straight out. The trap snaps down on their necks and the tails go pencil-straight.”
He opened the fridge door, retrieved the orange juice carton and mixed her a stiff drink. “You should really get them cleaned out. You want me to do that for you?”
“Nah,” she said. “I didn’t bring my assistants. I thought it would look silly to show up in Poeticule Bay again with a fucking entourage. I figured it wouldn’t go over well. Back home I would have told somebody to take care of it, or they would have taken care of it and I never would have known about it. Now that I’m here, I figure I’m an adult again. I should do it. I just—“
“I’ll do it.”
“
Don’t
. I’ll deal with it.” Her tone was sharp for the first time.
He handed her the sweaty glass and instead of taking a sip she put it against a cheek. “Do you believe in reincarnation, Marky?”
“Nope.”
“Me, neither, but yesterday I wasn’t so sure. As long as I’m unburdening here, I’m going to confess something awful to you.”
“Okay.” He sat again and looked at her long bare legs. When he looked up, he felt ashamed because he saw the raw pain in her eyes.
“I arrived day before yesterday. I’d gone straight to the funeral home first and made the arrangements. You know…all that bullshit. All I could think about was how I was going to go to this fucking funeral and some asshole was going to go on and on about what a great guy Uncle Joe was.”
He took a big gulp of his drink and gave her an encouraging nod.
“You’re going to think I’m a terrible person.”
He wondered how she could have managed to keep her secret…to keep him shut out.
“I am a terrible person,” she said, “or at least I can be amazingly stupid.”
“That just makes you human.”
“Then I’m ready to stop that,” she said and let out a throaty laugh. “Remember how good I was at math?”
“I always let you figure out the tip when we had clams and chips.”
“You always let me pay the bill.”
“No apologies. You were the local rich girl and I had nothing. You want me to cut you a check for all those clam dinners at The Skinny Dip now?”
“Nah, we’ll let that go.”
“Thanks, because you’re still the local rich girl.”
“I’m probably the richest girl on the east coast.”
“Then I think I’ll have another drink on you. I might even make it a double. You were about to tell me why you’re such a terrible person.”
She sobered. “Well, like I said, always good at math. Won first prize in a couple things. Dad thought I should go take a business degree. I was thinking astrophysics.”
“I remember. Our first kiss was when you invited me up the hill to look through your telescope.”
“Yeah. I’m sure astronomy was foremost in your mind.”
“I was fifteen. Give me a break.”
“I was fifteen, too. That’s something else I have to thank you for. See, after you came into the picture, Big Joe lost interest in me.”
“You think he was afraid he’d get caught?”
“No, it’s sicker than that. After we started dating, I was too old for his games. I was ruined—by you, I guess.”
“I’m glad. I just wish you’d told me at the time.”
She shrugged and raised her empty glass, tinkled the ice, and he got up to refill it. This time he avoided looking at the mouse.
He made the drink. She waited for him to sit down again and then continued, “Math always came easy and I liked that there was only one right answer. It’s binary. It’s right or it’s wrong. Subjectivity means no one is ever simply right. Arguing some obscure point in an essay just pissed me off.”
“Your history marks reflected that.”
“You’re getting entirely too comfortable around me awfully quickly.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Really?”
“No.”
She cleared her throat and warned him to be quiet with a look. “I also have a thing for symmetry. When I walked into this house after all these years…when dad was away in the oil fields or flying around the world selling stuff to the Chinese, I stayed here with Uncle Joe. This was my torture chamber.”
“Sorry.”
“Really?”
“You’re goddamn right. I
really
wish you had told me.”
“So you said. Okay, then. Anyway, I walked in here straight from the funeral parlor and headed straight to the toilet and what do I find but a little mouse is swimming in the fucking toilet bowl!”
“No shit?”
“No shit. Just this little mouse. Probably went in for the water and couldn’t get out. And you know what? I had this fantasy that this mouse somehow was Uncle Joe’s reincarnation or soul or something. I don’t know. It sounds pretty stupid now that I’m saying this out loud.”
“No, I can see why you’d think that. I mean, yeah, it doesn’t really make sense, but I’m sure it did at the time. You’d just come from arranging your…pedophile’s funeral.”
“Exactly. Thanks. I knew you’d understand.”
“Just give me half what you pay your regular therapist.”
She let out another throaty laugh and took another long drink from her glass. He thought she might be getting drunk but with elegant women it was so much harder to tell. He didn’t have much practice hearing the confessions of boozy starlets. When he knew Betsy, she didn’t drink at all. He hadn’t even driven a car when he knew her.
“What did you do about the mouse?”
“
Hm?
”
“The mouse in the toilet. Did he flush easy?”
“Well, now here’s the part where you see me for what I am. I watched him swimming around and around and around, his little pink feet paddling and paddling and paddling. I watched and I smiled because I thought, wouldn’t it be great symmetry if God had sent me this gift? God’s given me a lot of gifts. Why not this special one, just for me? Everything I do seems to be for everybody else, so why not
this
for
me
?”
He looked in her eyes. They were wet again but her face was perfectly smooth, uncracked stone. “What did you do with the mouse?”
“I waited for him to tire out. Eventually he did, I was standing over it for an hour or so, I’m not sure. Anyway, he drowned and when he drowned I was so stupidly happy. I can’t tell you.”
He nodded. “I understand.”
“Thanks. Even if you don’t mean it. I’ve been a spokesperson for PETA, you know!”
He couldn’t help himself. He began to giggle and first she looked angry and then that broke and she joined him. They laughed together a long time.
When the laughter died she added, “I pissed on him at the end, just for good measure, you know. It seemed so right at the time. Then to celebrate Joe being dead I walked out here to Joe’s bar and what do I find but another dead mouse. I look in every corner and there’s another fucking mousetrap filled with another dead mouse. I run around the house and they’re everywhere!”
“Jesus!”
“Yeah. It put things in perspective.”
“So you revised your reincarnation hypothesis?”
“I guess you could say that. I ran out here, found some paper and wrote out that letter to Joe. I cried all night. Then I went to that stupid fucking funeral and threw the letter in the grave and—“
“And the wind picked it up and delivered it to the world’s media.”
She nodded, the tears coming in long hot lines now, burning down her face, burning away her invulnerability and divinity.
“Shit,” he said.
“Tomorrow it will be everywhere. It’s probably already in China and when the sun comes over each horizon my private shame won’t be private anymore. It’s no doubt already all over the net. I haven’t checked whether it’s trending on Twitter yet. Can’t look.”
“People will understand.”
“I don’t want people to understand. I want them not to know!” She dug through her purse and found some tissues. She blew her nose loudly and when she looked at him again, her gaze was an accusation.
“Technically, I’m media, too, but not tonight.”
“What are you tonight?”
“I’m the guy who’s poured you too many drinks. Tomorrow…no. In a few days this will blow over. Britney will drown her kid or Paris will blow some politician in public and it won’t be long before the public will confuse heiresses and stars. They’ll screw it up and think your story really is about Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan.”
She smiled. “I’m glad you’re here to pour me too many drinks. You were there for me at the beginning, so maybe you’re the only guy I can trust in the world.”
“We’re not all so bad.”
“You don’t think so? Let me tell you one more story. A couple years ago I dropped out. People thought I was in rehab, I disappeared so long. I got out of Hollywood and went to the one place in all of America where there’s not a news rag jerk off within a short plane flight. You know where I went?”
“Rural Texas?”
“Still too close to California.”
“Where?”
“Cincinnati.”
“Cincinnati?”
“I dyed my hair purple and blond, tied it in a ponytail and got some baggy Old Navy clothes. I even picked up a job working as some professor’s personal assistant.”
“You are shitting me.”
“Nope. I’d just done my third supermodel spy movie and then my writer-director-asshole husband started banging his assistant director.”
“That’s so Hollywood.”
“The assistant director was a guy so it was so West Hollywood.”
“I have no idea what that means but I’m sure it’s funny. What happened to your new life of obscurity among the mere mortals of Cincinnati?”
She drained her glass again. “God is capricious in His wrath, Marky. He sent me another dreamy asshole. I was looking for revenge so I hooked up with a guy in a bar. I called myself Suzy but he must have seen right through the disguise because…you’re going to love this shit.”
“What?”
“I took him home and made the one night stand mistake. I fell asleep before kicking the fucker out and he stole my brand new vacuum cleaner.”
“What?”
“What. Just as I said.”
“Who steals a vacuum cleaner?”
“Oh, it probably ended up on E-bay. Who steals a vacuum cleaner is a guy who knows it’s
my
vacuum cleaner. He knew who I was, fucked me and now he can brag about that plus he got a celebrity souvenir! People think it’s so easy, and a lot of it is. If I could eat like a normal person it might all be worth it but I can’t even do that and keep my job. And I’ve got all these people around me. The agent, the personal assistants, make up and
their
fucking assistants. I quit Cincinnati and went back to Burbank as quick as I could after the whole vacuum cleaner thing.
“Of course, I still don’t know who to trust. You can’t trust everyone when they’re all paid to be there. You should have seen them. They went into shock when I said I was flying back to Maine alone. I guess I should have kept the bodyguards so they could have thumped a few of those goddamn paparazzi at the funeral.”
“Now I’m sorry I didn’t punch out a few for you.”
“Thanks, Marky. You were always my shining knight.
“You made my nights shiny.”
She gave him a big toothy grin that was so defenseless he glimpsed who she had been when they were kids. “So I guess I’m a typical Hollyweird celebrity. It’s all about me! Me! Me!”
“Yeah. Way to hold up the brand.”
“So what about you? Where are you at?”
“I got ambitious too late. Now I’m playing catch-up. I don’t see how I can ever retire from a job I hate. When it comes down to it, I’m just another vulture like those twits at the cemetery.”
“You’re nothing like them.”
He shook his head, meaning to warn her off.
“You’re a journalist and a radio personality. You’re a celebrity, right?”
“Betty Jane. Asia. Whatever. Coming from you, that’s about the cruelest and most insensitive thing you could say.”
She looked down at the filthy rug and seemed to study it for some time.
“I wanted to form a band but got a lousy technical degree instead,” he said. “I fell into being a DJ and somehow ended up no farther than a mile from where I was born. Money and distance from where you’re born: That’s how all success is measured. There’s no end in sight to me going in at five in the morning to do a morning drive show for a place so small there’s no rush hour. When we were—when
I
was a kid — I was so sure I was better than this.”
She looked at him levelly. “Tell me what you want.”
“I want to live where there are palm trees and I don’t have to wait forever for a vacation so I can get somewhere where there’s a Starbucks. I want to live in a city big enough that I can wander around and see something different each time. I want to be able to go somewhere where I can pick up an Irish newspaper or a book that hasn’t been read by someone else first.”
“In other words, you still want what every kid in a small town dreams of?”
“Yeah. It would be nice to go somewhere where there aren’t a bunch of people who remember me as a kid so they talk to me like I’m still a kid. Maybe meet some people who will remember I don’t want to be called Marky anymore.”
She look chagrinned. “Marcus.”
“Thanks. I see you and I am really nostalgic, but the Funky Bunch obsession is way over. Even Marky Mark is Mr. Wahlberg now.”
“So, why not leave?”
“I got bills like everybody else.”
“No ties? I heard you married a nurse from around here.”
“Jodi. Married and divorced. Didn’t last. Now it’s about alimony until she remarries, hopefully to the guy she’s shacked up with right now. Until then, she continues to get a free ride on the Marcus bus.”
“Careful, you sound like my ex. How come it didn’t work out?” she asked.
“She kept comparing herself to you.”
She gasped. Finally, in a voice just above a whisper, she said, “That’s not fair.”
“You’re right. I’m sure that’s not all of it, but the point is, I can’t seem to get out of here. I’ll die here.” He was about to take another drink but found his glass empty and realized he didn’t have the energy to challenge gravity and get over to the bar for another.