Third Girl from the Left (7 page)

 

Two years had passed since Angela had come to LA. She never went home to visit; she didn't call often. Every week at first, halting, filled with pauses, then every month. There were no friends to talk to back there. Louann, married and pregnant already, would not even begin to understand. And her brother and sister remained the strangers they had always been. She did talk to her parents, lying with almost every word she spoke. She told them that she auditioned as much as she could on her lunch hour from the fictional dentist's office. That she lived with two other girls in a nice part of town. That she was dating nice young men and not letting any of them go too far. That she'd heard about this new marijuana, but, no, she didn't know anyone who'd tried it.

Her parents never suggested visiting and eventually they stopped pressing her to come home. Sometimes this made Angela feel a little sad, but other times she thought they could hear that she was a different person now and they didn't want to know about it. She didn't tell them about the movie she was in, the slow hip swivel on the bar.

One cool fall night, when she answered the phone, she didn't recognize the voice. It sounded like a woman's, but it was hard to tell. “Naked. Naked up there” was all the voice said.

“Who is this?” Angela said. She almost hung up, but her hand tightened around the receiver at the same moment.

“You know who this is,” the voice went on. “It's your mother. Though God help me, I never raised you to do anything like that.”

Angela's hand went from tight to boneless. She nearly dropped the phone.

“Angela, you know you are to answer me when I'm speaking to you. I could not believe what I was seeing.”

“Mama?”

She went on. “I
wouldn't
have believed it except I saw it with my own two eyes. Everyone in town is talking. That's why I went. And there you were, right up on that bar. Naked. Naked!”

“Mama, I—”

“What in the name of all that is holy are you going to say to me? What are you going to say to me about that?”

Angela felt her mouth working, tried to think of what she could say. But nothing would come. “You've got nothing to say, have you, miss?” More silence. “Well, I don't want to speak to you until you do. Until you can somehow explain this to me. And I don't see how that day is ever going to come.” Then came the slam of the phone in Angela's ear. Angela sat there, her beautiful face a fist. She could feel all her muscles under her skin, the skin that her mother had seen when she was a baby, the skin that horrifled her now. Her hands rested on her smooth brown thighs, the thighs that frightened her mother. Her breath came hard in her throat. She thought she might vomit.

Sheila was out shopping. Angela choked on the silence in the apartment. Her hand worked furiously twisting her hair in back. After a while—she couldn't have said how long—she got up, took off her robe, and walked into the bathroom. She looked down and surveyed her body. Her skin was the color of pennies underwater, stippled here and there with moles in unexpected but oddly inviting places, like one side of her left knee. Her stomach was a little bit rounded, her breasts medium-sized perfect globes. She cupped her hands underneath them, touched the nipples experimentally. This is what her mother hated and feared—the amount of pleasure her body could give someone, even herself. Her mother would never understand the power of being wanted. The way she felt when she was just a little high and making love, like she was in charge of everything. She slid her hands over her stomach again, felt the insides calm down a little. The outside still looked good.

Angela was sitting in the dark when Sheila came home. She had not risen from the sofa for an hour. Her head hurt. She jumped at the sound of the key in the lock. “Sheila?” Her voice shook.

“Yeah, it's me. What's going on? Why you sitting here in the dark?”

“I just . . . My mama called. She saw one of the movies.” Her voice was tiny as though her throat were stuffed with cotton.

Sheila sat down next to her. “Not too happy, huh?”

“You could say that.” They sat in silence, legs touching, for a while. Finally Sheila spoke. “I've got some good dope,” she said.

“That would be good,” said Angela, wiping at her wet eyes.

“Come on, then. Let me just put my stuff down.” Sheila put her packages into her room, and came out clutching a little Baggie. “A cure for what ails you.” She waved it cheerfully. Angela smiled a little.

Sheila always made a big deal out of putting a joint together. First the picking out of the seeds, then the spreading out the leaves, and, finally, with a noisy, small rattling, shaking out the paper to roll the joint. Angela felt like slugging her. She didn't want to wait for the smooth absence to take her over. She just wanted to be there.

She didn't have any difficulty holding the smoke in her lungs anymore. In fact, she could no longer clearly remember the fear she'd felt when she was faced with that first joint, how nervous she'd been. Now it was all pleasure. She smoked until she couldn't remember her mother's call at all. Well, she did, but it didn't mean anything. What else was her mother going to say? She was her mother, after all.

Once they were high, they rested on the sofa, their legs entangled for a while, their feet lazily rubbing up and down each other's calves.

After a long silence, Sheila spoke. “I got invited to a party in the Hills. All kinds a people gonna be there. Let's go. I don't want”—she sighed deeply, rubbing her hands through the back of her hair—“I don't want to just sit here all night . . . let's get with somebody. Somebody who can do us some good.”

Angela nodded, her eyes still closed. “Yeah,” she murmured. “Let's go.”

So they moved to the bathroom, together, as though underwater. The air was lined with fur. Felt good against their skin, slow, like they could eat it, like chocolate. Sweet.

They chose their outfits together, tight and shiny and beautiful. They leaned toward the mirror together, smoothing on gleaming reddish brown lipstick. They both put on big hoop earrings, earrings that twinkled, small spots of cheap light against their brown skin. They put in eye drops to get rid of the red and picked their hair out to its fullest glory. They put on false eyelashes. They were so stoned that it took a long time. One of Angela's lashes got stuck to her cheek as they laughed helplessly, trying to remove it, then making crooked attempts to glue it onto her eyelid. Finally, they were ready. They fired up another joint that they shared in the car, then had to stop for doughnuts on the way, and then they were winding down the road, out to Bel Air, up to the top of a mountain, Sheila's little orange Bug putting the road away underneath them, gasping a bit at the difficult turns. They laughed a lot at nothing, that kind of obsessive laughing that takes your breath away and makes your eyes water. They didn't want to because it made their mascara run, but they couldn't help it. Everything was just so funny. Sheila drove with her hand on Angela's thigh.

Finally, they pulled up at an enormous house, ablaze with floodlights. Cars dotted every inch of gravel around it. What you could see of the roof was flat and angular, punching the night sky at odd angles. Angela wiped at her eyes and finally said, “Whose house is this? It's fucking huge.”

“It's fucking Wilt Chamberlain's, that's whose,” said Sheila.

“Fuck. No!” Angela screamed. “You got us an invite to Wilt's house! Oh my God! And I was just sitting there all crying and shit when you walked in the house. Why didn't you just tell me?”

“Well,” Sheila said, checking her eyes in the mirror. “I didn't want to make you all nervous, you know. And you were so upset when I came home . . . I don't know. I thought it would be a nice surprise.”

“Hell, yes,” said Angela. She fussed with her hair, reached out and took the lipstick Sheila extended toward her. “Everybody's gonna be here.”

“Damn straight,” said Sheila. “Let's go.”

They jumped out of the car, their four platformed feet hitting the ground at the same instant. Tossed their keys to the valet, who caught them on the beat. Colors pulsed from inside the house, orange and red and bright pink. They turned their heads toward each other, grinned. Walked in the door.

According to an article Angela had read in
Ebony
, the soft gray fur of the enormous conversation pit, had been gleaned, along with the fur for Wilt's gigantic bedspread, from the nose fur of seventeen thousand Arctic wolves. The grayness was covered by brown bodies dressed in every silky shade of the rainbow, and over to the left, on a bed set into the middle of the floor, bodies half-undressed, entangled, flashes of breast and hair, a hand moving. The air was sulfurous with the mixed tang of pot and cigarette smoke. “Freddie's Dead” pounded out of the stereo speakers, making their flared pant legs vibrate. Hundreds of people talked, embraced, screamed, pulled slowly on joints, and hoovered coke off a low glass table and off the belly of a blond woman who lay on the floor, spread-eagled, her eyes closed, her shirt off, slowly rubbing her nipples as if she were alone in her bedroom. Angela took it all in with the diffidence of the truly high. Then she felt a hand on her neck as she made her way toward the scene. “What's up, lovely ladies?” Some man she'd never seen before, good-looking but still . . . She needed to find out who he was before she did anything. Her heart hummed in her chest.

“I'm doing all right. This is my friend . . . ,” she trailed off. Sheila was gone. “Well, she was right here.”

“Yeah, I saw her go. You're the one I wanted to talk to anyway.” The smile. The look. The joint offered. The dance begun. He had a name. What was it? Sam or Tony or Reggie or John. This one was named Rafe. They always stood too close. They always looked at her face for one minute and her breasts for five. They always offered her joints and she always took them, inhaling deeply, feeling her head waft away from her body. Her mother wouldn't have believed she could be so fast, going on the pill so she could fuck whomever she pleased, whenever she pleased, without worrying. Sizing it up. Looking for kicks. Filling her lungs with that sweet smoke and then dancing with him. He smelled good, like some kind of flower. She was so high that it was getting hard to stay awake, but she didn't want to sleep, she didn't want to miss this, so when he held the little mirror out to her, the powder heaped in a line, she took the rolled bill gratefully. As soon as she snorted it, she felt the top of her head explode, all light stars inside. In a minute or so she thought she might never need to sleep again. All she needed to do was keep dancing, keep talking, keep feeling Rafe's lean hips against hers. She felt like every good idea ever conceived. She could see Sheila across the room in the conversation pit and she laughed and waved. Sheila laughed back. She had caught the night's real prize; her leg was thrown casually across Wilt's long, long leg as if Sheila found herself hugged up to the world's most famous basketball player every day. He was rubbing her neck. They weren't in a hurry. They both knew how this scene would end. Sheila smiled up at him, then back at Angela. “That your friend?” said Rafe.

“Yeah. Looks like Wilt's gonna get lucky tonight,” said Angela.

“Wilt? How would you know he's getting lucky with your friend?”

Angela smiled mysteriously. “A girl can just tell.” She ground her hips into his a little. “If you play your cards right, you might get lucky too.” She could see he was trying to figure out the deal between her and Sheila. She could tell it turned him on too, which just got her more excited. The song had changed to “Ben.” Angela saw Wilt get up, extend his hand to Sheila. They left the room, he lowering his hand to cup her ass briefly. Rafe looked at them speculatively. “Guess you're right about Wilt.” He paused. “You know, the playroom—where they're going—is just down that hall. Wanna go with?” Angela had been running her tongue around and around her teeth. She felt the separation of each one with particular intensity. “Sure. Let's see what they're doing.” She looked at him, her eyes challenging.

They went down the hall, which was dimly lit every few feet with sconces that gave off a warm purple light. Rafe backed Angela up underneath one of them and started kissing her before they even got to the playroom. She couldn't open her mouth wide enough underneath his. Couldn't pull him close enough to her. He stopped after a minute and pulled her the rest of the way down the hall.

The playroom. What to say about the playroom? There wasn't a pinball machine. The room had five sides, three of them mirrored, and a vast pink circular sofa surrounding a huge open surface that undulated gently from the weight of the bodies already moving on it: the biggest waterbed Angela had ever seen. When she and Rafe entered the room, Sheila and Wilt were already there, had already begun. They stood in the doorway a frozen moment, quiet. Angela's high fell away just for a second; she remembered what it was like to crouch in her mama's backyard with her sister, watching a box they had propped up on a stick and waiting for a bird to blunder underneath. They always thought that someday they'd catch a bird that way. But they never did. Where'd that come from? That memory somehow propelled her into the room in front of Rafe, propelled her onto the bed next to her friend. Sheila opened her eyes and looked at Angela steadily. She was so lovely; Angela wanted to kiss her. Wilt was still working away on Sheila's breasts, but Angela knew in that moment that Sheila was thinking of her. Wilt never looked up. Angela swallowed and sank onto the bed, and Rafe came up behind her on his knees, his hands on her breasts before she could even exhale. She could feel his breath hot on the back of her neck. “You done this before?” she murmured.

“Done what?”

“You know—more than one person,” she said.