Читать книгу Radiance - Louis B. Jones - Страница 6

FIRST, IN HER car, he did the obvious thing, he dialed Lotta’s cell phone, but he knew what would happen. He of course got the recording of her voice (Hi everybody, it’s Carlotta. Leave me a message)—but only after she’d let it ring six times—meaning she knew it was him but didn’t want to answer. Blythe as she drove listened to the failure of the call. And when he folded his phone she told him, “The area where she got out, all along there it’s safe. It’s all tourists and shoppers. One of my, actually, favorite restaurants is there.” She glanced to see if he was worried. “This happens often. Somebody goes off, and whenever it happens Billie has to come out—and she has to get you to come out—because legally now you’re responsible for the little Celebrity, not Fantasy Vacations Incorporated. Billie will be there. She’ll meet us at the Studio Lot, and then we’ll look for Lotta. And just keep calling till she does answer. She’s just riled up.”

The story, as Blythe had got it from Billie, was that Lotta was spied in the back seat of Bodie’s limousine, and that she wasn’t resisting but rather taking an active part. They’d been parked in a side street. The two kids who had looked in through the tinted glass and, quite by accident, caught them were Rachel and Josh, a girl from New York and a boy from San Diego, a pair of teenage Celebrities on the tour who themselves had been developing their own romance during the weekend.

These, all of them, were all good-hearted kids; nobody was invidious in the way Mark had feared spoiled children would be, and nobody would want to embarrass Lotta. They tended to take care of each other. The New York girl, Rachel, had ambitions as a singer-songwriter and strummed an acoustic guitar while simultaneously managing the curtain of her lustrous hair, keeping it away from the guitar fretboard; and Josh was a very serious classical pianist who preferred to be called by an Arabic name: he was either pretending to convert, or had genuinely converted, to Islam (at age sixteen, from Mormon parents, in the pretty little Southern California town of La Jolla). Everyone kept reverting to calling him Josh, because the Arabic name he’d chosen was completely unmemorable; also, it involved a throat-clearing sound in the middle that nobody could master. He had made a minor nuisance of himself, during the week, by requiring that all his food be halal, somewhat overscrupulously halal, and complaining that the girl Celebrities in the group, including Lotta, dressed too revealingly and danced too suggestively. (However, he and Rachel were the only two kids on the trip who were known to be, at night, tiptoeing in the corridors visiting each other’s rooms.)

For their tryst, Bodie and Lotta’s limousine had been parked on a street off Sunset Boulevard. After their friends discovered them embracing, Bodie and Lotta had rapped on the screen that occludes the driver in the front seat, and they told him to get going. Then, after a few blocks, Lotta asked him to stop so she could be let off, apparently in some emotional distress. The driver was going to be reprimanded by the Fantasy Vacations office because it turns out the drivers are legally responsible for the return of their young Celebrities to their hotel rooms. He’d been sent straight back to the neighborhood, to have a look around for her, but of course Lotta had long since traveled up Sunset, and he’d had to report back that he couldn’t find her. Mark, for his part, as father, would find the driver excusable, because he knew Lotta, and how ravishingly authoritative she could be (particularly when she was agitated).

The driver had told the chaperones, and word got out, and all the other young Celebrities learned that Lotta was out there alone somewhere, so they all began to fret over her. They saw her as a girl who didn’t merely need to be located, she needed to be redeemed from a boy’s infamous discourtesies. They all wanted to form a search party. She was out alone in Hollywood, standing on a curb somewhere, presumably wearing the same outfit she’d performed in, the red dress from the thrift shop. With a slit hem.

Her disabled boyfriend, meanwhile, had told the driver to take him back to the hotel, where he had holed up in his room. Bodie was a young Celebrity who had come on the trip without his parents. This was his second year with Celebrity Vacations, and his parents had preferred to stay home in Shaker Heights. (The other orphan this week was Rachel. Her parents, too, had stayed home even though it was Rachel’s first time, but Rachel was such a sophisticate she could go anywhere.)

Mark, looking within himself, found that there were layers. A topmost layer of him absolutely forgave both kids of course; a little misjudgment in love is a trifling and even necessary learning experience; he had once been young, too, and he knew all about the vagaries of flirting, delight, acquiescence, mistakenness, and he was even slightly pleased, that Lotta should have the blessing of ardors. All this is part of life. Looking at the thing in this light, he hated it that, through bad luck, her first foray into that enchanted forest had become a public comedy. Yet another part of his mind kept reverting to the scene itself. Since Bodie was paralyzed from the waist down, and since there was the added pathos of his terminal illness, he had to wonder. What were the emotional assumptions in this relationship—and what the mechanics, too, incidentally?—because the terrible picture to be blackened from imagination was of Bodie’s handsome lip snarling in sedentary lordship’s pleasure. There was a certain paternal layer of himself that sent wrath surging into his hands. He sat there in the zipping, lurching Subaru watching the strip malls of L.A. go past—all looking universally like crime-scene footage from the ten o’clock news—and he despised the suave expression he imagined on that Bodie’s handsome face. Disability or no disability, Bodie was an operator. There was, in Bodie’s perfect courtesy and self-assurance, something authoritarian, something fascist; it was visible even at the first day’s Meet-and-Greet, a vigilance, a hyperalertness. The boy had a way of seeming, though seated, to tower over others in the room.

“Does that one, in fact, have a terminal condition?” he snapped, recklessly. He hadn’t really considered anybody could doubt Bodie’s claim to be doomed. There was no empirical reason to disbelieve him.

However, his intuition seemed right on target because Blythe, while she drove, rolled her eyes and let out a deflating whistle. For a minute she paid attention to driving, and then she admitted, “On the one hand, I personally believe him, but his medical form they fill out mentions nothing terminal. And some people on staff have noticed how he tends to tell people all about it, when he first meets people. But personally I wonder why would anybody want to invent such a story?”

Mark imagined the boy now back in his hotel room raiding the minibar for all its chocolate, by way of solace. Calling up room service. Watching television on the bed. Doing the daily calisthenics that keep him in such tip-top shape.

Right now as father it was his main job to protect and salvage Lotta’s fragile dignity. Without censoriousness, without making evaluations, nor even inquiring into the facts, the thing to do would be to find her and get her out of the environment of Celebrity Vacations—and if possible transport her away, to some distraction. If she were still five years old, an ice cream cone would make everything all right.

His own cell phone started ringing. It wouldn’t be her, it would be Audrey at home. It was the home ringtone, and this was the right time of the evening for her call.