Читать книгу A Model World - Michael Chabon, Michael Chabon - Страница 7

On the morning of his cousin’s wedding Ira performed his toilet, as he always did, with patience, hope, and a ruthless punctilio. He put on his Italian wool trousers, his silk shirt, his pink socks, to which he imputed a certain sexual felicity, and a slightly worn but still serviceable Willi Smith sport jacket. He shaved the delta of skin between his eyebrows and took a few extra minutes to clean out the inside of his car, a battered, faintly malodorous Japanese hatchback of no character whatever. Ira never went anywhere without expecting that when he arrived there he would meet the woman with whom he had been destined to fall in love. He drove across Los Angeles from Palms to Arcadia, where his cousin Sheila was being married in a synagogue Ira got lost trying to find. When he walked in late he disturbed the people sitting at the back of the shul, and his aunt Lillian, when he joined her, pinched his arm quite painfully. The congregation was dour and Conservative, and as the ceremony dragged on Ira found himself awash in a nostalgic tedium, and he fell to wishing for irretrievable things.

At the reception that followed, in the banquet room of the old El Imperio Hotel in Pasadena, he looked in vain for one of his more interesting young female cousins, such as Zipporah from Berkeley, who was six feet tall and on the women’s crew at Cal, or that scary one, Leah Black, who had twice, in their childhoods, allowed Ira to see what he wanted to see. Both Ira and Sheila sprang from a rather disreputable branch of Wisemans, however, and her wedding was poorly attended by the family. All the people at Ira’s table were of the groom’s party, except for Ira’s great-aunts, Lillian and Sophie, and Sophie’s second husband, Mr. Lapidus.

“You need a new sport jacket,” said Aunt Sophie.

“He needs a new watch,” said Aunt Lillian.

Mr. Lapidus said that what Ira needed was a new barber. A lively discussion arose at table 17, as the older people began to complain about contemporary hairstyles, with Ira’s itself—there was some fancy clipperwork involved—cited frequently as an instance of their inscrutability. Ira zoned out and ate three or four pounds of the salmon carpaccio with lemon cucumber and cilantro that the waiters kept bringing around, and also a substantial number of boletus-mushroom-and-goat-cheese profiteroles. He watched the orchestra members, particularly the suave-looking black tenor saxophonist with dreadlocks, and tried to imagine what they were thinking about as they blew all that corny cha-cha-cha. He watched Sheila and her new husband whispering and box-stepping, and undertook the same experiment. She seemed pleased enough—smiling and flushed and mad to be wearing that dazzling dress—but she didn’t look like she was in love, as he imagined love to look. Her eye was restive, vaguely troubled, as though she were trying to remember exactly who this man was with his arms around her waist, tipping her backward on one leg and planting a kiss on her throat.

It was as he watched Sheila and Barry walk off the dance floor that the woman in the blue dress caught Ira’s eye, then looked away. She was sitting with two other women, at a table under one of the giant palm trees that stood in pots all across the banquet room, which the hotel called the Oasis Room and had been decorated to suit. When Ira returned her gaze he felt a pleasant internal flush, as though he had just knocked back a shot of whiskey. The woman’s expression verged a moment on nearsightedness before collapsing into a vaguely irritable scowl. Her hair was frizzy and tinted blond, her lips were thick and red but grim and disapproving, and her eyes, which might have been gray or brown, were painted to match her electric dress. Subsequent checking revealed that her body had aged better than her fading face, which nonetheless he found beautiful, and in which, in the skin at her throat and around her eyes, he thought he read strife and sad experience and a willingness to try her luck.

Ira stood and approached the woman, on the pretext of going over to the bar, a course which required that he pass her table. As he did so he stole another long look, and eavesdropped on an instant of her conversation. Her voice was soft and just a little woeful as she addressed the women beside her, saying something deprecating, it seemed to Ira, about lawyers’ shoes. The holes in her earlobes were filled with simple gold posts. Ira swung like a comet past the table, trailing, as he supposed, a sparkling wake of lustfulness and Eau Sauvage, but she seemed not to notice him, and when he reached the bar he found, to his surprise, that he genuinely wanted a drink. His body was unpredictable and resourceful in malfunction, and he was not, as a result, much of a drinker; but it was an open bar, after all. He ordered a double shot of Sauza.

There were two men talking behind him, waiting for their drinks, and Ira edged a little closer to them, without turning around, so that he could hear better. He was a fourth-year drama student at UCLA and diligent about such valuable actorly exercises as eavesdropping, spying, and telling complicated lies to fellow passengers on airplanes.

“That Charlotte was a class A, top-of-the-line, capital B-I-T bitch,” said one of the men, in the silky tones of an announcer on a classical music station. “And fucked up from her ass to her eyebrows.” He had a very faint New York accent.

“Exactly, exactly,” said the other, who sounded older, and well-accustomed to handing out obsequious counsel to young men. “No question. You had to fire her.”

“I should have done it the day it happened. Ha ha. Pow, fired in her own bed.”

“Exactly. Ha ha.”

“Ira!” It was his cousin, the bride, bright and still pink from dancing. Sheila had long, kinky black hair, spectacular eyelashes, and a nose that, like Ira’s, flirted dangerously, but on the whole successfully, with immenseness. He thought she looked really terrific, and he congratulated her wistfully. Ira and Sheila had at one time been close. Sheila hung an arm around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. Her breath blew warm in his ear. “What is that you’re drinking?”

“Tequila,” he said. He turned to try to get a glimpse of the men at the bar, but it was too late. They had been replaced by a couple of elderly women with empty highball glasses and giant clip-on earrings.

“Can I try?” She sipped at it and made a face. “I hope it makes you feel better than it tastes.”

“It couldn’t,” Ira said, taking a more appreciative pull of his own.

Sheila studied his face, biting at her lip. They hadn’t seen one another since the evening, over a year before, when she had taken him to see some dull and infuriating Soviet movie—Shadow of Uzbek Love, or something like that—at UCLA. She was looking, it seemed to him, for signs of change.

“So are you dating anyone?” she said, and there was a glint of tension in her casual tone.

“Lots of people.”

“Uh huh. Do you want to meet someone?”

“No thanks.” Things had gotten a little wiggly, Ira now recalled, in the car on the way home from Westwood that night. Sheila drove one of those tiny Italian two-seaters capable of filling very rapidly with sexual tension, in particular at a stop light, with Marvin Gaye coming over the radio and a pretty cousin in the driver’s seat, chewing thoughtfully on a strand of hair. Ira, in a sort of art-house funk, had soon found himself babbling on about Marx and George Orwell and McCarthyism, and praying for green lights; and when they arrived at his place he had dashed up the steps into his apartment and locked the door behind him. He shook his head, wondering at this demureness, and drained the glass of tequila. He said, “Do you want to dance?”

They went out onto the floor and spun around a few times slowly to “I’ll Never Be the Same.” Sheila felt at once soft and starchy in her taffeta dress, gigantic and light as down.

“I really wish you would meet my friend Carmen,” said Sheila. “She needs to meet a nice man. She lives next door to my parents in Altadena. Her husband used to beat her but now they’re divorced. She has the most beautiful gray eyes.”

At this Ira stiffened, and he blew the count.

“Sitting right over there under the palm tree? In the blue dress?”

“Ouch! That’s my foot.”

“Sorry.”

“So you noticed her! Great. Go on, I., ask her to dance. She’s so lonesome anymore.”

The information that the older woman might actually welcome his overtures put him off, and somehow made him less certain of success. Ira tried to formulate a plausible excuse.

“She looks mean,” he said. “She gave me a nasty look not five minutes ago. Oh, hey. It’s Donna.”

“Donna!”

Donna Furman, in a sharp gray sharkskin suit, approached and kissed the bride, first on the hand with the ring, then once on each cheek, in a gesture that struck Ira as oddly papal and totally Hollywood. Donna started to tell Sheila how beautiful she looked, but then some people with cameras came by and swept Sheila away, so Donna threw out her arms to Ira, and the cousins embraced. She wore her short hair slicked back with something that had an ozone smell and it crackled against Ira’s ear. Donna was a very distant relation, and several years older than Ira, but as the Furmans had lived in Glassell Park, not far from Ira’s family in Mt. Washington, Ira had known Donna all his life, and he was glad to see her.

This feeling of gladness was not entirely justified by recent history, as Donna, a girl with a clever tongue and a scheming imagination, had grown into a charming but unreliable woman, and if Ira had stopped to consider he might, at first, have had a bone or two to pick with his fourth cousin once removed. She was a good-looking, dark-complected lesbian—way out in the open about that—with a big bust and a twelve-thousand-dollar smile. The vein of roguery that had found its purest expression in Sheila’s grandfather, Milton Wiseman, a manufacturer of diet powders and placebo aphrodisiacs, ran thin but rich through Donna’s character. She talked fast and took recondite drugs and told funny stories about famous people whom she claimed to know. Despite the fact that she worked for one of the big talent agencies in Culver City, in their music division, and made ten times what Ira did waiting tables and working summers at a Jewish drama camp up in Idyllwild, Donna nonetheless owed Ira, at the time of this fond embrace, three hundred and twenty-five dollars.

“We ought to go out to Santa Anita tonight,” Donna said, winking one of her moist brown eyes, which she had inherited from her mother, a concentration camp survivor, a Hollywood costume designer, and a very sweet lady who had taken an overdose of sleeping pills when Donna was still a teenager. Donna’s round, sorrowful eyes made it impossible to doubt that somewhere deep within her lay a wise and tormented soul; in her line of work they were her trump card.

“I’d love to,” said Ira. “You can stake me three hundred and twenty-five bucks.”

“Oh, right! I forgot about that!” Donna said, squeezing Ira’s hand. “I have my checkbook in the car.”

“I heard you brought a date, Donna,” Ira went on, not wanting to bring out the squirreliness in his cousin right off the bat. When Donna began to squeeze your hand it was generally a portent of fictions and false rationales. She was big on touching, which was all right with Ira. He liked being touched. “So where is the unfortunate girl?”

“Over there,” Donna said, inclining her head toward Ira as though what she was about to say were inside information capable of toppling a regime or piling up a fortune in a single afternoon. “At that table under the palm tree, there. With those other two women. The tall one in the flowery thing, with the pointy nose. Her name’s Audrey.”

“Does she work with you?” said Ira, happy to have an excuse to stare openly at Carmen, seated to the right of Donna’s date and now looking back at Ira in a way that, he thought, could hardly be mistaken. He wiggled his toes a few times within his lucky pink socks. Donna’s date, Audrey, waved her fingers at them. She was pretty, with an expensive, blunt hairdo and blue eyes, although her nose was as pointed as a marionette’s.

“She lives in my building. Audrey’s at the top, at the very summit, I., of a vast vitamin pyramid. Like, we’re talking, I don’t know, ten thousand people, from Oxnard to Norco. Here, I’ll take you over.” She took hold of the sleeve of Ira’s jacket, then noticed the empty shot glass in his hand. “Hold on, let me buy you a drink.” This was said without a trace of irony. “Drinking shots?”

“Sauza. Two story.”

“A C.C. and water with a twist and a double Sauza,” she said to the bartender. “Tequila makes you unlucky with women.”

“See that blonde Audrey is sitting beside?”

“Yeah? With the nasty mouth?”

“I’d like to be unlucky with her.”

“Drink this,” said Donna, handing Ira a shot glass filled to the brim with liquid the very hue of hangover and remorse. “From what I heard she’s a basket case, I. Bad husband. A big mess. She keeps taking these beta-carotene tablets every time she has a Seven and Seven, like it’s some kind of post-divorce diet or I don’t know.”

“I think she likes me.” They had started toward the table but stopped now to convene a hasty parley on the dance floor, beneath the frond of a squat fan palm. Donna had been giving Ira sexual advice since he was nine.

“How old are you now, twenty-one?”

“Almost.”

“She’s older than I am, Ira!” Donna patted herself on the chest. “You don’t want to get involved with someone so old. You want someone who still has all her delusions intact, or whatever.”

Ira studied Carmen as his cousin spoke, sensing the truth in what she said. He had yet to fall in love to the degree that he felt he was capable of falling, had never written villanelles or declarations veiled in careful metaphor, nor sold his blood plasma to buy champagne or jonquils, nor haunted a mailbox or a phone booth or a certain café, nor screamed his beloved’s name in the streets at three in the morning, heedless of the neighbors, and it seemed possible that to fall for a woman who had been around the block a few times might be to rob himself of much of the purely ornamental elements, the swags and antimacassars of first love. No doubt Carmen had had enough of such things. And yet it was her look of disillusion, of detachment, those stoical blue eyes in the middle of that lovely, beaten face, that most attracted him. It would be wrong to love her, he could see that; but he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.

“Just introduce me to her, Donnie,” he said, “and you don’t have to pay me back.”

“Pay you back what?” said Donna, lighting up her halogen smile.

She was a basket case. The terra cotta ashtray before her on the table, stamped with the words EL IMPERIO, was choked with the slender butts of her cigarettes, and the lit square she held in her long, pretty fingers was trembling noticeably and spewing a huge, nervous chaos of smoke. Her gray eyes were large and moist and pink as though she had been crying not five minutes ago, and when Donna, introducing Ira, laid a hand on her shoulder, it looked as though Carmen might start in again, from the shock and the unexpected softness of this touch. All of these might have escaped Ira’s notice or been otherwise explained, but on the empty seat beside her, where Ira hoped to install himself, sat her handbag, unfastened and gaping, and one glimpse of it was enough to convince Ira that Carmen was a woman out of control. Amid a blizzard of wadded florets of Kleenex, enough to decorate a small parade float, Ira spotted a miniature bottle of airline gin, a plastic bag of jellybeans (all black ones), two unidentifiable vials of prescription medication, a crumpled and torn road map, the wreckage of a Hershey bar, and a key chain, in the shape of a brontosaurus, with one sad key on it. The map was bent and misfolded in such a way that only the fragmentary words S ANGEL, in one corner, were legible.

“Carmen Wallace, this is my adorable little cousin Ira,” Donna said, using the hand that was not resting on Carmen’s bare shoulder to pull at Ira’s cheek. “He asked to meet you.”

“How do you do,” said Ira, blushing badly.

“Hi,” Carmen said, setting her cigarette on the indented lip of the ashtray and extending the tips of her fingers toward Ira, who paused a moment—channeling all of his sexual energy into the center of his right palm—then took them. They were soft and gone in an instant, withdrawn as though he had burned her.

“And this is Audrey—”

“Hi, Audrey.”

“—and Doreen, who’s a—friend?—of the groom’s.”

Ira shook hands with these two and, once Carmen had moved her appalling purse onto the floor beside her to make room for him, soon found himself in the enviable position of being the only man at a table of five. Doreen was wearing a bright yellow dress with an extremely open bodice; she had come to her friend Barry’s wedding exposing such a great deal of her remarkable chest that Ira wondered about her motives. She was otherwise a little on the plain side and she had a sour, horsey laugh, but she was in real estate and Donna and Audrey, who were thinking of buying a house together, seemed to have a lot to say to her. There was nothing for him and Carmen to do but speak to each other.

“Sheila says you live next door to her folks?” Ira said. Carmen nodded, then turned her head to exhale a long jet of smoke. The contact of their eyes was brief but he thought it had something to it. There was about an inch and a half of Sauza left in Ira’s glass and he drained a quarter inch of it, figuring this left him with enough to get through another five questions. He could already tell that talking to Carmen was not going to be easy, but he considered this an excellent omen. Easy flirtation had always struck him as an end in itself and one which did not particularly interest him.

“Is it that big wooden house with the sort of, I don’t know, those things, those rafters or whatever, sticking out from under all the roofs?” He spread the fingers of one hand and slid them under the other until they protruded, making a crude approximation of the overhanging eaves of a California bungalow. There was such a grand old house, to the north of Sheila’s parents, that he’d always admired.

Another nod. She had a habit of opening her eyes very wide, every so often, almost a tic, and Ira wondered if her contact lenses might not be slipping.

“It’s a Hetrick and Dewitt,” she said bitterly, as though this were the most withering pair of epithets that could be applied to a house. These were the first words she had addressed to him and in them, though he didn’t know what she was talking about, he sensed a story. He took another little sip of tequila and nodded agreeably.

“You live in a Hetrick and Dewitt?” said Doreen, interrupting her conversation with Donna and Audrey to reach across Audrey’s lap and tap Carmen on the arm. She looked amazed. “Which one?”

“It’s the big pretentious one on Orange Blossom, in Altadena,” Carmen said, stubbing out her cigarette. She gave a very caustic sigh and then rose to her feet; she was taller than Ira had thought. Having risen to her feet rather dramatically, she now seemed uncertain of what to do next and stood wavering a little on her blue spike heels. It was clear she felt that she had been wrong to come to Sheila’s wedding, but that was all she seemed able to manage, and after a moment she sank slowly back into her seat. Ira felt very sorry for her and tried to think of something she could do besides sit and look miserable. At that moment the band launched into “Night and Day,” and Ira happened to look toward the table where he had left his aunts. Mr. Lapidus was pulling out his aunt Sophie’s chair and taking her arm. They were going to dance.

“Carmen, would you like to dance?” Ira said, blushing, and wiggling his toes.

Her reply was no more than a whisper, and Ira wasn’t sure if he heard it correctly, but it seemed to him that she said, “Anything.”

They walked, separately, out to the dance floor, and turned to face each other. For an awful moment they just stood, tapping their hesitant feet. But the two old people were describing a slow arc in Ira’s general direction, and finally in order to forestall any embarrassing exhortations from Mr. Lapidus, who was known for such things, Ira reached out and took Carmen by the waist and palm, and twirled her off across the wide parquet floor of the Oasis Room. It was an old-fashioned sort of tune and there was no question of their dancing to it any way but in each other’s arms.

“You’re good at this,” Carmen said, smiling for the first time that he could remember.

“Thanks,” said Ira. He was in fact a competent dancer—his mother, preparing him for a fantastic and outmoded destiny, had taught him a handful of hokey old steps. Carmen danced beautifully, and he saw to his delight that he had somehow hit upon the precise activity to bring her, for the moment anyway, out of her beta-carotene and black jellybean gloom. “So are you.”

“I used to work at the Arthur Murray on La Cienega,” she said, moving one hand a little lower on his back. “That was fifteen years ago.”

This apparently wistful thought seemed to revive her accustomed gloominess a little, and she took on the faraway, hollow expression of a taxi dancer, and grew heavy in his arms. The action of her legs became overly thoughtful and accurate. Ira searched for something to talk about, to distract her with, but all of the questions he came up with had to do, at least in some respect, with her, and he sensed that anything on this subject might plunge her, despite her easy two-step, into an irrevocable sadness. At last the bubble of silence between them grew too great, and Ira pierced it helplessly.

“Where did you grow up?” he said, looking away as he spoke.

“In hotels,” said Carmen, and that was that. “I don’t think Sheila is happy, do you?” She coughed, and then the song came abruptly to an end. The bandleader set down his trumpet, tugged the microphone up to his mouth, and announced that in just a few short moments the cake was going to be cut.

When they returned to the table a tall, handsome man, his black hair thinning but his chin cleft and his eyes pale green, was standing behind Carmen’s empty chair, leaning against it and talking to Donna, Audrey, and Doreen. He wore a fancy, European-cut worsted suit, a purple and sky blue paisley necktie, a blazing white-on-white shirt, and a tiny sparkler in the lobe of his left ear. His nose was large, bigger even than Ira’s, and of a complex shape, like the blade of some highly specialized tool; it dominated his face in a way that made the man himself seem dominating. The shining fabric of his suit jacket caught and stretched across the muscles of his shoulders. When Carmen approached her place at the table, he drew her chair for her. She thanked him with a happy and astonishingly carnal smile, and as she sat down he peered, with a polished audacity that made Ira wince in envy, into the scooped neck of her dress.

“Carmen, Ira,” said Doreen, “this is Jeff Freebone.” As Doreen introduced the handsome Mr. Freebone, all of the skin that was visible across her body colored a rich blood-orange red. Ira’s hand vanished momentarily into a tanned, forehand-smashing grip. Ira looked at Donna, hoping to see at least some hint of unimpressedness in her lesbian and often cynical gaze, but his cousin had the same shining-eyed sort of Tiger Beat expression on her face as Doreen and Carmen—and Audrey, for that matter—and Ira realized that Jeff Freebone must be very, very rich.

“What’s up, Ira?” he said, in a smooth, flattened-out baritone to which there clung a faint tang of New York City, and Ira recognized him, with a start, as the coarse man at the bar who had fired an unfortunate woman named Charlotte in her own bed.

“Jeff here used to work in the same office as Barry and me,” Doreen told Carmen. “Now he has his own company.”

“Freebone Properties,” Carmen said, looking more animated than she had all afternoon. “I’ve seen the signs on front lawns, right?”

“Billboards,” said Donna. “Ads on TV.”

“How was the wedding?” Jeff wanted to know. He went around Carmen and sat down in the chair beside her, leaving Ira to stand, off to one side, glowering at his cousin Donna, who was clearly going to leave him high and dry in this. “Did they stand under that tent thing and break the mirror or whatever?”

Ira was momentarily surprised, and gratified, by this display of ignorance, since he had taken Jeff for Jewish. Then he remembered that many of Donna’s Hollywood friends spoke with a shmoozing accent whether they were Jewish or not, even ex-cheerleaders from Ames, Iowa, and men named Lars.

“It was weird,” Carmen declared, without elaborating—not even Jeff Freebone, apparently, could draw her out—and the degree of acquiescence this judgment received at the table shocked Ira. He turned to seek out Sheila among the hundreds of faces that filled the Oasis Room, to see if she was all right, but could not find her. There was a small crowd gathered around the cathedral cake at the far end of the room, but the bride did not seem to be among them. Weird—what had been weird about it? Was Sheila not, after all, in love with her two hours’ husband? Ira tapped his foot to the music, self-conscious, and pretended to continue his search for Sheila, although in truth he was not looking at anything anymore. He was mortified by the quickness with which his love affair with the sad and beautiful woman of his dreams had been derailed, and all at once—the tequila he had drunk had begun to betray him—he came face to face with the distinct possibility that not only would he never find the one he was meant to find, but that no else ever did, either. The discussion around the table hurtled off into the imaginary and vertiginous world of real estate. Finally he had to take hold of a nearby chair and sit down.

“I can get you three mil for it, sight unseen,” Jeff Freebone was declaring. He leaned back in his seat and folded his hands behind his head.

“It’s worth way more,” said Donna, giving Carmen a poke in the ribs. “It’s a work of art, Jeff.”

“It’s a Hetrick and Dewitt,” said everyone at the table, all at once.

“You have to see it,” Doreen said.

“All right then, let’s see it. I drove my Rover, we can all fit. Take me to see it.”

There was moment of hesitation, during which the four women seemed to consider the dictates of decorum and the possible implications of the proposed expedition to see the house that Carmen hated.

“The cake is always like sliced cardboard at these things, anyway,” said Donna.

This seemed to decide them, and there followed a general scraping of chairs and gathering of summer wraps.

“Aren’t you coming?” said Donna, leaning over Ira—who had settled into a miserable, comfortable slouch—and whispering into his ear. The others were already making their way out of the Oasis Room. Ira scowled at her.

“Hey, come on, I. She needs a realtor, not a lover. Besides, she was way too old for you.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed the top of his head. “Okay, sulk. I’ll call you.” Then she buttoned her sharkskin jacket and turned on one heel.

After Ira had been sitting alone at the table for several minutes, half hoping his aunt Lillian would notice his distress and bring over a piece of cake or a petit four and a plateful of her comforting platitudes, he noticed that Carmen, not too surprisingly, had left her handbag behind. He got up from his chair and went to pick it up. For a moment he peered into it, aroused, despite himself, by the intimacy of this act, like reading a woman’s diary, or putting one’s hand inside her empty shoe. Then he remembered his disappointment and his anger, and his fist closed around one of the vials of pills, which he quickly slipped into his pocket.

“Ira, have you seen Sheila?”

Ira dropped the purse, and whirled around. It was indeed his aunt Lillian but she looked very distracted and didn’t seem aware of having caught Ira in the act. She kept tugging at the fringes of her wildly patterned scarf.

“Not recently,” said Ira. “Why?”

Aunt Lillian explained that someone, having drunk too much, had fallen onto the train of Sheila’s gown and torn it slightly; this had seemed to upset Sheila a good deal and she had gone off somewhere, no one knew where. The bathrooms and the lobbies of the hotel had all been checked. The cake-cutting was fifteen minutes overdue.

“I’ll find her,” said Ira.

He went out into the high, cool lobby and crossed it several times, his heels clattering across the marble floors and his soles susurrant along the Persian carpets. He climbed a massive oak staircase to the mezzanine, where he passed through a pair of French doors that opened onto a long balcony overlooking the sparkling pool. Here he found her, dropped in one corner of the terrace like a blown flower. She had taken the garland from her brow and was twirling it around and around in front of her face with the mopey fascination of a child. When she felt Ira’s presence she turned, and, seeing him, broke out in a teary-eyed grin that he found very difficult to bear. He walked over to her and sat down beside her on the rough stucco deck of the balcony.

“Hi,” he said.

“Are they all going nuts down there?”

“I guess. I heard about your dress. I’m really sorry.”

“It’s all right.” She stared through the posts of the balustrade at the great red sun going down over Santa Monica. There had been a lot of rain the past few days and the air was heartbreakingly clear. “You just feel like such a, I don’t know, a big stupid puppet or something, getting pulled around.”

Ira edged a little closer to his cousin and she laid her head against his shoulder, and sighed. The contact of her body was so welcome and unsurprising that it frightened him, and he began to fidget with the vial in his pocket.

“What’s that?” she said, at the faint rattle.

He withdrew the little bottle and held it up to the dying light. There was no label of any kind on its side.

“I sort of stole them from your friend Carmen.”

Sheila managed an offhand smile.

“Oh—how did that work out? I saw you dancing.”

“She wasn’t for me,” said Ira. He unscrewed the cap and tipped the vial into his hand. There were only two pills left, small, pink, shaped like commas—two little pink teardrops. “Any idea what these are? Could they be beta-carotene?”

Sheila shook her head and extended one hand, palm upward. At first Ira thought she wanted him to place one of the pills upon it, but she shook her head again; when he took her outstretched fingers in his she nodded.

“Ira,” she said in the heaviest of voices, bringing her bridal mouth toward his. Just before he kissed her he closed his eyes, brought his own hand to his mouth, and swallowed, hard.

“My darling,” he said.