Roadmap Part 5

CHAPTER 17 - THE SONS OF GANGSTERS ARE NICE

"'What time do you get home at night? Where do you go when you stay out?'" Edward's imitating Carmelita—hip out, lips pouty.  He's stopped in mid-smoothie to show me how she questioned him.  He's obviously turned on.

On his way to the bathroom, he asks if I'd like to go to the Chill Out with Suki and him, when she gets up.

Last night when I got home, Tony's door was open and Carmelita was sitting next to him on the bed, wearing jeans and a blue denim shirt tied up to show off her tiny midriff.  Her smile charged up the room.

I sat down to watch Seinfeld with them. "Carrie’s favorite show," Tony says to Carmelita who continues to smile. "She doesn't understand a word."

During the show, Carmelita tells me they wouldn't let her enroll in Pacific Palisades High, so Eva enrolled her at a private school in the Eighth Grade.  Her classmates are two years younger.

"Tell Carrie what they're going to make you do tomorrow," urges Tony.  "She really hates it."

Wrinkling her nose, "They make us go to the beach."

"What's wrong with that?"

"I have nothing to wear.  They say, 'You can't tie your shirt up.  You have to wear your dress down.'  I have no clothes for school.  It is loco!"

It’s the Seinfeld where Jerry tries to make his masseuse girlfriend give him a massage.  I’m plotzing inside to have to watch this with Tony, but he doesn’t react as if he sees a physical therapy connection.  Afterward. I go to the kitchen for water, and when came back to find Tony's door closed.  Who closed it?  I can hear him playing guitar and saying, "Cool!  I'm getting a band together.  Maybe you could..."

Could what?  The rest was muffled.  Feeling my world flip-flop, fighting my nausea and loneliness, I return to the kitchen, sit on the floor and pet the cat. Thinking I need a life.          

Tony and Carmelita burst through the door on a wave of laughter. He stands behind me, she in front of me, swiveling her hips, red fingernails splayed in mock disgust. "He is always telling me lies."

"What kind of lies?" I ask.

"He told me you and Edward are in a gang!"

"They are!" insists Tony.

"And you know what else he tells me? 'If you want somebody to think you are cool, you have to say, I AM STINKO.’ What does it mean?"

I hold my nose.  She screams.

"Tony, why are you teaching her the wrong words?"

"She's in there teaching me twenty different Spanish words for dick.  What am I supposed to do?"

"I'm not touching that with a ten inch pole."

"Exactly."

"Repeat after me, Carmelita," I said.  "I...was...not...born...yesterday."

xx

This morning Carmelita stumbles into the kitchen, lets me give her coffee and in between sips, tells me about past boyfriends.

"Before I leave Columbiana, I go to school to say good-bye to all my friends.  I have so many.  There was one boy really cute last year, but this year, he look so ugly, I no like him anymore."

She really is just a kid. "My boyfriends are all older than me," she shrugs.  "Two, three years." 

One was a drug addict, another left a condom in his wastebasket where she could find it ("From another girl!").  "Then he say, 'She mean nada, Carmelita.  I only say yes because she want.  But you, you I love.'" 

Condoms and ten words for dick.  She was not born yesterday.

xx

For the first time in Relationship House history, we all go to the Chill Out—the only cafe in Topanga Canyon.  Except Eva who had to go to yoga.

We sit around an outdoor table under a blue umbrella with Carmelita dead center—her red-bead choker as vibrant as the air around her.  She speaks in staccato, waving her cigarette for emphasis.  With her upswept auburn curls dangling over one heavily lined and mascared eye, she  comes off like a combination of Charro and Claudia Cardinale.

Openly fascinated, Edward grins and nods, occasionally remembering to pat Suki's knee.  Suki leans back in her chair, perhaps to study Carmelita with her actress' eye.  At twenty-seven, even Suki finds herself thrust into the "older woman" category. 

Tony sits between Carmelita and me, his chair pushed so far away that he’s almost not part of the ensemble.  "I'm freezing," he explains.  "I need to be in the sun."

Carmelita speaks feverishly in a kind of delirium:

"My parents, they give me all what I want, except love.  My father one day tell me all things bad in me.  He finish and I say, 'Now tell me what is good in me.'  He say, 'Nada. There is nothing good.'  Columbia is country of gangsters, drugs. Gangsters so horrible, you can't imagine. But sons of gangsters are nice.  My Ambrosio, his face is so beautiful, but he has so many problems.  And we fight." She puts up her fists.  "I get so mad I throw things. I hate him sometimes but I love him. When I leave Columbiana, he cries. Too bad for him, I don't care anymore."

Edward looks down, scratches his nose. Is he disturbed because she’s not the sexy little Mouseketeer of his Lolita fantasies? Not that this is intrinsic to him, but I suspect to many men.

I don’t feel distant from Carmelita's troubles.  I could still remember my own at that age. Your sexual feelings at fifteen are every bit as real as they'll be at forty.  Still, I keep quiet.  Content to watch the men drool and resist their drool, as they listen to her grown-up/childish talk.

I’m driving them back from the Chill Out when Carmelita lights a cigarette.  I want to tell her no smoking in my car, but fear the men will think me jealous. Instead, I roll down the window, relaxing only when she tosses the burning butt out. For the next two days, my car smells like stale cigarettes.  I check the ashtrays, the back seat, but find nothing. 

xx

A week later, I open the hatchback of my Mercury Tracer and find the butt, burned into the carpet, surrounded by a black burned hole with lipstick at its tip like a fresh wound.

CHAPTER 18 - LIGHTNING

Edward calls me from his cabin.

"We need an audience for our show," he says. "Reviewers are coming tonight and we only had four people last night." He urges me to call everyone I know and tell them. Hanging up, I wonder if he’s asked Shane?  Edward didn't mention it, so probably not.

I call around and the only person who can make it is Boris.  Why did I ask Boris?  Well, Edward needs an audience.  Edward met Boris through a recent audition that I set up when Edward needed six hundred dollars and Boris needed to pay an actor six hundred dollars. Boris decided not to hire him, but said he’d like to see Edward act sometime. 

This was my logic.

Maybe at the back of my mind, I thought we could actually have a public outing as a mature, friendly ex-couple. Or maybe I was just feeling lonely. But as soon as Boris said yes, I began to fret. 

I wait until the last minute to bathe and throw on a comfortable too_big, too-long granny dress and my latest acquisition; a rust-colored suede fringe jacket from the Topanga resale shop. Then I drove to see Edward's play in Hollywood. My dallying has made me late. Nobody at the box office, the lobby is dark.  I feel my way to the back row and take an empty seat., A few rows in front of me, Boris turns and waves.

I scan the audience, knowing full well who I’m looking for.  There’s Suki across the aisle. And next to her—Shane. Sans girlfriend. "Oh, shit!" I gasp so loudly that the man beside me flinches. I look like hell. I’m not ready for this. I should leave right now, get in my car and drive home. But then I think, "Maybe it's not Shane."

But when he throws back his head and laughs...

It’s my favorite Chekhov play: The Seagull. Gladly escaping my agitation and confusion, I give it my full attention until I find myself merging with the play's own agitation and confusion as I identify with its tangle of intertwined characters.

Intermission.

"This play sucks," says Boris who’s waiting on the sidewalk for me. I hear someone call my name. Suki with Shane right behind her.

"Suki!" I hug her and impulsively reach for Shane's hand. "Shane!" He takes my hand.  Sexy as hell in tight jeans and plaid shirt (Marlboros in pocket)

I introduce Boris as my husband. After the courteous handshaking, Shane asks, "But I thought you were...Edward's...roommate?" I note his confusion with pleasure. 

So it matters.

As I nod yes, Boris adds loudly:  "And I vas her roommate for ten years."

Shane laughs, blowing his cigarette smoke away from us with a sweep of his head.  We three standing there in the midst of the buzzing theater crowd give awkwardness a new name.  I can see Suki smoking outside our triangle, looking from face to face, her eyes even bigger than usual.  What happened to Grace? Her friend? Am I in the wrong place at the wrong time again?

"Isn't that Ian McKellan?" Shane points toward the crowd outside the café next to the theater.  Yep.  That’s him.  The great Shakespearean actor humbly waiting for a table with some friends.

"Omigosh!" I gasp, no time to say all the memories.

"I saw his one man show," Shane says.

"I saw that, too, it was incredible," I look at Boris.  Why didn't I say "we"?

Boris looks back at me. "It vas a couple years ago."

"Five years ago," I correct.

"It was five years ago," Shane agrees.  "You're right."  Was he there the night we saw it?

Has the Universe just opened up and rained down Synchronicity?

Boris grabs my arm and was pulls me in McKellan's direction, "You must go say hello to him."  I pull the other way.  Not letting go, Boris informs Shane, "She is very shy."

Owner's manual footnote.

Mercifully, the theater lights blink and we stumble back inside.  Shane is next to me as we walk through the narrow corridor, bending his ear closer to my mouth while I tell him about McKellan.  We corresponded when I wrote a play that I wanted him to star in.  He'd written back support, but then my financing fell through.

On the other side, Boris put his mouth against my ear: "So, Carrie, do you want to sit with me?"  Feeling doomed and guilty, I sit next to Boris in the center row, with an eye to the side where Shane was sitting with two empty seats next to him.  Thank God for the exceedingly tall man who sat in front of me, giving me an excuse to jump up and announce, "I have to move!"

I don’t care anymore.  With Boris in tow, I land beside Shane who gives me an easy grin.  So now I’m between them for the duration.  During the next act, Boris reaches out and tweaks my nose affectionately as he used to do every day for the past decade. But now it's a ghost-like gesture that saddens me.  Sitting so close to Shane has turned me on. Can Boris sense it? Smell it? Can a nose tweak be a territorial gesture? Or is it fueled by the same mysterious energy that keeps fingernails and hair growing long after the body has expired?

As soon as the play resumed, it reasserted its grip on me.  At sixteen, I memorized Nina's monologue (Do you remember you shot a seagull once?).  But I never so completely understood what she means when she re-enters her old life worn out by her new one ("Life is coarse!"). I gasp at the play’s last line (which I know by heart) about the playwright having just shot himself.  I feel Shane’s look

Play over, the not-so-eternal triangle gathers on the sidewalk.  I’m sending telepathic messages to Boris, "Leave…Leave…Leave..." and feeling simultaneously guilty. He and I are standing as we used to stand after we'd seen a show on a warm autumn night. Only we're not together anymore. No longer a couple. Strange not to feel at ease anymore. Yet waves of excitement wash over me as I wonder, Where's Shane's girlfriend?

Boris fingers the fringe on my jacket with pitying condescension. He’s always hated my getups.

"You think I look silly.”

"Yes." He smiles.

"It's my seventies look."

Shane chimes in, "Well, you do look very Neil Young."

Et tu, Shane?  No, he can’t be like Boris.  No way.

Edward still hasn't emerged from the theater so I endure a few more moments of awkward silence.  I offer no encouragement to Boris until he finally clears his throat, "Well, I guess I'd better be going" and takes a few steps backward.  "Tell Edward it was almost as good as the one I saw in Moscow."

Then he leaves.  Alone.  Walking away with his back to me to his car alone.  It's the toughest moment since our separation.  I feel like bursting into tears and at the same time, feel relieved.  My knees buckle as I breathe out with a WHOOSH!

Suki's hand tenderly grips my arm, "Is this the first time you've seen him in public?"  I let this be the excuse for my trembling.  I can’t say out loud how delighted I was to see Shane, how I never expected to see him again.  How embarrassed I felt about Boris. 

When Edward comes out, he suggests we go next door to what Shane refers to as "that French dive."  It's an Italian bar and grill--not McKellan's café.

I'd never been less hungry.

While the others sit down to order, I go to the bar for a shot of tequila.  I get back as Shane is  saying, "Well, if she had come, she’d have sat on one side and I would've sat on the other."

Sitting opposite Shane, I say, "She could've sat with Boris."  They laugh uneasily.  "I don't know what you're talking about," I add.

"Oh, I think you do," Edward says, giving me a sidelong glance.

Shane sips his beer with a tequila shooter, immersed in a shroud of blue funk, "The other night I ushered at East/West and I didn't know she was ushering.  She wouldn't talk to me, wouldn't look at me.  I felt like, 'Hi, remember me?  We used to be close, do we have to pretend that we weren't?'"

I don’t want to eat. I’m buzzed from the turmoil of the play and my dumb luck.  Edward hunches over his salad gloomy and depressed.  Why?  He claims the performances weren't up to par and the play is a mess.

"I found it moving and passionate!" but before I can explain, Edward cuts me off with a roll of his eyes, biting his lip and rubbing his nose with a snide finger as if to say, "You don't know what you're talking about."

Time to clam up.  Just sit quietly and see what happens, as I did last time with Shane, and in seconds he's holding out his plate, "Do you want some of my salad?"  I don't.  But I want to share so I spear a few leaves from his plate onto mine.

"So what happened?" Edward asks Shane.  "How'd you break up?"  Ever the gossip monger.

Shane pushes himself back from the table as if distancing himself from the memory, "It was kind of complex, the way it ended.  I don't know.  We were in an intimate moment and I says why don't we live together and she says, 'Children?' and I went, uh oh, I kind of backed off and she got really pissed."

Suki looks at him and says gently, "She's young."

He nods agreement.

I get up for another shot.  He holds up his empty glass. "Get me one too,"

The bartender pours tequila into monster-size shot glasses insisting that "They're singles, I'm out of single size."  Holding the giant glasses in one palm, I return to the table showing off my waitress skills, trying to look experienced and worldly.  Hoping to impress with an old acting trick:  gesture conveys character.  The Chekhov Effect was still ticking inside me.  I just can’t let him get away this time.  Even if I make a fool of myself.

As for Shane, he's acting miserable and seductive at the same time.  He reaches out to clink my glass across the table with me, as we toast our exes.  And as for Edward, he's sunk even deeper into depression while Suki's eyes ooze sympathy at him.  Clowning, Shane takes a Personal Ad clip from his wallet and reads it to us, "Asian female into fishing and Richard Nixon looking for good sex."

Why I respond with this, I don’t know, but it pops out: Must be my Sagittarius Rising: "Well, we've got this 15 year old nymphomaniac from South America living with us..."

Shane brightens with (feigned?) interest, but Edward snaps, "Why do you call her a nymphomaniac?"

Suddenly my throat feels choked, face hot, "I'm exaggerating to make you laugh..."

As before with his “Millie” retort, Shane cuts in with, "It's okay.  I'm sure she's a very nice young girl." And then: "Who likes to sleep around." Cracking us up. Just like at El Conquistador.  Saved again by his inevitable social grace.

"You should come over and meet her," Edward says to Shane. "Maybe you'd have a chance." Why did he have to say that? Does he not have a clue? Or does he?  Ignoring him, I launch into the story that Carmelita told me when she came home last night.  She was eating in a health food restaurant with Eva and Tony when she caught sight of a passerby's pants ("They looked like a clown!") and she laughed so hard that she projectile vomited her food across the table onto Tony.  The wearer, who had witnessed this, stopped and asked, "Is it the pants?"

Shane howls at this.  How I love to see him laugh.

As Shane and Suki got up to settle the check at the cash register, Edward turns to me and says, "Those were doubles."  Is that what's causing his pissy mood?  His disgust with people who drink?

Frankly, my dear, I'm too drunk to ponder this too deeply. 

As the bill is being paid, I decide to run a test. Walk quickly outside and see if Shane will follow me. I do and he does, lighting up a cigarette in the night air.

"Can you walk me to my car?"

“If you can drive me to mine,” he says.

I can’t feel my feet, but I feel great.  Edward and Suki come out and ask if we're okay to drive.  No, not really, but we have to. Walking next to Shane down the long city block, I say, "I'm fucking drunk," hoping he'll see this as an invitation to take advantage of me.

"Me, too," he says.  "That's how it is when you get older, it's such a big deal.  It's like, 'Omigod, I'm drunk.'  When you're young, you just party on."

Okay, not the most romantic line, but I stop in the middle of the sidewalk a few feet from my car and announce, "I'm going to do something brazen." Opening my purse, I take out a personalized bank deposit slip.  "I'm going to give you my phone number.  Maybe you can come up to Topanga sometime, see how the other half lives."

"I'd like that."

In my car, I ask: "Do you like Jackie Chan movies?" (Tony will groan when I tell him later: "Why?  Because he's Asian?")

Shane leans back in his seat-belted corner looking at me, "As a matter of fact, I cut out the schedule for the Jackie Chan Film Festival."  I keep my eyes on the road, afraid to let him see my face as he says, "Maybe we can go.  I'll give you a call."

There.  He said it.  At least he said it.

Driving home, I’m suddenly afraid that I am too drunk.  Praying all the way, I make it back to the Relationship House.  I’ve never drunk so much in my life as I have during this divorce.  I’m usually the “nurse it all night” type. Note to self:  Stop.       

I cannot sleep.

In the kitchen the next morning, Tony hears my tale of the Boris-Shane collision and chuckles as I cry out, "Why me? Other people can invite their exes and not have a potential new lover show up."

  "Other people don't invite their exes," he corrects.  "You don't have a strong sense of boundaries.  So stuff happens."  I must look sufficiently chastised because he smiles, "On the other hand, if you hadn't invited Boris, you wouldn't have had all that richness:  Boris's tweaking your nose and your past getting to meet your future and all your excitement and embarrassment. It’ll make a helluva movie. Admit it."

Heading for the bathroom, he calls back over his shoulder, "I got a good feeling about this guy."