With or Without You Read online

  Two things: (1) Nobody but my grandfather ever called me Lil. I hated it. But in Edie’s mouth the name seemed reborn. Cool even. (2) Her brother sounded like a jerk, but who wasn’t?

  I nodded and said nothing. She kept on nudging about where I got the pot, and finally I said, “Jack.”

  “Your father gets you pot?”

  “No, no, it’s not like that. He doesn’t know about it, or if he does, we’ve got, like, what they said in social studies: a de facto understanding.”

  “You liar! Your parents are such hippies! I’m okay with it, don’t worry. I mean, I know the deal. Anyway, all those bands at Woodstock are all playing in football stadiums now. They’re corporations. Oh yeah, I know all about hippies giving it up for the big bucks, you don’t have to be embarrassed.”

  “I’m telling you, they’re not hippies. They never went to Woodstock or anything. Jack’s in advertising. They have to do a lot of schmoozing and partying.”

  “Yeah, sure, Lil, whatever you say.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Edie shook her head back and forth, smiling. “So, come on, what are you waiting for? Flare up Jack’s dope.”

  We smoked, and Edie talked about how great it was and asked if I could get more and I told her only if we kept within the rules: one medium-sized bud per month. Any more and Jack might have to say something, although he’d probably go after the cleaning lady first. They’d blamed the last one for money I lifted from Nancy’s wallet. It was right after Blair left, and I was still saving up to go and find her. Jack said if Linnelle was taking the money she must really need it. Maybe they weren’t paying her enough. They gave her a raise. And congratulated themselves on their problem-solving skills. A few years later, Linnelle was gone and a woman named Sema took her place. No one ever said why.

  “Hello!” Edie snapped her fingers in front of me. “This is a no-zoning area. I had enough of that back in Ohio. Nobody says anything out there, but it’s different from Andromeda. We read each other’s brain waves.”

  “That sounds awful. I wouldn’t want everyone knowing what I think.”

  “It’s not like that. You have your private mind that people can’t access, unless you want them to. The thing is, you’re in control. You can make the information public, or transmit to one or two other people. Your choice.”

  It sounded familiar. The way you and I communicated. Edie said all the electrical wires and satellites and TV antennas on earth made it harder to read people here. Too many signals jumbled together. Still, she was more psychic than most people. “I bet I can read you,” she said, slipping forward on the couch and beaming her purple eyes into mine. “Let’s start with something easy. What kind of guys are you into?”

  “Um—”

  “Don’t answer! The point is, I have to guess.” She put two fingers on the side of each one of my eyes and hummed. Up close she smelled like pot and candied lip gloss. “Okay, I’m getting a signal … Wow, you’re an open book.” I squirmed a bit. What if it was everyone? Not just you and Blair. What if my brain was wired all wrong and anyone could see it? I felt myself heating up. “Here we go,” Edie said, her fingers massaging my temples, our knees touching. It felt good. “Okay, you like the depressed intellectual type, a lot of dark clothes and facial hair, right? Come on, am I right?” I smiled. She was so not from another planet. I could read people better than that, even through TV screens. “Hah!” Edie shouted. “I knew it. That’s totally not what I’m into. I like ’em big and sexy, with tight, round football-player butts and really big dicks. Not too thick though. Nice and long and thin.”

  She dragged out her words so I could see those dicks. I had a few visuals stocked from my parents’ porno tapes. Dicks resting in hairy palms, bouncing between scrawny white legs, making tents of their tight white underwear. I liked watching them grow under the cotton and sometimes in class imagined all the penises simmering beneath those wooden desks, aching to bust through their dungaree shields like the fire-breathing dragons on black concert T-shirts. I liked this immediacy, their need to be tended and tamed. Guys were always raising their hands to be excused and running off to the bathroom. All kinds of jerk-off sessions must have gone on in there. I said this to Edie, who moved in closer and pulled us down to the floor. “Holy fuck! It’s so hot!” I smiled and told her it was heated. She stretched out on the fiery slate and said, “Nice. Really fucking nice.” I wanted to lie down next to her but stayed cross-legged. I was sort of dizzy. “Okay, Lil, you’re really gonna like this,” she said in a deep, low voice. “Damon—he’s one of my boyfriends. I’ve got another one: Bobby. But he’s a little scary. He drives a beat-up old Chevy and has the coolest little flask that fits in his bomber jacket. We haven’t done it yet or anything. I just got in his car and we kissed a little. I have no idea where he lives even. Everything about him’s a total mystery. But, anyway, Damon …” she smiled, and between her lips that name became full of secret messages and meanings. “He starts off so small I can put the whole thing in my mouth and in, like, just a few seconds he gets so big I swear I’m gonna choke. I’m telling you, it’s the coolest thing.”

  “That’s wild,” I said, and tried to ignore the pins and needles in my legs. I couldn’t stretch them forward without hitting Edie, and my back was wedged against the couch. My jeans felt like plaster casts and my butt was burning off.

  “Wild? That’s nothing. Sometimes when we’re on the bus together I put my head in his lap, and oh my god, he gets so hard! Once—” She put her hand on my thigh without looking up. It threw a weird tingling into the mix. She continued talking, lying there like the slate floor was her own private beach. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this, you’re so easy to talk to, Lil. Anyway, a couple of months ago we were on the bus and it was so hot and stuffy and Damon took off his jacket and put it over us and he got hard in like a second and you know …” She fluttered her eyes, and my cheeks flushed. I could feel how hot it was on that damn bus. Could see his head thrown back, her arms moving under the coat. It was like I’d walked into one of my parents’ videotapes. I could barely breathe but managed to say, “Go on.” Edie took her hand off my leg and sat up. She glanced over my shoulder, where the Long Island Sound was rumbling away outside the windows. Waves crashing like the roar of a bus in motion. Edie in the backseat, hand pumping a long, thin dick. She turned back to me, eyes like glimmering headlights. “I made him come, Lil. Right there on the fucking M34 or whatever. It was such a rush, even better than getting stoned. I keep playing it over and over in my head.”

  She looked off into the water again. For the first time in days the sun peeked through the clouds, throwing a steamy pinkish glaze over the tiny beach. “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Edie said. “Let’s go see Damon!”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, he works at the mall. We can take the bus from town.”

  “It takes like an hour to get into town,” I protested. The thought of walking all that way felt like trudging through the desert on a hot summer day. The only place I wanted to go was into the kitchen for a grilled cheese sandwich, then up to my bedroom to watch World. I was sort of hoping I could get Edie to watch with me.

  “Wow,” she said, “you’ve really got a lot to learn. You’re gonna be so happy you met me. It’s ten minutes in a cab.”

  “We’re going to take a cab to the bus?”

  She stared at me like that was the stupidest question she’d heard in days, like there was nothing I could do to protest without sounding even stupider. Edie and I were going to the mall to meet Damon. You and the rest of the world would have to wait.

  LAST WEEK THE SHIT HIT THE FAN. This according to my lawyer, Jonathan Brickman. He asks if I know what happens when the shit hits the fan: Everyone gets splattered.

  Brickman gives me the quick coverage: Gustave Monde collapsed the company he and Jack had launched fifteen years ago and joined a Hollywood stable with big-time movie and music video connections. It was written up in the trades, Brickman
says. Huge news. Not that anyone was surprised. Jack hadn’t been bringing in much work these past few months, and Gustave needed work, didn’t he? A writer can write in solitude. A painter can paint. But a director, very much like a monarch, is nothing without his subjects. Since I’d been inside, the question wasn’t whether Gustave would leave, but where he might end up. “Nonetheless, it’s a slap in the face,” Brickman says, shaking his head ominously, and I feel like I’ve eaten a cup of laundry powder. When I’d seen Jack over the weekend, I bugged him again about getting a new lawyer. He was sullen and withdrawn. Could barely bring himself to argue. He curled his fingers into fists, took deep breaths, clicked his lips together, kept checking his watch. Whenever I said something, he answered, “That’s nice.” It was like talking to a piece of cardboard.

  “He wanted to tell you,” Brickman says, “he just didn’t know how.”

  “That’s lame.” I remember the call I’d made from the Shelter Island police station: “Jack, I’m going to need a lawyer …” It’s not like I knew what to do. And this is what my father came up with.

  “It’s a tough blow, Lily,” says the lawyer Jack hired. “He’s not himself. Which is all the more reason we have to stay on track here. The more holes we can plug in their case, the easier it’ll be for everyone.”

  “I want to change my plea,” I say.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Let me plead guilty, bargain for a lesser charge, get out of here at least.”

  “Were you listening to anything I just said? Your father is suffering. Suffering worse than you can imagine. Didn’t you hear me when I said the shit hit the fan?” He slams his fist down on the metal table, his thick ring reverberating like a gunshot. I am stunned to attention. He sits down across from me. I can smell his cologne or aftershave. It reeks of sailboats and split-level houses, designer suits and weekends in Paris. Everything about him says “I’m loaded.” He moves his high-priced face in close, almost whispering. “Do you know where that saying comes from, Lily? The shit hit the fan. Let me tell you where it comes from. It’s an old vaudeville joke. A guy’s having stomach pains and knows he’s about to have diarrhea. He walks into a crowded bar so pained by this point it’s amazing he’s made it so far, and yet somehow he manages to ask where the toilet is. The bartender points up a flight of stairs. At the top there are two doors. The guy’s about to lose it, mind you, when he opens the first one and sees a hole in the floor. ‘Primitive,’ he might have thought if he’d had any time to think, but you know how these things go, right? So he squats down over the hole and lets it loose, every last drop, then sighs a happy little sigh and walks downstairs to find everyone in the bar’s disappeared, and the place is covered with smelly, brown soot. ‘Where’d everyone go?’ he asks, innocently. The bartender looks at him and says, ‘Where were you when the shit hit the fan?!’” Smiling ear to ear, his face is the perfect outline for a Colombian necktie. Then his brow clouds over: “Do you see what I’m saying, Lily? You’ve got to look underneath your own shithole here. It’s not just Gus I’m talking about. Things have gotten worse than you can imagine. Much, much worse …” He tells me again how Jack is suffering. Between my legal fees and Nancy’s rehab, he’s going broke. He’s sold a couple of cars, taken out a second mortgage on the house, put the summer place on the market, and his career’s stalled out on both coasts. He’s a salesman, remember, and his number one product has just jumped ship: Imagine if Colgate lost its patent for toothpaste. Everything is more … tenebrous, I think Brickman says, more tenebrous than ever with the media trailing him, and now the crash. His investments are worth less than they were a week ago. “See, Lily, he’s got to believe this’ll end. He’s got to trust that I’m going to get you out of here. It’s the only thing giving him any hope.”

  What he really means is Jack needs to believe I’m innocent. That he had no part in birthing a monster. It’s the only way he can get on with his life, save face. And in walks the attorney singing sweet alibis.

  For the next couple of days I am haunted by Brickman’s words. I look up tenebrous in the dictionary and it says dark and gloomy, like Jack’s face whenever he comes to see me. I imagine him day after day sitting in his office with the door closed and blinds down; lights dimmed to nothing, he wades through it. Shit. Splashed across his windows the way I used to finger-paint it, piled steaming high on his desk, caked into the grooves of his oak floor, nothing escapes. Even his neat black furniture used to be a pat on the back, now it’s cold, sinister, angry as the telephone blasting his heart to the moon when it rings. On the other end it’s nothing but shit.

  My father used to love his job. He saw it as a public service. Once he told me, “Some people build buildings, some sew shirts, some make milk cartons, others run the farms that make the milk … The point is, everybody’s selling something. Gus and me, we’re selling lifestyles. We give people stories, these tight little nuggets of life, and they go, ‘Hey, I want that, that’ll make me happy.’ Maybe they never even thought of it before, it doesn’t matter. We tell them what they want, how to make their dreams.”

  This was a man who’d built his own. After his father’d died young—some kind of liver trouble—it was just Jack and his mother. Their house was modest, they never owned a car or even a radio. Jack was enlisted by the woman as a young boy to deliver tiny decorative pillows to their neighbors. Each pillow had a saying sewn on top, something his mother had dug up from the Bible and stitched with her Singer: “Love thy neighbor as thyself “; “If thou have ears, listen”; “Whom the Lord loves He disciplines.” Jack loved going out on pillow runs. He was invited into people’s homes, given food, Coca-Cola, was introduced to television. He watched shows with cowboys, listened to crooners, saw people become millionaires, but it was the sponsors he loved most. How they set out a world of endless possibility. Creation. You didn’t have to be who your family was.

  And so in those grainy black-and-white images my father saw what his mother had failed to show him: He saw his future.

  I call Gustave Monde collect at his home in L.A., and he picks up. It’s very early in the morning out there. “Well, hello, Lily! Hello!” he says. “What a surprise! … Very well, it’s good to hear you. We’ve been thinking, eh … Pamela did write a letter, I think.”

  “I got it. And I wrote her back. Listen—”

  “But tell me, what is it like there? Are you doing okay with yourself? Sometimes I read things that are not so fantastic. But the media is terrible. They make it like everything is a film. A bad film.”

  “It is like a bad film,” I say, thinking, Actually, it’s more like TV and I’m trapped inside. Nobody ever turns off the set and says it’s time to go to bed.

  “And how is the food?”

  “Not too bad, really, but I want to talk to you about Jack.”

  Through the phone I hear him take a deep breath. “I am very sad about this,” he says. “Very, very sad.”

  “Can’t you help him out?”

  “It’s terrible. The whole situation just stinks.”

  “There’s got to be something you can do.”

  “I’m sorry, Lily, but really there is nothing … nothing.”

  Dramatic, his words resonate like the bang from Brickman’s ring. What a fucking liar. “Oh, come on,” I say, “you’re Mr. Hollywood. I saw your name in Variety. Don’t tell me this.”

  “We are out now on the coast all the time—there is nothing left in New York. Nothing. Jack, he knows this too but he’s stuck. He can’t leave in the middle of … in the middle of everything.This is not his fault, I know, but neither is it mine. You don’t know the pressure there is with these things. Please understand, I’m not saying you are … you did … it’s just that there’s too much publicity, and I am working harder than ever—in fact, I must now go and prepare for work. I can’t hold on the telephone. But please, you’ll call again?”

  “I don’t believe this. Jesus, you’re supposed to be, like, my godfather!�
�� I say, blood crawling up my neck.

  “No, not officially. There was never a ceremony.”

  “But he didn’t do anything,” I plead, about to crack.

  “I wish I could help, you don’t know how much, but—”

  “Bullshit!” I bang my fist against the side of the phone. Needles fly up my elbow, everything throbbing. I hit again … and again, biting my tongue to keep from screaming.

  “I feel terrible about—”

  “No you don’t. You’re a fucking asshole!”

  “It’s not my—”

  “ASSHOLE! ASSHOLE!” I slam down the phone with my good hand. What an asshole! Sinking against the wall, wishing it would grow a pair of arms and take me in, everything throbs. A guard comes and lifts me up. My pinkie hangs low, like it’s stupidly splintered from the rest of the group. The guard touches it lightly with her fingertips and I flinch, “Ahhhh!” Feels like she’s trying to break it off. I squeeze my elbows into my sides, clench my teeth together, as she whisks me off to the infirmary, where like something out of a dream the white coats wrap me up and pop me with codeine before sending me back to my cell. Mimi slips by, dragging her mop and aluminum pail behind her. They let her in even though they’re not supposed to.

  As the guard unlocks, she stares at the white bandage on my hand. “Oh, chica,” she says, and leans her mop against the wall. I could vomit from the bleach and ammonia clinging to the invisible ring she carries everywhere. Like an earthly saint with dishpan hands, stinking worse than the chemicals on her rubber gloves, she can still get me with the look. Makes me stir where I don’t necessarily want to, not with my hand injured and head clogged. She’s directly in front of me now, long brown hair swept behind her back and she’s so tall, almost six feet. From where I sit, I’m looking straight at her stomach. She sits down next to me, grazes her middle finger against my splint, looking at me with those deep brown eyes like Jack’s. So dark I’m afraid of falling inside and never coming out. Tenebrous eyes.