With or Without You Read online

  “Don’t touch it!”

  “You’re not eating it.”

  “Doesn’t mean you can have it.”

  “You are such an only child!” We struggled until she dropped the fork. I sunk my spoon into the tiramisu and shoved a few monster scoops in my mouth, satisfied.

  “Piglet!” Edie said.

  I grunted.

  “I mean it, you’re disgusting. No wonder you can’t—”

  “Shut up!”

  Gustave cleared his throat—loudly. We froze. He tugged the sleeve of his linen jacket to check his braided gold watch. “A wonderful meal,” Gustave announced, as if he hadn’t heard a word we’d said. One last sip of cappuccino before he ushered us out of the restaurant.

  On the ride home I saw your face behind the wheel of every passing car. It didn’t help that all the girls in California had straight blond hair like yours, and the landscape made me feel as if I’d been here a million times before. Los Angeles had to be the ultimate déjà vu. At a traffic light a Mexican boy was selling oranges. A group of punks flexed in leather and studs, a rainbow of spiked hair. Otherwise the streets were empty. But when Gustave took a deep reverent breath and in between the giant boulevards pointed out the Hollywood sign awakening at twilight, I felt as if I’d reached the promised land. My heart fluttered like a pulsing marquis.

  I’d seen this place over and over again in my dreams. Sprawling hills and bright white lights, winding roads and limousines and theatres and movie stars all so close I could feel them rushing into me, cohesive yet abbreviated, like movie previews, but it was better than any film I’d ever seen, any place I’d ever been. It was a living dream.

  Back at Aunt Fifi’s, Gustave told us Chuck would arrive at nine the next day to take us to the TV studio. “Then you will come to my office,” he said. “Or better, you go to Melrose for shopping. I have no more time tomorrow.” He kissed Edie and me on both cheeks and I thought we were so lucky it was almost shameful. Gustave noticed and tapped the side of my head. “You carry everything in here, oui? “ he said, and Edie snorted. As if it were unfathomable I had anything in me she didn’t know about. “No, it is not a joke, she has a thousand other lives. A very old soul.” He shrugged and kissed my forehead, and although Edie eyed me as if I’d crossed enemy lines, I loved Gustave for making me feel good about being a weirdo.

  The minute he left she lifted the coffee can full of keys next to the refrigerator and dumped them out on the counter. All day she’d been dropping hints about driving the Buick so I’d taken precautions. I opened the refrigerator, empty ’cept for a six-pack of Tab, a few packages of coffee, some condiments, and pharmaceutical vials. “What are you looking for?” I played dumb.

  “The keys, Einstein. I heard about a place to find guys but we have to drive.”

  “Neither one of us has a license.”

  “Your road test’s in two weeks.”

  “Tell that to the California Highway Patrol.”

  “They’re not even real cops, they’re too pretty.”

  “You’re thinking of the TV show.”

  “My brother told me about it … it’s, like, where all the cool people go. He said he did the best crystal in his life there. The best crystal in his life, Lil. Think about it.” She had maybe thirty keys set out on the table in front of her and was dividing them into subcategories by name and size. The table was like something you’d find in an old diner, Formica. Nancy’d had our kitchen counters smothered in it. She said it was good for hiding stains. And it was slippery. The keys slid from side to side as Edie shuffled them. A better friend might have said something, but it was a riot seeing her so determined. She looked up. “Why are you smiling?”

  “I’m not.”

  “Jesus, Lil, what is it with you? You’re not even trying. Here we are in the middle of Los Angeles, in a house all by ourselves, and sitting behind fucking door number one is a car! Think of the potential for life experience!”

  “Okay, I can’t take it,” I said. “They’re not there.”

  “What?”

  “The keys.”

  She sighed. “You can sit here all night like a loser if you want, I’ve got places to go, people to meet, you know?”

  “Just stating the facts.”

  “You are so selfish sometimes. Do you realize how much time I’ve devoted to you and your problem? And what have I gotten out of it? What have I seen? I’ll tell you what I’ve seen: nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch. I don’t even know why I put up with you.”

  “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be going to the TV studio!”

  “Oh my god … you really came all the way out here to see a stupid soap opera, you really did. You’re more fucked-up about this than I thought.”

  “Shut up!”

  “She’s not even real.”

  “Don’t talk about her.”

  “I mean, it’s one thing having all those posters up on your wall, but—”

  “I’m not kidding, Edie, shut your fucking mouth!”

  “Look at you, your cheeks are all red. What’s the matter, did I insult your make-believe friend? Your little teen idol? You’re such a baby.”

  The room exploded in colors. Throbbing monsters in front of me, slime oozing from the walls. Before I knew what was happening I’d swiped my arm across the Formica, and the keys flung out in every direction, ringing against appliances, knocking over statuettes, bouncing off the floor. Edie covered her head with both arms. “You fucking psychopath!” she screamed. I felt as if a snake had wrapped itself around my body, cutting off my breath and blood, and the kitchen was about one hundred degrees. I was sweating from every pore.

  Air, I thought. I needed air.

  I bolted out to the pool and sat down on my torn lounge chair, breathing deeply in the dark, calming myself to the fact that she would never find the car keys. Earlier, I’d seen them dangling in the ignition and nabbed them for safe keeping. No way was I letting anything come between you and me and tomorrow. You were right: bringing Edie along was a big mistake.

  A few deep breaths later I jumped to the set tomorrow. You smile at me in the mirror as the woman dabs your cheeks with a cotton ball. Your eyelids flutter shut. Makeup always gets you sleepy …

  The outdoor lights kicked on and Edie stepped outside sipping from a bottle of gin. She sat down on the lounge chair next to mine, her presence so big it was like sharing a beach towel with an elephant. I wished her away, but as usual she had other plans. She unrolled a plastic bag full of Ayatollah weed and loaded her silver pipe. On the surface of the swimming pool, I traced the movement of her hands, her hair, her face, as if I were creating a stencil. She was a phantom, like your reflection on my window. Somehow out here you seemed closer yet farther away. The elephant woman stood between us.

  Edie put the pipe in her mouth and lit up, embers crackling with the scent of burnt chocolate. Marijuana was a sweet sort of high. It made me want to stick my fingers into a jar of honey and lick off every last drop. Laugh at the stupidest things. But making my point required I didn’t take the pipe when Edie passed it. “Come on, you won,” she said. “And you’re a dirty little fighter, too.”

  Did she know I had the keys buried in the front pocket of my pants? No, she couldn’t possibly, but the way she surveyed me when I turned my head I couldn’t be sure. I could never be sure of anything with Edie and it drove me nuts. With her, I always felt as if the earth might crack open and suck me down below the way people out here were forever conscious of faultlines and Richter scales, because any minute the ground could start shaking for real. It seemed unfair that a place so magical could go down in a few minutes. Might as well be stoned.

  I took the peace pipe from Edie and inhaled, trying to avoid eye contact. “Good girl,” she said, her omniscience multiplied in the floodlights. She was larger than life and timeless, as if she’d been here back in the fifties with Aunt Fifi and the president. Of the two of us, I might have had the old so
ul, but she knew things beyond age and experience. I handed the pipe back and noticed she’d once again slipped on the hard hat with the nuclear power symbol. Settling into a fuzz-buffed mind bubble, I began to formulate a theory: Tough girls like Edie had a way of converting the things they knew into beauty. Like little nuclear reactors. Trouble was, when they went up it was big-time. The world still couldn’t get a grip on the fallout from Chernobyl, and that explosion had been a couple of months earlier. On TV we watched people all over Europe say they were afraid to drink milk or eat raw vegetables, unsure how far the radiation had traveled. I imagined cancerous particles like tiny jet planes circling the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, and all those foreign boys Edie’d kissed on her trip, wondering which was worse: going up in a nuclear explosion or being sucked through a crack in the earth. Either way it was over immediately, like the space shuttle blowout, or opening the wrong bottle of aspirin and swallowing a poison pill. I felt worse for people living in the fallout, not knowing whether they’d been touched until it was too late. Death was easier sometimes.

  Edie handed me the pipe again. It felt like a slab of hot metal in my palm. “Do you ever think about dying?” I said.

  “All the time.”

  “Does it scare you?”

  She took the pipe from me and lit up a few times before deciding it was played. Her decision always, when we started and finished anything. Knocking out the residue, she said, “Where I come from death is a beautiful thing.”

  “In Ohio?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, I’m from—”

  “The planet Andromeda. Yeah, yeah …”

  “See, this is exactly your problem, Lil. You refuse to believe, you won’t visualize. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it. You know?”

  She sounded so much like people on talk shows, so California, I burst out laughing. So did she, and within seconds we were hysterical, tears streaming down our cheeks. She turned to me, smiling so big I couldn’t believe she was the same person who’d insulted us earlier. “Okay, Lil, now I’ve got something to show you,” she said. “Are you ready for the bonus round?”

  I nodded. As long as I had the car keys I was ready for anything. She emptied her pockets, and a cascade of cloudy orange vials and cardboard packages spilled out in front of her. We sifted through the ant hill, identifying what we could—blue capsules, little orange hearts, red dots, big codeine tablets, multicolored dots encased in plastic, but the best was a box that looked like it belonged in an old copy of Life magazine and said: Quaaludes, from the makers of Maalox. The name was a compression of the words quiet and interlude. Edie said it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard.

  She pushed a couple of pills through the silver-and-plastic shield. They were huge and chalky and reminded me of the antacid tablets my grandfather sucked like candy. Edie dropped one in my palm. “I don’t know,” I said. “They’re probably older than we are.”

  “No problem. I found them in the freezer.”

  “Okay,” I said, and together we swallowed, chasing the pills with the bottle of gin Edie said she’d also discovered in the freezer, and I made a mental note to always check people’s freezers as we sat back on our lounge chairs and soaked up the cool breezes of a California springtime. The scent of newly mown grass sifted in and out like a dab of well-placed cologne, soft gusts rustled through the leaves and sent a ripple of waves across the swimming pool. Goosebumps rose up my arms, and my mouth tasted salty, tangy, like blood. I realized I’d been gnawing at my lower lip for who knows how long, as hyped-up inside as the scenery was palmy outside. The damn drug was taking forever. “I don’t feel anything,” I said.

  “Be patient.”

  “Maybe it’s not working.”

  “Okay, let’s eat another one,” Edie said, and we swallowed once more, passing the bottle of gin back and forth. It shadowed in obscene shapes and sizes and made us giggle into convulsions out there by the pool in the foggy night and I found myself more content than I’d been just a few minutes before. My legs felt like Jell-O, jiggly but plastered to the chair, and everything inside me heated up, like I had a band of miners drilling inside my veins while outside the winds raised the hair on my limbs.

  Everything was fine until you showed up. Floating fully clothed on the surface of the swimming pool, you beckoned me: How could you, Lillian?

  I asked what’s wrong, and your voice came charred with frustration.

  You’ve given over again, and we must not delay. Do you have any idea how busy I am? How much prep time goes into a projectilevomiting scene? What it takes to speak in tongues?

  I said I was sorry.

  I can’t believe you’d come all the way out here to forsake me for this false god from the planet Andromeda. Somebody’s been watching too much Star Trek.

  I said it wasn’t like that.

  “Like what?” Edie said, and I flinched nervously. Turning to the pool I noticed you’d gone under. I looked back to Edie whose face had expanded into a giant balloon, this demonic raccoon with big purple lips, demanding: “What, Lil?” I was paralyzed. In escaping you’d grabbed one of my arms and were trying to pull me into the pool. I turned toward Edie, keeping my arm behind me so she couldn’t see you. Didn’t want to get her riled again, we’d been getting along so well. I told her I’d drifted off on a cloud, and she said she totally knew what I meant, and slowly, as we settled back into our chairs, I managed to disengage my arm from your grasp. It throbbed with pins and needles—somehow you’d stunned it.

  A brittle wind brewed, and I offered to go inside for our jackets. Edie said no. The minute one of us left, she explained, the mood would change. And she was digging our mood even if I kept zoning out. So I sat shivering until we siphoned every last drop of gin through our chattering teeth, and Edie said it was time to go inside where she flicked the switch and hunkered down at the player piano, pretending to play The Sting, singing the notes as they rolled out perfectly … da, da, da, da, da-da, da-da … the ghostly marionette smiling over us in the dark shadows. I sat down next to Edie on the bench and watched her fingers move up and down along the keys without touching them.

  She stood up in the middle of a line for another roll, a new song, but there was no other song, and she said that was really depressing—a piano that played only one song. She went for the on-off switch but it wouldn’t budge and we shared a quick alarming stare before she started fiddling with it again, cursing the damn instrument and finally slamming the cover over the keys. The piano continued … da, da, da, da, da, da … da, da, da, da, da, da! … and we burst into giggles, writhing next to each other, her body so warm against mine. Every time one of us stopped the other would snort or hiccup and we would be off again until Edie said, look, and pointed to the marionette whose jaw bobbed up and down, laughing with us, controlled by invisible strings. We screamed and ran into Aunt Fifi’s bedroom to take cover in the king-sized bed with its insanely bright floral covering.

  I pulled back the blankets and dove underneath. Edie followed. Long past the point of communication, our laughter tapered into a few occasional grunts. My brain felt like I’d been shoved head first through a windshield and emerged a palpitating mess. Edie said some more pot would help the coming-down process. She leaned over me to get to the side table where she’d left the works, and I felt her heartbeat against my arm, her skin so warm the heat outside almost matched the burning inside, and I thought, That’s love: a matching of inner and outer heat. Moonlight wormed through the window. Sheets rustled, we passed the metal pipe, sprawled across the giant bed the way Los Angeles sprawls through the hills. I wanted to sleep but was suddenly terrified. What if the Quaaludes were too old? Or they’d been tampered with? What if we never woke up?

  Edie put a pillow in between her legs and moaned. “This bed makes me want to fuck.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “I don’t get you, Lil. Don’t you need it? Don’t you even want to know what it’s like?”

 
The quiver in her upper lip made me feel insignificant, tiny, static. Cymbals crashed in heavy-metal soundtracks. My body burned like an acid rash. Edie started monologuing about sex, her hips bumping up against that pillow. I burrowed under the covers where it was dark and tomblike. A bed to nurture a million deaths. My vision gone, I felt even smaller, a psychedelic dot trapped inside one of Nancy’s diet capsules, playing footsie with my dotty friends until an invisible hand rips open our shield and we spill into a colorful waterfall, like a sequence from a Gustave Monde commercial, all of us struggling to keep afloat before bouncing out of sight, never to fulfill our mission as an appetite suppressant. Alone, away from the other dots, I was useless.

  I slithered further inside the bed and stumbled upon Edie’s legs. She shaved them almost every day. Her arms, too. Guys were lucky with her, she was so smooth and had big tits. It was an added bonus. One I’d never know. This must be what it’s like at the center of the earth, I thought. The air hot and stuffy and you can’t have what’s lying next to you. On the verge of suffocating, I threw off the covers. Edie’s knees clamped the pillow, her hips engulfing its cotton tip. She pushed her kneecaps against my stomach, her skin translucent in the moonlight. It took everything I had not to hug her like I’d hugged Blair in that other big bed, on the other coast, but I sensed she didn’t want to hug. I flipped over on my back and stared at the waves in the stucco ceiling. Sleeping with Edie was nothing new, we did it all the time, but something was different in Los Angeles. I could feel the city pumping through her, a Vaseline hypodermic. “Hey Lil,” she said. “Can you hear me? You’re not even listening, you shit … turn around.”

  I climbed up next to her, and she looked bigger and shinier than all the injected lips in Hollywood. “It’s like swimming,” she said, and I couldn’t recognize her voice. She was starting to sound like Blair, her drunk-talk. “It’s like flying through a warm, salty ocean”—her right leg inched over my hip, the other side of the pillow rubbing against my crotch—“like flying”—with her free hand she pulled the sheets over us again and tightened her body against the pillow, pressing it into me—“or pushing into another world”—her hips bucked—“and if you’re stressed or pissed off or something, you just push harder”—she jammed into me, legs moving faster, and it was difficult to breathe, like sucking down smog.