We had a huge fight, Lila and I, when I got inside. I was so mad at her, I could barely speak. I put a bowl of water for Max in my room. His bed was already in there, but I would keep my eye on him like the vet said to. One of us had to be a responsible adult around there.
“Baby?” Lila shouted up the stairs. And why did I always have to go to her, huh, whenever she shouted?
“Come lay down, bud,” I said to Max.
“Baaa-by! Come here and tell me what happened. I got your message.”
I sat on my bed and folded my arms and wondered what I was doing in that place. I wanted to go home. To my real home. Where things were nice and good. I’d stay in that empty dorm if they let me. I’d stay with no heat or food, whatever. I had a brief, pointless fantasy of putting Max in a dog crate on a plane to Seattle. I patted the bed, and Max hopped up.
“Get your hair all over if you want,” I said to him. “You’re the only respectable person in this place.”
“Baby!” Lila thumped on the door. “Open up! I’m talking to you! It’s late. Aren’t you hungry or anything?”
No answer, plus I wasn’t. That whole strange, scary night had made my hunger vanish.
“Are you mad?”
I rolled my eyes at Max. I’m sure he would have rolled his eyes back if he could.
“Syd-Syd, open up this minute, or I’m going to go downstairs and get a hammer and bash my way in.” Max’s ear twitched. The pounding on the door was upsetting him, so I got up and flung it open. I didn’t even want to see her face. God, beauty could be ugly.
“What?” she said. “Why are you so mad?” Really, I was clenching my teeth, and my hands were fists at my sides.
“You left your chocolates right on the table.”
“How was I supposed to know he’d get up there?”
“You’re supposed to think about these things. You’re supposed to think about other people’s safety.”
“Well, he’s okay, by the look of it.”
“He could have died. And then I had to ride home alone with your boyfriend’s creepy associate. After they did God knows what with some giant statue.”
“What are you talking about? I thought you were at the vet.”
“We were at the vet. And then we were at some scary warehouse with a bunch of guys and they were moving some giant statue or something. In the dark? When no one’s around? Come on, Lila. Open your eyes.” This made it sound like I knew what was going on, but I didn’t.
“What statue?”
“I don’t know! How am I supposed to know? You’re supposed to know!”
Well, I know now. The beautiful naked woman was that statue the Aphrodite of Knidos. The missing Aphrodite, from, what, the fourth century B.C.? Marble goddess of beauty, preparing for the bath that would restore her purity. And don’t ask, because you can ask and ask a million times, but I don’t know what happened to it after that.
“He doesn’t tell me everything that goes on in his business!”
“Well, did he tell you why he was screaming at some guy in that car I keep seeing?”
“A car out front?”
“Yes, a car out front. I told you before! Something’s going on. Something bad. Obviously illegal. People don’t move art around in the dark.”
“He’s a broker! Clients sell and clients buy! Stuff moves around. People meet other people. Baby, stop yelling.”
Lila’s eyes filled with tears. She tried to touch me, but I stepped back.
“Where were you?”
“We met with Evan! Then Evan and I drove out to Sea Ranch. I was working!” Evan was Evan Dunne, the director she and Riley wanted for Peyton Place. The director everyone wanted for everything, after he did Endless Kingdom.
“With your phone off?”
“I couldn’t have interruptions Evan Dunne? Come on! He’s perfect! He gets it. He understands Constance, how she’s gorgeous and only seems repressed—”
“Stop it! Stop. It!” I had my fists in my hair. I was in the worst sort of hall of mirrors, where you never see your own reflection, where you begin to doubt whether you’re there at all. “I am here! I am here and all these things are happening.…”
I started to cry in frustration. Poor Max, he had his chin on his paws. It was the worst kind of day, where you just plain give up on it. Where it seems the bad stuff will keep coming and coming until the sun rises again.
I stared out the window at the sea. Or where the sea would be if it were visible in the darkness. It was ridiculous to feel so miserable and so alone in a house like that, where people had everything. I put my arms around myself. Tears rolled down my cheeks.
And then I heard a sound. Oh, I’d heard it before, the wounded-animal cry, but I’d never been the one to cause it. When I turned around, I saw Lila on the bed, her face in her hands.
“Lila.”
She refused to look up.
“Lila, look at me.” She lifted her head, and I saw her stricken face. It was like, I don’t know, she was a child again, like that night on the beach. A child who’d done wrong. She looked innocent and beautiful, and, shit, I remembered that she wanted things too. She wanted to be seen, because she kept trying and trying for that and it never happened. In spite of her face so large up there on theater screens, she was never seen. In spite of her face and her body in magazines and on TV, she wasn’t. I was the only one who saw her, really. And because I did, I felt, you know, that it was my job to take care of her. I felt responsible for her. She was my baby, not the other way around, as much as I wished that weren’t true.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Of course, I’m sorry means a lot of things. Sometimes it just means Never mind.
She was sobbing, though.
“Lila, it’s all right.”
I knelt beside the bed. I put my arms around her. I felt bad and guilty. I wasn’t sure what she might do in this sort of state. I mean, there were all those pill bottles. I shouldn’t have been so hard on her.
“I’m doing the best I can,” she cried.
That night, after Jake finally came home, I heard their voices. More fighting. The Summer of Fighting, that’s what this film should have been named. Dark Summer. Endless Summer. Frightening Summer. I put my pillow over my head. Visions of the day spun in a disturbing mix. Nicco and the fire between us. Jake, with his finger touching the mark on my neck. That statue.
Maybe it was Jake’s. Or maybe it was stolen. I was confused about what belonged to who, who was allowed to take what, what was mine and mine alone. And it gave me the creeps, the way Jake was guarding my own body. Hovering over my “purity” and virginity like those dads who threaten the guy who comes to date their daughter, their prize, the prize they’ll one day hand over to the man they approve of. The whole virgin thing was seriously messed up—how could you be revered and sacrificed to the gods? Why was virginity always taken or lost instead of just given? Why were you defiled and deflowered, as if your cleanliness and true beauty were gone forever? And what was so dangerous about me having sex, compared to a guy? Lila was right—even my father didn’t protect my purity, but then again, he didn’t protect me at all. He’d fled the scene, leaving me to hold things that were way too heavy for me. Like a mother, one made of fragile marble.
And then—even through the pillow—I heard it. Those words, yelled: all day alone with Evan Dunne.
That was what they were fighting about? Jealousy? Not stolen art or irresponsible mothers? Jake was jealous. The “jealous type.” Which means: You’re mine, and I’ll decide when I share. The jealous type is a toddler. The jealous type is an insecure baby, apologies to babies.
The jealous type is dangerous when someone touches his stuff.
She was an object to everyone, and I was an object to them, and we were Woman I and Woman II and Jacqueline and the Aphrodite of Knidos, and that charcoal study Jake showed me a few days before, Nude in a Black Armchair. I mean, Nude in a Black Armchair. God, she didn’t even get to be Woman. Just Nude. Breasts and body, stolen, gazed upon, owned, going back to the fourth century B.C. Images with dangerous, pasted-on mouths. Here is my face, assholes, I wanted to shout down through the generations. Here is my voice.
Let’s just say it was a bad time, a very bad time, for Meredith to come visit.