The next day I call Mom when she’s at work. I leave a message, and don’t answer when she calls back, doing that oops-we-missed-each-other lie that cell phones are so handy for. If I talk to her, I’m afraid I’ll feel too much. Too guilty, too sad, too lonely, all the pulls of old that can keep you from new. My two-and-a-half-million-dollar self expects more from me. There are no more messages from Trevor. I check again. Still no messages. I want there to be messages and I don’t want there to be messages. I feel these small shots of hollowness that I refuse to label as missing him. They’re just the leftover echoes of routine, old habits; they’re just my own fear, looking for a safe place to hide.
Melanie and I go back to the beach, and I take off my shorts and talk to the streaky blond-haired guy whose name is Jason Lindstrom. Jason surfs. No, he actually surfs, like in the movies. He has this thing on his car to attach his board to and everything. He shows me the lines on his ankle from where the umbilical cord that attaches him to his board cut into his skin. It looks like a suicide attempt by a very ignorant person.
We take a walk down the beach and Jason tells me about his grandmother who has Alzheimer’s and how every time they see her she thinks it’s his birthday and she gives him money. He tells me his favorite cereal is Cheerios, because he likes how the sugar falls between all the little holes and gathers in a sloopy splotch of syrup in the bottom of the bowl. I like this. I’m glad to find someone here I like besides Melanie.
That night, Allen comes home, the first time we’ve seen him since the airport. We are in the “media room” (it’s actually called that, which seemed obnoxiously self-congratulatory) when he pops his head in the doorway. My liquor knowledge is spotty, so I don’t know exactly what he smells like, only that he smells fumey, like little wavy alcohol lines are coming off of him. It’s the odor of one of the brown alcohols, poured into short glasses over ice. He would give the glass a spin in his hand before sipping, I imagine, so the ice didn’t collide with his nose. He smells like cocktail napkins filled with hors d’oeuvres, like the cling of cigarette smoke on jackets and gazes both too intent and glazey from false interest.
“So there’s a thing this weekend. Saturday night? You can come—bring a friend,” Allen says. “Just one, though. Tickets required.” He pats his jacket pocket.
“What kind of thing?” Melanie asks. She’d been trying to figure out the DVD player, but ditches the whole effort when he says this, as if she was unwrapping a stick of gum and has just been handed an ice cream cone instead.
“Little party for friends of Two Heads Records. Sunset boat cruise.”
“Oh my God,” Melanie says. She looks at me and I look back because Slow Change, Hunter Eden’s band, is part of the Two Heads label.
“Can’t promise who’ll be there,” he says, then takes his bleary self down the hall to his room.
“Did I tell you?” Melanie says. She grabs my arms. Her eyes are as shiny as grocery store paperbacks.
“Two Heads Records,” I say. My heart gives a little flop of anxious-excited. “You don’t think he’ll actually be there, do you?”
“I told you, I saw him at one of these things before.”
“You said you saw his ass.”
“Like anyone would not know that ass?”
“Oh my God, it was probably some guy that works with your father’s ass,” I say. But my voice is high and jazzed, speeding like a Porsche with my own foot on the accelerator. High, jazzed, and a wind-in-your-hair thrill, even though we’re inside, just clutching each other’s arms and jumping up and down.
The day of the party we skip the beach, but Melanie calls Glenn and Jason and asks them to come to the party that night. Mom calls, but doesn’t leave a message. A strange number appears on my call log, and I hear the uncertain voice of Bomba. …miss you and hope you’ll…Wait, shit, there was a beep. Indigo? Did I press the right number? Can you hear this? I hate these blasted cell phones. That’s supposed to make your life easier? It’s Bomba, if you hear any of this. I miss you. Call me. I picture the photo we have of Bomba on our fridge at home, with her saggy boobs in her funny bathing suit, sitting in a wading pool. I wonder what she would think of where I am right now, in this house on the beach, with the housekeeper that makes every dirty dish vanish as if nothing unseemly like eating has ever really taken place here. I wonder what she would think if she knew that I am going tonight on a yacht to cruise the coastline with the rich and famous. I feel a pang of disloyalty. I’m an economic traitor.
We spend the day getting ready. Or rather, Melanie spends the day getting ready and I splash in the pool and clear the fridge of pine nuts and cheese and some flat bread crackers that are made with spirolina, which sounds like it has the capacity to kill me. It is one of those days when the day is just something to get through until night comes. One big giant endless bowl of soup before the main course. I let Melanie take the Porsche to go shopping, and when she gets home, she tries her hair in various styles and shaves her legs twice. She wants us to get pedicures, but I’m sorry, people buffing and painting your toes is just twisted.
Jason and Glenn are picking us up in Glenn’s Jaguar. I thought only old ladies with tanned purse-leather necks and golf handicaps and aging husband CEOs had Jaguars, but apparently I was mistaken. I sit on the leather couch to wait for them. Melanie hasn’t appeared yet.
“Melanie! Come on! I want to see what you finally decided to wear!” Me, I’m just in my orange skirt and orange tank top. Orange always makes me happy. An orange is a fine thing, itself, and there isn’t anything much nicer than having someone peel one for you. “They’re going to be here any minute!”
I’m in a fine mood, thinking about oranges and wearing orange and being here starting a new life and getting to go on a yacht and maybe seeing Hunter Eden. All the angst about leaving home is missing right now. I’m having a is-this-really-my-life moment, but in a good way. Usually you have those when you have the flu, or when you step in something the cat hecked up, or when you leave your wallet somewhere when you are starving. But this—if I’d thought it up, imagined it, if I’d wished on birthday candles on a cake, it wouldn’t be this moment. It was a moment I wouldn’t even think to dream.
And then Melanie walks in.
“What are you wearing?” I ask. I think I might be seeing things, because I can’t believe it. I really just can’t believe it.
“Indigo, don’t give me any shit about it.”
I stand up. I walk over to her, because I think maybe it’s just the same color. Maybe it’s just a different green T-shirt. I take a pinch between my fingers. “It’s that same T-shirt,” I say.
“Indigo, quit it. You’re going to get it all wrinkled.”
“I cannot believe you would do something so stupid,” I say. I’m not mad. I’m still sort of in my happy-orange mood. I’m not mad, I just think she’s an idiot. You know, fine. Go spend seventy-five dollars on a saltine cracker. Go spend it on a rubber band. Go for it. “What a waste of good money,” I say.
“Well, I didn’t actually spend it,” she says. You can tell she knows she has made a mistake the second the words are out her mouth. She actually looks over her shoulder, back down to her room where she came from, as if she could reverse all this and try again.
“What?” It can’t be that. She didn’t mean that. “What do you mean?” But I’m afraid I know. Suddenly, I’m sure I know.
“Never mind. In? Never mind.”
“Fuck never mind. You didn’t actually spend it. That’s what you said. What do you mean? You didn’t shoplift that, did you?”
“No!” she says.
But she has those little lines around her mouth. The sewn-up lines. And the thing about a conscience is, we’re not the full, single owners of it. We may think we hold it, like an orange, ours, in our hands; we may think we can toss that orange away into a patch of blackberry brambles. But we forget it is made of sections; sections that belong to the people who love us and look out for us. Your mother has a section of that conscience, your father, your family, and I have a section of Melanie’s. Maybe she could lie to Glenn, but she could not lie to me. Maybe because we most successfully lie to the people who we don’t care (never cared, no longer care) if we disappoint.
“Melanie. You did. My God. You did! How could you do such a thing? WHY did you do such a thing? You have money to pay for that if you wanted it so bad.” I look at Melanie, with her silly green T-shirt and her jeans, her manicure, her hair straight and long, and her wide eyes, still showing shock at the way her mouth has betrayed her, and she looks so small to me. At home, she was large; in her circle of friends she was loud and in command and so large. But here she is small. If this is her place, it is a place that makes her small and faded and wrong.
“I just…I wanted it.”
“You wanted it? So you just took it?”
“I wanted it, Indigo, okay? There’s no great big psychological issue here. I just wanted it.”
The doorbell rings then. And then too, a bang, bang, bang, as Glenn and/or Jason knocks on the door. I can hear Jason say something that makes Glenn laugh. I realize Melanie is right about what she said, and the realization makes me slightly sick. It disgusts me. There is no great big psychological issue here. There is no contemporary-society pseudo-psycho-sham explanation of lack of self-esteem or childhood wounds or other such shit. The truth is much more simple. We think a lot about not having. When we don’t have and we think about not having, it’s called dreaming. When we do have and think about not having, it’s called greed.
I sit with Jason in the backseat of Glenn’s Jaguar, and Melanie sits in the front. The back of her head looks guilty to me. I feel the cringing tangle of electricity between Melanie and me, disappointed energy that might as well be solid and real and not just air and feelings. I could almost touch it, but it might burn my fingers. Neither Glenn nor Jason seems to notice the fifth entity in the car.
“Do you think Twisted Minds will be there?” Glenn asks.
“I don’t know, you know, there are no guarantees,” Melanie says. “I don’t want everyone getting disappointed if not.”
“How about Raw?” Glenn asks.
“As long as Hunter Eden’s there, that’s all I care about,” Melanie says.
“Oh man, he’s so gay,” Jason says.
“That’s what all guys say when another guy is really hot,” Melanie says. She may be right, but I’m in no mood to agree with her.
Jason goes on to tell us about some gay surfer he knew who dropped out of school, and then Glenn tells some story about his sister dropping out of school and his parents going nuts, and then Melanie tells some story about the time her mother freaked out and threatened to put her brother in the hospital for depression if his grades didn’t improve, and then we are at the marina. There is a young Latino valet and Glenn hands over the keys and says, If you scratch it, you’ll never say ‘green card’ again to us as we walk off, cracking up Jason and Melanie, and causing me to step on the heel of his shoe on “accident.”
“Hey!” he says.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say. Asshole.
It’s a beautiful night, that’s true. The water sparkles glittery white, and the marina boats are strung with lights, their windows glowy and gold. The air shimmers with sound—laughter, and the slam of car doors, and voices lifted with anticipation. There is a warm breeze that makes the palm fronds sway and sing their tick-tick-tick song. Melanie hands over our tickets. Her dad is supposed to be there already. We walk up the ramp of the yacht. We, I, walk up the ramp of a yacht. Do you understand? A yacht that looks like a yacht, long and sleek-nosed and demanding a compliment.
Jason holds my arm. “You okay?” he asks.
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Fine.”
It looks like a house inside here—a house with paintings and furniture, jammed with people holding glasses of tinkling ice cubes and…Wait a sec, someone I recognize. The blond woman in the upswept hair. There she is, over by the stairwell, a portly man’s hand around her waist, and there she is again, in a black dress, getting something from the bar, and there she is, pressed up against a guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt, his stomach bloated and his gray beard full and bragging.
“Let’s find the food,” Jason says.
“Let’s find the booze,” Glenn says.
We are in a little clump, like ducklings who’ve lost their mother. Even Jason and Glenn seem uncomfortable here. The boat begins to move, the scene changing, sliding past, in the windows beyond. We follow Glenn in a line, weaving in between men and women balancing cocktail napkins and drinks, until Glenn reaches the bar. A band starts up, no songs I recognize, but suddenly the sound is thick and the volume on the boat rises so that you have to shout to be heard.
I smile at the bartender, a young guy who has a goatee-in-training. This is his job, which means he is viewing it all from the outside in, same as me. I’m a waitress, see? “Pretty crazy, huh?” I shout to him.
“Indeed,” he shouts.
I roll my eyes, indicating that we’re on the same team. Somehow, for some reason, it’s important to me to have him know that. To know that this is not my place. That his home, somewhere, an apartment maybe, with a wife and new baby and old Bob Dylan albums and leftover lasagna in the fridge is more my place, likely. But he is wary of me. I can feel it in his cautious smile.
“You’re not drinking,” Jason says. He has a glass of clear liquid with a lime in it, and Glenn and Melanie both hold martini glasses with olives skewered by miniature swords. Obviously, no one is carded on this trip.
“The brain is a terrible thing to taste—I mean, waste,” I joke. But I don’t know if he hears me. Jason just shrugs. We follow Glenn to the food table, which is lined with various items served by waiters in white. Glenn maneuvers us toward a living room table where we can set our glasses down.
“I’ve heard this band,” Glenn says. “Flying Something…”
Melanie nods. She looks nervous and uncomfortable, like the hostess of an unsuccessful party. She bites the edge of her nail, then remembers her manicure and stops. Three people sit on the couch next to us. The man in the Hawaiian shirt is there, along with another barrel-chested guy wearing tiny glasses, and a fifty-ish woman who is still aiming for the bimbo look. Allen appears at Melanie’s elbow.
“Having fun?” he shouts.
“Oh yeah, this is great,” Melanie says.
Wavy lines are coming off of him already. “Isn’t this the most amazing food? Let me introduce you,” he says. He turns and snags the first available audience, the three people on the couch. The woman is the wife of producer-somebody; Mr. Aloha is somebody-somebody; and the barrel-chested man with the tiny glasses is a photographer. I hear that part.
“His photos are amazing.” Aging Bimbo touches the barrel-chested man’s hand.
“Well,” he says.
“Really. That tomato,” she says.
“Tomato?” I shout to Jason.
“He photographs food. They just said—”
“Have any of you seen his work?” Bimbo says. “This tomato was unforgettable. Sitting on a white plate…”
“That red tomato?” I shout. “Is that the one?”
“You’ve seen it,” Bimbo says.
I feel a pinch on the fleshy part of my arm. Melanie. How dare she pinch me. She shoplifted a T-shirt. I don’t even want her hands on my arm until she goes back to that store and does the right thing.
“You just really captured its essence,” Bimbo says.
“Well, I try. It’s a matter of what Michelangelo says—about finding the character in the marble,” he says.
“You’re an artist,” Bimbo shouts.
“I saw the most amazing photographic display while I was in New York,” Aloha man says. “The most incredible you’ve ever seen. Nudes with pomegranates. I know about photography. I’ve seen the best exhibitions around the world, but this…”
“So much of it is having the right eye,” Vegetable Michelangelo says.
“And you do. You have such an eye,” Bimbo says.
“Well…”
“And blah, blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit”, Bimbo says.
Glenn is looking into the bottom of his martini glass. Allen has ditched us, veering off to refill his glass. I am beginning to see how it works. It is just like the Moore party. Everything and everyone is amazing. The best. And all you have to do is pat yourself and one another on the back, in some great big old narcissist backslapping orgy. These people—they are walking PR firms for themselves. Breathing human advertising. But this time I am here. I am inside, not outside. And I feel something about that. Something moldy and wrong.
“What about his cucumber?” I say to Bimbo. “It was amazing. So…green.”
“Nice to meet you all,” Melanie says. “We’re supposed to go say hi to some people.”
But they aren’t paying attention, anyway. Any words that aren’t self-reflected glory disappear into the din, mere lips moving.
“Green!” Glenn is busting up. “Fucking cucumbers.”
“Indigo, don’t,” Melanie says.
“The true art is seeing the inner tomato,” I say. “Of course, I always loved Michelangelo’s fruits and vegetables. He always did an amazing grapefruit.”
“I saw the exhibit the other guy was talking about. In New York. It wasn’t so hot,” Jason says. “Fucking naked people with pomegranates.”
“I thought you said Raw was going to be here,” Glenn says. Little wavy alcohol lines are starting to come off him, too.
“We’re going to go outside for a while, okay guys?” Jason says. “We’ll catch up to you.”
“We are?” I say. But Jason already has my arm and is steering me through the crowd. Another band starts up. We step outside two glass doors that lead onto the ship’s deck. It’s a little quieter out here. And this seems to be where all the performers are. You can tell—instead of aging-rich-people clothes and young-wives-of-aging-rich-men clothes, there are who-cares performer clothes. We-are-supposed-to-be-subversive-and-or-avant-garde clothes. And okay, sure, these are just other costumes, but I feel better out here, among the leather pants and pierced noses and vintage shirts that appear casually chosen but that were probably in and out of the reject/possibility pile same as Melanie’s.
“See anyone you recognize?” Jason says.
“Hey, aren’t you the drummer from Raw?” I say to him.
The ship has two floors, and we are on the upper deck. God, it’s beautiful out here. The black sea shines with moonlight; the sky has unfurled the stars. The city lights twitter and gleam in red and yellow and white along the shore. The air is just-right warm. Two and a half million dollars, though, could not buy the beauty of that sea, and the intoxicating temperature of that ever-slight wind.
Jason leans over the railing, and I do too.
“Light is amazing,” I say.
Jason laughs.
“No, really. It is. Look, it’s like light-magic out there. Light makes things magic. Think about it. Christmas trees. Fireworks. Glow in the dark stars. Fireflies. Phosphorous. Jet planes in a night sky.”
“I can sit in a dark room and just watch the lights of my stereo,” Jason says.
“Exactly,” I say. “And what about that dusky time of night when the hills turn pink and the trees turn yellow?”
“Well, they don’t really turn yellow,” Jason says.
“You know what I mean,” I say. But I’m not so sure he does.
“I guess,” Jason says.
We are standing very close together. Our arms are touching. Maybe it’s the way the breeze is blowing, I don’t know, but I notice something then that I didn’t notice even sitting next to him in the backseat of the car or standing beside him inside. It’s a smell—a familiar smell. Maybe I was too angry to smell or hear or see properly in the car, and maybe there were too many distractions inside, but here—yes, there it is. I know that smell. Jason—he smells like Axe. He smells like Axe, and it might have been funny, but suddenly it feels anything but that. It isn’t funny at all, because all at once it’s unbearably, overwhelmingly sad. I am here, and those people who I love, my family, my own Trevor, are somewhere else, under this moon too, but not here.
“Axe,” I say. I whisper. And my God, suddenly I just miss them so much. I can’t fool myself about it—the feeling is too large and whole, and the wall I have built against it just breaks down and I am alone with it, this missing. This monumental missing of the people who make me me. Absence is so much louder than presence. Axe. I swallow. Suddenly my eyes get hot with tears.
“Are you okay?” Jason asks.
I nod. But I’m not okay. I just…I want to be home. The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.
He turns to me and kisses me then. Jason, with these unfamiliar lips and this odd mouth that feels thin and wrong and moves in ways I don’t know. I remember again how the body is more honest than the mind most of the time, because this kiss tells me one thing, and that one thing is that I don’t want to be kissing Jason Lindstrom from Malibu. I want to be kissing Trevor Williams from Nine Mile Falls, who understands the way I feel about twilight-yellow trees. You need someone in your life who sees trees the same way you do.
The kiss ends. Jason looks happy. “Wow, that was great,” he says. “I can’t wait to have more of where that came from. You thirsty? I’ll go get us something. Stay here.”
I stay. I watch the water beneath me, rushing past. I lean far enough down to feel the force of wind at my face. I need the waking up. I stand straight, take a deep breath, and SHIT! Inhale twelve thousand toxins from some asshole’s secondhand smoke! I turn around, and that’s when I see him. There he is, standing not three feet away from me, in the center of the deck.
Hunter Eden.
Hunter Eden, standing and talking to my friend, the blond woman with the upswept hair and red nails. Hunter Eden, with a cigarette pinched between his index and middle finger, sending black tar my way through its glowing orange tip.
I have to look several times to be sure it’s him. The top of his head comes up just under the woman’s nose. He’s short, that’s the point. He doesn’t look at all like he did in the videos. He’s thin; scrawny as the type of dog you see tied up to a streetlight outside a tavern. Even his ass looks different. Diminished. Small and human. It is NOT the ass I know from the cover of “Hot”—no way is that the same ass. No way. The woman says something that makes him throw back his head and laugh, and I can see his teeth, yellowed from nicotine. Maybe I just imagine them yellowed from nicotine. But I don’t imagine the woman’s voice.
“Your last album was amazing,” she says.
“Well…,” he says. “I was so stoned I could barely play. Thank the sound techs. Thank some kid they brought in to fill in where I fucked up.” He laughs. She laughs. He takes a drag from his cigarette, and two streams of smoke jets exhale from his nose. He coughs a phlegmy, gray-lunged cough. Spits a hunk of something over the rail, into the ocean. The woman doesn’t seem to mind. He’s famous, he’s rich, and so who he is doesn’t much matter.
I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I can’t. If I close my eyes and open them again, maybe I’ll see the real Hunter Eden. Because this isn’t Hunter Eden. This isn’t him at all. This is some guy you’d see in a 7-Eleven, buying a box of rubbers and a six pack. How could they do this to us, whoever they are? How could they give us something so false to want? He doesn’t even play all his own songs? I’d been had. I’d worshipped something that wasn’t even real. I’d wasted my time and my belief on a lie.
The Hunter Eden I knew? He was product marketing with a stand-in ass.
I want out of here. It’s too much. I’ve got to get out of here, away from Melanie and Jason, away from Hunter Eden, away from these people at this party. I ran from the wrong things, to the wrong things, and the realization makes me sick with shame. I’ve hurt good people. I need to make it right.
There’s one small problem, though, with this pressing, now urgent, need. I am on a ship. Cruising around the coastline. I am stuck here, at the mercy of these people at this stupid party, until they decide when and where I get to leave.
I go back inside. Decide to find a bathroom. A bathroom is a great place to hide. There is no good excuse for anyone to bother you there. On the way, I see Melanie, fixated on a bleary-eyed Glenn, who has one hand up the back of her stolen T-shirt. I head down a quiet hall, find a bathroom with a sink and a basket of little rolled-up towels. I sit for a while. I consider my options. I can stay in here, play Let’s Use All the Towels until I get bored. I could be in here for a good long while. Option two: go back out. Put myself in my own Indigo bubble so that nothing these people say or do can affect me until we get back.
Neither of these ideas is satisfactory. What I want, what I NEED, is to get off this boat. But I can’t exactly tell them I want off, right? These are important people, partying on a fancy yacht, cruising in the ocean, and I am only Indigo Skye, sitting on a fancy toilet, hiding in a bathroom.
A woman pounds on the door. “Is anyone in there? Can you hurry it up?” she says. And right then, for some reason, I think of Nick. Nick and his oatmeal with raisins. The True Value guys. I think of Leroy, and of Mom, and of Jane, whose circumstances make them feel smaller than they need to feel.
“Watch the flusher,” I say to the woman waiting outside. “It gets stuck. Took me forever to get it working.” And then I find one of the stewards, in his white uniform.
“Do these things ever stop? The boat. I mean, does it make a stop? Like if someone needed to get off?”
“Can you wait ten minutes?” he says. “We’re letting off a passenger in Santa Barbara. She’s not feeling well.”
Ten minutes. I can wait ten minutes, all right.
“Sure,” I say. “Thanks.”
The party carries on, as the boat slips into harbor. I feel two seconds’ worth of bad about ditching Jason. I don’t feel bad enough, though, because when the boat stops, I am waiting at the bridge with the ill woman and her husband, who holds her elbow.
“I never could do boats,” she says to me. She waves her hand in the air as if to dismiss the whole sordid experience. She has a diamond on her finger the size of a cannonball.
“Go on ahead,” the husband says to me when the bridge comes down. “We’re going to take it slow.”
And so I do. I go on ahead, because I, Indigo Skye, have the power to stop yachts. Well, maybe not quite stop yachts, but I have the ability to end things I don’t like and to say something isn’t okay when it isn’t okay. I have the power to insist on good and real things for myself. Most of all, I have the right to change my mind.