ends. Disappear here. I stare out at the ocean until Griffin drives up in his Porsche. Griffin knows the parking attendant and they talk for a couple of minutes. Rip drives up soon after in his new Mercedes and also seems to know the attendant and when I introduce Rip to Griffin they laugh and tell me that they know each other and I wonder if they’ve slept together and I get really dizzy and have to sit down on the bench. Alana and Kim and Blair drive up in someone’s convertible Cadillac.
“We just had lunch at the country club,” Blair says, turning the radio down. “Kim got lost.”
“I did not,” Kim says.
“So she didn’t believe I remembered where it was and we had to stop at this gas station to ask for directions and Kim asks this guy who works there for his phone number.”
“He was gorgeous,” Kim exclaims.
“So what? He pumps gas,” Blair shrieks, getting out of the car, looking great in a one-piece. “Are you ready for this? His name is Moose.”
“I don’t care what his name is. He is totally gorgeous,” Kim says again.
On the beach, Griffin has smuggled rum and Coke in and we’re drinking what’s left of it. Rip practically takes his bathing suit off so his tan line’ll be exposed. I don’t put enough tanning oil on my legs or chest. Alana has brought a portable tape-deck and keeps playing the same INXS song, over and over; talk of the new Psychedelic Furs album goes around; Blair tells everyone that Muriel just got out of Cedars-Sinai; Alana mentions that she called Julian up to ask him if he wanted to come but there wasn’t anyone home. Everyone eventually stops talking and concentrates on what sun is left. Some Blondie song comes on and Blair and Kim ask Alana to turn it up. Griffin and I get up to go to the locker room. Deborah Harry is asking, “Where is my wave?”
“What’s wrong?” Griffin asks, staring at himself in the mirror once we’re in the men’s room.
“I’m just tense,” I tell him, splashing water on my face.
“Things’ll be okay,” Griffin says.
And there, back on the beach, in the sun, staring out into the Pacific, it seems really possible to believe Griffin. But I get sunburned and when I stop at Gelson’s for some cigarettes and a bottle of Perrier, I find a lizard in the front seat. The checkout clerk is talking about murder statistics and he looks at me for some reason and asks if I’m feeling okay. I don’t say anything, just walk quickly out of the market. When I get home, I take a shower, turn on the stereo and that night I can’t get to sleep; the sunburn’s uncomfortable, and MTV’s giving me a headacheand I take some Nembutal Griffin slipped me in the parking lot at the beach club.
I get up late the next morning to the blare of Duran Duran coming from my mother’s room. The door’s open and my sisters are lying on the large bed, wearing bathing suits, leafing through old issues of GQ, watching some porno film on the Betamax with the sound turned off. I sit down on the bed, also in my bathing suit, and they tell me that Mom went out to lunch and that the maid went shopping and I watch about ten minutes of the movie, wondering whose it is—my mom’s? sisters’? Christmas present from a friend? the person with the Ferrari? mine? One of my sisters says that she hates it when they show the guy coming and I walk downstairs, out to the pool, do my laps.
W hen I was fifteen and first learned how to drive, in Palm Springs, I’d take my father’s car while my parents were asleep and my sisters and I would drive around the desert, in the middle of the night, Fleetwood Mac or Eagles on, loud, top down, hot winds blowing, making the palm trees bend, silent. And one night my sisters and I took the car out and it was a night where there wasn’t any moon and the wind was strong, and someonehad just dropped me off from a party that hadn’t been too fun. The McDonald’s we were going to stop at was closed due to some power outage caused
Anthony Trollope
Betty Webb
Jane Leavy
David Levithan
Angeline Fortin
Amy Ewing
Jake Taylor
Julie Garwood
Michelle Madow
James Patterson