Cheating at Solitaire(14)

“You could have not invited him.”

“Not inviting people doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t show up.” Kendra got up and walked over to the great curved wall of windows. This was a Victorian-era house. The ceilings were not just high, but majestic, and that meant that the stories were higher than they would have been on a modern place. She could see the rocky promontory far below her, the tip of it sinking and rising as waves of water washed over it. That was boring too. It was incredible how much of what went on in the world was just plain boring, and there was nothing she could do about it.

“I wish something exciting would happen,” she said. “I wish we could have a ritual murder.”

7

There was a moment at the end there, right before the two of them walked out the door, that Arrow Normand thought she was going to lose it. She couldn’t figure out why she hadn’t lost it. She’d heard a lot in her life about self-control and self-discipline, and there were times when people said she had both, but she’d never really understood either, and she didn’t understand them now. What she did understand was that she was going to be in a lot of trouble, and waking up to tell them all about it wouldn’t help her situation at all.

It wasn’t as if they hadn’t tried to get something out of her, or that she had been able to play completely dead. Stewart Gordon could play completely dead. She’d seen him do it. He could lie there, so lifeless you thought he was dead, and you could poke at him and yell in his ear and he wouldn’t move. This was “acting,” he’d told her when she’d asked him about it, and she’d known right away that he was being sarcastic at her expense. There were times when Arrow felt as if she were nothing more than a big, bad ball of resentment. She resented nearly everyone she could think of, all those people, like Stewart Gordon, who didn’t understand what was important. They didn’t understand that she was important, that was the thing. She was famous, and she was rich, too. Money was very, very important. It was stupid to pretend that it was less important than things like if she knew where Switzerland was, or if she’d ever graduated from high school.

She waited awhile in the silence before allowing herself to open her eyes. She had to be careful. The world seemed to be full of people who didn’t understand what was really important. Besides, she didn’t want to talk to Stewart Gordon twice in one day. It was hard enough to talk to him once. He always looked at her as if she were some kind of bug.

She felt the cat come up next to her on the couch and then rub his side against the top of her head. She really liked cats, although not as much as she liked dogs. Too many people were allergic to cats. She opened her eyes and watched as it walked down the back of the couch behind her. It was just a matter of thinking straight. That was all. She just had to think straight, and act like herself, and everything would be all right. It would help if her head wasn’t so fuzzy and her stomach didn’t hurt.

She made herself sit up, just a little, and look around the room. It was the kind of room she remembered from home in Ohio before she’d come out to Los Angeles to be famous, except for the bookshelves and the books. Nobody back home in Ohio read much in the way of books, and Arrow had the sneaking suspicion that nobody else really did either. People just pretended to read books, most of them, to make other people feel stupid, and to pretend that books were more important than money, too. The woman who lived in this house must be either very poor or very ugly. She wanted to make the whole world feel stupid.

Marcey was lying curled up into a fetal position on the chaise lounge, which was really a “chaise longue,” which Stewart Gordon had lectured her about just that morning on the set. Only stupid people said “chaise lounge.” The real word was “chaise longue,” which meant “long chair” in French. It was Stewart Gordon who was stupid. Some people looked cool in bald heads, but he didn’t. And nobody made any money doing one-man shows off-Broadway.

She forced herself all the way up and swung her legs off the couch. Everything hurt. She was probably running a fever. First the truck had gone off the road and onto the beach, and then it was later, and cold, and the snow was pouring in the open window next to her. She didn’t see why anybody bothered to live in New England. Snow was horrible, no matter how neat it looked in the movies. Winter was horrible too. This island was the most horrible thing of all. That was because everybody watched you here, but not like they watched you in L.A. They were like schoolteachers who thought you were stupid, stupid, stupid, and they were always making mental notes about what you’d done so they could tell you all about it afterward.