My dad pushed his plate aside. I noticed that he hadn’t eaten very much—often, with my dad, a sign that he was drinking, or about to start.
“At some point, I just had to cut my losses and get out,” he said, crumpling his napkin and throwing it on the table. I wondered if he had told Xandra about Mickey Rourke, whom he viewed apart from me and my mother as the prime villain in derailing his career.
Xandra took a big drink of her wine. “Do you ever think about going back to it?”
“I think about it, sure. But—” he shook his head as if refusing some outrageous request—“no. Essentially the answer is no.”
The champagne tickled the roof of my mouth—distant, dusty sparkle, bottled in a happier year when my mother was still alive.
“I mean, the second he saw me, I knew he didn’t like me,” my dad was saying to her quietly. So he had told her about Mickey Rourke.
She tossed her head, drained the rest of her wine. “Guys like that can’t stand competition.”
“It was all Mickey this, Mickey that, Mickey wants to meet you, but the minute I walked in there I knew it was over.”
“Obviously the guy’s a freak.”
“Not then, he wasn’t. Because, tell you the truth, there really was a resemblance back in the day—not just physically, but we had similar acting styles. Or, let’s say, I was classically trained, I had a range, but I could do the same kind of stillness as Mickey, you know, that whispery quiet thing—”
“Oooh, you just gave me chills. Whispery. Like the way you said that.”
“Yeah, but Mickey was the star. There wasn’t room enough for two.”
As I watched them sharing a piece of cheesecake like lovebirds in a commercial, I sank into a ruddy, unfamiliar free-flow of mind, the dining room lights too bright and my face flaming hot from the champagne, thinking in a disordered but heated way about my mother after her parents died and she had to go live with her aunt Bess, in a house by the train tracks with brown wallpaper and plastic covers on the furniture. Aunt Bess—who fried everything in Crisco, and had cut up one of my mother’s dresses with scissors because the psychedelic pattern disturbed her—was a chunky, embittered, Irish-American spinster who had left the Catholic Church for some tiny, insane sect that believed it was wrong to do things like drink tea or take aspirin. Her eyes—in the one photograph I’d seen—were the same startling silver-blue as my mother’s, only pink-rimmed and crazed, in a potato-plain face. My mother had spoken of those eighteen months with Aunt Bess as the saddest of her life—the horses sold, the dogs given away, long weeping goodbyes by the side of the road, arms around the necks of Clover and Chalkboard and Paintbox and Bruno. Back in the house, Aunt Bess had told my mother she was spoiled, and that people who didn’t fear the Lord always got what they deserved.
“And the producer, you see—I mean, they all knew how Mickey was, everyone did, he was already starting to get a reputation for being difficult—”
“She didn’t deserve it,” I said aloud, interrupting their conversation.
Dad and Xandra stopped talking and looked at me as if I’d turned into a Gila monster.
“I mean, why would anybody say that?” It wasn’t right that I was speaking aloud, and yet the words were tumbling unbidden out of my mouth as if someone had pushed a button. “She was so great and why was everybody so horrible to her? She never deserved any of the stuff that happened to her.”
My dad and Xandra exchanged a glance. Then he signalled for the check.
xx.
BY THE TIME WE left the restaurant, my face was on fire and there was a bright roar in my ears, and when I got back to the Barbours’ apartment, it wasn’t even terribly late but somehow I tripped over the umbrella stand and made a lot of noise coming in and when Mrs. Barbour and Mr. Barbour saw me, I realized (from their faces, more than the way I felt) that I was drunk.
Mr. Barbour flicked off the television with the remote control. “Where have you been?” he said, in a firm but good-natured voice.
I reached for the back of the sofa. “Out with Dad and—” But her name had slipped my mind, everything but the X.
Mrs. Barbour raised her eyebrows at her husband as if to say: what did I tell you?
“Well, take it on in to bed, pal,” said Mr. Barbour cheerfully, in a voice that managed, in spite of everything, to make me feel a little bit better about life in general. “But try not to wake Andy up.”
“You don’t feel sick, do you?” Mrs. Barbour said.
“No,” I said, though I did; and for a large part of the night I lay awake in the upper bunk, miserable and tossing as the room spun around me, and a couple of times starting up in heart-thudding surprise because it seemed that Xandra had walked in the room and was talking to me: the words indistinct, but the rough, stuttery cadence of her voice unmistakable.