Calling Mr Lonely Hearts Read online

  But now she had lost Thad. She hadn’t heard from him since he hadn’t come home that night. Some of his clothes, his passport, and his secret envelope of cash (of course, she knew he had it, and had thought it kind of cute) were gone, along with his shaving gear and the picture of Pilot, that stupid dog.

  When another five minutes passed, and none of the waitstaff gliding through the main dining area would catch her eye, she was ready to give up and go home. The gourmet shop, where she could pick up a slice of quiche and maybe a salad and perhaps a cold split of champagne, was open until ten. Thad didn’t like her to drink champagne because he said it made her act like a teenager. Yes, a little lift was what she needed after such a tiresome, lonely day. She reached for her handbag.

  “I think you’ll like this Sauvignon Blanc.”

  Alice looked up. A man—not a waiter, surely, in that sport coat—put a glass of wine down in front of her, then put a second one at the other place setting. He pulled out the opposite chair and sat down.

  “I see you haven’t ordered yet,” he said. “Good.”

  Alice smiled her most polite social smile. “Pardon me?”

  But in the next second, looking at his face, she had to keep herself from crying out. She felt as if the chair beneath her might collapse, or, worse, suddenly disappear. She was certain that the man in front of her couldn’t be real.

  “I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me for someone else,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice from shaking. Not a mistake. She knew it wasn’t a mistake. She knew him. What a stupid game, Roxanne had said. Why make up a lover?

  He gently took the menu from where it lay in front of her and opened it.

  “This lighting in here is so poor,” he said, glancing up at the chandelier with its several burned out bulbs. “I’m afraid Les Deux Freres has seen better days.”

  She knew the curve of his cheek, the sleek texture of his black, black hair. She knew the confident set of his mouth, the slight lift of his left eyebrow as a sign of his concentration. She knew these things because she had thought them into being.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” she said, trying to put a hint of indignation in her voice. She suspected that she was not really in a restaurant, but dreaming in her own bed. But if it were a dream, she would have been expecting this man, her lover. If it were a dream, the service would be better, or she would have him, alone, in one of the restaurant’s discreet alcoves with the curtain drawn, and they would be making love. She would be naked, astride him on the tufted velvet chair, her hands gripping the ornate back of the thing, the gilt fracturing beneath her fingernails. She blushed to think of it.

  “If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll have the management ask you to leave. They might even call the police. I know someone who’s with the police.”

  “You mean the young man who calls you once a year to extort fifty dollars for a sheriff ’s department sticker for your Lexus?” he said. “It won’t get you out of any tickets, you know. He works in a boiler room in Enid, Oklahoma.” He smiled.

  Hearing his voice, looking at his eyes—though she found she couldn’t quite look into them, she knew they were dark, rimmed with heavy lashes that would make any woman jealous—she was suddenly afraid. But why should she be afraid if he was the product of her own imagination?

  “If this is a joke, I don’t think it’s a very funny one,” she said. Her next thought was that he was a madman, someone who knew (how?) her dreams. She told herself to just get up and walk away. Then: He knows my name.

  “Alice,” he said, and her world turned on that single word. Such tenderness in his voice. No one had ever said her name in that way before, as though it were composed of something more precious than mere letters, or simple syllables. Coming from his mouth, her name sounded special, sacred. Had Thad ever said her name in such a way? Once? No. She thought of Thad as soft, and such tenderness in his mouth would have been repulsive. This kind of tenderness could only come from a man with enormous strength, and she was suddenly sorry that she’d thought him condescending.

  I am just plain Alice, she wanted to say. Not Dream-Alice.

  “Do you want me to leave?” he said.

  But this only confused her further. He had cut through to her heart. The most dangerous place.

  She nodded.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. He took a quick sip of wine from her glass and put it back down in front of her. “It’s just wine, Alice. It’s really very good.” He stood and laid the open menu down in front of her. So tall! She’d never thought of him being so tall!

  His lips, warm against her forehead, were real enough.

  Now, practically running up the interior stairs from the garage beneath the house, she felt like a girl again, ready for her first date. Any other night, she would’ve come inside cautiously, double-checking the alarm, making sure nothing had been disturbed. Tonight, she left the door unlocked, feeling a small thrill in her stomach as she did so.

  What about Thad?

  So many feelings. So new! This was what Roxanne had talked about—the excitement, the newness. Why shouldn’t she have it for herself? Her next thought was to call Roxanne. What would Roxanne have done about the man? She’d have played right along, no doubt. Probably would’ve ended up with her bare foot in the man’s crotch, playing lap hockey. She didn’t have Roxanne’s chutzpah, though, or her casual ways.

  Varick was the name on the card she’d found on the table after he left. She tested the word in her mouth. It was a perfect name. Could she have made up such an amazing, mysterious name? And what was his accent? Whatever it was, it was wonderfully foreign. Sexy.

  She stashed the clothes she’d changed out of to go to dinner in a hamper, and hung up the damp towel from her shower in the bathroom. Her feet felt warm and sticky in her sandals and she kicked them off and put them on a shelf in the wardrobe closet just off the bedroom.

  In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth and swished some mouthwash. Thad couldn’t bear the taste of mouthwash, even when he kissed her. Varick wouldn’t care. Mouthwash would be the last of her lover’s concerns.

  “Varick.”

  His name filled her room. There was no question that he would come. She looked around. Would he prefer some other room? Maybe the formal living room downstairs with its enormous German and English antiques, her father’s passion. She could picture him there. He would be at ease anywhere, of course. So cosmopolitan!

  From her lingerie armoire, she took a gold peignoir set, a silky, fluid gown with hand-tatted lace at the bosom and a matching robe whose silk was so finely woven that one could see through it. She’d bought it in San Francisco, back in May, when she and Thad had traveled there for a cousin’s wedding. Thad had wanted to spend the few afternoon hours they had free sleeping, but she hadn’t wanted to go shopping alone. At first he had just followed her dutifully, reading a guidebook he’d picked up somewhere, but then he’d seemed to finally relax. Giddy with the energy of the city, the crowds, the charm of the place, they’d stopped for a glass of wine just before going back to the hotel where they made love. Had that been the last time? She was sure it had. She held the peignoir to her chest, fingering its satin trim, feeling the slightest bit guilty.

  Should she?

  “Varick.”

  She lay on her bed, listening to his footsteps coming down the hall toward her room. Resolute footsteps. She felt like a virgin bride on her wedding night; her entire body shook—not with a lover’s anticipation, but with an excited, guilty fear.

  Out of habit she’d closed the bedroom door, and the old knob turned with noisy protest beneath her lover’s hand. For the briefest of moments, she worried that it wasn’t her lover, but someone else who had come in the unlocked back door. Maybe Thad? She sat up.

  But when the door opened, it was her lover’s face that was illuminated by the candlelight flickering on the walls of the room.

  In the morning, she woke with the sun on her back and her face pressed deep into t
he pillow. She knew she was alone before she opened her eyes. Her shoulders ached and her wrists and elbows were stiff and her body lay heavily on the bed. She felt as though she’d been dropped from a great height.

  Pushing up off the pillow, she turned over. Around the room, the candles had burned down to nothing, with the exception of the one on the nightstand, whose flame seemed to float on a tiny sea of melted wax. Her mouth was dry, but there was only the empty champagne bottle near the candle. There had been something about the champagne bottle, but she couldn’t remember, and thought that maybe it was better that she didn’t.

  The air conditioner wasn’t running and the room was already warm. Two flies seemed to have discovered her left knee and buzzed lazily above it. When she sat up to brush them away, they spiraled off, chasing toward the open window.

  She looked around for the diaphanous gold robe, but didn’t see it anywhere. Her nightgown lay puddled on the floor. She got out of bed slowly, not yet ready to acknowledge the blue and green bruises on her thighs. Crossing the room, she saw herself, naked, in the mirror. Despite the bruises, which she couldn’t see well in the mirror, she liked what she saw there. Her body seemed more substantial to her. No longer pale and sallow, it had a kind of glow she hadn’t noticed before. Happiness! Surely, it was from the happiness her lover had brought her.

  In the mirror, she saw the reflection of the robe, as well. Only it was no longer whole, but was tied in four ragged pieces to each poster of the bed where she now recalled being tied up.

  A sly kind of smile came to Alice’s lips and she did something she hadn’t done in months and months. She giggled.

  CHAPTER 9

  Week 18 6/7

  “You’re going to like this, baby,” said Malina. Or was it Ivanka?

  For a while, Dillon had a system to tell which girl was which just by looking at their faces. But now he couldn’t remember the system and didn’t really give a fuck anyway. They were the same. Twins. Delicious, gray-eyed fucking twins like he’d seen only in magazines up to this point in his life. Had he been here in the loft with them for three days? A week? A month? He didn’t really give a fuck about that either. It was all good.

  He’d spent most of the previous night on the adjacent rooftop that had been converted—nicely converted—to a sprawling patio with a hot tub surrounded by teak furniture and small potted fruit trees. He and Malina had made good use of the double chaise. Yes, it was Malina, the one with the smiley-face tattoo on her inner thigh right there where he’d had to work to discover it. It wasn’t a particularly convenient way to distinguish the girls, and, once, he’d thought he was in his bedroom with Malina, but found, in the dim light from the bathroom, that he’d been with Ivanka the whole evening.

  “Goody time,” Malina/Ivanka said.

  There were goodies and there were goodies. Malina/Ivanka was smiling. She carried the silver tea box—at least that’s what she’d called it—ahead of her like it was a birthday present. He could’ve gone to get the thing himself from its place on the table against the wall, but he was so fucking comfortable where he was on the leather nest of the couch that he didn’t want to move. But it was as though she’d read his mind. He’d awakened a couple hours earlier (there were no clocks, but he thought it might be around two in the afternoon), and after a roll around the bed with Ivanka (he’d checked), a beer, and a plateful of the jelly doughnuts he’d come to like so much, he’d had a steam shower and was feeling just fine, ready for either a nap or some powdered white fun from the box-that-never-emptied.

  Malina/Ivanka settled down beside him and spooned some coke onto the tabletop. It was so fine, so loose, that it didn’t need chopping at all.

  “Where’s my buddy Varick?” he said. It spooked him the way Varick would show up in the middle of the day, or night, never hanging around for long, and never sharing in the goodies.

  “Oh, you know how he is,” she said, tossing her hair back to keep it out of the coke. “He gets busy.” She did a small pile and handed the glass straw to Dillon.

  “Ummmm,” she said, lying back. She closed her eyes.

  He’d noticed that the twins always looked perfect, as though they had a standby team of makeup artists inside the first bedroom, the door of which was always closed. They’d never invited him in, and it had never occurred to him to ask. What could be inside there to interest him? He needed only the girls themselves, their centerfold bodies: each pair of breasts an identical feast; juicy red lips, lips that couldn’t seem to taste enough of his skin; and legs, impossibly long and firm, that twined around him to create a playful prison when the twins joined him in his bed. Every so often he asked himself what he’d done to deserve what he was getting.

  He did his own pile of blow. As the burn penetrated the membranes of his nose, and, seconds later, his throat, he thought about Amber. He should call her. But he’d misplaced his phone, and there didn’t seem to be one in the apartment. What if he called and Asshole Thad answered? Fuck Asshole Thad. Asshole Thad had stolen Amber from him. Before Asshole Thad, he and Amber had been close. Even when he’d lived out of town, she would call him every day to make sure he was okay. She needed him and he needed her.

  Now there was going to be a kid, too. She would be tied to Asshole Thad forever.

  When he felt the rush of the coke come on him, he knew he needed to do something about Asshole Thad. It could wait, for now. But he felt strongly—very strongly—that he could improve the situation. Asshole Thad could disappear, maybe. Amber would be sad for a while, but she’d get over it.

  “What’s the matter, honey?”

  Malina/Ivanka stroked his forehead, which was still sore from the infection that wouldn’t seem to clear.

  “You look so mad,” she said. “Are you mad at me?” She pushed out her lower lip into a pout. Malina/Ivanka was naked, and when she leaned back, shifting her leg, he saw the smiling tattoo. He decided that Malina was his favorite.

  The only answer he gave her was a smile. Fuck Asshole Thad. He licked two fingers and used them to scoop some blow out of the open tea box. Then he spread Malina’s legs farther apart and rubbed the blow on the exposed, tender place between her legs. She giggled and pulled him to her.

  Varick hadn’t come around in a few days, and Dillon was thinking that maybe it was time to go, that maybe he needed to leave this place because it was all just too good, too fucking delicious—when he found the rig and packet of heroin next to the jelly doughnuts in the kitchen.

  He knew hopheads and didn’t like them. They couldn’t be trusted. There was a girl he’d known in high school, whom he’d seen at a house where he’d gone to buy some weed. She sat in the middle of a laid-out sofa bed in the living room, looking like six kinds of hell. Her long blond hair that had been so beautiful when he’d seen her in the school courtyard, always laughing, was dull and thin, and she had a look on her face like she’d spent the last month scared shitless and didn’t know whether to move or not. The smell coming from the paper grocery bag beside her was definitely puke. When he said “hey” to her, she stared back at him like some kind of zombie. “Why isn’t there any fucking Mountain Dew?” she finally said. No one answered her, and she didn’t repeat it.

  “It’s too early in the morning for that,” Ivanka said. (At least he thought it was Ivanka. She had put on the pink robe in his bedroom that morning.)

  “Let’s wait until after lunch,” Malina said.

  “I don’t want that shit,” he said. And he meant it at that moment.

  Malina shrugged and the girls wandered off—Ivanka to the bedroom, and Malina to the patio.

  He waited until the sun went down. They’d ordered in steaks and Varick had sent a messenger by with a couple of bottles of champagne of a kind that he’d never seen before. The label looked expensive, obscure. The girls had dressed in matching white dresses that clung to them like water, and Ivanka had penciled a deep brown beauty mark on Malina’s cheek, telling him that it was a better way to tell them apart th
an fucking them. But she said it with a sly smile to let him know it was a joke.

  Was it the champagne that broke him down, finally? He didn’t know, didn’t care.

  Malina proved to be an expert with the H and the rig, getting a look of intense concentration in her brown eyes; her manicured fingers handled the cooking tools and the syringe with calm certainty.

  “Ivanka, you do it with him,” she said. Ivanka nodded, solemn. “But Dillon, honey, you get to go first.”

  The champagne had mellowed him, but he still felt nervous, virginal. Up to now, even when he’d been offered a joint with H in it, he’d turned it down. It wasn’t the needle that the luscious Malina was offering that bugged him. He was used to needles. It was the crossing of that line—a line he’d set for himself, but hadn’t known he’d set.

  A person could die from too much delicious.

  But it wasn’t just delicious. It was Love. He wanted to weep (and maybe he did) because he’d never known what Love would feel like running through his veins.

  He felt the Love every day. Sometimes, they did coke in the morning, but there was always Love in the afternoon. Like one of those soap operas his mother and Amber used to watch. But he was thinking less and less of the world outside. He was happy, here with the girls.

  Dillon was dreaming. As in every dream he’d had since he came here, he dreamed of being alone in the loft. It was as though he’d never been anywhere else, never lived another life outside of here.

  He was counting spoons, taking them out of the cutlery drawer and laying them out on the table according to size and pattern. Every utensil in the drawer had turned into a spoon: there were tablespoons and teaspoons and long-handled spoons like the kind he’d seen people use to stir iced tea; tiny spoons for coke, and souvenir spoons like you get at amusement park gift shops. The categories were getting complicated, and he was getting anxious.