He couldn't figure it out and Van laughed at him. He looked as though he were in shock.
“I don't know. We're all different I guess, even if we are one family.”
“Apparently.”
“Want to trade me in for Val?” She was always afraid of that. Valerie was so much more spectacular, and outrageous, with her box of joints, her loose morals, her wild red hair. She got the feeling that she would have gladly slept with Jason, if Vanessa would only have disappeared, but she knew her sister too well, and was careful of that. She had lost too many boyfriends to her over the years to ever trust her again with a man, but she didn't hold a grudge for it. It was just the way Val was, and it didn't mean anything to her.
“Not yet.” Jason looked enormously relieved to have found the quieter twin.
But he did not look relieved when Vanessa made a suggestion several months after that. Their affair had been continuing comfortably. In fact, she had moved in with him downstairs, and Louise had found another roommate in no time at all. And the deal they made was that if her parents called, they would cover for her, tell them to hold on, and come downstairs and bang on the door so she could run up and talk to them. But they seldom called. And if they had come to town, Vanessa would have moved back in for a few days, but so far they hadn't come to New York. They were too busy with their latest film. Lionel was still in Vietnam, but miraculously thus far all had gone well, and Valerie still hadn't returned from Rome. She had gotten another bit part once there, this time in a cowboy film, which was new for her, and she had modeled a few times in Milan, she'd said on the phone, but what she didn't tell Faye was that it was without clothes.
But whatever the case, they were spread all over the world now, and the only one left in L.A. was Anne. Ward wanted to rent a house in Lake Tahoe for two weeks, and he wanted to know if Van could be there. Lionel would be on leave, Greg would be through with his summer job, Val said she'd be home from Rome by then, and Anne said she'd go if she could bring Gail. What he wanted was a commitment from Vanessa, who wanted to bring Jason along, but he looked horrified at the thought.
“To Plastic Land? For two weeks?”
“Come on, you'll be finished with your thesis by then, and Lake Tahoe's for real. Besides, I want you to meet my family.” That was precisely what he feared. He imagined that they all looked like Val and he would be devoured by the enemy. He was a small-town boy and he had no defenses against them. “You already know Val, so they won't all be strangers to you.”
“Oh God.” He did everything to talk her out of it in the next few weeks, but she absolutely refused. She had taken a summer job in a bookstore downtown, and she bugged him about it when she came home every day. “Isn't there something else we can talk about? Robert Kennedy's been killed, the politics in this country stink, your brother is in Vietnam. Do we have to talk about vacations now?”
“Yes.” She knew he was scared but she couldn't imagine of what. They were a harmless bunch, at least in her eyes. “We are going to talk about it, until you agree to come.”
“Shit!” He had shouted at her because he really loved her a great deal. “All right! I'll come!”
“Christ, was that a big deal!” It had only taken two months. And when she called her parents, they were stunned. Other than Anne's little friend Gail, Vanessa was the first one to ask to bring “someone” along.
“Who is he, sweetheart?” Faye tried to sound casual as she frowned at her desk at MGM. She was suddenly frightened that he wasn't good enough, or didn't have Vanessa's best interests at heart. How could she know if the guy was decent or not, and Vanessa was still so naive about everything. She had run into Valerie the week before with some character who looked like a hairdresser and he had been so stoned Val was practically holding him up. She was going to have to spend some time with that girl. Ever since she'd been in