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.
xxi.
“SO,” SAID MR. BARBOUR at breakfast the next morning, clapping a hand on my shoulder as he pulled out the chair beside me, “festive dinner with old Dad, eh?”
“Yes, sir.” I had a splitting headache, and the smell of their French toast made my stomach twist. Etta had unobtrusively brought me a cup of coffee from the kitchen with a couple of aspirins on the saucer.
“Out in Las Vegas, do you say?”
“That’s right.”
“And how does he bring in the bacon?”
“Sorry?”
“How does he keep himself busy out there?”
“Chance,” said Mrs. Barbour, in a neutral voice.
“Well, I mean… that is to say,” Mr. Barbour said, realizing that the question had perhaps been indelicately phrased, “what line of work is he in?”
“Um—” I said—and then stopped. What was my dad doing? I hadn’t a clue.
Mrs. Barbour—who seemed troubled by the turn the conversation had taken—appeared about to say something; but Platt—next to me—spoke up angrily instead. “So who do I have to blow to get a cup of