Fly Me Page 5

  “Is that really a thing?”

  “Well, apparently, you only need one to really hit. Especially something Sela del Mar–related.” He frames it in the air with his hands: “‘Sela Vie.’”

  Suzy giggles.

  “Like the French thing,” he says.

  “Oh, I got the reference,” she says, laughing a little harder.

  “Can’t print enough of them.”

  Suzy laughs again and, for the first time since the first hit, hears its warm mettle externally. There is a voice in her head, speech mechanics happening with her throat and tongue, and then a laugh—a thing not whole but made of distinct parts of sound; it was all science…hard science, Cs in each. And the whole two-shot with this saltwater towhead, and even that silly mustache, a separate entity in itself; the picture seems to dim at the edges, a Vaseline lens, the effect of motion blur. There’s something missing in Billy’s face, and it’s only now in their shared cocoon that she’s placed it: his eyelashes are blond, too, blond like pound cake. And they do this thing to his eyes that has the inverse effect of mascara. Is it even handsome? Here are these little lakes on a face—edgeless, though—contained not by shoreline, but by these high-walled, shale-cut cheek- and brow bones. She’s seen pictures like this, from the continental ranges of Italy and Switzerland. Lakes you’d walk into, not just up to. Hike for days toward a moonscape of heaven-stretching rocks that puddled black eyes depthless at their base.… All this inside the silence in their conversation, Suzy wrapping a long strand of her own orange hair around her index and middle fingers and popping her lips to the backbeat like a goldfish in a tank.

  “You’re feeling pretty good,” Billy says.

  She nods and smiles.

  “You know who you look like?”

  She ticks her head low to high, like, Who?

  “Sissy Spacek.”

  “Ugh. Really? Try again.”

  He smiles and inhales: “You know who you look like?”

  Nods upward again.

  “Mia Farrow.”

  “Better.”

  “Mia Farrow on Peyton Place. Mia Farrow with hair.”

  “Mia Farrow and…” She gestures to him. “Robert Redford?”

  “Sure, that’s it,” he says.

  “Peyton Place Farrow and Butch Cassidy Redford.”

  “You’ve got it, good.”

  A while on, she’s moving her head around with her eyes closed, and the silence summons an onset of strings. “E-L-Ohhh!” she says. There’s a clatter of silverware somewhere, the foamy choke of the keg. The sounds flip Suzy’s lights on. And then there’s Mike, a case over each shoulder, stepping onto the patio, looking both more propped up and more destructed than Suzy has ever imagined he could. His shoulders pull in on themselves and collect in big fists in his upper arms. But then there’s his leg—torn open below the knee and spilling a black, sandy flow down his shin, dammed, firebroken, at the edge of his sock.

  “Oh God, what happened?” Suzy says, leaping up to meet Mike.

  He unloads the cases on a wooden table, and a few guests sidle up to grab a longneck.

  “Well, uh, I kinda got lost—was riding up and down PCH, cutting up one block and then down another. All the walkstreets look the same to me.” Mike didn’t move with Grace in January. He took two months in New York to tie up loose ends. The place really is still new to him. “Anyway, I found a market and bought the beer, and on the way home I was no-hands-ing it, until right at the base of the hill when I hit this slick of sand and the bike crumpled beneath me.” Suzy looks again at the gash. It has clotted, but it’s stuffed with grit—crushed shells as old as the first fish that lay out on Sela Beach, that came up for air and got tan instead. Fish with suntan, Suzy thinks. Fish with sunglasses! She’s smiling even though Mike’s in pain.

  “And I didn’t think it’d be such a good first impression,” Mike goes on, squinting at her cinched-off giggle, “to toss the beer to save myself, so I kinda held on and let my legs and shoulder take the—what?”

  “Nothing, sorry, that’s horrible.” Suzy pulls it together. “Does your back look like that, too?” she says, flipping him around. His seafoam button-down is sliced into a clean flap along the spine. It’s strange to see him like this—Mike, whom, until she moved, she pictured mostly dressed up for dinner in Schuyler Glen or suited for a wedding. And yet here he is torn to pieces like an eight-year-old who’s fallen out of a tree and into a rosebush. It has always sped a small sense of shame through Suzy seeing adults outfitted in corrective plaster or gauze. A pretty Vassar girl in a cast; a white-shoe attorney in a neck brace; a mother of three with molar-to-molar braces. They are extrafashion trends people are supposed to grow out of. Now Mike has his own—bloody as a little kid launched from his basketed bike.

  And yet Mike seems better fit for the party than he was forty minutes ago. In ragged bones and blood comes a looseness. And having it implemented unwittingly makes him simpler, freer.

  “Holy shit, amigo, what happened to you?” Flipper says to Mike.

  “I fell,” Mike says. “The beer’s fine, though. And here’s this.…” Mike hands Flipper a handful of coins.

  “You are fucked up!” Flipper says. He grabs a beer. “I can’t believe you didn’t break any bottles.” Flipper grabs another beer and pops the caps on the edge of the patio table. The foam draws up the necks like blood in a syringe and Flipper lifts his bottle to his mouth to cut the surge. He cheerses Mike and pats him wide-palmed on the back.

  Mike has passed.

  Now Grace is at Mike’s side with a wash of horror in her face.

  “What happened?!” He tells the story again while Grace’s fingers drift over the raspberries beneath his shirt. Suzy moves back toward Billy, and they sit in their chairs, and Suzy explains.

  “Whoops,” Billy says, running his tongue along the edge of some rolling paper. He’s somehow wearing her sunglasses, so she grabs his.

  He describes several places around town, the spots she has to try this very week. The streets that correspond to the best parts of the beach. The totally good guys who throw better parties than the other guys whose parties are still pretty great. As far as Suzy can see (through the honey-colored lenses of Billy’s Vuarnets), there isn’t a place or person or idea in Sela deserving of a critical word. At some point, after Suzy opens another beer, Grace decides she can’t look at Mike’s blood any longer.

  “We’re gonna head home and clean up,” Grace says. “You good?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “Airport by ten forty-five.”

  “I’ve got all the time.”

  “Ehhh,” Grace says.

  Suzy puddles up right there in her chair for another couple hours—four o’clock, five o’clock—and experiences an encouraging coming-into-focus. The restaurants Billy described earlier float in her mind at first as islands in a black void—El Guincho, the Mexican joint with the tripe tacos and the parrot on the sign…it’s just a Billy story, tagged with a detail. But when she learns that Tuna, the bar that’s best on Wednesdays, is not only across the street from El Guincho, but also run by the same family as Howlers, the web touches. The darkness on the map, cast in new light, bridges with connective tissue. Billy even untacks a real-life map from a wall inside the house and brings it to Suzy to show her: there it is, Sela del Mar, and all its referents. She is beginning to see it. And just as brightly as she sees it, the answers appearing in relief, the Big Idea starts coming into focus, too—the meaning of the interconnectivity and infinity of it all starts to organize itself in an elegant and obvious solution to the great puzzle, the key to comprehension right over the edge there, just beyond that last wave, one deep dive, deeper than the last, down down down…

  When she wakes up—having drifted, for how long she can’t tell—she feels like she’s slept with a sock in her mouth. The sun still hasn’t set, but she’s beat. Someone has covered her in a serape, and with the exception of a burn-stained couple smoking cigarettes near the boug
ainvillea, everyone else has left or moved inside.

  Suzy stands, embarrassed, and the blood rushes to her toes. She sits again, white in the head, and folds up the map with her eyes closed. She collects some drained beer bottles into an empty box. She toes up to the front door and tries to locate Billy before stepping inside.

  “You’re awake!” Flipper says. The “Starman” 45 is moving in circles at low volume, and smoke hangs from the ceiling like a thunderhead. There are eight of them, no women, stretched out around the coffee table. Flipper’s leaned over a bowl of reds and blues, deliberating like a child selecting a jelly bean. When he picks one, he bends himself back, and shakes it down his throat. Suzy finds it improbable that she shares a generation with them. Flipper offers Suzy the bowl and an orange Frisbee coated with the peach fuzz of unlined blow. She declines, there’s a flushing, and then a door opens. Billy emerges from the bathroom looking oddly put together. His hair is wet and freshly tilled. No matter what, the crisp part. He slips a purple comb into the front pocket of a fresh lavender tank top, and Flipper extends his arm toward him.

  “No thanks, good bros,” Billy says.

  He’s midmorning-weekday alert, smelling like soap and lotion up close. Did he have toiletries and a change of clothes in his backpack? Suzy becomes instantly self-conscious, tasting her mouth as he might, a wet cave of champagne and malt and char. She brushes her hair with her fingers and finds it fried.

  “Sorry for checking out like that. I don’t normally just, you know, collapse midconversation.”

  “I saw it coming quick,” Billy says. “You started talking about your final-semester grades with your eyes closed.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Last thing you said was how you sensed between us an accelerated gravitational pull. A potential energy. No, an undeniable potential energy.”

  “Oh my God, no I didn’t.”

  “No you didn’t. But you did talk about physics. And you did tell me about Dave.”

  She covers her face with her hands. “That’s bad, too.”

  “Nah, he sounded like an all right guy,” he says. “You hungry?”

  Suzy hasn’t thought of it, but she is murderously empty. She feels hard and hollowed out, like a seashell. Growing up, Suzy would sometimes imagine the color and texture of the contents in her stomach. A healthy green bed of lawn mower clippings after a salad; cartoon-strip toxic lava after a day of fried eggs and booze. She needs salt, she needs starch. “Yes,” she says.

  “Cool, I’ve got an idea.”

  Just a minute to clean up, she tells him. She steps into the bathroom and flips the switch. She wets her fingers and streaks her hair—darkening with the dampness. Her eye whites harbor little lightning bolts, and a pair of heavily shadowed half-moons lie on their sides beneath her lower lids. She’s taken in just enough sun to wake up her freckles, to roust the red in her hair. It’s latent but there—an all-out redhead deep on one side of the family, responsible for a sixteenth share of the makeup, just enough to taint the family blond the color of a grapefruit. She surveys the medicine cabinet for a tube of toothpaste and squeezes a segment onto her tongue. She runs her tongue over her teeth, and with a ring of mint hanging around her mouth, she walks back into the living room and says some nice things to Flipper, before Billy cracks a joke she barely hears and pulls her from the room on the laugh line.

  It’s maybe thirty minutes out from sunset, and there’s a buoyant glow hovering above the rooftops. The sky peels back shades and the light grows richer. When Suzy looks up, there’s this thing that happens, where she can see through the light but also detect the faintest reflection. It’s like a glass ceiling, a sky of mirrors—each talking to another, all color moving together from warm to cool, to cream-colored and then white.

  Down the hill, down toward the water, they find the Strand. Pressing north, they pass house after house, about which Billy shares intel: This stretch of four homes is where the Sela del Mar Club hosted Hollywood types for a while, before they moved on to the Jonathan Club in Santa Monica. That Tudor with the sloped roof attracted bad news—a few years ago, three teens fell from way up on a big, breathy Santa Ana afternoon and cracked their heads right there. This bungalow is where one of the Manson girls lived, one of the ones wrapped up with Sharon Tate. Winkel-something. And then that lot next door—no house, just ice plant and dog shit—is where a Dodger infielder was all set to build a mansion before they traded him away to Kansas City, or somewhere else in the middle.

  “Tough luck,” Suzy says, getting a feel for the POV.

  “Incomprehensible.”

  As they scoot along, a few kids fire off some Piccolo Petes, comet-tail screeches that fail to resolve in explosions.

  “I’m always waiting for the bomb,” Billy says.

  “That’s ’cause you were in elementary school in the fifties. Sirens and drills.”

  “I like the stuff that explodes.”

  “You should enlist, then.”

  “Not that much.”

  “We were only ever given sparklers,” Suzy says.

  “That’s probably the pro-peace thing to do.”

  A sizzle and a bang this time. Suzy jumps, still a little light in the brain.

  “Jesus, they’re everywhere,” she says.

  “And this is illegal. You should’ve heard it when anyone could be on the beach.”

  Pretty soon they’re there, a stucco block like a lump of clay: El Guincho. The Tow Truck. Its insides are unstuffed, walls hand carved, seemingly by the scoops of a sculptor at one end and, at the other, by the greedy paws of a child gutting a pumpkin. An overweight server with long black hair and smudgy tattoos counts cash in the register. The counter looks to seat about a dozen, and the honkings of a mariachi record leak from the speakers. A leather pipe of a man with golden hair and golden nails swallows the fat end of a burrito and skims the front page of the Sela del Mar Sounder.

  “Memo! Qué tal, migo?” the server says.

  “Bien, bien. Qué pasa?” Billy reaches over the counter with both hands, and they grip each other’s forearms. The cook turns over his shoulder and flashes a shaka. “Pablo, this is my friend Suzy. She’s just moved here. I told her this is the only place to eat. El primero, el mejor.”

  Pablo wipes his hand on a stained dishrag he keeps tucked in the front of his apron and offers it to Suzy. Suzy shakes but can’t stop eyeing the burrito being double-palmed by the little golden man. She can’t remember ever having been this hungry. If she doesn’t eat soon, she might throw up—and in her cursory survey of the facility, there wasn’t any certain indication that a bathroom existed.

  Pablo reaches into a steel bin beneath the counter and emerges with a basket of tortilla chips and a Styrofoam cup of salsa. Suzy waits for Billy to take the first chip and then dives in two at a time. Billy walks her through the menu, his favorites—which, like his opinions of most things and people, are not terribly discriminating. “It’s all the best, each as good as the next,” he says. “But maybe since it’s the first time, it’s not such a bad idea to start with the Number One.”

  Suzy asks for the One and Pablo writes down Billy’s usual without his asking for it. Instead Billy says, “Escuchame, Pablo: Jack está aquí?” Pablo hands their ticket to the cook, who disappears behind a tin wall that’s cluttered with concert flyers and stickers of what look to be surf brands and skateboarding companies and, how ’bout that, front and center: SELA VIE. The infamous bumper sticker. Pablo doesn’t glance up at Billy but nods toward the ceiling.

  “I’m gonna go say hi to the owner for a second,” Billy says. “He’s upstairs, I’ll be right back.”

  Suzy shrugs happily. While she waits, she swivels in her stool from ten o’clock to two o’clock, in rhythm with the schlock-plod of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the radio. It triggers flashbacks to the war she waged with Dave in defense of Wings. But here was a gift for the opposition—a miserable single that choked the stereo at stew school. She stands and steps ju
st outside the door onto the sidewalk and watches the moon slip behind some thin, low-hanging clouds, and it is suddenly a bright dusk—an unnatural glow that reminds her of the seedy flashings of Times Square. Pablo waves a brown bag at her and Billy emerges from the staircase.

  “Want to take it to the beach?” he says. “They usually start up the fireworks right after sunset.”

  Something has changed in Billy. Something in the backpack. He went upstairs light; he returned with the leafy-green JanSport nice and bulky.

  Suzy is happy to go along. Fireworks are never something she goes out of her way to find, but the protracted show—the heavy presentness of sitting and watching, neck craned—is always better than she expects. “Hasta luego, Pablo! Hasta, Chuy!”

  They clatter down the steep hill—long, loud steps—and they’re suddenly on the Strand with the twilight walkers and dogs without leashes. Suzy orients herself by proximity to the pier. The pier is closer than when she tracks to the beach from Mike and Grace’s house, but not much. Six blocks nearer, she figures—and then glimpses a street sign that confirms it. Six blocks, on the money.

  “I’m getting it,” Suzy says.

  “What’s that?”

  “I know where we are, and where I go from here. It’s making sense.”

  “It’s easy, right? Complicated elsewhere; easy here.”

  “I’m having a tough time resisting that idea.”

  “Goddamn!” Billy says, swallowing the first bite. “You’ve gotta just take it to the face. All at once.”

  They chew in silence.

  “People from San Diego say it’s better there,” Billy says. “The closer to Mexico, the more Mexicans and all.”

  “I suppose that’s logical.”

  “Well, they’re wrong.”

  Suzy eats as quickly as she’s ever allowed herself, and then it’s all gone and she’s ready to sleep again.

  “I guess my timing was off,” Billy says. The clouds just hang there, no explosions yet. Families gather on the sand. People move to the balconies in the Strand-front homes. It is growing dark enough to detect television sets in some of the ocean-facing windows.