American Girls(52)

“Yes,” Roger said. “Of course.”

My sister talked with more and more of her mouth as the drive went on, but her speech was running together. Roger drove us back to his place, the same crappy apartment that he’d lived in with my sister. I had repressed, trauma-victim memories of the place, of listening to them have weird, angry sex through the walls, of my sister crying. Roger dropped us in front of the building and I helped Delia up the stairs and through Roger’s unlocked apartment door. For someone documenting murders in LA, he wasn’t exactly taking the safety lessons home.

Once Roger came in, we sat on his decrepit balcony that overlooked a Dumpster, and I watched my sister drink more vodka, the scent of decaying food and urine not even kind of faint in the air.

“I can’t breathe,” I said.

Roger ignored me and so did Delia.

“Can I get something else to drink? I finished my soda.”

Roger gestured at the bottle of vodka. My sister shook her head.

“She’s not even sixteen, Roger,” Delia said. “Don’t start thinking you’re Polanski. There’s water on the counter.” And I wondered why my sister was so sure of where he kept his things. Did she just assume, or was this where she’d been going those nights that Dex and I were watching bad TV?

“Ugh,” I said. “Throwing up in mouth. I’ll get some water.”

I wandered into his apartment, which had giant movie posters in Italian and French on the walls, L’avventura, La Dolce Vita, à Bout de Souffle. The women on the posters were beautiful and foreign, larger than life in every sense of the phrase. I took a handful of chips and ate them while I poured a glass of water from the pitcher, which was exactly where my sister said it would be. When I went back outside, they were going at it.

“He is a beautiful director,” Roger said.

“He’s a pervert and a monster,” Delia said. “I don’t care what happened to him. And I really, really, really don’t care how many times you’ve seen Chinatown, or The Tenant, or Repulsion, okay? So please don’t give me his résumé against his ass-rapery. Because it’s funky math.”

While she was talking, the phone next to her kept ringing. I saw Dex’s number flash, and then the time, 7:20, and Delia ignored it, like having a broken nose was making her deaf as well.

“Your phone,” I said.

She looked at it, turned it off, and tossed it into her bag like she’d touched something radioactive.

“Your reactions,” Roger said. “They are very American.”

“Bullshit,” Delia said, taking another shot of vodka. “You think European women like being raped? Not even in the most French film on the planet.”

Roger leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head.

“If you believe she was raped.”

“I do. I do believe that she was raped. And they should drag his ass back to America and put him in jail.” Delia tossed her empty shot glass from the balcony into the Dumpster and looked at Roger like she was daring him to say something. The more relaxed Roger acted, the twitchier my sister became.

“You do not like to believe,” he said. “But some girls, thirteen, yes, some girls, perhaps they do want this.”

“You mean,” Delia’s voice sharpened, “that a thirteen-year-old girl was asking for it?”

“Is it so impossible to imagine?”

“Any girl who would want that hasn’t been taught what else to want. Or she’s been taught to want it. Either way. No. Just no.”

“He was grieving,” Roger said. “Who can imagine how a person lives through what he saw? He lost his child and beautiful wife. It turned him ugly. Anna, you have read about this?”

I had. I had read about how Roman Polanski was pretty much a sketchball who knocked up a very pretty actress and then continued to be a sketchball. Supposedly, after they’d been married a while, he was driving up to Tate from behind and started to catcall at the hottie walking down the road before he realized that it was actually his wife. His mother was killed in the Holocaust, his wife and unborn son were horribly murdered, and he turned around and raped a young girl. It reminded me a little bit of The Virgin Spring, an art film that Roger made us all watch one Christmas. In it, a young girl is raped and murdered by two men as the kid who is traveling with them, a kid who can’t even talk and doesn’t do anything, watches. They then accidentally go to the house of the father of the young girl, and after he lets them come in to spend the night, the father realizes that they’ve killed his daughter. He murders them all, even the kid who didn’t do anything, who couldn’t even talk. I don’t know why, but Polanski reminded me of the father, all of that death and then he goes and does the wrong thing. There had to be a reason, but it made no sense. Still, it seemed important.

“I have a question,” I said.

“The answer is no.” Delia was cracking herself up. She was seriously drunk.

“Why do you think it is that Roman Polanski does this awful thing and doesn’t even feel sorry about it, but he gets to live his life? And you have these women, the Manson girls, who did this really horrible thing when they were young and stupid and on drugs, and they never get to spend one day not paying for it, even though most of them have spent the rest of their lives trying to do something to, I don’t know, atone?”