The Lioness(73)

“Can I see them?” he’d asked when the Russian had brought him his food. His voice sounded like he had a stuffy nose.

“No.”

“But—”

“It’s like you don’t trust me,” the guy had said. He was smirking, and Billy knew not to press. But the gunshots and the car engines had left him deeply unnerved, even when the fellow had promised him that the noises had been nothing, nothing at all.

And so Billy counted and thought of his little boy and the cartoon penguins, and just like in that closet, his own personal—fuck that professor—oubliette, eventually he fell asleep.



* * *



.?.?.

“So, the coaster had all this condensation on it from my soda. My apartment was an inferno and the ice melted, and when I picked up the glass, all these drops of water just cascaded onto the photo of my mom, and it was wrecked. Blotchy and smeared. And I was weeping and couldn’t stop,” the woman was saying to Billy. The recollection alone had the patient’s eyes filming up, and he handed her the box of tissues. The cardboard design had big, garish daisies. Suddenly this spring, everything had big, garish flowers of one sort or another. Wallpaper. Album covers. Tissue boxes.

“I mean, my mother was the sweetest woman on the planet,” she went on. “I loved her so much. She loved me so much. You know what that’s like.”

“I do,” Billy lied.

“And that picture of her was going to be on the funeral card, and now it was worthless. And it was all my fault.”

He didn’t remind her that the loss of the photo was a bearable disappointment; that death tended to pervert one’s view of the world, at least until the grief had begun to taper to mourning. Instead he said, his tone ruminative, “I suppose it felt rather like you had lost her again.”

She blew her nose. “Yes. Exactly.”

“Did you find another photo?”

“I did. It wasn’t as perfect.”

“Were your brothers upset about it?”

“No. They didn’t even know that I’d been careless and ruined my first choice.” She sat up. Her internal clock knew that their time was winding down. She used her middle fingers on each hand to push identical locks of cinnamon-colored hair back behind her ears, and then brushed her hands across her skirt. She was fine. Or she would be fine. It never ceased to amaze him how fucked up he was compared to the people he cared for. She reached into her purse and handed him the picture that she felt she had ruined. For a moment he was surprised she carried it with her, but then, no: it was inevitable that she would. She carried with her guilt and shame and disappointment the way most people carried car keys and wallets. He noticed that one of the drops had landed squarely on her mother’s face, but he still had the sense that the woman had been very pretty. She was wearing a cardigan and holding a bouquet of tulips—yellow, he suspected, but that was conjecture because the photo was black and white—and they reminded him of the flowers that his first wife had carried when they had been married. The photo, Billy supposed, was from the 1920s.

He thanked her when he handed it back to her, and after she was gone, he went to his office desk and pulled out the wedding picture from his first marriage. The divorce had been amicable; he was still friends with Amelia. More or less. He saw her often because of Marc. But she fell out of love with him when she fell hard for another professor at UCLA. When they’d been married, she had hated more and more each month the way their lives were increasingly linked to Katie’s, and what Amelia referred to dismissively as that whole Hollywood cabal. They were an inside, gated world, she said, one that depended upon the neediness of places like Rockville, Illinois (where Amelia had been born and where her parents and siblings still lived). When he pushed back that UCLA was the epitome of an ivory tower, she’d asked him if it ever creeped him out that every time his kid sister was in public, strangers’ eyes would slither over her like spiders. They craved her: her beauty, her money, her status. And she ate it up, Amelia insisted. They all did. Actors and actresses. They devoured their fans’ longing. It was the air that they breathed and the food that they ate. He defended Katie because Katie wasn’t like that, not at all, but he had to admit that narcissism and self-importance marked a lot of the business. It was the armor that lots of actors and actresses wore, because the only thing Movie Star Confidential liked more than a movie star at the top of his game was one who had fallen hard off that pedestal and shattered into a million squalid pieces. God, to catch Katie Barstow out and about without makeup? It was like spotting a rare and exotic bird landing on the handle of your shopping cart in the parking lot while you tossed your grocery bags into the back seat of your car.

He supposed he was at least as responsible for the marriage burning out as Amelia. It wasn’t that the professor was so magnetic; it wasn’t that he himself was so repellent. But, Billy knew, back then he had not been especially communicative. He knew now he should have listened more and he should have talked more. Amelia said he was—and this was the expression she used—shut down. She said he was so shut down that some days it was like living with a stranger. She never knew what he was thinking and he never told her when she pressed. They’d been married two years one day when Katie was visiting, and his sister had kissed six-month-old Marc and said something silly about how he’d never be locked in a closet, no, never, and Amelia had asked her what in the name of holy hell she was talking about. Until that moment, Billy had never, ever told Amelia about the closet.