“I do care. I love you. I want you to marry me.”
Christie was fully awake now. Her violet, reddened eyes were wide with something like rage. She was shaking, but when Eric reached out to calm her she pushed him away.
“What are you?” she said. “How dare you.”
“I don’t understand, Christie. I’m sorry.”
She would not cry. She would not.
She got up from the bed and dressed quickly in pants and a T-shirt, putting on no underwear.
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“I’m going away for a while,” she told Eric, holding back the rage.
“When will you be back?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Today?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right. If that’s what you have to do.”
“It is. I’m going,” she said, and she was out of the apartment in less than a minute.
C h ri st i e drove toward the desert, finally able to cry now that she was behind the wheel and sealed in her car. She turned the radio on and then off. She took out her cell phone, entered a number, then disconnected before the call engaged.
She turned on the radio again, turned it off again. She put a CD into the player. It was an old collection, one she had bought for her mother, Mary McCaslin’s
Drew wasn’t visiting from back East. He’d dropped out of school and come back to L.A. a year before. He called her when Eric wasn’t home and begged her to come back to him.
Her departure from his life, it seemed, left a wound that would not heal.
She still liked Drew. She cared for him. But after months of his begging and after years of Eric’s cool detachment, she couldn’t take any more. So when Eric went away to keep from getting Mona sick (as if, she thought, his germs were deadlier than other people’s), Christie said okay when Drew wanted to come over. She said to herself that she merely 2 0 9
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wanted company, to have her own life. Maybe they would have dinner and talk about old times, she had thought. Her mother had wanted to spend time with Mona, and so Christie packed her an overnight bag.
Drew tried to kiss her at the front door, but she pushed him away and said that if he did that again he’d have to leave.
She meant that. He apologized nicely, and they sat down on separate chairs in the living room in front of the window that looked out over Santa Monica.
They started out talking about his paintings. There was a gallery in San Jose interested in showing two canvases. They were paintings of Christie the way he remembered her when they’d gone to Catalina Island for the weekend once. They were nudes. He’d love to show them to her. To him she had always been the ideal of beauty. He loved her then and he still did. He dreamed about her; he told her he dated women who looked like her. He had dropped out of school to be near her.
“I love only you,” he said at last.
Her anger at Eric and the pathetic bleating of Drew came together in Christie’s brow.
“It has nothing to do with you, Drew,” she said, affecting a gentle tone. “It’s just that . . .”
“What?”
“It’s just that Eric is so wonderful.” She felt a perverse satisfaction seeing the pain entering Drew’s face. “It’s not just that I love him, but he’s got everything a woman could want in a man. That day he beat you on the tennis court I called him.
We went for a drive, and I told him that I loved you and I wanted to be just friends. But he took me in the backseat and made love to me until I was completely his. I didn’t even want to be with him, but he made himself my man.”
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The tears flowing from Drew’s eyes were a balm for Christie’s ragged heart. She loved hurting Drew, but at the same time she told herself that it was for his own good.
“Stop,” he said.
“From that first night, we got together whenever I could get away from you,” she continued. “You remember that stain on the roof of my car? That was Eric. His dick is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen, and when he came it was so hard that I could feel it inside.”
“Stop, Christie.”
“You can leave whenever you want, Drew. You’re telling me how much you love me. I’m just telling you how I feel.”
She expected him to jump to his feet and run from the apartment. She wanted to make him run, to feel the pain that she felt. She realized that she really did blame him for not being man enough to keep her.
But when he did stand up, it was only so that he could fall to his knees and press his face against her skirted
