But Amy stayed for an hour, giving a sort of informal resume of her bit parts and commercial walkons and her part-time gig as a back-up singer in a rock band (surprising Prentice by mentioning that she played the accordion with them, too). She was too amusing to be tedious, but then Prentice's viewpoint on that might have been muddled by the sheer erotic magnetism Amy gave off. She could be quite funny, too, and despite everything, he was glad she'd showed up.
Finally Gloria had to go to a meeting with the director of an art department. Prentice paid the check and they put on their coats; Prentice opening his mouth to offer Gloria a drop-off from his taxi, when Amy said, as if just thinking of it, 'Tom, I have to walk through Central Park to go to my agent's office and – and I'm kind of scared -'
'You scared you might hurt someone?' Gloria said, with savage sarcasm. 'Amy, it's broad daylight, Central Park is perfectly safe now.'
'It's never safe, don't give me that. I thought if Tom wanted to walk me -'
''We could drop you off in the cab,' Prentice said. 'It's too rainy to walk.'
That wasn't the graceful way out after all, because once they were in the cab Amy and Gloria jockeyed to see who would get dropped off first. Gloria had to give in: her office was on this side of the park.
When she got out of the cab, she slammed the door. 'Gloria takes life too seriously,' Amy said, and laughed.
By the time Prentice had dropped her off at her agent's building, he found he'd asked her to go to a jazz club with him that night. And he'd begun to suspect that she was loaded on something.
When he picked her up to take her to the club, she offered him some of the drug. She called it 'X', which was short for Ecstasy, also called MDMA, a neurotoxin variant on speed that produced animated friendliness in people. In Amy it only made her more the way she already was when she was in her hypomanic stage.
Amy was manic depressive. She preferred the term 'Bipolar'. Something the hospital in Culver City had completely failed to diagnose.
Now, remembering that wet day in New York, and her astonishment the same night when he'd told her he didn't take drugs and didn't want any X, he thought: Yeah, it was probably drugs. Some other drug, like Buddy said, probably crack, methamphetamine, or some new designer drug that ate her up. Left a mummy in a file drawer.
But there was something else, too. Some one. Who gave her a Gold Card and two hundred dollars. She hadn't been working, he knew that for a fact. Someone. Some son of a bitch. Some bastard.
Probably some goddamn producer.
LA. County Juvenile Detention
Lonny went yelling for' the supervisors, the first time he ever went to them for anything, trying not to cry and trying not to be sick, bringing them back to the room, swearing at them for their slowness. Showing them Mitch.
Mitch was just sitting there. Sitting awkwardly, legs out-thrust like a baby, his face infant-innocent: a baby sitting in a pool of blood. Red strings hanging out of the ragged openings in his left arm – pieces of muscle. Leg sawn open and in one place you could see the bone. Mitch shaking and still working at himself, the knife carving his right thigh, working its way up, getting close to his groin. Mitch smiling distantly, as his eyes went in and out of focus, pupils widening and shrinking, widening and shrinking. And then he saw Lonny and the guard and his connection was broken and he stopped cutting himself, and said, 'Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh fuck it's starting to hurt. Oh no.'
But he didn't take the knife out of the wound.
Culver City, Los Angeles
'God Dammit did you see that!' Jeff shrieked, making Prentice jump half out of his seat. 'He had it, he HAD the motherfucking ball and he DROPPED it!'
Prentice slumped back in his chair, and cracked another beer. 'Yeah. He probably feels bad 'cause he can hear you at Dodger Stadium, too, Jeff.'
Had the ball and he dropped it. It was beginning to sink in to Prentice: he blamed himself for Amy's death. He'd dropped the ball.
He'd' known the relationship was going to go somewhere the third time he dated her. The first date had been convulsively sexual; the second time a bit rocky, both of them defensive, unsure, her manic jitteriness making it worse.
After the second date, parting with a brittle politeness, Prentice didn't think they'd see each other again. He'd told her she was childish to talk about herself all the time; she'd said his conversation was nothing but jokes, and she had to talk about something real.
But two days later she surprised him, again, by inviting him over for dinner. Very sweetly. Another mood swing maybe. Get into a relationship with a girl prone to wild mood swings and you were, to paraphrase President Bush, in deep doo-doo.
But he went. She was a good cook, though afterwards her kitchen looked like hurricane wreckage. And she left the mess for two days. The stir fry was great, her raspberry mousse was exquisite, but before he'd quite finished it she pushed the little table aside, strode across to him, and straddled his lap facing him. Reached down for his zipper. He could taste mousse and brandy on her tongue. She wasn't wearing panties.
The first time they made love, that particular night, was a prolonged spasm, starting on the chair and ending on the rug. But when it happened again, in bed, it began languorously, and veered into an ecstatic mutual searching. He quickly learned to maintain a steady, pistonlike rhythm, once he was inside her, to counterbalance her bucking and thrashings. It was exactly what she needed, his rigid organ the axle for her wild torquing, and it brought them to that rare confluence of desire, mutual orgasm. In the moment of orgasm, the timing was right: they both flung their emotional doors open; they opened their eyes and saw one another. Knew fleetingly that until that moment, their skilled and very modern sexuality had been only a way of using.
Suddenly, all the pretenses were dropped, and isolation was gone, and they embraced for the first time: the first time it was real.
'Jesus Christ,' he breathed, amazed at the intensity of his feeling.
After that, she didn't have to talk about herself, her outsized ambitions, the people who'd 'validated' her. At least, not so much. They could sit quietly in the windowseat, holding hands, talking sometimes and sometimes not. Watching people on the street. Both of them perfectly happy. And he'd thought: Finally. I can stay with this one.
For twelve years, since he began dating at eighteen, he'd never had less than two girlfriends at once. It was a constant juggling act. And he was constantly on the look-out for more pins to juggle. Knowing all the time the performance was commanded by some undefined insecurity. Completely unable to fight it; and maybe having too much fun to want to fight it.
But, now and then, he felt the lack, too. No commitment meant no real closeness.
Amy's sheer intensity had overwhelmed his insulation. Maybe something more: some quality of underlying familiarity about her, as if she were someone he'd always known. It made him feel close to her at the roots of his personality.
And it felt good that she needed him deeply. He was a writer, a humourist, a freelancer, something of a rake, but compared to Amy he was as stable as the Rock of Gibralter.
It took time, though. The morning after that third date, Amy was resoundingly depressed. 'It's not you,' she said, huddled in a corner of her bedroom with a cup of coffee. 'It just happens. It just comes. I'm up and then I'm down. It takes me a long time to talk myself back up again…
Prentice had talked Amy into seeing a psychiatrist. It wasn't easy; she wouldn't consider it at all when she was up – and when she was down she was sure that therapy would turn out to be a dead end, 'Like all 'solutions''.
They gave her medication and it worked. She stabilized, without losing her vivacity. Prentice felt safer: he asked her to marry him. They moved in together; had a small, informal summer wedding on the roof of his apartment building. People in t-shirts, drinking wine on the roof of the adjacent building, applauded and yelled 'Go for it!' when he kissed her. Amy had laughed and yelled at them to come over for champagne.
She stayed on the medication until the last three months of their marriage. Until then, everything went swimmingly. She was getting some work in an independent film production shooting in New York. He was riding high on the good box office for Fourth Base. Everything was great. Amy was growing up. She could go hours without
