They each do another line, then, far too restless to stay in the store, decide to go for a ride.
Stan insists on driving and they all pile into their clunky old Westfalia van and she finds herself in the back with John as they cruise south on the PCH with her head and puss buzz-buzzing and she hears Doc talking to Stan about a “distributorship” like it’s Amway or something.
“Even if you just buy for yourself,” Doc is saying, “we’ll give it to you wholesale, so you’re already ahead. Then if you decide you want to make a business of it…”
Buzz buzz.
“… serious money…”
Buzz buzz.
“… can’t be a lot of profit in leather bracelets…”
Suddenly she watches herself turn to John and hears herself say,
“Kiss me.”
John looks startled. “What?”
She repeats herself with some urgency, with some heat, with her husband two feet away, she offers her mouth, her full lips, and John takes them and she sucks his tongue into her mouth and sucks on it like a dick and she feels moist, wonderfully wet, and then Stan pulls off the road into the Harbor Grill because apparently the men are hungry and as he turns off the engine he turns and looks at her and she knows that he saw.
85
The waitress hands them menus.
“I know that girl,” Doc says, watching her walk away. He turns to John, sitting in the booth beside him. “We know that girl.”
John shrugs. They know lots of girls, and he’s still a little blown away by Diane kissing him with her husband right there.
But if Stan is pissed, he’s not showing it.
Not showing it at all, because his hand is under the table, stroking his wife’s thigh, and she’s looking across the table straight at John, her lips curled into a smile that wants to become a laugh.
“I know that girl,” Doc repeats, then gives it up and asks Stan, “So what do you think?”
Stan strokes his beard.
Black and bushy.
“I don’t know,” he says, studying the menu. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” Diane asks, as if she hadn’t overheard the conversation in the van.
“Doc has a business proposition,” Stan says.
“You know,” Doc says. “Business.”
“Oh,” says Diane. “ Business. ”
“Should we be talking about this here?” Stan asks.
Diane is surprised that she feels contempt for him.
The waitress comes back for their orders.
She’s pretty, Diane thinks.
A cheerleader.
They all order omelets.
Diane sees Stan (sneakily) look at the girl’s tits.
“Do we know each other?” Doc asks the girl.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t think so.”
You couldn’t describe the girl as bubbly, Diane thinks, but you wouldn’t call her cold, either.
She’s reserved.
Older than her age.
“I just think I know you from somewhere,” Doc says.
Kim thinks, maybe it’s because you used to sleep with my mother with me there, but she doesn’t say anything. If Doc doesn’t remember her, good. If no one remembers her, good.
“Jesus, will you let it go?” John mutters at Doc.
Kim remembers him, too.
The boy who lived in the cave and ignored her.
Stan watches her ass as she walks away, then says to Doc, “I don’t think we have the money to buy in.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Doc says. “You don’t have to. You just go down to Mexico, bring some back with you, and keep a piece for yourself. Sell that piece and you’re in business.”
“I don’t know…”
Doc leans over the table and says to Stan, “You could sell right out of the store. I’m telling you, this is money. ”
“I don’t know,” Stan answers. “We’ll have to think about it.”
“Don’t think about it too long,” Doc says.
Cocaine doesn’t make you exactly patient.
Diane looks at John.
86
As they’re undressing for bed Stan asks, “So what do you think?”
“About the cocaine?”
“Yeah.”
Or about me kissing another man, Diane thinks. Nothing about that? We’re just going to let it slide? She tosses it back at him. “I don’t know, what do you think?”
“Do we want to be drug dealers?” he asks.
She knows that they can go on for hours like this, answering questions with questions with questions.
“We dealt grass,” she says; “is it so different?”
Stan unbuttons his denim shirt and hangs it up in the closet. Shucks off his jeans and hangs them on a hook on the back of the door. “Isn’t it? I mean, grass is natural-this is a powder.”
“That comes from a plant,” she says.
“So does heroin,” Stan counters. “Would we deal that?”
“No,” she says, impatient now, naked now, sliding into bed. “But is cocaine addictive?”
“I don’t know.” He gets in beside her. “It would be nice to have some money.”
“We could buy the house,” she says, thinking that if he says anything about “feminine nesting instincts” she’ll punch him in the face.
“But it’s drug dealing, ” Stan says. “Is that what we started out to be?”
“What did we start out to be, Stan?”
To his credit, he laughs at his own pretension. “Revolutionaries.”
Volunteers of America.
“The revolution is over,” Diane says.
“Who won?” Stan asks.
Diane laughs and then takes him in her arms, pulls him close. His body is warm and familiar, and he gets hard quickly. She knows that he wants to slide into her, but she rolls over and straddles him.
He looks up at her, his eyes shining, and she can see him thinking.
“You saw me kissing him,” she says.
He nods.
