Her brothers had wandered outside and appeared on the grass in the yard. Mo was waving wildly up at them, while Mickey pointed his camera. “Smile,” Savy told Clay, with no expression at all.
At the gates, she jotted her info on an old concert flyer—not her number, Clay noticed, but an e-mail at least—and told him, “Thursday night, we’re jamming at work.”
Clay read the logo on her shirt again. “Where’s The Knickerbocker?”
“Hollywood. It’s a hotel—sort of a hotel. Come by around ten.”
She wasn’t asking and Clay preferred it that way. After the incident with Fiasco Joe, he would need Savy’s insistence just to show up. “I trust you’ve got the charm to seal the deal,” Mo told him, brushing at Clay’s shoulders. “I’ll be best man at the wedding and we can all move into this palace together.”
Then Mickey shook Clay’s hand, all business, in a way that was funny and sad.
Savy thanked him, with eye contact but no physical contact, and her family piled into an ancient white Datsun, and it was a miracle that the crankshaft turned and the spark plugs fired and the wheels turned in concert with the jerk of the wheel.
Five minutes later, Clay was finishing cold eggs on the deck when his father appeared in a suit, hair slicked back, waving his phone back and forth like it was something nasty he’d found under Clay’s mattress. “Please don’t give my cell number to anyone. That flower woman left six messages.”
Clay laughed. But when Peter drew his posture to full attention, Clay understood it was time to get down to it. “You know a lot about Rocco Boyle.”
“I guess.”
“I didn’t realize you were such a fan.”
“Does it matter?”
“Living in the place he died? We moved across the country to recover from a death.”
“Really? I thought we came out so you could work in the movie biz.”
“I don’t like your new friends. You think I don’t know a junkie when I see one?”
Clay blinked. And he almost told him, No, you don’t. Because for nearly a year Clay had been experimenting with every drug under the moon and Peter was as ignorant to it as a deaf man to the beauty of a vinyl record.
Clay’s mother had asked him what he wanted for his eighteenth birthday that year and Clay had replied, “Nothing. You’ve literally provided me with everything I need, contrary to our capitalist nature.” So Peter had thrown him a party instead, at a hotel banquet hall reserved for wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs, and populated it with his law-firm cronies. Clay’s handful of friends had come, and of course his sometime-girlfriend, Renee, who’d raided the cash from Clay’s birthday cards, and even endorsed a few checks, and went over to South Street to buy him a gift of her own. They’d ended up in a stall in the ladies’ room, snorting lines off the back of one another’s hands, and Clay’s heart had been going and his mind had been spinning and Renee had been wearing this ridiculous red prom dress with a big girlish bow in back, and how he’d wanted to tear it right in two. Except Renee had denied him, once again, her eyes saucer-big, gleaming with virginal pride. So Clay had grunted and returned to the party to dance with every female but Renee—even Gwen, his father’s secretary, who he’d held inappropriately close while the DJ spun one awkward ballad after another. And what had Peter told him? He’d stared Clay straight in the dilated pupils and shouted, “I’ve never seen you happier, son!”
“I saw scumbags like that at the courthouse all the time,” his father told him now. “They’ll win your trust, then rob us blind, first chance they get.”
“Savy’s clean. She’s the only one I want to be friends with.”
“Friends, right. You think it’s a smart idea to lose your head over some girl right now? She’ll wrap you around her finger, like Renee did.”
“I ditched Renee,” Clay reminded him.
“If you’re hip to Rocco Boyle, fine. I liked Eric Clapton in my day. Just don’t start thinking you’re some kind of L.A. rock star. There’s no future in that for that.”
“Anything else, meineFuhrer?”
“Yeah—don’t forget your appointment with Alexander today.” Peter’s phone rang and he winced. “And for shit’s sake, never give my number to crazy flower women!”
Despite the tension, their laughter erupted on the patio.
It would be the last bit of levity between them for a long time. But of course neither of them could know that, nor see what was coming.
4
ENJOY THE SILENCE
Payton Alexander kept his office in an anonymous plain stucco building in Sherman Oaks, of the variety that were abundant in the Valley. By the time Clay located the correct one, he was fifteen minutes late. But Alexander—“Payton, call me Payton.”—epitomized the laid-back SoCal stereotype, with his trimmed goatee and sandals and peach-colored polo. His face had the reddish hue of a beach bum and the long hair sprouting around his male pattern baldness was gray and pulled into a sloppy ponytail. He might have spent his nights playing maracas in Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band.
The office, likewise, was different from other shrinks that Clay had been required to visit in the last year. Abstract paintings crowded the walls—vague animal shapes and Rorschach ejaculations on canvas. Tropical fish swam in a large utopian tank. A twelve-inch Godzilla was dancing with Barbie among a forest of well-kept bonsai on Alexander’s desk. “Are these La-Z-Boys?” Clay asked of the two recliners parked in the center of the room.
“I don’t enjoy couches,” the therapist replied. “In fact, I loathe clichés. Don’t you?”
Clay cranked his feet up and they shot the shit about Philadelphia, where Dr. Alexander—Payton—was also from (“The parking still suck there?” “Yup!”), before coming around to the point. “So what would you like to talk to me about, Clay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Of course you do.”
“Well.” Clay stared for a while at the painting over
