you hit women?' I said.
The grin disappeared. 'Champ, I told you. That's not really me. I was drunk and down. She was bitching at me. Do you want me to phone her? I'll do it now.' His tone was painfully earnest.
'That's up to you. It's your relationship.'
'Relationship,' he said. 'My favorite word.' His eyes went down to the table for a moment and then flicked back up to me. 'I'll do it, but let me wash up first and get some ice. My tongue feels like a beanbag chair.' He got up and headed for what I guessed was the kitchen. He stopped and turned back to me. 'Want a beer or anything? More coke?'
'No, thanks. I passed my limit when I did the first one.'
'Well, make yourself at home. I'll be a couple of minutes, and then we'll phone Nana.' He disappeared.
Hearing its name, the phone began to ring again. I wondered how he stood it. Mine rang only once or twice a day. I wondered how
Above the bookcase the wall was hung with a series of bright, four-color magazine covers, maybe twenty in all. Toby's face was on every one of them.
He had a beaming, ingenuous, boyish smile. His expression was open, healthy, friendly. He looked about twenty-seven in most of the photographs.
Other magazines lay heaped on top of the bookcase. Toby's picture graced these, too, but he'd either gotten tired of cutting them out or he hadn't gotten around to it yet. I picked up one on which he looked particularly boyish and turned to page 28, which promised to tell me 100 THINGS TOBY DOESN'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT HIM.
Toby apparently didn't want much known about him. Among the riveting nuggets the magazine's crackerjack investigative team had unearthed were the facts that his favorite color was blue, that he cried at sad movies, that he'd had a German shepherd named Sam when he was a boy, and that his ideal girl was one with a lot of self- respect.
I was mulling that last one over when he called from the kitchen. 'Simeon? Are you sure you don't want a beer?'
I dropped the magazine guiltily. 'I'm fine,' I said. 'Just looking around.' I partially straightened the stack of magazines, which was leaning forward alarmingly. 'Is blue really your favorite color?' I shouted.
'What?'
I went to the kitchen door and leaned against it. He was leaning over a sink, holding a washcloth against his mouth. The washcloth was wrapped around something that might have been an ice cube. 'Do you really cry at sad movies?'
He started to grin, and then he winced. 'Don't,' he said. 'Don't make me laugh. They just make that stuff up. All I do is pose for the pictures.'
'That's a fictitious character, the Toby Vane in those magazines?'
'All the Toby Vanes are fictitious characters. My real name is Jack Sprunk.'
'What a peculiar way to live.'
'I couldn't agree more. Now go away and let me work on my wounds.'
I went back into the living room and straight to the magazines. They had a kind of horrid fascination. The one I picked up this time had a sincere-looking Toby on the cover and the headline TOBY VANE'S NEW YEAR WISHES FOR YOU. I decided I wasn't up to it and dropped the magazine onto the top of the tilting stack, and the whole slippery batch of them slid forward lazily and fell to the floor.
Beneath them was a cheap satin-covered photo album on which was written, in flowery script, 'Precious Memories.' Beneath that was another, inscribed 'Loved Ones.'
'Give me another minute,' Toby shouted. 'Then we can call Nana. Maybe we'll even go get her, if she's forgiven me.' Even though I knew he was loaded to the gills on at least two kinds of dope, he sounded healthy and happy.
I opened the top album.
At first the shapes didn't make sense to me: they were just abstract patches of color and shadow. Then I realized what I was seeing. They were pictures, the kind of pictures you normally see only in magazines with names like
They were Polaroids.
Many of them had been taken in the room I was in.
Women were tied into impossible positions. Women were gagged and handcuffed. A woman lay naked on her back with the photographer's shoe pressing into her chest. A very young girl, no more than sixteen, was covered with broken eggs. An even younger girl had mean-looking electrical clips dangling from her nipples. Then an entire page of close-ups of a woman with two closed, swollen eyes and a split lip.
It was Nana.
'Maybe we could all go out together,' Toby was saying cheerfully in the kitchen. 'Me and Nana and you and your bartender. Go to a movie or a late dinner or something. How does that sound?'
I closed the album and put the fan magazines back on top of it. I went to the door and through it, without slowing down, without trying to collect the rest of my seven hundred and fifty dollars. I didn't need it any more.
And I certainly didn't need Toby Vane. I didn't need anybody whose idea of an electric personality was an alternating current between Jack Armstrong and Vlad the Impaler. Smile or no smile, he was a sick boy.
I lost my way twice trying to get out of the canyon and up to the Pacific Coast Highway. By the time I finally reached it, it was ten o'clock. I drove south like Mario Andretti, but the holiday traffic was a series of Gordian knots and it was after eleven when I finally got to McGinty's of Malibu. Roxanne was gone.
I'd missed the fireworks, too.
2
The fifth of July had a delayed case of the June glooms: dull and flat and gray, courtesy of low-hanging clouds that had slid in overnight to lower the ceiling and the spirits of everyone stuck under it. At eight-thirty in the morning the day looked as bright as it was likely to get. I was sitting with my chin on one hand, muffled and depressed from Toby Vane's cocaine, staring at a dark screen that had nothing on it but two characters that blinked in a bright, bilious green. This is what it said:
A›.
I'd been looking at A› for what seemed like months, wondering what was supposed to come next. So far, what had come next was frustration, surfing a wave of nostalgia for the user-chummy old Apple I'd given away.
A stack of fat books stood next to the computer. They were written in a language somewhere between beginning English and advanced Dada. The index to the one on top, the open one, said that the chapter called 'Getting Started' began on page 92. I slapped it shut and hit one of the computer's keys at random, and the damn thing beeped at me. My blood pressure tripled. I found myself standing up with my fists clenched, took two breaths, and wandered over to say good morning to Hansel and Gretel, my parakeets. They ignored me. I ignored me too and climbed out onto the sundeck.
Topanga Canyon folded itself away toward the horizon.
