bought in Seattle with a tight hobble skirt that squeezes her ass into the perfect big heart shape. You would not believe how much this suit cost. The markup is about a zillion percent. The suit jacket has a little peplum skirt and wide lapels and shoulders. The single-breasted cut is symmetrical except for the hole pumping out blood.
Then Evie starts to sob, standing there halfway up the staircase. Evie, that deadly virus of the moment. This is our cue to all look at poor Evie, poor, sad Evie, hairless and wearing nothing but ashes and circled by the wire cage of her burned-up hoopskirt. Then Evie drops the rifle. With her dirty face in her dirty hands, Evie sits down and starts to boo-hoo, as if crying will solve anything. The rifle, this is a loaded thirty-aught rifle, it clatters down the stairs and skids out into the middle of the foyer floor, spinning on its side, pointing at me, pointing at Brandy, pointing at Evie, crying.
It’s not that I’m some detached lab animal just conditioned to ignore violence, but my first instinct is maybe it’s not too late to dab club soda on the bloodstain.
Most of my adult life so far has been me standing on seamless paper for a raft of bucks per hour, wearing clothes and shoes, my hair done and some famous fashion photographer telling me how to feel.
Him yelling, Give me lust, baby.
Flash.
Give me malice.
Flash.
Give me detached existentialist ennui.
Flash.
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
Flash.
Probably it’s the shock of seeing my one worst enemy shoot my other worst enemy is what it is. Boom, and it’s a win-win situation. This and, being around Brandy, I’ve developed a pretty big jones for drama.
It only looks like I’m crying when I put a handkerchief up under my veil to breathe through. To filter the air since you can about not breathe for all the smoke since Evie’s big manor house is burning down around us.
Me, kneeling down beside Brandy, I could put my hands anywhere in my gown and find Darvons and Demerols and Darvocet 100s. This is everybody’s cue to look at me. My gown is a knockoff print of the Shroud of Turin, most of it brown and white, draped and cut so the shiny red buttons will button through the stigmata. Then I’m wearing yards and yards of black organza veil wrapped around my face and studded with little hand-cut Austrian crystal stars. You can’t tell how I look, face-wise, but that’s the whole idea. The look is elegant and sacrilegious and makes me feel sacred and immoral.
Haute couture and getting hauter.
Fire inches down the foyer wallpaper. Me, for added set dressing I started the fire. Special effects can go a long way to heighten a mood, and it’s not as if this is a real house. What’s burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock-Tudor big manor house. It’s a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is, aren’t we all?
Just before Evie comes screaming down the stairs and shoots Brandy Alexander, what I did was pour out about a gallon of Chanel No. 5 and put a burning wedding invitation to it, and boom, I’m recycling.
It’s funny, but when you think about even the biggest tragic fire, it’s just a sustained chemical reaction. The oxidation of Joan of Arc.
Still spinning on the floor, the rifle points at me, points at Brandy.
Another thing is no matter how much you think you love somebody, you’ll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
Except for all this high drama, it’s a really nice day. This is a warm, sunny day and the front door is open to the porch and the lawn outside. The fire upstairs draws the warm smell of the fresh-cut lawn into the foyer, and you can hear all the wedding guests outside. All the guests, they took the gifts they wanted, the crystal and silver, and went out to wait on the lawn for the firemen and paramedics to make their entrance.
Brandy, she opens one of her huge, ring-beaded hands and she touches the hole pouring her blood all over the marble floor.
Brandy, she says, “Shit. There’s no way the Bon Marche will take this suit back.”
Evie lifts her face, her face a finger-painting mess of soot and snot and tears, from her hands and screams, “I hate my life being so boring!”
Evie screams down at Brandy Alexander, “Save me a window table in hell!”
Tears rinse clean lines down Evie’s cheeks, and she screams, “Girlfriend! You need to be yelling some back at me!”
As if this isn’t already drama, drama, drama, Brandy looks up at me kneeling beside her. Brandy’s aubergine eyes dilated out to full flower, she says, “Brandy Alexander is going to die now?”
Evie, Brandy, and me, all this is just a power struggle for the spotlight. Just each of us being me, me, me first. The murderer, the victim, the witness, each of us thinks our role is the lead.
Probably that goes for anybody in the world.
It’s all
Anymore, when I see the picture of a twenty-something in the newspaper who was abducted and sodomized and robbed and then killed and here’s a front-page picture of her young and smiling, instead of me dwelling on this being a big, sad crime, my gut reaction is, wow, she’d be really hot if she didn’t have such a big honker of a nose. My second reaction is I’d better have some good head-and-shoulders shots handy in case I get, you know, abducted and sodomized to death. My third reaction is, well, at least that cuts down on the competition.
If that’s not enough, my moisturizer I use is a suspension of inert fetal solids in hydrogenated mineral oil. My point is that, if I’m honest, my life is all about me.
My point is, unless the meter is running and some photographer is yelling: Give me empathy.
Then the flash of the strobe.
Give me sympathy.
Flash.
Give me brutal honesty.
Flash.
“Don’t let me die here on this floor,” Brandy says, and her big hands clutch at me. “My hair,” she says, “my hair will be flat in the back.”
My point is I know Brandy is maybe probably going to die, but I just can’t get into it.
Evie sobs even louder. On top of this, the fire sirens from way outside are crowning me queen of Migraine Town.
The rifle is still spinning on the floor, but slower and slower.
Brandy says, “This is not how Brandy Alexander wanted her life to go. She’s supposed to be famous, first. You know, she’s supposed to be on television during Super Bowl halftime, drinking a diet cola naked in slow motion before she died.”
The rifle stops spinning and points at nobody.
At Evie sobbing, Brandy screams, “Shut up!”
“
The sirens, you can hear them wandering and screaming all over the West Hills. People will just knock each other down to dial 911 and be the big hero. Nobody looks ready for the big television crew that’s due to arrive any minute.
“This is your last chance, honey,” Brandy says, and her blood is getting all over the place. She says, “Do you love me?”
It’s when folks ask questions like this that you lose the spotlight.
This is how folks trap you into a best-supporting role.
Even bigger than the house being on fire is this huge expectation that I have to say the three most worn-out words you’ll find in any script. Just the words make me feel I’m severely fingering myself. They’re just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue.
“Tell me,” Brandy says. “Do you? Do you really love me?”
