White Oleander

She invited me in, glanced over my shoulder as she shut the door. On the stereo, a man was singing in French, sexy, half talking. "I'm glad you came," she said. "I've wanted to see you, but I've been so busy. Excuse me, I was just cleaning up." She loaded glasses and plates on a lacquered tray, emptied a crystal ashtray with cigar butts. I wondered which man was the cigar smoker. The Mercedes had been there again. The fan turned slowly, stirring cigar-sour air. She carried the tray to the kitchen, poured some coffee. "Milk?"

 

The coffee was so strong it didn't change color when she poured the milk in. "You look different," she said. We sat down at her dining room table, gilded chairs with harp backs. She pulled out small mats with Dutch tulips for our cups.

 

I took out the bag of pot from my pocket, put it on the table. "I sucked a fat kid's dick at the park. He gave me this."

 

She held the bag in her hand, in the palm, the fingers lightly cupped around it, and I thought it was the way she would hold a man's penis. She turned her hand over, knuckles to the table, and shook her head. The two vertical lines scored her brow. "Astrid. That's not what I meant."

 

"I wanted to see how it felt."

 

"How did it feel?" she asked softly.

 

"Not great," I said.

 

She handed it back to me. "Roll one, we'll smoke together."

 

I rolled a joint on the elegant mat, a parrot-striped bloom. I wasn't good, but she didn't offer to help. While we smoked, I looked around and thought how much come all this must equate to, the framed botanical prints and harp-backed chairs and fat wooden shutters. It must be an ocean. If I were Olivia, I would have nightmares about it at night, a white sea of sperm, and the albino monsters that lived in its depths.

 

"Do you like having sex?" I asked her. "I mean, do you enjoy it?"

 

"You enjoy anything you're good at," she said. "Like an ice skater. Or a poet." She got up, stretched, yawned. I could see her slim belly as she lifted her arms. "I've got to run an errand, would you like to come? "

 

I wasn't sure. Maybe my mother was right, maybe I should run. She could steal my soul. She was already doing it. But who else did I have, what other beauty was there? We agreed to meet down the block, so Marvel wouldn't see me in her Corvette.

 

She had the top down, a white polka-dot scarf tied over her hair and around her neck, front and back, Grace Kelly-style. Was there ever a woman so glamorous as Olivia Johnstone? I slid into the passenger seat, so low it was like lying down, buckled my seat belt, keeping my head ducked in case anybody saw me as we sped away.

 

I fell in love that cloudy afternoon. With the speed and the road and the spin of scenery like a fast film pan. I usually got carsick, but the pot lifted me out of it, and the road and the pines peeled away the gloom I'd been carrying around since the park, leaving nothing but the tenor song of the engine and the wind in my face, Olivia's dished profile, her big sunglasses, Coltrane 's "Naima" unfolding like a story on the CD player. The slut next door's got a goddamn Corvette. And I loved Olivia for sharing it with me, this champagne pearl she 'd brought up from the depths of the white sea.

 

We drove down Ventura, up Coldwater Canyon, the twists in the road like the rise and fall of Coltrane's tenor sax. We were dancing it, embodying it as we climbed past overblown Valley ranch homes, white cinder block pierced ornamentally, black cypresses planted in unimaginative rows and geometrically trimmed, up over the top into Beverly Hills.

 

Now it was tree ferns and banks of impatiens and houses with two-story front doors, grass the radiant green of pool tables, the gardeners with blowguns the only humans in sight. We were entirely free. No children, no job, no foster mothers, just speed and our beauty and the soulful breath of Coltrane's sax. Who could touch us.

 

She valet-parked at a hotel on Rodeo Drive, and we walked past the expensive shops, stopping to look in the windows. We went into a store so fancy it had a doorman. Olivia took a liking to a black crocodile bag, bought it with cash. She wanted to buy me something. She pulled me into a store that had nothing but sweaters, scarves, and knit hats. She held a sweater up against my cheek. The softness was startling. I realized I had not thought enough about the possibilities of physical reality.

 

"Cashmere." She smiled, her overbite twinkling. "Like it?"

 

I sighed. I had seen the price tag.

 

"Good girl. But not peach." She handed the sweater back to the shopgirl, an eighteen-year-old who smiled placidly. The store smelled of money, soft as a dream.

 

"Aqua is pretty," the girl said, holding a cable knit sweater the color of spring.

 

"Too obvious," I said.