Sunset People. Herbert Kastle

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СКАЧАТЬ he went for his walk.

      FOUR: Sunday, July 30, a.m.

      Arthur called Diana at one-thirty. She wasn’t overly fond of the Grecian Massage’s owner-manager because of his AC/DC action and his numerous attempts to drag her into it. But yesterday had been the worst day of her life, and now she was into the black morning hours, and there was no one to turn to. Certainly not Mom and Pop.

      Arthur said, “I’ve been in La Jolla since Friday afternoon, y’know?”

      “I know.”

      “I just got back about an hour ago and Lori’s filling your shift and she tells me what happened and I can’t believe it, right?”

      “Right,” she whispered.

      “You need anything?”

      “I can’t sleep.”

      “Quaalude’ll relax you. I’ll bring a few. And a friend so we can talk.”

      “No friend, Art.”

      “A lady, hon. A doll.”

      “Please. I’m a sick girl tonight.”

      He was silent. She knew she’d spoiled his plan to dope her and comfort her with hetero and lesbian sex. To Arthur Dumont, sex was the answer to all pain, all loss and anguish, his main, perhaps his only reason for living. And he wasn’t alone. The Strip was loaded with what street people called “come freaks.”

      When he still said nothing, she said, “I’d be glad to pick up the pills at your place if you don’t want to bother coming here. I really need something to knock out the thinking mechanism, the memory banks.”

      “What about your books?” he mocked, having resented her withdrawal into reading as so many of the parlor people did.

      She answered straight. “Can’t read, Art. Can’t concentrate. Can’t do anything but remember.” Which disarmed him.

      “Yeah, well, a tragedy like that—” He sighed. “You don’t know how to live, Diana. I’ll bring ’em over.” He hung up.

      It would be at least half an hour, probably longer. Arthur was in Hollywood; Diana lived in a condominium in upper Malibu, inland side of the Pacific Coast Highway but with a good view of the ocean. One of a row of attached two-level apartments called town-houses in L.A.—two bedrooms and bath upstairs; living room, kitchen, dining area, and shower-bath downstairs—it had cost more than she’d felt she should spend. But she’d needed a place away from the action, a place with some sense of the natural world, with the peace that the ocean provided, and she’d sunk just about every dime into buying and furnishing it. That was three years ago, and the townhouse had turned out to be the best investment she could have made, more than doubling in value. A neighbor had recently sold a similar apartment for two hundred thousand.

      Another reason she’d bought the townhouse was so that her beach-loving sister would spend weekends with her. Her friend. Her lifelong playmate . . .

      She was crying again, and there was no sense in that. Better Arthur’s way, with drugs and repeated orgasms. Better any way than to remember Carla, remember childhood.

      St. Louis. Mom and Pop and Carla and Diana. And, for fifteen years, their brother, youngest of the brood, Jackie. Like Carla, doomed. Like Carla, struck down by violence. But unlike Carla, it was violence of his own making. He’d wanted a car. He’d stolen two before taking the Corvette from the dealer’s lot, and being chased, and dumping the car, and running.

      And being shot when he ignored the officer’s repeated commands to stop.

      “I swear I thought I would hit him in the legs,” the officer had said at the inquest, looking at her parents. “But he tripped . . .”

      So he’d been struck in the back, the bullet passing through his heart. So he’d been buried near Grandma’s, in St. Anne’s township, where he’d been happiest.

      Not that they hadn’t been happy enough as kids. Poor, yes, but no one mistreated them too badly. An occasional slap in the face from Pop, who saved his real anger for Mom. Her he beat up. And that, along with Jackie’s death, had sent Diana out of the house, out of her sophomore year at Washington University and plans to teach English, to Los Angeles and a brief attempt to break into the movies.

      Being pretty, being involved in amateur theatrics, had led to a good deal of attention from men in St. Louis, and to a certain amount of sexual experience. Which increased during her year of acting classes and auditions in Hollywood. Also, her own appetites had been strong and steady.

      Still were, though her cynicism had matured and altered the way she looked at men. A stiff penis was one thing; it could be enjoyed on the very simplest of terms without involving your mind, your future, your freedom. Love, long-term affairs, and marriage were other things entirely, being weighted, it seemed to her, so heavily in the male’s favor that fewer and fewer intelligent women were willing to involve themselves. Careers were the answer for these women. And Diana felt her career was to earn as much money as quickly as possible with as little involvement as possible.

      Which the massage parlors had offered, with the big plus of satisfying her sexual appetites. She got ten percent of the money Arthur received from her basic twenty-dollar fees, plus everything else she could make. Other parlors had paid less, but she hadn’t stayed long where she wasn’t getting her just share. Now she was content.

      Or had been.

      She’d had her condominium and her reading and an occasional play or movie. Had a weekend or two each month with Carla when they cooked for each other or ate out at a good restaurant. And watched TV. And talked, talked, always talked about home and Jackie and their parents and their old friends. And this link to the past had kept them both—but especially Diana—sane and stable.

      It was Diana who had suffered most at Jackie’s death. With Mom so hard on him, saying he was “just like his father,” Diana had become surrogate mother. It was she who had known how bad he was turning, how dangerous his life was becoming. It was she who had planned to get him away from St. Louis as soon as possible. And it was she who had sat up with his body all night in St. Anne before allowing the morticians to have it.

      A strange night, that one. A night of healing as well as grieving. A night during which she had grown in a way that few people her age grew.

      She’d known her own mortality that night. She’d lost her true virginity that night. She’d understood life in a certain way, and while Carla had continued to look for love, for marriage, it had somehow ended for Diana.

      And now what? Now her sister was dead and she hadn’t been able to make herself call her parents. Her embittered parents who kept asking when she and Carla, who had followed her to L.A. within eight months, were going to “come home.” Her mother who explained the continued beatings by saying, “It’s your fault. Yours and Carla’s. Your father takes his grief, his loss, out on me.”

      Which was bullshit! Her father took his failure at work, at being a man, out on her. Her father, who talked of having been scouted by the major leagues when he was a high-school baseball star. Who said her mother had “planned to get pregnant with you,” looking at Diana, “so she could trap me into marriage and make me quit school and СКАЧАТЬ