Less Than Zero

One of my sisters, who was lying next to her, shrugged and put on her sunglasses.



“Anyway, I’m having ON put on the cable,” she said, harassed, as I left the pool.



The businessman leaves. My father doesn’t say much. I try to make conversation. I tell him about the coyote that Blair ran over. He tells me that it’s too bad. He keeps looking out the window, eyeing the fire-hydrant-red Ferrari. My father asks me if I’m looking forward to going back to New Hampshire and I look at him and tell him yes.



I awoke to the sound of voices outside. The director whose party my parents had taken my grandmother to the night before was outside at the table, under the umbrella, eating brunch. The director’s wife was sitting by his side. My grandmother looked well under the shade of the umbrella. The director began to talk about the death of a stuntman on one of his films. He talked about how he missed a step. Of how he fell headfirst onto the pavement below.



“He was a wonderful boy. He was only eighteen.”



My father opened another beer.



My grandfather looked down, sadly. “What was his name?” he asked.



“What?” The director glanced up.



“What was his name? What was the kid’s name?”



There was a long silence and I could only feel the desert breeze and the sound of the jacuzzi heating and the pool draining and Frank Sinatra singing “Summer Wind” and I prayed that the director remembered the name. For some reason it seemed very important to me. I wanted very badly for the director to say the name. The director opened his mouth and said, “I forgot.”



From lunch with my father I drive to Daniel’s house. The maid answers the door and leads me out to the backyard, where Daniel’s mother, who I met at Parents Day at Camden in New Hampshire, is playing tennis in her bikini, her body greased with tanning oil. She stops playing tennis with the ball machine and she walks over to me and talks about Japan and Aspen and then about a strange dream she had the other night where Daniel was kidnapped. She sits down on a chaise longue by the pool and the maid brings her an iced tea and Daniel’s mother takes the lemon out of it and sucks on it while staring at a young blond boy raking leaves out of the pool and then she tells me she has a migraine and that she hasn’t seen Daniel in days. I walk inside and up the stairs and past the poster of Daniel’s father’s new film and into Daniel’s room to wait for him. When it becomes apparent that Daniel won’t be coming home, I get into my car and drive over to Kim’s house to pick up my vest.



The first thing I hear when I enter the house is screaming. The maid doesn’t seem to mind and she walks back into the kitchen after opening the door for me. The house is still not furnished yet and as I walk out to the pool, I pass the Nazi pots. It’s Muriel who’s screaming. I walk out to where she’s lying with Kim and Dimitri by the pool and she stops. Dimitri’s wearing black Speedos and a sombrero and is holding an electric guitar, trying to play “L.A. Woman,” but he can’t play the guitar too well because his hand was recently rebandaged after he sliced it open at the New Garage and everytime his hand comes down on the guitar, his face flinches. Muriel screams again. Kim’s smoking a joint and she finally notices me and gets up and tells me that she thought her mother was in England but she recently read in Variety that she’s actually in Hawaii scouting locations with the director of her next film.



“You should call before you come over,” Kim tells me, handing Dimitri the joint.



“I’ve tried, but no one answers,” I lie, realizing that probably no one would have answered the phone even if I had called.



Muriel screams and Kim looks over at her, distracted and says, “Well, maybe you’ve been calling the numbers that I’ve disconnected.”



“Maybe,” I tell her. “I’m sorry. I just came for my vest.”



“Well, I just … it’s okay this once, but I don’t like people coming over. Someone is telling people where I live. I don’t like it.”



“I’m sorry about that.”



“I mean, I used to like people coming over, but now I just can’t stand it. I can’t take it.”



“When are you going back to school?” I ask her as we walk back to her room.



“I don’t know.” She gets defensive. “Has it even started yet?”



We walk into her room. There’s only a big mattress on the floor and a huge, expensive stereo that takes up an entire wall and a poster of Peter Gabriel and a pile of clothes in the corner. There are also the pictures that were taken at her New Year’s Eve party tacked up over the mattress. I see one of Muriel shooting up, wearing my vest, me watching. Another of me standing in the living room only wearing a T-shirt and my jeans, trying to open a bottle of champagne, looking totally out of it. Another of Blair lighting a cigarette. One of Spit, wasted, beneath the flag. From outside, Muriel screams and Dimitri keeps trying to play the guitar.