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“She’s a fox.”
“But she’s five hundred pounds!” I pointed out.
“I need a cold shower just looking at her,” he said. “Oh, man.”
“Her feet are bloated.” I thought he should know. “She’s a bloated hippo with clown feet.”
“She’s even hotter than her calendar.”
“And bigger than her car.”
“You know,” he told me, man to man, “I jerked off to that calendar three times a day for like two months.”
Fifteen minutes later, I slipped onto the patio. There was a couple sitting on the Adirondacks overlooking the pool, and chatting in low tones. I was going to sneak past, but it was only Ian and Emily.
“Why aren’t you inside with your adoring fans?” I asked.
“I needed some air,” Emily said. “The photographers…”
Ian shot a longing glance back at the house. “A little peace and quiet.”
It was disgusting. Even in herd-of-buffalo form, Charlotte was breaking his heart. “She’s enormous,” I mumbled. “She’s a one-woman stampede.”
“What?” Ian gestured toward the party. “Is that what that crash was?”
“Oh. Um. That was me. I broke up with Billy.”
Ian opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then closed it again.
“A long way from par,” Emily said. “He didn’t even make it to the first hole.”
“Emily!” I said.
She blushed bright red. “I meant golf hole—like in golf.”
“You’ve been watching too much porn,” Ian told her.
“Porn is film,” I observed.
“Why’d you break up?” Ian asked me.
“We’d grown apart.” I turned to Emily. “So where’s your invisible boyfriend?”
“We broke up, too.”
“Really? When? Why?” The relationship may have been clandestine, but she’d seemed happy.
“It was only sex,” Emily said.
“Well, what did you expect from a porn star? Intellectual fulfillment? I don’t know what—”
“A porn star?” she said.
Ian laughed. “Hung like a moose, I bet.”
Emily shot him a stern look, then finally copped to her blue-movie adventure. “The sex was great,” she admitted, “although his idea of a good film was The Sperminator. He just wasn’t right for me. We didn’t have anything—” Her face lit up as Jamie Lombard stepped out of the house with two margaritas. “Jamie! Over here.”
He headed our way and she sprang at him like a hungry lioness and dragged him to the corner of the deck, where they could talk privately. Did she have her eye on Jamie? They’d make a perfect pair.
I looked at Ian. “Did I imagine that?”
“Maybe she had two secret boyfriends.”
“The porn star and the publisher. Sounds like a sitcom.”
“On the Spice Channel.”
I laughed more than that deserved, because I liked Ian. And he looked good. And apparently had forgotten what I did last time we met. “So…you saw Charlotte,” I said.
“More beautiful than ever.”
“She makes a very attractive Mack truck. Meet my sisters: dangerous mind and dangerous curves.”
“Not feeling dangerous, yourself?”
I held up the plate of food that hadn’t left my side all evening. “Only to the buffet.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s a little wickedness in you.”
Okay, he was Charlotte’s ex, so this was marginally incestuous and repulsively secondhand. But he was handsome, single, funny, smart…and nobody had ever called me potentially wicked before. I gave him my lower-wattage version of Charlotte’s smile and said, “A lot of wickedness.”
He laughed. “Remember last time we met? You invited me to your school dance.”
My smile dimmed.
“You were what?” he said. “In seventh grade? I was a senior in high school. It was so sweet. What was the theme again?”
Hawaiian luau. “No idea.”
“Hula or something. You were cute in your little grass skirt.”
Actually, I was. I’d wanted to wear a coconut bra, too, but Dad wouldn’t let me.
Ian smiled at the memory. “You marched up to me with a flower necklace and asked if I wanted to get laid.”
“Lei-ed,” I said faintly, remembering the mortification. I was trying on my outfit and had gone to Charlotte’s room to show her. A half-dozen other kids had been there, Charlotte’s friends, and they’d howled with laughter. Not Ian, though. He’d said, very kindly, no, and on the night of the dance had actually sent me a corsage.
We were silent a moment, listening to the party sounds from the house. Then I turned to him and—God help me— I said, “The offer’s still good.”
Ian took my hand. He told me how flattered he was. He said I was beautiful, wonderful, perfect in every way—but he’d rather staple his earlobes to the deck than sleep with me. Well, I don’t know exactly what he said, because I was busy trying to transform my utter mortification into the ability to sink unnoticed into the ground, leaving behind only a thin film of humiliation.
Okay. So he hadn’t forgotten.
The next morning Dad and I met in the living room for coffee. We usually chatted for about twenty minutes before I left for Banana and he headed to his office at UCSB.
“You looked pretty last night,” he said.
“Nice that someone thought so,” I muttered into my coffee.
“Hmm?”
“Nothing.” I put my cup on the coffee table and held out my arms to show off my new red T-shirt and black mini. “And what do we think of today’s ensemble?”
“Not the book!” he said.
I grabbed my cup from the book I’d used as a coaster. It was Porn Is Film. Emily had placed it there, and we didn’t dare move it. She’d come on a surprise inspection last Tuesday and found it buried at the bottom of the bookcase. The echoes were still fading.
Dad inspected the cover for stains and declared us safe when he found none. He smiled at the book, from fondness for Emily. “Mom would be so proud. Little did she know when she named you after the Brontë sisters, one of you’d become an author.”
“Mom published stuff. So did you,” I said sulkily. “All professors get published.”
“In journals. Not like this.”
“Well, Charlotte helped.”
His smile wavered. “Your mom never would have expected her daughter to become a swimsuit model, though. I think she’d have supported it….” This was an old conflict with Dad.
“Dad, she’s still Charlotte. Fame, fortune, and public nudity haven’t done a single bad thing to her. Look what she’s made of herself.”
“Speaking of which…” he said, and I realized I’d been deftly maneuvered into this conversation.
“I like Banana.”
“Anne—”
“Yes, Anne,” I said. “The Brontë sister no one’s ever heard of. So lay off!”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Dad.”
“I’m only saying—”
“Dad.”
“Okay, okay. I’m saying nothing.”
“And I’ve heard it all before.”
At the end of that summer, Emily and Jamie were married. Charlotte had a baby girl. And I got a job working for a dot-com. I was destined to make millions—in an artsy-businessy way, of course.
I heard Ian moved to New York.
CHAPTER 04
The third time Ian Dunne came into my life was eight years later.
I was twenty-nine, with a steady job and a steady boyfriend and a steady life. And I still managed to invite my sister’s ex-boyfriend to an inappropriate party. There’s a word for that: Fate.
Or maybe it’s: Stupid.
It started when Emily and I were having lunch at the Sojourner, a natural foods restaurant downtown. We were arguing over a gift for Charlotte’s birthday. Emily and I always joined forces to buy presents for Charlotte. Even though Charlotte insisted she loved everything we got her, together we could afford something unembarrassing.
“You know what she gave me last year?” I asked.
“A mahogany tilt-top occasional table.”
I nodded. “Used furniture.”
“It’s an antique. Must’ve cost thousands. And it’s in perfect condition—it looks brand-new.”
“But it isn’t.”
“I’ll take it, if you don’t want it,” Emily said. Like she needed secondhand used furniture. Between her book and her articles, her lectures and TV appearances, she was almost as stinking rich as Charlotte. Well, maybe a tenth as rich, but that was still pretty stinking if you were only an office manager, like me.
“I didn’t say I didn’t want it,” I said. “Just that it wasn’t new.”
Emily shook her head. “Well, neither is the gift I want to get her, so you’re even.”
The waitress came and I ordered a Gorilla Fizz, which I’d been ordering at the Sojourner since I was a kid, and a Popeye Salad, which I’d been ordering since I had trouble zipping my Levi’s last week. Emily quizzed the waitress about what exactly was in the vegetable timbale, then ordered the pumpkin ravioli with a totally different sauce than was on the menu. Then called the waitress back and changed to the stew. When she finished, she turned to me. “Charlotte and I found a new antiques place in El Paseo a couple weeks ago.”
“Antiques,” I said, disgusted, “are the world’s biggest scam. First something is new. Pristine. Unsullied. Then it’s gently used. Crusty. Questionable. Then used. Old. Nasty. And finally, if nobody’s thrown it away, it becomes antique. Repulsive, rancid, swirling with layers of greasy body oil. And more expensive than when it was new.”
“It amazes me you can eat in a restaurant,” Emily said. “You know other people have used that fork.”
I paused midbite, trying not to think about it. Hundreds of mouths sliding wet tongues over the prongs. It was deeply off-putting—but fortunately, my fondness for all things new and unused was (mostly) limited to what I owned. Besides, I liked to eat. I put the forkful of salad in my mouth and smiled triumphantly at Emily. “See! Not crazy.”
“Good,” she said. “Prove it by picking up Charlotte’s gift at the antiques store.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A lacquer box. She loved it when she saw it in the window.”
“Why can’t you get it?”
“Because I have a real job, Anne.” Emily thought I wasn’t living up to my potential, answering phones at a real estate company. She didn’t understand that that was my potential.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Academia. Nothing more real than that.”
