talk. I don’t dare bring up Victor again and after we’re all tired of walking down memory lane, Janet and Seth talk about work and I lose myself in another martini. I lost track of the number I had some time ago. Why do people want to talk about work when they’re out for drinks? I pop the last shrimp of my shrimp cocktail into my mouth. Isn’t the whole point of going drinking to forget about work?
By the time they move on to real estate prices and Williams-Sonoma kitchenware I’m drunk and exhausted—but I don’t want to leave. I look around: the room is filled with new, anonymous faces—more shaggy bobs, less chignons. People dance and a live band plays trippy lounge classics. Janet has switched to water and keeps checking her phone as she describes a butter chicken recipe she calls “otherworldly.” She’s waiting for a message from old, gross Victor, I suppose. She goes on about the recipe and then Seth takes out a pen and starts writing it down. At first I think he’s joking, but when he starts asking questions about the best brand of garam masala, I know he’s not. Food is for eating, not making, and this is supposed to be a fun night out, our special reunion, not a recipe swap.
I almost cheer when Seth starts making up fantastical stories about the people in the bar, imagining transsexual mobsters and hermaphrodite spies. It’s something he’s done as long as I’ve known him.
Seth goes on and I notice that the maître d’ looks my way now and then, sneering. I smirk. I must be a terrible reflection of his abilities as Enforcer of the Dress Code. Janet keeps her eyes trained on her phone. She looks worried and is off in her head. I tell her she can go, that I’m fine here with Seth and his stories, but with Janet etiquette trumps lust and she stays.
“Maybe we should take this back across the street,” Seth says, cutting his socialite-cum-secret-freak story-time short.
“What?”
“To your suite—it’s getting boring here. Janet?”
“Huh?”
“We should take this back to Mason’s suite,” Seth says.
“I shouldn’t, really. I have an early morning,” Janet says. Seth and I exchange glances. I am dying to make a quip about Victor, but hold my tongue. Surprisingly, Seth does, too. “I have to work on the show.” She’s holding a fashion show at her studio on Thursday to showcase her latest collection.
“I guess it’s just you and me, Mason.”
“We should get the check,” Janet says.
Check? Shit. I have no credit card and this is an emergency, precisely the things I have been racking up a tab to forget. “Um, I don’t suppose one of you could cover me? It’s just—I saw the lawyer today and he canceled the card I had and I can’t get my mother’s money and there’s taxes and everything’s frozen. Ron said he would … but I can’t and—”
“No worries,” Janet says and puts her hand over mine. My heart is speeding and my breath is short. My eyes well up and for the first time since my mother’s death, I cry.
NORTH BEACH
Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that the key the estate lawyer gave me works, but I am. It would be just like my mother to have bequeathed her apartment to me only to have changed the locks as some kind of “lesson” for me to learn. But the key works and Seth and I trip through the door—still drunk—laden with bags.
It’s dark and the curtains are drawn and the rooms smell of garbage and dust and Shalimar. I step over my largest suitcase and fumble for the light switch.
“Holy shit,” Seth says.
I am speechless. Everything—the furniture, the walls, the art, everything—is white. The last time I stepped foot in this flat eight years ago, it was still kitted out like some retro Asian bordello, with red and velvet and rich dark wood. Now it’s streamlined, sleek, spare and calm—so unlike my mother.
I head immediately for what was once my bedroom expecting to find a workout room with all-white equipment or a weird meditation room or a library where all of the books have white spines and blank pages.
“Holy shit,” Seth says. His vocabulary is limited by booze, though his words do accurately sum things up. Everything in the room—all of it—is exactly how I remember: my bed, my desk, my books, the three-hundred-dollar-a-roll Italian wallpaper with the black bats. I open the closet and it’s full of my clothes circa nineteen-ninety-something, when I was twenty and walked out with nothing. I’ve only been here once since—maybe for an hour or two—after my mother lured me here under some false pretense I can’t remember. That was eight years ago. I left for good after that. I never imagined I’d be back.
Even through the numbing layers of martinis I feel a twinge of—something—as I look around. It stabs me again when I pick up a framed photograph off the bureau: me, Seth, Janet, that guy I was dating at the time who turned out to be a total prick snob. I think his name was Davis. I squint my left eye and Davis’s face blurs. That’s better. It’s one of the only photographs of myself that I like.
Seth dives onto my king-size bed. “Ow!”
“What?” I place the picture back on the bureau and turn to Seth, who sits up and pulls a book out from under him.
“Ooh, the Secret Diaries of Mason McDonald,” he says as he flips through the pages.
I recognize the book’s cover immediately—it’s a journal collaged with Bryan Ferry pictures I snipped from a stash of old British music magazines I found at a rummage sale. I would have been fifteen or sixteen. “Give me that!” I lunge at Seth, but he darts and I fall face-first into my goose down comforter. It’s red and Egyptian cotton and hand silk-screened with black-and-grey geometric shapes.
“My mother (aka Satan) is acting like more of an evil bitch than usual. She had a dinner party tonight and of course everyone got drunk on wine and one of her retarded friends (the one who wears too much perfume and has bad breath) starts talking about her twelve-year-old daughter and puberty and blah, blah, and it’s totally disgusting and I swear I just about puked. But then my mother starts going, ‘Oh, that’s nothing. I remember when Mason started to develop, blah, blah.’ And she’s being awful and telling these stories and all of her retarded friends are laughing like, ‘heh, heh, heh,’ and the guys (who are completely gross) are looking at me in this dirty way, so I tell her to shut up and fuck off (seriously), and she just laughs and says something about ‘teenagers’ so I go to my room and smoke a joint with Seth (at least he was here). I even left the door open and didn’t smoke out the window. I don’t care if she knows. She’s such a bitch.
“Wow—that’s fucking awesome, Mason. You should publish this—it’s hilarious!” Seth leans over and kisses my cheek. “And thanks for the shout-out.” Seth lays the journal in his lap and I grab it. “Aw, come on, Mason—it’s funny. Let’s read some more!”
“Fuck off.”
“Pleeeease …”
“No.” I’m so pissed off I’m shaking. Not so much at Seth, but at my mother. She’s been—what?—sitting on my bed and reading my teenage journals. I decide that this is an all-new low and pull Seth up off the bed and charge out of my room, dragging him behind me.
“Where are we goooing? Your bed is commmfy.” Seth can be such a whiny drunk.
“I
