to Ernest (no redeeming features), her many visits to Europe (ditto – Paris is littered with dog shit apparently, Venice is a rip-off and Florence is a bore) and the time she spilt a bowl of soup at the American Ambassador’s house in Regent’s Park. She never talks about anything real. She never gives herself away. It’s like her life started at twenty-one, like nothing happened before that was worth mentioning.
“Maybe it didn’t,” Ernest said to me once. “Maybe things were awful,” and it made sense, I suppose, of the way she drinks and thinks of everything as a fight, and grabs hold of the day like it’s a sheer drop and if she doesn’t dig her nails right in, she’ll fall.
Back home, whenever we had people over, Hannah rolled out variations on her four stories while Lowell pretended to cook deli-bought meals from scratch, throwing his head back when he laughed, rattling pans and putting on a show. The moment the doorbell rang he was out on stage and she was prepping herself under the lights. I guess it made them both feel as if they were working. My job was to pour the drinks and play it like we were your dream family, like really the best of friends. We couldn’t keep it up for long. Four minutes was about the limit. If we strayed into five, one or the other of us got bored or cranky and had to leave the room. There was no trace of our usual cook-your-own pizza and stay-out-of-sight arrangement. They didn’t work their way through a bottle of vodka in old T-shirts if there were guests in the house. They hid the TV in a cupboard and acted like we spent our spare time holding hands and listening to recordings of T.S. Eliot reading ‘The Waste Land’.
I used to think it was a miracle that anyone believed them. But people believe what they see. And mostly they see whatever is put in front of them, if it’s in their interests to believe. Thurston told me that, and he was right. If someone gave you a fat stack of money and told you to spend it, you’d like to think the money was real. If they handed you a diamond and said it was worth as much as a house, you’d want it to be true, because you’d be getting something out of it.
The first and only time Thurston met Hannah and Lowell, he showed up dressed as a girl. More precisely, he showed up dressed as Hannah, wearing clothes he must have taken from her closet some time before, when I wasn’t looking.
Lowell answered the door.
“Your friend’s here,” he said to me.
“What friend?”
“Charlotte.”
I didn’t look up. “I don’t know anybody called Charlotte.”
“Well she’s here,” he said, “and she’s asking for you.”
This girl came into the room, all long legs and lipstick and fingernails. Beautiful, flawless, just Hannah’s type, the kind of girl I avoided like the plague, who wouldn’t notice if she tripped over me in the street in her Manolo Blahniks.
“It’s Charlie,” she said, “remember?” Stretching out towards me, all grabby and polished, like some kind of sisterhood reunion. I looked down at her hands and I saw the little star tattoo at the base of the left thumb and it was only then that I knew it was Thurston.
“Oh God. Charlie!” I said. “So sorry.”
Charlie was bespoke, made-to-measure perfect for Hannah and Lowell to fall in love with, an Orange County girl, drowning in labels, with money in her veins and parents who did, “Oh, I don’t know, something in the movies.” She dropped names in a way that made the sweat break out on Lowell’s forehead, always the first name twice, to show how well she knew them.
“Leo, Leo DiCaprio’s got one of those,” she said, pointing to our crappy vintage-style blender. “Cate, Cate Blanchett would just love how you’ve done this wall.”
“She’s got style,” Hannah said, watching her own skirt stretched tight over Thurston’s narrow hips.
“Good manners,” Lowell said, doing the thoughtful movie-star clench with his jaw, already wondering whether she had a crush on him, already working out how to get in with her people.
It didn’t for a second occur to them that this was a piece of on-and-off homeless, skinny male white trash from the uglier side of town, graffiti maestro, street artist, performance poet and pickpocket, with a mild criminal record (trespass, jaywalking, vagrancy) and no sway whatsoever in the Hollywood Hills. Even if I had told them, right then I don’t think they would have believed it. Just the week before, Thurston had strung a huge banner from the top of the Ocean Palms building, hand-stitched in letters more than two metres tall, FROM UP HERE WE ARE ALL NOBODIES. That wouldn’t have meant a thing to Hannah and Lowell. There was nothing in that for them.
“Can I take your daughter out tonight?” Charlie asked, and they looked surprised as hell that someone so spectacular might know me, but they said yes, of course they said yes.
Thurston kissed them on both cheeks when we left and they didn’t feel the stubble underneath his smooth skin, didn’t notice the bitten-down nails behind the false ones.
“I can’t believe you just did that,” I said.
“No big deal,” he said. “Everyone here is faking it.”
“I suppose.”
“How the hell,” he asked me, taking my arm on the stairs, “does anyone walk in these shoes?”
We stopped at a restroom round the corner from our apartment. He’d stashed his clothes there, his baggy black T-shirt and ancient jeans. When he came out looking like Thurston again, I thought he was a hundred times more beautiful than Charlie, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t say so.
He grinned. “They loved me, right?”
“You were perfect,” I told him. “How could they not?”
“Jeez,” he said, “your parents are easy to please.”
Charlotte didn’t appear again. A while later, Hannah and Lowell asked me what happened to her.
I was reading about a sinkhole that had opened up out of nowhere underneath a man’s house and swallowed his bed with him in it.
“I haven’t seen her,” I said.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“I get it,” I told her. “Too good for me, right?”
“Such great potential,” Hannah said, like she’d know.
“I wanted to get her parents over at the weekend,” Lowell said.
I suppose they wanted to believe I’d had a friend with connections, that it might almost make me somebody.
“She died,” I told them, and I didn’t care if they bought it or not. “She moved away.”
Lowell’s face hovered somewhere around shock at the further thinning of his address book, and Hannah said, “Well, which is it?”
“Both,” I said. “But not in that order.”
They didn’t bother to argue
Gullible works both ways. Tricking people requires their full co-operation.
“We’re
