"You know, there used to be a big mystery about that. Gran and Mom, they were always tragic and secretive when I asked them about him. I had lots of stories to explain his absence: ran off with another woman, thrown in jail for running guns, murdered in a bar fight. I used to be a bit of a celeb at school-lots of kids didn't have dads around, but they all knew where their fathers were. We could always kill an afternoon making up his who and where and why. Even the teachers got into it, getting all apologetic when we had to do a genealogy project. I found out the truth, finally, when I was nineteen. Just looked it up online. It never occurred to me that my mom would be that secretive about something that was so easy to find out, so I never bothered."
"So, what happened to him?"
"Oh, you know. He and mom split when I was a kid. He moved back in with his folks in a little town in the Thousand Islands, near Ottawa. Four or five years later, he got a job planting trees for a summer up north, and he drowned swimming in a lake during a party. By the time I found out about him, his folks were dead, too."
"Did you tell your friends about him, once you found out?"
"Oh, by then I'd lost touch with most of them. After elementary school, we moved across town, to a condo my grandmother retired into on the lakeshore, out in the suburbs. In high school, I didn't really chum around much, so there wasn't anyone to talk to. I did tell my Gran though, asked her why it was such a big secret, and she said it wasn't, she said she'd told me years before, but she hadn't. I think that she and Mom just decided to wait until I was older before telling me, and then after my mom died, she just forgot that she hadn't told me. We got into a big fight over that."
"That's a weird story, dude. So, do you think of yourself as an orphan?"
Art rolls over on his side, face inches from hers, and snorts a laugh. "God, that's so-
Linda rolls over on her side, too, her robe slipping off her lower breast. Art is aroused by it, but not crazily so-somewhere in telling his story, he's figured out that sex is a foregone conclusion, and now they're just getting through some nice foreplay. He smiles down at her nipple, which is brown as a bar of Belgian chocolate, aureole the size of a round of individual cheese and nipple itself a surprisingly chunky square of crinkled flesh. She follows his eyes and smiles at him, then puts his hand over her breast, covers it with hers.
"I told you about my mom, right? Wanted to act-who doesn't? But she was too conscious of the cliche to mope about it. She got some little parts-nothing fab, then went on to work at a Sony dealership. Ten years later, she bought a franchise. Dad and second-wife run a retreat in West Hollywood for sexually dysfunctional couples. No sibs. Happy childhood. Happy adolescence. Largely unsatisfying adulthood, to date."
"Wow, you sound like you've practiced that."
She tweaks his nose, then drapes her arm across his chest. "Got me. Always writing my autobiography in my head-gotta have a snappy opener when I'm cornered by the stalkerazzi."
He laces his fingers in hers, moves close enough to smell her toothpaste-sweet breath. "Tell me something unrehearsed about growing up."
"That's a stupid request." Her tone is snappish, and her fingers stiffen in his.
"Why?"
"It just is! Don't try to get under my skin, OK? My childhood was fine."
"Look, I don't want to piss you off. I'm just trying to get to know you. Because... you know... I like you. A lot. And I try to get to know the people I like."
She smiles her lopsided dimple. "Sorry, I just don't like people who try to mess with my head. My problem, not yours. OK, something unrehearsed." She closes her eyes and treats him to the smooth pinkness of her eyelids, and keeps them closed as she speaks. "I once stole a Veddic Series 7 off my mom's lot, when I was fifteen. It had all the girly safety features, including a tracker and a panic button, but I didn't think my mom would miss it. I just wanted to take it out for a drive. It's LA, right? No wheels, no life. So I get as far as Venice Beach, and I'm cruising the Boardwalk-this was just after it went topless, so I was swinging in the breeze-and suddenly the engine dies, right in the middle of this clump of out-of-towners, frat kids from Kansas or something. Mom had called in a dealer override and Sony shut down the engine by radio."
"Wow, what did you do?"