Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [464]
"Do you think I should?" she asked.
They were getting along like hot dogs and mustard. "Well," he said, "I won't tell you what's in it, but it's a pile of crap."
She smiled again. She had a great smile, he thought. It came out of some place in the center of her, and spread slowly across her face like whipped cream. She had full lips and it gave her a great, tough grin. It said, "Come on, you're no better than I am." He was surprised how fresh she was. A remarkably clean young lady. On this promising note, they left the office, went to the airport, and were off to California.
On the plane, however, she began to slump. He could feel her pulling away from everybody. She no longer looked her own soul.
More like a waif in a house whose windows were wet with fog. Schiller felt a worm of fear stir right in the pit of his gut.
In L.A., waiting at the airport to pick them up, Lucinda was thinking of some of the acts she had heard Gary talk about to Nicole on the tape recorder, the kind of things Lucinda had never heard anybody else say. So she could hardly believe it was Nicole she now saw coming toward her down the runway, but she felt, to her surprise, overwhelmingly sorry for her. Nicole seemed so small and alone, as if plucked from another world, and put in this one without the capacity to grasp it. Yet this was the same Nicole coming toward her now with her mother and children, carrying her little Newsweek magazine that had Gary on the cover. The magazine was what made Lucinda feel the worst. It was as if Nicole had no way to grasp anything. Looked numb and out of it. She seemed far off from Larry. Lucinda couldn't tell if Nicole hated him, or hated all of them. There seemed to be nothing coming off her but this refusal to have anything to do with anybody.
After the drive out to Malibu, Larry took Nicole and her to the grocery store and Lucinda watched him spend something like $160 on food for the Baker family. It was probably, Lucinda thought, more food than they'd ever had together in their lives, but Nicole didn't say anything. Just walked up and down the aisles. Larry would say, "Well, think we need some of this?" but she just kept walking through this incredible Malibu supermarket with all these dressed-up moneyed people around her.
Larry kept buying, as if to compensate for the awkwardness of the situation. Two full baskets before long. Nicole would just kind of smile, like food was the last thing she had on her mind. At one point Larry asked her if there was anything else she wanted, and she said, "Yeah, like I think I'd like some instant potatoes."
Later, driving Kathryne Baker around L.A., out on the freeway with this skinny high-strung, very made-up little woman, Lucinda listened to how Gary had come over to Kathryne's house with guns, and she was always terrified of him. It was almost as if so much attention had been given to Nicole, that Kathryne wanted to get in with her story too, and was telling it right in front of the children. It came out in a jumble. But Lucinda was fascinated. When the kids would interrupt, Lucinda wanted them to be quiet.
The first thing Schiller told Nicole after they got back from the supermarket was that she was going to have to take on responsibility for the house. There would be a thousand dollars in cash available as expenses this month, and he would leave whatever part of it she wanted now. The station wagon was also there for her. Now he would say goodbye for a while. The moment he left, however, it came over him that Nicole might open those boxes Gary had left, read something he wrote, and kill herself. She had the kind of calm to do it. That was