Indiscretions - Elizabeth Adler [116]
“You gonna do your Rory-when-he-was-poor story?” asked Margie cheekily. She sniffed happily and burst into laughter as Rory glared at her. “You were never poor,” she said, leaning around the table to pat his cheek. “There was always some old woman to make sure you didn’t starve. Like Jenny.”
“Bullshit!” Anger flared in Rory’s narrowed eyes. “And shut up about Jenny.”
“Why? Feeling guilty?” Margie’s peals of laughter rang across the room and Bob watched with interest as Rory’s temper rose.
“Come on, you two, stop bickering and pass that stuff over here.” Joanne took her line and passed it on to Bob. Bob slid it carefully back across the marble to Rory.
“Hey, Bob, why don’t you do this stuff? You buy me the best, and I never see you take any yourself.” A thought crossed Rory’s mind and he looked at Bob in alarm. “Hey, listen,” he said, bending closer and speaking quietly, “are you into something else … you know, hard stuff?”
Bob stared back at him and shrugged.
“Jesus, Bob, that’s bad, that can kill you! Come on, man, you don’t need that scene. This is where it’s at—it’s the only safe drug, anything else’ll fry your brains and fuck up your body. Look at us, Bob, we’re just a bit high, a bit happy, that’s all.”
“What about free basing?”
“What about it?” laughed Margie, who was now lying down across the cushions.
“Yeah, well, I don’t do that anymore, not since—“
“Since October?” said Margie, dreamily.
“Shut up, Margie, or I’ll send you home,” threatened Rory.
Margie giggled and shut up.
“I’m starving,” said Bob. “What about some food?”
“Sure.” Joanne fished around the floor for her bag. “I could eat.”
“Let’s go to La Scala.” Rory reached for the phone without waiting for their response. He liked La Scala; they’d be sure to have a table for him—they treated him right there, and besides, he could put the check on the studio’s account. And you never knew who might be there. It was good to be seen around. Not with Margie, though, she looked like stoned jailbait.
“You’re staying here,” he informed her. “We’ll bring you back a pizza.”
Margie rolled over on her stomach to turn up the sound on the stereo.
“Sure,” she said, “just as long as you leave this here.” She dipped a finger into the silver bowl and licked it, laughing.
“Margie’s getting to be too much,” grumbled Rory as they climbed into the Ferrari. “I’m gonna have to lose her. Send her back to the Valley.”
They were laughing as the car sped through the mist toward Santa Monica Boulevard.
Margie sat in a booth at Du Par’s on Ventura Boulevard eating a stack of buttermilk pancakes swimming in butter and floating in a pool of maple syrup. A double order of bacon on the side and a strawberry milkshake completed her after-midnight snack, and Bob turned his head away, unable to watch as she took a strip of bacon in her fingers and dunked it into the syrup, crunching it cheerfully.
“I didn’t realize I was starving,” she said contentedly. “That creep Rory should have remembered my pizza.”
“He’s a busy guy,” said Bob. “He can’t remember everything.”
“Yeah. That’s true, I guess.” Her laugh rippled through the surprisingly busy room. Du Par’s coffee shop was popular with the late-movie crowd and tired singlesbar people, ready for a cup of coffee and a sandwich or their great pancakes. “But I think he just forgets when he wants to,” she said, crunching a second strip of bacon and passing one across the table to Bob. “Here, try this, it’s good.”
Bob laid the bacon on his plate next to the untouched slab of apple pie that he was planning on feeding Margie as dessert. He wanted to keep her here as long as he could. She was just high enough to talk without thinking, and yet not wiped out, as she had been when they’d left her at Rory’s place.
“What do you mean, forgets when he wants to?”
Margie pushed back her blond bangs with sticky fingers and concentrated on the pancakes.
“You know—like when it’s convenient.