Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [71]
I spent the rest of the morning putting the furniture in the living room back in its original position but realized while doing this that I liked how the furniture had been rearranged—and felt a weird pang of nostalgia as I pushed the couches and tables and chairs around. And the carpet—though still discolored—was spotless: the footprints stamped in ash were no longer evident, and even though the wide expanse of beige Berber bordering on green shag was bothersome, the room was no longer open to interpretation. I then went outside to the field and checked on the blackened wet patch; to my relief, it had almost dried up, and the hole was beginning to refill itself, and as I looked out over the acres of field leading out to the dark bank of woods, taking in deep breaths of the fresh autumn air, I briefly felt that maybe Jayne was right, that this was a meadow and not a place where the dead reside. Next I went upstairs to look at the scratches on Robby’s door, and when I knelt down and ran my hand over the grooves I’d seen on Halloween I could detect no change. Again: relief. I felt now as if the bad news Kimball had brought yesterday was being balanced out. The afternoon was long and quiet and uneventful. I watched football games, and Aimee Light still hadn’t called me back.
At six o’clock Jayne dressed me in a pair of black Paul Smith slacks and a gray Gucci turtleneck and Prada loafers—chic yet conservative and imminently presentable. While she took the next hour to pull herself together I went downstairs to greet Wendy, the girl who was going to watch over the kids tonight since Marta had Sundays off. Wendy was a not unattractive student from the college, whose parents Jayne knew and who also came highly recommended by all the mothers in the neighborhood. Jayne had initially resisted calling Wendy since we were only going next door for a few hours and could simply bring the kids with us, but Mitchell Allen mentioned something about Ashton’s ear infection and subtly vetoed our plan. And considering what Kimball had told me yesterday, I was grateful to have someone in the house to look after the kids. While waiting for Jayne I downloaded onto the computer the pictures she’d taken on Halloween: Robby and Ashton, both sullen and sweaty, already too old for the holiday; Sarah looking like a child prostitute. An image of the cream-colored 450 SL initially caught my interest, but it no longer seemed fixed with meaning—it was simply someone’s car and nothing more. I realized this after uselessly trying to enlarge the photo and locate the license plate, but it had been washed out in the glare of the street lamps and, as with everything else that Sunday, didn’t seem to matter much. I skipped any shots that I was in, but the photos that bothered me most weren’t the ones of me looking frightened and blitzed but those of Mitchell Allen and Jayne posing in front of the Larsons’ house on Bridge Street, Mitchell’s arm wrapped protectively around Jayne’s waist, his lips raised in a mock leer. That seemed far more worrisome than the small and innocent car I’d briefly become so afraid of on Halloween night and now no longer was.
I had actually gone to Camden with Mitchell Allen but barely knew him there, even though the school was a tiny and incestuous place. What had surprised me to discover was not so much that Mitchell Allen was now living next door to Jayne, but rather that he was married and had fathered two children: Ashton, who because of their close proximity was Robby’s default best friend, and Zoe, who was a year younger than Sarah. Given what little I knew about Mitchell at Camden I had assumed he was bisexual if not, in fact, totally gay. But back then, before AIDS hit, everyone was basically screwing everybody else during that brief, sexually freewheeling historical moment. After we graduated and the eighties