Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis [75]
The women cleared the table and went into the kitchen to prepare dessert while the men sauntered outside to the pool area to smoke cigars, but Mark Huntington had brought four prerolled joints, and before I realized what was happening we started lighting up. I wasn’t a pot fan but I was surprised at and grateful for its arrival: it was going to take forever to get through the rest of the evening—the sorbet with fresh fruit and the lingering goodbyes and the dreary promises of another dinner—and without getting stoned, falling into bed seemed impossibly distant. After the first toke I collapsed onto one of the chaise longues that were set in some particular and artful arrangement around the large yard, which unlike ours sat off to the side of the house instead of the back, and the night was dark and warm and the light from the pool shadowed the men’s features in a ghostly phosphorous blue. From where I was slumped on the chaise I was facing the side of our house, and while taking deep drags off the joint I squinted my eyes and studied it. I could see through the French doors into the media room, where Robby was still lying on the floor in front of the TV and Sarah was still sitting on Wendy’s lap as the babysitter read her the story about those stranded boys on that lost island, and above them was the darkened master bedroom. And surrounding everything was the great peeling wall. Yesterday morning, up close, the patches on the wall hadn’t seemed as large as they looked from this angle. The entire wall was now almost entirely covered with pink stucco, with only small patches of the original lily white paint remaining. A new wall had been uncovered—it had taken over—and this was alarming enough to spread a chill through me (because it was a warning of some kind, right?) and after I was handed another joint and took a heavy toke, I hazily thought, How . . . strange . . . and then my thoughts drifted away to Aimee Light and I felt a faint pang of lust followed by disappointment, the usual combo. The silhouettes of the women could be seen in the kitchen and their voices, distant and muffled, were a gentle backdrop to the men’s conversation. The men were trim with flat stomachs, their hair expensively colored, their faces smooth and unlined, so none of us looked our age, which I supposed, while yawning on the chaise, was a good thing. We were all a little detached and had a tendency to snicker, and I really didn’t know any of them—everyone was still a brief first impression. I was looking at a weather vane on the Allens’ roof when Mitchell asked me with an actual aura of concern and not the overlay of malice I had braced myself for, “So what brought you out to this part of the world, Bret?” I was drowsy and scanning the dark field behind our neighbors’ house.
I aimed for the right note of detachment, and snickered. “Well, she read too many magazine articles about how children raised in fatherless homes are more likely to become adolescent delinquents. And voilà. Here I am.” I sighed and had another toke. An enormous cloud was billowing across the moon. There were no stars.
A chorus of grim chuckles were followed by even more snickering.