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By Root 586 0

moment, adjusting my sunglasses, reaching for tanning oil. The poolboy is walking toward me slowly and the sun is beating down and I’m spreading my legs and rubbing oil on the inside of my thighs and then across my legs, knees, ankles. He is standing over me. Valium, taken earlier, disorients everything, makes backgrounds move in wavy slow motion. A shadow covers my face and it allows me to look up at the poolboy and I can hear from the portable stereo “Our love’s in jeopardy” and the poolboy opens his mouth, the lips full, the teeth white and clean and even, and I overwhelmingly need him to ask me to get into the white pickup truck parked at the bottom of the driveway and have him instruct me to go out to the desert with him. His hands, perfumed by chlorine, would rub oil over my back, across my stomach, my neck, and as he looks down at me with the rock music coming from the cassette deck and the palm trees shifting in a hot desert wind and the glare of the sun shining up off the surface of the blue water in the pool, I tense and wait for him to say something, anything, a sigh, a moan. I breathe in, stare up through my sunglasses, into the poolboy’s eyes, trembling.

“You have two dead rats in your drain.”

I don’t say anything.

“Rats. Two dead ones. They got caught in the drain or maybe they fell in, who knows.” He looks at me blankly.

“Why … are you … telling me this?” I ask.

He stands there, expecting me to say something else. I lower my sunglasses and look over at the gray bundles near the Jacuzzi.

“Take … them, away?” I manage to say, looking down.

“Yeah. Okay,” the poolboy says, hands in his pockets. “I just don’t know how they got trapped in there?”

The statement, really a question, is phrased in such a languid way that though it doesn’t warrant an answer I tell him, “I guess … we’ll never know?”

I am looking at the cover of an issue of Los Angeles magazine. A huge arc of water reaches for the sky, a fountain, blue and green and white, spraying upward.

“Rats are afraid of water,” the poolboy is telling me.

“Yes,” I say. “I’ve heard. I know.”

The poolboy walks back to the two drowned rats and picks them up by their tails which should be pink but even from where I sit I can see are now pale blue and he puts them into what I thought was his toolbox and then to erase the notion of the poolboy keeping the rats I open the Los Angeles magazine and search for the article about the fountain on the cover.

I am sitting in a restaurant on Melrose with Anne and Eve and Faith. I am drinking my second Bloody Mary and Anne and Eve have had too many kirs and Faith orders what I believe to be a fourth vodka gimlet. I light a cigarette. Faith is talking about how her son, Dirk, had his driver’s license revoked for speeding down Pacific Coast Highway, drunk. Faith is driving his Porsche now. I wonder if Faith knows that Dirk sells cocaine to tenth graders at Beverly Hills High. Graham told me this one afternoon last week in the kitchen even though I had asked for no information about Dirk. Faith’s Audi is in the shop for the third time this year. She wants to sell it, yet she’s confused about which kind of car to buy. Anne tells her that ever since the new engine replaced the old engine in the XJ6, it has been running well. Anne turns to me and asks me about my car, about William’s. On the verge of weeping, I tell her that it is running smoothly.

Eve does not say too much. Her daughter is in a psychiatric hospital in Camarillo. Eve’s daughter tried to kill herself with a gun by shooting herself in the stomach. I cannot understand why Eve’s daughter did not shoot herself in the head. I cannot understand why she lay down on the floor of her mother’s walk-in closet and pointed her stepfather’s gun at her stomach. I try to imagine the sequence of events that afternoon leading up to the shooting. But Faith begins to talk about how her daughter’s therapy is progressing. Sheila is an anorexic. My own daughter has met Sheila and may also be an anorexic.

Finally, an uneasy silence falls across the table in the restaurant on Melrose