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By Root 500 0

’s stay in the hospital except for a single get-well card, is now a constant, hovering, mothering, hectoring presence. Her agents have just landed her a contract with Maybelline, which is rushing to come out with a line of warpaint of its own, and they’re fielding offers from several clothing retailers. Ivy has formally given Ursula the right of attorney over her career, and the sums of money she can command for these jobs are so staggeringly beyond anything Ursula anticipated that she’s finding it difficult to perform her primary, self-appointed duty: to turn down offers and thus keep Ivy’s schedule light and her stress level to a bare minimum. This effort is made still harder by James T. Couch, whose own self-appointed duty seems to be to laze around Ivy’s loft and feed her ego, which already knows no bounds. She’s anything but satisfied with the degree of success she’s achieved. Her hunger for one of everything is by no means limited to food. She pillages the world with her wide, alien eyes, scavenging each object—animal, vegetable, and mineral alike—not so much for the thing itself as for the attention it signifies. The ownership of any given thing means that that thing is paying attention to her, just as the service of a person means that that person is paying attention to her. It’s not really greed, Ursula has decided. It’s of another order. Ivy requires celebrity as others require air; it functions for her as a protective layer, allows her a kind of second childhood, makes strangers indulgent, happy to cater to her whims, and eager to please her. For this reason Ursula has become reconciled to Ivy’s notoriety and even grateful for it, and to some degree she’s managed to make peace with herself as well, since the evidence would seem to indicate that she really has been helping her sister after all.

Of course, there’s ample indication that Ursula has been helping herself, too. The Trend Journal’s account of the savage craze went on to credit Ursula personally, dubbing her “the savvy behind the savage girl, her sister, the troubled and beautiful Ivy.” It’s only a trade journal, but in the small world of marketing it seems to have a great deal of currency. People introduce themselves to her at parties now. New clients ask to meet her. She is the brains behind Ivy’s glamour, and as such she seems to have become just a little bit glamorous herself.

Ivy plays with the shiny gold lighter, unleashing frighteningly, ridiculously large torches of blue flame.

“God,” Ursula says. “Where’d you get that thing?”

“Chas Chas,” she says lackadaisically, perhaps unaware that this is the first time she’s mentioned his name in Ursula’s presence. Since the night she fooled around with him, Ursula hasn’t brought him up, either.

“Chas?” Ursula says, trying to sound calm. “Have you seen him?”

“No. I won’t let him see me. He couriered it. He couriers stuff all the time.”

“ ‘Stuff’? Stuff like lighters?”

“Sometimes just notes.”

Ursula nods, not sure whether to believe this.

Ivy flicks the torch on again and watches it contemplatively.

“I never understood what you two could’ve possibly had in common anyway,” Ursula says.

The flame goes out. Ivy stares at her.

“You’re wondering how he could love me,” she says.

Ursula opens her mouth, a false denial frozen in her throat.

“Sure,” Ivy goes on, “you’ve always wondered that. To you I’m the dumb blond sister with the cracked head.”

“I don’t think you’re dumb,” Ursula insists. “I never thought that. That’s Gwennan talking, not me.”

“ ‘Gwennan talking,’ ” Ivy reflects. “ ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!’ That’s Gwennan talking. The bitch. I hear Gwennan talking all the time. Don’t talk to me about Gwennan talking.”

She picks up her water glass, blows some smoke into it, and turns it upside down, trapping the smoke inside.

“Chas was the same way at first,” she adds.

She crushes her gold filter against the tabletop and tosses it into Ursula’s glass, where it floats just below the rim.

“He thought I was a box with a big red ribbon,” she says. “He thought I was Ivybox. Put things