| house were killed. She was beautiful. She was kind. She was rich. She was maternal. Her ass was not very large, nor was it a sexy, mean little fist. She had a kind ass. She gave me a really cool handheld version of Space Invaders. I couldn’t figure out why. I concluded that she just liked me and was generous. I did not know that she had also been Dad’s lover while pretending to be Mom’s friend. I did not know that my stepmother was almost Danielle, not Dede. I did not know that around the time of the divorce Danielle had proposed to Dad, and he had turned her down. He’d said, “I can’t marry you. I’m old enough to be your father.” Danielle was older than Dede. Had he been hoping for Dinah Shore? I’ll never know. I did not know that I had come that close to paradise—and gone to hell instead. Danielle would have made a great stepmother! I thought of her every time I went into a bookstore or supermarket. There were Danielle’s books, with their dedications to John and Todd and Trevor. It could’ve been me! She’d have loved me. I’d have been a big brother to her son. As for her daughter, the beautiful Beatrix Lazard (this really was her name), who was delicate, sophisticated, and, it seemed to me, of refined sensibilities—it would be okay if we fell in love, because we would not be related. In four years I’d |
scene: Back from church, Blane cooked two packs of hot dogs on a huge flat grill we had in the center of the stove at the penthouse. The song “Tequila” played in the background. There was a lot of smoke and sputtering noise. Blane wore a dirty baseball cap and an untucked oxford. A cigarette dangled off his lower lip. He drank a beer and pressed the dogs with a spatula so they hissed. He nodded to the music. The camera pulled back and a girl called Ariana—a pack-a-day smoker from Urban who Mom disapproved of—entered the frame, looked at the grill, and said, “Hey, what’s cookin’?” Blane raised his eyebrows, smirked knowingly, puffed on the cigarette. Ariana (who’d laughed at enough of my jokes in first-period history class for me to convince her that she should “be in my movie”) made a painstakingly choreographed expression I’d instructed her to make because I thought it was sexy (she thought it was ridiculous). She tipped her head back, closed her eyelids, rolled her eyes back behind them, and ran her tongue slowly around the outside of her mouth. Then she opened her eyes, nodded her head back down, inclined her chin at the grill, full of hot dogs, smiled, and bit her lower lip. The camera tracked over to the grill. The dogs sizzled. I cut. Everybody held their place. The dildo went on the grill. The camera started again. The dildo, spanning the whole grill, seemed to appear |
