Hand-Me-Down
Charlotte sat beside me and the cushions seesawed me into the air. “You two sick of each other yet?” she asked. Meaning me and Dad, living together.
Dad and I looked at each other. Why get sick? We got along great. Plus, I didn’t have to pay rent, so I could spend my little all on necessities like clothes, mochas, and alcohol.
“Because the guest house is empty,” Charlotte said. “With the baby coming, I thought it’d be nice to have Anne close.”
Sure. I’d already had a lifetime of Charlotte’s secondhand goods, the last thing I wanted was to take care of her second generation. Then reason lifted its shaggy head. The guest house was a cozy cottage with one bedroom, a kitchen with a Wolf stove and Sub-Zero fridge, and a living room out of Metropolitan Home.
“How much for rent?” Dad asked, a shade too eagerly.
“Well, if she’d baby-sit every now and then…”
“No.” Dad shook his head. “Anne needs to pay rent. It’ll be good for her.”
“Dad.”
“How about three hundred?” Charlotte said. “Including utilities.”
Three hundred I could swing.
“Not enough,” Dad said.
“But if she takes the baby a couple times a week.”
“Wait one infantile second,” I said. “I never said I’d help with the baby.”
“Of course not,” Charlotte said. “Only if you had time.” She and Dad looked a little nervous. There’s a bit of Emily in me.
“What do you think?” I asked Dad.
“I’d miss you…” he said, gloomily.
And I realized I couldn’t leave him. It wasn’t like he still had Mom to take care of him. Maybe it’s a youngest daughter thing, but I felt I had a responsibility. And he did like having me around, even if he grumbled about it occasionally.
“…but I’ll help you move next week,” he finished.
When Emily arrived, the photographers positioned her in front of a huge poster for a film called Spanking Schoolgirls. She’d been posed to hide the naughty bits, and hadn’t budged since. I guess she had a little of the model in her after all. Her publisher, Jamie Lombard—early thirties, an ink-stained cowboy, with rugged good looks and a receding hairline—stood proudly beside her. He was a local publisher, and few of his books had ever sold more than five hundred copies. The unexpected success of Emily’s book had left him slightly shell-shocked.
Emily, on the other hand, looked utterly comfortable chatting with a reporter about the dichotomizing of sub-textual prurience or something. As far as I could understand, her point was this: women like to fuck. Not exactly an earth-shattering insight, but apparently if you dress it up in postmodern theory, you get famous for your dangerous mind.
It did make me eye Emily speculatively. She’d been secretly dating someone all summer, and my bet was that he was someone in the “film” trade who she was too embarrassed to introduce to her family. A porn star like Johnny Deep, maybe, or Roger More.
I looked for Charlotte, to expand upon this theory—why had none of us met this mystery man?—and my Aunt Regina drifted into range. She eyed me and said, “I’m glad you’re finally out of mourning.”
This was her joke. Her only joke. My mom—her sister—had died when I was ten, and though I sometimes missed her, I hadn’t been in mourning for twelve years. But Aunt Regina had an arrested image of me from what she called my “Goth Phase” in high school. Every time she saw me since, she was amazed anew that I wasn’t wearing black lipstick.
I gave a courtesy laugh, and starting heaping food on my plate.
“Now you’ve stopped coloring your hair black,” she said, “you look much more like Charlotte.”
“We’re often taken for twins,” I lied.
“Surely not identical,” she said. “Now if only you were a success, like your sisters. How proud your mother would be.”
Before I could kill Aunt Regina and stuff her body in the crawlspace, Billy and Ian arrived—at the same time, like they’d shared a ride. This worried me for some reason, so I raced over to introduce them and be sure the introduction was necessary.
“Ian, this is Billy,” I said, taking Billy’s hand in a loverlike fashion. “Billy, Ian.”
They said hello.
“So this is your boyfriend,” Ian said.
“Yep,” I said—giving Billy’s hand a warning squeeze.
“What?” Billy said. “Me?”
I laughed and dragged him to a corner where I hissingly instructed him that, for the duration of the evening, he was my boyfriend. He claimed he wasn’t. I told him he was. He became stubborn. So I offered an introduction to Charlotte, and he said he’d be my boyfriend for a whole week if he could shake her hand. A month if he could lick it.
We threaded through the crowd as I internally debated the merits of allowing the lick, but Billy dug in his heels when he spotted Charlotte.
“That really is Charlotte Olsen!” he said.
“Yeah.”
“No way. She’s totally—”
“Pregnant,” I explained.
“—hot. She’s totally hot.”
“She’s a water buffalo.”
“She’s a fox.”
“But she’s five hundred pounds!” I pointed out.
“I need a cold shower just looking at her,” he said. “Oh, man.”
“Her feet are bloated.” I thought he should know. “She’s a bloated hippo with clown feet.”
“She’s even hotter than her calendar.”
“And bigger than her car.”
“You know,” he told me, man to man, “I jerked off to that calendar three times a day for like two months.”
Fifteen minutes later, I slipped onto the patio. There was a couple sitting on the Adirondacks overlooking the pool, and chatting in low tones. I was going to sneak past, but it was only Ian and Emily.
“Why aren’t you inside with your adoring fans?” I asked.
“I needed some air,” Emily said. “The photographers…”
Ian shot a longing glance back at the house. “A little peace and quiet.”
It was disgusting. Even in herd-of-buffalo form, Charlotte was breaking his heart. “She’s enormous,” I mumbled. “She’s a one-woman stampede.”
“What?” Ian gestured toward the party. “Is that what that crash was?”
“Oh. Um. That was me. I broke up with Billy.”
Ian opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then closed it again.
“A long way from par,” Emily said. “He didn’t even make it to the first hole.”
“Emily!” I said.
She blushed bright red. “I meant golf hole—like in golf.”
“You’ve been watching too much porn,” Ian told her.
“Porn is film,” I observed.
“Why’d you break up?” Ian asked me.
“We’d grown apart.” I turned to Emily. “So where’s your invisible boyfriend?”
“We broke up, too.”
“Really? When? Why?” The relationship may have been clandestine, but she’d seemed happy.
“It was only sex,” Emily said.
“Well, what did you expect from a porn star? Intellectual fulfillment? I don’t know what—”
“A porn star?” she said.
Ian laughed. “Hung like a moose, I bet.”
Emily shot him a stern look, then finally copped to her blue-movie adventure. “The sex was great,” she admitted, “although his idea of a good film was The Sperminator. He just wasn’t right for me. We didn’t have anything—” Her face lit up as Jamie Lombard stepped out of the house with two margaritas. “Jamie! Over here.”
He headed our way and she sprang at him like a hungry lioness and dragged him to the corner of the deck, where they could talk privately. Did she have her eye on Jamie? They’d make a perfect pair.
I looked at Ian. “Did I imagine that?”
“Maybe she had two secret boyfriends.”
“The porn star and the publisher. Sounds like a sitcom.”
“On the Spice Channel.”
I laughed more than that deserved, because I liked Ian. And he looked good. And apparently had forgotten what I did last time we met. “So…you saw Charlotte,” I said.
“More beautiful than ever.”
“She makes a very attractive Mack truck. Meet my sisters: dangerous mind and dangerous curves.”
“Not feeling dangerous, yourself?”
I held up the plate of food that hadn’t left my side all evening. “Only to the buffet.”
“Oh, I’m sure there’s a little wickedness in you.”
Okay, he was Charlotte’s ex, so this was marginally incestuous and repulsively secondhand. But he was handsome, single, funny, smart…and nobody had ever called me potentially wicked before. I gave him my lower-wattage version of Charlotte’s smile and said, “A lot of wickedness.”
He laughed. “Remember last time we met? You invited me to your school dance.”
My smile dimmed.
“You were what?” he said. “In seventh grade? I was a senior in high school. It was so sweet. What was the theme again?”
Hawaiian luau. “No idea.”
“Hula or something. You were cute in your little grass skirt.”
Actually, I was. I’d wanted to wear a coconut bra, too, but Dad wouldn’t let me.
Ian smiled at the memory. “You marched up to me with a flower necklace and asked if I wanted to get laid.”
“Lei-ed,” I said faintly, remembering the mortification. I was trying on my outfit and had gone to Charlotte’s room to show her. A half-dozen other kids had been there, Charlotte’s friends, and they’d howled with laughter. Not Ian, though. He’d said, very kindly, no, and on the night of the dance had actually sent me a corsage.
We were silent a moment, listening to the party sounds from the house. Then I turned to him and—God help me— I said, “The offer’s still good.”
Ian took my hand. He told me how flattered he was. He said I was beautiful, wonderful, perfect in every way—but he’d rather staple his earlobes to the deck than sleep with me. Well, I don’t know exactly what he said, because I was busy trying to transform my utter mortification into the ability to sink unnoticed into the ground, leaving behind only a thin film of humiliation.
Okay. So he hadn’t forgotten.
The next morning Dad and I met in the living room for coffee. We usually chatted for about twenty minutes before I left for Banana and he headed to his office at UCSB.
“You looked pretty last night,” he said.
“Nice that someone thought so,” I muttered into my coffee.
“Hmm?”
“Nothing.” I put my cup on the coffee table and held out my arms to show off my new red T-shirt and black mini. “And what do we think of today’s ensemble?”
“Not the book!” he said.
I grabbed my cup from the book I’d used as a coaster. It was Porn Is Film. Emily had placed it there, and we didn’t dare move it. She’d come on a surprise inspection last Tuesday and found it buried at the bottom of the bookcase. The echoes were still fading.
Dad inspected the cover for stains and declared us safe when he found none. He smiled at the book, from fondness for Emily. “Mom would be so proud. Little did she know when she named you after the Brontë sisters, one of you’d become an author.”
“Mom published stuff. So did you,” I said sulkily. “All professors get published.”
“In journals. Not like this.”
“Well, Charlotte helped.”
His smile wavered. “Your mom never would have expected her daughter to become a swimsuit model, though. I think she’d have supported it….” This was an old conflict with Dad.
“Dad, she’s still Charlotte. Fame, fortune, and public nudity haven’t done a single bad thing to her. Look what she’s made of herself.”
“Speaking of which…” he said, and I realized I’d been deftly maneuvered into this conversation.
“I like Banana.”
“Anne—”
“Yes, Anne,” I said. “The Brontë sister no one’s ever heard of. So lay off!”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Dad.”
“I’m only saying—”
“Dad.”
“Okay, okay. I’m saying nothing.”
“And I’ve heard it all before.”
At the end of that summer, Emily and Jamie were married. Charlotte had a baby girl. And I got a job working for a dot-com. I was destined to make millions—in an artsy-businessy way, of course.
I heard Ian moved to New York.
CHAPTER 04
The third time Ian Dunne came into my life was eight years later.
I was twenty-nine, with a steady job and a steady boyfriend and a steady life. And I still managed to invite my sister’s ex-boyfriend to an inappropriate party. There’s a word for that: Fate.
Or maybe it’s: Stupid.
It started when Emily and I were having lunch at the Sojourner, a natural foods restaurant downtown. We were arguing over a gift for Charlotte’s birthday. Emily and I always joined forces to buy presents for Charlotte. Even though Charlotte insisted she loved everything we got her, together we could afford something unembarrassing.
“You know what she gave me last year?” I asked.
“A mahogany tilt-top occasional table.”
I nodded. “Used furniture.”
“It’s an antique. Must’ve cost thousands. And it’s in perfect condition—it looks brand-new.”
“But it isn’t.”
“I’ll take it, if you don’t want it,” Emily said. Like she needed secondhand used furniture. Between her book and her articles, her lectures and TV appearances, she was almost as stinking rich as Charlotte. Well, maybe a tenth as rich, but that was still pretty stinking if you were only an office manager, like me.
“I didn’t say I didn’t want it,” I said. “Just that it wasn’t new.”
Emily shook her head. “Well, neither is the gift I want to get her, so you’re even.”
The waitress came and I ordered a Gorilla Fizz, which I’d been ordering at the Sojourner since I was a kid, and a Popeye Salad, which I’d been ordering since I had trouble zipping my Levi’s last week. Emily quizzed the waitress about what exactly was in the vegetable timbale, then ordered the pumpkin ravioli with a totally different sauce than was on the menu. Then called the waitress back and changed to the stew. When she finished, she turned to me. “Charlotte and I found a new antiques place in El Paseo a couple weeks ago.”
“Antiques,” I said, disgusted, “are the world’s biggest scam. First something is new. Pristine. Unsullied. Then it’s gently used. Crusty. Questionable. Then used. Old. Nasty. And finally, if nobody’s thrown it away, it becomes antique. Repulsive, rancid, swirling with layers of greasy body oil. And more expensive than when it was new.”
“It amazes me you can eat in a restaurant,” Emily said. “You know other people have used that fork.”
I paused midbite, trying not to think about it. Hundreds of mouths sliding wet tongues over the prongs. It was deeply off-putting—but fortunately, my fondness for all things new and unused was (mostly) limited to what I owned. Besides, I liked to eat. I put the forkful of salad in my mouth and smiled triumphantly at Emily. “See! Not crazy.”
“Good,” she said. “Prove it by picking up Charlotte’s gift at the antiques store.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A lacquer box. She loved it when she saw it in the window.”
“Why can’t you get it?”
“Because I have a real job, Anne.” Emily thought I wasn’t living up to my potential, answering phones at a real estate company. She didn’t understand that that was my potential.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Academia. Nothing more real than that.”
“At least I enjoy what I’m doing,” she said.
“So do I. Putting people in real homes, with roofs and doors—things they can use. Not theories about how porn queens articulate their genitalia.” Emily had actually said that once, articulate her genitalia, on Crossfire or Politically Incorrect or somewhere. She hated to be teased about it. “Don’t tell me how important your work is compared to mine.”
“I didn’t say it was important. I said I enjoyed it.” She looked down at her plate. “At least I used to.”
I immediately felt awful for snapping at her. She’d been having a terrible time with her second book, struggling with it for years. “Problems with the book again?”
“No, it’s—well, it’s finished. The first draft.”
“But…” I prompted.
“But nothing.”
“What does Jamie think?”
“He says he likes it.” She dipped a hunk of bread in her stew. “My agent wants to shop it elsewhere.”
“You mean—elsewhere?”
“She says I should get a big-name publisher.”
“Instead of Jamie?”
She nodded.
It would kill Jamie. Emily was his lead author as well as his wife. The reason he’d been able to attract other good writers was because of Porn Is Film. And Emily relied on him more than she knew, and not only because he stayed in Santa Barbara with their son, Zach, while she commuted three days a week to UCLA.
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I know.”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know. Not really. Remember when my first book came out? How excited I was? Everything seemed possible. I just want to feel that way again.”
I felt for Emily—and still wanted to stab her in the eye with my fork. She had a career she loved. She was famous enough to get mentioned on NPR—though, I’m pleased to say, not on SNL. She had Jamie, who doted on her, and Zach, who was a great kid. Yeah, she wasn’t a dangerous young mind anymore, but she had the perfect life. Well, Charlotte had the perfect life. But Emily’s was first runner-up.
Still, because I’m a good sister, I made sympathetic noises and kept my fork to myself. I even paid for lunch—treating Emily as a reward for finishing her book.
She gave me a quick hug outside the restaurant. “You won’t forget Charlotte’s gift? The place is called Tazza.”
I wrinkled my nose.
“Just buy it, Anne.”
“Okay, okay. But if I come down with medieval squirrel-pox, it’s your fault.”
“What are the symptoms?” Emily asked. “Irritability, lack of ambition, fear of commitment— Annie, you’ve already got a terminal case.”
After the EMTs arrived to remove my fork from Emily’s forehead, I rushed back to my job at Parsons Realty. I tried not to take long lunches, even though I’d been dating the owner, Rip Parsons, for six months. Knowing where the boss sleeps at night (the right side of the bed) is pretty good job security.
I’d been working there for eight months, and considered the longevity of both relationship and job fairly impressive. The longest I’d worked anywhere was at the dot-com, a little-used search engine called The Ask It Basket. A name even lamer than “Rip,” but the company had been started back in the days when all you had to say was, “It’s a company on the World Wide Web. Which is on the Internet. Which is a global network of computers,” and millions dropped into your lap.
I’d worked three years at The Ask It Basket. My job title was Coordinator of Technology, but my business card said Geek Wrangler. I basically translated requests from management into geek-speak and back again. If a manager asked: “Why are the coders three weeks behind deadline?” I’d ask the geeks: “Would you stop downloading porn and get to work?” Or if the coders said, “Seagate’s got a brand-new campus, with a video-game room and everything,” I’d tell my boss: “They want free Mountain Dew and fruit leather.”
Then I’d sold my stock. But you weren’t supposed to sell stock, you were supposed to spend hours online every day, watching it go up and up and up and up. Selling stock was a betrayal worse than corporate espionage or claiming that Bill Gates wasn’t actually Rosemary’s Baby. I became persona not-entirely grata, and quit shortly thereafter, clutching the meager proceeds of my stock sale close to my heart.
Then I spent a depressing year watching the stock go up and up and up and up.
Then down. Wheeeee!
Everyone had thought I was crazy to sell, but after the dotcom crash I felt like Warren Buffet’s love child with Suze Orman, despite having sold a year early and spending nearly everything. Still, Dad was so impressed he said I should become a stockbroker. Instead I convinced Wren to hire me at Element—the clothing boutique she managed. We’d been best friends since working together at Banana, so she sort of had to hire me. Sadly, I was so bad at selling clothes that she sort of had to fire me three months later. But at least she wept while giving me the pink slip, so I forgave her.
After Wren fired me, I starting doing temp work—which I loved. Every job was a new job. I worked for an interior designer, the community college, a sheet music business, and World of Goods, a nonprofit. A local title company hired me permanently, and I stayed six months before I realized I’d paper-cut my throat if I had to type one more set of title instructions.
Right on cue, Rip Parsons had wandered into the office. A little flirting, an extra-long lunch, and I had a new job. He wanted an assistant, but I insisted on “office manager,” because it sounded almost reputable. Plus, I figured it was a good way to explore the possibility of becoming a Realtor (who basically mints money in Santa Barbara) without actually taking the courses and test.
A couple months later—a little more flirting, a few dinners added to the lunches—and I had a boyfriend. Rip had short brown hair and green eyes and I liked his arms, muscular from tennis, with the hair bleached blond from the sun. He looked faintly like Peter Gallagher, and on paper seemed like a jerk—a too-handsome young Realtor, a smarmy salesman. But he was lovely, super kind and always caring.
So, sure, I was twenty-nine and working behind the front desk of a real estate company—my career peak apparently long past—but at least I had a wonderful boyfriend.
Actually, getting boyfriends had never been a problem for me. I have a system. Wanting them after a few months was tougher.
There was Matthew. I broke up with him when he said, “Because I’m Matthew, that’s why,” once too often. There was Billy from Banana. My “dumping” him at Emily’s party had somehow ignited his interest, but I dumped him for real after he admitted he fantasized about Charlotte when we had sex. I didn’t mind him doing it, but couldn’t forgive him admitting it. Then Doug, the creative genius behind The Ask It Basket. I broke up with him when he started a porn-only search engine, called The Beaver Basket. There had been Mason, the public defender who was great fun when drunk, incredibly tedious when sober. Nick, the portrait artist with the trust fund who I had to leave because he wore Mary Janes. Arthur, the world’s sexiest plumber who liked laying pipe a bit too much. Alex, the wannabe screenwriter who asked me to give him “notes” about his lovemaking.
And Rip. Who had just buzzed me from his office. I hated that buzzer—sounded like I’d said the wrong thing on Family Feud—and had warned Rip not to touch it. Now he only buzzed to annoy me.
I opened the door to his office. “What?”
He grinned.
“I’m on a deadline, Rip. The ads are due.”
“Guess who just sold Knox Tower.”
I looked at him. “No!”
“Yes!”
“Oh, my God! That’s fantastic. Who? When?”
The Knox Tower wasn’t a tower. It was an old lodge in the Santa Barbara mountains, with 360-degree views of the valleys below and the distant crystal blue of Lake Cachuma. A rich socialite of the Great Gatsby type—though named Knox, I presume—had hosted lavish parties there until it burned down into ruins, many decades ago. It was never rebuilt, and the land and rubble had been on the market since. For millions.
“Just now,” Rip said. “That was the buyer on the phone.”
“Who is he?”
“Super rich L.A. contractor. CEO of Keebler, Inc.”
“Keebler? Like the elves?”
“If you meet him,” Rip said, “that’s the first thing you shouldn’t ask. Anyway, he’s big into low-impact, green construction. Fell in love with the place.”
“I thought you couldn’t build up there.”
“Green construction, Annie. He’s gonna put up tents. Or yurts or something, a cistern, solar energy, the whole deal.”
I shook my head. “Will it actually close?”
“I spoke to the lender. It’s a go.” A gleam came into his eyes. “I’m thinking I deserve a reward.”
“Oh, is that what you think?”
“Mmm-hmm.” He put his hands on my hips and pulled me close. “That was a good movie last night.”