The Girls from Corona del Mar Read online

  Obviously she did not think these things consciously; one does not think such stupid things consciously. Only assumptions, which are by nature unexamined, are allowed to be this stupid. Lor assumed these things as they lay naked on the sand or naked under their mosquito netting, as they ate Starbursts filled with drugs and drank lukewarm soda, as they befriended a dog outside a restaurant, or watched a man carrying a giant bag full of eggs on his head: perhaps two hundred eggs, balanced there atop his head in the bulging see-through garbage bag, magically not breaking.

  Running out of drugs was not as worrisome to Lor as what would happen when they ran out of money. They had started the trip with roughly six thousand dollars. Three thousand had been eaten up by airfare, vaccines, and visas. (They had not exactly gotten all of the vaccines, but they had gotten some of them and they had bought the malaria medication. It was just that hepatitis B vaccine—you had to get it over the span of six months!) Luckily, India was incredibly cheap, and so they had spent only a thousand dollars in their first month. But eventually they would have to do something to generate money; eventually they would have to stop being tourists and start living lives. It was the slowly depleting tally of her bank account that made Lor know this.

  In a way, it would have been better if they had had less money. There would have been a distinct call to action, an end in sight. It was worse to know they could go on this way, aimlessly vacationing, for months.

  She sent her mother a postcard of the Taj Mahal, even though they hadn’t been to see it. The card read, “Dear Mom, I miss you and Zach every day. I still don’t understand how you could let them take him like that. It must mean that you think I’m some kind of monster. It must make it worse that I ran off to India. Perhaps it will make you hate me even more, but I am happy here. Much love, Monster.”

  But she wasn’t happy. Not at all.

  And then, one day, they met a woman.

  They had been living for two weeks in the pretty green hotel that looked like a layer cake, where every morning they would sit on the veranda and play with the pug dog, Rosa, who had a lame back leg but who did not seem to mind, and where they would drink a pot of delicious French press coffee and eat a bowl of mango, coconut, papaya, and strawberries. The veranda overlooked a river that led out to the ocean, and Arman and Lorrie Ann would watch passively as it emptied itself unceasingly before them, a scintillating python of coppery brown-blue. The proprietor of the hotel was a small Afghani man named Rinoo, who never wore any shoes and who also never frowned. He was always smiling, calling Lorrie Ann Princess of the West and calling Arman Baba G, both in seeming sincerity. If they wanted to do something, it was Rinoo they asked where they ought to go or how it could be arranged.

  But lately they had been running out of things to do. They had spent many days on the beach, punctuating their hours of sunbathing with beer and fiery hot fish curry. They had spent many days renting a moped (Arman could pilot one even without legs, whereas he was nervous of the motorcycles) and going to the neighboring town of Arambol to shop and eat in the different restaurants there. They had rented a Jet Ski. Lor had taken a yoga class. They had eaten every place it was advisable to eat. They had visited the spice farm. They had ridden an elephant. Rinoo was out of ideas, except, he said, if they didn’t mind paying for a taxi, there was always the nightclub in Anjuna, the Paradiso.

  It was a sign of how desperate Arman was for any kind of entertainment that he agreed to go, since he despised dancing even before losing his legs, and despised it more afterward. On the other hand, as Lorrie Ann well knew, he found Indian women intoxicating. Their beauty was a subject he never tired of pontificating about. And the chance to watch many young Indian women dance in a disco was certainly better than staying in the room getting moderately drunk on vodka and pineapple juice with Lorrie Ann. Besides, they had been to Anjuna only once and in the daytime for the flea market (where Lor had bought a beautiful labradorite necklace that shimmered as though enchanted).

  And so, when night fell, Lorrie Ann and Arman dressed themselves up and took a cab the sixteen kilometers to Anjuna. (More appropriately, the cab—for the cabdriver, Dillip, waited for them outside their hotel day and night, having discovered, probably, that Arman was a good tipper and deciding that his luck was better as their twenty-four-hour driver than as a free agent trolling the town.) In Anjuna, Dillip dropped them off and assured them he would be there waiting for them no matter what time they finished at the disco.

  Lor and Arman had to walk down the dirt paths of the town in order to get to the Paradiso, and it was as they were walking that men, almost invisible in the darkness, offered them drugs. Softly, as they passed, voices would mutter: hashish, coca, MDMA. Hashish, coca, MDMA. Because she and Arman were nervous, they kept walking, both saying, “No thank you,” in the same embarrassed way they did to the beggar children who followed them everywhere. But after they had passed through, Arman turned to her and said, “Do you want some?”

  “Some what?” she asked. Despite being, by this time, very fully addicted to painkillers, Lorrie Ann had tried no other drugs besides marijuana. She wasn’t entirely sure what they all did.

  “I don’t know. Some E?”

  “Would I like it?” she asked.

  “Oh, you’d love it,” Arman said.

  “Do you think they’re cops?” Lorrie Ann asked.

  “Even if they are, don’t you think we could just pay them off?”

  “Probably.”

  “Let’s try it,” Arman said, and so they went back to the whispering men in the dark and told them that they would like some ecstasy please. The man they were speaking to was wearing a white-and-blue-checked shirt and he smiled wide so his teeth glowed in the darkness as he waggled his head. “Very good, sir,” he said. “Please wait.”

  And so they stood there awkwardly for almost ten minutes. Several times they tried to go, but the man in the checked shirt assured them it would be just a few minutes longer. Eventually, a man on a moped came. “Hop on,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Hop on!” they were told. And so both Arman and Lorrie Ann clambered onto the moped, hugging tight to its driver and to each other. The driver laughed with excitement at the difficult driving as he navigated the back roads of the town weighed down with Arman and Lorrie Ann, and even Lorrie Ann found herself grinning at how stupid and ridiculous this was. Finally they reached the end of a dark alley, and the man on the moped stopped the bike and gestured for them to disembark. He got off the bike too and beckoned for them to follow him into a small shack.

  Inside the shack, which was perhaps ten feet square, were three sleeping children in a pile and one snoring woman. The man held a finger over his lips to indicate that they should be quiet. He located a flashlight and then began to root around in a cardboard box of buckets and dishes where he eventually found a ziplock bag filled with ecstasy tablets.

  “MDMA, no?” he asked.

  Arman and Lorrie Ann nodded.

  “How many?” the man whispered. Lorrie Ann could not stop staring at one of the sleeping children who had a runny nose. When Zach had been that age, about three, he had seemed almost normal. Not yet emaciated, not yet skeletally distorted.

  Arman shrugged. “Four?”

  And so the man named the price, which was preposterously low, and he and Arman exchanged money for drugs, shook hands, and the three exited the shack in the moonlight.

  “Wait here,” the man said and dashed down the alley.

  “Should we stay?” Lorrie Ann asked. “Maybe now is when he goes and gets the cop?”

  “Do you know how to get out of here?” Arman asked. “Because I have no fucking idea.”

  Lorrie Ann admitted she didn’t. “Here,” Arman said, and handed her two pills. “Let’s destroy the evidence.”

  “Both of them?”

  Arman nodded as he dry swallowed his own. Lorrie Ann copied him. The man spontaneously reappeared from the shadows.

  “Can I?” he
asked, and held up a Polaroid camera.

  “I think he wants your picture,” Arman said.

  “Oh,” Lor said. But the man took this for consent and eagerly approached her, put his arm around her, and took a photo of himself with her. The flash was blinding, and the silence of the night was broken by the mechanical whir of the Polaroid ejecting the film.

  “Thank you very very much!” the man cried, and ran back to wherever he had come from.

  Lorrie Ann and Arman stared at each other.

  “So,” Lorrie Ann said, “do you want to just start walking toward the sound of the waves?”

  “Sure,” he said, and together they walked off arm in arm.

  By the time they reached the disco, having been lost for almost an hour, Arman admitted that the pills were very strong. It would have been smarter to take one and see if they needed the other one. “But they were so cheap,” he explained, “I thought they’d be shitty!”

  Lor’s teeth were chattering uncontrollably. The warm wind on her skin was intoxicating, and she found herself playing with the silk of her dress, rubbing it against her skin.

  “I feel like my skin is warm sparkles,” she said through her clenched teeth.

  “I know,” Arman said.

  They both stood awkwardly on the edge of the dance floor, watching the flashing lights and the writhing dancers. The Paradiso was a beautiful club of many different terraced levels overlooking the sea. All of the structures were white stucco, and so the lights made the rooms glow soft purple and blue and pulsating pink. The architecture was a series of curves and domes, organic shapes that made Lorrie Ann feel she was inside a magical nautilus shell.

  “There’s no way I can dance,” Arman said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t dance either,” she said.

  Together they floated toward a low wall and sat on it, still facing the dance floor.

  “Humans are so pretty when they dance,” Arman said.

  “Humans are pretty all the time.”

  “No,” Arman said. “They aren’t pretty when they are killing each other.”

  “You’re probably right,” Lorrie Ann said.

  “I’m definitely right. I’ve seen it.”

  “Oh yeah,” Lor said, “I forgot.”

  They were silent for a little while.

  “Do you want a drink?” Arman asked.

  “God no. Do you?”

  “No. I just thought I’d offer.”

  “No.”

  More silence. Unknown spans of time went by.

  “Do you think it’s wrong that I thought Zach was beautiful? I know he must have been ugly to other people. Could you ever see it? How beautiful he was?”

  “Yes,” Arman said. “There were times he was beautiful.”

  “I miss the way he would raise his eyebrows, like he was in on the joke. Like it was all one big joke,” Lorrie Ann said.

  “I know.”

  And just then a woman sat down right in between them. She was wearing a neon orange triangle bikini underneath a pair of baggy overalls. On her feet she wore bright red galoshes. “I have a favor to ask you,” the woman said in a heavy Italian accent. “You do speak English?”

  Lorrie Ann assured her that they did.

  “Light and dark together,” the woman said, shrugging, “can only mean that you are American.”

  Lor was still trying to figure out what she meant by light and dark when the woman asked Arman if she could borrow his fake legs.

  “No,” Lorrie Ann said immediately.

  “What do you want with my legs?” Arman asked, amused.

  “We want to play a trick on a girl named Cara,” the woman said. She reached out her arms and put one around Lorrie Ann and one around Arman. The skin of her arms was burning, as though it had retained the heat of the sun, and her perfume was spicy and sharp. Lorrie Ann began to feel very confused. Were they friends with this woman? How long had they been talking to her?

  The trick that was to be played on poor Cara seemed to be to use the fake legs as stilts so that someone could videotape her having sex in the bathroom of the club and then live-project the image onto the dance floor.

  “Why not just use a stool or a chair to look over the wall?” Lorrie Ann asked.

  “It is a bathroom stall—we must sneak up on her!” the woman explained.

  Arman was laughing, clearly tickled by the idea. “I would totally lend you my legs, but no one could balance on them using their feet—see, they have sockets that fit my stumps.” He pulled up his Dickies shorts so she could see where prosthesis met flesh.

  “No?” she asked. “What a boomer!”

  It took Lorrie Ann a moment to translate “boomer” as “bummer.” Arman was giggling like a little boy, and the woman leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you anyway, darling,” she said. “My name is Portia, by the way.”

  Lorrie Ann felt distantly the tolling bells of jealousy. God, she was tired of being jealous over Arman.

  “And you,” she said, turning to Lorrie Ann. “You are truly a beauty.”

  And then she kissed Lorrie Ann full on the mouth.

  “I can’t explain,” Lorrie Ann said, “unless, have you ever done E?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, kissing feels just amazing. Just heavenly.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You think I’m gross. You think I’m some kind of lesbian.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t.” There had been a time, when we were thirteen or so, when I had fantasized almost nonstop about kissing Lorrie Ann. Fortunately for our friendship, those fantasies had stopped as soon as I started kissing boys and had failed to ever return. But I certainly didn’t think it was unnatural.

  “It was like being in a dream.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “We wound up taking her back to our hotel,” Lorrie Ann said, with a breezy casual tone that could only signify shame. I nodded, as though it were the only possible outcome: Of course! What was there to do with a stranger who kissed you but take her back to your hotel?

  Perhaps if Arman had played a more active role, it could have been called a threesome. As it was, the three of them lounged around on the platform bed, nuzzling one another and drinking vast quantities of 7UP. Lor had never been so thirsty in her life and 7UP had never tasted so good. They had found the little man in the blue-and-white-checked shirt again and bought more E, so Portia was rolling with them. None of them had the energy or sustained attention for something as athletic as actual sex. There was a stained-glass lantern that hung from the ceiling on a chain and the panes of it were brown and yellow and red, so the resulting light was warm and made everything feel like a seventies home video. The statue of Ganesh cast huge shadows in his niche. Lor often did not know who was touching her or whom she was kissing. Everything just felt good. Arman kept laughing and saying, “Incredible,” as though he had just been given the Venus de Milo as his personal possession, and it made Lorrie Ann embarrassed: how bald his pleasure was, how paltry and sweaty his desire. He was just altogether too grateful. It made him seem pathetic.

  But then, wasn’t there always something slightly embarrassing in male desire? Maybe it was just that every woman has had the experience, usually quite early, of being with a man who is entirely turned on when she is not turned on at all, which was, frankly, a lot like being sober in a room full of drunks.

  And so there was also a subtle bond between Lorrie Ann and Portia that consisted of a very quiet and unspoken disdain for Arman. When he said “You’re so beautiful” to Portia, which could have hurt Lorrie Ann’s feelings (though Portia was indeed quite beautiful, had been a model and not just as a pretension but as an honest-to-God profession—she was nearly six feet tall), Portia cut her eyes to Lor, as if to say, “What an idiot,” and so Lorrie Ann was able to grin and remain lighthearted.

  Eventually, the three of them drifted into a dreamy slumber, from which Lor was roused only by Portia’s tuggi
ng on her shoulder. “It’s morning,” Portia whispered. “Let’s go outside.”

  Lor sat up in bed. She was in her bra and panties. Arman had fallen asleep fully clothed and with his legs still attached. Portia was standing beside the bed, wearing that orange string bikini, barefoot. “Let’s go,” she whispered again.

  Lorrie Ann threw on a silk dress she had bought in Arambol and followed Portia out onto the beach, where the sun was just rising.

  “So how did he lose his legs?” Portia asked, taking her arm and clinging to Lorrie Ann. They walked in their bare feet on the wet and hard packed sand right at the edge of the water, and, when a wave caught her foot, Lor was shocked by how warm the water was. The Indian Ocean was magic. She was so used to the cold Pacific.

  “Fighting in Iraq.”

  “A soldier, then,” Portia said lightly and, Lor couldn’t help feeling, a little dismissively.

  “Is that a bad thing?” she asked.

  “No.” Portia laughed. “I am not political. I think what your country does is disgusting mainly because it is fashionable to think so. I am really very shallow and think only about myself.”

  Lorrie Ann looked over at Portia, studied her face in the dawn light, unsure how to take her words. It was impossible not to look at Portia, really. Her hair was a mess of rich, brown curls, but her eyes were a light, watery jade and slightly too wide set, making her look at all times like a questing woodland creature.

  “I can’t tell whether or not you are serious,” Lorrie Ann said.

  “I’m very serious,” Portia said. “People are so afraid of their own flaws, but I’m not. I am also very lazy, I have a poor memory, I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t like animals, and I am materialistic to a fault. But I know all of these things, and this is power, no? I am not running from myself.”