All About Lulu Read online

  “Yeah,” she said. “I know what you mean.”

  But perfection is rare, so we forged ahead anyway, going through the motions in the front seat of the Duster until our teeth hurt, and Vin Scully and Ross Porter wrapped up the post-game show. And after that, there was silence and no more pretending. We made vague plans. Nobody had a pen, but I knew where to find her. We kissed one last time before Shelly Beach drove off in her Toyota Tercel, bound for Alhambra, and I drove off in the Duster, bound for nowhere.

  After fogging up the windows with Shelly Beach, it was impossible to set Lulu aside. Without her, there would be only more Shelly Beaches, a lifetime of Shelly Beaches. And there was nothing wrong with Shelly Beach, after all—poodle hair and forty pounds notwithstanding—she only shared the common flaw of all other women in that she was not Lulu. Lulu was not like anybody else; nobody else was young and weary, nobody else wore pajamas to school, nobody else inspired such fantastic speculation as Lulu. A mythology was created to explain Lulu’s inaccessibility. She dates Jose Gonzalez from the Dodgers. She only dates black guys. She’s a lesbian.

  Had I myself been capable of accounting for the tantalizing and dangerous singularity known as Luluness, I would’ve found myself possessing large sums of social currency at Santa Monica High School, though certainly I would’ve hoarded such a bounty.

  September 8, 1985

  I saw her four times today at school. All four times her hair was down. It used to be that if I saw her four times, twice her hair would be up, and twice it would be down, or at least three times up, and one time down. I like it better up, but the point is it’s like she doesn’t even care anymore. It seems like she could be anything she wants, but she doesn’t want to be anything.

  September 12, 1985

  I’m starting to like her hair down, sorta. And the really sick part is that she looks so damn pretty when she’s sad, like she’s smaller, or something, like this little delicate thing. That sounds totally gay, I know. But she does. Even if she were happy again, I wouldn’t mind if she looked sad.

  Then Lulu found somebody to confide in. Namely, Scott Copeland, the “young drama teacher” who let his students call him Scott. I watched helplessly from afar as he lured Lulu in with the promise of maturity and understanding, leaning casually in the doorway in his pink sneakers and his skinny black tie, like some new-wave refugee, not saying anything, really, just listening, nodding his head, fingering his mustache, and smiling sagely.

  As a rule, I’ve never trusted guys named Scott. I can’t say why, exactly. Scotts have done nothing personal to earn my distrust or arouse my suspicions. It’s just a hunch. I’ve never trusted forty-year-old men in sneakers, either, so I had every reason to distrust Scott Copeland.

  One day I passed him in the hallway, and he patted me on the back.

  “You’re Lulu’s brother aren’t you?”

  “Stepbrother,” I mumbled.

  I kept walking, and he fell into stride with me, like we were old buddies.

  “She’s a neat girl,” said Scott.

  “Neat?”

  “Yeah. Talented. Smart.”

  I was determined not to have this conversation. No way was I going to empower old Scott by letting him get chummy with me. But he just kept at it.

  “She says you’re the smart one. She says you’ve got this amazing voice. Let’s hear it.”

  “Fat chance,” I said.

  “You ever think about coming out for drama?”

  “Never.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I stopped in my tracks. “Well, frankly, Mr. Copeland, Scott, because of guys like you: old pervs with sneakers and ponytails trying to get into everyone’s pants all the time.”

  He just smiled at me, cool as a cucumber, and nodded in appreciation. “You’re funny,” he said.

  The guy had balls, I had to give him that.

  “I’m serious, Scott. I’ve got my eye on you.”

  His mustache twitched. He may have been suppressing a laugh.

  I looked him right in the bridge of the nose. “I don’t know if Lulu has told you anything about our dad, Scott, but the guy could eat the Hulk for breakfast, okay? And you don’t look much like the Hulk, get it?”

  That one made him smile. The hot seat was like a butt massage for this guy. He was perfectly relaxed, calm like a cobra. And what he said in response to my veiled threat defied all explanation. In fact, I simply had to write it off as bizarre coincidence, or else the implications were just too staggering to ponder.

  Patting me on the back, he said: “Easy, Tiger.”

  I had thoroughly underestimated Scott. His audacity flew in the face of all logic and convention. His flirtation with Lulu remained overt. He seemed almost to be taunting me: having her stay after class to work on monologues, walking her down hallways, sharing laughs, giving her books, all the while knowing that my eyes were upon him. Once, he even winked at me. To this day I don’t see how he got away with it. It was like he wanted to get caught.

  One afternoon he gave Lulu a ride home on his chopper. Clearly, that was crossing the line. If only Big Bill had been home. I watched Lulu dismount the bike at the curb, take her helmet off, and shake her hair out with a smile. That was the worst of it, the smile. He made her smile. When was the last time I’d inspired such a wonder?

  If I’d been a bigger person, if my love for Lulu had been true and unsullied, generous, expansive, unconditional, I would’ve been happy for her, I would’ve been grateful for this sensitive Prince Charming in pink tennis shoes who managed to draw Lulu out from under her rock. But show me love without conditions. And besides, I would have been giving that dirtbag Copeland way too much credit.

  I intercepted Lulu in the stairwell, and blocked her way like a sentry. The smile was long gone. “Where’ve you been? It’s quarter to five.”

  “Move,” she sighed.

  “I wonder what Big Bill is gonna think about you getting rides home on Copeland’s chopper?”

  “He isn’t here, so I guess we’ll never know. Can I please get by?”

  I stood my ground, a hand on each banister. “Maybe I should tell him,” I said.

  I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t drunk on power blocking her path, dangling the key to her fate in front of her like some cruel medieval jailer.

  “Go ahead,” she said, pushing right through my outstretched arm and up the stairs without looking back.

  “Don’t worry,” I called after her. “I wouldn’t.”

  September 21, 1985

  Today she painted her toenails. I saw her laughing by the tennis courts, and I wanted to throw a rock at her, or a bouquet of wilted flowers. Does that sound psycho? She was talking to Kathleen Topping, only the biggest slut at Santa Monica. Popular, though. The Dodgers lost again. Valenzuela walked six. At least someone’s happy.

  September 27, 1985

  My birthday. We went to Arby’s. I had the beef and cheese with no beef. Then we went to Doug’s wrestling meet. Doug pinned a kid with really bad acne. Lulu got me some headphones. I thought about hugging her, but I didn’t hug anyone else. She looked beautiful eating her Big Montana. I made her laugh once.

  October 1, 1985

  Saw her today talking to Scott in the hallway. But it looked to me like Scott was trying to brush her off. He wasn’t really looking at her. I know it makes me a jerk, but I felt really good when I saw that. I wanted Lulu to feel bad, and I know that’s wrong, even though Scott’s a perv and everything.

  October 3, 1985

  Lulu has been really bummed the last few days, and I’m sure it’s because of the whole Scott thing. She hasn’t been staying after class, or even practicing her lines. I know it seems like I should be happy about that, but it makes me sad at the same time, not only for Lulu, but for myself. It sorta feels like I’m giving up by not being happy.


  My notebook was at my side always, a trusty old companion, a confessor, a dog to kick. It was not a body of work, it was a vessel, a heart, the place I stored all the emotions I didn’t know what to do with—a gathering place for all of my unshaven affections and battle-weary defenses. I took it with me on my nightly sojourns in the Duster, up to Mulholland, or south to Redondo Beach, where I parked somewhere secluded and scribbled like a mad genius under the dome light. I filled volumes, and ferreted them away with the others under lock and key. My notebooks went to the bathroom with me, followed me from room to room. I fell asleep with them in my clutches. And I was ever scrupulous in protecting their secrets. As a rule, I never left them lying about—if they were not in my possession, they were securely locked away.

  October 9, 1985

  It happened. I left my notebook by the bathtub upstairs, just for a minute, and when I went back to get it, the door was locked and someone was in there. The shower was running. I knocked, and Lulu said, I’m in here. But it didn’t really sound like she was in the shower. I just about shit myself. My heart was pounding like cannibals were beating it around a fire. I had that feeling of terror and delight I used to get whenever I knew I was going to get in trouble by Mom. That sounds pathetic, I know. But that’s kind of the feeling I got. This flood of opposite emotions, like when a cold front hits a warm front. When Lulu came out she had a towel around her head and her big fuzzy bathrobe on, and her big fuzzy slippers with the plastic googly eyes. She smelled like the Garden of Eden. She looked pale. Beautiful, but really pale, like my love had drained all the blood out of her. There was something sort of soft about her expression, except her eyes were stiff and she couldn’t look at me when she passed. She passed so close that the sweet smell of her wafted right up into my lungs, and I swear to God I just wanted to fall down on my knees and beg for something, mercy maybe, or forgiveness, or maybe just for the chance to smell her again.

  The Bend of Break

  The first time Lulu cut herself was two days after the discovery of my yellow notebook. It was an accident, she told everybody, a collision between the side of her face and the sharp edge of a locker door, and nobody but me had any reason to doubt her. The cut left a scar: a fleshy, pink promontory about two inches long, starting below her left earlobe and running a jagged, diagonal course toward the middle of her face. Though visible at a considerable distance, Lulu made no attempt to hide her disfigurement; in fact, she began to wear her hair pulled back behind her ears, off her face. But the scar only enhanced her beauty in my eyes. Her perfection was now held in balance by a thin pink line.

  A week or so after the first incident, as the story goes, somebody launched a lit cigarette in the pool parking lot, and the cherry end struck Lulu like a missile under the right eye, so that when the burn healed it left a raised semicircle. But this deformity didn’t deter me either, for now I could read the suffering and turmoil like hieroglyphs on Lulu’s face, and they fascinated me, even if I couldn’t make sense of them. I understood implicitly that I was the cause of Lulu’s suffering, but I couldn’t decipher how I’d caused it. I can’t deny that I felt somewhat redeemed by her anguish, and empowered by my ability to inspire it, and I’m not proud of that. Nor am I proud of the fact that I didn’t contrive some form of intervention.

  It’s no great wonder that Lulu’s suffering managed to escape Big Bill’s notice, but the fact that Willow (a grief counselor, no less) could not intuit Lulu’s emotional distress, could not read it on her face and arms, or at any rate did not act upon it, still mystifies me. Or if she did see it, why didn’t she react? Or was she so deep into Big Bill she couldn’t see anything else?

  Lulu stopped coming home at night. She spent a lot of nights at Kathleen Topping’s, or Shannon Stovel’s. She began hanging around with snotty Westwood kids who played tennis, friends of Kathleen’s. Boys named Daryl and Troy and Chad who drove Jags and Porsches. Sons of doctors and prominent entertainment lawyers. They were known collectively as “the Benders,” a self-appointed moniker bespeaking their proclivity to “party hardy,” even on weeknights, for days on end, with cases of Heineken and eight balls of cocaine. I don’t know how Lulu, of all people, endured their shallowness, any more than I understand how she gained their acceptance.

  Lulu could have possessed any of them, could probably have possessed their fathers and their uncles, for that matter, but Troy was the one she dated, by far the ugliest Bender, and probably the richest. He was stooping and acne-riddled, but the world was his oyster and he’d probably end up eking out Cs at Princeton and driving convertibles for the rest of his life.

  I met Troy one afternoon in the jaws of our downstairs hallway, where a half dozen family portraits hung in a cluster near the base of the stairs. I could hear Lulu rummaging around in the kitchen, while Troy viewed the photographs with what appeared to be something less than mild interest. He seemed perfectly comfortable, a little bored, but not impatient.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “Troy,” he said, extending a hand.

  I left him hanging. He played it off pretty gracefully, just letting his hand wilt. “So, you must be Will.”

  “Must be.”

  “Lulu’s in the kitchen packing sandwiches. We’re gonna jet up to the observatory and have a picnic.”

  “Jet?”

  “Just an expression. It means we’re—”

  “Yeah, I think I got it. That your car in the driveway?”

  “Sort of. My dad’s, actually. But he never drives it. You can jet around the block a few times if you want.” He threw me the keys.

  I didn’t even try to catch them. They caromed off the banister and landed near the foot of the sofa. “No, thanks,” I said. “The Duster might get jealous.”

  Once again, Troy played off my rudeness pretty well. He noted the position of the keys for future reference, but didn’t go pick them up right then. Instead, he turned his attention back to the family photographs. I had to admit, for a stooping guy with acne, he was kind of a player. Lulu liked them decisive. At least he wasn’t forty and wearing sneakers.

  “Your sister’s hot,” he observed.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Lulu, I mean. I guess since she’s your sister it probably doesn’t count.”

  “She’s not my real sister, and she looks like Mr. Potato Head.”

  “Yeah, she kinda does. She’s got a great body, though.”

  Just then Doug walked in the front door, left it open, and farted to dramatic acoustical effect in the foyer. “What’s up, knob-gobbler?” he said to me.

  “The water level in your brain,” I said.

  “Good one, ass-bag. It doesn’t even make sense.”

  “I’m Troy,” said Troy, extending a hand.

  Doug farted again. “So?”

  Ross straggled through the open door in Doug’s wake, piloting his Batmobile hair safely under the threshold. “Ach, what stinks?”

  “Maybe it’s your upper lip,” said Doug.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Or your imaginary friend Regan.”

  “Go die,” said Ross. “At least I don’t talk to my radio.”

  Troy followed the volley around the room like a pinball. I had to wonder how it all measured up to life in Westwood.

  Lulu emerged from the kitchen with a grocery bag. “Let’s jet,” she said, without breaking stride.

  Troy scooped up the car keys on his way out.

  If, by dating Troy and cavorting around west L.A. with preppy hedonists, and by mutilating herself, and by not coming home, Lulu’s intention was to deter my adoration, she succeeded only in torturing and embittering me. The more unworthy her consorts, the more I esteemed her. The uglier she made herself, the more beautiful she appeared. Because the power of Lulu’s beauty radiated from some unseen center, some hot, magnetic core. And that very same gravitational pull that sucked me into its orbit like a
rogue meteor threatened to destroy both of us.

  The day Lulu was accepted at the University of Washington marked the end of our Cold War and the beginning of my active hostility toward her. On her way out to celebrate that night, I intercepted her in the foyer.

  “Boy, you look skanky.”

  “I am skanky. Now get out of my way.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “Shannon’s.”

  “You’re going to Westwood with Troy, liar.”

  “We live in dishonest times,” she said, pushing past and slamming the front door in her wake.

  “Whore,” I called her. “Bitch! Cunt! Freak!”

  I was at war with the world. And I was at war with myself.

  I formed an alliance with Troy, to whom I was equally cruel. When Lulu’s erratic ways set his head to spinning, I let him utilize me as a confidant.

  “Oh, I don’t know. One minute she’s fine and the next it’s like, I don’t know, like she’s off the hook or something . . .”

  I listened.

  “She won’t open up. I know that sounds wussy, but I’d just like to know what she’s thinking sometimes . . .”

  And listened.

  “And it’s like she doesn’t even really like me, you know? Like she just sort of tolerates me most of the time . . .”

  Like a grief counselor, I listened, though I never went so far as to offer Troy solace. In return, I got to treat him like shit. My voice had become a formidable weapon. I launched my invective at his insecurities: his acne, his stooping, and, cruelest of all, his inability to ever truly hold the deed to Lulu’s heart, to ever be anything but a well-heeled diversion, a sugar daddy, a ride somewhere, a nothing. But these insults were always delivered covertly and with great tact, so that Lulu couldn’t help defend against them, and so that Troy was forced to expose his insecurities to Lulu, and in doing so, remain always in a position of need, and need and weakness were one and the same thing for Lulu, just as they were for Big Bill. In this manner, I ensured that Troy would always be whatever I told him he was.