Less Than Zero (Page 45)

“Come on, Trent,” I tell him. “My nose hurts.”

“It’s all right. This’ll make it feel better. We can go upstairs at Hamburger Hamlet.”

I look at Trent.

Trent looks at me.

It only takes five minutes and when we come back down onto the street, I don’t feel too much better. Trent says that he does and wants to go to the arcade across the street. He also tells me that Sylvan, from France, O.D.’d on Friday. I tell him that I don’t know who Sylvan was. He shrugs. “Ever mainline?” he asks.

“Have I ever mainlined?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“Oh boy,” he says ominously.

When we get to his car, some friend’s Ferrari, my nose is bleeding.

“I’ll have to get you some Decadron or Celestone. They help swelling in blocked nasal passages,” he says.

“Where do you get that?” I ask, my fingers and a piece of Kleenex, covered with snot, blood. “Where do you get that shit?”

There’s a long pause and he starts the car up and says, “Are you serious?”

My grandmother had gotten very ill that afternoon. She started to cough up blood. She had already begun to grow bald and had been losing weight as a result of pancreatic cancer. Later that night, as my grandmother lay in her bed, the others continued their conversations, talking about Mexico and bullfights and bad movies. My grandfather cut his finger opening a beer. They ordered food from an Italian restaurant in town and a boy with a patch on his jeans that read “Aerosmith Live” delivered the food. My grandmother came down. She was feeling a little better. She didn’t eat anything, though. I sat by her and my grandfather did a magic trick with two silver dollars.

“Did you see that, Grandma?” I asked. Too shy to look into her faded eyes.

“Yes. I saw it,” she said, and tried to smile.

I’m about to fall asleep, but Alana comes by unannounced and the maid lets her in and she knocks on my door and I wait a long time before I open it. She has been crying and she comes in and sits on my bed and mentions something about an abortion and starts to laugh. I don’t know what to say, how to deal with it, so I tell her I’m sorry. She gets up and walks over to the window.

“Sorry?” she asks. “What for?” She lights a cigarette but can’t smoke it and puts it out.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, Clay …” She laughs and looks out the window and I think for a minute that she’s going to start to cry. I’m standing by the door and I look over at the Elvis Costello poster, at his eyes, watching her, watching us, and I try to get her away from it, so I tell her to come over here, sit down, and she thinks I want to hug her or something and she comes over to me and puts her arms around my back and says something like “I think we’ve all lost some sort of feeling.”

“Was it Julian’s?” I ask, tensing up.

“Julian’s? No. It wasn’t,” she says. “You don’t know him.”

She falls asleep and I walk downstairs, outside, and sit by the jacuzzi, looking into the lighted water, the steam coming up from it, warming me.

I get up from the pool just before dawn and walk back up to my room. Alana’s standing by the window smoking a cigarette and looking out over the Valley. She tells me that she bled a lot last night and that she feels weak. We go out to breakfast in Encino and she keeps her sunglasses on and drinks a lot of orange juice. When we get back to my house, she gets out of the car and says, “Thank you.”

“What for?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says after a while.

She gets into her car and drives off.

When I flush the toilet in my bathroom, it becomes stopped up with Kleenex, and blood clouds the water and I put down the lid, because there’s nothing else for me to do.

I stop by Daniel’s house later that day. He’s sitting in his room playing Atari on his television set. He doesn’t look too good, tan to the point of sunburn, younger than I remember him in New Hampshire, and when I say something to him, he’ll repeat part of it and then nod. I ask him if he got the letter from Camden asking what courses he’ll be taking next term and he pulls out the Pitfall cassette and puts in one called Megamania. He keeps rubbing his mouth and when I realize that he’s not going to answer me, I ask him what he’s been doing.

“Been doing?”

“Yeah.”

“Hanging out.”

“Hanging out where?”

“Where? Around. Pass me that joint over there on the nightstand.”