Chapter 4 #3
When Billie stuck her head in the open door of Mickie’s room on Saturday morning, she realized that her sister hadn’t come home that night, which surprised her.
She thought Mickie must have met up with friends after dinner with the doctor.
She didn’t report to Billie and wouldn’t have called to tell her if she wasn’t coming home.
Billie’s standing in in a parental role had ended four years before, and Mickie owed her no explanations.
It was a beautiful day, and Billie could hear a few people chatting around the pool.
She decided to go downstairs and check it out.
She had an old faded one-piece bathing suit left over from her high school days on the swim team.
She didn’t own a whole drawer full of bikinis the way Mickie did for trade shows, and didn’t need them.
She put her bathing suit on, with cut-off shorts and one of her bottomless supply of MIT T-shirts, slipped on a pair of sandals, finished her coffee, and went downstairs to join the other tenants at the pool.
By the time she got there, the two couples she’d noticed with a child had left, there were two women lying on deck chairs at one end of the pool, and a man lying face down on the other side, sleeping in the sun with a copy of the Los Angeles Times lying next to him, and a thick book about the death of communism.
She sat down in a chair halfway between him and the women, and pulled out the biology book she wanted to reread over the weekend.
Half an hour later the two women left, and the man at the far end had turned over on his back and was reading the book on communism.
He didn’t acknowledge Billie’s presence, and she only glanced at him once, wondering who would read such a boring book.
He had an athletic body and long legs, and was wearing sunglasses, and she liked the fact that she could read there peacefully and no one would talk to her.
The pool was apparently not used as a meeting place or dating rendezvous in the building.
There weren’t groups of tenants getting drunk together, or a flock of guys with a cooler of beer.
The building was quiet and the tenants discreet, which suited her perfectly.
She had finished two more chapters and put the book down, as the other tenant walked past her with his newspaper and book, glanced at her book on the chair next to her, and smiled.
He looked at Billie, and spoke to her in a casual friendly way.
He was wearing swim trunks and a Columbia T-shirt, and his hair, as dark as hers, looked as though he hadn’t bothered to brush it.
“I think we both win the prize for most boring books read at a swimming pool on any given day. Sorry, I couldn’t help but notice. Biology? Where do you go to school?” he asked her. She pointed to her faded T-shirt, one of her oldest.
“Except I graduated. I’m not sure communism is much more interesting.”
“I agree with you. I’ve been trying to finish it for two months, and every time I pick it up, I fall asleep.
Did you really go to MIT?” She nodded. “That’s a pretty unusual school for a woman, except if you want to be a physics professor or an engineer.
I’m sorry if that sounds sexist. I don’t mean it to be. ”
“I was a biology major.” She pointed to his shirt. “Did you go to Columbia?” She was just being neighborly, although she noticed that he was nice-looking, despite the unruly hair. He looked like he was in his mid-thirties, ten years older than she was.
“School of Journalism,” he answered her question.
“I went to UCLA undergrad. I liked it here so I came back.” He lingered in order to talk to her.
There was something about the way she looked that he liked.
She was unfussy and looked normal and natural.
She didn’t have a lot of airs and graces, and didn’t have the artificial look of a lot of the women he met in L.A.
, mostly ambitious young actresses and models.
And his female colleagues at work were very competitive and intense.
He had no desire to compete with them, which they would have liked.
It was a new breed of women these days, anxious to prove that they were superior to men in every way and didn’t need them.
Several of the women he knew at work had gone to sperm banks to have babies, saying they didn’t need a man to start a family.
His mother was an attorney in New York, but she was warm and gentle and feminine.
She specialized in intellectual property and literary law.
“Where are you from?” he asked her. No one he knew was from California.
They all came from somewhere else originally.
“I’m from Iowa,” she said, feeling shy for an instant.
“I’m from New York,” he said. He would have liked to sit down next to her but didn’t want to intrude. “No one is ever from California. It fascinates me. Does no one grow up here?”
“Probably not.” She smiled at him.
“Have you been here long?” he asked her.
“Two weeks.” He smiled again at her answer.
“See what I mean?” he said. “Are you from Des Moines? I went there once for work.”
“I grew up on a dairy farm in Collins, Iowa,” she said sheepishly. “With a population of five hundred.”
“Can you milk a cow?” he asked, amused at the image, and she laughed. He couldn’t imagine it.
“Definitely.”
“Now that begs for further conversation. A girl from Iowa who grew up on a dairy farm and went to MIT. Are you in med school?”
“Nope, I work at Cedars-Sinai. I’m hoping to get a job in a research lab with a pharmaceutical company, but I got here two weeks ago and needed a job, so I work at the pathology lab there.”
“I work at the L.A. Times, in crime. I want to work in politics, but so does everyone else, so I’m stuck with crime for now. I was a political science major at UCLA.”
“That’s kind of how I feel about working in the lab at Cedars, waiting for a better opportunity, but I’m enjoying it more than I thought I would.”
“I think half the people working here are in a temporary job, waiting for something else, or they’re actors or musicians out of work.
It’s very L.A.” His smile grew into a grin.
“Would you like to discuss it over dinner sometime? And I’m sorry, I’m Jason Bell.
” He held out a hand and they shook hands.
“Billie Banks.”
“Interesting name too.” He looked intrigued. He liked her, she seemed normal and sane and smart. And pretty.
“Wilhelmina.”
“Even better. Is it too blunt to ask you for your number, or should I just stick a note under your door to invite you to dinner?” She laughed, and told him her number and he put it in his phone. “I’ll send you a text. There’s a pretty good Mexican restaurant down the street if you like spicy food.”
“That sounds great.” He went back to his apartment a few minutes later, and she thought about him.
She liked him too. He seemed nice and straightforward, with an interesting job, more so than hers.
He reminded her a little of her friend Tom Carter, not like some of the people they went to school with, mean bitchy girls, and guys who just wanted to drink beer and get laid, with no ambition.
She and Tom had never fit in with most of their peers.
A political science major who was a crime reporter sounded like fun to her.
He was certainly worth having one dinner with to check it out. She had liked talking to him.
Mickie came home in her black cocktail dress a few hours later, packed a small bag for the weekend, and left again.
Alex was waiting for her in the Ferrari while she rushed into the apartment to pack.
She told Billie she didn’t know when she’d be back.
She said Alex was the most amazing man she’d ever met.
There were signs of the old Mickie of their youth, sex-driven and always having some wild impulsive fling, now with her new boss, which didn’t seem like a good idea to Billie.
But she knew better than to warn her, or try to reason with her.
She just waved when Mickie ran out the door, after flying around the apartment for ten minutes gathering what she wanted.
She hoped that Mickie knew what she was doing and wouldn’t regret it, but there was no stopping her when she had a new man in her sights.
In the past she had turned vicious whenever Billie tried to reason with her.
Billie finished reading her biology book over the weekend.
She got a text from Jason on Sunday, inviting her to dinner at the Mexican restaurant on Monday night, and she accepted.
Mickie hadn’t come home yet, and Billie had no idea when she would, and didn’t worry about her.
Mickie could take care of herself. She always had.
Billie knew better than to try to stop her.