Janet Fitch - White Oleander

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said as we walked back to the car and I collected Caitlin. My first trick, I thought, trying out the sound of it.

THROUGH the kitchen window, I watched Olivia emerge from her house, cinnamon and beige silk, hair sleeked back. I was peeling apple slices for Justin and Caitlin’s snack. I watched her climb into the champagne Corvette, back it out, and I understood.

For her, it was a job. She was earning her car, her copper pots, just as much as someone pasting up magazines or delivering mail. These men weren’t lovers, the Rastaman, the BMW. They were customers. The kneeling was just more subtle, the service more discreet, the illusion more substantial, and the payoff no half-bag of dope.

I ANNOUNCED to Marvel that I was starting an exercise program, so I could be ready for the army. I tied on my gym shoes on a cloudy morning, put my hair back, did a couple of jumping jacks, touched my toes, stretched my hamstrings against the fence, the full display for her approval. The army would be a good place, job security, benefits.

Then I ran around the block once and knocked on Olivia’s door.

She was dressed in white jeans and a sweater, loafers. On her it looked sexy, I tried to see why. The shoes weren’t quite school shoes, they were slimmer, with a tassel. The sweater lightly skimmed her body, the neckline showing one shoulder. I had drawn that shoulder, which gleamed as if polished as it slid out from the soft ginger wool. Her hair was caught in a long silver pin, which probably cost more than the pot I’d just earned.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

She invited me in, glanced over my shoulder as she shut the door. On the stereo, a man was singing in French, sexy, half talking. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “I’ve wanted to see you, but I’ve been so busy. Excuse me, I was just cleaning up.” She loaded glasses and plates on a lacquered tray, emptied a crystal ashtray with cigar butts. I wondered which man was the cigar smoker. The Mercedes had been there again. The fan turned slowly, stirring cigar-sour air. She carried the tray to the kitchen, poured some coffee. “Milk?”

The coffee was so strong it didn’t change color when she poured the milk in. “You look different,” she said. We sat down at her dining room table, gilded chairs with harp backs. She pulled out small mats with Dutch tulips for our cups.

I took out the bag of pot from my pocket, put it on the table. “I sucked a fat kid’s dick at the park. He gave me this.”

She held the bag in her hand, in the palm, the fingers lightly cupped around it, and I thought it was the way she would hold a man’s penis. She turned her hand over, knuckles to the table, and shook her head. The two vertical lines scored her brow. “Astrid. That’s not what I meant.”

“I wanted to see how it felt.”

“How did it feel?” she asked softly.

“Not great,” I said.

She handed it back to me. “Roll one, we’ll smoke together.”

I rolled a joint on the elegant mat, a parrot-striped bloom. I wasn’t good, but she didn’t offer to help. While we smoked, I looked around and thought how much come all this must equate to, the framed botanical prints and harp-backed chairs and fat wooden shutters. It must be an ocean. If I were Olivia, I would have nightmares about it at night, a white sea of sperm, and the albino monsters that lived in its depths.

“Do you like having sex?” I asked her. “I mean, do you enjoy it?”

“You enjoy anything you’re good at,” she said. “Like an ice skater. Or a poet.” She got up, stretched, yawned. I could see her slim belly as she lifted her arms. “I’ve got to run an errand, would you like to come?”

I wasn’t sure. Maybe my mother was right, maybe I should run. She could steal my soul. She was already doing it. But who else did I have, what other beauty was there? We agreed to meet down the block, so Marvel wouldn’t see me in her Corvette.

She had the top down, a white polka-dot scarf tied over her hair and around her neck, front and back, Grace Kelly-style. Was there ever a woman so glamorous as Olivia Johnstone? I slid into the passenger seat, so low it was like lying down, buckled my seat belt, keeping my head ducked in case anybody saw me as we sped away.

I fell in love that cloudy afternoon. With the speed and the road and the spin of scenery like a fast film pan. I usually got carsick, but the pot lifted me out of it, and the road and the pines peeled away the gloom I’d been carrying around since the park, leaving nothing but the tenor song of the engine and the wind in my face, Olivia’s dished profile, her big sunglasses, Coltrane’s “Naima” unfolding like a story on the CD player. The slut next door’s got a goddamn Corvette. And I loved Olivia for sharing it with me, this champagne pearl she’d brought up from the depths of the white sea.

We drove down Ventura, up Coldwater Canyon, the twists in the road like the rise and fall of Coltrane’s tenor sax. We were dancing it, embodying it as we climbed past overblown Valley ranch homes, white cinder block pierced ornamentally, black cypresses planted in unimaginative rows and geometrically trimmed, up over the top into Beverly Hills.

Now it was tree ferns and banks of impatiens and houses with two-story front doors, grass the radiant green of pool tables, the gardeners with blowguns the only humans in sight. We were entirely free. No children, no job, no foster mothers, just speed and our beauty and the soulful breath of Coltrane’s sax. Who could touch us.

She valet-parked at a hotel on Rodeo Drive, and we walked past the expensive shops, stopping to look in the windows. We went into a store so fancy it had a doorman. Olivia took a liking to a black crocodile bag, bought it with cash. She wanted to buy me something. She pulled me into a store that had nothing but sweaters, scarves, and knit hats. She held a sweater up against my cheek. The softness was startling. I realized I had not thought enough about the possibilities of physical reality.

“Cashmere.” She smiled, her overbite twinkling. “Like it?”

I sighed. I had seen the price tag.

“Good girl. But not peach.” She handed the sweater back to the shopgirl, an eighteen-year-old who smiled placidly. The store smelled of money, soft as a dream.

“Aqua is pretty,” the girl said, holding a cable knit sweater the color of spring.

“Too obvious,” I said.

Olivia knew what I meant. She found one in French blue, without cables, gave it to me to try on. It turned my eyes blue-berry, brought out the rose in my cheeks. Yet in my drawer, it could pass for something from the Jewish Women thrift store. It cost five hundred dollars. Olivia didn’t blink as she counted out fifties and hundreds. “What’s real is always worth it,” she explained to me. “Look how it’s made.” She showed me the shoulders, the way they were knit together with a separate yoke instead of a seam. “You’ll wear it your whole life.”

What was real. That’s what I learned as we moved from shop to shop. The Georg Jensen silver bangle. The Roblin pottery vase. Stores like churches in worship of the real. The quiet voices as the women handled Steuben glass, Hermes scarves. To own the real was to be real. I rubbed my cheek against my sweater, soft as a blue Persian cat.

She treated me to lunch in a restaurant under yellow-and-white-striped umbrellas, ordered us a meal composed solely of appetizers: oysters, gravlax, carpaccio. Hearts of palm salad. She explained how each dish was prepared as she sipped a glass of cold white wine and tasted first one, then another, putting her fork down between bites. I’d never seen anything so elegant as Olivia eating. As if she had all the time in the world.

“Life should always be like this.” She sighed. “Don’t you agree? Like lingering over a good meal. Unfortunately, most people have no talent for it.” She pointed out my empty water goblet to the white-jacketed busboy. “As soon as they start one thing, they want it to be over with, so they can start on the next.” He got a pitcher and refilled the glass.