Bentley Little - The Association

Talk of the association was banned at the dinner table, and to Barry it felt almost as though none of that insanity had ever happened. They were cocooned in their own little world here, safe from the harsh and twisted realities of Bonita Vista, and for the first time in a long while he went for over an hour without thinking once about the homeowners' association.

They had wine with dinner and a few beers afterward, and they noisily talked politics and celebrity scandal as they made their way down to the living room. Barry sat down on the floor, motioning for the two couples to take the couch. Maureen settled into the chair, and after looking around and ascertaining that there was no other place to sit, Dylan plopped down on the floor by the fireplace.

"So what about sleeping arrangements?" Danna asked. "I saw only one guest room."

"Two of you take the room," Maureen explained. "Two of you can sleep up here; the couch turns into a bed." She smiled. "Dylan? I'm afraid you're stuck with a feather mattress on the floor of my office."

"That's okay. Can I look up porn on the Internet while the rest of you are asleep?"

Maureen heaved a throw pillow at him.

"That'll be fine." Dylan chuckled. "No problem."

They'd caught each other up on almost everything, and for the first time since their friends had arrived this morning, there was a protracted silence.

"It's too quiet here," Dylan said. "All this nature and stuff. I find it very disturbing. Don't you have some tunes or something?" He pointed toward the television. "You guys got cable or satellite?"

Barry reached up to the TV table and tossed him the remote. "Go wild.

Make yourself happy."

There was nothing decent on any of the broadcast or cable channels, so Barry read through his list of videotapes until they found one they all could agree on: Young Frankenstein.

Jeremy cleared his throat, spoke up. "Bare? Do you have a copy of those famous C, C, and Rs ?"

"Sure. Hold on a sec." Barry went downstairs, grabbed the massive book from Maureen's computer desk, and hurried back up, handing it to Jeremy. "Here you go."

While the rest of them watched the movie, Jeremy pored through the document. "Jesus!" he'd exclaim periodically, but when anyone asked what he'd found, he waved them away.

Finally, he put the book down. The movie had ended some time ago, and they were watching a Dennis Miller rerun on HBO. "I can't believe this is real," he said.

"Tell me about it."

"Did you know that homosexual couples are banned from your little Utopia here? And unmarried couples?" He looked over at Lupe. "And minorities. Which I assume means anyone who isn't white."

Dylan laughed. "I guess you two won't be retiring here in bee-yoo-tee-full Utah then, huh?"

"I need to go through this with a highlighter. I'm not even halfway through it, and I can't even remember all of the craziness I read." He shook his head. "This is one densely shit-packed document."

Barry grimaced. "I'll bet you believe me now, don't your'

"I always believed you. I just didn't think they'd be so obvious about it. They're not only trying to impose their values on the membership, to legislate morality in a blatant way that no federal or local government would even attempt to do, but they're codifying shit that isn't even legal, apparently intending to use the courts' previous up holdings of homeowners' association bylaws as a shield."

"I was hoping you'd say that. I thought so myself, but you're the lawyer, and I figured you could make an informed judgment."

"Jesus."

Using the remote, Dylan had been flipping through channels. "Hey," he said. "What's this? Some kind of community access station?"

"BVTV," Barry and Maureen said in unison.

On the screen, a young woman was jogging on one of the bridle trails.

The camera zoomed in on her jiggling breasts.

"BVTV?"

"Bonita Vista Television," Barry explained. "I guess I forgot to tell you about that. There are security cameras all over this place. They use them to videotape people and broadcast it on their station."

"Sometimes," Maureen added quietly, "they tape people in their own homes."

"My God."

"Don't worry," Barry said. "I've gone over this place with a fine-tooth comb. We're safe in here."

"In here, maybe," Jeremy said. "But outside this house, we all have to be on our guard, watch what we say, put on a happy face. The streets, the green belts the empty lots-it's all theirs, enemy territory."

That cast a pall on the evening, and they broke up soon after, Maureen bringing out fresh linen to make up the sofa bed for Chuck and Danna, then taking Jeremy and Lupe to the guest bedroom. Barry pulled the feather mattress out of the closet and set it up on the office floor for Dylan, tossing him a blanket. He went into their bedroom, closed the door, took off his clothes, and got under the covers to wait for Maureen, but he was more tired than he thought because by the time she returned he was dead asleep.

Liz called during breakfast, It would have been a minor blip on the day's radar under normal circumstances, but considering the present state of affairs, it was a big deal and a cause for celebration. Maureen answered the phone and took the call, and she motioned frantically for Barry to take over the pancakes while she went downstairs to the master bedroom to talk in private.

She hadn't spoken to Liz since the meeting, and the few words they'd exchanged at that time had been stilted and impersonal, but Liz sounded stronger than she had at any time since Ray's funeral.

There was a renewed feistiness in her attitude and a welcome wryness in the older woman's voice as she said, "Sorry I haven't called lately, but I was temporarily overcome with grief, despair, and unbearable self-pity."

"How are you?" Maureen asked, sitting down on the bed.

"As well as can be expected, I suppose. Nothing's ever going to be the way it was, but I think I'm learning to accept that. I'm sorry I've been so out of it lately."

"That's okay. I understand."

"Part of it is lack of sleep. They've been keeping me up every night, trying to break me down, calling me at all hours with weird threatening phone calls, turning my power on and off, throwing things at my house.

It's psychological warfare, and it obviously worked. It cut me off from my friends and made me so nervous and jumpy I was afraid to answer the phone or step out of the house."

Anyplace else, at any other time, Maureen would have thought that, far from the crisis being over, it had kicked into high gear, Liz exhibiting alarming signs of acute paranoia. But she had no doubt that her friend's feelings were justified. "You lost your husband. We didn't expect you to be the life of the party."

"Yes, but we both know my behavior went a little beyond that. And I

want to thank you, all of you, for not giving up on me, for being there when I needed you even if I didn't take advantage of it."

"We're your friends," Maureen said.

"Well, I'm grateful, and I'm sorry for the way I acted. I thought I

could try and make it up to you. I thought maybe you and Tina and Audrey could come up this afternoon for drinks and ... well, just to talk."

"I'd love to," Maureen said. "We have some friends up from California, though." She hesitated, not wanting to de-j cline the invitation for fear of throwing a wet towel on I friend's tentative efforts to pull her life back together, but not sure she'd feel right about abandoning Lupe and Danna] for half the day. "If it wouldn't be too much of an imposition and if you felt you were up to it--"

"Sure," Liz said, and she sounded like her old self. "Bring them along."

"And, uh, Audrey ..." Maureen let the words trail off. She didn't want to burden Liz with additional problems, not; now.