Billie Girl

Chapter Seventeen

I stupidly told Tova about Von, and naturally she got all hot on the prospect of posing for him, which was not necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn't good either. After all just because the police questioned him and let him go didn't mean he was not a suspect. Happens all the time in TV shows; they have a killer, but they can't arrest him on anything. And he goes out and murders again. Then I thought, hey what if I called the police and suggest Tova act as decoy?

But I nixed that plan because it would put Tova in undue peril.

I showed Tova Von's web site, which mostly showed the works he made when he was under thirty, and she was duly impressed by his obsession with the youthful female figure.

"How much do you think he would pay for a session with yours truly?" She asked, batting her eyes like a girl from the Flapper days.

"I don't imagine he can afford to pay you much," I said. "After all he lives on disability."

"Oh shucks," she shrugged, "this bod does not come cheap. I have to keep up my standard of living. Mochoccino's and Banana Republic clothing, if you know what I mean?"

But I kept thinking about that local artist as the days went by. Strange that he would slum it in GR. In a way he was like those expatriates who moved to other countries. It must have been romantic in a way, to live off the beaten track far away from the center of it all. But what troubled me most about that middle-aged guy was how he had let it all slip through his fingers.

Could something like that happen to me? After all, I had everything a girl could want–looks, youth and smarts. Yet I too could be hit by a car, and there would go my looks and my smarts too, if I got brain damage in the smash-up.

That was why I was rushing into marriage before any inevitable catastrophes.

Blake and I were planning a very low-key wedding party. Basically, it would be a glorified dinner party. What we wanted to do was rent a big open space, and place a table diagonally across the room: like the sort of tables they had in King Arthur's court. The special menu would feature pasta for all. And when I told my sister Leslie about my plans, she was not into the fact that we wanted to do it all on the cheap.

"Absolutely not!" she said over Skype from her condo on Venice beach. "I will not allow you to have a ragtag wedding. Your wedding party must be catered, and you should have wine and champagne and an open bar. You will need to have a DJ there as well. What kind of music do you like?

On my computer screen I admired her vivid red hair which flowed, cascading to her shoulders. Her eyebrows were so meticulously tweezed. She had the perfect bone structure of a movie star, yet the collagen injected into her lips were a bit too much of a good thing. They looked too firm and uninviting. She was a striking woman, but that did not save her from the fact that she was over thirty and desperately single.

But there was no stopping her from making sure I had the wedding of my dreams, "What else do you need? Oh yes, you will need to hire a photographer and a videographer. What you need is a wedding planner. Do you know any, Billie?"

Like I would know a wedding planner. This was not some Anne Hathaway movie; I was not in touch with designers and wedding planners and florists and wineries. But I was at the age when everything was thrown at me. First a proposal from Blake, and now the generosity of my sister. People always offered me the world. Girlfriends wanted to know if I wanted to go catch flicks at the Mall, boys wanted to take me bowling, to sushi, dancing, or maybe, if they could get away with it, a trip to Chicago. My dance card would always be full if I took up all my offers. But the truth was I would rather veg out in my PJs and see if there was a good romantic comedy, or even better, a sleazy slasher flick on cable, and just snuggle with my Blake.

Yet I knew that his sudden need to tie the knot, to commit, to make it legal was his basic need...to get laid. He could have other girls if he wanted to. He had a way with girls. Maybe it was his long hair. Girls love long hair on a guy, especially when it is Jesus-like: oily, messy, black. What set me out from the rest of his girl options was the fact that I did not put out. In fact, the word was out on me in my suburbia. It seemed all the kids knew about my cherished virginity. Most found it hard to believe, because I often dressed provocatively in tight leggings and buttoned-down blouses.

Yet somehow I knew that abstinence was the best way to get under Blake's skin. Blake was a great catch, and this was my way of snagging his interest. Not that he had any financial prospects for the future. The two of us were just two lost young souls hopelessly addicted to words. He mostly just typed out stream-of-consciousness onto his laptop in coffee shops. What he wrote you would not call poetry, and they certainly were not coherent stories. They were like shooting comets made of words.

Blake didn't even work out, but he was fit from all that walking. He walked a mile to visit me at my house. He had a license but didn't like to drive. I was the one who had to drive him around. That was one of the main reasons why he dragged me out on our dangerous walks...because he didn't want to let the killings deprive him of his favorite pastime.

My sister made me promise her that I would go online and search for a wedding planner.

"Sweetheart, I want this to be the best day of your life. I want you to know that you are doing the right thing. I know Mom thinks you are rushing into things. But I envy you. Maybe you will get it right. I never could."

"You will find love, Leslie. You are gorgeous; just have to keep looking."

"Well, I just went out with a guy on Match dot com and he excused himself to go to the bathroom, and he never came back."

"I heard about that from Mom. Ouch, that must have hurt."

"I just sat there for a half an hour, wondering where the hell he went. We were at a Mexican restaurant and his order of enchiladas came, but he never returned. So I was left with the bill. It was the most embarrassing day of my life. And I didn't even have his cell number to call and give him hell. I sent him a nasty e-mail and it bounced back. So I never got any closure."

"You don't need to get closure from some jerk you were just meeting for the first time."

"When you get to be my age, you want something out of the deal, even if it is only fleeting revenge."

My poor older sister Leslie. A success in her field, yet unlucky in love. But who's to say I would not end up like her? What if things went sour with Blake? Could happen. Maybe not now, but maybe in twenty years when I was no longer his blooming flower. And then he would find some little insignificant reason to toss me aside. I heard from Leslie that guys do that later on, when you get older. They claim it's because you don't make them dinner or that you don't want to have sex every time they do, or maybe they will accuse you of sleeping with someone else on the sly, and they start acting like prosecutors until you become compelled to just go out and do it. Because what's the difference? If somebody doesn't trust you anyhow, what's the use of staying faithful? Or they will claim you don't listen to them any more, but they don't realize that's it's hard to listen, to really listen to someone all the time. Especially if that person is always complaining about you. What made me think that I would be on the "till death do our part" side of those statistics?

And who knows? Maybe after a while I would be the one who gets the "seven-year-itch" that Leslie told me about, and I would want to see what it was like with another guy besides Blake. Right now I couldn't even picture doing such a thing. But who knows? Maybe I would turn into Tova and go off with this guy and that guy. I'd become a slut princess.