“Mother told me.”
Katie rolled her eyes. “I was getting fat.”
“Mother told me that, too.”
She was wearing a straw hat, and she hit him with it. He feigned terror and shielded his face as he groaned, “I’m just telling you what she said!”
“Did it work?” Margie asked.
“I lost weight, yes.”
“You should tell the Hollywood Reporter or Teen Screen: it could be the Katie Barstow Miracle Diet,” said Billy’s new girlfriend, and for a moment Katie imagined suggesting the idea to Reggie. Sugar-free iced tea from a cannister or a jar, and all the peanuts you wanted. The weight would just melt away. Reggie would think she was kidding and laugh at the idea good-naturedly, and then suggest a healthier alternative, if she really wanted him to pursue this. She recalled how when Teen Screen had reached out to him for baby pictures of his client, she’d told him to check in with her mother back in New York. Katie had never expected that Glenda would send Reggie a snapshot of her in the pumpkin. She was sure it would be one from her first Broadway show. Or maybe that dinner at Sardi’s when she was thirteen and her father let her have a glass of champagne, and she’d stared, mesmerized, at the opaline phosphorescence of the bubbles in the flute. Will I ever be this happy again? she had wondered, and for a long second, she had been scared. But the second had passed. Thank God. Those weren’t baby pictures, but her mother had boasted often how pretty she looked in them, and how very much mother and daughter resembled each other. Had her mother sent the pumpkin pic because it really was a baby photo and she was following instructions, or had she sent it to torture her? Did she really believe that horseshit she’d told the magazine writer about their joyful, eccentric, theatrical evening trick-or-treating together with Billy on the wrong night?
“Part of Katie’s team is Reggie Stout,” Billy was telling Margie. “Owns a small but very powerful PR firm. So, what do you think, sis: should Reggie pitch the glossies the Katie Barstow Miracle Diet?”
Sis. Since when did Billy call her “sis”？ She put her hat back on her head and watched a keg-chested seagull swagger along the coralline lip of the swimming pool. The house was at the edge of a cliff, and in the distance today—across the dry brown scrub that marked the valley—you could see Los Angeles, a little pink in the haze.
“I was kidding,” Margie said before she had to answer.
“I was too,” said Billy. He was gazing out into the valley and then asked, “Do you ever use the diving board?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes?”
“When I’m alone.”
“That sounds sad.”
“Sad? Why sad?”
“You should be using it at parties to encourage some old-school Hollywood bacchanalia. You need a diving board for the real madness, and you have one.”
“I don’t want real madness.”
“When I was in high school,” said Margie, “I had a teacher who told the girls we should always walk like we were on a diving board.”
“Because it would make you walk with real confidence?” Billy asked. “Three or four athletic steps, arms swinging, and then, boom, you’re up in the air?”
Margie shook her head. “No, I think it was just the opposite. We’d walk demurely. Little steps in straight lines.”
“The things adults tell us,” Katie said.
Her brother nodded. She knew that he, too, was thinking of their mother and father. But, mostly, their mother. “David says hi,” he told her, and she understood the synaptic connection. Mom and Dad. Central Park West. David Hill.
She was happy for Billy that David had moved west. She thought that as his life was transformed by the divorce, it was good he had his best friend from childhood with him.
“Say hi back. Say hi for me. How’s he doing?”
“He’s excited about the gallery. It’s looking good.”
When she’d heard that David was opening a gallery, she’d been perplexed. What the hell did he know about art? She always assumed he would follow his father’s lead and do something that involved international relations: the State Department or the Foreign Service or, maybe, the CIA. But Billy explained that David had studied art history at college and had an entrepreneurial eye. The gallery was never going to be trying to sell a Fabritius or Vermeer, but would instead be looking for the next Warhol. It would hang on its walls lots of hip modern stuff that would work well in the beach houses in Malibu. That was David’s plan. But even that had left her a little dubious. Her father had bought a Mark Rothko painting from a show at—of all places—Macy’s in 1942, and David’s parents had looked at it hanging in the Stepanov living room and been incapable of mustering even a semblance of enthusiasm. Surrealism wasn’t in the Hill family’s genes, she supposed, and a government bureaucrat wasn’t likely to wax poetic over something so abstract.