Free Sleeping Beauties by Susanna Moore Page A

known how to make it clear, must have realized intuitively that Clio was leading him to his best self, even if it were against his will.
    It was very difficult for him to talk about his childhood. Clio, who was overwhelmed by her sense of the past, had married a man who had no past. She knew that it could not be coincidental. He refused to admit to having any feelings about his family—he almost refused to admit thathe had a family—except to say that his father had played more with the family dog than with him. He claimed never to have masturbated, even as a boy.
    One night, in the back of a limousine coming home from Santa Barbara, where Tommy had accepted an award from the Theatre Owners’ Association, he said, “Remember when you asked me about the first time I had sex? Well, you got me thinking about it. It was in the Vermont woods the summer I was fifteen. I couldn’t really even see her, it was so dark. I didn’t even take off my jeans. When I got back to the cabin where my friends were, I looked down to make sure my fly was closed and I saw my jeans had blood all over them. I thought, Fuck, I hurt myself, I hurt my dick. But then I checked and saw I was all right. I thought I must of hurt the girl. For a minute, I even thought maybe I killed her. I didn’t know what to do. I went down to this pond and took off my jeans and sunk them in the water and rubbed them with stones until my hands were so fucking cold I was shaking. Then I put them back on and snuck into the cabin, dripping water everywhere, still wearing my jeans. I don’t know why I put them back on. In the morning I could hardly move my legs, I was that stiff. But the blood was gone.”
    She stared at him, his handsome face illuminated now and then by the headlights of passing cars.
    “Did you ever figure it out?” To her surprise, she was aroused by his story. She took his hand in the dark of the car and put it under her skirt.
    “What?”
    “The blood. That she was menstruating. Or perhaps that she was a virgin.”
    “Not a virgin. Shit, it was her idea, the whole fucking thing.” He paused. “Yeah, course I figured it out.”
    Perhaps the nearer we are to Los Angeles, she thought,the less he is his true self. She knew she’d have to work fast to take advantage of the time left to her. She pushed his fingers against her. “It might have been her first time, even if she did think of it.”
    “Hey, you weren’t even
there
, babe. I forget what happened.” He pulled away his hand. “Want to stop at Jemima’s? I’m hungry.” He rolled down the window and looked away from her, his face vacant in the neon lights of Malibu.

 
    O ne day, Clio found a naked redheaded woman choking to death by the pool. To Clio’s astonishment, Judy calmly read a script while the woman gagged soundlessly. Clio rushed over and knocked her to the AstroTurf.
    The woman sat up, furious. “Christ!” she screamed.
    Clio stared at her in that interested way one has when another person is beautiful, but unlike one’s self. Clio was slim and long. The woman screaming at her was small and sturdy. Her skin was the color of butterscotch. Her nipples were very dark, her breasts small. Clio was accustomed to naked guests. Tommy and his friends often did not wear clothes around the house, and she had noticed that it was easier for a woman to remove her clothes if her breasts were small. Clio thought that her own breasts were too big for her to lie nude by the pool with Tommy and his friends, and she kept on her bathing suit.
    “Mimi the Great,” Judy said, not looking up from the script. “This is Clio. Say howdy.”
    Clio knew about Mimi. Mimi had been Tommy’s girlfriend when he first came to Hollywood from Disneyland. She had been in a police series with him. He had told Clio that Mimi was the first person he ever knew who bothered to make coffee in a pot rather than just using instant.
    “Haven’t you ever seen anyone do chin exercises? You could of killed