Shane and Carmen: The Novelization Ch. 23

"I know."

"I know you understand this, but Shane has two things working against her that you don't have. The first is that she takes a long time to process things, and when she's under stress and has to think or react quickly, she makes mistakes. She's just not good under stress. The second thing is, she's self-destructive. She has a long history and a long pattern of sabotaging herself. That affair with Cherie Jaffe, that was a collision of bad things coming together all at once. It was all those old feelings for her, coupled with difficulty with monogamy, coupled with being under stress, coupled with being self-destructive. And none of it was about you."

"Okay," Carmen said.

"And you have to consider, something like that might happen again."

"I know. I've been thinking about that."

"She's probably learned her lesson about Cherie. But monogamous people tend to stay monogamous, and people who sleep around generally tend to continue sleeping around. These kinds of patterns are hard to break. You are what you are."

"I know."

***

On the following Monday morning, Carmen was sitting at the kitchen table having her breakfast coffee, toast, jam and a bowl of Cheerios when Shane walked in and poured herself a cup of coffee. She was wearing her terrycloth bathrobe, and had just gotten out of the shower. She had a towel draped over her wet hair, and looked like a welterweight boxer entering the ring before a fight. She sat down at the table opposite Carmen.

"I've been thinking," Shane said.

"Okay," Carmen said.

"There's something I'd like us to do. It'll take maybe two or three hours. What's your schedule like this week?"

"On Saturday I've got that overnight DJ gig down near San Diego. I'll probably leave here around noon or one, but the morning's open unless we go visit Dana. Thursday's probably going to be pretty light, it looks like only half a day. I can be home by one-thirty or two."

"Saturday morning won't work, and anyway I want to go visit Dana, too. Can you hold Thursday afternoon open?"

"Sure. What's up?"

Shane shrugged and looked up from her coffee cup. "Can it be a secret? A surprise?"

"Sure, if you want."

"It's ... I think you'll like it. Really like it. But ..."

"But you want it to be a surprise. That's cool. Thursday afternoon it is." Carmen stood up, finished with her breakfast, and started taking her dishes to the sink.

"It's gonna be cool, I think. I think you'll like it."

"Shane?"

"Yeah?"

"If you want it to be a secret surprise, stop talking about it."

"Oh. Yeah. Okay."

"I'm sure it'll be great. I gotta run, we've got an early call on the set today."

"Okay. Thanks. Go." Carmen was almost out of the room when Shane turned in her chair and looked at her. "Hey, Car?"

"Yes?"

"I love you. I do."

"Aw, baby!" Carmen came over and hugged Shane to her body. "I know you do. And I love you, too. And now you make me regret I took my shower first. But if I'd jumped in the shower with you this morning we'd both still be in there, all wrinkled and pruney and fucked out, and we'd both get fired." She leaned over and kissed the towel on top of Shane's head. "I gotta run."

"Bye."

"Bye."

***

On Thursday afternoon Shane was sitting in her truck in the street in front of their house, reading a book and listening to music, when Carmen got home. Shane had moved out of the driveway so Carmen could park there without blocking Shane's pickup. Carmen got into the pickup and said, "Okay, babe, surprise me."

Shane grinned and took off down the street, and was soon headed toward Venice Beach.

"Are we going to Wax?" Carmen asked.

"No, but nearby. A couple blocks away."

"Okay."

In Venice Shane circled a block, looking for a parking spot, and soon found one. They got out and Shane started feeding the meter. "You got some quarters?" she asked Carmen.

"Here, what do you need?"

"Two hours ought to be enough. If we need more, I'll just come out and feed it."

"It'll be six o'clock by then," Carmen said.

"Oh, yeah, right."

"Lead on."

Shane walked down the street, Carmen following, until they came to a tattoo parlor called "Michael Angelo." Shane opened the door and held it for Carmen.

"This is where we're going?" Carmen asked.

"Yup."

The tattoo parlor was bright and airy and clean, and had a modern and successful look about it, almost clinical. There were a few people in the waiting area, leafing through magazines, waiting their turns or else waiting for someone they'd come with. Shane went to the counter and was greeted by a receptionist.

"Shane McCutcheon," she said. "I have an appointment for Mike."

The receptionist went through beaded curtains leading into the back room.

"Who's Mike?" Carmen asked.

"Mike is Michael Angelo," Shane said. "She's terrific. She's the one who did the violin on my back."

"Are you getting a tat today?"

"We both are," Shane said, looking at Carmen and grinning. "At least, I hope we are. That's my secret surprise. I hope you'll like it. You don't have to do it if you don't want to, but I really hope you will. It'd mean a lot to me. I think it'd mean a lot to you, too."

Carmen's mind was racing, trying to figure all this out, but then the receptionist came back through the curtains, followed by a dark-haired woman in her early thirties. She was attractive in a boyish kind of way, on the thin side. She was wearing what appeared to be an open lab coat, like doctors wore, with the name "Mike" embroidered over the left chest pocket, which was filled with pens and pencils. She wore jeans and under the lab coat a low-cut knit jersey. At the top of it, Carmen could see she had some major, colorful tat work across the top of her chest.

"Hi, I'm Mike," the woman said, reaching to shake Carmen's hand. She had her lab coat sleeves rolled up a couple of turns, and Carmen saw more colorful work on Mike's arms. "You must be Carmen. Shane's told me a lot about you. Come on back."

Mystified more than ever, Carmen followed Mike through the curtains, with Shane close behind. They entered a large, well-lit work room with four bays where tattoo artists, two men and two women, worked on customers. Mike led them to her office just off the workroom and sat down behind her desk. "Please, sit," she said, gesturing toward two chairs in front of her desk. The office was large enough, but it was cluttered with all manner of posters on the walls, filing cabinets, books of tattoo selections, equipment, a couple of soda cups and coffee cups that might have contained soda or coffee. It was the office of someone who was a serious artist, and the clutter had some order to it.

"So, Carmen, it's really great to meet you," Mike said, and then turned to Shane. "You haven't told her, like you said you weren't, is that still right?"

Shane nodded.

Carmen looked back and forth at them, like she was watching a tennis match. "Somebody want to fill me in, please?"

Shane was her usual tongue-tied self, as Mike quickly saw, so she jumped in.

"Sure. Here's the story. Shane came in last week and told me she wanted a pair of matching tats, one for you and one for her. We talked about where to put them, and Shane thought the nape of the neck, just at the bottom of the hairline would be good. If you happened to wear your hair down, nobody would see it. If you put your hair up in a ponytail or a bun or something, it would be visible, although it would be fairly small and unobtrusive. So then we talked about the design she wanted. She was pretty specific, she knew exactly what she wanted, the only problem was how to find it. We looked through a lot of pattern books, and there was lots of choices, but nothing exactly what Shane wanted. So she asked me if it was possible for me to come up with a custom design." Mike laughed and grinned at Shane. "So I said, 'Hey, Shane, I'm fucking Michael Angelo, man. I can do anything.'"

"She can, she really can," Shane said to Carmen with enthusiasm. "You ought to see some of her work. It's crazy. Crazy good, is what I mean. Unbelievable."

Mike laughed again, easily. "Thanks. So anyway, Carmen, I did a bunch of research and sketched something out, and came up with a final drawing. So then I faxed it over to Shane's work, and she calls me up, and she's all, like, oh my God, that's it, that's it, Carmen will love it. And she tells me she's going to bring you in, but it's going to be a surprise, and now here you are."

Carmen looked from Mike to Shane, who was beaming and grinning fit to burst her pants. "Show her, show her," Shane said.

Mike opened her desk drawer and took out two small, identical stencils and put them on her desk facing Carmen. "What do you think? I hope you'll like it," Mike said.

Carmen's breath caught, and she clapped her hands over her mouth, tears welling up in her eyes.

Each stencil showed a small bird about an inch tall, which looked like a long-legged wading bird, an egret or a stork. The body was in the shape of two small hearts, one inside the other. Then there was the round head with the triangular beak, like a chickadee's beak. They style of it was clearly representational, and clearly had a Mayan look about it.

Mike looked up at Shane. "I think she likes it."

"It's a bird, Car," Shane said, unnecessarily. "A bird, like a Mayan would draw it. A bird that mates for life. One for each of us."

***

Carmen sat in the chair with her head bent forward, while Mike held the buzzing tattoo gun, finishing up the bird. Shane stood behind her, watching. "It's looking good, girl," Shane said. "How's it feel?"

"Ahh. Hmmm. It feels good," Carmen said as Mike finished and leaned back, setting her tattoo gun down.

"All done, Carmen," Mike said. "Next victim."

Carmen got up, picked up a hand mirror from the counter, and stood with her back to the big wall mirror, so she could examine the tattoo.

"Let me see it," Shane said, coming over and looking at the back of Carmen's neck. "Hey, I like it."

"Yeah?"

"I do."

"Good," Carmen said, "'cause it's on for life."

Just then a good-looking brunette parted the curtain and stuck her head in, already talking. "Hey, Mike, I'm gonna head out-- oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were with somebody." She was about Carmen's age, and had a trace of Nawlins accent.

"No, it's all right, come in," Mike said. "Shane, Carmen, meet the Gulf Coast version of Michael Angelo. This is my protege, Lisa Bobo, from New Orleans. She's got a tat shop in the French Quarter and she's just starting to make a name for herself down on the bayou."

"Hi, nice to meet you," Lisa said, shaking hands with Shane and Carmen. "You guys are getting some of Mike's work, huh? Me, too. Hey, look at this, she just finished this one on me this morning."

Lisa was wearing a very loose, baggy blouse and pulled it up just under her breasts to reveal a brand new tattoo on her stomach. "It's a quote from Albert Einstein," she said.

Carmen bent over slightly to read it. "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds," she read out loud. "Cool, I like that."

"I like it, too," Shane said. Her radar and gaydar had already told her this woman was straight, even though she was quite edible. Dark hair, tanned skin, good tits, good legs, a killer smile, great eyes. This one would break some Cajun hearts before long. They'd be guys, though, most likely. Can't win 'em all.

"Hey, I gotta run, I'm catching a plane," the girl said, approaching Mike and giving her a sisterly hug. "Cher, thanks for the ink. We'll do some more next time I'm in town."

"You got it," Mike said. "Have a good flight." When the girl left Mike shot gunfighter fingers at Shane. "Next victim."

Shane sat down in the chair.

"Look at you two," Mike said. "Another couple of dykes with matching tats."

"You know what, though, at least we didn't get our names tattooed," Carmen said.

"That would be the ultimate KOD, wouldn't it?" Shane said as Mike applied the stencil to the nape of Shane's neck.

"KOD?" Mike asked.

"Kiss of death," Carmen and Shane said simultaneously.

***

A week later Dana's chemotherapy started. It began with an intravenous infusion of her cocktail of drugs, which took about three hours, and then Lara brought her home. The schedule called for one of these IV "cycles" every three weeks, for anywhere from four to eight cycles, depending on how the drugs were working and how Dana was reacting to them. Among the many side effects most women experience, Dana had most of them, some worse than others: nausea, constipation, hemorrhoids, and "burned tongue" sensation. She was tired, which was normal, and she suffered another common side effect, which was forgetfulness and impaired ability to think, which was nicknamed "chemo brain," a phenomenon no one in the medical community understood. Never a "good" patient at the best of times, Dana was irritable, testy and bitchier than normal.

Dana's lover, Lara, was a sous chef, and was a very nice person. She was kind, gentle, smart, self-effacing, sweet, considerate, thoughtful, and a good lover in bed. She was a little moody, and perhaps more quiet and withdrawn sometimes than was good for her. She had many wonderful qualities...but she was not a good caregiver, like Carmen and Kit were. And it wasn't that her ego was fragile, it was all the rest of her that was. Like Shane, she was not strong, emotionally, at least, and she was not a fighter, not like Dana and Carmen and Bette were. If she had been an athlete, they would have said that, like Shane, she lacked "heart," that intangible quality athletes needed. She detested confrontation and arguments, and ran away from them, like Shane and Jenny did. She was a nice person, but she wasn't a warm, open person, a social person, a friendly person, like Carmen or Tina or the new, improved Helena. As Dana's lover, she had automatic membership in the group...yet she never took that opportunity. Alice hated her...but that was because she was Dana's lover, not for any other reason. In any case, Alice's antipathy was ignored by everyone else. That was just Alice being Alice.

Lara tried hard to please Dana, but everything she did was wrong. She did the best she could, but her best just wasn't good enough. It takes extraordinary skill and effort to be the partner of a breast cancer patient and mastectomy survivor. Lara lacked those skills, and knew it. She knew everything she did failed. And she knew that Dana was eating her alive, corrosively eating away at her self-esteem, her spirit. She knew she wasn't helping Dana. She knew it was taking her down, and she had no idea what to do about it. She perceived that she had no one to talk to about it. She felt lost and alone, and had turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, a downward spiral. Still, she kept trying. She thought that maybe a party might lift Dana's spirits. Nothing big, and nothing that took a lot of energy, or even planning: Just a small, casual afternoon with all her closest friends, maybe over at Bette's house, where Dana could lounge in the sun by the pool. Yes, that seemed like a good idea. She would talk to the gang, and she was sure they all would pitch in to help.

***

Alice drifted on a raft in the middle of the pool, drowsing off. Dana was in a lounge chair wrapped in a sweater.

"Hey, Alice? Alice? Wake up, come on," Shane called to her, splashing her to wake her up. Shane and Carmen had just walked over from their house next door and were sitting with their backs to the pool. Shane wore a T-shirt and jeans, but Carmen was stunning in what seemed to be the world's skimpiest white bikini. "Come on, wake up!"

Alice woke with a start.

"Alice, what do you think?" Shane asked her as she and Carmen both pushed their hair up at the backs of their necks to expose their new, matching tattoos.

Helena, looking gorgeous in a black two-piece, swam over for a closer look. "I think they're really discreet," she said.

Mangus was manning the grill. "I had my first girlfriend's name tattooed on my ankle," he said. "I had it removed."

Kit, coming out of the house, passed by him. "Oh, why didn't you have something else put on over it?"

"Bronwin?" Mangus asked, accepting a bottle of Dos Equis from her.

"Hello, everybody," Jenny said as she arrived. She carried a small bouquet of daisies in a drinking glass over to Dana. "I picked these, out of the garden, for you."

Dana took them and smiled wanly. "Thank you, they're beautiful," she said.

"Hey, I thought you were out of here," Shane called out.

"I'm taking the Red Eye to New York tonight," Jenny said.

"What's going on?" Helena asked.

"I'm going to be meeting with my book editor."

"Well, that's exciting," Helena said. "Is Moira going with you?"

"No, she had to stay to work tonight at The Planet with Billie."

"We had to close tonight so we could rig for tomorrow," Kit said.

"That's right!" Carmen blurted, grabbing Shane's arm. "The B-52s are gonna be there! That is huge. Kit, how did you get them?"

"My sex- and drug-crazed manager, he landed 'em," Kit said, throwing up her hands. "Hey, Carmen? I could use a hand bringing some food out."

"Sure," Carmen said, jumping up and following Kit inside.

"There's a big bowl of potato salad in the fridge," Kit said, stacking up a batch of hamburgers on a plate to take out to the grill.

Carmen got the bowl out of the refrigerator and as she turned she bumped into Mangus, dropping the serving spoon from the potato salad onto the floor.

"Sorry," Mangus said, taking a large plate out to the grill.

"No problem, I got it," Carmen smiled. She set down the potato salad bowl and took the spoon to the sink to wash it off. She flipped on the faucet, and as she did she saw Alice and Bette right under the kitchen window. They had their backs to the window and their heads together, but Carmen could just hear them.

"Go ahead, ask her," Alice hissed. "I bet she'd do it."

"What about Shane?" Bette asked.

"I betcha Shane would be okay with it."

"You think?"

"Yeah. Anyway, I wanna see it, too," Alice said.

"I'm going to kill Tina for telling you how badly I want to see it," Bette hissed.

Alice laughed. "Well, you aren't the only one. Jenny told me it was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen."

Carmen quietly turned off the faucet and dried the spoon with a dish towel. She stepped to the side so no one would see her eavesdropping. What could they be talking about? What would Shane be okay with?

"Shane!" Alice hissed.

Carmen could hear Shane say, "What's up, guys?" as she came up to Alice and Bette under the window. Carmen could hear whispering and carefully leaned over to look out. Shane was drinking from her bottle of beer while Alice whispered something in her ear. Shane suddenly laughed, but she put her hands up in the air like she was surrendering. "Hey, don't ask me, ask her!"

"Ssssshhhhhh!!" Alice quieted her. "She's in the house somewhere."

"Yeah, yeah, okay," Shane whispered in reply. "But like I said, you'll have to ask her, not me."

"But you're cool with it if we do? You don't mind?" Alice asked.

"You guys are twisted," Shane laughed.

"That's not fair, Shane," Bette whispered. "You and Jenny have both seen it. It's not like we're gonna touch it or anything. We only want to look at it."

"Shane, it's already practically a fucking urban legend. Everybody knows about it but nobody's actually seen it, except you and Jenny. Helena wants to see it, too. She told me she did."

Shane waved her hands and her beer bottle. "Hey, this is all on you guys," she said laughing.

"But what do you think she'll say?" Alice pressed her. But Shane just held up her hands and walked away laughing, and went to go sit near Jenny at the other side of the pool.