“From time to time.” Paxton smiled and caressed her own neck. “The young, hip aunt. He liked the fact that I’m in the industry, more in touch with pop culture than his parents. We’d chat from time to time. The time he told me about Little Miss Beverly Hills—I think her name was Katya, something like that—we were all out to dinner—right up the block at Il Principe, the food’s divine.”
“I’ll have to try it,” said Milo. “So this was a family dinner?”
“Gavin, Sheila, and I. Jerry was out of town. As usual.”
“How long ago?”
“Um, I’d say half a year, maybe more. Anyway, there we were enjoying the fabulous food—they cook sea bass in a wood oven, make their own pasta from scratch—and all of a sudden, Sheila wasn’t feeling well—another typical Sheila thing, she can’t enjoy anything, not even a good meal, without suffering—and she ran to the little girls’ room and stayed there for a while. Gavin started talking to me, he’d been looking kind of tense all night. Finally, I pried it out of him. He’d lost his girlfriend because she wasn’t interested in sex. He called her a ‘compulsive virgin.’ ”
She propped the chewed-down biscotti between her index fingers. Rolled it. Placed it on her plate. “I asked him what had happened, and he told me. While he was telling it, he really worked himself up. It was clear he was angry and frustrated.”
“About losing the relationship.”
“No, that was the thing. He said he couldn’t care less about having a girlfriend, it was not getting sex that griped him. It really made him angry.”
“This was after the accident.”
“Shortly after—maybe it was eight months ago. But Gavin was always easily frustrated. As a little boy he threw all kinds of tantrums.”
“Excitable,” I said. “And now he was all worked up about not getting sex.”
“He talked about sex as if it was his right. Said he and the girl, Katya, had been going together on and off since high school, it was about time she put out. Like there was a schedule you adhered to. Then he said everyone else was ‘fucking themselves blind,’ the whole world was one big fuckfest swimming in jizz and he deserved to swim, too, and she could just go to hell, he’d find someone else.”
“Lots of anger,” I said.
“He always had a bad temper. It got worse after the accident. It was like his emotional barometer was off—he just did or said what was on his mind. I mean, I’m his aunt and he’s talking about jizz in a booth at Il Principe. I was mortified. Important people dine at that place.”
“Gavin was talking loud?”
“His voice kept rising, and I had to keep telling him to lower it. I tried to reason with him, told him women weren’t machines, they needed to be cared for, sex could be fun, but it had to be mutual. He listened, actually seemed to be taking it in. Then he slid over in the booth, and said, ‘Eileen, thanks. You’re awesome.’ Then he grabbed my breast in one hand, the back of my head with the other, and tried to shove his tongue down my throat—Gio? A refill, please.”
*
Milo pressed her for more on Gavin’s sex life and the family, but once she’d gotten past the basic hatred, there was nothing. He steered the conversation to Gavin’s tabloid fantasies.
“That,” she said, “is another thing he was impressed with—my work in the industry. He kept asking me to hook him up with some celebrity parties, so he could observe.” She laughed. “As if I’d help him dig dirt on my friends.”
“What was his angle?”
“Unearthing filth and selling it to the tabs. He saw it as his journalistic debut, he was going to make his mark as a journalist. I told him the tabs were trash and full of lies, but he wouldn’t hear it. He claimed they were more honest than the establishment press because they were open about their goals.”
“Filth.”
She nodded. “After the accident, Gavin saw the world as one big ball of filth.”
I said, “Did he make any progress toward being a journalist?”