When she said this I was certain all of you must have guessed and been discussing it among yourselves in my absence. I told her I had to go, indicating the pages for the rewritten scenes and glancing up the drive at the gate, hoping there weren’t photographers lurking. One night earlier that week I had dreamed of sealing the whole house in black cloth, to keep all that Pacific light from exposing our lives.
Find a way to tell him whatever you’ve got to say.
How do I tell him I have to leave and don’t know when I’ll see him again?
Helen trembled at the words and I realized she’d only been fishing. What the hell does that mean? she asked, clinging to my sideview mirror.
It means I’ve concluded I can’t risk sticking around.
That sounds a little extreme.
I told her it was not a decision I’d made overnight, although in a way I had.
You sound so flippant, Desmond. You should remember that even if he isn’t yours, you are definitely my husband’s first love. If you’re not careful you’ll break his heart. He didn’t even know what he was until he met you.
That isn’t true, Helen.
You always seemed more confident than I was, so joyful when we were alone together, but Helen insisted I had given you permission to be yourself.
When you’re not around, Myles sits by the pool reading and rereading your books. He said to me once, I know if I read them enough times I’ll understand him one day. You’re a mystery to him.
Is it true, Myles? I never thought you’d read my books, but when I told Helen this she laughed and said you’d already worn out one copy of The Argosy and knew it backwards.
Dammit, Desmond, stop crying.
The two of us stood in the shade of the carport, blushing in the breeze that whipped off the ocean.
I wish it were easier.
Don’t we all? At least give Myles fair warning. He’ll need a week or two to prepare. A month if you’ve got it.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her we were long past any such notice period. Time was up.
If only one of us could turn into a woman.
Helen snorted and wiped her cheeks. All these categories. I don’t see why categories matter so much. Why don’t you just marry Barbara and the four of us can build houses next to each other and dig a tunnel between them? Wouldn’t that solve everything?
But to me that sounded just as fantastic as being reborn in the body of the opposite sex. All such miracles are the stuff of fantasy, and ours was a desperately real life. It was a truth you reminded me of in your own way, telling me once when we were in bed, not long after we first declared ourselves to each other, that you could never disappear entirely into a character.
That’s not what audiences want, Desmond. They want to see me every time I appear on screen, just different versions of me. It’s what people expect of a star.
2
Are you alone now, Myles? I mean not only are you alone when you read this but are you alone despite your marriage to Helen? I see that you two are still together. I remember that Barbara died many years ago. I know almost nothing beyond that. The little I can gather from magazines and newspapers suggests you and Helen still live in the same house in Pacific Palisades after all these years, always such creatures of habit, and she has written to me with that return address I could never forget. It would be nice to hear from you, she says, after your silence all these years. Forgive me for asking, is it only she who wishes to hear from me and not you as well? I tear open her letters and find such scant lines, revealing nothing about her or you or the life you’ve made in my absence, while imploring me to tell her about myself. Why must the responsibility of communication and narration, the telling of a life, be entirely mine?
In the press I have seen references to your family ranch, inherited after the death of your parents. One profile describes it as a refuge to which you retreat from your life in Los Angeles. Between the lines I infer this is where you have sequestered your real life, or your real love, whoever he may be, hidden in that Montana cabin. When you are there I hope you are not alone, as I myself am not alone.
I now have a companion I hesitate to call a lover, although he would be hurt to know this. While I love Alessio, because he is much younger, I am never certain his love for me is genuine. He is an artist but without the temperament I might have expected from one who closes himself in a room each day and comes out in the evening paint-scarred and sweating, presenting me with canvases so brutal in their imagery I sometimes go to sleep wondering if I will wake the next morning. And yet the physical trace of his work, the exhaustion in his arms as he prepares dinner for us, is the only sign of drama. In all other ways he is a presence of calm and nurture, caring for me as if I were an infant, stroking my hair into order and washing me when I cannot manage it myself. I trust him with the greatest and most shameful of intimacies. Perhaps you will say he is after my money. I wonder this myself but try to silence such doubts before they have a chance to ruin what is otherwise a relationship of balance and care. No passion left, or at least not the physical kind. I am grateful for a kiss, an embrace, grateful that he does not flinch when I reach for him, that he is not miserly with his body and lets me look and caress as I wish, as it seems to please him. Does he have a father complex, I wonder, or even a grandfather complex? I asked him as much and he laughed, charming in his amusement. But don’t be so ridiculous, Desmond, I love you because you are loveable not because I am seeking the love of my fathers and grandfathers. They were all loving men. I mean not men-loving-men, he clarified. No, I understand, I said, they loved you. But completely, he said, and they were always affectionate. So don’t imagine I am seeking in you something they failed to give me. I love you for you. Not for my money? Not even a little?, I think to myself, despite myself. At least I have the sense never to say it aloud.
Alessio shook his head when I started writing this letter to you a few days ago. What do you always say, Desmond? Sleeping dogs. If you have not heard from Myles in all these years then why should you bother him now? Because, Alessio, I will be dead sooner than later and I would like to say what I must while the chance remains, and in any case, Helen has opened the door, she has said it would be nice to hear from me, and although she does not say whether Myles wishes that as well, it is what I choose to infer. You must promise me, Alessio said, fingers embedded with pigment stroking my face as if I were young and beautiful, one of the angelic artists who flock around him rather than an old prophet, wrinkled and stumbling, you must promise me if it becomes too much, if you start not sleeping again, or if I find you weeping at your desk over these pages, then you will stop and talk no more of it ever. I smiled at him, one of those conciliatory smiles that flash and fade quickly and so betray the falseness of their feeling. I cannot promise, but I will try, I said, and he leaned over to kiss me on the mouth. You have me, he said, and I am not going anywhere, not ever.
So you see, I am not alone, and I hope you are not alone, that Helen and your children are not the only people who care for you, as Alessio cares for me.
In beginning to write this letter to you, I went looking through my files and discovered a manila folder from the 1950s that had escaped my memory. When I opened it, relishing the particular odor of paper from the last century, American paper that smells to my nose different to any other, I was astonished by the series of fragments I found. Some would call them stories but I am not sure that is what they are. Inventions, speculations, assaults. Each one has a date at the end. A few I remember writing once I have read them, others still come to me with a shock – not only because I cannot recall them but because I no longer recognize the state of mind I must have been suffering at the time. Perhaps I thought they would become a novel or collection of stories, but I also sense that in writing them I might have been trying to settle scores as much as to understand, and so I describe people we knew in ways that would have been unpublishable during their lifetimes without disguising identities, but I also write
about people I did not know, with whom I had only scant encounters, or people only related to others I did know or met only once. In each of these cases I can see myself trying to understand what had happened to me, to you, to all of us. They were written following my departure, some in spring and early summer of 1950, others a few years later, typed up on my portable Remington and put away to rot. How quickly the worlds we invent can disappear from view. I wonder if you feel this about parts you played, if you look at yourself in a film from those years and have no memory of the person you must have been on the day when a camera captured you riding pell-mell on horseback across a river, or the morning you were climbing from a bomber with your face artfully grease-smeared, or the evening when you closed your hands around the neck of a man so much like yourself he might have been your twin. Do you always know what you were thinking in those moments captured on film, or is the person you were then unreachable now? Do you recall the date and place of each performance, seeing those moments whole in an instant that you can stretch and reinhabit at will?
To remember that day when I last stood by your side and kissed you, I have to step out of the present, forget Alessio upstairs in his studio with its view over the city, and slip into a state of mind closer to trance. It is only through letting consciousness fall away that I begin to see clearly what happened, but just as I grasp your image, the way you looked that morning, you threaten to turn fugitive and escape my mind. If only I could live that day again, not only to do everything differently, but to remember you more clearly, in your ungraspable singularity. The closest I can come to repeating those hours is to submit myself to the dangerous will to dream, here, fingers on my keyboard, summoning you back to my mind. Why did I not work harder to learn you by heart in the years you were mine, that I might now play you more convincingly for my own if for no one else’s consolation, play you as automatically and instinctively as I make a pot of coffee or brush my teeth? That would be impossible, of course, and I know that even dreaming you now, trying to dream in order to recapture who you were when I saw you last, you exceed my capacity to know, to understand. I cannot reduce you to a trope, to Myles Haywood as he appears in the photographs covering my walls or Myles Haywood as he moves, framed and edited, chopped apart and reassembled with varying degrees of continuity and fragmentation on my television screen. So I project the details of my memory onto you now, hoping I will capture, by chance, even a few of the same images you may recall when you remember that day.
And I know you must remember it.
The sun was in my eyes as I pulled out of your driveway and turned from Chautauqua onto Sunset. In half an hour I should have been at John Marsh’s house, in time for me to discuss the rewritten scenes with him in the car and still arrive at the studio by seven-thirty, grab something more substantial than toast and black coffee in the commissary and sit through the morning on set before the lunch during which I was certain the studio heads were going to tell me that unless I could satisfy the right people, and only if I was willing to betray my own beliefs, I could find a different line of work. My agent Stan had already made it clear that no other studio was going to hire me: every one of them would condemn me for being Red, even though by that time I was no longer a member of any party, and if that failed to stick then I was certain someone would eventually discover our secret and find a way to condemn me for being a man who loved men.
Did the studio know the truth about you from the beginning, Myles, from the moment they decided you were going to be more than a body in the background? Did they know before your engagement to Helen was announced? Was your marriage their idea or yours – or even Helen’s? I asked Helen this at the engagement party after watching her gulp three martinis so fast I felt drunk myself. She narrowed her eyes and kissed me on the cheek. That was not an answer, or perhaps it was the clearest answer I could have hoped for. At the time I wondered if it was her way of telling me I could have been her husband myself if only I’d had the sense. Now I suspect she was just as sad and confused by it all as I was, as I suppose you must have been too.
Driving east on Sunset that morning I had to squint against the glare. Even with the visor down, the angle of the sun turned the windshield’s layer of dust into a scrim of diamond. At the switchback beneath the polo grounds an eagle flew up from the side of the road, veering towards the car, and at the last instant I swerved into the oncoming lane to miss it. In turning I thought of that moment on Mulholland earlier in the week when I was coming back from John’s, imagining you and Helen and Barbara already at home, how it would feel to ring the bell at your gate and steer down the long drive, take my berth in the carport, and find you in the living room watching television, relaxed with each other in a way I could never be since there was always the prospect of my next departure, the fear of photographers catching me as I was coming or going and having to explain myself if the pictures ever slipped into the hands of Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons. When I left John’s that evening I intended, perhaps not quite with full consciousness, to drive off the road. I went up to Mulholland thinking it was a sensible way out, an exit that would cause you the least distress because it could be explained as an accident. If I left behind no suicide note you might allow yourself to believe I’d had one too many bourbons with John and perhaps chose that route – so out of the way if I was just going home – to see the view and take the air, as if I ever cared about views or airs. But as my wheel went off the road onto the gravel that night, I braked hard, anxious that you would blame yourself for what I had done, and that was something I could not risk.
To avoid colliding with the eagle on Sunset I did end up driving off the road, pumping the brakes just before hitting the trunk of an old eucalyptus. A strip of bark sailed down onto the hood as the left front tire collapsed, while up in the tree the eagle ripped the guts from a snake.
Since I had no spare tire, I started walking towards home. Twenty minutes later, not halfway there, a car pulled to the side of the road and a gentleman in the front passenger seat rolled down the window. He was wearing a homburg and little round glasses and a brushy moustache. The driver, whom I had at first mistaken for another man, was the gentleman’s daughter. I recognized them both from parties we had all attended. These were not parties you would have enjoyed, Myles, but ones where all the artistic and intellectual misfits who fled Europe before the war gravitated for sympathy and moral support.
Can we offer you a lift? the man asked. I told them I lived in Brentwood but actually needed to get to Beverly Hills and they offered to take me all the way.
We so like driving, the daughter said. My father woke early and fancied an outing. He said he could not sleep and could not work and American roads are made for such a state.
I explained about the eagle and the flat tire, telling them it gave me a look as though it had achieved something significant.
The man mumbled to himself, Jupiter’s bird. A winged lion. If you had not been walking, we should never have stopped, and then we would not have had this nice…he paused, searching for the right word…chat. So perhaps your eagle did achieve something. Worse things can come from the sky. You were lucky it was not a flying saucer! Again, the man and his daughter laughed. This United States government of yours does not want us to believe in flying saucers or objects in the sky that cannot be explained, even things they might have put there themselves, unless they can blame it on Russia. But anyway, we also live in Brentwood, so we are neighbors who did not know they are neighbors and nowadays, sympathetic neighbors we need even more, especially in this – you will forgive me if you do not agree – this country of gangsters. I do not mean to be so critical, but these men with their witch hunts are no better than criminals.
Sounds as though you have the measure of the place, I laughed, and the man and his daughter said yes, after all, they had been in the country more than a decade, escaping fascism. You outran it for a while, I told them, but it’s back on the march.
Only now I am an American citize
n, the man sighed, so where would I go? I fled insanity and danger for what must have seemed like security, I cannot now remember. Hope and reason, purity, even maybe innocence. But I did not know you Americans only pretend at innocence, while in fact you are always play-acting, and the reality, what is beneath the masquerade, is so, so dark. Anti-Semitism everywhere.
What about returning to Germany, I asked, but the man mumbled, No, I do not think I can go back.
France?
No, nor England. Too depressing their weather, and the English do not like a foreigner unless he wears a sign around him saying Just Visiting and even then… No, Switzerland, maybe we go there. Neutrality is the last refuge, but I think it is a boring place.
The man’s daughter turned onto Summit Drive and glanced at me in the rearview mirror, raising her eyebrows to ask where she should stop.
Up on the right, I said, the one with the tall hedge.
The man wondered if he recognized me from the movies but I told him I was just a writer and reminded him of several parties we had both attended. At this his face brightened. A brother writer as well as a neighbor! Perhaps I will come to see you sometime, and we can talk about birds and accidents and…beauty. Presently I go to Scandinavia so it will have to wait. But you must come visit. I live at the corner of San Remo, just by Monaco. These European names give a nice idea to people who have never been to such places, thinking they belong to a culture older than this young city. It is very pretty, my house, an enchanted garden for an old man. Tell me, your eagle, was he beautiful?
I had no time to reflect on the bird’s beauty, but it was as attractive as any other I’ve seen.
The old man chuckled as his daughter idled their car outside John’s house. Another car, a dark coupe, was parked across the street. Not every bird is beautiful, the man sighed, glancing at the coupe. Vultures. Buzzards.
Night for Day Page 3