by Paula McLain
“You’re going to have to give it up sometime,” Fawn said as we lay sunbathing one afternoon in Raymond’s yard. “Otherwise, no one’s going to stick around.”
I supposed she was right, and in a way I did want to move on and get it over with already—to dispense with the cherry, cherry sign flashing over my head. But in other ways, things had come pretty far pretty fast. Wasn’t it just a few weeks before that Collin had touched my ankle in the van? How was I supposed to go from that to “giving it up” by the Dumpster behind the Razzle Dazzle and not feel like my head was going to explode?
After JJ there was Steve the keyboardist, then Steve the lead guitarist, and then a stream of guys from the bar who were only too happy to dance with me and buy me drinks. And if they wanted to put their hands on me, that was okay. I nearly always liked it—though I could never quite place or satisfy the hot and complicated sensations that would flood me at such times. What I liked was the sense of power I felt edging up to the threshold and then turning away again, answering the groans of “please” against my neck with “not yet,” or “soon.” And if occasionally I’d catch a glimpse of myself from the outside and not be able to recognize myself, or hear a pale inner voice asking, What are you doing? it was the faintest possible intervention, weak as starlight coming at me from a region of deep space.
TELL HER NO
Sycamores surrounded the apartment building on Valencia, where Raymond and Leon lived. The trees were older than the building and grew in such a way that they seemed to be nursing it, arching worriedly over the ailing roof, swaying over the spindly metal back stairs, nudging sets of high, double-hung windows with fat branches and slender ones. Since June the sycamores had been dropping winged seedpods. They spun in a slow-pitched way and hit the sidewalk with a lisping sound, collecting on the windshields of parked cars in balsa-colored drifts. Balancing on the scaffold, scraping paint, Raymond crunched them underfoot like mayflies, batted them out of his hair.
Raymond was the building’s super and had been since he and Leon had moved in in ’62, three years before. Mostly his job entailed plunging toilets, replacing lightbulbs, setting and clearing mousetraps—unglamorous and undemanding work. When the landlady, Mrs. Unger, had suggested he paint the building for a thousand dollars on top of his small salary and free rent, his instinct was to say no. Ultimately he had decided the extra money would be a nice buffer—and he was glad he did. Day by long day, he was finding that he liked the work. It was tedious, and the way he had to reach over his head made his shoulders ache, but there was some pleasure in the routine, the daily wrestling with the tarp and ropes and the pulley system. He liked stirring primer, watching as the amber oil floating on top was absorbed slowly, and liked most of all the long minutes when he could simply rest against the scaffolding and stare out into the branches and clustered leaves that were a patchy red and green on top, nearly white on the bottom. Around him the trees seemed to be conspiring to hide him from what-or whomever might need something he wasn’t at that moment prepared to give. Like Suzette.
He hated to admit it, but in the three weeks since he’d brought Suzette back to San Francisco with him, Raymond was feeling more and more like it had been a mistake. He had wanted her there to keep an eye on her, to get her away from her odd life in Oxnard long enough so that maybe she could see her way through to something better, but the speed with which she was throwing herself at the new life she was constructing for herself daily troubled Raymond. She’d boomeranged so quickly he couldn’t keep up. She wasn’t “getting over” John, the good doctor, as Raymond had hoped: she’d apparently forgotten about him altogether—and the boat, her job, her ostensible friends there. Raymond simply couldn’t trust the happy frenzy in the way she unpacked her small suitcase into his room (he was now sleeping on the couch), and decorated it with Indian print spreads, dripping candles, a fringe of deep purple beads. He had a bad feeling about the whole thing, and wondered if it wasn’t San Francisco she had her sights set on, but Leon. This wouldn’t be such a surprising move for Suzette. She seemed to need a new guy to get over the old one the way addicts needed methadone to get over heroin. It wasn’t a fault, exactly; she just couldn’t be alone. But things hadn’t ended with John in the way Raymond was used to seeing with Suzette. There had been no betrayal, no conflagration of a final fight—no ending at all. Less than three weeks ago, she’d been aglow with “love,” and now, nothing. Total amnesia. John wasn’t really the old guy, and Leon wasn’t really the new one. Raymond had been watching them together carefully, and Leon wasn’t doing anything that could be interpreted as encouraging. And yet Suzette was showing all the signs of being newly in love.
She’d also gotten a job. She hadn’t been in town more than three days when she answered an ad run by the old Sutro Baths. The place was now a skating rink and curiosity museum, and they were looking for part-time girls—actresses, models, local beauties—to stand out front in leggy costumes, selling pink popcorn balls and balloons, luring folks inside for the afternoon. Suzette had gone for an interview one morning, and came home two hours later, not just employed but sporting a new haircut and a new dress she’d splurged for at the May Company.
“They thought I was a model,” she said, parading through the apartment in the new dress, swinging her thin hips broadly, throwing in a few turns as if she were on an imaginary runway. “Can you believe it?”
“It’s a nice dress, Suzy,” Raymond had said. “But maybe you should be a little more careful with your money. You haven’t even gotten your first paycheck yet.”
“Why are you always pissing on my sunshine, Ray? Jeez, you’d think you’d be happy for me or proud of me. Instead you’re like an old grandma.” She’d stormed off to her room then, the one she’d simply taken over like a claim she’d usurped in the Yukon, ignoring Raymond’s markers, his stake. Ignoring the fact of him.
“What’s going on?” Leon asked when he came home shortly after the scene over the new dress. He jerked his head toward her door where The Dave Clark Five boomed seismically.
“Hell if I know,” Raymond said.
Maybe he should have been happier for Suzette, but he couldn’t quite get a bead on what she was up to. What she wanted from him. What she was really seeing as her new prospects in San Francisco. It was as if she’d flipped compulsively forward from the beginning of one story to the beginning of another, and Raymond couldn’t read the print of either clearly. Was he missing something? Had things gotten going between Suzette and Leon in a way Raymond just wasn’t seeing? He certainly hoped not. That would be an unprecedented disaster. Raymond knew he could count on Leon himself for anything, but where women were concerned, Leon was a dog, plain and simple. So he tried to head a nightmare off at the pass by asking Leon out for a drink one night. Raymond had a plan to get Leon a little drunk, then start the conversation gradually, but as soon as the two men climbed into Raymond’s car to head downtown, Raymond blurted it out: “I don’t want you sleeping with my sister, all right?”
“No problem,” Leon said, chuckling. “I mean, I’m flattered and all, but isn’t she just a little messed up right now?”
“Yeah, a little,” Raymond agreed, breathing a sigh of relief. He was happy to have Leon’s easy company. Their friendship had always been straightforward—ever since they’d met, a decade before, on the pier at Santa Monica. Leon was arguing with a mime, or rather, Leon was arguing, his face animated, his long hair twitching, while the mime gestured so emphatically Raymond thought his hands might fly off. As Raymond watched from where he leaned against a pylon, his interest was drawn at first by the humor in the situation, and then by the figure of Leon himself. He would argue fiercely for one side and then flip and argue just as fiercely for the other side: the circus barker and the performer in one package—the king and the jester, the lion and the lamb. He had gold-tipped hair, shaggy and center-parted, and a fuzz of gold too on his upper lip and along his cheekbones, as if he were a boy, not yet old enough to shave.
>
Leon had caught Raymond’s eye as he watched. Smiling slyly, he jerked his head to call Raymond over, and Raymond had felt, with this small action, a tug of brotherhood, confederacy. Some of it was timing. Leon had just signed the lease on a rental house in Topanga Canyon that was far too big and costly to live in alone. Raymond was renting a room the size of an ironing board in Westwood, and wouldn’t need much convincing to take up with even a stranger. But Leon, as luck would have it, was ridiculously likeable, loyal and generous to a fault. He loved to talk, particularly when the points were fine, minute even. A shaggy and amiable shepherd leading his sheep through the finer points of Platonic philosophy, or Camus, or straight-up bullshit.
Raymond was just twenty-two then, and had recently landed a job as a security guard on the Universal lot. The job was fine. He worked nights, which meant he rarely had to do more than sit on his stool in front of the triple-locked studio door and make rounds every forty-five minutes, but LA felt too slick and posed for Raymond. Everyone was waiting for their break, waiting to be discovered, cocktail waitresses shellacked into tiny skirts, offering up their most favorable profile, setting down your napkin with a flourish and something approximating a back bend, the way the Bunnies did it at the Playboy Club in Hollywood. And it did happen this way sometimes, you could read about it in the trades: this guy behind the counter at the hardware store to be the next Troy Donahue, that sweet thing at a pool party in the Valley set up with a seven-picture contract at Paramount. Even Raymond was approached, though only by studio little shots saying, Did anyone ever tell you you look like Montgomery Clift? Gregory Peck? Steve McQueen? He had a small stack of business cards on his bureau under a pyramid of matchbooks and loose change, but he couldn’t take them seriously. He was having a hard time taking anything seriously.
In the late afternoons he’d go to Santa Monica, left of the pier, and watch the tide come in, squinting into the dipping sun as surfers rose and fell, wriggling as if on hooks. Aside from the surfers and rich housewives walking sneezing Pomeranians, the beach at this hour was peopled by girls—high school girls, just let out for the day, some still carrying book bags, and second-shift girls, nurses and stewardesses and waitresses trying to catch a last bit of sun before heading to work. Raymond would prowl between lifeguard stations, but there was a fish-in-a-barrel quality to the pickup scene here. More often than not, they approached him—You an actor? You look just like William Holden. But he’d take them back to his room, anyway, putting their phone numbers with the business cards, a small pile of meaningless paper.
He felt relieved to leave the city and his routine and head up into Topanga to live with Leon. They stayed up till all hours listening to Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs and smoking hash, slept late, woke feeling hungover but otherwise well. The house in Topanga was a sprawling ranch surrounded by mesquite and twisted cypress trees. Before Leon had rented the house, a large family had lived there but left suddenly, abandoning much of their furniture. In a way, it felt as if the family were still there, living just behind the homemade curtains in the kitchen, the bamboo-patterned wallpaper in the study, the painting in the bathroom of blue sea horses balanced on their weird curled tails.
The house was full of these kinds of touches, yellow-checked contact paper in the kitchen drawers and cabinets, stick-on daisy bathtub decals, which Leon fought to keep because of Kitty. Kitty was the housewife whose spirit haunted the house, according to Leon. She’d come to him in a hallucination and pronounced him the caretaker. When he was drunk or stoned, Leon had long, lucid conversations with her and after would say to Raymond things like “Kitty wants you to stop peeing on the toilet seat. It’s just not right.”
“So how’d this Kitty die?” Raymond asked once.
“Who said she was dead?”
“She’s a ghost but she’s not dead?”
“I never said she was a ghost,” Leon corrected, shaking his shaggy head. “I said she was a spirit.”
Leon didn’t work if he could help it. There was some money his grandmother had put in an account in his name, mostly not to have to pay taxes on it. He would get it eventually, when she died, but for the time being he was “borrowing” on it, just to tide him over. “Grandma money,” he called it. As in, “Let’s go down to the Whisky on Grandma.” And one evening, two years after they’d been living in Topanga, “We could use some Grandma money, go up to Berkeley, see what’s going on there.”
“Sure,” Raymond said. It was time for a change of pace, for women who weren’t tan, weren’t highlighted within an inch of their lives, weren’t “doing a little print work on the side.”
They cleared out in under a week, but Leon wasn’t happy with Berkeley, declaring it full of bullshitters, people who thought they knew everything about everything—people a lot like Leon, really—but Raymond was flexible. They found the place on Valencia instead, the super’s job feeling like a windfall to Raymond. Leon stayed slothful. He spent mornings wearing his bathrobe and flip-flops at the tiny built-in dinette set, eating Quisp cereal dry and “considering his prospects,” which generally meant he’d wander back to bed soon. It had been a good time, a very good time. They drank a lot of beer, ate tamales and gluey refried beans bought warm from the bodega on the corner, slept with anyone they wanted—or nearly anyone.
Now, as Raymond sat with Leon at a bar called Café Limbo near Hyde Park, he was glad to have the awkward conversation about Suzette being off-limits behind him, and grateful to be halfway to very, very drunk, an excellent numbness working its way through his body and brain. He hadn’t been with a woman himself since that night with the film student, when Suzette had called from Oxnard. He was thirty-two, and knew most people would say that was too old to still be alone, but he wasn’t so sure himself. Sex made people crazy. How many times had he watched Suzette become rubberized by this man or that one—and usually complete dead ends, like her married doctor, or like Benny.
It bothered Raymond that he had never really gotten to the bottom of that hysterical call from Oxnard. He’d originally thought she’d just heard from Benny, but Mr. Garabedian said Benny had been gone over two weeks before his and Suzette’s visit to Bakersfield. Could she be that unhinged over a letter she’d received weeks before? Had something else happened that she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him about? He couldn’t be sure, and so was closely guarding the secret about Benny’s death. When would he tell her? Maybe never, if he could get away with it. It was spooky watching her feverish new optimism, but if he had a choice, he preferred this to watching her crash and burn. He didn’t want to see her hurt again so soon, not by the news of Benny, and not by Leon. Since steamrollered was the only way she seemed to come out on the other side of love, he would simply do what he could to stand in the way. It was exhausting, though, he had to admit. And somehow more exhausting than usual now that she was so happy. Too happy. It was like living with an undetonated bomb.
“Women,” he said to Leon as he emptied a pint glass down to the froth. “Can’t live with them and what’s that other part? Why can’t we live without them?”
Leon sent his eyebrows up in a gesture that could have meant anything.
“You have to admit they’re not always worth the trouble,” Raymond persisted, bent on getting agreement from Leon.
“I don’t know, that’s one way to see it, I guess.”
“Oh? What’s another way?”
“Look, I don’t want to get involved.”
“But?”
“But you’re going to push me until I say something you don’t want to hear.”
“I can handle it,” Raymond said.
“All right then. All I’m saying is maybe Suzette isn’t the only messed-up one in this particular equation.”
It might have been the beer, but Raymond was having a hard time following Leon’s meaning. In fact, if he’d had to wager a guess right then, he’d have supposed Leon was talking about himself. “What? What?” he asked several times.
“I’ve
already said too much. Let’s just leave it.” Leon signaled the bartender, who was off in one corner doing inventory, for the check. It was late and the bar was nearly empty.
“No, really, hit me, doctor. I’m all ears.”
“Well, I’m not sure family should be so…close.” He felt for the word carefully. “Maybe you should let her go.”
“I’m not exactly barring the door,” Raymond said. “But since you bring it up, go where? Back to Oxnard? Did she tell you about that doctor? Her job? Give me a break.” It was strange. For weeks Raymond had been feeling conflicted about Suzette’s being there, but now that Leon was challenging his intentions as her brother, her keeper, he felt defensive. “You don’t think she’s better off here where I can keep an eye on her?”
“Just ask yourself this, Ray. Why do you want her here? I mean, did you bring Suzette home because you want to do what’s best for her, or do you just like being the hero?” He looked over at Raymond as if he were trying to gauge whether he’d over-stepped his bounds.