by William Boyd
I don’t like the jog back so much, as all the people are coming out. Lying around, surfing, cruising, scoring, shooting up, tricking. Hell, the things I’ve seen on that sand, I could tell you a few stories. Sometimes I like to go down to El Segundo or Redondo beach just to feel normal.
I usually park the car on Santa Monica Pallisades. I tidy up, change into my clothes and shave. I have a small battery-powered electric razor that I use. Then I have a beer, wander around, buy a newspaper. Mostly I then drive north to Malibu. There’s a place I know where you can get a fair view of a longish stretch of the beach. It’s almost impossible to get down there in summer; they don’t like strangers. So I pull off the highway and climb this small dune-hill. I have a pair of opera glasses of my aunt’s that I use to see better – my eyesight’s not too hot. I spotted Rod Steiger one day, and Jane Fonda I think but I can’t be sure, the glasses tend to fuzz everything a bit over four hundred yards. Anyway I like the quiet on that dune, it’s restful.
I have been down on to Malibu beach, but only in the winter season. The houses are all shut up but you can still get the feel of it. Some people were having a bar-b-q one day. It looked good. They had a fire going on a big porch that jutted out high over the sand. They waved and shouted when I went past.
Lunch is bad. The worst part of the day for me because I have to go home. I live with my aunt. I call her my aunt though I’m not related to her at all. She was my mother’s companion – I believe that’s the right word – until my mother stuffed her face with a gross of Seconal one afternoon in a motel at Corona del Mar. I was fifteen then and Vanessa – my ‘aunt’ – became some kind of legal guardian to me and had control of all the money I’d made from The Scrantons. Well, she bought an apartment in Beverly Glen because she liked the address. Man, was she swallowed by the realtor. They build these tiny apartment blocks on cliff-faces up the asshole of the big-name canyons just so you can say you live off Mulholland Drive or in Bel Air. It’s a load. I’d rather live in Watts or on Imperial Highway. I practically have to rope-up and wear crampons to get to my front door. And it is mine. I paid for it.
Maybe that’s why Vanessa never leaves her bed. It’s just too much effort getting in and out of the house. She just stays in bed all day and eats, watches TV and feeds her two dogs. I only go in there for lunch; it’s my only ‘family’ ritual. I take a glass of milk and a salad sandwich but she phones out for pizza and enchiladas and burgers – any kind of crap she can smear over her face and down her front. She’s really grown fat in the ten years since my mother bombed out. But she still sits up in bed with those hairy yipping dogs under her armpits, and she’s got her top and bottom false eyelashes, her hairpiece and purple lipstick on. I say nothing usually. For someone who never gets out she sure can talk a lot. She wears these tacky satin and lace peignoirs, shows half her chest. Her breasts look like a couple of Indian clubs rolling around under the shimmer. It’s unfair I suppose, but when I drive back into the foothills I like to think I’m going to have a luncheon date with . . . with someone like Grace Kelly – as was – or maybe Alexis Smith. I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind a meal and a civilized conversation with some nice people like that. But lunch with Vanessa? Thanks for nothing, pal. God, you can keep it. She’s a real klutz. I’m sure Grace and Alexis would never let themselves get that way – you know, like Vanessa’s always dropping tacos down her cleavage or smearing mustard on her chins.
I always get depressed after lunch. It figures, I hear you say. I go to my room and sometimes I have a drink (I don’t smoke, so dope’s out). Other days I play my guitar or else work on my screenplay. It’s called Walk. Don’t Walk. I get a lot of good ideas after lunch for some reason. That’s when I got the idea for my screenplay. It just came to me. I remembered how I’d been stuck one day at the corner of Arteria Boulevard and Normandie Avenue. There was a pile of traffic and the pedestrian signs were going berserk. ‘Walk’ would come on so I’d start across. Two seconds later ‘Don’t Walk’ so I go back. Then on comes ‘Walk’ again. This went on for ten minutes: ‘Walk. Don’t Walk. Walk. Don’t Walk.’ I was practically out of my box. But what really stunned me was the way I just stayed there and obeyed the goddam machine for so long – I never even thought about going it alone. Then one afternoon after lunch it came to me that it was a neat image for life; just the right kind of metaphor for the whole can of worms. The final scene of this movie is going to be a slow crane shot away from this malfunctioning traffic sign going ‘Walk. Don’t Walk.’ Then the camera pulls further up and away in a helicopter and you see that in fact the whole city is fouled up because of this one sign flashing. They don’t know what to do; the programming’s gone wrong. It’s a great final scene. Only problem is I’m having some difficulty writing my way towards it. Still, it’ll come, I guess.
In the late afternoon I go to work. I work at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Vanessa’s brother-in-law got me the job. I park cars. I keep hoping I’m going to park the car of someone really important. Frank – that’s Vanessa’s brother-in-law – will say to me ‘Give this one a shine-up, Charlie, it belongs to so and so, he produced this film,’ or ‘That guy’s the money behind X’s new movie,’ or ‘Look out, he’s Senior Vice-President of Something incorporated.’ I say big deal. These guys hand me the keys – they all look like bank clerks. If that’s the movies nowadays I’m not so sure I want back in.
Afternoons are quiet at the hotel so I catch up on my reading. I’m reading Camus at the moment but I think I’ve learnt all I can from him so I’m going on to Jung. I don’t know too much about Jung but I’m told he was really into astrology which has always been a pet interest of mine. One thing I will say for quitting the movies when I did means that I didn’t miss out on my education. I hear that some of these stars today are really dumb; you know, they’ve got their brains in their neck and points south.
After work I drive back down to the Santa Monica pier and think about what I’m going to do all night. The Santa Monica pier is a kind of special place for me: it’s the last place I saw my wife and son. I got married at seventeen and was divorced by twenty-two, though we were apart for a couple of years before that. Her name was Harriet. It was okay for a while but I don’t think she liked Vanessa. Anyway, get this. She left me for a guy who was the assistant manager in the credit collection department of a large mail order firm. I couldn’t believe it when she told me. I said to her when she moved out that it had to be the world’s most boring job and did she know what she was getting into? I mean, what sort of person do you have to be to take on that kind of work? The bad thing was she took my son Skiff with her. It’s a dumb name I know, but at the time he was born all the kids were being called things like Sky and Saffron and Powie, and I was really sold on sailing. I hope he doesn’t hold it against me.
The divorce was messy and she got custody, though I’ll never understand why. She had left some clothes at the house and wanted them back so she suggested we meet at the end of the Santa Monica pier for some reason. I didn’t mind, it was the impetuous side to her nature that first attracted me. I handed the clothes over. She was a bit tense. Skiff was running about; he didn’t seem to know who I was. She was smoking a lot; those long thin menthol cigarettes. I really didn’t say anything much at all, asked her how she was, what school Skiff was going to. Then she just burst out, ‘Take a good look, Charlie, then don’t come near us ever again!’ Her exact words. Then they went away.
So I go down to the end of the pier most nights and look out at the ocean and count the planes going in to land at L. A. International and try to work things out. Just the other evening I wandered up the beach a way and this thin-faced man with short grey hair came up to me and said ‘Jordan, is that you?’ And when he saw he’d made a mistake he smiled a nice smile, apologized and walked off. It was only this morning that I thought it might have been Christopher Isherwood himself. The more I think about it the more convinced I become. What a perfect opportunity and I had to go and miss it. As I say: �
��Walk. Don’t Walk.’ That’s the bottom line.
I suppose I must have been preoccupied. The pier brings back all these memories like some private video-loop, and my head gets to feel like it’s full of birds all flapping around trying to get out. And also things haven’t been so good lately. On Friday Frank told me not to bother showing up at the hotel next week, I can’t seem to make any headway with the screenplay and for the last three nights Vanessa’s tried to climb into my bed.
Well, tonight I think I’ll drive to this small bar I know on Sunset. Nothing too great, a little dark. They do a nice white wine with peach slices in it, and there’s some topless, some go-go, and I hear tell that Bobby de Niro sometimes shows up for a drink.
Bizarre Situations
Before we start, something from this book I’m reading, called Truth, Falsehood and Philosophy:
It occasionally happens that a situation is so new and unusual that no speaker of the language is equipped to say what words are appropriate for it. We shall call such situations bizarre.
That’s what the book says, and I think it’s quite interesting and fairly relevant. But, how to begin? Perhaps:
I shall never forget the sight of Joan’s crumpled body, her head clumsily de-topped like a fractious child’s attempt to open a boiled egg; as if some giant’s teaspoon had levered and battered its way to Joan’s decidedly average brain.
Or maybe:
I am here in Paris, Monday night, Bar Cercle, Rue Christine – well into my third Pernod – looking for Kramer. Kramer who came to stay and allowed his wife to suicide in my guest bedroom. Suicide? No chance. Kramer murdered her and I have the proof. I think.
Or possibly:
To cure some chronic cases of epilepsy surgeons sometimes resort to a severance of the corpus callosum, the substance that holds together – and forms a crucial link between – the two hemispheres of the brain. The cure is radical, as is all brain surgery, but on the whole completely successful. Except, that is, for some very unusual side effects.
Into which we shall go later – my own epilepsy has been cured in this way. But, to return, the problem now is that all the beginnings are very apt, very apt indeed. Three of them though: three routes leading God knows where. And then, endings too are equally important, for–really – what I’m after is the truth. Or even TRUTH. A very elusive character. As elusive as bloody Kramer, sod him.
My preoccupation with truth arises from the division of my corpus callosum and explains why I am reading this book called Truth, Falsehood and Philosophy. I open at random. Chapter Two: Expressing Beliefs in Sentences. ‘Beliefs are hard to study directly and many sentences do not naturally state beliefs . . .’ My eyes dart impatiently down the page, ‘. . . although truth does not have degrees it does have many borderline cases.’ At last something pertinent. For someone with my unique problems these donnish evasions and qualifications are incredibly frustrating. So, ‘truth has borderline cases’. Good, I’m glad to find the academics admit this much, especially as since my operation the whole world has become a borderline case for me.
* * *
Kramer was at school with me. To be candid I admired him greatly and he casually exploited my admiration. In fact you could say that I loved Kramer – in a brotherly sort of way – to such an extent that, had he bothered to ask, I would have laid down my life for him. It sounds absurd to admit this now, but there was something almost noble about Kramer’s disregard for everyone except himself. You know these selfish people whose selfishness seems quite reasonable, admirable, really, in its refusal to compromise. Kramer was like that: intelligent, mysterious and self-absorbed.
We were at university together for a while, but he was scandalously sent down and went off to America where he duly made something of a name for himself as a sort of hoodlum art critic; a cultural vigilante with no respect for reputations. I often saw shadowy photographs of him in fashionable glossy magazines, and it was in one of them that I learned of his marriage – after ten years of rampant bachelorhood – to one Joan Aslinger, heiress to a West Coast fast-food chain.
Kramer and I had grown to become close friends of a sort and I continued to write to him regularly. I’m happy to report that he kept in touch: the odd letter, kitsch postcards from Hammamet or Tijuana. He used to come and stay as well – with his current girlfriend, whoever that might be – in my quiet Devon cottage for a boisterous weekend every two years or so.
I remember he was surprisingly solicitous when he heard about my operation and in an uncharacteristic gesture of largesse sent a hundred white roses to the clinic where I was convalescing. He promised shortly to visit me with his new wife Joan.
It was during one of my periodic sojourns in the Sanatorium that I experienced the particularly acute and destructive epileptic attack which prompted the doctors to recommend the severing of my corpus callosum. The operation was a complete success. I remember only waking up as bald as a football with a thin livid stripe of lacing running fore and aft along my skull.
The surgeon – a Mr Berkeley, a genial elderly Irishman – did mention the unusual side effects I would have as a result of the coupage but dismissed them with a benign smile as being ‘metaphysical’ in character and quite unlikely to impair the quality of my daily life. Foolishly, I accepted his assurances.
Kramer and his wife came to stay as promised. Joan was a fairly attractive girl; she had delightful honey-blonde hair – always so clean – bright blue eyes and a loose generous mouth. She chatted and laughed in what was clearly an attempt at sophisticated animation, but it was immediately obvious to me that she was hopelessly neurotic and quite unsuited to be Kramer’s wife. When they were together the tension that crackled between them was unbearable. On the first night they stayed I overheard a savage teeth-clenched row in the guest bedroom.
It was the effect on Kramer that I found most depressing. He was drawn and cowed, like a cornered beaten man. His brilliant wit was reduced to glum monosyllables or fervent contradictions of any opinion Joan ventured to express. Irritation and despair were lodged in every feature of his face.
It didn’t surprise me greatly when, three strained days later, Kramer announced that he had to go to London on business and Joan and I found ourselves with a lot of time on our hands. She tried hard, I have to admit, but I found her tedious and dull, as most obsessively introspective people tend to be. She came slightly more alive when she drank, which was frequently, and our preprandial lunch-time session swiftly advanced to elevenses.
I soon got the full story of Kramer’s constant bastardy of course: a tearful, finger-knotting account leaden with self-pity that went on well into the night. Other women apparently, from the word go. Things had become dramatically worse because now, it seemed, there was one in particular; one Erica – said with much venom – an old flame. As Erica’s description emerged I realized to my surprise that I knew her. She had figured in two of Kramer’s visits before his marriage to Joan. Erica was a tall intelligent red-head, strong-shouldered and of arresting appearance and with a calm and confident personality. I had liked her a lot. Naturally I didn’t tell any of this to Joan whom – as Kramer predictably rang from London announcing successive delays – I was beginning to find increasingly tiresome; she was getting on my nerves.
Take her reaction to my own particular case, for example. When I explained my unique problems caused by the side effects of my operation, she didn’t believe me. She laughed, said I must be joking, claimed that such things could never happen. I admitted such cases were exceptionally rare but affirmed it as documented medical fact.
I now know, thanks to this book I’m reading, the correct academic term for my ‘ailment’. I am a ‘bizarre situation’. Reading on I find this conclusion:
Our language is not sufficiently articulated to cope with such rare and unusual circumstances. Many philosophers and logicians are deeply unhappy about ‘bizarre situations’.
So, even the philosophers have to admit it. In my case there is no hop
e of ever reaching the truth. I find the concession reassuring somehow – but I still feel that I have to see Kramer again.
Indeed, my condition is truly bizarre. Since the link between my cerebral hemispheres was severed my brain now functions as two discrete halves. The only bodily function that this affects is perception, and the essence of the problem is this. If I see, for example, a cat in my left-side area of vision and I am asked to write down what I have seen with my right hand – I am right-handed – I cannot. I cannot write down what I have seen because the right half of my brain no longer registers what occurred in my left-hand area of vision. This is because the hemispherical division in your brain extends, so to speak, the length of your body. Right hemisphere controls right side, left hemisphere left side. Normally the information from both sides has free passage from one hemisphere to the other – linking the two halves into one unified whole. But now that this route – the corpus callosum – has gone, only half my brain has seen the cat, the right hemisphere knows nothing about it so it can hardly tell my right hand what to note down.
This is what the surgeon meant by ‘metaphysical’ side effects, and he was right to say my day-to-day existence would be untroubled by them, but consider the radical consequences of this on my phenomenological world. It is now nothing but a sequence of half truths. What, for me, is really true? How can I be sure if something that happens in my left-side area of vision really took place, if in one half of my body there is absolutely no record of it ever having occurred?
I spend befuddled hours wrestling with these arcane epistemological riddles. Doubt is underwritten; it comes to occupy a superior position to truth and falsehood. I am a genuine, physiologically real sceptic – medically consigned to this fate by the surgeon’s knife. Uncertainty is the only thing I can really be sure of.
You see what this means, of course. In my world truth is exactly what I want to believe.