No Cure for Love

by Peter Robinson

  She helped herself to a gin and tonic from the minibar and sat down on the sofa. She didn’t really want a drink, but she felt restless. It was something to do, and it might help take the edge off her nerves now the sedative had worn off. She thumbed through The New Yorker but couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything. There was nothing on TV, either, except soap operas.

  As soon as she tasted the gin, she thought of the tour. Gin and tonic had been Sarah’s drink then, and the taste brought back memories. So did hotel rooms. They acted on her the way the “madeleine’ did on Proust.

  Sometimes on tour, she would sit up all night with the band playing poker, smoking, drinking, maybe listening to late-night radio stations in Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, New Orleans or Phoenix. She couldn’t remember the places, just the one composite hotel room, the pills, the joints, the drunkenness and the hallucinatory quality of it all: someone fucking in the bathtub while one of the sound tekkies puked down the toilet; someone, maybe Gary or the lead guitarist, whatsisname, going crazy and trashing the room.

  Now she had the memories back, they didn’t matter. She knew now that she hadn’t really lost her memory in the first place, hadn’t blocked out incidents. The whole thing had been exactly like her memories of it. That was it. There was no more. The entire experience had been a blur; it was vague. That was exactly the quality that life had possessed above all others at that time: a kind of hallucinatory, jump-frame vagueness. What seemed blurred now had been blurred then. In fact, things were perhaps a little clearer now than they ever had been at the time.

  It had been a long walk on the wild side for her—more of a stagger, really—and if she had slept with a few people she shouldn’t have, so what? Chalk it up to experience. After all, she hadn’t caught any diseases, and she had come through.

  She also remembered the incident that had finally driven her to run away from the tour madness and into a different kind of madness of her own, the incident she had begun to tell Arvo about in hospital. Thank God she had stopped herself in time.

  IT HAD been a very hot day and the band was staying at a hotel in Anaheim. They were supposed to be playing at the stadium there the next night. Gary needed some designer-drug cocktail or other, and Mitch had found a guy who lived over in the trailer park across the road. Someone who dealt a little.

  So, they had gone over. Gary, herself, Mitch and his brother. Inside, the trailer was hot and stuffy. One of the windows was open an inch, but it didn’t help much. Someone had stuck yellow plastic daisy and sunflower appliqués on the walls beside the crude drawings of cocks and cunts, the kind of thing she’d once seen in a gents toilet in Bognor Regis one drunken night long ago.

  Sarah was sitting in a battered armchair, she remembered, the kind with the seat so worn and low that it’s difficult to get out of easily, especially if you’re as spaced as she was. There was a fat woman at a table by the door silently removing her bright red nail polish, head bent so she showed at least three chins. She was wearing shorts and a black tank top that strained at its seams over her bulk. The acrid smell of acetone infused the hot, stale air.

  The man from whom Gary was buying the drugs was skinny and wore only a pair of garish Hawaiian shorts. He had no hairs on his chest and a tattoo of an anchor on his upper right arm. His teeth were bad, like a speed freak’s; his long hair was greasy, and he hadn’t shaved for a few days. He smoked one joint after another. The other man in the trailer looked like a biker to Sarah, with a full beard, beer gut, black T-shirt and torn, oil-stained jeans. The smell of oil and grease formed an undertone to the nail polish remover and marijuana smoke. Like the woman, he too remained silent.

  The only ones doing the talking were Gary and the skinny guy. Sarah remembered wanting to leave, but she was so out of it, and so deep in the armchair, that she couldn’t muster the energy.

  Seven of them in there, then. And the dog. A bowlegged, mean-eyed, ugly pit bull with a black-and-white snout. It looked like the dog equivalent of a shark, Sarah thought—single-minded, merciless, vicious—and it scared her the way it kept coming over to her and sniffing. She asked the biker to tell it to go away but he ignored her. So did the skinny guy and the fat woman too. They all snorted a sample of the designer drug. All except Sarah, who had just about had it by then, and Mitch’s brother, who never touched drugs.

  Everyone got more bright-eyed and excited. God knew what was in the cocktail, but they either seemed to find every word a priceless witticism or every sentence a pronouncement of the most profound importance. It was all getting to seem very silly to Sarah, who was coming down fast now, and she was trying to work up the energy to get out of the damn armchair.

  But the dog wouldn’t leave her alone. It kept sticking its snout in her crotch, pushing hard up against her. She kept shoving it away but it just glared at her and came back for more. She was wearing a short skirt, and the position she was stuck in, the dog could get its nose under the hem, right between her thighs and rub against her panties.

  Getting scared now, she smacked it hard on the snout one time and it snarled at her. The others noticed then, distracted out of their drugged haze for a moment. Then the skinny guy pointed, said “Look,” and they all started to laugh. Sarah couldn’t see because of her position, so she twisted sideways and saw that the dog had an enormous erection.

  She told them she didn’t think it was funny and tried to get out of the chair again. But the dog stopped her. This time it put its forepaws up on her breasts and tried to straddle her. This brought howls of laughter from the skinny guy and the fat woman. Even the biker grinned. “Hung like a horse, that dog,” he said.

  Then, before Sarah knew what was happening, the dog was sniffing and rubbing around her thighs with its snout, great hard-on down between its back legs, and the mingled smells of motor oil and marijuana smoke and acetone were stifling her, the heat making her skin burn and her heart pound. Christ, she was coming down so fast it was leaving skid-marks on her brain.

  Someone tried to pull her out of the armchair. He got her almost all the way out, then she felt dizzy, slipped out of his grasp and slumped over to one side, hanging over the chair arm. She could feel the dog nudging her and sniffing between her legs from behind now and someone said something about doggie-style and she felt a hand pull at her panties.

  She kicked back hard, hit flesh with a sharp heel and heard someone curse, then she mustered all the strength she could and got to her feet. She swayed for a moment, dots swimming in front of her eyes, and steadied herself with her hand on the wall. The room was spinning around her; everyone was looking at her like faces in a fish-eye lens.

  The dog growled. Gary was holding his shin but still laughing. The fat woman near the door had put down her bottle of nail polish remover and was starting to look threatening in a blank, porcine kind of way. The dog was still worrying Sarah, barking, rubbing against her legs, licking them and jumping up to push its snout in her crotch.

  Nobody moved. They were all just watching her. Sarah managed to dredge up all her reserves, and with what felt like a superhuman effort, she pushed open the door. Just before she got outside, the fat woman grabbed her roughly by the arm and tried to drag her back in.

  As she struggled, she became aware of a quick movement and a slapping sound from behind her. She turned. Mitch Cameron had hit the fat woman in the face and blood poured from her piggy mouth. Her grip loosened and Sarah staggered out, crying, into the harsh daylight. Nobody else tried to stop her. She weaved her way through the trailer park, then toward the road, dodging between the lanes of honking traffic on the wide road and tottering on her high heels back to the hotel.

  She looked behind once, but no one was following her. Something snapped inside her, and now there was only one thought in her mind. Run far away from here.

  By the time she had crossed the road, she had regained enough basic control to know that the only thing she could do was take a cab to Ellie Huysman’s. She knew the address by heart, even when she was
stoned. Ellie would help her.

  The doorman at the hotel recognized her, knew she was hooked up with money and got her a cab. It was only when she had collapsed in the back seat and given the cabby Ellie’s Redondo Beach address that she realized she’d left her purse, wallet and everything else she owned either back at the trailer or in the hotel room. But by then she didn’t care. There could be no going back; it was all over; she just had to get away. Ellie would pay the cabby. All Sarah wanted to do was sleep. Sleep and cry.

  SARAH RUBBED her eyes, as if to erase the memory, then pushed the gin and tonic aside. Why she had even poured it in the first place, she didn’t know. She hadn’t touched a drop of the stuff since she had walked out on Gary. Damn hotel rooms, the things they made you do, made you remember. She took a small can of ginger ale out of the fridge and sipped that to take the taste of the gin away.

  An airplane left a vapor trail across the horizon above the Hollywood Hills. Closer to the hotel, a police helicopter whirred over the Blue Whale, maybe keeping an eye on her. Sarah sighed and picked up The New Yorker again.

  Nothing to do now but wait.

  40

  WAITING. WAITING. WAITING.

  He hadn’t been able to wait outside the hospital all night—there were other things he had to do—but he was certain they wouldn’t let her out until morning. He had seen the crash from a distance, and though it had wrenched his heart to watch and to think he might have been partly responsible, that there had been a misunderstanding, he could tell that she hadn’t been seriously injured.

  Now, in different clothes, with darker hair and driving a new rental car, he watched the chaos outside the hospital as the detective wheeled her out.

  She was Their prisoner now. His love was a prisoner, and there was nothing he could do. It was obvious They had tightened security since last night. That studio bodyguard had been pathetically easy, only too willing to jump to the bait of a macho game of freeway cat-and-mouse.

  Now, though, he was certain that the car following them was an unmarked police car, and he made sure, after he had broken from the crowd of reporters, that he stayed well behind.

  Again, it turned out to be remarkably easy. His sense of luck was developing fast and strong. Instead of taking her to jail, they took her to a hotel. Well, a hotel could become a jail easily enough, couldn’t it?

  He knew there would be guards on her door and maybe even a bodyguard in the room with her. The thought made him shake with rage. He gripped the wheel until his knuckles turned white and told himself to be calm, calm, calm.

  He wanted to kill them all and carry her high into the mountains or deep into the sea. He no longer had any fear of the unknown. The way things had been going, with the lies they had probably brainwashed her to believe about him and the shyness and awkwardness that still inhibited the way he communicated with her, he knew now that their best chance, their only chance, lay beyond the confines of the flesh. She must learn to love the unknown with him.

  Soon. It would be soon. Nothing to do now but wait. Wait and think.

  41

  STAN HARVEY’S OFFICE WAS ON THE FOURTH floor of a low-rise stucco building on Hollywood Boulevard, just a stone’s throw from the Capitol Records Tower, that bizarre construction on Vine, built to look like a stack of records. It was showing its age, Arvo thought as he parked. These days it would be built more like a stack of CDs.

  Harvey himself answered Arvo’s knock at the frosted-glass door and excused himself for a moment. He was on the phone, he apologized, and his secretary had left early. Wearing jeans and a black Rolling Stones T-shirt, the kind with the tongue sticking out between red lips on the back, he looked about fifty. He was mostly bald, and whatever gray hair he could muster from the sides and back was tied in a ponytail. Lord deliver us from middle-aged men with pony-tails, Arvo thought. Don’t they realize how ridiculous they look?

  While Harvey finished his phone call, Arvo studied a signed photograph of Gary Knox among the dozens of other framed celebrity photos on the walls. He had forgotten how decadent, how aristocratically, poetically and elegantly wrecked Knox had looked, a sort of cross between Jim Morrison and Keith Richards, with his full lips in a pout, faintly sneering expression, five o’clock shadow and the lank brown hair perpetually falling over one eye.

  The other eye, however, stared out with disconcerting clarity, as if piercing into your soul, knowing all your faults and secret shames. Knowing and not forgiving. Gary Knox looked merciless in his judgements.

  As he looked at the image, Arvo found it impossible to picture Sarah Broughton as part of this man’s life. From what he knew of her, she seemed an intelligent and sensitive woman; what on earth could she possibly have seen in him? On the other hand, Arvo knew well enough that whatever powers governed human coupling often showed a very black sense of humor indeed.

  “Nasty looking piece of work, ain’t he?” said Harvey, hanging up the phone and lighting a cigarette with an initialled gold lighter. Not much to look at himself, he had a scraggly gray beard and matching moustache. Where the facial hair left off, little red veins were visible under dry skin. Above the thin lips and the slightly hooked nose, his eyes seemed to weave the motifs of his hair and complexion; they were gray, streaked red with burst blood vessels.

  Harvey was yet another member of the Brit “Mafia.” A Cockney, by the sound of him. “Siddown, siddown,” he said. Arvo sat in a black swivel chair opposite the cluttered desk. “What can I do you for?”

  “How long have you been in this business?” Arvo asked.

  Harvey sucked on his cigarette. “’Ard to say, really,” he answered, blowing out smoke as he said it. “Since the sixties, I suppose. I used to hang around the London clubs when the Stones, the Yardbirds and the rest used to play there. Christ, those were some days. You can forget Liverpool. I mean, fuck Liverpool, man. London was where it was at. The energy. The talent.

  “I was just a snotty-nosed little kid back then, didn’t know my arse from my elbow. I got into the business slowly, in a small way at first, working as a roadie for a local band, arranging a few gigs for my mates. Then, poof, all of a sudden these local bands are in demand. Record contracts materialize out of thin air. There’s money in it. Well, Stan, this beats clocking on for a nine-to-fiver, I told myself, so I set up as a semi-pro. One thing led to another, and here I am.”

  “When did you come over here?”

  “Late sixties. Matter of fact, I came over for Woodstock—the original one—and never really went back again. Well, you know what I mean, not back to settle there, like. Business trips, of course. But LA’s my home now, for my sins. England’s finished. Fucked. Has been for years.”

  “What exactly was your relationship with Gary Knox?”

  “Purely business. I kept the bastard at arm’s-length as much as I could. Between you and me, he was an evil little pillock. Talented, sure, but what a manipulative, arrogant son of a bitch. Unreliable, too.” Harvey shook his head slowly. “You meet all kinds in this business,” he said. “Mostly they’re egotistical little pillocks without any talent, so I suppose Knox at least had one over them on that score. But the bastard cost me money.”

  “How?”

  “No-shows, for a start. And that notorious gig in Omaha—you must have read about it—when he staggered on stage late, tried to get the opening of the first song right for about five minutes, then swore at the audience and walked off. Stoned. Naturally, they all asked for their money back.”

  “What was your job?”

  “Well, basically I promoted the tour. You know, arranged the venues, the publicity, transport, accommodation and so on. When I say that, I don’t mean I did it all myself, of course. Most of the work was delegated or contracted out to local promoters. I guess my office sort of coordinated things. I used to work with Kenny Little, Gary’s manager, in London years back.”

  “Did you have any contact with Gary and the band while they were on tour?”

  “Too bloody much
. Knox was such an obnoxious prat, I kid you not, that he’d phone me in the middle of the night to complain if the hotel had Courvoisier instead of Rémy in the minibar. Which can happen a lot if you’re doing places like Milwaukee and Rapid City, no matter how ritzy the hotel, believe me. I mean, you’d be lucky to even get cognac, some of those places. Don’t know Rémy from cough syrup.” He stabbed out his cigarette in an ashtray shaped like a gold record with curled edges. The smouldering butt fell to rest among about twenty others.

  “But you didn’t actually spend any time with them at the hotel or backstage?”

  Harvey stared at him, open-mouthed. “Spend time with those infantile piss-artists? You must be joking.” He pointed his thumb at his chest. “This may be my job, but I’ve got a life, mate.”

  “What about when they were here in LA?”

  “Same thing. No, wait a minute. I did have to go down and sort something out once.”

  “Sort what out?”

  “I like to give local bands a chance to play as openers sometimes, if they’re good enough, and I’d arranged for a band I liked to open at one of Gary’s LA shows. Naturally, they’re all excited, so they get there early and set up their equipment. Then Gary’s roadies arrive and start dismantling it all. They said there wasn’t enough room on the stage for both Gary’s and the support band’s amps and speakers, and they wouldn’t have time to set up for Gary between acts, so the support band would just have to fuck off.”

  “Nice guys.”

  Harvey smiled. “Welcome to the music business. So, when I get there, there’s almost a fight going on, and Gary’s stoned already, just sort of watching and standing back. I sort it out—find a corner for the support band’s gear—and leave.”

  “Did you meet Sarah? Sally Bolton?”

  “Oh, yeah. She was backstage, just sitting there, you know, crying her eyes out, and everyone was ignoring her. I remembered meeting her once before, in London. I asked her what was wrong.”