Celia spends most of her stay just outside town in Palo Alto bringing the house down at Nero’s Nook in the Cabana Hotel then on to the gorgeously gaudy just-built Caesars Palace in Vegas.
Her first night in town is Dean’s last before he heads back to L.A.
“Sammy looks like shit,” she says when they catch up for a drink. “Lawford’s always stoned and screwed up and he goes right along with him.”
Dean sips his scotch, puffing his Lucky Strike. “Don’t worry about Sammy. He’s just blowing off a little steam. ’Specially in Canada and England—the girls don’t care what colour he is.”
“Does Frank know he’s into the drugs so much?”
“Ahhh, Frank … Sammy would cut off his balls for Frank.”
When she first came to Vegas, Dean’s stage booze was apple juice. Now he’s sucking back scotch morning till night. He’s getting a nose that could guide someone’s sleigh. “Everything’s changing,” she says.
“When Momma dies, a little bit of God dies.”
Her chest seizes a moment, she studies his face.
“My mother died at Christmas,” he explains.
“Mine too.”
“Guess it’s going around. You ready to divorce your wife?” He smirks. “Frank’s getting ready to toss Mia.”
“They just got married for chrissake!”
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” He reaches into his jacket and pulls out a bottle of pills and sips one down. “Percodan?” he offers. “Great for what ails ya.” She shakes her head. “At least one of us is pure.” His eyes drift about the lounge. “I wonder sometimes what woulda happened if I’d taken you up on your offer that night. If I woulda been washed in the blood of the lamb. Probably woulda got you dirty.”
“I should get back.” She pats the armrests of her chair. “Maybe we can catch up in L.A.”
“Yeah. You do that. Baby.” Calling after her, he adds, “Hey, come do my little TV show when you get to town. You wouldn’t believe what they pay me to get out of bed.”
In L.A., the Coconut Grove is booked solid. On her night off, she heads to the Factory. Lineup outside, the doorman opens the door wide for Celia. Inside, lights are flashing, go-go girls are dancing in birdcages. “Soul Man” wails from the sound system. On the dance floor they’re doing the frug and the pony but what catches her eye is Frank’s Mia in the middle of it all with Bobby. His eyes crinkle and he’s smiling his bunny smile as he dances. Mia hops like a sparrow in front of him. His eyes catch Celia’s. When the song ends, he heads over.
“Hi!” He leans in to be heard over the sound system. Celia glances about as though someone might be taking notes. “I, ah, I heard you were in town,” he says. “I’ve been reading your reviews—I, ah, especially liked the one that said you challenged America to acknowledge the plight of the castrated woman.”
“I liked that one too. I thought the feminists would hate it. My agent promised!”
He smiles. “I think it’s time I caught a show referred to as arch and sardonic by one crowd and far-out by another.”
Laughing, she rests her hand on his arm, pulls it back. They each shift foot to foot.
“You should. Come to my show, I mean. You and Mia. I’ll save you a ringside table.”
“That was—Mia and I are just friends. Not that you, ah … I’m actually here with Rudy.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean. Sure. Bring whoever you like. I’m, ah—I’m sorry I didn’t return your calls. I was—”
“Busy. Yeah.”
They nod, avert their eyes. “Rudy? Is she—”
“He. Nureyev. The dancer? You should come say hello.”
Turns out all four of them, Bobby, Rudy, Mia and Celia are staying at the Ambassador. They make a date to head for sand and surf that week, three of them determined to hit the nude beach. Nureyev thinks Celia’s hesitation is hilarious. “She okay onstage with music but without, she is squeak like mouse,” he says, pounding his steel thigh.
Taking the elevator up, Rudy and Mia get off on the fourth floor.
“Well,” Bobby says, stopping at Celia’s door. “I hope you’ll be up for the beach.”
“Thank you for this evening.”
“It was a pleasure. I worried I might never see you again when you didn’t return my calls. Not that you owe me any—never mind. Sweet dreams.” He moves back a couple steps before he sticks his hands in his pockets, turns and heads for his own bed.
Inside her suite, she wafts through to the bedroom, a little giddy. The phone rings.
Johnny. He can’t dictate to her and she is going to tell him so. She sits on the bed. The ringing stops. Resumes. She plucks the receiver as if it might burn. “Hello?”
“Hey, baby. How’s your clyde?” Off her silence, “It’s Frank. You forget me too?”
“Course not. I haven’t heard from you since Christ was a kid. How are you, daddy-O.”
“Daddy’s hacked. You seen Mia? She’s in your neck these days.”
“She’s got the lead in a scary movie! I saw her tonight.”
“Scary all right.” His voice is angry and morose at once. “She was sposed to stay in New York and do a picture with me. Stead she fucked off west. She say anything?”
“Yes … she said that she misses you.”
“Don’t con a con, kid. She don’t miss me. She don’t give a shit.”
“Yes, she does. She just doesn’t want to live off your name.”
He snorts. “How the hell y’think she got the lead? Where’d you see her?” Frank knows all about the Factory. Peter and Sammy are part owners. “A discotheque? Her and a bunch of goddamn free-love longhairs?”
“No. When I came in, she was dancing with Bobby Kennedy and then I joined—”
“She’s two-timing me with that little shit-for-brains.”
“They were dancing. I was dancing more with him than she was.”
“I don’t like that either. Johnny know you’re with that prick?”
“I’m not with him. And Johnny’s not my keeper.”
“Well, I’m Mia’s and that’s it for that broad. She’s deadsville far as I’m concerned. Tell her I said so.” He hangs up.
Two days later Mia brings Bobby, Rudy and Celia to a nude beach she knows out past Pepperdine, Celia and Mia in dark wigs and sunglasses, Bobby and Rudy sporting fake goatees and baseball caps. They wave to people as they drive, giggling and blowing kisses.
Not long after they’ve reclined under the sun, Mia springs a leak. Frank’s lawyer served her with papers that morning. Celia’s throat seizes. About to offer condolences, she blurts her conversation with Frank instead, wrapping it in apologies.
Mia bites a nail. “I should have stayed in New York, I guess. I should’ve been a proper wife. I don’t even know what that is.”
Celia looks at her tiny childlike body, the big sad eyes. The four of them lie back against the log and stare at the ocean. Only Mia and Rudy are naked. Celia has on her bikini bottoms and can’t get up the nerve to take her top off in front of Bobby who’s still not out of his shorts either.
Finally Rudy announces it’s time for wine and opens a bottle. “Goddamn. Don’t remember some cup.” He shrugs and takes a belt, passing the bottle to Mia, who sips pensively.
“I used to want to be a pediatrician,” she says, wiping a tear. “Maybe Asia and Africa. Look where I end up: pregnant with the devil’s baby.”
“Oh god, Mia. Does he know?” Bobby asks.
Mia manages a smile. “Not that devil. Satan. He’s co-starring in the picture I’m on … I’m performing in these chunks of capitalist piggery and I’m the wife of the most decadent man in America …” She plucks at the rock on her finger, flashing like a lighthouse under the sun. “I think I need to contemplate, find some kind of truth in my soul. I need to go to India.”
Celia stares at Mia’s elfin feet. “What’s in India?”
“Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.”
Celia glances to
Bobby for enlightenment.
Bobby and Rudy sit at the table reserved for them and Celia makes a meal of flirting with both through the earlier part of her act. Dressed as Wayne Newton, she grabs Nureyev’s face and, just before she pulls off her mustache, kisses him on the lips. The room erupts.
Come four in the morning, Bobby walks Celia to her suite again, the two of them giggling.
“Does everyone know about Rudy? You’re not afraid people will think he’s your lover?”
He smiles. “With the reputation Kennedy men have?”
At her door, they stop. Bobby stammers something inaudible, looks down the hall and takes Celia’s hands. “I wish I weren’t leaving in the morning,” he tells her.
Guilt winds around inside her. “I’m savouring your book a little at a time. You’re a wonderful writer.”
“It’s not high art but I suppose wiretapping’s the closest I come to creativity.” Glancing down the hall again, he suddenly puts his mouth on hers.
She kisses back, grasping his arm. He pulls her in by the small of her back. As his lips part to kiss her more deeply, she turns her head. “I’m sorry.”
“You’re involved with someone?”
“You are.”
He smiles sheepishly. “‘Most dangerous is that temptation that doth goad us on to sin in loving virtue.’”
“More Shakespeare?” she sighs.
“When faced with reality, steal another man’s poetry.” He takes his hands from her shoulders. “Would you—I’m sorry,” he says. “Good night.”
Seventeen
I SAT ON THE COUCH WATCHING A CLIP OF AN OLD Merv Griffin Show: footage of Norman Mailer being cuffed by police in Washington followed by Merv’s studio interview. “I felt it was very important to get arrested to protest the war in Vietnam, which I think is an obscene war. I’ll repeat myself, I think it’s more obscene than all the dirty four-letter words that all the dirty American authors pour into all the dirty books that you ban in your libraries. I think this war is more obscene in one minute in the mind of General Westmoreland than all those words put together because we’re burning children over there, we’re burning children we’ve never seen.”
Hoots and mutters from the studio audience as I picked up my phone. Leonard was in my ear with an invitation. I pressed the VCR’s pause button and said, “You’re not going to be a monk, so shut up about it.”
Silence. I looked down at my toes, laced with toilet paper to keep them apart as my Rascal Red polish dried. Leonard wanted me to drive out to Westminster Abbey Mission with him to see the Benedictine monastery. “I can’t go anyway,” I told him.
“Why? Are you hungover again?”
“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning, that’s the best they’re going to feel all day.”Silence. “Frank Sinatra said that.” More silence. “Frank made me an appointment to get acrylic nails done. My Frank, I mean.”
“You can’t go with me to investigate how I can use my art to contribute to peace and truth in the world because you need fake nails so you can sell more pornography to pathetic soulless perverts, is that what you’re saying?”
“Well. Yeah. Oh for chrissake, Len. Have you talked to Eunice?”
“Yes. I was over there this morning. I brought her some soup and a little painting. I wanted to tell her that she inspired me spiritually.”
“Eunice, you and your mental instability have inspired me to hide out in monkitude.”
“I’ve always been interested. The first awareness of a vocation to the consecrated life is often seen and discerned in early childhood.” He was reading from that goddamn Web site again.
“Watching In the Name of the Rose thirteen times suggests obsession not a calling.” I hobbled on my heels, wet toenails splayed upward, sat at my laptop and Googled “Benedictine monastery.” The Sisters of Benedictine came up first. Have you considered a lifetime dedicated to serving God and the people of God? Maybe you have what it takes to be a Benedictine woman. My eyes drifted up to the webcam sitting at the top of the screen.
“Are you still there?” Leonard asked. I grunted. “Why is this pissing you off so much?”
“Can’t you just volunteer someplace or something? Why do you have to fuck off to a monastery? Some guys like older women. Big deal.”
He let a couple seconds go by. “I’m a thirty-four-year-old waiter. I’ve never had a real girlfriend. I’m supposed to be an artist and I barely produce. Maybe if I focused on finding the Christ in other people I could at least use my art to make somebody else’s life better.”
I clicked on my mail program. I hadn’t done that since I’d got back from San Francisco. There were three hundred new e-mails. “Why can’t things stay the same?” I asked, deleting blocks of twenty and thirty junk-mail offers for bigger boobs, dicks and mortgages at a time, until I came to one with Kiss of Death in the subject line. I hesitated, clicked and gasped: a picture of a dead girl lying at the riverside, rotting leaves and twigs around and under her head, mud and blood smeared across her slack jaw, her hands, dark roots at the back of her dirty matted yellow hair, purple bruises on her throat.
“What’s the matter?” Len asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, gagging on fear. “Oh my god. I thought someone sent me a picture of a dead hooker and it’s me. Fuck.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I opened an e-mail from a props guy on set—oh god. Why did I ask to see these? I forgot …” There were four pictures. Each image was closer up until I could clearly make out the grains of mud and dirt on my fish-white skin, feel the cold on my strangled neck. A big drop of rainwater slipped off the branches overhead and wriggled into my ear again.
Under those shots were four more of my corpse on the shower floor, a pale peach curtain covering my torso and thighs, wet hair stringing over my limp hand. My neck looked as though it had been broken. “Why would I take a job like this right after she died?” I said, my voice high and faraway, like some small self begging.
“To pretend you don’t give a shit. You always do stuff like that.”
“I don’t,” I muttered.
“Whoa! Is that you? Cool.” Frank leaned over my shoulder now. I recoiled. “Are those from Kiss of Death?”
“I gotta go, I’m late,” I said into the receiver and hung up.
Frank’s hand came in and scrolled up so he could see the rest of the images. “Jesus. These ones by the river are really creepy. You look dead. Man. We should post those on our site. There’s guys totally into this shit.”
I stiffened. “What?”
“E-mail them over to Brian’s.”
“No. These are property of the studio. We could get s-sued,” I stuttered in my chair. “These are dead pictures. They’re not sex. They’re dead!”
He chuckled. “Don’t get all pissed. I just thought it’d be funny. We could charge ’em up the whazoo for these. On that other page I’m building, you know. Actually we could just mail them copies for twenty bucks a pop or something. Like with your panties.” He looked at me like a kid looks at someone with cake.
“Would you … fuck off!” I shut down my mail program and lurched out of my seat. I shook my hands in front of me, my spine wiggling away from him with a shudder. He laughed and grabbed me around the waist, making some kind of perverse ghoul howl.
“Get your mitts off.”
“I was just kidding!” he yelled as I went down the hall to get dressed. “Oh, by the way, I paid your Visa bill. Happy birthday.”
“What’re you talking about?” I called from the bedroom, hunting for a bra.
“They called from Visa yesterday and you were over your limit so I transferred two grand from our site account onto your bill.”
I pulled my jeans on. “Thanks.” This was rather un-Frank. “What got you so fired-up thoughtful?”
“I didn’t want my girl running around with no credit.” He stood in the bedroom door now. “And I ordered you some
really cool slutterwear. And I needed to charge a new camera.”
Figured. “How much was the camera?”
“I’ve been bulking up search words that’ll bring guys straight to your page. Traffic’s gonna be major soon.”
“How much was the camera?”
“Fifteen hundred.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I looked at him aghast. “Why didn’t you put that on your own card?”
“My limit’s only five hundred. You know that.”
I grabbed my purse. “I guess I’m paying for these acrylic nails you bought me then.”
He hauled me into one of his arms and reached into his pocket. “We are. I almost forgot.” Pulling out a wad of bills, he peeled off three hundred bucks behind my back then stuck it in my bra. “Here’s a little mad money. Now, give Daddy some sugar.”
“Oh brrrother,” I said, my mother’s letters fluttering in my head.
Expo ’67; Canada’s birthday; Charles de Gaulle; “If You’re Going to San Francisco”; Love, Frankness, Contemplation; Haight-Ashbury; Eastern mysticism; New York; Fun City; Barbra Streisand; Free and Easy; Jackie goes to Cambodia; The Doors; Carl Sandburg; Come on, come on, come on, come on, now touch me, babe; Bobby Kennedy; Pope Paul; Vietnam; Berkeley; Mohammed Ali; Hell no nobody go; Martin Luther King; Norman Mailer; urban revolt; Detroit riots; National Guard; race warfare; anti-riot bill; Black Panthers; it’s a gas gas gas; Rap Brown; Che Guevara; kill for peace; between a chuckle and a sneer; Six Day War; “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”; “Come Back When You Grow Up.”
Celia’s digs in Atlantic City are at the Claridge Hotel, a quick hop from the 500 Club. Sinatra was in town the week before and Skinny D’Amato puts her in the suite he had.
“Sonuvabitch left it in good shape this time,” Skinny tells her when he calls to see that she’s settled in all right. “Didn’t leave no punch holes in the wall or nothin’.” He invites her to dine with him at the club but she thinks she’ll order room service, give herself a chance to unwind before the show.
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