Mystery Girl: A Novel

by David Gordon

  So that’s how I ended up in Hollywood. The twin pulls of America and the movies. I had an art career in London and Berlin but I had to escape. I couldn’t stand those snobby, overstuffed yet pathetically desperate European art whores, although of course I was one of them myself. One of the worst. And no matter what anyone says, no matter how much you crow over Antonioni and Bergman, in the end to really engage with the cinema means American cinema, Hollywood cinema, the golden age. It is like a Catholic and the Vatican or an Englishman and the Queen, or a German and the Camps: the thing that you might hate but that still defines you, that you must acknowledge and somehow confront. Plus there was a lot of sex to be had in Hollywood with healthy happy tan American girls, and warm non-German, non-English weather and cheap rent. You like fucking outdoors? In the fresh air? I do. I love it. Or by the pool. Or just to relax and take a piss in the warm sun like an animal. I love this about LA. I love the sun and the whores and the cheap rent and the Korean barbeque and the old American cars. So what if some whores are dumb? You think everyone with an English accent is smart? They elected Thatcher and reduced their own country to a bleak, wet, gray, tired, used-up slag heap. Anyway, I’m not so smart myself. I sound smart to Americans because of my European accent and because I read a few books in school which is so rare here. If you know a little Shakespeare, one play, Hamlet, and two poems by anyone, Americans think you’re a genius. Really I read much more later on in Mexico. One good thing about being dead is you can catch up on your reading. Though finding books in English or German is hard. My Spanish is OK now, I can read. For English and German books you have to order, or go the estate sales of dead expats, dead white whales, where the locals snatch up the clothes or furniture but no one else wants the books. Then you get to read what everyone has on their shelves but never reads, Shakespeare, Goethe, Homer, Dante. A lot had never been opened. I read the Norton Anthology of English Poetry cover to cover. Finally I became an educated European, a cultured man, reading the unread books found in the vacation homes of retired drunken soccer-obsessed Euros. For the first time in my life, I read the Bible, relaxing here in my tomb.

  Where is my lighter? That is the problem here. You can get Cuban cigars but you can’t keep them dry in this humid, fetid, rotting jungle. So. As it happens, in the end, I did not make too many films in Hollywood. Oh well. I am a lousy whore after all. I am willing. I am not proud. I will show my ass and tits. I will take the dick. Take it deep. But I cannot with a straight face tell the customer, I love you, sir, you are so handsome, your dick is so big, you make me come so good like no one else. Maybe you say I am too smart for them but honestly I think I am too stupid. A smart whore knows how to lie to the customer, to bullshit him, to tell him what he wants to hear. When they ask me what I think of their idea I always said, this is sheer stupidity but I will do what you say, it’s your money. This they don’t like. It’s not good enough to suck it up for money. You must pretend it is for love. But then, like in a storybook, like in a lame stupid American movie, I did find love in Hollywood after all, true love and happy ever after, with the most beautiful, the most brilliant, the most courageous, the most filthy and horny whore I’ve ever met. My darling wife. No, I correct myself. She was not a whore. A whore does it for money like me. I am the whore. She, my friends, was a slut. A slut does it for love. She loved me. I won’t say she was my soul mate since there is no such thing as a soul. That is a ridiculous fairy tale created to enslave the childish ignorant masses who fear life almost as much as death. But she was my brain mate and certainly my body mate—my cock was the partner of her cunt, my tongue was the best friend of her clitoris and yes her ass too, her lips were pals with my testicles, and my mouth became intimate buddies with her nipples. The self-help therapists and women’s magazine editors say that the mind is the most erogenous zone of a man’s body. This is ridiculous of course, it is the underside of the tip of the penis. But still, something in my brain lit up when I met her. Like sticking my dick in an electrical socket. I knew I had found my destiny. I felt the way real artists feel when they pick up a brush or a pen. Did I ever think she was a demon, succubus, come to suck the marrow of my mind? Of course. Many times, I called her demonchild, devil, vampiress, goddess, monster, and queen. I felt that she had enslaved me, with her cunt and her brain and her eyes. My work became about her and for her and then also with her. We were partners, cocreators, and I say without false modestly or any sort of hesitation that she was the leader, the primary creative force, not I. I am not ashamed to admit this as a man. She was superior to me. I worshipped her. I was her slave. Her dog. Yes, I know, my form of worship was not typical. I am an atypical man, and so an atypical dog as well. People thought I was exploiting her sexually, involving her in perverse fantasies, degrading acts, delirious escapades, and transforming her into an erotic object. This is all true. I was doing all of that and more. Much more. But it was all to please her. These were her fantasies, her desires, and I was her plaything, her willing, very willing, this I admit freely, her decidedly eager and willing servant. I was in heaven. But I was also dwelling in fear. Fear that she would leave me, tire of me. Fear that I would fail to satisfy her, that I could not meet her needs, sexually, creatively, even financially, so that she would leave me behind. Some part perhaps of my film Succubi! deals with this. We cowrote it and during the process I shared with her my fears, and, very cleverly, she suggested we make a story on this. Also my best films, our best films, the trilogy, Invitation, Consummation, and Ascension, were a long homage to her. I don’t say that it was dedicated to her. That is an insult. I would not dare to say such a thing. It belonged to her. It was hers. Of course in the end my fear came true. She did leave me. But it was not because I failed to please her or to spend enough money. She simply outgrew me. She outgrew this life here. She needed to be free. She had grown up and was ready to leave home. No, the difference in our ages did not ever bother me. It excited me. Fine, I am a pervert. Good. I have never given a damn about your bourgeois morality anyway. I am an outlaw, OK, a nonviolent, intellectual, and comfortably well-off outlaw, a meek, obedient outlaw, but here I am still in Mexico, like Billy the Kid. The other reason was that when I met her I knew she was a genius, and to genius age is irrelevant. Yes, I am a pervert, I admit this fully, but I stand up and claim I am also a feminist, because when I met this girl, this young girl, I immediately recognized an equal. I don’t expect you to understand, because you weren’t there, you didn’t know us, you didn’t know her, but we were in fact a true marriage of equals, or perhaps in many ways she was the stronger, yes, she was the leader. Between a middle-aged mediocre artist and a fifteen-year-old genius there is no contest. She wins. This is why when I met her I did not hesitate. I threw myself at her. I begged. From the night I met her, at a party in the Hollywood Hills, where she was sitting in a hot tub in her bikini bottom and no top, smoking a joint with the also topless wife of the owner of the house, and their four breasts just sort of bobbing in the bubbles and the nipples gazing peacefully at me through the steam, and I climbed in beside them and the wife, her husband was a British film producer, he was out of town somewhere making a picture, and the wife said, Zed, have you met Mona? And we shook hands, which the ladies laughed at, my being so formal with a topless woman, and I said, It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance and she said, Enchanté, and I kissed her hand, her soft, wet little hand, and she giggled and said, Please, sir, have a seat. And I sat down in the tub with them and they handed me the joint. The water was very hot and at first the heat and smoke dazed me. It was dark too, where we were, with the main party at the other end of the estate, across the flat, still pool, glowing blue like a hole in space, and the laughter and voices and music seeming so far away, and the lights all around us, the lights of the city and sky all flowing together into one great sea, everything blinking on and off, star, car, airplane, satellite, comet. Before I knew it the producer’s wife had gone, she said to get a beer, it was only us two remaining, and I had barely seen
her face, it was dark, the scene just lit by the moon and the tip of the joint, and we talked and talked and laughed and laughed, then I realized we had stopped talking and stopped laughing and were just sitting, just sitting there and staring into the darkness in silence. Marry me, I said. Let’s drive to Las Vegas and get married. She laughed. You’re stoned, she said. I am, I said, it’s true, but I mean it, let’s get married. She laughed, I can’t get married she said. I am fifteen. I can’t legally marry for a year. OK, I said. I will wait. She laughed again. Then she kissed me. And one year later she was my wife.

  I have cancer. That’s why I rose from my grave. I’m dying, again, and this time, the doctors assure me, it will last. When I received this final verdict, I decided to leave my one valuable object, my only treasured possession, to the only woman I ever loved, my wife, or ex-wife, I suppose. We had not been living together for some years but it did not matter. She was still my genius and I knew she would know what to do with my gift, which has supported me all these years. I am speaking of course of the film, the one and only copy of Ascension. It is the desire of some very powerful people to keep unseen this film that has bankrolled my very comfortable life since my death. Now I decided to give it to her, since it was hers all along, to profit from, to release or to destroy as she saw fit. But when I contacted her, when I told her that I was dying and wanted to meet her one last time and deliver the film, I did not foresee the danger it would create. My enemies were not sleeping after so many years. As soon as I began to arise from my grave, their alarms went off. They had been watching her and watching for me, watching everyone we knew. As a result, my stupid actions placed her in danger, grave danger. If the film falls into their hands, then she is certainly dead. Of course as you know by now, it does not contain my suicide. I had always promised to kill myself and film it. This was well known. I had always assumed that was how I’d die. But as long as I had her, I found I wanted to live after all. At least a little bit more. I’m glad I did. The film, Ascension, is in a bank box, a safe deposit, number 5424, at the Desert Savings Bank in Twentynine Palms. She is the only one left alive who knows what it contains. I’ve sent the only key under a fake name that she would know, because she used to call me by it, in Mexico, the name I wish was mine. Go there, retrieve the key, then get the film, and use it to help her. Go to the UPS in Twentynine Palms and ask for—

  80

  AT FIRST I THOUGHT the house had been struck by lightning. I thought the sound was more thunder, rolling from the sea, and the shattering impact on my left was the lightning strike or maybe the storm blowing out a window. Without thinking, as though pausing to answer the phone during a movie, I hit stop on the video remote control. A red X flashed on the screen and it went blank.

  “Oh shit,” I blurted, realizing I’d fucked up. Then Nic gasped and I looked where she was looking. The sliding glass door was gone and a woman was standing in the frame, pointing a large machine pistol at us while the rain fell in curtains around her. She wore skintight pink Lycra pants, red booties, and a purple sports bra. A man flanked her, pistol up, dressed in small, tight, crotch-cuddling running shorts, hiking boots, and a T-shirt slit to make room for his swollen biceps. The front door opened and another guy came in, aiming a shotgun. He was in running tights that contoured his buttocks and genitals, sneakers with neon springs under the heels, and a tight mesh top. We raised our hands, the remote still in mine, as the woman stepped through the shattered frame, glass crunching under her sneakers.

  “Who the fuck are you guys?” Nic asked.

  The girl ignored her and stepped up to me.

  “Nice to look at you again,” she said in her heavy accent.

  “Hi,” I said, my hands in the air. “Yes, it’s funny to bump into you here.” I turned to Nic. “She works for Buck Norman, the director. But I’m sorry, I don’t recall your name.”

  “John,” she said.

  “You’re an actress?” Nic asked, looking her over, confused and frightened but curious.

  “No.” She smiled. “I am not actress. But I make the action. I can say this in English?”

  “You mean, you take action?” I asked.

  “Take? No I give. I give action.”

  “Yes, but that’s not how you say it. You say take.”

  “Why take if give?”

  “Or just act. You act.”

  “Yes OK.” She laughed. “I like.” She pointed the gun at Nic. “I am not actress but I act, OK?”

  Nic nodded. “Sure.”

  “And you are the harlot.”

  “I’m what?”

  “The harlot. Is the right word? Perform sex acts for payment?”

  “Let’s just say I act, like you, OK?” Nic said.

  John shrugged. “OK, keep your pants untwisted.” She turned back to me. “You were watching a movie, maybe?” she asked. “We are also looking for a movie.”

  “We were about to,” I said. “There was a disk in the player.”

  John took my remote. She aimed it and hit play. Static. She shrugged and turned it off.

  “The movie we want is real movie. You know, not disk. Old fashionable film. Where is it?” She smiled again. “Just tell us and no problemo.”

  I smiled back. “We’d love that. We definitely do not want any problemos.” My arms were getting tired and I could see Nic’s sagging as she also smiled and shrugged her empty hands. “But unfortunately we just don’t know. We have no idea. Sorry.”

  “Sorry,” Nic chimed along.

  “That’s OK,” John said. Then her hand flashed out and the gun hit me in the mouth. It seemed like nothing, a mere flick of the wrist, like a good tennis player catching a lob, but I stumbled back, my face ringing and my mouth full of blood. I tried to curse but I just burbled, and something hard rolled on my tongue. It felt a lot like a tooth.

  “You watch her,” she told one of the aerobics dudes, Billy or Joel, I forget. “You bring him with me.”

  The other muscle dude, (Joel?) poked me with a gun, and I followed John, afraid of another blow. As I passed Nic I heard a small whimper, whether of fear or sympathy, I don’t know. Blood still dribbled down my chin, my shirt was soaked, and my tongue had definitely located an empty spot on my upper left corner.

  “Don’t worry,” I reassured Nic, or tried to, but it sounded, well, rather worrying, like “Doonesbury.” The guy behind me pushed and I coughed out my tooth. It went skittering across the tile floor. “Toof, toof!” I yelled, chasing it around. John turned back.

  “What now?”

  “He puffed me,” I explained as I searched the floor. It was gone.

  “Stop fooling around. Both of you,” she said and led us into the studio. She pointed to a rattan armchair. “Tie him to that.”

  I tried to say it wasn’t necessary, but “necessary” was too hard to say, and Joel bungee-corded my arms to the arms and my legs to the legs of the chair. I had a perfect view of the mural. I noticed how artfully the blood had been done: where the woman drove a sword into the bull, the gore seemed splashed on, as though it had actually gushed onto the painting, rather than being in the painting, if that makes sense. Also, I couldn’t help observing that Naught had taken special care with the genitals. Where the bull’s oversized penis met her vagina, every vein and curlicue of hair was lovingly and realistically rendered. On the other hand, the sky was stylized, with the sun dead center between the bull’s horns. And the landscape, now that I stared at it, looked familiar. The long desert horizontals, the odd rocks and rounded protrusions, the witchy humanoid cacti. It was Joshua Tree, the national park right by Twentynine Palms.