by David Gordon
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what? I had no answers to give. I had to let you lead me. But when Ms. Flynn called this morning with the information about your wife’s photo, I understood, and now that theory has been confirmed: it seems your wife was Mona’s Mexican friend, as mentioned by your informants, the third in the threesome with Zed, the other performer in the films. Probably your wife assisted the couple in their deception, the fake death, the escape, and then kept their secret safe all this time. Perhaps she even obtained that false ID to reenter the country safely. She met you, got married, went on with her own life. Then years later, when, Zed, realizing he was dying, attempted to reconnect with Mona, she was drawn back in. I am sorry to say this, but I think it is highly likely that she is dead, buried under another name in Mexico, and that Mr. Norman has used his great influence to cover his tracks and falsify the records. I have to surmise that it was her body all along, that it was she who was thrown from the balcony that night.
“My condolences. I know that due to my own psychological and emotional difficulties I do not process or demonstrate sentiment in the culturally prescribed manner, and I am further emotionally insulated from my fellow humans by this excess of fat, but please accept my sympathies nevertheless.”
“Thanks,” I said. I hadn’t moved. I didn’t know what to do next.
“No doubt you are in shock. Would you like an alcoholic drink to soothe your nerves? Or a whole roast chicken with new potatoes? I find that helpful sometimes. They are juiciest when roasted whole.”
“No thanks.”
“I will leave you then, to grieve. It is nearly time for dinner. I’m told the meeting spot is about twenty minutes’ drive from here. Let’s convene for breakfast at seven.”
He left for dinner. I grieved. Or I tried to. I stepped outside into the soft dark and tried, but really I felt not much. Or to be honest, nothing. But maybe that was right. That was it: the big nothing, opening within me, vast as the nothing all around me. It was always there, of course, but now I noticed it, felt it, sounded it, each thought like an echo bouncing back to tell me of that emptiness, like a stone dropped into a well. I took a last breath of sage-scented night and went into the glowing cabin where Nic was waiting, to tell her my wife was dead.
PART VII
ASCENSION
87
MY NAME IS EULALIA NATALIA Santoya de Marías de Montes, but I have had other names. I was Ramona to my mother. And I became Mrs. Mona Naught. But to you I was always Lala. Who knows which of these names I will be remembered by, if any? None will be written on my grave, because, my dear husband, if you are reading this, then I am already dead. Do you miss me? Would you be sad if you knew I had died? Do you hate me for leaving you? Or, worse yet, have you already forgotten me, grown indifferent, moved on? Am I just your ex-wife, your first wife, an old story? Do you even want to know the truth anymore, or is it better if I just rest in peace, buried along with my lies and secrets? Or would you hate me even more if you knew who I really was, besides your Lala? I was born Ramona Noon. Yes, I am one quarter Asian on my mother’s side, Chinese and Pacific Islander, her own mother was from Malaysia, and her father was Portuguese, though she was illegitimate and never knew him, a tradition in my family. My father was white, they said, Black Irish, and so my mixed colors, my tan skin, green eyes, black hair, the standard human look, the look that to a white person especially makes me seem vaguely from anywhere except the lands of blond and blue. I could be Israeli or Arab, Greek or Turk, Ecuadorian or Chilean or Argentine. Or Mexican. Sorry, darling. Another lie. I never met my father, or rather my one meeting with him, a surprise and gift-laden visit on my fifth birthday, was so steeped in misty legend that it might as well have been a fairy tale. It sure felt like one. He was a famous movie star, according to my mom, though she was sworn to secrecy, supposedly because of his evil wife, whom he didn’t really love, and the deadly effect that the scandal would have on his career. The story seems dubious now, I know, but as a little girl with no daddy getting teased at school, I was comforted by the thought that my father was a great actor, not a random one-night stand, or worse, maybe, a married sugar daddy. My mother was a glamorous, brave, but tragic beauty, or a frustrated artist who’d sacrificed it all for love, but definitely not a kept woman, or a lazy welfare mom, or a puta as the other kids suggested. I guess that’s how I first fell in love with movies (and how I fell for you, my movie lover, those quadruple features under the covers when we first met, those long weekends cooking and fucking with Godard and Lynch and Hawks). My mother was addicted of course. On Saturdays she’d pack a lunch and take me to the multiplex, let me buy a coke, and then we’d sneak from movie to movie, spending six or eight hours in the air-conditioned darkness, a magical cave far from the glare of reality. At home we’d sit on the couch and cry or laugh in front of the TV, and she’d teach me, the way other parents taught religion or family history, about the trials and struggles, the marriages and divorces of the gods. Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, each of these magical heroes appeared before me as a symbolic father, a fantasy that was only inflamed by my mother’s coy denials: “No, Clint Eastwood is not your dad, though of course if he was I could never tell you.” Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, Kate Hepburn, each was an idealized version of my mother, who spoke as if she were one of them. “See that lipstick Marilyn has on there, the deep pink? I used to use that exact shade.” Who knows what the truth was? The money arrived from somewhere. God knows my mother never worked. It was a bohemian household I suppose. She had a lot of artsy friends who came and went. Dancers, male and female and undecided, came by in the morning to stretch and do yoga on our deck. Actors came for tea in the afternoon, to cry after auditions or to practice lines with my mom, whom they somehow considered an expert based on nothing but her supposed affairs with famous men and, in one particularly scandalous case, a famous actress whose marriage to a secretly gay movie star was just a front. Painters came for the potluck dinners. A guy with a huge belly and huge beard ran the grill, a painter she knew named Gus who lived in a school bus that he sometimes parked in our driveway. Others turned up, their torn jeans covered in paint but driving shiny Mercedes convertibles with bowls of salad in the back and heaps of pink hamburger wrapped in brown paper from Chalet Gourmet, the fancy shop. Two gay boys in matching red jumpsuits brought a case of beer. Then late at night the musicians would arrive, after their gigs or recording sessions, dressed in black, instrument cases slung over their shoulders, to play old records and smoke pot and fall asleep on the couch or sometimes slip off to bed, in silence, with my mom. I remember meeting Tom Waits when he showed up at our house for a party with a carful of people, though he didn’t say much, just flipped through our books and records. Once Leonard Cohen was sipping tea with brandy on the porch. Another night Siouxsie Sioux rang the doorbell, asking directions. She was at the wrong party but she came in for a drink anyway. Johnny Rotten got into a big argument in the kitchen over how to make a proper gazpacho. Lux and Ivy from the Cramps came to a barbecue but instead of drinking and dancing with the grown-ups in the yard, Lux ended up watching TV with me, Scooby-Doo and Thunderbirds Are Go. Joseph Beuys came with some art people and someone spilled ketchup on his shirt and he sat just in his vest and hat while my mom washed it. Dennis Hopper showed up late and wouldn’t leave. He talked to my mom all night until she crashed and was still there in the living room watching movies when I got up for school and I made Pop-Tarts for us both. Coppola and Scorsese had a long, passionate debate beside the fire, and now I wish I’d listened, but back then I didn’t know who they were, just two madmen with beards and wild eyes, waving their arms and yelling. William Burroughs sat in an armchair saying nothing and I was scared. Rich and powerful men would come to see my mother or take her away for weekends when I’d be left with a series of sketchy teenage babysitters. Often I’d get a present when she returned, or new clothes. Sometimes her date would enter my room awkwardly, and wh
ile my mom watched in the doorway, he’d pat my head and stiffly, formally, hand me a toy, which I would confusedly thank him for, with only my mother seeming happy about it, all smiles. I wonder now if more than one of them thought he was my father. I remember the first time I ate a hash brownie, thinking it was just a desert and laughed hysterically and then freaked out and had nightmares and the old lady from next door, she was a retired TV writer, took care of me because my mom wasn’t home and my babysitter who’d baked the brownies had panicked and split. My mom was furious at the sitter, but of course didn’t feel responsible herself. I remember her all dressed up, in her high heels and jewelry and her hair piled high. Some tall man in a suit carried me upstairs and put me to bed. At nine I swiped pot from her underwear drawer and smoked it with a friend. At ten I got drunk for the first time, sneaking sips at a party. By twelve I was tagging along to shows to see bands. At thirteen I tried ecstasy and coke with school friends, girls and boys who lived in parentless mansions in Beverly Hills, getting wasted and playing in their pools, watching movies in their screening rooms while the maids made us food. At fourteen I lost my virginity in the back of a car to the drummer from Spork, a noise band that was passing through, after a show. At fifteen I was on the party circuit, beach houses in Malibu, downtown lofts, sometimes turning up with my date at the same parties where my mom was with hers. My mother wasn’t embarrassed by this, though often our dates were, since they sometimes knew each other, mine too old for me, hers too young for her. It was at one of those parties that summer, at a movie producer’s house in Benedict Canyon, that I met my husband. My first husband, that is. Zed Naught. He actually asked me to marry him that night right there in the hot tub. What a nut, I hadn’t even seen his face in the light. I had no idea what he looked like. I turned him down, of course, but he got my attention, that’s for sure. It was pretty romantic. A crazy artist. A glamorous European. Of course I gravitated toward older men, being dadless and all. But we didn’t sleep with each other that night. He didn’t even try. I think he was too nervous. He came over the next night and talked to my mom, then took me out. She was thrilled. I know that sounds weird, but from her point of view it was perfect. Since my birth, she’d been obsessed with turning me into an actress. I barely went to school, but she hauled me to ballet lessons, piano lessons, singing lessons, all of which I sucked at. She dragged me to auditions and actually got me in several commercials and ads. As a toddler there was one for baby powder where I run around the house with an open thing of powder, spraying it everywhere, until the mom follows the trail and finds me and laughs. Years later, she was still bitter about how she should have played the mom, but I think the residuals from that commercial bought her car. Then I was in a local bank commercial, pretending, with a boy and two grown-ups I didn’t know, to be a family in our new house. I remember fantasizing about how this supernormal family and house really were mine, and that the curly haired actor with the kind eyes was my dad. Finally, I am standing around in the background in an episode of T. J. Hooker when they go to a school gym. You see why it was so easy for my mom to accept my future husband when we first met. A famous filmmaker, a director, an artist and intellectual who spoke several languages, had read all those books, who painted, wrote, knew a million people. He was handsome too. Long hair, fair skin, beautiful hands. I felt dizzy looking in his eyes. We drove out to the beach to eat and after dinner took our shoes off and walked and walked and talked. He kissed me. We went back to his place and spent the night. We saw each other every day after that. I pretty much moved right in. It was like another world, just around the corner. His house was full of books and he told me I didn’t have to bother finishing high school if I just read, so I’d read all day by the pool. He had a ton of art books too and we went through those together, looking at the images, pulling down book after book from the shelves as one thing reminded him of another. Music too. We’d see punk shows at night and he loved slam dancing but he’d blast opera and classical at home. Not that life was fancy. Not at all. The house was at the top of a steep hill and the driveway was just dirt. You couldn’t get up there without a four-wheel drive. The yard was a jungle. When it rained everything would flood and we walked around the property in boots along with our bathing suits. But it felt glamorous to me. I’d stomp out to the jeep with rubber boots under my dress, cruise into town, then change into high heels before we went into the restaurant. It was an education, just living there. I didn’t miss out on sex ed either. At first, I was shy and inexperienced. But as soon as I felt comfortable, I started to do research. While he was out I’d watch all the porn flicks in the house and then when he came home I’d be like, let’s try that or I want you to do that to me. He was thrilled, of course—who wouldn’t be? A young cute girl saying I want to be tied up or spanked, coming home to find me in the sauna with another girl. We’d pick girls up at a club or whatever, they’d stay a night or two and move on. Boys too, Zed didn’t mind, as long as they looked like girls. Other times it was just me and him alone in the house and yard together for days. We’d go around naked, eating, cooking, sleeping outside on a futon we’d drag out under the stars, swimming at night, waking up to hear him typing, reaching for a book and reading till breakfast. We got married. My mother had to sign a form. Then we drove to Vegas, just the two of us, with the top down on the jeep, at night. Passing through Death Valley was so black and still and hot it was like being inside an oven or driving through outer space. And then you see Vegas blazing up ahead, like a planet. Zed had never been before. It attracted and repelled him. The tourists freaked him out, that side of America he’d never seen. Even fatter than the Germans, he kept saying, but dressed like giant drunken kids. We got married and hit the casino, and won a bunch of money playing craps and blackjack. Little did I know that was the last time he’d win. He totally got bit by the gambling bug, would start driving to Vegas on weekends and also gambling at the underground clubs in Chinatown until he owed way too much. But that was later. That first night it was all just magic. Getting married then rolling dice in my white silk slip dress and his black vintage suit, outfits we’d bought in a thrift store, winning big. He bought me a ring in a pawn shop, a sapphire, and then we spent our wedding night in a cabin out in the desert alone, cooking steaks and lobsters on a grill over a campfire. My mother of course had assumed that Zed would turn me into a movie star in no time and we’d all be living in a huge mansion, but it didn’t work out quite like that. In fact it was a difficult time for Zed. He’d come to LA enticed by offers from producers and agents but nothing ever worked out. Project after project would fall through and meanwhile whatever heat there was around him cooled off. We had money, or we seemed too. We lived like we did. He’d option scripts or get attached to projects and they’d pay something up front and we got by on that, but the big payoff never came. There was this sense of frustration building all the time, a manic depressive cycle with each project, where this was going to be the one and it was all going to be so great and Zed being Zed they were all so ambitious and there’d be scripts and drawings and models and renting office space and big meetings and dinners and then it would all fall apart and he’d be like totally shocked and devastated. He was naive that way. He still just thought, every time, this is it, my big shot, and then he’d be heartbroken. Then he’d go on a rampage, drinking and waving his gun around and threatening to kill them all, whoever. He’d shoot at bottles in the yard. Then he’d fall into depression and talk about killing himself. He’d researched it thoroughly, knew the best ways, the least pain, how he could rig a camera to film it. I was the one who talked him into doing the horror film. At first it didn’t sound grandiose enough for Zed. But I was like, hey it’s a job, and if you actually get a film made here, even low-budget, it will attract more investors and build confidence with money people, and a lot of cult movies and horror movies are better than the mainstream trash anyway, and what about all these European exiles who made the old B-movies? That grabbed him more than anything, I think
. He liked thinking about Fritz Lang and all those guys, the one who made Detour. You and he could have talked about that all night. Still, he claimed he had no idea about horror movies, he’d never seen one, blah blah, so I offered to help him write it, like sit at the computer and type and so forth, and he finally agreed. I think that at first the idea of us working together intrigued him more than the script itself. That I was his muse. So all of a sudden just like that, we were collaborators. Now instead of being an actress, which I’d never really wanted anyway, I was going to be this genius writer. Of course I didn’t stop to think that I’d simply switched from my mother’s fantasy to his. But I liked writing at least. Honestly it didn’t seem so hard to me, like it did to him or to you, all that misery and drama and hating yourself and ripping things up. You never really reminded me of him until that first time I came home and you were lying on the floor with torn paper all around you. I was like, uh-oh, here we go again. Another diva. You two were the real actresses. To me making up a story was fun. I liked the script. I didn’t care if it was a masterpiece. I liked being behind the camera with Zed. I could tell people didn’t really take me seriously of course, this seventeen-year-old girl, but Zed did. He’d make everyone wait while he took me in the corner and asked what I thought. Still, even though it was flattering and showed how highly he thought of me, I realize now that it signaled a shift in him, the first tremors of self-doubt. Looking to me for reassurance, trusting my taste, not his own. In any case, it didn’t end well. Once again the suits fucked us over. The backers were shady and ran out of money. At one point Zed drove to Vegas with his cameraman and tried to raise the cash by playing blackjack. In the end the bank owned the movie. They took it away from Zed, had some hacks recut it, changed the title, and dumped it onto the video market. After that Zed vowed no more commercial Hollywood movies. But it didn’t occur to him that it is hard to live a commercial Hollywood lifestyle without them. He assured me everything was just fine. What we needed was a new project, one of our own. That was when we started working on the trilogy. Of course the basic subject matter, the texts, the music, were all from Zed. But more and more, he seemed to turn to me, taking my ideas and fantasies and incorporating them into the films. The lines were blurring and he wanted to blur them even more, between art and life, between himself and me. When I woke up in the morning, he’d ask about my dreams and write them down in a notebook. We’d take ecstasy and he’d tape-record us talking. Then Maria joined us, and it got even more complicated. She was a Mexican girl we met at a salsa club and brought home with us, and somehow she just never left. Everyone thought it was Zed’s fantasy, but really it was my idea. I was lonely. I had no friends of my own, I wasn’t in school or working a job, I hung out at that house all day. Maria was my age and we actually looked similar. People used to think we were sisters, which amused us because it made us feel even more perverse. We had a room in the house that we painted all black, sealed the windows with tinfoil and heavy curtains, where she and I went to light black candles and read our black books, play around with spells and potions. It was silly, we were children, but dangerous, demented children, with money and drugs and freedom. We’d have a fantasy or read something in a book and act it out like an amateur theater troupe. Maria and I making love while Zed and his friends watched. Group scenes. Whips and masks and candles. Multiple men and me. I never wanted you to know all that or to think of me that way. I thought it would change the way you saw me, twist it, poison our love. Was I wrong? Could you be happy knowing your wife had been a crazy slut? Or that her first great love wasn’t you? That’s why I lied. I never wanted you to know Mona. I decided to bury that person in Mexico and forget her forever, and just be Lala, your wife. But the dead won’t stay buried, not when they’ve been murdered and hidden away, then they won’t rest in peace. Mona became my ghost. I dreamed as her and caught glimpses of her in mirrors. I’d see her in your eyes when we made love. She was always waiting and watching. Looking back now, it would be easy to blame Zed for everything. You’d say, he was older, the grown-up. He was rich, supposedly. He was a man who took advantage of a young girl, two young girls. And you’d be right. But at the same time, I knew just what I was up to. I knew how to work him and get whatever I wanted, how to exploit his fear of failure, his fear that I would leave. I had the killer instincts of a girl who grew up among hustlers and had to fend for herself around needy or predatory adults. I used to say that Maria and I were both raised by wolves, just different packs. No doubt, hers was tougher, harder. Her mom died young. Like me, she had no dad. She’d crossed into the US illegally when she was fifteen, fleeing a little town where there wasn’t much hope for a poor girl born out of wedlock. She adored her grandma, who raised her, and grew up close to her cousins, but she still swore that she’d never go back. She fantasized about having a big house someday and bringing her grandma up to live there. She was wild. She was hungrier than I was, for adventure, men, sex, money, glamour. She wanted to be a star. She dressed like me, wore her hair and makeup the same way, liked to snuggle in bed on one side of me with Zed spooning me on the other. Maybe she was in love with me a little, or with our lives, or maybe just desperate to become somebody else, rich, white, famous, American. Who knows? One thing is for sure, the whole mess was doomed from the start. The whole triangle. Maybe our whole lives. It was right around that time that Buck first showed up. Zed gave him that nickname. He was Bradley Norman, a trust fund kid from somewhere back east supposedly studying film at UCLA but really just getting high and sucking up to us. Zed used to tease him about his All-American kind of aw-shucks vibe and his rich-kid lameness, calling him Boring Normal, Barely Human, and so forth. He didn’t care, he followed Zed around like a dog, laughed at all his jokes, thought every idea was brilliant, supplied the drugs. Then late one night, one of those old black-and-white Buck Rogers shows was on and Zed thought he was just like the actor, a real Ken doll, started calling him Buck and that was it. He didn’t even look like him, but it was the perfect kind of ultra-American nickname and it stuck. I couldn’t stand him. He gave me the creeps, the way he was always staring at me, at Maria, at Zed. I wasn’t sure who he had the hots for and I doubt he even knew himself, but a scene like that always attracts the freaks and psychos. We found out later that he already had a history—kicked out of his fancy boarding school for trying to burn the dorm down while his roommates were sleeping, then kicked out of the special farm school they sent him to for killing the cat. I think his rich family just paid him to stay away. Zed didn’t really like him either. He just liked having followers, flatterers. What he really wanted was money. He hoped Buck would help support his films. What I think now is, Buck didn’t really want to fuck any of us. He wanted to be us. To be Zed. Anyway, it all came to a head when we made those last movies, the trilogy. Maybe we jinxed ourselves messing around with that dark magical shit. I am not religious of course or even superstitious, but I do feel like when we foolishly unleash forces we don’t understand the results can be tragic. Years later I took an anthropology class and this teacher said something that really rang true. Something like, true spirituality is about selflessness, it’s surrender, giving up yourself to something higher, a greater good. But magic is an attempt to manipulate the world for personal gain, to increase your own power and like, swell up the self. Prayer should shrink it. Magic is selfish and selfishness creates pain, even for yourself. We shot the first two parts at our house. Invitation and Consummation. On the one hand it was a normal film shoot, or at least normal for us, low budget and artsy-fartsy, thrown together with help from friends and various oddballs. But under the surface was something else, a nightmare carnival aspect. Most of the performers and crew people were somehow in the scene, into rituals or kink or drugs. It was all real to them. To us, too. It was our private lives and fantasies being acted out in public for the world to see. After the second film, the one with all that sex in it, Maria had a freak out and locked herself in the bathroom for hours until Zed, who was worried she mig
ht kill herself, axed down the door. Even then somebody filmed it. I suggested canceling or postponing the last shoot after all that, but Zed wouldn’t hear of it. The money was in place. He was convinced that the trilogy would finally get him established as an important artist. Meanwhile, unknown to me, the gambling debts had mounted, interest on the interest, way beyond anything we could pay. That suddenly burst into the open too, Zed’s dirty secret, like an affair or a secret drinking problem would have been for regular people. In our home drugs and random sex were normal, but not the bank calling about past-due mortgage payments and all the money he’d borrowed against the house. There were letters that said Final Warning across the envelope in red. There were lawsuits over the whole fiasco of Succubi! and now the lawyers themselves were suing us for payment. And these were the legit, lawful bullies. There were also the gangsters, Italians from Vegas and Chinese from downtown, stopping by for a chat, always nicely dressed and soft-spoken, but Zed pale and shook up when they left, sleeping now in the guest room with his gun under the pillow while the big bedroom with its king-size bed and mirrors was just for Maria and me. Sex, which was now all about performance and ritual, took place in the living room, where we entertained guests, or the black-walled dungeon room, or outside. But no matter what, the shoot was on. Zed overcame my misgivings, as did Maria, who bounced back from her freak out and was all for it, though now she was high all the time and never seemed to sleep or eat. And I guess I wanted it too. I wanted to believe it would change things, get us out of the corner we were in. Like magic. So we packed up and drove to the desert. It was a tiny crew. Just me, Zed, Maria, Buck as DP, and our friend Tommy, who took sound and had become a constant hanger-on. I liked him though. He was the sweet and lost type, still going to art school although he was almost as old as Zed, happy to come over and help paint scenery or sew costumes or just get high and watch TV with me. Technically he was gay but really he was just obliging. He had a thing for Zed, like everyone did, he was very magnetic in those days, but Tommy was kindhearted and sort of submissive and not creepy like Buck. We took the lightweight 16mm camera with the built-in mic, so that I could run it during the scenes where all the guys were on-screen. The shoot was a disaster from the get-go. Of course we got a late start and by the time we arrived in the desert the shops were closed. Zed said not to worry, we’d get groceries in the morning, but of course we overslept and the cabin we’d rented was way out in the middle of nowhere and he was frantic to shoot. So there we were, insufficient food and water, but more than sufficient booze and drugs, intense heat and light, hauling equipment up and down and dancing around naked on boulders. Drinking warm beer and whiskey to quench your thirst in hundred-degree heat isn’t wise. Neither is taking acid and getting lost in the desert. By nightfall we were all out of our minds, half crazy, but I guess Buck was all crazy. What I now believe is that he is evil. Just a bad soul. Rotten. And real evil isn’t big and monstrous, it’s small and pathetic and mean and weak but capable of true hate and cruelty. The rest of us are just fucked up, messy people trying our best and screwing up all the time. That’s what I like to think anyway. That’s how I hope you will remember me. As someone who tried her best but fucked up. Someone who loved you but wasn’t sure how to. How do we learn, people like us, except by practicing on each other? The sundown was gorgeous and Zed got some shots. We built a fire and tried to roast hot dogs and burgers but we were too wasted. They were part burned and part raw and we threw them away. Coyotes howled and I thought I saw wolves running, packs in formation in the shadows, but it was dusk and in the desert the dusk will play tricks on you. That’s how I felt when Buck killed Tommy. Like I was seeing things. Like I was dreaming, until I got woken up by someone screaming and realized it was me. Zed tried to revive Tommy but there was no chance. He was gone. Then he attacked Buck and almost strangled him. I think he would have killed him but Maria and I begged him not to. I said to call the cops, to turn Buck in. Buck didn’t even object. He just looked at me like the whole thing was out of his hands, like he wasn’t even the one who did it, covered in Tommy’s blood. It was Maria who was worried about the cops, who pointed out how much trouble we could all be in, with the drugs and weapons and so forth. Accessories, whatever. The whole night passed and at dawn we had a plan. By now Buck had come down to earth. He was desperate and willing to do anything if it meant he didn’t have to go to prison. He claimed he couldn’t remember what happened, that it was all a blackout from drugs. That was when we saw how this could solve a lot of problems for all of us. Zed and me with our debts. Maria with the INS. I felt sick about it, but nothing was going to bring Tommy back. First, Zed faked the suicide. He loaded his pistol with a real bullet, put the gun in Tommy’s hand and blew his face off, then toppled him over the cliff. The damage from the fall made it hard to see the knife wound and he was unrecognizable anyway. Then Zed hid in the desert while the rest of us went back to town and reported it. We said it was Zed who’d killed himself. We pretended not to know exactly where we’d been so it took a few days to find the body and by then the coyotes were at it. We all gave statements and no one doubted it was Zed. Buck obtained a passport for him and an envelope full of cash for us and one for Maria. Zed held onto the film as insurance. Then Maria and I traded passports, agreeing that she would go to Europe using my name. As long as she left LA, it was easy. Everyone had always mixed us up and called us sisters, and over there, where we were only known by name or from our films, she could pass. People don’t really look. They see what they expect to see. Zed and I got to escape a life in LA that was destroying us and disappear to Mexico like outlaws. Maria got to be the widow of a famous artist and an American. She got to be me and I got to stop being me. Perfect. Buck would use his trust fund to pay for it all, but it didn’t feel like blackmail. More like we were helping a sick friend and being thanked for our trouble. He eagerly agreed. He seemed totally stunned by what he’d done. He kept crying. I pretty much expected him to go mad or confess or take his own life. Imagine my shock a few years later when he directed a hit movie. I guess he got over it. He moved on like the sociopath he really is and after that his fame and wealth just grew. But we were safe. We had him by the balls and he knew it. The money went into our accounts, no questions asked. But I did feel sometimes, like maybe he really had sacrificed poor Tommy in exchange for fame and success, that he had sold his soul to the devil or been some demon in disguise all along, that he’d tricked us all and stolen our souls. When he struck the deal that bought his own success, he doomed the rest of us in the bargain. That’s how I feel anyway, because while Buck went up and up, America’s sweetheart, we all went down and down. Not at first. At first it seemed like we might just make it, get away with everything and start again together. I was twenty. We traveled around Mexico for a while, the jungle, the beach. It cleared your head out and made you feel clean. Then we got a house and settled in. We lived by the ocean in a small village full of smugglers where no one cared who we were and asking questions about the past or how you got your money was considered rude. I went surfing and learned Spanish. It was like college for me. I read all the books that other people read in school. I spoke some Spanish already, from growing up in LA, and Maria had taught me more, we’d speak it at home so Zed couldn’t understand, but now in Mexico I got fluent, not enough to fool the Mexicans of course, but good enough to fool white people with my dark skin. I fooled you too, my love. And I took care of Zed. He set up a studio and started painting. Really I think he had talent, and if he had dedicated himself to it the way he had to film at the start, he could have had another whole career, as a reclusive Mexican painter. Anyway that’s my opinion, but he didn’t have it in him. I couldn’t see it at the time, but he was done, burned out. He painted, but only in spurts and only pictures of me. Most days, he smoked weed instead, standing waist-deep in the pool. He went drinking with the locals, the fishermen and smugglers and Indians, who would dump him off drunk at our door. Five years went by. Zed’s depression got worse. H
e had a lot of guilt about Tommy. He felt like he was being punished, like he was cursed. He even went to the church and prayed, though he was drunk at the time. He sought help from the Indians and their healers. He would go on long rituals with them, out in the jungle and in the desert, taking medicine and whipping his back to chase out the demons. It didn’t work. A shrink probably would have helped more. Then he lost his sex drive, and though I tried to reassure him, he felt like this too was a punishment. His talent and his libido, the two engines that drove his life, both ran out on him. Suddenly he was the old impotent fool with the sexy young wife he was terrified of losing. And then at last I realized I really did have to leave him. It was what he had always feared and predicted, but not for the reasons he’d thought: not for new sexual or artistic adventures, just the opposite. I was a twenty-five-year-old woman. I wanted to go to school, to have a job, a life, maybe even a family someday. I wanted to be single for a while, to be on my own, and then I wanted another marriage maybe, with a real partner. I had been Zed’s lover, then his muse, his mistress, his caretaker, and at last his nurse. Had I ever really been his wife? The other thing that happened was my mother died. She’d become a big-time alcoholic years before. She was in and out of rehab, Promises Malibu, Betty Ford, only the best for her of course, but it never worked and finally she smashed her car up on Mulholland Drive. I didn’t go home for the funeral, how could I, but I swore I was not going to watch Zed do the same, drive off the cliff drunk or drown in our pool. Finally I told him and he understood. He wasn’t even mad. He said he’d help me. With his shady local connections, we got a fake ID and a Mexican passport and then applied for a student visa under that name. I packed and we spent a last night together, hugging and crying and apologizing and thanking each other. Then in the morning, he drove me into town to the airport and I left. I flew to New York and spent a winter there, taking classes and working in a clothing shop, then returned to LA. I suppose that might seem like a foolish choice. But there was no one left to recognize me, really. I never had normal friends, or any family besides my mom. Plus, Maria had come back, and she was in bad shape. She’d had some sort of breakdown in Europe and was in a psych ward in Pasadena. I went to see her, to see if I could help and also to find out what she was saying about us. It was a rough visit. After pretending to be me for so long, she finally believed it herself. In her mind, she was Mona, and I was her. So I just hugged her and went along with it. She would be Mona and I would be Eulalia Natalia, the new me. After that her doctor, this guy Parker, said it was better if I didn’t come back, that seeing people from the past just upset her. But the trip home brought back good memories too. I missed the sun, the hills, the food. I just stayed. I got a job doing something I actually liked and was good at. I made friends. I got my own little studio apartment. And I met you. I want to say that no matter what, those next years with you were the best of my life and I will always be grateful for what you gave me. Real love, real happiness. You showed me what those were. But it didn’t last, did it? Something happened. We wore each other down. We gave up on each other. Or maybe our expectations were wrong all along. In the end, you are not responsible for anyone else’s unhappiness. And no one else can save you from your own. But I didn’t know that and I got angry, so angry. I felt trapped in that house with you, like a cage. I felt like it was all wrong and it was all your fault. I felt like I had to make you change, or else be done. And then Zed wrote to me. I’d given him an email address when I left, for emergencies only, and honestly I’d forgotten about it, didn’t even check it for months and months. But when I began to separate from you emotionally, to have secrets, it seemed natural to use that account and there it was, his note. He told me he was dying. He told me he was sending the film. It felt like a sign. It was like the old me, Mona, getting back in touch. Suddenly I had a way out. I could take that money and disappear again. I could be free. So I ran away from home, one more time. But of course I didn’t get far. Buck had been keeping tabs on us all along. He had people watching, in Mexico, in Europe, in LA. When Maria fell ill he made her a prisoner in that hospital. But he couldn’t touch Zed or me because of the film. Then he found out about Zed’s cancer, and he knew he had to make a move. He couldn’t trust what a dying man would do, or leave the film floating out in the world. So he had his people snatch me up. Since then I’ve been here, alone, locked in this room. He says he will trade me to Zed for the film but I know he won’t. He can’t leave me alive. Once he has the movie, I am the only loose thread and he will cut me off. This is the end. I do feel some small comfort in knowing that by leaving I kept you out of this, that you are safe from Buck. I am glad that even though you will probably always hate me, you will never know the whole ugly truth. You won’t even know my real name. Because you will never even read this, my good-bye letter. Because there is no letter. I am not writing it. There is no pen, no paper. I am handcuffed to a bed in a cabin in the desert, waiting for someone to come kill me, lying in the dark and talking to you. There is no one here to hear my voice when I talk. I am not even talking. It is silent. There are no words at all. Love always. Your Lala.