Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  Danny and I looked at each other. “What?” he said impatiently. “You haven’t understood what we’ve been saying, so—”

  “Enough! I only tell you what comes through to me. You are missing something. Both of you.”

  “What are we missing?”

  “I told you. You are both looking for the same woman.”

  “No, look, there’s two women.” Danny said, irritated by what she saying. “There’s Ariana and then there’s—”

  “There’s one,” she said, interrupting. I could see panic in Danny’s eyes. Panic in a place where no danger ever seemed to intrude. “Physically there are two. But really there is only one woman, one single source of energy. She is following a life imposed by others. Terrible things are all around. And she loves you.” She was looking right between the two of us.

  “And that is why the two of you found each other,” she said.

  “We didn’t just find each other,” Danny said. “It was a fluke. He got OpConned to our unit and—”

  “It was no fluke. Each of you was out there in the universe, waiting to be found by the other.

  “It was the women who guided you,” she said.

  20

  When we were in the Afghan mountains we would sometimes watch the F-15s come swooping in. Twice, when we were fighting Taliban who had vanished deep into their caves tunneled miles into all that granite, the planes had dropped something we later learned was a BLU-118B bomb. More specifically, a thermobaric bomb, a word none of us had ever heard before. All you needed to know about those bombs was that you did not want to be anywhere in those caves—even miles down in the most remote manmade recesses of that hollowed-out mountain—because those thermobarics were going to blaze through all the miles-deep twists and turns and blow all your deep-fried innards out through your nearest available orifice.

  “Thermobaric” was the first thing Danny whispered to me as Constance was walking back to the singed Taurus. He was totally unnerved by what she’d told us and was trying to come up with something catchy to make like he didn’t take her all that seriously.

  “Totally,” I whispered back. We were both still absorbing what she’d said, pretending to cope with it. She had reached into some of the sanctuaries we’d preserved in the deepest part of our defense mechanisms, vaporizing illusions we’d held dear.

  At first I thought what she said was a bad joke of some kind. But then the idea of Danny and me having somehow been looking for one another across an invisible universe, joined by a quest for a single soul in the body of two women, sank in. And for a while we both quietly disintegrated after pretending to be too cool to take her seriously. I asked Danny, “Do you believe her?”

  “Sort of. I guess.”

  “Yeah me too. Because, I mean, who can believe in that psychic stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But we should humor her.”

  “We should.”

  “It would be rude to act like we didn’t believe her. Like it was all bullshit.”

  “Absolutely. We don’t want to hurt her feelings.”

  • • •

  We sat there on the beach for hours. Constance phoned for pizza and as Malibu burned in the background, the deliveryman came trudging across the beach with dinner. I lay on the sand watching Constance check for double pepperoni.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Danny asked.

  “I don’t have a clue what you’re thinking.”

  Constance made another phone call, talked in low tones, and then announced that it was time to go. We endured a wordless drive back down the Pacific Coast Highway, with news choppers blasting back and forth overhead in their quest to fill their assigned wavelengths with images bearing the precious word LIVE.

  We wove the winding thread of Sunset Boulevard for about ten miles, driving inland to the overpass across the 405 and looking down on endless beads of white and red lights inching in opposite directions. The sun had set and darkness rose out of the east above Beverly Hills. “I’m still hungry,” she said.

  We got through Beverly Hills and into West Hollywood, to the diner in the middle of The Strip on Sunset Boulevard, the one where the younger movie stars hang out between clubs, order cheeseburgers, and show that they haven’t moved off normal no matter what kind of car they gave the valet to park. The whole place was artfully over-lit, loud, and packed. Kind of a cafeteria with money, where some invisible scorecard of life hung over everyone.

  A couple of the girls walking in behind us had legs taller than some people I know, and the movie stars sitting at the counter pretended not to notice them. Cool ruled.

  But when Constance walked in, half the heads at the counter swiveled. It was our first real insight into the power she wielded here. The young woman taking names for the waiting list looked up, saw her, and with arched eyebrows immediately escorted us past the waiting hordes to a booth beside the huge window overlooking Sunset Boulevard. Constance was the queen of cool, making eye contact with no one, ignoring stares, and pretty much exuding the kind of perfected disdain that makes people in this town desperate to be seen with you.

  “It’s only an act,” she said before either of us could say anything. “I usually don’t come to these places. I’m only here because of you.”

  “What has this place got to do with us?” Danny asked.

  “I phoned someone. I’m waiting for them to show up,” was all she said staring into the menu.

  An actor who I recognized from some magazine cover tried to get her attention and finally came over. He was about our age, intense, and wiry. Everything about him was screaming money and cool; he was expensively scruffy; his jeans and leather jacket were skillfully distressed; and his hair shot out in all directions like spiky razor wire, something that would have taken hours to get that casual. He leaned into our table and, without even looking at us, said, “I need to see you. It’s urgent. I’ve got two feature offers. Both shooting in October. I’ve got a decision to make.”

  She looked up for the first time, her little china-doll face framed by all that hair. “Phone me,” she said sweetly.

  “Maybe we could do it now?” But it really wasn’t a question. Not even close.

  She hesitated. The actor was aware that, in the midst of all that noise and rushing waiters, a lot of eyes were on him. He remembered to grin. “I’m with these two gentlemen,” she said.

  The actor stood up, looking at us for the first time. “Who are you?” It was as if he smelled something bad.

  “Friends,” I said. He was waiting for me to say something else. I didn’t. He thought for a moment. You could see he was weighing the options. Or maybe thinking about all the cell phone cameras just waiting to be whipped out of purses and pockets.

  “My apologies for interrupting,” he said, widening that grin into something that did not match the look in his eyes. He gave the table a quick, sharp tap—which reminded me of an animal pissing on something to mark claims of territory. For public consumption he winked at Constance and then went back to the group he was with.

  “He’ll call,” she said. “They always do.”

  Sometime around when the milkshakes showed up, I had stopped hearing whatever it was that Constance and Danny were talking about. All around us were young women, sculpted and polished into confections to be dispensed by the machinery in this town. I found myself thinking of Annie and not wanting to connect her to what I was watching. But it was impossible not to. Danny barely noticed me leaving the table.

  From the other side of that window, out in the parking lot, you could see him hunching over the table like he was being drawn into whatever she was saying. I stood out there feeling a million years old even though we were the same age as most of the people going in and out. When Annabelle answered the phone and I said, “Hi, Mom,” there was a long pause and then: “I just saw Annie and her sister on Entertainment Tonight.”

  “I’m fine too, Mom.”

  “Now, don’t you go guilting me. I’ve
moved past guilt. Living with Albert did that to me. The only blessing from such a nightmare. Cynthia has helped me see that.”

  “Cynthia? The real estate lady?”

  “That was last year. This year she’s a therapist.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “You mean, except for nearly dying when the house slid down the hill? I’m fine. Thank you for asking.”

  “We already talked about that, Mom. When I landed in New York. Remember? A few days ago.”

  “Are you still in New York?”

  “Not exactly. I’m on my way to see you. Tomorrow.”

  “Someone’s been looking for you.”

  “Who?”

  “That Mr. Jones. I told you about him. A nice man. Very clean-cut. The kind Annie probably would have liked. You just never dressed rich enough. That poor girl needs a man who—”

  “Mom.”

  “I’m only trying to help.”

  “Who’s this Jones guy?”

  “He didn’t say. He wants to talk to you, though. Such a nice man. I saw him sitting in a car outside here last week.”

  Something about this spooked me. I didn’t know anyone named Jones. Or why anyone would be staking out my mother’s place, waiting for me. “Mom, I don’t know who the guy is and I’m not interested in—”

  “I invited him to come back. And told him all about you. A real gentleman. And he agrees with me and Cynthia that Albert is a devious gigolo.”

  “Don’t tell this Jones guy I’m even in town.”

  “He thinks you’re a hero for fighting for your country.”

  “I gotta go.”

  “You have no idea how difficult it’s been for me.”

  “I do, Mom. I do.”

  • • •

  Back inside the churning diner, Constance followed me with those green eyes of hers, all the way to the booth. I wasn’t so much walking toward her as being reeled in.

  “She was watching you,” Danny said.

  “The window,” she said. “It enabled me to go in.”

  “In?”

  “Where I saw her. This woman you want to find. She is surrounded by people, all of them touching her. There is the color red. Lots of red. But then something strange happens. Someone near her dies under strange circumstances—”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. But this woman, the one you are looking for, she has a mask. And it looks exactly like her. But it’s not.”

  It must have looked like I hadn’t heard Constance. All sound vanished—the voices, the laughter, the yelling and the fires of unmet ambition roaring, stacked high with the kindling of sculpted smiles all around us.

  Or maybe it was because of the dancing eyes that hung just over my own portal in the darkness of all those mountain nights, a portal into a warmth I had never known before.

  Or since. Annie.

  And why was this guy smiling and shaking my hand after he gave Constance an air kiss and slid into the booth beside her?

  “Eugene is the man I was waiting for.”

  “Constance rules,” Eugene said, grinning. He was short, about our age, almost handsome in some vaguely Latino way, his dark hair as carefully in place as everything else about him. “Half this town relies on her to tell them what to do.”

  “Oh, stop,” said Constance, pretending to sound irritated but looking pleased.

  Eugene had no rough edges, at least outwardly. Unlike the others there, he scored low on the grunge factor. In fact, he was almost well dressed, wearing a blue blazer over a turtleneck shirt. He switched effortlessly into Spanish when the waiter came over, and then wove both languages together as he acknowledged endless drive-by greetings, knuckle taps, grasped hands, and other hormone-based codes of Sunset Strip as they flashed around the booth we were in.

  “Constance tells me I’m your guide.”

  “Didn’t know we needed one,” Danny said.

  “You do. Trust me, you do.”

  Eugene took about a dozen glossy cards out of his coat and laid them across the table. Names like Viper Room, Ivar, White Lotus, Bliss, Pearl, Geisha House, and Eden were among those that leapt from all that gloss and graphics. Across some of the cards was the inscription: A Eugene Fulton Presentation. “Clubs,” he said. “I’m a promoter. I live in this jungle. And so far it hasn’t eaten me alive.” He was still grinning. “But give it time.”

  “Eugene knows this world,” said Constance.

  “Look, the first thing you need to know anytime you go into a club: Everyone in the place is miserable. They’re all looking for love. And the minute they find it—or think they’ve found it—you never see them in there again. Until it doesn’t work out. Then they’re back, plowing the same rocky ground all over again. As miserable as ever and smiling like they love it. Problem is, all they know about love is that it was what made their momma cry while she was in the lawyer’s waiting room.”

  I thought of Annabelle.

  “I told Eugene I definitely didn’t want you two going back into war without him helping you,” said Constance.

  Eugene gave a mock salute. “My marching orders.” The grin hardened. “But tell me that this horrendous rumor isn’t true,” he said, “about one of you looking for the Boo Two. Anything but that.”

  • • •

  Out in the parking lot Danny stopped walking. “I have to go back,” he said.

  “Back where?”

  “Afghanistan. Where else?”

  “Go,” I said. “I mean it. You have to find Ariana.”

  “I don’t want to leave you here. Not in this zoo.”

  “Hey. If I can survive Shah-e-Kot, I can survive Hollywood.”

  “You’re delusional.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “They’re way more vicious here.”

  “And what are you going to do about it?”

  “Two days.”

  “Two days what?”

  “I’ll stay for two days.”

  • • •

  Eugene was a different kind of scout. Constance said that if anyone could get to Annie Boo, he could. He was as wired into that scene as anyone could be, and within a couple of hours after we’d left Constance and the diner, we’d followed him past rope-line throngs and been waved through guarded doors by human-wall bouncers who gave him the obligatory hand-clench and hug. Names like Deep, Nacional, Bar Fly, and Spider Lounge blended in with all the others, some of the clubs being packed and writhing amid shades of darkness with women in G-strings dancing on pedestals, while clusters of guys stood under them staring up and shifting around like chimps on Viagra. And still more places a block or so north of Hollywood Boulevard, ones that had potted palms, Moroccan-tiled floors, latticework, and rumors of George Clooney or Brad Pitt having just left.

  Always, they had just left.

  It was all sort of like being in the middle of a movable opera performed by a garage band. Stage props like Ferraris or sculpted women back from a weekend in Dubai were waved onstage as needed. Eugene was everywhere, serene and magnetic and cool. In fact he was the arbiter of cool, and when he met someone who did not possess the mandatory high-cool-factor, he passed judgment on the offender:

  “When that guy eats he needs mud flaps.”

  Or: “She has all the grace of a cow on skates.”

  Or: “That guy’s so boring. His idea of daring is to leave his umbrella at home.”

  He led us through VIP rooms, which were really just more roped-off real estate containing more guys with a need to show off in front of women who needed to be with guys who needed to show off. Actually they weren’t really rooms, they were just open spaces with a rope around them because the aim was to be seen. Spending all that money to get in there wasn’t really worth it if you weren’t envied by the peons on the other side of the rope.

  The VIP Bottle Guys, the ones who sold five-hundred-dollar or even thousand-dollar bottles of mediocre champagne to the men in those areas, were usually the best source of information,
according to Eugene. They saw it all. Every club we went to, he checked with the bouncers and the Bottle Guys.

  But Annie was nowhere. Again and again Eugene wove enquiries about sightings of the Boo Two into the rounds of hugging, clenching, air kissing, and all the rest of the rituals. No one had seen them for at least a week. Merely the mention of their name raised eyebrows on the men who were asked. But Eugene was as skilled and smooth as the army recruiter who had signed me up. Everyone wanted to talk to him.

  It was only later that Danny and I figured out what made us so uneasy about him. “The Edge,” Eugene said as we were driving along La Cienega in the quest to find Annie Boo. “You have to have The Edge in this town. Without it, you’re just another fire hydrant for all the two-legged dogs of this town.”

  “What Edge do you have?” Danny asked a few minutes later as we left the sonic assault of Zama where it felt like the bass from the speakers was rearranging your vital organs.

  Eugene didn’t answer. He’d already gone on to rolling calls, as he called it, hitting the speed dial on his cell phone—Ashley? Hi!—and talking to women—Tara? Remember me?—he had met on the street or in other clubs.

  He was constantly in motion any time we got out of his car, with some inner compass needle leading him straight to beautiful women, moving toward them in a long duster coat he sometimes wore for effect, occasionally finessing a huge roll of cash under it just for luck. “Rule number two: Cash, cash, and more cash,” he said, looking us up and down like an appraiser. “You guys need some fluffing.” That grin was back.

  Fluffing, in our case, was some theme, some narrative as Eugene called it, that we needed to be more accepted in the clubs. Eugene was relentless. “What other clothes you got? You need to change.”

  “We’re fine.”

  “You’re not, trust me. You look like you’ve been up in the mountains burying a cat.”

  “Did Constance tell you about the cat?”

  “More than one way to be a psychic in this town. Gossip is power. Get changed.”

  There was one reason that any further resistance to his demand pretty much crumbled. Speaking for myself, I was worried that all those months in the mountains had sort of desensitized any smell receptors. Not taking a shower from one astrological sign to another does that to you. You could smell like a dog in August and not even know it.