by Martyn Burke
The prettier of the two movie stars, Raquel—was sitting alone in the shadows. I was aware of the smoke from her cigarette before I realized she was there, staring straight ahead. “Hi,” I said. She didn’t reply, sitting there manically smoking that cigarette, her arm snapping it back and forth toward her mouth in a kind of periodic salute.
“I’m not going to let you fuck me, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said finally, still looking straight ahead.
I didn’t even bother replying. I just shook my head.
“You think that’s funny?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Just because you’re a goddamn war hero?”
“I’m not a war hero.”
“Then what are you?”
“We’re soldiers.”
She said, looking amazed, “Then what the fuck am I doing here then? You’re supposed to be a goddamn hero. I don’t want to have my name out there with just some ordinary generic-brand soldier.”
“I don’t either.”
“Well you’re going to be a hero when Carla gets through shaping your life.” She thought for a moment. “Just like I’m a fucking movie star.”
For some bizarre reason I almost felt sorry for her. “Hey, if someone like me has seen pictures of you, then you’re a movie star.”
“Oh yeah, sure.” It was the first time she’d looked over at me. She was one of those women who could project vulnerability and ferocity at the same instant. But the effortless beauty she had been gifted with pretty much neutralized whatever she was saying. For a moment, I forgot to listen. “What photos did you see? The ones when I rolled that fucking car off Mulholland? Rehab number one? Or maybe number two? Or maybe the barfing into a storm drain on Sunset?”
“None of the above.”
Silence. “Yeah right.” More silence. “I’m still not fucking you.” There was a perverse charm to her wizened cynicism. It was like an old person’s anger bubbling up fecklessly from a child inhabiting the body of a beautiful woman.
“I wouldn’t worry about it I were you.”
“Even if Carla wants it for the through-line,” Raquel said defiantly.
“What’s a through-line?”
“The story. They’ve got a whole story for us. Didn’t you know? Scripted hour by hour. You and I sleep together for like three nights before you go off to war. I tell ET and People and TMZ how proud I am of you. I give some dipshit reporter an exclusive on how I realized because of you that I, like, needed to turn my life around and shit like that. Then in front of about a zillion paparassholes I, like, wave goodbye with tears in my eyes or shit like that as you get on the plane and go off to fight for your country. Wholesome shit like that.” The cigarette went up to her cherubic lips in another of her salutes. “You mean you didn’t see the through-line they came up with?”
“They actually have a script for all this?”
“Two. A second one if you get killed over there in . . .”
“Afghanistan.”
“Whatever. And, like, if you go lights out, I’m supposed to go and meet the plane with your coffin. Dressed in black. Bawling. The whole fucking bit.”
“I’m touched.”
“But don’t worry—if I have to go do the widow bit, I’ll tell them how great you were in bed. How we’d just fuck ourselves blind trying to make a baby war hero.” She giggled for a second and then went back that brooding silence.
“I thought only your movies were fiction.”
“What fucking planet are you on? Everything is fiction now. On the set or off the set. It doesn’t make any difference now. My whole goddamn life is fiction.” She threw herself back in the big overstuffed chair. “Honestly,” Raquel said to no one in particular, “this sucks.” She lit another cigarette. “I’m supposed to drive a fucking Prius. It’s part of the package. Carla wants everybody to know that I’m helping save the world by cutting down on greenhouse gas. She thinks it’ll cut my probation time. What kind of car do you have?”
“I don’t have one.”
“What? You take the bus?”
“I don’t need a car.”
“Seriously?” She looked almost appalled.
“In a war zone?”
She looked confused. And then, for some reason, defensive. “Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know?” She sat back in the big chair. In profile she was even prettier, but it wasn’t her appearance that in some strange way made her interesting. It was that vacant vulnerability, once the fierceness subsided. It was replaced by a kind of confusion that made you think she could almost detonate. “I don’t like your attitude,” she said.
“I didn’t know I had one.”
She acted as if she hadn’t heard me. She sat staring straight ahead. And then suddenly, she smiled. It came out of nowhere. “Got any beans?” she said brightly.
“Beans?”
“Happy pills.” When I shook my head, she giggled. “When I was in high school, I sold my cheerleader’s uniform for a two-week supply. And some benzos.”
“I didn’t know there was a market for used cheerleader’s uniforms.”
“Old pervs love them. The smellier the better.” A transient observation drifted through her thoughts like prey to be caught. “You know, Sari likes your friend.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. She’ll fuck him. She told me she would, back at the club. But she wants to hammerhead.” She giggled again when she saw I didn’t know what she was talking about. “Mixing Viagra and happy pills—Ecstasy. She tries to get all her guys to do that. I hated it, though. It was like fucking a jackhammer.”
I just laughed at her. I didn’t really mean to, but it was a spontaneous response. And amazingly, she laughed back. “I’m gonna get us a treat. There’s got to be one here somewhere.” She bounced to her feet, and suddenly she did a strange little shimmy, her arms vanishing inside her blouse and reappearing, holding her pink, lacy bra, which she waved in front of me. “Da-da!” she laughed, spinning around and throwing it over her shoulder before walking into the chaos of the living room, where lights and cameras were being set up. “Gotta go to the bathroom,” she yelled to Carla before she vanished down a hallway.
I was left on my own on the big balcony. The lacy pink bra hung from a tall, red bougainvillea, regimental colors of whatever forces were doing battle in the interiors of her mind.
On the terraced hillside at the back of the house, Sari was hurrying toward the house, racing grimly through the pools of landscape light. For an instant she saw me, said nothing, and kept walking through the French doors on the lowest level of the house.
From somewhere below there was a soft clicking noise, the kind Danny and I made over in the Afghan mountains when talking was too dangerous. An almost unnoticeable glint flashed from the darkness near the end of the property. I made a single clicking noise in return.
At the end of the property, Danny was lying on his back, staring up at the sky. “Weird not being able to see even one star,” he said.
“What was with that Sari? I just saw her barreling back to the house.”
“Strange, that,” he said. “She was saying we should mix cough syrup with cocaine and then get laid up in that tree there, but all I did was talk about Ariana. And how much I miss her.” He squinted into the smog trying to see a star. “These Hollywood types retract their wheels before they get liftoff.”
For a moment, the distant noises of L.A. at night had a strange music all their own. From up at the house someone called our names. Lying on our backs under the gray shroud of the night sky, we ignored the voice. “I was just counting up the number of people I ever really loved. I only got to two—my old man and Ariana.”
“Hey!” The bellowing came from the top balcony, way behind us. “Where the hell are you guys?” It was Carla. For a really thin woman, she had amazing lungpower. “We need you up here.”
I lay back again, staring at the gray shroud of the sky. I started counting up the number of people who’d heard
me say I loved them. I stopped after my mother, my grandmother when she was alive, and Annie. “I only got to three people. You think maybe we’re weird that way? I mean, shouldn’t we have about a dozen or more?”
From back on the top balcony, all that lungpower was still shredding the relative silence of the night. Carla was getting a little screechy and yelling for Eugene to do something! “The photographers are getting impatient.” We could see several security guys approaching, obviously sent to bring us back inside the wire.
And then everything changed. To pure panic. “Call an ambulance!” It was a scream that cut through the night. The security men above us instantly lost all interest in what they’d been doing as “Help!” came through the walkie-talkies and “Hurry, hurry, tell ’em it’s a goddamn emergency,” was screamed from the balcony.
“Eugene? Anybody?” yelled one of the security men into his walkie-talkie. “What the hell’s going on?”
The reply crackled with a lot of static for such a short transmission. “She pried open Carla’s medicine cabinet. It was locked. She pried it open.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning she got the fucking Demerol and injected it into herself. Along with some other shit she took.”
“What other shit?”
“We think blow. Maybe sherm. Just get up here.”
“I ain’t doing the mouth-to-mouth again, pal. She puked in my mouth last time,” said a security guy.
“Just get the fuck up here!”
We weren’t even trying to avoid them anymore. We just pulled ourselves up the steep part of the property and stood on the grass, listening to Carla’s frenzy and a barrage of sirens getting closer. You could hear her yelling that everything was okay like a kind of ringmaster of denial. “She’s fine, do you understand? Fine.” We got back to the house about the same time as the paramedics crashed through the door, accompanied by sheets of white lightning from those flashbulbs. Raquel was lying unconscious on a couch, the silent center of a constellation of self-perpetuating panic. Carla was yelling orders and camera technicians and security people came racing back and forth with water, ice cubes, blankets, electric fans, hot towels, cold towels, and whatever else she demanded and then discarded in quick sequence. Several paramedics came barging in through Carla’s screeching—“There’s really no need to”—and went straight into their drill of pulse, blood pressure, heartbeat, and pupil dilation as their team loaded Raquel onto a gurney without paying any attention to Carla, who was still yelling for hot towels just to show that she was in charge. The paramedic pushed past her, wheeling the gurney toward the entrance. “Not that door! There’s too many—”
“Out of the way, lady,” one of the paramedics shouted as the door was opened and the night exploded all over again. The paparazzi were one seething organism, a roiling, contorted ball of elbows, screams, and faces that had become masks, festering around that gurney like a swarm of jungle insects suddenly discovering carrion. Police and fire department vehicles came screaming up as the ambulance doors were slammed shut and it lurched into the hillside darkness, trailing a multicolored tail of paparazzi motorcycles, blasting out flashes and screams, illuminated as it careened all the way down the winding hillside roads toward Sunset Boulevard, by the lights from the news helicopters that had taken up the scent.
The noise and the flashes receded, and within a few minutes the house was empty except for a couple of technicians putting the video equipment into shiny metal cases and two police officers putting pill bottles into plastic bags.
We went past the yellow Do Not Cross police tape into what must have been Carla’s bedroom, which was a static avalanche of pink frilliness. Teddy bears and dolls like silent sentries guarding the framed photos of her and every movie star we’d ever heard of. We liberated—to use one of Annie’s parents’ favorite words whenever they stole anything—two fluffy down comforters.
All those months in the mountains somehow had changed us. Sleeping indoors seemed so unnatural, so we went back out to that grassy overhang, rolled ourselves in the comforters, and watched Los Angeles twitch beneath us.
The mere thought of Annie sent the jackals in my head scattering thought and devouring composure. She was down there somewhere among all those lights. I was fine, or sort of, until the memories came flooding back—the wind-whipped, sandy-blonde hair under the bandana being brushed away from in front of a smile that drew me in across the days and months and years since I had last seen it. And I remembered as if it was now the velvet warmth that came when her hand rested on my arm and gave me a sense of completeness. And then there were the times when all I wanted was to shut it all out.
“Hey,” said Danny. “What was that business about us both being after the same woman?”
“Probably nothing.”
“Yeah.” We both stared at the lights some more. “I mean, that psychic stuff only goes so far,” he said.
“Absolutely.”
“Pretty ridiculous when you think about it. I mean, Annie lives here and Ariana’s over there. How can they be the same woman?”
I’m not exactly sure why I had a need just to lie back, stare at where the stars should be, and then drift into sleep as fast as possible. We both knew that what Constance had said was somewhere between my mother’s tea-leaf readings and some higher plane of understanding. Or a curtain neither of us really wanted to look behind.
“It makes no sense,” was the last thing I remember him saying.
“Yeah, what does she know?”
22
Going to see Annabelle the next morning, I had to stop twice on the way to steel myself. Or maybe just to practise deep breathing.
I stopped on the bluffs of Palisades Park, that thin sliver of grass guarded by sentinel rows of skinny palm trees swaying like giant green sunflowers high above the nearby Santa Monica beaches, enormous fields of sand sprouting tourists and beach towels. It was almost the same place where Albert had told me that the reason people were crazier here was because ever since the Tigris-Euphrates, thousands of years ago, they had been moving west, looking for something better. And if the place they found wasn’t good enough, they could always go further west. But when they got here to the edge of California, there was no further. This was it. And when things didn’t turn out the way they wanted, the only journey left was in their heads. Which is why this is where all the nuttiness starts.
I remember as a kid listening to Albert tell me this and deciding that he was some kind of warped genius.
“Oh, you mean Mr. Pubic Head,” said my mother when I mentioned that memory. This was not long after she’d yelled to the neighbor that her son, the warrior, was home. I’d just walked from Palisades Park to an old stucco bungalow near the rim of Santa Monica Canyon where Annabelle was housesitting for two months while the owners were in Europe. It took less than an hour for me to start thinking of reasons why I didn’t want to spend a lot of time here.
“Look!” she proclaimed angrily, standing on the rim of the canyon overlooking the houses and trees down below. “A felony! Perpetrated by that waddling charlatan.”
I looked over to the opposite side of the canyon and wasn’t sure what she was pointing to. “I don’t see anything.”
“Precisely,” she said, pointing again.
I looked more closely. “You mean that empty patch of ground on the other side?”
“That ‘empty patch of ground’ just happens to represent my entire life.”
I thought about asking her if she wanted to rephrase that. But decided that it would be too much trouble to explain why.
She insisted we inspect that empty patch of ground. Which meant going into the garage of the house she was looking after and using the owners’ new BMW. By checking all the possible hiding places in the house, Annabelle had finally found the keys to it a week ago, and now had the problem of the newly wrecked front right fender. “It’s not my fault,” she said, more or less aiming the car down West Channel Road. “If they had just l
et me have the car to drive, I wouldn’t have been so nervous.”
On the other side of the canyon, she parked on that empty patch of ground. At its highest point there was a view of the ocean stretching from Catalina Island in the south all the way up to Point Dume, the big cat’s leg of land stretching out from the Malibu coastline. “You are missing it entirely,” she announced in that voice intended to let me know she simply could not for the life of her! understand how I could survive even one day without her.
Below her in splintered contortions was a tangle of wreckage, a kind of massive doll’s house tossed down a steep little hill. Broken walls, or what was left of them, gouged at one another. Splintered rooflines took off at random angles, and curtains, clothes, and a twisted refrigerator lay scattered around and partly submerged in the mud from the hillside that had collapsed. It was all stillness except for a woman’s stocking, the old-fashioned, long, silk kind, that wafted from a tree, a pallid banner of a life once led.
“My savings! which that colossal runt fleeced me out of in order to invest in this catastrophe.”
“Mom, c’mon, you said the two of you went into this foreclosure business as a way to—”
“Perfect!—the house slides down the hill and you’re taking his side?”
“No, I am not taking his side. Forget Albert, will you?”
“Forget Albert?” she almost yelled. “He got the insurance money. Which he used to buy a drunk tank up in Malibu. It’s making a fortune. Everyone wants in on the rehab business now. It’s the wave of the future.”
“Let it go, Ma. Move on.”
“You realize this wouldn’t ever have happened if you hadn’t broken up with Annie.” Guilt 101. Prof. Annabelle at work.
“Exactly how did you come up with that gem of logic?”
“It’s obvious.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket and dabbed her eyes. “I wouldn’t have gotten tricked into this because we would have been all one big happy family.”