I looked at the clock. Wasn’t the session over yet?
“As you said, your mother was all you had in the world.”
“Did you know I never told Katharine about this?”
“Why not?”
“Oh, come on. It would make me into a perverted man. Things were bad enough with her. I didn’t need to add that to our sex life.”
“Did Katharine remind you of your mother?”
I couldn’t answer that because it was true. I just sat there with my hands to my face. I was almost forty and I thought that I was over that. Katharine was dead, after all – I didn’t have to talk about her. “Can’t we stop for the day?”
Alice was silent, the way my mother was silent once I came on her belly. I was always afraid that I’d get her pregnant and that my brother would be my son.
“You’re very brave, Alex.”
“I don’t feel brave.”
“It took a lot of courage for you to tell me about what your mother did to you.”
She did to me? I was confused but only for an instant. It was my mother’s fault. What if I said no, like I finally did? She wouldn’t love me anymore. And she didn’t.
The wind chimes were slowing down, then they came to a stop. The wind that had been following me grew silent and I stood up from the couch. I looked out the window at all the normal people, the young people who didn’t have their mothers as their lovers.
“I’ll see you on Monday,” Alice said. At least she wasn’t rejecting me.
I left the office and got into my car. I didn’t know what I’d do with my day. It was hours before I had to go to work. We had a midnight call time.
SUNSET RISING
On the drive home, my ears remembered the jiggling sound of Alice’s wind chimes. I opened my car window, let in the cool breeze as I drove through Santa Monica. Inside the house, I went through a drawer in my office, a drawer filled with photographs. I found one of my mother from thirty years before. She was sitting in a beach chair, holding a glass, smiling at the camera. I’m also in the picture. I’m glaring at her with a child’s fearful hatred. I try and remember the day it was taken. Deep in memory, I capture the moment and remember that I wanted to knock the glass out of her hand, that I wanted her to take me home, to spank me. I always got sexually aroused with a good spanking. I let go of the picture; let it drop into the drawer of other memories. My mother’s picture falls near my oldest photo of Katharine.
She was seventeen and standing in between her parents. Her mother, the adventuress, had a benign smile on her face. She was secure about her actions, in charge of the family. Katharine’s father, though stern looking, had vacated his strength as a man. His eyes were full of his morning’s breakfast. He was tentatively at peace with the women in his family but the hand resting on his daughter’s shoulder seemed to be decaying. I could see its roughened exterior, skin that had been weakened by letting his wife’s rage smother him.
I looked at Katharine’s eyes, arrogant and alluring, like my mother’s. I was trying to find some answer in her facial expression – but nothing was there besides her determination to have her way, both her father and her mother approved of her audacious behavior.
I put back the pictures, closed the drawer and walked into my office. I went directly for the bar and made myself a Scotch and soda. I could hear the waves crashing outside. They were louder than usual. They were giving me permission to let my mind take a rest with the alcohol even though it was only noon.
As I stood in front of the window and watched the surf, I floated in the gentle waves that were rolling around my half-brother’s boat. In a moment, I was no longer home. I was back in Tahiti, in Bora Bora, on board Michel’s elegant sailboat. The room had disappeared and I was fully present in one of my hallucinations. I felt the need to tell Alice about this. I wanted to call her. One of my psychiatrist’s best qualities was that she never admitted me to a mental hospital for seeing things which weren’t there, which couldn’t possibly have been there. She listened to my stories about my double life, the life of the art dealer who serenely sold the work of other, more talented men, while his own visions were kept from being recorded on canvas – they were too real to be transferred to a temporal medium, and even if they were, they’d never sell.
I walked out onto the patio, looked over the terrace’s edge. I wanted to see Katharine and Mara playing in the sand but all I could see was Katharine in the last dress she wore, all wet with the water of San Francisco Bay.
She chose that location, I supposed, because it was the city of the dreams we had of escaping Los Angeles. We couldn’t make it out of smogland in enough time so she had to make a permanent dent in the waters of the Bay. Mara was fifteen at the time, as close to her mother as any child could be but still not close enough to intervene in her mother’s single-minded solution to her troubles.
I stepped back into my office. I looked at some of the art I had brought home from my gallery. A tiny Kandinsky and larger works of contemporary artists who painted in the coastal brown and woodsy style of Big Sur and Carmel, the Cezanne wanna-be’s, the malingerers that couldn’t make their way to San Francisco.
I sat down on my couch. I started thinking about the final vacation Katharine and I took together. We drove up the California coast, past the Hearst Castle, through the winding mountain roads of Big Sur and into the cozy and enchanting village of Carmel. We would look at the galleries, at the art currently on display, art that portrayed the brave new world of the end of fascism, abstract expressionist work that didn’t need to duplicate the stolid and resurrected certainty of the art from Germany and Italy during the war.
In my head, I heard Alice’s words: “After this anniversary, things will begin to go better.” Will they? A year to the day since my wife’s suicide and I feared the images of ruin going by in my head, the feelings that there is so little I can do to make the day, the month, the year and time any better.
I got up and walked into my shrine room, a small bedroom at the rear of the house that Katharine and I had converted to the one spot where dreams were just dreams, where any illusion could come, at any time, without either of us being sucked into it. All I had to do was meditate, to partially close my eyes and lower my gaze to an uncertain spot a few feet in front of me. My eyes usually settled on the bright oak wood beyond the Persian rug. It was there that I focused on my breath, only my breath – anything else that might come to me was labeled as “thinking” and I just continued to breathe as I sat there, pausing between the inhale and exhale to note, in the moment, that there was a gap of thought and experience where I was able to be transported to the hard reality I was living at the second – the breeze through the windows grew brighter, the colors grew brighter, my whole outlook on life would rise a level and I’d rest between my thoughts and my breaths, though quite often that rest would include a message from the outside, something that always toyed with my heart or my stomach.
On this afternoon, as the skylight filled my meditation room with more light than usual, I was brought back to Hiroshima, to the day after the bomb was dropped, when I was working for Life magazine as a war photographer. The carnage I saw there, the legless children sliding by as their two arms propelled them across the sidewalk, the sidewalk with the outline of a human form without the human, a memory of life seared into the concrete, vaporized by the bomb as it dropped on that August morning. I labeled the thought as “thinking” but I knew it was much more, it was memory of the horror of the twentieth century, the century that permanently enshrined memories on film, thanks to my father and his memory light.
Long after the sun set, I bowed before my Tibetan Buddhist altar and released myself from my temporary freedom to go back to work. We were shooting night exteriors that evening – the burial of Norma Desmond’s monkey, Gillis wandering around the outside of the house and then, the beginning of the movie which took place at dawn.
We photographed the now famous opening shot of a curb with the street name,
Sunset Blvd. white lettering over a background appropriately painted in black. The camera pulls back and wanders down the street, towards a story about black and white Los Angeles, chiarascuroed police activity. Coming down the streets are the five AM warriors of justice, arriving as usual, too late to prevent the event that had been taking place silently and privately – the murder of Joe Gillis by Norma Desmond. When they arrive at the house, they are followed by reporters, by newsreel crews, by a coterie of curious neighbors. “As much whoop de do as they get when they open a Super-Market.” Gillis would later narrate. Only this was no opening, it was a closing event, the afterlife of a small time Hollywood player. The scenes we shot were married to the end of the movie, convenient bookends that placed an act of murderous reality within the context of nothing more than the story of a small time screenwriter who made a bet with himself that his visit to old Hollywood would yield great personal dividends, not just another loser’s demise.
PROVENANCE
Provenance, the origin of something, the authenticity of a work of art. But in this case, it was the name of the drug that Alice started me on - little blue pills that brought clarity to my waking life and extinguished the dreams and hallucinations – even at times, the memories.
Alice gave me a plain bottle (there was no prescription possible, the drug was still in its experimental phase); I took three (one more than was suggested) and went to work.
When I arrived at Paramount Studios, their famous gate had a crystal aura around it – apparently, the drugs not only kept the real world present in your consciousness, it emphasized it with a creepy patina of artifice. I was in reality, of that I was sure, but the reality had an imperious absoluteness about it. When I entered the sound stage that morning, I entered a reality more certain of itself, a kind of arrogant reality that didn’t let doubts darken my perceptions.
We were in Norma’s house. Gillis had just moved into the bedroom next to Norma, the “husbands’ room” as von Stroheim had described it. There was rain on the set that day, clouding up the sight line outside of Gillis’s new bedroom window. He walked around, discovered there were no doorknobs anywhere.
“The doctor suggested it,” Max told Gillis. “Madam has had moments of melancholy. There have been some attempts at suicide.”
Madam needs to find her provenance, I thought to myself. Despite the familiar atmosphere of self-destruction, I wasn’t infected; I didn’t give in to my own repetitious melancholy. The drugs worked all day. I didn’t have a thought that wasn’t cemented in the reality of things and people around me. It was a new experience. One that made me feel stronger than other people, maybe even a little superior to all the examples of regular humanity that were surrounding me on that sound stage. It gave me a megalomaniac’s sense of self-confidence.
As I was driving back home that night, I imagined that I saw Michel in a car that I passed and all my thoughts went back to the sailboat and his death. Then, realizing that I was losing my mind, I reached into the glove compartment to take more Provenance – it was clear that the drugs were wearing off. But the drugs weren’t there, only more thoughts about Michel.
I parked my car, walked into the house, then saw Michel standing in my study. I grabbed a knife and stabbed him, then grimaced as the blood shot out of his chest.
I reached in my pocket and found a full bottle of Provenance but changed my mind because the hallucinations fascinated me too much.
I was still thinking of how I would get rid of the body. How I would clean up the blood. It stained a carpet. My God, I had committed murder. The guilt was intolerable but it didn’t stop me from putting his corpse into the trunk of my car and imagining a drive into the Santa Monica Mountains where I buried him.
I went back home, cleaned off the stiletto I had used on his heartless chest. I put it away in the drawer of my desk. I looked around for anything that belonged to Michel. I found his hat and coat. I ripped these apart and flushed them down a toilet. But the toilet started backing up and I could hear people coming. What if Katharine came in now? How could I remain calm with the guilt that was suffocating me?
Finally, the toilet was in good repair. There wasn’t a string of fabric left from his coat. Pristine water rested in the basin, water that I felt I should drink to make sure there was no taste of Michel in the toilet. But before I could lower my face into the bowl, I was being pulled backwards. Was it the police? Did they know what I did?
It was Sabrina, bringing me out of my trance. I had parked in front of the gallery and fallen asleep.
“Are you all right?”
I was groggy, unable to accept the world in which I found myself. I walked inside with Sabrina, and then took more pills. In a while, after listening to Sabrina talk about that day’s successful sales, I was back in reality again.
“Let’s celebrate,” Sabrina said.
“Celebrate what?”
“The ten thousand dollars we made from today’s sales.”
Looking at the sales slips, I was astounded. We’d never made money like this on a regular day. “What have you been doing to make sales like this?”
“I guess I’m just good, Alex.”
“You’re remarkable.”
That remark brought her close to me. She bit my neck like a sweet little vampire and said, “Let’s get to work,” as she was undressing.
“I’d love to, Sabrina but I’ve got to be on set at six.”
Sabrina placed her elegant hand over mine. “Come on, Alex, you’re a big boy now, you can still get up and go to work in the morning.” I looked at her hand. She didn’t move it. In fact, she grasped mine tighter, then turned off the lights, leaving us in a blackness that hid our actions from the street.
Sabrina leaned forward and kissed me, with determined affection. I dropped the sales slips and put my arms around her. We embraced like I hadn’t embraced a woman since Katharine. We kissed more; there was no stopping it now. We were committed to making love right there in Potala. We left the main room and retired to a couch I kept in the framing room. Sabrina took my clothes off, then her own. She didn’t waste time in a seduction; Sabrina went straight for the jugular. Her young body rested on top of my own and she grabbed my cock. She was welcomingly wet and within a half of a minute, we were fucking like we’d been doing it for years. She knew exactly what to do to arouse me. And so did I, it seemed, for Sabrina’s cries of orgasm were uncontrollable. She fell off the couch and I fell on top of her. When I entered her again, she screeched and bit at my neck, then pulled my head down to her neck and let out with a yell that sounded like she was being murdered. We both came at the same time and lay next to one another on the sweet floor. Everything was sweet to me. Katharine was no longer dead, or even if she was dead, she approved my making love to Sabrina. Katharine expected it. She deserved it. Her death didn’t bring an end to my jealousy and lying with Sabrina, my hand massaging her mons, seemed the right way to commemorate my wife’s demise.
THE EXAMINATION
When I walked into Alice’s office the following week, the middle-aged doctor was sitting behind her desk, writing notes, probably about one of her psychotic patient’s fantasies. Perfect, I thought. She’s in the mood for more psychosis.
I flopped down on the couch, put up my legs and lay there like a good mental patient, taking the Freudian pose that always amused Alice.
“Ready to tell me more dreams,” she asked as she got up from her desk and sat in a chair opposite me. I didn’t respond at first. I couldn’t. I wasn’t in her office. Another hallucination took me back to Germany. I was in a morbid cabaret with Odette, one filled with human skeletons and lit by large candelabras that stood on top of the coffins that served as tables.
“Alex,” she said, “Where are you?”
I raised my head to Alice. My wandering mind had returned to the present which was a let down from my fantasies. “These drugs aren’t working,” I said.
“Where were you?”
“I’m still there,” I to
ld her as the room once again transformed itself into a Berlin cabaret. “The place was called ‘Holle,’ an establishment with a huge mouth framed around its door.
“It was perfect…it was perfect because it swallowed you and all your bourgeois sentiments along with it. You were in hell and you could fall in love with the devil of your choice.”
I smiled, imagining myself to be Odette’s satanic fantasy – and in a second, I was fully immersed in Berlin. I smiled at Odette as she picked up my Leica and quickly took a picture of me. In it, I was sitting next to one of the coffin-shaped tables and a magic show was beginning behind me, a show where ghosts would appear and flirt with you.
If you lifted the coffin tabletops, you’d find recently deceased bodies, blood still spilling from their wounds like the blood that came out of Michel’s head on that sailboat.
I stood up, unable to tolerate Michel’s death in my imagination. “You have to give me something else, something that will stop these visions. I’ve gone completely wacko.”
“Sit down,” Alice commanded me. Why was she being so brutal? I fell back on the couch, reclining again in my psychoanalytical position, ready to mouth the agonies of my early youth.
“What do you see now?” Alice said.
“Why, I see you walking to your desk. Now, you’re opening the drawer and you’ve grabbed a bottle of pills. It’s the Provenance.”
“A stronger dosage,” she said.
Alice walked across the room and handed me three of the tablets with some water. I happily swallowed them, and then lay back down on the couch. I was no longer in the cabaret. I was in Alice’s office but music began to play in my head – it was an organ playing Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue.” The volume rose and I stood up again, looking outside. As I watched the UCLA students going to their classes, I witnessed a total eclipse of the sun. The daylight became a dirty darkness, wind soared through the trees.
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