“I’m pleased to be sitting with you here. I’m happy with Mara and I’m concerned about you.”
“Does concern taste like love?” Katharine asked as she sipped at her martini while staring at me with eyes that had pupils as large as cannonballs. Katharine was at her sweetest and most sentimental when fueled by her injections, when casting a curtain over the bad times.
“Don’t think I don’t appreciate my husband,” she said. “I appreciate him more than I ever enjoyed his brother.” I was touched but I wouldn’t let down my defenses during that last night when Katharine was attempting to bloom for me.
Dinner plates were placed before us but the food didn’t taste like Ernie’s, it tasted like Tahitian dinners, like Parisian dinners, like all the past dinners. Words of comfort wanted to crawl out of my mouth but I thought that I could see what she was doing, creating an atmosphere of ruined romance to recapture what was truly dead. It had died six months before when Michel was murdered on that sailboat. Katharine had changed her style. She became thinner than usual, drank and smoked till she fell into a filthy but fetching pose on our bed.
Before the Ernie’s dinner, when we had been in our hotel room, Katharine had vamped me. She dressed up in her most seductive dress and removed my hand from the paintbrush so it could paint the sex all over her. But as I removed her clothes, the sex wasn’t there. It was a cadaver I was making love to; an only remotely sexy Katharine lay on the hotel’s soft Victorian comforter. She had kisses left but they were more like wells of suffering than unions of soft lips and inviting tastes.
The sun was setting as I moved inside of her and felt as if the lustful Katharine I knew had taken her vows of celibacy. Our lovemaking was more like a rape. She didn’t resist but she wasn’t really involved in what it was supposed to be about. And it was supposed to be about a vacation from suffering, a cozy trip up north to the private places of wonder and fascination that kept us together all those years.
Katharine had the aroma of the end of suffering on the bed that night and I was sitting in the now of the past trying to recreate what I could never really understand about my wife – what she wanted from me and what she wanted from her life.
I was painting lucidly at this point, the speed I was filled with gave me at least the illusion of concentration as I added color that wasn’t really there at Ernie’s into the high cheekbones that I was always proud to know and posses in my moments with Katharine.
A stab came from nowhere. Someone or something had stabbed my eardrum and caused it to shriek like the unforgiving bell that reminded me it was time to go back to class. Katharine and I didn’t meet in school but the times we spent between our private lives seemed like the breaks between classes.
Then, I began to paint her lips and I was pulled back from my painting just as I was pulled towards it. I felt a kind of vertigo and I had to hurry to put the finishing touches on Katharine’s never finished kisses.
I got up from my canvas and took a look outside. The Pacific Ocean was still there, the waves still smashed gently against my ringing eardrums but there was something wrong with my reality. I was nauseated and I felt abandoned. Katharine was about to leave the painting I was composing. She was about to make her final lonely trip.
In Ernie’s, I remembered when we finished dinner. Neither of us wanted dessert. We both wanted to leave the place – and leave each other, if the truth be told. Our relationship was used up. There was nothing left, as evidenced by the love making before dinner.
“I want to go on a walk,” Katharine said outside of the restaurant.
“All right,” I responded, “I’ll go back to the hotel.” There was no question of our walking together. The days of our efforts at maintaining a union were finally over. The last time I saw Katharine was when she was walking away from me towards Telegraph Hill. It was the beginning of a long walk to the bridge and an even longer leap from it’s safe but irresistible fence.
I finished the portrait of Katharine that night, knowing less than I knew about her when I was her husband, when I knew her so well I could strangle her or make moist fleshy love to her. She was gone now, forever, and I was left with a painting that summed up my life with her – a lot of color, shafts of light and details in the darkness, details that it was impossible to make out.
NAUSEA
Immediately after putting down my brush, I started vomiting and I collapsed, making loud screeching noises, trying desperately to get out of me for good whatever evil it was that had entered me.
The housekeeper came, then my daughter. They called an ambulance and as I was driven through the Santa Monica streets, the flashing lights and siren became a kind of lullaby for me. I was back in my mommy’s arms, being coddled and played with. My mother was rich. I had an enormous bedroom filled with toys and stuffed animals. Things were great just like they never were.
Shortly after I arrived at the UCLA emergency, I was unconscious when the doctors examined me, then rolled me into the X-Ray room. As radiation pored through my body, with much less effect than it had on the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I dreamt about Katharine and Hitu. I saw Katharine running away from him, Hitu in hot pursuit. He grabbed her, ripped off her clothes and raped her. Katharine struggled, but in the end, of course, she quivered and shook with pleasure at his manliness.
When I woke up, it was another sunny day. I was sitting in a hospital room. Sabrina was there. Mara was there. The doctor explained to me that I had a brain tumor.
“But you checked for that before,” I told him.
“The tumor wasn’t big enough. We couldn't’ see it. It was growing in a tiny bony canal and the x-rays couldn’t detect it until it had come out of that canal.”
So, then it all made sense. I wasn’t as crazy as I seemed. I was just dying from too much thought, too many adventures, too much duplicity to keep myself on the straight and the narrow and the living.
I learned more about the tumor, about how it can affect my thoughts, how it can bring on hallucinations and a confused and anxious state mixed with a little nauseating euphoria. Also how some trauma might have triggered it to grow more quickly.
“Many of the symptoms may have been there for years but some event must have taken place more recently to advance its growth so much,” the doctor tells Sabrina.
“His wife committed suicide a year ago.”
The physician nods, acknowledging that that could have triggered the tumor advancing within the temporal lobe. I’m also told that there’s a fifty/fifty chance that I’ll survive the surgery that they have planned for me.
They gave me drugs for the nausea; my vital signs were being monitored by the high tech of the time. My surgery was scheduled for the next day. It would be long and complex. I could be left with facial or vocal paralysis. I might not smile or speak again. But would that be so terrible, I thought to myself.
Sabrina cried, and then pulled out a rosary. Why is it that everyone gets religious when they’re desperate? If it were Katharine standing there, she’d just hold my hand and meditate together with me – that is, after downing enough opiates to kill a whale.
I suddenly felt my belly coming up through my esophagus. I was vomiting the whole of my internal organs, it seemed. Sabrina called for the nurse. I was cleaned up, given another shot for the nausea and the doctor was consulted. Apparently, it was normal for me to be getting sicker and sicker.
“You might even have some strange thoughts or visions.”
He was right there. After the doctor left the hospital room, I was in the hotel room with Katharine on the night that she killed herself.
“Why can’t you accept me,” she asked.
“I did. For years I did, Katharine.”
She was shooting up. I reached out to take the needle from her arm but suddenly, I was on the Golden Gate Bridge and my arm was actually pushing her off the bridge. She yelled up at me as she fell down to her death. I tried to jump off after her but someone stopped me. I woke up to find out th
at I was actually trying to pull myself over the edge of the bed’s restraining bars.
Sabrina took my hand. “It won’t be long now.
She stood there, holding my hand, then wiped the sweat from my forehead. I could see the clock on the wall. It was 4:30 in the morning.
“When are they going to do it,” I asked.
“The surgery is at six.” Sabrina looked brave…I didn’t have to be brave – all I had to do was learn how to say goodbye to everyone and everything. I wouldn’t be the one suffering once I was gone.
The nurse came in. They were taking me to pre-op. In the hallway, I said goodbye to my daughter. She was showing a maturity that I never saw in her mother.
Mara, the excellence in my life, stood tall and slender with soft, auburn curls streaming down her face like tears that were falling into a well so deep underground that they could never be used to nurture the growth of flora. They could be used for nothing but vacating misery.
“I’ll be back,” I reassured her but I wasn’t so sure myself. She stood there for a moment, and then she started following the gurney as it moved away from her. I couldn’t see my daughter any longer but her separate life entered my body and emboldened me. I was leaving someone behind, someone who flashed in my brain as her mother on the night that we met in Salka Viertel’s backyard. I could hear the tinkling water in Salka’s waterfall. I stood next to a composite woman, part lover, part wife, part daughter. A cycle had completed itself and I let my arms fall heavy on the gurney.
They rolled me down the hall, into the anteroom of the surgical theatre. I was given a series of drugs, attached to more equipment and rolled into the surgery room where I was introduced to the anesthesiologist. I tried to shake his hand but my hand was tied down and couldn’t move. “I understand that your sense of time passing doesn’t exist when you’re under.”
“That’s right, you’ll be up in a few moments.”
“Or out forever,” I suggested.
The surgeon ignored my comment of doom. He turned to me. “Are we ready?” I nodded and the unconsciousness came. Now the way it was explained to me, the way it was always supposed to happen is that I would regain consciousness in what seemed like seconds to me even if it had really been hours, which I knew it would be. But that’s not what did happen.
I saw my life from the interior of a projector. Light poured through my unconscious body and projected itself onto a screen. The room was filled with people from my life, those dead and those divorced from reality; friends who had become enemies were friends again. I was at a great party but I couldn’t enjoy it. I was a ghost, a hungry ghost. I brought a glass of champagne to my lips but I couldn’t taste it. My first cat, Egmont, was a little kitten, dead in the gutter, fluid pouring from his mouth. I knelt down and cried in front of him but his feet and whiskers began to move as if he were just having a bad dream. He had to get away from the reality he was in. Then, he stretched his body out and smiled at me. I picked him up and walked back into my apartment, a larger, brighter, cleaner apartment. My mother was a loving and gentle woman. I sat on her lap and she read to me.
A loud bell buzzed. A camera craned down to me. I was lying in Norma Desmond’s bed. Was I myself or Joe Gillis?
I saw Mara in the waiting room. Her soft curls had been hardened by the tears that flowed from her eyes. She was bent over, letting every tear fall into her lap and every tear was measured by a clock. Time was passing while crews of doctors were in my brain. They must have been touching memory centers. I was on the beach at Normandy, the ardent and terrified lovers of life were pouring forth from the boats that reached the shore. They were machine gunned down. I looked around and everyone was dead but me. I was floating in the water, the red water that was absorbed into my skin like a sponge.
And then, I was on Michel’s sailboat. He was happy but smaller. The clothes her wore were too big for him. He tried to hold the helm but he was too little, only a child. And his face was dissolving into light. The sun, our father, grew larger over the water, larger and warmer. Michel was crying in my arms, all the jealousy had been drained from him.
Katharine was no longer in San Francisco bay and she was no longer wet. She was laughing, a young woman who held the world in her imagination. Her laugh was free of irony. She was free from me at last and we were friends for a lifetime.
More beacons of light cut through my mind while the surgeons were cutting my actual brain. But this made me laugh along with Katharine. I had a stiff drink that went down my throat so gently that I felt my throat was a stream…and everyone from my life floated on this stream. It was a river soon and the water smashed on everyone but no one felt pain or fear. There was a solitary guitar melody that played with the wet pants I was wearing as I lay on that operating table.
Loud and indistinguishable voices tried to enter my ears but I wouldn’t let them. I blocked them with my father’s light.
EPILOG
Mara was crying without end when they buried me in the
Cemetery at Forest Lawn. Billy was there with Audrey. Sabrina, in black, was beautiful as ever and free to fall in love again. All my friends and family wore lights on their lapels; the women had lights in their attitudes and on their dresses and skirts. There was no avoiding the fact that I was a son of the light – but this time, I was legitimate and held by the love that follows you wherever you go.
Joe Gillis was living with Betty in a home by the beach. Margaret and Norma were nothing but still photographs, brilliantly lit but frozen in their ravenous roles and unable to join us in this stuff called life eternal.
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HOLLYWOOD BRAT
A true story of mental illness in Hollywood, as experienced through the eyes of a child, then adult, who refused to kowtow to the demands of the success he was convinced would end his suffering.
FROM THE REVIEWS:
“What Holden Caulfield was to the forties and fifties, Nick James is to the fifties and sixties. And Nick is not fictitious. Please don't go reclusive on us. More, Mr. James, More.
Robert Sanny, Author, Editor, Publisher
“If Nick doesn’t turn this into a movie, I’ll do it myself.”
Ronald Shusett, Producer-Writer, “Alien,” “Total Recall,” “Minority Report”
SURFACING
A novel, taking place both under and above water about a marine microbiologist whose mind has twisted to the point that he is shocked to realize that his nightmares are true. His grandson was kidnapped and there really are people trying to kill him.
FROM THE REVIEWS:
“James has such a convincing way of telling a story that you start to remember things that never happened.”
Jim Burton, Indie Book Reviews
“Surfacing is a breakthrough novel that brings dead sex back to life.”
Sharon Rafferty, Bond Street Journal
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