by Carson, Tom
As for the rest, isn’t it enough it all happened? And has stayed imprinted, untransmuted but there, on my elderly mimsies, nostrils, cerebellum, and skin. Like everyone else’s from Bill M.’s to Cadwaller’s, Pam’s Second World War will all only unhappen at the instant I die.
Sorry, Tim. I can’t do it, though as you see I’ve just tried. It’s futile. Just waves slapping bodies, engine noise always, food out of cans. Too many cigarettes, hairy black icebergs, mud and shouts, fucking. Sometimes I wake to a thunderstorm and think they have our range.
Posted by: Pam
At my age, however, one’s memories dwell as much or more on what didn’t happen, which can mean things that might’ve but didn’t or things you aren’t wholly sure did. The day in 1951 when thirty-one-year-old Pammie Gerson, a blissfully childless producer’s wife who hadn’t yet conceived Glory Be, realized her life in Los Angeles had crossed over irrevocably from a light-hearted transformational game into confining if pleasant kung pao had elements of both.
Gerson and I had been married two years. As I’ve said and his warm letters after our divorce confirm, we were happy. When Pink Thing plays safecracker, though, I’m forced to accuse myself—for his sake, not mine—of treating my second marriage as a respite. A lulling sanatorium stopover, prefigured by Metro’s whitewashed buildings and green lawns on my first Gersonized tour of the lot.
That morning in our now twice redecorated Beverly Hills home—Stella Negroponte’s picture, what did I care?, still watching from the den—my husband had let out a swiftly muted cry. The script he’d found in his briefcase was supposed to have been messengered the previous day to some actor or actress whose name I don’t recall. He was addled enough to reach for an already emptied juice glass.
“Pammie, I hate having to ask. Could you please, please run this up to Malibu? We’re in horrible rewrites on That’s All She Wrote”—one of Gerson’s sorrows, originally based on Abigail Adams’s correspondence. “You know I’d do it, but I don’t have time.”
Was I resentful? It’s possible. A request that mars your day’s plans is as nothing irritation-wise to one that interferes with none. A week had gone by since my welcoming telegram and it was obvious Bill M. wasn’t going to take Pam up on her offer to play the knowledgeable Los Angelena while he was back in town.
If he had, of course I’d’ve had to tell Gerson the truth The Gal had so nearly hit on. It would’ve been worth it to see Bill again. And possibly, now it was all in the past tense, confess to him too, with the amused valedictory laugh at my youthful foibles I was getting so good at. Sometimes one quick candled look in a restaurant gives you all you didn’t have in an instant, sparing both parties the trouble of having lived through it but nonetheless curing regret.
In a modest rebellion once Gerson’s Packard scooted offscreen (our front window was Beverly Hills Panavision), I phoned up the DeWitts for a lunch date. Since I’d be going out their way anyhow, I’d drop off the script after a good meal and some enjoyably surf-pearled Manhattanish banter. I was ignoring a stricken face’s plea of the sooner the better.
Luscious Eve was off shooting: Manley Halliday’s The Night’s High Noon, I think. Addison said he’d be tickled mauve just the same. As usual, he proposed their Filipino cook’s warthog sandwiches—his delighted description, not mine. But I’d spent lots of time in their yard’s pilgrim lands and the day’s warm but wild breeze had me craving the Pacific in closeup. In a rare feat, I convinced him to putter down from their hill and meet me in Eve’s and my favorite restaurant, glassed-in and exclusive but hunkered out at the far end of a weathered fishing pier near Porto Marina Way.
The juxtapositions of leather wine list and fried seafood, fine china and sandals, wind and protection from it defined the California I’d come to adore. God, how Tim and I both loathe Joan Didion, who flatters East Coasters by treating such stuff as a vulgarization without ever explaining what it’s a vulgarization of or how you go about vulgarizing something unprecedented.
In a Hawaiian shirt that was dreadful even by his standards—“Jekyll and hydrangeas,” he bragged—Addison dropped into the facing chair. I was instantly overdressed by comparison in a bronze silk blouse, copper scarf, beige toreadors, low-heeled fawn shoes, and modest peach handbag. When friendship’s unflustered edition of silence came over us after updates and gossip, we gazed at the beach’s dotted idyll: tiny lovelies with their interchangeable Chucks, gulls soaring like punctuation hunting the sky’s nonexistent sentence. He looked so tranquilly pleased I decided to tease him with beatitude’s opposite: “Do you envy them, Addison?”
Judging from how his eyes had to drop as well as turn to meet mine, he’d misunderstood me slightly. “Oh, Pam! We’re all creatures and the rest is verbiage. That’s really all my verbiage is about.”
Our food came. Recalling now dead and obscure (not in that order) Sinclair St. Clair’s Provincetown jingle from Pammie’s childhood, I recited. Tickled purple, Addison wanted to memorize it: “‘To eat an oyster/You crack it foister/This part is moister!…’ Wait, what’s the last line again?”
As we crunched back over gravel to our metallurgic cars, the beach’s squeals and caws becoming audible as their source grew invisible, I remembered Gerson’s script with distaste. “Addison!” I called, eyeing it in the back seat. “Do you know where Blank Blank lives?”
“My dear girl, I’m a poet. I study how people live”—grand sweep of his car keys—“not where. To find my way home, I just keep going up.”
In an un-Gersonishly hasty scribble, the address was on the envelope. I still needed help. Damn few of the surf-facing houses on the coastal highway’s beach side sported visible numbers then or maybe now. Too prey to fans, not yet called stalkers but anathema all the same. Mailmen must’ve loved Malibu in 1951.
As for why I’ve long forgotten the name and even gender of the star Gerson was pursuing, your guess is as good as mine. Mine is that the erasure is Pink Thing’s archival way of mimicking the fact that Glen or Glenda never starred in that film, title also gone to oblivion and evidently unproduced. I’d know it if it were among my second husband’s credits on imdb.com, a website whose name I sometimes read as “I’m D.B.”: Daisy Buchanan.
Near Topanga Canyon Boulevard, Gerson had said. More irked at that sweet man than I could ever remember being, I parked when I got to it and set out, the script swinging like a second handbag to metronome my real one. Found one boite with a fearlessly displayed address under twenty digits lower than mine, so at least he hadn’t been lying. But its neighbors’ expensive roofs and protectively recessed, unnumbered doorways wandered away from Pam’s sight as if queuing for an invasion of Canada.
Nothing for it: I’d have to find someone to ask. The odds of spotting any Malibu resident in reach of my halloo on the highway side were about as good, though for the opposite reason, as seeing convicts wander at will outside a maximum-security prison. They kept to themselves, those exiles from availability: on the beach side, with architecture to match. When you drive past, you’re really looking at their houses’ anuses, not facades.
Spotting a thumb of white with its nail painted blue in an unfenced gap between two boites, grimly aware the breeze had played hob with a hairdo that had been hobbled even at Antoine’s, I plunged into the sand, my miscast shoes sinking like miscast actors’ hearts. Out back, since the beach was the whole bloody point, I knew I’d see somebody hallooable. Maybe even, by good fortune, run right into Blank Blank him/herself.
To my shock—but why? It wasn’t that unlikely—someone hallooed me instead. “Why, Pam! Pam Buchanan. That is you at last, isn’t it?”
Turning, I found myself face to face with a woman’s apparently decapitated head. We weren’t precisely eye to eye, since her pleased blue ones, pellet nose, and rich red pulpit mouth were perpendicular to mine inside a dark crater of tangled bangs and between two slats of the h
ouse’s raised beach-side deck. The rest of the railing was mostly screened by bright Navajo rugs, explaining the Mary-Queen-of-Scots effect.
“Well, hello!” I said, purse and script dangling at my beige toreadors’ flanks. I couldn’t remember who the fuck she was.
“This is so nice! Come around that way,” said she with a lift of her chin, meaning the stairs on the deck’s far side.
As I did as told, I was racking what was left of my brains after lunch’s two bottles of Riesling. I knew her face wasn’t famous, but then what was she? Director’s wife, actor’s mistress, child star’s mother? My guess is I’d met some two thousand of movieland’s crème de la foam, and she really could have been anybody. In Hollywood, you never knew when a forgotten handshake would turn out two years later to be the shakee’s conception of sisterly intimacy. Unless her chat dropped a hint or she tactfully recognized the problem—had she looked tactful? Hard to say, since California faces can be as friendly without implying tact as Manhattan ones can be tactful without implying friendliness—and told me her name, I was stuck.
While I wouldn’t call it a hint, it was certainly intimate. As I reached the top step and all of her sat up, naked as the day we were born, her small breasts stopped pouting and grinned.
She hadn’t sat up before then, you ask? You don’t know California. Hands to her sides like a swimmer at rest, upper baubles two dark stoppers on those little brown jugs and thatch going from crackle to cruciform as I came up the stairs, she was taking the sun and had even reclosed her eyes. Ten more seconds was ten more seconds.
“Isn’t it wonderful? After all this time too. I didn’t even know you lived out this far,” she said eagerly, drawing up her knees. Only for balance as the deck braced her palms, though, not from self-consciousness.
“Me? Oh, God, no. I’m just, ah—” My purse and Gerson’s script fidgeted as if I was unsure which was the right token.
“Oh, of course. I should’ve known from that handbag you didn’t, shouldn’t I? Rodeo Drive’s satchel is Malibu’s porte-monnaie.” Proving that, whoever or whatever she was, she did have an eye for the telling detail.
Her grin counted on me to appreciate it, too. Her question asked Pam’s approval, but before I could answer—how I would’ve beats me—she’d deduced that my fidgets, along with my pause on the weathered top step, might have a meaning that surprised her.
“I’m sorry! I’m stupid from sun. It never crossed my mind you were shy. ‘Nothing like a dame!’ But I can—”
As she tilted one haunch, her eyes still on me politely, the arm that reached for her towel was at once ceremonial and a genuine concession, what with every inch of that compact body plainly craving more radiance, heat, breeze, and salt air. Craving everything except the gull droppings, so far as I could tell.
“Oh, no. It’s perfectly all right,” I told her, showing a cool I didn’t feel by stepping onto the deck proper. Of course anyone who adds “perfectly” to “all right” doesn’t know what he or she’s talking about and is hoping to fool people. “I’m just—”
“Silly, isn’t it? He likes me dark all over,” she cackled. “Marry in haste and repaint at leisure, I guess. I’ll be black by the wedding. Of course you can’t come.”
See what I mean about friendliness without tact? “Oh, I’ll live,” I said.
“Let’s just hope I do! Say, is that your new book? Please tell me it is.” She meant Gerson’s envelope. “Of course you remember how I loved your first one.”
Did that help? Not much. Of Pam’s two thousand or so dabs of movieland’s crème de la foam, maybe six hundred had said they loved Nothing. Some two hundred of those had gone on to strenuously demonstrate they were familiar with Nothing’s contents. The other four hundred plainly felt just knowing Nothing’s name was enough. “Take that, Joan,” I can almost hear Tim say.
Speaking of tact, you may wonder why Pam—a well-bred product of Mme Chignonne’s, Purcey’s Academy, and briefly Barnard—hadn’t opted for civilized honesty: “I’m so terribly sorry, how do we know each other?” and so forth. With much winning facial and gestural embroidery to convey only a fellow member of our overcrammed crowd would understand my plight.
Well, it was a bit goddam late for that, bucko. Couldn’t tell someone naked who was acting this fond of me I didn’t have a clue who she was. As soon as I’d considered the noblesse oblige route, I’d imagined breezeblown dark bangs and cruciform crackle catching fire in the sun to cinderize her to parchment. In other words, I’d pictured this whole mirage vanishing, putting paid to a trance I wanted to end but not that way.
“This? Oh, no. Just somebody else’s script. I’m just—”
“We’ve seen enough of those!” the Great Unknown laughed. “I’m making sun tea. Would you like some?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You don’t boil it. Desert trick. Put it out in the sun and it steeps.” She nodded to a screwtop jar of auburn liquid on the railing that I hadn’t noticed before. I doubt I’d have noticed if she’d had an ack-ack gun hooked there.
“Wait a sec. I’ll get ice and glasses.” One tanned arm scything out at me, the Great Unknown made as if to stand up. “Sugar or lemon for you?”
“Oh, neither! I’m just—”
Seeing more of that trim practical body wasn’t my idea of a health program. Nor hers, since trying to rise started her coughing.
“Oh, brother! What an awful racket. Let’s make it worse, see.” Squatting on her heels Indian-style—in profile, but my saints—she reached for cigarettes. “Want one?”
“No, thank you. You see, I’m just—”
Whoever was puissant enough to like the Great Unknown darker all over and get his way, he wasn’t a movie star, big-league director, or paunchy gent toasting beside That Hotel’s pool. All three kinds of panjandrum said “Next” when a bathing beauty turned twenty-five and this one was closer to my age, Hollywood death to us both if we hadn’t had brains or other connections. The smile and her limberness had made me hesitate, but her cackle had been the first giveaway. My own raucous whoop, Pam’s party trumpet by the New Frontier, had budded in 1950.
“Maybe I should just let you finish your sentence,” she laughed, squatting and smoking. “I haven’t let you get a word in edgewise. And you’re Pam Buchanan, for Christ’s sake! Who I’ve waited so long to meet.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’d love to stay awhile, truly! But I can’t! I’m on duty, you see. I can’t find Blank Blank’s house and I’ve got this stupid purse, script, to deliver.”
“Oh, is that all?” The Great Unknown scrambled up, stood near Pam. Pam guessed the Navajo rugs were only decorative after all. “It’s the one with the blue awning, just down there.” She aimed with her cigarette hand.
“It looks like a mausoleum for tropical fish,” I said.
“God, that’s just like you! It used to belong to Monroe”—and she hesitated—“Monroe Stahr. But he died without ever living there.”
Now that we were side by side, the most obvious difference—I mean aside from her being so richly naked, Pam so impoverishedly clothed in Rodeo Drive’s copper, bronze, and beige best—was that I was taller. I don’t mean we were twins, just in the same general league looks-wise. Yet she was a pure emanation of Los Angeles, I a collection of scattered lives from East Egg to war that had wired itself into a semblance of nativity. I’d thought it genuine because I’d unconsciously thought it temporary.
I could live out my life here and still only be bivouacking. I’d never offer my skin to the sun with such assurance my reward would be the Pacific’s answer to Chanel, from faint tingle of cinnamon to heat of proud driftwood.
It only lasted a beat, as actors call seconds. Then I said, “Thanks ever so much! See you later.”
“I hope so.”
I was back down the steps whe
n she called me. “Oh, Pam!”
I looked up, which I’d never done before at her. Since it was a clear day, they must’ve seen that smile and those dark stoppers winking all the way from Redondo.
“Yes?”
“Come back when you’ve dropped it, why don’t you? I’ll give you sun tea. Or if you like, wine! One bottle between us and I bet you’ll join me.”
“Who knows? Maybe I will,” I called over my shoulder as I floundered in costly beach flour. My purse and the script were now Malibu skipoles: inadequate ones, neither reaching the ground.
At the one with the blue awning, I got told Blank Blank wasn’t home. A woman servant accepted The Script Not Taken on her hermaphrodite employer’s behalf. Once I’d agreed with Manuela I had a car waiting, not precisely a lie, she showed me out at the street door. As I trudged up on the highway side past a Greyhound bus I’d neither catch nor ride to the convertible I duly got into, drove away in, and soon traded in for an Olds, I realized I’d never know for sure behind which of these hideouts the Great Unknown lay waiting with sun tea.
Why did it matter? Wasn’t that a relief? Oh—scythe, my foot. You’re so fucking easy, you know? You’re so scared of cigarettes, too much sun, and namelessness. The Great Unknown wasn’t death or the devil’s dark bride.
Did you really think daisysdaughter.com had gone supernatural? No, no. As I’d told Bill at Chasen’s three years earlier, I had lots of voices in my head. But they all belonged to real people, including the Lotus Eater. Her little cry of “That’s death!” had sent me from a gimlet to the ETO. Then this and that happened and here I was now, too beigely burdened and frightened to answer that cry’s contradiction in Malibu.