Karoo

by Steve Tesich

  “Careful!” she screamed suddenly and gripped my shoulder.

  I slammed on the brakes just as I was about to pass a slow-moving car. She apparently didn’t realize that I had two lanes to myself and that the oncoming traffic was not a threat.

  We continued, but whenever I approached the legal speed limit, she got nervous.

  “Not so fast.”

  “We’re not going fast.”

  “Feels fast to me. This is why I take cabs everywhere. Nobody ever gets killed in a cab.”

  Her anxiety bothered me.

  “Don’t worry, I’m an excellent driver,” I tried to reassure her.

  “How could you be, you’re drunk.”

  “I’m not drunk.”

  “But you drank as much as I did.”

  “I can take it,” I told her.

  I got on the freeway and headed toward Venice.

  “Do you think I’m going to be a movie star?” she asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “A big star?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then it’ll all be worth it.”

  She slid down in her seat, her knees pressed against the dashboard.

  I was taking her home, but I didn’t feel like taking her home. I felt like driving and driving. I felt like getting lost, getting both of us lost, and having a common starting point for ourselves, a brand-new beginning for both.

  It took me a while to realize that she was crying.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “This is not what I had in mind,” she sobbed.

  “What’s not?”

  “This life I’m having. When I was a young girl, I had a whole other life in mind.”

  Moments later, smiling through tears, she said, “Your face looks like a ratty old sweater. But a nice ratty old sweater.”

  And then she started crying again.

  I slowed down and came to a gentle stop on the shoulder of the freeway.

  “What’re you doing?” she wanted to know.

  “I can’t bear the thought of you being home and crying alone. I thought we’d stop here for a while so you can cry your eyes out.”

  With an exuberance that belied both her age and her drunkenness, she sprang to life and flung her arms around my neck. Sobbing and laughing, she began kissing me all over my face. I had never been kissed like that before. Rapid little kisses, too fast to count. Kisses all over my face and eyes, as if there were no end to them.

  “You know how to sweep a woman off her feet, don’t you,” she said, and kept on kissing me. “Most men go stiff and cold when I start crying. They feel all put upon. But not you. You’re a strange man, mister. Yes, you are. Maybe we’re meant for each other.”

  How was it, I wondered, that I had lived as long as I had lived and never been kissed like that?

  She just kept crying and kissing me.

  When we kissed on the lips moments later, an odd thought accompanied the kiss.

  I’m putting my lying tongue in her mouth, I thought.

  “We’re too old to be doing this on the shoulder of the freeway,” I said.

  She didn’t want to go home. I invited her to spend the night at my hotel.

  I drove back as slowly and carefully as I could bear to drive. We rode in silence, as if everything had been said that could be said until after we slept together.

  Headlights from oncoming cars came and went, and although they looked nothing like projector lights they brought back memories of the cut scenes I had seen in the screening room yesterday.

  She stumbled and almost fell as we walked across the nearly deserted lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I caught her just in time.

  “How drunk am I?” she wanted to know.

  “Very drunk,” I told her. “But don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you.”

  “You will?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you take me under your wing?” she asked as we got on the elevator.

  “I will.”

  “I was just a little girl when I heard that expression and ever since then I’ve yearned for it to come true. To find someone who would take me under his wing. Oh, God, dear God, how lovely it still sounds.” She started crying again, as only drunks can cry.

  5

  Being undressed, I had come to think, was the same thing as being naked, but Leila reminded me that night that it was not the same thing at all.

  I was coming out of the bathroom, where I had taken a hurried shower in order to be fresh and clean before I got into bed with her. The lights were on in the bedroom when I came out, and I saw her lying there on my huge bed.

  The sight of her stopped me dead in my tracks.

  The closest I had ever come to seeing human nakedness before was in a movie. A documentary. It showed hundreds and hundreds of naked Jews, men, women, and children, being escorted by armed Nazi guards and barking German shepherds to their deaths. All the Jews were naked. Not undressed. Naked. And it seemed to me then, while I watched that documentary, that it wasn’t just the Jews that the Nazis wanted annihilated but the very concept of nakedness as well. What was troublesome to me was that I found myself approving of the annihilation of that concept. I am no historian, but as far as I can tell, I was not alone in feeling that way. As far as I can tell, those images of those naked people stumbling to their deaths were the last recorded images of human nakedness in the twentieth century.

  I had of course come to terms with all that a long time ago. With history. And with the history of history that followed. And with my own feelings about it all.

  So it was not pleasant to be confronted with something I had assumed no longer existed.

  Leila lying naked on my bed.

  Her nakedness covered not just the huge bed but filled my whole suite. It wasn’t just that her eyes, looking directly at me, were naked. Nor that her long white arms and her breasts were naked. Nor that her legs were naked and parted. It was as if she had brought her whole deleted past with her, and her past lay there alongside her, naked as well. The fourteen-year-old girl to whom I had only talked on the telephone lay there alongside her and she too was naked. The young mother. The young mother deprived of her child. The woman. The actress. The parts she had played in life and in films were all there on the same bed, waiting for me to take them under my wing, and all were as naked as those Jews trekking across that barren landscape to their deaths.

  I hurriedly turned off the lights in order to clothe myself in darkness and avoid the suffocating multiplicity of meanings of that one naked body on my bed.

  And then, a few fumbling moments later, either because I lacked the capacity or the courage or the wingspan to take all those Leilas under my wing, I had to decide which Leila I would embrace in the darkness and to which Leila I would make love.

  I chose, for the record, the fourteen-year-old girl. When I say chose, I mean I consciously imagined myself making love to that young girl, and while I made love to her, the rewriter in me was rewriting the screenplay of her life. The two of us were reconceiving Billy. I was rewriting the events that would follow, so that in the end there would be a happy ending for everyone. I was fixing it all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  1

  IT WAS FRIDAY again, just as it had been Friday when I arrived in LA. Cromwell was coming back from Europe tomorrow and I was supposed to be in New York when he arrived.

  But that would not happen. I no longer had any hopes of leaving. I was stranded by circumstances.

  Most of the time, I come to terms with things after the fact, after I have done the wrongs I’ve done. This time was different. This time, I had to come to terms with things ahead of time in order to free myself to commit the wrongs I planned to do.

  I chose the poolside of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as my designated spot for coming to terms with my future crimes.

  It was not yet noon, but it was hot. It would turn out to be the hottest day of the year, but it was plenty hot already. Not a hint of breeze. Heat
fell down from the hazy blue sky like a torrential downpour. A deluge of heat.

  Following the young pool attendant (in white shorts) to my poolside chair, I was sure that I would be unable to take the heat for long. A few minutes at best and then I would return to my air-conditioned suite and come to terms with things there. But once I lay down in my chaise longue, it was all over. A Niagara Falls of heat fell upon me, pinning me in place. I was trapped. I might as well have been strapped to a poolside electric chair.

  There were others there, lying in chaises longues of their own all around me. Men. Women. Young girls. A little boy with red hair. All of them, I assumed, were trapped just as I was. They too had probably thought that they would only stay a few minutes and then leave. Scattered around the pool, we lay in our reclining chairs like so many victims of nerve gas.

  The sound of falling water from the recycled water fountain had a hallucinatory quality to it in all that heat. Like the sound of something sizzling.

  2

  I had Leila on the brain. Her life. The many losses of her life.

  Her baby was her first loss, and that loss paved the way for all the others. That loss led to a choice of a career, and that career in turn turned out to be nothing but one loss after another.

  In my own defense, I could not be blamed for anything. I did not take her child away either by force or cunning. It would have been taken away from her by somebody else if not by me. I was merely a random man who paid, with his wife’s money, for the implementation of its removal, and was therefore, at worst, only the recipient of her loss, not the cause of it.

  As far as that original loss went, I was now more than willing, eager in fact, to do the right thing and reunite her with her child. To serve as the agent of their reunion.

  But to do that was not enough anymore.

  She had incurred too many other losses along the way. If she got Billy back, but at the same time discovered that she had yet again been cut from a film and not just any film but a film in which she finally got to play a major part, that might turn her reunion with her son into yet another loss. The reunion, I was determined, had to be a triumph. A total triumph. Nothing must be allowed to detract from the joy of that occasion, or undermine the happy ending I had in mind for the two of them.

  Had I known at the start what I knew about her now, I never would have come to LA.

  But it was too late now. We can’t unknow what we know.

  I agonized over my dilemma (as I lay there by the poolside) not out of any genuine irresolution about what I planned to do but merely to be on record with myself that I had agonized over it. It was part of the procedure of coming to terms with things ahead of time. It was important to leave a trail of torment behind, so that if unexpected consequences occurred as a result of my actions, I could exonerate myself on the grounds of the torment I had felt prior to causing them.

  I agonized over the unthinkable act I was prepared to commit in order to have a happy ending for Leila and Billy.

  The more I agonized over it, the more familiar the unthinkable became, until it was not unthinkable anymore.

  But it was not easy, even for someone as gifted as myself with coming to terms with things, to contemplate desecrating a work of art.

  Being an out-and-out hack who had never even come close to conceiving a true work of art, I worshiped Art in a way that a practicing artist could not possibly understand. To a practicing artist, it was something one did. To me, Art was a miracle, the only man-made miracle on earth.

  How then was it possible, I agonized by the poolside, that I could lie there and plot its undoing?

  The more I castigated myself and the more I agonized over something I knew I would do, the more I came to terms with it. My savage self-criticism licensed me to proceed.

  Most of the horrors committed in my time (I waxed philosophical) were not the work of evil men bent on committing evil deeds. Rather they were the acts of men like myself. Men with moral and aesthetic standards of high order when the mood was upon them. Men who knew right from wrong and who did right when the mood was upon them. But men with no moorings to hold those convictions and standards in place. Men subject to changing winds and moods, who were doomed to reverse themselves completely when another, contradictory mood was upon them. They would always, these mood men, find a way to justify their actions and come to terms with the consequences. The terminology they used in coming to terms with their crimes constituted, in large part, what we referred to as history.

  Listening to myself, while I lay there by the poolside, was an education. The philosopher within me philosophized, the psychologist within me psychologized, the moral man moralized, but all to no avail. Their voices had a fatalistic keening quality, as if they had all gathered within me to eulogize the victim of my upcoming crime rather than to keep me from committing the crime itself.

  Throughout the long hot afternoon, while I lay there sweating in my poolside chair, a woman’s voice came over the poolside PA system to say that one of us lying there had a telephone call.

  “Telephone call for Mr. Stump.”

  “Telephone call for Ms. Florio.”

  “Telephone call for Mr. Messer.”

  Those called, as if paged back to life, awoke from their deathlike stupor and arose to answer the call. Not one of them came back from his telephone call to lie there among us. They were saved. The rest of us, the damned, the uncalled, remained to broil in that terrible heat.

  Perhaps, I thought, Judgment Day would be something like this. There would be no trumpet blasts to raise the dead. Telephone calls instead. You’d either get called our you wouldn’t.

  The earth revolved around the sun (while I lay there), spinning on its axis and creating the illusion that the sun above me was sailing across the sky, east to west.

  Shadows lengthened, creeping across the pavement like sprung leaks.

  The heat of the day began to subside.

  I lit a cigarette. Some process had been concluded. Something within me had been metabolized, digested, eliminated.

  So much life (the third-person narrator within me narrated) had been sacrificed over the years for the sake of Art, that it was high time for Art to be sacrificed for the sake of someone’s life.

  I arose and left the pool, having successfully concluded the business I had come to accomplish.

  And so Friday came and went.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1

  SATURDAY MORNING BEGINS the way Friday afternoon ended, by the poolside. Only now it’s by the poolside of Cromwell’s house in Coldwater Canyon, where I’ve arrived a little too early for our working breakfast and am, as I sit there, a little too eager to get going.

  I sit at a wrought-iron table with a glass top, in a wrought-iron chair with a thick, soft seat cushion. Cromwell’s housekeeper, another Maria, is bringing out the breakfast. English muffins. Canadian bacon. A big pitcher of freshly squeezed orange juice. A basket of pastries and coffee in a large ceramic pot. I sit and smoke and wait. Through the glass tabletop I can see the light-blue Spanish tiles on which the wrought-iron table rests.

  A handyman is repainting the tall wrought-iron fence that surrounds Cromwell’s property. I can see that the paint he is using is black, but it smells yellow to me, and when I look away from the fence and the handyman, it’s a manila-envelope-yellow fence I see in my mind.

  There is a hint of a breeze, just enough to carry the scent of paint fumes from the fence toward the poolside table where I sit.

  Cromwell appears. He is clean-shaven and fully dressed for work, so that when he is finished with me, he can get into his car and drive to his next appointment without having to go back inside the house.

  Everything about him says that he has a busy day ahead and that there is a definite limit on the time he has for me. Knowing that I know the score, he is free to create the impression that he has nothing but time for me.

  He greets me graciously, unhurriedly, as if we had made no appointment to meet he
re at this time, as if I were an old friend who dropped in uninvited and unexpected but a friend he is thrilled to see.

  “How nice of you to come,” he tells me.

  “Look at you,” he tells me, “you’re all tanned. You look wonderful, Doc. You really do. I’ve never seen you look so good.”

  “I feel good,” I tell him.

  He sits down. Having stood up to greet him, I sit down again myself.

  We drink coffee and orange juice and eat English muffins. We talk about Europe. He gives me credit for knowing everything he tells me, but he tells it to me anyway, as if seeking corroboration for his impressions from a post–cold war expert of Eastern Europe like myself.

  He tells me about the Russians, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Bulgarians, the post-Ceausescu Romanians. (He pronounces it perfectly: chow-SHESS-koo.)

  He tells me about the cities of Eastern Europe, about Budapest and Prague and Moscow and Leningrad and Sofia and Bucharest and Warsaw. The museums in the cities. And how, despite all the economic and social turnmoil in those countries, there are still some wonderful hotels where one can stay.

  “It’s mind-boggling,” he tells me, “the changes that are happening throughout Eastern Europe. Monumental. Absolutely monumental. I was just on the phone with a playwright I’d met in Prague and I was telling him …

  “It’s heartbreaking,” he tells me, “the way they have to live in this period of transition from the old to the new without so much as a pause to catch their breaths. The poverty. The anxiety. The suffering, both physical and mental …

  “And yet,” he tells me, “it was exhilarating. The humanity, the unadorned and undisguised humanity of the people I saw was worth the trip. It makes you think, to see people like that. It makes you wonder that perhaps for all their suffering …”