The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women

by James Ellroy

  There she is. She’s on the bedcovers. She’s telling you things.

  We had amazing conversations. Her green eyes grabbed me. Her gestures were more forceful than those of any other woman who had ever joined me in the dark.

  I finished my novel. It embodied Joan, Karen and daughters unfound. The weight of my years and my native kid verve coalesced. I felt swervy and out of control. That Rilke quote kept popping up: “You must change your life.”

  I knew that I had to change. I sensed that I could change. I had to hurl my God sense and word self at The Curse.

  It came to me in the dark. The revelation occurred between phone calls with Helen and Karen. Marcia Sidwell had drifted by. A flow of faces followed her. Jean Hilliker morphed out of them. Erika was propped up beside me. I had just thought about Joan.

  19

  So women will love me.

  Jean Hilliker would be 95 now. The Curse is 52 years old. I have spent five decades in search of one woman to destroy a myth. That myth was self-created and speciously defined. I imposed a narrative line to ensure my own survival. It levied blame to suppress grief and vouchsafe my crazy passion. The Curse was half a blessing. I’ve survived just fine.

  So women will love me.

  It’s a fine raison d’être. It’s kept me hungry and working hard. I am predisposed to rash and thoughtless acts in love’s name. This memoir will help me to interdict the practice. I require strict boundaries. They serve to curtail my ardent resolve and grandiosity. The inward gaze has always pushed me outward toward Them. It’s often delusional and occasionally a ticket to a state of grace.

  I have now set a bar that will mandate circumspection. The dominant story line of my life will dissolve on the last page I write here. The preceding pages have been me in address of Her and Them. It’s time to put down my pen and live from Their sole perspective. I must sit alone in the dark. They must come to me sans conjuring or images recalled and transposed. They may say nothing. They may tell me that I have always possessed an unfathomable fate. God engages me through women. My task has always been to bring women to God. This pursuit has pushed me toward self-serving error. They have slowly and persistently revealed the cost of my actions. I must sit alone with Them now and will myself receptive. They have formed a sisterhood within me. I am steeled for Their rebukes and open-armed for any messengers They may send me. I’m getting past the shallow breaths at the core of my quest.

  I exist in a matriarchy. I’m the lost boy rescued and cut loose by strong women. I outgrew him as I told his story. I always write my way through to the truth. I believe it because Helen Knode said so.

  I talk to Helen and Karen most nights. Helen just moved to Austin, Texas. Margaret barks at me, long-distance. Karen’s still married to her fruit husband. I’ve quit pestering her about it. We’ve kept it clean for some time now. Karen still comes forward in laughter and nearly gasps in retreat.

  Joan had a child last year. I’ve heard conflicting reports of the kid’s gender. I suspect it’s a boy and hope it’s a girl. I’m clueless per the patrimony. I want it to stay that way. History is the smallest of the many gifts Joan gave me. She earned her prominence and paid for it dearly. She’s a far-off fixed star now.

  Joan never calls me. A woman named Julia does. She’s 29, she’s brilliant, she’s a lesbian. We look alike. She’s my spiritual daughter. We have dinner and talk profound shit about women. Restaurant people assume my patrimony. It’s heartbreaking. I met her at the L.A. Times book fair, 2009. I went there to give a speech. I had dressed for Erika.

  I was armed for Erika. I wanted to go someplace quiet and contained with her. I wanted to look at her and let our hands brush across a table. She’s married, I’m not. Who’ll pull their hand back first?

  It’s been two years now.

  I’m exhausted with my crazy shit.

  We comprise a significant courtship. Your appearances are inimitable. Are you thinking about me?

  20

  I gave the speech. It was a fucking barn burner. I wore a blue-and-white-striped seersucker suit, a white shirt and a tartan bow tie. I looked handsome as shit. I never saw Erika. I prowled the greenroom and the area surrounding. My dream lover was nowhere.

  Erika dressed for me at that Christmas party. She described the shoes that put her up at six one and the shoulderless black dress. We laughed about it last night. Erika said, “I met your ex-wife instead.”

  She knew it first.

  She summoned me.

  She sought me alone in the dark. She spent over two years in the pursuit. She practiced the conjuror’s art with greater persistence and acuity than I did. She knew more about me than I sensed about her. Her knowledge superseded a glut of rumors and published text. Her insight outweighed my self-awareness. She came better armed. Her preeminent commitment, first formed in solitude, has enjoined us and sealed our romantic fate.

  She willed me. I lacked the fortitude and certain knowledge that fueled her will. She knew she could outwill me. A confrontation was required. I had failed to accomplish that task. Erika knew how to do it.

  My publisher hooked me up to Facebook. They knew my aversion to computers and coerced me into it. My job was to ballyhoo my new novel all over cyberspace. A colleague told me that people posted “friend” requests that I must reject or confirm. I performed this boring duty for three weeks. It was deadening shit work. Then Erika’s name and image hit my colleague’s computer screen.

  I whooped. I hit the confirm button. I composed an ardent poem in rhyming Old English. I pushed the send button. I waited a full day. Erika sent me a note back.

  She was surprised, she was thankful, she was delighted. She included a perfunctory aside on her marriage. She left room for me to wedge my snout back in her Internet door.

  I sent her a more ardent poem. Her reply gently rebuked me.

  Yeah, I dig you. But, I’m happily married. I’ve got two daughters. We have too many friends in common. You’re too notoriously obsessive. It’s not worth the risk.

  I Internet-apologized. Erika e-mail-accepted my mock retreat. She bemoaned her current psychic state. I slashed at the critque. I knew her. I knew her marriage was tanksville. I knew the extent of the crazy shit in her head. I sensed what she knew first: This person is a cut-from-the-bone version of my flawed and transcendence-seeking self.

  Erika wrote me again. She dissected my most recent TV performance. I was nervy and pervy. My ego staggered her. I exemplified a particularly male strain of arrested development. But—she still felt compelled.

  The e-mail was a wounder. I wrote back and offered to splitsville for good. I had called her “my seditious sister.” Erika wrote, “So it is with great regret that I must banish you, my brazen brother.”

  I moped a little. I quickly revitalized. Give up? Fuck that shit!

  I waited two weeks. I thought about Erika, non-stop. She had implied her own two-year conjuring. I conjured her conjuring and got an idea. It came to me. Not surprisingly—alone in the dark.

  Erika was unparalleled in my passion pantheon. Our chaste courtship was two-plus years in. She might have her own belief in invisibility. She possessed wild perceptive powers. Her wavery skepticism demonstrated that. All our detractors would dispute it—but—now I know.

  This woman is the female embodiment of your inner soul. You must address her in the voice of the most urgent artist in history.

  Thus: this aging horndog writes as Beethoven. Thus: Erika becomes his “Immortal Beloved.” Thus: cyberspace becomes Vienna, 1810.

  I went at it with bombast and glee. The letter reeked of the staggering ego that Erika glimpsed on TV. My mere identification with the Master announced my megalomania. The built-in gasp-and-yuck factor was enormous. Softness underscored it. I was a journeyman yearner. I assumed the voice of the greatest yearner of all fucking time. Erika was a yearner. She lived in the soft passages of the “Les Adieux” Sonata, whether she had ever heard it or not. She understood unexpressed desire and the sweetnes
s-sadness parlay that is art. The years were 1810 and 2009. I added a jolt of 1962. I was a junior high school window-peeper, adrift. Erika was the mother of all the Hancock Park girls combined. She was all the society ladies I peeped at that Twist party. She was vexed, unbodied and riddled with ennui. Her height and carriage connoted Anne Sexton. She was 45, I was 61. She was every older woman I had youthfully glimpsed and craved. I was significantly older than her now. I was far further into the back nine of life. The letter was a cri de coeur and a treatise on ephemera, cut through with a blast of the “Peppermint Twist.”

  I wrote it. I sent it. Erika wrote back, immediately. She expressed reluctant pleasure. She praised the dramatic construction and ridiculed my “Immortal Beloved” casting. She guardedly invited me to contact her again.

  A daily correspondence commenced. I handwrote letters and faxed them to Erika’s computer. Erika sent typed faxes back. I pursued. Erika advanced and retreated at an unpredictable pace. She cited my reputation as a grand-stander, womanizer and right-wing buffoon. I tried to differentiate my public and private personae. I unloaded the truth of my life. I requested reciprocity. Erika complied. She described her life as seeping compartments and looming icebergs. She was a one-book wonder with a second memoir in perilous rough draft. Her daughters were 11 and 14. Motherhood was exaltation and drudge work. Read my book. Motherhood is my shtick—just like dead mothers are yours.

  I love my daughters. They’re always there. They’re just like She is for you.

  Yes, but they’re alive. They’re more real than Her. They’re children. They devour your everydays. They’re not this ghost I dance with at whim.

  I spend my time with car pools and Girl Scout troops. I write intermittently. You’re correct about my marriage. It’s been in unbreachable stasis for years. I’m fucked behind inertia. Your brutal will moves and horrifies me. I wonder who you are in your heart.

  I’m fearful. I’m domineering and unsocialized. I lure people in and push them away. I write obsessively and with great concision. I’m religious and possess social views you would surely find appalling. All I want is intense communion with women and time alone in the dark.

  Letters went out. Letters came in. I sent Erika my phone number. She declined to send me hers. I pursued. She resisted. I retreated in a decorous fashion. Erika rewarded me with lovely compliments. I felt hot-wired to God. Erika bid me to virtue as we committed a text-taled adultery. We decoded each other sans benefit of voice, sight and touch. Our letters deludedly banished the prospect of sex—as we rushed toward it in platonic love’s name.

  She called me. It was 11:00 p.m. on a Monday. Our courtship was one month in.

  She said, “Hi, it’s Erika.” She was in her car, parked near her house. It reeked of cheating. Her voice startled me. It countermanded the tone of her letters. Some bottom dropped out of me. It was queasiness meets weightlessness. Small talk dribbled out and took us nowhere. Spoken discourse contradicted the heft of our words on paper. I thought we’d get to big themes fast. I came on judgmental. Erika felt foolish and overmatched. We both went borderline hostile.

  The chat lasted ninety minutes. I hung up and crashed on my bed. The room spun. My pulse went triple its normal rate.

  We went back to writing. I assumed Erika’s perspective. She was cheating. Her herky-jerky chatter and long pauses made that plain. Her new faxes confirmed my assessment. Fucker, I called you. I’ve got more to lose than you have. This is not easy.

  She said that she’d call again. I knew she would. Leave the lights off and wait by the phone. It will ring. You’ll make it ring. You’ve got it equally bad for each other.

  Our rapport accelerated via the written word. The main theme was change. The question was, How do we change each other? My outer life was all success and well-earned recognition. My inner life was lonely turmoil and obsessive ambition and lust. Erika had a moribund marriage. She’d lived a wild early life and became horrified at her penchant for chaos. She married a sweet-natured man and set out to redeem him and create a safe-love zone. The man failed to fulfill Erika’s fatuous expectations. She felt guilty and unreasonably responsible for his psychic state. The union was decidedly over. The two bright and lovely daughters were daily compensations and a brutal workload all to themselves. Erika lived in despair. She built her own cage and stared through the gaps in the bars. Her daughters provided work furlough. There was a dear joy in it—and more and more work. She carried the bulk of the weight in the marriage. She took full responsibility for the state of the union and assigned her husband no blame. Her native joie de vivre was going, going, gone. She possessed a heroic soul. She was Beethovian in her schizy grasp at life in all its horror and beauty. She humbled me. I was male and unencumbered. I cut and ran from dicey entanglements and lived full-time in my head. I was a man. Gender bias had favored me.

  You know your job. Work hard to quash other men and render them sterile. Dream enormous dreams and seek women. Many men do this. You do it with unique verve and efficacy. Now you’re 61 and waiting in the dark for another married mother to call you. Isn’t that pathetic? Aren’t you ashamed?

  No, not really.

  I’m in a sacred fight now. There’s her as Her and something else, and if we continue to tell the truth, we’ll both win.

  Erika called me again. The conversation went more smoothly. We had accepted the weightiness and open-endedness of the attachment and considered the emergent US to be a spiritual entity. Erika railed at my media antics. I railed at her willingness to live in dysfunction. It reigned as subtext: We’re out to saw off the chains that constrain our souls—but we can’t fuck.

  Our correspondence was six weeks in. My fax machine and Erika’s computer worked overtime. Erika flew back east to visit her sister. We scorched the phone lines from L.A. to Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

  We discussed everything. Our talks ran for hours. We detailed our promiscuous pasts and argued politics. We ping-ponged between We’re already lovers, No, we’re not, and Who are we kidding? Erika discussed her daughters. I admitted my incapacity for fatherhood and conceded that children as redemption for murdered mothers was a truly nutty ideal. We talked lots of sizzling sex shit. We kept trying to define what we were and finally gave up. We told each other “I love you” at the end of every phone call—and meant it.

  I didn’t care who we were.

  I required no consummation.

  I knew that whoever we were and whatever we had would never stop.

  I told Karen about Erika. She said, “I used to think you were smart.” I told Helen about Erika. Helen noted her marked resemblance to Jean Hilliker. I noted her marked resemblance to yours truly.

  Erika said, “What do we do now?”

  I said, “We tell the truth.”

  The courtship was seven weeks in. We hadn’t seen each other in one year and three months.

  The phone rang. It was midweek at 3:00 p.m. Erika said, “Hello.” I blurted, “Coffee? Le Pain Quotidien at 1st and Larchmont?” She said, “Half an hour?”

  A faux-rustic coffee cave. Overpriced java and overdressed pastry. Overlit in faux-Provence colors. Not the backdrop for film noir fatality.

  But it was.

  Because it was over then.

  Film noir is an over-referenced genre. Adultery rarely ends in the greenroom at Big Q. Divorce court is a more likely destination. Pellets don’t drop into acid vats. People weep and rage and try to determine where things went wrong. People try to figure out how to get things right.

  I arrived first. The table was at the back, with a front-entrance view. She walked in five minutes later. She wore a look that I’ve come to love and that Erika first formally noted. “If I’m not smiling, I look frightened, worried or stern.”

  She wasn’t smiling. It didn’t matter. She was the loveliest woman I had ever seen.

  We embraced. We held each other 47 beats too long. We sat down. We didn’t hold hands. We leaned across the table and laced up our arms.

  Two h
ours dissolved into microseconds. Self-absorbed memoirists? All we talked about was US.

  It was natural.

  It was easy.

  The flow was evenly deployed. Two self-obsessed memoirists—and no one talked too much.

  Who are we? What are we? Should we do it? Fuck—my husband and kids. It doesn’t feel wrong—it feels sweet. My husband, my kids, the censure I’ll face, your shitty reputation.

  Your shitty rep and your murdered-mom miasma. Everyone will think I’m insane—but I have no doubt you’re the one.

  I said, “I’ll help you with your manuscript.”

  She said, “Whatever happens, I don’t ever want to lose you.”

  Those green eyes. Those beautiful big hands. Her buoyancy in the face of years of disappointment. My retreat into her glow.

  She called me “Ellroy.” It was a distancing device. I addressed her as “Darling” more than “Erika.” I said, “I want to buy you a black cashmere dress.” She said, “Don’t do shit you’ve done with other women. It would fucking kill me.”

  I walked Erika back to her car. Our good-bye embrace lasted 48 beats too long. She held me very tightly. My hands played over the long sweep of her back.

  Other women blurred and faded altogether. Blood’s A Rover neared publication. The dedication to Joan receded as a milestone event. I pondered Erika. I resisted the urge to recast her in my own image. A shared resemblance asserted itself even as I tried to refrain. The backlash was a soft truth set off by whispers, jingles and gongs. She’s big and clumsy. So are you. She’s sweet-natured and often appears harsh. She observes moments as she lives them. You’re that way. She’s afraid to love and more afraid not to. She’s indefatigable and dutiful. She loves to put unequivocal and somewhat shocking words on paper. Now she’s writing them to you.

  She’s short-sold herself to the world. You’ve over-sold yourself. You diverge there. You have told each other the truth for over two months now. You have fought for comportment. She knows your whole Karen story. She knows that you can’t tread that route again.