I can picture all of it, every small gesture that is Maggie’s homecoming: how she flips the keys onto the small table just inside, steps out of her shoes (the sigh, always, when those heels come off—the thousand contradictions that make up my wife: she’ll rail on about “the prison” women live in, the one “society” puts them in—Women starve, she’ll start, & then she’s off and running. They vomit, they live their lives thinking about the next mouthful of food, they wear clothing that cuts off their circulation, they wear terrible shoes—).
Rants one day, refuses dinner the next (I’m not hungry, she’ll say, while later in bed, reading, we can both hear her stomach, growling); she buys push-up bras that leave grooves on her skin, & the cruelest of shoes—can hardly wait to show me when she comes home from some spree, lifts one, gleaming, out of the box, its heel a weapon you could take somebody’s eye out with—
Your back, I’ll protest, using her own argument: how it sways her, tightens her spine—forces women to assume the posture of sex, that’s another one of her rants, preferably delivered whilst furiously smoking one of her (admittedly rare) long, skinny cigarettes (“You’ve come a long way, baby”; she’s pointed that one out, too). It’s all about getting men to look at us as sex objects, tits and ass pushed out—
But they’re so beautiful, she’ll say to me when I ask, but don’t they hurt, & then model them for me, stripping down to her routinely outrageous lingerie (“Aren’t they fabulous?” Turning provocatively. “Don’t you want to fuck me?”).
I watch the changing angles of light on the Marlboro Man’s features, I count forward; four-forty here, seven-forty there. I sit back, close my eyes.
Standing in her stockinged feet, the beginning of a run, maybe, painted over with nail polish, one foot propped on a shaped and shapely calf; the squint as she pulls the cork from a bottle of white, as if she expects it to pop out wildly, hit her in the eye—
… Just past eight & she’s nearly finished the glass, the single glass she always has, “my welcome home.” She’s sitting on the couch, feet flung over the arm, the Times in her lap, the Metro section swatched open, the Arts, more journalism, all the time…
I watched the Weather Channel, it’s dark there, it’s cold—“with windchill it feels like twenty-five,” they said, & “expect possible snow flurries late.”
It isn’t until the light’s completely drained from the Marlboro Man’s face that I turn my back on him and call.
Hello, she says on the second ring, & I read caution in the lilt of the question, read her already knowing who it is.
You’re home, I say, thinking this sounds warm, even grateful, but all she says is, Where else?
I don’t know, I say, I thought maybe the idea of coming back to an empty apartment…
Trail off on that, another cue, but she misses this, too, I can’t believe she’s not doing this on purpose. She says, Well, I’d better get used to that, hadn’t I?
Her delivery so light, no one else would, but I hear the tension underneath, the layer of hostility that’s crept into her tone, it’s been so long now—some element of enmity whose cause I have yet to understand (have refused, perhaps, to face?). Maybe she just wants me to be the one to cave first (baby I can’t do this, I can’t live without you), but even as I think I will, this time I’ll rise above myself to be the bigger person, I hear other words coming out, whiny, like a child’s hurt nyaah-nyaah: Sounds like you already have.
The sharpness of her tone then, asking, What is that supposed to mean?
How does it happen, so fast: the battle lines are drawn & we are thrust into our opposing corners! My statement comes out an accusation, when all I want is reassurance, while she seems incapable of anything other than defensiveness; almost indescribable, how that prickliness exhausts me, plucks at any patience I may have mustered, throttles whatever tenderness I might have shown. …
Maggie has never understood that when she wins, we both lose.
I go on, helplessly churlish, repeating what Peter said, telling her how it sounded to me, as though she’d already accepted this “whole arrangement as a fait accompli” & she pauses a second, says, Let me get this straight: you call and tell me you want to stay and work there—
I interrupt with my crucial distinction, how I’d said they want me to stay and work here—which she interrupts with her icy sarcasm. Oh right, it’s their choice & what are you, just a puppet, neutral in the middle? Saying, You don’t care one way or the other, is that what I’m supposed to think?
Have never been able to stand her condescension, & I come back, equally bitter, tell her to think whatever’s convenient for her. What the hell—you always do.
How, she says to me then, did all this become about me? As if this were my choice!
That’s what I’m saying, I jump in. That’s what I called to say—thinking, stupidly, that maybe she’ll hear me now, but that’s precisely when she explodes, yelling, Christ, Miles, how passive-aggressive can you stand to be? You call me up at work when you know I can’t talk, and just as we’re about to hang up, it’s oh, by the way, I’m moving to Los Angeles—!
Of course I have to yell back, shouting at her to stop exaggerating, shouting that I had asked her what she thought because I wasn’t going to do anything that wasn’t okay with her, too—& then it’s her turn to spit, Oh yeah, and I’m going to be the nagging shrew wife who says pack your bags right now, mister, leave the land of sunshine and fame and get the hell home right now, to another fabulous New York winter! Right, you’d really love me then, wouldn’t you. No, thank you.
No, I keep thinking, it doesn’t have to be that way, & even more stupidly, I try to tell her this, suggesting another way she might express herself, as in, Look, if you’d just said something like Listen, do what you want but I’d rather you were here—
She cuts me off faster than I can exhale, says, What is that, a line reading? Is that how it’s done in Hollywood, you tell me how Mrs. Ideal Wife sounds and I take direction?
After which she reminds me, by the way, that she had said do what you want—which I throw right back at her, asking if I’m really supposed to take that and think, oh she’s dying to have me back?
It’s then she accuses me of the most shallow, the worst:
Look, Miles (can’t stand the way she uses my name, like an insult itself), she says, I know how dazzled you are by Hollywood—I know you want this goddamn movie more than you want anything else—God forbid you miss any of the actresses auditioning for the part …!
It inflames me & I do what I always do when I’m inflamed; I become Super Rational Man, asking, What part, exactly, would that be—Savage’s friend, the Buddhist monk? One of the CIA agents who comes to find him? Or maybe the old man who sells him the opium?
She can’t wait to dismiss me, I know this, she says, Give me a break, Miles, you know what I mean—& even though I knew it was coming, it’s then that I lose it, words fast and low and mean. No, Maggie, you give me a break, because I am so fucking sick and tired of your jealous tirades—it’s sick how it was all so fine when I was struggling, but the minute the book starts to sell—
I manage to stop myself there, waiting for the inevitable expletive, waiting for the phone to slam in my ear, but instead I get a long, an absolutely unlike her, fathomless pause … and then she just says, That is what you think, isn’t it. That’s what you think this is all about.
Such a long silence after that, until I ask her to please then just tell me what it is, because I just … because I don’t know what to think.
It’s the closest I come—the closest we both come, and right then I’m sure she knows what I’m talking about, and suddenly I think this is it, certainty like ice in my veins, she’s going to say it: (I’m in love with someone else), she’s going to leave me—
I grip the phone as if it has the power to save my life, aware of a single bead of sweat trickling cold over my ribs, & it’s almost a relief when instead she says she can’t talk to me any
more—
I had a terrible day, a really terrible day, she tells me & I have to wonder why, how, but before I can ask she says all she wants is a bath, that she just can’t…
She sounds truly upset, white-hot rage gone, a mood switch I never would have predicted—I can’t read her & the thought comes to me then, like poison—he’s coming over, she’s waiting for him … he’s coming over and she doesn’t want to be upset when she sees him—Christ, maybe he’s already there—
It’s more than I can stand to hang up on and I almost blurt it, I start to talk about “these thoughts” going through my head, how I can’t seem, & then I have to ask her, I have to know, Maggie, are you alone—
The perplexity of her pause makes me sigh with relief, and she starts to ask, why, but then she says she doesn’t care, she just wants to get off the phone, even though I insist, feebly, that we have to talk, before finally letting her off the hook, asking her to call me later, then.
It’s an eternity before she agrees, but she does agree. Okay, she says, the defeat in her voice awful. Later.
We hang up & I sit there, the wind knocked out of me. I could meditate with a Buddhist master on the top of the highest mountain, inside the farthest-flung cave, for months—for years—& still I’d lose my cool within the first five minutes of a single phone call to Maggie.
The entire Marlboro Man has been plunged into darkness. All I can see are the outlines of his cardboard face.
What, I think. What am I going to do now.
—12 january, Chateau Marmont
Up all night, TV on.
Dawn like a bruise, rising. A morning like fatigue itself, gray, hungover, the fatigue only the insomniac knows, eyes wise-old by the time dawn, too late, makes its blushing entrance. No cameo, this one.
Can’t sleep.
Can’t eat.
Can’t think.
Can’t, most of all, write.
Drink.
What do I want—the question is so old. Too old. Or me—it is I who am too old for the question. “Meditation is obscene,” I read some leading psychoanalyst shouted during some worldwide meeting. According to this guy, the question is really “What does the world want from you?”
I have this to give: Armor. Bleakness. A full head of hair. “All is vanity, & a striving after wind.” Ecclesiastes.
The familiarity of self-loathing. Aaah, there’s the bitter relief; I’m home.
The pure selfishness of desire alone is tolerable. The overripe smell of sex. “Genius,” the writer cried out when her lover left her. “What genius?”
What should genius be for if not love? Love alone deserves it. Love alone demands it. Generosity is a kind of genius; friendship my favorite form. Marriage, however. Marriage is something different—where genius fails (where, of course, it’s needed most).
Remembering a night we spent with that model-slash-wildlife photographer Peter B. in Kenya, three, four years ago? Maggie and I on safari there, him more famous, perhaps—or is it infamous—for his womanizing than his art (in fact am sure it was Maggie w/ her tan legs & skimpy tank top who prompted his invitation to stay the night).
Sitting around the campfire, god knows what beasts rustling nearby—sounded so close, remember that, too, the vulnerability of my back to the dark—the two of us still drinking after Maggie had gone off to bed, he said, “Your first marriage is just something you have to get out of the way.”
The cynicism of which I found breathtaking. But the thought stuck with me, unnerving. A blow to romantics everywhere.
Remember at parties, how, when Maggie would say something cruel, witty, sly (glancing my way, waiting), I’d turn to the person next to me, and casually quote a line from a Stoppard play, “Very witty woman, my present wife.” (How hard she’d laugh, always the most amused, her laughter tinged with hysteria—did she feel it then, like premonition? Has she known something I haven’t, all along …?) Am tortured by a thousand unanswerable questions.
First wife. Ex-wife. She would still, I cannot imagine it otherwise, be my wife.
To be romantic is to know how to mourn—one’s own life, passing.
The day looms ahead, me wishing I had some of Isabel’s cache—Valium, Dalmane, codeine—her never-ending supply of downers. She offered before I left (swearing she personally would never be caught in Hollywood without them); refused, on principle, to take any.
Prideful idiot, I think now. Arrogant asshole.
—13 january, Los Angeles
Lear, producer extraordinaire, calls, saves me from another hideous evening in solitary (“we have a lot to celebrate, let me take you to dinner”). My first Hollywood date—imagine saying it, “So I was having dinner with my producer…”
We meet at a restaurant on La Brea—Chaplin built it, Lear tells me, for his second wife, then divorced her before moving in.
It’s like an Italian villa, tiled, with a fountain in the middle of the first room, the ceiling soaring.
We sit down, Lear takes three calls on his cell before the drinks arrive. Sorry, he keeps saying, he keeps lifting one finger, as if I am about to interrupt, and on the phone, tells someone it’s a “celebration”—
Once again, my mind goes straight back to my last night in NYC, at home with Maggie, and Con (just the three of us—how cozy). Con came late, holding a brown paper bag that clinked, he wouldn’t let us unpack it, then from its depths, flourished a bottle of champagne I knew he could not afford.
Do people still drink this stuff, he’d asked, elaborately offhand, and I was reminded again of the self-consciousness of being twenty- (what is he, twenty-six, twenty-seven—I don’t even want to know). No, I’d answered, immediately rewarded by the brief flare of panic in his eyes, and how he’d looked at Maggie for reassurance—what it was like to be that young, sure that everybody’s watching, that we would all remember what was said the next day, and by whom…
He wanted to know my schedule, when I was meeting Lucci, where I was staying.
Wherever I want, I told him.
No budget?
God forbid, no, I said, and predictably he laughed, impressed by the money, the scale of it all. He never asked outright but he picked up on everything, it was clear. It has always been Connor’s greed for my life—because of its transparency, I guess, and his youth—that’s allowed me to see it as if I were someone else, and from that distance, even I felt half-stunned, glancing around like an outsider at the picture it presented: tiger lilies blooming on the table, framing my wife in candlelight, as gorgeous & elegant as the urban verticality sparkling through tall windows, the city our background—and, woven through it all, the solid sense of the three books that I’ve written (that I’ve finished) out in the world now, lined up in strange houses, stuffed and carried in beat-up backpacks across campus lawns, tucked into briefcases prepared for travel, all of them existing independently of me, going places I’ll never see…
Watching the tableau through his eyes fills me with the sense of success, of accomplishment, that I so infrequently grasp on my own.
I hear they let the author write the first draft, I said to Con. And then they hire whoever they wanted in the first place to do the rewrite.
Well, Maggie said, you can always take your name off the credits.
She has the New Yorker’s token disdain for all things Hollywood—has, indeed, maintained an aloof attitude from the beginning, stinging: there’ve been times I’m convinced that her deepest feeling about my work is, in fact, mere indifference.
It’s only a movie. I lifted up my hands, giving it to her.
A movie. She seized this. Yes, the focus-grouped, test-marketed movies—
There are some good ones, Con said. At least your director’s European.
The covert glance I gave him (gratitude). There was a complicity between us, unspoken; this, I knew, was something he wanted for himself, too.
Glance around the restaurant now, think how fucking young everybody here seems to be—young and white and ric
h, the women perfectly thin, the men fit, I bet none of them smoke—and Lear, he’s years younger than me, looks hardly thirty, wears Prada, drives one of the biggest SUVs I’ve ever seen (I’d swear new). The maître d’ knows him, brings us special dishes—carpaccio sliced paper thin, tuna seared and rare, asparagus risotto made with champagne—and Lear accepts it all like a mafioso don, a young tyrant, the deserving aristocrat.
I’m fucking excited about this project, Miles, you have no idea. He says this every time there is a lull in the conversation, leaning forward, raw beef dangling delicately from the tines of his fork. He mentions names, actors, women—Michelle, Robin, Meryl, he says. We’re going to get the best, and you know what? They’re going to do it for fucking scale, because this project is prestige, you understand what I’m saying?
I smile, as if indulging him, but I can feel myself getting swept up in it all, his excitement, manufactured or otherwise.
Oh, yes, Maggie had said that night, speaking to both of us, Con and me: Fame. I forgot, it means more fame.
I’m famous enough already, I’d answered then, and there have been times when this was—when this is—true, but it is also true that I’ve become acquainted with the peculiar greed for attention that any kind of public praise seems to incite, and though I know—am sure—that ultimately it can only be a weakness (fatal, even), it feels like strength to me now, like the rush of energy you get from chemicals, or intensely focused exercise.
Hollywood Savage Page 3