Lear overtips the maître d’ extravagantly and we go someplace else, another restaurant with a deep, dark, horseshoe-shaped bar, everyone looking up when the door opens. Everywhere you go in LA, you look for the celebrities.
They’re all gonna know your name, Lear says, as if reading my mind. They’re all gonna whisper when you walk in—
He turns to watch a young woman moving past us, her body, her face, so breathtakingly perfect she is difficult to believe in. He says, She’s gonna smile at you, Miles, she’s gonna be yours.
I’m married, I remind him and, for the first time, hear the statement ring hollow. Lear pays no attention. Married shmarried, he says. She’ll be yours anyway.
I let him order me another drink, though I know that half an hour later the night will be over and there we’ll be—there we are, standing on the curb, waiting for the red-jacketed valets to bring us our cars.
All fucked up and nowhere to go. Los Angeles is no place to get fucked up; after you take a $35 taxi home, they’ll tow your car.
See ya, guy, Lear says, and he’s gone.
The streets are deserted, the drive back to the hotel like flight. Getting out of the car, I catch some strong scent, honeysuckle or jasmine, the sweetness of it painful. I turn my head away, but it’s too late, the thought is there again—where is she. Where is she right now.
He’s young, she’d said dismissively that night, after he left. He’s easily impressed.
Then why do you try so hard? I’d asked, only realizing I wanted to embarrass her when I succeeded. She’d turned away with a jerk.
He’s in love with you already, I’d said (excruciating to remember saying that now, how it was only an attempt to annul the barb, certainly no threat), and what she cut me off with:
Why, because I’m yours?
I had no answer, and then we were even. Had fantasized about being in bed with her, began anticipating it even while the three of us were sitting over Con’s bottle of Cognac, Maggie the woman between us—had fantasized about us earlier, too—imagined her naked, back arched, sweat beading her upper lip, hands reaching around my back, pulling me close, the groan she emits when I enter her…
Instead we lay next to each other without speaking, the urge gone. I didn’t want to give her anything.
We cannot, we never do, apologize to each other; turned the lights out without even a goodnight. My sense of alienation from her happens in five, in ten seconds and then there’s only the night, the long, mortal night…
Still, I’d known, we’d both known, that we’d turn toward each other in the morning, as if nothing. We had sex then, though the previous night’s drunken passion never returned; I would be gone before she came home, this was our last chance for weeks.
The strange embarrassment of married sex, the wordless, concentrated pull toward orgasm.
Missing her is like missing home, but when I imagine her here with me, now, I know I’m missing someone she doesn’t want to be (probably hasn’t wanted to be, for a long time …?). No, the homesickness is for some past state, how she has given—how she used to give—herself to me. Can remember the feel of it, how soft she could be, how incredibly sweet—her voice, her touch. Her skin. The rare Maggie—the marvel of her showing that rarity to me.
Why is exclusivity so important.
Is it nothing but pride.
Alone now, I lie sleepless, have the fleeting, terrorizing sense of time hurtling through me, and the thought occurs, reoccurs, it won’t leave me alone: I left her first.
—14 january, Los Angeles
Find myself obsessively going through previous events, once innocent-seeming, now full of portent—like last Christmas season (me definitively NOT WRITING)—remember it as a period of retreat, bouts of parties…
Drinking too much (as usual during December)—but still, it all comes back with a startling clarity—remember thinking how amazing the effect of a recognized name (FAME) is on people, how it changes them. A certain obsequiousness, soon tiresome. Still I was (am) grateful, astonished to have them (my fans …!).
At Haphazard Press’s annual end-of-year bash that night, they kept coming up, industry people and strangers, it seemed everybody knew who I was.
In particular, remember meeting Gina H., “the” new young novelist (for once, the real thing). She came over, all platinum hair & heart-shaped ass, her face full of the joy a writer feels when, at last, she has been pulled from anonymity & told, yes, YOU!
Next to me Maggie’d stiffened, waiting for my response—was about to introduce them (Maggie, in fact, having been the first person I knew of to have read her work), when Gina leaned toward me to say I was brilliant (“a genius,” her exact words).
Flustered, I’d ended up saying something asinine about her “being the latest one so crowned.” Maggie, of course, split (midsentence, which of course called NO attention to herself. Brought back the memory of my own publication party, her contempt for what she called “the flatterers,” and worse, me: “You fall for it so hard it’s sickening to see”).
Immediately became one of those occasions on which, I knew, we would not speak again: an evening of intense, choreographed dislike. Toward the end, I stood and talked with Gina, an hour, maybe more—she’s truly bright, charming, her hair nearly white-blond. She kept flirting with me; difficult not to respond. The obvious pleasure in language, for both of us. Grinned at each other like classmates, like members of the same cult.
Peripherally, aware of Maggie sitting on the other side of the room, Connor on the arm of her chair (if this were a different occasion, i.e., if this had nothing to do with me, she would have introduced herself to Gina, she would have made her own connection).
Connor caught my eye and I made the gesture (come here)—introduced him to Gina—what could make me more innocent? But just seconds later, Maggie was behind me, patience gone, let’s go—words between her teeth, no casual suggestion. Turned toward her like nothing, not wanting to take the battle home, but she says where’s your coat. I started to speak (Maggie) but she didn’t let me finish—I’m leaving. Kissed Peter goodbye, all dimples and light—saves it for everyone else, then goes home with nothing but bitch for me.
Connor went to bid the hosts goodnight, then came to say goodbye to me. I’ll walk her, he’d said, one arm around my neck.
Watching her disappear through the door, I knew that this, too, would be something else we’d never speak of.
(Remember the exact date—21 December, last year)
***
Found a house, seems hard to believe, the same day—a two-bedroom bungalow in the hills—when I was driving around and around those deserted, twisting roads. I kept going up and up and up, looking for the sign showing through a window, posted to the fence, to the mailbox: For Rent.
Stopped the car occasionally to peer inside a house or two, all shuttered silent in the afternoon sun; once, walking back, just happened to glance down… to see a copperhead coiled on the flagstone I was about to step on, lidless snake eyes open, its stillness absolute. Wrote “snaky” in the margin of my Thomas Guide and decided to try the next canyon over.
Wasn’t till I’d been out three hours, when I finally resigned to cave and call a real estate agent, that I realized I was lost. Somehow it relieved me—as if at last I’d found some purpose, the day’s task. I was still up on some hill, still lost, when I drove past the bungalow, almost didn’t stop—but something about it, unostentatious and set back amidst the richer, Spanish-style villas, made me back up.
The owner lived in the neighborhood, his address taped to the mailbox. He was an older man with silver in his hair and the laconic manner of a native Californian.
You in the industry? he asked.
Screenwriter, I said, and his tacit, half-pitying, half-amused (how many times has he heard this before?) nod. He unlocked the front door for me then waited outside, his thumbs in his pockets.
The bungalow itself barely furnished; clearly a man’s house, a fireplace
in the main room, but its most noticeable feature is a strikingly beautiful, enormous deck facing the back of a deep canyon, separated from the house by a row of floor-to-ceiling French windows, so that the effect is almost one of stepping outside.
The upstairs is divided into two rooms only, a surprisingly large master bedroom and, next to it, the perfect study, both floors opening out to another deck with the same interfacing canyon views, this one parallel and perched over the bigger one below, both facing the backs of two other deep canyons. Outside the house’s wood is weathered to near-silver by years and years of sun and rain, until it looks like the driftwood you sometimes see washed up on the shore, shining in the sun.
Standing at the railing, I see nothing but green, houses dotted up along the sides, hidden behind eucalyptus and palm. Far off in some distance, the sound of an electric saw, workers building something somewhere, but there was not a soul in sight.
I was stunned with desire for it, this back canyon and its wild view, had to struggle to keep it from my tone when I ask the price (two thousand five).
Was too anxious for negotiation, sure anyway there was no negotiation to be had, equally sure he would deny it to me when I presented him with my uncertainty re how long—or how short—I’d need to rent it for. Adopted his terseness, both of us using as few words as possible, said six months, maybe more, maybe less…
He asked if I had pets. Told him I didn’t have anything, except some clothes and my computer.
He gives it to me on a month-to-month basis, two months down. He’d fax me the lease, he said when we shook. I am free to move in as soon as the first check clears.
—15 january, Los Angeles
Don’t speak to Maggie until the phone’s hooked up, a couple of days (decide, if asked, to say my cell’s service spotty up in the hills—a legend that actually proves true enough). Find the idea of her trying to reach me, unable to track me, weirdly comforting.
Drove over to Lear’s office to check in, first thing he said was call your wife. He gave me his cell, stood. And if I were you, I’d do it now.
She doesn’t even say hello, lights right in.
What the hell is wrong with you? Now I have to leave messages on some goddamn Hollywood producer’s machine and hope you get around to calling me back?
My cell doesn’t get service where I live—I’ve been waiting for the landline to get hooked up. (Keeping my tone mild, banal—what she hates, I know, the most: a deliberate emotional obtuseness, a refusal to acknowledge the real, the underlying problem.)
You know your voice’s gone flat—it’s already gotten to you, hasn’t it? Truman Capote was wrong—it’s not every year, it’s every week in LA that erodes your IQ.
She herself speaking so fast, unaware of it, a New York woman. I don’t answer, sigh instead, the implication that she’s on a tirade now, that I will not participate. She refuses to speak then, too, and for a long time we are both holding the phone, holding out, it stretches on and on…
Right, she says suddenly, I have to go.
The click in my ear so instantaneous, I realize her hand was poised on the button, ready to fire.
Nothing like youth, I say, as if she were still there, to sharpen the reflex.
Imagine Con listening to her, leaning in close. Coming over like he always has, to stay up late and smoke endless cigarettes, to talk and talk and talk—the compulsive garrulousness of youth. I am no longer so indiscreet, or trusting of strangers.
Keep thinking of the woman at Griffith Park. Weirdly enough, thinking about her more than obsessing re Maggie; have seen her twice in the last four days, the weather spectacular (wonder if she’s frequenting the park more than usual, herself …?) it’s a given by now that we’ll speak; her name, I finally found out, is Lucy. (Lucci, Lucy, what are the odds …?)
It means light, she said. From the Latin lux—then asked if I knew that Lucifer meant archangel of light. (I told her that yes, actually, I did know that.)
Poor Lucifer, she said. He’s so misunderstood.
She told me this as we shared (at her insistence), her lunch, which was the same as Walter’s: peanut butter & jelly with a carton of whole milk and a handful of Oreo cookies (none of which would pass Maggie’s lips, for fat content alone).
Hard at first to tell, for how those oversize clothes make her look small, but still I can see she’s got hips—the hips of a woman who’s given birth—and her son clings to her, mindlessly possessive; his mother’s body his own. Find it weirdly attractive, the ease of it, the powerful womanliness, and her lack of concern with fashion, makeup, adornment of any kind.
She seems unlike any other woman I have known. Watching her under that brilliant sun, her eyes seem to change color, from gray to blue, her iris rings of pale green.
We talked about Nietzsche, Kierkegaard (“the irrationalists, my favorites,” she said), about philosophy, about language. Her relationship to language is, she tells me, a physical thing. She writes words out, she said, because she likes “to feel their shape,” she keeps certain phrases from her readings, loves what she calls “the archeology of language,” finding the mutation of meaning, layer by layer, the difference of definitions in old dictionaries—the generational idioms, new synonyms, antonyms—
In fact, she told me she’s collected a shelf full of these enormous, all-inclusive, all-explanatory old dictionaries, from the fifties to the twenties and older, one from the turn of the century (her favorite of course), describing it to me as if I might have questioned its validity (the otherworldly, faintly ammoniac smell of its pages, so brittle she was scared to turn them), as if to prove that this linguistic sort of prehistory existed, was documented.
It’s like the game telephone, she said. Remember how distorted whatever was first said ended up being? Language is always changing, she went on, me just listening, half-mesmerized by her capacity to get this excited by mere words…
It’s a living thing, she said, putting a hand on my arm when I agreed, her touch urgent, powerful, eyes raking my own to make sure I was taking this in:
I mean it, I really think it’s alive—not an organism, quite, but definitely animate, you know? A kind of currency, maybe—an electromagnetic flow, if you want to be scientific—but it’s not about communication, really, it’s just the opposite! I mean, if you see how kids learn language—watching Walter, even as a baby—how do they get what possibility means, or annoying, or upset, and what about grammar, and syntax? They soak it up telepathically, from the tone of your voice, what’s happening when you say it, the look on your face—until they learn language, they just read you, like you read them—so, really, language is about separating, and not just from each other, but from our own selves—it’s our fig leaf, what we use to hide from each other, so that you can’t read my thoughts and I can’t read yours—it’s what we’ve used to make ourselves different from each other! Remember in Genesis, how Adam gave everything a name, and then all things were separate, distinct from each other? It’s how we’ve differentiated ourselves from all the other animals, and paid for it, by becoming alienated from the most basic, the most fundamental—from our own bodies, from the earth, from each other, from nature!
She saw me starting to say something (to raise my hand, as I’d later tease her), but she was too caught up to be interrupted or, at least, not before she got it all out.
But it’s also what created the Taj Mahal, I know that, too, and everything else—mathematics, imaginary numbers? And relativity, and airplanes that can actually outrun sound?
That’s quite the theory, I said finally, unprepared for the totality of it, this “theory” that was starting to sound more and more like religion, from the intense conviction in her voice, and the need she seemed to have to transmit it. I wondered if anything else—any other concept, interest, undertaking—had the power to wind her up quite like that.
It’s not just a hobby with you, is it, I said. It’s more like a mission…
I know, she said, I sound like
a teenager who’s just smoked pot for the first time, don’t I. She laughed, her eyes very bright; I couldn’t take mine off them.
I have some advice for you, she said when we got up to go. From Baudelaire.
She riffled through the pages of a notebook, read the quote out loud: “At the beginning of a story attack the subject, no matter where, and open with some very beautiful phrases which will arouse the desire to complete it.”
She ripped the page out, gave it to me. Her writing like her mind, dense and beautiful.
It’s from his journals, she said. His Intimate Journals.
I touch the edges of this scrap, feel its value—like some ancient money that falls unexpectedly into your hands, beyond spending. I have read it again and again since then, and the words still fall like coins in my mind, gilded, rich.
Somewhere in the back of my mind the idea is planted, grows furtive as a seed blown off course; she has been injured, something long-past now, but deep. I imagine some man twice her size—an uncle maybe, or stepfather—lying next to her at night, breath hot against her cheek. Though the image revolts me, made myself come against it, had to rise immediately to shower.
Who the fuck am I turning into.
—17 january, Hollywood Hills
It’s two more days before I call Maggie again, leave the briefest of messages (on the machine, when I know she’s at work). Another day still before she calls me back, both of us speaking tersely, exchanging only the absolutely necessary information, neither of us addressing the undercurrent of hostility there now; we’re entrenched in the kind of cold war that signifies the worst between us (both of us going out of our way to prove we care less). Have had periods like this before, but never across such geographical distance. When I try to imagine reconciliation, my mind goes numb.
Thank Christ, Lucci’s finally here and the project is officially under way. Older than I thought, he has the kind of corpulence that attracts children, robust and genial, a wonderfully raspy voice, the veritable Italian warmth. He seems genuinely pleased that I am going to be here—
It is much better, he says, to work with a face.
Hollywood Savage Page 4