Hollywood Savage

by Kristin McCloy

If I go on with this, she says, I will break his heart. There is no other way to have it.

  This is it, I think then, and she has only come today to tell me. It was a single episode, the only blight in her record of fidelity; it will never happen again. Don’t know what I expected, only know it wasn’t this. It is like being stricken.

  It’s me now who can’t look at her, and I watch the boy instead. What, I ask, finally, needing to hear it. What are you saying.

  I don’t know, except I think what I most need from … She pauses and I know it is her husband’s name she doesn’t want to say again (as if, in this context, it would be profane) … From marriage, is to be as important to someone else as they are to themselves. To have someone say they won’t leave you, not ever … and mean it.

  What about Walter, the thought instantly presents itself (accusation, unvoiced—the better part of valor, indeed); am careful to steel my face against any expression; have yet to take my eyes off him.

  And the fear, she says, her voice even lower now. If I can’t say to—someone—that I won’t leave him, then I have no guarantee that someone will say it to me. And I don’t know if I can live without that guarantee.

  Who said anything about leaving anyone?

  She gives me a look, such fresh hurt. She doesn’t answer, and then there’s only Walter’s voice, the seeming nonsense of his singsong full of some eccentric, personal meaning. As if feeling the weight of my gaze, he stops abruptly, he looks up. His eyes huge, limpid. For a moment, we are all three of us silent, and I feel the invisible web we have already woven—intricate, snarled, impossible to retrace.

  Right, she says finally, and I can’t tell if she’s angry or full of sorrow. Nobody did. I mean, thank God.

  But I mean, Luce, I say, turning back toward her, and I hate the pleading note in my voice, it’s not like we didn’t know, right? I mean yes, it’s disloyal—to him, and to her—but what about to us? What about the way you—what—I mean am I supposed to just bury what happened—what made it happen—and say no, it’s bad, it’s just bad, and tough shit for me? Am I supposed to just—let you go?

  I’m married, Miles. We both are. So … yeah.

  Look, I know that—please don’t pull that shit on me, Lucy—

  No, you don’t know. It’s not the same.

  I follow her glance in Walter’s direction, find him looking back, one hand on his bright yellow toy, his huge eyes fixed on us.

  Hi, baby, Lucy sings, the bright love that becomes her voice, how she changes for him.

  She grabs her bag, starts putting everything away with awkward, violent gestures.

  This furtive life, she says. The caginess …! I’m taking him with me to do something I don’t want him to understand— I hate myself, I can’t stand it.

  Okay, so forget that part then.

  She looks at me, incredulous, am I being sarcastic— I shrug, careful to keep my voice as low as hers, as we always have when Walter’s around.

  I won’t fuck you, I near-whisper, I put both hands up—I feel perfectly willing, that instant, whatever, any way— But please … I still want to know you. Let me still know you.

  She pushes the grass with her toes, stares down at her feet. There is mud on the rubber toe of her sneaker, her laces are dried with it.

  Walter, she says, but she hasn’t raised her voice, she hasn’t raised her face.

  From the ground, Walter looks up, as if he felt his mother’s pain, and he raises his little train car, offering it to me, his face mirroring an adult anguish.

  Want Toby?

  This simple gesture (and what I know it cost him, this “three-and-a-half”-years-old little man) just about undoes me.

  Thanks, buddy, but I’m afraid he’d miss you too much and we’d only end up having to bring him straight back home.

  He could just sleep over, Walter says, again more man than I’ve seen anyone (including—OW—myself) be in a very long time. An’ then we could go to Ships for greasy over-easy pancakes! His face is a mirror of hope, one that even he, regardless of his youth, already knows is false. It hurts me physically, an unlocalized stabbing sensation. Christ, kids. How do people live through it?

  The need to reestablish distance comes over me like the onslaught of disease, or freedom. I stand up, saying, Another time, big guy, ’kay?

  ’Kay, he says, his disappointment clearly for me, not himself, since, obviously, he has everything he needs: his mother, his father, his Toby, his little bedroom with the bright red airplane night-light and navy blue sailboat sheets (accumulating details: what good writer does without? Now, of course, they only add to the sharpness of the stabbing, and I wish to God I’d never asked—about him, about his room, about his house … about the house he lives in with his mother … and that goddamned ubiquitous father).

  Instead, I just smile. It is so easy to smile at him, until suddenly, as if I’d just been put in the slow learners class, it occurs: I won’t see him again, either. I bend down to his height, smooth his wild, glossy hair.

  Thanks, Walter, I tell him, but I really gotta get going here.

  You can’t stay? His knees splayed out on the dirt, his face upturned, asking.

  Nope.

  Not even one more minute?

  Not this time, my man. Sorry.

  Next time maybe? (Jesus, his unwillingness to give up hope is going to kill me, I’m sure of it—it’s going to make some long-awaited blood clot burst in my brain, or in my heart, and for a second I think, What a relief! Which is immediately sequenced by the trauma such horror would inflict on that small soul. It’s nothing but inhuman, the way these kids manage to take away a man’s last option—how wise, I think then, never to have had any. How wise and how infinitely, unspeakably poverty-stricken …!)

  Maybe, I say finally, forced to acquiesce, even if only to end the torment.

  Okay, he says, accepting at last, and it seems it is this acceptance that puts us in motion again, that makes Lucy stand, too.

  Bye, Walter, I call as he heads for the car at a run.

  Bye, he shouts back, and then he’s running back to his mother, saying something I can’t hear—something I want to stop and listen to, for the particular construction of his language, the original genius of it—but I can’t stop and ask now; I can’t afford it.

  Our departure orchestrated with as little fanfare as possible. Not looking at her and then her sudden clutch around my neck before she gets in the car, that lemony fragrance bringing everything back, the warmth of her flesh and the rush of adrenaline that had come with it, at the thought that I might have had her, that I might have had this, a new, another life—

  See you, she whispers, what false promise; I can hardly answer. She presses something, a piece of paper, into my hand, closes my fingers around it.

  She ducks quick into her car, the heavy slam of the door. She turns the engine over, gives me the smallest of waves.

  The blare of the radio when she drives away. I stand in the street, watching the car get smaller and smaller. I am the only pedestrian.

  It isn’t until I get home that I smooth the small note out.

  “Admirers do not count,” it says, Cocteau’s name written beneath it. “One must have utterly overwhelmed at least one soul.”

  —15 february, Griffith Park, LA

  Dreamt Maggie left me & in it, cried so hard the hill eroded beneath me. Woke up in a cold sweat, couldn’t move. The dream memory, the distinctly physical sensation of the hill sliding out from under me insignificant beside the other, loss of her.

  Outside, raining again, another freak deluge without end.

  Craving a cigarette but the thought of dressing, driving through all that water to some fluorescent convenience store like desolation itself. Some clerk looking at me as if I’m just one more ambition-ruined lonely fuck in this town, w/ a rented convertible, no woman.

  Losing ground.

  —17 february, H. Hills

  Dismal weather continues.

  Pouri
ng, sky white, decks drenched.

  Me sick, like being hit by a (big—a very big, a Mack) truck.

  Slammed.

  But the worst was driving through the rain to the park, such desperation, and then no one—find myself missing Walter, missing sunlight, in the same way.

  He and Lucy vanished without a trace. I don’t even have her phone number. She’s not listed, and it was only yesterday that I realized I don’t know her husband’s—hers, Walter’s—last name. Unlike Maggie, she didn’t keep her own.

  My father’s, my husband’s—what’s the difference, really, she said when I asked, stating it as a simple matter of fact, without a hint of rancor. Either way, it’s just another man’s.

  Know now the answer to the question that’s nagged, that’s been nagging me from the beginning: No.

  It isn’t now, if it ever was, a simple (!) matter of revenge. Or conquest, or sabotage. Perhaps that was it once, okay; and maybe it did provide the original impetus—but afterward … it was something else entirely.

  Do you know what karma means, she asked that first night, from the exquisite anonymity of my room (now, as I liked to think, newly christened).

  People think it’s some nebulous concept, a New Age idea, she went on. But in fact it’s the name of a law, you know, like E = mc (squared). Literally, it means the law of cause and effect.

  I try now to trace said law back, from effect to cause, and cause to effect—that twisting, delicate series of events, beginning with (the irony inescapable as a vise grip), the most innocent (if not downright vacuous) of mistakes: hitting the goddamned code that retrieves our messages—how long ago now, less than two months? Impossible that it should be even less, but somehow, it is. Feels like a lifetime, since the shock of his voice, Manhattan in the background (in the b.g., as I have learned to write … my favorite e.g., some famous director calling out, “Background, mill around! Make a hubbub!”).

  Meet me at five. I have replayed those four words so many times, they’ve nearly lost their meaning. Though not, unfortunately (goddamn that motherfucker to HELL), their shock. But I digress!

  From that cause, to which effect, exactly, then? From Con’s voice to Lucy’s arms? From suspicion to betrayal?

  I know a Cuban doctor who fled the Castro revolution as a young man, a medical student who had yet to finish his residency, his wife unaware still of the child, so freshly conceived was he, already in her womb. This same man, twenty years later, raising a glass at the dinner table of his house in Florida. Raising a glass, his face shining as he looked around. To Fidel. Because without him …!

  His arm’s sweeping gesture, encompassing everything—his large, many-roomed, pillared house; his Beamer next to his wife’s this-year’s Volvo in the spacious two-car garage; his powerboat high-docked just above the calm, man-made bay; his Ivy League–educated children (one beautiful, long-limbed girl; one whip-smart, confident boy) sitting at table, teeth straight, posture perfect (ditto attitude); his steadfast, accomplished wife, as beautiful today as the day she’d consented to marry him; her many-carat diamond ring locked up tight in a safety deposit box (the ring she actually wore being cubic zirconium—having lost an entire island/childhood, how much of a stretch was it to imagine an octogenarian on a trike with a gun, gumming—that is, mugging, his wife?); and at said same bank, his million-plus, ever-accruing interest dollars, diversified among Treasury bonds, trust funds for the (nonexistent so far) grandkids, and his Roth IRA.

  Is it possible, I wondered, that I will ever raise my glass to Con …?

  Sweat dripping down my neck, shivering, pen slick in my hand, have to laugh at the idiocy of such crass hope. (Of course it is not. What, after all, is mere real estate compared with true love?) Then again, if said love is not, in fact, true at all—if it turns out to be as false as any other guy’s cliché… well then. (And that’s as far as Lucy’s law gets me: to Well Then.)

  In the glaring need to salve my (potentially) wounded pride, without even confirmation of such, I turned my back on my own to chase another man’s wife.

  Unlike myself, Lucy has the capacity to sacrifice what must be sacrificed (selfishness and desire, abject lust, the hard joy of taking what you want), in order to maintain the sacred vows. But then (can you say rationalizing? I knew you could) Lucy understands the sacred better than I; she’s a mother, after all. (Thinking how wrong that is even as I write it—it’s not about motherhood, and I take nothing away from all its attendant saintliness, nor has it got to do with understanding anything. She’s just that way. Better. It’s how she’s built, what she’s chosen. Who I love.)

  Because I know now, I am in love with her. I am in love with Lucy, this woman whose last name I do not know. This woman who is not my wife. I know this because of how fucking miserable I am. Only love can make you this miserable. I’m sick with it. Lovesick: a term people, including myself, have laughed at—it goes with those frivolous others: puppy love, schoolboy crush, some sweet sentimental passing fad. In fact, it has nothing to do with them. Lovesickness is more, I think, like cholera, or malaria, or typhoid. One of those terrible tropical fevers that rack the body with pain, dehydrate every organ.

  Can hardly fathom myself, what was it that I set out to prove—that it’s possible to seduce a happily married woman? And if so, what consolation did I expect to derive? That Maggie could be, yes, still, desperately in love with me (HA) yet nonetheless fall for somebody else? That her loving someone else—loving him—didn’t, in effect, annihilate me? Was it for that meager salve that I staked Lucy’s breach of promise? (Of course this last the most arrogant of all; as if I could take credit for anything Lucy does. Did. Or will—Christ, that word again!—do.)

  Lie in bed, too sick to work. Lear has his assistant bring me things—an enormous down comforter, brand-new, ultra-luxe (says the label, and I have to wonder—were these geese fed cream and caviar, had any unpristine feathers plucked before slaughter?), chicken soup (more poultry, is all my fevered head can think, with an equally insensible sense of repulsion), fresh (I am assured) from Canter’s on Fairfax, along with a staggering array of primary-colored bottles of Walgreens over-the-counters: Robitussin (for night and for day), NyQuil (ditto), Contac (same), Tylenol, Excedrin PM, Advil, Motrin, Bayer, multivitamins (plus something called Emergen-C), echinacea, goldenseal, Oscillococcinum, Yuan Chu (my personal fave, she testifies), zinc lozenges, Swiss herbal lozenges, lemon lozenges filled with honey, cherry Chap Stick (I refrained from commenting; too easy), an “extra-protein-power-boost smoothie” (I thought that’s what D-girls called agents who hit on them, I mumbled, and she let out a most ungirlish guffaw that made me hers completely)—and still what I was beginning to suspect was Mary Poppins’s own purse, so bottomless did it appear, had yet to disgorge the totality of its arsenal—including but not by any means limited to—a truly vile container of wheatgrass and aloe vera juice (mm, I said when she made me taste it, bitter and slimy! She bit her lip at that and I could just imagine the retort she contained), a bunch of slightly crushed daisies, a crate of clementine oranges, and one astonishing tea armada: green, peppermint, chamomile, chai, and—what else—Theraflu; plus one large fresh-squeezed OJ (or, as the label so claimed, “naked”—how do they manage to make even fruit juice lewd? Then again, this being California, they probably mean au naturel), “real live lemons” (I picked ’em, she said, not without an endearing note of pride, from your neighbor’s tree—I mean the branch was hanging over the wall, that’s not exactly stealing, right?).

  Having unloaded this ungodly amount of loot, she then produced not just a humidifier (guess Lear thought Noah’s out there might not do the trick), but also a DEhumidifier (certainly come in handy if in fact forty days etc. etc.), a thermometer (once again pleasing me when she let out another great guffaw at the single eyebrow I raised, then wagged one finger at me and said, In your dreams, sir, and I mean it), until finally, la pièce de résistance: Vicks VapoRub!

  Wow, I said. If you just gave me that, a g
lass of tepid ginger ale, a handful of saltines, and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, I’d be ten years old again, my mom hovering nearby in case I swooned weakly away.

  Well, she said, I got you the real thing—Jewish penicillin from Canter’s. Because you know, Mr. King, Campbell’s actually, um, sucks.

  If I could have guffawed, I definitely would have; as it was, I’m afraid all I could manage was a pathetically girlie giggle, which had me instantly reaching for a Kleenex (from one of two fresh—vitamin E enhanced!—boxes) ASAP.

  She sweetly looked away, pretended to be rooting around in what I fervently hoped was her now-empty bag.

  Well, Bonnie, I’d say thanks, but it hardly seems adequate, I said, anxious to let her get on with her day.

  Pshaw, she said (she DID). Any excuse to get out of the office. Besides, I took care of all my brothers during their chicken pox, measles, and mumps plagues. One even had whooping cough—talk about yecch. This, she assured me, is nada.

  Still in her early twenties, she reminds me of my ex students. Hair unwashed, face clean, poreless, she exuded a glamour she was wholly unaware of, consisting as it did of her unlikely innocence in the face of Hollywood, and her own as-yet undefeated ideals (the grand ambitions of youth—anticipation, I think I can safely claim, was the best part. That this is true, however—I am ever keenly aware—is, no doubt, only so because my own came to fruition).

  Here you go, Mr. King, she says, handing me a palmful of pills. I groan, pull the covers over my head.

  Jesus, Bonnie, calling me mister’s really kicking a guy when he’s down.

  I can’t help it, she says. I just have such respect for writers.

  She sits on the side of my bed, unafraid, studies me for signs of fever. Of course she would be the kind of girl who grew up in a household of brothers (tormentors and protectors both), the kind of girl who lost her virginity long before any of them suspected, and now only sleeps with the man she loves. The kind of girl I used to think Con might bring by.

  Thanks, Bonnie. You’re a pal.

  This earns me her widest smile yet, and she leans over to pull my covers straight before admonishing me about which medicines when, a set of instructions so complex I silently vow not to take any of them.