Hollywood Savage

by Kristin McCloy

  I listen to her flying down the stairs and, minutes later, to the cough and sputter of the piece of junk she undoubtedly drives, kicking herself every time the water pump, timing belt, brake pads—the long etc. of the once “great deal”—costs her another week’s salary.

  I fall into an uneasy doze, awakened only when Lucci calls, deeply sympathetic, consoling and paternal. He pooh-poohs all things drugstore, advising I take grappa instead.

  It will kill anything which dares to remain inside you, he says with total conviction. Don’t forget the grappa, eh, paisan?

  I had forgotten, but as soon as I hang up, I stagger down the stairs, barefoot like an idiot, make a pot of plain Earl Grey tea, and pour an inch of the alcohol in it—and then, as a concession to Bonnie, add an enormous teaspoon of the vitamin C crystals, glittering and white. Immediately back in bed, I fall asleep. Drink it again every time I wake up to the same effect, and once I see Bonnie standing there, holding a pitcher of ice water, a figure in a dream—

  Your wife called. She said she’s been leaving messages.

  Tell her it’s a sabbatical—I hear my own voice and laugh, the croak of it, but feel sure what I’m saying is enormously important, urgent—of this I am convinced— Tell her we just need a sabbatical—professors do it all the time, she knows that— there should be a contract, you tell her that— My need to convince Bonnie overwhelming, makes me half-struggle out of bed, my arm an unbearable weight as I raise it to grab her hand—

  Bonnie, you gotta call her right now—212, dial 212 first… ya gotta—

  She pushes me back into the pillows, saying, Ssh, ssh…

  I can’t be dreaming, I think, I would never dream myself so goddamn weak, would I …?

  It’s okay, she says, I told her you were sick.

  Is it raining still? Try to lift my head to look out but the blinds are shut. It’s still raining, isn’t it.

  It never rains like this, she says it like apology, as if I might get the wrong impression of this, her golden state (and what, I think, leave? I want to laugh, the thought of getting up alone so painful, the effort it would require!).

  It’ll clear up soon, Bonnie says soothingly. You’ll see.

  Lucifer, I remember thinking this, too. Let there be light.

  —20 february, Hollywood

  The next morning, felt sure it was the faith of this expectation itself that was rewarded, for how I finally came to with no symptoms—and outside, the smell of wet soil, everything etched sharp, clean.

  After it’s rained, the miracle of the air. I sit on the deck, notepad in my lap, and watch the sun move across the sky.

  Fancy myself a connoisseur of light now, living here, the flat waves and piercing waves of it, light like a ceiling, how it can shimmer like something solid, the sheer gold of it. Clouds moving overhead, but moving fast, over a blue sky with such depth, I swear I can feel the pull of space itself.

  Make a pot of coffee, strong, heat the milk. It is the small luxuries that give life the texture of wealth, and solitude is the wealth of self-sufficiency. I am possessed of a calm I haven’t felt since I’ve moved here; it is the calm, I think, of having nothing left to lose.

  I am a writer—above, below, whatever else. I will lay claim to my life, to everything I’ve ever wanted—the world itself—with words. I was driven out of bed last night to find them, with my cramped hand, my stiff neck.

  Writing till the ink runs dry.

  —21 february, Hollywood

  Message from Maggie today, before I woke: Hope you feel better (all disbelief and sarcasm), before informing me that she’s taking a couple of days off, going to East Hampton, staying the weekend.

  Am meant, I suppose, to assume Don and Nancy’s, or maybe even (that rarest of pleasures!) Jim, his young wife, and their boy, Theo, but she leaves me no phone number, no name, nothing; no further information at all.

  I could call, I think; I could find out … if I really wanted to. I watch the Weather Channel. More snow, they say, for the Northeast (and what could be more natural in those conditions than a weekend at the beach?).

  It becomes apparent to me, w/ my continued disinclination to pick up the phone, that I, in fact, do not. Really want to. At all.

  —22 february, Hollywood

  Have been sitting at my desk for days (or, more accurately, nights), for hours, working, when the phone rings. Hear myself say hello in that new, cautious way.

  Miles, she says. It’s me.

  Lucy.

  I’ve tried, she says. But I can’t shake the sense—no matter what I’m doing…

  I am silent, aware of my position, knowing I have only seconds (less), to either be drawn back in or opt out.

  Of what? I ask finally.

  Of waiting.

  I could still, I think, opt out.

  It’s not a frivolous thing, she says.

  I want, she says then, to be with you.

  Two days later, pulling out of the driveway, her smile is blinding. God is dead, she says, and hits the gas; we were already gone.

  —26 february, heading north

  Driving up that heart-stoppingly winding road to Big Sur, she can’t relinquish the wheel, the speed with which she takes the curves—me, too, I drive fast, but when it’s someone else—keep slamming my foot on an imaginary brake, but her reflexes are sharpened points, she never makes a mistake, her ease apparent; is this how she drives, I can’t help wondering nonetheless, with Walter?

  Finally I just shut my eyes and put myself in her hands, thinking I’m there anyway. Thinking, if she’s given herself to me, then…

  Then what, I’m not sure. I’ll get whatever it is I deserve, I suppose.

  From this road, California so majestic—the mountains ancient beasts, the sea infinite on the other side. I stare at the northern coast, rocky and foggy and breathtaking, and when the sun comes out, the water’s muddy and blue, the air sharp with the smell of eucalyptus, and everywhere, such green—cypress and spruce and fir, hills in every shade of sage and olive, vegetation springing up new.

  It’s a freak of nature, I think it again, the barren turned fertile, and looking at it, I think how easy green is on the eye, how sweet.

  Nature’s fave, Lucy says, flipping through the radio, looking for a song. Stops at some screaming chorus, savage long-haired boys, interrupts herself to mutter along, she knows all the words.

  This, I point out, is pop culture.

  She shrugs, indifferent to my efforts at making her consistent, intent on the song, and I can picture her a teenager, lying on the floor of her parents’ house, studying the lyrics of her favorite new album, knowing the words to music I’ve never heard of. Pirate radio.

  Music is the most important thing, she says. Sex the hardest bargain.

  But you, I tell her, you’re the real thing.

  Know even before she gives me that slow smile, amazement, how much it will please her; like pulling the lever of a slot machine and knowing the cherries will all, this time, line up.

  It’s Lucy who says no B & B for her—no quaint, family-owned little inn with charmingly mismatched cutlery, and authentic American quilts, the tray of pastries in the morning. No. She wants a motel, she says.

  With nothing extra, she says, except that strip of paper wrapped around the toilet seat.

  We are at that stage of road trip when everything around us, innocent bystanders, makes us laugh. At the gas station, Lucy has to excuse herself, try to regain some composure in the bathroom. Later, the mention of the attendant’s name tag alone is enough to set her off. Wally, I whisper subversively, and she’s helpless again.

  We stop at a little general store and she roams the aisles while I ask directions, comes back with chocolate, vodka, a box of candles. I ask for condoms, the thinnest, most expensive kind. Then, at the last minute, I buy cigarettes, the familiar package thrilling in my hand, illicit, like adultery itself. She stands beside me, arms full, hair still tangled from the long ride, and the sight of her stops m
y heart.

  This woman, I think, I have to tell it to myself, this woman is my mistress.

  The room we get has one enormous bed, a television, a single dresser, its mirror silvery with age. In the bathroom, the towels are skimpy, the tub scrubbed clean, smell of scouring powder still in the air. There is nothing spectacular except, through the window, the ocean, black and endless. We can hear the dim sound of TV dialogue next door and over that, the waves, pounding up high against the cliff across the road.

  It’s spooky up here, Lucy says, and it is.

  California’s paradise. Every paradise is cursed.

  Don’t say that.

  She’s from here, I know this, from someplace south of San Francisco, though she doesn’t like to talk about it, dismisses her past with a wave of her hand—one day, she says, I’ll show you.

  It’s a lie, we both know it, even though all the time, in the car, we have been talking, she has been telling me endless stories, fragmented, fascinating.

  It’s not like crushes I’ve had before, she says to me now. It’s like an uncontrollable spiritual lust.

  We’re sitting on the bed, drinking vodka rocks.

  The magic of being seen, she says, of finding, meeting, the most extraordinary people—it’s the only transcendence I believe in.

  She bends over me for another drink, her ribs brush against my knee. There is a second, I think she is going to turn toward me—but she stands instead, putting distance between us.

  I sit up, open my first pack of cigarettes in three years. Let’s go to dinner, I suggest.

  Okay, she says. Just let me wash up first.

  Cannot believe how intense the pleasure, smoke in my lungs again. I hear the water rushing into the tub. I fall back on the bed, close my eyes, all I can think of is the smoke. Have no sense of relapse—nothing but the defiance of pleasure, how far it can take you. What else, the murmur always coming back to me, what else is there.

  I hear Lucy in the water, the sigh she makes sinking, and it reminds me of Maggie, she makes the same sound.

  Imagine Con in the apartment right now, lounging in the bathroom doorway, candles flickering; watching my wife. The vision, intolerable, forces me up.

  I walk over there, I look at Lucy. Have to look at her, and she looks back at me, but she can’t see what I’m thinking.

  Come here, she says, she sits up so I can see her body, wet, bare. Come over here.

  We never eat dinner, we never leave the room. In bed, stopping to pause, we begin again before the pause ends, neither of us coming. Desire’s the grip, coming the relinquishment of that hold, the return to sobriety; the losing of interest. Instead, we’ve got the exquisite agony of climbing to the verge, the twisting reach of it, before we swerve and fall off, grabbing each other.

  (Come here. Come over here.)

  Unable to stop. Leaving the bed engorged, dizzy. Only wanting to come back.

  The covers on the floor, the sheets twisted. The candles she lit burned all the way down, wax pooled on the table. Chocolate and empty beer bottles, my watch, our rings, Rorschached across the dresser, the phone, turned off.

  All the detritus of an illicit bed party, the most intimate human arena of them all. Tête-à-tête, Lucy says.

  Mouth-to-mouth, I answer back.

  Her hands everywhere, I make her fuck me till the place our bodies meet is drenched with sweat, and still we haven’t come.

  She takes a sip of cold water, opens her mouth on my navel.

  You are so hard, she whispers.

  Time passing red-lit on the digital clock. It’s getting early, she says much later, It’s getting so early…

  Wake from some half-dream to the music from Midnight Cowboy, and Lucy’s face, bathed in the television’s bluish light, the sun outside beginning its rise.

  Baby, I mutter, can’t you sleep …?

  She shakes her head; incredibly, she’s never seen the movie before. Watch the end of it with her, dazed. She wears the same look on her face throughout, intent, expressionless, but when it’s over and the credits roll, that song again, she begins to cry, hides her face against the wall. Lucy, I say, I can’t help laughing. Come here—

  No, she says, she can’t stop crying, it was just a movie.

  That, I think, pulling her against me, is the kind of movie I want to write.

  —27 february, Big Sur

  Going back south the next day, it’s her turn to stare while I drive, both of us half-blinded by the dazzling winter light.

  She keeps shifting, as if trying to find something, the relief of some pain.

  What is it, I ask her.

  This, she says, her gesture inclusive of everything, despairing. Us, moving through.

  Travel creates such an ache. Wanting to possess more than just the fleeting experience—wanting the entire imagined life, the wild isolation of those shacks set back against the cliff, another future, even an other, different dialect…

  What do you say we pull off the road here, I ask, get ourselves a pony, plant an illegal crop or two, and stay the rest of our lives?

  She laughs, she looks at me.

  Okay, she says.

  God, she says, I’m so happy.

  I turn to see her face but she averts it, too shy. She goes on, And the idea that I can’t do this, because of—

  Always stops herself before she says his name (Will) as if saying it would be taking it in vain; how she rephrases her statements, turning to the abstract, the hypothetical, using the impersonal—

  Because there’s someone else, and if you love anyone other than that one, you’ll ruin the cherished belief—the cherished illusion, let’s face it—that there is only one single person you will ever want, will ever love—as if there weren’t room for any more! I just keep thinking … is marriage meant to be such a prison?

  I laugh, quote something I read, don’t remember where: “Why do I have to get married? I didn’t do anything wrong!”

  She laughs, too, but it’s clear, her heart’s not in it; she goes on, Yes, but then I think, if he did—if he did this to me—

  She stops, half-shudders, helpless.

  You’d think we could all look each other in the eye and come to—some—agreement … where we wouldn’t have to say anything, we’d all just know.

  What, exactly, I ask finally, since she’s stopped speaking, would it be that we would all “just know”?

  Just, she says, like some tripping college girl, that everything’s going to be all right.

  Not exactly a Nietzschean notion, I say, & she responds to me like the Buddha’s goddess of love, all eyelash and non sequitur.

  Consistency, she says, is overrated.

  She smokes cigarettes with me, though they make her sick.

  It’s kind of nice, she says, squinting, to be in control of your own destruction.

  When we stop for gas, both of us head for the bank of pay phones. Though her back is turned, I can still hear her voice, know from the low, sweet tone she uses that she is speaking to Walter, and for a second I feel it, a flash of jealousy—can’t believe I would stoop so low as to compete with a three-year-old (three-and-a-HALF, Walter would say) child’s demand for his mother’s attention, but I’ve found myself actually resenting him—

  She’s mine, too, I’ve felt like saying this, quite literally—I want to stoop, in fact, to eye level, and say it: she’s mine, too, you know, and we’re going to have to learn to share if we want to get along…

  Lucy, I know, would be aghast. Given the choice, there wouldn’t be any. I would lose, instantaneously. She would not even look back.

  It bothers me more than I care to admit.

  I turn my back to her and dial. In New York, the machine picks up. It occurs to me that they are both there, that she is screening every call, that she is listening, that he is listening, too, and for one long moment, I can’t think of anything, not a single thing, to say. In the silent space that follows, I hear Lucy, as if from some great distance.


  I love you, she is saying. Don’t forget.

  It seems, I say finally, speaking very deliberately into the receiver, that you’re never home.

  I wait by the car while Lucy visits the ladies’, think how I have never—I have rarely—talked about Maggie. She doesn’t talk about her husband, either, except in the most abstract, the most metaphysical, of terms. It seems strange to me only now. Before, it had only seemed unnecessary.

  Back in the car, we are both quiet, miles and miles. It is me who breaks it, asking, What are you thinking.

  Did you know, Lucy says, looking out the window still, that Proust’s mistress was a dyke?

  —28 february, Pacific Coast Highway

  Obsessive rituals. The idea of luck, of jinx, the coup de grâce that is inspiration, and what I have to go through just to face it; to SIT DOWN. Have to wear certain clothes, have to tilt the chair just so. Constantly adjusting everything in the room, the temperature, the light, even the scent, burning Japanese funereal incense or Tibetan-made, “with forty Himalayan herbs.”

  I listen to music Lucy gave me, a group named after Cocteau, everything obscure to me, nearly all composed of otherworldly women. All the music I really love, she says, has an element of morphine in it.

  Turn it up, turn it down, jump out of my seat. Crave drugs, alcohol, music, sugar, cigarettes, orgasm, everything, all of it. More. I understand addiction, every form. Looking for something.

  Take a break to study a script written by Waldo Salt. Other literature a source of energy, a bank, vital. Where I learn everything. “Screenwriting is not something I take lightly,” Salt had said when he was on trial during the McCarthy era. He understood the push toward the original, which takes courage, and genius. “It is my work,” he’d said. “It is my craft, and one day, I hope, it will be my art.”

  The phone rings and I pick up on the first one, sure it’s her; sure it’s Lucy. Hello, I say, smiling already. There is only silence on the other end, and then I know, the exact pause, it’s my wife.

  I’m never home?