Hollywood Savage

by Kristin McCloy

I’m home, I say, the absoluteness of deceit. I’m working.

  Yeah, Maggie says, she’s ice, I’m working, too.

  Well it’s nine to five, isn’t it.

  Or six or seven, I go on, when she doesn’t answer.

  Depending, I add, when she doesn’t respond to that, either.

  Depending, she agrees.

  Jealousy like a beast with fangs, tearing at me from the inside out, instantly snarling, out of control. I can analyze everything, write about it so coolly, and yet the minute I catch even the most minute glimpse, evidence—it doesn’t matter what—I am shaking with rage.

  I’ve been sick, I say, terse.

  I heard, she says. Some woman told me.

  That was Lear’s assistant, Bonnie.

  Bonnie, she repeats (I can hardly fathom this tone, the restrained fury of it …! It’s a projection, I think, even as I reach for what I have to say to disarm, to turn the tables back on her)—

  How was your weekend, by the way? Get some sun?

  You don’t care how my weekend was, Miles, she says, suddenly upset. It’s just another way to dig at me.

  Me. Digging at you.

  No, I didn’t get any sun, she says, mimicking the way I’d said it perfectly. It snowed the entire time. And it was beautiful, and peaceful, if you really want to know—and frankly, it feels like it was light-years ago right now.

  I guess it’ll be your little secret then.

  What?

  I think it’s odd, that’s all, you never mentioning where the hell it is you were…

  I was at Don and Nancy’s, where else?

  And you went alone. By yourself.

  All by myself, just like a big girl, yes; I did.

  I see.

  Her laugh, incredulous—but more than that, I think, it’s defensive, too—

  I’m not the one who has strange women answering the phone at my place, am I?

  Strangers? No. I would never accuse you of that…

  What would you accuse me of, then?

  She’s thrown the gauntlet down now, knowing perfectly well how much I hate this aggressive confrontation, especially over the phone—

  Maggie, remember last time …? We can’t do this shit over the phone, it’s not fair—

  Oh, but I guess it’s fair for you to make all these nasty little insinuations, as if— You can’t just say something like that and leave it hanging there—that’s what isn’t fair!

  Tell her she couldn’t taunt me into it this time, already reaching for what I have to say to disconnect, to get her off—

  Anyway, listen, I’m working.

  The word loaded, as it has always been between the two of us, as writers. “Working”—i.e., actually writing, as opposed to simply staring—has always been a statement that invokes immediate silence and tiptoeing, all calls personally screened, and the music turned very, very low; it is also a statement one can—but rarely does—make in vain.

  The length of the pause before she speaks the only sign she shows, how difficult restraint is for her—

  Of course.

  I wait a second, sure she’ll hang up on me; she doesn’t. After a moment, I start to say goodbye.

  I’ll talk to you, I say, and hear the click off before I finish, later.

  We’re rivals, siblings, the enmity pure and strong. I remember how it was between us when we first met, the refusal to admit dependence. One of us always coming back with something, the last word (and I can still feel the hard cannibalistic joy of it, winning. Forcing the other person to laugh, even—especially!—while wounded). It was as if we both knew, now that we’d found each other we could never be apart again.

  I think of the anger that lines our relationship, and how starting with somebody else you are reborn, can live for months, maybe even years, without resentment like limestone building on itself until it is a calcified plaque, stained deep between you.

  It’s so different with Lucy—have never felt the need to hurt her. Only want to give her everything—sex, faith, New York City. An untarnished adoration.

  It’s a fantasy, I think. It has nothing to do with life.

  I go back to my script but I know, it is ruined. The plot seems opaque, preposterous, all the characters’ concerns false. I can’t read any of it. Still I sit there, staring out, I don’t want to sit anywhere else. I watch the blurred wings of two hummingbirds, hovering in front of the feeder Lucy hung there, their bodies round and brilliant in shades of scarlet and jade, midnight blue. Behind them, the green spine of the hill, and the sun, going down.

  It isn’t until the sky has turned black that I give up, and turn the computer off.

  —2 march, Hollywood

  Two days later, I awake from a dream, suffused with happiness—it brings back a memory of being in New York, nearly finished with the book, spending whole days and most nights holed up in my office—one night in particular, when Maggie & Isabel came by while I was still trying to work, fractured from too many phone calls. Both of them giddy from wine at dinner, they shouted at me. Old man, Isabel called me, because I hate it so much, take some time off …!

  She loves to act like she’s black (even though, she’s the first to point it out, “I got such a white-girl ass”), sassing me, a bottle of something alcoholic, expensive, old, tucked under one arm (and, she informed us both quite extravagantly later, she was NOT going to work the next morning).

  Christ, Maggie said, get a real job.

  Woke up in all my clothes next a.m. at eight-thirty, a fake leopard-fur coat thrown over me, full ashtray next to my ear, and Isabel crashed, beautiful, on the couch next to me, her black stockings, her earrings still glinting as if it were night (Stan Getz—still!—playing on the stereo).

  Maggie had long gone, remembered her exit line (the wife, she’d pronounced, always goes home first). Thought of her then, naked and clean between white sheets in our dark room, the big windows on either side of the apartment open, the cool breeze blowing through. Can’t STAND modern science for not having created the molecular transport system yet.

  I pulled the blinds shut for Isabel, told her one day—SOMEDAY—I really was going to fuck her. Careful not to wake her as I tiptoed out.

  The memory painful now.

  —4 march, hollywood

  Next day (like some cosmic practical joke, more visits from the past), Scott MacPherson tracks me down (found me through my LA agent, he said—wasn’t till he mentioned the guy’s name that I realized I’d forgotten it—like that old joke: one guy says to another, hey man, your agent called, said he was at your house when it caught fire—your house’s burning down! Other guy stunned for a second, then asks: my agent was at my house?).

  The familiarity of his voice over the phone like an acid flashback, instantly transporting me to the trashed intimacy of college days, using each other’s dorm rooms interchangeably, creating equal hovels.

  Been reading about you, he says, a forced geniality, and I hear the years, him out here all this time, writing script after script, still waiting for his big break.

  To change the subject, I ask, So what’s up, Scotty, what’s going on?

  Hey, you tell me! You got the world by the tail, right? And you’re still married to that woman—shit, I forgot her name—

  Maggie, I say quickly, Maggie Moore—yeah, she never changed it—said “Maggie King” made her feel like some corrupt politician—anyway, forget me, man, I want the dirt on you—what’re you scheming about these days? You married yet or what?

  Or what. He laughs, cavalier, dismisses the subject. Anyway, Miles, it’s good to hear your voice, man! Now you’re out here let’s get together, huh?

  Yes, I say (the enthusiasm of the guilty—we both know: he’s the one that lives here; I who should have called him).

  How’s tonight? he asks, and behind the casual tone is the challenge: or don’t I rate.

  He names the time, the place, and I submit like some yesteryear geisha, saying yes, yes, yes.

  There’s
no sign, there’s just an awning, he tells me. Go in through the black door.

  I find it on Fairfax, the thoroughfare empty after dark (it occurs to me that would be a good title for a Baedeker about LA), right next to a garish yellow sign advertising the Farmer’s Daughter. There’s something, I remember Lucy saying in Big Sur, about motels.

  The restaurant is small, really just a bar, all sleek wood and small tables, where people in black sit drinking wine and eating bitter greens, oysters, and the seemingly ubiquitous oversize plate of salted french fries. The demographics are pure LA, an uninterrupted contingency of youth, beautiful but somehow sexless, their faces blank with the same ravenous ambition: fame, fame, fame (without any particular interest in talent—i.e., whether they possess it or not).

  Having observed the denizens of this town for some time now, it’s beginning to seem to me that this state of fame (or should I say Fame?) is ultimately the same as the state of Most Fear. Or at least the one of Most Self-Editing—i.e., repressing native/impulsive/candid self-expression for proscribed self-negating role…

  It’s not as if I am immune to any of it—the locale, the youth, the frenetic, almost panicky need to define the edge—of style, anyway; or at least, that which can be bought. (After all, there’s no excuse for not knowing what that is; not when its entire culture is aimed at your last junior high insecurity.)

  I’ve been sitting with these thoughts for just over half an hour, and just beginning to wonder if somehow I got it wrong—the time, the day—when Scott shows. He clasps my hand, both of us grinning too wide, idiotic.

  Miles, how long’s it been, man!

  I don’t know—what, six, seven years …?

  He’s bigger than I remember; he’s fully grown, I tell myself, we both are, but I can’t assimilate it. He stands next to me at the bar, he orders shots for both of us. I can’t think of anything I want less than straight tequila, harsh and raw—(take it like Papa, we used to say back when both of us read a lot of Hemingway, or pretended to, and I accept it now the same way, throwing it back without protest).

  How are you, I ask, I keep asking. How are you—

  Oh, you know. Got a place in Santa Monica, mile from the beach. Broke up with Kelly when she got fixated on having a baby. A baby I said, Scott repeats, this joke well used. Next thing you know she’ll wanna get married, too!

  He synopsizes his life for me in a studiedly casual manner: developing a big project for Warners when the studio head quit—you heard about that—

  I shake my head, both truly and willfully innocent of each and any incident that may have conspired in this, his latest failure—in fact I am totally out of the loop when it comes to “biz gossip,” know nothing about it.

  That’s right, he says. How could I forget—people in New York don’t read Variety. (Sardonically, as if we both know what bullshit that is, and I grin like I’m in on it, suddenly sure that he was parked two blocks away the whole time I was here, sitting in his car, thinking, Make him wait awhile longer.)

  He faces out into the room, watches a woman move past him, tilting his head after her like a judge, one elbow edged along the bar.

  Of course the new bitch didn’t even read the goddamn script before she threw me into turnaround.

  Jesus, I say (have not one earthly idea what he’s talking about).

  So it goes; he shrugs, quoting another college favorite, but his is a bitterness that only pretends to be feigned, while my gut sense tells me he’s sunk so deep inside it now that he has something invested there—something integral, his take on life itself.

  No luck. I say it, shake my head as if this is the only explanation possible, even as the words shape themselves inside my head: No talent.

  I am appalled at my own harsh Darwinism, the vague sense of contempt I feel for him: he who hasn’t the power to shape his own fate.

  It’s the contempt that having it all breeds, the sense of superiority—because it nauseates me, in an existential kind of way, to imagine otherwise: the notion that I, too, might not have risen from the swamp of mere survival, that the rise itself was not, in fact, inevitable—it’s simply unthinkable.

  We get drunk and reminisce about the past, we don’t know what else to do. Across from us, two women sit together, laughing self-consciously.

  They want us, Scott says (something else we used to tell each other, he remembers it all). They want us bad—

  They look over finally, one of them moves her fingers in a little wave that makes them both laugh some more. Scott smiles, sloppy, genuine, and I have a vision of him in some nameless Hollywood apartment, picking up little stuffed animals and turning them over, while in the bathroom she tears at the package of a contraceptive sponge with her teeth.

  Hey, he says to the bartender. Give ’em two more of whatever they’re having.

  The bartender nods, she has perfected expressionlessness to an art. She pours gimlets from a silver cocktail shaker, she has very slim arms, a beautiful face. Her pupils are pinpoints even in this dark place, making her eyes a pure, distant blue.

  Lucy in the sky, the line runs through my head (the unexpected pleasure of coming across her name in a song I have known for years!—without ever having had any premonition of her—of Lucy, hidden in my future).

  Listen, I tell Scott, hate to call it a night but I got an early meeting tomorrow.

  Yeah, right, he says, winking, and I laugh, as if the hilarity between us is understood. He stands to say goodbye, hugs me in that male awkward way, one hand clapping my back, his voice gruff. Good to see you, huh? Good to see you.

  The bartender looks through me when I pay her, never once meets my gaze.

  —5 march, the Hills

  Lucy showing up unexpectedly, just past noon, potted vines and flowers pressed against the windows of her car, bags of soil piled high (I got them wholesale, she insisted, refused the extravagance).

  I saw these old pots, she said, disappeared into the depths of the garage, came out backward, dragging two enormous red-clay pots.

  They’re too beautiful to languish in obscurity, don’t you think? Her face flushed, the triumph of salvation, hands on those generous hips, arms bare in a flannel shirt cut off—the surprise, again, of her biceps, the articulated swell of muscle beneath such smooth, pale skin … (from lifting Walter, she told me when I’d traced them, the first time—babies are better than Pilates).

  Don’t let me bother you, she said, insisting, when I started to help her, that she didn’t want it—what she did want, she said, was for me to keep writing.

  And let me putter around, as if we lived together, and had all the time in the world. (How she makes time for me, gives me everything …! I try to remember, but can’t—was there ever a time when Maggie loved me this way?)

  She spent hours transplanting her flowering vines into the pots she hauled up to the deck, where she put them in the direct line of vision from where I work, at Lucci’s table.

  Didn’t get much done, but what pleasure to sit there, all afternoon—glancing furtively over the top of my computer to watch her bend and kneel, the concentration of her face, hands plunging into rich, fragrant earth, inadvertently streaking dirt across one cheek as she reached to tuck her hair behind one ear … to admire the delicacy with which she handled fragile root systems, or twined bougainvillea, deep crimson and wild fuchsia, all around the rails, then intertwined perfect flutes of sky blue morning glories, before finally standing the last, Japanese honeysuckle, unobtrusive in one corner, its tiny white flowers improbably dense with scent.

  Thinking she was done, asked if I could fix her something to eat—yes, she called back, but Project Eden, she informed me in the kitchen, wasn’t finished yet; when I asked her what more she could possibly do she only said, Flavor, and spice—

  I opened a bottle of wine, made manchego cheese and tomato sandwiches w/ avocado, voluptuously ripe, & nutty seven-grain bread, mayonnaise. She watched me, something faintly amused, drinking the wine I gave her.

/>   What? (Me, asking, always, What?)

  Nothing (smiling wider), I just never saw your cooking face before— Imitating me, protruding tongue, weird little frown—

  Okay that’s enough, I said, even as her face dissolved in laughter.

  I turned away and she laughed even harder, becoming, I knew, helpless. Me trying not to grin, still annoyed—I do NOT make that face—which only made her stagger off the stool she was perched on and push herself into me, to press her face into my chest, still giggling, half-gasping her apologies, I’m sorry sweetpie, I’m just giddy, that’s all—

  She devoured her sandwich, let me make her another half. Love her appetite, voracious; the frankness of it. Stopping to eat on our way up to Big Sur, she’d ordered a big sloppy plate of banana pancakes with bacon and extra syrup, big glass of fresh-squeezed, coffee with cream. Smiling happily around an enormous mouthful, telling me, You have to eat like this at places like these—it’s what they do best.

  Tried to imagine Maggie before the same roadhouse menu, knew she’d pick something like the iceberg-lettuce-w/-DDT-aftertaste-&-hard-tomato salad (the dressing, of course, on the side) … or perhaps she’d deconstruct a chicken sandwich, picking out the meat, scraping off the mayonnaise, eating only half the bun—no dessert; perfect thighs.

  I watched two lovers kissing in a café yesterday, Lucy said, her second glass of wine. Wouldn’t even’ve looked before—would’ve been way too embarrassed … but now I want to see it…

  Why’s that?

  … Because now I know how it feels—to be wanted like that.

  What about your husband, I wanted to ask, but did not; marriage, I know this too well myself, is nothing if not the blunting of desire … domesticity, I think, smothers lust; to be tamed is to vanquish desire.

  Asked her how did it feel, instead.

  I don’t know, she said, then immediately, glamorous.

  She slipped into my lap, her smile so close I felt it more than saw it.

  I keep imagining I’m someone else, she said. The kind of person who could disappear at a moment’s notice, turn up again in Rio, or some deserted beach in Thailand…