Where your hair would turn blond from living in the sea, she murmured, lips moving against my ear, and your eyes black, from smoking opium.
The curve of her smile against my cheek, intimate, shy. Her hands coming up around the back of my neck, holding me—
I’m in love with you—
I kissed her, my eyes closing against the plunge of it, how deep she takes me. What could be better, I said, lips against hers, and she answered, no breath at all, What could be worse.
She filled a long redwood window box—from her own garage, she said, where it had only been taking up space—with herbs: sage, thyme, mint, basil, and rosemary; cilantro, parsley, the small purple of French lavender.
The smell of dirt on her clothes when she came inside. Had to bury my head under her shirt, had to touch her skin.
Isn’t it amazing (this from her later, in bed) how generous love makes you? I can feel myself turning out to the world, overflowing … wanting to share it, to make it contagious…
Me saying things I’d never heard myself say before, speaking of desire as magical—hearing these words coming out of my mouth, I am amazed, again, continually, by the wealth of freedom I feel with her, to say anything— I could speak in tongues, if so possessed—and still, I am sure, she would understand.
Would any love affair, I wonder, any lover, inspire this—or is it only her, is it just Lucy who has this profound capacity to provide me with such a sense of safety, such a luxury of space …?
It lights you up from the inside out, I told her. Makes you drop all your crutches.
Yes, she said. And I love the ardor— Sitting up to look at me, her eyes weirdly silver, as if light were coming out of them. The urgency of wanting something—just wanting, alone, it doesn’t matter what, it’s this wanting anything, anyone, so much, that makes me feel connected…
Looking up, swinging her legs off the bed even as I reached for a handful, her wriggling so fast all I got was hair—and only the ends, at that (Savage, I thought, would have had her by the waist, and back on the bed by now…).
Ends enough, anyway, to catch her up short (her smile as she gently pried my fingers apart, sucking each one)—
Because you know (of course she had to add this, too), romance (she just could not leave off without the caveat) is an addiction, too.
Sitting on the floor to lace her mustard-colored sneakers, she pulled one knee up in a gesture so like Walter’s, I was startled into wondering if such specific acts, such mannerisms, could be genetically inherited—thinking, again, what marvel to have a child (with Lucy, the inevitable addendum…). Asking, this lack of censorship she inspires, Wanna have a baby? A daughter this time, for me …?
Lucy’s sharply raised head, her heart-shaped face, the flush of her cheeks, those silvery eyes … saying, Don’t, Miles. You mustn’t say things like that.
Why mustn’t I?
Don’t joke about it.
I wasn’t joking.
Come on.
Are we fighting now?
The shake of her head, no. No and no and no.
The laces so long the single loops trailed on either side of her shoes; when she rose to move past me, caught her by the waist.
Miles (only woman I have ever met who lowers her voice when upset), I really have to go—
I know. Bent over her to double-lace those loops, so that my fair-haired maiden would not trip, would not fall, would not hurt herself…
Woman I know has a little four-year-old girl, Katy, I tell her. And she says four-year-old girls can rule the world.
Her turning to put her lips in my hair, her arms around my neck, my head, the faint buzz of her voice against my skull. She’d have wispy blond hair … so blond it’s almost white, and your eyes—definitely your eyes … we’d name her Francesca, or Grace…
She’d have your perfect knees (I speak this into the space just below her breastbone, eyes closed against her ribs), and the elegance of your neck…
Touching the hollow of her flank, the sweet curve of flesh—on Maggie, I could not stop thinking it, that hollow’s concave, but just as sweet, both of them with their skin so smooth…
Lucy laughing, pulling away. If I hadn’t been watching so intently, would’ve missed the swift hand to her face, fingers brushing each eye.
Standing on the top of the hill, her car long down the other side, still I hear the blast of music that is Lucy, turning her radio on.
Dreamt about her and woke up hard, only to jerk off to more, memories of sex with her.
“Insatiability as a form of satisfaction.” I find the note under my coffee cup in the morning, the long loop of her letters. I am possessed.
There’s a shelf of books here, some of them quite old, the selection surprisingly literate—Hemingway and Bukowski, Lillian Hellman, Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler. They’ve accumulated over the years, the landlord said when I asked, adding, Every tenant leaves one.
(Remember calling Peter to tell him about the view, the books. An unusual tradition, I remarked, and of course he had to say it, Especially in Southern California.)
Took down Chandler’s The Long Goodbye just to browse through it; hours later, still reading.
He brings forth the image of another Hollywood: darker, glamorous, a fabulous setting full of mystery and dames gone wrong, his dialogue all theater and irony. Leaves me wishing I could write like that, too, instead of the “realistic” artful dodging that is the next scene in my script.
Let it come out of the blue, Lear says when I complain. That’s dramatic. (No, I always think, that’s Hollywood. Lucci, when I recount this, does not even deign to respond, rolls his eyes.)
I write and rewrite, no draft seems particularly better than the last. Everything is different—the rhythm, the style, the rules. Lucci coming off devious to me now, how he uses his language, his culture, to obscure his true aim from me: to repossess what’s mine—or at least what was, once. Feel bled by collaboration, the loss of authority. The book, I want to yell this at all of them, the book is so much better!
Used to talk to Con about it, the twists and turns, the ingenuity of intelligence for its own sake. He is the only one I would trust to read the script now, for how fast he thinks, unafraid of his own intuition, and capacity to feel.
All the same reasons I won’t.
Realizing there is no price commensurate to this process, this weird alchemy of turning literature into film—and that, whatever the price, it cannot describe the cost. Only the risk; am risking the integrity of what has been created entirely from within, whole—and risking it out of nothing, really, but sheer curiosity. And, of course, the lust for fame.
Maggie, damn her, was right.
—6 march, hollywood
Phone rang at two-thirty this morning, insistent, until the machine picked up, a mechanical operator asking me if I would accept a collect call from—raucous noise, laughter, a familiar voice going up in a half-shriek—
Hello?
Did we wake you? (Isabel, giggling insanely.)
What makes you say that?
Her gleeful tones, shouting out, We woke him up!
Who’s we?
We, the inner sanctum! Your friends and familiars! Your coven!
Behind her I hear a male voice (“Isn’t coven just three?”) & instantly I’m asking, Who’s there?
Con and me and Peter and Maggie, your wife—
Still in a semicomatose state, I feel nausea coursing through me, a horrible taste in my mouth, and then Peter’s on the line, it seems everybody’s had too much to drink—
Fuck Hollywood, Miles, come on—grab the first flight back while you still can!
Behind him I hear Maggie shouting out, And fuck the Nebstar babies! (A phrase we saw printed on a large plastic bag in Tokyo—it was the irreproachability of the woman carrying it, an elderly woman in traditional garb, that made us laugh so hard, made us remember it still.)
Make myself speak. Yeah, well, if you all want to keep living in
the style to which you’ve become accustomed (the last word slurred w/ sleep, and Peter yelps, he puts his hand over the phone, shouts, He’s drunk, too!).
Immediately Maggie, breathless with laughter, flaunting it. Are you? Miles!
I’m sleeping, Maggie. I’m sleeping and this is not really that much fun for me—whose idea was it anyway? To call?
Her hand over the receiver but still I hear her, He wants to know, whose idea!
Miles. Now it’s Con’s voice, loose from alcohol and giggling, his tone beguiling, it’s not the same without you. It’s not the same.
(The words in my head, like the neon phrases in Times Square: Yes, but how do you like fucking my wife?)
I make a sound, nothing more, aware of my teeth, grinding.
Been reading your book again—third time, Miles. It’s so fucking good. You know that, don’t you? I mean, you do know that—
He uses the same coaxing voice, as if to seduce me (and in some such perverse way attain benediction? The fucked thing, always, is how he succeeds—).
Luckily Isabel hears this, she seizes the phone from him before I can answer—
Don’t flatter him! Miles, cover your ears! Cover your ears and hum!
I’m hanging up now, Isabel.
Mi-les, don’t be mad, come on—we’re just having some fun …!
I’m going back to sleep, Isabel. Right now.
He’s pissed, I hear her saying to them, and then the laughter, the great drunken laughter of these people I have gathered with so many times, these people I have admired and loved, loved so much—more than anyone—
Goodnight, Isabel. And don’t call back!
Lie in bed, heart thumping. Seems proof positive now, can’t say why—not precisely, anyway. Just from the sound of it, Con laughing in the background with Maggie; such intimacy. It’s not, I think, anything they haven’t done before, but suddenly it seems glaringly obvious, and me the asshole so blinded by self-satisfaction, so complacency-addled, I was looking right at it and STILL couldn’t see! What a fucking joke, them calling. Makes it all seem so innocent. Must be some kind of thrill to move beyond your mentor. Must make him feel like a MAN.
Wait till she cuts them off.
—7 march, h’wood hills
Lucy agrees (finally) to meet me in the park—because I beg, I have been begging—to see her son.
Walter’s as thrilled as I am, puts his face in mine to laugh, and I don’t even have to look at her to see it, how she knows we love each other. I pick him up & see, feel, how this sturdy little body has grown even since I last saw him, his hair longer, his laugh wilder.
Wish he were mine, I say like an idiot, she doesn’t hesitate, not a second: No one, not a soul in this world, could ever take the place of his daddy. Not a one.
Sometimes the way she raises an eyebrow (her tone of voice) makes me want to smack her.
Walter steps between us, impatient for my attention. Look! he says (he always has something to show me), I gots money.
He takes a fistful of change from his beaten-up pocket & holds it with every sticky finger, shiny pennies, silver dimes.
Wanna buy something? he asks hopefully.
Yeah. Sometimes I speak to him with the same tone he uses with me, a quiet intensity that cracks him up. He understands absurdity innately, his sense of humor so brilliant, acute—there exists no cynicism in his world; he is crazy with excitement.
Life is fabulous, I tell his mother as he pulls me to the swings, naming what there is for me to choose from. The slide, he repeats, the same undisappointed hopefulness, & offers his money again.
I don’t know, I say—we both know the slide’s his favorite. Can we afford it?
He looks at me raptly, then stares at the slide. I look at Lucy. Walter turns back to me, his grin devilish.
Yeah, he says, and we both run for it, me letting him break ahead at the last minute. Lucy stands by the ladder, I catch him at the end. His laugh infectious, we giggle like maniacs. She shakes her head, she raises both hands, as if to acquit herself of any responsibility, and I assure her that this is, in fact, just between us—Walter and me.
It’s got nothing to do with you, I tell her when I come back to sit with her again, Walter still playing.
If it weren’t for me, she says archly, you two never would have met.
No, I say. If it weren’t for him, the two of us never would have met.
Her smile slow, dazzling, hands held tight in her lap, as if it takes enormous effort, enormous strength, to hold them there (to keep, she tells me later, from touching you).
I smile back, amazed at the happiness I’m capable of with her.
I can come over, she says to me, no volume. Later.
Showing up on my doorstep before dark, shy, hiding behind her hair. I ask her if she wants some wine, she says yes, she says, I’ve been potting. I nod, as if I understand (and think again, this WOMAN, this disarray of light in my life—ah, God, Lucy …!).
We went into my study for no clearly relevant reason (wanting to show it to her, I guess—where I work), and the next thing I knew she was on me, arms wrapped around my neck, her mouth against mine, wanting everything—
What (me saying it, still an ignorant fifteen-year-old helpless before the appetite women contain, so well concealed—it’s ravenous, a seeming capacity for craving nothing less than everything at once, ALL OF IT)—
I just want you here, she says, voice snagging between demand and supplication. On me, like this—Miles, like this, like this—
I’m hard, the knowledge comes to me as if from far away, though I’m already acting on it—pushing against her, she falls back over the table, she wraps her thighs around my waist. Earth falls from her sleeves, smudges into the creases of my notes, rich and dark. We don’t stop to undress, we pull clothes off as we have to, everything falls on the floor—shoes and books and pens and paper, the heavy thud of the stapler. It’s happening, it comes to me, just like Lucci said—I have a woman with hips, and I hold them, I hold her down, I say it to her: On a table big enough to feast on …!
Fertile ground, she says in bed afterward. Isn’t that what every writer prays for?
I shake my head, light the joint she’s just rolled (something else, apparently, that she grows in her garden).
No, I say. No praying.
Everybody prays.
Never have. I roll over, face her, only the blue light just dark coming in through slatted shades, her face pieced in light and shadow. The irregular sound of traffic in the distance, cars traversing the curves of Mulholland, almost sounds like surf washing up on shore, its dim roar. We smoke, we talk low, my eyes fixed, always, on some part of her (transfixed), & she lies still for once & lets me look.
When your life is in danger, she says. You say please God.
Not the same thing.
The same thing.
No, I say, both of us so sure of ourselves. Panic isn’t faith.
So you do have faith.
Sure—it requires a leap, right? You only have to do it once.
The leap of faith … it sounds so daring, doesn’t it?
What are you saying, that you’re a faithless woman?
No, I have faith, I do. I just don’t know where to put it. She speaks slowly, takes a great many pauses:
I thought when I married Will that that was it—I had fallen in love and now I would dedicate myself to this one person, to loving this one person … and then at the end of my life, this love, and everything that came with it, would somehow save me…
From what?
I don’t know. Death, I guess.
I let the last of the smoke go, watch the blue, sweet plume of it.
I’ve had two fantasies, she says. Ever since.
Tell me.
She is facing me, head fitted into the crook of her elbow.
The first that nothing—that NO ONE—could ever pull me away from that … you know, that one, single-minded love…
And the other …?
We are, both of us, dimming in the going light, the outline of her features harder to see now, her lips, moving.
… That sometime in my life, I would meet someone… that someone would come along who was…
… Beyond all that.
Yes.
We look at each other, no light now but the glitter of her eyes. I know she has to go, I have to let her go, but I wind her fingers up in mine because I haven’t got (never seem to get) enough.
Miles, she says, my name in her mouth like something she can taste.
It’s pitch dark now, she should have left an hour ago, and still we lie there, her hair falling around my face.
I’m not sorry, she says, her words in my mouth. I never will be.
—9 march, Hollywood
Some cat has wandered here, wild striped tabby with a cry that makes my hair stand on end. Fed him last night when I saw his ribs were showing. Keep meaning to put up signs, “FOUND CAT: tabby, fetchin, skittish. Call #”—but the idea of posting my phone number on telephone poles, cars flying past, seems cursed. I can’t do it. Only stop when I’m in the car, peer at the other LOST signs posted up on telephone poles. LOST PUPPY. LOST CAT. The description never matches, but I spend whole rides thinking about the screenplay I could write, a love story for Disney w/ animal stars. I’d whip it out, ten days, one draft—
Use a pseudonym, demand an enormous sum; take the money and run. Never tell anyone.
Lucy, I think, would never find out.
Maggie, on the other hand … Maggie would never forgive me.
—12 march, hollywood
Record-breaking cold in New York, a 119-year low. They talk about an “Arctic express” from Canada on the Weather Channel, show clips of people with their faces covered like Arabs, taking tiny, mincing steps on streets glazed with ice.
It’s cold in Rome also, Lucci says, it’s always he who turns the television on, rapidly changing channels, stopping for no apparent reason. My wife tells me she is coming every time I call—every time, on the next plane, she will be here!
What do you say? I ask.
Every time I say the same thing— And the children? Will the children come, too?
His shrug enormous, making me laugh (not him, though; he never laughs when it’s his line).
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