Hollywood Savage

  Here, it is the first question out of everyone’s mouth after nice-ta-meetcha. What do you do, they ask; I’m a writer, I reply, and they lean forward, either interested or feigning interest, asking, Anything I might have seen? They ask, What format? Thirty-, sixty-minute, or full-length?

  Forever, I answered the first time, startled into metaphysics (later I had to laugh—a writer’s idea of forever being the Library of Congress!).

  We leave the party when Maggie says she’s tired, asks the time. When I tell her it’s only one, she looks surprised. It seems so much later, she says.

  I tell her my theory re the time difference between here and New York, glad for the chance to speak lightly.

  Basically, I explain, there is none. One A.M. here is exactly like four A.M. NYC. Just like six A.M. is like nine there. LA is as diurnal as NY is nocturnal—it’s about sunshine, power breakfasts, and working out before the office opens. Never mind the supposed movie star glamour—their call is earlier than anybody else’s—they have to be in makeup at five A.M. and God help them if they’re hungover.

  She doesn’t laugh, makes no comment. Instead, she asks, Don’t you miss the city?

  Don’t you miss Peter and Isabel, and Con? She continues when I don’t answer, but when I shoot her a glance, I find her face averted, she’s buckling her seat belt.

  Peter Con and Isabel, I think, that’s how we’ve always said it; that’s how it flows. It’s as if she weren’t going to say his name at all, then realized omitting it would call more attention to him than not.

  I treat her questions as if they were rhetorical, don’t answer. Keeping my voice elaborately casual, I ask if she’s seen much of Con since I left. (Have you seen his dick, for instance, I want to ask, so badly I bite my tongue and wince.)

  She makes an absentminded noise—a noise I am suddenly sure she has rehearsed for just such an occasion.

  Oh, not really, she says, such offhandedness, then adds, Though I have been seeing more of him than I expected, frankly.

  It was the frankly that threw me, for the way she said it, as if almost—what? Condescending? As in, not expecting it because, frankly, she hadn’t really wanted to?

  Why’s that? I ask, unable not to.

  Oh, she says (there’s that false air of absentmindedness again), I don’t know—because he’s always been more your friend, really, and I guess I’m just used to thinking of him as … I don’t know, young, I guess.

  Young, I think, as in what, tedious? What bullshit. She has never thought him tedious in her life—it was the single most reason Maggie would refuse to entertain people, and she had certainly entertained Connor …!

  (Plenty, I couldn’t help adding to myself, immediately dismayed by the persistency of this inner voice, the one that jumps out whenever I think about Maggie with Con—something so corny about all that self-righteous fury masked by sarcasm … kind of like some bad cross—as go all descriptions in Hollywood—between Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne.)

  I saw you speaking to that actor, I say, incapable of talking about Con anymore without losing my composure. He have anything to say?

  Only if we were speaking about himself, she answers.

  Which he managed, she adds, pretty much nonstop.

  I can’t help admiring her ability to dismiss the guy with a single sentence, her absolute lack of awe.

  Facing me now, she suddenly leans closer, sniffs hard. When she sits back, her eyes are narrowed.

  Are you smoking again? she asks, all hardness and suspicion, and it brings to mind the battle she waged so long ago for me to quit—even crying once, I recall, when I came home from a party with half a pack.

  You’re going to die, she’d yelled, hitting my chest with one fist. You’re going to kill yourself and leave me a widow, just like my father did my mother!

  She acted as if smoking were an affair I were having, a way of cheating on her; her jealousy had been unfathomable to me, how personally she took it, but it had also been flattering—proof, I’d thought, of the depth of her love for me.

  I just had one, I say now. For the first time, tonight—more like six, I think, or half a pack—suddenly focusing on this inner dialogue, it occurs to me that I’m drunk, and the next thought comes completely by surprise, unbidden: maybe we’ll fuck—

  This last sobers me like nothing else. I blink hard, focus on the road ahead.

  Did you meet Nina, I ask, to change the subject, Lear’s colleague? She just had cosmetic surgery—she flashed me her tits by the pool.

  Maggie reacts with uncharacteristic surprise.

  I wouldn’t have thought it.

  Why not? She’s almost forty, isn’t she?

  Maggie spares me a look, withering. Because, she says, as deliberately as if she were speaking to the hard of hearing, she’s a lesbian.

  My mouth opens, closes (… Now I’m the gay divorcée!). Maggie crosses her legs, the movement dismissive.

  How, I have to ask, do you know?

  Because, she says it again, she made a pass at me outside the bathroom.

  Didn’t she know you were my wife?

  Were? Maggie turns, she fixes her eyes on me. My pulse slows, everything, the car, how fast the scene goes by outside. She’s going to tell me, I think, the truth, right now—she’s going to tell me everything.

  But she only turns away again, staring out the window as if at some endless vista.

  Back at the house, we get ready for bed, our old routines rising up to claim us, the well-oiled choreography of marriage; how smoothly we move about the bathroom, automatically stepping out of each other’s way, wordless.

  In bed, the ritual continues, carrying us through, as she creams her face, her hands, then arranges herself beneath the sheet—her form, that profile, so familiar to me … how many nights have we spent next to each other. How many hours have I gazed at that face. Surely it adds up to years by now; I have spent years, I think, the years of my life, looking at her face.

  How strange it is to have another, a different face in my life now, someone else I watch with that single-minded gaze. There’s a curious relief in the thought, the sense of having been, somehow, spared. It makes me appreciate Maggie’s beauty in a strangely abstract way; the symmetry of her brow, the fine straight features, the shine of gold in her hair. The upward swell of her breasts.

  Something in me flares at the thought of another man’s hands—Con’s hands, the greedy hands of a younger man—on her body, & I have a sudden vision of her face, strained with desire, eyes rolling back, breathing that sounds like pleas…

  Don’t know exactly what I’m doing when I grab her, aware of something violent beneath my erection, some not-quite-unconscious urge to hurt her. Pinned her wrists down, held her there. Fucked her as hard as I’ve ever done anything, both of us coming at the same time.

  Rolled off her immediately, know if there had been any cigarettes in the house, I would have sneaked off to smoke one. She lies next to me, her breathing slows. Neither of us says a word.

  Can’t remember the last time I was so overcome with her. Years, I think. It’s been years.

  —march, the ides of; hollywood

  She comes downstairs the next morning in cutoffs and a sweatshirt, papers in hand. She takes her coffee outside, puts her hands on the railing and tilts her face up. Underneath the unobscured California sun, I see it then, the map of fine lines around her eyes, and I am equally shocked by this other view—of age, of time—on hers, on Maggie’s face, because she is, she has always been, the face of my youth … and if she’s aging, so am I.

  She settles down to work, & I watch her from the safety of the house, think of her wanting things I can’t give her—the same way I do. Why, I wonder. Why is that so intolerable.

  As if on cue, the phone rings.

  Hi.

  … Lucy.

  Surprised you, didn’t I.

  … Yeah. You did.

  She picks up on my hesitation instantly. What’s wrong?

&nbs
p; Maggie’s here.

  … Maggie?

  My wife.

  She is so quiet on the other end that for a second I think we’ve been disconnected.

  Lucy?

  I’m here.

  Listen, I didn’t know she was coming, either. She just decided yesterday.

  Her silence continues, intense, unnerving.

  I tried to call and tell you, but I kept getting the machine.

  I got the afternoon off. (Her abruptness when she’s been disappointed. Her complete inability—unwillingness?—to act otherwise, to hide it.)

  … Today? On Saturday?

  Will’s taking Walter to his mother’s house at one. I told him I had to study.

  Oh.

  I was going to surprise you.

  I’m surprised.

  Me, too.

  Both of us quiet then, I don’t know what to say.

  Okay, she says at last, and I can hear it in her voice, devastation.

  Lucy.

  What.

  What was the surprise?

  Lunch.

  I love lunch.

  I never eat it unless I’m with someone else, she says, she’s so unhappy; it’s hard for me to believe sometimes, how unhappy she can get. How quickly.

  Okay, she says it again; it isn’t true, not by the farthest stretch.

  Look, I can have lunch with you, I tell her. But late. A late lunch.

  The silence of her disbelief, and something else—the peculiar sense that it is she I am betraying. A feeling with teeth, the same bite I feel with my wife. It occurs to me for the first time that they would, in fact, have something—an entire language—between them; the language of women. Maggie would love her, I am suddenly sure of it. This woman, she would say. She would steal Lucy away.

  Okay, she says.

  I mention a place, a New York–style coffee shop, on Beverly, mostly frequented by trendy twenty-nothings, but I happen to know she’s a sucker for the jukebox there.

  I hear it in her voice when she says it for the fourth time, consolation, Okay.

  I get off the phone just as Maggie pads into the kitchen for another cup of coffee. She pours, it, then leans against the counter, staring thoughtfully out at the deck, at the profusion of bougainvillea and morning glories that Lucy planted there, the cat stretched out on the railing, sunning himself, eyes closed, apparently totally unconcerned that one wrong twitch and he’d fall a long way down to the steep hill beneath him.

  I’m envying him that utter self-confidence, the state of bliss he so often inhabits, when Maggie speaks, breaking the reverie.

  All these flowers, she says. You never mentioned you had such a garden … or the cat … or that hummingbird feeder. She turns to look at me, her eyes so full of light they’re startling. It all seems so … domestic. Taking care of all that. So time-consuming. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess a woman lived here.

  Why? I ask, the single syllable covering up what would otherwise be a stammer.

  Because usually it’s women that think to take care of other living creatures, she said. Men—especially when they’re living alone—tend to let everything die … and don’t even notice.

  I’m on the verge of arguing with her (that, at least, is familiar ground) when I remember how, early in our marriage, her father had died and she’d gone home to help her mother, staying just over a month. How, when she came back, all the plants had withered into dried old vines, and our single pair of goldfish gone belly-up.

  Guess I’ve gotten older, I mumble, and retreat upstairs to take a shower.

  When I leave the house hours later, Maggie is still outside, still working. I tell her I have to drop by Lear’s, run a couple of errands. She is staring at a hummingbird whirling around the feeder.

  How did you know, she asks, she can’t take her eyes off it, what that was, anyway?

  The feeder? It came with the house, I say, realizing this is not an answer, then add, inanely, All I do is fill it.

  She nods, she is still staring at the wild little creature, at the insanely manic blur of its wings.

  Okay, I say finally, I’m going.

  She doesn’t answer.

  I get there before Lucy does, immediately look for someplace to buy cigarettes. Find a machine in a motel adjacent (it’s the perfect Hollywood motel, with a pool right off the road and a desk clerk who doesn’t speak English).

  I stand just outside the diner, smoking, and all at once I am stricken with it: I’m risking it all, risking everything—twelve years of being with Maggie, seven years of actual marriage—risking an entire, a unique history of tenderness, the trust of the one woman, before Lucy, that I have ever wanted with all that I am; with the desperation that only real love can truly evoke.

  Cigarette gone sour in my mouth, I step first on it, then back as far as I can get beneath the awning’s shadow. There is no question, I know this, of leaving.

  There is only love and the fear of not being loved. Everything else lies in between.

  She arrives in disguise, her hair tucked up under a baseball cap, sunglasses that cover half her face; I have to hide my smile. We sit in a booth.

  I don’t want anything, she says as the waitress pauses by our table, but I order for her anyway, a chocolate malt that comes in a tall silver mixer, beads of water dripping down its shiny sides.

  She puts her mouth on the straw and asks me questions, one after the next, direct, specific—what time did she get here? What did you do last night? What does she look like?

  I answer briefly. She’s blond, I say to the last one (the full extent of my description. She doesn’t push for more).

  Why do you think, she asks, she came here now?

  I don’t know. I have no idea.

  Did you have sex with her?

  I look at her, can think of no way to answer for so long that that itself becomes the answer. Her eyes sliding from mine, her fingers intertwined, all knuckle.

  What, I say finally. You don’t fuck your husband?

  Lucy looking through me, and through those eyes, I see myself. Hate her for the vision, how it makes me scrabble to regain her.

  You think like a man, I hear myself say (regretting it even as the words form). You surprise me.

  Immediately I am stricken by the smallest flicker of her eyes, unable to meet mine, something ancient in her face.

  As usual when chastened, I am instantly furious. Is that offensive, I ask, and she says, Only if I’m supposed to take it as a compliment.

  She gets up, unfolding a dollar bill from her pocket, then goes and stands at the jukebox so long I’ve finished her malt when she slides back in. From the juke, a woman’s voice, crooning (I’d love to hurt you)…

  What’s it like for him, I ask her then (this taboo subject), with you?

  It’s me and that’s it, she says. I’m everything.

  Even though I know he would survive without me, she adds immediately (rolling her eyes to show how little she accepts this, her own deification), I’m not deluded. I know Will, and I know his drive, how strong it can be. But I also know his capacity to blind himself, to make a choice and then live as if it could have never been any other way. He talks about having another baby, he wants a little girl (her eyes glancing off mine, so briefly) … I thought maybe I was ready, too, but then…

  (I met you.) That’s the end of her sentence, we both know it; she doesn’t have to say it.

  One of the songs ends, another begins. She plays with her straw, me silent, too, wishing I could light a cigarette. After a while she starts talking again, speaking slowly, as if this is the first time she’s found the words for what she wants to say.

  It was beyond me, it really was, you know … the idea of ever raising the question, even to myself, that I might … that I could, actually, choose again.

  She pauses, a long time.

  I used to have this feeling … it was so primary … you know what I mean? That we would always think of the other one first—it was like a sixt
h, another sense … I didn’t think about it, it was just always there, like knowledge itself—that he was It, and I had chosen. But now…

  Now what, baby.

  I never realized how exclusive it was, she says (at last she raises her eyes to mine, and I see the question there, lurking in the back, haunting). I can only seem to have it for one person at a time.

  Can I get you anything else? The waitress has a pseudo-bright voice, freakishly long legs, she towers over us.

  Just the check, please, I tell her.

  Lucy bites her lip, she looks the other way.

  What are you going to do, she asks. Tonight.

  I don’t know. Go out to eat, I guess.

  Where?

  Some expensive place, I say. I name the restaurant. Bonnie made the reservation, I tell her, I can’t keep the apology from my voice.

  The waitress comes with the little plastic dish, the square of paper. Have a good day, she says, the same bright tone. Who, I wonder, does she think she’s talking to.

  We stand outside, it has not been enough. Lucy very near me, biting her thumbnail. What, I say. Talk to me.

  She says something, mutters it so low I can’t make the words out. I lean closer. Fuck me, she whispers.

  It shocks me, some profound way—the idea of Maggie at home. This, I realize it only now, this is what Lucy goes through, every time. Please, she says, she has my arm, we’re already moving toward the motel.

  Lucy, I say, I’ve already been gone for—

  Fifteen minutes, please! Just fifteen more, Miles, I swear…

  She insists on paying, cash. I sign the register with my character’s name, dash it off slanted so it looks like someone else’s writing. Savage. Next to “place of birth,” I write “Hollywood.”

  Up in the room, I can’t relax. Everything happens too fast, Lucy’s hands on my zipper. It’s okay, she says, she lays her head on my thighs, holds my legs. I smoke without speaking, a silent cliché. When I stub the cigarette out, Lucy puts her face in my navel, her tongue. Suddenly I’m hard. Stop, I say, I try to pull her up, but she won’t let me. She’s somewhere else, holding me, a fierce grip. I want to fuck you, I say, I’m almost gone, but she won’t raise her head. When I come, it’s like surrender. Okay, I hear myself saying it. Okay.