Hollywood Savage

by Kristin McCloy

  For the briefest flash envision it—her—seen for the first time: the brilliant smile & honeyed flash of hair, the high curve of her cheekbones, and God, that mind—as high-strung & prancing as a thoroughbred’s, imperceptibly nervous and so goddamn quick she’s always light-years ahead of everybody else…

  Wouldn’t I fall in love with her again? Wouldn’t it all happen just the same way?

  To have had her here, the thought keeps coming back. To have had her here, not to have confronted her.

  Not to have asked for the truth.

  It’s better when I leave, too, drive in the open air to meet Lucci in some restaurant he favors in Santa Monica; hardly anybody there this early, tables with umbrellas under a bright sky, the smell of the sea.

  Now we are out of Hollywood, he says. Maybe we can think!

  The waiters hover; they love him, this is clear. They bring us espresso, sparkling water with lemon sliced thin, a basket of hot, crusty bread and homemade orange marmalade; they serve us deferentially, careful not to disturb.

  He has ideas, Lucci tells me; he has been thinking all weekend. An ephipany, he says, this being the latest word he’s become enamored with, a word he pronounces with such reverence, I cannot bear to correct him—and, in fact, I do find his latest interpretation of Savage startling, invasive, staking out new psychological territory.

  You’re a genius, I say, part admiration, part bait, and he half-squints at me, the sun in his eyes.

  And who is not, he says, he will not be bought, under such light?

  Later, they bring us food, hot bread and olive paste, a bowl of steamed mussels with chunks of tomato and garlic, pasta with pepper ground from an enormous mill, fresh Parmesan cheese, a very cold bottle of white wine.

  We don’t talk about the script while we eat, it’s one of Lucci’s rules.

  Better to digest, he says, and it is always these meals I enjoy the most, the company of the only other man who shares the same intense interest in these, my imaginary characters, the sense of something taking shape between us, for this hour that the struggle to control it is briefly laid aside.

  I tell him I met Lear’s wife. His ex, I say, but they seemed perfectly friendly.

  Lucci’s worldly shrug.

  Probably there was nothing wrong between them, he says, except wanting to sleep with someone else.

  For some people, I remark, that’s a real problem.

  What is the problem? Unless, of course, the one he wanted did not want him. He grins, the joke at Lear’s expense.

  Maybe it’s more than that, I say, can’t drop the subject. Maybe one of them fell in love.

  He answers with the same tone he uses to discuss the script, a definitive vision of the world, of what’s real.

  If you are in love, he says, wait. You were once in love like this with your wife also, no?

  Yes, I say, & even though I know he’s speaking in the hypothetical, the answer still sounds like betrayal, with its faint implication that it is me, personally, and Maggie, whom he is referring to—

  In America, Lucci goes on, everyone thinks because they are married, they will never fall in love with someone else. Ten, twenty, thirty years, and you think you will never meet another woman to love? How sad, how boring the world would be!

  But here, he says, there is someone new and immediately, there is divorce! Americans always thinking divorce changes everything … so naïf! He laughs, incredulous, tolerant.

  But of course this is why everyone loves Americans, he says, dipping a hunk of bread into the olive paste. For how naïf they are.

  I nod, still eating; how a meal can camouflage a conversation with an unspoken mundanity, the most casual of airs.

  Marriage is man’s business, Lucci says. His domestic business, and also his wife’s.

  But sex, he says, he raises both hands. For sex we all want a wild animal.

  So your wife has a lover, too? I ask, joking, but he lowers his eyes at me, murderous.

  If ever I find this out, I will kill her, he says, grim. She knows this. I will kill them both.

  I laugh; of course, he doesn’t.

  Your wife, he says then. The next day after the party, I telephoned to you but it was she saying hello. She said you were out …? So, of course then she and I, we talked together for a little while—she was asking to me, had I written this words, by Baudelaire she said, about a—what did she say, damn to God, I knew I will maybe forget this—wait, no, yes, it was this—“a mistress with hips” …?

  (Meestress wiz ’ips?)

  I nod, wordless; my heart has stopped. Lucci pauses, looking at me, missing, I know, nothing, and it occurs to me that he’s savoring this moment—the tension, my anguish—because it is just such moments that he looks for in his scripts; for the element, as he puts it, of “drama—because without this, there is nothing to make anyone care.”

  I told her yes, he says finally. It was me.

  You did?

  Naturally, I did, yes. If it was to be my wife asking you, I hope this is how you would act for me, so…

  He shrugs, elaborately dismissive, but his eyes never leave my face; he’s watching me intently, studying my every reaction, and because I am so grateful, I let him see it, my immense relief. Sometimes I think everything he does, everything he says, is part of some larger master plan, all of it means to an end only Lucci himself knows, and would never divulge…

  Well, I say, wiping the sudden sweat from my upper lip. Thank you.

  He nods, looking away for a moment, as if out of courtesy, and I know, he does not expect me to explain. I feel another rush of pure gratitude toward him, and (not for the first time) for his distinctly European sense of discretion; over there, secrets are meant to be kept … as opposed to here, where people apparently line up to spill their guts on daytime TV.

  She is a very beautiful woman, your wife, he says to me then. So intelligent—this is what makes a woman fascinating.

  Your wife, he says it again, she is someone to keep.

  The unexpected words, the look he gives me. I can’t hold his gaze, I look at the sea instead. The horizon, the sky, slowly turning white.

  The fog’s coming in, I say finally.

  He looks, too, & for a long moment we are both caught by the infinity of that far, blurred line.

  Okay, he says at last. To work.

  —20 march, hollywood

  I can’t get hold of Lucy after Maggie leaves. She doesn’t call, she doesn’t answer the phone. The last time I try, get a man’s voice instead. There’s a quality of depth in his voice that makes it not deep so much as profound.

  I acted confused, kept him on the line, all the while thinking, This is him, this is her husband—the man she sleeps with … the man she lies next to at night.

  He repeated his number, patient, courteous, and I said, Oh, right, I see, wrong number, sorry (sounded like a British farce, some character from the spy books my father used to read—World War II espionage, he’d say—his need to differentiate—when intelligence was imperative, a real act of heroism…).

  The precise sound the telephone made when I hung up echoed back to me three-dimensionally, like a reflection of our exchange—the briefest of conversations between strangers.

  He hung up, he was a man unthreatened. We’ve never met, I think, but we share—we’ve been sharing (it suddenly strikes me as peculiarly wrong that he not know)—his wife.

  Would he mention it to her, the call, I wondered. Would she ask.

  Was she even there.

  That evening, a storm that hits with unusual force, out of nowhere. I sit trying to write, end up staring at the eucalyptus tree instead, watch it lashing up against the windows like some furious animal—an elephant, maybe. A giraffe.

  Somehow the wild gusts of wind, the shudder and crash of unexpected noise, soothe me, as if nature’s expressing a violence that I myself cannot.

  My next book, I tell myself. My next book will be different.

  —28 march, t
he hills

  For days afterward imagine stalking her, parking in the dark by the driveway. Watching her husband come home from work, Walter running out & me invisible, a vague shadow across the street. Espionage, Lucci said once, is just another name for research.

  Think of Savage hiding out in the hills outside of Bangkok, the beginning of his protracted flirtation with opiates. Plotting his advances and retreats from another plane, a transcendent state that seems less illusive than reality. Misinforming everyone—so betraying, as I like to tell Lucci, no one. The treacherous man, Lucci calls him.

  I’m trying to assimilate this into the story, long hours in front of the screen, staring. Writing and deleting, writing and deleting so I just keep coming back full circle: the same blank beginning. Go outside for a change of scene, sit on the curb, smoke.

  The isolation of these hills. Aside from my landlord, have never laid eyes on any neighbor. Wonder sometimes if anyone really lives here. They’re all in their cars, this is my assumption: everyone’s driving.

  Sometimes I walk around at night, the wall-hidden villas insulated to an eerie, perfect silence, elysium dense in the air, its fragrance enveloping me stride after stride.

  This is it, I think, the glamorous life: everyone’s in bed by ten.

  Having called Lucy’s house too many times to do it again, I go inside to find the herb she so expertly baggied for me, then tucked inside my freezer. Gingerly, I extract a single bud, small, purple, tight (remember how lewdly those adjectives lined up when I enumerated them to her—and how her refusal to acknowledge the lewdness, juvenile as it most certainly was, reminded me of the way women know how to keep walking when men call after them in the street).

  Night falls abruptly, a curtain coming down. Stoned, lean against the railing of my deck and watch the little yellow lights come on inside all the pretty Spanish-style (so-called) haciendas that dot these back canyon walls.

  I think of the Hollywood sign above Beachwood Canyon—how it is, in a way, the heart of Hollywood, the sign around which this entire town is built—and how, in fact, it is the perfect symbol—the letters themselves just fronts, like movie sets—two-dimensional, with nothing behind them, and, more to the point, its glamour beckons from a barren, rocky, steep, and inhospitable piece of land that no one, aside from the occasional daring hiker, ever visits (if, as Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, “there is no there there,” then re LA, one might further add, “there is nobody there there”)—it’s insubstantial and hollow, much like most of the dreams that bring people here, all of them desperately hoping to be the Next Big Thing, while the years of their lives peel off like so many layers, thinner and thicker, of onionskin…

  Up close, the letters look exactly like what they are, which nonetheless provides quite the disappointment: big, clunky pieces propped up crooked on a human-hostile hill, nothing but scrub for miles around; in the end, it seems chiefly only a historic place of famous suicide. Whose, I can never remember until I hear them again, the names—the young leading man, the faded glamour queen, the has-been and, worse, the never-was…

  Suicide the ultimate melodrama, the option of which (according to Lucy), Nietzsche once declared, “gets one through many a dark night.” The quote that always comes back to me, though, is one I found written on the side of a grocery bag she’d carried: “Everything can be acquired in solitude, except sanity.”

  If that’s true, it occurs to me, then I am losing my mind.

  Later, it’s that thought that propels me up and out of the house, makes me drive aimlessly until I find myself on Santa Monica Boulevard. I drive past the garish transvestites in their leather minis to Formosa Ave., a bar there with red booths, pictures of forgotten stars, a surly, humpbacked Chinese “hostess.”

  No stand there, she tells me as I lean up against the bar, and when I move to sit, she says no again: You party too small this table.

  I end up at the back, one person at a table for two, the air around me hazy with smoke. Order Scotch on ice, thinking of its comfort at my local on a New York winter night, bartender always remembering the brand I like, saying how’s the new one coming, saying this one’s on the house.

  I sit there trying to emit some air of affability, but everyone looks like they’re in high school, girls in expensively distressed jean shorts, legs long and hard and perfect, and I sink into fantasies of soulless sex, athletic, mute, positions that would use every muscle of my body.

  I signal the waitress for another drink, then can’t stand the wait, split before it gets there.

  LA sky starless above me, the occasional drunken blare of music lurching from a passing car. Bitterness like a taste I can’t get rid of.

  Fuck it, I think. It’s like a song, a chorus that keeps me company all the way home. Who needs this.

  —april fool’s, Hollywood

  As if to punish me, the next day dawns impeccably blue, almost hot, a preview of the season to come—one of those classic Southern California days that makes you wish they all could be California girls.

  It’s not a day to work, to stay inside, my cranium furrowed, in search of “plot device.” It’s a day for no device whatsoever, a day to be out, communing with the great outdoors. The thought alone enough to make me weak—have never been able to meet nature without the fortification of artifice; some mood enhancer, perhaps (white wine by the sea, a six-pack in the cooler by the pool, cigarettes smoked in the woods hiked through).

  In New York, I think, these questions do not exist; nature does not exist. It’s kept caged, rounded up. Young trees in the Lower East Side are tied to poles, as if they don’t know enough to grow straight by themselves (as Izzy once remarked, it’s because they have no role models). There’s Central Park, of course: an exhibit of grass, trees, rocks, and water—on a day like this, there would be no spot left unpeopled.

  Having made up my mind to wait for Lucy to get ahold of me, I call Lear instead. What’s up, what’s up, he says (he seems never without a disc jockey’s optimism, a perennially upbeat get-up-and-go).

  Don’t think I can stand to write any more “literature,” I inform him, and he is (what else) in complete agreement.

  From now on, he says, nothing but schlock.

  I want society, I tell him. The higher the better.

  Beverly Hills, he comes back, I got a party go see. That high enough for you?

  He’ll pick me up, he promises, at six.

  Somewhere to go, people I haven’t met. The idea replenishing in and of itself, and I find myself dressing in khaki, khaki slacks and an olive green shirt (what I hope will pass for camouflage in those walled-off, canyoned parts).

  The party, Lear informs me, careening along Mulholland Drive in his Saturday-detailed, newly waxed, unnecessarily monstrous SUV, is at the home of a well-known, self-produced musician. People will be there, Lear says, he gives me a significant look.

  People, I think, with a capital P: The Famous.

  Benedict Canyon. The blessed, indeed. In between groves of trees I see one after another faultless villa, multistyle, ancient and vanguard, Spanish, Italian, modern, Greek, rising aesthetically perfect over high, flower-covered adobe walls, so that at times the road seems like some exotic bougainvillea-made alley of wild colors, the colors of the tropics, deep crimson, robin’s egg blues, hot, fierce pinks.

  Driving further in, further up, I notice a kind of hush spreading out from these tucked back, landscaped places; it’s the hush of everything functioning perfectly smoothly, without a hitch; the hush of the First World—the hush of wealth.

  At the party’s address, we encounter a sleek, single-storied manor, enormous, its interiors done in black and chrome, high-tech minimal, the floors cool marble; pure bachelor’s chic. I seem to recall this particular style, maybe even the living room itself, from some decorator’s spread in one of Maggie’s erratically purchased Architectural Digest’s, & now I think either this was it, or this guy saw it, too.

  I walk through the house alone, gla
ss of wine in my hand, compelled by some aloofly assumed contempt to mock it all. I stare at the master bathroom, the aluminum sink, the artful light. It’s beautiful, I think, and cannot keep from sneering.

  The party is on the occasion of someone’s birthday, apparent from the ornately decorated buttercream cake atop a small marble table; there’s a single candle on it, thick enough to be obscene-looking, but no icing name.

  Similarly, there seems to be no host. When Lear and I walk in, people look up, but only once; briefly, warily. It’s an industry crowd, what else, men in their forties accompanied by much younger, fabulous-looking women standing long-limbed in bikinis that will not touch the water, silky fabrics wrapped saronglike around flaw-free hips, drinking champagne and smoking cigarettes, ignoring the hors d’oeuvres. There are no children.

  Someone gestures to Lear, a man in sunglasses, his head shaved bald. Gimme a sec, Lear says to me, I gotta do this, okay—get yourself a drink, I’ll be back, one sec—

  The party, it goes without saying, is catered, the bar tented between two lemon trees. There are silver buckets, bottles of every-flavored vodka stacked up high and wet from chill, mounds of fresh-cut lime, imported jars of olives.

  I head toward it, and people turn slightly away, as if to look would betray some perverted curiosity; as if to look would imply that they were not, already, perfectly satisfied with (the famous quotient of) who they are, and who they are with.

  They stand in clumps, threes and fours, or sit around the enormous, slate-tiled freshwater pool, but for all the casualness of the outdoor setting, of this early evening soiree, there’s a peculiar stiffness, an inhibiting lack of motion. That, it comes to me, is exactly what it is: a pure and simple lack of movement. Nobody walks in LA—a statement no less true for its being cliché. We walk from the car to our door, from the car to the restaurant (a distance one can measure in steps, given the ubiquity of valet parking).

  Angelenos travel great distances every day, more than a hundred miles sometimes, just to go to work, the supermarket, the dry cleaner’s, the kids’ school … and all the while they’re going sixty, seventy miles an hour, the scenery whipping by so fast, the illusion of motion is complete; in actual fact, nobody’s moving anything but their mouths, we’re all just sitting on our asses; it’s the most sedentary place I’ve ever been.