Hollywood Savage
Page 18
It’s the youth I hold against him, only his youth that seems to me unfair: it all lies before him still—the work, the triumph, the unexpected sense of being found, recognized. Of being claimed. (Of course then the world owns you; you become the public’s. And public property, as everybody knows, is so quickly despoiled, you’d almost think that were the point. At least—fuck, especially—in America.)
What is he writing. He did not even offer—then again, I didn’t ask.
My head carries the echo of its headache with such vivid sense memory, I can’t tell if I am remembering it or if, in fact, pain is the case…
Think back to the class I took in logic, the syllogisms we had to break down, i.e.:
If pain is the case, then q.
(And if q is the case, then what?)
I can’t remember the logical corollary, the propositional equation. Either way, it doesn’t matter: if q, I’m fucked, the answer seems perfectly clear: no matter, if this, if that, the truth remains; I’m fucked.
—9 april, h’wood
Can’t stop thinking about New York.
I watch their weather on the Weather Channel, see wild, unusual, gusts of wind. They show clips (people’s umbrellas turning inside out my favorite, those cheap Chinatown jobs; I can tell, I’ve owned dozens of them myself, all bought from the nearest deli or drugstore, three dollars and fifty cents a pop). It’s one of the ways New York inhales money out of your pockets. You’re outside and it starts to rain; you have packages, groceries, or you’re wearing your best shoes, carrying a newspaper—you and everybody else, too, nobody hesitates to duck in, fish four crumpled singles out, hardly waiting to get two quarters back.
Every umbrella has the automatic button that’s supposed to make it go up effortlessly (nation of invalids that we are), which is inevitably the first thing that goes—unless, as is the case on TV now: the wind is whipping them like sails, bending the cheap aluminum, turning them inside out, their frenzied owners whirling helplessly beneath, hair streaming, hems lifting…
It looks so human to me, even from this inhuman position … on the floor in front of my bed, too close to the television backed against the wall, a big one. Easily the biggest one I’ve ever watched.
I flip through channels, stop briefly at one of those confessional talk shows, men and women revealing enormous, long-hidden secrets to their unsuspecting lovers for the first time, and you wonder—how is it, why is it, that everybody in America is so goddamn fat?
Images seem to distort across the screen—people’s faces, the whites of their eyes, widening. I squint, I sit back, but the distortion’s still there. It isn’t me, this is my decision; there’s nothing wrong with me. My vision feels sharp—acute, even—but objects look opaque to me, dumb somehow … the script especially—the script looks terminally two-dimensional; I am uninterested.
The wet and spatter of New York’s streets reflected inside my enormous television screen appears, in contrast, supremely real.
Have given up trying to reach Lucy; her silence more eloquent than anything she could say.
Disenchantment too weak a word for what I feel.
Ah, God.
—11 april, hollywood
Raining again.
Lucci left two days ago for Rome—he had to see his family (This, he said, the solemn raising of a single finger, is first), but he also had some business to attend to (That, he said, is what this American studio understands)—real estate, apparently, a vineyard he’s invested in, his brother-in-law’s.
Listening to him as we drove out to the airport, purportedly to hash through some notes, I envied him his life—it seems so full, so … real somehow, in a way mine is not; a life bound to children, land, and a wife with whom he would surely grow old—the fabulous apartment in Rome, the ancient farmhouse in the outlying land—he’s got family, love, travel, work … everything!
I rode home in the limo, notes unhashed, and could not stop feeling how sterile my life was in comparison, what I had to return to: a rented house, a rented car, a rented (I mean let’s fucking face it) script—even the cat’s not my own!
I couldn’t stand to think of Maggie (veering from the poisonous idea of her, on that list, too), or Con—realizing, for perhaps the first time, that I’d lost him, too…
And Lucy, ah, Christ—! Remember asking, telling, begging her, don’t leave me, but not once believing—don’t ever leave me (how she clutched me, never answering) that she really. Really. Would.
By the time the driver dropped me off, I knew; I was nothing but a pauper.
—13 april, hollywood
Now that Lucci’s gone, can’t seem to work without his goading; my streak’s broken.
Can’t concentrate.
Panic sent me out of the house and into—where else—the car…
Spent two hours cruising Griffith, thinking maybe … but there was no sign of her.
It’s as if I don’t know what I’m doing when I pick up the phone, as if my fingers are on autopilot when they punch in the numbers that serve to hide the caller’s ID before her number at home.
She picks up on the second ring—the sting of knowing it for sure then, she’s been deliberately avoiding me—and I hear her voice at home, sounding different somehow (another man’s wife).
Hi.
I can hear it but only barely, the shock of my voice in her ear, in her house.
… Hello.
So I was thinking … how’ll we ever know if we could manage the friends thing without even trying it?
Silence. I wait a few seconds, but either she’s floored or thinking how can she say no, so I rush in quick, cut her off at the pass—
I mean hey maybe it’ll suck, maybe it isn’t possible … but what if it is?
Okaaay, she ventures finally, and in the drawn-out word I hear what I need: permission.
Yeah so what I thought was, lunch. Let’s do lunch, what do you say?
Miles, she begins, then stops— I would swear she’s smiling.
Okay, she says then. Lunch. Your place.
It’s my turn to smile then. She has not broken character, whatever character she has chosen (fellow student?). There’s an integrity in her voice, in her absolute declarative nature: she is not hiding anything, she is speaking to me; I have become, suddenly (painfully) aboveboard.
My place, I confirm. Tomorrow, say one?
I’ll see you then.
You bet.
The precise sound the telephone makes when I hang up comes to me three-dimensionally, as if reflecting the contract just made, how people establish their time, their place. The language of men.
—15 april, another tax day gone, unfiled; LA
She was different when I saw her, too, wearing poise as if it were a new perfume. She kissed my cheek at the door, no further intent implied, as though she’s moved into this new chasteness naturally, without problem.
We headed straight for the kitchen, where I opened a bottle of white without asking did she want any, keeping up a steady stream of chatter as she watched me make all-organic sandwiches.
We talked about neutral subjects—her class, the books she’s tearing through (more Proust? Christ, who knew real people—by which I mean Lucy—actually liked the guy?).
Somehow, in a circumlocution of nerve-driven non sequiturs, we ended up talking about cemeteries—she’d been to the famous one in Paris, where Jim Morrison was interred, had I?
No, I admitted, biting back the urge to add that I had, however, been to Paris enough times to know the Sixth Arrondissement from the Twelfth, etc.—& then we both said we’d been meaning to get to the one out here, where all those old-time stars (primarily Marilyn) were buried…
There was a brief, extremely awkward pause where we both very consciously did not exclaim how surely we must do that, then, together—where we both did not say, “It’s a date.”
Instead, she managed to somewhat deftly steer the subject over to the idea of epitaphs.
You’re a
writer, she said (why does it always feel like an accusation?). You must know what you want yours to read…
Sleep late, I threw out, and when she arched one brow, amended it to Sleep later?
She ignored that, too, her eyes skittering away from mine.
I don’t know exactly what I want mine to say, either, she declared. But I do know I want it to be something along the lines of “loyal sister, um, decent daughter” (she laughed then and so did I), “loving wife, devoted mother, and student of” … well, just student, I guess—that’s what you are when you just take random courses, right? Student for life, hey.
Why do you bother with all those philosophy classes, anyway? I asked her. I mean, it sounds like it’s all about how there are no answers, ultimately…
Because, she answered patiently, the study of philosophy is an attempt to learn the ultimate lesson, I think—to learn how to die.
I gave her my best “you’ve lost your goddamn mind” look, and she added, as if speaking to someone with a very low IQ, How to die well.
Both of us are drinking more than usual (I remember the last time I poured her wine for lunch, have to consciously keep from following that memory up to my study—to that table), but I think I sense the conversation assuming a certain recklessness, albeit restrained; after I’ve finished my sandwich, and she’s put the rest of hers down, napkin crumpled on top, I ask, Do you want anything else? And while I don’t mean for them to, the words come out starkly, assume another context—only to meet the deflection of her response:
What time is it?
I don’t know. Three maybe? Three-thirty at the latest—why? You got a hot date?
I see the hurt in her eyes before she veils them, see it in the flicker of her smile, but she answers me straight:
I have to leave at four.
Her half-eaten sandwich is the only indication that she might actually be nervous. She stands, vigorously dusting nonexistent crumbs from her lap, and asks, in an overly cheerful voice, Can I see the garden?
She moves past me before I can answer (her body very close for the briefest of seconds, it’s impossible not to notice how careful she is not to touch me), then heads upstairs and through my study to the deck beyond.
I follow her outside, stand amidst the flowering bloom, inhaling honeysuckle and jasmine, lilies, all of it mixing with the herbal scent of rosemary, sage, and lavender, their combined perfume dense, truly heady in the honeyed sunshine.
At home here, among the earth and the life she planted, she’s back at ease, seeming almost serene as she fills the rusting water can without asking, then soaks each pot till water comes streaming out beneath … the clean smell of it steaming off the sun-bleached wood.
We stand in the warmth for a moment; there are no human voices, just machinery echoing from another canyon, the sound of traffic—and, inevitably (reminding us this is So Cal), a helicopter monitoring something somewhere (fire? Freeway accident? Stray pot plants?).
She turns finally, looks straight at me, the empty water can still in both hands. Moving deliberately, she puts it down, then pushes the heel of each sneaker down with the opposite toes and steps out of her shoes.
I’m sure she’s going to drop it then, the whole platonic charade, and just come to me, no explanation … but she only moves past me again, and stops in front of the house’s single bookcase.
She leans forward to check out the meager selection, putting one bare foot up against her other calf and chewing on her thumbnail like she does when she concentrates.
The Long Goodbye, she says. My husband has this.
The weight of that word, falling hard. She doesn’t look at me. Is it good?
I don’t know, I lie, wanting only to have less in common with him than the unthinkable we’ve already shared, I’ve never read it.
Well he liked it, she goes on. He loves that whole genre.
Why, is your husband (I can’t help the sardonic edge I give the word, suddenly wish I hadn’t finished that bottle) a private investigator?
I watch her eyes roving the shelf, immediately wish I hadn’t put my book up there, too (although of course I did it expressly for this, for her to find; today was made, it would appear, for second-guessing myself)…
I don’t say anything, though, just stand there, incredulous, as her hand drifts up to touch its spine…
He’s a general contractor, she says, still frowning at the books. He builds houses.
The look she shoots me.
Instantly imagine I read covert suspicion, and further imagine I know exactly what she presumes me to think (i.e., the patronizing & false idealization of manual labor that those—especially those!—who don’t practice it can affect)—have to suppress the urge to say hey, I work with my hands, too. Manage to keep my mouth shut & just look back at her, thinking of the man on the phone with the space in his voice.
He reads, she goes on, clearly not possessing my discipline. He’s read your books.
She drops it like nothing. The essential violation of privacy this information can bring with it, its primal shame, goes off like a depth charge inside me. The need to cover it makes me open my mouth, and I hear myself asking the one question I have sworn I would never ask—does she want to take that copy home …?
She half-turns so I can’t see her face when she answers but the words come out rushed, as if she could no longer hide her own embarrassment. Well, um, espionage—it’s not the kind of thing I usually…
Even knowing her taste for predominantly dead European writers, this indifference (feigned?) the deepest rejection, worse than anything; have to work to suppress the wince.
It’s not exactly genre, I say, as evenly as if we were simply two strangers standing in a bookstore, with nothing at stake between us.
I’ve tried, she says, she makes a half-gesture I can’t help but find dismissive. But I just can’t seem to— I keep thinking you, you wrote these words, you—
She looks at me then, her eyes almost beseeching as she continues, It’s like I can’t make the words mean what they mean … they’re just—yours. You. All I can think of is you, sitting here, at that desk, looking out this window…
She makes another gesture, it encompasses the room, at once knowing and helpless.
I picked your first book up the other night, and I was sitting there, looking at the author photo—I almost didn’t recognize you, that haircut …! Anyway, then Will came to b—— I mean, he found me with it, and he gave me the strangest look, like, since when are you interested— She hesitates then, as if suddenly aware that she sounds like some half-illiterate Valley girl. She tries to backtrack. Because I’ve never, you know, before—
She cuts herself off abruptly, sucks in her lip—something, I’ve noticed, that she does when she’s worried … something he must have noticed, too. (We are sharing, the thought recurs, his wife.)
He loves it, you know—you, your stuff, she says when I don’t respond. Says how intelligent the writing is…
How strange, this is what I’m thinking, that she has found a way to discuss me with her husband. And has she begun the book as a means of doing this, or of soliciting his—what, approval?
That’s all? I ask.
The quickness of her glance then (she thinks I’m fishing) makes my face burn (so what if I am), but I keep quiet, move away instead, brusque, turning to put my hand on the doorknob in the host’s universal gesture of farewell.
He’s a man of few words, she offers behind me.
I’m as close to hating her as I’ve ever gotten; makes it easy for me to give her my most impersonal smile. I say nothing.
She gets it. After a few seconds, she walks back to the deck, picks up her shoes.
I better go.
I walk her to the front door, hold it open, but then she just stands there, looking at me, her eyes going back and forth between mine like some kind of Morse code I can’t decipher, fast, searching.
Too late—my withdrawal is now final, nonnegotiable.
Anytime, I say, stepping back. Give Walter my love.
I shut the door, can hardly fathom my own closure. It makes me think of Savage, his inability to trust anyone, how his dogged sense of persecution turns into prophecy.
Cleaning up, I find the piece of paper she left me, another quote scripted underneath, another diary, this one Cocteau’s:
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
—18 april, the hills
Watching 82 channels consumes big chunks of time, five, six hours at a time, an activity made tolerable only by the accompaniment of consecutive pitchers of martinis (something, I reason, has to counteract the absolute trashiness of indelibly imprinting my ass’s outline on the couch). I take great care making each one, use only the most expensive vodka I can find (it turns out Ketel One is the bottom of the barrel for the truly wealthy—and, clearly, bored shitless—connoisseur), imported Spanish olives—as for vermouth, I place the bottle where I can see it, and call it done. I keep my glasses—the perfect martini receptacles, heavy and thin-stemmed, with exquisite rims—in the freezer, and sip them very slowly (while still managing to make the last swallow cold).
Lather, rinse, repeat.
In this way, I find entire days slip by with nary a thought of either wife or mistress.
It isn’t perfect, however; one question keeps coming back, it’s on a loop. Her husband has read my books, he has at least one of them still. In which case, perhaps she has, in fact, reached for one again. Actually tried to read it, from the beginning. Imagine the worst thing (I couldn’t finish it).
Working does not occur to me.
I make sure.
When I wake up with a hangover for the fourth day in a row, I finally decide to return one of Lear’s calls.
Miles, man, you still here?
The question nonplusses me—where else would I be?
I’m only talking to you if you swear on your mother’s grave not to mention the script.
How’s it going?
… Are you trying to be funny?