Hollywood Savage

by Kristin McCloy

  Buddhism, she says, doing her language of non sequiturs. Theory of bliss.

  If only, she says, I didn’t have a child.

  The way she fucks me. Slow, voracious. Taking everything. The pillage is reciprocal—me, too, I’m looting her. She lets me turn her over, I do it really slow. Reaching around to kiss her, the twist of her body to take it. Never, she says, she expects the same comprehension as Walter does, from the briefest of fragments. She won’t come so I won’t come, either, until it seems beyond choice, beyond exhaustion. She cries, clutching the pillow.

  It’s six o’clock in the morning but I still can’t sleep. I get up to smoke a cigarette and stare out the window, the lightening sky.

  Curled up like a child on the bed, Lucy’s finally asleep, but not me—it’s six o’clock in the morning and I’m in Manhattan, wondering where the fuck my wife is.

  I’m wide awake.

  —6 may, at the Chelsea, NYC

  By tacit agreement, neither one of us suggests going out the next day—Lucy’s last (she leaves early tomorrow morning, on a separate flight; we couldn’t arrange it otherwise). That’s okay, she’d said, averting her eyes, I don’t think I could get off the plane with you and meet Will. Without having thought, or talked about it, somehow it’s been decided that it will be my last day, too. I leave at one P.M.

  Thank God for that. Could not have handled the red-eye.

  We ring the clerk downstairs, pay him another small fortune for coffee and doughnuts, The New York Times. I spend a lot of time hunched over this notebook, seized with a mania to record, as if writing were some kind of atonement, while Lucy buries herself in her book—Proust’s The Captive. Occasionally, she reads bits of it to me:

  It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to our own like a bomb which we hold in our hands, unable to get rid of it without committing a crime.

  Christ, yes.

  And this:

  There are certain desires, some of them confined to the mouth, which, as soon as we have allowed them to grow, insist upon being gratified, whatever the consequences may be…

  Yes, don’t we all know about that insistence…

  Toward evening, Lucy starts picking her clothes up, folding them; I pretend to be sleeping, something I have never done in her presence before.

  Living life with the shades drawn—I keep thinking of Savage, sweating in Bangkok, imagining someone he knows in every other shadow. His alienation palpable to me now, the cold sweat of it. For the first time, I feel a real admiration for the courage of his restraint. He is worthy, I think. He is truer than me.

  Use this, I keep telling myself. This is how Savage feels, always.

  We order Chinese, I ask the delivery boy to bring us a bottle of red—what kind, he asks, and I tell him to pick out something that costs more than ten but less than twenty.

  Afterward, Lucy goes into the bathroom, I hear the shower running. I realize then I’ve been waiting for this opportunity all day. Seize the phone, dial Maggie. Naturally, I get the fucking machine. Call Isabel instead—she goes nowhere without her cell; it’s the single person’s lifeline.

  Miles? My God, twice in one week, I am blessed!

  Listen, you know when Maggie’s getting back?

  Um … not exactly…

  Izzy, come on.

  Come on what?

  Tell me what’s going on.

  You’re asking me?

  You’re the best friend, aren’t you?

  As much as you’re the husband, m’dear.

  Goddamn it, tell me what you think!

  Hmmm…

  What? Talk to me, Isabel, Christ! I have no idea.

  It’s all fallen apart without you, babe.

  Don’t be a bitch.

  Well it’s not the same.

  And who do you think wants it that way?

  Is this a quiz? ’Cause you know me, Miles, I only do true/false.

  True/false, Maggie wanted me gone—

  Oh false you bastard, don’t even!

  Her choice, swear to God.

  You don’t believe in God.

  Ask her.

  You put her on the spot is what she said. Only thing holding you back—that’s what she said.

  She could’ve said come home. You think I didn’t want her to say that?

  How should I know? For that matter, how should she? You haven’t exactly been present, you know—

  Like I said—

  Miles, you know your wife. Come off it. She’d rather die than think you were sacrificing something for her—

  Rather die? She expects it! For once, just for goddamn ONCE I’d like for her to come out, say it out loud, instead of me always having to guess …!

  Love means reading each other’s minds, darlin, haven’t you learned a goddamn thing?

  Apparently not.

  Fuck it, Miles, just come home, will you? (That note of pleading, and worse…)

  Iz, what’s wrong?

  Everything! The two of you like this—if you two fall apart, I don’t think— It’s WRONG, all of it, I hate it!

  Tell me.

  (The pause; Izzy’s pregnant/caught-between-two-loyalties pause, that’s how I read it) I’m telling you now.

  What else?

  I don’t know what you’re asking me.

  Isabel.

  Miles. (Mocking now, upset—)

  Okay, I know, I’m putting you on the spot—

  Don’t put words in my mouth.

  Where else?

  Come back. Her voice soft now, truly asking. Please, Miles. Come home already.

  (Stops me in my tracks, that—how I already have. How here I am.)

  I can’t, not now. I’ve got to finish—

  Oh, bullshit!

  The silence between us. Tears standing sudden in my eyes. Aware of the weight of my head, hanging off my neck; the posture of defeat. How much I love them all. How much, Christ—how much I still—will I always?—miss my wife…

  Behind me then, I get a sudden whiff of wisteria—I turn fast, but only enough to see the bathroom door shutting again, soundlessly, and I’m left holding the phone, mouth agape, wondering, how long …? How long had she listened to me, me practically begging to be asked back?

  Gotta go, Iz. I’ll be in touch.

  In person, she says, & I swear I could hear tears in her voice, too.

  Too ashamed to face Lucy, I call to her that I’m going out for some cigarettes (all the while fingering the pack in my pocket). Back in five!

  It isn’t till much, till aeons later, after we’ve both finished packing, all the while speaking of nothing consequential, that she finally brings it up.

  You still love her, don’t you.

  In bed, in the dark. I see my own hands raised, a gesture of helplessness, and supplication. Lucy turns, curling up away from me, buries her face in the pillow. Wanting, I know this, desperately, not to cry. I touch her shoulder but she pulls away, the motion quick as instinct.

  And you don’t love him? Hearing, as the words come out, how I sound (defensive, childish, even whiny)…

  Lucy, I try, then stop, embarrassed how my voice cracked in the space between us … yet that’s when she bends over me like I’ve seen her bend over Walt, and it’s this, her tenderness, that undoes me worse than anything, I just break under her, I break beneath her hands…

  It’s you, I say. It’s you I want…

  Sssh, she says, fingers on my lips wet, salty. Ssh, don’t talk … don’t say anything…

  She cries with me, our faces pressed together like children. The violence, the extravagance of such emotion.

  It’s a luxury I have never, before this, before her, known.

  —7 may, last night NYC

  In-flight. Almost there, we keep flying into the light. Chasing west. This mile-high limbo the transition between the continent’s extremes—on the screen, a schmaltzy movie I’ve already seen flashes a cliché glimpse of the NYC skyline, the twin towers, & my heart cramp
s, or maybe it’s my solar plexus—in any case, all I know is that I feel their loss physically, as if a part of my own necessary landscape had been amputated.

  Craving distraction, I flip through the few things I brought in my carry-on, find the Proust book Lucy lent me—read it, she ordered, I mean it, it’s so damn good.

  Know I won’t be able to concentrate on this labyrinthine, early-twentieth-century prose, but having nothing else except an old People magazine I’ve already consumed, I start flipping through it idly … and almost immediately find the first of what turn out to be many places she has underlined, in faint, curiously wavering pencil. Some of her choices mystify me, seem opaque and laborious, their meaning beyond me, but others leap out, only too comprehensible:

  Jealousy is often only an uneasy need to be tyrannical, applied to matters of love.

  And:

  Love, what is it but space and time rendered perceptible by the heart.

  And:

  … beneath any carnal attraction which is at all profound, there is the permanent possibility of danger.

  The last one I come across speaks the loudest:

  “We love only what we do not wholly possess.” God. Is it really that simplistic? That childish?

  Press my head back into the weirdly contoured headrest, thinking it could only be a sadist’s idea of comfort, and give myself over to staring out the window.

  At least, I find myself thinking, Lucy has Walter. My son, the words come to me. My daughter. Imagine Maggie as a child, the foxy chin, wispy hair, those enormous eyes.

  A child to fill the chasm between us…

  The idea alone (conceiving w/ M.) treacherous, though I can’t decide whether it’s because Lucy & I are so enmeshed, or because I’m casting Maggie in the role of mother. Aside from the fact that the thought of pregnancy still makes her shudder, sometimes I think she lacks an essential quality—she’s simply not, comes the traitorous thought, maternal.

  ***

  Thirty thousand feet above land, the sense of limbo is strong enough to be palpable. I’m halfway between two worlds, and more than the diametrical opposites that compose New York and LA, the stronger one pulling me in half is the difference between Lucy and Maggie, wife and mistress, long-term and brand-new … it’s a difference that seems most compellingly expressed by their bodies—Lucy’s lush, curvy, soft, imperfect, made to welcome another body…

  And though I know how memory excludes and exaggerates, I see Maggie constructed of angles—the sharp planes of her face, from the high arch of cheekbone to the square one of jaw, then down to the horizontal ridge of clavicle, in perfect geometrical contrast to the vertical string of vertebrae pearling all the way down her spine to that sweetest curve, the aptly named sacrum—“the pedestal,” I used to say (once upon a very long time ago), tracing one finger all the way down, “that holds up your fine ass…”

  While she goes to great lengths to give the impression that she takes her appearance for granted (just genetic dumb luck), I know how consciously she accentuates it, from the way she sweeps her hair cleanly up and back—the better to feature that long, Nefertitian neck—to donning her favorite earrings, long silver lines that look like falling rain, caught, swing animatedly when she speaks, in perfect concert with her flying hands, that mobile, expressive mouth, eyes all flash and glitter…

  Her image vivid in my head, I close my eyes and remember how, during those first few years (and maybe, I think, all the ones since, too), how proprietarily prideful I’d feel, even smug, lying on the beach next to her, continuously aware of the reassuring glint of my diamond solitaire ring on her left hand, watching men—from the old geezers to the middle-agers to my own peers, and younger (even goddamn teenagers!)—all of them slowing, even stopping, just to look (tossing a sharp elbow to the friend), heads literally turning, as Maggie tossed her shirt off to prostrate herself beneath the sun … (remember in particular one summer’s white one-piece, its neckline modestly high, while the other side featured a radical backlessness, cut so low you could see the shadow in the cleft of her ass, its legs cut so high as to nearly expose the small knobs of hip bone)…

  Ah, but I knew how hard she worked to reveal that skeletal architecture—how many meals skipped, how much sleep surrendered for the five-a-week harsh, demanding workouts—at the beach, forever absorbed in some book or another, she always did seem totally unaware of both her body and her body’s effect on others (men and women, it should be added—how many times had I spied, safe behind my sunglasses, the women who strolled past, feigning indifference, only to cast a sharp glance backward, their own sunglasses pushed down to allow the better view…).

  The word that’s always come to mind is striking, I think it again now—and it only occurs to me now, for the first time, that it also describes assault.

  I lean my overheated brain against the freezing window, and I realize something else: for the first time in—what, six months? God, half a year—I’m thinking of her without the usual accompaniment of rage and bitterness…

  Instead, the grief I’ve always managed to keep suppressed way beneath, comes bubbling up, a kind of suffocating miasma, and though it seems insane, I wonder only now if it’s honestly possible, might it actually be true, that our marriage is really over?

  My legs kick out beneath me, narrowly missing the seat in front, an involuntary jerk, reflexive, as though violently rejecting the notion. No, this is what I think; it’s unacceptable, that’s all. But if that’s true—I can’t stop the next thought—then why haven’t I fought for her? Why don’t I fight for her?

  Instead of an answer, I have a sudden, unbidden memory of Lucy chasing Walter one afternoon, the two of them giggling maniacally, rolling on the earth—she appeared to have no concern whatsoever for her hair, her clothes, any of that, while whatever had been preoccupying her earlier (as if I didn’t know) was magically lifted from her face.

  I live with a child, she’d said when I mentioned it later, shrugging. It gives my life levity—every single day.

  Listen, she’d added, no matter how grown up he gets, he’ll always want me sometimes—when he gets hurt. Everybody wants their mommy sometimes—especially when their wives ditch them—

  Is every mother such a bitch? I asked her, using my most impersonal tone, and she bit me so hard I yelled, called her a vampire bat from hell.

  I’ll drink your blood, she warned.

  In fact she bruised me, and I watched it develop like a Polaroid picture, from violet to purple to pale green, finally paling to a kind of lime yellow for days, turning colors like some slow-motion kaleidoscope … what really struck me was how long it took—days that turned into weeks!—for it to fade.

  Looking back at my years with Maggie, that life seems equally encapsulated, though not so much fading as blessedly distant … from this strange vantage point, the weird perspective that sheer height often seems to bestow on us, it seems as if our entire marriage occurred in a kind of bubble, one made of equal parts naïveté, idealism, and the purely adolescent notion that we were simply beyond ordinary temptations.

  We spent twelve years together (granted, only seven actually married, but having moved in together almost immediately upon meeting, neither one of us made much of a distinction re before or after the ceremony), and my ideas about it—about us, together—never wavered; I just felt that infidelity was, inarguably and beyond all doubt, unthinkable … not because it was a “sin,” or even so-called morally offensive, but simply because I thought it was the worst, the lowest, kind of betrayal: of trust, love, respect, and, ultimately, of your word; nothing less than your integrity itself.

  It was cowardly, too—the opposite of everything I thought defined masculinity, and manhood (at least, mine) and the same went for her. I figured if things ever got that bad, it was time to clear out.

  But so many years, and now so many miles, too, later, nothing is that simple. It’s all mixed together, the ideals w/ the reality, the happiness w/ the resentment, the love w/ a
ll the days spent (as in, lost) baiting each other, engaging in pure mind-fuck—or, worse, refusing to engage at all…

  Lately I think more and more that love is simply thinking of the other as being as important as one’s self; of not seeing the distinction.

  And loneliness, I have thought, could be defined as the lack of a constant, companionable continuity (i.e., from morning to afternoon, afternoon to evening, evening to night, night through to morning, etc.).

  The lack of this daily kind of company, that missing of someone who, if not literally follows, at least witnesses you moving into a different mood, a new dynamic, another season—from spring to summer to the first flash of fall … someone to snug with through those endless winters—this is what you have with the person you have lived with, years upon years upon years—that kind of time spent together is in itself evidence, I think, of love—it has to be, doesn’t it?

  Who are you that you love me, I used to think when Maggie & I first moved in together … I couldn’t believe it sometimes, that there she was, night after night, asleep on the pillow next to mine, letting me wrap my arm around her waist and pull her ass tight into my lap, press my face into her neck…

  How is it that such a habit has been lost …? (Lost, I think, as if it could actually be as innocuous as something misplaced… in which case, surely it can be found again. As long as it exists, somewhere—doesn’t it make sense to assume it’s there still?)

  Quantum mechanics states that we literally cannot envision the manner in which our universe works. What happens at the quantum level, i.e., the substratum of reality, what reality is BUILT ON, contradicts Newtonian mechanics, which, conversely, explains the way we actually SEE the world working—visual proof having always been the key, at least for Westerners (“seeing is believing” comes to mind, or “saw it with my own two eyes,” and—as the ultimate proof of validity—“there it was, in plain sight”).

  Scientists, physicians, mechanics, engineers: they visualize theorems, biological laws, chemical solutions, and literally “see” the model upon which their idea is—or will be—built.

  “I can’t see it,” people say when they’re rejecting something, some proposition. “No.”