Hollywood Savage

Come over, I say, fast, I’ll be here.

  Whatever I was doing (reading the paper? Reading the script? Making breakfast?) is instantly irrelevant. I go sit on the back deck, pull out a cigarette, but as soon as it’s lit I’m besieged w/ the irrational fear that I won’t hear her at the front door, she’ll come and go and I’ll never see her again—

  I jump up, glad nobody’s here to witness my weak-ass behavior, and go sit on the front step instead.

  Smoke three cigarettes in a row, not one of them enjoyable. It’s time, I think, to quit.

  The whole time I sit there, I see no other sign of human life. The houses are tombs, walled, silent. There is no music wafting from a window, nobody whistling into their garage, no mailman trundling from box to box, nobody walking a dog.

  It’s as though they’ve dropped the neutron bomb, and forgotten to notify me.

  It says something about my state of my mind that I find the idea comforting; surely the neutron (gas?) will start to work its way through my pores into my vital organs, and my body will, in short order, break down.

  It’s only when I start to imagine the more gruesome side effects (bilious leakage from unlikely orifices, limbs either paralytic or boneless, and pain as yet unimagined—) that I shudder, and in the very same instant, I hear the low rumble of L.’s unreliable little VW struggling up the hill, gears churning in an effort to keep it going.

  I grind my last butt out, wipe my hands on the backs of my jeans, with a pang of regret completely irrelevant to the occasion.

  The first thing I see is Walter, straining out of his little car seat to wave at me with both hands, evincing the same unquenchable enthusiasm I have always relied on him for.

  Hi! he yells. Hi, Mi, hi! Hi!! Hi hi hi!!

  Walter, I say. I jog over to his side of the car. Little dude, what’s going on?

  My house burnded down, he says, his expression becoming utterly grave.

  I know, I answer, bending my knees so we can be eye level. I saw it on the news.

  On Tee-Vee? he asks, eyes rounding (obviously this hasn’t occurred to him yet).

  Yup.

  Mommy! He turns to her excitedly. Did you know we got burnded down on Tee-Vee?

  Well, she begins to qualify, but he’s having none of it. He swivels back to face me, little hands gripping the door. We’re famous, he breathes, and I can already see that this makes up for a great deal of what he’s lost (or at least, it does right now; no doubt his parents have been keeping him busy with room service and heated pools and new toys and his favorite videos so as to stanch the tide of loss he’s bound to experience when, object by lost object, it begins to sink in to his childish psyche that all of the things he’s treasured for the better part of his short life are really and truly gone).

  What more, I answer back, using the same reverential tone, could a boy want?

  Unfortunately, he takes my question literally, and stops to give it some thought. I look at Lucy over his head (sorry!), and she rolls her eyes (what can you do)—it’s a moment of ineffable sweetness for me, not least for how casually, how thoughtlessly it played out—for the glimpse it gave me into what it might be like to actually be going with them—to have so many of such moments up ahead they could not possibly be counted.

  A plane I could fly with a moted control, he says, breaking my reverie.

  Remote control, Lucy corrects gently.

  Yeah, he says, eyes fixed on mine, rapt.

  Yeah, I answer in kind, then add, Maybe Santa’ll get you one for Christmas!

  Or maybe Gramma, he says judiciously. Before.

  I laugh hard, see Lucy turning her face away so she won’t be caught doing the same.

  Sounds like he’s got somebody’s number, I say.

  Oh yeah. She nods. From birth.

  Well, I say, flexing my stiffening knees to stand. That’s good.

  This appears to be Lucy’s cue to unbuckle and get out, too, leaning back in to tell Walter, Mommy’ll be right back, okay, sweetheart? I’m just going to say goodbye to Miles.

  But we already said, Walter pouts.

  Lucy reaches across and finds a book to put in his lap.

  I know, sweetie, it’s not going to take any time at all—by the time you get to the last picture in this book, I’ll be back in my chair and we’ll hit the road for real, ’kay?

  He doesn’t answer (his attempt at punishment, clearly) but then becomes so absorbed in his book he barely notices us walk back up to my front stairs.

  Facing each other, have to wonder who’s more nervous.

  As if in answer, she lets out a long breath, bends all the way from the waist to do it.

  Jesus, she breathes.

  Amen, I answer, still unsure where to look. My eyes start a circular rove, but she catches them, puts two fingers on either side of my chin.

  Lucy, I start, embarrassed, but she shushes me.

  Ssh … Please—just let me look.

  I feel myself becoming very still beneath her hands, and watch as her eyes rove over every inch of me with a kind of desperate intensity … as if she’s afraid she might forget what I look like.

  Lucy, for Christ’s sakes, I whisper. Don’t go …!

  Ssh, she says again, but I see her wince. I know the decision has cost her more than she probably had to pay.

  What am I going to do, tomorrow when you’re not here? I ask, knowing I sound angry now, hurt, and not caring.

  You’re going to get on with your own life, Miles, she says. The way all of us do during times like these…

  I almost yell at her then, almost grab both her arms and scream Lucy, you fucking bitch, don’t DO this to me! Don’t do this to US!

  But I don’t.

  Write me, she says.

  (She has no idea, how much already).

  I will, I say, the way it comes out reminds me of another time I said these words this way—

  Don’t, she says, raw, trying to smile, take my husband’s name in vain.

  Never, I say, a vow, how we both want the promise, everything (& then I remember the moment perfectly, so lucid it is like being someone else, someone younger, in love with the world: the day I married Maggie. Her hands in mine, gripping mine. I will. We didn’t do it, she would always say later. We willed it.)

  Lucy holds on to me. I keep thinking the last time, the last time; it is beyond belief.

  Okay, she says, I’m leaving.

  She starts to pull back but I don’t let her go, and she has to push away, off my arms, before she’s free.

  Write me, she says, she says it again, a child wanting something so bad, Walter’s pure face.

  A book, I tell her. A whole book. She presses her hands against my face, licks the tears off my cheeks as if I were her kitten.

  When I open my eyes, it is to see Walt in the car, strapped-in shotgun, his grin enormous, pressing his mouth to the half-open window. A kiss, the glass fogs and clears, I have to grin back. Lucy turns, her face changing—she is Walter’s brave, she is Walter’s beautiful mommy.

  Okay, he shouts, Mommy ready!

  I walk with her to the car, we don’t touch each other.

  Walter, I say, I have something for you.

  I know before I give it to him how much he loves it—a ring my father once gave me, his ring, gold, a black onyx eagle signet on the top. I put it on a linked chain, sturdy, clasp it behind his neck, something he can pull without breaking.

  See. I show him. You can wear it all the time, you never have to take it off.

  Even in the hot tub?

  Yeah, I say, quiet, intense, matching his tone.

  He is staring into my eyes, the ring in his hand.

  Yeah, he says, rapt (the wild unself-conscious beam of love). I reach in to hug him and he does just what he saw his mother do, he pulls back in my arms and looks at me.

  He asks the question, as if he’s just trying it out, the first time: Will you miss me?

  Lucy in the seat next to him, her face turned all the way. She c
an’t cry in front of him, I understand this; not now.

  Every day, I tell him. Until I see you again.

  Lucy looks back and I can’t say another word. She smiles and I am as unprepared for it—for her, for the flashing rapture she can evoke in me—as I have always been. She’s mine, I think, a thought that grabs me around the throat, unrelenting. She was born for me—

  Okay, she says. She pushes a piece of paper into my hand. Mommy’s ready.

  I stand there after they’ve left me, I keep putting it off (just one more minute, one more second), because it isn’t till I move that everything—this day, my life—will begin again … and then I will have to go on…

  It will have begun & then it won’t ever end: going on, having to live without her.

  It’s only when I finally turn back and reach for my door that I remember the piece of paper—her last quote (Jean Cocteau):

  Do not expect me to be a traitor. Of course opium remains unique and the euphoria it induces superior to that of health. I owe it my perfect hours.

  —16 september, LA

  Lucy’s absence a gaping hole, yawning before me the instant I awake each day. Find myself conducting a near-continuous postmortem, a kind of inventory I know I should have done much, much earlier (God knows, it reaches much, much further back).

  Everywhere I go, no matter what I do, I’m accompanied by a sense of failure, driven deep. All the while I’m missing Lucy, am also mourning Maggie, the loss of Maggie, who (and this is what Lucy surely knew) always lurked beneath.

  Can’t stop thinking that we, my wife and I, did not—we have not—loved each other very well. We could not give up the ways we wanted to love for the way the other person needed to be loved. Love should pull you further toward selflessness (putting the other ahead of yourself)—and it did, I’m sure it did, at least, up to a point—then, ultimately, we did not (could not?) make the leap.

  The failure of it unravels, frays my sense of integrity itself (dis/integration). Feels like homelessness, the gradual loss of identity accumulating, suddenly in my face, unavoidable (Lucy shielded me from this, for so long, and so well). The loss of her sharper than anything, beyond words.

  Don’t go out, don’t answer the phone, don’t work. Only think about any of it when I try to write it down (i.e., now); once again, feel the writer’s need to write as self-preservation (or, as Bukowski more succinctly put it, “the typer saves my ass”).

  —22 september, hills

  Driving alone on Mulholland Drive, some perfect, ethereal music on the radio, for once I’m not fantasizing about anyone, or any place. No lover, no paradise. Just by myself, experiencing the sheer poignancy that is the passing of time, when one is conscious, and mortal.

  Leaving LA. Now there’s a title I can get behind.

  Such natural drama in departure—each like a small death, forcing you to organize, to weed out the inessential.

  Too impatient to be polite. Refuse to have farewell dinners. Violently refuse to mourn any of this before I’m gone. Now that I’ve decided to go back to NYC (thank God, I have thought this so many times, it is there) feel the relief of upcoming change…

  Am thinking it’s only when I leave, when I am someplace else, that I’ll be able to grasp what I have, here. What I once had, here.

  —26 september, top of the hill

  Next A.M., start disassembling my stuff from the house in the most desultory, disorganized way imaginable: rifling every pocket I own (pants, shirts, jackets) for the occasional jolt I get when I do find the little written scraps L. stuck there (often clearly unbeknownst to me; made me wonder how many I might have inadvertently sacrificed to the washing machine)—most favored:

  Bribes, all, in the conspiracy of everything to continue to exist.—Renata Adler

  Already thinking of the bribes I will offer myself (shallow, all, in her absence, but all the more necessary, I think, for the same reason)—how to create the tease toward happiness (or at least the temporary satisfaction of self-created desires)—mundane shit, like bacon for breakfast, a martini outside, watching the sun set, imagining Izzy’s face when I just show up (I’m baaaaaack …!!!!).

  Know the tricks I must turn to approximate my own seduction. They wear thin, do not always work.

  Getting to know myself, it seems to me now, here, has been the ultimate journey of disillusionment.

  There are no answers, this is what I think, only periods of respite. For Lucy, toward Lucy, I think this:

  There is no philosophy. There is only the imperative to love—whatever, whoever, you can—as much as possible.

  —27 september, the hills

  Finally getting the endlessly tedious (packing and DE-packing) job done—not, however, well. Know it’s the perfect opp. to just purge, hit files, notebooks, boxes, throw a ton of crap out, but I can’t stomach it. Instead, throw the same crap into boxes (why the hell do I keep this shit, I think, again and again, when what I want my obituary to admiringly note, this was a man who traveled light…).

  Unraveling stacks of unread LA Times pages to wrap the assorted detritus I seem to inescapably collect (see: 1 unprocessed disposable camera, 3 pix left; 1 stack of postcards picked up in used bookstores happened upon whilst traveling—Big Sur, reads one, pic the wholly expected wild Pacific, crashing against rocks the seals sun themselves on; pile (more than 7, less than 17) of unread newspaper articles clipped together; books I’ve bought that immediately enter my Should Read/Rarely Do list; bunch (more than 5, less than 15) of loose CDs, files I apparently don’t need, & won’t reread but cannot delete (what if the most important thing, the document w/out which etc. etc., is saved there?); &, inevitably, the miscellaneous assortment of notebooks, often stained & only half-filled—scrawl, some of it illegible even to me)…

  No time, no patience to go through the stuff, still can’t pitch it, all the while nagged by the sense that all this extra baggage must be a symptom of moral turpitude (a kind of slatternly ethos, me clearly inviting it in, cluttering my way through life)…

  Fuck it, I tell myself (it’s my mantra, because it’s either pack the crap up or just crawl under the covers and wait to be discovered by some—preferably the NY one—CSI team—a team that would be led—I further fantasize the cast—by the intrepid, though naturally to-be-disgusted, Bonnie) & force myself into autopilot, methodically filling boxes scavenged from the two liquor stores whose business I greatly enhanced throughout my stay, sucking all the satisfaction I can from the sound of tape being crisply ripped into long strips, sealing each box neatly then labeling it with my faux-architect print.

  (What I’ve heard R. Chandler’s notebooks looked like—though, to be precise, the rumor is he used legal pads exclusively.)

  What the hell, show me a writer and I’ll show you a rip-off artist.

  —28 september

  It’s late afternoon & the sun’s beginning its long descent, dark gold rays reaching for the canyon tops as I’m down to the last couple suitcases (i.e., about when my righteous sense of duty’s segueing to the bone-wearying phase of Christ-please-let-this-be-over) when the doorbell rings.

  Raise my head, flushed w/ acute wariness. Silence. Feel my shoulders slump (as if, I tell myself). Who do I know? Lear? Ha! Lucci?? Please!

  Lucy? Her name both acid & painfully sweet on the tip of my mind, even as I know, no, never; it’s an impossibility.

  Someone w/ wrong address, I’m sure—so certain, I bend to snatch another page of LA Times, wrap the crooked mug Walter made me—when there it is again. This time, whoever’s there keeps pressing (makes a highly irritating sound).

  Shit, I think, jogging downstairs to let whoever know where they went wrong (even as—and what writer isn’t intimately acquainted with this—dying for a break, am filled with relief—blameless, I exult, especially since the interruption wasn’t self-manufactured), yanking a T-shirt on as I go (only other clothing I’ve got on is my oldest pair of jeans, bleached white at the knees, crotch, and ass, & ripped all over�
��who cares! I can’t be bothered, not with doing laundry, not even for clean socks to warm my feet).

  I’m reaching for the door when the bell goes off again, so shrill and close I yell, shit! & pull it open, fast enough (I hope) to frighten the errant intruder—

  Sorry (this is the first word Maggie utters, her teeth chattering even though it can’t be less than sixty-eight degrees out). I shut my mouth, she half-smiles, then bursts into tears.

  I get hold of her, bring her inside, all the while aware (Jesus Christ, how could I not be!) of the insanely tight hold she’s got on me—so tight my ribs are paralyzed.

  What the hell, I begin, & instantly she’s pulling away, using her hands against my chest—

  I let her go with the same immediacy.

  I’m sorry, she says it again; I can hear the continuum of sleepless nights her voice, hoarse (somehow—why is it?? knowing her this intimately, still, after so many months of silence, annoys me more than anything—keeps me from replying, from saying don’t worry, from saying, it’s okay)…

  Meanwhile, though it’s painfully obvious that she is doing her summa cum laude holy best to suck them up, the tears just keep rolling down her face, she is so not in control. Makes my chest feel tight, makes me inhale as deeply as I can (which is, frankly, not very. Fucking cigarettes) in an effort to contradict it. Exhale all in a rush & ask, For what? (Words coming out before I can censor them, surprising even me with their fury.) What’re you sorry for, Maggie?

  Using the wall for leverage, she allows herself to fall into a seated position, knees up, arms wrapped around them, chin propped on the top (what I used to call her Apartheid Asana when she was going through her yoga phase), all defense and set apart, walls and moat, gangplank up.

  I know, she says. Believe me, I know—

  It’s all she can manage before she just gives up and sobs, so wrenchingly I can see her ribs contract, hear her gasping for breath.

  But she looks so little to me suddenly, an orphan w/ tangled hair & tear-soaked face, that something in me, something I know I’ve been nurturing, feeding with resentment and jealousy, fury and guilt, begins to thaw.

  Bend my knees to lift her up, hold her as I would a child (as Lucy holds Walter—as I myself have held him, sleepy-eyed and ready for his nap). She wraps her arms around my neck & presses her face into my chest, still crying so hard I’m afraid she won’t be able to breathe.