Black swans, p.13
Black Swans, page 13
“I like the Hollywood Y,” I said. “It’s all people older than me mostly. You can park on the street, and it’s only twenty-five cents in the meter.”
I drove over to the little house where he was staying; it was one of those way-too-small places in Echo Park that once must have been nice for a single girl secretary or bohemian, but with Jed in it, so bristling with shimmering charisma, it was wonderful—zinging ions permeated the atmosphere.
“Darling,” he said, flopping down on the bed, since the couch was much too small for either of us, “you look wonderful, a blond odalisque! Really sexy! But then, all I ever think about is sex. That’s all I apply to everything—even say, physics; if anyone were to explain to me the origins of the universe, it would turn into sex for me!”
“That’s because you go to the gym too much,” I explained. “It makes everything seem like sex. I only stay at the Y for long enough to do the Nautilus, and then I go home, because if you stay longer, all you’ll think about is sex, and I’m too busy. The most I can think about is parking.”
“Parking?” He looked at me, running his great hands through my hair. “But, darling, you’re so beautiful, so fabulous, you’re a sexy blond odalisque, your skin is so fantastic, and you smell so great!”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering how Jed could possibly still be alive—was it his incredible health just basically coursing through his system, or was it some magic? The whole world was pining from lack of these incredible men, able to give women compliments, to say the things we want to hear to make up for all the daily men who never say anything, the men who regard spontaneous goodwill as something they’re too tired, too passively resistant, and too sad to bestow.
“Your hair!” he said. “It’s perfect. You should have always had it this way!”
“Yeah,” I said, “a punk Doris Day.”
“No,” he said, “a punk Marilyn Monroe.”
“You know, Jed, along with everything else these weird days, I have suddenly developed a soft spot in my heart for Doris Day. Marilyn was too tragique!” But I was glad he was still on her side, though I had been playing this wonderful sexy duet between Doris and Harry James—“Too Marvelous for Words”—which she sings in this sultry, slowed-down version, her voice like cake and vanilla and cherries mingling with his witty, charming horn; they’re “much too much, and just too very very . . .” Her voice is—what? It’s clean, clear, it’s rain—the scent of Vitabath, like Swiss springs, that’s her voice.
But this summer—this August in particular, when it’s now rained for two mornings and the weather is hot and ratty and needs loud Cuban mambos to give it a cultural pulse, maybe “El Caballo Viejo.” It’s Mexican weather—hot and damp and gray and making everything greener and greener. Until suddenly, it’s too green to be L.A. anymore; it’s jungleland, Hawaii. This summer when August isn’t August, when all my friends are getting notices from the water department that they’ve got to use less and less water or they’ll be charged more and more, it’s raining.
Doris was never one of the shimmering charismatics; she was one of the ones who sent children to college, a woman with principles—she had formidable rules in her movies; she knew that the business of being a woman wasn’t one-night stands but long-term cement. Her side of the bargain—in the movies where she was married and already had children (my favorites were her soap commercials)—her ideal was to be sunny, keep her figure, and stay in love with her husband. Her formidable principles were as American as apple pie. Dogs she protected, dogs and her reputation.
Doris Day would be out on hayrides or playing baseball or returning mink coats to Cary Grant, as all decent American girls of principle must—but there were other movies. Ones that girls who couldn’t say no, like Elizabeth in Butterfield 8, won Oscars for. Whereas Doris never did—James Cagney or Rex Harrison, one of those, said she was one of the best actresses of her generation, but neither the public nor Doris noticed.
In the days when Doris was a star, women weren’t supposed to like sex until they were married, it was late at night, and they were in the mood. During the day, Doris was too busy, which was why her hair was plain and short. Elizabeth and Marilyn and the others may have had time on their hands to fool with their hair, but Doris had principles. The others might slink around in sex-bomb outfits; Doris just dressed like a lady, and if she happened to look like a sex bomb, well, you were reading things into it. With Doris, men had time to think about whether or not they could resist her. She, obviously, could resist them. Especially if all they wanted was “it.”
Jed, my dazzlingly glamorous friend, only wants “it” from his black lovers; they were not in his life except at these clubs he knew about—the less he knew about them, the better. The stranger, the weirder, the better. And they, him.
He got dressed to come for lunch with me, waiting till I arrived so he could show me his muscles without a shirt—which were dense and marvelous in daylight and seemed a shame to waste at night when whoever it was that got to appreciate them wouldn’t for very long.
“Where shall we go for lunch?” he asked. “I want you to meet my friend Letty—she’s great.”
“I know a place with parking,” I said, thinking of this L.A. family restaurant called—by everyone who goes there—“Tex,” which the menu said was the correct French pronunciation for “Taix.” Les Freres Taix is the name of the restaurant, and it’s on Sunset past Alvarado, near his gay Echo Park neighborhood—though nobody gay goes there, just Americans over eighty, it always seemed to me. Ancient couples who like courses. Like the soup course, the main course, and the dessert course.
When Taix first began in downtown L.A., it was located in a huge building near the railroad tracks, and my father used to take us—every Sunday come rain or come shine, because the food was so great and so cheap—even though you had to sit at large tables with people you didn’t know. The food in those days was served by overworked waiters with muscles of steel and incredible balance and purpose. They’d serve huge many-course meals—first the pea soup (which was the best soup on earth), then the French fries, roast chicken, vegetables (like green beans), and macaroni or something, and finally the salad. No dessert. If you wanted chocolate, they sold chocolate after-dinner mints at the cash register on your way out for two cents. The dining rooms—there were three huge ones—held about one hundred people each in those days, and it was one of the few things in life nobody complained about in our family. Going to Taix’s was always everyone’s idea of heaven.
(You could park next to it on the street or in the lot. Dinner was seventy-five cents per person. Then it went up to $1.50—it was that kind of place. When it opened in 1927 downtown on Commercial Street, dinner was fifty cents.)
When you were finished, the waiters poured hot coffee into your ice-water glass; you had to put a teaspoon in first to make sure the glass didn’t shatter. Several times it did anyway, and I was always glad for the excitement.
Now, though, Taix is a traditionally padded-booth place with nice rugs on the floor (unlike the wooden original), and they actually have desserts—although nothing as fashionable as caramel custard; mostly it’s chocolate cake.
There are no more family tables, and we made the mistake of going on a day when they didn’t have The Soup, but rather minestrone, which was so-so but not the great thing the pea soup was and is. They, like Doris, have boundaries and aren’t giving “it” away daily.
Taix seemed to me to be still incredibly seductive in a long-term kind of way, and I thought if it kept raining, I’d come back on the weekend for the real soup. For “it.”
After lunch, Letty, Jed’s friend from San Francisco, and I begged to go to Olvera Street and look for shoes, and poor Jed, whose idea of a good time is not Latinos, had to say yes. Big raindrops began falling as we left, but raindrops few and far between. Hotter and hotter it got.
We found an actual street parking space down there—though it took millions of quarters to make an hour—and we wandered through the smell of taquitos, corn, leather, wet serapes, and scented-candle stores, which filled the air with waxen orange blossoms and jasmine. Plus the smell of wet cobblestones was nice too. Letty found some great floral-designed leather mules that came in the right color for her and made her look even more flamboyant.
We watched little girls in white costumes doing a Mexican dance in the place—a corrida dance—and I got myself a mango on a stick for dessert. Although I don’t ever think I’ll get enough mangos in my life, eating one in the hot rain is one of the more perfect divine interventions. Mangos will make you forget anything but mangos.
“Give me a bite,” Jed said, and I did.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Mangos!” Letty and I said in unison. No wonder he only thought about sex; he never heard of mangos.
The rain was falling in bigger drops closer together, and we ran to Jed’s car and drove back to Echo Park, where Letty’s and my cars were parked, and I drove home to Hollywood, listening to KPPC, the National Public Radio station from Pasadena, a city where there’s nothing if not parking spaces and where the “public” is so elderly, their idea of music is swing. All the songs have lyrics you can listen to, and they play Doris, Bing, Frank, and on back into the twenties. They often play Ella, Louis, and Billie too. They play Artie Shaw, the great Glenn Miller, and great big bands, listing under the voices and the great songs. I read somewhere that Johnny Carson so loved the station, he contributed when they had subscription drives. It used to be you could only hear the station when you actually were in Pasadena, but now I can play it anywhere, and I do. The music of days gone by, from a town gone by that links me to an America with ethics and principles before it got the way it is now.
Driving home, listening to Nat and Natalie singing the new “Unforgettable,” things seemed improved. Or maybe it was the mango, or Jed’s kiss good-bye, when he said, “I can’t kiss you without thinking we’re committing incest.”
But when I did get home, there was a message from my old friend Albert, who had just flown back from New York and had forgotten we were supposed to have lunch—which we’d agreed to the week before but obviously both been too brainwashed by reality to remember. Albert and I have lunch about once a year. Like clockwork, when we remember.
I always think of him as though he were just around the corner, and if I invite him to any social event, no matter how out of the way or unworthy others might regard it, he’ll show up—smiling that too-L.A. smile, like Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher, both smiles Beach Boy songs if ever there were.
Albert grew up at the beach, Malibu—although at first he lived down the street from us in Hollywood, and we were in grammar school together, both playing beneath the HOLLYWOODLAND sign out in the noonday sun. I thought one day we’d . . . but we never did, and like most men I have lingering around the edges of my invisible boundaries, what we do is exchange books and new restaurants. (When the wonderful Saddle Peak Lodge opened in Malibu Canyon, he called me and said, “Get the saddle of lamb and go with someone hot.” “I thought you were a vegetarian!” “Except for this I am,” he said.) Meanwhile, he got married and, fifteen years ago, had a baby—an odd thing for someone like him, if you ask me, because he was such a surfer.
Something about having children, though, makes people pull themselves out of the water.
He came and picked me up; he was in one of his overweight periods; like me, he went up and down, usually down in summer when he could swim in the great lap pool he’d put in his hip divorced-father beach pad. This summer it’s been too cold for narcissism, though, too cold to swim, too cold to care how you look in a bathing suit, too weird for vanity, getting tan; in fact, this summer requires actual effort. Usually, Albert could just take the top off his jeep and tan he’d be, but today he came to pick me up in this adult Mercedes, silver with a new cassette player inside, which already blasted Willie Nelson’s Stardust album.
(Albert’s like me; a song with lyrics is his idea of a song—lyrics and a tune.)
Now, so long after I remember him in grammar school, he still has the smile but never smiles; you can’t even really see his teeth anymore, and he’s not tan. All that’s left of the beach are his blue eyes with the wonderful dark eyelashes.
“I can’t believe it,” he said when I got into the car. “Your hair—it looks great. You look like Betty Grable.”
“I thought it was more Doris,” I said.
“Nah,” he said, “you’re too sexy for Doris, she was never a pinup. You always were. Even in the fourth grade.”
“Turn left,” I said. “Oh! A parking spot!”
We had pulled into the too-small parking lot for Victor’s restaurant, but since it was 2:30 and no longer mobbed by lunch, there was a nice spot right in front, and Albert’s ship-like Mercedes fit perfectly.
On this particular corner, Bronson and Franklin, the northwest part, there used to be a neighborhood market called Victor’s, which, when I was growing up, I went to at least once a day. Then when I was twenty and got a checking account, Victor’s was the only place in the world where they’d cash my checks, and I used to buy steaks there, steaks and salads.
Then I moved to West Hollywood, and the world grew larger; I found other places to cash checks, other places to buy steaks, other places to go once a day. Until finally I moved back into the neighborhood, by which time I no longer ate meat, had a plastic bank card that spewed money from machines, and Victor’s had changed into a gourmet deli. It was run by people I’d never seen before, but one day when I asked to pay by check, the guy running it said, “I have to ask the owner.”
He picked up the phone, called a number, looked at me, and said, “Okay.” Then he hung up the phone and said, “You can cash any check you want; Victor says it’s okay.”
Victor, who owned the grocery store, was now retired and living in Palm Springs, but not only did he remember me, he let me cash checks. And even in the old days, my checks bounced. But bygones were bygones.
Now the gourmet deli had expanded into a restaurant with great cappuccini, a wine bar, great pastrami (which even though I’m a vegetarian, every once in a while I can’t resist), normal American food like meat loaf and gravy and mashed potatoes (which people say is great), and last but not least, the world’s greatest tuna melts. Even better than the commissary at Warner Brothers, which everyone swears has the best tuna melts in Christendom.
We entered Victor’s and found a large empty booth, and I ordered a cappuccino while Albert ordered this Holy Grail objet d’art déjeuner, and he brushed his worried frown off his face long enough to say, “I can’t believe it, if I don’t cut loose soon, I’m going to crack!”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “first of all, I bought my daughter a house up in Santa Barbara so she can keep a horse—she’s fifteen, I figure it’s cheaper than the malls. Emotionally, financially, and spiritually I figured a horse was cheaper. But now, I’m like a Santa Barbara dad—I’ve got too many houses. Harriette—you remember Harriette, my ex? She loves it up there but the fireplace started falling apart after the earthquake. And my stepfather died in some sort of debt, so I had to fly to San Francisco and get a lawyer to make sure they don’t take all his life insurance he left my mother. I mean, I flew back with the guy’s ashes on my lap because he never liked it up there, he wanted his ashes strewn down here!”
“Poor Albert,” I commiserated. “Did you ever think we’d get this old?”
“I mean, that’s how I feel,” he agreed. “I feel like I’ve been doing the right thing for so long, if I don’t—I don’t know—do something pretty soon, something stupid, I’m not going to make it.”
Just then, something stupid arrived, the tuna melt, which was on the divine grilled rye bread (Victor’s rye bread costs seven dollars a loaf, so you know it’s too good for you), and the onions were grilled beyond dreams of gluttony, the tuna was fluffy, the Swiss cheese on top melted like a dream, and it was altogether a promise fulfilled.
“Mmmmmmmmmm,” he said, biting into it, “my God, Eve, this is . . .”
He shut up and was lost in rapture. Cheap, considering what other stupid things he could have stumbled across.
Luckily, his art was so irresistible, huge corporations bought it by the yard, and he was backed up with commissions so expensive, keeping horses in Santa Barbara wasn’t really the folly it would have been for anyone else but a TV producer with at least one series in syndication.
He was in a much much better mood, all things considered, by his third bite. Life returned. Albert used to be one of those people I drank with, but now we were both sober, and cutting loose was not the same thing. It’s all very well to cut loose if you’re Jed and can go somewhere dark, pick up mysterious strangers, have something called “safe sex,” work out daily so you’ll be beautiful while you’re doing it and cute enough to cast unleashed glances across crowded taverns, but if you’re Albert, with old age piling up on your mother and taking care of so many women, with art now a business, the dailiness is crushing. Like a huge wave from Australia yanking a surfer into its curl, crushing.
Albert did everything a man could do to achieve a normal life, and I didn’t do a single thing any woman could do: never married, had children, got divorced, went through houses, even universities I avoided like the plague. And yet, here we both were, me in my same neighborhood from childhood, him back where he was born, native Californians, the kind who are never disillusioned by L.A. because it’s always what we expect. It’s life that’s the crusher.
Maybe it’s the weather.
“Maybe it’s the heat,” he said, as we left Victor’s and went into the muggy overcast afternoon.
I said good-bye to Albert. To me he still looked cute enough to eat, even if he did need to lose a few pounds (and who didn’t?), and even if he did have that wrinkled look in his eyebrows. But with Albert, it really would be incest, we’ve known each other for so long. He’s always been one of those lifeguard types—the blond in his hair had been unbleached this year—who strike me as too like any brother I might have had to be exotic enough for sex. Which is what I have to tell myself when, hugging me good-bye, he gives me that flash of teeth, which makes my heart feel like a hot kiln.
