Black swans, p.8
Black Swans, page 8
At least to me. But then, I wasn’t running it. And anyway, she was only twenty-seven when she left, so maybe she thought everything could be as easy to get as this was. Or maybe this was too much.
The sun was beginning to set, we’d been there so long with me trying to make clear what I thought was a tragedy, when Kate Lake had beauty, friends, a red-hot husband, a beautiful child, and a boundless future, like Marco Polo setting out. And except for the weird fact that someone nasty from New York could mistake her for a “Hollywood wife,” nobody who knew her thought of her that way because we didn’t think of Hollywood that way, that it was something to be sneered at. We thought it was something we could run better or at least it seemed that way until Zack broke down to make a movie like Mighty Mo for whatever lame excuse.
And Kate had gone from being married to a man who was too full of the sixties to ever make compromises, to being the wife of just any studio president.
“If he does it once,” she told Vicky, “he’ll do it again.”
Of course, Vicky didn’t see Zack that way. She liked Zack for being her charming brother-in-law; to her he was family; to her Kate was, as she said, “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater!”
And if Hollywood was the bathwater, poor Zack was the baby.
“And so?” Renzo asked.
The sky was growing beautiful behind him, in spite of the smog, or because of it; the sunset was gorgeous.
“And so,” I said, “Vicky was crushed. The whole town was damaged. But Vicky was in pieces.”
“And what about you?” he asked.
“Well, I was really too peripheral,” I said. “And as my old friend Irene Kamp used to quote some French guy who said, ‘Everything will work out, but badly.’ I’ve always known everything could fall apart at a moment’s notice, ever since Walter left—my old boyfriend who used to live at the Château. I’ve always tried to cultivate a disillusioned and world-weary attitude to counteract my rude streak of optimism, which gets in the way of reality. Not that anything works.”
Thinking that nothing works, always makes me laugh.
All this talk was getting me sultry. I’d had a crush on Renzo for so long all I wanted to do was sag into his molecules and let the good times roll. But in this day and age, things are so vile and complicated you have to decide whether sex is worth dying for, and my eyes were drawn to him with such magnetized force that I found myself staring into his in silence.
“Listen,” he said, “do you care that I have AIDS tests every time I donate blood? I’m a rare type.”
“I’ll say,” I agreed.
“Type O,” he was blushing. “Universal donor, and I just gave blood a couple of weeks ago. And I’m not into gay sex or a junkie, so . . .”
He looked like such a vampire, it was hard to believe blood transferences with him went the other way, but he took my hand, kissed it, and said, “You’ll stay with me, won’t you? I can’t let you go now.”
“Oh,” I gasped. “A plan.”
He leaned forward, bit my cheek softly, and I turned into mush, the way I always do, if someone I love because they’re beautiful suddenly looks as if they’re taking charge. Really, my body had gone into rapture of the deep, while now that night was falling, all around us smelled of the jasmine Kate had planted long ago.
His body had gone into another dimension too; he had that fierce look I love so much.
“My plan,” he said, “is we should go back to the Château Marmont and not come out. I mean, I know lots of people here, but I don’t want to see anyone, even the producer guy who sent for me I don’t really have to see until next week. Let’s go back to my room, you’ll like it, it had no view and it’s real quiet. You don’t have other plans, do you?”
“Not that good,” I said.
We rose to our feet, he put his arm around me, and we rambled back to my car, got in, and I drove, with no radio, just silence back to the Château, which, like Tangiers, is a place that once you get there, you don’t want to leave. Even now that they’ve recarpeted, repainted, and the phones work almost too well.
I drove into the parking lot underneath the hotel and gave my car to the attendant, who was watching an old black-and-white TV, giving him Renzo’s room number and taking a ticket. One of the many great things about the Château is you can park downstairs and take the elevator to your floor without passing the lobby, which we did.
We got to his room, one of the ones facing the hills behind the Sunset Strip, and as he put the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, I called my next-door neighbor Nancy and asked her to feed my cats until I got home.
“I thought we wouldn’t want to go out,” Renzo said, “so I had all this food sent up, just in case.”
(Another great thing about the Château is that all the rooms have kitchens with refrigerators, motley silverware, and odd dishes.)
What I remembered most afterward besides Renzo’s incredible body and his magical stamina was the sultry smell of burning, which I thought was us, and the silence that seemed, after a while, to be us too, which I thought was because I’d gone deaf from it all, except we talked so much, I couldn’t have been really deaf. His eyes went in and out of my mind; sometimes I couldn’t see them because it was too dark, and sometimes the light was on and I could see these faded light olive-green masterpieces that looked like some old vampire poster, a tinted Dracula from long ago. The air was velvet, but then what wasn’t, except for his teeth, which were sharp. With his white skin and shiny wet black hair, things just marbleized into unbridled fiery endlessness, almost as if we lay in smoke.
Sometimes we’d talk for what seemed like days and then we’d start kissing, and things would lapse into that parallel universe you can only find in a place where they leave you alone and you’re not home. Every now and then we’d shove fistfuls of cherries or mangos into each other’s mouths before passing out and then wake up still in dreams, with that velvet smoke throughout everything.
“The air smells like it’s burning,” he said once, looking out the window to make sure, but the hills behind us, in some strange light, were still and quiet. Too still, in fact, too quiet.
“We’d hear fire engines if something were wrong,” I said, “wouldn’t we?”
He was one of those lovers I’d read about in books (not his), who, once his momentum was inflamed, could wait, wait forever on top of me or at my side, saying, “Are you sure there’s nothing else you’d like to try?”
“What else is there?” I pointed out.
“Mmmm,” he said, “we haven’t tried the kitchen yet.”
His eyes followed me everywhere, these tango eyes that had been my heart’s desire, as far as eyes were concerned, from the time I was four years old and had fallen in love with a pirate on Halloween. He moved like a cat, and when he stretched, every muscle in his back sang.
Occasionally I would go take a huge hot bath, and he’d sit in the bathtub with me, washing my hair, which was so blond it was all he liked about me, I thought. Except that he did like my toes, I noticed, and everywhere in between.
Several times he ordered orange juice from room service, and it came with a condensed version of the New York Times, rolled up in a rubber band, which we were much too busy to read.
Then, it happened, I woke up from a nap and saw Renzo had ordered more orange juice, and almost as an afterthought, he undid the New York Times that came on the tray, looked at it a moment, and said, “You know we’ve been here since Wednesday and it’s now Saturday—is it Saturday? Maybe it’s Sunday. My God, look!”
It was then that we found out about the city, how it had, in our absence, gone up in smoke. The smoky smell was smoke. The silence was the curfew.
He turned on the TV and every channel had the city from helicopters, showing shops on Hollywood Boulevard, even Frederick’s, looted. It struck me that I’d been having too swell a time to get away scot-free, but this seemed too much of a price to pay, I love Frederick’s!
“What day is it again?” I asked. “What day did we get here? Oh, my God, look at Crenshaw Boulevard, it’s all mangled!”
“This place is really quiet,” Renzo said. “Can you imagine, Vietnam’s going on outside, and here, it’s still Tangiers.”
“Let’s get out, go downstairs,” I said. “Get dressed.”
I put on my jeans and T-shirt, and so did he, and we took the elevator to the lobby where, it turned out, the whole staff had risen to the occasion, working extra shifts to take care of people who’d come there and were afraid to go out. “The kitchen,” the desk clerk said, “has been great, working overtime.”
The TV behind him was on, with the mantra “ever since the verdict.” Whole business facades still stood, while the rest of the buildings behind them were totally gutted; streets and homes gone with only jacaranda trees blooming away like nothing had happened in front.
The National Guard was arriving or had arrived; the marines, five thousand of them, were on their way; little Korean grocery stores were gone; furniture stores were pillaged; and Daryl Gates was still at the helm, running things by not being there at the beginning but on his way to Brentwood to a fundraiser against Proposition F that would change the police department once and for all.
For a moment, watching this on TV, I thought maybe it was my fault, and I said, “Maybe if I’d been home, none of this would have happened!”
Renzo rolled his eyes at me and said, “You’re taking this too personally.”
Renzo picked up his messages from friends in New York and put his arm around me. “Nobody’s going to believe I missed this and I was here,” he said. “I’m usually more abreast of current events.”
“What day is it anyway?” I wondered.
“It’s Saturday, the curfew’s still on,” the desk clerk said, “you might as well go back to your room because it’s almost seven o’clock now.”
“P.M. or A.M.?” I wondered.
“P.M.” he said.
We sat in bed with newspapers and the TV, and read about an electrical storm of anarchy that had spread from images on TV, other cities caught up in simultaneous combustion like Seattle and San Francisco, and even New York had gone home early on Friday, so many rumors abounded there too. It was all due to the verdict from the Land That Time Forgot, but living in L.A. all my life, I’ve always had to be wary of people like the jurors, who we could have made see reason in the seventies if we’d kept our wits about ourselves.
“We can’t go anywhere,” he said. “There are still things going on. But apparently it’s supposed to be under control, whatever that means, pretty soon.”
His beautiful hair had fallen into his eyes, and he looked younger and more gorgeous than, in my years of unrequited yearning, I’d ever imagined any other could look. If we or L.A. had to die, in other words, now was the time to do it.
He leaned over and handed me some fresh honeydew and kissed the back of my neck, which, by then, he knew was one of my many weak spots. Though like L.A. itself, it seemed, I was all weak spots.
He said, “I can’t believe I’m actually here with you, after so long. You know, you changed my life.”
“I did?”
He had slipped into this red kimono he claimed he had bought in Miami Beach, which made his white skin look spine tingling, and I slipped out of my clothes again and put on one of the Château’s new innovations, a terry-cloth robe that was so thick and fleecy, it seemed like a fur coat. (Though I found out later, not all rooms had these robes.)
“Yes,” he said, “because when you first started writing to me, I was a wreck; I had injured my left arm in Vietnam and it got worse when I played racquetball, and they had me on painkillers and muscle relaxants and they said I might never recover. But then you sent that horrible Ashtanga tape, that video, remember? And I went to Paris to the Ashtanga center there, doing that kind of yoga. Well, I wound up in India for a while, six months in fact, in the end. I’ve been doing it almost every day since. I’d have been doing it now, if you weren’t clouding my mind.”
“Who could breathe this air anyway?” I pointed out, since it was still filled with smoke, and by now we knew the smell of ashes and smoldering was more than just us.
“I’m going to try anyway,” he said. “Someone’s got to be in their right mind around here.”
“Well,” I said, “if you’re going to do fire yoga, it seems like the perfect town.”
“I heard they called it fire yoga in India,” he said. “For a while we were calling it gorilla yoga, we all felt like such apes doing it.”
Renzo was a little older than me, but, of course, doing Ashtanga all the time, he moved like some kind of Edward Villella replica (in fact, he looked like him too, only taller with a better nose). His back was always flat, I realized now, and of course his arms were so strong: he did push-ups and handstands all the time, no wonder. No wonder he never ran out of energy; doing what we did in bed was nothing if you did what he did on the floor every day for that last five years.
(If everyone in L.A. did Sun Salutations instead of drive-by shootings, the fires would have been within, instead of without.)
“I quit doing Ashtanga,” I told him, “after I sent you that tape. I didn’t like being so sane anymore, I wanted something wilder. I guess you changed my life too, because you sent me that postcard about Tango Argentino and when the dancers came to L.A. I got totally hooked. Not that I do tango much anymore.”
“I’m not leaving until I see you dance,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “I could tango while L.A. burns.”
“We already did.” He laughed as an ash the size of a tennis shoe landed on the back balcony.
If Kate couldn’t get along with Zack just because he wanted to go surfing and make a schlock movie, how could one expect people under Daryl Gates to be big about things like that verdict? Or for anyone to forgive and forget after all that. You can only be so big and forgive so much, unless you’re a saint, in which case it’s your job.
Not that we shouldn’t try to be saintly for free, but still.
IT ALMOST SEEMED to have started when Kate left, because before she did, it seemed to me now, we had hope. We knew things were bad, but Vietnam was over and Nixon as impeached as we could get him, even if he did resign. If the people with our ideals who had risen like Zack deserted to go surfing, who was holding the fort after all? At the time, I didn’t think it was a tragedy, Zack’s fall, but later I wondered if the tragedies in life are only about when you could have been great but weren’t.
As far as Vicky was concerned, civilization as she knew it had collapsed the day I went to meet her in Nickodell’s again, after Kate and Dylan had moved to New York and Zack returned from the Philippines.
“You know,” Vicky said, on her second gin and tonic, “Haily has moved in. With Zack.”
“With Zack?” I said. “He let her?”
I wasn’t surprised, the sheets were barely cold but Haily was infamous for appropriating her friends’ men.
“She’s in Kate’s bed,” Vicky croaked, “with Kate’s husband. And you know what she’s done, she’s moved all her clothes into Kate’s closet, but she’s decided it’s too small. So she’s got carpenters up there now, knocking out walls in the bedroom. Kate’s walls!”
“No,” I said, “poor Zack!” (I was still on his side, being a sucker for cute men as I’ve always been.)
“I went there this morning to get Kate’s paintings to be shipped back by Cart and Crate, and there were these carpenters, knocking down that wall. Poor Zacky is going to come home tonight and not be able to sleep!”
“What did Haily say?”
“She said Kate was such a hippie she didn’t care how she lived, but now that she was there, things were going to improve.”
I suppose Kate was a hippie; she may have believed in silver boots and looking incredible and had glamour, but not to a fault. At that time, Haily, like the eighties to come, believed in too much, and like most of those women who think you can’t have big enough closets, she still didn’t look that great. Or at least she never looked kind and beautiful like Kate. She looked mean and stylish, as if she were supposed to be beautiful and you should take her word for it. From afar, she looked a lot better than close up. Sort of like America. Or even L.A.
Kate was an original self-enchanted creation, whereas Haily was only an amateur creation. Like those dictators the CIA tried to pawn off as the “will of the people.”
“I’ve got my car and a trailer filled with stuff,” Vicky said. “I’m driving to New York.”
“All by yourself?” I said. “Alone? You’re leaving? Kate’s left. All that’s here is me and Zack. And Haily.”
“Haily has no principles,” she sighed. “But I’ll miss you. You I’m sorry about. Poor Zacky has no principles either.”
“Yeah,” I said, not that I had any principles that I could think of myself in those days, except the cliche about artists not selling out.
“If Mighty Mo doesn’t make it,” she said, “I don’t know what poor Zacky’s going to do.”
“It already hasn’t,” I pointed out. “At least in certain circles.”
“I asked Zack to meet us here,” Vicky said. “He’s late.”
At which point, there was light at the front of Nickodell’s as the large, soft, padded door opened and Zack arrived, looking like a West Coast Dick Diver, all sad and rich and tragic and, if you asked me, too great to leave if it had been me. I had known Zack since he was hustling scripts trying to be a producer, and he had never been anything but detached and ironic, “easy to work with,” they call it in Hollywood, the criteria that we expect out of great men, along with making money. Now he looked like the wind had gone out of his sails; his tan had faded. Really, he did look awful, and it served him right for letting Haily knock walls down in that great bedroom.
“I hate people who knock walls down,” I said, “in those nice old houses like yours that are okay like they are.”
“What walls?” he asked.
We explained.
“Haily did that?” he groaned. “I guess I’ll have to move into the Château.”
