Black swans, p.9
Black Swans, page 9
He sat there, wondering why he was born and why he was living, as the waitress brought Vicky’s turkey croquettes and Vicky sighed, “These are the last I’ll ever have.”
“Why?” he said.
“Because I’m leaving,” she said, “today. I’ve got my car outside, a trailer hitched to the Bug, and I’m driving to New York right after lunch.”
“Leaving?” he cried. “Today? No!”
(Maybe this was how people in England felt watching the empire recede.)
In the end we walked her to her car in the dusty lot across the street; we couldn’t hold her and neither could L.A. She drove away east into the smog, back to her own coast as Zack and I stood there, watching one last hope dissolve to gray. These cheap thrills like surfing result in such an expensive regret.
I hated people to leave L.A. back then; I felt personally responsible, but no matter how I tried, there was nothing I could do to make Vicky stay. Nothing to hold her.
Of course it’s different being born in Los Angeles; if you feel you’ve failed at life, it’s not like you can go back where you came from. For her, home was a peony farm in the spring in Pennsylvania, where her grandmother lived.
All there were left were us chickens, me and Zack.
When I was growing up, people who came to Los Angeles were grateful to have found a peaceful place to get on with their lives and away from the dementia of Europe and Russia in spite of the movie business’s being so corny and so intent on happy endings, which everyone knew were wishful thinking. But now, a happy ending would be a nice change. At least in real life.
But the trouble with life is, just when you think you’re having a happy ending, things are changing, because there are no endings except death.
When I was younger I used to read what they referred to as “wisdom,” and it was always the same boring thing, it seemed to me—i.e., “Money isn’t everything”—even Hollywood High’s motto was “Achieve the honorable,” though this was confused by Hollywood High’s mascot, which was the Sheik.
Anyway, by then I was already used to a life of having to be satisfied with knowing that sometimes, no matter what you did, the rug was going to be pulled from under you, although I never thought Los Angeles itself would almost be pulled from under my feet; I always took for granted that at least L.A. was going to always be the same, which would keep me from minding too much when someone like Vicky left.
“I thought Kate would come back,” Zack sighed, “but now I know it’s over. Vicky wouldn’t leave if there were any hope about Kate.”
ALL I WANTED as I called Nancy from Renzo’s room was that my cats were still alive and not too mad at me.
“They’re fine,” Nancy said. “All the birds who live down on Crenshaw have flown up here into our trees so the cats are just ecstatic. Where have you been? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve been with Renzo. I’m still here at the Château.”
“Oh, you lucky!” she said (she loved his books too). “Well, the markets have been jammed. You can’t get into the ones that are open. The Mayfair was wild.”
“Were you afraid?” I asked.
“The worst part was on TV, seeing the man running down the street with this ugly lamp,” she said. The thing she fears most is bad taste, in other words.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said and we hung up.
The phone rang, just then, and it was Dylan Gregson, Kate’s son, staying at the Château too all that time, and he said, “I thought you’d be with that Renzo guy, my aunt wants you to call her.”
“Your what?”
“Vicky,” he said, “Aunt Vicky. She’s worried. I told her we were all fine, but she wants you to call her.”
He gave me her number in Philadelphia where she still was and Renzo said, “Is she the one, your old lover, Kate’s sister?”
“Yes,” I said, “back when our hearts were young and gay.”
“Was she the only woman you were with?”
“No,” I said, “but once I stopped taking drugs and drinking, my sex life got a lot less interesting.”
It’s not that I don’t still love women; it’s just that women are rarely bold enough to back me into beds the way Renzo did and take charge. Although, believe me, with the dearth of men and AIDS and all, I’ve been thinking about it more and more. But then, if I did all the things I thought about, I’d never get out of bed.
Like now, for instance.
IT WAS SUNDAY when we finally got out of the Château and into my car to drive through as much of the city as I could stand seeing or smelling.
Fortunately, I had just read Miami, City of the Future by T. D. Allman, which my dreamboat friend Kenny Zarrilli sent me from Miami, city of the future. And after their riots, nothing improved much either as far as treating anyone they could get away with treating unfairly that way; however, things in the city changed so much in other ways, that some of the most affected places are today, if not better, at least different. Unforeseen circumstances that seemed to befall Miami at every point in its wacko history seemed to me like the unforeseen circumstances that befell L.A. And as morbid looking as Hollywood Boulevard was that day, there were only a few gutted and burned-out stores. I drove down Hollywood Boulevard, east toward my place, and except for the National Guard and the fear, it wasn’t really so bad.
“I expected a lot worse,” Renzo said. “Didn’t you?”
In my opinion, only two things can even remotely create a secure peace: justice and appreciating diversity enough to marry into it, not kill it, rape it, or pound it on the head when you think no one’s looking but fellow members of law enforcement whose idea of “undue force” is much more generous than Renzo’s. But then, he’s from New York and easily shocked.
So it wasn’t an earthquake that nearly destroyed the city but us, ourselves.
A woman I knew, who was from an old WASP California family (fourth generation, as old as they get in these parts), took me to a beach club in Santa Monica the day the Olympics began in L.A. in 1984. After lying in the sun, we went inside to watch the opening ceremonies on TV, and everything was going fine until the team from Israel came on, at which point almost everyone in that room, simultaneously, began to boo.
It wasn’t the first time I had had the feeling that WASPs are as bad as everyone thinks when they think no one is looking, but if that’s how they feel about Jews, just imagine how they must feel about everyone else they feel is too much trouble.
If all the police department did was boo at people they didn’t like when they thought no one was looking, L.A. would be a lot better off.
I COULDN’T DRIVE down my usual street to Melrose because the National Guard or the marines or someone was down on Santa Monica guarding Sears, and it smelled like wet ash, so I took Van Ness to Melrose and turned right where Nickodell’s was still standing behind its banana leaves, which were still as lush and fabulous as ever.
Except, like everything else in that neighborhood, Nickodell’s was closed, though it was usually open on Sunday. It was closed from fright.
I drove us west on Melrose, and we passed the Gap, which had its windows broken and was already boarded up. It struck me as unfair because their ads have been so benign, showing celebrities in plain T-shirts, the Gap’s obvious premise being “It ain’t much, but much is out.”
Style is no longer in style, basically. The celebrities photographed in Gap T-shirts look every bit as important as the ones in “What Becomes a Legend Most” mink coat ads, except that few celebrities would be caught dead in a mink coat anymore.
“All my T-shirts,” Renzo said, “I get there. I love their greens.”
He was wearing a faded olive-green T-shirt that matched his eyes so perfectly, it made my heart melt like the melted electronics stores all over town. But without the violence.
It was a perfect day for the beach, warm and sunny, but you couldn’t go to the beach and walk on the sand either—the first Sunday L.A.’s beaches were closed that I ever knew.
“Let’s drive around and see what’s happened,” Renzo said.
“No,” I said. “I can’t. Not yet.”
“Let’s go back to the Château then,” he said.
“Really?” I asked.
“It’s going to take a lot more than this,” he said, “to get you out of my system.”
Back at the hotel, just as we were coming up the stairs from the garage, we ran into the five kids again with Dylan, their leader, who said, “I met someone who knew which window. You were right, it was one of the bungalows.”
“So how did you like the, uh, last few days?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said, “well, you’d expect that out of L.A. wouldn’t you? Jim always did think it was all about to end, didn’t he? I mean in his songs. My father said that he was sort of apocalyptic in his thinking.”
“I think people read too much into Jim’s thinking,” I said. “How is your father anyway?”
“He skis a lot,” he said. “Renzo, I’ve got your books to sign, could you?”
“Show me,” Renzo said, “where the window is.”
He went with the kids to see the window and sign the books in Dylan’s room.
I went back to Renzo’s room and ordered us hot food from room service, and while I was waiting, I slid into a chair by the window overlooking the hills behind the city of the present, and talked to someone from the city of the past.
“I always had doubts about your damn town,” Vicky said, “but what could I do, you were always wearing that boa.”
“We were all like that then,” I said, “except you.”
“Haily’s in New York now,” she said. “Can you believe it? She’s Kate’s best friend. I can’t believe it. But Kate, I guess she’s got character or something. She forgave her about the closets and the walls and everything.”
“No,” I said. “Maybe she rises above things.”
“But how?” she wondered.
I assured her Nickodell’s was still standing and told her I’d call her later when I knew more.
“Hi.” Renzo smiled as I put down the phone. “This is the longest we’ve been apart since you took me to Kate’s house up there. It was Wednesday, this is Sunday; I missed you, and it’s only been fifteen minutes. My God, you’re worse than opium. You smell like it too. Sort of like jasmine and smoke.”
“That’s L.A.,” I resisted. “You Italians are such romantics.”
“Lucky for you,” he said, “or you’d have had to watch the whole thing on TV instead of only finding out later.”
And it’s true I was lucky to have someone who at least said all the corny things I was dying to say but couldn’t, for fear—once he was gone—of being filled with more regrets than I already was. One thing I’d learned from tango, turning to mush will get you nowhere.
“I missed you,” he said, again, his smile sad.
“Okay, okay,” I said, “it’s entirely possible, if I weren’t on the phone, I might have missed you too.”
His eyes met mine and once more we slid into an oblivion so intense, the whole city of the present could have further gone up in smoke. But it didn’t. Around us we were bathed in jacaranda flames, lavender, sticky clouds, full of cities of the future, which love alone can transpose into hope.
Tangoland
Architecturally, L.A. is a lot like epilepsy these days, full of grand malls and petit ones, enough to make you want to stay home or only go anywhere before anything opens. Which was why I was standing there on the escalator crawling up the outside of the Beverly Center (a grand mal if ever there was one), arriving at 9:50 a.m., before the parking lot became too jammed, when the place was entirely deserted. I have found that malls are an acquired taste, like anchovies, and just as I’m beginning to think they’re not that bad, they’ve become something of the past. But this was in the mid-eighties, when we still thought they were a brilliant solution—like credit cards, the way so many people I knew with credit cards were living on credit, the way people lived on margin in the stock market of the 1920s.
Anyway, I didn’t have any credit cards, didn’t think malls were a great idea, and all I wanted, in fact, were little bows to go on my high heels to tango.
My hair was still damp from the gym; I even had Velcro weights lashed to my ankles, which looked ridiculous, but then who would see me? I was, altogether, unsuitable for being presented at court or even running into anyone, since the only good thing about how I looked was healthy—and my color was flushed from the gym.
But then these are the times when you always run into the wrong person.
And I ran into him, Bradly—an acquired taste whom I, unfortunately, once thought I could easily afford.
What he was doing in the mall before it opened, standing at the top of the escalator I was ascending, I didn’t know. People said he went to malls all the time; he was a Rodeo Drive type—that was, in fact, one of the things about us not working out; I was a believer in finding perfect things in thrift shops, whereas he would not enter a place with the word “thrift” either stated or implied. He was expensive.
Except for him, I liked things—even men—who were kind of decrepit and had some elements of falling apart–ness, whereas he couldn’t help being what he looked like, an actor/ model who even liked new diamonds. Maybe it was some eighties curse clouding my mind that had made me suddenly decide maybe he wasn’t such a bad idea after all when we first met. I had thought, Just because he’s six-four with movie star hair and blue, blue eyes doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll dump me before I can get over him.
It’s horrible when someone dumps you, especially when he’s not your type. Seeing him again brought it all back, his crispy newness, his smell of Patou cologne, his six-thousand-dollar watch, even his shoes were too good for a normal person—a cursed normal person. I wanted to run like a normal person and not remember. . . . But it was too late, you can’t turn around on an escalator in an empty building. I was stuck in this later-day Piranisi tableau, my past a wreckage behind me, ruined like Western civilization itself, and all I could do was face the music.
I kissed him quickly (this being Hollywood) and said, “Bradly, how nice to see you.”
(Even his name wasn’t my type.)
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Bows,” I said, “for tango shoes.”
“I just never thought of you in a place like this,” he said. “Tango? I used to tango, it’s such a passionate dance.”
“Oh,” I said. “Passion.”
Our eyes met. He was the only person in whose eyes I ever found myself lost. It was just too sickening being cursed dressed wrong in a mall.
He used to look into my eyes so earnestly before he dumped me.
Con man hustler that he was.
Is, rather.
As lovers we knew each other beyond dreams of lust or avarice; it was bigger than both of us. Colors brightened like on mescaline around him, everything was funnier; life took on an arpeggio of mariachi harps. The world smelled of hot wildflowers on hay rides. Life without him was inconceivable, even though he was inconceivable, with his name and his hatred of old diamonds. Except very large old diamonds. He used to stare at me with worshipful admiration. Practically like I was a new diamond myself.
He’d stare at fashion magazines and want all those things, those houses, those trips, those restaurants, and that luggage. It was 1982. All of L.A. was getting like he was, though; the whole country was off on this Reagan roll, dreadful Trumped-up cities, but especially L.A.; a city built on the premise that downtown was unnecessary suddenly had one, we were rolling in traffic, quaint old neighborhoods fell to “improvements,” and people squeezed out of Central and South American countries by fear and poverty fought their way to “paradise”—us, L.A.
L.A. made its kids afraid of the future.
The poverty of values trickled down to the streets.
It was all a curse—a curse in eighties clothing.
Like the architecture, the dancing was too loud, too public. Plus the only people who could do these dances were nine-year-olds on MTV, or kids of seven like Michael Jackson clones.
Like the architecture, the dances only made people lonelier. Juliet Prowse introducing ballroom-dancing competitors on public television is practically the only place today you can even think about what it must have once been like to dream to music.
Oh, to have seen tango long ago.
Like all great partner-dancers, Valentino could look at and touch a woman without throwing her down on a floor; he could go into that space where time stands still—of music and romance and dalliance. Down in Buenos Aires, where white slave traders really did exist and were often Jewish, girls—often Jewish but also Italian and Spanish—were taken from their homes or the streets and hustled into bordellos, in a seaport town where lots of sailors brought lots of business and where there was lots of time to learn very complicated steps. Stravinsky wrote the tango in L’Histoire du Soldat in 1918; the high society in New York was frequenting low society, where people tangoed starting in 1913 to 1915, mingling with the hoi polloi. It was a ribbon through that time, tango, the way blues became later—the blues for white girls trapped in whorehouses who could never escape. And had lots of time to learn impossible steps.
As in L.A. now, everybody in Argentina was in exile; in New York, Valentino was in exile; Stravinsky was in exile; everyone in Hollywood was from someplace else. Those who danced tango were all in exile in tangoland.
I knew nothing about tango, of course, before going to see Tango Argentino. Before that, I was just like everyone else, believing what I saw on TV at the ballroom-dancing contests, where international-style tango was cursed by pancake-makeup dancers who looked like mechanical dolls on top of music boxes with head snaps that made no sense. Or else I believed the scary tango dancers in Last Tango in Paris that Bertolucci made grotesque. Like everyone else, before seeing Tango Argentino, I thought tango must be a mistake.
