by Susan Kandel
Which gave me pause.
I had been neglecting my index cards.
One of them in particular seemed to be calling out to me. That would be the pink one that read “Salvador Dalí/Too many nipples/Too many coincidences.” I was listening now. Why the hell not?
Woman’s intuition beats reverse chronological order on average three to one.
“WATCH IT!” A girl in a UCLA sweatshirt sped past me on her bike, her long blond hair slapping me in the face.
“You watch it!”
Late for a chemistry lab, or an astronomy lecture, or maybe a Chaucer reading group. I hated her. Only because I’d once wanted to be her. But I’d made the mistake of taking that job at D’Amico’s when I was sixteen instead of prepping for the SATs.
And yet, if I hadn’t still been working at D’Amico’s a year later, I never would’ve met Roger, the handsome Princeton grad student from Newport, Rhode Island. And if Roger hadn’t had a father he wanted to punish (turned out I was the punishment), he wouldn’t have come down to Asbury Park for the weekend. And if he hadn’t been hungry for pizza (it seems obvious, doesn’t it?), I wouldn’t have had Annie. And if I hadn’t altered my master plan to raise her and help Roger get started in his career, who knows where I’d be? I certainly wouldn’t be writing biographies of dead mystery authors. That, ironically, only came about because of Roger’s chief character defect. He was a shirker.
I could’ve said ass, but I’m a lady.
Early in his battle for tenure at the University of Chicago, Roger—currently the world’s second leading authority on James Fenimore Cooper, much to his chagrin—was assigned a course in American popular literature, fondly known as “Shit Lit.” Since I was the one who regularly cleaned up his shit, he’d doled out the research to me. Let’s just say he lived to regret it. I spent weeks digging into police procedurals. I was so thorough I surprised even myself—not to mention one of Roger’s colleagues with her own imprint at a small press. My first book contract about killed him. He liked me a lot better when I was hostessing at the faculty club.
Anyway, some things still made me feel young and dumb. Being at UCLA, for example. Getting slapped around by a coed. But here I was, just the same.
The art library was nearly empty. Maybe college students didn’t use libraries anymore. Maybe they did everything online. I found the section on surrealism, borrowed an available trolley, and loaded it up with books on Salvador Dalí.
I loved research. I’d learned by watching Roger, then doing everything the opposite way. It was a lot like shopping. Your senses are on high alert. Your pupils shrink to pinpricks. Nothing escapes your notice. You are searching for the clever juxtaposition. The creative solution to the recalcitrant problem. Take Adrian’s emphasis, during World War II, on pockets, plackets, and goring to create interest in lieu of techniques that would have cost rationed fabric. There’s a creative solution. If you stumble upon a piece by Adrian, consider yourself lucky. Or a peplum jacket from the fifties, maybe in a nice mohair and cashmere. Lilli Ann, a California label, did some gorgeous ones. Nothing, and I mean nothing, camouflages childbearing hips better than a peplum.
I sat down at the nearest open carrel and pulled a heavy book from the stack on the trolley. It must’ve weighed ten pounds. I shook my head in disapproval. Good research involves culling the telling detail, not accumulating them willy-nilly. I heaved the book onto the table and it fell open to a double-page spread of a painting from 1938.
It was lovely, a sepia-toned image of a young woman, almost Vermeer-like in its stillness. The woman’s head was bent reverently over a letter. Not what you’d expect from Salvador Dalí. I stared at it awhile. Then, suddenly, it dissolved into an image of a man with a heavy mustache and beard, sort of Sigmund Freud crossed with William Shakespeare. The big daddies. The title of the painting was The Image Disappears. There was a quote from the artist: “We see what we have reason to see, especially what we believe we are going to see.”
I flipped back to the front and started reading. Dalí was born May 11, 1904, in Figueras, a small town in Spain, though he liked to claim he was born not once but twice. This was because he was not the first Salvador Dalí his parents had. The first died as a baby. The second arrived exactly nine months and ten days later. Creepy. That was Dalí’s life in a nutshell.
He was a teenage prodigy known for his bizarre outfits as well as his uncanny ability to fake any style: impressionism, pointilism, purism, cubism, futurism. It was when he began experimenting with surrealism in the late 1920s that he finally came into his own.
His dreams became raw material. He made paintings of angelic babies eating bloody rats, disembodied heads being attacked by ants, flaccid limbs, melting watches, drooping tigers, and gelatinous everything. Everywhere were double images and concealed self-portraits. Favorite fetishes included keys, nails, zippers, and teeth. And his audience couldn’t get enough.
Pale as a cadaver, his mustache waxed to perfection, he became a master of self-promotion. He designed shirts, fabrics, ties, calendars, ashtrays, oyster knives. André Breton, the leader of the surrealists, eventually turned on him, calling him by an anagram of his proper name, “Avida Dollars.”
His phobias multiplied as fast as his successes. He was afraid of everything. He couldn’t buy shoes because he feared exposing his feet in public. On his first crossing to the United States, he never took off his life vest. He was so shy that he once addressed the public in a diving suit and almost suffocated when he couldn’t remove the helmet.
I was riveted. I wanted to keep reading. But personal edification wasn’t the goal. I had to maintain focus, a key axiom of shopping and scholarship alike. What did any of this have to do with anything? Nothing. I was looking for some esoteric clue that wasn’t there. After all, there was one perfectly plausible, perfectly logical answer to the question of why Salvador Dalí’s name kept cropping up. Edgar Edwards was an art collector. He had an interest in buying work by Salvador Dalí. Asher Farrell and Mitchell Honey were art professionals. They had an interest in making that possible. They were doing their homework, that was all. That had to be it. And it made perfect sense, Edgar’s attraction to this particular artist. Dalí was strange; Edgar was strange. Dalí loved practical jokes; Edgar did, too.
I walked back to my car swinging my purse around and around in circles. Okay. So Dalí was a dead end. Back to square one. Shit. Too bad Lois hadn’t panned out. But how could I have expected anything from her? She and Marlene were hopeless.
I pulled out of the parking garage and turned onto Sunset Boulevard, going east.
Avida Dollars. That was really good. I wondered if you could come up with any good anagrams for Edgar Edwards.
“Rage” was in there. “Dada,” too. Also “sad.”
Poor dead Edgar. None of this should have happened.
If Edgar’s name had had an l in it, you could’ve spelled out “raw deal.”
22
It was almost eight P.M. Gambino would be here any second.
I shimmied into a pair of black leggings and a pink off-the-shoulder sweater. The mirror was behind me. I turned around and studied my reflection.
All ready for the remake of Flashdance.
Next I tried a Halston ivory cashmere tunic and matching palazzo pants.
I looked like a milkman.
A striped shirtdress from the forties made me look like a USO volunteer. The addition of stiletto ankle boots made me look like a demented USO volunteer. But maybe that was okay. I was getting bored.
Tut, tut. A girl cannot afford to be complacent. There was always my fuchsia sari dress; the matching stole was big enough to use as a tent if we decided to camp out. Or my sheer metallic cowl-neck ensemble, a must for the shy girl coming out of her shell. But since I wasn’t shy, it seemed redundant. Then it came to me. You can never go wrong with Azzedine Alaïa.
I pulled the long-sleeved black dress off the hanger. I remembered the afternoon I bought it, after catchi
ng Roger in bed with one of his grad students. It was a thick, semigloss knit with a low square neckline and a seam running up the center of the back that gave new meaning to the phrase “lift and separate.” And separate we did. He had an excuse, like always, but that was the day I finally gave him the boot.
I wriggled into the dress and twisted my neck to get the rear view. I could live with it. The sixties were difficult for me to pull off, with all those straight up-and-down lines, but the eighties, now those were good years for shapely women like myself.
A car door slammed. I slipped a lipstick into my purse, and opened the front door.
Gambino, freshly shaven and in a dark sports jacket and jeans, was standing there with a bouquet of red roses.
“Did the guys tell you to do that?” I asked.
“If I did everything the guys told me to do, I’d be in a lot of trouble by now.”
“I think you’re already in trouble.”
“I am?”
“You’re looking more and more like husband material.” Shit. I didn’t say that. “I didn’t say that.” Shit.
“Say what?” He was grinning from ear to ear.
“Stay here while I stick these in a vase.”
“Am I taking orders from you now?”
“Any complaints?”
“Nope.”
I found a black lacquered vase under the sink, but it had several chips. It was over. Ditto the wildflowers Lael had picked for me. I pulled them out of my tall crystal vase, dumped the brackish water, filled the thing with clean water from the tap, and arranged the roses. Impulsive. Unrestrained. Rash. Only a fool says everything that’s on her mind.
We drove to Nancy Olsen’s cabaret show in silence.
Finally, Gambino said, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“About what?” I asked, opening my window.
“About what you said before.”
“No. The light’s green.”
He hit the gas. “Do you want to talk about anything?”
“The weather.”
“It’s cold out. Why’d you open the window?”
I closed the window. The traffic got bad around Hyperion. We were stalled for a while behind an old yellow Pontiac.
“Why don’t you put the siren on? Isn’t that one of the perks of your job?”
“Cece.”
“Okay.”
“Can we talk about it soon?”
“It what?”
“Us. The future. We need to talk.”
“Okay.”
“When?” he asked.
“In one week.”
“Seven days?”
“Seven days.”
“Make it six, and you have a deal.”
“Deal.”
He pulled into the driveway of the Witching Hour, which was located in a former body shop on a back alley in Silver Lake.
“You take me to all the best places,” I said.
“I thought you were taking me.”
“Does it matter?”
“Nope.”
Inside, the walls and ceilings were painted black. It was Sunday night, but Saturday night had evidently lived on. There was broken glass on the floor, dirty cups on empty tables, and a hostess with matted platinum-blond hair who seemed to have just emerged from a coma. With great effort of will, she seated us at a small table near the stage. An Asian girl who looked about twelve took our drink order. As she walked away, I caught a glimpse of her tattoo poking up over the back of her leather shorts. It was a royal flush.
“Do I need a tattoo like that?” I asked, still pouting a little.
“You, babe, have everything you need.”
I rewarded him with a lip lock.
“So what happened to our drinks?” he asked after a while.
The room was starting to fill up. Maybe the waitress was overwhelmed. She should’ve probably been home, practicing her multiplication tables or something.
“I’ll check.”
I walked over to the bar and waited. There were two guys in lumberjack shirts standing next to me. I thought I heard them talking about Nancy Olsen.
“Do you know what time she comes on?” I asked.
“Why? You in a hurry to get out of here?” asked the taller one. The shorter one just leered into his beer.
“No,” I said. “I’m with the gentleman over there.” I pointed toward Gambino.
“The cop?” asked the tall one.
I nodded. They made themselves scarce. With our drinks in hand, I returned to the table. Gambino was deep in conversation with the hostess. When she saw me coming, she disappeared.
“What’s with her?”
“She wanted to know how to get rid of the hookers that hang out in the back of the parking lot.”
“How do all these people know you’re a cop?”
“People know.”
The lights dimmed as the musicians came out. A guy on keyboards, another on drums, and a third with an electric guitar. They sat down and the stage went black. Then a white spotlight shone on somebody’s teeny-tiny form. Nancy Olsen. What a piece of work. She was wearing her tartan minikilt, her tank top, and a spiked dog collar with a chain that circled around her body several times and hooked onto one of her motorcycle boots. She scowled at the audience, which I think meant hello. Then the guitar started screeching and she started wailing.
What followed was the weirdest performance I’ve ever seen. And I don’t mean Nancy howling “Some days it don’t pay to get out of your crypt,” because on occasion I’ve felt the very same way. No, things got weird when she wrapped up the vampire number, and “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and disappeared backstage only to emerge as Dolly Parton—I mean with boobs spilling out of a peach sequined halter dress, foot-tall blond hair, and foot-long peach fingernails, belting out what sounded like “My Tennessee Mountain Ham.” The twang was dead-on.
“Who is this girl?” Gambino whispered.
“I have no idea.”
“Do you want another drink?”
“Good idea.”
After warbling her way through “9 to 5,” Nancy went backstage again. A Betty Boop cartoon came on. When it was done, she returned in a mauve cocktail dress with padded shoulders and a come-hither look in her eyes. She blew a few kisses around the room, then draped herself across the top of a baby grand piano the keyboard player had wheeled in. He put a wineglass out with a couple of dollars already in it, sat down, and played a few bars. She introduced him as “Bobby,” then did a credible job with “Stormy Weather,” though she positively burned through “I Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good).” She was still a kid, but to sing like that you had to have survived some messy affairs of the heart.
“Would you call her versatile?” Gambino asked.
I tapped my fingers on the table. “Schizophrenic.”
The hostess came over again and whispered something in Gambino’s ear. He nodded and got up.
“I’m going to go help this woman for a second.”
“I thought you were off duty.”
“I’ll be right back.” He leaned down to kiss me.
“Be careful.”
“I think I can handle a couple of hookers.”
Nancy left the stage and the guitar player announced it would be a few minutes until the grand finale. They started projecting footage of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to JFK. You couldn’t hear Marilyn, though, because the room was so loud. I checked my watch. It was eleven forty-five. Almost the witching hour. I got up and headed to the ladies’ room.
It hit me as I stood in front of the bathroom’s grimy mirror. Gambino and I were having a normal evening. An actual date. Okay, maybe I’d jumped the gun a little with my comment, but he’d taken it well. I reapplied my lipstick. Very well, in fact, considering that marriage was one of his sore spots, too, thanks to his own cheating ex-spouse. That was part of the problem the first time we got together four years ago. It was too soon for both of us. Maybe this was finally
the right moment. We were learning to trust each other.
Earth to Cece.
This was not a normal evening. This was not an actual date. I was doing surveillance on Nancy Olsen. I had to tell Gambino because we had no chance whatsoever of making it if I kept having all these agendas he knew nothing about. I regarded my mouth dispassionately. An error. I would be throwing away all my heavy lipsticks. Heavy lipstick was yet another defense mechanism I was done with.
“Sorry to bother you,” came a voice from one of the stalls, “but there’s no bathroom tissue in here….”
I checked in the other stall, but there wasn’t any in there either, so I grabbed some paper towels from the dispenser and bent down to shove them under the door. I found myself face-to-face with a pair of high-heeled red slingbacks and some expensive-looking stockings.
“Clarissa?”
There was a flush and the door opened, almost knocking me over.
“Cece, dear, watch yourself. What a lovely surprise.”
“Clarissa. All the way from Phoenix. What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to surprise my daughter, of course.”
She washed her hands ferociously, like she did everything else. “Nancy doesn’t know I’m here, though. I don’t want to make her nervous.”
I was nervous just standing next to her.
She yanked down some paper towels and dried her hands until they were almost as red as her shoes and her dress. Red was her signature color, I guess.
“How’s the book coming?” I asked.
“Spectacularly. And yours?”
“I finished it.” A white lie. White was my signature color.
“I can’t wait to read it.”
“Thanks for the support.”
“We don’t want to miss the finale.”
“We certainly don’t,” I said, heading for the door. She didn’t move. I paused. “Would you like to join me? There’s room at the table.”
“No,” she said, smiling furiously. “I’m fine here.”
I supposed she’d come out when she was ready.
