Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales

by Mark O'Donnell

  She respected Van’s feverish idealism, but she was more romantically drawn to Cliff, regally brooding and commanding, despite the widespread presumption he was to be a failure. He became particularly notorious after desecrating a supposed miraculous image of the Virgin’s face, which some perceived at a certain angle in the rust stains on a local septic tank. Righteously annoyed, he threw red paint on it, simultaneously obscuring the local chamber of commerce’s hope that the image would become a tourist attraction. People gossiped even more nervously when Culvert, jealous of Cliff’s place in Carlotta’s affections, one day in a hungover haze offered him a hundred dollars to pedal his bicycle into the path of an oncoming truck. Cliff was used to dodging traffic, and impulsively accepted. At the last second Culvert repented and stopped Cliff, promising him the hundred dollars anyway. However, Cliff was intrigued and went ahead with the stunt, spinning nearly sideways under the truck’s high chassis, amazingly without injury. Carlotta perceived in both these incidents a holy misfit’s honor, unaware that it was more likely a delinquent’s stupid compulsion.

  One fateful night of their senior year, Van’s, Cliff’s, and Carlotta’s destinies became permanently knotted. It was a warm autumn night, and Carlotta didn’t accompany Van to his self-appointed swim practice, but instead rendezvoused secretly with truant Cliff in the school parking lot, where he set off some illegal fireworks he’d stolen. They also made love, her first experience, and its clumsy danger on the concrete, surrounded by a dazzling bower of sparklers and links of firecrackers, excited her. Tragically, one errant rocket went through an open gymnasium window and struck Van in the heel as he was preparing to dive, temporarily crippling him and permanently ending his hopes for a swimming career. People later said his limp was the most interesting thing about him, but when Carlotta found out what had happened, she was from that moment locked into her lifelong dilemma—guilty about Van’s wounded goodness, and guilty about Cliff’s compelling antisociability. Van was hers but wasn’t there. Cliff was there, but was not to be had. Her heart went out fearfully to both of them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THIN AIR AT HIGH ALTITUDES

  Mother Hover knew Carlotta was precipitously close to being in love with Cliff when the girl started coming home exhausted and smelling of gunpowder. In an uncharacteristically ingenious moment, like those adrenalized mothers who can suddenly lift autos off their trapped children, she convinced the alcoholically amnesiac Culvert Booney that he had had his way with Carlotta the night of the harmless Christmas light-decked dinner, and he must pay for her to go away and resolve her resulting pregnancy. Culvert remembered nothing, but in a twinge of retrospective satisfaction and remorse, took Mother Hover’s word for it. He gave her a large sum of money, which she announced was a scholarship to acting school for Carlotta, who had just impressed everyone playing Sacajawea, again wordlessly, in the Lewis and Clark float on Homecoming Day. Dishonestly, the money was used for exactly its announced purpose, and Carlotta, unaware of the deception, was packed off to New York City to study. Mother Hover felt guilty but relieved, having successfully bluffed her way through blackmail. Julienne now had her own room in which to chafe. Only after Carlotta left did people notice that Cliff had disappeared. Chick and Kitty each assumed he’d been staying with the other. The kindest gossips theorized he’d enlisted for service in Vietnam, but no one could imagine him taking orders from anybody. Van, meanwhile, recuperated from his leg injury by sorting through scholarship offers from numerous colleges and singing in his clear tenor for the other patients in his wing.

  In New York, Carlotta studied Acting Natural and Advanced Simplicity with Nestor Haze, a toweringly avuncular and cagily cornball old writer who had become an institution spinning jingoistic western novels and plays, including a movie about the Alamo that so stirred audiences that war was declared on Mexico as a result, which led to its conversion to our fifty-first state. He taught to keep his ego inflated on a daily basis, and because subservient young people were a fetching distraction from his typewriter. His students were generally aimless offspring of the famous, and here Carlotta met Shep Woodhead, an amiable and talentless nonentity who happened to be the son of an undistinguished president and the grandson of a great one, “Roaring Twenties” Woodhead, who is remembered for saying “Without American business, there would be no American pleasure.” Shep had not been called on to grasp business, but he knew his pleasure, and, typically smitten with Carlotta, took her to the hottest zebra-skin-hung and strobe-lit spots, happily dizzying her, if not quite winning her. At discotheques like the Go Go Stop and the I Love You Club, she began to catch producers’ eyes, and her luxurious red hair became a flattering banner for the nightclub set. Shep took her into men’s rooms to do cocaine while his bodyguards stood outside. He took her upstate to the family home on Paradox Lake, though she mistakenly thought it was called Paradise Lake until the ancient former first lady corrected her, explaining that flooding from higher ground made its water flow in contradictory directions. Carlotta was mortified to have erred before a celebrity, but old Mrs. Woodhead assured her many people thought Paradox was Paradise. When Shep asked Carlotta if she liked sailing, she said she was willing to.

  Meanwhile, Van was ascending, too. He won a scholarship to prestigious Leeward College, whose motto was To Stand and Mingle. Founded in colonial times as a divinity school, but latterly a trainer of businessmen, its dull brick buildings were as ponderous and maroon as unabridged dictionaries, and its endowment as vast and slow as that symbol of conservatism, the elephant. Here Van majored in government under the influence of a new set of friends, brash scions of Potency, or anyway, Solvency. His mentor at the Snake Club and the campus Vox was Win Woodhead, Shep’s antithetically brilliant twin brother. Generally, Win was cynical about the world, which study showed to be wicked, but he was fascinated by Van’s malleable virtue and cream-colored bangs. His father had rejected him for not being as cheerful as doggish Shep, and Win, in a combination of homosexual love, spite, and vicarious ambition, decided to mold Van into a future president. Van idolized Win’s savvy, and, like Carlotta, was mesmerized by the Woodheads’ money-salted mystique. He acceded uncomfortably to Win’s well-managed seductions, regarding their affair as a required course, but he was erotically indifferent. Virtue is not a virtue in bed. Gradually Win shifted his hopes for Van from Lover to Lifelong Project, which was after all only a slight adjustment.

  His subjugation to Win might have explained Van’s strange behavior during his occasional visits to Carlotta in New York, during which their mutual uneasiness was mistaken for a budding relationship. Each wanted to want the other more than they did, though they honestly shared the bond of orphans who witness each other’s rise in the world. As both grew busier and more popular in their respective circles, it was harder for them to get together, and that let them assume their love was unchanging.

  After graduation, Win engineered a high-paying job for Van at the Acquirable, the Woodheads’ huge New York—based insurance company. The job was crunching numbers, truly crunching numbers, human suffering compacted like trash into cubes of data, and it strengthened his resolve to relieve mankind and get noticed at the same time. True to their platonic course, Van moved to the city just as Carlotta was taken to Hollywood. She had excelled in her flat line readings of Nestor’s dustbowl ingenues, and he recommended her when a studio sought to film his loose retelling of the Wright brothers’ flight called Woman in Jeopardy. She was renamed Charlotte Haven, since “Carlotta” sounded overweight, and Haven is better than Hover. Her screaming in the picture—she dangled from a biplane while circling an active volcano—struck a responsive chord in audiences currently frightened by an unaccountable string of plane crashes. The picture was a sleeper hit, and Carlotta’s new-found agent, Jay Newfound, set her up for a string of pictures in which she would scream. She wanted to be happy, but she had been typed otherwise.

  Carlotta’s unsought success led her to a difficult showdown with Julienne, who ha
d taken the train to Los Angeles in her evening gown, hoping to emerge as a rival talent to her stepsister. Julienne assumed bitter feuding between them would attract the most publicity, and she was right, except Carlotta insisted on trying to reconcile, even insisting Julienne move in with her, which threw love’s wet blanket over the proceedings, and the press turned away. Julienne bitterly sipped champagne in Carlotta’s guest bungalow, acting as if she were plotting her next move.

  Then Carlotta’s goodwill turned inadvertently fatal. She brought Mother Hover out from Vertigo Park to live with her, but the superficial glories of Carlotta’s glittering house so thrilled and overwhelmed Mother Hover that she died of a heart attack ten minutes after her arrival. Julienne, eager to pin her agitation on external events, and undone by weeks of champagne, blamed Carlotta for their mother’s death, and after accusing Carlotta of everything she feared in herself, ran widdershins around the far side of the pool house, and disappeared.

  Carlotta had to return to Vertigo Park alone for Mother Hover’s funeral. Julienne had appeared to vanish, so to speak; even after all this time, no one knew where Cliff was, except he was rumored to have joined the Hell’s Angels; and the town itself seemed in its wan decay about to fade from sight—so Carlotta was grateful when faithfully visible Van showed up at the service. One of the Walker sons had been killed in Vietnam, so Van was torn between two coincidentally simultaneous funerals. Carlotta was flattered that he chose to be at her side, but she noticed he fidgeted throughout the service, in the way men do when they make a decision and then fear it’s the wrong one. He looked handsome in his dark suit, though, and Leeward had certainly taught him to mingle smoothly, even in somber situations. After Van finally reverted to his own family’s gravesite, Carlotta found herself suddenly confronted with revived advances from Culvert Booney, who assumed Hollywood had rinsed her of all inhibitions. Like the detested formal clothes of childhood, though, which are merely pathetic when unboxed years later, too tiny to be forced to wear, this once imposing figure seemed quaint and helpless, almost suckling as he sought a kiss from her. She had offered him a ride in the dark sanctum of her rented limousine, and when she rebuked his advances, Culvert angrily reminded her of what she had never known, that he believed he had once slept with her, and that he had paid for her to go away to avoid a scandal. Carlotta was boggled and sickened to realize Mother Hover’s darkest secret, especially only minutes after burying her, but she rallied—mourning dress gave her dramatic strength—and told Culvert the truth. He was shattered to learn of his own innocence, and even when she offered to pay him back, he could only murmur that he never suspected such things hadn’t gone on.

  Disillusioned and unnerved, Carlotta phoned Van seeking comfort, and he gladly rushed to her hotel room from the crowded Walker memorial party. She had never wanted him to hold her before, but both were dangerously vulnerable and proximate. Necessity is the mother of affection. They entwined like the babes in the woods, but the next morning, each returned to their subsuming daylight roles. She was determined to find the vanished Julienne, and he to find himself through selflessness.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  TERROR BENEATH THE GRAPES

  Win Woodhead was politically ambitious, but he rightly reckoned his disdainfulness made him unelectable, so he decided to get Van appointed to the National Safety Council. It appealed to Van’s idealism, and was a natural promotion from his statistical tasks at the Acquittable. Win presented Van to President Miles Phaeton Torque, who recognized Van’s niceness as a flavor missing from the spice rack of his staff. Van got the job, and quickly made headlines when he refused to attend the President’s second inaugural gala on the grounds that the energy required for the First Lady’s float was excessive. The subsequent blackout of the East Coast confirmed his concern, and the tabloids were soon filled with pictures of Van personally changing citizens’ fuses or putting poisons out of reach of children.

  In Hollywood, Carlotta’s distracted search for her stepsister impaired her performance in her second film, Centrifugal Force, which by the laws of criticism was bound to disappoint anyway. She did learn that Julienne had worked for a time as a clothes-check girl in a wild nightspot, and one day recognized her as the poster girl for an X-rated movie called Will Wanda Never Cease? Tracking her from these clues, she found out that Julienne had renamed herself Comet and joined a sex cult living in a bankrupt vineyard in the Sonoma Valley. This was a time when cults were in blossom. Carlotta borrowed Nestor’s luxuriously refitted pickup truck and drove north.

  Once on the vineyard property, Carlotta was captured by the dimwitted gardener, whom Carlotta recognized to her fright as Shep Woodhead, drug-addled, sunburned, and brainwashed to boot. He had dropped out of sight the previous year, and his family had felt looking for him might be too intrusive. He had come to California, since the picnic table called America is on a slant, and everything loose rolls there. His job was to pick up the empty liquor bottles, used syringes, and soiled lingerie that littered the grounds, and he was the only man in the cult besides its leader, the polygamous Pan the Man. Carlotta was further thrown when she was brought by torchlight before the commanding figure of Pan the Man, and he was the runaway Cliff Burns. After a stint as a biker and stuntman, he had discovered his charisma’s uses, and had set up his own community, which people pointed out later showed he was presidential material. Julienne was indeed there. She, too, loved Cliff, but was forgotten among dozens of his followers.

  As always, Carlotta was thrilled by Cliff, but she knew there could be no trustworthy romantic alliance with him. Still, she was dizzied when he took her hand and walked her through the lush but untended arbors. The moonlight made his totalitarian idyll seem more benign, and she lost her reasoning in the leafy maze of the dark vineyard. Somehow she succumbed to his immediacy a second time, again under stars scattered like loose change on God’s night table. Instead of fireworks, this time Cliff spiced his excitement by making love to her on the highway just beyond the gate. Luckily, no traffic passed while they were briefly forgetting their safety rules.

  Afterwards, Carlotta’s feelings were mixed, so mixed that they were about to spill. In the American tradition, there was a competing cult at the next bankrupt vineyard down the road, a group called the Dionysians, an order of deranged pockmarked men who were supposed to be ecstatic from alcohol but still seemed to brood over neighbor Cliff’s success with women. As it happened, man was landing on the moon for the first time that night, and the Dionysians had hallucinated the need to appease the moon with a female sacrifice. Two of its members, the two most able to walk, saw Carlotta in the road and seized her. They didn’t see Cliff, though. He carried a gun in the bathrobe he wore, and shot both men dead before they could drag Carlotta more than a few yards. She was unharmed, but her left cheek had been slashed with a knife. Even though man landed on the moon that night, the attack was still a major news story.

  Cliff was hailed as the rugged landowner who had saved a movie star’s life. Since his cult was all women, it was depicted by the press as a nest of pacific earth children, whereas the Dionysians weren’t just drunk and deranged, they were pockmarked. It was roundly concluded that no deliberation would be necessary to declare Cliff not guilty of manslaughter. Shep’s parents, who had finally tried but grown tired of looking for him, reclaimed him promptly, and enrolled him at Lilly Willow, a patrician old rehabilitation center. The public thrilled to Carlotta’s escape from death, and warmed to the fact that she had found her lost sister at last. Julienne, upstaged at her own rediscovery, despondently retreated to Vertigo Park to dispose of her mother’s and imaginary father’s belongings. Cliff was sought by numerous clubs, employers, and advertisers who wanted to borrow his presence to defend the right to bear arms or to endorse a spark plug. It all sounded too much like school, though, and he did nothing, instead taking off in Nestor’s fancy truck for days at a time, returning only to descend on Carlotta some dusk, a craggy Cupid surprising Psyche.

  Car
lotta’s publicized suffering made her exempt from ever receiving bad reviews again. Her scar gave her superficial depth, and overlooking it gave her public a smug sense of broad-mindedness. Her next film, Blood Pressure, again written for her by Nestor, presented her as a helpless call girl who refuses to entrap a liberal politician for the greedy colleagues who fear him. The apparent corruption of President Torque’s administration made the government a convenient villain for even the lightest entertainments. Nestor preserved her image by making this the call girl’s first job, and people began to refer to her as Our Charlotte.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PRESENTING THE WIND

  Two more Walker sons died in Vietnam, but these deaths were surprising, because the war there had been over for several years. Van’s investigation showed that the costly Ace of Spades helicopters in which both had crashed were carelessly manufactured by Woodhead Paper and Aircraft, the source of Shep and Win’s trust fund. A nervous stockholder, President Torque promoted Van to National Safety Adviser and called for full disclosure. Win continued to manage Van, indifferent to any potential distress the investigation might cause his family. Soon people were jokingly threatening to have each other investigated by Van Walker, and Win also convinced him to write a very thin book called Why Not Answers? which commendably, if vaguely and briefly, called for a return to idealism. It was a bestseller, and the National Council of Mothers declared Van their official choice for son-in-law.

  Carlotta, meanwhile, was increasingly unnerved by Cliff’s irregular midnight appearances at her house, and debated whether or not to demand his phone number and address. Although he resisted all employment, Cliff did agree to appear in a stage show produced by Nestor. He said he felt guilty about stealing Nestor’s truck. It was an improvised monolog, in which Cliff sat and drank a fifth of bourbon, urinated real urine, and fired a real gun at impulsive intervals. No rehearsal was needed, and after leading a cult, Cliff had acquired a taste for commandeering a crowd. The production, called Manolog, was a sensation in a small Los Angeles theater. Electrified by a drunken handsome man shooting out lights over their heads, people saw him as a free-living hero, a maverick unfettered by speechifying and special interests. The fact that he never injured anyone intentionally made him seem friendly, and his arbitrary pronouncements suggested a mystic cowboy. Cliff frequently missed performances, which was seen as integrity, and the defiant slap titillated even the stood-up audience. As time went by, however, Cliff became more dependable, and even seemed to look forward to showtime. This confused Carlotta. She wanted to see it as a sign of his socialization, but queasily guessed he was becoming a demagogue. Worse, he was still unpredictable in his visits to her, although he showed up at the theater right on schedule. She phoned Julienne occasionally, hoping to strengthen their bond by sharing her worries, but Julienne tended to insist that a nervous breakdown was what Carlotta needed. Finally, Carlotta gave Cliff an ultimatum—to give her his phone number, and to phone before arriving. He looked at her with cold disappointment, said he thought she knew better than to corral him, and walked out. When he failed to make the next hundred performances of Manolog, his audiences concluded that he had disappeared again. They respected his vanishing, though, as if it were duty and not dereliction.