Finally, they pulled up at an enormous house, ablaze with floodlights. Cars dotted every inch of gravel around it. What you could see of the roof was flat and angular, punching the night sky at odd angles. Angela wiped at her eyes and finally said, “Whose house is this? It’s fucking huge.”
“It’s fucking Wilt Chamberlain’s, that’s whose,” said Sheila.
“Fuck. No!” Angela screamed. “You got us an invite to Wilt’s house! Oh my God! And I was just sitting there all crying and shit when you walked in the house. Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“Well,” Sheila said, checking her eyes in the mirror. “I didn’t want to make you all nervous, you know. And you were so upset when I came home . . . I don’t know. I thought it would be a nice surprise.”
“Hell, yes,” said Angela. She fussed with her hair, reached out and took the lipstick Sheila extended toward her. “Everybody’s gonna be here.”
“Damn straight,” said Sheila. “Let’s go.”
They jumped out of the car, their four platformed feet hitting the ground at the same instant. Tossed their keys to the valet, who caught them on the beat. Colors pulsed from inside the house, orange and red and bright pink. They turned their heads toward each other, grinned. Walked in the door.
According to an article Angela had read in Ebony, the soft gray fur of the enormous conversation pit, had been gleaned, along with the fur for Wilt’s gigantic bedspread, from the nose fur of seventeen thousand Arctic wolves. The grayness was covered by brown bodies dressed in every silky shade of the rainbow, and over to the left, on a bed set into the middle of the floor, bodies half-undressed, entangled, flashes of breast and hair, a hand moving. The air was sulfurous with the mixed tang of pot and cigarette smoke. “Freddie’s Dead” pounded out of the stereo speakers, making their flared pant legs vibrate. Hundreds of people talked, embraced, screamed, pulled slowly on joints, and hoovered coke off a low glass table and off the belly of a blond woman who lay on the floor, spread-eagled, her eyes closed, her shirt off, slowly rubbing her nipples as if she were alone in her bedroom. Angela took it all in with the diffidence of the truly high. Then she felt a hand on her neck as she made her way toward the scene. “What’s up, lovely ladies?” Some man she’d never seen before, good-looking but still . . . She needed to find out who he was before she did anything. Her heart hummed in her chest.
“I’m doing all right. This is my friend . . . ,” she trailed off. Sheila was gone. “Well, she was right here.”
“Yeah, I saw her go. You’re the one I wanted to talk to anyway.” The smile. The look. The joint offered. The dance begun. He had a name. What was it? Sam or Tony or Reggie or John. This one was named Rafe. They always stood too close. They always looked at her face for one minute and her breasts for five. They always offered her joints and she always took them, inhaling deeply, feeling her head waft away from her body. Her mother wouldn’t have believed she could be so fast, going on the pill so she could fuck whomever she pleased, whenever she pleased, without worrying. Sizing it up. Looking for kicks. Filling her lungs with that sweet smoke and then dancing with him. He smelled good, like some kind of flower. She was so high that it was getting hard to stay awake, but she didn’t want to sleep, she didn’t want to miss this, so when he held the little mirror out to her, the powder heaped in a line, she took the rolled bill gratefully. As soon as she snorted it, she felt the top of her head explode, all light stars inside. In a minute or so she thought she might never need to sleep again. All she needed to do was keep dancing, keep talking, keep feeling Rafe’s lean hips against hers. She felt like every good idea ever conceived. She could see Sheila across the room in the conversation pit and she laughed and waved. Sheila laughed back. She had caught the night’s real prize; her leg was thrown casually across Wilt’s long, long leg as if Sheila found herself hugged up to the world’s most famous basketball player every day. He was rubbing her neck. They weren’t in a hurry. They both knew how this scene would end. Sheila smiled up at him, then back at Angela. “That your friend?” said Rafe.
“Yeah. Looks like Wilt’s gonna get lucky tonight,” said Angela.
“Wilt? How would you know he’s getting lucky with your friend?”
Angela smiled mysteriously. “A girl can just tell.” She ground her hips into his a little. “If you play your cards right, you might get lucky too.” She could see he was trying to figure out the deal between her and Sheila. She could tell it turned him on too, which just got her more excited. The song had changed to “Ben.” Angela saw Wilt get up, extend his hand to Sheila. They left the room, he lowering his hand to cup her ass briefly. Rafe looked at them speculatively. “Guess you’re right about Wilt.” He paused. “You know, the playroom—where they’re going—is just down that hall. Wanna go with?” Angela had been running her tongue around and around her teeth. She felt the separation of each one with particular intensity. “Sure. Let’s see what they’re doing.” She looked at him, her eyes challenging.
They went down the hall, which was dimly lit every few feet with sconces that gave off a warm purple light. Rafe backed Angela up underneath one of them and started kissing her before they even got to the playroom. She couldn’t open her mouth wide enough underneath his. Couldn’t pull him close enough to her. He stopped after a minute and pulled her the rest of the way down the hall.
The playroom. What to say about the playroom? There wasn’t a pinball machine. The room had five sides, three of them mirrored, and a vast pink circular sofa surrounding a huge open surface that undulated gently from the weight of the bodies already moving on it: the biggest waterbed Angela had ever seen. When she and Rafe entered the room, Sheila and Wilt were already there, had already begun. They stood in the doorway a frozen moment, quiet. Angela’s high fell away just for a second; she remembered what it was like to crouch in her mama’s backyard with her sister, watching a box they had propped up on a stick and waiting for a bird to blunder underneath. They always thought that someday they’d catch a bird that way. But they never did. Where’d that come from? That memory somehow propelled her into the room in front of Rafe, propelled her onto the bed next to her friend. Sheila opened her eyes and looked at Angela steadily. She was so lovely; Angela wanted to kiss her. Wilt was still working away on Sheila’s breasts, but Angela knew in that moment that Sheila was thinking of her. Wilt never looked up. Angela swallowed and sank onto the bed, and Rafe came up behind her on his knees, his hands on her breasts before she could even exhale. She could feel his breath hot on the back of her neck. “You done this before?” she murmured.
“Done what?”
“You know—more than one person,” she said.
“No.” He turned her to face him, started unbuttoning her silky blouse. “But I’m always willing to try new things. I think a person ought to be willing.” He had her shirt off now. “To try new things,” he said.
“Right.”
His mouth closed on her breast. She stopped thinking. Her favorite part was when her mind went off altogether. The bed moved beneath them. She was unbearably excited by Sheila’s moans, by the bed waving and swirling beneath them, by the knowledge that this man was a stranger to her, by the mouth on her breasts, by how far away it was from Tulsa, from anything anybody ever thought of in Tulsa, by knowing that her mother would never understand this in a thousand years. She pulled him—what was his name? oh yeah, Rafe—inside her. She cried out, just after Sheila. Everything seemed very clear. And then it was over.
The next thing she knew, she was home in her own bed. She had no idea how she’d gotten there, where Sheila was, what had transpired after the events in Wilt’s playroom. Her mind turned gray at just that point, covering a harder-edged truth. She looked at her yellowing shade, could feel that her hair was totally flattened, her mascara smeared all over her eyes, lipstick a pathetic reddish memory. She was still wearing her jeans. She skinned her hand into her pocket, drew out a small piece of paper. “In case you want to get to know me better . . . 555–
8976. You something else, girl. Rafe.” Rafe. Hmm. They usually didn’t give her a number. It might be worth calling.
While she was considering this, Sheila came to the door and leaned in the doorway. Her hair was matted on one side and bushed out on the other. Her eyes were reddened and her mouth looked bruised. Angela looked at her, smiled slightly, and said, “Girl, you look a mess.”
“Well, you ain’t exactly ready for your close-up either, girl.” She pulled absently on the flattened side of her hair, then came and lay down next to Angela. “Some night last night, huh?”
“Who you telling?”
They were silent. “Think Wilt’s gonna call you?”
“Nah.” She went quiet again, looking at the ceiling. “He was something, though. I never been with somebody so tall. Hadda keep scooting up and down. Felt like a damn fireman on a pole.” Angela laughed and took her hand. The sun suggested itself, warm and inviting, outside her window. Living in a way nobody in Tulsa could ever even have dreamed of, she felt not the least bit dirty. Not this morning. She didn’t even mind that Sheila had been with someone else. They were just two girls doing what a girl’s got to do. They’d always have each other. She ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. It tasted as though a desert resided there, hot grit and sand and the rot of dead things. She sat up, told Sheila she was going for a shower, walked to the bathroom. Once she got there, she looked at herself for a long, long while, her face out of focus from time and sex and cigarette smoke. She had a sudden moment, just a moment, where everything fell away, where she knew that her mother was right, this was never going to work out. But she pushed that thought away, drew a deep breath, turned on the shower. Another day begun. Another day begun.
5
HERE WAS THE THING ABOUT LOS ANGELES THAT year: it was hot. Not just hot: the Santa Anas blowing 100 degrees so that you could barely breathe half the time. Not just hot: the air like sandpaper on the skin, the sun like a weapon. Not just hot: you had to spread newspaper on the seat of the fanciest car in order to have any hope of sitting there. But it wasn’t just hot with the weather. It was hot with change, with happening, with beautiful black girls pulling up from every little dogtown and holler and city and shouting, “We want to be in pictures.” Rafe Madigan could have any girl he wanted. He could have them any way he wanted: doggie-style, ass-backward, all happy to go down on him (black girls—happy to go down on him!), two at a time. No matter what he asked, he found some beautiful young woman willing to do it. Sometimes he’d try asking for the freakiest thing he could think of just to see if they’d refuse. But they never said no. Never. He was born and raised in Los Angeles and he’d been a good-looking, smooth-talking, heart-stealing black man all his life, yet he had never seen anything like it. Got kind of boring sometime. Just waiting to see if he could find somebody different. Somebody who might make him feel different. It was a great warm, wet sea of flesh after a while. Couldn’t tell one from the other. A few sweet words, a mention of the movie business, and he was in. One more fuck.
That’s what it was like when he met Angela. He was acting a lot. He’d been on the fringes of the business since ’68 but somewhere around ’71 after Sweetback and after Sam Arkoff and Roger Corman figured they could make some goddamn money fast off this game, he couldn’t stop working. He just had to show up at an audition and the part was his. Never the lead, though. He was handsome, but he wasn’t quite something enough for that. So he played his share of cops and bouncers and sweet kid brothers of the leading lady. He kept busy. And he was called in a lot to read with people—the audition traffic had never been heavier.
When Angela came in for her audition, Rafe wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. He’d been idly checking out the girls as they came in—that one had a nice ass, this one pretty lips—but he didn’t think much beyond that. Until she came in. There was something so sweet about her, that little bit of a southern accent that she was trying unsuccessfully to hide, the long, pliable neck with a hollow at the base that he couldn’t help but think of kissing, breasts that looked as though they’d fit right into his hands. She was something else. Thing was, the producer saw it too. Rafe saw the whole thing happen—the card, the look between them, the hardness that came into her eyes. And he knew he’d have to wait until Kaufman was done with her to make his move. She walked right out past him without another word after the audition. No rap, no phone number, no nothing. He was out in the cold. He didn’t worry about it long. There was always someone else. But she did have an elegant throat.
That’s actually how he remembered her a year later when he saw her at Wilt’s—that long neck. He came right up behind her and put his hand on the length of it and she still didn’t remember him. She was pretty fucked up but still beautiful. She must have been smoking all night. More than that, she was getting that look people get when it’s not happening. Rafe had seen it before. The parts don’t come and the change doesn’t come and the moment you moved out here for doesn’t come and there you are. Your blood starts to turn to ice. He could see it in her eyes. He came with the rap anyway. Might as well get some.
But it was that last moment of softness he saw in her that made him give her his phone number. After they’d finished, when they were lying together on the bed, the last ripples dying beneath them, Wilt and that girl she knew just a few feet away, he could see her eyes in the half-light of the room. There were tears there. She looked about fifteen, just a girl. That touched him somehow, made him want to know her. So he slipped his number into her pants pocket after she fell asleep.
He didn’t think about the fact that he’d left her there. These girls didn’t ask anything of you. Except maybe that you help get them a part. They didn’t seem to need to be courted or treated well, they didn’t ask questions, they didn’t mind if you didn’t take them to dinner, or if you didn’t know their names. They just wanted to be in those movies. They didn’t know there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about that.
It was a Sunday afternoon when she called him. Sundays were hard. You spent the morning getting over Saturday, either regretting or celebrating or trying to remember what you’d done and hoping it wasn’t too fucked up. Then maybe you’d go out to lunch, but then there was the afternoon. Maybe a movie in Westwood, but that didn’t last all day. Maybe somebody you knew from a picture was home, trying to decide what to do with himself too. Maybe you’d have to face the day alone, but that was to be avoided at all costs. He was grateful when the phone rang. He didn’t care who it was.
“Hi, is this Rafe?” A girl’s voice, southern.
“Sure is. Who’s this?”
A pause. “We met the other day, well, night really. At Wilt’s house?” She trailed off, silence yawning. He smiled. “Sure. I remember. We had a pretty good time. Angela, right?”
“Right.”
He could hear the easing in her voice. What could she have said to further identify herself: that was me you were fucking at that party? “Well, Angela, how you been?”
“I been all right. Took me a couple of days to get over that party. You know.”
“How well I do. It was some party.” They fell into an awkward silence. “Well, Angela, can I ask why you called?”
“It’s Sunday. My roommate’s out. The light was making me sad.”
“What?”
“The light was making me sad. Doesn’t that ever happen to you? It comes in all orange and soft and it just feels sad. Like you gotta talk to somebody? I found your number.” She stopped.
His heart tightened oddly at her words. “What are you doing now?” he said.
“Nothing. That’s why I called,” she said.
“Well, why don’t you meet me at the Santa Monica Pier in about half an hour. We can do nothing together.”
“OK.” He could hear the relief in her voice. That made him feel a little sad too.
There had been a break in the heat—the sun was on his back was friendly, not a hammer, as he waited not far from the Ferris whee
l. The distant shouts of children in the surf made a counterpoint to the music from the merry-go-rounds and Scramblers and everything else behind him. It made him think of how he loved coming here with his old man, the few times he’d managed to do it before his father died. The music made him feel hopeful. He was just listening and staring out at the water so intently that he didn’t even hear her come up behind him. She put her hands over his eyes, laughing. He turned around, caught her wrists. “Girl, you don’t know me that well yet.” But he was laughing too.
“I don’t know,” she said, poking him gently in the belly. “I think I know you pretty well. Rafe, right? Don’t like to waste any time with a girl.”
“No, I don’t. And my last name’s Madigan. Just so you know.”
“Mine’s Edwards. Angela Edwards.” She laughed. “Seen you naked and I still didn’t know that. That is really something,” she said. She leaned on the railing next to him and looked out at the sea. “Really something.”
He felt, for the first time in months, a little uncomfortable about . . . well, about that. About balling a girl before you even knew her last name. This girl anyway. “So,” he said after a while. “How long you been out here?” They both kept looking at the sea.
Third Girl from the Left Page 6
