It’s true that I never believed in Crassius’s Dark Lady theory. Not through prep school, not later on in my undergraduate years at Harvard, not while I was getting my MA at Columbia, and in truth I never in my life ever expected to believe the theory. But that seems ages ago, before I arrived at UCLA to study for my doctorate under Irian St George, before I fell under the spell of his well-known personal charms, academic brilliance and suave persuasiveness … But wait! I don't want you to get the idea that the elderly Franco-Armenian-American scholar – personally delightful as he might have been – was my Dark Lady. Ridiculous as that sounds, I sometimes wish it were true, because it would be so uncomplicated. Well, relatively uncomplicated, compared to the more Byzantine and unpalatable truth.
No, while St George is undoubtedly responsible for leading me onto the path I eventually took, it wasn’t all him. And no, it wasn’t (though people have speculated, gossiped) even the great author Damon Von Slyke, at whose home in the Hollywood Hills I ended up living that fateful summer, ostensibly to catalogue the enormous mass of thirty-eight years of his manuscripts and papers preparatory to their being packaged and sent off (sold off really, and for a pretty penny) to a prestigious university library back East. After all, Von Slyke was in Europe all that summer: from London to Hamburg to Majorca. Once the job was set up and the keys to the house handed to me, and Conchita, the maid’s, days arranged, I was left alone. I think we only slept one night in the place, he in the master suite, I in a guest bedroom across the courtyard with its ceramic colored Cuernavaca tiles and fountain.
It’s really so difficult to begin to explain how it all happened, to explain what happened; it all became so snarled up and confused, so fraught with non-essential matters, encumbrances having to do with gaining tenure and securing academic standing, with publicity and publishing, with the personal lives of, well, of myself, among others. So, let me just say straight out that none of it was planned, there was never any malice aforethought, certainly no hint that I’d find anything quite so explosive.
And yes, if you must have it spelled out, it all happened by accident (though Von Slyke and St George would tell you there’s no such thing as ‘accident’): the accident being that among Von Slyke’s scores of cardboard boxes of manuscripts and papers I discovered … a manuscript … and through that single, at first utterly baffling and later on revelatory discovery, I made other discoveries – not only of works, but of the existence of a certain person until then totally unknown to any scholar or historian of the 1970s and 1980s. And how as a result of discovering this person, I unearthed his various relationships to and effects upon not only Von Slyke, but also Dominic De Petrie and Jeff Weber and Aaron Axenfeld, on Cameron Powers and Rowland Etheridge, on Mitchell Leo and Frankie McKewen and Mark Dodge, all the members of the legendary Purple Circle (as well as his effect upon some of their hangers-on), and thus his centrality of influence upon what we know to be that bursting bright nova of American literature in the last decades of the twentieth century.
So, yes, that was the key moment, when everything changed, although I didn’t know it at the time, thought something else was going on, certainly not anything that would forever alter my understanding, my sense of values, my life itself. And yes, it’s only natural, after all that, that a little thing like a belief would also easily fall victim.
I’m still not certain this is how I should do it. Or even if I should do it. Except there are so many people who hate me now for what happened, who blame me and who are convinced it was deliberate, that I wanted to undermine and expose, sought to destroy, carried secret prejudices, harbored low motives from the very beginning. From before the beginning.
None of which is true: I swear it!
I’m getting nowhere, circling, and circling, like a half-blinded bird over some fallen morsel. Bird of prey, others would say, over some not yet fully dead creature. Carnivorous insect, even others would say, attracted to the putrid, rotting flesh of long-dead carcasses.
Maybe I’d better try at what was the actual beginning – I don’t know how else to do it – the late morning that I drove my newly leased Celica convertible to Von Slyke’s house …
BOOK ONE
The Von Slyke Papers
From the pubescently trembling onset itself, we’d dared aspire to that lofty elevation, into the nearly godly presence our incomplete knowledge hinted at, and which our as yet untried instincts assured us existed; not at some vast remove, but instead here at hand, fluttering almost peripheral, within our grasp; if only we dared … extend ourselves
Damon Von Slyke,
Systems for Approaching Emmeline
IT WAS A LATE MAY MORNING as I drove my newly leased, late-model Celica convertible to Damon Von Slyke’s house. Being a relative stranger to the so-called ‘Southland’, I was closely following his directions, from Westwood along Sunset Boulevard through the famous Sunset Strip, turning at Laurel Canyon first onto Hollywood Boulevard, then, a few blocks later, turning again onto Franklin Avenue, where I cruised several blocks high above the old and imperfectly revitalized Hollywood of our day: a residential neighborhood redolent of the Cinema town of two-thirds of a century ago; lengthy blocks where 1920s high-rises with French names and Gallo-Gothic architectural ornaments were interspersed with vaguely Spanish-style garden apartments. The north side of the street was suddenly different, covered in foliage – spindly poinsettia trees with blackish bark and hot red flowers larger than your head, grotesquely twisted pine trees, lush candleflower bushes, fragrant eucalyptus, mixed with cerise bougainvillaea’s papery flowers and clumps of Birds of Paradise, growing hard and straight like primeval cycads, all of it luxuriant and tropical, Eocene and slapdash, designed to hide yards and yards of twenty-foot-high wrought-iron fencing and gates, behind which lay Runyon Canyon, several semi-public gardens and a score of big silent-movie-star mansions put up when the town below was a handful of Victorian wooden houses along a newly macadamized main street.
After driving past twice, I at last found my turn onto the liana-overhung gloom of a dead-end road and, slowly inching along its narrow length, located the frond-hidden sign. Following Von Slyke’s earlier instructions, I used my car phone to call.
‘Hi!’ Von Slyke answered, as always sounding about twelve years old. ‘You made it! Now when we hang up, point the phone at the sign, hit the pound key and dial these numbers, 7-5-8-8. It spells S-L-U-T,’ he giggled, ‘and shall, skittishly, let you in.’
I did as instructed and a large, until then invisible, gate clanged and drew inward. I drove the Celica into what might have been a scene out of a Disney animated movie: a curved gravel driveway defined by huge trees susurrating in the breeze so that every one of their millions of purple flowers stirred, their brown-black limbs and trunks dark against a background of bushes white with what smelled to be jasmine and honeysuckle, all of it - trees, jasmine, honeysuckle - perfuming the air as though it weren’t outdoors, but within the labyrinth of a sultan’s most secret harem.
I slowly circuited a softball-diamond-sized island of grass and flowers, dominated by a Spanish-style bird-bath set in a mass of pink and orange azalea, out of which, at the Celica’s approach, a fistful of large blue birds exploded into the air. They wheeled as I slowly passed what looked like the hedge-darkened front of a single-story house, and arrived at my next turn, the porte-cochère built into an extension of the house’s stucco front wall, where, as previously instructed, I parked next to Von Slyke’s expensive-looking silver sport utility vehicle.
Looking deeper into the driveway, I could make out through the tangle of wild oleander what old architecture books called a ‘motor court’ and, beyond it, the three closed doors of the garage, festooned with lilacs. The unexpectedly long stuccoed wall seemed shut, the deep-set windows at varying heights of a tower-like structure - wreathed in more bougainvillaea - appeared closed up. The heavily carved, deep-stained wooden door, barely visible through trailing yellow hibiscus, was sealed off.
I
walked around to what I supposed to be the front of the house, seeking ingress. I’d just spotted a path along which I determined my steps would lead past a two-story window, barely visible behind yet more, this time orange, hibiscus blooms, and from there into a partly covered entryway when I heard Slyke shouting from a direction ninety degrees away, ‘Here! Over here!’
He was on the opposite side of the circular driveway, beneath two more of the unearthly-looking purple trees, sprawled upon the floral cushions of what seemed to be a once white-painted, now weather-mottled wickerwork lounge chair. A battered tan Maine fishing hat with curled brim lay high on his ginger and white hair. He wore soiled white painter’s pants and an oversized T-shirt that barely hid his bulk, but, like his voice, his face was much younger than the sixty-five years I knew he’d amassed.
He’d been writing something on a pad of yellow foolscap and seemed to hastily finish off a sentence before closing the pad and covering it up with a cellular phone as I approached, threading my way through the azalea, so the birds which had just resettled on the lip of their bath once more rose, large and bright blue and surprisingly soft-voiced. I was still half turned to watch them when I reached the chaise.
‘May the bluebird of happiness shit on your head!’ Von Slyke laughed. ‘They’re genuine California bluebirds. During the fall and winter, they feast on the olives from those trees’ – he pointed to the dark foliage of what I’d taken to be the front of the house – ‘which fall by the bushel and stain the pathways black and drive my gardener to distraction. God knows what they eat in spring.’
While putting out a white hand to be shaken, he added, ‘You’re even handsomer than I remembered from our brief meeting. And such a butch name: Ross Ohrenstedt! Not that you don’t look butch enough to carry it. You unquestionably do.’ He finally let go of my hand. ‘Have a seat’ – pointing to a wrought-iron chair drawn up next to the chaise. ‘Want some coffee? It’s cold, I’m afraid. It’s always cold. In fact one of the best-kept secrets about southern California is how, despite the constant year-round heat, everything is always getting cold. Cole Porter wasn’t kidding when he wrote in that song, “She hates California. It’s cold and it’s damp.” You don’t believe me?’
‘No, I believe,’ I said. ‘It’s just all so … you know, so pretty and clean and so, well, so fabulously verdant. Back East everyone gives this place a bad rap. I’m embarrassed I’m not finding it so.’
Everything – table, hat, lawn – was covered with, patterned by, scores of fallen purple blossoms. I bent to pick one up. Odorless. So where did that musky smell come from? The bark?
‘Whatever are all these purple trees? They’re unreal.’
‘Jac-a-ran-da!’ Von Slyke said. ‘Or yak-a-rahn-da, if you prefer Spanish. Although I’m not certain they’re Spanish to begin with, or even native. They look like they should be from Bali or someplace like that, don’t they? I do know the entire city was planted with them for the 1932 Olympic Games. And I do mean everywhere. Even South Central.’
‘I hope,’ I quickly said, ‘I’ve not come at a bad time. I didn’t mean to interrupt any writing.’
‘No, not at all. I do all my writing in the morning. This was just a letter.’ He smiled boyishly, despite the hair-color job that needed immediate and serious touching up and the pasty-colored sagging skin of his cheeks and jowls and the overcartilaged (by age and good food and drink) nose and ears. Von Slyke smiled boyishly, just as it’s been reflected in the hundreds of photos of him and on TV interviews and in those two documentary films made about his life; boyishly, as though that was Von Slyke’s natural role in life, not at all a put-on, as others have darkly hinted; and I thought with a thrill, here I am, at his house, and despite Dr St George’s warning that Von Slyke could be simultaneously charming and devious, he was being instead comfortable with me, polite.
‘My mother,’ Von Slyke said, clearly amusing himself with what was about to come, ‘a woman of decided views, now deceased, totally despised California, although I don’t believe she ever in her life stepped foot here. She was personally offended by anything having to do with the state. She would hear some news report about it on the radio or read some item about it in a newspaper and she’d snort and harumph. I’m not kidding, she would actually snort and harumph. Only time I ever heard anyone do that. Her worst put-down of a person was that they’d moved to Los Angeles, or worse that they’d “gone Hollywood”, which she always said as though it were between inverted commas, and had come from the title of some slashing expose, an article by Clare Boothe Luce she’d read in her youth perhaps. So naturally … this would be where I ended up. What do you think it means when a person has “gone Hollywood”?’
He’d stopped me by the suddenness of the question, coming in the middle of all that flattery and candor, and I had to remind myself that he still wasn’t certain of me, didn’t trust Irian St George’s estimation but had to know for himself, and might – like some character out of some old Märchen – be determined to test me. I decided to be completely open.
‘I used to think it meant a person had become stuck up, snobby, all façade. But recently someone who’s lived here a few years told me what he thought it meant and I’ve thought about it and I’ve come to adopt his definition. So, here it is: going Hollywood means being able to stand up old friends, stiff former acquaintances, not return phone calls and letters of former lovers and … this is the key element … being able to rationalize it all by telling yourself you’re too busy making money and getting famous.’
‘Bra-vo!’ Von Slyke applauded. ‘Said with the cynicism, slashing wit and honesty of a true follower of the Purple Circle! Rowland Etheridge must be squirming with delight in his dark little grave, deep in Ole Virginny! But you know’ – he was suddenly thoughtful - ‘if you come here, stay here in this house while I’m away all summer, sorting out that utter bedlam of papers inside, you’ll be right in the very heartless heart of Hollywood: zip code, town line … Why, even the phone number spells out Beachwood, like in the ’60s song: Beachwood Five-Six-Seven-Eight-Nine. Doesn’t that intrigue you? Scare you?
‘No, of course it doesn’t,’ he answered himself. ‘After all, despite your stellar face and spectacular body, you’re not just some Santa Monica Boulevard clone looking to break into TV commercials, are you? You’re a Serious Scholar. And all such ideas are totally beyond you. What was it exactly that St George told me about you? That you’re his most promising colleague in a decade. That you’d read all of the Purple Circle’s works while still in grade school –’
‘That’s not exactly true,’ I interrupted. ‘I discovered your novel Instigations in my prep-school library. I don’t know how it had gotten in there, frankly, because all the other books were pretty old and conventional. And to tell the truth, I’m not even sure now I had a glimmer of what your book was about at the time. I did know it excited me far more than For Whom the Bell Tolls or Catch-22, which is what we were reading in class that term. And, of course, your book opened a door …’ I let that hang, not wanting to say too much. ‘It was only later, when I was in Cambridge, Mass., that I got around to reading all of your work. All of all of your work,’ I added, meaning the entire group he’d belonged to briefly, famously, a quarter-century before, and lest he think I was flattering him.
Clearly I’d said what he wanted to hear, because Von Slyke’s eyes, which had up until now been focused on me in a general sort of way, with darting, openly evaluational glances at my well-muscled arms, legs and crotch – I’d been clever enough to follow St George’s guidance in accentuating it with a one-size-too-small pure-cotton white T-shirt, tartan flannel gym shorts, custard ankle socks and ‘natural’ leather work boots – now looked at me fully face to face. I could at last gauge whether or not the writer’s eyes were ‘a junkety, watery blue like the flotsam-filled Great South Bay two days after some remarkably disappointing storm’, as he’d written of the protagonist of the novel I’d first read, which after all – and not all t
hat early in his life – had made his name. Or if, instead, Von Slyke’s eyes were ‘iced and sharp, like the trined iron sides of one of those overpolished slide rules mathematics nerds suddenly sweep out of their chem notebooks and apply to a numerical riddle’, as he’d written of another protagonist, Jamie Dollinger, in the more recent DOS: Manuscript in Distress.
‘You’re an assistant professor at UCLA?’ he added, rather than asked. And when I nodded. ‘You don’t have summer classes?’
‘I didn’t … but Dr St George asked me to take over a class another professor couldn’t handle because of family problems. It’s undergrad Twentieth-century American Lit. But I did manage to subversively get stories by Capote, plays by Tennessee Williams and Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry onto the classes’ dozen required books, which isn’t bad: one out of four. And I added tons of Purple Circle books to the additional reading list … I can easily handle an undergrad class and do the cataloguing, if that worries you.’
The Book of Lies Page 2
