Mystery Girl: A Novel

by David Gordon

  “Actually, speaking of fucking and killing, I was thinking of something cozy and soothing like Goodfellas or The Godfather.”

  How could a movie that features a guy getting stabbed to death in a trunk cheer me up? It is, I think, the combination of a certain kind of formal perfection, a calming flawlessness, combined with the warmth of long familiarity. These are movies I had seen countless times. I’ve worn out both a tape and a disc of Goodfellas, and when I couldn’t sleep, I could lie in bed and follow just the dialogue of The Godfather or its sequel from behind my drooping lids.

  “I know what you mean but I can’t see them right now,” Milo said, running his hands over his face. “I just can’t.” (This is the other side of such intimacy. There were many beloved films, like Manhattan or Taxi Driver, that I saw so many times, I had to declare a moratorium, the way some bakers have to temporarily swear off chocolate cake.)

  “A Satyajit Ray?” he asked. “Apu?”

  “Jesus, I’m already suicidal here. Are you trying to kill me? How about Shoah?”

  “OK, OK. Point taken. Rules of the Game?”

  “Hmm… maybe.”

  “What do you mean, maybe? It’s a masterpiece, a serious contender for best movie ever.”

  “I know, I know. Shoulder to shoulder with Kane, you told me.”

  “Plus, as a worldly, wise Frenchman, Renoir makes your petty love problems seem like a joke.”

  “OK,” I said, settling on the couch. “Let’s do it. Though I actually think it’s his warmth, his Shakespearian compassion for human frailty, that can help me now.”

  “Shit,” Milo muttered, scanning the shelves. “It’s at the store.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “This could take forever.”

  “Look, why argue? You want perfection crossed with familiarity? How about your lovable but perverted uncle?”

  “Hitchcock.”

  “Hitchcock. Exactly. Marnie?”

  “Too troubling. North By Northwest?”

  “Too charming. Dial M?”

  “Really, you know what the most perfect movie ever is?”

  “Vertigo.”

  “Exactly. Vertigo.” This is what I generally answered when asked those ridiculous questions, favorite, best, ever. Of course there are hundreds of best movies, but Vertigo to me was the one that most truly fulfilled itself: story and song, form and content, manifest and latent—like the two sides of the tapestry, every image and gesture, every moment and glance, was both the plot and the dream. It was what life would be if we were all geniuses—complete.

  Milo shrugged. “Yeah, but I don’t feel like seeing it tonight.”

  I slumped deeper into the couch. “I don’t either, really.”

  “You know what I could watch though?” he asked.

  “Yeah, muscle porn, but wait till I go home.”

  “Fair enough, but you know what else I could go for first, dude?”

  “You’re right.”

  “It will cheer you up. The perfect thing for when you’re down and out.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  So he put on The Big Lebowski.

  Everyone loves the Dude of course, and his renown has only grown over the years, but for those of us who have drifted, effortlessly, to the bottom of the shark pool in Los Angeles, The Big L touches an especially deep place in our drowned hearts. As soon as I saw the opening shots of Jeff Bridges at a Ralph’s supermarket, seemingly in a bathrobe, paying for half-and-half by check, I began to laugh. I knew that guy. Let’s face it, I was that guy, more or less, though younger and less stoned and correspondingly far less at peace with myself. It is a comedy of course, a light film compared to the Coen bros darkies, like Fargo or their great masterpiece, Miller’s Crossing, but it is a sad movie too, sad in the way only comedy is sad, and brimming with the tender love we save for life’s losers, here where the evil always win and the worst never cease to be victorious.

  PART II

  THE MAN WITHOUT QUALIFICATIONS

  13

  I WAS WAITING OUTSIDE Ramona Doon’s bungalow when she emerged the next day. She was in a sundress, light blue with thin straps over her tan shoulders, and red strappy heels with bare legs. She had sunglasses on, and her dark hair swung across her back as she walked to her car, a creamy old Mercedes convertible with a yellow frosted roof folded back and chocolate leather seats. We were off.

  She led me westward through Hollywood and swung down to Sunset and the Strip. When you are not in any rush, when the traffic is rolling and the air is flowing and KXLU is playing and your time is paid, it can actually be a very pleasant ride. There were the billboards and the hotels and the shuttered nightclubs. There was the former health food restaurant were Woody freaks out in Annie Hall, and the long-ago strip club that Ben Gazarra runs in Killing of a Chinese Bookie. There was the rest of humanity washing past you—the ugly, the pretty, the angry, the bored, the sweaty tourist, the smoking Mexican gardener, the junior executive yelling into his headset—each one bobbing to the surface for a second before fate carried them away. Perhaps it was being here in the city of movies, or perhaps it was just the automatic magic of movement, music, and cars, but I felt comforted, as if my own stupid drama were part of some larger show, some movie set against the sweep of this landscape that scrolled by me as I drove into the wind. To give our lives a form, however fleeting, and lend our losses a name, these too are among the consolations of art.

  We left West Hollywood and sailed through Beverly Hills, passing the green lawns, olive canyons, and pink hotels, the cartoon mansions of every style and period—a ten-bedroom thatched English cottage beside a Tudor mansion with five cars in the drive, next to Monticello, the Pantheon, and the Doge—like a miniature golf course blown up bigger than life. Then came Brentwood, the Palisades, those other, lower-keyed neighborhoods, somehow even more unreal. While Beverly Hills, in its exuberant overkill and luxury, is utterly itself, these further lands of fabulous wealth, poised on the western edge of the country, are more like fake hometowns, with ranch-style spreads, shingles and shutters and cute shopping pockets, except that everything, from a house to a house salad, is ten, or a hundred, or maybe even a thousand times what it costs back home, and despite the warm, folksy aura, you know, as soon as you see the ideally gorgeous moms, brutally rich dads, and the junior millionaires on their bikes: you don’t belong.

  But it’s worth every penny, for those who can spare the change. The warm light is rubbed with sage and rosemary. The breeze smells like organic cough drops and artisanal focaccia. You can feel the unseen sea on your skin. You dip and rise, shadow to sun, through treelined glades of eucalyptus that shed their bark in long soft curls, and hillsides glowing gray-green and deep red. And then, beyond that last hill, dazzling you always no matter how much you expect it, the ocean is there again. Ms. Doon took a right onto the PCH, and, as if I were the one leading her, we rode right past all the tourist spots, past Malibu and Zuma Beach, past waving paragliders and sliding surfers and detoxing movie stars, way up by the county line, to El Matador, my favorite beach.

  El Matador is cut like cake from the cliffside, eaten out by the ocean from beneath into caves and crumbs and columns, while sugared waves lay down in thick ruffles on the satin sand. The beach is slick and narrow, mirror-bright in the shallows. In the surf, a spindly tower of rock stands alone, like a bad tooth, severed from the cliffs by the lick of waves relentlessly swirling around it. Its top forms a tiny plateau, a little garden covered with bright clinging plants and grasses lying down in the wind. Perhaps this lone, thin rock is the matador whom those first Spanish warriors named when they too came and prayed, knee-deep in the surf, facing the bleeding sun.

  I recalled my drives up here with Lala, hiking along the ridges and ravines of Topanga Canyon, walking on the beach, kissing in the caves, sucking back clams in Neptune’s Net, then napping on a blanket on the sand, sea-cooled breezes chilling my arms, sunshine baking my face. Those were good days, and as I trailed my subject along the
coast, longing shot through me again. It was a physical pain, this loss of a former happiness, and a possible future joy, a sharp ache across my forehead, behind my eyes, and down into the hollow of my chest. A physical pain from a metaphysical wound: It was almost enough to make me question my life-long conviction that there was nothing outside the facts of flesh and the noises of the brain. This throb, this wasting misery, this cry, what could it be, dying inside me now, but a soul?

  Ramona Doon pulled into the lot, where you had to slide your money in a slot and leave the receipt on your dashboard. I parked along the road for free, cleverly swinging my car around so that, when she left, I’d already be behind her. As she began descending the long, twisted staircase to the beach, I sauntered along casually, sporting sunglasses, hands resting in my pockets. I smelled water and tasted salt as the wind came over the cliff. Her heels echoed weirdly on the wooden steps. To stay hidden, I bypassed the stairs, and took a steeper path down through the scrub.

  She had betrayed me. My wife had betrayed my trust. I could still hear her promising to love me forever. To stay with me. Forever. Gasping, sweating as I humped it down the cliff, I bit down on my pain and tasted anger. That was what rushed in to fill the empty space where her love had been. I’m not saying she’d lied deliberately when she made her pledge. But what difference did that make to me? I saw it now: love was just a feeling like any other, and when she said she would love me forever, what she meant was, right now I feel like I will love you forever, but perhaps, tomorrow, that will change.

  And why not? I told myself, as the sea rose back into view. Mountains, beaches, planets all change. Everything passes away. Why not us?

  Then, since I was too busy brooding on the cosmos to look where I was going, I tripped and fell on my face. I stumbled on a root and lost my footing in a small avalanche of sand. Unable to pull my hands from my pockets in time, I tipped over, headfirst, pitching forward into the dirt, and skidded and tumbled down the slope. At first I struggled, eating sand and kicking my legs helplessly, with my sunglasses jammed into my skull. Then I gave up and just rolled with it, luging to the bottom, where I landed with a grunt in a pile of rotten seaweed. Spitting sand, I looked up to see my lady reaching the last landing of the staircase. In a panic, I flattened myself against the ground, hiding my face in the stinky greens.

  “Are you OK?”

  I opened one eye and saw a red heel sunk into the sand beside me. Desperate to hide my identity, I pressed my face deeper into the mulch, and faked a deeper, more guttural voice.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Her own voice was soft and smart, well educated. Burrowing into the sand and sludge, trying to appear comfortably homeless, I adopted a kind of conceptual disguise, trying as hard as I could to look like a drunken derelict without actually moving.

  “Are you sure you don’t need help?” She touched my shoulder gently. I felt nails on my skin.

  “Uh-uh,” I grunted back.

  “You mean you don’t need help or you’re not sure you don’t?”

  That stumped me. I couldn’t think of any response expressible within my phonetic limits. Meanwhile that hand sat lightly on my shoulder, like a bird about to lift. Then—quite cleverly I thought—I grunted, “No need help,” in the manner of an old movie Injun.

  “OK, then, I won’t bother you,” she said, one nail tracing a soft line that lingered, tingling for a moment after she left. I remained motionless, breathing dead sea, until my heart stopped pounding. Then, like a stranded sea monster, I opened one sandy eye, and watched her walk the beach, shoes in her hand, not doing anything. The wind sifted her hair. Her dress shivered close to her body.

  When at last she left, I took the stairs too, a flight behind her, slopping along in my wet shoes and seaweed-scented clothes. I jogged to my car and had the engine started by the time her Mercedes rolled out. She put the roof up as we headed back to town. It was growing colder, and I could feel the damp wind slap against my face.

  The truth, if I admitted it to myself, was that Lala’s betrayal also set me free. It broke my heart, but also cut the cord I’d never even noticed around my neck. Suddenly everything that, for better or worse, had been a given, a certainty, was a question once again. Turned loose, against my own desperate wishes, I suddenly couldn’t help wondering—what would it be like to live alone? For years every decision, from what to eat for dinner to what to do with my future had revolved around her. Even this job I was on. Alone, I could rededicate myself to my own work, write, travel, do anything I wanted, at least in theory. I could theoretically fuck somebody else! The very idea made the blood pound in my veins. If I ever wanted out, this was my chance. But did I want out or back in? And all at once, it occurred to me: everything is possible again, now that she is gone.

  14

  THE RIDE HOME WAS a lot less cinematic in my clammy clothes, sand grinding into my skin and the smell of old sea scum hanging around me in a cloud. She made a right on La Cienega, swung a quick U-turn and vanished into one of the drives or lots. I found a meter and paralleled in, just in time to glimpse my quarry disappearing into a shop somewhere in the rearview. I stripped off my beach clothes and pulled my sweats and a T-shirt from my detective’s kit. I didn’t want to lose her trail now. But could I risk following her on foot, after my fiasco at the beach? Recalling my new employer’s policy on disguises, and figuring I had little dignity to lose, I yanked out Lala’s thrift store blond wig and pulled it on, fitting the mangy yellow curls over my own damp rug in the mirror. I looked preposterous. Still, this was Hollywood, home of the preposterous. That gave me an idea: I took out the little makeup kit Lonsky had pressed on me and smeared red goop on my lips, instantly transforming myself into a shopworn drag queen. In any other town this might stand out, but here it was as good as camouflage.

  Strolling up the block in my new getup, I was so distracted by my reflection in the car windows, it took me a second to realize I was headed for Trashy Lingerie. Had Ramona gone in there? What the hell, I decided, take a peek. I felt weirdly liberated. My very oddness made me feel invisible, and no doubt all of the other low-end trannies in the hood were regulars already. I’d fade into the background. I opened the door.

  “Welcome to Trashy!” A buxom young lady in a logoed T-shirt greeted me loudly. “Have you been here before?”

  I froze. I didn’t even know what sort of voice to use. Male? Female? She-male? I shook my head, No. The wig jiggled. I tried to back out but she blocked me, smiling broadly.

  “If you like I can show you our larger sizes for more statuesque ladies. Though you’re actually very slim-waisted.” She touched my shoulders appraisingly, as if measuring me for a strapless gown. I cleared my throat and spoke in a voice that, to my surprise, was actually deeper than my own.

  “Thanks but…” To my horror, I spotted Her, Ramona, heading our way with a few hangers clutched in her hand. The shopgirl was oblivious.

  “Still, your shoulders will be a problem for smaller pieces,” she went on. “What’s your shoe size?”

  As Ramona stepped up, I shook my head and turned away, pretending to be fascinated with the makeup on the counter.

  “Excuse me,” she asked the salesgirl. “Do you have these in crotchless?” She dangled slinky bits of black and pink. They didn’t look anything like underwear to me. More like trims she was thinking of adding to underwear.

  “Only in the lavender,” the girl said.

  “And where can I try them on?”

  “Straight in the back.”

  “Thank you.” Ramona smiled warmly at us and swiveled away. The shopgirl watched her go, perhaps, like me, imagining how she’d look decorated in those frills. But before I could slink off, she snapped back to my harsher reality.

  “I see you’re looking at Azure Galaxy.”

  “Um, who?” I had no idea what she meant. A fellow drag queen?

  She snatched a bottle off the counter. “I love that one too. Let me show you.”

  Too afraid to mov
e, I stood like a statue while she drew on my face. “The sky tones bring out your eyes. And the glitter stands up to your strong features. There.” She squinted at me doubtfully and held up a mirror. “Perfect. Take a look?”

  I looked. A very frightened, very ugly, old prostitute looked back. Then I spotted Ramona, swinging over again with her dainties. “Sorry,” I blurted. “I’m late. Got to go.”

  “Come again,” the girl called after me. “You look really pretty!”

  I jogged to my car, head down, and drew only a few stares and one honk from a passing trucker. I removed the wig and tried to find some kind of wipe or napkin. Of course there was none. Why would there be? This was my car. I tried to rub the blue glitter off my eyelids with spit but only smeared it. Now the whole area around my eyes sparkled. I looked like a raccoon on ecstasy. Then I saw the Mercedes heading south.

  This time it was a pleasant surprise. My lady turned onto Beverly Boulevard and led me to the New Beverly Cinema, a rerun house where I’d spent untold hours. Back on home turf, I parked leisurely and watched the mystery woman saunter up to the theater. I put my broken sunglasses back on to hide the glitter and followed. She went in, tossing a shopping bag with the Trashy logo into the garbage. Why would she dump her new items? the detective in me wondered. That place wasn’t cheap, added the husband. I waited a beat then bought a ticket, hoping the teenaged clerk wasn’t watching as I snuck her Trashy trash from the garbage on my way in.

  15

  THE DARK THEATER WAS nearly empty, with featureless silhouettes scattered among the rows. I spotted a shapely shadow taking a seat in front and slid into my preferred spot, the center of the middle row. I hadn’t noticed the name of the film when I came in but I recognized it quickly: They Live by Night (1948), Nicholas Ray’s first film, the original doomed-lovers-on-the-run movie. Its story has been repeated so often, and is so stripped down to the core here, that the film came back to me, filtered by cinematic memory, as collage, a poem of images and gestures: depression-era gas station attendants who wore suits, long black cars jittering down narrow roads on skinny tires, Cathy O’Donnell’s sad eyes and pixie face and her body in those sweaters and skirts, Farley Granger’s creased hair and nervous hands molding emptiness.