Mystery Girl: A Novel

by David Gordon

  “The second screening was at the Venice Biennale, in 1980, when, to ensure the integrity of his vision, Naught insisted that a select audience agree to remain sealed in the room for the entirety of the performance. Nevertheless, Italian security was lax and in the morning, the only remaining viewers were some vagabonds who had no place else to sleep and their dog. The last time it was shown was in the home of a collector who had purchased the only known print of the complete work. He screened it once, at a private showing, projecting the film on the four walls of a locked and empty room for no one before sealing it forever. It was however written up by several critics as a triumph of negativity.

  “With this success under his belt, and an international reputation, Naught was courted by several famous fans in Hollywood, including Jack Nicholson, Francis Coppola, and Warren Beatty, and he moved to LA, where he undertook a number of projects, few of which reached fruition. Scripts and ideas started out strong and became derailed somehow, including a psychedelic Western version of The Tempest, a live-action version of the Pogo comics involving puppets and costumes, and a multimedia rock opera based on Sade, involving live on-stage sex and called The 120 Minutes of Sodom. Interestingly enough, all three projects foundered in part because he refused to cut or alter the original texts. He was also, at points, attached to The French Connection III and The Odder Couple.

  “In the end, the only feature he made here was the low-budget horror flick Succubi! He later undertook a series of shorts, which drew inspiration from his growing fascination with the occult. An intended trilogy, only the first two parts were ever made. They were shot mainly at his home, a run-down mansion on a road off Laurel Canyon, and apparently detailed some of the odd goings-on—orgies, rituals and what have you. The whereabouts of these films are unknown. They have never been publicly shown.”

  He subsided again, eyelids slipping, only this time his head fell forward to his chest and I thought perhaps he had fainted. Again I looked quizzically at Milo, who shrugged. I sat back. Several minutes passed in silence. Finally, I stood, waved my thanks to Milo, and took a step toward the door, but Peaches barked at me and Jerry’s eyes opened again. I hopped back into my seat like a student caught passing notes in class. He cleared his throat.

  “Lastly we arrive at his final and most notorious work. A depressive gun lover, Naught had long insisted that he would die at his own hand and film it. The last years of his life were difficult: The final cut of Succubi! was taken from him, slashed to bits, and dumped on the home video market. He owed a fortune to bankers and tax collectors in several countries, and apparently also to gangsters. Finally, he was indicted for embezzlement and tax fraud. His health, after decades of abuse, was poor. One night, he shot himself in the head. Legend has it the camera was running, and that this film is actually the last third of the Infernal Trilogy, but no one can even prove it exists.”

  “What can you tell me about his wife?” I asked.

  “Mona? She was a Hollywood kid who met Naught when she was fifteen. At sixteen they married. He was forty-five. It was scandalous but it seems they were really very deeply in love. Apparently she was watching when he killed himself, some say running the camera, and she was never the same. She took off, to New York, Paris, Bangkok, Tokyo, further and further, living in exile as a kind of underground celebrity. She came home, broken, and I’m told, still lives in an institution.”

  “She killed herself a week ago, in Big Sur,” I said.

  “Ah, well. Poor girl.” He took a rattling breath, drank some water, and went on. “As I said, the films are hard to find. Succubi! you have. 6X4 is still in a private collection. As for Ladbroke Grove, there are three copies. One in the vault of the Kulchurbunker in Zurich. One at MOMA in New York, where an injunction prevents it from being shown until the litigation, which has been going on for decades, is resolved.” He paused to draw another long, creaky breath. There was silence.

  “And the third?” I asked.

  He gasped. His hand quivered in the air, one finger pointing at the corner. Milo jumped up and offered him the inhaler. The dog barked and howled.

  “Should I call for an ambulance?” I asked.

  Jerry shook his head fervently and pushed the inhaler away. He drew in a long, rattling breath and pointed again. Milo grabbed the water, but Jerry brushed it off, shook his head, tried to speak.

  “Um, should I leave?” I wondered aloud.

  “Light,” Jerry whispered. “Off.”

  “OK.” Milo nodded. While I watched awkwardly, he lowered Jerry’s recliner into relax position and fitted the mask. The oxygen sighed peacefully. Then Milo strode purposely out of the room. I smiled uncomfortably at Jerry, who stared back from beyond his mask, blue eyes like twin moons. The poodle bared its little fangs.

  “Thanks,” I said. “For telling me all this.”

  He waved a finger.

  Milo returned with a bowl of popcorn and two Cokes and set them on the table before me. Then he turned out the light and started up the projector.

  36

  LADBROKE GROVE IS SET in an old creaky house in a private walled garden on a small street in a then broken-down part of London. It’s a dingy gray London, resting between up times, no longer the swinging scene of Blow-Up, but with the yuppie-trashy “cool Britannia” of hip nineties bankers still far off. This is a London of smoky pubs, council flats, and skinheads, of wankers and kebabs and chips. Of skies the color of overdone meat, old rain that barely fell, shoulder-high clouds, and ancient libraries where wind groaned through the shelves. Of lamplights on cracked wet cement, bad teeth, warm beer, ten-packs of fags, and the dole. Of taking the piss. Pissing down. Pissing off. Every sort of piss.

  In the film’s opening scene, Garreth Barke, a scruffy young artistic type, accidentally brains a cop in a demonstration and goes on the run with a mournfully beautiful dark-eyed commie-waif who hides him in a squat (the doomed Maxine). When the cops show, they hop the garden wall and are taken in by the neighbor, a glamorous blond who lives in a mansion owned by her husband, whom we’ve seen pull away in his Bentley on a business trip. Most of the movie takes place in this house, which was in fact owned by a baroness or marquise, an art supporter Naught knew, and actually located miles from the neighborhood that gives the film its name.

  It is, I suppose, my kind of movie, an artsy talkfest where pretty people blab about big ideas, then strip down to roll around in bed or argue, the edges singed here and there with random beauty: grim sun through dusty windows, cracked plaster walls, bed heads brooding over chipped cups of tea, nimble fingers rolling cigarettes in fascinated close-up, pale asses by moonlight in rumpled sheets, eyes in smoke, the scene where they play records and dance. I won’t soon forget the part where the two girls bathe, dousing each other with that handheld hose thing, the blond’s white legs rising from the suds and dipping over the rim like twin swans, or the brunette’s miraculous, twenty-year-old tits, perfectly round and aloft, as she stares into the camera and delivers a passionate diatribe on American imperialism, while lucky Garreth, lean and naked with a bad tooth and itchy pubes, broods and blows smoke across the screen.

  In the end, what climax there is gets generated by the imminent return of the industrialist husband and a vague plot to hold him for ransom and smuggle Garreth to freedom. Police surround the house and Garreth is shot. Then, either there is an avant-garde twist that went over my head (it had been hours now, in the close heat of Jerry’s apartment, and I hadn’t eaten anything but popcorn all day), or maybe Milo jumbled the reels, or else Jerry, who was fading in and out of a snooze or coma, had mislabeled them decades ago: now the brunette is the one living with the rich husband, looking moody in a lot of eye makeup and a superchic gown, staring out the window of the chauffeured Bentley, while Garreth and the blond sneak through the garden naked and back into the squat. Or perhaps she is imagining this as she stares into the rainy twinkling night traffic. It’s hard to say. Then we pull back and see that in fact it is Garreth in the Bentley
with her. She pulls out a small pistol and shoots him. Next we see the two women burying Garreth in the garden. They climb into the Bentley together and we see them kiss through the rainy windshield before driving off under the credits.

  37

  DID I MISS MY WIFE? I was too angry to miss her. And yet the old wiring remained, the neural paths that lit up at the sound her name, the sight of her vitamins forgotten in the fridge, her scent afloat in a sweater hung in the closet. I didn’t miss her, but I ached in the places she once touched me, like a fresh blister rising still tingles with the kiss of the flame: I remembered. I remembered her that last day at the therapist, her green eyes aglitter with mean joy. I remembered her narrow shoulders in my arms when we hugged awkwardly on the street after, and how easy it might have been then to break her lovely neck. I remembered when she left me, cheekbones crossed with tears like that Indian who hates pollution, banging her Louis Vuitton case down the stairs, baby feet sweet as always in high heels, each toe dipped in pink like a perfect pebble. I remembered our first nights together when, after we fucked, I realized she was crying there in the dark, and I was frightened that something was wrong, until she told me she was crying because it was all so beautiful. I remembered when her nails bit my chest during sex and I’d have to pin her hands. I remembered her ass in a thousand ways, in thongs and panties and frills and ribbons. I remembered the impressions her tight jeans left on her hips. I remembered the pimples on her back that she hated, from her salty sweat and hair grease in the summer. I remembered how to save time in the mornings we’d just shower together and fuck while we were in there, before heading out for the day, since we were both too tired at night. I remembered when she started peeing in front of me (the first night actually, she wasn’t shy) and when she gave me permission to fart in her presence and then tried to retract it, since she felt I abused the right. I remembered in the winter when she got in bed in long underwear, a knit wool hat, her thick nerd glasses, and the retainer that was supposed to stop her from grinding her teeth. She looked retarded, but I couldn’t wait to wrap her in my arms and squeeze. I remembered how she talked in her sleep, and sat up one night while I read beside her, eyes shut, and in her dream announced: I’m so sleepy. Lie down then honey, I told her, go to sleep, and she did. I remembered that I loved her and then I remembered how she’d stopped loving me and how that made our whole life and love together and everything I remembered a lie. And then I remembered to hate her again.

  38

  THANKS TO JERRY, I got in touch with Daemonica, the blond actress from the film. (Much married and divorced, she was currently known in full as Daemonica Angelika Uta-Floss-MacTeague-Goiter-Goldstein.) She lived in Brentwood, in a big house with a Ford Navigator out front and many large, mostly nude photos of herself all over the walls. A round-faced Mexican housekeeper opened the door and with a sweet smile told me: “She on the deck.”

  I passed through a room displaying a number of gold records, a few framed and signed guitars, and a large naked oil of the mistress supine over the mantel, and stepped onto a deck overlooking an oval pool, still and blue as an opal. There I encountered a woman, Madam Whatever I assumed, folded over in a yoga pose, her body encased in a black unitard, while a nimble young man in white karate pants helped hold her in place.

  “Does my enormous ass look absurd?” The woman’s voice rose, thick and throaty, from the upside-down face between the legs.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I could come back later.”

  “But I’ve been waiting for you, darling. You’re one of the few men alive who’ve seen it in its heyday and have the brain cells left to remember.” She shook her bottom a little.

  “It looks great, actually,” I said, and it did. The skin tone was different, a tobacco brown now instead of that crème fraîche white, but it nevertheless remained a top bottom.

  “Thank you, my dear.” She exhaled heavily, and the man helped turn her right side up. Her face was flushed, and her cleavage, squeezed tight in the spandex, was sheened with sweat. Her nipples declared themselves, pressing out through damp rings of moisture, like thirsty little kitten tongues. Her hair, up in a bun, was still white-blond as in the film, and the rest of her body, though stained darker as I said, was still impressively close to that ideal. Her face was a different story: heavily lined, overly tanned, saggy jowled, slashed with lipstick. She laughed wetly, showing teeth nearly as brown as her face.

  “Hear that, Reg?” she croaked at her yogi. “Says my bum’s still buggerable.”

  He smiled and nodded rapidly. She winked at me and picked up a bottle of Evian. “Guess I can hold off on the lipo for a bit. The third round, I mean.” She laughed her juicy laugh again and guzzled from the bottle. Sweat coursed down her breasts, which heaved and trembled as she drank. She shook her hair out and it fell down her back. “Fucking hell, I’m sweating like a horse!” she shouted, and Reg handed her a towel. She swabbed her pits and wiped under her boobs, lifting each and letting it fall, then sawed the towel between her thighs, still eyeing me all the while, before handing it back, soaked, to Reg.

  “Miss me,” she said, more as a command than a question.

  “Um… a little?” I tried, thinking maybe she had me confused with someone else, but Reg produced a spray bottle and moistened her face and chest, then his own. He aimed it toward me with a querulous expression.

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.”

  “Let’s have a drink,” Daemonica said, “before I bloody faint.”

  Her accent was Bride of Dracula goes to Carnaby Street, just what you’d expect from a part-Hungarian, part-Romanian, part-Ukrainian ex-model raised in Madrid and Monaco, who married and divorced a few Brit rockers and sang for a couple of deathcore sludge-rock bands. I followed her back inside, where the housekeeper met her with some kind of thick green shake in a glass. She handed one to me as well.

  “Oh,” I said, “thanks, but…”

  She quaffed deeply. “It’s organic kelp. With protein powder, spirulina, parsley, ginseng—” I took a polite taste. It wasn’t too bad. Kind of like a malted with no ice cream or syrup or malt. I drank more.

  “—and whale semen,” she added, smacking her lips.

  “What?” I coughed.

  “Very expensive. Good for the blood, organs, skin, and stamina. I have it flown from Japan.”

  “Hmm…” I managed to nod, holding a rich swallow in my mouth.

  “Drink that once a day and you’ll be hard as a rock,” she said. “Right, Reg?” He giggled as she chugged, leaving a thick mustache over her lip.

  I discreetly spit into my glass while pretending to sip. “Mmmm,” I said. “Filling. Too bad I ate such a big breakfast.”

  “I live on it. Haven’t touched alcohol or sugar in twenty years.” She lit a Marlboro and then, while the housekeeper and Reg both stood by, she stripped off the uni. Her body was impressive, if you like blond goddesses. Her nipples stood triumphant. The hair between her legs was a wild mane, white as snow.

  “I hope you are not one of those men who are terrified by the female bush,” she announced, exhaling smoke through her nose.

  “Not so far,” I said.

  “Good, then the sight of my cunt shan’t disturb you.” She drew smoke and released it through dilated nostrils, while frankly sizing me up. “But don’t get the wrong idea, darling. I only like them young, hung, and dumb, like Reg here.” She laughed hard, gargling with her head back, as Reg blushed and blinked his big brown eyes at me.

  “Now I need a soak,” she went on. “Reg wrings me out like a dishrag.” Reg giggled as we followed her down a few steps to the pool, where a Jacuzzi bubbled and steamed. She stepped in carefully, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, and descended till she was covered up to her shoulders. “Sit,” she demanded. I sat on a beach chair nearby.

  “Now then.” The Marlboro dangled from her red mouth. Ashes dropped into the bubbling froth that seethed around her boobs. “You are writing a book about Zed?”

 
“Kind of.” I supposed that was a convenient lie of Jerry’s, or Milo’s maybe. “I’m doing some background for now.”

  “Well I knew him as long as anyone, I guess,” she said. “Anyone alive. He was a pretty boy then, so funny and charming, with his scarves and tight pants, and these gigantic sloppy paintings he made in his awful garret, they looked rather like great wet nightmarish vaginas to me. Now I can’t imagine getting nude in a cold dirty place like that but then believe me the girls were lined up around the block. They quite liked it I suppose, being ravished on a chaise among the rags.”

  “Yourself included?”

  “Of course, darling. It was the seventies. It wasn’t polite to decline a shag or a drug, from boy or girl. And like I said, he was quite the dish. He slept with everyone.” Her fangs bent her U’s and W’s into V’s and sharpened the into zee. “But of course I was married to the Baron, and the other girl in the film, Maxi, was more his type. He liked the dark meat. But don’t we all? Grrr.” She growled at Reg, who giggled. His slender form was nut-brown and hairless.

  “Can you tell me about the movie?”

  “Making the film was rather like posing for him, I’d say. One felt him seducing one, manipulating one, dominating one, but also beseeching one. One felt needed. It was damp and cold in that house and he kept us all there, Maxi, Garreth, and me and his crew members, who were all really artists and musicians he’d picked up someplace. All living together and shooting for several months. That was his idea, this experiment. He’d cook big meals. Wonderful earthy stews. We’d play music and sing and dance. And of course everyone slept with everybody. But he would also rage and yell or make us sit and wait in strict silence while he just stared into space, you know, deep thinking. We were so besotted, we didn’t mind. Plus he locked the door to keep us from leaving. It was my husband’s aunt’s house and he took the keys and locked me in it. Extraordinary! You couldn’t do that now, could you? Just the insurance is unthinkable.” She sipped her drink and her long, pointy tongue flicked extra whale sauce from her chin.