‘An old friend,’ said the voice from behind the door.
‘What kind of friend?’
‘A friend-friend, never anything more than that. Perish the thought.’
‘So where did you meet him?’
‘Listen, grand inquisitor . . .’
The smell was an intimacy, you inhaled someone. To smell her, the maternal scent, made me nauseous.
When I closed the bathroom door, the humming of the ventilation stopped. She was standing at the window. Below was the silent swimming pool. A flat, blue stone. A thin fog had moved in, along with the dusk.
‘Why don’t we take a little walk?’ she said. ‘The pier is lovely.’
In the distance I could see the Ferris wheel on the pier, bathed in shimmering light.
‘You can have your name written on a grain of rice.’
‘I’m not a little boy anymore.’
‘I know that, darling.’
‘You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.’
‘You can’t imagine how depressing London was.’
She turned to face me.
‘Come on, let’s go out. Stop staring at me like that, would you, sweetheart?’
*
There was gym equipment on the beach, with a low wall around it; in the semi-darkness a man was practicing on the bars. She took off her low-heeled shoes and we walked through the sand to the pier. The words were burning in my mouth, but I couldn’t spit them out.
‘People surf here during the day,’ she said. ‘Boys with those boards, what do you call them . . .’
‘Surfboards.’
‘It’s amazing, the things they can do with them. They’re completely at home on the waves, they know exactly what they’re going to do. You should take lessons while you’re here.’
A few good moments were all that remained. Who would want to go and spoil them?
‘First I want one of those grains of rice with my name on it,’ I said.
We crossed the heavy timbers onto the boardwalk. Along the way there were people fishing, and others offering useless services. The man who wrote your name on a grain of rice was there too. There was a Latino girl selling Disney balloons, a little stand where you could buy soft drinks, magazines and cigarettes. The Ferris wheel was deserted. It was almost dark, except for a deep purple stripe along the horizon. We stood at the railing. A ring of buoys with bells attached had been set around the end of the pier: an audible warning to those approaching in the fog, which had a way of coming up suddenly here. They made a lonely sound. She said, ‘The pier at home didn’t have bells like that, did it?’
We walked back. The rice-grain man was still sitting close to the entrance. A light-skinned Negro, his hair hanging in matted strips.
‘Lookie there,’ he said in a voice that could make heavy objects shiver.
My mother smiled.
‘This is no woman,’ he said, ‘this is a story. I’ll write it for you on a grain of rice.’
‘It’s for him,’ my mother said.
She nodded in my direction.
‘His name is . . .’
He held a finger to his lips.
‘Your name is enough. I’ll be gentle, I’ll write it between heartbeats.’
He bent over and took a grain of rice between thumb and index finger. The hand holding the thin fountain pen moved under the lamp.
‘But it’s for him,’ my mother said, ‘Ludwig.’
‘Magic formulas first,’ the man said.
We stood and waited, curious and ill at ease. The shaman made a zooming sound as he wrote. Beneath the timbers, the water was slapping against the pilings.
A little later he held up the prize triumphantly, and put it in a little glass tube.
‘A grain of rice for you, from your humble scribe on the banks of the Nile.’
He added a drop of oily fluid and sealed the tube with a silver cap on a string. She took it from him. We looked at it. The name was magnified by the curve of the tube and the oil in it: Eve LeSage.
‘What does it say?’ asked my mother, who wasn’t wearing her reading glasses.
‘Can’t you read your own name?’ the Negro asked.
Then she got it.
‘Oh,’ she said coolly.
‘It’s all here in black and white,’ he said, ‘look!’
Reaching around behind him into the box in which he carried his things, he produced a magazine. LA Weekly, with my mother on the cover: EVE LESAGE BACK IN THE LIMELIGHT. A come-hither pose, her forearms crossed beneath her breasts, her face held up alluringly. The snakes hissed on the Negro’s head. My mother, sustenance for the poor.
I took the glass tube out of her hand and slid it back across the table.
‘Don’t believe everything you read,’ I said.
We walked beside each other without a word, away from the pier. I was thinking Eastern thoughts, fortune-cookie things like he who wishes to hide the truth must beware even the grain of rice, which was comical, but not right then.
‘You knew,’ she said.
‘More or less.’
‘That’s why you came.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘I had the feeling you knew.’
‘I’ll never not know anymore.’
‘That’s life, sweetheart. That’s part of growing up.’
‘Don’t give me that horseshit. Please.’
It was silent for a bit. We plowed on through the sand.
‘That’s no way to talk to your mother, you know, I deserve a little . . .’
‘Don’t say respect. That’s not one of the matching words.’
‘We’ve talked about this before, Ludwig. I can’t make things any better for you, this is how it is.’
‘And so now you’re going to say you didn’t have any choice in the matter?’
‘Did I?’
The words caught in my throat. From far away I could hear the bells at sea. My voice was thick with frustration.
‘You didn’t have to do this.’
‘You know, I earn ten thousand dollars for every day on the set. That makes up for a lot, okay? Not for all of it. But for a lot.’
‘A well-paid whore is still a whore.’
‘Ludwig, I don’t want . . .’
‘But isn’t that the way it is? Do I have to call it something else, just so it’s easier for you to take? Get used to it: the world sees you as a whore. For what you are. For what I am.’
‘Oh please, don’t make such a production of it,’ she said, suddenly calm.
I reach out and grabbed her arm.
‘But that’s the way it is, isn’t it?!’
‘I respect your feelings, Ludwig, but I also have a life of my own. I don’t have to take you into account in all my decisions anymore. I spent twenty years . . .’
‘Oh, I see, a sacrifice. Of course. You made a sacrifice, for me . . . I was an inconvenient interruption to your life as a whore.’
‘That’s not what I am,’ she said quietly, ‘so please stop it. I have a contract for three films, and Rollo’s trying to arrange a show for me in Las Vegas, along with Annie Sprinkle and one of these new girls, Holly Cranes or something. I’ve heard that Linda Lovelace got thirty-five thousand a week in Las Vegas. We could make a new start, Ludwig, start something new.’
‘So this Liban is your pimp.’
‘My agent.’
We had arrived at a broad channel that ran down to the sea. We couldn’t go any further, we had to go up, to the paved path used during the day by cyclists, skaters and pedestrians. An asphalt road through the desert.
‘They dump straight into the ocean,’ my mother said. ‘Swimmers get sick from it.’
The water was covered in thick foam. It moved. I couldn’t help but think about puréed shit.
She walked on, back to the hotel; I went looking for something to eat. I was not pleased. There were certain words. Whore. Pimp. They bothered me. It was pathetic. I crossed them out of my vocabulary.
<
br /> On Appian Way I saw a big man screaming into his cell phone. The man’s voice cut through the darkness.
‘No, now you’re gonna listen! We’re talking here, you and me. I buy a drink, you buy a drink, and that’s it. No, I’m talking now. No! First you’re going to let me finish . . .’
He was giving someone hell. It was all completely revolting. Before I even reached the corner, a woman came running past me. She was holding a cell phone to her ear as well. She screamed.
‘I wanna fucking die! Do you hear me?!’
She slalomed through the cars waiting at the light on Ocean Avenue. A shopping bag fluttered wildly on her arm. She ran into a parking lot and was gone.
Russian cabbies on Colorado Avenue were chewing on seeds, spitting out the hulls. A couple of blocks further along I went into a restaurant. The realization that it was a vegan place arrived with the menu. The mint tea, pumpkin soup and spring rolls all landed on the table at the same time, because, the boy waiting on me said, we’re closing in a minute. He put the bill on the table as well.
‘Maybe you should have told me that before I ordered,’ I said.
The look on his face changed. The hatred with which restaurant personnel talk about us behind the swinging doors. Sometimes spitting on the plates.
‘It says so on the door,’ he said curtly.
Still lightheaded from the flight, I slipped into that buzz of estrangement that the world sometimes produces. I left the restaurant before finishing my meal. Out on the sidewalk I saw sheets of thin, parchment-like paper, torn from a book. I picked up some sheets that were still glued together. Someone had ripped a Bible to pieces. The pages rustled between my fingers. The final pages of Genesis, a large chunk of Exodus – the portent was not lost on me.
My mother was in bed when I came in, she looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. I suggested asking for extra sheets and blankets and sliding the two halves of the bed away from each other.
‘I don’t want you to do that,’ she said determinedly, ‘that would clutter the place up right away. The bed is big enough as it is.’
I was too tired to enter into another conflict, to work up the energy needed to get my own way. She went back to her book about force fields and how a secret world government had covered up the discovery of an internal combustion engine that ran on water. Esoteric literature was all she read anymore. I took my toothbrush and pajamas out of the suitcase. A fast shower to rinse off the trip, my gums bled when I brushed them. I tried not to think about the future, about a life full of temporary addresses.
Sleep was long in coming. On the other side of the bed there was someone else’s body. It breathed, it made a choking noise and then, two hours after the light went out, it began to snore. Sucking in air with a rattle, letting it escape again with a soft burble. Disquieting intimacy.
‘You’re snoring,’ I said in the dark.
A little later, again, louder this time.
‘Hey, you’re snoring!’
She awoke with a start.
‘Oh, sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll roll over.’
She fell back asleep, became body once more. The body that would again play a role in people’s fantasies. Men’s. Millions of men. It would be lusted after, it would summon up burning desires – her likeness would be reproduced countless times, she would be a star again, for that is what a star is, the result of uncontrolled, eruptive proliferation, a metastasis. But now, because it was a comeback and she was much older than back then, there would be the nudge-wink of camp, of bad taste taken ironically, perhaps she would become the patroness of homos, who had more or less invented camp. But how ironic could it be, I wondered, commercialized sex: you could fuck in front of the camera in a derby or a Minnie Mouse mask, but it remained pornography: the portrayal of penetration, intended to stimulate masturbation. The way it had appeared to me in Lilith. That body beside me. That had already caused me so much painful confusion, and that was now snoring. The thought: what if I raped her? Then it would all be over and done with, then the sin would be manifest and my life would have purpose, it could consist of penance. I would long for what didn’t exist: forgiveness. I can’t turn my thoughts to anything else, it’s all equally filthy. And she sleeps on, like a baby. A very noisy baby. In her dreams there are no demons. I am standing guard. This is how our lives will be, I suddenly see it all clearly: she will give herself away, and I will save her. With me she will re-find herself and remember who she was. The life of a porn star is her point of departure, I will be her return. All night long, that is the only clear moment, the moment when I realize what our life will look like. I will stay with her, wherever she goes to do whatever she does, I will be there with all the inert patience of a confession box. I also know that she will push me away, that she will say I should lead my own life and that I don’t have to be her keeper; words I will tolerate purely and passively, with the smile of one who knows better.
Halfway through the night, I’d had enough.
‘Why did you turn the light on?’ she moaned.
‘You’re snoring, goddamn it.’
I climbed out of bed and began pulling away the sheet on my side. I pushed the beds apart.
‘I have earplugs in the bathroom,’ she said, ‘in my sponge bag.’
‘Forget the earplugs.’
Now I had a single bed, but not enough sheets and blankets. In trousers and a T-shirt I went out into the hall, took the lift down and asked at the desk for extra sheets and a duvet.
‘Which room number, sir?’
‘I’ll take it up myself.’
‘We’ll have it brought to you, sir, that’s no problem. What is your room number?’
A little later a knock at the door, a black boy with sleepy eyes behind a pile of linen. My mother had turned onto her side, a sleep mask from the plane over her eyes. She had fallen asleep again.
The next morning she had gone out, without leaving a note. A big breakfast, the fruit aglow with freshness. I could get used to this life. Dozens of snowy white gym shoes wandered back and forth through the dining room, a procession in all directions. Outside the windows an oceanic heaven full of immaculate light. To be honest, I didn’t quite know what to do. The day spread out before me without direction. I tried to summon up the feeling of a traveler who, after journeying on foot for two years, finally arrives in California.
‘California, here I come,’ I said to myself quietly a few times, but couldn’t hold on to the feeling for long.
At a little breakfast place on Ocean Avenue I pulled a copy of LA Weekly from the pile. After taking a walk, on a bench outside an alternative coffeehouse I sat down and read the cover story. The article was in two parts, an overview of her career and the account of a press conference. My eyes skimmed back and forth over the lines, Mister Rollo Liban, Miss LeSage’s agent . . . major deal . . . Watchtower Productions . . . high-class porn . . . return of porn-chic . . . Autumn would see the release of her first film in twenty-four years. Yes, she was older, she must be close to fifty now, the journalist wrote, but she was still absolutely dazzling. If she had been preserved so wonderfully without the benefit of plastic surgery, he noted, then it was nothing less than a miracle, comparable to the wondrous conservation of the remains of the nineteenth-century saint Catherina Labouré in Paris.
‘Do you think your body can still stand up to it, to all that tumult?’ was one of the questions asked during the press conference.
She had smiled and said ‘This body is the tumult, Mr. Journalist.’
Concerning what she’d done between then and now, where she had been, she spoke only in guarded terms – Europe, a family, life on the sidelines. And why had she chosen to make a comeback now? Three reasons, she’d said: for the money, for the money and for the money. And the fourth reason: for the light. The light was her metaphor for attention, the fame she had left behind for a man. That explained the text on the cover: EVE LESAGE BACK IN THE LIMELIGHT.
It amazed me to see the
matter-of-fact tone in which they spoke of a comeback in the world of porn: no sniggering, no moralizing. Perhaps it didn’t matter what you were famous for, perhaps politics, entertainment, criminality and pornography all enjoyed the same status here.
A contract had been signed with Watchtower Productions for three major productions: First Lilith, The Second Coming, then Josephine Mutzenbacher’s 1000-and-1 Night, and finally Testament, a delirious, pornographic reconstruction of three sexually laden stories from the Old Testament: the tale of Tamar, Onan and Judah, the story of David and Bathsheba and that of King Ahasveros and Esther.
The film about Josephine Mutzenbacher would be shot on location in Vienna. The director was Jerry Rheinauer, the Cecil B. DeMille of pornography. The article referred to her, Eve LeSage, as the Grace Kelly of porn; it was a universe of derivatives, of quasi-artists trying to gain status through references to real artists, to other stars who had shone without the rancidness of smut.
I was dressed too warmly, the sun was scorching now. This was not a place where one could do without sunglasses. The light was too bright, it made my eyes water. Through the blur of tears, my gaze fell on a review in the Must See Art section: a new exhibition, Abgrund, by Bodo Schultz, at the Steinson & Freeler Gallery.
Bewildered, I took the paper inside and read the article there. In an exclusive move, Bodo Schultz’s agent has offered the gallery new work. The art critic describes what he has seen: a film made by Schultz, ragged and intense. Schultz leads us along the brink of an Abgrund, a chasm of his own making, not the chasm of the soul but a physical one, somewhere in the jungles of Panama. He himself does not appear on camera, except for one moment; the camera is fixed on a single point, we see a man approaching and then, behind his back, there is a huge explosion. The camera is knocked over by the shockwave; a few moments later someone picks it up, it’s still running, the camera’s eye slides across a man’s torso, his face: Schultz. The charge has gone off prematurely. A slow, silent film, for the rest; each time Schultz launched into his poisoned litanies, the viewer was shocked. It was a video report of his project in the jungle – he was destroying a mountain. A mountain. The critic was impressed by the ruthlessness, praised him as a man of extreme consistency. A ‘must-see’, in other words.
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