"That's not what I wanted to talk about."
"That's all anybody ever wants to talk about, Brad-lad. Fucking and getting fucked. Who's doing it and who it's getting done to. When can you fuck, how long can you fuck, how soon can you brag about it. It is the basis of all power, all human desire, and most ambition. People groom themselves according to notions of fuckability. They edit their lives to make their personal stories fuckworthy. If you don't aspire to fuck someone, then you aspire to fuck them over, and thus achieve a goal or desire, which usually boils down to fucking someone else. We're pretty predictable, as a race. Cheers."
"I think this woman is Drea Wiseman?"
One of McCabe's eyebrows arched. "Boy, there's a blast from the past. What were you, about two years old?"
"Older than that. Old enough." That struck Brad as peculiar, since lie's always assumed he and McCabe were roughly the same vintage. Now, in the tricky light partially afforded by the board-up, McCabe definitely seemed older. Perhaps it was his gruff, paternal delivery. Or maybe it was the fact that McCabe hadn't had so much gray when Brad had last seen him, several weeks ago.
"Drea Wiseman is old enough to draw Social Security, if she hasn't OD'ed by now, or blown her brains out, or been croaked by cancer or AIDS. Most of these chicks don't enjoy happy endings. Look at the pictures again. That's not Drea Wiseman with an expensive makeover and a good wig, posing for one of those stupid Sexy Moms Over Fifty spreads with the stretch marks airbrushed out. That's Sela, who wants to break into acting and be known by a single name only. She'll be a sensation until next Veteran's Day and then nobody will remember her except Cherique."
"You're blowing my fantasy, McCabe."
"Sorry. I've shot so many of these chicks with a camera that I think I want to start shooting them with a gun, maybe save them a little heartbreak. Then they get on their knees for you, and take your dick in their hand, and their eyes get luminous and seem to fill the universe, and what do you know, I keep snapping away, even though some days I feel like the Grim Reaper, collecting souls on proof sheets."
"You've got to look at this." Brad pulled the copy of Risque from his briefcase. "I mean really look at it?'
"Don't have to?" said McCabe, recharging both their glasses. "I shot it. Two sessions, summer of '73, I can show you the proofs if you want. I'm the guy who suggested the clear polish on her nails."
Brad's heart gave a slam that seemed to bow his ribs. He almost blushed. Instead of lunging at the opportunity, however, he said, "What are you not telling me?"
McCabe looked directly into his eyes, holding his gaze for the first time since Brad had entered the room, then chuckled. "That's much better."
"I don't understand."
"You understand more than most. Come on."
Most of McCabe's career files were stored in seventy lateral filing cabinets, stacked double along a corridor as long and wide as Death Row. They were labeled with adhesive numerals. Whatever treasures they contained remained unmolested. McCabe led Brad past every single one of them and into a room with a lot of slanted drafting tables, lightboards and broad, flat work surfaces. It reminded Brad of the Raw Room, if one could ever conceive of the Raw Room as uncluttered.
Stacks and stacks of Drea Wiseman awaited his inspection. Fully clothed, naked, daytime, by nightlight, by moon shimmer, in shadow, close-up, far away, demurely shy and spread out like lunchmeat on a cutting board. It was a feast, and Brad was meant to gorge, and when he did he found that his brain could not hold enough of her. This was all static photographic evidence; it added Drea's existence up to a still picture. At least the Drea in Forced Confession had moved.
"And here's Sela Brownlee." McCabe portioned out a generous file of the new kid.
"What're those others?"
McCabe riffled the label tabs. "Hm ... Nadia Dröeste, Brady Caverston, Milicent Rich, Leigh Micheline, Rexanna Schott, Corey Rose?'
They were all Drea Wiseman. Different hair, different eye stylings, but all Drea. Brad paged through a mental timeline from 1979 to 1986, to 1992, to ... Sela Brownlee.
"Jesus H., McCabe?" he whispered.
"Pretty weird, huh? So now that you're digesting this world-staggering information, what do you think you might do about it?"
"This is …" Brad groped for adequate hyperbole. "Unprecedented. This is an article ... no, a book, at least ... this is ... McCabe, I've got to find her."
McCabe leaned against the door jamb and exhaled heavily, rubbing his face. He looked, in that moment, like a very old man, decades distant from Brad's generation. "No chance you'd just kinda give this up and let me put away my files?"
"Are you nuts?"
"Nab, I can see the light in your eyes. You're not gonna let go of this?"
"No way, masked man."
McCabe sipped his drink contemplatively. "I thought you might come to that." He extended a folded slip of his own letterhead paper, already written up. "Here's where you'll find her."
Further up PCH, practically to Point Pitt, as the sun gradually sinks into the horizon line of pre-storm chop. Brad imagines the thunderheads are steam produced by the extinguishing orb. It's in a big hurry to set, and the faster the road darkens, the faster Brad drives, making the night highball toward him. Salt accretes in damp white scales on his windshield. He is well past the posted limits as darkness takes over, well aware that he is forcing himself to rush toward the night, the storm, and the things he hopes he might find inside.
McCabe had scared him by handing over Drea Wiseman in a single folded page, even though her existence, insofar as it concerned Brad, had begun with another single folded page. Brad had wanted secret files and dusty evidence, a process of excavation rewarded by discovery. Surely McCabe does not spew forth referrals to everyone who had ever gotten turned on by a centerfold. Brad feels stupidly like a guy viewing a Pointillist and seeing only big dots.
Nobody is laughing at him. Yet.
The address is a walled Spanish cliffside retreat thoughtfully constructed to sluice off the assault of sea storms. No neighbors. Amber, insect-proof bulbs ring the wall and lend the compound a sodium glow against a night now insistent upon rain. The first drops speckle Brad and nest in his hair as he reads a framed, typed sheet telling him what to do with the intercom.
The iron gate buzzes and admits him to a courtyard. His hair is already soaked as he waits on the next door - three times as wide as he is, massy, struck crudely from wood. It resembles a drawbridge hinged on one side. The entry to a fortress. He suspects most of the house is hidden away in caverns snaking through the rock below him.
Too late now; he's drenched.
"You're Brad?"
"No ... I mean, yes, I ..."
She is already holding a folded green towel and she is looking at him the way a person might look at a citizen sprawled on the sidewalk before saying, Are you all right? She is wrapped up in some kind of leather-belted silky black top that swims around her when she moves; her slacks match and the whole ensemble is almost dressy. He expected her to be barefoot in her own home and she is wearing shoes like she expects to conduct business. She looks exactly like the Drea Wiseman in the 1974 centerfold except that now her hair is a deep, burnished mahogany and there is more of it, casually horse-tailed back. Brad's vision telescopes vertiginously and for a horrifying instant he is afraid he might faint dead away.
"It's you," he says.
"We'll see about that. McCabe called me." She leads him in and hands him the towel, indicating he should follow her, but they have not touched yet. Brad watches her walk and it seems to amaze him.
"Mind you, McCabe wouldn't have called if the circumstances weren't special. Sit over there." She points at a chrome sculpture of a chair meshed with a kind of rubber webbing. Brad glances at the sofa. Of course not; he's wet as a fish. He dries his hair, grateful that he can hide behind the towel for only a second. She brings him a tall glass of sparkling water and a flute of something that turns out to be a pretty refreshing Rhine, s
lightly spicy, not something that will render him sleepy or more idiotic. "No, drink the water first," she says. Brad does as he's told and is mildly shocked to find his body craves the water as though dehydrated; he drains the glass. "Now you can sip that," she says. "Okay ... so what makes you so special?"
"Are you Drea Wiseman?"
She smiles to herself as though Brad has just asked whether she's female, or human. "Yes, now what makes you so special that McCabe would call me about you, and send you all the way up here in the rain?"
"I ... uh ..." Brad has no idea, so he says so.
Again the smile. "I like that. You don't lie if you don't know."
Already Brad is seduced, and he wonders if she is playing him out, feeding him the line that precedes the reeling in, and the devouring. He compels himself to stay level. "I'm not sure; I can tell you what I told McCabe."
"That'd be a good start." She settles in to listen. She can see Brad marveling at her all the way. This is nothing like a wet dream or a fantasy; Brad feels completely out of control, like he's just shit his pants on a city bus, and he comprehends why Chinese clichés warn people about wishing for things.
He unspools the story of the foldout, thankful he left the damned magazine in the car. He is not seeking an autograph, and why would Drea need to see an obsolete magazine, anyway?
"My name is Sela now." she corrects him, making him more a boob. "Brownlee."
"Yes. Go ahead."
He is being given permission to display himself in an embarrassing way, and suddenly he wonders about hidden cameras, recording devices, maybe in the potted ficus next to him. Then he wonders why he has not brought a camera, a tape recorder. And all the while, his mouth keeps talking. He talks about Drea, and Nadia, and Brady, and Milicent, and 1979 to 1986, and 1992 to now, and -
"And so you might conclude by saying that in one way or another, you've been looking for me ever since you were, what, a teenager?"
"I didn't want to put it that way," Brad says. "It would make me look more sheepish that I already feel."
"You can relax; it's okay. How old are you now? Pushing forty?" Brad makes a face.
"Already crossed that Rubicon; that's okay too. Kind of begs the next question, doesn't it?" Drea - Sela gets up, crosses the room, gets refills for both of them. They still have not touched. Brad has no idea of how much time has passed, but it is still raining, in fact, water is bath-tubbing down from the sky in harsh sheets. "I could tell you that I age well. I could tell you that I'm a different person, despite an amazing resemblance, and that you have been somehow tricked by the light, by romanticizing old photos, by projecting onto still pictures. But you still haven't told me what makes you special. Why you?"
Brad senses that he is failing some kind of quiz, and based on the assumption he might see this woman, this stranger, only this one time, he digs deeper and finds a confession. Instead of prattling on about magazine dates and pursuing Milicent Rich to find Leigh Micheline, followed by Rexanna and then Corey, he tells Sela about his dad. He talks about glimpsing the face of Drea Wiseman while losing his virginity at a drive-in, and marrying Suzanne, and getting dumped by Jennifer Spikers, whose last name he now has no trouble remembering. He replays his intense conversation with McCabe, about how finding Drea Wiseman means articles and money and publicity, and maybe a book.
Sela reacts as though she has just received a mild electric shock on some pleasure center; things seem to align for her. "I've watched them try to expose Bettie Page, like boarding a bug under a magnifying light," she says. "It's disgusting. They printed those police photos of her when she was arrested. Those pictures damage what she meant to the people who loved her image. And when she's dead, full disclosure will help murder the mythology. I don't know about you, Brad, but I need to believe she'll always be that Bettie Page." She framed her hands, view-plating a picture in her mind. "You know what I mean?"
Brad says that he thinks so, lost. Her voice is giving him an erection he has to cross his legs, nonchalantly, to obscure.
"I know why you're special," she says. "You won't give up. Not ever. You'd be surprised how many obsessive people do. You feed them a bite of contrary evidence, you exploit their need to disbelieve the unbelievable, and they're satisfied. They give up and go away because they think they're found answers. Sometimes - rarely - people find it in themselves to countermand their default setting for rationalization; it's a double, she had a younger sister, it's someone made up to look like her, it can't really be her, why, she'd be a hag by now."
Blood pounds in Brad's temples. How is he supposed to conduct his life after he leaves this place? "But McCabe seems to know what's what."
"I have a deal with McCabe; he shoots my photographs. And I trust him, and soon I'll have to ask if I can trust you."
She has the power to make Brad's desire seem frivolous. He thinks - really thinks - for a moment, then says, "How?"
"I need you to tell me if everything is the same." She stands and loses the blouse and the light makes her the same color as in the magazine, so many years back. There are no tan lines and few dermal imperfections, and Brad is looking at her in a way that can only be described as respectful, even though she is removing her slacks and now stands less than four feet from him, naked except for the shoes, which have enough heel to mold her legs as she turns. "You'd know, you see. You'd recognize if anything was wrong or different, and you would tell me, yes?"
"Yes," he says, very softly, fighting not to lose his voice.
She beckons him up and kisses him. Their lips are the first flesh contact, which quickly spreads. His hands explore her as hers reconnoiter inside his clothing. In her mouth he can taste every lust he ever experienced, desires so familiar they are like necessary organs shielded by his bones.
"Can you help me?"
He regards her eyes, inhales her breath, and does not need to answer.
"Can you help me stay the way I am, the way you've always loved me? Can I trust you?"
"What can I do? What did McCabe do?"
"He gave me ten years of his life. I would ask for ten of yours, for this thing we are about to do." She points toward the ocean. "Out there, in the storm. I'll take you out there. And I would ask for ten years."
Brad has already spent close to thirty years, he realizes, in transit toward this room and this moment. He is willing to eagerly agree to this bizarre proposition, and not solely for glandular reasons; he not only wants this woman, who is named Sela, tonight, but he needs her to actually move in and occupy one of the spaces of his life, exactly tonight, during this raging storm.
"Please say yes, and help me," she says. She removes her shoes and opens a big sliding glass door. The rain sizzles on the terrace and a vigorous breeze snaps burgundy curtains inward. It is not cold, merely wet and alive.
When they are naked on the sand, they too are wet and alive and anything but cold. Their connection is magnetic and unyielding, more akin to the elemental forces prompting the storm than to any mere collision of flesh, of lengths, depths and widths. Every one of Brad's pores seems gently threaded to those of Sela; when she moves, he feels the tug all over his skin. When he comes the first time he swears he can feel his own semen being ducted out of him as though pulled by a strong alien gravity. Sela has but to shift a minute degree, and meet his gaze with eyes that shone violet in the storm-glow, and he becomes erect inside of her again - that is all it takes. He would not peak with a mere orgasm and be deprived of the warm embrace into which he is so blissfully sunk. He feels her climax, like a powerful fist, cradling him with deliberate gentleness and the tease that such control might be quickly and unexpectedly overridden. Most feelings of security held the danger of becoming suffocating traps, like quicksand. But for those who could ride this treacherous tide, the raw current gushing through Brad's body came as close to defining genuine ecstasy as any thought or sensation it had ever been his conceit to experience.
They outlasted the storm.
Hours, still, befor
e sunup. They started a blaze inside a capacious flagstone fireplace, and tended each other's needs.
"Ever since I was old enough to have sex," said Brad, "it was never a question of who I wanted to fuck, but who would agree to fuck me. I thought I had to pursue women. A teenage boy is just an enormous gland, and like most teenage boys, it never occurred to me that girls had sexual cravings."
"Excepting sluts, of course," Sela said, amused by watching him talk half to the fire, half to her.
"The first time I aspired to a girl - a woman - who, as it turned out, wanted me right back, I figured it must be love."
"Reciprocity is a bitch. She wanted you, so you concluded this was the love you'd heard so much about ... and it turned out that the emotions were different for her, I bet."
"Yeah - she just basically wanted to get laid, and didn't want to be called a slut. If I had a virtue before I was twenty, it was discretion, mostly because I was terrified of revealing anything to anybody. She had already been through so much more than me, and had just hit that phase where she needed to vary the menu, because she was afraid of closing doors too early on relationships that were different than the ones she knew how to control."
"And her name was ...
"I remember it, alright, the way you're supposed to remember the name of the person who relieved you of the curse of virginity. That's one myth that's true. But I'm going to keep it to myself, okay?"
"That's kind of charming," Sela said. "That privacy thing is hardwired into you, isn't it? Now I'll have to wonder if you're lying, and can't remember her name, or if you're telling the truth."
"I'm telling the truth."
"It's that discretion thing, right?" She saw his expression and smiled. "Relax. I already have what I want from you, and I'm enjoying this part, too." She watched until she was sure he hadn't been wounded. "What became of her, that long-ago love?"
"Married a guy who impregnated her and beat her up a lot. They knew her as well in the E.R. as they did in Maternity."
Lost Angels Page 12
