Fun With Problems

by Robert Stone

  "This child was ageless, man," Ace told us. "She had the wiles of Eve."

  If any images or other evidence of desert passion existed, no one worried much about it. Talk was cheap. And most American tabloids then did not even buy pictures.

  Ace and Lucy became a prominent item, appearing in the very papers that now employed me. The stories were fueled by Ace's sudden trajectory toward stardom. Though she was blooming, grew more beautiful as she aged, Lucy was noticed only as Ace's companion.

  It happened that one week the papers dispatched me with a photographer to do a story on kids in South Central who rode high-stakes bike races. The races ran on barrio streets, inviting the wagers of high-rolling meth barons and senior gangbangers. Lucy decided to come with me, and when I went down a second time she came along again. Both times she seemed a little hammered and could not be discouraged from flirting with a few speed-addled pistoleros. A local actually approached me with a warning that she was behaving unwisely. Driving back to Silver Lake, she said: "You and I are sleepwalking."

  "How do you mean?" I asked her.

  "We're unconscious. Living parallel lives. We never see each other."

  I said I thought she was involved with Ace.

  "I mean really see each other, Tommy. The way people can see each other."

  "You're the one who's sleepwalking, Lucy."

  "Oh," she said, "don't say that about me." She sounded as if she had been caught out, trapped in something like a lie. "That's frightening."

  "That's what you said about both of us. I thought you were on to something."

  Maybe she was confounded by her own inconsistency. More likely she never got there. She sat silent for a while. Then she said: "Don't you understand, Tommy? It's always you with me. Ever since Grauman's."

  It was not a joke. I don't think she meant to hurt or deceive me with the things she said. For some reason, though, she could leave me feeling abandoned and without hope. Not only about us but about everything. She was concerned with being there. And with whom to be. It occurred to me that perhaps she was going through life without, in a sense, knowing what she was doing. Or that she was not doing anything but forever being done. Waiting for a cue, a line, a vehicle, marks, blocking. Somewhere to stand and be whoever she might decide she was, even for a moment.

  "That can't be true, Lucy."

  "Oh, yes," she said, urgently, deeply disturbed. "Oh, yes, baby, it is true."

  There was no point in arguing. A couple of miles along, she put her hand on my driving arm, holding it hard, and I suspected she might force the wheel.

  "I have such strength," she said. "I don't know how to use it. Or when. I accommodate. That's the trouble."

  One strange afternoon, Asa Maclure, Lucy and I decided to go bungee jumping. Seriously. It might have represented the zenith of our tattered glory days. The place we chose to jump from was a mountainside high above the desert, reachable by tram from Palm Springs. There, over a rock face that rose a sheer few hundred feet from the valley floor, two actual Australians, a boy and a girl, had the jump concession.

  I might say that I can't imagine how we came to plan this, but in fact I know how. Ace was well aware of the fraught status between Lucy and me. I'm sure she talked about me to him, maybe a lot. He would tease me, or both of us, when we were together.

  "You all are pathetic," he declared once. "A gruesome twosome. Tommy, she sighs and pines over you. I believe you do the same. I don't mind."

  I was provoked. He was saying that our strange affair notwithstanding, he—Mister Mens Sana in Corpore Sano—was the one she turned to for good loving. It was a taunt. So I decided I'd play some soul poker with him for Lucy and win and take her away. Thereafter he tried to see that she avoided me. When we were all together Ace and I would watch each other for cracks in which to place a wedge. Though I liked to believe I was smarter than Ace, he was verbally quite agile.

  The bungee incident began as a bad joke and started overheating, the way one kid's playful punch of another will gradually lead to an angry fistfight. In fact it was completely childish, nothing less than a dare. It was I who made the mistake of talking bungee-jump; I'd seen the Australians referred to in the Times's weekend supplement and it occurred to me I might get my employers to pay for us. Ace was famous, Lucy semifamous, beginning to get noticed, frequently called in to test, and cast at times to help lesser actors look good. There were also reruns of her several soaps.

  I felt I had to do this. I had made a jocular reference to this scheme in the presence of Ace, and Lucy and Ace called me on it. While I was trying to prod the powers above to spring and assign a photographer, the two of them went and did it. Would Lucy descend into the ponderosa-scented void after her paramour? A thing never in question. It was an eminence she'd sought lifelong, a Fuji-disposable Lover's Leap. They survived.

  All my life I have regretted not being there. For one thing, regarding Maclure, I held my manhood cheap. He had foxed me and bonded with her in a way that I, who had made something of a career out of witnessing Lucy's beau gestes, would never experience. She hurt me bad.

  Suffering is illuminating, as they say, and in my pain I almost learned something about myself. I repressed the insight. I was not ready, then, to yield to it.

  "I wanted it to be you," Lucy said, like a deflowered prom queen apologizing to the high school athlete whose lettered jersey she had worn and dishonored.

  "I wanted it to be me too," I said. "Why did you go and do it?"

  "I was afraid I wouldn't do it if we waited."

  I shouted at her, something I very rarely did.

  "You'd have done it with me! You goddamn well would have!"

  Of course this exchange was as juvenile as the rest of the incident, but it stirred the unconsidered home truth I had been resisting. This kind of juvenility goes deep, and you can also approach self-awareness after acting childishly.

  Still, I wasn't up to facing it. For days and days I went to sleep stoned, half drunk, whispering: What was it like, Lucy? I meant the leap. I very nearly went bungee jumping by myself, but it seemed a sterile exercise.

  I was bitter. I had excuses to avoid her and I used them all. She called me at the office and in Laguna, but I was tired of it. The next thing I knew I had quit my job and gone over to England to find Jennifer.

  Jen had got a Green Book and was teaching dance with some friends in Chester. When we saw each other I knew it was on again. I had to peel her loose from some painter from over the border. Another fucking Welsh boyfriend!

  I took her home to Dallas and met the high-toned folks and married her in the high-toned Episcopal equivalent of a nuptial Mass, dressed up like a character out of Oscar Wilde. She conscientiously wore red, though I pointed out that neither of us had been married before. We moved to Laguna and, lovely and smart as she was, Jen got herself a tenure-track job in dance at UC San Diego. I watched her work, and she was peppy and the good-cop bad-cop kind of teacher, and you never saw a prettier backside in a leotard. We moved to Encinitas.

  My bride all but supported me while I worked on a few scripts. She had loans from her parents and the UC salary. I don't know exactly what had changed in the movie business; I hadn't noticed anything good. However, I optioned two scripts right away.

  One day I was coming out of the HBO offices on Olympic when I ran into Asa Maclure. The sight of him froze my heart. In those years you knew what the way he looked meant. He was altogether too thin for his big frame; his cool drape sagged around him. The worst of it was his voice, always rich, Shakespearean, his preacher father's voice. It had become a rasp. He sounded old and he looked sad and wise, a demeanor that he used to assume in jest. I hoped he wouldn't mention the bungee jump, but he did. Plainly it meant a lot to him. From a different perspective, it did to me too. We traded a few marginally insincere laughs about how absurd the whole thing had been. He looked so doomed I couldn't begrudge him the high they must have had. I didn't ask him how he was.

  A couple of
weeks later I got a call from Lucy, and she wanted to see me. She was still in Silver Lake. I lied to Jennifer when I drove up to visit Lucy. Jen had not asked where I was going, but I volunteered false information. I felt profoundly unfaithful, though I realized that there was not much likelihood of my sleeping with Lucy. No possibility at all, from my point of view. So I felt unfaithful to her too.

  Lucy, in Silver Lake, seemed at once agitated and exhausted.

  "Ace said he saw you," she told me when we were seated on the patio dead Heathcliff had demolished.

  Passing through her living room I noticed that the house was in a squalid state. The floors were littered with plastic flowers and charred metal cylinders. There were roaches on the floor and in the ashtrays, along with beer cans and other post-party knickknacks. Lucy had been running with a new set of friends. I imagined these people as a kind of simian troop, although I never got it clear who exactly they were and how Lucy had been impressed into being their hostess. I did know that it had somehow to do with supply and demand.

  I had been out of town and was not familiar with freebasing. I can't be sure that Asa turned her on to it. Basing was the rage then in extremist circles like his. She talked about it with a rapturous smile. I had been around long enough to remember when street drugs hit the industry big-time, and I remembered that smile from the days when each new advance in narcosis had been acclaimed as somebody's personal Fourth of July. A life-changing event. To cool the rock's edges Lucy had taken to easing down behind a few upscale pharmaceuticals: 'ludes, opiate pills. Unfortunately for all of us, genuine Quaaludes were disappearing, even south of the border. This left the opiates, which were still dispensed with relative liberality. While I watched, Lucy cooked up the brew in her kitchen as she had been instructed. She told me she had always liked to cook, though this was a side of her I'd never seen.

  Cooking base, we ancients of art will recall, involved a number of tools. 7-Elevens then sold single artificial flowers in test-tube-like containers, so that crack scenes were sometimes adorned with sad, false blossoms. Lucy mixed quite a few gram baggies with baking soda and heated them in a cunning little Oriental pot. The devil of details was in the mix, which Lucy approached with brisk confidence. Alarmingly, the coke turned into viscous liquid. People who have put in time in really crappy motels may recall finding burned pieces of coat hanger on the floor of the closets or wardrobes. Lucy had one, and she used it to fish the brew out so it could cool and congeal. It was then that the stem came into play, and a plastic baby bottle, and a burned wad of Chore Boy. On the business end of the stem, appropriately enough, was the bottle's nipple, which the adept lipped like a grouper on brain coral.

  We did it and at first it reminded me of how, when I was a child, my mother would have me inhale pine needle oil to cure a chest cold. The effect of freebasing was different, although if someone had told me it cured colds I wouldn't have argued. It was quite blissful for a time and we were impelled toward animated chatter. I commenced to instruct Lucy on the joys of marriage, for which I was then an enthusiast. She soared with me; her eyes flashed. In this state she was always something to see.

  "I'm so happy for you. No, I'm really not. Yes I am."

  We smoked for an hour or more. As she plied the hanger end to scrape residue from the filter and stem, she told me about her career prospects, which seemed stellar. She had been cast for what seemed a good part in a film by a notoriously eccentric but gifted director who had assembled a kind of repertory company for his pictures. Some of these made money, some tanked, but all of them got some respect. For Lucy, this job was a good thing. And not only was there the film part. As schedules permitted, she was going to do Elena in Uncle Vanya at a prestigious neighborhood playhouse. I rejoiced for her. As I was leaving, supremely confident and looking forward to the drive, I kissed her. Her response seemed less sensual than emotional. I was hurt, although I had no intention of suggesting anything beyond our embrace. Sometimes you just don't know what you want.

  Around Westminster, I began to feel the dive. Its sensation was accompanied by a sudden suspicion that Lucy's reversal of fortune might be a little too good to be true. When I got home I took two pain pills and believed her again.

  Not long after this we read that Asa Maclure was dead. He had AIDS all right, but it wasn't the disease that killed him. The proximate cause of his death was an accident occasioned by his unsteady attempt to cook some base. He set himself on fire, ran as fast as he could manage out of his San Vicente apartment and took off down the unpeopled sidewalks of the boulevard. He ran toward the ocean. Hundreds of cars passed him as he ran burning. According to one alleged witness, even a fire truck went by, but that may have been someone's stroke of cruel wit.

  Asa Maclure was a wonderful man. He was, as they say, a damn good actor. He was also enormous fun. In the end, he was a good friend too, although obviously a difficult one. Suffice it to say I mourned him.

  Jennifer and I went to his funeral. It was held at a freshly painted but rickety-looking black church in what had once been a small southern town not thirty miles from where her parents lived in Oak Lawn. Asa's father presided, his master in declamation. Asa had resembled his father, and the man was strong and prevailed over his grief. There were a few people from the industry, mostly African American, all male. Praise God, Lucy did not appear.

  Back in Dallas at my in-laws' stately home, we had a few bourbons.

  "Your friend has the kiss of death," Jennifer said. She delivered this observation without inflection, but it remained to hover on the magnolia-scented air of that cool, exquisitely tasteful room.

  Both of my optioned scripts were being green-lighted.

  From what I read in the papers it seemed Lucy had been replaced in the mad genius's picture. The neighborhood production of Vanya opened with no mention of her. I presumed she had read for it. Maybe she had assumed the part was hers. Once I met her for a sandwich in a Beverly Hills deli and we talked about Ace's death. Lucy spoke slowly, with great precision, and was obviously high. I was worried about her and also concerned to discover where Ace's death had left her.

  "I've compartmentalized my life," she declared. She had brought with her a huge paperback book with dog-eared pages and she showed it to me. It was a collection of drawings by Giovanni Piranesi that featured his series called Imaginary Prisons, in which tiers of prison cells are ranked along Gothic stone staircases and upon the battlements of vast dungeons that ascend and descend over spaces that appear infinite. For reasons that many art lovers will immediately comprehend on seeing some of his drawings, Piranesi is a great favorite among cultivated junkies. His prisons are like their world.

  On the blank pages in the book Lucy had written what she called plans. These were listed in columns, each laid out in variously colored inks and displaying Lucy's runic but attractive handwriting. When she handed the book to me for comment I could only utter a few appreciative sounds. Every word in every paragraph of every column was unreadable. I still have no idea what she had written there. Finally I could not, for my life, keep myself from saying something meant to be friendly and comforting about Asa. I got the same cold suffering look I had seen when Brion Pritchard died.

  In the weeks after that, in a craven fashion, I kept my distance from her because I was afraid of what I might see and hear. She didn't call. Also the trip to Texas had left Jen and me closer somehow—at least for a while.

  A few months later Lucy left a message on our machine, absurdly pretending to be someone else. Suddenly I thought I wanted to see her again. The desire, the impulse, came over me all at once in the middle of a working afternoon. On reexamination, I think the urge was partly romantic, partly Pavlovian. I was concerned. I wanted to help her. I wanted to get seriously high with her because Jen didn't use. So my trip back to Silver Lake was speeded by a blend of high-mindedness and base self-indulgence. It's a fallen world, is it not? We carry love in earthen vessels.

  Lucy's house was not as dirty and disorderly a
s it had been on my previous visit, but everything still looked rather dingy. She did not garden or wash windows; she no longer employed her help. And she no longer cooked, since crack, the industrialized version of base, had obviated that necessity. It was safer too and far less messy than basing. The rocks went straight from the baggie into the stem. For me the hit was even better. She had Percocet and Xanax for coming down, a lot of them. She was still very attractive, and I later learned she had a thing going with a druggy doc in Beverly Hills who must have been something of an adventurer.

  "I'm going to Jerusalem!" she said. She said it so joyously that for a second I thought she had got herself saved by some goof.

  "Yes?" I approved wholeheartedly. Seconds after the pipe, I approved of nearly everything that way. "How great!"

  "Listen to this!" she said. "I'm going there to live in the Armenian quarter. In a monastery. Or, like, a convent."

  "Terrific! As a nun?"

  She laughed, and I did too. We laughed loud and long. When we were finished laughing she slapped me on the shoulder.

  "No, ridiculous one! As research. Because I'm going to do a script about the massacres. I'm going to sneak into Anatolia and see the Euphrates."

  She had an uncle who was a high-ranking priest at the see of the Jerusalem patriarch. He would arrange for her stay, and she could interview survivors of the slaughter.