Pure Hollywood

by Christine Schutt

  ALSO BY CHRISTINE SCHUTT

  Prosperous Friends

  Nightwork

  Florida

  A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer

  All Souls

  Pure

  Hollywood

  and Other Stories

  CHRISTINE SCHUTT

  Copyright © 2018 by Christine Schutt

  Cover design by Abby Weintraub

  Cover photograph: Falken Flats (04) © Hamish Robertson

  “The Hedges,” “A Happy Rural Seat of Various View: Lucinda’s Garden,” “The Duchess of Albany,” “Where You Live? When You Need Me?” “The Dot Sisters,” “Oh, the Obvious,” and “The Lady from Connecticut,” all originally appeared in NOON, A Literary Annual.

  “Family Man,” originally appeared in Fence.

  “Burst Pods Gone-by, Tangled Aster,” originally appeared in

  Oxford American.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: March 2018

  This book is set in 12 pt. Bembo by

  Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2761-7

  eISBN 978-0-8021-6565-7

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To David

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Christine Schutt

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Pure Hollywood

  The Hedges

  Species of Special Concern

  A Happy Rural Seat of Various View: Lucinda’s Garden

  The Duchess of Albany

  Family Man

  Where You Live? When You Need Me?

  Burst Pods, Gone-By, Tangled Aster

  The Dot Sisters

  Oh, the Obvious

  The Lady from Connecticut

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  Pure Hollywood

  How disappointing it was to wake intact and far away from the matchstick aftermath of the extinguished fires, thready smoke rising from piles that had been homes, the famous modern house not among them.

  “Mimi?” he asked quietly, driving up a slight incline and into a space still hers, everything, all of it: a modern house shaped like slung plates, no corners, different heights. “What do they think this place is worth?” he asked, still whispering so as not to disturb—what? There was only the house.

  “What’s it worth? It’s like living in a great fucking painting is what it is. The place is priceless.” The house was not that much cooler than the car, and Mimi went through it and opened windows and the sliding door to the terrace. “I know I’m letting in hot air,” she said, “but I hate things shut.” She moved off to the kitchen and offered Stetson a drink.

  “What are you doing?” he asked as he found and filled two glasses with ice.

  “I’m taking off my clothes,” she said. “They smell of smoke. I should go ahead and burn them.” Off came her shell and the wavy pants that shivered down the chair rail as fast as she threw them. Underneath she wore what looked like string. There wasn’t much to her.

  “Fuck,” Stetson said. His shirt was off, his pants, his shoes. He sniffed his arm. “My arm stinks.” He put his arm up to his sister’s nose. “What is that?”

  “Pickles?” she offered. “What did you have for lunch?”

  He sniffed his other arm. “Nothing.”

  All the pleasure to be had in looking at Stetson but Mimi had married Arnold Fine, ugly as an anvil, Arnie, and driven her brother away. Less than a month ago her husband stepped into the pool and died. Age sixty-nine, heart attack—happened fast and what happened after came on faster: the ambulance, the body bag, the funeral home, the furnace. He was ashes in a matter of minutes.

  Mimi poured vodka into her glass. “Tonic,” she pointed to the counter, “and there’s Perrier.”

  Tap was okay with Stetson but did she have any food?

  “How can you be hungry! Smell your arm,” she said.

  Wearing pointy mules, Mimi walked onto the terrace to a Hockney scene, only not so blue, more green. The lounge chairs were rightly low and wide, hewn from wood that would outlast them, but the pool? Mimi said, “The pool’s a swampy squiggle, I’m afraid, decorative. What do you think it’s worth?” she asked and watched him assess the place. “This is like old times,” Mimi said, and walked into the water to her waist.

  “You’re tempting me,” he said. “How do you insure a priceless place?”

  “You don’t.” For a time she stared at the house, then walked out of the pool and took up her glass and banged the cubes against her teeth, chewed ice.

  She adjusted her strings, distracted by leaves wooden in the wind. If only the wind weren’t so hot.

  “Is there someone here?” Stetson asked.

  “The gardener?” A gardener seemed to have come with the house, a man not so new as ignored. The gardener had a leaf blower. The plants weren’t a problem but the grotesque tree shed. Brown leaves, long as shoes, got shuffled around the walkways until the nameless gardener came to blow them out of sight. They disappeared, just as the gardener disappeared, week to week. Sometimes Mimi heard the hacking cough of his truck; sometimes, his blower. Today she had heard nothing; there was nothing much to blow away; nothing dead in the pool, but the slack hose jumped, distended, and withdrew around the house, followed by the sound of water. It had to be the gardener.

  Mimi went to see and, yes, it was the gardener misting the front of the house. He had nodded at her. What was wrong with him? Didn’t he read the papers? Someone—not Mimi, not today—would have to tell him there was no more work here. She walked back to Stetson, enjoying the katack-katack of her shoes against the stone terrace, a sound both slutty and indulgent, right out of the movies, but wasn’t Mimi right out of the movies? She was pretty enough—everyone said.

  “Does this really feel like home to you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said and she adjusted the chair to lie flat, eyes closed, given over to the liquidy heat lapping her pale body.

  “We weren’t married long enough for anyone to believe I loved Arnie,” she said, “but I did. He made me laugh. Honestly. Aren’t you hot?” she sat up, wiped her eyes, and walked into the pool. “Come in with me. The water’s cold, but you get used to it.”

  If his sister was thin, he was thin, too, jailbird-sickly with his arms held up as he waded in, testing. The pool was not very deep, which might explain the slightly yellow color of the water, and the sky, too, was a creepy kind of yellow, a spreading dread.
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  “Do you think …” she began and didn’t finish. She said, “The gardener’s hosing down the house.”

  “When’s the last time this pool was cleaned?” Stetson treaded water and looked around him. “Just the color,” he said, which, along with slimy tiles, was sickening, and he did his swimming, such as it was, in the middle. He dived under; he made a few strokes down and back. Only the tiles along the ledge of the pool seemed unclean, and he avoided the ledge until the last minute when he lifted himself out.

  “Hey,” she said, “where’re you going?”

  “Inside.”

  In the kitchen, he refilled his glass and drank enough to fill it again before he set it on the counter. His medicine made him thirsty. Mimi came up from behind him and he flinched at her touch.

  Water splattered against the windows—the gardener was close.

  “You don’t get it.”

  “I do,” she said, “you’re sober and I’m not.”

  He said, “That’s right,” then he took up his glass and walked down the hall into the bathroom, where a clunking noise signaled his intention to shower. From the looks of the soap—discolored, cracked—no one had used the downstairs shower for some time. Tepid reddish water pooled at his corpsey feet and the clunk of the pipes when he turned off the water echoed, sounding spooky. He couldn’t do much with a hand towel, and his long hair dripped onto his collar and down the back of his white shirt. At least he felt cool; at least dressing and the hotter prospects of the hours to come didn’t dismay him. But his sister, just getting past her was hard. Mimi stood, almost as he’d left her, in the kitchen, listening to nothing he could hear, but her expression suggested the sound grated.

  “What is it?”

  “You don’t hear that? Not the pipes. There it is again.”

  All he heard was the high-pitched present.

  “Stay,” she said.

  “I can’t,” he said and said again to himself as he backed onto a steep road that wound through the dry brush down the hillside, past other drives and tucked-away houses. The houses he could see were messy blots on other hills, expensive blots. Stetson didn’t have much money but whose fault was that? He knew that’s what his sponsor would say: Why not whine home to Daddy and ask? Some sponsor.

  The late afternoon sky he saw was the same Mimi saw leached of all its color. Mimi, with her eyes stung by the smoke or crying or both, drew the draperies and turned on a downstairs light, a small flame in the gloom of the mostly bare and sunken living room. The Eames chair—her husband’s—startled her: where had it been that she had not seen it? Then her lawyer, making good on his word, called, and she learned what she already knew: nothing was hers.

  Briefly sober, she called Stetson’s cell to say she wasn’t going to drink anymore and she wished he would come back. She didn’t like to be alone in the house. “I want to get better. I want to get over this. I wish you’d pick up,” she said, then blipped off, hurt to think he hadn’t even answered a call with her name. She fixed herself more of the same and lowered the blinds in the kitchen and in the dining room to spy on the gardener as he moved around the house. His expression was hard to make out, but she watched him wrestle the hose into a terra-cotta pot; the hose must have weighed more than he did, poor man. When she thought he might come to the front door, Mimi took off her mules and crept through the house, up the floating staircase to what she had made into her bedroom, where she hid between the bed and the wall. She waited, she waited for a long time, which was perhaps what he did, the gardener, in his garden colors. He stood outside the door in good faith of payment but for what? Hosing down the house against fires, mounting staghorn ferns? What had he done today, this gardener, and why was it she knew him only as shadowy and poor? His stunted children rest their chins on the kitchen table. Sticky fly strips hang near the sink and back door. His wife’s scorched hair is in the rice and on his tongue; now the rice tastes dirty. Look elsewhere—forget the shapeless face of his fat son, there is his favorite there, his daughter, over there near the fly strips shaking cinnamon on everything she eats. “Even beans?” he asks her.

  The gardener, where was he now? The gardener’s truck was gone—the gardener was gone, left without being paid: now how will he feed those children?

  Driving east into the sensation of a rising sun, driving into mountains made no more attractive than dung by that same sun not seen, not seen—Stetson was driving without any music, and Jesus—it hurt to look at it, the desert house as he remembered it: a rusted box on stilts and the garden, made of white crushed rock and cacti, too forbidding to play near although their mother sat among the stolid barrelheads, plinking the pink spines in her cloud of absence. She liked to smoke and watch the sun drop behind the mountains on the other side of which were the Pacific and their father. Mother said their father was watching the same sky, but how did she know this?

  “I do.”

  When she said, “I do,” she would pout in the way she used to as an actress and for a moment she was Sabine Agard again and not their mother.

  Why weren’t they in school? Their mother said they could make up the weeks missed in summer at home in LA. Their mother made a face Sabine Agard made in movies: shifty. She turned away. On the baked stone she sat, barrel-like and spined in fishhook spines too fine to see, yet they knew enough not to brush against their mother. They sat quietly and waited out the sky until it dulled.

  Mimi’s job was to fry eggs for a breakfast-dinner; Stetson’s to put out plates. They made a lot of noise; it felt good. Turned on the radio and the Mexican guys in sombreros sang “Las Mañanitas.”

  Great cracks from the bacon Mimi poked made them jump and roused their mother, who sniffed her way in but looked through them. The bacon buckled and the yolks broke.

  “Careful,” Mother said but too late. Grease prickled Mimi’s arms and she yelped. No long good night tonight, they knew. No books, no songs, no prayers, no promises; no stories about when, When you were born … When you were two … Was there ever a time before them—really?

  Yes. Since they had moved to the desert Mother thought most about what happened before with people they didn’t remember or hadn’t known.

  Stetson shunned the eggs and stuck wadded fat from the bacon up his nose.

  “That’s disgusting!” Mimi cried.

  But their mother was already gone.

  Best not think about how she did it, how half in and out of the bed she was, pills, goblets—gobbets, blood? Even then he was thinking of soldiers and dragons and fortifications.

  You didn’t see anything. I didn’t either.

  Mimi told the helpline their mother wasn’t waking up but that their mother was alive.

  How did Mimi know that?

  I didn’t. I was afraid. I got you out of the house. Do you remember? We sat in the cactus garden. The sun wasn’t over the mountains and the desert was cool. After a while an ambulance came. He could only pretend to remember. Everything about his mother’s suicide came from newspapers and magazines.

  Stetson was nine years old at the time; Mimi was eleven. Someone drove them to a little airport, put them on a little plane. They knew they were going to their father because his name was repeated, Jack Deminthe, Mr. Deminthe, said in tones that made him out to be an important man working from afar.

  Jack Deminthe, at seventy, masseused and smooth as a skinned almond, orderly and fit, no swollen or discolored parts about him but he attended to them, got himself fixed, saw the right doctor, bought a better, more expensive chair or piece of equipment to pedal. He was pedaling now at home alone and watching while on the TV fires unevenly advanced again in the Malibu Hills. He was safe but his daughter wasn’t, was she? Jack had warned Mimi: comedians don’t retire; they just get more depressed. Arnie Fine, once a funnyman, had died of a curdled heart. How many times had Jack told her: Arnie Fine will not make you laugh.

  But she had insisted he did. Arnie may have made others cry, but not her. Mimi had said he was funny to her.
“What’s odd is that a comedian would marry someone like me with no sense of humor,” and then in a sly voice, “Must be something else about me,” which even to remember made Jack uncomfortable.

  Later in the morning, Jack Deminthe told his trainer about Arnie Fine, not mentioning his daughter Mimi.

  The trainer had never heard of Arnie Fine. The trainer was from one of those places in Eastern Europe that Jack associated with mass graves in the woods and wet wool coats. “I don’t know this man!” he shouted. Everything the trainer said came out loud, but to be fair, when Jack thought about it, as a Chechen, the poor bastard had probably survived by being loud.

  For lunch Jack had a vegetarian concoction—kale, lemon, mint—an astringent drink that made his blood fizz. He drank water, several glasses of water, along with the kale juice. His lunch companion, his secretary, Jody, had the same.

  “How does that make you feel?” Jack asked.

  “Full?”

  Whereto after lunch but Walmart for slippers. He needed new slippers. Jack had his driver take him to Walmart and the two of them walked through the store until they found slippers. “Everyone in this country is fat,” Jack said, and he made no effort to be discreet but repeated himself as he sensed approach, which happened from time to time, so that he said something repellent, something about the aisle and its width, the supersize quantities of crap. He considered a tub of mayonnaise.

  Jack let his driver pay for the slippers but before he could take up the receipt, he heard the low utterance of his name and was ruffled by the flurry of two women passing. In the car Jack told his driver the next stop was Malibu. He wanted to see for himself: was the famous house still standing?

  Yes, the house, a stacked appearance as of a backbone, he could just see it, the house named after its architect, Alessandro Piro, the Piro house was upright. Jack could see it as the car took the last turn, but was his daughter in it?

  He should know but they had stopped speaking when Mimi told him she had married Arnie Fine.