He came to the house with a bottle of grappa, the neck of it a swan’s neck, pulled long and thin, exquisitely delicate.
You take one glass in the morning, before coffee, he said, measuring an inch between two fingers, and you will never suffer from this writer’s disease, the block—
He guaranteed me the truth of this, said every writer he has ever worked with assured him it was, in fact, the case. I thanked him, neither one of us in the least ironic; we both understand the importance of superstition, the idea of a magic elixir, a talisman.
You need a table, he said when I showed him around, his gesture sweeping, encompassing the whole house. A table one can imagine feasting on—a feast with everything, pasta, fish, the best wine—a table one could have a woman on, he goes on. A woman with …!
He made another gesture, his fists closing on handfuls of imaginary flesh, and low in his throat, the noise a man makes before a meal, a declaration of his carnal nature, the intent to devour—a noise before which silverware, plates, the straps of a woman’s brassiere, are briefly illuminated for what they are—the thin and shiny trifles of civilization.
You think I am romantic, Lucci said, he raised one finger, as if to silence any protest, but I am only practical.
This morning, a table is delivered, enormous, its top thick, scarred, the legs solid, planted wide.
—20 january, Hollywood Hills
Nine days since I’ve written in this notebook, and everything’s changed. Wind blowing, knocking things over. At night like something’s alive, moving. Wake up to eucalyptus leaves littered, a massacre, all over the deck. Air has a fragrance I can’t divine; the subtlety extraordinary.
At Griffith Park, the same wind—with Lucy, and Walter, the two of us at the table, him over by the swings. As soon as she sees me, she’s reaching for her bag—a student’s bag, battered, filled with books and papers.
What else, I asked when I saw her notebook, do you have written there?
She flipped through more pages, utterly unself-conscious, read to me:
“The aesthetics of failure are alone durable. He who does not understand failure is lost.” Cocteau, she told me, from a diary he kept while at a sanatorium undergoing opium withdrawal after a younger lover’s death.
Oh, I said, I answered idiotically, as if I remembered this event—as if, perhaps, I might have even been there. She takes courses, she told me, she’s taking one now: French modernists, Proust, Cocteau, Baudelaire.
Uh-huh. I said that a lot, too, I kept nodding, unsure of my responses in the face of such erudition, unable, still, to pin her down.
Well, it’s pointless, she said. The only credits I need for my degree are science, I can’t do it. Every time I go to sign up, I end up in a class like this.
She shrugged, and in the gesture I saw the girl, staying up late with her flashlight under the covers, reading, wide awake. She keeps a notebook, I made her admit it, but it’s mostly, she said quickly, other people’s words. It’s her greatest pleasure—I like to stay up after Will and Walter have gone to sleep, she said, and fill the pages.
Told her I wished I felt that way about my work.
But you do it for money, she said (it wasn’t an accusation, somehow, although perhaps she meant it to be)—
I would never, I told her, and I meant it, too, suffer that much for anything else.
Taken aback by the pleasure her laugh gives me, and some urge toward her, my body’s unconscious invitation—closer to me, I think. Come here.
How’s everything, she asked then, the unnerving candor of her tone, with you?
Okay. I answered as if she were asking about the script, I stuck to the subject: Lucci’s deviating now, like everyone told me he would—he’s making his own way.
Is that a good thing?
The book is better, I said, delivering the line like I always do. But Lucci’s film is something different.
A parallel life, she offered.
Yes.
All around us, crazy wind in gusts, sweeping through fast, unexpected, some gale blown clear through the unobstructed desert—
Both of us rose with the noise, it seemed my instinct as immediate as hers, as if we shared the same sense of Walter’s presence moving out into the world, all the time we were speaking—we are both, I think, in love with him.
The heart-stopping pitch in his voice, and then the sight: blood streaming over his eyes, wood splintered in his hands.
I drove, Lucy holding him, blood all over my rented car’s upholstery, everything, both of us pressing on his head with the tourniquet made from the sleeve of my shirt, and how richly dark red it kept coming, vital, endless.
Minutes later, I was following her in the back of an ambulance, traffic stopping here for sirens in a way that would make New Yorkers incredulous, everyone pulling over. Raced shamelessly behind it, saw the oval of Lucy’s face, profile blurred by glass.
Ten stitches, she said to me when I got there. She was standing over his bed, the child’s eyes closed beneath her hand, his head wrapped white, his face smooth, uncreased by pain.
The doctor said he’d hardly have a scar to show for it.
None of the color had come back to her face, it was still contorted; she was trying not to cry, and I thought of the woman who tore my shirt off, how fast she took it, never asking, hardly even looking at me: Her child was hurt. Her child was bleeding.
Nine lives, I said to her, my voice low—could hardly believe how lightly we, all three of us, escaped. Smiled at her, helpless, and when she smiled back at me, the tears spilled over, even as the urge to cry was gone.
I knew it then, knew it was moving toward this from the first moment: she will be mine, the knowledge of it like sex itself—the way she already possesses me.
—29 january, Hollywood Hills
Conversation with Maggie (guilt, fear, prodding me):
I have two round trips NY–LA in my contract, every three months. Lear set it up.
Whose money did he steal for that?
Was going to ask her, how about soon—how about this weekend, we could drive to Big Sur—but her obvious contempt for the deal (and its evident lack of appeal) shut me down.
Asked her what was up instead, she said the usual. Snowed in the city. Going out after work, she and Isabel.
Meeting men? I asked, couldn’t help it, and she comes back with Meeting women?
Sure, I say, all the time.
Right, she said, and pretty much hung up.
Always twisting everything around, and what am I supposed to do—ask outright if she’s doing my former student? She’s already lied to me, what’s to keep her from doing it again? If it’s in her self-interest, fuck anybody else.
Marriage is for assholes.
—31 january, Hollywood
Escape to Malibu on a perfect beach day, Lucy behind the wheel, driving fast, driving through an unusual, baking heat, the Pacific so blue, Topanga Canyon Road winding through mythic country—dry hills rising all around, thick, tropical rain clouds piling up behind them. The land biblical somehow, puts me in mind of Jerusalem, the Tigris-Euphrates, Babylon.
Walked down wooden stairs nailed into the side of a cliff to a series of magnificent coves, arched rock, beach narrow, water numbingly cold. Dove in once, then just lay, hours in the sun, beside her.
She doesn’t go to the movies, she doesn’t read magazines, knows nothing at all, she claims, about pop culture; she’s never heard of me.
I’m not pop culture, I told her, and she said she wasn’t good about “contemporary” writers, either.
Told her I didn’t care, and while this isn’t quite true, I still want to hear it, everything she has to say. Her logic is fierce, intrinsic, irreducible, impossible to predict or refute. Have hurtled to some preternatural intimacy with her, and she with me, too; I’ve seen her body now, and herself, hiding behind it. Women always with their enigmatic sense of inadequacy—Lucy’s body so lush, her skin flawless, and she apologizes, she kee
ps a shirt wrapped around herself.
Love is a physical event, she says at one point, just one part of a series of abstract philosophical theorems she won’t admit to being her own.
My head feels tight when I’m with her, I am aware of some constant arousal: an erotic fascination with someone’s mind.
We both knew when we left that she was coming home with me, we didn’t speak of it. All I could think was that it would be the first time I’ve slept with anyone who is not Maggie in twelve years, and how terrifyingly accustomed I’ve become to my wife, to her cultivated look, sleek and poised, hair streaked, legs waxed, muscles tautened. She takes the attention for granted when she walks into a room, she catches everything, remarks, so quick and sharp I’ve seen people move back, afraid of getting cut.
Lucy seems without vanity, I don’t believe it; there exists no such woman. Kept glancing at her, as covert as I have ever written Savage to be, try to catch her assessing herself, even the most casual of looks down, at the double-looped shoelaces, or her nails, clean and square, but I haven’t seen it yet.
Don’t compare me, she said, out of nowhere, and I shook my head (I’m not, I would never), but they rise anyway, inescapable:
Lucy’s blond, too, but any streaks she has are strictly sun-made, natural. Her eyes change color, it doesn’t seem quite possible—mood eyes, I call them—from the color of slate skies on overcast days to a kind of green, to the high blue they are today, by the sea. Her skin is perfect, soft, blemish-free, unmarked, where Maggie always has bruises, small nicks, testament to a seemingly uncharacteristic (and, once upon a time, endearing) clumsiness.
Lucy’s body is beautiful, muscled but not cut, her strength a natural one, made only by the effort of everyday life—pulling weeds, picking up Walter, biking through the park (making love?). She herself dismisses it, says, It’s not perfect (grabbing the soft flesh of her thighs, her belly, to show me—flesh, I know, that Maggie would never permit), but I find it incredibly sexy, this lack of self-absorption, the unconscious confidence it shows. She has never cultivated anything but the child she grew inside her. She tells me the pregnancy passed like a dream, like sleepwalking—
I swam and I read and I slept in the sun, I craved food raw. For the first time in my life, she said, I felt my existence was justified by itself, nothing else.
And now you have him, I said, am still, am always surprised by the same stab of jealousy—Walter, both of us thinking of him, eyes so sunny beneath the big black stitches.
It’s not the same thing, she said. We’re two separate people. It’s his life now.
I’m surprised you don’t have more.
She looked at me as if I hadn’t heard a word, not any of it. It wasn’t like Maggie’s quick contempt, her correction, but something else—as if I’d just confirmed what she already knew, what she was born knowing: how no one can ever hope to be truly understood by anybody else. It made me frantic with wanting to prove otherwise, with wanting to set myself up and above, beyond that.
My wife is terrified of pregnancy, I said. The disfigurement, she calls it.
I don’t care, Lucy said. She gestured down at herself as if to say, See? And then, before I could contradict her, she said, I can’t have children just because I miss the high of pregnancy. I’m not that selfish. Anyway, maybe it was only that way with Walter. The next one might have me puking nine months straight.
She spoke casually, but there was a breathtaking brutality in it—as if she would not, for a single minute, be seen in any other light than the glare of reality.
We drove back to my place, neither of us spoke. I was nervous in a way I could hardly remember (pre-Maggie, obviously—God, I was still in my twenties then, but I don’t remember any of the old moves … just as well, I think—grimly—this woman would never put up with “moves”).
I parked at my place, opened her door. She didn’t look at me, followed me inside. Nervously, I asked if she wanted a drink. She shook her head, started going up the stairs with the reluctance of a woman heading to her executioner. When I was sure she couldn’t see me, I quickly poured two fingers of Scotch, downed them (just don’t want to shake, I told myself—coward).
When I walked into the bedroom, found her already under the covers, her swimsuit, pants, sneakers, in a heap on the floor—she buried her face in the pillow as I undressed, and I was glad, for the clumsiness I evinced—as if I’d never pulled my pants off in front of a woman (not my wife, I tamp the thought down) before.
I crawled beneath cold sheets next to her, then found myself at a complete loss: do I act like Super-Love-Dude, grab her, take her? Yes, I thought, then found I was paralyzed. Jesus, I said to myself (pure disgust), but before this mental diatribe could continue, she was suddenly on top of me, holding my face, kissing me—as naked as any woman has ever been since the dawn of time, I was sure—since Eve herself.
Her hot mouth started me up like a key in some long forgotten engine, and then I found myself trying to slow down, using techniques from my adolescence (baseball stats, the square root of pi—), but she wouldn’t let me, she was all over me, and even when I felt her face getting wet, she was reaching down, reaching for me, she was more urgent than I was, and all I could do was respond, her body was so hot, so sweet, so welcoming—I exploded inside her, the orgasm so intense I thought I might lose consciousness, and I held on to her hips for dear life, at once terrified and thrilled beyond belief.
Told her this as the last of the sun disappeared from the sky, told her everything (shades drawn, house locked).
You writers—all your talent is in your mouth, she said. And your hands.
“You writers”? How many of us have there been?
You’re my first, she said, shy again (the thought imposed itself: where M. would be flip).
She put her lips against my eyes, she wouldn’t let me look at her; it’s her shyness that hypnotizes, her shyness that invites me in—I pulled her face gently down to mine so I could see: in love, Lucy’s eyes have violet depths, limpid and penetrable.
And your last, I muttered jealously—already so jealous, yet find, somehow, admitting it painless (again: where Maggie would smirk, agonizing).
You fuck me the way you talk to me, she said, her voice raw. You imagine everything about me.
I’m a writer, I said. It’s my job.
Are you this way, too, she asked, with your wife …?
Remembered for one brief instant meeting Maggie so many years ago, and how I’d worked to impress her.
No, I said. It was different.
She turned away then like she has before when I answered some unexpected question, and I read the gesture of rejection, the sudden movement of distaste.
Why do you always speak of her in the past tense, she asked. You’re still married.
It’s not the same, I said it again; there are no other words for it. I won’t explain Maggie, the ongoing dialogue I have with her in my mind; how we are friends, how I hate her.
Lucy stayed late, I didn’t ask how. She won’t discuss “arrangements” with me—as if it were in bad taste, I said.
Deception is in bad taste, she answered, and I flinched at that tone again, a blunt harshness turned inward.
What, I asked her. I’ve never been so relentless with a woman before, never chased anyone the way I’ve chased her.
I want to know you’re saying these things for the first time, she said. But I can’t—
I am, I told her, my arms wrapped around her waist, the need to convince so urgent it was painful, but her voice rose over mine.
Don’t you see, she said. It’s how badly I want to believe that I can’t trust—
She held her hands up to show me, fingers shaking.
Lucy—I pressed my head to her navel, as if to get under her skin—Lucy, Lucy, Lucy…
She held the back of my neck when she kissed me, held me against her mouth, her tongue sudden, overwhelming.
You’re seducing me the only way I ever wanted
to be seduced, she said later still, dressing, tears streaking down to the corners of her mouth.
Stop, I said, Lucy, don’t cry, I can’t stand it—
Against my will, she said, and shoved her feet into her boots.
—1 february, Hollywood
Infidelity.
Adultery.
Betrayal.
There is no nice word for it.
In France (I keep telling myself this), in France they’re civilized about these matters. One has one’s wife, and then one has one’s mistress. I think of stories I’ve heard, of the wife and the mistress consoling each other at the man’s funeral, going home together, sleeping in the same bed, weeping together…
Every time I close my eyes I’m driven, again, to recall those images (the shock of a novel woman, phenomenal—the shock of Lucy’s nakedness, the intimacy of Lucy’s smell)—to replay them, lingering over certain flashes (my tongue in her navel, her belly swelling soft around my face; the creamy heaviness of her thighs resting on my shoulders; the surprise of her fingers, reaching, digging into me…).
Like some teenager who’s just lost his virginity, can’t stop thinking about it—and then, inevitably, of Maggie…
Can’t shake the nausea—a turmoil in the pit of my stomach, a feeling that resembles nothing so much as fear. Have been wanting to call her all day, the urge like desperation. Fight it every time; she would know, I am irrational on the subject, convinced. She would hear it in my voice; I have had carnal knowledge of a woman not my wife.
Fuck her, I tell myself, forcing other images, herself and Con, rolling together, in my bed—but they come up thin, absurd almost; they have no power compared to my own memory of last night—compared to the power of simple flesh, the inarguably tangible weight of it…
The thought nags now, persistent (what if I’m wrong… what if I’ve been wrong all along, and there’s nothing…).
So what, I tell myself, twelve years is a record anyone could be proud of.
How many marriages, I ask myself, can claim unblemished records for themselves anyway?
It’s inhuman, I reason with myself, to expect perfection.
Hollywood Savage Page 5
