Part 5 (2/2)

”What made you bring a hooker home anyway?” Dr. Billy asked.

”I explained that,” I said.

”Oh right,” Dr. Billy replied, ”I remember now. You were saving her life or something. It was a humanitarian mission. You were a regular ... what was the word?” he said to Ventura.

”Paragon.”

”You were a paragon.”

”He felt sorry for her,” Ventura snorted.

”The guy who keeps telling us he's not a romantic anymore,” Dr. Billy guffawed. Ventura guffawed back, although I don't know what the h.e.l.l he was laughing at, slumped over his desk at night and snoring in his spinach leaves while the Princess slept in his bed. At any rate, the only thing Dr. Billy was going to help us do was empty our wallets while he drank everything put in front of him, so Ventura and I went back to taking the Princess off each other's hands whenever we could, while waiting for the rain to stop. Instead it just came down like a drumbeat for the approaching moment when the whole thing would blow up in our faces. The women in the Hamblin were giving us dirtier and dirtier looks every morning the Princess strolled down the hall from Ventura's place to mine, in her heels and tight little black s.h.i.+rt; and on the phone with Viv I was sounding more funny, not less.

One night I took the Princess with me to a movie I had to review. In a screening room up on the Strip, not far from where I had first bailed her out of the water that fateful afternoon, a ponderous Czech film engaged her attention ten or fifteen minutes before she began squirming in her seat. ”This movie's boring,” she finally complained at a clearly audible volume; I ignored her. ”This movie's really stupid,” she insisted a few minutes later, to which I leaned over and whispered ”Be quiet” as the other people in the screening room began looking at us. ”I hate this!” she cried after another minute, and in the seat behind us the long-time film critic of the city's big daily paper leaned forward and warned, ”If you can't be quiet, I'll have you removed.”

”f.u.c.k you,” the Princess answered.

At that moment a plan hatched in my head by which I figured if she could just get herself kicked out of the screening, in our brief but significant separation that followed I could duck through the other exit at the front of the room, make a beeline for the car before she got there, and drive away with her running tearfully after me waving her arms. The problem with this plan was that when the publicist finally came along to eject the Princess, the Princess refused to leave without me, and so in short order I was being ejected too. I protested, of course. The big-shot critic in back, becoming more and more outraged with every bit of commotion, finally exploded, ”Get out and take your little wh.o.r.e with you!” to which the Princess, rather than flying into the scornful fury I might have predicted and suggesting within earshot of everyone that she had ”done” him a couple of weeks before in the back seat of a car down at the corner of Sunset and La Brea, instead began to sob pitifully. ”Call her that again,” I managed to answer before I felt the hands of the security guard on my back, ”and you're going home with your eyeb.a.l.l.s pinned to your lapels,” but the next thing I knew the Princess and I were outside, and I was sprawled on the sidewalk in the rain.

”Are you all right?” she said in her little voice, standing over me a few seconds before scurrying back under an awning, where she watched the rain fall on me for a while. I picked myself up off the sidewalk. We drove home in seething silence. Even though she had never particularly cared before about having a conversation, I could tell now she would be happier if I said something, so I didn't, because I didn't want her to be happier. When we stopped at a traffic light I turned to look at her and she recoiled, not as if the look in my eyes was something she had never seen before, but as if she had seen it plenty of times, all too often. I was about to reach over, open the pa.s.senger door and give her a good shove when the light turned and the car behind me honked. I was still thinking about it as we drove down Fountain Avenue picking up speed-ten, twenty miles an hour, thirty, forty. ... In the garage we sat for a while, the dark quiet of the car welling up around us.

”I'm sorry I cause you so much trouble,” she finally murmured, picking at the ends of her hair. ”I know you've been nice to me.”

Just as Ventura and I were at our wits' end, the episode with the Princess resolved itself rather ironically. For days we had been waiting for the rain to stop so she would leave, but instead it just kept coming down, harder than ever; and then the morning after the incident at the screening, when Ventura was at one end of the hallway and I was at the other, and the Princess was walking from me to him or him to me-I had long since lost track of who was transferring her to whom-suddenly the ceiling gave way and a hundred gallons of rain collapsed into the Hamblin. Like the day I picked her up out of the rapids of the Sunset Strip, it nearly washed her down the stairs; she only barely sidestepped the deluge in time. She began screaming like a banshee. Still screaming, water flooding the hallway around her, she fled down the stairs and out the front of the building, and down Jacob Hamblin Road where we could hear her all the way to Santa Monica Boulevard. Ventura and I ran down to the hotel lobby behind her, where we locked and bolted the doors and silently thanked the rain, which had condemned us to her in the first place, for now delivering us from her.

The day she erected the Memoryscope, Viv had lunch in the Glow Loft District with a guy she had known since art school. He had been married for a long time, with a couple of children, and worked for one of the few studios that were still left in L.A. He wasn't someone with whom Viv had an especially close friends.h.i.+p, but they got along well enough that, once beyond the cordialities, he felt free to tell her the story of a woman he had loved very much, since around the time his marriage had gone bad. He never had an affair with this woman but thought of her as his best friend and confidante, and dreamed that once his children were grown he would spend the rest of his life with her. One day, only a few months before, the woman had been killed in a car accident with her husband; their child, a little girl, had been in the back seat and emerged miraculously unscathed. Another couple driving by when the accident took place pulled their car over and held the little girl until the police and ambulance arrived, praying with the child and protecting her from the sight of her dead parents. Now the studio executive could only live with the realization he would never have the time with this woman he had longed for and dreamed of.

For days and weeks Viv was haunted by this story. She was terribly shaken by the chance he had had to be happy, and how that chance was now gone forever because he had never taken it. It was after hearing this story that she began to feel the pain in her stomach, below her heart. Doctors couldn't tell her what was wrong; a few suggested nothing was wrong. But I knew something was wrong. If anything, Viv was the kind to try and minimize something, ignore it, so that even when she called in the middle of the night in agony, she couldn't quite bring herself to ask me to come. One night I was shocked to find her doubled up on her bed, her face as yellow as her hair and both streaked with sweat; the pain had spread from her stomach to her back, where the muscles had convulsed so long she couldn't stand it anymore. She hurt so much that when she cried she hardly made a sound. I put some of her things into a bag and took her down to the car, and drove her back to the Hamblin slumped and dazed in the seat next to me; and as I kept trying to tell myself I had had no idea she was so sick, she kept murmuring over and over, under her breath so that I could barely make it out, ”I guess you're not such a bad guy after all.” It didn't make me feel any better.

After a day or two in my apartment, I realized she was starving. She couldn't eat anything; anything the least bit solid seemed to cut right through her. I concocted one gruel after another that she wouldn't eat because it hurt too much, and no amount of badgering on my part could force her. When she wasn't sleeping she was bent in pain, a terrified look in her eyes, and when she did finally fall asleep, the pain woke her up. ”What's wrong with me?” she cried. For days this went on, and I got it into my head that one last No from those first days at the Seacastle, one last No that had been hiding up inside her that she had never released, was devouring her from the inside out. ...

Finally, though, after time, the general sense of crisis began to pa.s.s. Finally the rains stopped as unequivocally as they had begun; down the hall Ventura appeared to survive, at least for the time being, the creamy blood frothing in his veins. Perhaps there was nothing left of Viv for the No to consume, and so it was the No that starved, wasting away; perhaps a predatory doubt inside her had evolved into a winged resolution that was suddenly poised to take flight. After a week of my pabulum she slowly graduated to hot cereal, mashed potatoes, rice and bread and ice cream. Still exhausted she slept all day and night, and in the new sunlight through the window she looked about six or seven years old. Viv always hated it when people told her she sometimes looked like a little girl; but sitting in the corner of my bedroom watching her sleep, I was surprised by a momentary desire to have a daughter someday, if only she would look just like Viv. Then one afternoon she sat right up in my bed from out of her sleep, as if from out of a dream. ”I have to go to Holland,” she announced. It was the first fully coherent sentence she had said in a week.

”Holland?” I stood by the bed looking down at her, and put my hands in my pockets, not sure what else to do with them. If I were to have put them on her, it might have been mistaken as an attempt to restrain or suppress something. My heart sagged like a ceiling full of rain.

”To build the other Memoryscope,” she explained.

”Why Holland?”

”Because that's where the one here is pointed.”

”How do you know?”

”I dreamed it,” she said. I nodded. We could pull out a map and check; but what was the point? I had no doubt that any map would say Holland as certainly as her dream did. ”So I have to go to Holland,” she said, ”to build another one, pointing back.”

I sat down on the bed beside her.

”Come with me,” she said.

”I can't.”

”Why?”

”I don't know.”

”It seems,” she said, ”like you should know.”

”Yes, it does.”

”But you don't. So you can't.”

”Not yet, anyway. Something's not finished here for me.”

”What?”

”Well,” I tried to smile, ”that's what I don't know.”

”So how long do you have to stay here before it's finished?” and then, irritated, she answered herself, ”I know, you don't know that either. You don't know anything.”

”I don't want to lose you,” was all I could think to say.

She asked, ”Do you believe, after all your disastrous romances, that you're capable of loving deeply?”

”Yes. Maybe more,” I answered, though I didn't want to have to explain that, because I wasn't sure I could.

She seemed unconvinced. ”I need your undying pa.s.sion, like you had for Sally and Lauren.”

”You make me happy.”

”That's not the same as undying pa.s.sion,” she said, and I couldn't think fast enough to explain that while my pa.s.sion for Sally or Lauren might have been undying, the man who felt those particular pa.s.sions had died, and that while I bore him a resemblance, I was different, and that the pa.s.sion I felt for Viv was a new kind of undying pa.s.sion, of a new man, and that it was better because she was better, because I trusted her in a way I could never trust anyone else. I remembered a night she had come to me, long ago, in our early days when I was at my most mute and we weren't really getting along; it was late one night, and early in the morning Viv had to catch a train out of town-a business trip or family visit, I don't remember, or maybe one of those little Viv impulses that was going to take her wherever she happened to wind up, b.u.t.te or Madagascar or Holland. On this night I had one of my headaches, and she sat in the dark stroking my brow till I fell asleep. There are a few things I know I'll remember at the end of my life. Some of them may be things I would as soon forget, things so small they should have been forgotten a long time ago, but so sharp they can't be; others are things like Viv exhausted, sitting in the dark for hours on end stroking my brow until I fell asleep. She probably doesn't think twice about it now. She's probably forgotten it completely. But I think about it all the time, every time my head feels like it's splitting down the middle: it is the soothing touch of trust and forgiveness; and if any other woman has ever touched me like that, and in retrospect I can imagine one or two might have, I was neither smart nor old nor unselfish enough to recognize it. Thinking back on it, it makes me ashamed to have ever suggested that a woman wouldn't die for love.

Right before Viv left for Holland came K's most recent correspondence. Now, you understand I don't necessarily cop to everything K has to say; she has only seen the secret room, after all, and the literary one I suppose, so her perspective must be considered accordingly. But after copping to everything else, I don't have much reason to conceal anything anymore: ”S, I fell into a river of thought about you this morning, and this is the current I fell into. ... Your sense of love is overwhelming and imprisoning. You contrive both release and relief from it, which then makes you feel guilty. Then you suffer for your guilt, but it's preferable to the suffering of a great love. You are powerless in the throes of a great love so you're compelled to a.s.sert yourself in various ways, eventually gaining your freedom. The price of freedom is guilt. The price of love is guilt. The pain of separation is preferable to the stress of obsession. You're possessed and obsessed until you break away-so, from feeling powerless and resentful, you gain a sense of mastery and control through domination and bondage. But conversely it's her love that dominates and binds you. Love courses through you with such intensity (you may laugh) that you rebel against it, and against the feeling of being controlled by something or someone else. In one way or another you are going to free yourself, in order to feel that you're not powerless. So you'll force yourself on her and derive satisfaction from it, and when you try to subdue her, you're trying to subdue that which subdues you; but you are really the one you're subduing. ... Pretty good for a Sat.u.r.day morning, don't you think?”

G.o.d, I can't stand it.

I can't stand that she had to go. After she told me she was going, she was angry, I think; I was not; and she was angry, I think, because I was not, not to mention that I wasn't going with her and couldn't offer a good reason why, even as I could have offered a hundred good reasons why I should. We didn't talk about it after that. We didn't talk about anything. In the void of our talk I thought furiously, to formulate a reason that we could talk about, but I couldn't think of any that counted. Over the next couple of weeks, as she prepared to go, the sun hurtled toward L.A., to fill the hole in the sky where the rain used to be. The city became a swamp. Buildings buckled and roads turned to glue. Fauna grew from the Hamblin floors and walls; toadstools erupted from the cracks of my baseboards and lichen layered the ceiling. A radiant red moss covered my windowsills and strange mounds rose beneath my carpet. I weeded the kitchen and pruned the bathroom, and hacked my way to the refrigerator with a knife. Sometime during the night before she left, I finally got angry but I didn't know at what; I had been getting angry a lot lately without knowing why. Nothing had broken the silence between Viv and me through all the recent weeks, or through the night before her departure; and even after I got angry it could not break through the silence of the drive to Union Station to catch her train to St. Louis, where she would then catch a plane to Europe. Even walking to the train there was nothing I could think to say that was worth breaking the silence for: the small talk in my head only felt like it would trivialize everything we felt and everything we held back. I kept wis.h.i.+ng she would tell me again I wasn't such a bad guy after all. On the train we found her compartment and I helped her with the luggage; she was still a bit weak. And then, all I could finally say was, ”G.o.d, I can't stand it,” and she looked at me with the hope there was more. And there was more, and I wanted to tell her, but I couldn't just now, just yet.

She threw her arms around my neck. She pulled her face to mine, and put her little mouth to my ear. ”I'm still so hungry for you,” was the last thing she whispered, before she disappeared like a ghost of the Seacastle, who had stepped from the shadows just long enough to show me not who I was but who I could be, before she stepped back.

The day after Viv left, Shale called with the news that Freud N. Johnson had finally fired him.

He was quite calm about it, which is not quite to say pa.s.sive. As usual, he seemed most concerned about how to prepare the staff for the news; he had already told both Dr. Billy and Ventura, and asked that I not say anything to anyone else for twenty-four hours, until the firing became effective. ”I know,” he concluded, ”that this doesn't come at an easy time for you. I don't want you to do anything stupid. There's absolutely nothing you have to prove to me.” Of course, I muttered. I hung up the phone and typed up my resignation. I waited for Ventura to call, which he did, and then Dr. Billy; both asked what I was going to do, just to make sure, I guess.

I didn't presume anything of anyone else. I was close to broke, but my circ.u.mstances were no more dire than others': Dr. Billy's dead millionaire money ran out some time ago, and he hadn't been able to get his latest doc.u.mentary about s.e.x addicts in Anchorage off the ground. No one had more at stake than Ventura, who confided he was deeply in debt. As Ventura suspected might happen, Freud N. Johnson did offer him the editors.h.i.+p of the newspaper; thus he was confronted with a choice between dest.i.tution and not only security but something that I think had always represented to him a secret dream, to run the paper he had started. I don't think Ventura had ever given up on that dream. He always thought it was really his newspaper and, in a way, he had always been right. Now the tone of his voice was both funereal and charged, or whatever pitch suits the man who has to decide between having everything and having nothing, and finds for vague, almost inexplicably moral reasons that what should be the easiest decision in the world is the hardest.

By that evening the rumors were rampant. Around midnight the noir blonde from the advertising department called almost giddy with excitement; I finally hung up on her, because she was just enjoying the whole thing too d.a.m.n much. The next morning it became official, and I got ready to head down to the newspaper. More than just wanting to get it over with, I also didn't want anyone to think I had wavered, and I suppose it's possible, though I honestly don't think so, that I didn't want to waver on my own account either. The Hamblin was in full bloom this morning, the sun blasting in through the hole in the hallway ceiling where the rain had collapsed; exotic vines wound up out of the elevator shaft. Ventura was strolling up and down the hallway lost in thought, his hands in his pockets. I told him I was heading down to the newspaper. It wasn't until then I was completely sure what his decision was; he said Dr. Billy was on his way over and I should wait and they would go with me. Billy had phoned this morning, Ventura said, ”wanting to know if we would be quitting if you weren't.” Obviously I didn't have an answer for that. Half an hour later Dr. Billy showed up, and for a while we stood around looking at each other in the hallway before Ventura said, ”Let's go.” The newspaper office was in a tizzy by the time we got there. The official word was now definitely out. I didn't feel like talking to a lot of people about it, holding their hands and repeating ad nauseam my little speech about how everyone had to make his or her own decision. I certainly wasn't going to try and rouse the rabble. I wanted to get in and get out. The three of us confronted Freud N. Johnson in his office with our resignations. His face went a distinctly sick shade of pale when we walked in. He sat behind a huge gleaming black desk that appeared to have been chosen both to a.s.sert his importance and protect him from moments just like this one, and on top of this mammoth desk was absolutely nothing but a digital clock and a video ent.i.tled How to Fire People. After a while he couldn't bear sitting any longer, so he stood up. We didn't beat about the bush. I had no illusions about the impact of my own leaving; of the three of us I knew I'd be the least missed. Dr. Billy was a much bigger blow, to both the paper and the staff, not only because of his popularity but because his departure dramatically contradicted what some might have misperceived as a survivalist's amorality about office politics. It was Ventura's loss, however, that the paper would find especially devastating, not to mention extremely inconvenient for Freud N. Johnson to try and explain, since the paper was not only losing a prospective editor but its most famous and mythic figure. So now Johnson was too shocked to say much, and while it surprised me at the time, in retrospect it's entirely predictable that his main concern was not trying to talk us out of quitting, or making sure others didn't quit, but preempting whatever bad publicity might come out of the whole thing. He tried a bit of strong-arming that was frankly beyond him. If there was any trouble about all this, he warned, he would put out any number of stories about Shale: embezzlement perhaps-his mind was whirring like a little wheel with a rodent inside, racing in place-or hara.s.sing female employees.

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