James Ellroy (9 page)

I owed Betty Short the romance of her life—and was determined to give it to her.

I began microfilm research and stitched up the plot. I recognized Jean Hilliker as a sister phantom reborn and dedicated the book to her. Honor the debt and reseal the tomb. Tell the story on your best-selling book tour. Combine Jean and Betty and ignore the enveloping issue of women. Seek more recent phantoms who might assuage you or at least fall for your act.

Marcia Sidwell and Marge from the train kept nudging me. They played hell with my phone-call stints and stunts with present women. I called directory assistance once a week and tried to track Marcia. I had a friend post a note at that L.A. Laundromat. I checked Grand Central Station for Marge. I cruised the Tarrytown station and lurked by the tracks. My landlady told me about the film
Brief Encounter
. It was a ’45 British weeper. A man meets a woman in a train station. She’s married, he’s not. They acknowledge their love and kowtow to propriety and circumstance. My landlady said, You’d dig the sound track—it’s all Rachmaninoff.

Bummer. You don’t fold before circumstance. You’re a weak sack of shit if you do.

True in 1985. Still true today.

Things were getting better. Book money trickled and almost flowed in. I tossed my caddy cleats. I wrote Betty’s story as the phone did or did not ring.

And it was just that good and just that acclaimed. And it sold just that well. And it honored Jean Hilliker—as a fount of male inspiration and an
opportunity
.

People
magazine ran a feature. The photos flattered me. I had a listed phone number. Four women called out of the blue.

Women #1 and #2 sounded crazy. I got off the line quick. I kowtowed to circumstance with the others. Beethoven grinned and scowled above us. Jesus, what a run! and You’re a fucking
Scheisskopf!

I always get what I want. It comes slow or fast and always costs a great deal.

The world veered toward me. Acknowledgment and compensation flowed. I bought women I’d just met four-figure cashmere sweaters. I overtipped waitresses to the verge of bankruptcy. I sent half the female universe flowers. Sex was there or was not there. I stayed in my dark basement with big bucks in the bank. The phone rang or did not ring. I wrote three more big historical books. Joan and Karen came of age a few miles south. Erika reached maturity a shouting distance away. They did not know one another or know me.

Propriety beckoned. Marriage and daughters became a fixation. I proposed to two women in short-term relationships. They vehemently declined. I proposed to a longer-term sweetheart. She said yes. I ran from her as we said our vows and settled in Hancock Park East.

Mary was a business executive. She hailed from big bucks in Akron, Ohio. She was a righteous human being and devoid of pretense. She represented a genetic brew of all the Hancock Park girls. I liked her very much. She got
me a dog. I was tired. I was running out of inspired shit to tell women on the phone. We bought a big house in New Canaan, Connecticut. I thought marriage would
re-re-re-re-re-
suppress all my crazy shit. Mary told me that my nights in the dark might prove counterproductive in time. I conceded that she might have a point.

Our home was too spacious and airy. Marriage countermanded my shtick of seduce and explain. Cohabitation was constricting. Mary was in no way culpable. My office was too bright. My yard was too big. Mary was probity defined. She got me as much as women got me and played out her end of the string. I wanted out, so I got out. I had to be back in that dark hole, with a phone line plugged in.

Beethoven winked in welcome. Divorce was an exacting legal duty. Repentance came naturally. I saw the hasty union as atonable misconduct. Mary saw my departure as demons aswirl.

There’s the dark, there’s the phone, there’s the Grosse Fugue.

“Take note of what you are seeking, for it is seeking you.”

It’s a paraphrase. Some swoony swami said it. Attribution doesn’t matter, because it is true.

I always get what I want. I conjured her, so she came.

Lover, confidante, subverter, mighty soul and sacred comrade.

Hark the name Helen Knode
.

The faces evaporated. The march of Them stopped at Her. She was sui generis. I took immediate note.

She slid into a booth at the Pacific Dining Car. Her journalist ex-boyfriend was interviewing me. I was jet-lagged and raw. My L.A. jaunts always scared me and confirmed my hometown retreat. Helen said she felt surreal. She was working off four tooth extractions and a painkiller buzz. God spoke to her. His message: you have not yet begun your life’s work.

She was 33. She was small and fit. She wore slick-soled shoes and moved with deft pivots. She had light brown hair and blue eyes. Her glasses were too big. Her clothes were cut too trim. Don’t dress monochrome. You said “God” unsolicited. Keep going on that.

I talked about myself. Helen hadn’t heard of me. The ex-boyfriend tried to brief her. Helen acted bored. She wore too much lipstick. Take off your glasses and dig on me, please.

Chat meandered. Helen mentioned an East Berlin rendezvous. The wall was still up then. Her kraut lover blasted Beethoven’s Ninth.

You said “Beethoven” unsolicited. Don’t stop there. Take off your glasses. They overplay your face. They produce a circus-mirror effect.

The ex-boyfriend gobbled his steak. I ignored my food and eyeballed Helen. She complained about her teeth. She took off her glasses and rubbed her jaw.

There’s the softness, there’s the God sense, there’s proportionate hurt and pizzazz.

I concocted some one-liners. They were all self-referential and all fell flat. Helen said she had to split. She cited a boyfriend and her sore gums. I stood up and thanked her for coming. Helen studied me.

The brood den was fall-winter cozy. I was completing a new novel and sharing bed space with my ex-dog. My ex-wife got custody. Barko bunked with me weekends. Women weren’t calling me. My recent marriage had created a phone slump. I talked to my ex-wife’s dog in the dark.

I miss Barko and look forward to our heavenly reunion. He was a homicidal bull terrier with an evil yen for human females. I gave him a
veeery
deep voice. We sprawled together and discussed Helen Knode.

The ex-boyfriend fed me the skinny. Barko and I riffed off the established facts.

She wrote for the
L.A. Weekly
. It was a counterculture rag fueled by lovelorn singles postings and prostitution ads. Helen’s gig was bad-girl critic. She reviewed films, wrote features and penned a memoir column entitled “Weird Sister.” It was tell-all/polemic. Attack the Right, decry gender bias, ballyhoo sex as politics.

Helen detailed her horny-huntress adventures. She hailed from western Canada. Her people were Texans in the oil biz. She was the eldest of four. Dad squandered the family fortune and pushed mom to Splitsville. Helen spent her late teen years in Kansas City and Lawrence. She lettered in tennis at KU. She got a master’s degree at Cornell and
played cowgirl cutup. Paris was next. Woo! Woo! It’s Hurricane Hélène!

She’s rugburned from rambunctious ruts and sordid sorties at the Sorbonne! She’s fragging frisson-frazzled frogs en masse! She wears a black beret and mainlines espresso! She’s the
diiiiirty
au pair girl! She’s a bohemian-banging Bathsheba! She exhumes Existentialism as a one-wench show!

Four guys in one night?
I dug it, but didn’t want to believe it. Barko tormented me. You’re pathetic, Dad! Helen was shagging schlong while you were jacking off on uppers!

I was less than obsessed and much more than tweaked.
Work
obsessed me. I was reliving L.A., ’58. My corrupt-cop hero was torqued on a murderous carhop. She was equal parts ex-girlfriend Glenda and Swedish soprano Anne Sofie von Otter. I stared at a poster of the mesmeric mezzo and time-warped her to my book. Barko considered this pursuit unmanly.

Life was sweet. I retained my ex-wife’s friendship and got Barko time. The alimony crunch didn’t faze me. Helen lived on the left coast. Her Homeric-hung boyfriend was a minor impediment. Her ex-boyfriend said she was reading my books and was digging their romantic sweep. I read Helen’s feature work and memoir
mishigas
. She was significantly good. God wanted her to jump-start her life’s work. I knew what that was.

Marry me. Write a righteous crime novel. Co-opt the L.A. hipster-journalist scene. Critique present-day Hollywood and media culture. Portray your hatred for your boozed-out dad and your as-yet-undiscovered love for me. I’m God’s conduit. Grasp this opportunity.

Spring ’91. Cold nights and consoling darkness. The silent telephone. The demonic talking dog. Anne Sofie’s
lush lieder, sung directly to me. Helen Knode—raucous on my mind.

My book neared completion. Helen’s ex-boyfriend requested another interview. I said, I’ll fly out now. He said, The magazine won’t cover it. I said,
I will
.

Helen moved first.

She’d read my last three books. She didn’t know that the next book would be dedicated to her.
The Black Dahlia
wrecked her. The wantonness-versus-love motif did it. She grokked my weird-ass feminism. It inspired an idea: write a Dahlia-based cover piece for the
L.A. Weekly
. Her move: Will you show me around the sites?

She looked different that day. She was fresh-scrubbed and even more intent. She took off her glasses to frame close-ups. Her gaze was withering. L.A. was rain-damp. Helen wore jeans and boots. We toured the body-dump site and the Hollywood locations. Storm clouds brewed. I wanted to sit in Helen’s car and wait out the longest thunderstorm in world history. I knew our heads and hearts would transport us solar-system wide.

It stayed dry. We trekked Beachwood Canyon, side by side. It was an effort. We both curbed a tendency to claim the lead. We talked. We monologued at similar length and rarely interrupted. My book on a dead woman gave us this world. I never said “Jean Hilliker” or “my mother.” Helen went to abstraction as I held to anecdote. It challenged me. It made me ascribe meaning to my most-repeated tales. We discussed romanticism. Helen described the literary precedents. I ran down symphonic music. Content must dictate form. Form must be recognizable. Passion must never be squalid. Love must run in precise counterpoint to loss and death. That proportion stood as the basis of moral art. Helen said it first: All drama is a man meets a woman.

It had never been like this. I knew it then. Helen knew it in exact proportion
.

We talked ourselves out on big ideas. We got lunch at a pita pit on Sunset. I calculated our age gap: nine years, four months, 12 days.

We were fried. Helen yawned and rubbed her eyes. They were steel blue. They importuned and demanded in perfect proportion.

Prosaic shit hovered. I had two more days in L.A. Helen’s ex-boyfriend was throwing a bash the next night. Helen and her current boyfriend were invited. It vibed train wreck. I knew I’d create a scene. I sensed Helen sensing it.

The Dahlia day wound down. Our big talk cut through small talk to no talk. I did not deliver God’s plan for Helen. I resisted the urge to propose.

Our good-byes were brusque. It was telepathy. We knew this: to address the day would be to affirm it and change our lives forever.

I slept poorly that night. The moon did funny things. I’d called my landlady back east. She said Barko had attacked the poster of Anne Sofie von Otter. I predicted Helen Knode’s next three actions.

I knew she’d call me and bail on the party. I knew she’d cite her boyfriend. I knew she’d say, Where is this going?

I said, I’ll write you a letter on the airplane. She said, I’ll write you back.

Vows affirmed, call to honor, sacred pledge.

The correspondence began. We were constrained by distance and work commitments and wowed by the notion of an epistolary courtship. We utilized FedEx for a fast turnaround. Helen dumped her boyfriend. We were reinvesting in sex. Our letters set a lofty tone. There was no equivocation. We were comrades on a mission of unvanquishable
love. That tone defined all our musings. Helen crafted the concept of
B.C.E.
and
A.C.E.
It meant “before the common era” and “after the common era.” The Black Dahlia Day formed the dividing line. We viewed life as our personal adventure. Our preceding round-heeled stunts were auditions for a sizzling monogamy. We explored the gestalt of a man meets a woman. It was the hub of all our beliefs. We riffed on films, books, music and politics. Helen refused to pigeonhole me as a right-wing mystic. I poked at her bad-girl Marxism and got her to concede that she’d outgrown the pose. Our letters were breathless with what it all meant.

Nightly phone calls complemented our written texts. The banal-chat quotient ran zero. Sex was our low voices cloaked in collusion. The coastal gap allowed me to finish my new novel and yearn for Helen alone in the dark.

I bought a new Anne Sofie von Otter poster and kept Barko away from it. I brooded on Helen, to the exclusion of all other women. I re-read her letters, found new meanings and calibrated fresh responses. We spoke for hours at a pop. I laid out portentous epigrams. Helen cut loose with scattergun insight. She was smarter than I. It was intimidating. I lost my mental grounding and flailed for bright things to say. God threw us together. I believed it then and believe it no less vigorously now. I downplayed my religiousness and stressed a reluctant egalitarianism. Helen was a brain broiler. I was a caffeine-cooked autodidact in over his head. One thing consoled me: I knew God’s big plan for Helen before she did.

I lacked her hyper-brilliance. She lacked my loony self-confidence and drive. I lacked her omnivorous view of the world in all its lively flux. She lacked my brutal will.

That astonishing spring. Passion postponed. Palpitating souls eternally entwined.

•    •    •

We collided at the airport. Our embrace scorched baggage claim. Helen’s hair looked darker. Tears washed her eyes an even paler blue.