L.A.WOMAN (14 page)

“How's—”

At which point Mitchell himself cheerfully appeared, and it was so great to see him I stopped frowning.

“You should be in school,” Molly said. “What are you doing?”

(It would take Molly, of course, to live in a town with me on the front page of every glaring tabloid and refuse to look at it or notice that I was otherwise employed.)

By that Christmas I'd been in Rome two years and one nice (not raining) morning, perhaps in March, I was on my way to meet someone, walking to the other side of the Tiber. I had on my usual tweed skirt and too-tight sweater over my too-L.A. breasts and my usual five-inch heels that made me six feet tall, and I was heading toward Hadrian's Tomb, standing at an intersection where I was towering over almost everything but the Castel Sant'Angelo itself, when all of a sudden I felt this tugging at my side, like a gnat.

I looked around and there, down on the sidewalk looking up, was a tiny man, about a foot and a half shorter than me, who was dressed like a bum, and through his tiny little wire-framed glasses he was staring way up at me.

It gave me the most awful feeling, being that blond and healthy and rich and Southern California-perfect in this tiny man's eyes anyway, and I took yard-long lunges across the intersection when the light turned green and was almost out of breath two blocks later when I finally allowed myself to slow down, knowing I'd been far too fast for him to catch up.

But just as I was coming to the bridge, the tiny man appeared in front of me, having somehow managed to know some shortcut or to rematerialize at will, either one.

Seeing him there, just a few paces in front of me, really made it even worse and I actually began to run as fast as I could, which was pretty fast, even if I was wearing such high heels. But the moment I allowed myself to relax after crossing the bridge and gotten two blocks away, there he was—in front of me again.

Only this time I stood there and did not run.

This time I calmly reviewed all the Italian I possibly could drum up.

Instantly, the phrase appeared perfectly in my mind and I conjugated it especially for him so he'd know who I meant.

“Basta
and
ciao ciao bambino,”
I said imperiously.

It was as though I'd hit him with a club, like I was Aphrodite and he a mere mortal, and here the goddess of Beauty and Blondness had slammed him one for no reason at all. He flinched and tears squeezed out of his eyes and ran down his cheeks underneath his glasses as he drew back against the wall, mute.

Then he ran away.

And I decided to leave Rome right away.

I hadn't felt that bad since I gave Tango away.

· · ·

Ed got me a fishy ticket (leaving from Frankfurt so I could say goodbye to my parents and landing in New York so I could say hello to Aunt Helen).

“Is this a black market ticket?” I asked.

“Shhh,” he said. “And it's round trip, I need you back.”

“Oh,” I said.

As we were leaving my
pensione
he looked back and said, “Oh, there are your new boots. Now I know you'll come back. Soon.”

(I couldn't exactly bring myself to tell Ed Rome didn't seem right anymore.)

In the taxi he looked up from the
Daily American
(he was now thirty, really
old)
and said, “It won't be any fun without you here.”

“You know, Ed, why isn't Mitchell Craven on the team?”

“Who?”

“You know, he got blacklisted,” I said, “he's really distinguished. He'd be great for the guy's uncle, the rich one?”

“Wait a minute,” Ed said, slowly writing it down, “where can I reach him?”

I gave him their phone number.

Even though I knew I would never come back to Rome again, giving Ed Mitchell's phone number atoned for the
feeling I got when I told that old man to
ciao ciao bambino,
and it made me feel just like me again whereas before I felt afraid I was turning into Sam, turning on someone who just loved me. Or whatever it was he did.

T
HE TOWN OF
H
OBOKEN
, New Jersey, where Aunt Helen lived, was not atoned for by Frank Sinatra. Fortunately, I already knew what to expect from Hoboken because we passed through it on our way to London, and the first day I'd seen what Hoboken looked like with my own eyes before I'd broken and run for it, getting to the Village in New York City all by myself on a bus before I called my parents and explained where I'd be after I picked up a guy from Yale (an actor) and had a place to stay.

So it didn't surprise me to see Aunt Helen standing in that drab little kitchen overlooking a grimy backyard which faced somebody else's grimy backyard behind someone else's little kitchen. And it didn't surprise me that her four children spoke with foreign New Jersey accents and not like they were from L.A. or her children at all.

“Ten years you've tried to live here,” I would say to her after we lit a joint and had half of one giant Hershey bar with almonds, “and look at it—it's still fucking New Jersey!”

“Yeah, but . . . ,” she said dreamily.

It was obviously meant to be forgotten—New Jersey—as anyone could see just by looking at her.

“Darling dear,” Helen said, changing the subject, “these boxes are so heavy.”

“I'll say,” I said, “those sixteen-millimeter cans weigh a ton and so does the film.”

“What are you carrying such things for?” she asked.

“They're Sam's,” I said, “I'm taking them to L.A. We can't figure out what to do with them.”

“Doesn't he want them?” she asked, her voice so flushed with interest that all at once I knew she didn't know he was dead.

“Don't you know?” I asked her.

She looked at me with her large brown eyes, my sister's eyes and my father's eyes all the way from Russia, and panic branded through her usual haze forcing her to slump against the kitchen sink.

“No, I don't know,” she said, “is he . . . ?”

“Of course,” I said, “he's been dead for two years. Didn't anybody write you? Heroin or something.”

She grabbed a dish towel and wept, flinging herself down into a chair so her elbows could rest on her knees.

“God, that's right! You had a crush on him too,” I said, filled with wonderment once again at how peculiar adults always were. I mean, Sam was much too short for her anyway. How could anybody let themselves get a crush on a shrimp like Sam?

It was too dismal to stay in New Jersey any longer once Aunt Helen found out about Sam so instead I took a cab back to the airport and got on the first plane for L.A. We landed just at 6:00
P.M
., the huge orange sun hung over the Pacific Ocean reflecting the sunset to anyone in the sky looking down as I was, and I was suddenly uncertain about what I would do. I thought perhaps I ought to call Goldie or some relative, but then I didn't want to be at the mercy of relatives so I took the bus into Hollywood and got off at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel where I couldn't get a room.

Suddenly I found myself alone in Southern California with no friends and hardly any money, lost and planless with no place to spend the night. The Cravens were in Rome of course, Franny was living on Martel in a West Hollywood bungalow court with three girls on the make for Marlon Brando—which gave me a headache whenever I thought
about it—Ophelia was up in Berkeley getting “an education” although once you knew how to give head the way she taught me I thought you didn't need to learn anything else to get through life. Every time I thought about Aunt Helen crying that way, I wondered if Lola had heard or if Sam was going to surprise her like that too.

Once I got enough quarters from the lobby newsstand, I telephoned Lola in San Francisco before going another step on my planless way.

“I thought you were in Rome!” Lola said. “Where are you?”

“I came back to L.A.,” I said, “Hollywood.”

“Oh, you kid,” she said, “your poor mother.”

“Listen,” I said to her, screwing up my tact in case I was supposed to handle myself like an adult, “have they told you about Sam?”

“Oh, sure,” she replied, “Steve Hoffner wired me from Paris. I wasn't in the least surprised. Not in the least.”

“Whew,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “that's right. I can put two and two together, you know. After all, you were there.”

“We got there but we didn't see him,” I said. “He sort of was dead before he knew we were there.”

“What a shame,” Lola said, “I'm sure he would have liked to see Mort. He would have put it off for one day if he'd known.”

It occurred to me that she believed Sam had purposely o.d.'d rather than accidentally be taken by surprise, at least she sounded like she thought he'd done it himself and could just as well have waited as not.

“When did you get in?” Lola asked.

“Just now,” I told her. “I don't know where I'm going to spend tonight, I could stay at Goldie's, but that husband of hers this time is such a—”

“I know,” Lola agreed, “why don't you call Estelle? She's
staying in Marie's apartment while they're in Africa. And you know Marie lives around the corner from Barney's Beanery.”

“Oh, goody,” I said. “Goody, goody gumdrops.”

“What was wrong with Paris? And Rome?”

“They're just never L.A.,” I explained.

“Oh.”

Lola then gave me Estelle's number and we said goodbye.

“Ciao,”
I said.

“Ciao?”
she said. “Oh, your poor mother.
Hasta luego.”

Somehow Helen's awful husband kept her stranded. New Jersey was as far from real life as the Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights to me. Once I'd spoken to Lola and fallen straight back into the Hollywood I knew you could always go home to again, I felt everything come right back into focus. L.A. was not much at night but during the day it had become the city of light, the center of world culture and the arts and the smart money knew it. Even cars flourished in this sunny clime. If you were looking for a place to die, you'd go to Paris.

T
HE PEOPLE WHO RENTED OUR
house in Hollywood when we went to Europe did not pay rent for eleven months. The father and mother and daughter had a drawerful of bills in the kitchen in the middle drawer where my father used to keep hammers and tacks, bills for the telephone as it lapsed longer and longer, bills from us, letters from my father's accountant, bills from Michigan where they lived before coming to L.A., bills from Wisconsin where they lived before Michigan, bills from dentists, bills duplicating bills with
NOTICE
or
IMPORTANT
or
LAST NOTICE DUE
written in red across them—tons of bills.

Naturally, they looked excruciatingly respectable—not like us at all. We looked like disreputable bohemians to everyone with an ounce of
Reader's Digest
in their blood, but my father did not believe in credit, he believed in paying bills once a month before the crooks who owned the phone company began getting uppity.

Right after I returned from Rome, when everyone else in my family—my father, mother, and sister—were still in Europe, my father finally had been able to get rid of them but not until after they'd called the electrical wiring people working for the city and had our house condemned.

Of course, my father was a little weird about electrical wiring, I'll admit. I mean, no house in the whole world is going to have lights where he thought they ought to be—behind the pillow on his side of the bed, in the middle overlooking his other shoulder (to prevent eyestrain), on my mother's side of the bed, on both sides of the mirror on the downstairs stairwell, lights to be directly blazing over everything and lights to be indirect so people could talk to each other—the lights which blazed were for people whom he wanted to show something to in the living room, and the indirect lights were for after he'd shown them and they needed to rest up.

But once they got our house condemned, they lived on for another seven months before finally—a week before I returned to L.A.—they took all the lightbulbs and left.

In Heidelberg where my parents were staying unable to do anything but sit there while the tenant in our house complained about the fire hazard in outraged indignation, my father would say, “When the guy told me he was a Quaker I knew something about him was too good to be true. He's a crook—the same story that crook from Whittier uses, like Nixon. The same story both guys. Both crooks!”

“But darling . . . ,” my mother would say.

“I'm selling the house,” my father decided, “that's it!”

Of course, now that our house had been legally declared unsafe, even after the tenants left we could no longer let anyone new rent it unless the whole house was rewired and the city inspector declared it safe again, and since my parents were not able to oversee the job themselves, there was little else my father could do but sell.

But basically he was so mad at the house for being outraged in such a manner that he had to avenge himself by getting rid of it. Out of spite.

If our house offended him, fuck the goddamn thing.

Of course the whole episode ravaged our family—it was like having a foot amputated—at least it ravaged me in some mortal irrevocable way.

The past was torn off right there.

And from then on I would never feel exactly at home anyplace I lived. But then I never was exactly at home so to have felt so would have been wishful thinking.

Nobody in my family ever came home in time to see our house before it was sold but me. The place which I returned to was no longer home, of course, it was newspapers piled up in the corners and dust like gray clouds left to grow everywhere. There were curlers in the music room and bobby pins on the fireplace mantel on top of more stacks of bills. And there were brushes stuck in cans of paint in the dining room where someone had chosen school green to cover the roses on the wallpaper of half a wall, their one attempt to improve our house.