Sleeping Beauties (8 page)

Clio looked at her hands. “Like a manicure?” she shouted over the noise of the blender.

“Not exactly,” yelled Judy.

Unlike Clio, Tommy’s friends did not spend much time thinking about ambiguities of speech or gesture. They had no prejudices, and few preferences. Clio had spent most of her life as a guest, both in her father’s house and later at Emma’s, and she had accustomed herself to the sensitive, somewhat dubious position of the guest. It was soothing for Clio to be in a house where the interpretation of behavior or language was so irrelevant as to be a kind of bad manners. Clio had staggered through childhood under the weight of puzzlement and it was a lovely surprise to discover that things in Tommy’s house were quite what they seemed.

Tommy’s friends were nice. Clio liked them. They often spoke roughly to each other in a teasing way, but they did not really have strong opinions about things. They were not interested in books or science or art or even in other countries, and they were not interested in politics except for local issues, like the banning of cigars in the Sports Arena or the shooting of coyotes from helicopters. They sometimes talked about clothes and food. They always talked about movies.

There were friends who had followed Tommy to Hollywood from the small mill town in western Massachusetts where they’d grown up, surly and restless teenagers, setting fire to railroad ties and throwing cats into quarries. There
were friends from Tommy’s early days at Disneyland, where they’d performed skits about traffic signals. There were black friends from his Saturday basketball game in the Valley. There were small-time pimps; men who got girls or drugs or laid bets for the friends too famous or too busy, or not famous enough, to make the calls themselves. There were rich kids who made dinner reservations at three or four restaurants every night, just in case. There were friends he worked with in films—directors and underwater camera operators and good-looking stunt men. There were people he had met on location—an Indian woman from South Dakota and a destitute English art dealer who hoped Tommy would someday commission him to buy some real paintings. There were many, many friends.

Clio grew accustomed to their presence in the house. She was often awakened in the morning by a smooth, thin man named Yuseef, who would open the door of the bedroom and whisper, “Hey, Tommy, a little one-on-one, man?” Clio realized she’d never hear Yuseef coming, no matter how hard she listened for him each morning, because the blue wall-to-wall carpeting that Tommy had put on every floor surface of the house, including the garage, muffled the sound of the bouncing basketball and Yuseef’s expensive sneakers. She missed Yuseef those mornings when he didn’t come to her bedroom.

Clio was not treated much differently than the crew except that she was allowed to stay through the night. She tried very hard to do her part. She was willing to give Tommy whatever he needed. She was fond of him. The irony was that although he did what he was supposed to do—pull her into the current—he didn’t seem to want very much in return. He seemed relieved just to have her around. She was no trouble, as he had known she would not be.

She sometimes wondered if Tommy, like her stepmother, Burta, mistook her stillness for a lack of will. Some women, she knew, would have been grateful to be left alone, and she wondered why she minded. It was not as if she were used to adoration, or even attention. She had assumed that when two hearts really did become one, a certain alteration, a rearranging and even forfeiting, was demanded—out of fondness as well as necessity. She was surprised to have her hours and her days, and even herself, returned to her so quickly.

Clio had entered a period in her sexual life in which caresses, kisses, and embraces, all the delights and torments of a preliminary nature, were dispensed with in favor of immediate resolution. Puna Silva had liked to make love every day, snapping off his black rubber wet suit to fall happily on top of her. There had not been much erotic contemplation with Puna Silva. Although he had been graceful and passionate, he had not been very curious. Clio was not too surprised by Tommy Haywood’s lack of exploratory interest, but he was neither passionate nor curious.

Although Tommy believed that sexual intercourse was good for one’s mental and physical regimen, he was not a sensualist. Clio realized that he would not be able to make love to a woman who he didn’t think was physically perfect. He said “Good muscle tone” when he looked at Clio’s legs, and “You must be a great swimmer” when she lifted her arms to braid her hair for sleep. It would have been a reflection of himself that would have made him very uncomfortable, and even anxious, had he discovered too late that a woman to whom he was making love was ten pounds overweight.

He was quick at his lovemaking, his head buried in her
neck, his small hands gripping her shoulders. He jumped up as soon as he regained his breath, and went to the mirror. He tilted his head boyishly so that he looked up at himself, and ran his hands through his thick black hair. He smiled at himself. Then he took a long shower.

He sometimes bathed three times a day. He would not take a bath if she had used the bathtub unless the tub was scrubbed down with cleansing powder. She had made the mistake of admitting, reluctantly, that she sometimes urinated in the bath water. It was very like Clio to tell the truth, and he made her feel guilty about it. She had read of a prime minister in India who drank a glass of his own urine every day as a tonic and she told him this. He was shocked.

“I just feel better if the tub is clean, that’s all,” he said. “It makes me feel good. I’m the Number Four Box-Office Star in America. I like to feel clean. I don’t give a shit what some Arab does.”

In the rare instance when she was alone with him, when he sent away his friends and bodyguards and trainers, and rarer still, when there was a kind of tenderness and intimacy between them, she asked him questions. She could see that he became interesting to himself in a new way during those unaccustomed moments when she prodded him and pulled from him a spontaneous truth. Those occasional hours were, she realized, the only times he ever interested her. He, too, but in an unclear way, because he wouldn’t have known how to make it clear, must have realized intuitively that Clio was leading him to his best self, even if it were against his will.

It was very difficult for him to talk about his childhood. Clio, who was overwhelmed by her sense of the past, had married a man who had no past. She knew that it could not be coincidental. He refused to admit to having any feelings about his family—he almost refused to admit that
he had a family—except to say that his father had played more with the family dog than with him. He claimed never to have masturbated, even as a boy.

One night, in the back of a limousine coming home from Santa Barbara, where Tommy had accepted an award from the Theatre Owners’ Association, he said, “Remember when you asked me about the first time I had sex? Well, you got me thinking about it. It was in the Vermont woods the summer I was fifteen. I couldn’t really even see her, it was so dark. I didn’t even take off my jeans. When I got back to the cabin where my friends were, I looked down to make sure my fly was closed and I saw my jeans had blood all over them. I thought, Fuck, I hurt myself, I hurt my dick. But then I checked and saw I was all right. I thought I must of hurt the girl. For a minute, I even thought maybe I killed her. I didn’t know what to do. I went down to this pond and took off my jeans and sunk them in the water and rubbed them with stones until my hands were so fucking cold I was shaking. Then I put them back on and snuck into the cabin, dripping water everywhere, still wearing my jeans. I don’t know why I put them back on. In the morning I could hardly move my legs, I was that stiff. But the blood was gone.”

She stared at him, his handsome face illuminated now and then by the headlights of passing cars.

“Did you ever figure it out?” To her surprise, she was aroused by his story. She took his hand in the dark of the car and put it under her skirt.

“What?”

“The blood. That she was menstruating. Or perhaps that she was a virgin.”

“Not a virgin. Shit, it was her idea, the whole fucking thing.” He paused. “Yeah, course I figured it out.”

Perhaps the nearer we are to Los Angeles, she thought,
the less he is his true self. She knew she’d have to work fast to take advantage of the time left to her. She pushed his fingers against her. “It might have been her first time, even if she did think of it.”

“Hey, you weren’t even
there
, babe. I forget what happened.” He pulled away his hand. “Want to stop at Jemima’s? I’m hungry.” He rolled down the window and looked away from her, his face vacant in the neon lights of Malibu.

O
ne day, Clio found a naked redheaded woman choking to death by the pool. To Clio’s astonishment, Judy calmly read a script while the woman gagged soundlessly. Clio rushed over and knocked her to the AstroTurf.

The woman sat up, furious. “Christ!” she screamed.

Clio stared at her in that interested way one has when another person is beautiful, but unlike one’s self. Clio was slim and long. The woman screaming at her was small and sturdy. Her skin was the color of butterscotch. Her nipples were very dark, her breasts small. Clio was accustomed to naked guests. Tommy and his friends often did not wear clothes around the house, and she had noticed that it was easier for a woman to remove her clothes if her breasts were small. Clio thought that her own breasts were too big for her to lie nude by the pool with Tommy and his friends, and she kept on her bathing suit.

“Mimi the Great,” Judy said, not looking up from the script. “This is Clio. Say howdy.”

Clio knew about Mimi. Mimi had been Tommy’s girlfriend when he first came to Hollywood from Disneyland. She had been in a police series with him. He had told Clio that Mimi was the first person he ever knew who bothered to make coffee in a pot rather than just using instant.

“Haven’t you ever seen anyone do chin exercises? You could of killed me! Fuck!” She rubbed her jaw.

“I’m sorry,” Clio said, staring at her.

Mimi leaned forward to look at her closely. “You could probably start doing some of these stretches yourself. It’s never too soon, girl.”

Clio nodded. She had expected disdain, not advice. She was absolutely ready to begin chin exercises. She ran her hand over her throat.

“Mimi is very hedonistic,” Judy said with a sigh.

“Like you even know what the word means,” Mimi said, smiling at Clio for the first time.

“You spend all your money on body treatments and clothes. How can you spend your money on seaweed body facials? on clothes? You know what a dress is worth two minutes after you leave the store?” Clio was surprised to see Judy so indignant.

“I think that buying clothes is the very definition of luxury.” Mimi lay back on a rubber mat. “All that money on something so beautiful and so worthless.” She closed her green eyes and shuddered with delight. “It wouldn’t mean as much otherwise.”

“It’s like drinking expensive wine,” Judy said, looking up for the first time. “It’s just gone when you’re finished. You might as well eat a hundred-dollar bill.”

Mimi licked her lips. “But a hundred-dollar bill has no taste,” she said. “Or has it?”

Judy shook her head in disapproval.

Clio laughed. She had never thought of luxury in quite that way.

“Clio understands,” Mimi said, opening one eye to look at her. “Don’t you, baby?”

“I think I do,” Clio said as she basked in the ease, the swiftness, of her corruption.

•   •   •

On the days that Mimi and Clio did not sit in the shallow end of the pool listening to Doug Sahm records and drinking margaritas, Mimi drove Clio into Beverly Hills. Clio was not allowed to use the beautiful Bentley that Tommy had given to her in Honolulu because Tommy, who had worked in parking lots when he first arrived in Los Angeles, disapproved of the way that attendants handled the cars. She was happy to have Mimi drive her. She admired Mimi’s expediency, and her even, generous temper. She liked that Mimi did not envy her.

Mimi introduced Clio to her manicurist and to the maître d’hôtel at La Dora and to the salesgirls at Carole Lee. She took Clio to her electrolysis technician. Mimi had had every hair on her legs and arms removed—a process that had taken twelve years. She was having her pubic hair plucked into the shape of a heart.

She took Clio to luncheons at her girlfriends’ big, clean houses. The women were full of gaiety and affection. Even though the lunch party might be in celebration of a new husband or a new part in a movie, the women often brought presents for each other, very expensive presents—pink leather jackets and Georgian silver place settings. They drank champagne, and then, suffused with confidence, spread out through the little streets between Wilshire Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard to spend money. The women bought things for their children, their maids, their mothers and husbands and sisters, perhaps because there was little more, no matter how tirelessly and imaginatively they tried, to buy for themselves.

Like Tommy, Mimi lived in the present, at least as far as hangovers and due bills were concerned. Her credit card statements were divided, not always evenly, and mailed to the business managers of several of her boyfriends. Bad headaches at five in the afternoon were averted by drinking straight through the day. “It is only if you stop,” she said
to Clio, “that you feel bad.” It was a theory, Clio thought, that could be applied to most things.

One chilly afternoon, Mimi took Clio to a baby shower at the house of her friend Deirdre Michael. Clio wore flannel trousers and a sweater, not knowing better, but the women, taking advantage of the cool weather, wore kid gloves and tight suits with peplums, and suede boots to the thigh. They sat on their knees on a thin Aubusson carpet, their skirts hiked to their panties. The walls of the room were covered in pale green moiré silk. When one woman stood to make a telephone call, her high heel caught in the carpet. The woman righted herself gracefully and smiled at Clio.