Zeroville (18 page)

She smiles at him and hurls the model into the wall, like a champagne glass into the fireplace.

He stares at the shards of the smashed model on the floor. She reaches over to the wall and flips off the light; in the dark, his coat slides off her bare body and she wraps his belt around his neck, running it through the buckle and tightening it. “When we fuck, Mister Barbaric Church Builder,” she says, giving the belt a yank, “do we make death an ecstatic experience rather than a lonely one?” What? thinks Vikar. She takes him out of his pants again and gets on her knees and puts him in her mouth; he stares through the window at the lights on the park outside. After a while she pulls herself back to her feet by the belt around his neck and says, “Put it inside me.” He sways where he stands and she pulls him into the other room as if she’s been in this suite a hundred nights. In the dark, she stretches herself out on the bed. “Put it inside me.”

He sways where he stands, caught in the lights off the park. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” she says.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re hard.”

“That’s not why.”

For a moment nothing happens and then she says, “O.K.” In the dark she pulls him by the belt onto the bed where she curls between his legs, breasts pressed against his thighs, and takes him in her mouth again.

Afterward she says, “It’s O.K. We can do it however you like,” and he drifts to sleep.

He wakes a couple of hours later. It’s still the middle of the night; she’s sitting at the edge of the bed in the dark, with her back to him. “What?” he says. He can’t hear her when she answers. “What is it?” he says.

He hears her say, “You should not have used what I told you in that way.”

“Used what?”

“It was cruel.”

Vikar says, “I don’t understand.”

“Your little church. I know it’s not a church.”

No, he admits to himself, it’s a movie theater: Did she see the tiny blank screen when she threw it at the wall?

“It’s a private thing,” she says, “that belongs to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know.”

“No.” He sits up in bed.

“The institution.”

“What institution?”

“I told you. When I was a teenager, in Oslo.”

“Oslo?” he says.

“In the institution there.”

He remembers about the institutions. “I remember now about the institutions, but not Oslo.”

“You made a toy of it.”

“My model looks like an institution in Oslo?” Perhaps someone did tell him about Oslo, he thinks, but it wasn’t her.

In the dark she turns to him. “You’re making it worse.”

“I made it before I knew you. I’ve never been to Oslo. It’s far, isn’t it? Farther than Spain?”

“Why won’t you admit it’s cruel?”

“I promise it was a church,” he lies.

He feels her staring at him. “A lion wearing a crown? Holding a gold axe?”

“I don’t know where that came from.”

“A crowned lion holding a gold axe,” she says, “is the symbol of Norway.”

He wakes again at five-thirty in the morning. It takes him a moment to realize she’s up and moving around in the dark. “I have to go to work,” she says. Is she rummaging through his clothes? “I’m taking a pair of your jeans,” she says. In the dark he can see her holding one of his white shirts. “I’ll use your belt. May I take your belt?”

“Yes.”

She cinches around her waist the belt she tightened around his neck the night before. She says, “Your work, how is it?”

“All right.”

“Go back to sleep, but not too late. You don’t want to miss work.”

“I won’t.”

“It’s a good job. You don’t want to lose it.”

Every night she lies between his legs like his dream; and then one night he turns

to the suite’s empty doorway, and the cylinders in his head click into

place, and he sits up from the bed. She stops and says, “What is it?”

“Where’s Zazi?”

“What?”

“Where’s Zazi?”

“I told you. She’s in L.A. With friends.”

“You said with friends. Then you said with her father. Then you said with friends.”

“What does it matter?”

“‘What does it matter?’” he repeats. He gets up from bed in the dark and begins putting on his clothes.

“Where are you going?” she asks. He doesn’t answer. He finishes dressing, slipping on a coat.

By the time he’s down to the hotel lobby, she’s caught up with him, pulling on her own clothes. “Stop,” she says, grabbing him by the arm, but he doesn’t stop. Out at the street in the cold night, the doorman hails a cab.

He says, opening the cab door, “You can come or not.” A panic is in her eyes. He gets in the cab and she darts in after him before the cab pulls away.

It’s one-thirty in the morning. At the parking structure on Thirty-Fourth Street, he gives some money to the driver and gets out, leaving the door open behind him. “What are you doing?” she keeps saying. He walks into the structure and wanders among the aisles of cars on the first level, then walks up the concrete stairs to the second level, then the third.

In the midst of the parked cars on the third level, he turns to her and says, “Where is it?”

“What?”

“The car.” He begins searching again.

“I moved it,” she says, “it’s parked in another structure now.”

“Where?”

She shivers in the parking lot. Her mind races almost audibly. “Back uptown,” she says. Then, “Out in Queens.”

“Is it uptown or out in Queens?”

“I …”

“Is she with friends or with her father?”

When she doesn’t answer, he turns and sees a black Mustang at the end of the lot. Three thousand miles from Los Angeles, he didn’t believe it would really be the black Mustang.

He walks toward the car. Again she grabs him by the arm to pull him back, again he pulls his arm away. She stops in her footsteps and begins screaming. “All right then! All right!” He reaches the Mustang and peers through the window into the backseat and sees a form huddled under some blankets. The form sits up and looks back at him.

He rattles the handle of the car door. The young girl inside the car reaches over and unlocks it.

Vikar sticks his head in the car. It’s strewn with the cellophane wrap of eaten junk food, MacDonald’s bags, styrofoam cups. Zazi must see something in his face because she retreats, pulling the blankets up around her.

When Vikar turns to Soledad and steps toward her, in this moment she sees in his eyes the person she was afraid of when they first met.

He slams the back window of the car with his fist and glass implodes. Both Soledad and Zazi scream.

His bloody hand hangs at his side. The girl begins crying. “Oh mother,” Vikar says, then reaches to Zazi with his other hand as she draws away from him amid the glass.

Soledad sobs, “You’re frightening her.”

“I’m frightening her?” Vikar says. The wrath that seemed momentarily satisfied when he smashed the window returns.

“No,” Zazi calls to Vikar when he takes another step toward her mother.

“Now do you want to see
bárbaro
?” Vikar says to Soledad, raising his bloody fist.

“Don’t,” says the girl.

“All these nights your daughter is sleeping in the car?” says Vikar. “Do you believe you’re the Whore of God, to sacrifice your child on the altar of pleasure?”

“
Mi dios
,” Soledad cries.

“He’s not
my
god,” he says. “Look.” He turns his head. “This is the profile of the one who wants you,” and turns his head back, “this is the profile of the one who would kill you, for sacrificing your nine-year-old child.”

“
Diablo
.”

Zazi says to him, “Don’t. I’m O.K.” She adds, “Actually, I’m eleven now.”

In the corners of the parking lot’s concrete bunker, homeless people look up from the rags where they sleep. Crying, Soledad rushes Vikar and pounds his chest. “Don’t you think I’m trying?” she blurts. “Don’t you think? Driving all the way from L.A. for this shitty little part in this shitty little movie?”

“By spending your nights with me?” he says. “You try to take care of her by sp—?”

“Yes!” Her pounding exhausts itself. “It’s
exactly
what I’m trying to do!”

Vikar begins walking away. He gets halfway across the parking lot and turns; his hand leaves a trail of blood. “Come on,” he says.

Soledad still cries.

“Come on.” He motions to Zazi.

“Where?” Soledad finally says. “I can’t sleep with you when she’s with us. It’s not right.”

“Come on.”

Back at the suite, mother and daughter sleep in the bedroom and Vikar finally falls asleep on the couch. Both are gone when he wakes. He doesn’t go to work but lies on the couch looking at the remains of his model church on the floor.

On the fourth day, someone slips something under the door. He still lies on the couch. Another hour passes before he rises from the couch and walks to the door; it’s that day’s
Variety
. A small notice in the bottom left-hand corner of the second-to-last page is circled in purple, announcing that United Artists has brought onto its “troubled” production of
Your Pale Blue Eyes
a “respected Academy Award-nominated” editor to take over the project in its “final stage.”
I wonder if this is how Dotty found out
. An hour and a half later Vikar gets a call from the Sherry-Netherland front desk, informing him his balance is paid through the next day.

Vikar takes a cab to the parking lot on Thirty-Fourth Street. Soledad’s Mustang is gone from where it was parked; the space still glimmers with broken glass. He walks up and down the aisles and up and down the structure from one level to the next, but the car is gone.

He arranges with the hotel to stay in New York another forty-eight hours. In his inertia he manages to ship to Los Angeles the stack of movies:
I’m not giving them back
. The night before he is to catch his plane, he shakes himself from his torpor for one more trip down to the Bowery.

He finds himself watching the band without seeing it, listening to them without hearing, until someone pulls at his elbow. There in the dark he almost can’t register her; she’s shorter than everyone else. He says, “What are you doing here?”

“Mom told me about it,” she says. “The more she talked about how disgusting it was, the cooler it sounded.”

He says, “How did you get in here? You’re nine.”

“I’m eleven,” Zazi says, “almost twelve.”

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I’m not drinking or anything.” She says, “Everyone seems to know who you are.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“You missed this great band. They’re from England and the lead singer’s this little fat chick with braces and I can’t tell if she’s black or white or what, and get this, the sax player is a chick too.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“There are ten million fucks in the naked city, and she’s with one of them. Or maybe,” Zazi shrugs, “three or four.” She sees the look on Vikar’s face. “Sorry,” she says.

“You’re nine,” he says, “you shouldn’t say things like that.” He gives her fifty dollars and the key to his suite. “Do you need a place to sleep? Do you remember where my hotel is?”

She looks at the money and key for a moment. “Thanks,” she finally says. “Aren’t you staying?”

“No.”

Back at the hotel he gets another key from the front desk, goes up to his suite and packs and leaves a folded blanket on the couch in the sitting room. He goes to bed and sometime in the night hears the door open and close. In the morning the couch is empty, the blanket draped over the end.

When Vikar reaches the TWA ticket counter at JFK, Mitch Rondell is waiting with an assistant. “Can I talk to you?” he says to Vikar.
He wants his movies back
. Vikar imagines an armed struggle there in the terminal. “Don’t check him in yet,” Rondell says to the woman behind the counter.

Vikar says, “I’ve already shipped them.”

“What?”

“I’ve already shipped the movies back to Los Angeles.”

“What movies?”

“The ones you gave me.
The Long Goodbye
.”

“The movies are yours, Vikar. I want to talk to you about what happened.”

“It’s all right. I saw the
Variety
article.”

“I need to talk to you.”

“Why?”

“Can we go into the lounge and talk?”

“I’ll miss my flight.”

“We’ll put you on another flight, if it comes to that. In first class. I need to talk to you.” Rondell puts his hand on Vikar’s shoulder and the assistant picks up Vikar’s bag.

In the lounge Vikar and Rondell sit at one table and the assistant with Vikar’s bag sits at another on the other side of the room. “We would like you to come back,” Rondell says.

“What happened to the respected Academy Award-nominated editor?” Vikar asks. From anyone else, it would sound sarcastic.

Rondell leans across the table, speaking with more intensity than Vikar has heard from him. “No one understands you or what you’re doing,” he says. “No one understands what this picture is as you’ve cut it. I don’t understand it. It’s not an art film and it’s not a thriller and maybe it’s a thrilling art film but I’m not getting it.”

“It would be better if it were finished.”

“Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t. I’m accepting that I may never get it. That’s O.K., I don’t have to get it, not at this point. We brought in a very smart editor, very hip, he did the sound edit on Coppola’s last two pictures and just cut Zinnemann’s last picture, two Oscar nominations in the last four years. He looked at what you’ve done and we talked about it.”

“Is it faster in first class?”

“What?”