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ОглавлениеPART I
Jacaranda
Jacaranda’s name was pronounced “Jack-ah-ran-dah,” as in jack-o’-lan-tern, the same rhythm. It’s the name of a Central American flowering tree that grows in Los Angeles, and in Spanish it was originally “Hawk-ah-rahn-dah.” It was just like her parents to name their daughter Jacaranda. Her father was a Trotskyite descended from bomb-throwing Russian anarchists, and Jacaranda’s mother was born illegitimately, because her mother refused to marry the man who was the father. “I’m not marrying a rapist,” Jacaranda’s maternal grandmother explained. She moved to Texas and lost her illusions about the Catholic Church in one fell swoop—she was excommunicated, not him!
The Ocean
They lived in Santa Monica near the ocean. Jacaranda’s father was a studio musician and they lived in a bungalow house, one with a mortgage, about two blocks from the ocean. Jacaranda grew up tan, with streaky blond hair, and tar on the bottom of her feet. Her sister, April, grew up three years younger, with a darker tan, and streaky reddish layers in her darker hair, and tar on the bottom of her feet. They looked absolutely nothing alike.
From the very start, Jacaranda was the big one with the large head who, till she was three, had to be swathed in pink for people not to say, “My, what a nice healthy boy you’ve got there . . .” April was a girl, a girlish girl with curly brown curls and a rosy-cheeked smile, delicate bone structure, and a small head. Neither Jacaranda nor April looked anything at all like the parents, Mort and Mae Leven, except that Jacaranda’s head and Mort Leven’s head were 7 ⅞ in hat size—one of the largest hat sizes, even for men.
The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden. All Jacaranda cared about was surfing. First it was body-surfing where she would stare at the edge of the water, watching the waves to see which side the riptide was twisting back out on; then she’d slowly force herself upon the sea though it resisted. She’d walk out till she was up to her waist and all tangled up in the problem. The waves would now be coming and it was her choice, as they came, whether to slide on through under them in the glassgreen water and ignore them crashing toward L.A. behind her—or to match herself up with the ocean’s rhythm, to swim out just far enough, then stop, wait, push herself forward to catch the wave, and tumble into shore. Sometimes, if she miscalculated, she’d be swung back under the wave’s lip and squashed down into the sand. When she was twelve, Jacaranda was given a surfboard.
No matter what the waves were doing, no matter what tides and thunders went on beneath her, she stayed on the board. The board tilted and tried to buck her off, the whole world slanted suddenly, the board would shoot out from under her before she knew it—the trick was to get the board back and keep going.
Jacaranda would surf before school and after school, and during school if she could, if the day was too nice. Mae Leven was “understanding” and would write notes to Jacaranda’s teachers about her daughter “coming down with a cold.” If Jacaranda tried it too often, Mae would turn into a black mamba snake and whirl around like a whip, snarling something darkly Southern.
Mort Leven played in the orchestra at Twentieth Century-Fox. They paid him $150 a week, which, in 1949 when he went “under contract,” was a comfortable salary. It allowed him to put a down payment on their house in Santa Monica where they could live happily ever after for as long as ever after would bear up. Mort Leven’s great-aunt Sonia was a major star in the early twenties and thirties, and two decades later was still so powerful with the studio executive system that she was able to get Mort a job. (In Hollywood, if you can’t have a father in the Industry, the least you can have is a great-aunt.) It didn’t matter that Mort Leven had been a concert violinist or that he had studied with the greatest masters of his time and toured Europe; it didn’t matter that he was probably one of the finest violinists in the world—not to Twentieth Century-Fox. What mattered to the studio was Sonia, Jacaranda’s great-great-aunt and “godmother.” Sonia was able to get Mort the interview with Harry Katz, the studio’s chief musical administrator, an interview that in those days only a miracle or a father in the Industry merited.
Harry Katz had started out in the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side and had a brother in the Industry, who in 1931 had sent for him to come out on a train to Hollywood. The pictures had sound and Harry could conduct the orchestra. After all, he’d been doing it since he was a kid in Toronto, a Jewish refugee like everybody else, a friend of Sonia’s from “the old days” before Toronto, in Kiev. So “For Sonia’s great-nephew, I put aside the official rules,” he declared. “I let a total unknown try out in my office.”
Mort was told to “bring something with a piano part” so Harry could play along and see just how well Mort could keep up. Mort Leven couldn’t quite bring himself to debase his musical worth either. So he brought a piece, a new piece by Igor Stravinsky that he’d purchased in Paris, a piece that hadn’t even been published in America yet, a piece where every measure was in a different time signature—so that it went from two-four to three-four (the waltz) to seven-eight to two-two to five-eight . . . Mort Leven casually handed the piano part to Harry and, on a music stand, set up his violin score.
“Who is this guy Stravinsky?” Harry asked. “That how you pronounce it?” He opened the music, took one look at the time signatures, and burst into roaring laughter. “Is this a joke?” To Harry Katz, this was the funniest thing a job applicant had ever done—faked up a whole score of music this way! (Later, when Harry found out a certain Igor Stravinsky did exist, and was the musical genius of the century, and was the man who had just left Jacaranda’s sixteenth birthday party with his glorious wife, Vera, he asked, “Morty, tell me the truth, a man like that, he can’t be making more than twenty-five grand a year, can he?”)
IT WAS AN easy life, growing up by the beautiful sea with her tan sister, her beautiful mother and black-curly-hair genius father, the Twentieth Century-Fox money rolling beautifully in every week, allowing Mort to save enough to buy real estate in Santa Monica. “Income property,” it was called. (So many musicians at the studio had apartment houses and courts that the joke, one day, became “Tenants, anyone?”)
In the days of her childhood, she was formally educated in three city schools where she mostly sat drawing pictures of Frederick’s of Hollywood models dressed in comic-book high boots and masks, with garter belts, knives, and whips, with long wavy blond hair down to their waists in the back, cleavage in the front, and beauty marks dotting to the left of their left eyes. She had not been raised in any religion, though she assumed she was Jewish. She found matzah hidden underneath her grandparents’ brocaded satin couch cushions, over at their West Los Angeles house every Passover. She really believed that the great religions of the world so far had come into being before anyone had grown up by the ocean. She believed in the ocean. Jacaranda believed that the ocean was a giant lullaby god who could be seduced into seeing things her way and could bring forth great waves. “Great waves, great waves, great waves,” Jacaranda used to chant on bland days. On days when there were great waves, she would in silence bow her head toward the sea and thank it. She would talk to the water, implore it to hotten up. When the surf was hot, everything reached a state of hurling glory and perfect balance between her body and the tides and eternity. “You children who’ve grown up in California,” she was often told, “you don’t know what life is. One day you’re going to run into a brick wall.”
“Like what?” she asked. “Snow?”
Jacaranda spent the first summer after graduating from high school custom-painting surfboards for twenty-five dollars apiece in her parents’ garage and bought a new old ’59 Plymouth station wagon.
By the time she got out of Santa Monica High School, she was a spare figure out on the beach wearing torn blue shorts or a torn blue bikini. From afar, she looked as if she’d washed up on the shore, a piece of driftwood with blond seaweed caught at one end. She had calcium deposits on her knees and on the tops of her feet that were caused by the pressure of paddling huge older boards out into the ocean. (These bumps were called “surf bumps” and even the scientists down at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla didn’t know exactly what they were.) From far away, she looked like all the other girls her age who were growing up near the water.
Up close, her expression—when she wasn’t smiling—gave people the impression that she was brand-new—a child, almost. When she smiled, her perfect white teeth slashed the air with sudden beauty, giving her a glow of confidence that smacked of rude invincibility. (“Are those teeth real?” was the common question.) Her bangs were too long (down to her nose), making her eyes difficult to notice. (She’d always wished they’d been blue—blue the color of improved skies on postcards.)
Mae Leven used to watch Jacaranda and April come in from the beach at sunset, with their hair tangled and salty and their taut arms and legs dragging sand into the house behind them, and she’d coo, “Oh, there you are. My two string beans.”
By the time Jacaranda was eighteen, she no longer looked like a boy, even with April standing right next to her.
People told Jacaranda she was lucky.
But luck is like beauty or diamond earrings: people who have it cannot simply stay home and receive compliments unless they’ve an enormous sense of public duty. Jacaranda wanted to see things before her luck ran out and she came upon the prophesied brick wall.
She imagined that she would be an adventuress and not need to go to UCLA or even Chouinard Art Institute, like Shelby Coryell, her one friend her own age. She would be an adventuress-painter, and just paint, because that’s what she’d be good at. Blue was everything.
Outside, that first September, everyone had gone back to school and she had the whole empty beach to herself. Everything in the horizon looked clear and blue.
True Love
Colman didn’t like the ocean.
“It’s too cold,” he explained, shuddering in his black turtleneck. “How can you go where it’s too cold? That’s why I left New York.”
“Cold?” she said.
“Cold,” he enunciated clearly.
But she was in love, so she moved in with him, way inland, to West Hollywood where he rented a ramshackle house all choked by passionflower vines. He had four ramshackle cats, named Harry, Dean, Stan, and Tentoes. His wife was divorcing him. He covered all his windows with black curtains because he hated the light in L.A., and daytime in general.
He had black curly hair and was plainly a genius—just like her father. He taught acting and everyone in his class said he was brilliant. He was twenty-nine and she was eighteen the night they met in Barney’s Beanery, a ramshackle West Hollywood bar where she drank beer and flirted with artists at night. Barney’s was one of the oldest bars in West Hollywood. Most of the artists were surfers who lived at the beach.
Colman was standing near the bar and his eyebrows went up gently when he saw Jacaranda. Everything Colman did made her laugh, and all he had to do was begin to tell a joke and she was lost.
After three weeks, Colman told her his wife had changed her mind about the divorce and was moving back in with him and bringing her cats, Fred and Rooster.
“More cats?” Jacaranda asked. “Your wife?”
He raised his eyebrows and spread his hands out in a “What can I do?” gesture.
Colman lied to her about everything and for a long time Jacaranda thought that that was what actors did offstage. But she found out most actors only lied for money in movies. He was entirely irresistible to all women, even Jacaranda’s grandmother, who took one look at him and started blushing and afterward said, “The Irish are a lovely people.”
“But, Grandma, you don’t like Irish people because of their red hair, I thought.”
“He has black hair,” she said.
He was not too tall, five feet eleven, with pale Irish skin, and beautiful gracefully endearing eyes—there was nothing “wild Irish rose” about him. Even his lies weren’t wild. His lies always leaned toward the tame. He lied that things were dull and lifeless without Jacaranda. If she asked him what was “new, terrific, and exciting,” he’d sigh, yawn, and say, “Peace and quiet, my darling, just nothing but peace and quiet . . .” And she knew—three people would have told her—that he’d been with some starlet on the coats at a party the night before.
What she loved about Colman was his New York accent. He talked like a Dead End Kid. Ever since Jacaranda was little and first saw television, Leo Gorcey had been her idea of “a man.” He was a lot like Mort Leven, but—instead of being Jewish—it was the Irishness that drove Jacaranda into peals of merriment; New York Irishness. New York Irishness was so exotic to Jacaranda that she had practically been able to overlook Elvis Presley’s Southern comfort. Jacaranda always felt that one day far off in the future—when she got over whatever it was about Leo Gorcey that drove her so crazy—she’d be able to take a leisurely cruise through the South. She loved Southern accents, but at the very moment when she was melting away from the effects of one, Colman would telephone and say, “Hi ya, beauty, what’s new, terrific, and exciting, huh?”
Being in love with Colman made her look beautiful. He loved her in purple and she wore purple clothes, which did her a lot more good than old shirts and torn shorts. Purple made her hair look reddish golden and her skin look burning hot. She had a purple corduroy coat that would have stolen the show even on Rome’s Via Veneto, where B-movie starlets paraded on summer nights in La Dolce Vita.
When Colman stood back, he could have been kissing her with his eyes, and Jacaranda knew what it was to be a palm tree who was truly adored, in lavender.
“Honey,” Colman said, “do you love me?”
“Madly,” she said.
He’d hand her some Red Hots, that cinnamon candy, and drive them farther up Laurel Canyon, because to him Laurel Canyon was a country road; he liked to drive out in the country.
Colman introduced her to all his friends, men who were junkies and actors and gamblers and cat burglars and jazz musicians. His idol was Chet Baker.
Colman had been depraved in his youth and understood entirely her desire to be depraved in her youth, too.
“Get it while you’re young, kid,” he said.
The best thing he told her, though, was in response to a remark she made about how two people they both knew couldn’t possibly be married and oughtn’t to be together. He said: “Honey, don’t ever try to figure out what’s going on between two people.”
After she moved out of his house, he resumed life as a married man, and on the face of it it didn’t seem right that they were still in love.
“But what will happen with Colman?” April asked. “How will it end?”
“End?” she said. “What would end it?”
For a while (five years) they met in an apartment in West Hollywood that belonged to one of Colman’s students, Gilbert Wood, whom Jacaranda never met in all the years she and Colman spent afternoons there. She knew that Gilbert was an actor, that he sold marijuana, and that he kept his surfboard on top of his TV.
The Sixties
West Hollywood during the sixties, when life was one long rock-’n’-roll, was easy to live in with its $120-a-month two-bedroom apartment and landlords who were used to weirdness. Though there were such things as Families with Children and a Dog, most of the people who lived in West Hollywood were dope dealers, rock-’n’-roll musicians, road managers, groupies, waiters who were really actors but were writing screenplays in their spare time, and writers who were writing four screenplays each and collecting unemployment. Hairdressers, models who did commercials, and youngish people with no visible means of support, too, resided in that area, between Melrose and Sunset Boulevard, from La Brea to Doheny. In the sixties, West Hollywood was like an open city, a port at the crossroads of all directions.
Jacaranda offered to help a friend of Colman’s out for a few days a week with his business. She circled and Xeroxed the names of all of his clients in the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and those “Teen Come” magazines, as she called them. And it more or less turned into a steady job. She made enough money to get her own West Hollywood apartment, gas, and drugs, and not have to be in a regular office where they expected her to wear shoes. Colman’s friend, Hal, paid her $175 a week for going to rock-’n’-roll concerts and hanging around backstage, an occupation that her friends who were groupies thought was the luckiest thing they’d ever heard of.
She drank Southern Comfort with adorable rich young men who were often smart, and spent more and more nights up in those mansions above Hollywood and Beverly Hills where ambulances often lost their way and where handsome devils sat around on their amps trying to outdo each other in songs, blondes, and downers.
She went to the Monterey Pop Festival, though she never really remembered how she’d gone, come back, or what she’d done for the two days in between. Everyone took Sunshine acid and smoked grass called Icepack. And then, of course, there was all that tequila and rum and Courvoisier that rock-’n’-roll was finding out about after deciding grass wasn’t enough.
She wore skintight satin pants and purple satin blouses. Her hair tangled down her back in blonder streaks of bleached disarray. She spent a lot of time in front of mirrors putting on brown eyeliner and mauve rouge, trying to see from behind her bangs, which still grew down to her nose and made her face look sweeter and more vulnerable when she was quiet and didn’t smile.
“I hate rock-’n’-roll,” she said, one night in the middle of the Stones at the Forum, and left.
HER SURFBOARD WAS lashed onto the top of her new old ’59 Plymouth station wagon but she hadn’t even been outside in the daytime, it seemed to her, since she took up with rock-’n’-roll. She was all white like an adult, not tan.
“I probably can’t even stand up anymore,” she moaned to April.
“Yeah, and it serves you right, too,” April said.
“God, this thing is so heavy,” Jacaranda complained, lugging her surfboard along to the beach near April’s Santa Monica apartment. Jacaranda thought her lungs were going to rip.
She got to the water and touched it with her foot. It was February and wasn’t very hot on the beach. But once Jacaranda was out where the waves broke, she found she could stand up and that her balance soon was intact. And she remembered how nothing else mattered.
“See, you can do it,” April yelled from the shore.
April was now twenty, and because she was truly sympathetic to the human condition, she was besieged by a band of stars and handsome devils, who came to her when life for them stayed too glamorous for too long and didn’t seem real. Eventually, April went to sea and became a sailor.
“I think I’ll move back to the beach,” Jacaranda said, panting and wet from throwing herself headlong into a battle of cold and tides. “I wonder if I still could make money painting surfboards.”
They paused together to take one last look back at the ocean.
“God,” Jacaranda said, “it’ll be so nice to read a real book instead of the Daily Variety.”
“Mother will be so relieved that you’re going to settle down,” April said.
“Me?” Jacaranda asked.
The Apartment
The apartment was in Santa Monica on Third Street, just a few blocks from the ocean, in a tumbling hillside alive with butterflies and cats. It was a long rectangle divided by two walls into a bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen. All three rooms looked straight out into a horizon of blue, gray, green Pacific with sunsets blazing orange in summer and glowing pink in winter. The bathroom was minute and the whole place had a rickety temporary attitude with a roof that leaked, but it only mattered when it rained and Jacaranda, being from L.A., thought the rain was more than a fair trade for damp rugs and puddles in the kitchen.
Three friends of hers from high school had opened the Eye of God Surf Company and offered to pay her thirty-five dollars per board for airbrushing tertiary and rainbow fades over the smooth surfaces of new boards.
The woman who rented her the apartment let her rent a garage in the back for twenty dollars a month where she could paint boards.
For the first six months, all she wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf. She was clean again, for the ocean salt water was purifying and good for washing away the ravages of depravity.
“What’s all that light doing in here?” Colman asked, on his first visit.
“It’s from the windows,” Jacaranda explained.
“But aren’t you going to get sick of looking out at that ocean all the time?” Colman asked. “Look at this place, it’s bright as day in here, how will you sleep?”
“You don’t like my apartment,” Jacaranda said.
“No, no, darling,” he lied. “That’s got nothing to do with it. I love this place. Really. I do.”
She’d spent five whole years inland so that Colman could drop over in the daytime. She couldn’t help it. She’d never told him this thing about herself but now he’d have to know.
“Colman,” she burst out, “I usually wake up at seven. In the morning.”
“Oh,” he said. He thought about this, and then, “You mean, you sleep when it gets dark outside? At night?”
She’d only seen him in the afternoons when he’d just woken up, and naturally he assumed she had, too.
“Hey,” he said, “did I tell you about this graffiti I saw in the men’s room at the Knife and Fork? Someone printed: ‘I’m ten inches long and three inches wide. Interested?’ and wrote his phone number down. And then, in pencil underneath, someone else said, ‘Fascinated. How big’s your cock?’”
As Colman walked down the hill toward his old Buick, she knew he would have nothing more to do with her now that light was in her apartment.
The next day she found Emilio, a black satin cat with ambitions that seemed more peaceful than the ones alive in Colman or West Hollywood. Emilio specialized in patches of sunshine and sharpening his claws on her one chair and purring if she so much as uttered his camellia name, “Emilio.”
About fifty of her friends continued to speak to her after she turned against rock-’n’-roll and they braved Olympic Boulevard down to the wilds of Santa Monica (not the beach her friends meant when they said “the beach”; they meant Malibu).
“I don’t know,” most of her friends said, “it’s so far . . .”
“From what?” Jacaranda asked.
“The Troubadour, Tana’s, everything!” they replied.
Jacaranda didn’t care if rock-’n’-roll was the pulse beat of art in America, or a massive connection to everyone her age, or the background wallpaper of a generation that didn’t seem to be dropping off and giving in to Frank Sinatra. She was tired of it.
“Maybe you’re turning into an adult,” April suggested.
“Me?” Jacaranda cried.
Surely there was something one could do besides becoming an adult just because she didn’t want to live in West Hollywood or stand in a crush of eighteen thousand people at the Forum, listening to a white boy making all that money singing “Love in Vain.”
But what?
“Will you feed my cat for me next week?” Jacaranda asked.
“Where are you going?” April asked.
A week later, Jacaranda boarded the plane in Oahu.
The Innocent Virgin
Jacaranda had taken the plane to Oahu to catch the smaller plane to Maui. She felt as if life contained nothing but odds and ends. She had always presumed that once people got to be twenty-three, they were Too Old, yet she was not old enough to content herself with brooding over the past like Marcel Proust, whose book she was reading on the plane, and who obviously had nothing more pressing to do than regard the years as a museum filled with beautiful reproductions of lost jealousy and bygone fashion. In another sense, she felt herself to be an Innocent Virgin—too young.
And so she began to see that instead of life becoming subdued as in Jane Austen novels, things were not to be that simple. Maybe the sixties had been too much for life ever to be that simple again. But rock-’n’-roll was behind her. And beneath her was the blue, blue sea.
She was wearing white jeans and a white Mexican blouse with a big pink silk rose pinned to it. She had only brought very little with her; she knew someone would loan her a surfboard.
The air felt funny when she landed, humid and ominous. They said a hurricane was on its way and that all inter-island planes for Maui were canceled.
In the Honolulu airport Jacaranda bumped into Shelby Coryell, her old boyfriend from the beach. He was in the airport to pick up some air freight. He’d graduated from Chouinard Art Institute and, she’d been told, had gone to the islands for a two-week vacation the year before but had never come home. He was still out in the water in Hawaii.
“I’m living with a girl on the North Shore,” he said, “at Sunset Beach.”
“Oh,” she said.
How dare he live with someone, she thought as they drove off to Shelby’s motel. She had always planned that Shelby would end up as hers. She decided to pull herself together and take him home to L.A. where he belonged, but when she got to his motel, she went for a walk on Sunset Beach, and there was Gilbert Wood.
In the hurricane, while everyone was home drinking rum and listening to ham radios about rooftops and towns being lifted out to sea, Gilbert Wood was surfing.
The waves were fifteen feet high and roared like lions and volcanoes. Gilbert Wood just crouched farther down on his surfboard and flattened his feet more. His left side, the side parallel to the waves, tilted slightly to enable him to drag his hand along inside the water, which left a white trail behind him the way his surfboard did, two white trails of foam and folly. He used his hand to practically confound the ocean, the day, and the hurricane. He was like a great beauty reaching for a cigarette in an officers’ club.
And he was a great danger. He had ashy-colored hair, and in profile one side of his face was vicious. His mouth looked as though he’d just been hit with the news that he had a week to live and he didn’t care.
Gilbert was an actor; he knew every last detail perfectly, of how beautiful he was. He was vain about danger, for hurricanes don’t care if one is an actor or beautiful.
•
ON THE PLANE going back to L.A., Gilbert said, “Have you met Max yet?”
“Max who?” she asked.
Gilbert did two things that impressed her. One was to bite the back of her neck with his sharp teeth so that time stood still. The other was to introduce her to Max.
Max
Once Max noticed her, the only truth was Max’s truth.
At Gilbert’s every morning at seven, the phone would ring. It would be Max. The first time this happened, Gilbert talked for a whole hour, laughing away throughout. Jacaranda asked, “Who was that at this hour?”
“Oh, just Max,” Gilbert said, closing back up into his vain and dangerous self. There they were, in Gilbert’s apartment—the place she and Colman had always gone to before she left West Hollywood forever.
“Max?”
“Just some fag I met at Jerry Getz’s opening,” Gilbert said.
Max noticed Jacaranda a whole month before she noticed him. She didn’t know that Max was bristling with curiosity over her affair with Gilbert, but it was, in fact, Max’s intense desire to uncover Gilbert’s secrets that kept Gilbert so wrapped up in Jacaranda. Before Max showed up, she and Gilbert would not have lasted together more than two days after they had returned from Oahu, and now it had dragged on for a month, with Gilbert insisting Jacaranda come over every night, and Jacaranda doing what Gilbert said, because he was so dangerous and there was something mysterious going on that she couldn’t figure out. She’d never have guessed it was just Max.
“I invited Max up for coffee,” Gilbert announced one Sunday morning. Up until this point, it didn’t seem as though she was debauched at all, but the truth was that while she believed in being a washed-up piece of driftwood on the shore, she also believed in bold adventuresses, cigarettes, and suffered from one too many of anything. It was one of those “Oh, no, I couldn’t have” mornings for her again—not that Gilbert ever noticed. (One of the ways Gilbert cramped her style was by not noticing anything.)
“You invited him up for coffee?” Jacaranda asked.
“He wanted to meet you,” Gilbert said.
“Me?” she asked.
“He’s here,” Gilbert said.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked a picture of health.
Then she heard him, Max.
MAX WAS A carburetor backfire in the driveway, an old green Jaguar with wooden paneling inside, and a dog named Diogenes. (Jacaranda thought, Diogenes! Really!) He emerged out of the Jaguar like a tall drink of water, like Cooper in Morocco; all he needed was a palm frond and a straw fan and he’d be complete. But he wasn’t in the French Foreign Legion and he, by no means, told the limpid, careless innocent truth the way it was spoken by Gary Cooper (because Cooper was too lazy to do otherwise). Max’s truth was sharpened by the sportsman honing of an artist whittler; like that Balinese carver’s reply to the question about Art, “I just do everything as well as I can,” Max just did truth as well as he could—he turned truth into a game, an art, when most others would just let truth pass by.
He was about six feet three and he had bright golden hair, a golden mustache, and eyes that reminded Jacaranda of those improved postcard skies. His face was lean and his mouth was pale, his teeth were vampiric—a tiny touch too long, but not from age. His neck was a slender Lucas Cranach neck and his body was slender; every move he made was like spring water, clear and salt-free. He wore white tennis shoes, white jeans, a white cotton shirt, and a red bandanna. Max saw her staring at him from inside Gilbert’s window and, with one simple smiling motion, he bowed.
“You’re here! Jacaranda Leven, right?” he drawled. (Oh—but a high-class sort of Savannah drawl from before Georgia was marched through, a drawl hardly extant in this world of redneck sentiments.) “I’ve heard so much about you.”
Jacaranda said, “Oh . . . and I so little of you.”
“Gilbert’s a fine man,” Max said, “but I’m afraid that boy’s a little short on character assessment.”
Jacaranda should have dumped Gilbert’s “character assessment” of Max out the window, but instead she was thinking how sad it was that Max was a “fag” and what a pity it was that she would never be able to seduce him. He was so beautiful and that bow had made her eyes go dry, she’d forgotten to blink for so long. Perhaps what kept Jacaranda thinking Max was a fag was that there could be no other reason but a sexual one, in her opinion, for anyone at all to like Gilbert. He was without redeeming social value except for sex—Gilbert with his mean ash-green eyes and his monosyllabic replies and his rudimentary manly desires to climb Mount Everest and swim the Dardanelles.
Instead of ignoring Gilbert’s “just Max” character assessment, Jacaranda resigned herself to Max being a fag. Maybe it was because she’d never tried to think what being a fag meant and what Gilbert’s idea of a fag could be. Gilbert might regard the whole world as a panorama of worthless rubble, peopled by macabre perverts and Cro-Magnon women, from the way he spoke of them. But once she resigned herself to Max being a fag, she saw Oscar Wilde in every move he made.
Or maybe it was because she had never met a man who was passionate about elegance. What went on between men and women was based on a kind of enraged foundation that to Jacaranda could only be transcended through clashes-by-night sex. One of the things that made her laugh so much around Colman was the ridiculous distance between his grim dislike of his wife (and Jacaranda too) and his feelings that he was a prisoner of sex—and his love of his innocent lust. It was all balance. But then, she already knew that from surfing.
As Max sat there, his eyes occasionally landing on Gilbert, who was talking on the phone by the kitchen, it struck her that Max was fascinated by a death-defier like Gilbert for the same reason she was, out of sheer childlike amazement.
Gilbert’s apartment was furnished by his landlord in cocoa-brown threadbare fifties’ Modern with a cocoa-brown shag rug and stucco walls, which had been swirled into a pattern so life would be more interesting. He had a coffee table with cigarette burns on it and a pile of scripts with dust on top of them. His cast-off clothes were piled up in a high heap by the front door, waiting for him to remember to take them to the laundry. There was no door between the bedroom and the living room. His bed was a twisted torment of sheets, which he’d been meaning to change for two months. A vaseful of dead flowers, roses, stood on the windowsill. It was West Hollywood, all right, and the only thing that really was not indigenous was Max, his long fingers shaking out a match from lighting his and Jacaranda’s cigarettes like some sort of lost art.
“Have you known Gilbert long?” Jacaranda asked, watching their smoke lured out the window by the sun.
“Have you?” he asked. He raised his eyebrows in elegant curiosity with a sort of stillness, an attitude of delight. It was as though at last he’d found her and now they had nothing else to do but spend the rest of their lives discovering the mysteries of each other’s perfection. The joy that came spilling off the way Max’s shoulders drew toward her in rapt attention was the joy she knew they meant by something being “bigger than both of us.”
“I haven’t really known Gilbert that long,” she said, “but I’m real close to his apartment.”
“Gilbert,” Max said, with a brilliant smile, “has the finest instinct for interior decoration in West Hollywood.”
She didn’t feel like laughing exactly, though what rose up in her was glee; she felt if only she and Max could sit this way, their cigarette smoke spiraling forever and Gilbert just inside their sight—well, if only they could.
Gilbert got off the phone. Instead of feeling, as she’d supposed she might feel, that Max would wreck her Sunday and that she’d want him to leave, she felt as though Gilbert were crude and inept. Gilbert’s dangerous face, at that point, looked almost stylized, like a mask.
Once she noticed Max, everything else seemed only half true.
“Who was that?” Max asked. “On the phone?”
“Sandy Ryder,” Gilbert said, pouring himself some more coffee.
“Oh,” Max said, and a look crossed his face that was so sad and polite that one might think he was at a funeral and Sandy Ryder was the body.
“He’s not so bad,” Gilbert said. Jacaranda had never heard Gilbert say that someone wasn’t so bad. She thought it was a trick.
“Not so bad!” Max cried, so excited he stood up and scowled. “Do you know what he said? Last time I saw him he told me: ‘Truth is like old brandy; it should only be brought out late at night among close friends.’”
Max stepped on a ceramic ashtray in his indignation, striding to the window.
Gilbert looked innocent. He’d tricked Max into anger. “Truth should be carried like a banner before you!” Max went on.
“But don’t you have any secrets?” Jacaranda asked.
“Secrets?” he replied. “Secrets are lies that you tell to your friends.”
He turned to look out the window and she saw his profile against an enormous bush, blooming with white oleanders. Her mother had always warned her about oleanders; they were poisonous and one was never to eat them.
The white flowers threw Max’s elegant silhouette into a sort of bas-relief, like Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, in Florence, golden. The sunshine was golden. The cigarette smoke and coffee smelled golden.
Max sighed, paused a moment, and then turned to her. “Are you coming tonight?” he asked.
“Coming?” she asked.
“Didn’t Gilbert invite you? I’m having a few people over. For drinks. I’m at the Sacramento. Wear anything.”
Diogenes was yawning and wagging and then Max was outside, a loudly backfiring carburetor, backing out of the driveway, and silence.
All that remained were the dead roses on the window and Gilbert, who raised one eyebrow crossly like a brown-haired child who won’t eat.
“Amazing, isn’t he?” Gilbert said.
He got to his feet and then, suddenly, crude, stylized Gilbert, with his flat-footed crouch and his vanity and his doomed mouth, turned into Max, languid and intense, with Max’s fancy drawl.
“Secrets,” he said, “are lies that you tell to your friends!”
Jacaranda gathered together the broken ashtray, so no one would get cut, as she wondered what she’d wear that night, now that everything was going to be perfect.
The Little Black Dress
She wore a little black dress, which in a mad dash she had borrowed from April. It was the kind of little black dress that Mae Leven always described as “decent.” April and Mae had found it on one of their perpetual treks out to Pasadena where two city blocks were lined with Salvation Army–type thrift stores. This little black dress cost $3.49 and was a Dior. With the jacket, it could be worn to court or to a funeral. Without the jacket, it was no longer quite so decent and Jacaranda was sure it would be the right thing to wear around someone like Max, who was ten years older than Gilbert (Gilbert was two years older than she). With little gold sandals, the dress was fine.
She spent about an hour in the bathtub crooning “I’m So Lonesome I Could Die” to her black cat Emiliano (his nickname, after she remembered Viva Zapata!).
She brought fresh flowers in from the tumbling-down hill where her landlady threw handfuls of wildflower seeds each spring. She stuck the wildflowers into a glass; and sang her entire repertoire of Hank Williams songs, which she had only recently begun to appreciate.
In the little black dress, with its square neckline and Paris, France, drape, she looked all wrong in L.A., especially in her old station wagon with surfboards on top. But if she’d been in Paris or Rome or New York, she’d have looked smart.
It wasn’t until it was too late that she realized she had only a large straw purse and not the little clutch purse the dress called for. On the phone April said, “A what?”
“A clutch purse,” Jacaranda repeated.
“Me?” April said.
Jacaranda’s hair was even blonder after Hawaii and her skin was tanner than usual. She painted her toenails grape, which matched her eye shadow. Her eyes, lined in brown pencil, looked out with innocent-virgin deception and complemented her large mouth with its expression of eager vulnerability. Her hair, parted in the middle, hung straight down untangled.
She looked as though she’d just stepped out of an opening-night intermission in London and not at all as if she lived on a hill apartment in Santa Monica with a roof that leaked.
Outside, the ocean was spread out in a blue line, and the sun, an orange circle, hung just above it, about to set.
She sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart” all the way into Hollywood.
The Sacramento Apts.
The Sacramento was smack in the middle of Hollywood—the neighborhood called Hollywood, not the mystical state. It wasn’t in Beverly Hills or West Hollywood, which were both All Right, and it wasn’t down by the beach or in Trousdale or Bel Air or Encino, which were all All Right, too. It was in Hollywood, smack in the middle, which was not All Right. It never was All Right, even back in the twenties when Valentino, an unknown, got all dressed up and strolled down Hollywood Boulevard, hoping to be noticed and put into a movie.
Of course, a few New York types thought “the Coast” was simply “the Coast” and that it didn’t make any difference where one stayed because it was only for two weeks and then one could go home to civilization, New York. And she’d heard they stayed in the Sacramento, which was why several New York comedians telling jokes about “the Coast” used to talk about Hughes Market, a block away from the Sacramento, a market nobody from L.A. ever went to because it was too expensive.
But for Max to be in the Sacramento meant it had been misunderstood and that it, and the part of Hollywood it was in, were both perfectly fine, after all.
It was one of those apartment-hotels with a lobby and a front desk and a manager, an elevator, thick walls, and high ceilings. Max lived in the penthouse, or what he called the penthouse, though it was hard for most people to think of a five-story building as having a penthouse.
It was eight, exactly, when she knocked on his penthouse door.
The door was flung open.
“You’re here!” Max said, his blue eyes alight with how wonderful she was. “You dressed! You look marvelous. The best-dressed woman in Los Angeles!”
“Except for the purse,” she said, showing him her car keys and cigarettes, which she’d brought along in her hand.
Max was still tall and wore a caramel-colored polo shirt and denim pants that were almost, but not quite, jeans that were white. He wore espadrilles that were worn out. Everything about him looked clean and bright. His hair, which was still wet, had been combed back off his face but the same strand that fell down when it was dry had already begun falling, wet or no. He smelled like a birthday party for small children, like vanilla, crêpe paper, soap, starch, and warm steam and cigarettes.
Anyone would have liked being hugged by him.
Only she, so far, had arrived. But there was a folly of luxury the likes of which Jacaranda couldn’t believe. There it was smack in the middle of a geography that was All Wrong. (If she’d come in later through the back parking lot, she would have seen limousines lined up—limousines looking startled at slumming in such an unlikely spot. Hollywood wasn’t exactly a slum—it was just Not Right.)
“I’m just fixing the salad,” Max said. “Tell me what you think.”
On a buffet of white-tablecloth tables were the most beautiful dishes, all white, with stainless-steel Italian-designed silverware (a little finer than anyone else’s silverware, she noticed). There were perfectly folded and ironed white napkins, and white ceramic pots filled with white flowers. There were wineglasses and Scotch glasses and gin-and-tonic glasses. The bottles, all Windexed into a high gloss, stood full of Scotches and gins and sherries and vodkas, and there were white wines in the refrigerator and red wines open and out. The wooden floor was polished and glowing beyond the rug and the whole penthouse was without a trace of grime or dirt anywhere.
There was art all over the walls. Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, a David Hockney swimming pool, and a huge pornographic watercolor by John Altoon. In the front to the right, where people came in, was a carefully framed photograph by Julian Wasser of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked girl. The contrast between Duchamp’s dried-out ancient little person and the large young girl’s Rubenesque flesh was not (unlike chess) at all subtle. This photograph was the only thing on Max’s walls that people actually looked at; even Altoon’s pornography was a little too tasteful to arouse real interest.
“You’ve got a print of this,” she said, her voice filled with hurt surprise. She’d never imagined that anyone might own a print and not have to tear it out of an art magazine as she had had to do.
“You know this photograph?” Max asked.
“Well, I mean . . .” (She’d have to be an idiot to spend all her time around artists and not know this photograph.)
“How would a friend of Gilbert’s know Duchamp?” Max said.
“Yes,” she said, looking at him now, “how would you?”
“Gilbert is a wonderful person,” Max said, “but I just didn’t think . . . Well, how do you like my apartment?”
“Why have you done this to the poor Sacramento?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Turned it into . . . the Plaza Hotel,” she said, taking a stab at it, since it looked exactly as she imagined the Plaza Hotel must look.
“Oh,” he said, turning to look at her with deep seriousness for the first time since they’d met, holding her in his gaze, “how wonderful you are!”
The doorbell rang.
“How wonderful you are,” she replied, smiling.
He looked at her just once over his shoulder from the front door, which he was about to open, and the whole world was filled with questions before them. The bell rang again.
“You’re here!” he cried.
“Darling!” someone said. “Is this Hollywood?”
Max’s laugh was like a dragnet; it picked up every living laugh within the vicinity and shined a light on it, intensified it, pitched it higher. It was a dare—he dared you not to laugh with him. He dared you to despair. He dared you to insist that there was no dawn, that all there was was darkness, that there was no silver lining, that the heart didn’t grow fonder by absence. He dared you to believe you were going to die—when you at that moment knew, just as he did, that you were immortal, you were among the gods.
JACARANDA COULDN’T QUITE remember when it was that she had glided from the banks of the Nile onto the barge. Perhaps because even that first night nothing had looked very different from the rest of the world. Well, of course, things were a little finer at Max’s, better silverware. Ease. But other than that, she saw nothing different; after all, it wasn’t as if money had been poured into the place, or that money was no object.
It was just that Max, and all of Max’s things, were so carefully chosen—like his friends—so perfect. Other than a sort of seamless wicked, sarcastic, teasing temperament about it all, one could hardly tell the barge was moving. Or that there was a Nile.
Or that on the banks of the Nile an unfortunate population was forced to go through life with brick walls and learned lessons, rather than simply float while catching tossed grapes, until with practice, one day, it became habit.
There was something special about Max’s parties, those first two years at the Sacramento, that she could never think about afterward without condensing it into one particular night.
As usual, in those days, the people who were from Los Angeles entered doubtfully, unsure about the Sacramento and wondering who Max was and what he wanted and why he’d invited them.
Within the first few moments after they’d arrived, they’d be drenched in Max’s delight with them and everything would become smooth and golden, and soon (this was what Jacaranda afterward never forgot) the whole place would ascend to heaven.
Max’s food was divine. His guests—all his other guests suddenly realized—were simply pillars of kindness, goodness, and beauty. The napkins were so fresh and bright. The salad was springtime in each bite.
“Have you seen his ice thing?” a guest might ask another.
“Ohhh,” the second guest would say, “isn’t it beautiful?”
And all it would be was an ice cooler, the kind one can buy in Milan, just slightly better than an ordinary ice cooler.
On this particular night, Jacaranda’s first, Max’s penthouse had filled up and people were sitting everywhere, humming and purring, a tight golden roll running through the air.
Gilbert was standing, leaning against the same wall that Jacaranda leaned against, and the two of them had been watching in smooth dreamy pleasure for nearly twenty minutes, not saying a word to each other. Finally, Gilbert cleared his throat.
“You know,” he said, “I think we ought to petition the Pope for a special dispensation—a year’s suspension of disbelief.”
When Jacaranda began to laugh, Gilbert turned and looked at her with an expression of puzzled concern, as though he didn’t know what was so funny.
Gilbert’s eyes were sometimes so green, but he was an actor. And Jacaranda just couldn’t be around someone who might be discovered, become a star overnight, and turn into a property. She rarely saw Gilbert alone after meeting Max, but she often was alone with Max.
The Barge
Max had two kinds of friends.
Jacaranda was in the handful of people he took up with because he was in Los Angeles.
But the main group belonged in the world, and were not tied down to any particular geography. They were mostly the names you read in W and on lists at weddings in Vogue or Queen, only instead of being in black-and-white, they were in color and moved. And instead of looking extremely uneasy and “public,” they looked extremely relaxed and protected. A childhood of privacy seemed to buffer them against the cruel fates of flash bulbs. Max gathered these public people and, through his laughter and money and his “amusing” penthouses, he brightened their lives and made the simplest things seem framed in gold. The women who organized charity bazaars, operas, festivals, and museum openings just fell into Max’s open “You’re here!” arms. (“You’re here!” was how he greeted every single guest at every single party Jacaranda ever saw him host—Max was a host: it was in his genetic code.) “You’re here!” he’d delight, and into his arms would fall an elegantly poised lady, suddenly a child of sorrow and joy, who’d say, “Oh, thank God, Max, yes, I am!”
They all knew where they all ate in Paris and where to go to in New York and whom to see if they went to Stockholm and they referred to each other as “dear friends.”
They demanded the same French food (what Jacaranda called “kosher fillet of sole”) in every city on earth, and were suckers for going to bars and nightclubs and restaurants because their “dear friends” went, no matter how much better the place next door was. They were perfectly ready to talk about airports for hours and not be bored.
When Jacaranda realized that these people were the ones meant by the words “jet set,” she was sure there must be a mistake. Why travel if it’s always going to be fillet of sole every night? If it hadn’t been for Max, the “dear friends” would have been stuck with each other in French restaurants forever.
But then, most people like even bad French restaurants. They’re used to them. And besides, one can always compare the food to the way it ought to have been, because one knows. French restaurants are not like art or love, after all; they’re like money, standard.
The women in this group were never quite in the mood for Los Angeles and often got tired in one day of Rodeo Drive and shopping. Besides, they had done it all before. Now and then, they would turn to Jacaranda and say, “You live here, don’t you? How can you live in L.A.? What do you do?”
The men all wanted to become movie producers and questioned her on what she thought they should do in order to make movies.
“Get some film,” she said once.
The idea that these people spent their whole lives outside of the movie business seemed exotic to her, but by the time she realized that the “dear friends” only recognized each other, and only ate French food, and would never have known her had it not been for Max, it was too late, because by that time she knew that fillet of sole is usually the safest bet. And that in general, as far as groups of strangers were concerned, the “dear friends” were probably the least impossible.
JACARANDA THOUGHT OF the “dear friends” living on a drifting, opulent barge where peacock fans stroked the warm river air and time moved differently from the time of everyplace else. Everything was better on the barge, the same kind of ease seemed to scent the nights. The barge passed through cities, along the countryside, and through major events without ever disturbing the thick layer of ease between it and the rest of the world. Perhaps the reason was that, surrounded by the Nile as it was, the barge was protected from most disturbances by hungry crocodiles waiting, like logs, in the river.
Max, Max
People said that his family paid him six thousand dollars a month to stay out of Alabama. Others said that he was just rich, pure and simple. Jacaranda never saw Max do anything but empty ashtrays and cook. When she first knew him, Jacaranda asked, straight out, “Max, do you do something, or what?”
“‘Do?’” he replied. “You mean like work?”
“Sort of,” she said. She’d read, of course, that people with manners never asked other people how they got money, but she didn’t believe it.
“Well,” Max said, “I do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, you know.”
“What, though?” she insisted.
There was a rumor that, as a sort of “social director” for the Beautiful People on the barge, he was kept in finery and not allowed to worry his pretty head about money; that his friend Etienne Vassily (and God knew where he came from) paid for everything.
Jacaranda could not even figure out how much money he’d have to have to live in the Sacramento and smell like vanilla and have Duchamp on the wall, and white ironed napkins. Sometimes she got the impression that he was just a figure in a landscape who began moving into the festivities the instant he knew someone was looking.
But other times she felt very, very close to him and heard him breathing and saw exactly what he saw and knew exactly why he did things and understood everything without a hitch. When he cooked in his kitchen, she forgot to wonder about who Max was and was overcome with instinct as she anticipated every move he was going to make and brought him the right wire whisk and herb or spice and put it nearby where he would find it easily.
Most of the time, Max wasn’t even in L.A. He was in New York where, he said, “They’re so provincial.”
Max usually served food so delicious that for itself alone people could have gone home satisfied. There needn’t have been unending champagne, fellow guests who seemed hand-picked to transport you into the kind of heaven you loved best, or Max himself, who never let the ball drop for a moment, and was always ducking in and out of silences, laughing at how brilliantly things were going. You could have just had the food and gone home happy.
He always made everything himself, and when Jacaranda was in the thick of the barge’s evenings, she’d go early to Max’s and watch. (When Etienne Vassily was handling things, servants were imported who knew how, or else he brought them with him and installed them in the servants’ bedrooms of his “bungalow” mansion. Once he brought ten along for a special nerve-racking occasion to entertain forty people who had been invited to stop by around eight for “something to eat and a chat.” Etienne relied on simple opulence like fresh caviar to settle the question of food.) Watching Max cook was when Jacaranda came closest to thinking Max came from someplace, had a childhood, and might have brothers or sisters, sisters especially.
“Where are you from?” she asked once while Max was expertly measuring out olive oil for salad dressing.
“The Old South,” he drawled.
“Come on,” she said.
“Louisiana,” he replied. “Really. That’s where I was really born and lived till I ran away.”
“My mother’s from Louisiana!” Jacaranda said.
“Your mother.” Max shrank back as though from a loud cannon noise. “That woman. My stars.”
“You’re the only man I’ve ever known who didn’t fall in love with my mother,” she observed.
Max loosened up and set about chopping thin slices of celery.
“Mmm,” he said.
He chopped celery like a Chinese professional.
Max knew so well what he was doing in that kitchen at the Sacramento that Jacaranda seldom intruded until it came time to wash the dishes the next morning. (The morning following most of those parties, Jacaranda stopped by to help Max and listen to his version of the night before.)
But it was the food, as far as she was concerned, not the heavenly other events at Max’s, that was really the center. Max’s salads were always more beautiful and kinder than anyone else’s salads; he never put too little or too much vinegar or anything untoward like honey into the dressing. All the leaves were gloriously green and fresh and crisply eager, except for the watercress, which held back and added character and shadow. His French bread was always the exact right warmth and freshness, straight from the French bread store in Beverly Hills. And he usually made rose potatoes or rice to take care of anyone who wanted another starch. His rice was always perfect. Steamed. Most of the time he made light dishes out of chicken or fish because he had taken so much acid that eating red meat stopped him cold, and because he didn’t know anyone who wasn’t on a diet. (Except Etienne, but Etienne could always eat cold roast-beef sandwiches when he got back to the bungalow, and always did.) The best thing Max made, Jacaranda thought, was red snapper poached in white wine, olive oil, and butter, with snow peas and translucently sliced onions and mushrooms. (He thought mushrooms were a horrible affectation of the middle class and he hated the middle class’s sad attempts to attain elegance.) The second-best thing Max made was chicken sautéed in tarragon and butter, with fresh parsley sprinkled over the top. Jacaranda loved tarragon. Perhaps it was the way Max served food, and not the food itself, for the way an orange tasted if Max had handed it to her was better than any orange she’d eaten before.
JACARANDA OFTEN HEARD about Etienne Vassily. People were surprised that she hadn’t met him.
“You mean,” someone would ask, “you know Max but you don’t know Etienne?”
If Max was nothing more than one of Etienne’s paid amusements, like a dance band, a servant, then he was obviously the best. Nobody cooked half so well.
It was one of the basic wonders of Max’s personality in those first two years that he could tell her, “You are the best-dressed woman in L.A.,” or that New Yorkers were “provincial,” with such glee that it was dazzling and somehow tender-hearted.
Social Direction
Until the night, at a black-tie supper for sixty for the opening of the Venice Biennale, when Etienne first met Max, Etienne’s ambitious practical jokes had an unfortunate likelihood of being unforgivable. This interfered with Etienne’s main ambition—to take over the world.
Max and Etienne sat down as strangers to dine in formal splendor and before dessert, slipped out as dear friends. They left the party together and it was discovered that they’d taken off in Etienne’s plane. For three days and nights they were “missing”—even the plane radio had been shut down. News that Etienne was dead did beady-eyed little things to the stock market. (News that Max was “missing” was simply not news, since he was never supposed to be anywhere.) Finally, Etienne’s third wife caught up with them. They were in jail in Kyoto for lewd conduct; they’d been found naked tied to an orphanage post and were being beaten by little girls, with real whips, who were trying hard to draw blood (it was reported), flogging their best.
“. . . and my husband didn’t even go on to the art opening,” Etienne’s third wife testified as she told the judge the mental torment she’d undergone that made her demand a divorce and a cool million, though they’d only been married for two months. The judge in Kyoto was understanding and let Etienne off with a warning not to get caught doing that again. The judge in New York gave Etienne’s third wife $100,000 and told her that a woman who marries a man of Etienne’s reputation doesn’t deserve a penny more for just two months.
Once Etienne met Max, he could devote himself to taking over the world and know that the half of him that only wanted to play was being fully seen to, and could be dished up, unimpeded by last-minute lack of plans, like a flaming shish kebab in a cornball tourist trap. Max, it was said, was simply brought in as Vice-President in charge of the Latin-American press for one of Etienne’s Venezuelan companies that lost money and would now lose a fortune owing to the high cost of Max’s salary—it supposedly dovetailed into some kind of tax loop that was more beautiful, almost, to Etienne than Gelsey Kirkland. Etienne, it was said on the barge, could put any amount of money into this Vice-President’s “entertainment fund” and it still made money for him.
Meanwhile, Max, like Michelangelo being given an open-ended budget by the Medicis, went ahead designing the architecture of particular places for Etienne, which were in as many cities as Max could arrange. Etienne liked different backdrops and colorful native customs. Etienne loved it, for example, that Jacaranda actually painted surfboards for a living. But Max, with his quick gaming eye, knew it was not even necessary that she paint surfboards for she was a rare enough thing—a native-born Angeleno grown up at the edge of America with her feet in the ocean and her head in the breaking waves, with a bookcase full of the kind of reading matter that put her in touch with the rest of the world. She was without any spiritual taint; she had neglected (she’d tried, but it was too boring) to read the Bible and, in fact, all religious books just failed to capture her imagination—she was without the “civilizing influence” that mankind has always enforced upon its young. She only knew about Adam and Eve the way a classical scholar immersed in Aristotle’s Ethics would know that Liz and Dick were holding up production on Cleopatra— by passing the newsstand on his way to the coffee shop. She had no sense of “sin” and no manners. She was the way she was by the Levens’ letting her alone to read, and she knew her way around Los Angeles like a Bedouin on his own two thousand square miles of trackless waste.
Max decided to arrange a meeting between Jacaranda and Etienne on the spur of the moment, one afternoon, when Max was visiting Jacaranda’s and Etienne was in town. Max had been visiting Jacaranda every day for two months. Every day, around three, Max would “just drop by for tea or a beer, I’ve brought the beer,” and every day, Jacaranda got more and more used to it. There Max would be. She couldn’t get used to Max but she got used to his being there. Her heart still turned four golden beats whenever he stayed late and the sun would shine a certain way across his profile.
That day Max asked if Jacaranda minded if he used her phone. “I would like you to meet a friend of mine. But I’m going to play a trick on him. Is that O.K. with you?” Jacaranda’s days had become so full of Max’s tricks, his laughter and his blue, blue eyes, that naturally it was all right with her. She just waited, looking out the window at the smoggy afternoon, while Max dialed.
“Hello?” Max began, “You’re there! . . . Listen, I want you to come over right away, it’s important. . . . No, I met a woman in the supermarket. . . . Her husband is in . . . [“By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was playing across the street on someone’s radio] Phoenix. So you’ve got to come at once. . . . No. Now. It’s important; they’ll understand. Here’s the address. . . . I know it’s far away from Beverly Hills. But she says she wants to meet you. She says she makes the best frozen potatoes au gratin in L.A.” His eyes grew demoniacally bluer, impossibly bluer. “Of course if you can’t make it . . .”—bluer still—”all right, then, we’ll be expecting you.”
“I don’t look like a housewife!” Jacaranda protested. “He’ll never believe this. Besides, there’s no furniture.”
It was true. Jacaranda had been living in the apartment for almost a year and all she had was Emilio. In the living room, she had two folding chairs and an orange crate on which to put the ashtray. Her clothes, in one of the back closets, were all of her really that was there. Except that the living room was pillared with a surfboard. It leaned against the wall, dry and waiting for the owner to come with the truck to pick it up.
Twenty minutes later, a new beige Lincoln Continental pulled up sharply across the street.
“He’s here,” Max said, lighting a cigarette.
“What do I do?” Jacaranda was wondering how her life had gotten so impossible when only last year she’d retired.
Out of the Lincoln stepped one of the most powerful men in the world.
He was about fifty years old and had thick gray hair that had been gracefully shaped so that his Byzantine classicism was visible. His eyes were rounded and dark, with black lashes, and his mouth was thick and dark red. He had a gray-black mustache and nice eyebrows, but his eyes, surrounded by their black lashes, were purple velvet. It wasn’t fair, Jacaranda was always to think whenever she remembered seeing Etienne’s eyes up close for the first time, that he had velvet purple eyes and her eyes were miserable brown. He was built like a lizard or a saluki. He was narrow and ancient-looking; his skin looked like papyrus, five thousand years old but not wrinkled, just from another age—from an age before they knew about chocolate or Dante or Charlie Chaplin. He was small, only five feet nine, with narrow shoulders, but his clothes were immaculate and his hand, when Jacaranda was offered it to shake, was as tempting and tended as though it had been kept fit for a king. His voice sounded abrasive, nervous, and his purple eyes darted around the apartment, never once looking at Max, while Max just stood leaning on one foot—a tall drink of water—waiting for Etienne to give up. But Etienne wasn’t going to give up; he would assess every hint, every clue, every past iota of data, and finally the information would link up and he’d know everything. Etienne said, holding out his tended hand, “You are Jacaranda Leven.”
Max, the joke on himself, nearly collapsed with laughter as he recounted, tears streaming down his face, the “potatoes au gratin” line and the “Phoenix” touch. But Etienne stood as still as a stag in a forest waiting for his own instinct, his own information, to come in as he looked at the surfboard, looked carefully at what was painted on the surfboard and how it was painted, looked with piercing exactitude; he looked at the no furniture, he looked at an open closet. He looked at Jacaranda and his judgment of how her skin would feel that night in the dark with the jasmine all around them was nearly perfect, except that he hadn’t quite known she’d be that satiny—for women with skin as satiny as hers are not so easily found. His eyes slid to the back bedroom where bookcases lined all the walls to the ceiling and he saw, from a distance of thirty feet, a group of books familiar enough to him in their paperback form to recognize as he said, “I see you read C. P. Snow. What’s a girl like you reading him? He doesn’t know a thing about power.” Etienne snapped, “Not one thing.”
“Oh,” Jacaranda said. She’d so hoped that reading C. P. Snow would tell her all she needed to know about the manipulations of powerful serious people so she wouldn’t have to be such a provincial.
“Well . . .” Jacaranda sighed. “If that diamond ring don’t shine . . .”
“I beg your pardon?” He formally cocked his head.
“What would you suggest I read?” she asked.
“Oh.” He shrugged. “Max knows about books. I never read.”
“What race are you from?” Jacaranda asked.
“The brown race,” he told her, opening the white silk right side of his made-in-Milan jacket to take out a tortoiseshell cigarette case and offer her a cigarette, which he then lit with a gold Cartier lighter.
“What a pretty bunch of stuff,” Jacaranda said.
“Like it?” he asked.
“I love it,” she said.
“I give it to you,” he said, laying the lighter and the cigarette case down on the orange crate.
