Further Out Than You Thought (14 page)

“So that makes you . . . Adam?” the Count said.

“If that's how you want to look at it. I'll walk from here. Barefoot.”

“You
would
look kind of odd in only high-tops,” Gwen said.

“At dawn, when the curfew lifts. I'm going to walk into East L.A.”

“Naked, holding a white flag,” said the Count.

“And you're going to walk beside me,” Leo told him. “You can photograph the whole thing.”

“Really? You know I've always wanted to photograph you naked.”

“So you're game?”

“Leo, you're out of your fucking mind.” The Count laughed—he was having a good time with this. “You're loaded.”

“All the more reason.” Leo tugged at the elastic tie in his ponytail, yanking out a few hairs as he freed the dark tangle. “I'm not confined by common sense.”

“Leo, you're insane. You've been smoking too much pot.”

“Well, isn't that the pot calling the kettle.” He lit the bowl, and the chamber filled with smoke. He took his finger off the carburetor and sucked the smoke down.

“Yeah,” said the Count. “I drink and smoke, but I don't smoke like you. You don't stop.”

Gwen was ready for the Count to leave. She loved him, but the arguing and the cigarette smoke were making her queasy. She turned toward the back of the sofa, closed her eyes, and tried to drift. It was here where she'd first lain beside Leo, where he'd first held her in his arms and told her he didn't know how it was possible—they had just met the day before—but he loved her. It was here she'd looked into his eyes and known she loved him back.

Fifi jumped onto the sofa and turned in a small circle until she settled down on Gwen's feet. Gwen opened her eyes, the smoke making them burn and water. The apartment was bleary. When it had been his and she was a visitor, it was different. Maybe she was romanticizing things, but she thought it was. There weren't the piles of debris to negotiate. The room was clean and the windows were open. Even Fifi had looked presentable. Her hair had been short and white—not the bedraggled, matted gray it was now. She'd even had pink satin bows on her ears. That first afternoon, Leo had been expecting Gwen's visit, and he'd had roses on the coffee table, opera on the phonograph.

And there'd been the painting, the one above the sofa. The one she'd taken her time looking at. There were note cards taped to the wall around it now, but it was still there, in its gilt frame, with its scene, its inkling of a story. Impression of a woman in a white dress, under a broad white hat, heading toward the mottled gray-blue lake in the distance, toward the sky of the same color, impression of a man in a dark suit and a bowler hat coming from that lake, passing her, almost. They were close, the man and the woman, his hat skimmed her parasol, and yet each faced the direction in which they were, respectively, headed, as if their lives would have them meet, and then continue on their separate ways.

Leo had bought the painting just before she'd met him, at an estate sale, when he'd been living off his winnings from the game show
Wheel of Fortune.
“Show business is show business,” he explained. With his quick game-show money, he'd moved from San Clemente to Los Angeles, found this apartment, furnished it with a wooden kitchen table and chairs, a plush sofa. As a girl just out of college, Gwen had been impressed. His apartment had a feeling of solidity. And she'd let her guard down and stayed.

She sighed. She was here, might as well make the best of it. Staring through the smoke at the ceiling, at the plaster, the way the lamp lit its raised shapes, she noticed faces there, too—like there were in the shower. But these were the faces of animals. The face of one animal and the body of another. There was a pig-fish—the face of a pig, or else a peccary, and the fins and tail of a trout. Maybe the peccary was becoming the trout, or the trout the peccary. Or maybe she was breathing too much of the ambient pot smoke. And there, with the wings of a bat, was the face of the mountain lion from this afternoon, staring down at her with its huge eyes.

“I saw,” she said. “Today when I was driving—” And then she didn't want to go on. To tell her encounter would be like telling a dream. She'd lose it, she knew, in the telling.

“Leo,” she said, changing direction. “Sorry. Zero.” He looked at her now, and she went on. “Today, when I saw you stepping out of the smoke, you were so American, you were epic, almost. Like you were emerging from a battle with the Brits or something. Why not be Revolutionary Man and walk into East L.A.? Why be naked?”

“You're asking me?”

“Well?”

“So you're the only one who can be naked, then?”

“I'm naked where one expects to find nakedness.”

“Where one pays for it.”

“And where it isn't illegal.”

“How fucked up is that? It's illegal to be in our natural state. To be naked in public. Unless the purpose is to entice, to titillate,” he said, emphasizing the
tit
in “titillate.”

“At the club, it's nude, not naked.”

“Nude, naked,” the Count said, crushing his cigarette into the ashtray in a single twist. “Come, my dears, let's put it to use. You're both cordially invited to my lair at two
A.M.
for a party in which we will wear nothing. Or at least nothing that counts, or nothing that covers where it counts. You get the picture.” He stood and opened his box of cigarettes and then closed it. “Fuck. These will have to last me.”

Gwen pulled herself off the sofa.

“You're in?” he said, making his way to the door.

“We're in.” Gwen kissed his cheek, and the Count opened the door.

“You should speak for yourself,” said Leo, slamming the refrigerator shut, and the Count, who could sense drama coming from a mile off and wouldn't miss it for the world, let the door close. He lit another cigarette and, taking a seat on the sofa, settled in for the show.

Gwen refilled her jar with water. She'd never been so thirsty.

“You know what, Leo?” she said. “I think it's a splendid idea—the naked East L.A. thing. A triumph of a plan. The plan to top them all. I think this is one you have to do. For real. In fact . . .” She paused, thinking it through. “I'm going to help you. All you need is a white flag, right? Ought to be easy enough.”

She grabbed a wooden spoon. “Too short? Let's see, you want the flag to fly above your head. To flap around in the breeze. Innocence. Peace. Love. You're sure you want it to be white? I know it's the flag of surrender—you ride across the battlefield with a white flag and it means your side surrenders—but in this case the tension is all, well, so black-and-white. Maybe a color would be more neutral? Maybe a green flag? Like Whitman's flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. You know, when he's talking about the grass as a uniform hieroglyphic, growing among black folks as well as among white?”

She caught her breath and looked at him. He sat in the chair and stared at her. This was the most she'd said to him in months. Always she was in a hurry to get to work, or she was spent after a long night. Or she was guarding her space, writing in a fever—annotations, poems—her next deadline for graduate school just around the corner. And when they did have a rare moment together, he was the one with the diatribe and Gwen was in the chair, pretending to listen.

“Are you all right?” Leo said.

“Is she all right?” the Count said. “Are you kidding? The girl is lucid as hell.”

“You stay out of it,” Leo said.

“He's right,” Gwen said. “I'm lucid as hell.” She opened the refrigerator. In the drawer she found a cucumber, somehow still crisp. She washed it off in the sink and bit into it. It was perfect. And the smell. She thought she'd never really smelled a cucumber before—so bright and green, like being in a garden on a wet spring morning.

“You're set on white?” she said.

Leo didn't answer.

“It was your vision, right?”

He squinted at her as if trying to bring her into focus. He nodded.

“He isn't saying much, is he?” Valiant said.

“Not so much,” said Gwen.

Leo looked from Gwen to the Count and back to Gwen. He clenched his jaw and folded his arms across his chest.

“Well, white it is,” Gwen said.

She stood on the kitchen table and took a curtain rod from above the window. The white curtain fell to the floor. “Here's your pole,” she said, holding the metal rod.

She took scissors and cut a square from the top of the curtain. She put the rod through the tube of fabric at one end of the square, and with duct tape she wrapped the rod from top to bottom so the fabric would hold.

“Here it is,” she said. “Your white flag.”

“Very nice,” said Valiant, exhaling.

She waved the makeshift flag and did a little dance down the living room aisles and back into the kitchen, where she handed the flag off to Leo as though it were a baton in a relay race.

The Count grinned, applauding gleefully. And she felt herself glow. How she did adore an audience. “Your turn,” she said to Leo. “And if you're going to hit the streets at dawn you'll need your rest.

“Count,” she said, turning to him, “he's sorry, but he can't make it tonight. There are urgent matters to which he must attend.”

She bit into the cucumber, smiled as she munched. “Leo,” she said. “I won't wake you when I get home tonight.” She kissed his forehead and raised his hand that held the flag so it was straight up.

“Looks good. The news is going to love you. Zero. Our new savior,” she said and turned and left him there, holding his flag and without a thing to say.

She glanced back at the Count, who was openmouthed, agog and aghast, but thrilled, as if she'd just thrown him a surprise birthday party.

She walked into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. She latched the French windows to shut out the singed smell of the night, to try to at least. She lay down on the bed. The walls were thin. She could hear arguing, name-calling and expletives, as though they were brothers fighting, and then the door slammed.

At last it was quiet. And she knew Leo was too high to come in and talk to her. He had no intention of being brought down.

Her body was pulsing, still, with adrenaline, as though she would have to run, keep her body in motion to stay alive. It had been too long a day already. She let her body sink into the bed. She was safe, alone. The windows to the courtyard were shut, the curtains drawn.

She watched the dimming twilight as it held each object. This room she had slept in for years was still very much Leo's. His oak headboard and chest of drawers made the room warm and heavy, of another place and time was what she'd thought in the beginning—an apartment in Paris in the fifties, someplace where she could curl up and forget—the strings of auditions and actors, and the callbacks (from both) that hadn't come—forget how tired she was of running, forget all those nights she'd spent in her studio apartment, listening to the classical radio station and reading a book, alone. And now that time was gone; it was long ago when she'd felt saved from herself, when this place felt like somewhere she could stay for a while, safe from the world.

In the corner, Leo's arrangement of old stuff—suitcases and wooden tennis rackets, a violin in its case and a pack of Lucky Strikes—had a kind of hopeful, sad, romantic charm. As if his life had once possessed ease and luck, lighthearted whimsy. Of course they were only props, the old stuff. Set dressings. He'd never played tennis, nor had he smoked or played the violin. At first the arrangement had been fresh, crisp, like newly displayed dried flowers, and it was now covered with dust, now it was
old,
old stuff, and it made the room feel stuffy and crowded, like an attic.

Beside it, the desk loomed. His desk. Wooden, with a fold-down top, he'd cleared it for her when she moved in, so she'd have a place to work. It, too, was neglected, piled high with mail and drafts of poems, journals and books. There wasn't even space to write. And what she wanted more than anything was to write, to sort her mind—the tangle and tumble of thoughts, like kelp and sea stones heaped along a shoreline. There were treasures, she was certain. Beautiful, sea-worn stones having come so far, taken so many years to round. She could hear the roar of the waves, the clattering of the stones, the hiss of the foam. There would be time, she told herself. Soon. Time to search this ocean inside her. Soon, when she wasn't so bloody tired.

Her head throbbed. She took off her jeans and T-shirt and bra and slipped naked between the cool sheets. She'd sleep a little. And then she'd bathe and wrap herself in a robe—that frayed silk robe of her mother's. She'd wear a high pair of heels and a strand of long, fake Mardi Gras pearls. She'd show her tits and everything else, because that was what you did when there was a curfew and you were pregnant—your body changing fast. That's what you did when your best friend was dying and your boyfriend was planning a stunt that, were he to follow it through, could get him arrested or beaten or killed the very next morning. That's what you did when your city was burning, the city in which you'd lived and dreamed and loved; that's what you did when you had just this night.

VALIANT'S HEAVEN-BLUE LIVING room twinkled with strings of little white Christmas lights he'd draped around the windows and doors, and with the devotional candles on the vanity, which, centered along one of the long walls, was the focal point of the room. Gwen stood before the mirror, looking at herself in the black silk robe, the Mardi Gras pearls, and her high heels. At least twenty candles of Saint Sebastian lined the edge of the vanity with a flickering rim of fire. His wrists bound, his body a pincushion of arrows, he was, she knew, patron saint of both masochists and the dying. His image multiplied made a circle that challenged pain and death itself. Fuck you, the candles said. Bring it on. Without you, there can be no ecstasy, no release from the self, no transcendence. You are wax and wick, the candles said to pain, fuel for liberation, for light.