High Life (2 page)
I left the Prelude a little way north of the commotion and walked back.
This was the shitty end of the park where the tramps came to dump and screw—a ravined and collapsing patch of dirt without sidewalk that sloped toward the cliffs in a shallow network of gullies and depressions. There weren’t many trees, but low bushes grew densely over much of the area, nourished by scraps of junk food and the droppings of withered bowels.
A small crowd of rejects from the park and early-morning joggers had gathered along the roadside and were craning their necks, trying to see into a gully that ran from the edge of the road, back into the park about five feet below ground level. They weren’t having much luck. The police had the scene locked down. They’d run a horseshoe of yellow tape around the gully and strung sheets of blue plastic between a couple of bushes to block the view from the street. Going for a side angle farther up or down Ocean Avenue wasn’t much use either. The depth of the gully and the bushes that grew along both sides of it made viewing pleasure an impossibility.
Flashlight beams flitted about behind the plastic sheeting, throwing the shadows of cops against it—hunched shoulders, hands rising and falling with cigarettes. Whatever had dragged them here at this hour was probably lying at their feet, and, as the paramedics were sitting on the step at the back of their van drinking coffee from a thermos flask, it was also probably dead.
I stood for a little bit with the other people, listening to conversations, hoping for information. Nobody knew what had happened, but they all knew what that yellow tape meant. And they knew if they waited long enough something would come out in a bag. But that was no good to me. I wouldn’t be able to see the face.
The alternative was simple enough. The cops had a couple of men making sure no one got too inquisitive, but they were only guarding the street edge of the scene. So … a quick walk twenty yards south, cut into the brush, and circle back deep enough into the park to hit the gully somewhere on the other side of the plastic sheeting. It took a while because I had to crawl in a lot of places to keep my head below shrub level and because I had to concentrate on avoiding turds. But I made it eventually, right up to the tape, the last ten yards on my belly. I got a good view through a gap between two bushes.
The gully had been reinforced with concrete to make a trough for a storm drain outlet. A shallow stream of water spilled from the mouth of a large pipe and made rills around the shoes of four cops who were standing in a group telling jokes. All of them were in uniform and didn’t seem too bothered about the thing on the ground. I figured they were killing time until the detectives showed.
The thing on the ground …
It was much worse than I’d expected.
I lay there and watched the water wash against it for a while, then I inched back the way I’d come.
Away from where my dead wife lay.
Back on the street. The leaves in the park went copper-red as the sun rose, and the sky started moving through a spectrum of pastels toward its daily trademark blue. The policemen were still telling jokes and their laughter carried well on the warming air. It came in snorts, like animals grunting.
I drove to Venice as the world woke up.
The picture in my head was pornographic in detail.
Speedway runs parallel to Ocean Front Walk, one block back. The beachfront buildings are several stories high and the only time you can see the ocean is when you pass a cross street. Away from the commercial fronts on the beach the houses and apartment blocks are funkily shabby and sun-bleached and dusted with salt. It isn’t a ghetto, but you don’t see too many photo teams from
Architectural Digest
setting up.
Venice has a reputation for being wacky and fun and full of counterculture freaks. But like Sunset Strip and Hollywood Boulevard, a lot of this is just PR to drag the tourists in. What Venice really is is a lot of different places. Bohemia for artists, rich pickings for the renovation-mad people they used to call yuppies, a place of sandy roots for the old folks who’ve been there forever, a carefully dressed-down place to have a pad if you’re on the way to celebrity. And it’s cool to watch the women rollerblading on the weekends.
For me, when I moved there, it had held the scent of possibility, of potential. The colors—the blue ocean, the white walls and red roof tiles—the soft air, the unexpected lushness of the vegetation, all that space on your doorstep, stretching out across the water to China, had all been ingredients I’d mixed into a metaphor for my future—optimism, bright light, movement, success.
I’d lived there two years and all of it had been unhappy.
I parked the car between two garbage dumpsters and just sat—windows tight, engine off. I felt zoned, separated from all human babble and activity. A riot could have broken out around me and I wouldn’t have seen it. The only thing I was looking at right then was what had been in the park.
I’d recognized Karen instantly, though of course she’d been very much changed.
Faceup, laid out as heavy and awkward as all the corpses on TV. I’d always imagined a real dead body would impact on the senses more violently than the slumped and spattered actors in cop shows. But Karen had seemed robbed of color, even of some amount of substance, compared to those nightly small-screen copyings.
She was naked, too, sports fans. Legs spread, one arm crossing her chest below her breasts, the other flung straight out to the side. Her eyes were closed, but her belly was open—sliced from sternum, through navel, to a couple of inches above her pubic bone, then T’ed there with a horizontal stroke to make flaps of her abdominal wall. It looked like the left flap had had a piece cut out of it.
I stayed in the car a long time trying to work out how I felt. In the end I gave up, my ambivalence was insurmountable. Instead, I thought about how easy it must have been to dump her—just pull up, open the door, and give her a shove, she’d disappear from view immediately. And how she must have looked as she fell, her legs falling loosely apart.
After that I figured I should hold a picture of her face in my mind, it seemed to be what people on TV did when they’d just lost someone. But the only picture that came to me was of water running between her legs over the wet concrete of the drain.
The apartment was the apartment. As it always was. Second floor in a poorly stuccoed fifties block. One room with a bed and a couch, kitchen and bathroom off it.
The place smelled stale. I could have opened a window for air, but that would have meant letting the world in, and this was one Venice morning when I needed to shut it down.
I fired up the VCR and ran last night’s edition of
28 FPS
, a weekly late-night movie-gossip show, pumped out by a small cable station. The presenter was a punky blond chick called Lorn. She didn’t care much about the actual movies people made, but she went all out for the people themselves—the actors, directors, producers, anyone rich and connected to the industry. Relationships, money, houses, cars, practices and preferences, addictions and detoxifications—she was jacked on all of it. I never missed a show.
Robert Downey Jr. was having hassles over drugs and guns and Don Johnson had broken his ankle. On a lighter note, Ray Liotta and Michelle Grace were engaged, Mickey Rourke and Carre Otis had been spotted looking totally cool in New York, and Goldie Hawn was in London for the premiere of
The First Wives Club
. At Heathrow Airport she wore a cute black see-through number that gave a fetching glimpse of her nipples. Back in L.A. at House of Blues, Noah Wyle and Anthony Edwards were hanging out at some MTV gig. Anna Nicole Smith was writing the story of her life and George Clooney had gotten pissed off over intrusive TV journalism.
The tape finished. I wanted to run another one, but I couldn’t concentrate—thoughts were starting to break through.
My wife of a year was dead and I hadn’t told the police she was mine. Anyone else would have burst through that tape shouting incoherently about wife and relationship and Oh My God …
But not me.
And it wasn’t like I could brush it off with the knowledge that they would be coming around to the apartment anyhow. Because they wouldn’t.
She hadn’t used her married name since the novelty of it wore off a few weeks after the ceremony, and she’d never converted any of her ID to my name or address. And getting a make on her from someone around where she was found was unlikely; no one knew her in Santa Monica—she hung out almost exclusively in West L.A. and Hollywood. Even if they did find someone who recognized her, the chance of me being located was still almost zero. We lived separate lives, she never brought her friends back to the apartment. As far as the world at large was concerned, there was very little connection between us. And anyhow, what was one more dead whore to Los Angeles?
We met in a bar. I’d been in L.A. about a year and I wasn’t making much of a success of it. Beyond evening courses in telehosting, held in small private soundstages whose only business was evening courses, I hadn’t integrated. I knew how to hold my head so shadows didn’t form in my eye sockets, I could read an autocue and I could keep a smile in place, I could project that flawless, unflagging vitality so important to holding an audience. But plugging myself into the city just wasn’t happening and my contact with the general population didn’t rise much above sitting on a stool in a bar with a beer in front of me.
I’d come west shackled with the usual dream of making a lot of money fast then spending the rest of my life in the sun enjoying it. But it hadn’t happened. In the absence of being mythically rags-to-riches discovered by some part of the media industry, an unskilled thirty-year-old tends to be channeled toward the dish washing end of things. And I didn’t get discovered.
So I got a job at Donut Haven. It meant I could survive. But even by the time I met Karen, after I’d been a doughboy for almost a year, I didn’t have a pot to piss in. My only financial achievement was that I’d stayed out of East L.A.
She’d been working that night. I’d never been with a hooker, but I said yeah when she stumbled against me and slurred that I could do her if I had the cash. Why not? After a certain point, city depression makes almost any offer of physical contact attractive. We went to my place and when it was over she stayed the night. She didn’t have a place of her own.
Karen was a short skinny blonde who lived on the streets, a twenty-two-year-old with a collection of borderline addictions. When she didn’t have a trick she slept in an all-night theater or under a bench in the park. She smelled so bad that first time I had to make her take a shower. It was pretty obvious she was on a downhill run.
I needed company. And Karen needed a place to put the brakes on and get herself together if she was going to see her next birthday. I guess I just saw my chance and took it. But then so did she. I paid her a few more times, then asked her to move in. She didn’t hesitate.
The first month and a half was great. She stopped hooking, we went places, I started living interactively. L.A. became a place I could call home, instead of a wasteland of envy. Karen scaled down her drug use and regained her health. Each of us got plenty out of the other, a situation we fooled ourselves into calling love. And, to put a tightener on it, one deluded weekend we got married. Something Karen looked embarrassed about the next day and would only rarely admit had happened.
She made a mission of avoiding her present, but her past was even more thoroughly sealed. The only thing of any personal weight I learned about her in our year together was that her father had been a cop and that she’d run away from home when she was fifteen and never gone back.
Maybe it was something in this shitty past, some need for attention, that made her start hooking again. More likely it was just that I was not a rich enough vein of disposable income.
It was a bad time, it was the beginning of the end, it happened early in our marriage, and it didn’t stop. If she’d been all one thing, if she’d been sluttishly callous in her pursuit of her preferred lifestyle, maybe I could have called an end to it and walked. But along with all the absences and the fucking of other men, she still talked about love, still said she wanted to stay with me. Most of me knew she just wanted to have her cake and eat it—hump for her money, get stoned, hang out, and at the end of it all come home to some sucker who’d provide a domestic recharge situation. But there was another part of me that so desperately wanted the whole couple thing that I could not rid myself of the idea that everything would come right in the end.
It wasn’t easy, though, this attempt to hang on. The first few times she came home from a gig it was all I could do not to hit her. I’d wait up, stupidly hoping she’d fall into my arms and tell me how glad she was to be back. But what usually happened was she’d walk straight to the shower and wash. So I’d follow her in and watch her undress, see the dried come on her belly like shiny, flaking scars, and think I was going to puke.
Eventually, though, I got numbed to it. I grew an insect shell over my boiling sadness and I stopped waiting up. It wasn’t that the pain was any less real, it was just that I didn’t have the energy to keep confronting it so actively. For a while I conned myself into thinking I could separate things, that I could section off the Karen who went out and sucked cock from the part-time wife who still declared an interest in me.
But that state of self-induced stupidity didn’t last. It might have been possible to maintain perhaps if things had stayed low-level, but she increased the pressure—escalating her whoring from the odd daytime stint to regular weeknights, then on to sleepovers and more. She mentioned a doctor, a policeman … Toward the end she was disappearing for a week or two at a time without warning. And I, of course, was self-destructing with a rage that had gone beyond jealousy into the realm of hate and self-loathing. Through it all she kept telling me she hadn’t stopped caring, that she owed her life to me for pulling her out of the gutter. But by then I was too far gone to believe it.
When she went missing eight days ago, I’d had a feeling something more than the usual call-out might be involved, something a lot more illegal and a lot more dangerous. But I didn’t call the police. I went searching for her eventually, but that was out of guilt, not love.
Now I’d found her and death, that ultimate clarifier, hadn’t done a thing to change the way I felt. Her corpse could have been made of rubber for all the emotion it evoked in me.
And it was this unveiling of the crushing pointlessness of our time together that had stopped me from announcing our connection. I just didn’t care enough anymore to put up with the hassle it would bring.
Eight days ago.
She’d come home late after a two-week absence and she didn’t look good. Her skin had gone beyond its usual gothic paleness to pallor, she’d lost weight, and her hair was dull. Nevertheless, there was a jagged energy about her, like she was a kid at a party about to give the best present, but to someone she didn’t really like. And basically that’s what she did, took me outside and gave me a present—the Prelude.
I knew by the look on her face she wanted me to be pleased and, shit, I wasn’t going to kick about being given a car, but the gift confused me. I said all the right things, though, the things she obviously wanted to hear, and we took it on a test drive to Santa Monica. All the way I couldn’t stop trying to figure what particular variation of sexual commerce had been necessary to get that kind of money together in two weeks.
Back in the apartment she sprawled on the couch, legs apart, leather mini riding up. I started to ask questions, but she drew me down. I wanted to pull back and hassle her, or at least grasp after dignity by firing off something like, “I wouldn’t defile my cock in your semen-soaked guts.” But I hadn’t had sex for two weeks and the feel and the smell of her was too much. I kissed her breasts through the cotton of her singlet and slid my hand between her legs. She used to moan when I did this, but now she was quiet, waiting for something. So what? I carried on, pulled her briefs off, pushed up her skirt, and rammed myself into her. I tried to ignore how distant she felt, after all I wasn’t expecting a valid emotional exchange. I just wanted to unload. Dealing with the emptiness that would come later was something I was used to.
But then I reached up under her skirt to get a better grip and the palm of my hand brushed against something that shouldn’t have been there. A swollen ridge, spiky along the top. It stopped me dead. I jerked out and had a look. Karen watched me closely.
“What happened?”
“It’s where cars come from.”
A twelve-inch horizontal scar curving from the left of her belly to her back, between hip and ribs, puckered and purple and still cinched with half-embedded loops of shiny black surgical thread. It made me think of
The Fly,
the remake with Jeff Gold-blum, where some kind of obscene bristle things start growing out of his back.