In the Beauty of the Lilies (42 page)

T
here isn’t an awful lot to say about me,” Clark would say, making an acquaintance, to fend off the oppressive, overshadowing fact, which came out sooner or later, that he was Alma DeMott’s son. Son and only child. “Oh, she did the best she could,” would be his answer to the inevitable question. “I didn’t see her much except on weekends. She was out of the house before I’d get up for school and a lot of times didn’t get back till I was in bed. People don’t realize how hard these poor stars work; the poor saps are
slaves
. Even weekends, there were things she had to do—special appearances, charity crap, interviews, trips to New York to be on some talk show. After her original agent died—he was a pretty laid-back guy from what I gather—she got this purely West Coast woman agent, Shirley Frugosi, who was
ruthless
. She had Mom hopping all the time—London, New York, Rome, wherever she could get up a little publicity hustle. And then, when she
was
home, Mom I mean, she had to keep going to these parties and stuff where it would be helpful to be seen, with a lot of
these L.A. drunks and deadheads. Mom went, but you could never say she was a drinker. That was really the main thing that soured the marriage with Rex—Rex Brudnoy, the rock singer, you’ve probably never heard of him—that, more than the groupies and the fact that her career hit some kind of a wall in about 1969 and his never
did
get off the ground. In Hollywood you can maybe have one flop in a marriage but you can’t have two.”

Rex would have been out of bed for a couple of hours by the time the driver had dropped Clark off after school at Beverly Vista Elementary and they would have a game of Wiffle Ball with a plastic orange bat out on the flat part of the lawn, beside the concrete pool. Rex had played on his high-school team back in Texas before dropping out and becoming a musician and he could tell Clark just the kind of fungo he was going to hit to him:
This’ll be a high one. Here comes a line drive. Start stretching, Superguy, I’m going for the fucking fences
. Rex called him Superguy as a joke based on Clark Kent’s being Superman. Looking back, Clark supposed that Rex was the closest thing to a father he had had. He was wiry and athletic in his motions but not tall—no taller than Mom, really, when she had on heels. His beard was black and patchy and smelled of beer and an incenselike sweetness. He was generally stoned, Clark supposed now, but it never seemed to affect his Wiffle Ball skills. When, after he had let Clark make his five catches, his turn came to take the field, he could make the most amazing grabs, of screamers whistling at his feet or twisting pop-ups which more than once Rex snagged on the edge of the pool or beyond, falling in with a splash that lifted a great scatter of small green balls of water into the dry California air. He would come up out of the water displaying the perforated white ball daintily in his hand and his drenched
beard all in little wet points around the neat white teeth of his casually triumphant grin and the hair on top of his head showing in his soaked strands that it was thinning; Rex was going bald and still his group, Brudnoy and His Boys, couldn’t get onto the charts, couldn’t get out of the rut of dates in dives in Santa Monica and Redondo Beach where after midnight the kids kept screaming and dancing themselves blind no matter what you did as long as the drummer kept up a beat. Though Mom’s name had gotten them sessions at Decca and Columbia the records didn’t take off, people said they sounded like the Beatles without Paul’s wistful appeal or John’s sardonic edge or the Stones without Mick’s fury or the Monkees without the cuteness or Led Zeppelin without the balls. It was no life, Rex confided to Clark. Straining every night to pull out of himself the personal electricity to connect with a mob of kids stupid with pot was wasting him away, making him thin as a long-distance runner. When the group came around to the house in the afternoon sunlight you could see how small they were, how slight, however long their hair was and woolly their beards; in their purple tank tops and leather vests they were boys, kids looking for a break, kidding each other for Clark’s benefit though he was just ten, their eyes sideways on him to check out his reactions, and talking to Mom politely as if she were an older woman, which she was, actually. She had been thirty-one when she married Rex and he twenty-five. Once, when about sixteen, Clark had asked his mother why she had married Rex and then stuck with him until 1970, by which time he had become a very pathetic drunk. She had given him a look, like
And who the hell are you
?, with those famous long eyebrows arched under her cap of carefully tousled platinum hair, and told him calmly, “Rex was all cock.” Clark didn’t think then or now that this
was a suitable thing to say to a son, even a son growing up and accumulating some experience of his own. It shocked him, it stuck in his mind: he could still see her, her flat defiant calm way of saying it, implying,
Get off my case, kid
, the long red nails of her hand aligned around a Virginia Slim uncoiling blue smoke into the air next to her ear. The white edge of her ear protruded a bit through the bleached feathers of her hair. Cartoons of her always emphasized the cup ears but when you were with her they just seemed to fit her face, which could look homely or tired but never lacked life, a kind of hungriness he could never blame her for, it was so simple and innocent.

Clark had used LSD and PCP a certain amount before he began to scare himself and the trips had left him with some windows in his head open a crack, so these bright little movies sometimes ran without his asking. One was Mom saying Rex was all cock—a kind of slap in the face when he had just been trying to be friendly, on some basis or other, since for once they were in the house together. He must have been back, at that age, on school vacation from St. Andrew’s, where Uncle Danny had gone for two years before Rutgers and the State Department and Mom for some sentimental snob get-even reason of her own insisted on sending her son, once Beverly Vista ended in the eighth grade. Clark had missed California like crazy and hated the raw Delaware winters and the general boggy climate, like your feet were always wet and your nose was always runny and stuffed-up. People said Delaware was beautiful but to Clark it looked like a crummy little cramped piece of the past, a historical set out in the weather too long, everything brick and tacky and weedy and industrial, there by the dreariest most oil-polluted river he ever saw. The East was full of these greasy black rivers not worth
one sparkling gallon of the Hollywood Reservoir. He could see why Mom got out as soon as she could.

Another inner movie was Rex flopping into the pool in that dead-serious silent-comedy way, all to amuse a ten-year-old kid, while Clark cringed in shame at hitting so many twisting pop-ups; he was anxious and kept swinging too quick and just ticking a piece of the Wiffle Ball at the bottom. “Easy,
easy
,” the Texas athlete might say, “think
contact
, Superguy.” But Rex never blamed him, just climbed out on the pool ladder, saying something like “He emerges triumphant” in a sonorous third-person voice-over, and took a tug on the Coors can on the glass table and went back to a crouching position on the carpetlike lawn in his sopping jeans and T-shirt, shivering slightly like an underfed dog, water streaming from the points of his beard and the long hair on his head, unaware of how his skull was starting to show through on top. Clark could even see in the little movie what was silk-screened onto Rex’s T-shirt; the front said
VIVA LA V.C
. and the back had a picture of that spaceman in a polar-bear suit saluting beside that funny stiff flag they had planted on the moon only it was the North Vietnamese flag with its single yellow star on red and Ho Chi Minh’s face was smiling out of the astronaut’s helmet. Mom, too, wanted North Vietnam to win, which seemed strange to Clark, since America had been pretty good to her.

“Rex wasn’t a bad guy, though onstage he went for this wild-man image. It wore him out, actually. We’d play Wiffle Ball or Frisbee in the yard and then come in and watch old movies on Channel Nine until my mother got back or he had to go off on a gig. They broke up when I was eleven. He got to be such a drunk he’d piss on the living-room sofa in his sleep. Mom told me the real problem was he couldn’t take
any more of being Mr. DeMott. Of course, there
was
no Mr. DeMott.”

“Of course.”

“DeMott was a made-up name,” Clark needlessly explained, sensing that he was slightly lost and that this ski-bunny was several steps ahead of him. She was a plain little item looking like Sissy Spacek used to—fine straight strawberry-blonde hair falling around a slightly tense freckled face, with a nose taut like an animal’s, so the nostrils showed—in a booth in the main café at the base of the mountain, called Golddigger’s. The various après-ski groups had shuffled and reshuffled themselves around the long mahogany bar, and some had gone off to eat Mexican down the road and others had piled into a van to go try the new Thai place one valley over, and he had been left here with this girl, as if by plan. He couldn’t figure it out but was letting it happen. She had the washed-out, rabbity, starry-eyed look of a pioneer woman, except for the vivid white band the goggles had left across her face, like the bathing-suit ghosts you see on actresses in a porn video. Clark supposed he would be sleeping with her tonight but wasn’t excited about it yet. Women were a trap—like drugs, like booze, like fame—he had decided a while ago, about the time he left L.A. for these beautiful mountains. God’s country, people called Colorado.

You had to nibble the bait, it was human nature, but you tried to get out before the steel door fell. The lower half of her face held about a three-days’ depth of freckles and tan, he estimated: out from the Coast or Denver or the East for a week of higher altitude. These bitches expected to get screwed. If they couldn’t screw a ski instructor a chair-loader would have to do.

Great-Uncle Jared had promised him chair-loading would
just be a transitional job, until a spot higher on the staff opened up. His mother used to take him and Rex to Squaw Valley over Christmas when this was still a fashionable thing film people did. Clark had loved the blank dazzle of the slopes, the sliding leaping motion of the sport, the ultra-violet blueness of the mountain sky. Mom would stick him in a kiddie class all day, but at best they went twice a year—again during the Washington Birthday week—and then, when he was around twelve, they stopped going altogether, maybe because Rex wasn’t with them any more; he skied like a pro, until his morning nips and the beers at lunch made him lazy and reckless. So Clark’s skiing never got good enough. Three times he had failed the test for instructor, with all these baby-faced twenty-year-old rube locals brought up on skis smirking. “If you dun’t haff zuh reflexes by aitch sebenteen, the botty has too much to remember”: this was the consolation offered by Bighorn’s head ski instructor, Rolf Koenig, from Austria’s Wild West, a crew-cut dimple-chinned Nazi type who even pushing fifty wedeled down the lift-line like a feather twirling to the floor.

Clark met resistance everywhere in the hierarchy of Bighorn, as Jared and his Denver partners had named the resort back in the Forties, when rope tows and single chairs and bear-claw bindings were the state of the art. The founder’s great-nephew didn’t like taking orders and wasn’t much good at giving them. He thought the lodge cafeteria should deëmphasize artery-pluggers like cheeseburgers, French fries, and glazed doughnuts; he thought that somebody would be killed one of these bright sunny days if Art Marling, the head of Patrol, continued to open expert trails when the spring melt was exposing rocks and stumps. “Experts don’t hit rocks,” Art told Clark.

“Yeah, but a lot of non-experts go down anywhere where the chain isn’t across. You see these teenage girls that can hardly snowplow. Their boyfriends talk them into it.”

“That’s their problem, then. The trails are clearly posted,” Art told him, giving him that dead-eye, do-it-my-way stare that always made Clark see red, though he usually cringed and backed off. His worst fight at Bighorn had been with Johnny Ponyfoot, the middle-aged full-blooded Ute who was operating, that particular Sunday, the new triple chair up to Silver Saddle, the halfway point. The trails down were broad and gentle but to keep the weekend crowds moving the lift had been so speeded up the chairs were slinging around the pulley wheel and chopping into the backs of the skiers like machetes. The skier in the middle, with no sidebar to grab on to, was especially threatened; three times that morning some little kid failed to get his ass in his slick Gore-Tex jumpsuit up on the seat in time and went sprawling in the slush here at the base, headfirst in the thousand bucks’ worth of flashy equipment his parents had poured all over him like Technicolor paint. At the speed the chairs were moving, a snagged skipole could break an arm, crossed skis a leg. It was aggravating work in any case, the trios of skiers nosing up to the mark half-hidden in the slush waiting for you to catch the chair and ease it under their butts like a bedpan—it got to your back, and your nerves, the way the chairs kept coming,
blang, blang, whoosh, blang, blang, whoosh
. The third time he had to pick up a sprawled little guy and settle him, red-faced and teary, on a stopped chair, he signalled
ease off
to Johnny, and was rewarded with an acceleration that had him grunting and the skiers giggling as they hurried up to the mark a second ahead of the chair. Clark saw red and put a hand up to halt the line and planted himself in front of the next chair, daring it to
knock him down. The cable was braked, bouncing and swinging chairs halfway up the mountain. Clark stepped to the shed and opened the door and told Johnny, “Hey, ease it down a notch, for Chrissake. You’re going to kill somebody.”