Playland (3 page)
Y
ou see where we made
Parade
this morning?” All I got was the back of Lizzie’s head. “You, me, and Blue Tyler.”
I tried again. “Wasn’t that her picture you were watching the other night on the tube? The one you said was a piece of shit?” But preferable, it seemed, to talking to me. That night, and apparently this one, too.
“Carioca Carnival.”
Lizzie kept staring out the window of the Porsche, as if she were trying to memorize all the houses on this particular stretch of Sunset. A mental map of enemy territory to report to her confederates in the feminist maquis. That she was always identified as my father’s former nurse never bothered her; indeed she took it as a point of pride, because it seemed to embarrass the people, mainly professional friends—correction, acquaintances—of mine, with whom she most often came into contact, and who preferred not to be reminded that they, like her, had come from circumstances more modest than those to which they had become accustomed. She hated Los Angeles—correction again, Hollywood, third correction, the movie business—hated the way women in The Industry (she equally hated the way she claimed I used those two words, with an upper-case
T
, and an upper-case
I
, as if The Industry was some kind of superior life-giving
force; I thought I was only being ironic) were relegated to the categories of wife or fuck. Or development slut. Her term. Meaning those women—
girls
was a word one used in front of Lizzie at one’s peril—with looks (the overweight need not apply, nor those with moles or the faintest palest shadow of downy mustache), drive, and no discernible talent, to whom the studios would sometimes give a housekeeping fund for an office and a secretary and some development money to work with would-be and never-will-be screenwriters whose primary virtue was that they were not in the Guild, and thus not eligible for minimums and benefits. Occasionally a screenplay might actually be written, perhaps even put into production, by which time the developer had been removed from the project (via a clause in the boilerplate of the contract she had never bothered to read, and would not have understood if she had) and was setting up still another office paid for by still another studio, all the while realizing but never quite admitting (in her quaint Spanish-style apartment off Laurel Canyon with the high-tech sound system and the frig filled with cranberry juice for her chronic cystitis, and in the garage the BMW 315 whose payments she could not quite manage) that the reason she was being sponsored by her economic and, in Hollywood terms, social betters was that occasionally she be available to service someone more important on The Industry food chain, with an itch and no one to scratch it.
“Hello,” I said after a moment. It was Lizzie who had told me that cranberry juice was a cure for cystitis. Nurse info. And further nurse info (dubious though I thought it was) that cunnilingus exacerbated it. This imparted after a drinks party in one of those Laurel Canyon apartments when she asked if I had ever gone down on the hostess when I was seeing her between marriages. I pleaded the Fifth, my psyche being insufficiently robust to sustain the weight of being a cystitis exacerbator on top of my many other derelictions. The party and the ambient noise about start dates and back-end money and negative pickups and most-favored-nation clauses had so bored her that she had gravitated
to the kitchen on the pretense of getting some ice and while there had taken a stock inventory of the refrigerator. “Anyone home?”
Still no response.
“Here’s something I bet you didn’t know.” Pedantry, oddly enough, was one way I could always get her attention. “When the Germans occupied France during the war—”
“What war?” Lizzie said, turning slowly away from the window. What I called pedantic she called patronizing. Lizzie always claimed that when I did not wish to communicate, as at that particular moment I most certainly did not, I would fill the silences with bits of arcane information—that Anne Boleyn had six fingers on one hand, or that William Howard Taft weighed 352 pounds. Once she bought me a book called
Little-Known Facts
, and on the flyleaf she had written “Here are a few things I bet you don’t know.” In fact I hadn’t known it was illegal to hunt camels in Arizona, or that it never rained in the town of Calama in Chile’s Atacama Desert, or that in the year 1221, in the Persian city of Nishapur, Genghis Khan killed 1,778,000 people in one hour, or that in France, in 1740, a cow was found guilty of sorcery and hanged.
“World War Two,” I said. “Anyway, the Germans liked the guillotine so much, they often used it to execute people rather than hanging them or shooting them. But they added a little wrinkle of their own.”
I waited for Lizzie to respond. Of course this was not what she wanted to talk about, but what she wanted to talk about I was not about to talk about, and I was playing for time.
“You see, when the French topped somebody, a certain delicacy prevailed, and they let the accused kneel face down. But the Germans, the Nazis, they turned the poor bastard around so that he was looking straight up at the blade, and then they taped his eyelids open so he couldn’t shut his eyes. The last thing he saw was that mother coming down.” Lizzie was staring out the window again. “Fuckers played rough.”
“We have to call Lois tomorrow, and Miranda, too, and get
the taillight on my Volvo fixed, and I suppose the hoses, too, I mean, you should get them all replaced when one gives out,” Lizzie said finally as we pulled over the rise on Sunset, just east of Anita, and then the Fiat Spider hit us.
Lois and Miranda were the lawyers she wanted to represent her in the divorce.
Which is what I hadn’t wanted to talk about.
I am he. Him is me.
They told him in the emergency room that Lizzie had been killed instantly, as had the boy in the Spider. The boy had lost control coming around the curve, a three-sixty into his lane, going too fast, of course, at least eighty, according to the LAPD accident report filed with the Motor Vee and introduced as evidence during depositions. The boy’s father said there would be no problem with the insurance, but then the lawyers for the boy’s father got involved, and the lawyers tried to make it look as if he was at fault for driving on Sunset at ten o’clock on a Sunday evening, under the speed limit and in the lane he should have been driving in, after dinner at Spago, a window table, just he and Lizzie, Lizzie staring out at the billboard for the latest Martin Magnin Production,
Metro Vice II
, he trying to keep his third marriage from breaking up, three divorces showed a certain instability. The lawyers for the boy’s father tried to make a case out of his two J&Bs and the two Beck’s beers at dinner, but only 0.044 on the Breathalyser when the LAPD finally got around to administering the test after the accident, well under the limit for DWI. His alcoholic intake came out in the depositions, every drink recorded on the dinner check the lawyers for the boy’s father subpoenaed from Spago (including Lizzie’s one glass of the house white wine), as had the boy’s misadventures with speed, and his semester at Betty Ford for substance abuse, records his own lawyers had subpoenaed in turn. His lawyers also subpoenaed the autopsy report, and the report’s toxicological tests showed a residue of cocaine in the boy’s system.
Don’t get rough with us, his lawyers told the lawyers for the boy’s father. You’re not getting a penny. What his lawyers meant was a penny of the Broderick money, there was enough Broderick money to keep the boy’s family in court for as long as the Broderick lawyers could file motions, until the boy’s father declared bankruptcy or caved in, Bleak House on the Pacific littoral.
We could live with no fault, the boy’s insurance company said.
A funny concept, considering. No fault.
If I was a former first lady, Lizzie had once said, I’m not sure I’d want my name memorialized on a drunk tank.
He had not counted on having to identify Lizzie. When he got home from the morgue after making the ID, he wrote it down exactly as he remembered the way it happened. Waste not, want not. Grist for the mill. It was a way to distance himself from it.
To see the bizarre side.
As it were.
Naturally he added a little filigreeing. Layering and subtext. Some pacing. For the flow.
This is what he wrote:
Have you ever identified a body in a morgue?
I hadn’t, but I thought I knew how to do it. First I would be asked to go down to the morgue in order to identify the deceased, as I was her closest, and in this case her only, relative. Lois and Miranda would have gone, in fact asked to go, but I did not think it entirely appropriate for the lawyers who were handling her divorce petition to make the ID, especially as Lois and Miranda had already asked about my alcoholic consumption earlier that evening at Spago. So I went downtown myself—it’s always downtown where the morgue is located, and for that matter the police station, too, otherwise cops would not always be saying in the kind of movie I write,
“Let’s go downtown.” It was the first time in all the years I had been going downtown in the interests of research that I had no trouble finding a place to park, but then I rarely go downtown at five in the morning. The morgue is located across the street from a Dunkin’ Donuts franchise, and through the window in the thin dawn light I could see several people at the counter dunking donuts in their coffee, as they were meant to do in a franchise of that name, it occurred to me. What struck me was that all the customers were wearing yellow jumpsuits with blue lettering on the back that said, in block letters,
MEDICAL EXAMINER
, and I kept turning over in my mind what it must be like to be a counterman in that particular Dunkin’ Donuts, serving guys in yellow jumpsuits who had been picking up stiffs all night long.
One of whom must have been Lizzie.
Scraped off the windshield of the Porsche at Sunset and Anita.
Then brought downtown.
Finally I went inside the morgue (the people who work there call it the Medical Examiner’s Office, but I prefer morgue, it has more nuance) and gave my name at the desk, and after a while a plainclothes cop appeared and he talked to me quietly, without ever actually meeting my eye, about “the victim,” her age and her weight and her height and her eye and hair color and then out of the blue he asked me if I had ever been on the cops. That was the phrase he used—“on the cops.” I love the way cops talk. It has such a particularity about it. I said, no, I had never been on the cops, why, and he said that he was a great fan of
Code 7
. That was a picture I had written, from a novel I had also written. The first line of the novel read, “You treat people right and they treat you right, then you can retire in very nice shape—the golden rule of the police department.” A
roman policier
with existential overtones, I always say defensively. Civilians don’t ever get cops down right, the cop said, and you did. The compliment seemed to embarrass him, as it did me, and he fiddled with a
ballpoint pen until another cop arrived, and then he said, Follow me.
I expected to walk into a room with all sorts of cabinets and cupboards and then the first cop would say it’s cold, and the second cop would say we won’t be in here long, just long enough to make a proper ID, and then we would get to the right cabinet and a morgue attendant who wore a white coat with a lot of pens in the pocket would open up the cabinet door and slide out the deceased, who would be lying under a sheet. One of the cops would pull down the sheet and the other would practically be leaning on me to catch me in case my knees began to buckle. The first cop would say don’t worry if you faint, a lot of people do, and I would look at the body and think it’s a funny color, that must be how you look when you’re dead. Then I would nod at the cops and the morgue guy would pull the sheet over her face and slide the tray back into the cabinet. All quite traumatic. A good scene. I had seen it in God knows how many movies, some of which I had written myself.
Except it was Lizzie I had to identify, not some stiff in a screenplay.
And it’s not done that way at all.
It’s done on television. Closed circuit. When the cop said follow me, I followed him into a small room, a cubicle with glass walls, like the kind office clerks have who don’t rate windows. Hanging off the wall in one corner was a television set, like the kind you see in a hospital room. There were a couple of chairs and a small couch, I guess in case the whole family wanted to come in and make the ID. The cop said are you okay, and I nodded, and he punched some letters on a computer keyboard and all of a sudden, there on the screen, there she was, Lizzie herself, an overhead shot, on a gurney, under a sheet, face all black and blue, eyes closed, mouth open because her jaw was broken when she went through the windshield, hair all wild, I’ll be goddamned, it
was
Lizzie, as beat to shit as she was, I could still recognize her. In a way it
was kind of great, brave new world, and I said to the cop, material always being hard to come by, is this how you do it now, and he said yes, it keeps the survivors from getting all emotional and trying to throw themselves on Uncle Bob or Aunt Sue, he couldn’t count the times family members knocked the victim onto the floor before this new system was installed, it would be kind of humorous if it wasn’t so serious, this way you just press the remote and the deceased disappears from the screen.
Then he pressed the remote and Lizzie disappeared from the screen.
It was the last time I saw her.