The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (42 page)

IV.

T
HE LEBARON CONVERTIBLE, AS CANDY-APPLE
in color as Bridey's dress, had been a gift from an MGM honcho, or so she shouted over the lament of wind, purr of engine, and thump of California asphalt zipping beneath us. I hadn't traveled so fast since outrunning Prohibition agents in Tin Lizzie, and held tight as the car nestled corners and blasted through stop signs down the crashing coast and through Santa Monica, slowing only when hitting the fences, hedgerows, and drives of Beverly Hills. She acted as tour guide, hollering who lived where along with a garnish of commentary.

“Clara Bow! Has a screw loose! Mother used to chase her with a butcher knife!”

“Buster Keaton! Serial lothario, new divorcé! Ten to one he's slobbering drunk!”

“Gloria Swanson! Couldn't hack it in talkies! Has a really unusual nose!”

It was too dark to comprehend the Valentine estate beyond how the outdoor tiki torches flashed across row after row of windows. We jerked to a halt inside of a garage, colliding with something. Bridey was unconcerned. She leapt from the convertible, took me by the tie, and led me beneath pepper trees, around a pool house, alongside a tennis court, past the servants' quarters, and through a back entrance made to look like part of the rubblework masonry.

Inside, her pull upon my tie tautened, and in the mausoleum dark
I could catch only major furnishments: the wrought-iron staircase, the opposite balconies overhanging the foyer. We passed through a hallway soldiered with grandfather clocks cracking away at the nut of Time, and emerged into a library lit by a popping fireplace and lined with surrealist paintings of an apocalyptic bent. I felt a sharp tug at my heel and fell to a knee. Hearst's invaluable candlestick rolled beneath an armchair.

The incriminating glass eyes of a bear rug stared up at me. One of its fangs had snagged my pant cuff, yanking the tattered fabric so that the top of my knickers showed. Before I could adjust my virtue, Bridey lifted me by the tie—had I needed air, I would have choked—and appraised the development. With agonizing slowness, she passed a cool fingernail between my skin and the elasticated waistband of my drawers.

“A little eager, are we?” she breathed.

I should not have come. I knew that. But the aftershock of
la silenziosità
was invariably a paralyzing loneliness; had the bear rug offered a fig leaf of companionship, I would have taken it. Bridey curled my tie around her fist to create a shorter leash, and dragged me upstairs until we arrived at a palatial bedroom. With nimble puissance, she untied my tie and skinned my jacket, and with both hands she shoved me between two of the four posts of a blue-and-yellow silk canopy bed. Tasseled drapes did a jig at my landing.

Bridey crawled her way up my body, her small, strong hands taking fistfuls of my shirt. She buried her face in my neck and filled the grappling-hook hole with warm breath. Kisses crested my jaw and continued across my ear. The long-forgotten glories of girl-flesh awakened in me a near-cannibalistic hunger. She bared her beautiful neck and I devoured it, nibbling the lean muscles, sucking the tender skin, licking at coils of hair with my sandpaper tongue.

Her hips rocked in pleasure and she slithered downward with a hiss of fabric. I felt a pull on my torso and gasped—it was Dr. Leather cutting the flap into my gut or Merle sewing it back shut. Bridey's head resurfaced, not with gore in her mouth but one of my shirt buttons. With the gentleness of an obedient doggie, she set it upon my chest, then waited, pleased with herself, for her reward.

For the first time since, well, my
first time
, I knew not what to do.

She gave me a sidelong look.

“I don't have to bite
all
of them off, I hope.”

Thirty-seven years, Reader! Nearabout four decades since I'd been skin-to-skin! With desperation equal to that with which I'd dug myself from a Belleau Wood trench collapse, I tore at Bridey's dress. Since the Nan-and-Dot episode, ladies' garments had evolved yet again and I could not locate a single damn hook-and-eye. By the time I'd isolated the key to her nakedness—an Oriental gold buckle that pinched the whole ensemble together—Bridey, embodiment of sex to a nation of men, was kissing her way down my stomach.

My rotten, putrefying stomach.

“Stop,” said I. “My body—it's unclean.”

“Good,” hissed she. “Everyone else is buffed and trimmed like show dogs.”

“I'm cold. Can't you feel it?”

“So? Everyone else is hot, or so say the headlines they plant.”

“I'm pale. Look how pale.”

“And everyone else is baked brown like hamburger in the pan.”

I snatched both of her wrists.

“What?” gasped she. “Did I do something . . . ?”

Show me a god, any god,
the
Gød, and I would build a ladder tall enough to strangle Him! It was not fair! Not fair! Seventeen I was, a
flooded reservoir of potency, but with no pumping blood to steel my enfeebled male organ, I might as well be a toddler. I snaked myself from her torrid limbs and sat against the headboard, feeling downhearted enough to end it all, if only that were an option.

“I can't,” said I. “I just can't.”

Here was a woman no man had ever spurned, and I braced for her face to adopt the wolfish snarl used to imposing effect in so many of her pictures. She would then scream for a manservant to throw my inadequate corpse to the street, or, to maximize degradation, do the honors herself. For leading her on with false promise, I deserved it.

This unpredictable female instead rolled to the side, propped her head with a palm, and gave me the studious squint of a zoologist struggling to classify a bizarre creature. She clucked her tongue.

“Chastity. Now that's a new perversion.”

“It is not my intent,” moaned I, “to be perverse.”

“Don't say that. I have a hunch you might be the most perverse of them all. Who knows? Abstinence could be a fun lark, provided one is open to a little suffering, which I am. I'll try anything once, and most things twice. For now we'll just—what do they say? Turtledove? We'll do some turtledoving?”

Zebulon Finch, barnstormer of female anatomy, conquistador of copulation, rutter of lore—
turtledoving
?

With an idle hand, Bridey pulled tight my belt and then, to torture me, traced her fingernails in circular patterns across the tongue.

“Polite young man like you. You're holding a torch for some sweet young thing back in Indiana, I'll bet.”

The first rule of any carnal encounter is to deny ever having
seen
another woman. Bridey's hypothesis, however, offered an honorable exit from an awkward situation. Moreover, there was truth to it. I had,
and forever would, hoist a torch for Wilma Sue, if not a ten-story inferno. From the floor I could hear my darling's heart, the Excelsior, ever patient with my shortcomings, tutting from my jacket pocket.

“Illinois,” said I.

“Tell me her name. No, let me guess. Phyllis. Wait.
Lois
.”

“Wilma Sue.”

“Two names? She ought to be twice the homemaker, then.”

Bridey did not hide her skepticism. For some reason, she believed us cut from similar cloth, incapable of finding any fulfillment in the humdrum of a little house, a little job, and a little lady to bring me my slippers. She had no idea of the type of creature with whom she laid, nor that creature's appetites.

I removed her hand from my belt and slid it up under my shirt.

“Changed your mind already?” pouted she. “I barely even tried.”

“Shh,” said I.

Over the next half hour, I gave her fingers a guided tour of my damage, every unhealed hole, abrasion, gouge, and burn, supplying no explanation beyond the obvious—that I was far stranger than my newsreel or parlor tricks had made me out to be. I was, just as she'd implied, a perversity.

I took care to make the exploration chaste, but even here Bridey rebelled. At each patch of decay she tickled; at every crossroad of collapse she caressed. It was, of course, sexually aggravating; more than that, though, it was moving—profoundly so. The promoted image of Bridey was that of an exotic who welcomed the uncanny and profane. Magazines, fabulists by trade, were, for once, on the money. My repulsiveness excited her. Perhaps my strange flavors acted as antidote to the perfect blandness of a celluloid world.

Had you burst in upon us afterward, you would have believed
we'd just finished the good deed rather than aborted it. For a time, Bridey lay stroking my cheek and watching the sluggish reaction of my dead flesh. I was not a fellow given to snug-a-bugging, but so thankful was I for her lack of disgust that I could have lain there all night. Bridey, being Bridey, had other plans.

She stood up alongside the bed and all but groped herself as she smoothed from her dress the evening's creases. By the time she bothered to give me her bedroom eyes, I was on tenterhooks.

“You're not sure you have what it takes in the sack. You're still stuck on this Wilma bird, too. Well, that's fine for now. I have but one humble question to ask.”

She detached the Oriental buckle and with a shrug the dress fell like rose petals about her naked feet. There in the moonlight shone an aphroditic vision of Bridey Valentine before which the general public would never get a chance to genuflect. She angled an arm behind her head coyly, while sliding the other suggestively across her exposed tummy.

“I wonder if, in the meantime, it might bring you some pleasure to . . . bring
me
pleasure?”

In my decades of keening over the end of my erogenous existence, I'd never considered such a simple thing. It took, I suppose, a woman bold enough to ask for it while her partner remained despicably decent.

I did not debate for long. I had thirty-seven years for which to make up.

“Why, yes,” said I. “I believe it would, at that.”

V.

E
VEN ONE AS DISMISSIVE OF
social mores as Bridey could not keep a strange boy nineteen years her junior on the premises. But neither would she allow me to return to my sleazeball inn. So, in an inspired whim, she drew up papers and hired me on as her official “amanuensis”—a term for “secretary” so convoluted it all but guaranteed that no one would be clear what I was supposed to be doing. Turning down the offer was not an option, for the position included a weekly paycheck. That meant I could begin sending Church the kind of money he needed. Surely, before too long, he'd write back to say that all my trespasses were forgiven.

Bridey gave me both an office and a bedchamber at the south end of her two-story, thirty-room Colonial Queen Anne mansion, using the excuse that the servants' quarters were already choked with the butler, cook, lady's maid, hairdresser, Japanese gardener, chauffeur, on-site vocal coach, and the executive assistant charged with shepherding forty-thousand fan letters a month as well as producing the
Bridey Valentine Fan Club Bimonthly
. These minions approved of me no more than Dixon and his gang, for if they knew one thing about their employer, it was that she did not need helping.

In fact, she made me feel like a thumb-twiddling kiddie. Never before had I seen a woman on equal footing with men. Bridey by then was bringing in the criminal-sounding sum of ten thousand dollars
per week, and yet she retained no agents, managers, or lawyers. More frequently visited than her closets of gowns or shoes was her fort of filing cabinets, in which she kept, in labeled concertina folders, ledgers enough to make old Mr. Hobby jealous. Between call times, she hunched over these logs with reading glasses and red pencil, tracing every monetary current: furs @ $7,000/year, stockings @ $9,000/year, perfume @ $30,000/year, and onward.

She was, to use a word close to my heart, indefatigable. Bridey woke at four to have her hair done before heading to the studio. MGM's contract stipulated four pictures per year, so invariable that they were shorthanded by season: “Spring Valentine,” “Summer Valentine,” “Fall Valentine,” and “Winter Valentine.” In February of 1934 she was Henrietta Hawk, brash flying ace able to pilot her biplane through any storm, until she meets a storm called Captain Schmidt, played by Spencer Tracey. In May she was Babs McCourt, smart-lipped small-town reporter who must team with a down-on-his-luck private dick, played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. In August, she was Letty Dekker, British spy who infiltrates Germany as a nightclub dancer in order to free Colonel Tab Candler, played by Leslie Howard. And so on.

Then there were exercise classes, dance practices, script conferences, and charity dinners. By bedtime, though, she was Bridey, my Bridey, and rare was the night we did not lie in bed talking for an hour or two.
Talking
, you ask? For an hour? Or
two
? Zebby, poor sop, how did you withstand so much girl-gabble? With ease, friend; Bridey was the most fascinating person I'd ever met, and yet she had few, if any, real friends. Even more than rubbing her to a frenzy, she relied on me for this—to hear her speak from the heart. What I learned was a backstory for which any scandal rag would murder.

Bridey had a daughter.

It made good sense to tell me about it, for as long as I was under her roof, it was unfeasible that she could hide her periodic phone calls to a nine-year-old girl called Gopher (short for “Margeaux”). With characteristic lack of sentiment, she unleashed the whole dirty truth one morning over breakfast.

“Don't ask about the father,” sighed she. “I couldn't tell you. Believe me, had I the money, I would've had an abortion faster than you can say the word. All the top girls have had two or three. There's more abortionists out here than clap doctors.”

Lady business of the most distasteful sort! I strived toward a bouncier mood.

“Surely you have found some mirth in motherhood?”

“I'll just say this: an actress should be wary, very wary, of children, and should never, under any circumstances, marry, not if she wishes to control her own fate. Now hand me that grapefruit before I starve.”

It was a momentous grapefruit. In the passing of it I weighed whether to tell Bridey of Merle. If there were a stage fit for such dissonant music, this was it. But Merle was older than Bridey, a fact perhaps too weird for even a self-proclaimed connoisseur of weirdness. Bringing up Merle would also bring up Wilma Sue, and that was a subject Bridey abhorred. As ever, Merle was a poison; mentioning her was tantamount to sprinkling arsenic atop, say, a grapefruit.

Young Bridey had known that her role in
An Orchid Unknown
was her ticket to stardom. She therefore concealed the existence of Margeaux and designed to steal the picture from star Norma Talmadge. No matter the costumes presented to Bridey, she scissored them all to hell to more favorably display her assets. She swung her hips in long
shots and licked her lips in close-ups until the crew wolf-whistled so loud you could almost hear it—and it was a silent film!

By the end of 1925 Bridey had received the honor of being named a Western Association of Motion Picture Advertisers “Baby Star.” Thus was she thrust into the limelight. Overnight, MGM publicists crawled from the crannies to whitewash her past of any dirt, and boy, did they ever find a large clod of it. Within an hour of finding out about Margeaux, a screenwriter had been assigned to concoct a story about a dead GI.

I, for one, liked the sound of it—wasn't I myself a dead solider? Bridey, though, tore the pages from the writer's hand and stomped them with her heels. Never would she allow herself to be defined by a man, much less a fictitious one! A single option remained, and so she took it, bestowing upon Margeaux the untainted surname of “Malone” and sending her off to be raised and schooled at an expensive boarding institution in Santa Barbara.

Marooned in the mansion, I had no choice but to take these stories on faith. Certainly there was no denying Bridey's dedication to the outré. Where other celebrities outfitted their homes in Seurat, Tiffany, and Cartier, Bridey appareled hers in macabre historical relics. A gold-leaf death mask from Ancient Greece. A jade Egyptian mummification kit. An Iron Age cauldron depicting human sacrifice. A death pendant taken from an aboriginal burial box in Newfoundland. In many ways, these morbid
objets d'art
had foreshadowed my arrival.

It was as if Bridey had been waiting for me her entire life.

The most alarming artifacts were an assortment of Middle Ages chastity belts. The gentlest resembled buckled leather underwear, while the harshest were steel-toothed traps capable of scaring away
the most determined of deflowerers. Bridey posited the collection as a rejoinder to the censor Will Hays—it was best to keep sex locked up, eh, Will? But as with everything Bridey did, her comedy had a point. It was all points, in fact, all edges.

Roughly once a week, you see, she rededicated herself to my seduction, and my stern deferrals only goaded her gambler's nature. She would win the kitty, resolved she, if she but sharpened her play.

“You are the rarest thing,” she'd flatter, “in my entire collection.”

There went her hand, creeping up my leg.

“Just try,” she'd beg. “I'll help you. I'll be patient.”

I required no belt to be locked inside my chastity.

“I am dead,” said I, “and that is that.”

“Forget Wilma What's-Her-Name. I can be better than her. Let me prove it.”

“Are you deaf? I cannot.”

“Then I'll borrow a movie camera. Put it in the corner while we do it.”

“Why on Earth would that help?”

She tickled my ear and laughed.

“Because pictures never die, silly. That's why I, too, am going to live forever.”