The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (47 page)

He, at least, had gone unchanged by time's passage. He was still larded in squalid rags and quaggy with sores, and I took solace in his dogged durability. He held to life like a parasite, repellent in a town built on the backs of beauties, and unapologetic about sucking from it what blood he needed.

My smile perturbed him. His song went skeptical.

“Tra la la la . . . la?”

If only I'd owned a complete set of
Variety
, that most sumptuous of toilet papers, to gift him! For the scuffling wretch had done me a service, reminding me that I'd once known a man like him, whose mind and body had been so crippled that he'd been forced to begin anew. His name was Burt Churchwell, and I castigated myself for having forsaken him. He'd saved my soul before, so why not again? Yes, the soul—that jejune belief. I hoped it might yet be tucked away inside me, that evasive thing Dr. Leather had tried to unearth and Chernoff had wanted to toss into the trash with the rest of the rubbish.

XIII.

W
RITING HAD FRIED ME INSIDE
many a pot of boiling oil o'er the decades. Is it any wonder I quailed upon penning this most delicate of summonses? After finding Church's old phone number was disconnected, I lived out a scene from Bridey's script, shredding draft after draft of a letter, each page symbolic of calendars' worths of wasted time. At the end of the day, not to mention wit, I mailed Church not an apologia but a transferrable plane ticket: first-class, one-way, New York to Los Angeles.

All that was left to do was tread water in hopes of staying afloat with Bridey long enough for Church to find me. During those ten months of lies, Bridey added to the household such gadgetry as a “television” and a bug repellant in the form of an “aerosol spray,” but these were flaccid distractions. Bridey had disparaged my decision to suspend taxidermic therapy, and after learning from Mercy St. Johns how I'd sacked Chernoff's “stuffed animals,” she accused me of undermining the future of
In Our Image
. I believed only two things prevented her from kicking me out: one, her schedule—she'd reach film number twenty-five before year's end—and two, the thought of me, the world's strangest thing, being in another collector's museum.

I feared the worst for Church. What if he'd been arrested as part of the Bonus Army and never released from jail, and every cent I'd mailed had been pocketed by the Chinatown landlord? Low were
my spirits that day in December when the butler found me in the library and announced that I had a visitor. I sprinted across miles of mansion to arrive at the eastern drawing room, where a man stood examining a pleasant series of framed medical sketches detailing the Mesolithic skull-drilling process of trepanation.

This was no champion of the gridiron and battlefield. Neither was it the scrapper with whom I'd ridden out the boom and bust of the Twenties. This fellow here was
old
, with thin, graying hair and a back so bent it took him five seconds to turn around with the help of a cane. He wore a beard to effect a comb-over of sorts across the crater in his cheek. It was Church, all right, but a variant I'd never imagined: bone-thin here, lard-soft there, and routed with wrinkles, particularly when he grinned.

“Dang,” said he. “You don't ever change, do you?”

A chirping laugh fluted up from lungs that had never satisfactorily healed. The greeting was, in fact, rather funny. Me, not change? What had I done in this ersatz Shangri-La but change? I extended my hand, which had reassumed its pre-taxidermic smutch. Church's hand, meanwhile, was draped in loose skin and freckled with age. But he was Midwestern, not Californian; he would not have blanched had I resembled a pile of hamburger.

We shook, and Reader, it felt fine.

“Gød, Private, I'm sorry, I'm so danged sorry. I got the operation, just like you said, and it helped some, it did—and my rent, it went up and up, and the money helped with that, too—but I couldn't—I just wasn't sure you wanted me to—”

I sealed our continued clutch with my opposite hand so that he did not feel it necessary to complete his statement. It was difficult to
believe that I was the son of the unfeeling Bartholomew Finch, so badly did I wish to embrace this long-lost comrade.

“I saw the magazine pictures,” said he, “but couldn't ever believe it. How in heck did you end up here?”

I dared grip his shoulder. Far beneath the atrophy lurked a quarterback's girth.

“There is much to say.” I indicated two chairs. “Let us say it all.”

Hollywood was a fever and Church was the tub of ice that lifted me from it. For hours we exchanged not gossip and aspersions but rather stories of simple struggles: the darn good buck-twenty-five an hour he'd made as a welder before the smoke had aggravated his bad lung; the highway robbery of dental fees that obliged him to home-yank three teeth via pliers; the work he'd recently found helping move an entire graveyard across town—lots of smelly coffins, but golly, he sure enjoyed being in the outdoors.

Church had found peace in hardship, and in his itemized banalities I found something as well: the pain and striving that
was
life, that
was
meaning, as opposed to the mesmeric embalmment of Hollywood. Of course I was lost out here in this fancy crypt—I was Death walking among the dead! Where I belonged was back in the trenches with my dearest friend.

So captivated was I by our future together that Bridey's nighttime return home caught me unawares. She clacked into the drawing room on impossible heels, legs glossy beneath a country-club daysuit, her gloved arms arranged fetchingly as she worked to unpin a hat from her waves of black hair. Even then, hours before the real disaster, I detected my blunder.

We should have already left.

“If you must use this dreadful room,” said she, “then I insist that you get off your ass and—”

The heels quit their clack. Bridey flapped surprised lashes at the giant man taking up her satinwood settee. Church, a gent through and through, pushed upon his cane and rocketed upward. Beholden by social convention, I did the same, but found it difficult to meet Bridey's eyes. Never before had I entertained a personal guest; it did not take a person of her intuition to sense that a plot was afoot.

“I don't believe I've had the pleasure,” said she.

Church stumbled forward, his leg fighting his cane, burying an inopportune cough in his shoulder while reaching out a quaking hand.

“Miss—I am—it's my—I am very, very pleased—”

I spoke through teeth.

“Allow me to introduce Burt Churchwell. He is a friend from the war. He is from
Iowa
.”

The last bit I added for sympathy's sake. Bridey peaked her eyebrows at the exoticism and extended a hand to see what the backcountry brute might do with it. Church stalked it as one would a greased pig, coming at it with two hands in case it darted. Once he'd captured it, he cradled it in disbelief, sliding his thumbs across the pearly silk.

“Are all Iowans aficionados of gloves?” asked Bridey.

Church dropped the hand as if caught licking it.

“Oh, no, ma'am. Not that yours aren't—I just haven't ever met—I've seen so—well, I can't even count—so
many
of your pictures and—”

“Then it is I who must thank you,” said Bridey. “Tickets are no longer cheap, are they? I fear one day they'll cost a whole dollar.”

Church's flabbergast blinded him to Bridey's unsparing enumerating of his threadbare blazer, unscrubbable shirt stains, and undernail grease. The plunging basin of his right cheek interested her the most.

“Of course you will dine with us,” said she.

“No, ma'am,” sputtered Church. “I couldn't!”

“That's right,” interjected I. “He is on a New York clock and weary from travel.”

“Good, I prefer my men weary, they are so much easier to influence. Wouldn't you agree, Mr. Churchwell?”

“Church. Everyone calls me Church.”

“Then I shall call you ‘C.' Now, let me rouse the chef. Odds are she's tipsy on cooking sherry at this hour, though inebriation does tend to bring out her genius. Shall we say ninety minutes? I would like to freshen up. Perhaps I'll don a new pair of gloves to feed your fetish.”

Quite assuredly the vixen was up to something.

A last supper,
I told myself,
and then I am gone.

Bridey came to dinner late enough to make an entrance. Though how else does one enter when squeezed inside of a blood-red Vera West cut so low that one's breasts receive only the tiniest handholds of crepe? This imposing chest was boosted by an engraved silver girdle, which matched both her sleek turban and the pearled band around her throat. From the staircase she descended like Poe's Red Death into the masque.

Church's thighs thwacked the table when he stood, the first of countless faux pas committed at regular intervals throughout the meal. Bridey, at her most devious, had arranged a menu fit to flummox: peppercorn ox tongue, braised cock's combs, and lemon-and-parsley
offal with a side of creamed durian fruit. Church gaped at the spread as would any Heartlander, and with every improper approach, Bridey was there to tut-tut and refill his glass with wine.

Does that sit queasily, Reader? It should. Church, the kid who'd survived a war without the abetment of a flask, the man who'd lived through Prohibition without so much as a curious sip, was so out of his depth that partaking in alcohol for the first time seemed like the simpler road, especially when being offered up by the star of his most outrageous fantasies.

In a click, he was drunk. He sniggered when a sliver of tripe skittered from under his knife and Bridey giggled right along. He went mush-mouthed when saying “I don't got a girl,” and the two hammed it up with “I gone dotted a knurl” and “I won't gut an earl” before descending into besotted hilarity. A lesser expert on the Valentine oeuvre might have believed the performance, but not I. Pause the projector. See there, hidden amid the grain? She pretends to drink her wine, only pretends.

Our tiffs had escalated to all-out warfare and the sea of battle was Church.

Then bring the carronades broadside,
thought I.
She shall strike her colors before dawn.

“Say, dear-heart,” posed I with acerbity, “why don't I avail you with tales of Church's wartime élan? He is a man twice decorated.” Pointedly I added, “The sort of man with whom one
should not trifle
.”

“To the contrary, lover-boy.” Bridey matched acid with acid. “I've found that the strongest men are the ones most in need of trifling.”

“Eating tongue is hard,” slurred Church. “So chewy.”

“But
lambkin
,” seethed I, “surely a gentleman who has maintained his innocence despite such odds should be permitted to
go about
his way
free of indoctrination into waywardism.” I brought out the Excelsior. “My, look at the time. Church, old friend, we ought to be tucking you into bed.”

“I pee the bed.” Church coughed, shook his head. “No, no, I didn't say that.”

“Bed does sound like fun,” snapped Bridey. “But before dancing? Unheard of!”

“Dancing?” I gnashed my jaws. “You cannot be serious,
sugar-bun
.”

But serious my sugar-bun was. She lifted my punchy partner onto unsteady feet and led him from the room. I lingered to stew until I heard from the phonograph player the sliding trombone of Glenn Miller. I threw down my napkin, charged through the hallway of grandfather clocks, and entered the library, where Bridey's seldom-used Philco unit was refulgent with electrical power. From the cabinet speakers resounded a juvenile ditty called “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”

The music had a woozy swing, a perfect match for the loopy ellipses sketched across the carpet by Bridey as she, veteran of untold dance scenes, steered Church away from such tricky obstacles as the walls and floor. It brought to mind, and painfully, the time Church had taught me the Charleston in his kitchen. He'd been clumsy then; now he careened about like a dog on hind legs.

Church had once mastered what he'd dubbed “the Game,” but Bridey's game was scored by goals more far obscure. After abandoning fancy footwork in favor of check-to-cheek oscillations, she tickled her fingers along Church's spine. His fists floated, afraid to touch her bare-skinned back. She pressed closer, crawling a hand up his arm, neck, and face, until her red nails tickled that most sacrosanct of private parts, the hole in his cheek.

He gasped, frightened by the intimacy, and gripped Bridey's body with childish desperation. His boozy, disoriented eyes sought mine and he mumbled for help.

“Private . . . ? Is this . . . is it okay . . . ?”

“Private Finch,” shushed Bridey, “can't help you now.”

“Private Prefer-Not-To,” blubbered Church. “That's what we use to call him.”

Their slow waltz circled round and Bridey's carnivore eyes caught mine.

“Why, that's a
very
apt name. There are, in fact, a few things he prefers not to do.”

She slid her hands down Church's sides and onto his thighs.

Even invertebrate cuckolds had their limits! I sprang forth, snared Bridey's wrist in one hand and Church's in the other, and disentangled them as would a boxing ref. Bridey was hurled into a bookcase; she cried out. Church capsized over the arm of a sofa. She I left to her smarting but he I hauled to his feet. His skin was teal and his cheeks swollen as if with vomit. I tugged him from the library and hollered to the rafters for help.

The butler met us in the hall. While the grandfather clocks tsked our boorish behavior, I enjoined the servant to call a cab, insert Mr. Churchwell inside of it, and supply the driver money enough for a hotel room in which my friend could repair. The butler was guiding Church's arms through his coat sleeves when Church began to register the new drama in which he'd been cast.

“Hang on. Wait. Private, I wanna stay.”

“Listen to me as well as you are able. You are being taken to a hotel. Sleep off the drink. Tomorrow I will gather you, I promise. But tonight there is business I must conclude.”

“Well, that's some way to treat an old friend. Merry Christmas!”

What I most wished to do was punch his lights out, stuff him into a trunk, and mail him parcel post back to Iowa where he belonged. A hotel was at least a quarantine; every second he spent in Hollywood, I now realized, came at the risk of contaminating the open wounds of his lungs or, more to the point, his heart. This town excelled at finding those whose damaged parts would make the tastiest sausage, provided an unsatisfied customer like myself did not move quick and steal them from the butcher block.