She didn't stop talking, although after the initial boyfriend flood, most of what she said was interesting. But there is a certain pathos and desperation in the person who never lets anyone else speak.
That first evening was nearly asleep by the time we left my friends' apartment together and walked down Bennogasse to her car.
"Whenever I go to the Easterlings' house for dinner, I feel like an ugly frog swimming through an aquarium full of colorful, gorgeous fish. You know what I mean?"
I stopped walking and took her hand. "You're so tight. What's the matter?"
"You're Weber Gregston! You made the greatest film I ever saw: You made Wonderful. You think I'm an asshole, don't you?" Undoing her hand from mine, she stepped back. "I was so excited to meet you. I didn't want you to see this stupid arm and I didn't want to say the wrong things . . . I wanted to hear you talk. . . . Now I fucked up again –" She tried to say more but tears stopped her.
A beautiful woman with her arm in a sling standing on a street corner in Vienna in the middle of the night, crying, is a good picture for a movie, but not real life.
I asked her for coffee, and we went across the street to a big shabby cafй that was all yellow light and old cigarette smoke. I even remember the name: Cafй Hummel. No one hummed in the Cafй Hummel.
Her father was just diagnosed as having pancreatic cancer. Her boyfriend left because she bored him. She wanted to do something else with her life. We talked in the cafй until three, then went back to her apartment and mistakenly made love. It wasn't very good.
But something more important happened in that charged night and during our next few days together. A friendship began that immediately did us both good. Soon we liked each other so much we knew we'd found something vital and necessary.
On impulse, we dropped everything and went to Zermatt together for a long weekend because it was snowing all over Europe that winter.
There are places in the world with which one falls in love with the passion and vitality we usually save for a great love affair. We see it and know from the first this will be right and long. If we're very lucky, our being here now will add dimension and knowledge to our lives later.
When we made love there, it was without the held-breath passion of the beginning of an affair. It was gentle, unhurried and long: two great friends on a walk together through a wonderful, familiar city.
The day we left, we sat out on the balcony of our hotel room and held hands, looking up at the Matterhorn. We were tired and fulfilled, in love with a moment in our lives when we'd made the right decision and it had led us to a treasure of high ice, silence, and Schlagobers in our coffee.
"Escape can be expensive, but sometimes it's more necessary than breath, huh?"
"What do you mean?" The late-afternoon light had grown tired and tan.
"This whole trip has been . . . before we got on the train in Vienna, I turned around and looked at the world there. In one part of me I knew that after this trip, no matter what happened between us, things would never be the same again. Something was coming to an end for me. So . . . so I looked at Vienna as if it were somehow the last time.
"I don't do things like this, Weber. I don't go off for weekends with people unless I'm in love. We both know we're not in love. But this time has lifted me off that 'old me' earth back there. It showed me how things look from a good distance.
"It's showed me it's time I went home to America. Knowing that my friend but not my love, Weber Gregston, will be there soon makes it better. Thank you."
She went back a week later to be with her father while he died. We wrote often while I roamed around Europe, and she flew to California when I returned. The sexual part of our new history was over, but we were still so glad to see each other again.
I introduced her to Phil Strayhorn. At first, they scared each other.
She knew him more as a writer: had read every one of his "Midnight in Hollywood" columns in Esquire and loved them. When she heard he was my best friend and that I wanted her to meet him, she rented the first Midnight film. And turned it off, shouting "Enough!" after ten minutes.
"What does he look like?"
"You mean does he look like Bloodstone? No, he's sort of middle size and balding."
"But it's so violent, Weber! I've seen horror films before, but that was the worst. How about that part where the dogs eat the child?"
"That's from Hieronymus Bosch, 'The Garden of Earthly Delights.' Most of his worst scenes come from famous paintings or books he reads. Did I tell you Phil graduated summa with a double major in Physics and Art History? For years the only thing he wanted to do was restore paintings."
"How did he end up in horror films?"
"A month before we graduated he decided he wanted to make movies."
He thought she was too good to be true.
"Phil, please go out there and talk to her!"
"I'm making the salad." He wouldn't look at me.
"You're not making salad, you're hiding. Don't forget I was your roommate for four years."
"That's true, Weber, she's pretty, she's rich, and kind? Bullshit."
"She is. Word of honor."
"She knows I make the Midnight films? That I play Bloodstone? You told her?"
"I told her everything. You write 'em, direct 'em, act in 'em. . . . Now give me the fucking salad and go talk to her!"
They fell in love over the dog, I think. A black Chinese Shar-Pei named Flea. Phil called them "sharpies."
On their first formal date, he took Sasha to Beverly Center to see the new film by the Taviani brothers. While they were riding the escalator up to that monstrous beehive of a mall, a bunch of teenage girls recognized "Bloodstone" and mobbed him for autographs. He was always nice about that, but they got pushy and demanding. It reached the point where, grabbing Sasha's hand, he just ran. The kids followed until Phil pulled a few quick moves and ducked them into a pet shop.
I know the store because a hamster there costs about as much as dinner at Spago. But one of them (they later disagreed over who) saw the little black pile of wrinkles in a corner cage.
One of the oldest homilies I know is don't buy a dog from a pet store because they're inevitably sick. But Phil said he'd never seen anything like that and wasn't it great? Sasha said it looked like a piece of dehydrated fruit: drop water on it and it'd blow up to full size. Phil didn't laugh. It was the most peculiar animal he'd ever seen. He paid with a credit card and picked the creature up after the film.
It sat on the back seat of the car as regal and still as a Bugatti hood ornament – until it threw up on Sasha's suede purse. When they got back to Phil's, the puppy continued vomiting – for hours. They took it to an all-night veterinarian who said it was only nerves: getting used to a new life.
Home again, they ended up singing quietly any song they thought might calm it. Sasha said in the middle of "Yesterday" Phil came up with the name Flea.
When do people cross the line to love? Wake one morning not only with the full taste of it on the tongue, but the sureness the flavor will stay as long as we work to keep and appreciate it?
Phil said it differently. To him, you opened your mouth one astounding moment and, with the first unexpected word, realized you were suddenly able to speak and understand an entirely new language, one you'd had no previous knowledge of.
"You know when you travel in another country how you pick up some words or phrases to get by? 'Donnez-moi le pain,' things like that. This language doesn't work that way. You either know it completely in an instant or you never know it at all. There aren't any Berlitz phrase books, and you can't pick it up on the streets. There are no streets where these words are used.