“Feh,” Joe groaned, waving his hand. “That one’s harmless. Believe me. I probably shouldn’t say this in the company of nice ladies like you two, but Jack Parson hasn’t exactly fomented a reputation as a ladies’ man in this town.”
Eustace’s face paled and her cherry-red mouth formed a broad O. “You don’t mean…”
“I don’t know the old fellow that well,” Joe said. “I don’t have the hardest evidence here, but word gets around in Hollywood. You screw up and everybody knows it. And glory be, just about everybody screws up out here.”
“Some worse than others,” Grace commented, half to herself.
“How do you mean, Gracie?” Eustace leaned in, eager for something juicy.
“It’s just a strange place,” Grace said, her eyes fixed on her glass. “You hear all kinds of things that make Picture Show look like a fat pack of lies. In the magazines, everyone is just so happy to be here. Playground of the gods, and all that. But I haven’t met very many happy people, Aunt Eustace. Most of the people I’ve met seem…broken, somehow.”
“Half of ‘em are dipsomaniacs, a quarter of them faggots,” Joe grunted, shaking his head. “Sure, there’s crime. A few bodies’ve been buried. But hell — pardon me, ladies — but seriously, my old man worked the iron mines in Michigan in the nineties and you know what? The men running that show were a bunch of crooks, too. Like I said: industry. Just keep your nose clean, Gracie. You do your work and go home at the end of the day. Stay away from the vultures. You’ll be fine, darling. Just fine.”
Just fine, she mouthed. She didn’t believe it.
11
With one of my cigarettes clutched between his fingers and a thousand-yard stare ahead of him at the 101, Jake exhaled noisily and flicked his ash out the window.
“We could write a screenplay about this,” he said dreamily. “You and me. It’s some story already.”
I was driving, a rental from the last century we’d picked up for a little more than twice what I expected to pay. Good old California. I turned the volume knob down on the ancient tape deck radio and said, “Have at it — you have my blessing.”
“Sorry, man,” he came back. “I guess you’ve got a personal line in all this.”
I said: “Yeah, I guess I do.”
He tossed the smoke out the window, and I glanced in the rearview mirror, scanning for cops. Maybe Jake forgot how serious they were about tossing butts in Southern California, but I sure hadn’t. They didn’t screw around when it came to fire hazards.
“So tell me,” he said, rolling the window back up. “What the hell happened?”
“When?”
“With your wife, man. What’s the story there?”
“She left me. You know that.”
“It’s about all I know. What with all this shit, seems like there’s more to it, you think?”
There was. Plenty more. Truth was, I’d been married to a sociopath for years and pretended I didn’t know it. I did know it, though. I just didn’t want to know it.
“She’s out of my life,” I said tersely.
“Not anymore she’s not. I mean, she’s out, but she keeps cropping up.”
“We’ll be in the Valley pretty soon,” I said. “Traffic’s not bad, considering.”
“Yeah,” Jake said, taking the hint. “Considering.”
If there was a Knucklehead Hall of Fame back in Boston, I’d have a revered place on the wall. I was never a world-class fuckup — that’s a different hall of fame altogether — but I’d done my share of significantly stupid things over the years that knocked me down a peg or two to plain old knucklehead status. Marrying Helen Bryan was chief among them.
Maybe that’s not fair. Marrying her I can forgive myself for. Sticking around? That’s another matter.
After we made it official I worked on an impractical English Literature degree and she talked about all the things she wanted to do but never had the motivation to actually execute. After about six months up there, my wife clammed up on me. Stopped talking to me. Just shut me out. Then she started running around with a new friend, who happened to be male and liked to take her out to fancy restaurants and late-night movies. I complained about it, and she threatened to divorce me if I was going to make a big deal about it. I relented. See what I mean? Grade A Knucklehead.
Things went from bad to mind-bogglingly shitty from there. By then I knew damn well that I was being cuckolded, as they used to say, but I just swallowed that pill and immersed myself in my graduate work, knowing it would never amount to anything since I wasn’t planning on continuing with it once they handed me a diploma. I tried to write a novel. It didn’t go anywhere so I gave it up. I got to drinking a little more than I ought to have. Then I got to drinking a lot more than I ought to have. The booze drove me into a hole and it drove my wife even deeper into the arms of Mr. Wonderful. Then one night I got a call from the Norfolk County lockup. My bride was being held after her beau got pulled over in Brookline and the cops found a gram of blow in the trunk. A little while and a warrant later, they found an ounce in Helen’s purse, too.
I bailed her out to the tune of five grand. The charges didn’t stick. She literally begged me on her knees to forgive her, to put it all behind us. Knucklehead that I was, that’s just what I did. And when it turned out she was pregnant and we both knew, given the coldness of our marital bed those last several months, that it couldn’t possibly be mine, I turned a blind eye once again while my wife quietly took care of it. As they used to say.
The Other Guy disappeared from our lives and though things didn’t exactly go back to normal, at least she stayed around. I quit drinking. I never asked about the coke and she never brought it up. We ate supper together, watched television. Went to bed at a reasonable hour. It was tense, though, the way so much was said without either of us ever saying anything. The way she’d recoil if my leg accidently brushed up against her in our bed at night.
And then, just like that, she was gone. She didn’t take much, enough for a long vacation, but there was no note, no phone call. No warning. I got an email a week later. Helen had run off to California with Other Guy Number Two. I didn’t even know about this one. She’d been a lot more careful. The divorce papers showed up in the mail within a month. I signed the waiver and sent them back, and then I went directly to the nearest package store to buy the biggest bottle of bottom shelf rotgut in the place. Inside six weeks they knew me by name there. Good morning, Mr. Woodard. Yeah — morning.
Goddamned knucklehead.
Destroyed by love and stupidity. I can’t think of an older story than that.
Florence Sommer lived in a small postwar crackerbox house in Sherman Oaks with rotting shutters and stray cats lingering arrogantly in the small side yard. I pulled the crappy rental onto the side of the street in front and enacted that age-old L.A. tradition of trying to figure out whether I could legally park there. The signs all seemed to contradict one another and even on their own didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I threw caution to the wind and left the car where I’d stopped. There wasn’t a meter, but I didn’t much care.
A doormat welcomed us by way of smiling cat faces and the legend HOPE YOU LIKE CATS! I didn’t really have an opinion about them one way or the other but felt like it was about to swing sharply. Jake rang the bell. We heard shuffling feet and a hoarse voice politely asking someone named Mr. Kitty to move out of the way. A second later the door opened and there stood a heavyset woman, mid-sixties, with a terrible blue-black dye job and a hideous sweater more cat hair than wool.