Violet was altogether charmed by the idea of “keeping” me, and for a span so was I. It’s not easy to denounce pampering no matter how kenneled up you start to feel. So I donned the Chinese silk pajamas, shaved more often than was necessary, tried different fruit combinations in the juicer (her parents’ hesitant wedding gift), and when toward evening I grew punchy, I would sometimes read aloud to myself of infant mortality patterns in Southern Asia or of Uzbek shamanism from the scholarly journals my wife stacked like furtive beaver mags in her closet. A day would perish by a kind of melting process. Never fully awake, I found it the most natural thing to slither into bed whenever Violet came in. Dinner was brought to me on a tray.
Still, it was a purely expository interlude, like the tumbling calendar leaves of an old movie. A vague fragrance of bed linen followed me everywhere and I started to cut myself up while shaving. Violet crayoned in my silences with the records she brought home by the armload; guaguancos and sambas, gamlans and cane flutes. Soon my nastiness was uncontainable.
“No,” I shouted, “I don’t want you to run me a fucking bath!”
Poor confounded Violet. I was worse than one of her students. It was a larger sample that was missing. I needed to hear someone else’s thoughts and opinions.
I had a friend who lived in Tuna Canyon, as yet a lightly populated zone. His place was up high near an air force radar tracking station and you could step out on his deck to look over dark sky and water and say, “It’s a tuna moon-a tonight.” The sun was direct all day long, could make things pretty stifling in the greenhouse; you misted yourself along with the plants. My friend’s business was illegal horticulture. Opium poppies, psilocybe mushrooms, Hawaiian wood rose, like that. He also brokered smuggled tropicals (even orchid collectors have their intrigues), and serviced an impressively wide market for bootleg roses. That’s right. Next time you buy one of those boxed hybrids, look at the little medallion it wears: ASEXUAL REPRODUCTION OF THIS PATENTED PLANT WITHOUT LICENSE IS PROHIBITED.
So I was up there one day singing my usual blues as I watched Marsh feed seedlings with an eyedropper.
“Frankly,” he said, “I don’t get all this static you’re putting out. She’s a bloody gem.”
“But, Marsh, I live like an invalid.”
“Exactly. That’s what paradise is all about in this town. Those Bel Air grandees spend all kinds of money and effort to achieve that state of utter helplessness. So get with the program, son, join the party.”
Okay, paradise meant having your own nutritional counselor and a Central American refugee to pumice your bunions. This was not an insight I could use.
“I daydream about auto accidents.” Taking a defensive sip from my rum collins. “I call up dentists and make imaginary appointments.”
“You should stop fighting your own normalcy, that’s my opinion.”
“It’s consumerism. Nothing but appearances.”
Finally Marsh told me to cheer up or shut up, I was disturbing the plants. I decided to do both.
But three days later Violet’s car was stolen from her campus parking space and we were plunged into a time of internal exile. Huddled in the apartment like a couple of Soviet dissidents, we developed a conversation of codes after wearying each other with previously covert intimacies. Traditional doubts, the plucking of questions — they belonged in this space. But a sense of artificiality was best for both of us. It was simpler to play hand after hand of five hundred rummy. We were such lazy people.
“The only things you can fix are machines,” Violet said after another immaterial call to the police.
I adored her sloppy exasperation, the rabbity twitching of muscle pads along her jaw as she ground her molars. I did not like to think about how much she’d invested in me.
“My darling,” I hummed.
“I mean it,” she said.
The timer dinged for the cheese pudding she had in the oven, and then I said something about what was one more missing Fiat, they were busy keeping the streets safe for plutocracy. Violet sometimes worried that I was in love with my own mouth. She stood up with such sadness in her loose arms and…well, certain things do not wish to be described.
Violet garnished our plates with sprigs of cilantro and carrot coins and I dealt another hand. That night we went for a walk, held hands, saw a huge man playing on his lawn with a turtle. He called it by name. Fritz. We held hands and looked at the stars (but only out of the corners of our eyes) and we wished for something. We were always wishing for something.
When I first came to L.A. I didn’t know anyone. It was summer, dead center. I sunned on bus stop benches. I looked at women browsing in drugstores. Burritos three times a day. Hunting for toilets. Mumbling into the wind. I wanted a job at the zoo. A Mexican in gumboots was hosing out the lemur cages and he laughed when I asked about it.
“You got to take a test,” he sad, and wrote his initials on the back wall with spray.
Violet, at this same time, was involved with someone ten years younger. Fragile. A troubled homelife. He was a lifeguard at a condominium tower in Marina Del Rey.
“I sort’ve liked it when he tied me up,” Violet told me. “An enthusiastic kid. Such bright black eyes. It felt like a camping trip or something. He’d want to show me every knot.”
Other men stressed her, but she always felt cool inside with him. Violet, sober by profession, don’t forget, distrusts flash and style (translation: anyone else’s), and he was so impervious, so very much without either, even wearing turquoise glasses and glistening with cocoa butter in his high white chair.
So imagine, please, her grim contorted Violet-like sense of shock when, on a weekend she was visiting her parents, he let himself in with the key she’d given him and slashed all her clothes, cut careful triangular holes in the crotch of all her panties.
She moved to the Valley, leaving no forwarding address.
It took some time to adjust to the ephemeral ambience, to find an empty socket in the fast-buck, dollhouse economy. But not that long. I had a two-room efficiency with fifties Sputnik furnishings, and thirty-two hours a week at a sporting goods warehouse. I was doing all right. With my off-time I did as little as possible: listened to the all-news station on the radio, began to keep a scrupulously trite diary. Rain arrived with the fall. I asked myself, Is this the way that Arthur Bremer felt?
Violet was in therapy at this point, compiling pills. She says now that the whole thing was an indulgence, like splurging at the dress shop, but I don’t know. At least she had a woman doctor. The doctor had a degree from the Sorbonne and a boundless faith in chemicals. Violet had such severe depression that she lost eighteen pounds and sensation in the ends of her fingers.
“The terrible thing,” she says now, “was that I’d look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘You’ve never been more beautiful.’”
Her mother came to live with her for a week, went home in tears. Violet stopped filling the prescriptions. After a while she could type again. The thing that brought her out of it was buying that car. The pine-green little scooper that slid us down Mulholland Drive.
Marsh and I talked security systems and watched the sun come up across from his deck. Marsh knew a guy who installed lawn sensors. He’d installed them for a French movie director who moved out two weeks later. Dobermans were more popular than ever. And someone had just opened a gun shop on West Wilshire, filigreed shotguns with pump action.
“I’ve got the flyboys right over here,” Marsh said. “My security comes free of charge.”
There was a sick beige light over the oil drum half we’d roasted a neighbor’s goat (strictly legit, a gift) on. A long night in the hills burning eucalyptus wood. I considered eventual billboards: HOW MUCH SECURITY CAN YOU AFFORD?