And came back to the restaurant. They came back to empty salad plates, Matty and Spada, under a speaker playing “Moondance.” The inevitable “Moondance,” the greatest hit of white wine, and in fact on the table beside the plates there stood two nearly full glasses. Spada was likewise well into some anecdote, something that had to do with the photographers out at the entrance.
If she suffered surprise, dislocation, she took care of it with a gesture. She wiped away something on the air.
As for the wine, this hadn’t been their first. Matty sensed the burring across the underside of his brains.
Intoxication, he recalled, used to work for the soothsayers. They had a swig or took a puff, and then the cosmos revealed its innards. Yeah well, not tonight. Not with the music in the background going from predictable to more so, Tony Bennett, and Spada was no help either. She allowed Matty to drive her back to the Chateau, but she offered zero to his attempts at making sense. What he had to say was mealy-mouthed, granted: Did you notice…? Was that…? Still, the woman didn’t have to spend so much of the ride looking out the window, or where the window would’ve been if he’d had the top up. When she at last turned his way, at the drop-off, she revealed less. Spada gave him the full photogenic glitter, so that Matty’s only fitting comeback could be more of the same. A grin like one billiard ball clicking off another.
He wound up with a club girl. A votive to help unveil the mystery. Over on Sunset he had no trouble scoring a serviceable bit of eye candy, but later, when they had a chance to talk, she creeped him out. When Matty found the words to describe what had happened, through the wormhole into Chinatown, the girl came back with some hand-me-down mumbo-jumbo about how the Divine always appeared in disguise. The Divine might spill its guts, but only beneath a duplicitous screen, a burning bush or the writing on the wall.
Creeped him out, utterly. In the morning Matty treated her to her favorite smoothie, but once again he found himself speaking in tongues. Out of nowhere, he announced that she would be his last club girl.
She didn’t get it anyway. She told him she already had a b.f., on tour now, playing Jim Morrison.
Matty had others he could talk to. He had a therapist, no glamour-puss, a man who worked with the industry people who didn’t buy into Scientology. He had his mom, back on Long Island, and he’d been planning to get in touch with her. He figured she needed to know about his upcoming scene as the sensitive Gestapo agent. Gestapo with a heart of gold, risking everything for the lovely half-caste who might be a spy…. And Mom, though she got her potato pancakes out of Fannie Farmer, had family that went back to the shtetls. But as soon as Matty got her on the phone, he found himself tongue-tied. He stumbled over the first euphemism, and they wound up covering old business, the danger of confusing the work with the life.
The mother asked, sympathetically: You remember Tom Cruise on Oprah? You remember him doing Mission: Impossible all over the woman’s furniture?
Mom was great, actually. She and Matty hadn’t gotten around to what he’d wanted to talk about, but they’d gotten somewhere. One good resonant pong on the sonar. By the time Matty came back on-set, by the time he slipped into his storm-trooper breeches, he knew that the person he had to do something about was Spada. This movie might change his life, and the nature of the change came down to Spada, and his mama hadn’t raised a boy who couldn’t suck it up and tell the truth when he had to. Tell it even when the person across the table was a jet-set hottie with higher billing. Spada was no more the Lord of Darkness than he was, and she could probably use a hamburger. Tonight, that’s what Matty would suggest—he’d make the invitation—burgers and blues. Tonight he’d do something about the magic between them.
Then as he and Spada headed into a joint he knew of, The Bottom Feed, why shouldn’t they pose for more pictures?
They took a moment outside the club door, enjoying the thump from inside, the tragicomic swing from A minor to B minor. They paused for the cameras, the lasers, and here it came again. The thing, the abracadabra. One moment Matty stood working up a People-worthy grin and the next he’d roiled through surf greenery into the middle of a chanting crowd.
His hair is down his shoulders (a good look for him, with these cheekbones) and he’s chanting himself, his neck straining against the weight of a cast-iron peace medallion. Around his hips runs a fat rawhide belt with a hash pipe as a buckle. The crowd sounds angry and the air smells of chemicals, part pot and part worse, and he has no idea what they’re protesting, he and this fine sistah beside him, her with the Foxy Brown ’do and the ragged jean mini. Are the two of them here about escalation or brutality? The Panthers or the Man? The Movement or the Wall? Matty can’t sort it out, especially with that projectile kiting overhead, so colorful and yet so ominous, maybe a brick and maybe a canister, kiting across the sky and trailing an elongated flicker of cartoon-candy, cartoon-crumple, psychedelia. Now he spies the psychedelics everywhere, bristle and overlap, rotoscoping, except he never signed on for something like that, Waking Life: The Sequel. He must be tripping. Spada beside him must’ve licked the same tab. What else could’ve given her such a maniacal shimmy and pop, dancing the terror down, her chant smack on the groove? What else could’ve so bugged out her eyes? Talk about cartoons, her eyes call attention to how black she’s become, practically cannibals-and-missionaries. She jerks like a Zulu.
Now he’s warning her, pointing to the sky, somehow right on the beat himself though once again he can’t be sure of the words. Pigs, gas, guns, whatever, she’s frightened yet ecstatic, her own mouth not so much moving in answer as framing a kiss, her arms spreading wide as if she wants to be an easy target, because didn’t she and her surfer boy come together precisely in order to defy the machinery of death, the weapons of hate? And they go into the clinch sloppy with inebriation…
So he came to. Popped out of the wormhole about as much in the moment as a man can be. He was naked, Matty. Flushed with effort, slick with sweat.
He lay stretched out on the king-size, in her suite at the Chateau. Out beyond the gauzy inner curtains dawn was coming on. On Spada’s side of the bed an iPod setup was playing wordless Eurodisco, just audible, a weave of synth and soprano as dense and exquisite as the woman’s nakedness, here calling to mind a Sicilian olive, there suggesting Niger River clay. Truth to tell, though, Matty wasn’t certain he’d seen such things outside of the movies. Maybe the olive in The Godfather, the clay in Roots.