Lamar, however, claims he spotted it instantly and it was this he found irresistibly attractive. I should say that Lamar has since become my closest friend out here on the Coast. Looking back through my diary I see I first described him as “a characteristically butch American businessman. Late thirties, handsome, tanned and stocky. Tough as a hill. Self-confidence surrounds him like a force field. The youngest vice-president in the company, responsible for sales and marketing. They say AOD will be his before the decade’s out.” Now that I know him I would say that this is only partially true. Lamar still exudes this brash ease but it’s something of a façade. He is no typical VP; he works hard at his job because that is all his background and education have trained him to do. He has his idiosyncrasies and I find him both stimulating and sad.
For example, the fact that I write — albeit commercially — for a living has prompted him to attack the cultural lacunae in his life with the same vigour he applies to chase after contracts. He sees me as some sort of intellectual guru, a source to be tapped and exploited. Quite early on in our friendship he suggested we read through Shakespeare together “because they say he’s the best.” To feed this new enthusiasm I gave him reading lists and drew up programmes for his educational self-improvement. He proved to be a sensitive and intelligent student, surprisingly perceptive. He would question me so endlessly I felt exhausted, victim of some nightmare seminar, dizzy from the rapacity with which he plundered my brain.
His friendship with Cherylle did not affect the growth of our own. Indeed the three of us often went out together. And as the two of them became swiftly more infatuated, my presence paradoxically seemed all the more essential. I became the talisman of their affair, as if they needed the constant reassuring presence of the catalyst that had started the reaction off.
I have, however, tried to talk to Lamar about the wisdom of this wedding — gently councilled delay. Cherylle is an incandescent but mercurial character, wayward and, I suspect, deeply uncertain of herself. But Lamar will not listen. He is in love, he insists, wholly in love for the first time in his life.
11 August 1973
The wedding. Lamar and Cherylle get riotously drunk. At the civic hall Cherylle arrived in thigh-length suede boots, jeans and a bright-yellow windcheater. She dresses in a bizarre series of fashions — sometimes glaring lack of taste, sometimes shining with demure chicness. Hardly the wife for a rising vice-president, I would have thought, but Lamar seems to accept her extravagances with a wide-eyed, ingenuous thrill.
Now I know her better I take Cherylle’s lurid anthology of styles to be evidence of a chronic insecurity in her personality. She teeters on the brink of moods with the practised equilibrium of the perennially schizoid. Lamar, somehow, responds to this. His marriage to Cherylle is the one publicly irrational event in his entirely ordered life. He told me once he understood her perfectly, could predict her moves and responses with a Pavlovian confidence. He underestimates Cherylle, I think, and I am a little concerned. He has never displayed such verve and elation, but this is no Platonic union of opposites. Lamar’s efficient diurnal parade has broken up to join Cherylle’s Mardi Gras — and it likes the headlong pace.
14 August 1973
Working steadily for the last two days in the beach house. Windless, lustrous weather. Postcard from Lamar and Cherylle honeymooning in Mexico. Lamar’s neat printed script overlaid at the foot of the card by some illegible felt-tip scrawl from Cherylle. Lamar says I would “love the art.” Is he being ironic? I suspect it’s a sop to our abandoned educational sessions — maybe he’s feeling guilty. They didn’t stand much chance against the potent lure of Cherylle’s callow, hard-edged embrace.
18 August 1973
Lamar and Cherylle returned this morning, tanned and restless, deeply bored by Mexico. They stayed for lunch. Their evident intoxication with each other is off-putting, to say the least. Lamar was unshaven and in a T-shirt. There were bags under his eyes. I’ve never seen him like this.
Their self-absorption has its curious aspects too. Judging from the hints Lamar dropped about their days in Mexico, it seems that it only functions non-destructively when observed by a third party. He alluded to uncouth nights of violent, manic rows and equally violent and manic reconciliations. He calls it “kamikaze love” and describes it as a mixture of “laughter and pistol shots”—which is quite good for Lamar. He claims he finds it entirely invigorating.
I suspect I am to be enrolled as resident third party: token voyeur of their lambent encounters. I’m not sure I welcome the role; I sense this self-destruct mechanism poised inside Cherylle and it makes me uncomfortable. For example, she was quiet and affectionate all afternoon; then she swam worryingly far out to sea. “Trying for Catalina Island” was all she said when she returned exhausted. They left about eight in the evening heading for some dim bar on the Strip.
19 August 1973
To the downtown offices of AOD to present the first draft of my package. Looked in on Lamar but his office was empty. His secretary said you could never tell when he’d be in these days. Over lunch with some of his colleagues I found that Cherylle was the prime topic of conversation. There’s a certain smug satisfaction evinced over the changes she’s wrought in Lamar; normally the paradigm of the totally committed company man, he now delegates more and more, and his faultless punctuality has degenerated to amnesiac randomness.
23 August 1973
Drove up the coast with Lamar and Cherylle in their new car, a preposterously large white Buick convertible. An unusual vernal, sappy feel to the day — all the colours seem unfledged and new. Cherylle was at her most entrancing, telling us stories of her attempts to break into the movies. Looking at Lamar, I see devotion lodged in every feature. He seems not to listen to her words, but rather watches her forming them — noting every smile, eye gleam, pout and hair-toss like some fervent anthropologist.
On the beach Cherylle changed into a skimpy scarlet bikini and we took photographs of each other. Lamar had given her an expensive camera as a present and we played with its delayed exposure device, taking endless reels of the three of us in absurd vaudevillian poses, throughout which Cherylle flirted shamelessly with me. Lamar — a little subdued, I thought — later moved up to the dunes with the telephoto lens. I saw him up there, obsessively sniping shots of her as she oiled herself and sunbathed.
When we got back home I found myself drained and exhausted from the sun and the fervid high spirits. Lamar and Cherylle wanted me to come and “cruise bars.” Lately their favourite pastime, it lasts all night — an intoxicating carnival snaking through the seamier side of the city. I begged off — I scarcely had the energy for a shower. I don’t know how they can keep this pace up.
4 September 1973
Lamar phoned and asked in a morose voice if he could come round and have a talk. Alone. I hadn’t seen him or Cherylle since that day at the beach and I wondered what was going on. He looked something like his old self — neater, back in a suit. Apparently word had come down from the higher echelons that the honeymoon was over. The postures of his body, however, struck attitudes of despair and gloom. Things were not going well. Cherylle hated to be on her own now that he had to be regularly at work. On one of their bar cruises they had met a young hippie-actor friend of Cherylle. He had stayed the night and was still there. “He’s a remarkable sort of guy,” Lamar insisted, unconvincingly. “Only I wish he and Cherylle didn’t laugh so much together.” Kick him out, I advised. No, Lamar said, no. Cherylle wouldn’t like that. My heart went out to him. We sat on and talked a bit longer, Lamar feigning unconcern, but with his strong shoulders slumped, his kamikaze love in a screaming death dive, the end of his fabulous amours, his brief bright horizon dimmed by valedictory clouds.