11 September 1973
I arrived home at the beach house this evening to find Lamar there waiting. I knew from his blank eyes Cherylle had gone. “Took the white Buick,” Lamar said, his voice numbly monotone, “and everything in the house they could hock. No note, nothing.”
I poured him a drink. She was young, I said, headstrong. She’d be back soon, to apologise, wanting to be forgiven. As he left, Lamar gripped my arm fiercely. “You know,” he said evenly, “I can’t face it. If she doesn’t come back.” I reassured him. I’d lay odds I said — five days, ten at the most. Wait until the money ran out, the binge was over.
29 September 1973
Lamar looks pale and sick. He hardly sleeps, he says. He has hired a private detective to look for Cherylle. Apparently everyone at work has been most understanding. Now that Cherylle has been away for three weeks, sympathetic consolation has turned to worldly reasoning. You’re better off without her, his colleagues declare with firm logic. Think of your career — be objective — did she really fit in? Yeah, anyone could see there was something unstable there. Hell, Lamar, they said, she’s done you a favour.
But Lamar, it was obvious, would never agree. He spent more and more time at my place tirelessly rerunning the scenario of his brief courtship and marriage as if he were trying to unlock some code the memories contained. A bleak dawn often broke on these disconsolate monologues: me in a half-doze; Lamar, his head in his hands, eyes staring emptily out to sea as if searching the sombre distance for an answer.
5 October 1973
10.30 P.M. A call from Cherylle. Would I meet her in the forecourt of a filling station not far from my house. Ah, I thought, I am about to be enrolled as mediator. However, Cherylle was proud and unrepentant. The Buick was parked at the kerb. Her boyfriend leaned against it just out of earshot. Cherylle looked more wild and unkempt. She gave me the keys to the car and an envelope of money. “Tell him to keep away,” she said. “I owe him nothing now.” I was puzzled and a little angry. “What about an explanation?” I said. “Why did you do it?” She laughed. “Nobody could take that kind of a relationship,” she said. “I was like some kind of dog, a pet dog. It would have killed me.”
When I got home I called Lamar and told him about our meeting. He came right over. When he saw the car and the money he broke down for the first time. I took him home, told him to get some sleep and said I’d be round the next day. He behaved like the victim of some appalling accident, a focal point for massive stresses.
14 October 1973
Much of my spare time over the last few days has been spent with Lamar. Our conversation on all other topics except Cherylle is desultory and half-hearted. There has been no further word from her.
Lamar is driven on remorselessly by his obsession. Now that her presence has been removed from him he hoards items of her clothing like religious treasures, the banal relics of a consumer saint. He carries around with him a cheap Zippo lighter engraved with her name, and a disposable powder compact which he is forever touching and examining like some demented votary.
We drive around at night to the bars they visited, in the vague hope of spotting her. Every distant blonde is excitedly approached until the lack of resemblance becomes clear. His moods on these occasions oscillate wildly, a leaping seismograph of elation and despair.
One day we drove back to the beach we had visited. Lamar sat in what he felt was the exact spot, raking the sand with his fingers like an insane archaeologist, finding only the cellophane wrapper of a cigarette pack and the plastic top of a tube of sun oil. Then two nights ago he asked me to come with him to Lake Folsom, where he and Cherylle had spent a weekend. We wandered aimlessly through the resort complex and then went down to the marina. There, Lamar stopped to talk to an old boatman who had rented them a cruiser for the day. He said he remembered Cherylle and asked for her. When Lamar told him what had happened he spat bitterly into the lake. He scrutinised the ripples he had caused for a few seconds and then said, “Yeah. I seen ’em all.” Then he paused. “I seen ’em all here,” he went on. “Fame, fornication and tears. That’s all there is.”
Lamar seemed profoundly affected by this piece of folk-wisdom and repeated the remark approvingly to himself several times on the journey home.
17 October 1973
A surprise invitation to Lamar’s for dinner. There were just the two of us. He tells me that after considerable thought he has eventually filed for divorce. He seems calmer but the brimming self-assurance that was there has not returned. The old solidity, too, seems a thing of the past; there is a slight lack of ease — a convalescent’s awkwardness — in his movements. After dinner he brought out all the shiny photos he had taken of Cherylle. He flicked through them once and then burnt them. He pointed to a slowly curling Kodachrome. “Cherylle, that day at the beach … remember the swimsuit?” Then he smiled, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s absurdly melodramatic, but at least I feel it’s over now.”
We went out later to buy some cigarettes. On our way back we saw a girl in a yellow window crying over a typewriter. “Think Cherylle’s crying for me?” he asked harshly. I said that she might be. “No, she’s not,” he said firmly. “Not Cherylle.”
23 October 1973
I was woken early this morning by the police. They said Lamar wanted me. Outside, he sat in the back seat of a police car. “They’ve found her,” he said. “They want me to identify. Will you come with me?”
Cherylle’s decomposing body had been found in a shack at an abandoned dude ranch out in the desert near a place called Hi Vista. There was no sign of the hippie-actor friend. Apparently it had all the indications of a half-fulfilled suicide pact. There was a note with both their signatures, but the police suspected that after Cherylle had pulled the trigger her lover had panicked, had second thoughts about joining her and had fled.
The deep irony was not lost on Lamar. He stood unmovingly as the policeman pulled back the blanket and there was only a slight huskiness in his voice as he identified her body.
2 November 1973
Lamar has just moved back to his flat. He had been staying with me since the inquest. The hippie has still not been tracked down. Lamar has been a moody and taciturn companion, not surprisingly, but he is not the broken man I expected him to be. There is a kind of fatalistic resignation about him, he talks less obsessively about Cherylle and I’m glad to say seems to have abandoned his mementoes. However, it has to be said that he is nothing like the person he was a few short months ago and he told me yesterday he planned to resign from the company. He keeps saying that Cherylle couldn’t have been happy, so it was just as well that she ended it all. “She couldn’t have been happy,” he will say. “Not Cherylle. If she couldn’t be happy with me, how could she possibly be happy with anybody else?” To Lamar’s numbed brain the logic of that statement appears incontrovertible.