In such a lunar light, the chasm that I dug between myself and Clea upon her mother’s death can now be seen as an all-the-more-ruthless act: I had committed the paramount sin of abandoning my own kind. As blue bloods, slightly inbred, we could only flourish in the absence of adversity — how could it have been otherwise? We had always enjoyed divine protection, and there was nothing in the rule book about those (parental) gods succumbing to Death.
I remembered, because at the time, I’d frantically — and futilely — scanned the index.
I didn’t see her until my thirty-seventh year, when we ran into each other at an AA meeting in a Brentwood church. (Clea used to say they should just drop the A and call it Alcoholics—“There is no real anonymity.”) She had three months of sobriety and didn’t look well.
Ten years ago, around the time I returned from the Bay Area and moved to Venice, Clea began making a name for herself as an actress. Her career hadn’t taken off but she’d done respectable work in small, respectable films, even winning an award at a prestigious festival in Berlin. For a while there were pictures of her in magazines — the lighting always seemed to emphasize the luminous bone structure and hooded eyes inherited from her mom — hobnobbing with pals, other groovy sons and daughters of icons, like Natasha Gregson Wagner or Charlie Sheen. I read all the interviews and saw all the movies (they screened mostly at the Sunset 5), following Clea’s career with a kindly stalker’s eye. She was good, sometimes very good. In a few films, she wasn’t fully dressed. All right, I’ll admit there was something slightly morbid about my attentions; maybe that’s not the right word. I flirted with the idea of contacting her but never did. I think — no, I’m certain — I was putting off a reunion until I had a degree of success to call my own. I wanted some measure of achievement before we broke bread or wine or heroin or whatever it was she wanted to break. I was actually quite amazed this almost pathologically shy girl not only chose to become an actress but had made real headway. I was also reminded — as if by the whisper of our old shorthand — that kids like us were genetically programmed to fly straight into the flames of their flamboyant heritage. Call it one of our fatal, masochistic charms.
Her career blipped along a few years before dropping off the showbiz radar. There were bitchy murmurs of drug intake — the town had a great sense of rumor — and the usual gossipy, unimaginative “like mother, like daughter” psychologizing overheard at clubs, screenings, and premiere parties. I can remember Clea’s unfocused face staring from the cover of a newsstand tabloid, feeling all noble about declining to make purchase (I leafed through instead). A few more mentions in the press — random, unjazzy catalogues of a tailspin, because by then she didn’t even rate the front page — before relegation to obscurity. I went through a big Howard Stern phase and for a long time part of me listened with perverse dread for the inevitable sado-dissection riff. Thankfully, it never came.
When I saw her at the church on San Vicente, Clea’s smile, lovely and bright, erased all the years — suddenly, we were twelve again. We sat beside one another and stood for the closing prayer, holding hands. After the meeting, overcome, I walked her to the courtyard and breathlessly made amends, confessing my shame and embarrassment over how I’d handled Roosevelt Chandler’s death (as if that childish faux pas had been the great traumatizing event of Clea’s life, surpassing even the loss of her mother). But she had no recollection of my cowardice or how I’d fled, even going so far as to say I had always been her port in the storm. “The best boyfriend I ever had — the best” was how she put it, with the sweetest, slinkiest wink. Upon absolution, I experienced the proverbial weight literally lift from my shoulders. With boundless affection and enormous gratitude, I tearfully asked her to dinner. Her eyes crinkled up and she hugged me, saying how sweet I was. Then, saucily: “No more confessions.”
We went for sushi across from Dutton’s. She’d been favoring her right arm — it relaxed in a silken makeshift sling — and midway through the meal I inquired what happened. She said that the last time she “used,” she’d nodded out and fallen asleep on it, sustaining nerve damage. I’d heard of that sort of thing happening to addicts but it was a keen shock it had befallen my precious Clea. She said a doctor weaned her off the heroin with pills and she was doing “tons” of acupuncture and physical therapy. Yoga was also a help and she’d recovered “about 70 percent range of motion.” When I asked where she was living, Clea said excitedly, “An amazing motel in Beverly Hills.” I told her I knew the place, over on Reeves (“Bertie,” she interjected, “I so want to write a reality show about the people who live there!”) — I remembered it from rare incursions to Leif Farragon’s south-of-Wilshire turf on my silver, high-handled ten-speed. As she spoke, I cruelly surveyed the parched plains of skin, flaky and blemished, and plumbed Clea’s half-dead eyes. Eyes that jauntily seduced, working overtime to camouflage the damage done through the years gone by.
~ ~ ~
WE FINALLY CARRIED OUT AN affair that began with overheated second-story kisses and ended precipitately (from my side, anyway) with a loss of innocence having more to do with the death of flesh than its celebration. I was squeamish when Clea admitted beforehand to having hep C, even though I had a lot of similarly afflicted friends. I’d done my homework, learning it was difficult to contract the disease through the sex act. To be honest, I’m not so sure how I’d have behaved even on discovering the virus could be transmitted by a single kiss. You see, I believed it was my fate to sleep with this woman — our renewed intimacies could not, would not, be thwarted.
The entanglement, while brief, had that most shocking outcome: we became best of friends. It was like one of those awful sitcoms you love to hate. We behaved like girlfriends (or boyfriends, depending on mood), becoming mutual sounding boards for all manner of crises across the spiritual, emotional, and carnal divides. We AA’d three times a week, and I had the great pleasure of watching her grow physically and mentally stronger. When, after nine months, I gave Clea her one-year sobriety cake, we bawled like babes. The fact that this was the longest-running relationship of either of our lives combined with the Solomonic certitude it would be a terrible mistake to shoehorn ourselves into coupledom seemed to bless our messy union with the platonic promise of longevity a simple marriage could never confer. Clea Fremantle Chandler and Bertram Valentine Krohn truly were till death they do part. The unexpected wisdom of this unexpected development allowed us to walk the earth with a lighter step, divesting ourselves of those gloomy, decades-old self-portraits, the scowling ones reflecting how we’d failed our parents, ourselves, the world. Good-bye to all that. We time-traveled, forward and back, and there was something flat-out amazing about the two of us sitting before my fireplace on a rainy Venice night, honoring one another (and a certain dimple-chinned phantom named Leif Farragon too).
Although Clea spent money freely, living large in the way that actresses do, she consistently claimed to be broke. I never pressed for details. Assuming Roosevelt Chandler’s estate had been in reasonable order (admittedly, a lot to assume), it wouldn’t have surprised if Clea had blown through whatever provisions were made — if they had been made — a long time gone. Aside from voice-over work erratically provided by a friend with a loop group, there was no evidence she was otherwise engaged. She occasionally auditioned for those cliché gritty, comeback indie roles though nothing ever panned out; I think they brought her in mostly out of curiosity. I’m not even sure she had an agent. Once in a while Clea and her beat-up Alfa Romeo disappeared on weekends and I feared the worst. After the third or fourth vanishing, I confronted her and was relieved to learn she was off doing conventions in the heartland, meeting Roos Chandler fans and signing memorabilia for a fee.