Mystery Girl: A Novel (17 page)

“What was the deal with this other girl?”

“Ah, well, there we have to dig a bit deeper into old Zed’s skull. The man was a great aficionado of the ménage à trois. I mean, we’ve all done it of course, after a few too many, or just enough, eh?”

I nodded and barked out a laugh.

“But for Zed it was more. Some kind of primal drama. He and the wife were always on the hunt, bringing girls back to the castle. I was
living there too, you see, for a few months, as a kind of court jester. So I got used to seeing them come and go. But this one girl stayed. She was different, special. Her name escapes me. She was Mexican, they’d met her working a club, coat check or go-go dancer or something. She’d come up rough as I recall, beatings, booze, the lot. She was the same age as Mona but already hustling, working as a taxi-dancer downtown, waltzing and fox-trotting with the Asian suits, no doubt giving hand jobs round back as well.”

“What happened to her, do you know?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? When poor old Zed punched his ticket, she disappeared, maybe back to Mexico. I was well out of it by then. Got a bit dark for me. I like a drink now and again, and a toke as well, and I did plenty of acid back in the day, and I’ve been known to sniff a bit of coke if you’re offering, but still, I’m a creature of the light, and Zed was a dark prince up on his hill. I got a job touring with a revival of
My Fair Lady
and was in Miami when I heard. I never saw sweet Mona again. And the other girl, poof! But I remember she was a beauty, too. Funny, they looked a bit alike. People used to mistake them for sisters, which gave Zed a thrill. Still, it was more than fun and games for her. It was love.”

“With Zed?”

“Perhaps in fatherly way. But I think it was Mona she truly loved.”

40

I CALLED SOLAR LATE
at night. He’d been released into his mother’s care, on condition that he agree to drop our “case,” and wanted to hear my reports when he could sit on the phone without disturbance or suspicious ears. It was hard to imagine many eager spies: my evidence consisted of rambling anecdotes gleaned from vague sources and a few obscure, forgotten movies. And my dreams. He insisted on detailed reports of my dreams along with any associations I
might have to aid in interpretation. This, he assured me, was where the really choice nuggets were hidden, the clues I discovered without knowing I had found them, which my interlocutors had revealed without intending to, or withheld without even knowing they knew.

In the meantime, my place had become a clubhouse, with empty beers marshaled on the coffee table and dishes stacked in the sink. The idea was that Milo and MJ were looking after me, but in practice it was a holiday for them, eating my ice cream, sprawled in front of
Come Drink with Me
(1966), King Hu’s kung fu masterpiece. Milo brought over his ancient, dusty VCR to watch
Succubi!,
but after we plugged it in and made popcorn, we found another tape already jammed inside. So it remained there, blinking 12:00 forever, while we poked it occasionally with a butter knife. If Lala came back now, she’d divorce me immediately.

“How’s Detective Whacko?” Milo said as I hung up the phone. MJ snoozed as the movie played lushly, swift bodies in the bamboo forest at night. I reached for the ice cream and he handed me the empty container.

“The whole quart?” I asked.

“It was about to melt. MJ ate most of it, anyway.”

“Right.” I flopped down on the couch with her between us. “He’s fine. He’s not so whacko.”

“They lock him in at night.”

“He’s home at his mom’s now.”

“That’s sweet. How old is he, fifty?” He opened a beer and tossed the cap toward the empty ice cream quart. It ricocheted across the room. “Hey, don’t misunderstand me. This is the best job you ever had. I’m jealous.”

“Well, we can’t all handle the life-and-death pressures you deal with. Speaking of which, did you fix the VCR?”

Looking deeply hurt, Milo made a show of pushing the buttons a few times. He banged the top with a beer bottle. Then he gave up.

“The thing is,” I told him, “I am kind of fascinated with these people, Mona and Zed. I feel like that’s the life I originally set out for,
artists wandering the earth and all. Somehow I ended up like this instead, a boring, pathetic loser.”

“The only thing pathetic and boring about your life is you.”

“Thanks. I feel a lot better.”

“Seriously. It’s like the deadly art of Zen. You see the glass as half empty,” he said, setting his bottle on the table before us.

“It’s totally empty.”

“Ah, but that’s your perception, my child.” With a flourish, he inverted the bottle. A few drops fell on my rug. “I see it as full… of air.”

“Or shit. What’s your point?”

“Yes, that chick and her old man were cool, interesting, fascinating people who had wild, kinky sex, traveled everywhere, and made awesome art while you’ve done none of those things. But they’re dead. Because that’s what happens. The cool die off. The boring and pathetic go on forever. Now get the bong. We’ve got a movie to finish.”

As it happens, Milo snored through the end of
Come Drink with Me.
I too slept deep that night, and woke up late, confused by dreams in which Lala and Mona, both dead, were sending me annoying emails from the beyond. Although I felt foolish, I couldn’t help going to my dusty office to see. There was nothing besides a message from Dr. Parker that had arrived early that morning. It said he had something urgent to discuss with me and would be grateful if I could stop by and see him as soon as possible. He’d be in his office at Green Haven.

“What do you think he wants?” I asked Milo, who was in the same spot on the couch as the prior evening only now he was sipping coffee instead of beer. MJ, I dimly recalled, had woken up and left in the night after an angry text from the wife.

“The Doc? He’s probably pissed. He found out you were helping Inspector Coo-Coo stir up trouble like he warned you not to, going around and talking to all those weirdos and playing investigator.”

“You’re probably right.” I poured coffee and looked for milk in the
fridge, foolishly. “But he will have to wait. I’m having tea with a warlock today.”

41

ANYWAY, THAT’S WHAT JERRY
called him, I didn’t actually address him as such. I called him Kevin. He had designed the costumes and sets for Zed Naught’s last, Satanically inspired films and had been a witness to the antics up at the haunted house. He lived now in a cottage in West Hollywood, a little gingerbread confection—crooked porch, paned elvish windows, lumpy, shingled roof—tucked, on its patch of green, between a newly ugly apartment building and a pet supply megastore. He answered the door in a kimono. His longish gray hair was cut straight across the brow in a kind of Klingon do and his fingers were ringed in large stones. A hunk of amber hung on a chain around his neck.

“Hello,” he said. “You must be Samuel.” I shook the long, elegant hand, and the rocks rolled between our fingers. “Come in. Come in out of that terrible sun.”

“Thanks.” The tiny room was crammed with a lifetime of clutter, an amazing profusion of framed photos, tarnished mirrors, sculptures, collages, and other wondrous objects: a bearskin rug, a gold leaf table, a grandfather clock with a doll head on a skeleton inside its belly, an antique chest of drawers painted pink and covered with glitter, an upright piano topped by a deer antler candelabra. Against one wall leaned a giant timber cross, upside down and strung with Christmas lights. It was like an art installation designed by a team of moody thirteen-year-old girls.

“Sit, sit,” he called, waving at a low white couch heaped with silk pillows. I squatted. A tray of tea things and cookies was already set on a coffee table that consisted of a crawling marble boy with a glass plate on his back. He sat, legs crossed, in a high-backed chair and
made the tea, my eyes level with his knees. “Now then. Jerry tells me you are writing a book about Zed Naught?”

“Possibly. Did you know him well?”

“Indeed. We were quite close at one time. Quite close. As I recall, he first came to a series of lectures I copresented on Aleister Crowley. Then he asked me to work on a film he was planning. I design costumes and scenery.” He swept his ringed hand over the room like a magician’s assistant. “I also do interiors. I feel they are sets for the drama of life.”

“I see. Was he serious about the occult?”

“Mmm. As you can imagine, there are always dilettantes about, particularly in Hollywood. Yet I suppose only a somewhat jaded sensibility would seek to slake its spiritual thirst in these extremes, these high mountain streams and deep dark wells. It is the glare of the spotlight that drives us to explore the shadows. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes.”

“I’m so very glad,” he said and, leaning across the table, touched the back of my hand with a long, bony finger before pouring the tea. That one nail alone was painted black.

“Sugar? Cream?” He smiled expectantly.

“No thanks.”

He leaned back, recrossing his long, oddly hairless white thighs, flashing a subliminal glimpse of what I thought were lace panties. He sipped his tea and I sniffed mine. It had an odd perfume.

He smiled warmly. “Do you like it? It’s my own blend. I find it soothing.” I didn’t. He was a warlock after all. I didn’t want to turn into a toad. I set the cup down.

“You were saying, about Zed’s interest in the occult?”

“Yes. He proposed a series of films drawing their inspiration from the Black Mass. He’d done a lot of reading. Crowley and LaVey of course, but also Fraser, Bodin, Huysmans. He’d even studied very early parodies of the Catholic Mass, dating from the Middle Ages. They called them the Feasts of Asses.”

“I think I’ve been to a few of those.”

He smiled thinly, unamused, and I tried to redeem myself. “I’m familiar with Huysmans,” I said, dimly recalling his nineteenth-century novels.

“Ah so. We are familiar with
À Rebours?
”

“I’ve read it.”

“I discovered Huysmans and Baudelaire when I was just a farm boy, believe it or not, hiding in my attic, strangely obsessed for reasons I could not myself comprehend by Poe, Wilde, and the withered lace in my grandmother’s trunk. Of course it was Huysmans’s
À Rebours
that inspired Wilde in the first place. In
The Picture of Dorian Grey,
his book is the poisonous French novel that is said to twist Grey’s mind toward decadence and nihilistic hedonism. The effect on me was similar: I found the book in the library—no one in Plainsview, Nebraska, was well read enough to ban it—and ran away to Paris immediately. Things had changed of course, but not as much as you might think. I met a theatrical designer and became his apprentice, in many things.”

À Rebours
or
Against Nature
was a kind of rebellion against Naturalism and the realistic style captained by Zola and which, like so much nineteenth-century European bourgeois culture, continues to more or less rule today. Huysmans’s hero disdains accepted reality and the conventional culture that surrounds him, and out of disgust, desire, boredom—infinite desire, infinite boredom—turns to a world of decadent, brooding artifice which, taken up as an aesthetic manifesto, formed an important basis for Symbolism in poetry and art.

It is also essentially plotless, more an argument than a story, and a particularly intraliterary argument at that, a fictional character railing at great length against other books. A 1925 translation actually announces, in proud type on the cover, “A Novel Without a Plot.” This happened to be a pretty good description of my own literary endeavors, as well as the prime reason given for their rejection. Was there really a time when publishers considered this a plus, the selling
point that would inflame the public frenzy? No plot! I could hear the electric buzz along the line outside the bookstore.

The warlock opened a lacquered Chinese box. “Cigarette? They’re Egyptian.”

“No thank you.”

He screwed one into an ivory holder, lit it with a glass table lighter, and blew a long stream of smoke at me while he narrowed his eyes, as if I were a chair he was thinking of redoing. I tried to look jaded and blasé. “I read that Huysmans modeled his main character on Robert de Montesquieu,” I said. “I happen to be a big Proust reader as well.”

“Ah oui, Proust…” he muttered and flicked ashes toward a standing art nouveau ashtray. They fluttered down like a tiny drift of decadent snow. “Yes, Montesquieu, we believe, was the main model for both Huysmans’s hero and Proust’s immortal Baron de Charlus.” He tossed this off as if he and the other foremost authorities had just been weighing the matter before my arrival. The real Montesquieu was a wealthy eccentric who lived in a dream world of his own making. According to the poet Mallarmé, whom Montesquieu reluctantly admitted to his home for a brief visit, there was a room done up like a monk’s cell, another like a yacht, and a hall that held an altar and cathedral pews. A fake snowscape contained a sled set on a snow-white bearskin. One can only imagine what or who was hidden, locked away in the dungeon when the poet came knocking.

Looking around again, I realized the extent to which my host’s own chamber, with its ratty furs and paper-mache skulls, was a small, sad attempt to cast his life in that heroic mold. This then was the final decadence, the darkest, smallest, sickliest flower at the far reach of the thinnest stem. First come the great originals, then their many descendents, on down through camp, drag, glam, goth, and metal, each one raising a spiked fist with nails of black and red. And finally it all ends here, with Kevin, whose own fragile playhouse was an artifice of their artifice, a third-hand thrift store copy. But wasn’t
this the fate of all artists? Wasn’t it all a desperate fight against reality? And didn’t reality always win? Wilde in prison, then exile, raging against the drapes in his cheap hotel, Baudelaire, wasted on opium and ill health, Poe mad and drunk in the streets of Baltimore. Proust coughing all night alone under his blanket of pages. Even the greatest writers were losers. Those who triumph in real life don’t have time for poems. The only difference between the giants and peons, such as Kevin and I, was the depth of the crack each of our defiant blows would leave in reality’s mirror. Against nature, indeed.