Mystery Girl: A Novel (6 page)

Did it matter? I wondered. Was this what he sent me to learn? What mystery could it solve, what crime? Where was the victim, and who the criminal, besides me?

12

LONSKY PAID ME, ANOTHER FRESH
hundred-dollar bill in an envelope, and instructed me to be back at my post, outside the cottage, by nine the next morning. I left with a strange sense of accomplishment, but by the time my car had taken me a few blocks, my mood began to sink. Sailing past the other travelers, arm’s distance in their cars, swimming through the lights and depths of streets and stores and bars while traffic signals flashed above, I dreaded going home to my haunted house, to await the ghost of my dearly departed wife who was off living it up in New York. So I called Milo, who was my dream date at that moment—an insomniac cinephile with no regard for marriage or books. He said to come over. He was about to watch a movie.

The question of what film to watch when in distress can be a complex one, and by the time I arrived Milo had given it some thought. (Although, I suppose, if you are Milo or me, the question of what movie to watch is fairly complex no matter what.) Milo is, of course, an utter snob about movies, precisely the languorous know-it-all who might annoy you when you stop by his shop, like the lady who held up the recent megahit
Fritz
(“Who Says a Robot Can’t Be All Heart?”) and asked if it was good. Milo shrugged. “It’s no worse than any of that other Hollywood crap.”

Awful, and yet I have a soft spot for such characters. Losers in all of society’s big games, they (we) are totally powerless by any measure except this one, which no one else even cares about, and which serves only as a means of recognizing one another, like fallen aristocrats from some other realm, whose fortunes, minted in a defunct currency, count for nothing here. Milo brushing off a billion-dollar hit was like some threadbare duke turning his nose up at an insufficiently stinky cheese or spitting out a Bordeaux that only he could tell was youngish or rather too muscle-bound, while crass hedge-fund millionaires lapped it up. In the eyes of the world, we are bums. Yet in a dusty shop, a ratty theater, a parent’s basement den, there we rule. But unlike the person with exquisite taste in painting or perfume, the movie nerd is classless as well. Grasping the genius of Russ Meyer or George Romero or Herschell Gordon Lewis carries no cultural cachet and gets no one laid, believe me.

“How about I spit on your grave?” Milo asked by way of greeting as he opened the door.

“I told you I’m freaking out about Lala,” I said. “The last thing I need is a movie featuring castration.”

“Don’t be so touchy,” he said. “I got a new Italian DVD copy and thought it might relax you.” He was referring of course to
I Spit on Your Grave,
the infamous splatter film (Meir Zarchi, 1978), a classic of the rape-revenge genre, in which a girl, seeking woody seclusion in order to finish her novel, gets assaulted by a gang of men and then goes on a bloody rampage.

“So what do you want to see?” he asked, following me into the living room, where an entire wall was covered in a bewildering array of DVDs, VHS cassettes, and homemade CDs. An enormous TV blocked the fireplace. Milo shared this house with two people, but since neither of them was ever around, he’d commandeered the communal living space as his screening room. The house was a vaguely Spanish, vaguely modern stucco box off Sunset in Echo Park. One rainy season, it had begun to slide down the hill and was now propped up, half off its foundation, with a dubious jack, some two-by-fours, and a couple of cinder blocks, for which its inhabitants received a reduction in rent. Tonight, however, it was just Milo and I, and the discussion got very deep very fast. “OK, Mr. Lonely,” he told me, waving at the movie wall. “What kind of heartbreak flick are you pining for?
Sleepless in Madison County? How The English Patient Got His Groove Back?
We’re all out of
Eat Pray Love,
I’m afraid. How about
Shit Fuck Kill?
”

“Actually, speaking of fucking and killing, I was thinking of something cozy and soothing like
Goodfellas
or
The Godfather.
”

How could a movie that features a guy getting stabbed to death in a trunk cheer me up? It is, I think, the combination of a certain kind of formal perfection, a calming flawlessness, combined with the warmth of long familiarity. These are movies I had seen countless times. I’ve worn out both a tape and a disc of
Goodfellas,
and when I couldn’t sleep, I could lie in bed and follow just the dialogue of
The Godfather
or its sequel from behind my drooping lids.

“I know what you mean but I can’t see them right now,” Milo said, running his hands over his face. “I just can’t.” (This is the other side of such intimacy. There were many beloved films, like
Manhattan
or
Taxi Driver,
that I saw so many times, I had to declare a moratorium, the way some bakers have to temporarily swear off chocolate cake.)

“A Satyajit Ray?” he asked. “
Apu?
”

“Jesus, I’m already suicidal here. Are you trying to kill me? How about
Shoah?
”

“OK, OK. Point taken.
Rules of the Game?
”

“Hmm… maybe.”

“What do you mean, maybe? It’s a masterpiece, a serious contender for best movie ever.”

“I know, I know. Shoulder to shoulder with
Kane,
you told me.”

“Plus, as a worldly, wise Frenchman, Renoir makes your petty love problems seem like a joke.”

“OK,” I said, settling on the couch. “Let’s do it. Though I actually think it’s his warmth, his Shakespearian compassion for human frailty, that can help me now.”

“Shit,” Milo muttered, scanning the shelves. “It’s at the store.”

“Fuck,” I said. “This could take forever.”

“Look, why argue? You want perfection crossed with familiarity? How about your lovable but perverted uncle?”

“Hitchcock.”

“Hitchcock. Exactly.
Marnie?
”

“Too troubling.
North By Northwest?
”

“Too charming.
Dial M?
”

“Really, you know what the most perfect movie ever is?”

“
Vertigo.
”

“Exactly.
Vertigo.
” This is what I generally answered when asked those ridiculous questions, favorite, best, ever. Of course there are hundreds of best movies, but
Vertigo
to me was the one that most truly fulfilled itself: story and song, form and content, manifest and latent—like the two sides of the tapestry, every image and gesture, every moment and glance, was both the plot and the dream. It was what life would be if we were all geniuses—complete.

Milo shrugged. “Yeah, but I don’t feel like seeing it tonight.”

I slumped deeper into the couch. “I don’t either, really.”

“You know what I could watch though?” he asked.

“Yeah, muscle porn, but wait till I go home.”

“Fair enough, but you know what else I could go for first, dude?”

“You’re right.”

“It will cheer you up. The perfect thing for when you’re down and out.”

“Let’s do it.”

So he put on
The Big Lebowski.

Everyone loves the Dude of course, and his renown has only grown over the years, but for those of us who have drifted, effortlessly, to the bottom of the shark pool in Los Angeles, The Big L touches an especially deep place in our drowned hearts. As soon as I saw the opening shots of Jeff Bridges at a Ralph’s supermarket, seemingly in a bathrobe, paying for half-and-half by check, I began to laugh. I knew that guy. Let’s face it, I
was
that guy, more or less, though younger and less stoned and correspondingly far less at peace with myself. It is a comedy of course, a light film compared to the Coen bros darkies, like
Fargo
or their great masterpiece,
Miller’s Crossing,
but it is a sad movie too, sad in the way only comedy is sad, and brimming with the tender love we save for life’s losers, here where the evil always win and the worst never cease to be victorious.

PART II

THE MAN WITHOUT QUALIFICATIONS

13

I WAS WAITING OUTSIDE
Ramona Doon’s bungalow when she emerged the next day. She was in a sundress, light blue with thin straps over her tan shoulders, and red strappy heels with bare legs. She had sunglasses on, and her dark hair swung across her back as she walked to her car, a creamy old Mercedes convertible with a yellow frosted roof folded back and chocolate leather seats. We were off.

She led me westward through Hollywood and swung down to Sunset and the Strip. When you are not in any rush, when the traffic is rolling and the air is flowing and KXLU is playing and your time is paid, it can actually be a very pleasant ride. There were the billboards and the hotels and the shuttered nightclubs. There was the former health food restaurant were Woody freaks out in
Annie Hall,
and the long-ago strip club that Ben Gazarra runs in
Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
There was the rest of humanity washing past you—the ugly, the pretty, the angry, the bored, the sweaty tourist, the smoking Mexican gardener, the junior executive yelling into his headset—each one bobbing to the surface for a second before fate carried them away. Perhaps it was being here in the city of movies, or perhaps it was just the automatic magic of movement, music, and cars, but I felt comforted, as if my own stupid drama were part of some larger show, some movie set against the sweep of this landscape that scrolled by me as I drove into the wind. To give our lives a form, however fleeting, and lend our losses a name, these too are among the consolations of art.

We left West Hollywood and sailed through Beverly Hills, passing the green lawns, olive canyons, and pink hotels, the cartoon mansions of every style and period—a ten-bedroom thatched English cottage beside a Tudor mansion with five cars in the drive, next to Monticello, the Pantheon, and the Doge—like a miniature golf course blown up bigger than life. Then came Brentwood, the Palisades, those other, lower-keyed neighborhoods, somehow even more unreal. While Beverly Hills, in its exuberant overkill and luxury, is utterly itself, these further lands of fabulous wealth, poised on the western edge of the country, are more like fake hometowns, with ranch-style spreads, shingles and shutters and cute shopping pockets, except that everything, from a house to a house salad, is ten, or a hundred, or maybe even a thousand times what it costs back home, and despite the warm, folksy aura, you know, as soon as you see the ideally gorgeous moms, brutally rich dads, and the junior millionaires on their bikes: you don’t belong.

But it’s worth every penny, for those who can spare the change. The warm light is rubbed with sage and rosemary. The breeze smells like organic cough drops and artisanal focaccia. You can feel the unseen sea on your skin. You dip and rise, shadow to sun, through treelined glades of eucalyptus that shed their bark in long soft curls, and hillsides glowing gray-green and deep red. And then, beyond that last hill, dazzling you always no matter how much you expect it, the ocean is there again. Ms. Doon took a right onto the PCH, and, as if I were the one leading her, we rode right past all the tourist spots, past Malibu and Zuma Beach, past waving paragliders and sliding surfers and detoxing movie stars, way up by the county line, to El Matador, my favorite beach.

El Matador is cut like cake from the cliffside, eaten out by the ocean from beneath into caves and crumbs and columns, while sugared waves lay down in thick ruffles on the satin sand. The beach is slick and narrow, mirror-bright in the shallows. In the surf, a spindly tower of rock stands alone, like a bad tooth, severed from the cliffs
by the lick of waves relentlessly swirling around it. Its top forms a tiny plateau, a little garden covered with bright clinging plants and grasses lying down in the wind. Perhaps this lone, thin rock is the matador whom those first Spanish warriors named when they too came and prayed, knee-deep in the surf, facing the bleeding sun.

I recalled my drives up here with Lala, hiking along the ridges and ravines of Topanga Canyon, walking on the beach, kissing in the caves, sucking back clams in Neptune’s Net, then napping on a blanket on the sand, sea-cooled breezes chilling my arms, sunshine baking my face. Those were good days, and as I trailed my subject along the coast, longing shot through me again. It was a physical pain, this loss of a former happiness, and a possible future joy, a sharp ache across my forehead, behind my eyes, and down into the hollow of my chest. A physical pain from a metaphysical wound: It was almost enough to make me question my life-long conviction that there was nothing outside the facts of flesh and the noises of the brain. This throb, this wasting misery, this cry, what could it be, dying inside me now, but a soul?

Ramona Doon pulled into the lot, where you had to slide your money in a slot and leave the receipt on your dashboard. I parked along the road for free, cleverly swinging my car around so that, when she left, I’d already be behind her. As she began descending the long, twisted staircase to the beach, I sauntered along casually, sporting sunglasses, hands resting in my pockets. I smelled water and tasted salt as the wind came over the cliff. Her heels echoed weirdly on the wooden steps. To stay hidden, I bypassed the stairs, and took a steeper path down through the scrub.

She had betrayed me. My wife had betrayed my trust. I could still hear her promising to love me forever. To stay with me. Forever. Gasping, sweating as I humped it down the cliff, I bit down on my pain and tasted anger. That was what rushed in to fill the empty space where her love had been. I’m not saying she’d lied deliberately when she made her pledge. But what difference did that make to me?
I saw it now: love was just a feeling like any other, and when she said she would love me forever, what she meant was, right now I feel like I will love you forever, but perhaps, tomorrow, that will change.