Mystery Girl: A Novel (9 page)

21

WE HAD THERAPY
the next day. I arrived right on time, but Lala was with our shrink already, in that office that felt like a fairy godmother’s storybook cottage fitted inside the bluntly ugly office building. There seemed to be some bonding going on. Gladys was turning before the mirror, appraising herself, while Lala expertly wound her like a mummy in a long scarf.

“Come on in!” Lala beamed at me. “I was just showing Gladys a new way to accessorize.” She pecked my cheek.

“Your wife’s really got the touch,” Gladys said. I realized she was wearing one of the decorative spreads that had been draped on the couch before. Was this allowed, precharming the shrink, like talking to the ref before the match? It wasn’t fair. Although I was the funny one, the comic relief, Lala had always been the star. Her powers of attraction were unstoppable. Her charisma lay in her ability to make her glamour contagious. It rubbed off on you, like stardust, and near her you somehow grew more beautiful and charming as well. That was part of what had made me feel so absurdly lucky to be with her, the specialness of that attention as she glittered at me over a teacup, rapt at my routine anecdotes, or we walked hand in hand through a museum and she pretended to be mesmerized by my babble. How happy she was to hear about (not read) my novels then. How wonderful she thought it was that I did what I did. So interesting! So brave! Even in failure I was noble as long as I glowed in her eyes. It somehow didn’t matter so much, if my job sucked or anyone read my books. If those attributes belonged to the man she loved, then he had to be a great guy. Here is the best thing anyone ever said
to me: once long ago, as I rambled and raved, no doubt about a book or movie, I looked across the table and noticed a dreamy, unfocused smile on her face.

“Are you even listening to me?” I asked.

“No,” she said, happily. “I was just staring at you and thinking about how handsome you are.”

Now that very same star quality was horribly annoying, for one reason: it no longer shined on me. And what was she so fucking happy about anyway? That’s what I didn’t like. There were no tears dimming her eyes today. She looked radiant. So did Gladys, her wrap artfully hiding the wrinkles on her neck. We all settled in for a cozy chat.

“So,” Gladys said, sitting forward and pressing her hands together in her characteristic gesture. “Who wants to begin?”

“Me, I guess.” I didn’t really. I had no idea how to go about discussing our issues, or even what they were. But I felt the need to seize the stage. “My job is going well. I started a new case.”

“Ooh,” she cooed, and blinked coyly at Lala, like a happy bird.

Lala smiled. “That sounds fascinating.”

“It does?” I asked. “Since when?”

She shrugged, smiling coyly at her brightly painted nails. “I don’t know. I did a lot of thinking on this trip. Just walking for miles around New York.”

“But you hate walking.” Lala was one of those Californians who circle the block endlessly until a spot opens in front. She adored valet parking, which I disdained, figuring, I hadn’t made it all the way from home to restaurant alive just to pay someone else to roll my car into a spot.

“It’s different in New York,” she said. “I was out all day, just wandering in the crisp fall air.”

“Mmm, that really clears your head,” Gladys said. “When I’m at the colony, out in the desert, I take a long nude hike every morning and watch the sunrise.”

“It’s so true,” Lala murmured, “and I started thinking, maybe
what we need is some time apart, some space to discover ourselves and see the relationship clearly.”

“A trial separation,” Gladys said. “That sounds promising.”

It didn’t sound promising to me: those two words,
trial
and
seperation,
troubling enough on their own, were utterly depressing together. Lala warbled on.

“I mean, why shouldn’t you be a detective if you want? Who am I to judge? Everyone should pursue their dream.”

“But it’s not,” I said.

“Not what?”

“Not my dream. It’s just a job. I wanted to be a novelist. Remember?”

She flickered but bounced back quick. “Of course, that’s what I meant, of course.”

Later, at home, I looked online. The weather in New York that weekend had been awful, wind and rain. No climate for Lala, who hated cold and sidewalks and loved her very high heels. But I didn’t even have to check. It was as if Lonsky had infected me with a little of his gift. I looked. I saw. I knew: Lala had not been to New York, had perhaps not even left LA. The reason she was being so nice to me was guilt. The reason for her guilt was the same as the reason for her new joy. She had the sheen of a well-fucked woman. No wonder seeing her now felt like our early days, when she was so madly in love. She was in love again now. But not with me.

22

I CALLED MILO AT THE SHOP
and told him that I thought Lala was cheating on me. He said to come right over. He had an imported copy of the new box set of old Jackie Chan films from Hong Kong, unavailable here and watchable only on his hacked all-region DVD player.

Milo and I debated which one to watch, while he deigned to accept money from the occasional customer. I chose
Project A 2,
actually superior to the first. Its costumey nineteenth century setting is cheering, and Jackie’s sweetheart is, as usual, played by the incomparable Maggie Cheung, and among its many miraculous feats is that part when, in an homage to Buster Keaton, Jackie walks calmly down the side of a collapsing wall, several stories high, and steps off just as it crashes. A world where this can happen can’t be all bad. Vintage Jackie Chan movies are one more small reason to suspect that life might be worth living. After all, a man can do this with his body. Not me, of course. But someone, anyone. Flight and grace and joy and wonder such as this were right there all along, trapped inside mere matter.

We were about to put the movie on when MJ arrived bearing Vietnamese food. As soon as she spotted me she plopped the bag on the counter and came rushing over, arms out, making that sound that girls (even tough brainy tattooed dykes in cut-offs, a wifebeater, and boots) make when they see a bird fallen from a nest. She hugged me tight. “I heard about Lala. I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

“Rubbing your boobs in his face like that is pretty good for starters,” Milo said, wrapping a spring roll in lettuce and dipping it in sauce before stuffing it in his maw. “Now how about a mercy fuck to take his mind off things?”

“He’s not like you,” she said, patting my head like a puppy. “You’d fuck that spring roll if it had a hole. Or better yet, stick it up yours.” She grabbed one and took a savage bite.

“Look who’s talking. You got a spring roll down your jeans right now. I see the bulge. You could deep throat that thing easy.”

Laughing, she pushed the roll in and out of her mouth.

“Actually, I think those spring rolls are mine,” I said. “You guys ordered the summer rolls.”

“Sorry.” MJ offered me the drool-covered one.

“Keep it,” I said.

“See,” Milo said, opening the summer rolls. He took one and
passed them to me. “That’s part of why Lala dumped you. Right, MJ? He’s a sourpuss.”

“Wrong.” She chewed the tip. “I think your wife’s crazy. After a few random fucks to get her pent-up sexual energy out of her system, she’ll realize she’s made a huge mistake.”

“And it’s not all bad news,” Milo put in, his mouth now full of summer roll. “You’ve got a cush job there, assistant panty-sniffing for Inspector Fatso. Yes?” He turned to a customer who’d shyly approached, box in hand. Milo looked at it, vaguely affronted. “
Fritz
again,” he said, sighing, and went in back.

“Don’t listen to that fag,” MJ said, while the customer, a wee hipster in a porkpie hat and goatee, listened politely. “They have no idea how we feel at a time like this. Totally insensitive.”

We? I wanted to ask. Instead I said, “I thought gay men were hypersensitive.”

“That’s drag queens, and superfemme types. They’re technically women. But men on their own, totally unregulated testosterone? They’re just like mobile hard-ons looking to insert. I mean, two guys meeting on a bus could just be like, Hey you, want to fuck? Sure why not? Grunt, grunt. Splat. See you later. But two women, well, you can’t really imagine. Love, hate, tears, blood. That’s the first week. Or month. It’s menstrual theater. All human relationships are more or less impossible, but when you think about it, it’s heterosexuality that seems most unnatural, like trying to mate cats and dogs. Even for a very sensitive feminine man like you.” She patted my knee. “So don’t feel too bad.”

23

MJ LEFT WHEN THE MOVIE
started. She had no patience for kung fu, another pornographic form of male-on-male action, I suppose. We locked up and turned off the neon. Later, as
Drunken Master II
(not,
of course,
The Legend of Drunken Master,
the butchered version released here) our second feature, headed toward its mind-blowing catharsis, there came three loud thumps on the ceiling, and Milo, who had been snoring away peacefully on the couch beside me, suddenly stood up, as if called by a distant trumpet. It was Jerry, the boss, who had been dying upstairs for as long as I could remember. I used to see him when he still descended with a cane to take a post behind the counter, a deep well of movie knowledge and LA lore, and an old photo taped up in the back room showed him young and mustachioed, nipple-ringed and chapped, back when the neighborhood was a hardcore barrio and videotape a miracle from the future. Now all of it, everything on the shelves, was part of the past.

“Going upstairs now,” bleary Milo told Mr. Chan, who whirled on the screen before him.

“Can I borrow something?” I asked, still not sure I could sleep, or rather, still a bit afraid to climb into my bed alone.

“Sure.” He staggered toward the back staircase to Jerry’s. I grabbed another Jackie and then randomly chose
Serpico
on my way out. Seventies New York movies soothed me as well. I pulled the shop door shut and was walking to my car, when I noticed that the light was on behind the papered-over windows of MJ’s now defunct bookshop. Was a new tenant in there redecorating? Was it a thief, a very desperate, unambitious thief, stealing the few remaining books too worthless even to give away? I pressed my eye to a small tear in the paper and peeked—this spying stuff is addictive once you begin—but I couldn’t see anything. Then I heard, in a high sonorous voice:

This is the dead land

This is the cactus land.

Here the stone images

Are raised, here they receive

The supplication of a dead man’s hand

Under the twinkle of a fading star.

It was MJ. Apparently she hadn’t gone home after all. I knocked. The voice stopped abruptly, and a brown eye, bright but glazed with a wine reduction, appeared in the little tear. I waved at the eyeball and it blinked. The door opened. She looked a little off, with a crooked smile and a bottle in her hand.

“Why are you still here?”

I gathered from her mutterings that she’d been fighting with her girlfriend, which helped explain her bitter take on relationships earlier in the evening. Drawn by nostalgia, she’d remained in the empty bookstore to drink, recite poetry, and curse womankind, and we ended up moping side by side on the bookstore’s back steps, where her old desk and abandoned belongings had been dumped by the painters. I found such conversations enormously rewarding, being able to rage against my wife, love, and female inconstancy, without threatening my image of myself as a liberated, prowoman type, though I was still too inhibited to refer to “bitches” with MJ’s utter contempt.

In the end, however, even my anti-life-partner turned on me. “You know what your problem is? How come no one wants to read your books?” She drunkenly poked my heart with her finger. “You can’t tell a fucking story.” Especially when drunk, MJ cursed with the relish of the deeply uptight, savoring the juice of her sin, while a degenerate like Milo, who might ask your aunt to please pass the fucking salt, didn’t even realize he might offend.

“What do you mean can’t?” I asked.

“Contraction of can fucking not.”

“I just told you the whole sad story of my marriage.”

“That was a goddamn bummer. A boring bummer. A borner, which is the opposite of a boner.”

“I agree. That’s my point. I choose not to tell stories. They’re borners. Traditional narrative structure seems totally irrelevant to actual experience today. I mean, what in your life has a regular beginning, middle, and end?”

She shrugged. “How about the part where I’m born, live awhile and die? With blank pages before and after.”

“OK, point taken. But then what about all those poets you read? They don’t make sense either.”

“Poems are short. They don’t have to make sense. Like a day at the beach or a quick fuck. Novels take forever. Like life or marriage or grad school. They need some kind of payoff. A reason to go on.”

“Maybe you’re right.” I sighed. “Maybe I’ve just wasted the last twenty years.”

“Well don’t fill another novel bitching about it.” She punched my arm, kind of hard. “Let’s just fuck.”

“What?” I was stunned.

“Sure, why not? Milo was right. I know you always wanted to.”

Had I? I suppose in the harmless, hopeless, barely conscious way that married men might vaguely lust after their lesbian cohorts. I suppose, behind my own back, I yearned for a lot of things. With drunken precision, she set the wine carefully on the steps and stood, balancing as if on a skateboard.

“I held off before,” she explicated, breathing sour grapes in my face, “because it might make firing you awkward. But now? Fuck it. My whole life novel is ruined. Let’s write a damn poem.” She dropped her shorts and leaned over the desk. “Just yank my panties down and stick it in. High Modernist–style.”