NINE
The same song was playing on a dozen radios, all tuned to KHJ. It was an AM kind of night. The sidewalks were more crowded than the four lanes of the street, and the street was plenty crowded, weekenders in from the suburbs to see how the other half lived, to pretend to be something wilder than what they were. It was the middle of summer. It was an even warmer night than usual, riot weather, but there wasn’t any chance of a flare-up among this throng. The word was mellow. Moving along on the sidewalk, cruising out of the sound of one radio and then into the zone of the next, was like moving along inside the song, like walking with the singer, best friends.
It could have been Polk Street or MacDougal Street or South Beach, or even Fisherman’s Wharf, but it was Sunset Boulevard, the Sunset Strip. It was L.A.
It could have been now, but it was 1995.
It could have been a lot of songs, probably should have been “London Calling” or “My Sharona” or even the Carpenters and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” but it was Tom Jones and “It’s Not Unusual (To Be Loved by Anyone).” Another big pop lie.
She was with another guy the first time he saw her. She was Mary, her name was Mary, though it would take most of the night for him to find that out, to work his way through the jungle of playful protective coloration she threw up, to break her down was the way she always put it later when they were telling others about how they met, about that first night.
Jimmy and Mary.
He was with someone else, too. Most nights he was alone, particularly on the Strip. He lived nearby, a little house down below Sunset, below a restaurant everybody was going to at the time, Roy’s. (Now it’s the site of the House of Blues.) It was dead center in the Strip. It was close enough to the Chateau Marmont to walk over, which Jimmy did all the time.
The girl he was with that night worked as a secretary at a record label. She liked him more than he liked her. She brought him records, what they called “product.” The LPs (they were still making them, along with cassettes and CDs) always had a hole drilled through some corner of the cover, a sign that they were meant for promotion. She’d bring him boxes of them. When she realized she liked him more than he liked her, trying to change that, she started bringing him boxes of “cleans,” albums that weren’t punched, that could be sold or traded for whatever you wanted. She hadn’t figured out that Jimmy was different, different from everyone, and that he didn’t care about money. (And, because he didn’t care, he had a lot of it or could always get it.) She didn’t know he was a Sailor. It was the secret he kept from almost everyone.
The guy Mary was with was a director.
It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone
It’s not unusual to have fun with anyone
She was twenty-two; the director was thirty-eight. She was five ten; he was five eight. She was blond. He was blonder. Jimmy and the secretary, who had her arm threaded through his as they walked, were on the north side of Sunset, next to Tower Records. Mary and the director were across the street, going into a sushi place with a bamboo facade and glossy bright red paint around the door, making the entryway look like a garish mouth.
“Do you know her?” the secretary had said to Jimmy, when she saw him looking across the street.
The joke they said later, Jimmy and Mary, each taking a line in the telling of it, was that the director had looked back through the red mouth of that door and said to her, “Do you know him?”
Mary and the director had fought over dinner, and she had ended up walking away from him. From his white Jaguar sedan specifically, with the director standing next to it, sake-drunk, the valet standing there, too. She’d walked away on up Sunset, headed west, pretending to be drunk, too, which she wasn’t at all. Jimmy had found her in Gil Turner’s, a bright, glass-fronted, classic corner liquor store near the end of the Strip. She was inside, at the counter.
He was alone by then, too, behind the wheel of the only car he had, an oxidized white ’68 Cadillac convertible, the punch line to some joke he’d forgotten. The top had long ago been knifed by vandals, so he left it down, at least once summer came. At the time, he thought he was just cruising, but he could admit later he was looking for her.
He parked. She came out. He set off after her. He caught up to her, walked alongside her. She was headed back toward the center of things. He didn’t say anything for a half a block. That section of the strip was dead, the block before the Rainbow and The Roxy.
“Let’s hear it,” she said, when she realized that he was just weird enough to walk along beside her silently, maybe forever. “Your clever first line.”
“I don’t have one,” Jimmy said. “I don’t have a clever last line, either.”
“Thinking ahead, are we?”
She was as tall as he was. And she had on flat shoes, dancer’s shoes. Capezios. She was skinny but not a model. She probably wasn’t a dancer, either. He thought of asking, but it sounded too much like a pickup line.
“You want these?” she said and offered him an unopened pack of cigarettes, after they’d walked another half block. She was setting the pace, not fast, not slow. Not an escape, not a stroll.
“Luckies,” he said.
“I don’t smoke,” she said. “I felt sorry for the man in the store.”
“That’s Gil. Himself.”
“I felt sorry for Gil.”
“He’s probably a millionaire,” Jimmy said.
“So millionaires aren’t worthy of our concern?” she said. Jimmy wondered if she was drunk, the way she chose her words. He’d learn soon enough that it was just her. Then, at least. The way she was then. She said, “I felt sorry for him because of the look in his eye, because he looked forsaken.”
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Lucky,” she said.
Jimmy pulled the ribbon on the white-and-red pack of smokes and tapped it against the palm of his hand.
“Why do people do that?” she said.
“I don’t know, I think it packs the tobacco tighter or something,” Jimmy said.
“Or everyone saw someone do it in a movie.”
“Are you an actress?” Jimmy said.
“No, you are,” she said. “You are.”
They walked almost as far as Tower Records and the sushi place. Jimmy was prepared to run into the boyfriend again, the director, but that would be overestimating him.
“Let’s go somewhere. Where do you want to go?” Jimmy said, standing there on the sidewalk. In 1995.
“San Francisco,” she said. “L.A. is bothering me. You’re not the Cut Killer, are you?” Lately, since the beginning of summer, there’d been a series of killings, girls’ bodies left spread-eagle on road cuts, the sloping gouges into the rock where the highway sliced through. Nine of them.
“Where do you want to go?” Jimmy asked her again, as serious about anything as he’d been in a long, long time.
062
Mary wasn’t a single mom. She wasn’t alone.
He came late to the soccer practice or play date or picnic or whatever it was. Sunday afternoon in the park on Tiburon. Her husband. Jimmy saw him drive up in a black BMW X-5. On the phone. He parked and sat there another two minutes, finishing his call. There were two other mothers and a father next to Mary on the sidelines of the playing fie ld. She had her back to the parking lot and didn’t see him. She had her eyes on the boy, who was dribbling a ball down the fie ld, or at least making an earnest six-year-old’s attempt at dribbling.
Her son. It was hard for Jimmy to even think it. He didn’t know much about kids but got close guessing the boy’s age. He did the math. Everything in him wanted to get closer, to see more, but he knew that Mary would spot him, his shape, his coloration, as easily as he had hers. Or at least that was what he told himself, to keep himself inside the car. To stop himself. He turned the key and started the engine. The sound of the rev made Mary turn to look. It was then that she saw her husband walking toward her across the apron of the field. He wore a dark gray suit, but as he came closer he pulled off the necktie and unbuttoned the collar of the blue shirt. He folded the tie in half and slipped it into his coat pocket. (Who goes into the office on a Sunday? Even for a half day?) He was dark-haired. With a hundred-dollar haircut. He smiled at his wife from ten yards out and then looked away quickly to find the boy on the field, to wave, though the kid wasn’t looking.
He came up and kissed Mary, put his hand on her back. Her hair was longer. And darker.
Jimmy drove away out the exit of the lot but turned left on the main road in and stopped on the shoulder. There was a little elevation, to look down on the fie ld, the water behind it, Sausalito behind that. The boy had come over. The father had kneeled down to ruffle his hair. The mother was saying something. A family was laughing.
Jimmy let out the clutch and drove on. Fast and loud.
Very high school.
And what do you call sitting in the dark in a car on a hilly lane on Tiburon, on Belvedere, across from a black Craftsman house with a light in the second-flo or window and a woman framed there, lifting a boy’s T-shirt over his head, his arms raised as if surrendering?
063
Mary kept living in the director’s house, though she said it wasn’t “living with him . . .” In his rented long and low ranch house up at the top of a cul-de-sac in Benedict Canyon. (“Leased,” she said. “He always makes me say leased.”) Whatever it was now, it had been a family’s house once, stuck up off in a rustic canyon, three bedrooms, two baths, a kidney-shaped pool, an enormous bank of rock behind it like a wave threatening to break. Now it was all white, inside and out, refrigerator white, and had bizarre white rocks the size of apples and grapefruits scattered across the white gravel of the roof.
“It’s like the surface of the moon,” Jimmy said the first time he saw it in the daytime.
“I like it,” Mary said.
There were four girls living there. They didn’t mind being called girls, except for the thirteen-year-old, who was the director’s daughter, there for the summer. The others were Mary’s friends. The girls. One was a friend from before Mary had moved in with the director; the other had become a friend. April and Michelle and Mary. They’d all three slept with the director at one time or another.
“You have to move,” Jimmy said.
“You’re always trying to relocate me,” Mary said.
The director was Canadian, pretended to be French. He’d done one movie, limited release. It starred a rock star, and the movie was notably unprofitable, so a few people at the studios and the agencies got the idea the director was hip. So he had that to ride for a few years. But he didn’t even have a deal anywhere now and was much angrier inside than anyone knew, even his agent. He’d shot another film with a little money from a horndog Pasadena dentist who liked the idea of the girls in the house up there in Benedict, liked the vodka-in-the-freezer thing, liked the old-school drugs they sometimes brought out for his sake. Everyone else thought that part of it was just too eighties. There were a pair of old-fashioned Movi olas in the bedroom where the director had stashed his daughter. Every once in a while he’d go in to work on it, at least run some film through his hands, but most of the time he went to restaurants and out to parties and meetings when he could get them and looked for the next thing.
“Come live with me,” Jimmy said.
It was the morning after they’d made love for the first time, four days after that first night on Sunset. They were at Hugo’s, down on Santa Monica, a breakfast, brunch, and lunch place. Everybody else there was doing business.
“I don’t even know what you do,” she said.
“I don’t do anything,” he said. “I think about you.”
“What did you do before I came along?”
“Think about you.”
If anyone was close enough to hear him, hear them, Mary would have made fun of the line. But he meant it.
“Me, too,” she said.
He could never tell anyone the things they said to each other.
They spent most of that day together, the day after they’d made love for the first time, rode out to the beach with the Cadillac’s ragged ragtop down, out to Paradise Cove to watch the surfers trying to make something happen on a collapsed, glassy day, then ate drippy cheeseburgers at a joint while the red sun flattened out at the horizon. The burger place was on a rise above a south-facing beach, on one of the twists and turns along the line of the coast, and the effect of the right-hand, apparently northern sunset was unsettling, though neither of them noticed it then.
“Everything can change in just a day,” she said.
They were riding back into the City, the back way, up and over Mulholland in from the coast, alone on the two-lane blacktop scrolling through the hills. He was watching the way the Caddy’s high beams swept the manzanita, let himself think that the light going across the brush was what had released the scent that filled their nostrils. It hadn’t rained in two or three months. There was a not-unpleasant dustiness to everything. What did the Eagles sing about in “Hotel California”? The “warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air.” He wondered what it was, colitas. It sounded like a plant, like manzanitas.
“Everything can change in an hour,” Jimmy said. “If it’s the wrong hour.”
“Or the right hour,” Mary said. “You’re so gloomy.”
He left her at the gate of the white house. It wasn’t that big a house, but the owners had put in a rolling iron gate and painted it white, too, so the renters, the leasees, could say they lived in a gated place in Benedict Canyon. Jimmy cranked the wheel, the power steering pump complaining, and turned around in the cul-de-sac. He wouldn’t go in, didn’t want to drop in on that scene again after so good a day, didn’t want to have to try to make it all lie down in his head one more time. The director always had a crowd over, standing around the black-bottomed pool, looking down at the lights, drinks in their hands, or joints between their fingers like they were cigarettes. Strangers. New people every time.
In the rearview mirror, Jimmy saw her push the button on the squawk box and wait. She pushed it again.
He wasn’t in any hurry to get home. In just a part of a week, she’d gotten him into some new music, new to him. Gloomy Canadian singer songwriters, as it turned out. She’d made him a tape, two-sided, 120 minutes. So, driving around, killing time, he had Leonard Cohen and the last cigarette from the pack of Lucky Strikes she’d given him that first night. He almost hated to smoke it, but he smoked it, cruising east on Sunset into East L.A. Lately he’d been spending more and more time with his friend Angel, had come back around again, reconnected. Everything seemed to go in circles. Angel was a Sailor who worked on vintage cars, who had a shop downtown, who was also a preacher in a way, a street preacher to gangbangers and their knocked-up girlfriends, to the people almost everybody else wrote off. He went by his apartment, went by the storefront church where Angel spent a lot of time, but never found him. He wanted to talk cars, nothing else. He headed for home.
The phone was ringing when he came in. When he answered it, it was just screaming.