Black Swans, page 14
Little thrills along the way.
“Go to Maui,” I said. “You can do that, can’t you? Just for a week or something. You’re not going to save that till we’re all one hundred and ten, are you?”
“My poor stepfather, he wanted us to strew his ashes over the Pacific from a sailboat,” he said. “We can’t even get that together, I’m so busy. Maybe next weekend. Anyway, if I went to Maui, I’d take my ex and she’s too busy right now.”
‘“You’d take Harriette?” I cried. “God, you can’t even get divorced with any conviction!”
A lot of my friends, these L.A. types with the sweet hearts inside, can’t even get divorced with any real hatred: Jed may need invisible lovers who go away before dawn like vampires; Albert is still in love with his ex-wife, and though she’s very mad at him for some of the sleazeball things we all did in past decades, love is love. It’s funny because we live in this place where it’s so easy to consummate flirtations, and it’s supposedly easy to get a divorce, but love, once it dyes our hearts purple, won’t go away. Especially the kind of love we used to feel when we were young, the kind we wish we could feel again for someone new.
I watched Albert drive away and decided the thing to do was to go later to Paul’s pool. Slithering into my navy-blue-with-white-polka-dots bathing suit, I remembered the day, last year, when Paul had first moved to the valley, the pool wasn’t yet retiled, and we had decided to go to nearby Van Nuys Boulevard and see what was in the local Salvation Army thrift shop. We got into his car and headed down Moorpark, and I was so happy.
In the car, in the heat, in the valley, with Paul. Everything had always been an adventure with Paul, and still was, going anywhere, doing anything, staying home doing nothing, it was still just love. Even though I had loved a lot of people since and was probably in love with Renzo in a newer and more mysterious way.
Now the pool was finished, the terrible gladioli were rampantly lining the fence, the little white clouds were reflected in the black water, and though it was a weird August, it was a weird August together. Several other of his friends drawn by the possibility of water, dropped by and they, not I, played Scrabble.
Later, they drove off to barbecues, but Paul and I stayed there, waiting for night to fall so we could turn on the lights and swim in the black water. Paul turned on the Jacuzzi, which he designed himself to be the world’s most beautiful place at night, a triangle in which two of the sides were the right angles of the pool sides, but the third was made of glass brick, which enclosed the churning water and left the perfectly flat water beyond, the same darkness lit from underneath glowed.
I’m not sure I loved this pool by day but by night in the Jacuzzi, even that ratty heat became something you could forget.
When he rested his forearms against the glass bricks, and the water was churning, his back lit up as if it were on fire, fire melting water. Perfectly happy, no future and no past. As weird as this August was, I felt safe. We were safe. I found myself beginning to sing, and I was singing a song that Doris, in her butter voice, had sung earlier before things had become, as they now were, too marvelous for words.
Now is all we have, now is “much too much, and just too very very.” And mangos.
Coco
According to my sister, a recent article in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) related that “They were looking for what it was that had caused so many African women to get AIDS and what they found was that the hot sex in the places where AIDS was really bad was where women used herbs for an aphrodisiac which made their vaginas dry and rough; they’d stuff themselves with these herbs if they had a hot date and sex for them is basically being ripped to shreds. . . . Cool, huh?”
“You know, what I’ve heard about Africa, it doesn’t sound like the continent you’d want to be a woman anywhere near,” I said, “what with those clitoridectomies women voluntarily think are such a great idea, jeez.”
I mean, here you are in this place where 80 million (I’ve heard) women actually agree to get clitoridectomies, which are done, from what I’ve heard, with sharp rocks and cause you to hemorrhage on your honeymoon, or so I’ve heard, and then in addition to that, you shove these horrible herbs up you so charming men in your life get the idea you’re a virgin. And then you die as proof you were really into it.
From AIDS, if your clitoridectomy didn’t kill you.
In my opinion, being a spinster might not be such a bad idea in Africa, but apparently, for them, it’s like a bikini wax is here—suffering for beauty. But whereas here, with high heels and other variations, beauty hurts, there beauty kills you.
Not that some people I have known didn’t kill themselves for romance right here in L.A. in the last year or so. Believe me, I can think of no other reason for Coco’s funeral on a hot smoggy afternoon not too long ago.
Before Coco, I looked with fright at someone buying something from, say, Saks, and if something came into style, my friends before Coco would figure it out, and we’d make it with our sewing machines, an object I still have threaded, though I never sew anymore except buttons and hems. It’s more or less buried in the past.
Anyway, the first time I met Coco, it was obvious sewing machines were for others. We met in my Italian I class, during summer school at Los Angeles City College; we were both nineteen, but she had already been married, divorced, and sick of her—to me—elegant furniture, and she had already been in a lead in an off-Broadway play in New York, and she had decided never to have anything to do with acting or actors again, for to her even New York actors, who everyone in L.A. thought were real and not fake like Hollywood’s, were slim pickings.
“So boring,” she sighed, adding more sugar to her coffee, “such dreadful children, all of them.”
At which point she stuck her Marlboro into a rather long cigarette holder, lit it, and blew her smoke into the air with studied nonchalance.
“Was your husband an actor?”
“Who, him?” she replied. “No, he was an accountant. I married him to get away from my mother.”
“What’s wrong with your mother?” I asked.
“Oh.” She frowned. “She’s one of those horrible types, with principles, you know. She thinks politics are more important than a nose job. I told her, give me a nose job and I’ll go away, leave you alone forever. And I have.”
“You had a nose job?” I asked, though of course someone who bought her clothes at Saks would think nothing of a professional nose—where my friends and I had been all those years, thinking we could get away with just rouge, I don’t know. “Didn’t it hurt?”
“Like hell,” she remarked.
It’s amazing that the people you really love in your life are the ones who connect you with other people you really love. I had an aunt in San Francisco whose best friend, a woman named Helen, had two children—both of whom I still know today, and one of whom, her daughter Sandra, was with me in that Italian class and introduced me to Coco, saying, “You’ll love this girl, she’s so bad.”
Sandra knew my taste in friends because she herself was nowhere near bad enough for me; she eschewed speed, hardly drank even wine, and halfway through a giant piece of chocolate cake, she’d get tired and quit apologetically. Sandra was so hopelessly good, she married the first decent man she happened upon and is still married to him, lo these twenty-six years later, her only excuse, when people ask how she did this, is to apologize, saying, “Well, I guess we have character or something.”
(She knows having character is out of fashion, but she attempts to make it up to you by picking people up at the airport, apologizing all the while.)
I’ve always been lucky in being so big and tall and learning early on that if you wear, say, polka dots or stripes—or red—you’re going to stand out, and my code of dress also has been based on the premise that anything that hurts, I don’t wear. This is called, in astrology, being a Taurus—and it’s true, most of the Taurus women I’ve known have always chosen their wardrobe on the fashion tenet: Do these pants kill me or can I sit down? This is followed closely by the second theme, which is, basically: Wouldn’t I rather blend in—maybe I should get the navy blue. . . .
Coco’s premise was that if you could buy a short suede dress at Saks and look like a million bucks because it actually cost $240, why not do it?
And once she wore this $240 dress out on the Sunset Strip, where voluptuousness was all the rage and being a chic classicist wasn’t; suddenly with Coco around, everyone else looked flawed, cheap, blowsy, and all wrong. She was great at poses, leans, and personifying nostalgic sadness. She could lead men to think about higher things, which, considering the time we were in, the early sixties, when Hugh Hefner was considered about as hip as a man could be, was incredible.
But even then, we had a running argument about the purpose of makeup. In my opinion, makeup was something nobody minded if you forgot. Whereas in Coco’s opinion, makeup was to cover your face, change the color of your skin, add dark smudges where your eyes used to be, amplify your lips, and never ever go outside the door—ever—without most of this on. And not only that, she used to use that horrible pancake makeup from Max Factor that came in sticks (the kind that smelled) and drew dark (hellish, really) rectangles on the sides of her face to “bring out” her cheekbones, which already were out, because if anyone ever had cheekbones, it was she. And maybe Audrey Hepburn.
“Only mine are better,” she explained.
“But men hate pancake makeup,” I’d say, since they did.
“Fuck ’em!” she sneered, scornfully, and she was right because, in her case, they made an exception.
After all, she was a creation, and if you were in for a penny with her, you were in for a pound.
In fact, makeup for her was sort of the same thing as perfumes were for subsequent women I knew, perfumes that were so overpoweringly awful that if a man loved you, it was in spite of how you smelled.
Until I met her, in fact, I didn’t even know what cheekbones were. I didn’t have the remotest evidence of them; all I had were cheeks, and when I remembered, I’d put rouge sort of in the middle of them, which didn’t make me look like an object of nostalgic sadness like Coco, but rather full of rude health, which I more or less was, in spite of all the drugs I could and did take. For a long time, I could wake up in the morning after nights of squalid overboogie and look innocent as a kitten, while other friends of mine would have dark circles under their eyes like Jeanne Moreau playing an adulteress.
Sometimes I look at pictures of me from those days when I looked so beautiful and wonder what I might have looked like if I hadn’t abused drugs, alcohol, and tobacco as I did with such a vengeance.
I remember trying to look jaded and world-weary and decadent—to make myself look “interesting”—but it never worked; I was always scaring the timid junkies with my radiant molecules. In fact, I was obnoxiously radiant.
I did have one beauty secret. I went to sleep instead of staying up for three nights in a row like speed fiends have been known to do, because to me, staying up all night was just not right; if it was dark outside, you were supposed to go to bed. At least after one night of no sleep.
Coco lived a double life in a strange kind of way. On the one hand she was on the cutting edge of styles and fashion and looked slinky. On the other, she read Family Circle–type magazines, which she hid under her bed.
Whenever she got into a position of total domesticity, with the husband, the children, and the wicker furniture, she wished she could work in Beverly Hills as the manager of a stylish store, and whenever she was working in Beverly Hills managing some boutique with pictures in Vogue, she was sneaking cutout recipes of Jell-O molds and fried chicken and casseroles.
There was another idea in the back of her mind—i.e., Wolf Tandini—who was synonymous with pitching headlong into oblivion and forgetting the whole thing.
I remember perfectly the night we met Wolf Tandini. It was one of our usual nights of going to Barney’s Beanery to find artists to talk to—those being the days when all the coolest artists in L.A. hung out at Barney’s, drinking beers on the patio and being, in my opinion, the funniest men in the world. We had come in early and were sitting at a booth, having ordered the tacos that we both loved, when this guy, alone in the booth next to ours, facing me, said, “Hey!”
“Yes . . .” I replied.
“Not you,” he said, “the cute one.”
Not me, the cute one? Even if he thought Coco was the cute one, he still didn’t have to say it.
Coco thought that was brilliantly funny. Her heart went out to his rottenness.
He was infamously alcoholic back in the days when people still thought Dylan Thomas was killed by New York. I mean, Wolf had been eighty-sixed from so many bars in New York, he’d come to L.A., and this was his first night at Barney’s, because he’d been kicked out of the Raincheck three blocks down Santa Monica.
Coco and I didn’t see much of each other after she took Wolf home with her that night. It wasn’t just that I hated him, it was also that they didn’t get out of bed for two years. She’d call me, insist I meet her somewhere for lunch or a taco, and then she wouldn’t show up. And if I called her, furious, she’d laugh.
Finally one afternoon, after standing me up about three times, she called and swore to God she’d meet me at Barney’s in an hour. “Wolf’s out of town,” she said, “so . . .”
So I stood her up, staying in bed with my own personal cute Italian boyfriend from the East Coast, and when she got so mad, she called to scream at me, I said, “Robert’s here, I can’t talk.”
And I hung up.
Of course, when she was with Wolf they did manage to make money, I think a mixture of dealing grass and refinishing antiques.
“I told her she could open all the shops she wanted,” Coco’s mother told me, “but I wasn’t giving her any money if Wolf was involved in any way. He’s cute, I know, but he’s such a criminal.”
In those days it was still fashionable to be neurotic—if you could afford the psychiatrists—whole sections of Beverly Hills were filled with psychiatrists, and one section, on Roxberry between Little Santa Monica and Brighton Way, was known as Mental Block. Coco’s mother, Luba Lichtman, was a psychiatrist, and Coco would occasionally make the mistake of trying to enlist her mother’s help in her ideas.
“She’s got such a brilliant mind,” Dr. Lichtman said, “she could be anything. And she’s so talented in many ways. I told her if she wanted to go to design school, I’d help out, but anything with Wolf, no!”
I could see how if you had a psychiatrist for a mother, you might take one look at Wolf Tandini and think he was a great idea.
Coco lost all her friends, not just me, during her Wolf episode, and it wasn’t until she took her mother’s advice, went to design school, and became an interior designer in a fancy-schmancy salon in Beverly Hills that she finally got rid of him and sent him back to New York City, where I, one day on a bus, saw him on the street and couldn’t duck fast enough not to be recognized. He jumped on my bus, came straight up to the empty seat beside me, sat down, and, trembling with righteous indignation, said, “Why do you hate me?”
“Because,” I said, “you said I wasn’t cute in Barney’s, you said, ‘Not you, the cute one.’”
“I did,” he said. “Well, it was just something I said.”
This was Wolf’s idea of an apology.
The thing was, he was very darling-looking himself—he had thick black curly hair, this angelic mouth, and big brown eyes and a kind of boyishness that I find, to this day, irresistible unless it’s a boy who says “Not you, the cute one.”
I didn’t like him in L.A., and I had enough on my mind in New York. I got off the bus and forgot all about him.
Coco and I became friends again, especially when she went through her Jell-O-mold stage when she married this very square advertising executive who thought she was the most beautiful girl in the world and allowed her to spend anything she wanted on wicker furniture, roses, and a Saab. Coco was so totally immersed in style down to the soles of her feet, she could concoct an English country life in the middle of West Hollywood, and for almost four years after she had her daughter, she was content to live inside this comfortable sameness in spite of how she not so secretly scorned her husband for wishing he were a poet.
The rest of the country was, at that time, going through the first onslaught of women’s lib, when wives were leaving husbands for all sorts of reasons.
One day Coco moved out, taking her daughter, and got a job working as a stylist on TV commercials, where she made twice as much money as her mother the psychiatrist and she was not yet thirty. People in the style business used to take one look at Coco and go into a kind of shock, her personifications were so astute. She could be the modern girl with hat, the slinky blue-jean baby, the English decadent lady, and other great things. Her grasp of clothes was so adept, it was a thing of beauty to watch her dress.
She had nothing on except slinky satin drawers with ecru lace trim, her breasts—she had never worn bras and when it became fashionable to throw them off, hers were already off—were like Marilyn Monroe’s in those last pictures of her with the scarf, little Polish breasts, she called them. She would put on these translucent chiffon thirties dresses from thrift shops and look like an Italian countess with exactly the right bracelets, shoes, and stockings. . . .
Some actresses I’ve known could become different people in clothes, but Coco carried this to some transcendent degree where she’d become days gone by, eras, or else fashionable today.
