Black Swans, page 15
Straight men in the fashion business used to follow her down the street in cars, too shy to speak.
She cut my hair—she still did hair if you begged her—and made me look like some enchanted spy on the Orient Express. “Here,” she said, handing me an old-looking crepe de chine ivory blouse with pearl buttons and old shoulder pads, “you have the tits for this.”
She ransacked thrift shops not only for herself but for everyone she knew, keeping her finds until she came by one day and would dig them out of brown paper bags in her car trunk; she made sure everyone she knew was at least in some way au courant no matter how to the contrary one felt oneself to be.
I myself have always thought that looking like Coco took so much time that if you didn’t pay attention to every new thing and know exactly what was in every store, you might just as well wear navy blue and call it a day.
“Can you wear something besides navy blue?” even my sister asked, after ten years of nothing else.
“I like navy blue,” I said.
In the eighties, when anyone remotely bohemian like me wore black, black, black, and only black, I could more or less go along with this, but really, I wished it were navy blue, because in black you can’t have any flaws. It’s got to be perfect, whereas navy allows for cats.
I’ve always noticed that once you let your looks take over your life, you’re going to spend all the livelong day talking about being too fat, having the wrong hair, and otherwise reducing yourself to the most sluglike common denominator—and if you ask me, someone looking back on the middle class of America during the twentieth century might be horrified to know that all the beautiful girls did nothing but hate their asses, legs, stomachs, and breasts. And what really is shocking about it all, too, the men who committed incest on their own daughters told a lot of them “You’re so fat, no wonder nobody will ever love you.”
In the twenties, when being boyish and slender came into fashion, it wrecked being fashionable for everyone else. Coco had one of those metabolisms that let her eat anything at all, lamb stew, pastrami sandwiches, Hostess cupcakes, and Coca-Cola—and it just burned right off her, as though all she did all day was work on a farm, whereas all she did all day was smoke Marlboros, lug boxes of clothes around, and spray walls.
By then, she had divorced her third husband, a man who directed TV commercials and who was a combination of both her Jell-O-mold idea and her artistic side, but who had unfortunately gotten sober in a local rehab, and as Coco said, “I could barely stand him when he was loaded, sober he’s just a fool!”
It wasn’t that Coco minded him not spending one hundred thousand dollars a year on cocaine, it was that she didn’t even want to consider the idea that she should quit smoking grass, because to her, grass was—well—her private life. Of course, today we’ve finally noticed that there are things like “cerebral atrophy” that afflict people who smoke grass, but in those days, among the crowd who took drugs so heavily in the eighties, grass was this innocent thing like a beer once was in the sixties, or a white-wine spritzer, and not hardly in the drug category at all.
Of course, by the time she got out of that marriage, not too many people in their forties were worse than Coco. Somehow, word leaked back to me that Wolf was once again in Coco’s life, and if anyone’s behavior was still horrible, Wolf’s, I’d heard, still was.
“He’s just been living with the worst alcoholic,” Coco told me sadly on the phone. “She is always throwing scenes and tantrums; she’s just driving him crazy!”
“Who could that possibly be?” I wondered, since someone worse than Wolf was difficult to conjure.
“Mary Alice Buck,” she said.
Not that long ago Mary Alice Buck had left a message on my phone machine threatening to kill me if I ever spoke to her artist boyfriend again; in fact, she left two messages like this.
Mary Alice Buck was like one of those Nancy Cunnard heroines whose face is ravaged by desiring too much, but whom men fell for anyway because she was so much trouble.
“If you wanted to fuck her at a party,” one guy told me, “all you had to do was make sure you weren’t her date.”
Men were always giving her real estate, she had houses everywhere, and how Wolf had wriggled his way into her favor when he obviously had no real estate to make things interesting is anyone’s guess, except she might have needed someone to drive to the liquor store for her, and maybe he, on heroin as he always was, seemed a sensible idea. At least he wouldn’t water down her gin.
It had been a long, long time since any of these kinds of people had been in my life, being the square that I now am and being on strict orders from my therapist to only hang around with people who love me and treat me well—in fact, once I began to make sure only sweetness and light got a foot in the door, men who were horrible ceased to thrill me as they once had, and although I find the rottenest people charming and funny, it’s become easier and easier to resist.
Even in this day and age of AIDS and Magic Johnson, there are yet those like a friend of mine, still in that life, who said, “Oh, I think five years from now people are going to look back on this AIDS thing as like that Reefer Madness movie, just some ridiculous scare tactic.”
“What on earth do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, nobody’s going to really get it except addicts and bisexuals—straight guys won’t get it,” he explained.
“But how do you know who’s doing what?” I asked. “Straight women get it, and they don’t know who from. What about Magic Johnson?”
“But he’s black,” he explained, sensibly.
It’s hard to believe that people still think like this, but they do; women are still too feminine and sweet to stop a guy and say, “Hey, you’re not doing that without a rubber, and here it is.”
Kids are still drinking blindly at parties and winding up in bed with people they wouldn’t have lunch with. In south-central L.A., when an injured high school kid was in the hospital, forty-seven friends offered to donate blood, and nineteen of them were HIV positive. At least, that’s what I hear is true now.
That’s not Reefer Madness; it’s more The Decameron.
Except that with this plague, there’s no place you can go and wait it out, because even Switzerland is HIV positive from so many drug addicts.
Anyway, Coco and I met for lunch at the West Beach in Santa Monica—she had a cheeseburger, French fries, and caramel custard and a bourbon. I had steamed vegetables.
She wore white from head to toe, a white hat, white shoes, a white suit with white stockings, and looked like she had when we met in summer school. Except now she had big dark plum lips. I, as usual, wore jeans and a navy-blue tank top, and though through eternal vigilance I fluctuate between having a waistline and not quite, my hair was at least now a shade of blond that cannot be denied.
“Who’s doing your hair?” she wondered, staring at it with iron concentration.
That’s the trouble with having designers as friends; if your hair suddenly looks a lot better than when they did it, they take it personally. Little did she know what my poor hairdresser, Jeannette Aaron, had been through—weaning me away from nature and into artifice through year after year of my horrible attitude about beauty salons, which is that I consider them the same claustrophobic place as the dentist.
“Some woman in the valley,” I said.
Her hair was now a charcoal black, which matched the charcoal smudges of her eyes, which were still, however, the same light-brown, hazel color. Before I got sober, I never really looked at anyone’s eyes, but I find myself looking at people’s eyes a lot more, just for the eye contact, which to me is such a rush, it’s like other people say they feel from gambling.
“Oh,” she said, lighting a Marlboro as she ordered the bourbon, something she’d never done before, at least at lunch. “Well, she’s done a fabulous job.”
“Yeah,” I said, “thanks.”
If this were forty years ago, you know, women could order a bourbon at lunch—or a manhattan or something—and maybe nothing would be grossly awry; even ten years ago it might not have seemed ominous to me, since ten years ago, I would have been ordering it myself. Unless you’re in your twenties, bourbon is no solution. And look at things nowadays, sperm is only half as powerful as it was sixty years ago; I mean, really, people have to watch what they themselves ingest, what with all these other things being ingested unknowingly.
“Where’s Chloë then?” I asked, her daughter. “You’re not going to let Wolf around her, are you?”
“Chloë’s living with my mother now,” she said. “She’s going to UC–Santa Barbara; she’s majoring in art history.”
“Still,” I said, “she might drop by when he’s there, he’s trouble . . .”
“He’s driving this car out for a friend,” she said, sipping her bourbon. “It’s not because I invited him, exactly; he was on his way anyway.”
“How long have you been talking to him?” I asked.
“I’ve always known where he was,” she said. “We were always in touch.”
“Oh,” I said, “plan B.”
For a lot of people, real life is plan A, and plan B is for in case real life isn’t working out. Sometimes it’s good to have a plan B, like if you are too desperately determined to have someone go to a party with you and you think all will be lost if they don’t, it’s best to have a plan B so you can either go by yourself or with someone else.
But Wolf was more of a lethal plan B—type augmentation.
Wolf was like a plan B from the black lagoon.
I knew Coco was struggling with what I struggled with in the last months before I gave up and joined the “Sunbeams for Jesus,” as Coco called the sober group I was in. She was trying desperately to fix herself in a setting where she wasn’t the worst one. It was very hard when all your old bad companions were either dead, drearily sober like I was, or else certifiable. One woman she thought for a while was going to be perfect because she refused to recognize any boring problems with “substance abuse.” She did all the substances she wanted and refused to consider herself abused no matter how stunning her hangovers.
Maybe in the olden days when all one did was drink, you could last until your fifties or sixties before you wondered why nobody liked you anymore. But today with the mixture of drugs so easily at hand—at least in L.A. where people have to get in cars and drive to have a social life, and the biggest events in people’s lives are receiving cakes at meetings for how many years they’ve been sober, cakes you couldn’t even call your own since the same cake is used repeatedly, and with everyone so frightened of AIDS that even rock stars are often sober as judges—it’s very difficult to find a milieu where people in their forties can feel everyone else is worse than they are.
When I first got sober, I was filled with enthusiasm over no longer waking up with hangovers, insulting people, or feeling horrible, and I went around browbeating all my friends, insisting they see the light too, but after a few years, I realized that maybe I wasn’t the inspiration I felt people ought to notice I’d become. I’d listen to people tell me their problems, like that day with Coco, knowing that her problem wasn’t how boring life was, knowing that Wolf was not going to help, knowing about the lateral moves and night moves, such as inviting Wolf to your door, knowing all this, and yet all I said was, “You’re not going to have him over when your kids are there, are you?”
By this time, she lived in a little Spanish house near Montana Street in Brentwood with her two sons, and she said, “Why not, he’s perfectly okay around children.”
I mean, by then everyone on earth knew that molestees (which Wolf claimed to be) were molesters except Coco, but then, she never watched Oprah, she was too sophisticated.
“Just please don’t leave him alone with them,” I said, “he might fall asleep and burn the house down.”
She might fall asleep and burn the house down, but who was I to say these things? If common sense did any good, nobody would have AIDS anymore, nobody would shoot anybody, nobody would rob banks, everyone would be in a good mood and be happy to help each other with glad hearts.
Right at that time my mother went into the hospital for one of those weird knee replacement operations, and though we were told that this was easily endured and almost always successful, still everyone in the family was at the Glendale Memorial Hospital quite a lot, bringing her flowers, mangos, and turkey sandwiches, and it seemed as if I was learning more about the parking situation in Glendale than anyone in my family needed to know.
But then one day I got home from the hospital, and there was a message on my machine to call Bert, Coco’s third husband—the father of her two sons. I got him at work, where he said, “Coco and Wolf died in a car accident two nights ago on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. She was driving. It was an accident, but, you know, it was her fault; she crashed into a telephone pole.”
“Oh,” I said.
“She’s going to be cremated,” he said. “We’re having a service, it’ll be simple . . .”
I wrote down the details, and for a moment, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that there was something I could have done—some more flash and charming way I could have been, that would have sprinkled magic dust on her and kept her from letting Wolf in the front door.
At her funeral, I found myself standing beside one of her fabulous stylist friends, Ynez, who said, “I tried to get her to quit doing drugs, but you know Coco, she was never going to let Wolf go—the two of them, Jesus.”
Just then, an audible hush/rustle came from the back of the funeral parlor—behind which you could see the cars on the freeway in the distance in the smoggy afternoon. An old woman, dressed all in black, a black veiled hat, a black cape, black boots, black gloves, and a black cane, and this very, very loud voice said, “That woman murdered my Wolfy!”
It was Mary Alice Buck, her limo behind her on the cemetery grounds, black too.
“Oh, great,” Ynez said, “just great.”
She lifted her veil, and I could see her once-great blue eyes that had acquired masses of real estate, her haggard cheekbones, her demented mouth with mauve lipstick, looking an age mixture of eighty and fourteen, and really, it made me glad I’d chosen to be boring and ordinary, if only for not being remembered for moments such as this quite so much nowadays.
Her artist lover—the one she threatened to kill me about on my answering machine—had kicked her out of the Great Southwest, putting all her stuff in storage, and had a restraining order out on her, something we could all appreciate what with her lack of restraint. There were few people on either coast who would take her nasty phone calls, and suddenly she raised her cane as though she could bludgeon anyone who got in her way and said, “That little bitch, she was always trying to kill my poor Wolfy, he called me and told me to come get him, he said she tried to run him over in the driveway!”
(Poor Wolf, who even suspected he had a plan B, too? And it was Ms. Buck.)
Anyway, she was now the only one left in this particular menage, and suddenly it seemed to occur to her that she was all alone forever, and she clutched her cape higher as she looked around like a mad Medea, bloated with rage, waiting for a deus ex machina to sweep her away.
But it didn’t come.
Instead she turned and limped out on the marble floors, into the smoggy afternoon, to her awaiting limo.
We were all too relieved to keep holding our breath in fright, and so the place exploded in laughter. It almost seemed to me that I’d been holding my breath since the night Coco had met Wolf at Barney’s and left without saying good-bye.
You know certain religions have a word for what happens when two people shouldn’t get together; in Hinduism they just out and out say it—“overexcitement,” it’s called.
At least we here don’t bind girl children into marriage contracts as in India and send them down the aisle when they’re eleven so they can die in childbirth at sixteen, and Cosmo girls here, no matter what they’ll put up with bikini wax–wise, draw the line at clitoridectomies and shoving drying herbs up their fronts to become all raw even before their hot dates come over so they can more easily contract their hot date’s HIV-positive condition. I mean, in condom stores here, the point seems to be—at least from the lubricant business implications—the juicier the better. And if Coco at sixteen did happen to have part of her nose chopped off, at least genetically her nose still stood, because Chloë, her daughter, seemed not to mind having it at all. She seemed to think what she looked like was okay, though God knows, she could be bulimic or one of those self-wounding types, who take razor blades to their wrists every so often to “relieve pressure.”
It seems to me that the African practice of harsh herbs is up there with eating disorders and drugs for an early grave—or even childhood marriages from India, though that is less the girl’s idea; it is more like being burned at the stake as a witch or being thrown into a volcano like a virgin—you’re being sacrificed for the good of the group, by others, and are more victimized than if you stand in line buying the herbs yourself.
Epilogue
RECENTLY, MILLY, A woman I know who lives in Santa Barbara, called, and she said, “I hear you know what to do if someone you’re working with drinks—I mean, if they have a problem. If you think they have a problem.”
“Like what,” I said.
“Like horrible mood swings, never being on time, and sometimes I think I don’t want this person around my child the way she acts. But we’ve been working on this project for about a year, and every time I feel like I’ve had enough, she calls in the middle of the night and says she knows doing this with me will save her. I took her to the care unit at Cedar-Sinai, to detox,” she said, “but she slipped out the next morning. Then she called me and said it wasn’t where she belonged. Maybe you know her, Mary Alice Buck.”
“Oh, no!” I said and gave her my therapist’s number so she herself could go, not Mary Alice, since in my opinion having someone like that for any kind of partner is up there with shoving herbs up your vagina, self-destructwise. Don’t tell me it’s not the same thing, because I know it is.
