Black Swans, page 4
When Warren arrived, wearing the horrible Rodeo Drive presents Wanda had bought him, which were Too Loud, and he saw Emily, his face just fell, and he began to tremble, and suddenly, the two of them were mingled together, laughing like they had never stopped. But Warren looked at his watch and said, “I’ve got to go. I’m expected somewhere.”
And he left.
What discipline.
I guess that is what they mean by “character” on the East Coast: leaving summer behind.
It turned out that he was on his way to his engagement party at the Rodeo Gardens and leaving that night for Bermuda, where he married Wanda on New Year’s Eve.
“When I heard about it,” Emily said, “I thought I was okay and I just went swimming at the Ambassador Hotel like I always do. But in the parking lot, in the parking lot, I just . . .”
And she began to cry again.
And then, two weeks later, we came in from going to see the new Laddie Dill art, and she turned on her machine and we heard this croak, this voice of Warren in a strangled gasp, saying, “I still love you.”
“Is that . . . ?” I asked.
“Never mind,” she said, and erased it. “It’s probably a wrong number.”
I knew Warren’s voice, even strangled, it was Warren—
“But it’s . . .” Then I thought, So what, after all, unless he’s getting a divorce. And he had told me he was getting “used to her,” so . . .
So it’s been like that for a few years now, this torment between Emily and Warren.
And I was there at my friend Monica’s baby shower, in a decorated blue room (they knew it was going to be a boy, and they’d already named him Alan—so much for yellow), sitting next to Marika, the sweater maker, ignoring the Godiva-chocolate favors we all got, when I looked up and there was Warren, staring at me across a room full of pastel women all talking a mile a minute.
I excused myself and went out a side door, meeting Warren by the ladies’ room at the end of the bar, and there we were, for a moment, in silence.
“Hi,” he said.
“So,” I said. (I looked at his stupid expensive shoes, his stupid expensive pants, his ridiculous neon-blue Las Vegas silk shirt—Wanda’s favorite color for him—this ridiculous silk handkerchief stuck in his stupid jacket pocket.)
“I heard you’re doing great,” he said.
“How are you?”
(He looked like a drunk Irish priest, old.)
For a moment I thought he was going to reply something eminently civilized and suitable for the Rodeo Gardens on a Saturday afternoon. But instead, to the question, “How are you?” he just cracked.
I shook my head, grabbed a cocktail napkin to brush a tear off my face, blew my nose, and left him there limp against the doorway, with a horrible new color in his hair and dyed eyelashes. If the scene had any character to it at all, it could have been Death in Venice. But to be corrupt, you must once have been innocent—and I guess some people never were.
Emily is still in love with him and insists he couldn’t have dyed his hair, that it’s just a rinse.
“It’ll wash out,” she says, determined to think he’s wonderful. And through her eyes, it might be true. Ever since she lost all that weight when they broke up, she has just stayed this Daisy Miller virgin, waiting for him to come home from the stupid winter madness.
Free Tibet
All I know about Tibet can be rolled up on a scrap of paper and eaten by a yak. It’s hard to get to; it’s cold; it’s high up; it’s a spiritual nation led by the Dalai Lama, a man who is chosen by the age of six or so to personify God and is raised by monks using rules of divine collusion. Shirley MacLaine went to Nepal, which isn’t the same thing evidently. Tibet is in southern China, overrun by the wrong people flushing out the right people, who have come to “us in the West” to make their plight known. Tibet is the last stop on the Iron Rooster, the train that runs through China, but you have to go by car to Lhasa, Tibet’s capital and perhaps only city, and, really, you cannot get to Tibet, let’s face it, it’s too remote and too elevated and too windy.
Unlike Brian.
I met Brian in Beverly Hills at my friend Janis’s party, and he liked me so much, he invited me to a party at his house, but I said, “Do I know you?”
He was not remote, elevated, or windy enough for me; by God, I liked my men humiliating or at least impossible to get to—and with Brian, why before I even knew him, I was hurting his feelings, or could have if he’d had less class.
In those days, I had this principle that all men should have hair—lots of hair—or else what good were they? Unless, of course, they were so rich they could introduce you to the Rolling Stones, in which case, I suddenly became flexible.
Brian was bald.
Bald but slinky.
Soon I began to notice him at social events I made myself go to, wearing baggy pants that were in style, with baseball caps and Italian sweaters you could find in Fred Segal’s or else Milan.
Of course, it was obvious to me and to everyone that Brian was gay—even if he did have a son, Eddie, and had once been married enough to leave L.A. and move to faraway Maui, where he and his now ex-wife grew incredible dope (she left him for a yoga guru and moved to India). He had enough social expertise to capture almost anyone’s imagination once they got over his baldness. He had flocks of people crazy about him. He emanated glee, exuberance, and wild joy. He had an operatic grandiosity that lit up and included everyone he met—including me, after about a year of his being fabulous and my resisting. He was a radiant creature.
Even though he was bald.
If there had ever been a Catholic cardinal in my social life, Brian was it—he radiated Jesuit evasion and elegance; he radiated things of the spirit and he radiated brilliance and tactics.
His tactic with me was to wait.
To keep offering me seats at dinners, invitations to openings, events of all kinds—and tomatoes.
It was the tomatoes that got me.
I love tomatoes, the kind people grow themselves, not the kind in stores. The fact that tomatoes make me break out in pimples doesn’t faze me in the least; if I can grab them off a vine and shove them into my mouth and go crunch, one after the other, I will. I love the smell of hot tomatoes in the sun and that sunny dust that smells like hot tomatoes on them. (The closest thing to hot tomatoes is a perfume called Calyx worn by my friend Caroline Thompson.)
“You love tomatoes,” he said. “Well, come by this afternoon, we’ve got millions of them.”
His house was in an old section of Hollywood up in the Los Feliz Hills, where people with old money still live. Brian’s family was lush with old money; he came from a fourth-generation California rancher/grower from around Santa Clara and had inherited enough and had enough trust funds to regard having fun as a proper life.
“Where does your money come from?” an innocent once inquired.
“The bank,” Brian explained.
Of course, when I met Brian in 1982, people in L.A. were just beginning to die of AIDS, and so many of Brian’s friends had it, it seemed to me he spent a lot of time in hospitals. Brian himself was apparently celibate, he was so Catholic-y and martial, and it didn’t seem to me that he could allow anything in his bed that could strike anyone as improper. He had been celibate since his wife left him in Maui and he was left caring for Eddie, who was gorgeous and only four when the wife abandoned them both and went to India. By the time I agreed to come over for tomatoes, Eddie was eight, and I had somehow decided that Brian was so funny, operatic, and interesting that, even without romance, he might be someone who added to life.
“He’s so rich,” my friend Janis explained to me when I complained he was always after me. “You’ll never get bored.”
By “rich” she meant texture, although the money didn’t hurt.
What happened between us was romance. It was as if my heart left my body and went to Tibet, I was so in love with him. But it was love between hearts and souls and not bodies, because no matter how far or how passionate things got, I could never bring myself to consummate our acts; I was always afraid he’d leave me for one of the cute boys who—heaven knew—seemed to be everywhere.
After about a month we were still aglow, but the passion had evaporated, and instead of his leaving me, I left him for horrible Peter, who I mistook for normal in one of my more insane judgments of character. Except that in the beginning Peter was fun and even promised to take tango dancing with me. Quickly this degenerated into sludge, and soon I was miserable and filled with despair.
But whenever I saw Brian, he looked at me with eyes of solace, and he’d burst into Puccini and offer me tomatoes.
“Come by anytime,” he said. “We’ve still got loads.”
“They make me break out,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “broken out or no, you looked better when you were around here than all ashen from this jerk you’re hanging out with now.”
Brian saw my beauty fade before his eyes as my dreams of having someone to tango with turned into shells of their former selves, until finally one night I got in my car and in tears went to Brian’s.
“Why do you do it?” Brian said. “We’re having duck for dinner. Come inside.”
“Oh,” I said, “I’ll just go home and dress.”
I got home, and when I did, horrible Peter was calling, and, cliché that I was, I went back to his house for more demonstrations of demonism, squalor, and life without hope among the clinically depressed. Every now and then he went too far even for those of us willing to see things go too far, and I salvaged what was left of myself physically and went home and wrote screeds, sixty-page letters about how awful he was. It had been months since I’d been able to think about Brian and fun again. Especially anything so rich and opulent as Brian’s type of fun.
One day I woke up and Brian was calling to say “Let’s drive up to Santa Barbara for some herbs.”
He arrived to pick me up with his Aretha Franklin tapes instead of Verdi, and as we were surrounded by songs of black beauty, he told me he was HIV.
“My T cells are way down,” he explained, though I had no idea what a T cell was.
He told me he got it from a transfusion in 1983 that had also given him hepatitis, which almost killed him. But then, Brian was always having things almost kill him. The reason he’d had the blood transfusion was because he had an ulcer, which he thought was merely an upset stomach from his wife’s leaving him. When the ulcer got really bad, he went to the hospital in West Hollywood and got seven pints of blood, which saved his life, but it must have been that blood, contaminated before they knew.
“It’s not that that kills people,” he said, “it’s the fear. I mean, it’s okay to die. We remember that from our psychedelic days, don’t we? That we are divine?”
I looked at him as anyone would, looking for symptoms, but the only symptoms Brian exhibited were songs of joy, tenderness, and concern for me. And my mental health.
“Can’t you see,” he said, “that life is too short to be miserable? You have to be with people who love you. The people who care about you. You are too fabulous, darling, to be miserable!”
“I’m not miserable,” I lied, though I still was halfway under horrible Peter’s spell, morbidly hoping that any day now the acute depression would lift and the word “happiness” or “fun” to him would no longer be like garlic to a vampire. The concept of looking forward to things was beyond his comprehension; he only looked forward to anything with trepidation—his general mood—and so you couldn’t make so much as a plan for dinner without him turning ashen and out of Edgar Allan Poe. “The only thing floating around free these days,” he’d say, “is anxiety.”
If you see me laughing in a room, it’s bound to be a manic-depressive making remarks. I had no idea how a man so gorgeous and successful and with a line like “The only thing wrong with you is we didn’t meet twenty years ago” could be completely devoid of friends, but as time went by, I realized that the reason no one was in his life was it would entail his making a plan and dealing with a human being, and the only companionship he could endure was a cat’s. Once I made the mistake of finding him a cat, my usefulness was over.
While I was up to my ears in vain attempts to get a firm commitment for lunch from Peter—even now—Brian called, and I decided a firm commitment for a day with him was at least a deal.
“I may have HIV,” he said, “but you’re the one who looks sick, look at you. If you’re doing this guy for sex, it can’t be great sex, or you’d look happier.”
(Actually, it was great sex, in an Edgar Allan Poe kind of way.)
On our way to Santa Barbara, Brian showed me the ranch friends of his had owned when he was young and where he had spent time when his own parents were too sophisticated and drunk to care what he did. “My aunt lived here,” he told me, “and she raised me. She’s sick now, and I’m taking care of her—that’s her place, there . . .”
“It’s as far as the eye can see!” I gasped.
“Yeah,” he said, “and the girls I knew then had places like that too. That’s my wife’s family’s place, over that hill, it’s just as big.”
Before the 1960s got to everyone and he went into a circle of incredibly handsome men who were reckless, gay, and had endless parties for art, Brian had been raised in that conclave of old California money that liked horses, shooting rabbits, and country clubs. “Until I met my wife,” he told me, “I thought I was out of this life forever. But once we got married, she turned back into one of them. All that adultery stuff, so bourgeois!”
The countryside flew past us, and I wondered what it could have been like, growing up such a rich Catholic in all these high places with rancho mansions, crops of citrus and avocados with their own gorgeous box labels, and cattle, horses, horse shows, camping trips overnight in the mountains on horseback—and the sea on the horizon, the Coast Range to ride around in.
It would have turned me into a junkie, it seemed so boring, and Brian said, “We all went to private schools in Ojai because our parents couldn’t handle us, we were so wild. And they wanted to travel. I went to a Dominican school; we all drank the sacramental wine—which we stole by the barrelful.”
In Santa Barbara, after buying some Chinese herbs, we went up to say hello to the monks at this Dominican spiritual retreat where, one weekend back before I met horrible Peter and was happy, Brian and I had gone with friends to “meditate” and walk and enjoy the incredible red windy sunsets, and I could remember how sublime it was, even though afterward I’d disloyally taken Peter there, and he’d gotten into such a huff when one of the monks asked him to repark his car that his black mood snuffed even the horizon’s blush into ashy flatness, and he became so depressed, he looked like a greasy lizard by nightfall. (But the sex was great; mind you, however, anything would have been great compared with everything else.)
“Everything I know about sex,” Brian told me that day, “I learned from the Dominicans.”
I knew Peter was rotten, but I was still too much of a cliché to leave. In fact, even in the car with Brian telling me he was HIV positive, I was still so low in my latest folly, I found myself wondering if I was not like Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes, who, when her dearest friend from the past, Swann, comes to tell her he’s dying of TB, brushes what he says aside as though unable to hear, and she says something like, “If only I could find the right shoes, I’d be able to go to this party I’m already late for.”
The most chilling moment in all of Proust, I always thought, that particular moment, and yet there I was, just as bad—wallowing in my self-pity when someone real to pity was right there. On our drive back from Santa Barbara I realized, in spite of Brian’s looking okay, he was tired—wiped out, in fact.
“I must have the flu,” he said.
“Oh,” I said, “you poor thing.”
On our way home, I decided I’d try not to be the Duchesse de Guermantes, and instead I would devote my life to good works, people who loved me, and even go to Brian’s next birthday party, which was a couple of weeks away, and make an effort to be kind and wonderful. Horrible Peter, I knew from long experience, hated parties and would no sooner go with me to one with my friends than celebrate any holidays normal people found so much fun. Peter spent every Thanksgiving at McDonald’s, crouched over a Big Mac that he said was “God’s most perfect food.”
Tibet, in other words, remote and elevated.
But did I do anything about it? No.
And so another season passed, and I hadn’t seen Brian, yet another terrible tangle with Peter went by, and anyone who loved me I avoided like the plague. Can things get worse? I kept wondering, and surprisingly, they did. Until finally I read this book by Fay Weldon, and she talks about a woman married to a depressed man and explains there’s nothing you (i.e., women) can do about them. And fiction got through to me where facts had feared to tread.
This, combined with the knowledge that if he didn’t change, I’d wind up with this extremely cute monster for all eternity, out in the desert somewhere in a trailer without hope of turkey on Thanksgiving, did it.
Was he cute enough for that?
Finally, no. But not yet.
Peter always insisted that I left because he started going bald, but if he was, I didn’t notice, and besides, Brian was bald; I was used to it by then.
There’s one thing about being in a bad relationship for longer than you should just for sex: when you get out, all you can think about is sex, and my advice to you is—for great sex, get a vibrator (or do it yourself), and remember how fabulous it was; don’t go trying to get the person back, or you’ll wind up a skull in the desert outside the Bagdad Cafe.
Anyway, I finally backed up fiction with dreary ordinariness, found myself a Jewish-princess therapist in the valley who wore even more purple than me most of the time, and cleaved unto her (she knew where to get vibrators too), until the worst of it was over, and not only that, she got me started on this book you’re reading.
