James Ellroy (11 page)

I was obsessed with
women
then. The emotional text was preordained. I was in love with
one woman
now. My whole world swerved. I got de- and re-compartmentalized. Helen rendered all other women sterile. My all-new novel got de-sexualized.

And more sophisticated and colder. And more about ruthless men and self-seeking solitude.

I know it now. I didn’t know it then.

Helen took me in and provided shelter. My life was blessedly contained. It comforted me. The restrictions impinged on Helen. I had a safe place to work and brood. Containment means suppression. Suppression festers and explodes in the end. Helen bought me time. It allowed me to go insane at a slow and highly productive pace.

Crazy boy, you still don’t know, no woman can save you.

You’re working too hard
.

Helen kept saying it. I kept calling my energy a by-product of US. Suburban life and blissful monogamy. The groovy ex-dog. One woman instead of
women
. You have to dig
that
.

Helen was skeptical. We’re not making love like we used to. You’ve become disembodied. You’re always off in your head.

I rebuffed her first few salvos. I denied the presence of sexual stasis and pledged instant redress. Helen’s candor unnerved me. I felt like I’d trashed our romantic code and abridged our marital vows. Sex was everything. We both believed it. We were two years in. I rejected the marriage-as-complacency saw. Helen rejected it with the same fervor. I stonewalled Helen’s suggestion of looming dysfunction. There’s trouble in paradise. Don’t tell me this.

Shit
, there’s seepage. One compartment’s fissured now. Fuck,
I’m happy
. I’m writing a new novel. I’m living big history at a trillion rpms. I’m devotedly in love with you. I may be approaching contentment. Please don’t hit me with this
—yet
.

That was my rationale. It was halfway true. The other half was more problematic. I was a cut-and-run guy pre-Helen.
I never got to this point before. This is where we confront and surmount. Please don’t make me do it
—yet
.

And I’m tired of chasing and seducing. And my erotic fire has embered and weirdly re-flamed. My book is a scorching blaze. Now sex is power and power is fiction and fiction has replaced sex. Darling, it’s all tangled. I only want to be with you. Let’s not broach this
—yet
.

The men in my novel were power-mad. The men in my novel were dissemblers and compartmentalizers. They were me sans all conscience and the guidance of Helen Knode. Helen Knode personified an exponential shift in my thinking. Helen Knode’s counsel led me to write a new kind of book. Helen Knode saved me from my gender-wide crush on women. Helen Knode got to the truth before I did in most cases. Now she got me to
this
.

Please, Cougar—not
yet
.

I ran, I postponed, I diverted, I crawled back in my head. Infrequent liaisons sealed the compartment. The fissures contracted and held.

American Tabloid
was the private nightmare of public policy. The infrastructure was power grab in place of love as redemption. Women veered through the book in subordinate roles. This was emblematic of the early ’60s. I wanted to write an all-new kind of novel and incinerate my ties to L.A. The former was laudable, the latter was not. L.A. made me. Jean Hilliker was killed there. I met Helen Knode a block from where I was born. The book was almost finished. Helen kept saying,
You’re working too hard
.

Christmas ’93 approached. Helen had written a draft of her book and gave me pages to read. They were impressive and raw by my inflated standards. I ladled on a line edit and Ellroyized the prose. Helen laughed at the loony language loops and tossed the pages back in my face.

The toss-back was loving. We laughed about it then. I
cut Knodeisms and juked the text with macho-maimed
mishigas
. I did not feel rancorous
then
. I’ll post-date and dissect my animus
now
.

I was running from the marriage. I wanted to parry Helen’s where’s the sex? routine. I was back in my dark-room mode, minus the constant Beethoven and chicks on the phone. I was the shirker and Helen was the confronter. Our domestic drama was starting to swerve along standard gender lines. I found that repellent. My tory feminism was playing out as a shuck. Helen had become the moral leader of our union. Her wisdom and courage superseded mine. My job was to retreat from my productive mania and give her all of myself once again.

I couldn’t do it.

I didn’t know
how
to do it.

I didn’t know that I
should
do it and
had
to do it
—yet
.

Then The Curse took an all-new form and Jean Hilliker bought us some time.

We exchanged gifts Christmas morning. I gave Helen a cashmere sweater and a tweed blazer. Helen gave me a fleece-lined bomber jacket. Barko got a shitload of beef-dipped bones.

Helen pointed to the last package. It was rectangular and festively wrapped.

She said the gift required some research. She expressed trepidation. She said, I hope you won’t be upset.

I unwrapped the package. I felt the frame and saw black-and-white flickers behind glass. I instantly knew what it was.

The
L.A. Times
photo. Quickly dismissed in ’58. Unheralded that Christmas. Frequently reproduced and perhaps over-scrutinized now.

I’m a doofus ten-year-old. I’m wearing a plaid shirt and light-colored pants. My zipper is prophetically half-down. A cop just said, “Son, your mother’s dead.”

Helen always cuts to the punch line. She asked me what I was thinking
then
and what I was thinking
now
.

I said, “Opportunity.”

I had a magazine-feature gig within weeks and a book deal a month later. My first job: view Jean Hilliker’s murder file and describe the jolt. My second: hire a homicide cop, attempt to solve the case and write an investigative autobiography.

The Curse was a formal summons of death and a bidding to engage the world obsessed. This new codicil empowered me to again exploit misfortune. I had to contain the Hilliker/Ellroy journey as a crime tale. It was a specious task at the get-go. Jean Hilliker and I comprise a love story. It was born of shameful lust and shaped by the power of malediction. Our ending was not and could never be the apprehension of a killer and a treatise on the victim-killer nexus. My precocious sexuality pre-shaped The Curse and preordained the resolution as my overweening desire for women.

I
knew
we would not find the killer. I
knew
my murder memoir would portray an arc of reconciliation and lockbox Jean Hilliker anew. I was deliriously willful and callow in 1994. I believed that all resolutions could be contained within narrative form. Helen knew otherwise. She gave me the picture so that I might view it in wonder and benefit in indefinable ways. She added mitigating clauses to The Curse without knowing that The Curse existed. Helen contended then, and still contends, that I always write my way through to the truth. She believes that I rarely get it right
the first time and that I often impose form at the expense of content. She knew that Jean Hilliker was more than a murder victim and less than a fount of rapturous worship. She sent me out to grasp at verisimilitude—in the hope it would sustain and enrich both of us.

I lived in Los Angeles for fifteen months. I talked to Helen every night. We had several East Coast/West Coast reunions and got back fractions of sex here and there. I was always anxious and distracted. Sex had always been pursuit and the performance of the task. My years with Helen had illuminated that and had pushed me tenuously past it. Awareness does not equal spontaneity in bed. My current task was to play detective and frame my mother within book pages.

I read ancient police files and compiled notes. I partnered up with a brilliant ex-cop named Bill Stoner. We interviewed scores of elderly barflies, East Valley riffraff and retired policemen. We got a great deal of TV and newspaper play. All our work got us nowhere. We lived the dead-end/unsolved-crime metaphysic. I brooded in the dark with Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. The music described romanticism’s descent into twentieth-century horror. It complemented my psychic state. I knew we’d never find the killer. I took copious notes on my emerging mental relationship with my mother. I understood that the force of my memoir would derive from a depiction of that inner journey. I erred in that regard. I knew that reconciliation was the only proper ending as I signed my book contract. I learned very little about Jean Hilliker’s death. I gained considerable knowledge about her life and structured my revelations in a salaciously self-serving manner.

I was her, she was me, we were doppelgangers and mirrored souls in duress.

I believed it then. I consider it fraudulent and dramatically
expedient now. I differentiated her with some minor details and let the convenient and viable theme of oneness stand as the truth. I did not acknowledge the calculated maliciousness of The Curse or reveal that I would never know Jean Hilliker as long as I sought atonement in women.

The investigation continued.
American Tabloid
was published midway through. It was a smash. I book-toured and deftly segued from doomed mom to doomed JFK. The lease on the Connecticut pad expired. Helen and I considered our options and decided to move to Kansas City. She had family there. I dug the high-swank pockets around Ward Parkway. We flew in and purchased a six-bedroom Tudor crib. Man-o-Manischewitz—it was Hancock Park on growth hormones!!!

Helen did all the relocation shit work. I waltzed in and waltzed back out to brood and play cop. My absence enraged Helen. She teethed on it. Our daily phone talks were rife with her resentment and my halfhearted repentance.

The investigation was boring me. I had everything I needed to write the book. Jean Hilliker had been reconsidered, recast and realigned with my orbit. I was mentally tapped out on her. My orbit shifted. I got realigned with the faces.

They came at me. I didn’t seek them out. It was an unconscious re-migration. My exchange of marital vows carried a binding no-fantasy clause that rendered me mentally as well as physically faithful. I was just that rigorous and disciplined. The gutter-to-stars arc of my life and its overall extremity had convinced me of the wisdom of absolutism and the folly of permissiveness.
I had to be that way
. I was a man of devout faith. Psychologizing was a slothful substitute for the iron-willed pursuit of perfection. I was heedless, reckless, boorish, domineering and self-involved. I
knew it and made sporadic attempts to eradicate it in practice. Character flaws were compartments. Compartments fissured and seeped. I acknowledged that, tenuously. I possessed two paramount spiritual goals and held them as unassailable compartments. They were my loyalty to my craft and to Helen Knode. I gave them my entire conscious focus. I underestimated the reflexive power of suppression and all the crazy shit that lies dormant inside your head.

The Faces
.

The Women
.

Them
.

I was burned out on Jean Hilliker. I had melded her into my craft with all the guile and Curse-derived passion I then possessed. My marriage was compartments within compartments, all starting to crack. I quadrupled my nightly prayers for Helen and grasped at the compartment of physical chastity with suffocating force.

It’s all right, Cougar—there’s only you—they’re just spirits aflame
.

There’s Marcia Sidwell at the Laundromat and Marge on the train. There’s Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto from
Brief Encounter
. There’s the wish-named Joan as she was then and might be now. She still feels prophetic. I’m nine years away from the real Joan, with her stunning, gray-streaked hair. There’s Karen out of my circa ’80 rainy-night dream. She’s more than a decade away in true life. Erika will find me in the backwash of both women.

And all the others. Alive in blur and hyper-focus. Indistinguishable spirits—each and every one unique.

I secured a new Anne Sofie von Otter poster. I propped it up on my work desk and studied her face. It was arrogant and kind in an artist’s proportion. She was blond and fair. Her hair was square-cut and severe and expressed the force of her will. She had rough skin and refused to disguise it.
That displayed her composure, merged with a big gulp of diva’s Fuck you.

She was seven years, two months and five days younger than I. A classical music guide told me that. I found a full-length photo. She was lush-bodied and seemed to be quite tall. I bought some lieder recordings and went crazy with her voice.

I cried. I got up close to the poster and hugged a pillow. I couldn’t understand her words sung in German. I improvised my own English love lyrics and studied her face. The poster was affixed beside my mother’s murder file. I trembled and knocked it over sometimes.

The music, her picture, the meaning transposed.

I was threatened by her genius. She was threatened by mine. We were big and strong and full of lovers’ fight. We were horrified by our loneliness and appalled by our need and went out in the world with our crazy beauty just to get a touch of it back
.

We burned down rooms. We knew what everything meant. We understood terror and fury as no one else had. It hurt to be together and hurt more to be apart. Our mouths clashed. Our teeth scraped. Our arms ached from the meld. We knew each other’s smells and heard each other’s voices and told each other things that no one else ever had
.

Hear me, Helen. I was not disloyal. They’re all sacred chords that play out faint and let me return to you, chaste.

You’re working too hard
.

Helen kept saying it. She said it first in ’93. She kept it up through ’99. No sex simmered as an issue, intermittently expressed.

Helen always broached it. I always said, “Soon, babe,” or “I’m on deadline,” or “You know we’ll get it back.” Helen mollified me or looked gut-shot or blank-faced let it rest. Her critique of my domestic forfeit assumed an edge. She called herself the “Concierge.” I was the “Star Boarder” or “VIP Guest.” She was the “Zoo Animal’s Keeper.”