James Ellroy (15 page)

She nailed my beady eyes. They were ruthless. My body language was jerky
and
deferential. That showed my desire and my instinct not to crowd her. I riffed on her performing sense and her tripartite inhabiting of all moments. She said I was the first man who ever got that.

We walked uphill to the Ritz. Our legs fluttered. We kissed until 3:00 a.m. and kept our clothes on. I pre-imagined one thing correctly. The clash was strenuous. Our bodies ached from the meld.

Milan was a portable Joan Zone. Our transatlantic calls featured a softened rapport and frequent sex sighs. Carmel was Joan and Helen coiled contrapuntal. My moral sanction impeded, rather than liberated, me. I felt loyal to both women. I had to regain Helen’s trust and gain Joan’s trust. The deal was “Don’t ask/Don’t tell.” Helen did not say “Don’t pray” and “Don’t brood.” The Hilliker Curse required me to protect
all
the women I loved. There were two of them now. Prayer pushed me toward either/or dictums. I was, and am, decisive by nature. That native trait
failed me here. Extra brood sessions compensated. I assessed Helen and Joan sans a decision-making process. I came to this: they were the only two women who had ever astonished me.

They emboldened me and made me fear my heedless maleness. They encompassed differing strains of strongly held belief and made me ponder meaning. Helen’s swami shtick imbued my Christian view with a lighter secular touch. Joan’s strident leftism gave me the passion of the red flag aswirl and contextualized her personal grievance as historical and therefore empirically valid. They were big women suffused with big ideas. Helen and I had 13 years together. She still had the power to move me, jazz me, fuel me. I had squandered sex with her. It felt irretrievable. Joan was the prospect of sex as endless ride. Joan represented dialogue to spark enormous change. She had described moments of childhood horror that left me eviscerated. Her sporadic softness engendered my full-time softness. All my praying and brooding buttressed my love for both women. My addiction to woman imagery and the force of The Curse pushed me toward Joan.

Summer courtship, ’04. The prelude extends.

Joan invited me to Sacto for Independence Day. It’s a long weekend. Get a room at the Sheraton—it’s near my place.

A film-director colleague lived close by. That provided my alibi. I drove up in an ever-present heat wave. The Delta Valley was always hot. This was the blast oven–Everglades combo. I checked in at the hotel and walked to Joan’s pad with flowers.

She wore a white blouse and jeans. Her hair was down and she wore her glasses. I smiled at that. Joan said “Down”
and “Yes” and kissed my cheek. She put the flowers in a vase. I checked out her bookshelves. The only shit I recognized were three of my own novels. The other tomes: labor history, Commie tracts, gender polemics.

Window units barely kept the heat out. Sweat seeped through my shirt. My pulse raced and produced more wetness. Joan served a roast chicken and salad dinner. It was simple and tasty. I hardly touched it. Talk was difficult. I wanted to tell her everything I’d never revealed to a woman. Helen trumped Joan here. She already knew
all
my stories. Joan chatted up her teaching load and a bar-b-q the next day. Some friends were throwing a bash. I was invited.

All I had were expressions of love and alone-in-the-dark perceptions. They seemed precipitous and untimely. Declarations of chivalry bubbled up and almost choked out. Joan mentioned her atheism. My chivalry pitch cited God as a primary resource. I kept my mouth shut. I got tensed up to fight or run.

We washed the dishes and sat down on the couch. Joan smiled. Some lipstick was stuck to her teeth. I wiped it off with my shirttail. Joan asked me what I was afraid of. I said, “You.” I asked her what she was afraid of. She pointed to me.

We kissed. We fell into the meld and stayed there. Joan held my face. I kissed her gray streaks. Joan pushed the coffee table back to make room for my legs.

I started to lay out my declarations. Joan touched my lips and shushed me. My heart rate went haywire. Joan sensed something wrong and held me. My shirt was halfway off. Joan removed it. I unbuttoned her blouse. I saw her breasts and started sobbing.

She let it be for a while. She said things like “Hey, now.” She saw that it wasn’t about to stop. She eased me up and got me to the door and told me she’d see me tomorrow.

•    •    •

Sleep was impossible. The air conditioner rattled and tossed ice chips. Drunks careened down the outside hallway all night.

I kept the lights off. I saw Joan’s face and fought half-nude imagery. I conjured Helen and told her we could work things out. I never completed my spiels. Joan appeared, Joan smiled, I dabbed traces of red off her teeth.

The bar-b-q was above Sacramento, near the UC campus. Joan had a VW stamped with pro-labor stickers. We crossed a drawbridge and hit a greenbelt. Joan said, Last night was all right, you know. I touched her hand on the steering wheel. She curled a finger around my wrist.

We drove in silence. It marked fifty rides we took in a similar quiet. I never knew what Joan was thinking. I would have given anything to know then. I would give anything to know now
.

The shindig was outdoors. The crowd was thirtyish academics. Joan introduced me around. She kept a hand on my arm to indicate that we were a couple. It was stunningly decorous. She said “James” and left off the Ellroy. I felt weightless without my hot-shit surname. Joan caught it and touched me that much more.

Sunstroke heat, burgers and guacamole. Weightlessness and sleeplessness. The vertigo that Joan always inspired.

A young couple recognized me. That gave me a task beyond yearn and obsess. I regaled them with outtakes from my perved-out past. I eyeball-trolled for Joan about once per minute. I caught her looking my way at the same rate. She winked on one occasion.

•    •    •

My hotel was near the statehouse. We watched a fireworks display from my room.

Joan sat on the window ledge. I sat on the bed. We imbibed room-service libations. The show produced a sputtery sound track. Joan’s silence was a roar. I started to tell a trademark story. Joan said, “I’ve read your books, you know.”

The fireworks crescendoed and died. I smelled gunpowder through the AC vents. Joan walked to the door. I got up and followed her. She touched my cheek and told me not to worry.

Sleep was impossible. I was terrified. She walked out the door and took my body with her. I checked my mouth for malignant bumps and my arms for seeping melanomas. I went from the bed to the bathroom mirror, all night. I conjured Joan’s face. The process tore at my fear. Every Joan image invoked Helen. Every Helen image returned me to Joan.

Dawn came up. I forced myself to shave and shower. I bolted half a bagel and coffee. I was tensed up to fight or run. There was no one to fight. I had no body to fight with—so I ran.

I drove to Joan’s place and rang the bell. Joan opened up and saw me. She sat me down and let me find some breath. I got light-headed words out. “I love you,” “I’m scared,” and “I’ve got to go home” are all I remember.

The dream house was empty. Margaret was kenneled up. Helen was back in K.C. with her mother. I gobbled food out of the refrigerator and fell down on the couch. I woke up at midnight. I ran to my phone machine. The number 0 glowed.

Four days went by. I called Helen in K.C. and reveled in her family minutiae. I worked on a TV pilot and played raging Beethoven and soft Rachmaninoff. I wondered when I’d get my body back. I saw her face every few seconds. It wasn’t a conjuring. She was omniscient.

The doorbell rang. Friday, midafternoon, FedEx for sure.

Take note of what you are seeking, for it is—

She looked grave and sweet, all bollixed some new way. She said, “Hi,” with her swoopy inflection.

I folded her up and kissed her gray streaks. I said, “I’ll never run away again.”

But I did.

But not far.

But not for long.

I was the amnesiac. She was the black-clad woman with the answers.

Joan raided my image bank. It was a yippie prank. The Red Goddess decreed that all women should look like her and that I should seek only her revised portrait. She gave herself to me and eluded me. She gave me the knowledge that all women
were
her and that any terrified exits were just preludes to runs back.

No faces looked like Her. No new images replaced Her. Every partial resemblance dispersed into pixilated dots. No woman could ever be Her. No face read for the power to redeem could ever connote what She gave me and what She withheld. I stopped looking. There was Her and nobody else.

Goddess: Beckon me and cast me out. Let me worship and learn, love thee and fear thee. Partake of my reckless spirit and know that I am soul-pure. I am falling. No place is safe. Savagely sanction me to seek the world in Thy name
.

My nerves were
still
shot. Sleep remained problematic. I juiced my original cover lie to explain my weekends away. I
stayed in the dream house with Helen. Margaret remained outraged. I relinquished myself to romantic fixation and built bridges at home. I was sober, I made money, Helen’s anger withered as her grudge snap-crackle-popped. I repented less and brooded more. Helen researched her new novel and made a bevy of friends. I wondered if she sought male action, and decided,
C’est la guerre
. I got smug. We had an agreement. Helen sensed my preoccupation as a return to form. He’s back, he’s less crazy, he’s off—per always—in his head.

Joan. The power of name. Strong-willed lovers Sturm-und-Dranged.

Joan despised my Helen deal. We had no deal ourselves. I refused to ask, Joan refused to grant. Helen and Joan were grudge holders. I was not. I was a movin’-on guy on a two-way track. It was a three-hour drive between women. Joan and I collided most weekends. Our time apart allowed me to yearn and seek Her in prayer.

Yearning is my chief fount of inspiration. I live in that exalted state. The drama of women sought and fleetingly found competes with History as tidal wave. My dark-room communion has given me a world to rewrite. Wanting what I cannot have commands me to create large-scale art in compensation. My broad social arcs backdrop big love at all costs. I must contain these stories and create perfect love in book form. Unfound women counterbalance History as random horror. I must bestow grandeur on my mother’s death and err on empathy’s side with all my depictions of women. The Hilliker Curse was a self-inflicted summons to compulsion and predation. The Hilliker Curse charged me to sit in the dark and seek art. The Red Goddess Joan obliterated other women for me. She left me gasping for meaning. I began to see her
as
History.

Our time apart was my monk’s retreat, shot through
with phone sex. Our time together was a passion play with an often dissonant chorus.

Joan took me everywhere. Sex was an unending surprise and an ever-replenishing joy. Talk was bewilderment, enlightenment and vexation. My theme was, you must change me and I must protect you. It was highly specious and unassailably tender. It allowed me to hear shit that I didn’t want to hear and stay in the war.

Joan’s atheism killed me. I eschewed Christian text and laid on a soupçon of deistic jive. I
listened
. My code was, Tolerance does not equal approval and should not be construed as censure. Joan’s leftist/anarchist shit bugged me. I
listened
. I conformed to her interlocutory style and asked gee whiz–phrased questions. I fucking
tried
. Joan loved me for it. I loved her for loving me. Every acknowledgment of my flowering heart gut-shot me with gratitude. We told each other sex stories. Joan chortled at my previous exploits. I portrayed them as buffoonish, to spare her pain and allay jealousy. We did not achieve parity here. Joan described good pre-Ellroy sex in wild-ass detail. It titillated me, horrified me, enraged me and moved me. The black-clad woman has the answers. She is your seditious sister. The easy answer is, She is you and you are She. The Christian answer is, Judge not, lest ye be judged. The hard answer is, Acceptance means loss of control.

We diverged and reconnected along odd lines. Our social codes dovetailed unexpectedly. I was a door-holder and a ladies-firster. Joan dug that. I never scoped other women in her presence. Joan
looooooved
that. Her brazen brother was a fascist, a religionist, a heterosexist. It didn’t matter. He was a good human being, and he was sweet to her.

She cut me open. I lived for her approval and wept at her harshness. I left blood spills wherever we went
.

Our love was immediate and unimpinged by commitment. My relationship with Helen killed the chance of a sanctified US.
I
was at fault here,
I
was confused,
I
was atypically risk-averse. Joan weathered this with grace and very few expressions of displeasure. She let me stay in the fight. I was
always
tensed up to fight or run. We fought. I ceded control in reluctant increments. Joan noted my efforts and gave me no reason to run.

I found the reasons, alone in the dark.

Sacramento to Carmel. The Joan Zone to the dream house, bereft. The Red Goddess to the best friend/roommate and her outraged dog.

The Hilliker Curse. Bylaw #1: You must protect
all
the women you love.

Helen never questioned my time away and always welcomed me back. I left my body and my design for conquest and surrender three hours northeast. I returned to Helen in all her goodness and unique brilliance. She’d softened toward me. I assumed the role of companion-husband sans bedroom access. I crashed—just a little. The roar of Joan subsided—just a
touch
.

The phone rang every other night. Anticipation kept me breathless. I felt unbodied. My need and taste for acquiescence horrified me. I fixated on Joan’s past. I feared her susceptibility. My sex tales stressed pathos. Her sex tales stressed seXXX. My fear stretched to encompass our inimical worldviews. I had become a sponge for reassurance and consolation. It appalled me. My need for titillation felt masochistic. It registered as peeping turned inside out.