I couldn't, since I had never heard of Bernard Henri Levy. Naturally I didn't admit it.
At that point Ponsonby wobbled back in. Seeing a tall woman, he assumed he'd found Lilah.
"My dear, they said you'd gone," he bleated, staring upward toward Cindy's bosom.
Cindy just laughed her vigorous laugh.
"You got the wrong lady, Jake," she said. "Lilah went home."
The news struck Ponsonby to the heart. "It isn't time to leave. I haven't left.
"Premature, so premature," he added. "The silly girl."
With that he turned abruptly and wobbled off in search of a lower bosom. He promptly found one, too—it belonged to the Guatemalan who was gathering up the brandy snifters. The maid was swifter of foot than he was, but he trailed forlornly after her for a while, until she lost him completely by reversing her field and darting off toward the kitchen.
"It's my impression that this means the end of Western civilization as we know it," he said, as he came back by.
"Gee," I said, once he was out of earshot. "Maybe Lilah should have stuck around."
Cindy wasn't worried about Western civilization. "Let's split," she said.
The Penrose mansion was on N Street, while Cindy's house was on Q, down the alphabet but up the hill.
It was a brisk night and we walked along briskly, in tandem with it. Cindy seemed indignant, a state that comes naturally to her.
"Pencil's had it," she said, after half a block.
"Why?"
"She's always using me to entertain her B—list," Cindy said. "That's why."
We continued along briskly until we were up the steps and in the doorway of her house. Cindy flung her coat on a nice French bench, not unlike the one in the Penrose hallway.
She had a tastefully appointed if slightly predictable bedroom, in which only one thing really caught my eye: a white football helmet covered with sparkles, of the sort commonly awarded homecoming queens just as they are about to be crowned. This one sat on a walnut bureau near Cindy's windows.
"Gosh," I said. "Were you a homecoming queen?"
She had already shucked her dress. Before answering she glanced at her watch and took it off, as she walked over to me.
"Of course," she said. "Santa Barbara High."
For a daydream believer like myself it was the acme of something: the boy from the little cowtown in the West, the homecoming queen from the far Pacific shore.
But for Cindy it was no big deal.
"Come on," she said. "Let's go to bed. I gotta have my sleep."
Book II
Chapter I
"Ho, ho, Cadillac Jack," Boog chortled, when I walked into his Cleveland Park house the next day. He was lying on one end of a huge leather couch, looking deeply hungover, although it was four o'clock in the afternoon.
"Lookit him," he added. "Pussy-whipped, weak in the knee joints, and deprived of his common sense."
"What common sense?" Boss said. She was sitting on the other end of the couch, wearing a red caftan. The couch was littered with newspapers, as was much of the floor.
Linda Miller and Micah Leviticus sat on the floor, playing electronic tennis on the TV set.
A tall, surly-looking man in green fatigues stood over them, observing their every stroke and occasionally offering advice. When Boog mentioned my name he strode over and shook my hand vigorously.
"Moorcock Malone," he said. "Glad to meet you, fellah. That was a fine thing you did."
"What thing?" I asked, trying to remember some fine action I might have taken. I knew, of course, that Moorcock Malone was practically the most famous journalist in America, and that he was probably very well informed. Still, it was unsettling to think he knew more about me than I did.
Meanwhile, he was still shaking my hand and beaming his approval out of big serious brown eyes, though even while he was beaming he tried to keep one eye on the tennis game.
"Down, down!" he said, after Linda had just zipped two aces under the little bar of light that constituted Micah's racquet.
Micah cast an anxious eye at Boss.
“Boss, I’m getting behind again," he said.
"What fine thing?" I repeated.
"Why, stabbing those pugs," Moorcock said. "A fine thing. Of course, drowning them in the finger bowls would have been even better. That would have been an excellent thing."
"There wasn't much water," I said.
"Oh, there's a way to do it," he said. "I saw it done once, near Vals-les-Bains."
"Like shit you did," Boss said.
Moorcock Malone looked hurt by Boss's disbelief. He stood without comment as Linda zipped another ace past Micah.
Then he suddenly furrowed his large brow, in an effort to better remember the pug drowning. I got the sense that Moorcock furrowed his brow as normal mortals might fiddle with the little knobs on a TV set: in order to sharpen the picture, bring out the living detail.
"Nineteen sixty-two," he said. "I was AP then, of course. European desk. Had been in Berlin, covering the Wall. Seems hard to believe now, but the Wall was a big story then. Jack Kennedy came over. The Wall was always worth a trip."
Micah Leviticus, down two sets, was darting anxious glances at Boss.
"Of course, the Wall got old," Moorcock said. "The Wall got very old. Went to Vals-les-Bains to interview General LaRoche-Jacquelin. Played a hunch. You could do that then.
"LaRoche-Jacquelin had a chateau near the Vals-les Bains. It was a little messy."
"Them chateaus is hard to keep clean," Boog allowed. "All the hired help run off and become movie directors."
"Oh no," Moorcock said, looking surprised. "The chateau was impeccable. It was the situation that was messy. The General's aide-de-camp was his mistress' brother."
"Shit, I wisht I had an aide-de-camp," Boog said. "First thing I'd have him do is go around and whip my kids for me. Bunch of little smartasses give me a haid ache."
"The General was tired of his mistress, and the aide-decamp was tired of the General,'* Moorcock went on. "Can't blame him for that. LaRoche-Jacquelin was a mean fucker."
Boss got down behind Micah and began to rub his neck. One reason Micah was so far behind was because of his obsession with trying to put topspin on the httle electronic ball. Electronic topspin was beyond his manual skills, a fact Linda coolly took advantage of.
"To make a long story short," Moorcock concluded, "the aide-de-camp drowned the pug while the General was reciting his favorite passage from the 'Chanson de Roland.'"
Boss looked up for a moment. "For your information, Bobby," she said, "you don't make long stories short. You make short stories long."
Despite this criticism. Moorcock seemed satisfied with his account. He poured himself a drink from a pitcher of cocktails sitting on the coffee table.
Micah stubbornly continued his quest for topspin.
"I'd hate like shit to have to listen to a French general recite poetry," Boog said.
"Why, when you recite it to every little hooker who will take your money?" Boss asked.
"Hail, I recite Thomas Hardy," Boog said. "A man of wisdom. A man who understood the human condition, which is more than can be said for any French general."
"Match point," Micah said, hopelessly.
Chapter II
Linda Miller had the killer instinct. She seemed to be the Tracy Austin of TV tennis. Instantly she rammed home a final ace and switched the game oflf. Micah turned to Boss for comfort, while Linda ran and jumped on Boog's stomach, catching him by surprise.
"I heard you call me a smartass," she said. "You asked for it and now you're gonna get it."
Everyone at the Millers' seemed to be in a strange, Sunday afternoon mood, not easy to put one's finger on. Micah was the first to articulate it.
"What we all need is Mary Tyler Moore," he said. "I hate days when there are no reruns. I miss her perky smile."
Moorcock Malone was glugging cocktails, a little frustrated at not being allowed to finish his story.
&n
bsp; "The aide-de-camp got cashiered," he went on quickly. "Not for drowning the pug, for marrying a Greek woman. Then LaRoche-Jacquelin got cashiered, for talking back to De Gaulle. That leaves the mistress, who also got cashiered."
Boog sighed. "The French are a nation of cashiers," he said.
"The mistress sold art," Malone said. "She bought back art the Krauts had stolen from the French, only when she got it back to France she refused to cough it up. LaRoche-Jacquelin denounced her. Finally the CIA got her out, along with the art, in return for services rendered. She lives in Nashville now.”
"My God," I said. "Mrs. Chalcocondylas! I know her."
Moorcock swallowed an ice cube, so surprised was he that a cowboy-looking person would have heard of someone he knew from his days with the AP.
Actually Mrs. Chalcocondylas was quite a jolly old lady, well known to every scout who had ever gambled a hundred bucks on a worthless copy of some Old Master. She cheerfully bought them all, cleaned them up, and fobbed them off for a few thousand dollars apiece on hillbilly record producers who felt the need for cultural legitimacy.
I had sold her twenty or thirty myself She lived in a big corny Southern mansion, filled with real Seurats and equally real Vuillards.
"Jack, you darlink," she would exclaim, when I pulled five or six crappy paintings out of the Cadillac.
In every possible way she modeled herself on Marlene Dietrich, and since she was short and fat the accent was the only possible way.
"Ecole de Titian," she would say, scraping at a painting with a long red fingernail. "Ecole de Raphael."
Ecole de Joplin, Missouri, would have been more like it. Somehow I could never get across Missouri without buying several worthless paintings.
Micah switched the electronic tennis back on and we all sat watching the little speck of light bouncing monotonously back and forth across the silent set.
While we were amusing ourselves in that fashion, Moorcock left abruptly, to catch the shuttle. Linda Miller could not believe it.
"But he left his girl friend," she said. "He just left her. He didn*t even go up to say goodbye."
"A blessing in disguise," Boog assured her.
But Linda was outraged, "How could he do that?" she asked, thumping her father a time or two for emphasis.
About that time the girl herself wandered in. She was a tall skinny redhead in her early twenties, dressed in a green satin running suit. I thought I detected a resemblance to Lilah Landry and I did. Her name was Andrea, but everybody called her Andy. Andy Landry, Lilah's daughter.
When informed that her lover had left, Andy expressed only mild dismay.
"Why that big ole asshole," she said. "We were gonna run."
Then she spread her long legs and began to do stretching exercises. When those were finished she began to jog in place, looking thoughtful.
"Actually, I'd rather run by myself," she said. "Bobby's always stopping to comb his hair."
And she jogged softly out.
"If a man did that to me I’d whack him,” Linda said, looking pointedly at her father.
About a year later I was leafing through The New Yorker, trying to satisfy my long-standing obsession with Boog and Coffee.
Everytime I see a New Yorker I grab it and leaf through the ads, trying to anticipate what Boog might give her next. It's not exactly that I expect to control Coffee for the rest of her life, and of course I know she's not organized enough to set a price on herself, even subconsciously.
I think I'm just curious about what might cause the little locket of her heart to spring open. A dozen Czechoslovakian Easter eggs? An Icelandic poncho? A Celtic cross from West
Wales? Or a four-foot-long white aviator's scarf, a dashing reminder of the early days of flight?
I don't know, and I may never know, but while I was trying to figure it out I came across a poem by Micah Leviticus. The poem was called "Ode to Billy Jean." I don't know much about poetry or tennis but it was clear to me that Mary Tyler Moore had at least one rival for Micah's affections. It was a long poem and only the first stanza or two called back that strange afternoon at the Millers':
Linda, implacable ... aces
Like Tracy's,
Seven of them on a windy afternoon.
The tall man did no running.
He was not Pancho Gonzales,
Far too tall to be Pancho Segura ... no
Topspin, despair, a scatter of papers.
All three cashiered, mistress.
General, aide-de-camp, and the pug
Dead under the table
At Vals-les-Bains.
Billy Jean,
Teen queen of San Diego, sees
Wimbledon rising ...
Chapter III
The reason Moorcock Malone knew about my violence toward the pugs was because Cindy had spread the word while I was out buying her the Sunday papers.
She had forced me out of bed about noon, at which time it became imperative that she have the papers. For an A-list person like herself, the Post and the Times were moral imperatives. By the time I staggered back with my load of morally imperative newsprint she had finished her telephoning and was ready to get to work.
Some people approach Sunday papers in the spirit of an orgy—Cindy approached hers in the spirit of a seminar. Her discipline was little short of daunting. She didn't go for the comics, or the gossip columnists, as most people would have, but simply read the papers straight through, from the front page of the Times to the last page of the Post. She even read the Times Magazine. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't been lying on her fine sheets, watching her.
Out of shame, rather than interest, I made her let me have the want ads, so I could at least make a pretense of professionalism myself.
Actually I do read want ads professionally, most of the time. One develops an instinct for them—a sense of which garage sales might be worth hunting up, or which auctions might yield a few sleepers.
While Cindy read she brushed her hair, which was as filled with nice lights as good maple syrup. Once in a while she would glance up long enough to pick a few hairs out of the brush, and once or twice she glanced at me thoughtfully, as if considering whether on the whole I had been a good idea.
I kept quiet, halfheartedly drawing circles around a few garage sales, though I knew perfectly well that if there were any scouts at all in the D.C. area the sales would long since have been picked clean of everything but Reader's Digest books and cheap glassware, the two great staples of garage sales everywhere.
"What does your father do?" I asked Cindy.
"He owns two thousand apartment buildings," she said, turning a page.
Then she gave me a look.
"You know what I think?" I said.
Cindy looked up, with a touch of impatience.
"I think you ought to get rid of that bread sculpture," I said.
Actually I was nursing a modest inspiration. I already had a clear sense that I ought to try to get Cindy away from Washington for a few days, onto something resembhng my own turf. If I were going to cement our promising relationship I would have to do it somewhere far from butlers, where she wouldn't be distracted by the touching sight of Harris Fullinwider Harisse, stuck in a doorway.
"I think you ought to do a boot show," I said. "At least consider it."
She gave me a big grin. "Giving you the boot is what I'm considering," she said. "If I'm not careful you could fuck up my life."
For a moment my heart leaped up, thinking she must be afraid of falling in love with me, but that giddy sensation didn't last more than a few seconds.
What she meant, of course, was that I was not the most likely partner with which to ascend the social mountain.
"I thought you were always careful," I said.
"Naw," she said. "Sometimes I'm reckless. I've made mistakes before."
"What did the last one do?" I asked, out of morbid curiosity.
"He was an NBA guard," she said. "The point is, it wasn't
enough. If he'd been an NFL quarterback it might have been enough, but an NBA guard just doesn't really count."
I kept quiet, trying to figure out where that left me.
A moment later Cindy told me, with a candor that hardly anyone except Tanya Todd and my two wives could have surpassed.
"You see my predicament," she said, pulling a few hairs out of the brush. "Here I am fucking down again. At least Maurice was a sports hero, but you're a complete nobody."
"Oh well," I said—stung slightly—"I was NRA bulldog-ging champion two years running."
Cindy laughed. "Tell that to Oblivia," she said. "Oblivia thinks a bulldog is something that sits on its ass and wheezes."
"Who is Oblivia Brown?" I asked.
"The hostess with the mostest," Cindy said. "We're going to her house Wednesday night, if you last that long."
It obviously didn't matter to her that my name struck terror into the hearts of auctioneers and antique dealers from Maine to Tacoma. She didn't understand that I was the superstar of the flea-market world, the man who found a hundred-thousand-dollar vase in De Queen, Arkansas. And if she had understood it might not have made any difference.
"Hey," I said. "Let's assume I survive a week or two."
Cindy looked up. "Okay," she said. "Let's assume you do."
"I think you should do an exhibition of boots," I said. "It's the perfect time. Cowboy fashions are sweeping the land. Cowboy art sells at ridiculous prices. Get rid of those Latvian breadcrumbs and fill the gallery with spectacular boots. Emerald-encrusted boots. Historic boots. Call your show The Cowboy Boot Its History and Aesthetics.' Do a major opening—massive media coverage. Who knows? The right people might come."
"Where would I get emerald-encrusted boots?" she asked.
"Be serious," I said. "Texas is full of emerald-encrusted boots. Also diamond-, ruby-, and sapphire-encrusted. I know an Amarillo millionaire with fifty pair. Every major hillbilly singer has them, not to mention Bum Phillips."
I was making an impression. Cindy looked almost curious.
"Historic boots might be harder, but they're there," I said. "The boots of Wild Bill Hickock, for example. Maybe Pancho Villa's boots."