Houdini Heart

  ~

  Charles was born right here in Little Sokoki, and he died right here in Little Sokoki. I don’t know much about him. I know I should have learned more (a wife? Two wives? Three? Children, yes or no? Habits? Character? Died when? Died how? Any scandals, good deeds, mysteries?), after all I’m a writer, and any writer worth her salt does research. But it’s too late now.

  He, I learned a great deal about. Born as far as one could get from someplace like Vermont, to wit: El Paso, Texas—dry, dirty, hot, and on the road from nothing to nowhere. I know he was the son of an irrigation pump salesman. I know his hard-worked used-up mother died giving birth to him, that he came into the world with no mother, but did have a nine year old sister. He and his sister must have had one hell of a dad though, because the man did not remarry, did not fob the kids off on some other woman, did not have more children to prove his manliness. He did not drink, raise hell, fuck whores, drive fast, or spend all his money on himself in one stupid way or another. On the other hand, he had no humor and no imagination, although I suppose it took some sort of imaginative process to believe so firmly in Hell, even if the Hell he believed in was the product of other men’s morbid idiot fancy. He also believed that virtually every human on earth was bound to wind up in that Hell, except himself, and by God, his goddamned kids.

  In grim silence, he raised his motherless daughter and his motherless son all by himself. He paid for their Catholic schooling. More to his credit than theirs, they both managed to get through their teenage years without too much trouble. He sent them to Catholic colleges (if they hadn’t chosen Catholic, he wasn’t paying), attended their graduations, lived alone, never stopped working the same job, then died of a massive coronary a few years before either one of them made it good.

  The sister moved away from El Paso to study religion at a college in Dallas, but with Dad no longer breathing brimstone over her shoulder, turned instead to painting. It took her a long time, even when her brother blossomed into a Hollywood star, but she’s become very well regarded in the Southwest, paints the heat and dirt of Texas like a smaller more precise Georgia O’Keefe. Four of her canvases burnt along with the Malibu house. I regret that immensely. I regret not being able to tell her I’m sorry. (But then I remember that all his money, and all of mine come to think, will be hers soon enough. She’s going to be able to buy a lot of paint.) As for him, he came out to California to play baseball for Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Not too long after that, he began appearing around L.A. in any play, large or small, good or bad, anyone would cast him in. He said he did it because it got him laid. I believe that. He certainly got laid. Sex wasn’t one of his hang-ups: sometimes he got laid to get the part and sometimes it was a woman and sometimes it wasn’t. As an actor, when he was good, he was very very good, a rumpled Bogie, a half brother to Mitchum, a full brother to Nolte. When he wasn’t all that good, it was almost always the play, sometimes the director, and later, often the drink. He was hardly ever bad. Even drunk, he had that magic. He could turn in a performance.

  It took him about a year to be tapped for the silver screen, another two years to become a major star. It took him five to become a major drunk.

  Unlike some leading men, he liked to talk in his pictures, the more blather the better. He was always looking for great dialogue. He said that’s why he took the role in my movie. He got to say clever things, insightful, funny things. Later, lying on his back on the rocky sand under the pilings that held his Malibu house above the tossing sea, he said, “The movie business is a crock of shit.”

  I said, “Is that why you drink?”

  For that, he gave me one of those ten-million-dollars-a-picture-plus-a-percentage looks, and said, “I’m not my Dad. I don’t even wish I was, the miserable fuck. Not drinking killed him. Hell, I’d fucking drink if I sold irrigation pumps all my life. I’d fucking drink if I had two little kids looking to me for everything they ever needed. I’d fucking drink if one of my kids painted virgin Catholic pussy. I’d fucking drink if the other never became a priest—that’s what he wanted. Wanted me to be a gardener for God planting demons in little kid’s souls. Hell, you think I drink because I’m an actor making an ass of myself every single day of my life, which I do and which I am?”

  I didn’t have a clue why he drank. I didn’t have a clue, period. I barely knew him. But then, at this point, he wasn’t really talking to me.

  “I drink because one of those demons came up like a fucking tulip, a black raging demon that hates my guts and that never gets tired of telling me about it. Fucking thing’s talking to me now, it’ll be talking to me an hour from now. It’ll be the last voice I ever hear. I wake up with it and I go to sleep with it. It drives me to rage and it drives me to panic and it drives me to despair and it just fucking drives me, period. Only three things touch it, and I’ve tried everything, believe me, every stupid kind of messed-up crap a man can do to himself.”

  Silence then, until I asked, “Three things?”

  “Drink, fuck—or pretend I’m someone else.”

  I heard this, I heard it clearly, and I still sat there on the stinking sand under his house, still went up to his bedroom a while later.

  We were made for each other. Kate never had a chance.

  But here’s a thought to make me smile. There were four things that could shut up that voice. Death was that fourth thing. He should thank me.

  ~

  Walking the fifth floor corridors of River House in the middle of the night is no different than walking any other corridor on any other floor of River House: the same dark doors to the same efficiency apartments, the same exit signs, the same soiled carpeting, the same drab paint, the same dim recessed neon lighting. No windows because the windows of River House are in the apartments. Of course, like the second floor, the fifth has an apartment I hope never to see again. 5-4, the one with the apple lying on the tatty carpet outside its door, the one I thought was the boy’s apartment and might actually, for all I know, be his apartment. No apple now. And no girl with a fist of steel to drag me in, not if I don’t knock on the door.

  Besides this, the ballroom is on the fifth floor. I’ve quickly checked both wings, High Street and Main Street. If there was once a door up here, an entrance to a private staircase for the Akeley family, it’s gone now. There isn’t even space for what must once have been in River House, the Akeley’s access to their little home on the roof. I can think of only one solution to this puzzle because there is only one place left to look. The entrance has to have been through the ballroom. This was Charles River Akeley’s building. He had it built to his personal design and he paid for it with the riches he took from the men who ripped the gold from the California earth. If he had a reason for putting the staircase to his own home in the ballroom, I can’t imagine what it was. Or maybe I can.

  Perhaps the ballroom came much later. Perhaps before it was a ballroom, the space served as a grand entrance to Akeley’s conceit of a house on the roof of his nose-thumbing building. Or perhaps the ballroom was the lower part of his private home, divided into things like his living room and kitchen and dining room and such, and perhaps in later years, he retreated to the small roof house for some reason, allowing what was once part of his personal apartments to become a ballroom. I don’t know. All I know is that I’ve already been in the ballroom, now nothing more than a huge storage room full of junk and ancient cast-offs, looking for a way into the tower. I can’t even recall how long ago that must have been; life before River House dims, even life in River House fades as it passes but it seems I have lived here for a long long time, so long life before River House no longer exists, therefore—what has it to do with me? (Aha. An interesting defense strategy. If I were still a writer, I could use that in a TV courtroom drama.) Whenever it was I was last here, I found no staircase up to the largest tower above me, no extension of the stairs that come and go in my closet.

  Once again, I stand in front of the ballroom’s double glass doors. U
nlike the first time, they’re locked; even bad maintenance men can get it right from time to time. Good thing the doors are made of glass and that I’ve brought a specialized glass cutter. Good thing I’ve regained my sanity on this day of all days. I now define sanity as the ability to function as if reality were real. In any case, I can actually work the glass cutter, and do it with very little noise. These good things come from watching movies and learning what tools to carry and what to do with them. First, near the doorknob, place a chromium-plated handle over the glass. Second, superglue the thing by its flat metal discs to the glass and wait about a second for the glue to dry. Third, cut a hole around the handle with the diamond cutting edge big enough for my hand and forearm, keeping hold of the circle of glass with the superglued handle so that it doesn’t fall and shatter on the floor. Then, gently but firmly, tap out the glass, and when that’s done, slip my hand through and unlatch the door. Simple. And finally—walk in. Naturally it isn’t as easy as that. The glass is as thick as a coffee table top. For a moment there, I’m sure that the pressure I have to apply to “tap out the glass” is going to shatter the whole door. Thank someone, it doesn’t.

  Can’t use my flashlight for the same reason I couldn’t use it in Benjamin’s office, whenever that was. There must be a cop out there somewhere. But enough light comes through the twelve foot tall windows from the streetlamps to make things visible. I can see just enough to get around without bumping into things, but I admit it’s a little bit spooky…which makes me smile in the pale light. To anyone else but me, I am the spooky one. I am the bad one.

  It takes only a glance to see that the corner tower is quite a distance from Akeley’s roof house; essentially, the entire length of the ballroom. My first time here, I never looked other than under the tower. Very obviously the way up to the Akeley’s house has to be under Akeley’s house.

  But first I’ll have to move about twenty old sinks, half as many old toilets, and a small mountain of cheap furniture.

  ~

  I’m already tired. It’s dimmer, darker, less comforting so far from the windows, and picking up and moving toilets as well as dismantling a furniture mountain (as quietly as an elf; don’t want to be caught here at this hour, at any hour), has taken most of the energy I began this with. I rest on an overturned toilet bowl, look out one of the ballroom’s huge windows. The little watch I bought reads one thirty-five in the morning. Little Sokoki seems to be in bed early tonight, even the guests of The Last Ditch. The streets are empty. No sound of a car or a motorcycle anywhere, no distant movement on the Interstate. No late night drunks falling about, no disillusioned kids lurking in shadows selling each other drugs, no dwellers in cardboard out scrounging for snacks in the dumpsters. There are no lights in any of the windows, not even in one of the private houses on the hills rising to the west and to the north and to the south.

  Can they all be asleep? Is the child sleeping? Does she grow ever younger in her sleep? Is her dog? Is it her dog? They’ve only just started hanging out together. Perhaps they met out of a common interest in me. Whatever. She is certainly not walking the halls of River House; all the walking being done tonight is being done by me. But, still…no one reads late into the night? No one sits in front of a flickering TV pondering the loaded gun in a bureau drawer or the sleeping pills in the medicine chest? No one has insomnia, or has forgotten to turn off a lamp, or is on vacation leaving something lit to fool would-be burglars? Apparently not. It’s dark out there. Very very dark. If not for the street lamps, Little Sokoki would have only the stars for comfort. And stars are not comforting. Stars dwarf us. Stars put us in our place—a minor solar system in a minor galaxy in a minor key. No wonder so few look up.

  Strange, I admit, but even so, this lack of light must happen from time to time, and this is merely one of those times. I guess.

  Back to my furniture mountain, which is by now no more than a few more chairs and a chest of some sort. But I can already tell that if there was a door, it’s been covered over. I am undaunted. There has to have been a door. What did Akeley do? Climb up and down the fire escape behind the theater to come and go from his house? Wait until dark and turn into a bat? Of course not. There’s a door here somewhere and I will find it.

  Three of the ballroom walls are outside walls, each with a row of tall windows and each a bearing wall. And one of the ballroom walls is an inside wall. This also seems to be a bearing wall. But behind the small tumble of discarded furniture, I’ve found a seemingly useless arrangement of curtain walls jutting into the ballroom from the center of the middle outside wall. Aside from cutting off a part of the huge room thereby possibly providing somewhere for catering, these walls seem to have no structural function. Somewhere along one of these curtain walls I will find what I’m looking for.

  3 A.M. is not that long from now. Where do I drill first? Studying the curtain walls, tapping for studs, I decide to begin my search where I would put stairs if this were my building and if this overlarge room was once a series of rooms. So where is the most dramatic place possible for an impressive staircase up to my roof house?

  Right here. It’s in a direct line of sight from the front doors of the ballroom which I am sure stand now as they originally did, even if they are not the original doors.

  Using my hand brace and bit, I make two holes in my chosen wall, one for peeking into and another very near to the first hole to insert my laser pointer through. The standard space between either side of a curtain wall of sheetrock is usually three and a half inches. Obviously, my drill will easily go through both pieces of sheetrock.

  First try shows me nothing. Doesn’t matter. I will keep trying until it does.

  Third try (third try is always the lucky one, the magic one)—what’s this? The little flexible laser can be either a tiny flashlight or a red pointer beam. Using the pointer beam, I can see that the red dot shining on whatever is on the other side of the wall appears to be some distance away, much further than the far side of the wall would be. What I’m looking for is behind this curtain wall, I’m sure of it.

  Good god, suddenly my heart feels sore with fear.

  But I will not stop. I have nothing else to do. Nothing. There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere. I thought it would be the river; I thought I would peacefully, easefully, drown. I thought I would simply stop. There would be no capture, no media feed, no trial, no lawyers, no mug shots in the tabloids, no television discussions of why I did it, no gruesome gloating over how I did it, no book written by me in a cell, no waiting, waiting, waiting, until…how does California kill? They give you a choice: lethal injection or gas chamber. I’ve researched neither. But then I don’t have to choose. Now I think something else awaits me. Something that flows directly out of the story I have been living through since the day Kate died, something that started with a small unwatched child wandering away from her home in search of wonder. How do I know she did not find it in a pool of golden fish?

  I have to get through this wall. That’s what the hand sheetrock saw is for. No fooling around, no thinking twice. I’ve already done enough damage in this building alone to warrant the worst the law can do. Vermont does not kill, but it does lock up for life—it’s not so much the locking up that sets my teeth on edge, though that is bad enough; it’s the company—I stab the sheetrock with the saw’s triangular point and begin sawing in a curve, working to make an ill-shaped hole large enough for me to crawl through. When that’s done, I intend sawing a similar but unavoidably different ill-shaped hole in the back of the curtain wall. And then I can use my large flashlight, the one I bought one day, a million years ago, at Price Chopper, to see what’s behind all this.

  Bingo. Charles River Akeley’s formal staircase. Hardly the worse for wear or for lack of wear.

  In nine minutes it will be three o’clock in the morning.

  ~

  The worst I ever saw him was when he was scheduled to guest on West Wing. His role was that of a senior senator from Connecticut who actually t
errified Martin Sheen’s President Bartlett: a man as educated as Bartlett, as articulate, as sober, as principled, but unlike Bartlett, loved on both sides of the aisle. Reading the script, he told me the part would be a real stretch for him: educated, principled, sober. But it was a good part: strong, complex…and the dialogue snapped with wit, a heady heretical intelligence played out at high speed, not to mention his getting to quote Shakespeare as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson. The moral tale of his true statesman from Connecticut, who suddenly collapses and dies in the Oval Room at the feet of the President of the United States, was supposed to extend over two episodes, but three days before filming he endured what he thought was a massive heart attack and we (his agent and I) rushed him to Cedars-Sinai Hospital.

  For hours, enduring test after test, he suffered the torment that comes with terrifying pain and an acute fear of death. He clutched at my hand until my bones cracked. He told me over and over how much he loved me, told me so often I began to wonder who he thought I was. Awash in tears, Kate in my belly unknowingly conceived, I had no idea he was so afraid of dying. I had no idea he was so wracked with the horrors of meeting his maker, or even of just clocking out, of going like my mother and blinking into blackness. I would have thought he’d be relieved to go. It would mean the death of his demon. It would mean his demon would finally shut up.

  What I discovered was that his Dad was still in there somewhere, talking up Hell.

  In the hospital, he could not drink. He could not fuck. He could not pretend to be somebody else. He was naked and defenseless. He was also not having a heart attack. He was having a panic attack so severe he went into a seizure.