“We, we, we, and this little piggy went to the market,” Beverly said meanly. “I’m looking at my calendar and next Wednesday looks clear. You just better show up at the Beverly Hills Hotel next Wednesday and take me to the Ivy or you’re never getting any more from me.”
“Beverly, I can’t even afford to park at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Bruce said. “I just work part time at a gas station. That restaurant probably costs more than I make in a month.”
“Are you telling me nothing doing?” Beverly said. The next thing he knew she had slammed the phone down, accomplishing just what he had been trying to think how to accomplish. The phone call was definitely over. Calling her in the first place had been one of his worst ideas in recent times—not as bad as sending Melanie off to shoplift steaks, but not a prize idea, either.
Still, he felt a little jittery. Beverly was perfectly capable of hanging up on him and then expecting him to show up at the hotel anyway even though he had just pointed out that he couldn’t afford the restaurant. Beverly had a real blind spot when it came to money—she just assumed he could get it and spend it on her if he really wanted to. If he didn’t get it and spend it on her, then all the problems of life were his fault.
Just thinking about Beverly made Melanie seem a thousand times better than he thought she was when she was in the dumps or had had a fight. The phone call shook him up and made him really want to solve the main problem, which was Melanie. It made him want to solve it so badly he even stopped a cop car. He waved his hands and the car wheeled over and stopped. The cop behind the wheel looked at him as if he were a banana peel or something. He did not look even the slightest bit friendly.
“Hi,” Bruce said. He felt he had better talk fast before the cop got out of the car and beat the shit out of him. “If someone living in this area got arrested, where would they take her?” he asked nervously.
“What’d she do?” the cop asked. He had a kind of southern voice.
“I don’t know, she just hasn’t come home,” Bruce said.
“She who?” the cop asked.
“Her name’s Melanie Horton—she’s my girlfriend,” Bruce said. “I checked with the Valley hospital and she’s not there. I thought maybe she got drunk and made a disturbance and got picked up.”
“You mean she’s a hooker?” the cop asked.
“Oh, no,” Bruce said. “She’s not a hooker. I just thought she might have got drunk and caused trouble.”
The cop who had been sitting in the passenger seat got out and came around the back of the car. He was a hefty white man with a gun on his hip that looked big enough to stop an elephant. Bruce was really beginning to wish he hadn’t had the idea of stopping the police car.
“What’s this hooker’s name?” the hefty cop asked.
“Sir, she isn’t a hooker,” Bruce said, as politely as possible. “She’s my fiancé. She’s way late getting home, and I just got worried, that’s all. Her name’s Melanie Horton.
“She’s pregnant,” he added, thinking that fact might make the cops a little less hostile to him.
“You think this fucker’s a pimp?” the large cop asked his partner.
“Could be,” the other cop said. “A pimply pimp.”
He smiled at his own wit, but the other cop didn’t smile. He took a little sinus sniffer out of his pocket and used it on both nostrils, all the while looking at Bruce as if Bruce were a bug it might be nice to step on.
“Sir, I’m not a pimp,” Bruce said. “I work at a gas station on Van Nuys Boulevard.”
The cop put the cap back on his sinus sniffer and strolled back around the car.
“Try Oxnard,” he said, “If she got picked up around here, that’s where they took her.”
It took Bruce a few minutes to calm down enough to drive, once the cops left. Talking to cops made him feel some high anxiety even if he was just getting a speeding ticket. Once he had got stopped for speeding when he had marijuana in the trunk; the highway patrolman hadn’t looked in the trunk, but Bruce had been so scared he had trouble even driving to Dallas. His legs were so weak they didn’t want to work the pedals.
When he finally located the Oxnard police station, five or six women who definitely looked like hookers were standing on the sidewalk, redoing their makeup while they waited for cabs. Inside, he had to wait so long that he almost nodded off; it was hot and boring in the waiting room, and the clerks had a tendency to do absolutely nothing unless you bugged them. He himself had always had a problem with public officials—he didn’t enjoy bugging them, or even approaching them. Still, it was obvious he would sit there all night if he didn’t bug somebody: every fifteen minutes or so he would head back to the counter and stand there, trying to look polite. Two or three sad Mexican men who looked as if they might be gardeners were also standing there looking polite. Actually, everyone waiting in the police station was polite—it was only the clerks on duty who had a don’t-give-a-shit attitude.
Finally a fat little white girl clerk took pity on Bruce and looked Melanie up in the computer.
“Oh, she was the one who got sick,” the clerk said. “Wasn’t she the one they thought had a miscarriage?” she asked, turning to another clerk. The second clerk was counting receipts or something, and took a while to answer.
“Maybe,” the other clerk said, not very concerned with the problem.
“‘Oh, no!” Bruce said, loudly enough that both women looked at him.
“Didn’t they say she went to Cedars of Sinai?” the first clerk said. “I think her mother and her sister came and got her. Two women, anyway. Seems like I remember Cedars of Sinai.”
“What’s Cedars of Sinai?” Bruce asked.
“Hospital,” the fat clerk said. She gave him a friendly look, his first in a while. Bruce could tell she thought he was cute—or else she was just feeling sorry for him.
“Is it in the Valley?” he asked.
“No way,” the clerk said. “It’s in Beverly Hills or West Hollywood. It’s not in the Valley.”
It was nearly two in the morning when Bruce found the hospital and persuaded them to let him go up to the room. He had to tell five or six nurses that he and Melanie were engaged—even after that, he got lost and had to retrace his steps. He had figured out that it must be Patsy Carpenter and her daughter Katie who had got Melanie out of jail. He had only met Patsy once, in Houston, and had never met Katie at all, although Melanie was always talking about how they ought to go see her. They had meant to go see her, but kept putting it off—Melanie was insecure about whether Katie really liked her or would just be seeing them to be polite.
By the time he finally found the hall where Melanie’s room was, he had built up a little anxiety about having to face Patsy Carpenter. After all, he had given the order for the shoplifting—she might be pretty mad.
But then he bumped right into her. She was just coming out of the room when he finally found it.
“Oh, Bruce,” she said, “good.” She looked tired, but she actually gave him a hug—it startled him. She seemed, to his relief, perfectly nice, really nice.
“Melly was pretty sick when we left the jail, we didn’t have time to go by and get you—and of course there’s no phone,” Patsy said. “How in the world did you find us?”
“Just kept trying,” Bruce said, very relieved that she wasn’t mad.
“Go on in, she’s sleeping,” Patsy said, “She’ll be glad to see you when she wakes up, though. I was just going to look for the Coke machine.”
“To the left, I just passed it,” Bruce said.
16
Patsy’s second husband, Tomas, had made no bones about the fact that he hated creative women—women painters, women writers, women singers. “They should just make dresses,” he said. The one creative woman he ever spoke admiringly of was Norma Kamali—even in that case, Patsy never figured out whether he liked Kamali’s dresses or her looks. He disliked actresses, ballerinas, ceramicists, sculptresses. His secretary, his receptionist, and a
ll his junior architects were male. The mere suggestion that a woman could ever be an architect sent him into violent spasms of contempt. Patsy had once taken the girls to Washington to see the Vietnam Memorial. When they got home and she began to sing the praises of Maya Lin, Tomas slapped her right in the driveway, in front of the girls—he set one of her suitcases down and slapped her.
Successful as he was at designing houses for producers and rich stockbrokers, Tomas’s dream had been to design a museum. He tried for all the local commissions, including the Getty, but was never a finalist. He applied in Dallas, Atlanta, Hartford, Tacoma, and Stuttgart, but when he finally did get a commission to build a museum it was only in Guadalajara. “The last place in the world I want to spend five minutes,” he said bitterly. Tomas hated Mexico, hated its poverty and its excesses, hated his own Mexicanness. He went to great lengths to conceal the fact that he had been born in Tijuana. He took the commission, though, and insulted Guadalajara by building them the museum he had wanted to build in Stuttgart. When Patsy tried to remonstrate with him he screamed at her and told her to shut up. “What do you know?” he said. “Mexicans are fascists, like Germans. They deserve a German museum.”
It was during the first years of her marriage to Tomas that Patsy let her own small hopes for creativity die. In Mill Valley, once her father died and left her a little money, she had underwritten a small review and published two stories and a poem in it. In Taos she helped a theater group get off the ground and made most of the costumes for it. They did Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, to local acclaim. She had started and abandoned three novels, and had written more than five hundred pages of the last one when she quit.
For three or four years she painted; she had a show in Carmel and another in Newport Beach. Tomas refused to go to the openings with her; he refused to so much as look at the paintings and insisted that she keep all of them at her studio, far from the house. He wouldn’t even let her hang a small gouache in Katie’s room, although Katie liked it and begged him.
At one point he allowed her a kiln; her pot-making was improving, but then, after a quarrel, Tomas broke all her pots. After that, the kiln went unused. Patsy could never summon the spirit to resume.
A wealthy man in Santa Barbara who owned a fairly respectable West Coast publishing company was eager to publish one of her novels, if she would just finish one. He was a nice, sweet man, disappointed in himself in many of the ways she was disappointed in herself; eventually she slept with him, but she never finished a novel.
When she finally gave up on creating, she consoled herself with the thought that patron-appreciators were important too. She was sleeping with a bright, voluble young poet at the time. His name was Matt, but he called himself Mathias, and he was busy with a new translation of Rilke that the same wealthy man in Santa Barbara was going to publish. Matt told Patsy about all the rich women who had kept Rilke going; for all his brains, Matt was pretty transparent. He obviously thought she should support him in the kind of luxury Rilke had been accustomed to and which the rich Continental ladies had been happy to supply.
Amused, Patsy supplied it to the extent of buying Matt a BMW motorcycle. For a while they rode the motorcycle to the more fashionable dance spots in L.A. That was during the time when Tomas was dying; but somehow, in dying, Tomas managed to cancel her attraction to Matt. It was because, she decided, she was such a snob about art. Horrible and cruel though Tomas had been, he had had a gift she couldn’t help but respect. Tomas’s contempt for almost everything was horribly self-destructive, but he did have standards, and he was first-rate. Even architects who despised him, and who easily out-politicked him when it came to commissions, respected his work.
Patsy knew that her attraction to the first-rate was snobbish, and that, as far as her own life went, it was as self-destructive as Tomas’s far-reaching contempt; but she couldn’t get rid of it. Even her girls teased her about it—they themselves had a healthy capacity to deal with all kinds of slop, artwise, and they constantly mocked her high-mindedness. Once they got radicalized, they argued that the sums she doled out to mime troupes or string quartets or poetry reviews could be better spent on shelters for the homeless or Third World relief agencies. Her worst fights with her older daughter, Ariadne, had to do with the relative merits of art charity versus what Patsy called the squalor charities. Ariadne had inherited her father’s rich vein of contempt, and also his tendency toward frequent physical violence. She had hit her mother several times in arguments over art versus the wretched of the earth.
Ariadne, though deeply committed to the wretched of the earth, was herself one of the most attractive and animated young women in L.A.; if in town she could be found almost any night with some of the least wretched of the earth—at Jack Nicholson’s table at Helene’s, for example, or at Jack Nicholson’s table wherever he happened to be eating. Ariadne had grown up with the stars and saw nothing wrong with partying with them. Then, the next night she’d drag them to Sandinista fund-raisers, or benefits whose purpose might be to save the whales, save the rain forests, save the homeless, save something.
Even when she believed in the cause, Patsy did her best not to show up at the same benefits as Ariadne. She herself chaired benefits for the symphony or the ballet, or the Pasadena Playhouse, or one of the museums. Even after she moved back to Houston, she still came to L.A. for the major benefits, meanwhile doing the same benefits, more or less, in Houston.
Tomas had known how much she hated being thought just a decorative woman, so, as he was dying, he told her over and over again that that was what she was.
“You should have made more babies,” he said. “Making babies is the best you can do. Find some little boy poet and make another baby.”
Patsy found the little boy poet, Matt, but managed to restrain herself from making a baby with him. In her heart she agreed with Tomas: she was best at making babies, making them and raising them. Her girls were nice girls, even if Ariadne had become a little strident, and her son, Davey, wasn’t un-nice—he was just a little uninteresting.
She had persuaded Bruce that Melanie ought to recuperate for a day or two in the little town house that she kept in Malibu, telling him that he was welcome, too. But Bruce declined. He had his job in the Valley, and he had better just stay in the Valley and keep his job: they might make him full time pretty soon.
Melanie was impressed that Bruce had managed to find her in the hospital, but she felt sad about the baby. She had only felt it kick a few times, but still it was definitely there—or it had definitely been there. Now it was lost, and she felt sad; maybe it was just as well that she and Bruce would have a few days off from one another. Otherwise the sadness might drag them down. The doctor assured her she could have another baby—she just had to wait three months. Patsy, too, assured her she could have another baby. Even Bruce assured her they could try again—he didn’t have the attitude that he’d just escaped some onerous responsibility. But Melanie still felt sad about the baby that was gone—it had just been itself, though she hadn’t got to know it. Even if she started a new one in a month, it wouldn’t be the same little person. That little person was lost. She sat in a chair on the deck of Patsy’s little house and cried all day. She asked her granny not to come out, and her granny, for once, seemed to understand; she obeyed, at least, and that was even more rare.
“Do you think Granny’s sad about the baby?” she asked Patsy one morning as they sat on the deck. It was cloudy; the sea was gray. The surfboarders looked cold, even in their wet suits. Bruce was going to come visit when he got off work. He wanted to try surfboarding, and was going to use one of Ariadne’s old surfboards. In her low mood, Melanie was thinking how terrible it would be if he got knocked off the board and drowned. But she didn’t voice her fear. She had done nothing but cry for three days; Patsy must be getting tired of her tears.
“Oh, sure,” Patsy said. “Aurora’s sad. I can hear it in her voice. What makes you think she wouldn’t be?”
“
I don’t know,” Melanie said. “She doesn’t like Bruce too much. Maybe she thinks that now that we don’t have to stay together for the baby we’ll just break up or something.”
Patsy was cradling a teacup. She looked a little somber. But despite the somber look, she still was beautiful, Melanie thought. She had always wished she could look like Patsy—sort of skinny and sexy and sure of herself. Patsy looked a little like Ali McGraw, and Melanie was a big fan of Ali McGraw’s looks—they were the perfect looks, as far as she was concerned. Now Patsy seemed a little sad, but Melanie still liked her looks.
“Most grandmothers aren’t crazy about their granddaughters’ boyfriends, you know,” Patsy said. “If Bruce stands by you she’ll come to like him, and Bruce does seem to be standing by you.”
“Yeah, he does,” Melanie said. It was amazing to her that Bruce hadn’t just freaked out and left. He hated having to deal with police and hospitals and stuff, and yet he had. He had been sitting right in her hospital room with Patsy when she woke up. Actually, he had been nodding—he was obviously pretty tired—but just seeing him sitting there had touched her. It was very reassuring.
Thinking about it made her start crying again—or maybe it was looking at the sea that did it. Melanie wondered if the tides had anything to do with crying—it just seemed that the tears were being sucked out of her.
“Your grandmother and I have never exactly been friends,” Patsy reflected. “We’ve always been slightly in opposition. I suppose it was because of your mother.”
“Why? What did Mom do?” Melanie asked.
“Nothing, she was just in between us,” Patsy said. “Your grandmother and I both wanted to be the main person in her life, I guess. Then your father came along and neither of us was the main person in her life after that.”
She got up, went into her bedroom, looked up Flap Horton’s number in her address book, and dialed Riverside, where he taught. She got his message machine, which was perfect: “Professor and Mrs. Horton are not in at the moment; please leave the date, the time of your call, and a phone number, and one of us will contact you. The beep is a little slow in coming, so please wait.”