Tweak

  And Spencer does seem impressed. “Just try not to get hurt,” is all he can say to me.

  I laugh. It seems so stupid. I mean, of course I don’t wanna get hurt.

  “I’ll try,” I say.

  He’s got nothing more than that to offer me and I feel pretty much fine about everything. I do my days’ work at the salon and all the guilt and everything is expunged from my mind. After all, I wonder, what have I done wrong?

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  DAY 280

  Zelda wants me to go to this twelve-step meeting with her on Bundy, so I’m gonna head over there and then I guess we’ll go back to her place afterward. As I’m getting ready after work, I call Spencer and talk to him about my day.

  Last night I watched that I Am David movie. My review started with the line: “Kicking heroin is nothing compared to the agony of sitting through ninety-something minutes of Jim Caviezel’s new movie, I Am David.” They’re printing the review Friday. I get a hundred dollars for each capsule I write. Next week I’m doing Blade: Trinity. It feels like I found the perfect career for me.

  Spencer is excited and encouraging, but then he starts grilling me on my relationship.

  “Now, about this Zelda thing,” he says.

  I swallow hard, lying on my bed and staring at the stucco ceiling. I’ve been waiting for this talk.

  “Nic,” he continues. “First off I just want to say that I’m not going to tell you what to do or not to do. That’s not my job and you’re gonna do what you want anyway. But try to hear this, okay?”

  “I’m listening,” I say.

  “This is fun,” he says. “This is fun for you. You get to sleep with an older woman—a celebrity, of sorts. That’s fun. That’s gotta feel good. But, Nic, seriously, listen to me. That is all this will ever be—fun. If you can keep that in mind, then you’re fine. If you can separate yourself from this whole thing and know that it is just a fling, well, then you’ll be all right. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah, but, I mean, Spencer,” I say, still just staring at nothing but the calm of my ceiling, “you know I love this person. I want to be there for her. I want to help her.”

  “That’s very poetic, Nic, I’ll say that much, but I also have to tell you that your grasp on reality right now is, uh, tenuous, at best.”

  “What?”

  “Listen,” he says. “I’ll tell you right now, I mean, just to be on the record—this is going to end badly. Zelda is not, not, NOT stable. I can’t say that I really even know her, but all I see is devastation in your future. If you’re willing to pay that price, than you can do whatever you want. All I can ask of you is that you don’t get high. Be willing to go through this and not use. That’s all I’ve got for you.”

  “Spencer,” I say, “I appreciate all you’re trying to do. But I’m telling you, nothing bad is gonna happen.”

  I think I really believe that. I mean, sure the doubt comes in that maybe I should be listening to this man who helped save my life. But, really, he just doesn’t get it. Besides, I want this so badly. I’d pay any price. Zelda is more important to me than anything else.

  “All right,” he tells me. “I’m not gonna argue with you. Just don’t get high, okay?”

  “No, no, of course I won’t.”

  I hang up and get ready to drive up Sunset.

  Walking down to the meeting, I see at least five hundred people in front of the church, milling about, chatting. I see Zelda, standing at the top of the steps with a black skirt, blouse, and long black leather jacket. She has on stockings and knee-high black boots. I push through the people to reach her.

  “Hey, beauty,” she says.

  I kiss her and hold her and she kisses back.

  “Thanks for coming, baby, I know how crazy this is.”

  “Nah, I mean, it’s interesting,” I say.

  She guides me in through the doors. There are people everywhere and Zelda seems to know almost all of them. She introduces me, but I forget all the names. There’s a sense of being her arm candy or something.

  “This is Nic, my boyfriend.”

  Everyone seems to look me over twice and I feel very self-conscious about my age. I know how young I am and, even more, how young I appear. I mean, I even got carded the other day when I was going to see an R-rated movie. You only have to be seventeen for that. Zelda is thirty-seven. I’m twenty-two. There shouldn’t be anything to your age when you consider love, but I can’t help but be so incredibly aware of it.

  Then, you know, as I’m being paraded around, people inevitably ask me, as they always do in L.A., “What do you do?”

  I think about Spencer’s words—about the importance of being humble.

  I say, “I’m a receptionist at a hair salon.”

  Zelda always laughs. “Yeah, but he’s also a writer for a bunch of different magazines, right?”

  “Yeah,” I say, averting my eyes. “Yeah, I am.”

  And, inevitably, they smile, or say something like, “Oh, how exciting.”

  There’s something very degrading about the whole thing, but I play along. I don’t know how not to.

  We take our seats, near the front.

  After the meeting I follow Zelda back to her apartment and we make love. In some ways, it feels like I’m making love to a cripple. She is so hurt and confused and there is something very erotic about that. Does that make sense? Probably not. I do realize I’m sick.

  We flip through the movie stations on TV. She stops on late-night Cinemax.

  “Oh my God,” she says, laughing. “I think I’m in this movie.”

  It’s a soft-core porn movie about a stripper who seduces men and then kills them. The stripper is Zelda. I watch her have pretend sex with this guy, then shoot him in the head while she’s climaxing.

  In our bed, she laughs like crazy. “That was my idea,” she says. “To keep going after I killed him so I could orgasm.”

  “Wow,” I say.

  We watch most of the very bad movie, but eventually we both fall asleep. The whole time I feel uncomfortable, to say the least. I feel so much younger and less experienced than Zelda. I want to be good enough for her. I want that so badly.

  DAY 309

  I’m still riding bikes with the group who meet on 26th and San Vicente at six thirty in the morning, but I’m driving there from Zelda’s in Hollywood. I’ve stayed with her every night for the last month and we spent New Year’s together. I find myself quickly moving in. We don’t talk about it, but it happens instantly and it just seems natural, you know?

  The only people it seems to bother is everyone else in my life. All my friends have made it very clear how stupid they think I’m being. They say Zelda is unstable and dangerous to my sobriety. Plus they’ve all noticed how obsessed I’ve become with her. I never want to leave her side. I want to sew her to me.

  My dad and mom have both expressed their concern. Spencer just keeps shaking his head whenever I talk to him about it.

  “I love her,” I say.

  “You love the idea of her, Nic,” he says. “You don’t love her.”

  “God, Spencer, you don’t understand. I mean, there’s no way I can explain it to you.”

  “No,” he says. “I guess there isn’t. Just try and have fun.”

  I hang up the phone. I’m driving home—I mean, to Zelda’s—after work. The I-10 freeway is bumper to bumper, a slow-moving dinosaur of cars stretching all the way out to Pasadena—if you could see Pasadena, through all the goddamn smog. I’m listening to the Talking Heads’ live album. I think about calling my dad, but know he’ll just treat me like Spencer—skeptical and condescending. My mom won’t be much better. But I’m nervous.

  Zelda is taking me out to dinner with her dad and stepmom. Zelda’s birth mom died about ten years ago; she was a recovering heroin addict who hung herself dead from a dog leash and choke chain. Now all Zelda has is her dad. He wasn’t around much whe
n she was little, but he’s settled down now and they’ve become very close.

  I’m being presented as her new boyfriend. She says her dad hated Mike, but she’s sure he’ll like me.

  When I get back to the apartment, Zelda is lying in bed, watching Being There on TV. I curl up next to her. Peter Sellers is being wheeled into an elevator by some servant in this giant house. “This is a very small room, isn’t it?” he asks.

  Zelda and I both laugh. We talk about our days. We make love. She smokes a cigarette and we go take a shower. In the shower, she completely grooms me. She scrubs me down. She washes my hair and detangles it. After showering, she gives me stuff to put on my face and she combs my hair. She asks if I’d like to borrow some clothes. When I say that I will, she starts pulling out tons of different pants and shirts for me to wear.

  “Is this real Prada?” I ask, pulling on a pair of black bell-bottom dress pants.

  “Yeah,” she says, laughing. “So be careful with that.”

  I put all the stuff on and I feel pretty cool and pretty stylish.

  “Where’d you get all these clothes?” I ask.

  “Oh, you know, when I was with my ex-husband, I could just go to Barney’s or something and they’d close down the whole store for me. They’d pour me a glass of wine and I could buy whatever I wanted. I have so many clothes. Besides these I have a whole storage unit full of clothes. We’ll go over there and you can pick out whatever you want. A lot of his clothes from being on tour are still in there.”

  “That’d be great,” I say.

  Looking in the mirror, I swallow. I can barely recognize myself.

  “Now,” she says, coming over and kissing me. “I’m a little worried about what a baby you are. I don’t know what everyone’s going to think. But, look, you don’t have to tell them you’re a receptionist. You can say you’re a writer. It’s not a lie.”

  “No, I know. I will—of course.” I look in the mirror again.

  “All right, let’s go,” she says.

  We drive in the new Jetta her dad bought her, over the back hills of Hollywood to get to Studio City. I’ve never really spent much time in the Valley, so I don’t know where we are. She listens to Cat Stevens really loud. The only songs I recognize are from Harold and Maude.

  Zelda smokes one cigarette after another. She drives fast, barreling around the corners without any caution at all. Underneath all that makeup she’s wearing I can see a face ravaged by the life she’s lived. Heroin has a way of preserving people so they look sort of frozen in formaldehyde. It’s not that noticeable with Zelda, but sometimes, in the right light, I can see it clearly. She still has scars on her arms from all the needles. But I don’t care. I think she is the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I lean over and kiss her cheek.

  “Baby,” she says.

  The restaurant where we’re meeting her dad and stepmom is some chic Italian place on Ventura Boulevard. We don’t valet park the car ’cause we don’t have any money, really. Inside, the lights are very dim. Zelda waves to her dad, a really large man with gray hair and a Marine Corps tattoo on his forearm. He shakes my hand with a tight, strangling grip. Zelda’s stepmom is pretty, a little overweight, with blond-dyed, very “done” hair. There’s another couple at the table who are well dressed and prosperous-looking. Zelda seems to know them and everyone’s talking and I just sit quietly.

  Finally, her dad starts grilling me about everything—what I do, where I live, all that. He’s not mean about it, but he barks questions at me like a drill sergeant. Eventually I seem to win him over. Maybe it’s talking about my family, about my dad having done the Playboy interview with John and Yoko. Whatever it is, he turns to Zelda at a certain point and says, “I like this one.”

  He lets up after that and then we’re all just talking. Zelda and her dad are joking about a time when she called him in the middle of the night to come get her in L.A. He was living north of L.A. and eight-year-old Zelda had gone to spend the week with her strung-out mom and one of her boyfriends. Zelda’s mom had gotten really drunk and wanted to do Zelda’s makeup like she’d been beaten up—a black eye and everything.

  Zelda got scared and secretly called her dad as her mom got more and more belligerent.

  “And you came and rescued me, Papa,” she says.

  “Yeah, but I wish I could’ve done more.”

  “I know.”

  They exchange a look and I think this man really might be very sweet.

  Zelda is always particular about the way she orders, asking for everything to be made a specific way. Tonight she gets fettuccine Alfredo, but she wants peas in it. Everyone laughs, but we all end up eating off her plate.

  For dessert, she orders all these different things and is really cute and enthusiastic. She seems so cool and everyone there seems to respect her so much.

  As I get up to leave we all shake hands. Zelda’s dad gives her a couple hundred bucks and tells her how proud he is of her. He tells me good-bye and I feel like I’ve passed some sort of initiation.

  “They liked you,” she says, lighting a cigarette as we pull off onto the Hollywood Freeway. The cars and houses string along like colorful, blinking Christmas lights—draped in patterns across the Valley.

  “Yeah, they seem really great.”

  She laughs. “Well, they can be—at times. There’s also a horrible, brutal side to my father, so don’t be taken in by him.”

  “No, of course I won’t. I’m sorry.” I feel so protective of Zelda. I want to take her away from all the horror she’s known in her life.

  “Fuck, Zel.”

  “Well, hell,” she says, accelerating some. “We’ve both had a fucked-up time of things, haven’t we?”

  I laugh.

  “‘Equally Damaged,’” I say.

  “What?”

  “It’s a song.”

  She tells me she loves me.

  I tell her I’ve looked into the core of her and held it in my hand, and I will never let that go. I tell her I will be here for her as long as she allows. I tell her I love her.

  “I’m not gonna leave you,” I say.

  She smiles. “We’ll see.”

  We make love when we get home. I feel so connected with her. I feel like I understand her and can help her. I feel like I can be her savior. Maybe that’s grandiose, but really, that’s how I feel.

  Zelda has known so much sadness, so much pain. I want to save her. I think I want to marry her. I want to commit myself to her like that and it just seems perfect.

  If everything in life happens for a reason, as Spencer would assert, then surely this relationship is no accident. I use all his teachings to reaffirm these feelings—to validate them. I mean, if there is a God that’s all-knowing and all-powerful, then surely he has orchestrated this whole thing. Why else would I have been delivered to Zelda, as I have been?

  That is my logic.

  DAY 351

  It’s February 16th, the anniversary of Zelda’s mother’s death. Zelda was in her mid-twenties when her mom committed suicide. It may have been almost ten years ago, but Zelda still breaks down crying and angry when she mentions her mother’s death.

  We’re going to Forest Lawn Cemetery, where her mother is buried. It’s so blue and crisp outside I have to wear sunglasses. The Valley hills are all pristine, groomed and vibrant. We drive in Zelda’s Jetta, listening to the first David Crosby solo album. I think about how beautiful the day is—how beautiful she is—how incredible it is that she’s taking me with her on this trip to the gravestone. She’s already told me that I’m the first person since her ex-husband to visit her mom. I tell her again that I love her and that I’ll never leave her. She leans over and kisses me, driving fast along the highway.

  I haven’t spent a night away from Zelda since we’ve reunited. Every day I ride my bike with Spencer, or swim, or run up the walls of Runyon Canyon—just blocks away from Zelda’s. I’m exercising at least an hour every day, whether I work or not. I still haven’t s
tarted smoking again, even though she smokes over a pack a day.

  Spencer and I have stopped really talking about Zelda. It’s like an untouchable subject. We go on our rides together and talk about movies and God and the twelve steps. My relationship with Zelda is just a given, not anything different from Spencer being married to Michelle. But I’ve stopped babysitting for them. And I haven’t been spending as much time with Spencer and I’ve been going to fewer meetings. I can’t stand being away from Zelda. I mean, she is definitely my priority. Spencer reminds me over and over how dangerous that is. He keeps telling me that I should “have fun” and not take everything so seriously.

  “You’re only twenty-two,” he says. “You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  Obviously he doesn’t understand. No one does. No one can.

  But at least at work I’ve become the idol of some of the stylists. Ayuha can’t believe I’m dating the actor’s ex-wife and cousin of a famous friend of hers. In fact, everyone seems impressed and I talk about Zelda all the time. She even stopped in the other day to visit me at the shop.

  “Nic,” said Ayuha, after Zelda had gone. “You’re dating a supermodel.”

  I just averted my eyes and smiled, saying nothing.

  Zelda’s mom is buried in a simple grave near the main church of the cemetery. Zelda remembers nodding out in that church—shooting heroin in the bathroom during her mom’s funeral. We park, having to walk only a few yards to find Zelda’s mother’s grave.

  I read the inscription. They are Zelda’s words.

  Zelda lies down on the grass and puts a bouquet of flowers on the headstone. She talks to her mom quietly, so I can’t hear.

  And me?

  I try to imagine her mother. I lie there. I try to think of something to say.

  Suddenly I see a picture of Zelda as a little girl, so vivid in front of me. I feel a sense of utter appreciation for Zelda’s mother—the woman who gave my love her life. I begin to thank her. I tell her thank you, over and over. I thank her and I start to cry.

  Zelda and I press close together on the grass—kissing like that.