Normalyn pulled away, too, to reject her back.
Troja’s further sigh acknowledged that the paused moments had to move on. “After that—”
* * *
—in a frenzy of frustration, their displaced revenge thwarted, the man and the woman hovered over Troja and Kirk, over naked flesh sheened with a film of perspiration.
His breathing chopped into gasps, the man still tried to arouse his cock. “The pimp told us you were impotent!” he accused.
“Frigid!” the woman yelled.
“You fucked a goddamn man!” he yelled at Kirk.
Troja knew she did not have to be apprehensive, not ever again. Kirk had made love to her. He had kissed all the parts on her body that had been created; he had asserted and acknowledged her unique creation, had found her beautiful.
“Can you feel anything—in there!” the woman shot at Troja.
“In your artificial cunt!” the man lashed.
Troja turned her head, as if slapped by the words. Kirk held her face, forcing her to look at him. She did. He kissed her lips, several times.
Suddenly he stood up. He smashed his fist into the man’s face. The man fell against the woman, who staggered. On the floor, the man still tried to arouse his dead cock. The woman laughed with harsh desire. The man stood up. He breathed more cocaine from both his palms.
“We won’t pay you!” the woman shouted to Troja and Kirk. “We didn’t get what the pimp told us.”
“An impotent aging muscleman disgusted by a black transsexual playing Monroe! A man disgusting the other!” The man substituted words for what he had been deprived of.
Duke had arranged this cruelty against her and Kirk, guaranteeing a recurrence of that first time. It had turned out otherwise, Troja knew in triumph.
“We won’t pay you!” the woman kept taunting.
“Doesn’t matter,” Troja said. And she meant it.
“It does matter,” Kirk said. “They wanted revenge, they have to pay; so does Duke.”
The woman flung readied money on the floor.
“Pick it up,” Kirk ordered the man.
“Help me,” the man said to the woman. She shook her head. On his knees, the man gathered the money, excitedly.
Kirk counted it. “Just wanted to know how much Duke thought humiliation would be worth.” He gave the money to Troja, who clenched it with the wig.
They dressed quickly and walked out of the enormous frigid house. They drove down the deserted roads of Bel Air. When they reached home, Kirk opened a fresh packet of cocaine and snorted twice into each nostril. He pretended that was all he had located, but Troja saw the gun. “No,” she pleaded. “We got so much, hon.”
“Yes,” Kirk agreed. “That’s why I have to make sure Duke’ll leave you alone. . . . I love you, remember that.”
“I love you,” Troja said back to him. Only in her mind did she repeat, Remember that.
Twenty-Seven
“Remember that,” Troja said now. As if she had allowed a banished meaning, she stood up suddenly. “So damn quiet in here! He always turned on the television, first thing.” She rushed to the other room, turned on the television, as if by restoring the daily routine she would bring him back with it.
Yes, voices rendered the absence less harrowing. The television flickered in colors into Troja’s room, distant sounds and images of the outside world that confirmed to Kirk, every morning, that he was still alive.
Normalyn looked at the lightening morning outside. Night had not taken away its sadness.
Troja sat back down on the floor and leaned her head on Normalyn’s shoulder. “He just went out to scare the shit outta that pimp—to keep him away from us,” Troja asserted. “That’s all.”
“That’s all,” Normalyn assured.
“Missed you a lot, hon,” Troja said. “Where you been?”
Normalyn tried to control the overwhelming emotion she felt at that admission. “You did miss me!” she said.
“Of course. You’re my friend,” Troja said.
“And you’re my friend,” Normalyn said. “You really missed me?”
“Told you!” Troja retreated from the threatened flood of Normalyn’s emotion.
Normalyn welcomed that tone only now; it assured Troja’s spirit was intact.
“Where were you?” Troja asked. The television, on, was soothing, affirming the familiar.
“With the Dead Movie Stars—”
“Those creeps?”
“Yes—at the old château near Franklin. And I went to a weird place called the Silent Scream.”
“Just trash there,” Troja disapproved.
“They almost raided it.” Normalyn added the note of danger, although she knew now that had been a lie. “I was there!” She could not restrain the exultant tone in her voice. She would seize these interludes for herself. Later she would tell Troja, and Kirk, everything. When Kirk returned. When they were eating. “I was almost bashed!”
“Bashed! Those pigs hit you?” Troja’s voice shook with rage. “No—I mean—uh . . . bashed?”
“Busted.” Troja understood.
“Yes.” Normalyn felt now that she had lived even less.
“Worried me—and Kirk—sick. Kirk said you and me got a special closeness between us, a real special friendship, hon.”
“We do,” Normalyn said, and missed Kirk so much.
“Why don’t he call? Why don’t he just drive up!”
“He’s all right,” Normalyn said, feeling tired.
“I know it,” Troja said. “Just couldn’t find that evil pimp, that’s all. Maybe went for a drive.”
“Nothing . . . is . . . going . . . to . . . happen,” Normalyn said drowsily, seized by sudden weariness pushing her toward sleep.
Troja’s body jerked. “No!” she screamed.
Normalyn sat up, awake instantly.
In the other room, before the television, Troja screamed again.
“No!”
From the television, which each morning had brought distant disasters, an announcer was uttering words that gathered into one remorseless meaning: “—shot and killed a known drug dealer and procurer, a possible murderer, known as ‘Duke.’” On the television screen, a body sprawled askew against a wall was being covered with sheets. “He was killed by a man who was still inside the house when police arrived. According to police, the man then walked out of the house with his weapon in his hand and they fired. The man’s revolver was empty, arousing speculation that the man drew fire to himself. He is reported to be a former Mr. America; his name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin.”
On the screen, attendants moved with a stretcher toward an ambulance. The outline of Kirk’s muscles showed through the sheet turning red.
“No, no, no!” Troja refused.
“Troja!”
The bloody images were replaced quickly with those of a commercial; on a bicycle a boy—
Normalyn turned the set off, angrily banishing its horror.
Troja gasped. “He never was Mr. America, just came close, real close!” She sank to the floor, moaning. Normalyn tried to hold her, but Troja’s hands struck out, fiercely, at death.
A cruel beautiful morning lightened the house.
Troja shouted, “He killed Duke, yeah. But he didn’t let himself be killed! Fuckin’ pigs killed him and made that up. He didn’t let himself be killed, he didn’t!”
But had he? Normalyn wondered. To remove from Troja’s life two presences, one despised, the other deeply loved, both destructive—and so to let Troja live.
2
When the police and all the others were through with him, Troja claimed Kirk’s body. An attorney who had once represented her after an arrest arranged it. There was no other “kin.” His body was cremated at “the movie star cemetery,” Forest Lawn. Normalyn offered Troja the necessary money, but Troja had enough—the money Kirk had insisted they be paid that beautiful then fatal night.
With the urn con
taining his ashes, they drove to the ocean at sunset, to the place where Kirk had said his youth was buried. Knowing she should, Normalyn stayed behind and watched as Troja walked to the edge of the beach and scattered Kirk’s ashes. A breeze glided over the sand. Good-bye, Kirk, Normalyn said silently.
Troja said, “Good night.”
They walked back to the car. “He was the only man who was ever kind to me, the only man who ever loved me, really loved me.” Troja said to Normalyn. “And he did love me, a lot.”
“Yes.” Normalyn was sure now.
They drove back in silence.
When they approached the single desolate palmtree, Troja’s face grew taut. In the few preceding days, they had come and gone, attending the details of death. Now they would enter the full emptiness of the house.
The place Kirk had occupied was vacant. Troja gasped at the absence. She pulled at Kirk’s belongings, gathering sheets, pillows, clothes. She held a shirt with short sleeves, one of Kirk’s favorites, tight. Then she replaced all the objects about the area again, leaving a disheveled monument. Near the bed, she found a packet of white powder—and a syringe.
“Throw them away!” Normalyn coaxed.
Troja breathed in the powder, into one nostril, then the other. She breathed into each again. She tilted her head back, to get its full effect. She held the syringe.
“No, Troja,” Normalyn said.
The drawn face stared at Normalyn.
“Please don’t.”
“What?”
“Please don’t take any more of that,” Normalyn said softly.
“What?” Troja snorted again. Her body jolted. She fumbled with the syringe as if to stab at her arm.
Normalyn saw her own hand thrust the needle away from Troja. It fell with a tiny sound.
Troja’s look darkened. “What you do that for?”
“You don’t need that stuff, it’s . . . shit.”
“Girl usin’ dirty words, huh? Girl learnin’ bad things.”
“Troja, don’t do that to me! And please”—Troja had to hear this—“please don’t destroy yourself, too.”
“Too?” Troja walked up to her. “Who the hell you think you are to judge him?”
“I wasn’t, I’m trying to help you. I know you’re saying all this because you’re so hurt: so I won’t listen.”
“You listen!” Troja said. “You gonna help me?” she derided. “Don’t need you! Don’t want your sad mopey face around me. Judging, judging—just like you was judging him all the time. Wasn’t you always judging him—accusing him of hurting me?”
Normalyn heard her own words, softly spoken but precise: “You told me he faced that, on the beach—his destruction . . . and yours.”
Troja frowned. She reached out as if to touch Normalyn. Instead, she pulled back. “What did you just say . . . real woman?”
“You’re a woman, too—you know that!” Normalyn said quickly.
Troja’s eyes were maddened with sorrow. “If I was a real woman, I’d be carrying his baby right here!” she pounded her stomach with both hands. “This can’t bear no child!” she reached for a bottle of bourbon on the counter. She gulped, a swallow, another. She held her head in her hands, as if to crush her thoughts. She said, “Get out, Normalyn, I have to be alone. Pack your things, leave. Don’t wanna see you!”
“Do you mean it?” Normalyn asked.
“Yes!”
“Do you really mean it—not just because you’re hurting?”
“Goddammit, yes, I mean it—yes, yes, yes!” Troja screamed. She rushed into Normalyn’s room. “I’ll pack for you!” She pulled at Normalyn’s clothes, opening a suitcase, crushing clothes in. She grabbed the chipped angel from the table. She thrust it at Normalyn. “Take it!”
Normalyn reached for it. It slipped, fell to the floor, smashed. She knelt over it, attempting to gather the pieces. It would be impossible to restore the shattered figurine. Normalyn faced Troja. “God damn you!”
Troja grasped Normalyn fiercely. Normalyn’s hands lashed at her with equal fury. They faced each other, for long moments.
“Now do you believe I don’t want you here?” Troja said and walked out.
Normalyn closed her suitcase.
In the kitchen, Troja sat at the counter.
Normalyn called a cab. She bit her lip, to stifle tears. She glanced at the empty bed, Kirk’s, and then at her own. She faced this: A part of Troja had always been raging at her because she had been born a woman; and the fact that Troja had not, had separated her, until the very last, from Kirk.
Normalyn waited at the door with her suitcases. She was sure Troja would turn and urge her to stay. Yes, she could hear the words: “Hon, hon! I didn’t mean any of that. Hon—”
Troja’s back remained to Normalyn.
Even when the cab drove up, Normalyn paused. The driver honked. She waited longer, outside, on the porch. But no words came from the woman inside the quiet house.
3
Normalyn took the cab to the château that William Randolph Hearst had given Marion Davies years, years ago. Kind evening shadows bestowed upon the building and its courtyard some of its surrendered grace.
In the cab, Normalyn had concluded that to uncover all that was available from the Dead Movie Stars, she would let them believe that she might want to join them. From the earlier time with them, this had survived: They knew something of the past she was searching through, though perhaps no more than they had already revealed—and they wanted her.
She was able easily to rent a room. To the manager’s shock, she requested one “with a view,” and to her own relief, the room was not entirely ugly. It had tall windows that opened into the courtyard. There was a small bed. A round table of shiny plastic tried unsuccessfully to pass for wood. An oval mirror looked gold-glazed but was only streaked. Normalyn opened a suitcase, to place Enid’s angel on the table. She remembered it had smashed. She substituded Enid’s makeup box.
She was tired and depressed as she unpacked only necessities. She told herself that she must keep moving now, into her own life, resolving the past. She tried unsuccessfully to force her thoughts away from Troja and Kirk. Finally, she lay on the bed and surrendered to exhaustion.
When she woke much later, it was into an immediate, stark awareness of all the horror of the past few days—the violence, the deaths, the separations. She longed to return to Troja and Kirk. But Kirk was dead! She was sure Troja hadn’t meant for her to leave; they had trapped each other. She would call her! But what if she hung up? If only she had asked once more, to stay. Troja had been terrified, grieved. And cruel! Normalyn reminded herself.
She must keep moving! She went to the tiny bathroom and showered. She dressed quickly. Now from memory she would locate Lady Star’s room along the maze of halls.
She knocked on a door that looked familiar. A shriveled old woman with a parrot on her shoulder opened it. The parrot shouted, “Get out of my life, get out of my life!” Normalyn backed away. As she tried to reorient herself to the gloomy corridors, she thought she heard furtive, darting footsteps. The Dead Movie Stars? Aware she was here? She knocked on another door—this one really looked familiar. An eye looked out of a peephole. The door opened.
“But of course you’re back!” Framed by the door of her room, Lady Star posed in a feathery lounging chemise. She tossed a strap off one freckled shoulder.
Normalyn faced her in the once gold-gilded, now ashen corridor.
“Come in, darling, come in,” Lady Star invited. “There’s a vile draft.”
There wasn’t. The air was still and hot.
Lady Star retreated to her chaise under the dripping umbrella of light.
Normalyn sat on a chair to one side of the chaise so Lady Star would not seem to be granting her an audience.
“As you can plainly see, darling, I am Carole Lombard today.” A tiny feather floated up from an airy boa Lady Star tossed recklessly over a bare shoulder blade. “Carole gives me a kind of mystery, an
aura.” She tortured waves of newly colored hair stabbed by a felt orchid. “So! You’ve reconsidered about auditions—of course!” she declared.
“I’m exploring the possibilities,” Normalyn clarified, and reminded, “Tit for tat.”
“Hmmm.” The felt orchid drooped over Lady Star’s eye. “A fresh one is due any moment from the secret admirer,” she explained. “If it’s one minute late, I shall refuse it!” She snapped her fingers. Another feather escaped her boa. She snatched it expertly and thrust it back into place.
She trilled, “You should have been with us last night, darling. We paid a visit to the Crouches—Dr. and Mrs. What with auditions coming up—real soon!” she confided, “we needed to brush up on tragedy, scandal, secrets. That’s how we test candidates and those who make it to auditions.” Leaning forward, she said with honest indignation, “You’d be amazed at how many of them try to make up scandal!”
Dr. and Mrs. Crouch. Those names again, from the earlier time here—and from Enid’s newspaper clipping, from Mark Poe’s recollections. Lady Star was clearly tantalizing with her close association with intimate knowledge.
Normalyn put derision into pretended familiarity: “That man and his wife know the truth?”
“That man and his wife were hired by the studios to hide the truth; so they must know it!” Lady Star was affronted. “They even know who—”
A knock at the door. “Enter only if you’re a Dead Movie Star.” Lady Star posed a bare leg, ready for any eventuality.
Slick, dark, ominous, Billy Jack wore a flashy suit with giant shoulders, broad lapels, shirt open revealing the edge of the flowering tombstone. Quickly disguising his relief at seeing Normalyn, he went on to tell her he was “trying on” Johnny Stompanatto. He pretended to stab himself, crumble with agony. He brushed his suit. “You gonna audition, huh? We knew it!”
Normalyn didn’t answer. She would not even attend their silly auditions, much less audition.
“Oh, she’s just exploring possibilities,” Lady Star echoed Normalyn’s words. “—unlike, darling,” she addressed Normalyn, “the petitioner you met at the Silent Scream, who’s uncovering remarkable things, we hear. . . . But I’m sure—” This was to Billy Jack—Johnny Stompanatto. “I’m sure this one has better secrets.” She pointed a long finger at Normalyn.