On the Yankee Station: Stories

Love Hurts

10 August 1973

It was sometime in the hot freedom of July that I introduced Cherylle to Lamar. I think it was at my delayed welcoming party that AOD were throwing. Cherylle was an out of work actress who rented the apartment below mine with two other girls. Quite spontaneously I had decided to invite one of them along — I had as yet made no friends since arriving here from England and felt I needed an ally of sorts at this gathering of off-duty American executives and their brittle, frosted wives. Cherylle was the only girl at home when I knocked on the apartment door. Such are the tricks time plays. She is marrying Lamar tomorrow.

Cherylle: tall, bony, a shock of wild blond hair. Twenty-five years old? Typically Californian flawless skin. I find her an oddly attractive girl without really being able to say why — a product of the curious vectors of a face: the arc of an eyebrow, the prominence of a cheekbone. There is a simmering feral gleam in her gaze, a sense of coiled, ticking energy within her which only truly strikes you on a third or fourth meeting.

Lamar, however, claims he spotted it instantly and it was this he found irresistibly attractive. I should say that Lamar has since become my closest friend out here on the Coast. Looking back through my diary I see I first described him as “a characteristically butch American businessman. Late thirties, handsome, tanned and stocky. Tough as a hill. Self-confidence surrounds him like a force field. The youngest vice-president in the company, responsible for sales and marketing. They say AOD will be his before the decade’s out.” Now that I know him I would say that this is only partially true. Lamar still exudes this brash ease but it’s something of a façade. He is no typical VP; he works hard at his job because that is all his background and education have trained him to do. He has his idiosyncrasies and I find him both stimulating and sad.

For example, the fact that I write — albeit commercially — for a living has prompted him to attack the cultural lacunae in his life with the same vigour he applies to chase after contracts. He sees me as some sort of intellectual guru, a source to be tapped and exploited. Quite early on in our friendship he suggested we read through Shakespeare together “because they say he’s the best.” To feed this new enthusiasm I gave him reading lists and drew up programmes for his educational self-improvement. He proved to be a sensitive and intelligent student, surprisingly perceptive. He would question me so endlessly I felt exhausted, victim of some nightmare seminar, dizzy from the rapacity with which he plundered my brain.

His friendship with Cherylle did not affect the growth of our own. Indeed the three of us often went out together. And as the two of them became swiftly more infatuated, my presence paradoxically seemed all the more essential. I became the talisman of their affair, as if they needed the constant reassuring presence of the catalyst that had started the reaction off.

I have, however, tried to talk to Lamar about the wisdom of this wedding — gently councilled delay. Cherylle is an incandescent but mercurial character, wayward and, I suspect, deeply uncertain of herself. But Lamar will not listen. He is in love, he insists, wholly in love for the first time in his life.

11 August 1973

The wedding. Lamar and Cherylle get riotously drunk. At the civic hall Cherylle arrived in thigh-length suede boots, jeans and a bright-yellow windcheater. She dresses in a bizarre series of fashions — sometimes glaring lack of taste, sometimes shining with demure chicness. Hardly the wife for a rising vice-president, I would have thought, but Lamar seems to accept her extravagances with a wide-eyed, ingenuous thrill.

Now I know her better I take Cherylle’s lurid anthology of styles to be evidence of a chronic insecurity in her personality. She teeters on the brink of moods with the practised equilibrium of the perennially schizoid. Lamar, somehow, responds to this. His marriage to Cherylle is the one publicly irrational event in his entirely ordered life. He told me once he understood her perfectly, could predict her moves and responses with a Pavlovian confidence. He underestimates Cherylle, I think, and I am a little concerned. He has never displayed such verve and elation, but this is no Platonic union of opposites. Lamar’s efficient diurnal parade has broken up to join Cherylle’s Mardi Gras — and it likes the headlong pace.

14 August 1973

Working steadily for the last two days in the beach house. Windless, lustrous weather. Postcard from Lamar and Cherylle honeymooning in Mexico. Lamar’s neat printed script overlaid at the foot of the card by some illegible felt-tip scrawl from Cherylle. Lamar says I would “love the art.” Is he being ironic? I suspect it’s a sop to our abandoned educational sessions — maybe he’s feeling guilty. They didn’t stand much chance against the potent lure of Cherylle’s callow, hard-edged embrace.

18 August 1973

Lamar and Cherylle returned this morning, tanned and restless, deeply bored by Mexico. They stayed for lunch. Their evident intoxication with each other is off-putting, to say the least. Lamar was unshaven and in a T-shirt. There were bags under his eyes. I’ve never seen him like this.

Their self-absorption has its curious aspects too. Judging from the hints Lamar dropped about their days in Mexico, it seems that it only functions non-destructively when observed by a third party. He alluded to uncouth nights of violent, manic rows and equally violent and manic reconciliations. He calls it “kamikaze love” and describes it as a mixture of “laughter and pistol shots”—which is quite good for Lamar. He claims he finds it entirely invigorating.

I suspect I am to be enrolled as resident third party: token voyeur of their lambent encounters. I’m not sure I welcome the role; I sense this self-destruct mechanism poised inside Cherylle and it makes me uncomfortable. For example, she was quiet and affectionate all afternoon; then she swam worryingly far out to sea. “Trying for Catalina Island” was all she said when she returned exhausted. They left about eight in the evening heading for some dim bar on the Strip.

19 August 1973

To the downtown offices of AOD to present the first draft of my package. Looked in on Lamar but his office was empty. His secretary said you could never tell when he’d be in these days. Over lunch with some of his colleagues I found that Cherylle was the prime topic of conversation. There’s a certain smug satisfaction evinced over the changes she’s wrought in Lamar; normally the paradigm of the totally committed company man, he now delegates more and more, and his faultless punctuality has degenerated to amnesiac randomness.

23 August 1973

Drove up the coast with Lamar and Cherylle in their new car, a preposterously large white Buick convertible. An unusual vernal, sappy feel to the day — all the colours seem unfledged and new. Cherylle was at her most entrancing, telling us stories of her attempts to break into the movies. Looking at Lamar, I see devotion lodged in every feature. He seems not to listen to her words, but rather watches her forming them — noting every smile, eye gleam, pout and hair-toss like some fervent anthropologist.

On the beach Cherylle changed into a skimpy scarlet bikini and we took photographs of each other. Lamar had given her an expensive camera as a present and we played with its delayed exposure device, taking endless reels of the three of us in absurd vaudevillian poses, throughout which Cherylle flirted shamelessly with me. Lamar — a little subdued, I thought — later moved up to the dunes with the telephoto lens. I saw him up there, obsessively sniping shots of her as she oiled herself and sunbathed.

When we got back home I found myself drained and exhausted from the sun and the fervid high spirits. Lamar and Cherylle wanted me to come and “cruise bars.” Lately their favourite pastime, it lasts all night — an intoxicating carnival snaking through the seamier side of the city. I begged off — I scarcely had the energy for a shower. I don’t know how they can keep this pace up.

4 September 1973

Lamar phoned and asked in a morose voice if he could come round and have a talk. Alone. I hadn’t seen him or Cherylle since that day at the beach and I wondered what was going on. He looked something like his old self — neater, back in a suit. Apparently word had come down from the higher echelons that the honeymoon was over. The postures of his body, however, struck attitudes of despair and gloom. Things were not going well. Cherylle hated to be on her own now that he had to be regularly at work. On one of their bar cruises they had met a young hippie-actor friend of Cherylle. He had stayed the night and was still there. “He’s a remarkable sort of guy,” Lamar insisted, unconvincingly. “Only I wish he and Cherylle didn’t laugh so much together.” Kick him out, I advised. No, Lamar said, no. Cherylle wouldn’t like that. My heart went out to him. We sat on and talked a bit longer, Lamar feigning unconcern, but with his strong shoulders slumped, his kamikaze love in a screaming death dive, the end of his fabulous amours, his brief bright horizon dimmed by valedictory clouds.

11 September 1973

I arrived home at the beach house this evening to find Lamar there waiting. I knew from his blank eyes Cherylle had gone. “Took the white Buick,” Lamar said, his voice numbly monotone, “and everything in the house they could hock. No note, nothing.”

I poured him a drink. She was young, I said, headstrong. She’d be back soon, to apologise, wanting to be forgiven. As he left, Lamar gripped my arm fiercely. “You know,” he said evenly, “I can’t face it. If she doesn’t come back.” I reassured him. I’d lay odds I said — five days, ten at the most. Wait until the money ran out, the binge was over.

29 September 1973

Lamar looks pale and sick. He hardly sleeps, he says. He has hired a private detective to look for Cherylle. Apparently everyone at work has been most understanding. Now that Cherylle has been away for three weeks, sympathetic consolation has turned to worldly reasoning. You’re better off without her, his colleagues declare with firm logic. Think of your career — be objective — did she really fit in? Yeah, anyone could see there was something unstable there. Hell, Lamar, they said, she’s done you a favour.

But Lamar, it was obvious, would never agree. He spent more and more time at my place tirelessly rerunning the scenario of his brief courtship and marriage as if he were trying to unlock some code the memories contained. A bleak dawn often broke on these disconsolate monologues: me in a half-doze; Lamar, his head in his hands, eyes staring emptily out to sea as if searching the sombre distance for an answer.

5 October 1973

10.30 P.M. A call from Cherylle. Would I meet her in the forecourt of a filling station not far from my house. Ah, I thought, I am about to be enrolled as mediator. However, Cherylle was proud and unrepentant. The Buick was parked at the kerb. Her boyfriend leaned against it just out of earshot. Cherylle looked more wild and unkempt. She gave me the keys to the car and an envelope of money. “Tell him to keep away,” she said. “I owe him nothing now.” I was puzzled and a little angry. “What about an explanation?” I said. “Why did you do it?” She laughed. “Nobody could take that kind of a relationship,” she said. “I was like some kind of dog, a pet dog. It would have killed me.”

When I got home I called Lamar and told him about our meeting. He came right over. When he saw the car and the money he broke down for the first time. I took him home, told him to get some sleep and said I’d be round the next day. He behaved like the victim of some appalling accident, a focal point for massive stresses.

14 October 1973

Much of my spare time over the last few days has been spent with Lamar. Our conversation on all other topics except Cherylle is desultory and half-hearted. There has been no further word from her.

Lamar is driven on remorselessly by his obsession. Now that her presence has been removed from him he hoards items of her clothing like religious treasures, the banal relics of a consumer saint. He carries around with him a cheap Zippo lighter engraved with her name, and a disposable powder compact which he is forever touching and examining like some demented votary.

We drive around at night to the bars they visited, in the vague hope of spotting her. Every distant blonde is excitedly approached until the lack of resemblance becomes clear. His moods on these occasions oscillate wildly, a leaping seismograph of elation and despair.

One day we drove back to the beach we had visited. Lamar sat in what he felt was the exact spot, raking the sand with his fingers like an insane archaeologist, finding only the cellophane wrapper of a cigarette pack and the plastic top of a tube of sun oil. Then two nights ago he asked me to come with him to Lake Folsom, where he and Cherylle had spent a weekend. We wandered aimlessly through the resort complex and then went down to the marina. There, Lamar stopped to talk to an old boatman who had rented them a cruiser for the day. He said he remembered Cherylle and asked for her. When Lamar told him what had happened he spat bitterly into the lake. He scrutinised the ripples he had caused for a few seconds and then said, “Yeah. I seen ’em all.” Then he paused. “I seen ’em all here,” he went on. “Fame, fornication and tears. That’s all there is.”

Lamar seemed profoundly affected by this piece of folk-wisdom and repeated the remark approvingly to himself several times on the journey home.

17 October 1973

A surprise invitation to Lamar’s for dinner. There were just the two of us. He tells me that after considerable thought he has eventually filed for divorce. He seems calmer but the brimming self-assurance that was there has not returned. The old solidity, too, seems a thing of the past; there is a slight lack of ease — a convalescent’s awkwardness — in his movements. After dinner he brought out all the shiny photos he had taken of Cherylle. He flicked through them once and then burnt them. He pointed to a slowly curling Kodachrome. “Cherylle, that day at the beach … remember the swimsuit?” Then he smiled, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s absurdly melodramatic, but at least I feel it’s over now.”

We went out later to buy some cigarettes. On our way back we saw a girl in a yellow window crying over a typewriter. “Think Cherylle’s crying for me?” he asked harshly. I said that she might be. “No, she’s not,” he said firmly. “Not Cherylle.”

23 October 1973

I was woken early this morning by the police. They said Lamar wanted me. Outside, he sat in the back seat of a police car. “They’ve found her,” he said. “They want me to identify. Will you come with me?”

Cherylle’s decomposing body had been found in a shack at an abandoned dude ranch out in the desert near a place called Hi Vista. There was no sign of the hippie-actor friend. Apparently it had all the indications of a half-fulfilled suicide pact. There was a note with both their signatures, but the police suspected that after Cherylle had pulled the trigger her lover had panicked, had second thoughts about joining her and had fled.

The deep irony was not lost on Lamar. He stood unmovingly as the policeman pulled back the blanket and there was only a slight huskiness in his voice as he identified her body.

2 November 1973

Lamar has just moved back to his flat. He had been staying with me since the inquest. The hippie has still not been tracked down. Lamar has been a moody and taciturn companion, not surprisingly, but he is not the broken man I expected him to be. There is a kind of fatalistic resignation about him, he talks less obsessively about Cherylle and I’m glad to say seems to have abandoned his mementoes. However, it has to be said that he is nothing like the person he was a few short months ago and he told me yesterday he planned to resign from the company. He keeps saying that Cherylle couldn’t have been happy, so it was just as well that she ended it all. “She couldn’t have been happy,” he will say. “Not Cherylle. If she couldn’t be happy with me, how could she possibly be happy with anybody else?” To Lamar’s numbed brain the logic of that statement appears incontrovertible.

8 November 1973

A dull smog-shrouded day of rain. By mistake the police forwarded on Cherylle’s personal possessions to my house, assuming Lamar was still staying here. A patrol car dropped them off early in the evening and I said I would make sure Lamar got them. There was a nylon suitcase full of crumpled clothes and a plastic bag of loose items. I laid them on the kitchen table and thought sadly of Cherylle. Cherylle, in her satin pants … her orange lips, her white-blond hair. And now? A few grubby clothes, a wooden hairbrush, sunglasses, a Mexican purse, a charm, a powder compact and a Zippo lighter with her name engraved on it …

I finally caught up with Lamar at a burger dinette down on the seafront not far from his apartment. It was still raining heavily. He sat at a table in the window surrounded by wax-paper wrappers and empty bottles of beer, gazing out at the passing trucks on the coast highway. A red tail-light glow lit his eyes.

I placed the Zippo and the compact in front of him on the table. “Why did you do it?” I asked. He hardly looked surprised. He gave a momentary start before resuming his scrutiny of the passing traffic.

“They were hers,” he said dully. “I didn’t want them any more so I just put them back in her bag.”

“But why, Lamar? Why?” His woodenness infuriated me. “Why Cherylle?”

He looked at me as though I’d asked a stupid question. “She wasn’t ever coming back, you know? But I found out where she was. I begged her on my knees to come home. But that hippie wouldn’t let her go. I tried to buy him off, but he wasn’t interested. And I couldn’t let her leave me for someone like that — for anyone. I had to do it, so I set it up that way.”

“What about him? The hippie?”

“Oh, he’s out there in the desert. No one’s going to find him in a long time.”

Lamar smiled a bitter smile and traced a pattern in the wet Formica round his beer bottle. A young Hispanic waitress approached for my order, carrying her boredom like a rucksack. I waved her away. I wanted to get out of this melancholy bar with its flickering neon and clouded chrome.

I had reached the door when I felt his hand on my shoulder.

“You can tell them if you like. I don’t care.” He looked at me tiredly.

I felt my voice thick in my throat. “Just tell me one thing,” I said. “I want to know how you feel now. Feel tough, Lamar? Feel noble? Come on, what’s it like, Lamar?”

He shrugged. “Remember that play we read once? ‘I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love’? That’s how it is, you know? It’s like the song says — love hurts. It gets to hurt you so much you’ve got to do something about it.”

It was all the explanation I would ever get. He stood in the doorway and watched me walk to my car. Tyres swishing on the wet tarmac, the road shiny like vinyl, the rain slicking down his short hair. As I drove off I could see him in the rear mirror, still standing there, a lurid burger sign smoking above his head. I never saw him again.