Sacred Monster

Flashback 14

This living room, large and airy, expensively and artfully furnished in shades of gray and blond and white, with owned original oil paintings on the walls, was up in the hills of Beverly Hills. The view out the large but well-curtained windows was of green hillsides tastefully decorated with mansions. Jack, in cashmere pullover and flannel slacks, barefoot, strolled up and down the thick pile shag rug, studying a movie script, silently mouthing his lines. In his other hand was a bottle of Tuborg beer from which he occasionally sipped.

Marcia entered from deeper in the house, wearing a well-tailored gray suit and a small hat with a veil. She looked elegant and handsome, but older. She was pulling on suede gloves. She stood a moment watching Jack, but he remained absorbed in his script, pacing back and forth, lips moving, expressions flowing and changing on his face.

At last Marcia moved over directly in his path and watched without expression as he paced away from her, swiveled, and came pacing back. Even then he might have simply angled around her if she hadn’t, in a low and cold and emotionless voice, said “Jack?”

He stopped in front of her. He looked up inquiringly from his script. Marcia reared back and gave him an open-handed walloping roundhouse gloved right across the face. The script went flying. The Tuborg bottle went flying. Jack himself went flying, backward and over the nearest low white suede sofa.

Marcia waited, adjusting her right glove, face still expressionless, until Jack righted himself on the floor over there and his bewildered face appeared above the sofa back. Then she nodded. “Good-bye,” she said.

Open-mouthed, Jack watched her stride across the living room and out the front door. His slack jaw, the left side of it reddening, rested on the cool suede of the sofa back.

I lean forward. Elbow resting on my interviewer’s gray-clad, bony, silently protesting knee, I reminiscently rub my jaw, where the ghost of Marcia’s departing hand still shimmers and burns. With two fingers and thumb, I check the working of my jaw hinge. All aches are psychosomatic, aren’t they?

I can tell my interviewer is feeling sympathetic at this moment because, though his face remains frozen in that blank look of reception, he is not pushing my elbow off his person. He is restraining his prissiness. Even to the extent of letting sympathy seep into his voice as he says, “She left you just like that, huh? No warning, no discussion, just up and walked out, just like that.”

“Just like that,” I agree. “She took the kids. Boy, the books they’ll write some day.”

“And they’re all still in their teens.”

“The Sargasso Sea of the teens,” I say. “In their teens. The penal colony of the teens. I remember my tee— No, I don’t! Memory begone!”

“There’s something back there, isn’t there?” my interviewer asks me. “Something that explains everything that followed. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

This knee is too bony, too gray-clad, too prissy. I withdraw my friendly elbow, I turn away — not toward the pool! — I turn back, I find my place on the teleprompter of my eyelids, I say, “Marcia.”

“Yes?”

“She left.”

“Yes.”

“I gave her the house, three pints of blood, and Ventnor Avenue, and after that Buddy and I moved into a place out on the beach.”

“Buddy again? Just the two of you?”

“Heck, no,” I say, smiling at the memory. Well, the beginning of the memory, anyway. “I got to fulfill an old dream. I brought my mom and dad out to live with me.”