Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (13 page)

Peter went out to the garage where Lenny was always busy restoring his antique guns. There they were, hanging from hooks in various stages of completion. And there was Lenny, a man who wore his body the way Ironman in Peter's comics wore his metal suit. (25–26)

I'm particularly proud of that Ironman simile, as I feel it really captures Peter's attraction to this new father figure, although I see now that that awkward “in Peter's comics” insert could have been eliminated if there'd been an earlier reference to Peter reading Ironman comics. Either way, the simile is much more powerful in the context of the novel, because there's a whole network of weak-man metaphors that surround Peter's father that lead up to this moment. Regardless, the point here is that I can understand Edie's need to blame our father, but I—and Peter—overcame it. The entire last act of
Rarer Monsters
, in fact, is about Peter seeing his father succumb to cancer and, understanding that he'd been wrong that whole time to blame him for the loss of his mother, reconnecting with the man. Of course, that's not exactly how it happened to me. In real life, our father died suddenly of a heart attack four years after our mom's death, and all those realizations that Peter has while playing catch
with his father, I didn't have until after my father was actually gone. But I prefer the version as it is in the novel, dramatically speaking. Peter doesn't have a sister in the novel. There just wasn't room. But, in real life, Edie was still around at this time. She was twenty and living at home. After high school, she'd gone off to Bryn Mawr but halfway into her second year dropped out. We didn't call it dropping out back then, just “taking a break” after “an excess of stress.” She was now living at home again, taking classes here and there at Valley College. In her book, Edie doesn't mention her Bryn Mawr breakdown—if that's indeed what it was—and I never did figure out what her retreat back home was all about. In fact, that period is so absent from her book that in order to figure out where exactly she applied her willed amnesia, I've been trying to correlate her memories to some of my own, matching up the timelines to see what's missing. The strongest point of correlation I've found—the one I can use as a fulcrum of sorts in leveraging other points of dis/agreement—is a little scene that must take place in the fall of 1961, about a year after Edie's return from Bryn Mawr. Our mother had taken her first missionary trip to Africa that summer and was back relaxing at home, spending afternoons sitting on the front lawn with some iced tea and enjoying the neighbors' scandalized expressions as they walked past and snuck glimpses at this wayward woman. On page 87 of Edie's manuscript, she writes,

Mom was doing some ironing one afternoon, singing to herself, as she often did, that French ditty “Alouette.” Our mom's rendition of the song was not the jaunty kids' tune; it was slurred and jazzy, slipping out, as if unconsciously, like a dream she only vaguely remembered.

When I passed by on my way to the kitchen, she stopped singing, grabbed my arm and pulled me into the laundry room, a strange smile on her face. She said she wanted to show me something and she pulled up her sundress to reveal what at first I thought was some dirt, but what I soon realized was a small tattoo on her hip. Just six months before, she'd been an L.A. housewife and now here she was, tattooed like a sailor! “What do you think?” she said. I didn't know what to think. My mother had never shown me her body like this, like it was something you could show another person. Up until this point, my mom's hips were just desexed padding that she was always slapping with frustration. (“Iris,” she'd say to herself, “you're a fat fatty.”) But now she was showing me a hip that had been slimmed by missionary rations, tanned by the equatorial sun, and inked with a voluptuous African design. The design was called a sankofa, she told me. Looking like an overflourished heart, it was a symbol of learning from the past. All I could think to say was, “Dad's gonna kill you.”

“Oh,” she said, scrunching up her nose, “like he'll ever see it.”

The reason I keep coming back to this scene is that I'm fairly certain I remember this exact moment. I remember Mom singing while doing the ironing, but there was nothing unusual about that—“Alouette” was a favorite refrain of hers. But I specifically remember seeing Mom pull Edie into the laundry room with a strange and excited urgency. Unless I've collapsed time in my head, which people often do when remembering things for the same reasons that I tinkered with the timeline in
Rarer Monsters
—to create a tighter narrative, to have a more reassuring pattern of causality, which sometimes stands at odds with the chaotic, meaningless reality—unless I've done that, which I don't think I have since it would mean that Edie has made the same mistake, since our memories coincide with what would happen at dinner that evening, then, seeing that our mom had left the iron on and unattended, I pulled out the condom I'd stolen from my dad's bathroom. For a more detailed scene, I'll just turn to how I rewrote it for
Rarer Monsters
:

Peter pulled out the condom he'd stolen. He slid it into his wallet. He then laid the pleather wallet down flat on the ironing board, and cautiously hovered his hand over the iron to feel for heat. He couldn't tell. He lifted it up and spit on it like he'd seen his mom do, the spittle hissing and sparking against the hot metal. Then he gently put the iron down onto the wallet and ran it back and forth over the cheap material. In less than a minute, the impression of the condom began to show through the wallet. He put the iron aside and checked out his work: It looked like it had aged this way naturally after years of carrying around countless condoms that had all settled themselves into this groove. (54)

At that point, my mom and sister came out of the laundry room and I made like I hadn't been doing anything. But they didn't seem to notice me. What makes me absolutely sure that Edie and I are referring to the same moment in our manuscripts is that we both agree that it was that night, just hours later, over dinner, that our mom announced she would be returning to Africa. She said she felt needed there, that
“[h]er training as a nurse gave her skills she could put to use administering much-needed vaccines, when her church teamed with the Red Cross to combat a yellow fever outbreak in the Didessa River Valley” (E. McWeeney 89). (Re: “training as a nurse”: in 1944, in what I can only assume was a fit of panicked patriotism, our mom had volunteered for the Cadet Nurse Corps, though for reasons I'm unsure of—and Edie doesn't mention—she never finished the program.) Since she had been sticking the African villagers with needles, they called her the Bee Woman with the Sharp Stinger. The moniker was, she assured us, a more fluid three syllables in their Amharic language, and she was clearly proud of it.

And then she was gone again, reduced to a voice on a phone, coming through thin and granular like a radio station lost somewhere in the stratosphere. And then in October, I came home one day from school and there was Aunt Paige wearing—though I know she wasn't—her
Save the Whales
T-shirt, telling me to sit down, that she had some news for me.

I just noticed something about that last paragraph there that I should confess. The first sentence—the one beginning “And then she was gone . . . ” and ending with “. . . somewhere in the stratosphere”—is actually from Edie's manuscript. I'm pretty embarrassed that it snuck in there uncited, but I have Edie's manuscript right here on my desk, so I suppose I can forgive myself. I saw Charles today and he insisted on having a few beers, which I'm unaccustomed to in the middle of the afternoon (a depressant is the last thing I need these days), so perhaps that's the reason for my momentary slip just then. I met with Charles—Chuck—at Lucky Strike in downtown L.A., which
he referred to as a bowling lounge rather than a bowling alley, and it's definitely loungy but in a wonderfully Sinatra way. We sat at the bar and drank heady Budweiser and he told me about his divorce and the daughter who hates him. He laughed at my tales of Chris's teenage antics and gave me what seemed to be a really good deal on a gently used bowling ball. It's black and I like its simplicity, its anonymity out there on the boards. Chuck and I played a few frames and then said goodbye.

Anyway, I see that I've gotten a little ahead of myself and left poor Betty Short back in 1947. The content of my sister's manuscript is of course important, but I must finish establishing the facts before I move on to Edie's fiction.

In the months after Betty Short's murder, as the newspapers filled out the legend of the Black Dahlia, countless people came forward to confess. There was Daniel Voorhees who turned himself in to the LAPD and gave a detailed account of how he had tortured and killed Ms. Short, but the police rejected his claims when he couldn't answer the “control question,” which had to do with a key detail of the murder supposedly revealed in the classified autopsy report. Then there was Joseph Dumais, an army corporal who handed his commanding officer a fifty-page handwritten confession. He made the front pages of the newspapers, but the police dismissed him too for failing the control question. These guys were just coming out of the woodwork, so eager to be the guy everyone was looking for, all of them with richly imagined scenes of what they'd done to this young woman. You hear about false-confessors a lot in these high-profile murders, but I've never understood why they do that. Sure, they're nuts, but beyond that there seems to be a
pathological impulse to validate one's existence by writing yourself into a nationally recognized narrative, which I just don't understand.

While the police were sorting through these false-confessors, James Richardson over at the
Examiner
was gathering together famous mystery writers. His idea was that crime writers know the criminal mind, so he would assign a few of them to profile the murderer based on the evidence at hand. For this task, he assembled screenwriter Ben Hecht, novelist David Goodis, and
Rampart
scribe George McWeeney. There it is, my father's name, casually in print. My source for this is James Richardson's 1954 memoir
For the Life of Me
, in which he admits that he'd originally tried to get Jack Hale but that Jack Hale had sent George McWeeney in his stead. There's an air of apology in this little parenthetical of Richardson's, an acknowledgment—or rather insistence—that George McWeeney was not a worthy name. This embarrassment at having been sent what Richardson saw as a lesser writer perhaps explains why in both the front-page article Richardson ran and in his memoir, he focused mostly on what the far more famous Goodis and Hecht had to say about the murderer. My father's contribution to this little brainstorming session has been lost to history, and I'd really love to see Dad's murderer-profile that Edie claims to have uncovered in his files, love to have a team of experts carbon-date the thing, because it's surely a fake. In fact, based on what she excerpts in her book, I can tell it's a fake. I may not be an expert carbon-dater, but I am an expert on my dad's prose style and he would never resort to such purple phrases as “the murderer's mendacious mien,” so Edie's claim that reading that profile is like seeing a man look into a mirror is nothing but a contrivance. Anyway, Ben Hecht was the most famous of these three writers,
and so Richardson gave him center stage in the final article. Hecht was a veteran not just of Hollywood (having written the screenplays for
Scarface
,
Notorious
, and a million others) but of journalism as well (having broken the case of the “Ragged Stranger Murder” at the
Chicago Daily News
before coming to Hollywood), so he surely saw the absurdity of the assignment and so it is perhaps with tongue planted in cheek that he wrote that the evidence clearly pointed to a killer who was “a dyke lesbian with a hyper-thyroid problem.” I thought I might be able to find some more information on these brainstorming sessions in Ben Hecht's journals—perhaps a different view of my father—but his papers are now the property of Newberry Library in Chicago. Fortunately, around the time I was at this stage in my research (this was in February of this year), Julia was planning a trip to Chicago for a conference. She's always jetting off to conferences, delivering papers, always hopeful that this networking and paper-giving will lead to a tenure-track position at a four-year institution whose acronym does not denote a sugary carbonated beverage. Just yesterday, in fact, she came back from a conference in Baltimore. I picked her up from the airport and she told me all about the man who sat next to her on the plane, said he was a real charmer. She often describes people as charming and I'm never entirely sure what she means by this. I imagine Rudolph Valentino driving women to suicide with one arch of his eyebrow, but I know I'm wrong, that the qualities she's identifying are more mysterious, subtler than that. She always befriends the men she sits next to on planes. I've never befriended a woman sitting next to me. Of course, before takeoff, when I'm sitting in my aisle seat (I always request aisle, not window, hating to disrupt people when too many ginger ales send me
to the restroom), reading my copy of Flaubert's
A Sentimental Journey
or Melville's
The Confidence-Man
(aware that a lesser known work by a canonical author is the best public reading material since the author's name immediately commands respect for the reader but the unfamiliar title proves that I'm not just some unlettered man in an adult education class, that I'm already familiar with the Great Books list and have now branched out), I always hope that some Rita Hayworth–type will walk down the aisle with her sleek black carry-on, ask me to heft it up to the overhead bin (for some reason I'm always at least six feet tall in this fantasy, very capable of hefting things into high places), then sit down next to me and ask me about the novel I'm working on, and although it's never happened quite like this, on the few instances that a nice-looking lady has sat down next me, I've never been able to take advantage of the situation. Something about air travel (the processed foods? the recycled air? the change in air pressure?) makes me gassy, and I often spend flights sitting in quiet shame, not to mention a periodic warm cushion of air, too embarrassed to strike up a flirtation. I always want to turn to my seatmate, apologize, tell her she smells of roses and I smell of rotten eggs and I'm sorry; I want to tell her that she is beautiful and I am not and I'm sorry; I want to curl up around her feet, cry onto her calves. But I do none of these things. Anyway, this man Julia sat next to yesterday, apparently he'd been to the conference too—a conference on something called Word Studies, which she's been getting into lately, having heard it's the next boom industry in academia—and he regaled her with his Wordian insights, with charm. I want to tell her that as a feminist she should be suspicious of charming men, and I will—I just need to figure out exactly how to phrase it.
Anyway, back to February, she was headed to Chicago and I needed to convince her to help me with my research while there. Problem was, I hadn't fully explained what all had been going on, why I'd been holing up at various libraries lately. It's not that I'd been lying to her; it's just that I didn't yet have a good reason to go into it all. But I had to come clean, explain the whole situation—the time was now. “Julia,” I said.