James Ellroy (16 page)

I brooded. I prayed. I toured for my journalistic collection. I called Joan from dark hotel rooms in a dozen cities. A new book and new acclaim. It felt like my old and safe world, redux.

Joan and I were six months in. I knew the sex would
never diminish and the roar would never abate. I couldn’t grapple the walls between us. A sob at the top of my chest was permanently stuck. I felt unreasonable. I felt infantile. I wanted more, more and more. It was staggeringly MORE than any sane woman could give.

I flew to a Mexican book fair. I told Joan I’d call en route. I didn’t. I felt unequal to her weight. I felt soul-frail. I abdicated. I vowed survival in apostasy’s name.

Misalliance, folie à deux, obsession. I mistakenly defined us as that.

She said, “You look the same.”

I said, “So do you.”

“It hasn’t been that long.”

“You haven’t asked me for an explanation.”

“I don’t need one. It got to be too much for you. I would have done the same thing if you hadn’t.”

“You would have done it more gracefully.”

“I’m not sure.”

“I am. You were always more gracious than me.”

“I was surprised that you didn’t return my calls. The phone was always your guiltiest pleasure.”

“I didn’t want to be tempted. I was afraid I’d go crazy with it all over again.”

“That might very well happen.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“You say that now.”

“I want to try again.”

“Why?”

“There’s no one but you.”

Winter ’05 was a dreamscape. Coastal storms indoor-contained me. Joan called twice. I ignored her swoopy inflections and erased the messages. The dream house four-walled the dreamscape. I sat still and brooded up hours. Helen went about her work life and social life. Margaret oppressed me. The Red Goddess appeared at least once per minute. She showed up conjured
and
unbidden. Her ban on images of other women remained in effect. I could think of no one else.

I tried. I screened Marcia Sidwell, the airplane woman, Marge on the train. I was internally resistant. Anne Sofie von Otter and Anne Sexton, ditto. Likewise the woman from that rainy-night dream.

Rain
. 1980 to 2005. Joan as childhood imagery transmogrified. The other woman still recalled and real-life unfulfilled.

My image bank remained intact. It stored the monomaniacal overflow of my world-class memory. It was a dormitory full of women the Goddess had slain. I got what I had always
really
wanted. I was alone with one woman who would never reappear and dash her power with the demands of real life.

I was overdue to write a new novel. I was bored with film and TV work. Journalism and short stories were snoresville.
I got a bug up my ass to write GIANT fiction. I had plot points, characters and historical flow brain-prepped. Helen urged me to create a less rigorous style and shape it with greater emotion. The crack-up had deadened my soul. My soul was astir now. I had an armored-car heist, black-militant shit, the late-’60s zeitgeist. I had protagonists, connective tissue, history writ small. I did not have the guts of the novel. A rainy-night brood session provided it.

Joan
.

The Red Goddess as the unifying force of four years of History.

Our clash of wills, our war of belief, that woman’s immensity exploded and
contained
.

I waited in the dark for the phone to ring. I played the Hammerklavier adagio in summons. I waited three weeks. She didn’t call. She sent me a card, instead.

It included birthday wishes and concluded with a poem. It ended with the word “Prayer.”

She came that far. She honored our separateness that deeply. She assured my eternal love.

Rain pounded San Francisco. The cab traffic-crawled and contained us. Space constraints and inclination kept us pressed close.

It stayed non-verbal. The cabbie was a witness. He dropped us at a restaurant in Sea Cliff. The place was crowded and deterred conversation. Small talk got us through dinner and a cab ride to the Fairmont Hotel. My call: drinks at the Tonga Room.

A tiki bar with a barge sunk in chlorinated water. Wall torches and carved god masks. The barge band played oldie covers. We imbibed the usual: scotch and coffee.

Joan was pensive. I was full of grand declaration. Joan’s
quiet gaze doused the volume and shut it off. I felt bombastic. I demanded the world in every moment. Joan looked exhausted. I saw what I had cost her so far.

The corny music was a life raft. Our talk floated in sync. We chitchatted, segued into it and got
to
it. There were no interruptions or silent intervals. The All-Souls Retreat meets the Worker’s Collective. Commie-cell minutes and Lutheran call-and-response.

My bullshit open marriage, her abrupt moods, our temperaments that no lover had ever withstood. My delusional expectations. Her debilitating brusqueness. Our incomprehensibly different worlds.

My controlling nature. Her controlling nature. Our conflicting surrender pacts. Our amalgam of white and red flags aswirl.

Our big hurt. Our dear love. Our moments of two different worlds subsumed.

We let it trail off. We watched fat tourists dance. Our eyes found each other’s. We both nodded yes.

Winter courtship, ’05. The process re-extends. Chaste weekends in Sacramento. Sex postponed and reinvented. A chastened rapport and a pre-commitment plunge.

I stayed at a hotel near Joan’s place. My cover lies became more convoluted. “My colleague” in Sacto—epic falsehood now. Lying killed me. The added mendaciousness made it worse. The re-courtship softened Joan. I started to think marriage, daughter, dog. The jaunts between women sapped me. I wanted to rebuild a dream house in the Red Goddess’s name and reconsecrate the sacrament of marriage. Joan was planning a move to San Francisco. I dream-built our love shack by the Bay and reimagined holy matrimony again.

My nerves were
less
than shot. My sleep was
less
problematic. I was
less
inclined to fight or run. The decarnalizing process tempered Joan and de-clawed me. We talked about sex, but didn’t do it. Joan reemerged and
re-
stunned me. I got
re
-obsessed within chaste boundaries. I reconceived our life together and repopulated it with ideals.

Paradox, dichotomy, dialectic. The Diaspora meets the Reformation. Our divergent beliefs
contained
. Our corporeal selves reconstituted with a daughter. My safety-zone concept deconstructed with someone dangerous. I was the amnesiac. She was the black-clad woman with the answers.

There was a
single
answer. It was Family. Joan never stated the word as goal or solution and refrained from comments on my familyless state. Jean Hilliker dumped my old man in November ’55. I was five decades into my only child/orphan/skirt-chaser/part-time husband act. Joan and I read wrong on paper. I revised our differences to read defiantly right. Prayer brought me to the concept of consolidation. Brood time brought me to a vision of parenthood and the mandate to fight even harder for an even truer cause and perhaps create a plane of unimaginable sanctification.

I told Helen that I’d met a woman. She winced and said, I know. She cried a little. I inquired about
her
action. She laughed and refused to tell.

I continued with TV and film work. I pored through research briefs and compiled a set of notes for my novel. I never told Joan,
This Book Is You
. I wanted to de-bombasticize. I wanted to reseal the union in a clarified state. We were buying time to observe ourselves. We were recycled lovers. I was bopping between dream houses, gone-bust and future. I was ever the amnesiac. I was ever prone to relive the life I forgot.

•    •    •

Re-consummation was joyful. The six-week prelude ended in Sacto, fresh with spring heat. The victory of resurrection jazzed me. I started predicting our future. Joan withstood a dose of it and blew up.

Not restricted by your marriage, not without more trust of you, not with you on some maniac roll.

I listened. I
heard
the answer. Joan didn’t ask me or tell me to bail on the marriage. She told me not to jerk her chain.

Joan always knew how to play me. It wasn’t guile. She understood that her best weapon was the truth.

I wanted more and more of her. I wanted honor to reign at our core. I didn’t want to cause Helen even more pain. The word
Divorce
ratched me. I wanted it both ways. I tend to err on the side of high cost and risk. I felt it coming here.

Spring into summer. Hotel weekends in San Francisco and dinners with Joan’s friends. Late lessons in social etiquette and the merging of lives. Lessons that I learned. Lessons rewarded with Joan’s bright eyes and light touch.

I was grateful for every small kindness she showed me. The gratitude was there that second summer. The gratitude remains with Joan gone
.

We spent the Fourth of July in Frisco. We had drinks at the Tonga Room and walked back to our hotel. It was downhill. We steadied each other. Joan slid on her slick-soled shoes. I kept an arm around her and swooped her back up. The hotel suite was red-walled and sconce-lit. Joan plugged in a CD player and performed a torrid dance. Her movements were stunning and shocking. Her black garments fell just out of my reach.

Lover, goddess, redeemer. Possessed eyes that went swoopy the instant the music stopped.

•    •    •

Joan slept. I didn’t. The black garments remained on the floor.

Dawn hit early. I cracked the drapes for some light. I circled the bed and watched Joan from different angles. I saw a dozen sides of her with every tuck and stretch.

So be it. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes
.

We said good-bye a few hours later. Joan drove home to Sacto and I drove home to Carmel. I told Helen then. We both cried. I fished for reassurance and got it. Yes, it was inevitable. Yes, it has to be. Yes, it’s the right thing.

We cut our financial deal there in the kitchen. I was grandiosely generous. I told Helen that I’d always take care of her. She said, I know you will.

We debriefed a fourteen-year marriage. Blame got spread bilaterally. We laughed a little and steered clear of the obvious detours. The talk did not relieve me. I felt shallow and cruel.

Helen had tea. I cued up Joan images and felt my brain screen lurch. I saw Jean Hilliker. I calculated her current age as 90. I recalled March of ’58, and the day I inflicted The Curse.

Joan was fearful more than moved. She expained why. She rarely knew when I acted from a sense of drama or from a viable truth.

So women will love me. So I get what I want. There is no other truth
.

I moved into a nearby Carmel apartment. Helen helped me pack. We put the dream house on the market and retained divorce lawyers. My lawyer found my largesse unnerving and financially unsound. I told her, Tough shit. Helen’s lawyer said, I dig this guy. He lets it all hang out.

Joan moved to San Francisco. I helped her pack and unpack boxes and do the shit work. The relocation felt right. Frisco became the new Joan Zone. Carmel was less than two hours south.

We orbited closer. I resisted an impulse to crowd Joan. I wanted to hover near Helen. Fence jumper/fence straddler/fence jumper. Fences and the two women I loved.

The divorce went forward. The house went unsold. Joan and I spent weekends in her town and mine. We enjoyed an idyll in West Marin County. We took walks and made love in a country inn. I described her transit of History in my novel. The wish-named Joan to the real Joan to the fictive Red Goddess named Joan Rosen Klein. Joan said she felt honored. She took my hand and placed it over her heart.

Helen and I moved forward in our own way. We formed a friendship and style pact. We vowed to comport ourselves as the world’s grooviest exes. The relationship was frayed raw. Helen dismissed Joan as an older man’s folly and damned my bulletproof heart. She never questioned my loyalty. She critiqued my eagerness to live in puerile fixation. She cited a single source: Jean Hilliker.

I had to keep Helen safe. I had to make Joan safe. We started discussing the possibility of a child. We both wanted a daughter. Joan loved the name Ruth. It rolled off the tongue and was resoundingly Jewish. I liked the name. It complemented Ellroy and sealed our Judeo-Christian pact. Joan nixed Ellroy and her own surname. She suggested Hilliker for our daughter.

It was like that. The Red Goddess went that deep. How could it go wrong?

The apartment came furnished and stocked with dishes and towels. It reeked of transience. It vibed fuck pad and divorce stopgap. Joan was 125 miles and a zillion light-years away. Helen was one mile and ten zillion. I settled in. I started to go breathless and squirrelly.

I got a script deal and goosed the Ellroy-Knode bank account. I fretted about Helen. Our years together cut through me and lodged as a sob. I lived for weekends with Joan. I sat in the dark and ached for weekday-night phone calls. The dream house sat on the market. The cash split and alimony contract meant big workloads forever. I creamed for the macho-maimed struggle of it all. My nerves started shearing. My sleep vaporized. Those melanomas kept popping up on my arms. Brain scrolls of Joan wiped the cancer cells out.

Fall ’05. The ratchets tighten. I live for the Red Goddess that much more.

We were committed now. I had trashed my life to assure an honorable union. Joan was grateful and perplexed. My burn-the-world-down mentality amazed and terrified her. It bid me to greater expectations and instilled an even greater lust.

Joan swooned and resisted. We had moments of great beauty. She told me the stories she’d withheld and let me hold her, sobbing. She refused to attend a police function honoring me. It entailed the Pledge of Allegiance and socializing with cops.

We spent time in West Marin County. We floated in hot tubs with wide river views. We had an hours-long fight on the subject of graffiti.