James Ellroy (20 page)

I wrote it. I sent it. Erika wrote back, immediately. She expressed reluctant pleasure. She praised the dramatic construction and ridiculed my “Immortal Beloved” casting. She guardedly invited me to contact her again.

A daily correspondence commenced. I handwrote letters and faxed them to Erika’s computer. Erika sent typed faxes back. I pursued. Erika advanced and retreated at an unpredictable pace. She cited my reputation as a grand-stander, womanizer and right-wing buffoon. I tried to differentiate my public and private personae. I unloaded the truth of my life. I requested reciprocity. Erika complied. She described her life as seeping compartments and looming icebergs. She was a one-book wonder with a second memoir in perilous rough draft. Her daughters were 11 and 14. Motherhood was exaltation and drudge work. Read
my
book. Motherhood is
my
shtick—just like
dead
mothers are yours.

I love my daughters. They’re always there. They’re just like She is for you
.

Yes, but they’re alive. They’re more real than Her. They’re children. They devour your everydays. They’re not this ghost I dance with at whim
.

I spend my time with car pools and Girl Scout troops. I write intermittently. You’re correct about my marriage. It’s been in unbreachable stasis for years. I’m fucked behind inertia. Your brutal will moves and horrifies me. I wonder who you are in your heart
.

I’m fearful. I’m domineering and unsocialized. I lure people in and push them away. I write obsessively and with great concision. I’m religious and possess social views you would surely find appalling. All I want is intense communion with women and time alone in the dark
.

Letters went out. Letters came in. I sent Erika my phone number. She declined to send me hers. I pursued. She
resisted. I retreated in a decorous fashion. Erika rewarded me with lovely compliments. I felt hot-wired to God. Erika bid me to virtue as we committed a text-taled adultery. We decoded each other sans benefit of voice, sight and touch. Our letters deludedly banished the prospect of sex—as we rushed toward it in platonic love’s name.

She called me. It was 11:00 p.m. on a Monday. Our courtship was one month in.

She said, “Hi, it’s Erika.” She was in her car, parked near her house. It reeked of cheating. Her voice startled me. It countermanded the tone of her letters. Some bottom dropped out of me. It was queasiness meets weightlessness. Small talk dribbled out and took us nowhere. Spoken discourse contradicted the heft of our words on paper. I thought we’d get to big themes fast. I came on judgmental. Erika felt foolish and overmatched. We both went borderline hostile.

The chat lasted ninety minutes. I hung up and crashed on my bed. The room spun. My pulse went triple its normal rate.

We went back to writing. I assumed Erika’s perspective. She was cheating. Her herky-jerky chatter and long pauses made that plain. Her new faxes confirmed my assessment.
Fucker, I called you. I’ve got more to lose than you have. This is not easy
.

She said that she’d call again. I knew she would. Leave the lights off and wait by the phone. It
will
ring. You’ll
make
it ring. You’ve got it equally bad for each other.

Our rapport accelerated via the written word. The main theme was change. The question was, How do we change
each other?
My outer life was all success and well-earned recognition. My inner life was lonely turmoil and obsessive ambition and lust. Erika had a moribund marriage. She’d lived a wild early life and became horrified at her penchant
for chaos. She married a sweet-natured man and set out to redeem him and create a safe-love zone. The man failed to fulfill Erika’s fatuous expectations. She felt guilty and unreasonably responsible for his psychic state. The union was decidedly over. The two bright and lovely daughters were daily compensations and a brutal workload all to themselves. Erika lived in despair. She built her own cage and stared through the gaps in the bars. Her daughters provided work furlough. There was a dear joy in it—and more and more work. She carried the bulk of the weight in the marriage. She took full responsibility for the state of the union and assigned her husband no blame. Her native joie de vivre was going, going, gone. She possessed a heroic soul. She was Beethovian in her schizy grasp at life in all its horror and beauty. She humbled me. I was male and unencumbered. I cut and ran from dicey entanglements and lived full-time in my head. I was a man. Gender bias had favored me.

You know your job. Work hard to quash other men and render them sterile. Dream enormous dreams and seek women. Many men do this.
You
do it with unique verve and efficacy. Now you’re 61 and waiting in the dark for another married mother to call you. Isn’t that pathetic? Aren’t you ashamed?

No, not really.

I’m in a sacred fight now. There’s her as Her and something else, and if we continue to tell the truth, we’ll both win.

Erika called me again. The conversation went more smoothly. We had accepted the weightiness and open-endedness of the attachment and considered the emergent US to be a spiritual entity. Erika railed at my media antics. I railed at her willingness to live in dysfunction. It reigned as subtext: We’re out to saw off the chains that constrain our souls—but we can’t fuck.

Our correspondence was six weeks in. My fax machine
and Erika’s computer worked overtime. Erika flew back east to visit her sister. We scorched the phone lines from L.A. to Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

We discussed
everything
. Our talks ran for hours. We detailed our promiscuous pasts and argued politics. We ping-ponged between We’re already lovers, No, we’re not, and Who are we kidding? Erika discussed her daughters. I admitted my incapacity for fatherhood and conceded that children as redemption for murdered mothers was a truly nutty ideal. We talked lots of sizzling sex shit. We kept trying to define what we were and finally gave up. We told each other “I love you” at the end of every phone call—
and meant it
.

I didn’t care who we were.

I required no consummation.

I knew that whoever we were and whatever we had would never stop.

I told Karen about Erika. She said, “I used to think you were smart.” I told Helen about Erika. Helen noted her marked resemblance to Jean Hilliker. I noted her marked resemblance to yours truly.

Erika said, “What do we do now?”

I said, “We tell the truth.”

The courtship was seven weeks in. We hadn’t seen each other in one year and three months.

The phone rang. It was midweek at 3:00 p.m. Erika said, “Hello.” I blurted, “Coffee? Le Pain Quotidien at 1st and Larchmont?” She said, “Half an hour?”

A faux-rustic coffee cave. Overpriced java and overdressed pastry. Overlit in faux-Provence colors. Not the backdrop for film noir fatality.

But it was.

Because it was
over
then.

Film noir is an over-referenced genre. Adultery rarely ends in the greenroom at Big Q. Divorce court is a more likely destination. Pellets don’t drop into acid vats. People weep and rage and try to determine where things went wrong. People try to figure out how to get things right.

I arrived first. The table was at the back, with a front-entrance view. She walked in five minutes later. She wore a look that I’ve come to love and that Erika first formally noted. “If I’m not smiling, I look frightened, worried or stern.”

She wasn’t smiling. It didn’t matter. She was the loveliest woman I had ever seen.

We embraced. We held each other 47 beats too long. We sat down. We didn’t hold hands. We leaned across the table and laced up our arms.

Two hours dissolved into microseconds. Self-absorbed
memoirists?
All we talked about was
US
.

It was natural.

It was easy.

The flow was evenly deployed. Two self-obsessed memoirists—and no one talked too much.

Who are we? What are we? Should we do it? Fuck—my husband and kids. It doesn’t feel wrong—it feels sweet. My husband, my kids, the censure I’ll face, your shitty reputation
.

Your shitty rep and your murdered-mom miasma. Everyone will think I’m insane—but I have no doubt you’re the one
.

I said, “I’ll help you with your manuscript.”

She said, “Whatever happens, I don’t ever want to lose you.”

Those green eyes. Those beautiful big hands. Her buoyancy in the face of years of disappointment. My retreat into her glow.

She called me “Ellroy.” It was a distancing device. I
addressed her as “Darling” more than “Erika.” I said, “I want to buy you a black cashmere dress.” She said, “Don’t do shit you’ve done with other women. It would fucking kill me.”

I walked Erika back to her car. Our good-bye embrace lasted 48 beats too long. She held me very tightly. My hands played over the long sweep of her back.

Other women blurred and faded altogether.
Blood’s A Rover
neared publication. The dedication to Joan receded as a milestone event. I pondered Erika. I resisted the urge to recast her in my own image. A shared resemblance asserted itself even as I tried to refrain. The backlash was a soft truth set off by whispers, jingles and gongs. She’s big and clumsy. So are you. She’s sweet-natured and often appears harsh. She observes moments as she lives them. You’re that way. She’s afraid to love and more afraid not to. She’s indefatigable and dutiful. She loves to put unequivocal and somewhat shocking words on paper. Now she’s writing them to you.

She’s short-sold herself to the world. You’ve over-sold yourself. You diverge there. You have told each other the truth for over two months now. You have fought for comportment. She knows your whole Karen story. She knows that you can’t tread that route again.

I studied Erika formally. The absence of sex fueled my study. She was
grateful
. She swooned at any dollop of recognition. Her harshness was a defensive posture and a moment-to-moment stance to propel her through the prosaic tasks of the world. She was impeccably gracious. She apologized for herself, without necessity. She jive-talked better than Karen and Helen Knode. I read her memoir. She was singularly perceptive and in surefire control of the autobiographical essay. This evinced her life in the constant
assessment of meaning. Her retreat mode was dirty-girl talk for shock value. She was Ellrovian that way. If you can’t love me, notice me. Give us a microphone and an audience and self-inflicted harm
will
ensue. Erika was on a harrowing human journey. She was deadeningly encumbered by people she loved dearly. She had all my crazy exhibitionistic bullshit pegged. She understood it because we shared that psychic componentry.
This was courtship
. We had two months of words, concepts and tones decoded. Our souls were locked as one. Our bodies had yet to follow.

We’re not even formal lovers. It was a long shot two months ago. I’m getting the vibe—
she just might have the stones to jump
.

We began meeting at my pad. We sat at the kitchen table and reviewed her manuscript. It was a woman’s-whole-life book couched as a coming-of-age memoir. I’d heard some of the stories anecdotally. Erika’s tale of exile and neglect was my story with the volume dimmed, upscale backdrops and no curse and resultant murder. We converged again. Erika told me the tale of her marriage. She included the through-line that Karen always omitted. We converged
and
diverged there. I never demonized or ridiculed Erika’s husband. I knew she wouldn’t tolerate it. He was a good man in the thrall of a powerful and powerfully tormented woman. I knew that our collective mandate was to change each other. We were attempting to merge into a symbiotic and non-codependent whole—whatever the parameters of our union.

We were united for that express purpose. It eclipsed sexual conjunction and anointed us with a solar system–high calling. We had to become the best parts of each other. I had to learn tolerance and greater humility. Erika required a transfusion of my determination and drive. I believed it because I knew it to be real beyond all manifestations of
madness in my woman-mad life to date. Erika considered us cosmic. She repeatedly told me that our bond did not feel wrong. Her friendly love for her husband did not enrage me. They were comrades and parents united by shared history and ripped apart by a stultifying isolation. Their commitment to their daughters was a full-time job all its own. Seasoned adulterer Ellroy knew this. Neophyte Erika knew that she should not pass her marital legacy to her girls. That common meeting ground in no way astonished me. The newly confrontational woman had
changed
. She could not run and hide like she used to. Nor could I. She had changed
me
. I now inhabited a romantic world with no prescribed borders. This astonished me: I loved Erika past all expectations.

Her manuscript required revisions. We worked at the table. It adjoined the living room and a long leather couch. Erika suggested an afternoon nap there. I gleefully acceded to the suggestion. There we were. The fit was tight. Erika threw a leg over me. My heart trip-hammered. Erika placed her head on my shoulder. We avoided eye contact that might lead to a kiss.

Reinvestment.

Fierce hearts beating. Let’s Twist again. Junior high limits adhered to—2009 as 1962.

The summer wore on. We were nine weeks into our courtship. It was hot. The couch got too sticky. We curled up on the bed. Contact accelerated.

We
still
imposed limits. We stretched out crossways and let our long legs dangle over the edge. The crossways pose became untenable. Two weeks of it was wracking our shins. We moved up and placed our heads on the pillows. Erika’s eyes were very close.

She played me a song her 14-year-old daughter had written. It was a sweet and melodic love tune. Her daughter strummed a ukulele. Her voice broke during the high notes. I started crying. Erika leaned in. I kissed her then.

She jumped.

She was on her way back from a family vacation. Their car overheated and stranded them in Fresno in a heat wave. They dined en famille at a Rally’s Burger dump. The girls scrounged trinkets at a 99¢ Only Store. Erika and her husband sat on a grassy strip nearby. A dog turd reposed a few feet away. Erika picked it up with a Rally’s Burger wrapper and trash-canned it.