L.A.WOMAN (12 page)

She looked at me with disappointed eyebrows.

“How do you expect to get into college?” she said. “You can't major in Spanish, you've got to think about the future.”

But it turned out that I could major in Spanish and graduate which was what I wanted to do and not all the tea in China or anything Miss Karl could say would make me spend my youth in any more school.

Of course, Franny Blossom disappointed them deeply too, because according to her previous school record, she was supposed to have an IQ of 190 and all she got once she arrived at Hollywood was C's or F's. They knew she wasn't living up to her potential.

Whenever I came home from one of these school counselor meetings, I'd ask my mother, “Mother, do I
have
to be anything?”

“Of course not, dear,” she said.

“Well, what about money?” I asked.

“You can always live with us,” she said.

Of course, my mother was always smiling benevolently at her company after dinner and saying, “I wish you could all come here and live with me for a year. That way I could make dinner for us like this every night.”

Deep in her heart, the girl in blue wished the country could have another Great Depression so everybody would be thrown upon her mercy and she could rise to the occasion.

· · ·

I once asked Lola about her attitudes and clearcut view of life.

“It was so awful,” Lola would always say, “because I've never been able to persuade anybody of anything, you know—especially by logic. Intellectually I've always finished last. In the Hollywood School for Girls the teacher used to say, ‘You are like a little butterfly fluttering outside but one day you must come in and face the truth.' ”

“A butterfly?” I asked.

“And I couldn't help it because tears just ran down my face.”

“Why, because of facing the truth?” I asked.

“No,” Lola cried indignantly, “because I knew I'd
never
do it. I'd always be a butterfly. Or some kind of animal. God, that reminds me. . . .” She stood there a moment. We were about to sit down on the green grass under the windy hot blue L.A. sky in a little gully where no bagpipe drone could find us. “Once Agnes de Mille was doing a scientific study on hair follicles and how certain types of hair only grew on intelligent people. And she sampled my sister's hair but not mine. She just didn't even think I was there . . . That's what I was like there though, a complete butterfly fluttering outside in the flowers. . . .”

“Agnes de Mille was there?”

“And she was just as clumsy then too, poor thing,” Lola said. “The girl was never able to move, you know, the simplest gesture eluded her. It was sad.”

By the time Franny and I began drinking Vicious Virgins at Kelbo's, the vicious virgins running Hollywood High were very tame and though they tried to invite both of us to sorority teas or to sit at their bench during lunch, Franny and I were getting into so much trouble running around in black cocktail dresses with fake eyelashes and high heels night after night that school seemed hopelessly small time. To us both, the future was Hollywood.

· · ·

At least when we got to Paris, we knew once and for all we'd get something to eat and after two weeks in London, I was finally beginning to look svelte as hell from starvation, so for the first time in my life I looked fashionable.

My father's musicological efforts had paid off and he'd gotten a Bach grant just in the nick of time (the Musicians' Union had just voted itself out of a job as usual and gotten rid of “that crook” who ran it so that suddenly it had
no
crooks on its side and it went straight to the dogs). In fact, my father had gotten
two
Bach grants—a Ford Foundation and a Fulbright—and suddenly, just as I was about to follow Franny into the movie business, my parents were dragging me off to have Interesting Experiences someplace almost as bad as New Jersey—Paris.

But on the train from Cherbourg, there was only scenery—no food—and my father kept promising, “When we get to Paris, we'll ask Sam for the best place to eat.”

“Sam!”
my mother said. “He's the one who can't even find a decent Chinese restaurant in San Francisco.”

“Yeah, Daddy,” I reminded him, “he smokes so much grass
everything
tastes delicious to him.”

My father flinched, remembering what Sam's idea of great
Chinese food was in the restaurant he recommended we go to in San Francisco one time when I was younger. And it was not the kind of food a person like my father could gloss over. I mean, food
is
food after all and it does have to get stuck in to your mouth. So there was no getting around the fact that Sam's place was all cornstarchy and lackluster and piled high with rubber octopi for authenticity. But once you got it into your mouth, Sam's definition of a good time bit the dust.

The sky over Paris the night we arrived was glowing miles above the city, like it actually was what my father said, “The City of Light.” Getting out of the train at the Gare du Nord or wherever we were, I noticed something horrible about Paris I never overcame, which was how short everybody was except me—and my sister, who was already cuter than me anyway, was now
in.

In high heels I towered over everyone whereas Bonnie, who was only five feet two to begin with, was already skinny enough even before London to pass through the Left Bank without them muttering to her what they did to me: “Allemagne.”

“That means German,” my father informed me, the second time it happened the first five minutes we were in the train station in Paris. “I guess they think you're so tall and blond you must be German.”

“Well, ick,” I said. (I was only eighteen.)

My father got a
jeton
finally and tried to call Sam, but Sam wasn't there. My father called another number, the number of Steve Hoffner, a friend of Sam's, but Steve wasn't there either.

“Well,” I said, “I guess we better find our
own
food.”

“We'll leave our things at the
pension”
my father said.

Luckily, we did not have to camp out like we did in Lake Arrowhead when we were in Paris. It was nicer, like San Francisco, we got to go places where there were beds and
chairs, and where we got to eat in restaurants, although this didn't do me any good since I was too tall to have any fun.

We were allowed to have our own private shared room, my sister and I, even if it was six flights up and overlooking the Panthéon. Naturally, the first thing we did was go number two in the bidet.

“Hey,” my sister said, “this toilet doesn't flush.”

I watched her try all the nozzles, but nothing budged the thing one inch. Finally we decided to wrap it in paper and put it on the balcony.

“Those toilets sure are funny,” I casually mentioned to my father on our way to the restaurant at last.

“What toilets?” he asked.

“Oh, they mean the bidet,” my mother said, looking at us and beginning to laugh. “What did you do with it?”

“We put it on the balcony,” my sister said.

“The toilet is down the hall,” my father explained.

“Oh,” we both said.

“Here we are,” my father said, “a fixed-price restaurant.”

(That night when we came back from the restaurant, it wasn't on the balcony anymore where we'd left it wrapped up in the pages of
Paris Match
and we were certain it couldn't have fallen off the ledge from a six-story window or it would have landed on somebody's head—and we were sure things like that don't happen.)

In Paris, where all the women went to such extravagant lengths to look so chic, my mother won hands down. There was just something about the way she dressed that was always a little too outrageous—like her after-dinner cigar—to be merely chic, she was more than just that. She managed to put together a style eventually that was such a blend of Italian, French and L.A. fabrics and fashions that nobody on earth figured out how she got so avant-garde two years ahead.

Even that first night in the restaurant, before my mother had really had a chance to figure out the territory, she
managed to outdo the fall season on the Left Bank women merely by the way she walked with such authority in her coat, which was pink on one side, yellow on the other, and blue in the back, which she'd created for herself out of baby-blanket remnants and lined with a flowered French silk print that somehow managed to look like a mixture of Dior and Joseph's “coat of many colors” from the Old Testament. It was the only place you could look in a room when she came in and the eye found it restful in spite of its audacity.

She also wore a fresh rose in her hair, shoved into her waist-length chignon and somehow staying put. While everyone in the restaurant stared at my mother, I finally and at last got something to eat without any further complications.

Then all I wanted was to climb the six flights and go straight to sleep until noon.

However, the first thing the next morning there was a knock on our door and I got up asking “Who is it?” instead of “Qui est là?” but that was okay because it was Steve Hoff-ner who spoke L.A. English.

“I'm sorry, I'm looking for Mort Lubin,” he said.

“He's my father,” I said, “are you—?”

“Look,” he said, “I'm Steve Hoffner. Sam's friend. I'm sorry if I look like I've been up all night. But I've been up all night, with the police. They found Sam. In his apartment on the Boulevard Raspail. He was dead. Under suspicious circumstances. And they've quarantined the premises. Because of drugs. But I shouldn't be telling you, you're just a child, where's your father?”

“What's that?” I asked.

Steve Hoffner was lugging two of those insanely heavy containers you put film cans into so you can carry them around, weighing about twenty-four pounds each. Naturally he'd be a mess having carried two of those up six flights of stairs.

“That's what he wanted me to bring him, it's a print of his
latest—his last—film.” Steve Hoffner looked like a meek accomplice, unequal to Sam's ordinary day-to-day escapades, never mind what he'd just pulled off this time.

“My father's up one more flight,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

“I'll go get him,” I said.

“Could you?”

I ran upstairs and knocked on my parents' door.

My mother opened it, looking annoyed and saying “Shhhhh, you'll wake your father.”

“That Steve Hoffner's downstairs,” I said.

“Who?” My father woke up.

“Something's happened to Sam” (although to me, it seemed this was simply another of Sam's usual tricks).

“To
Sam?”
my father asked, looking afraid.

“He's dead,” I said.

“He's
what?”
my father asked, suddenly swept to his feet and in tears.

I couldn't really believe he was crying over Sam himself. I thought it must just be because somebody—anybody—he'd known was dead at all. The adults I knew seemed to cry when anybody died.

But how could they cry over Sam, I wondered silently, when they knew he was going to die anyway? I mean, for one thing anyone who takes heroin “for migraines” is bound to o.d. by accident sooner or later, especially in Paris where the heroin is so much better than Americans were expecting
—plus
if you asked me, o.d.ing in Paris was practically all there was to do.

Anyway, my first few days in Paris there was really too much to see to think about Sam. I only remembered that in the eighth grade I'd written an essay called “The Most Interesting Place I've Ever Been” which was about Sam's apartment in San Francisco after he left Lola. Aunt Helen had been staying there and Sam was out, but I remember
being fascinated that anyone could live in a place where all the windows were papered over so no sunlight could possibly get in, the bookshelves were laced with Snickers Bars and English toffee containers, the bathroom was even ready in case there was a blackout. The floor was covered with Persian rugs, the couch was so low it was practically like the
Arabian Nights,
there was a hookah on the orange crate bookend, the lamps were definitely not encouraged to go above twenty-five-watt lightbulbs, and when I looked at it later, it was practically a classic dope-fiend's retreat. I got an A and I read the essay aloud in class.

“What an interesting place,” my English teacher remarked.

“I thought so,” I said.

Paris, though, looked to me like a graveyard after Sam died and ever since it seemed to fit and just be a continuation of that little cemetery where Sam was buried, crammed together in markers of gray; no matter how artistic or full of fol-de-rol the rest of Paris was, they still seemed only decorations on tombstones in their heart. For in the daytime the city was as gray as a cemetery and not made of light at all.

· · ·

My poor mother thought that I would resign myself to having a great experience and stay in Paris after my parents left Bonnie and me there and went to Germany. However, luckily I didn't have to, since resigning myself had never been my idea of fun. And I had only been there two months (we were supposed to be there a whole year), when one day I was sitting in La Coupole reading my third Nancy Mitford about how great Paris was for snappy repartee (which, unfortunately, was lost on me), letting my mind wander back to the nostalgic mornings when Franny and I used to smoke Kents and eat hashed browns in a place near school called Snow White's, decorated by all seven Hollywood dwarfs,
making La Coupole seem lonelier than ever, until I looked up and suddenly Paris wasn't so bad—for there he was—Ed Lakey.
The
Ed Lakey. And this time I wasn't too square.

Whereas a year before at Hollywood High when I'd seen him on Alumni Day (he'd graduated ten years before), I had only been a miserable seventeen-year-old virgin unable to do anything but bump into him by mistake until finally he realized by the fourth time that it wasn't coincidence and looked at me with those silvery eyes as he said, “How about meeting me later at Snow White's?”