Mystery Girl: A Novel
Read Mystery Girl: A Novel Online
Authors: David Gordon
Text copyright © 2013 by David Gordon
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Lynn Buckley
Author photograph © Michael Sharkey
Cover art © Gil Elvgren
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781477800799
ISBN-10: 1477800794
To the girls who mystified me
CONTENTS
PART I IN SEARCH OF LOST MINDS
PART II THE MAN WITHOUT QUALIFICATIONS
PART III PORTRAITS OF SOME LADIES
31 THE CASE OF THE CLUELESS HUSBAND
PART I
IN SEARCH OF LOST MINDS
1
I BECAME AN ASSISTANT
detective, and solved my first murder, right after my wife left me, when I went a little mad. Never as crazy as the master detective himself, of course; he was completely nuts. Certifiable with the papers to prove it. Madder than a shithouse rat. He was (and you’ll pardon the bad pun, but I’m a frustrated writer and we’re the worst, with our brittle, bitter brilliance now confined to the Scrabble board) mentally detective in every possible sense. And trust me, I know from crazy, being, as I admit right here at the outset, no poster child for emotional health myself.
But in truth, I knew I wasn’t really nuts, just angry and scared and lonely and so, so very sad. The disease wasn’t in my head, but in my heart. My heart was terribly sick. I could feel it carrying on in there all night: feverish, mumbling, tossing in its sleep, waking up in shivers from sweat-drenched nightmares, unable to keep anything down. I felt like an ambulance carting it around, siren moaning, expecting traffic to part and cops to clear my way. But there was no trauma center for me to come screeching up to. No winged nurses awaiting me in white. I just drove around in circles, wailing, Emergency, Emergency!
In the end, I diagnosed myself. The sickness I had was just life. And the only known cure for the malady of existence—although deeply tempting on certain endless white nights and empty black hole mornings—was too radical, too uncertain, too irrevocable to try until all other means had been exhausted.
2
AS I SAID, THIS
all began the day Lala, my wife, walked into my office and said the scariest, most stomach-curdling words in the language: “We have to talk.” (It’s never good news. Never: “We have to talk. I’m horny, but let’s hurry because there’s pizza on the way.”) She was leaving, she told me, and we were going into couple’s therapy, and I was getting a job.
Now I don’t want you to think I’m lazy, although that’s obviously what she thought. I’d always had jobs, in fact, far too many. My primary job, of course, was novelist. But it’s hard to make a good living as a novelist. After twenty years at it, my total earnings to date were $0, and I’d been forced to set my latest unfinished experimental fiasco,
Perineum,
aside in a drawer atop my other ill born unnovels,
Toilet
and
Slow Motion Holocaust,
and become a screenwriter for hire, since if there’s anything in this world I love as much as, or sometimes even more than, books, it’s movies. (And my wife of course.) Screenwriting proved to be far more lucrative than novelizing, as I was quickly recruited to polish a low-budget foreign-produced horror-sci-fi-softcore feature working-titled
Dark Probings,
for a small upfront sum and a larger share of the profits. The producer explained it all to me after he arrived in his Porsche at our lunch meeting when I turned in my work. His English wasn’t great, and I didn’t quite follow the math, and anyway he forgot his checkbook, but at least he bought me lunch ($13.25). Otherwise, my total film-career intake up till that fateful morning amounted to $180.00 net, which my friend Milo paid me, in twenty-dollar increments, for writing up the monthly New Releases and News To Us! notices at the video store where he worked.
So, while I went on “being” a novelist in my head if not on paper, and developing screenplays in my darkened bedroom by night, over the years I supplemented this base income with many, many
other jobs: messenger, delivery boy, survey taker, phone answerer, photocopier, assistant file clerk, assistant painter, assistant/driver, assistant copy editor, assistant office manager at a temp agency, temporary office assistant at an ad agency, office temp at an assisted living agency, assistant to the assistant of a motivator, (I’m not even sure what that was), and finally, the pinnacle of my assistancy: assistant manager of Bartleby’s Scrivenings, a secondhand bookshop managed and owned by the sole other employee, Mary Jane Rutherford, and located near my house in the beautiful and trendy Silver Lake neighborhood of LA. The job didn’t pay much, but then again I didn’t have to do much besides sit at the counter, dust desultorily, argue with my boss about literary theory, and chitchat with Milo, who knew more about movies than I knew about anything and assistant-managed Videolatry next door. Both shops were going under, it being a race to the bottom between our respective industries, and MJ (she started using her initials in college when she started dating women and her real name only appeared on her checks), who had retired from a long career as a graduate student in early modernist poetry to open this shop with the last of her student loan money, retired still further, into her tiny back office, and left me out front, alone at the foremast, holding the tattered flag of Literature.
At first I assumed she was just watching porn or googling back there, which was what I did when I retired to my own office at home, and which I referred to as “thinking.” Then I heard strange mutterings and saw her slinking around in dark glasses, clutching 100 percent biodegradable recycled paper bags to her chest, and I understood: she was on a self-destructive poetry binge, drinking Trader Joe’s wine and reading Stevens and Yeats, aloud, to herself. Sometimes she declaimed so boldly that it scared the rare customer who’d wandered in out of the sun to kill time waiting for a bus. She even alarmed Peaches, the toy poodle that lived upstairs with Jerry, Milo’s boss.
Though both stores were sinking, ours drowned first, as our
lease ran out and we could no longer afford the rent in a neighborhood like Silver Lake, which had become highly popular because it was full of quaint, neighborhoody features like secondhand bookshops and cinephile video stores. Jerry, who’d arrived with the early gay pioneers in the ’70s, had a long-term lease at preboom, barrio prices. He’d first hired Milo as a projectionist at The Alleycat, a gay porn theater he owned, while Milo worked on his MA in queer cinema studies. (He still claimed that his thesis project,
Undergrowth: Body Hair and Gay Avant-Garde Cinema,
would shift the whole field, if he ever finished it.) The communal movie theater gave way to lonely video booths, and then to the rental shop, as the Internet and gentrification drove the hairy and scary away. Now Videolatry was declining in turn, but Jerry’s own health was failing even faster, and he cared less about the future of cinema than about having Milo on hand to plump his pillows and bring up his soup.
First MJ sold online the few really valuable books we had: a nearly fine first American edition of
Naked Lunch
(the Paris edition, published by Olympia was worth much more); a nice if slightly too-loved set of Narnia firsts; several good-to-fair Jim Thompson paperbacks (
The Alcoholics, A Hell of A Woman, Savage Night
), which I had spotted in someone’s dead uncle’s carton and acquired for the shop but couldn’t afford for myself); the less rare 1935 edition of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
by T. E. Lawrence; Casanova’s
Memoirs
in six water-stained volumes; a paperback original, in fair condition, of
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
by Philip K. Dick. Then she tried to unload the rest of her stock wholesale to another dealer but got nowhere. Then she tried donating them to the library for a write-off, but even they wouldn’t take the paperbacks. Finally, we snuck over to our local branch in the dead of night, MJ driving her wagon and Milo and I riding along, dressed in dark clothing. We abandoned the thousands of orphaned books on the library’s back steps and raced off, as if dumping a murder victim, wine bottles and salvaged poetry rolling around in the back.
3
YOU SEE, MY WIFE
had me all wrong: I wasn’t lazy. Lazy bums don’t give a damn. They relax. They enjoy life. They kick back in a quiet shady alley all day, sprawled in a heap of old clothes and snoozing dogs, whittling and whistling and guzzling hooch from a jug. I’m not a bum. I’ve slaved away desperately my whole life. What I am is a failure.
And I suppose I had her all wrong too, because I was utterly shocked, astounded really, when, after nearly five years of coupledom, she walked into my “office” that day, where I was busy “thinking,” to tell me she was leaving. Up till that moment, I’d thought everything was fine, if by fine you mean barely talking, rarely fucking, occasionally yelling, and mostly just lying listlessly side by side, watching TV and eating Nestlé chocolate chip cookies that we sliced up and baked from a tube. But I didn’t mind, not really. This, I’d been told, was marriage. I’d been warned what to expect. And those instant cookies are actually pretty amazing when they’re hot and soft and melty. Not gourmet chocolate truffles, or exotic rare-fruit sorbets, or even homemade pie, but they hit the spot. And if our marriage was no longer a Valentine’s box full of rich, dark, 99 percent pure happiness, it still seemed like the kind of warm, sweet, chewy nonhappiness I could settle for. Plus I loved her. I really did. And she loved me, or at least that’s what she said, declaring it passionately, repeatedly, as she knelt on the carpet, tears streaming down her face, and dumped me.
“I love you,” she kept saying, “I fucking love you, but things have to change. And they’re not changing. You’re not hearing me. I love you so much it tears my heart out, but this is the only way to make you understand.”