Mystery Girl: A Novel (15 page)

“Huh,” I said, realizing my notebook was in the car.

“
Ladbroke Grove
was never shown commercially but Zed was still considered a key figure in the late seventies, early eighties London post-punk pre-industrial-house scene and moved in highly fashionable circles in Paris and Berlin, where he made his next major film
6X4.
Seen as a response to Warhol, the film is shot in various stocks, including grainy black-and-white, Super Eight color, and surveillance video, and documents life in a Berlin after-hours club from midnight to six a.m. The footage is then slowed down four times for a running time of twenty-four hours. Intended as an installation, it was projected on four walls of a dark room at once with viewers sitting on cushions in the center. One wall would show hours one to six, while at the same time, the next wall to the right would show hours six to twelve, then twelve to eighteen, and the fourth wall eighteen to twenty-four. As the first segment ends the films rotate one wall and restart, so that over twenty-four hours a complete circuit is made.”

Jerry stopped, abruptly pausing the monologue, and his eyes drooped shut, hands clutched around the snoozing dog. Worried that something was wrong, I looked to Milo, but he gave me a confident
nod and sat back. We waited. I listened carefully for breathing, and was just about to panic when Peaches yipped. Jerry’s eyes popped opened, and he resumed speaking as if unaware he’d ever stopped.

“This film, as far we know, was screened three times. First in Berlin, at the after-hours club where it was made. However, the club was illegal, and the extra publicity surrounding the screening drew the police who raided the show after just a couple of hours. All the tables and chairs had been removed and replaced with mattresses and big pillows, and when the police turned on the lights, several people were found having sex, or sleeping, or passed out from booze or drugs. Naught himself was not present. He was in Morocco, drinking tea with the Bowleses.

“The second screening was at the Venice Biennale, in 1980, when, to ensure the integrity of his vision, Naught insisted that a select audience agree to remain sealed in the room for the entirety of the performance. Nevertheless, Italian security was lax and in the morning, the only remaining viewers were some vagabonds who had no place else to sleep and their dog. The last time it was shown was in the home of a collector who had purchased the only known print of the complete work. He screened it once, at a private showing, projecting the film on the four walls of a locked and empty room for no one before sealing it forever. It was however written up by several critics as a triumph of negativity.

“With this success under his belt, and an international reputation, Naught was courted by several famous fans in Hollywood, including Jack Nicholson, Francis Coppola, and Warren Beatty, and he moved to LA, where he undertook a number of projects, few of which reached fruition. Scripts and ideas started out strong and became derailed somehow, including a psychedelic Western version of
The Tempest,
a live-action version of the Pogo comics involving puppets and costumes, and a multimedia rock opera based on Sade, involving live on-stage sex and called
The 120 Minutes of Sodom.
Interestingly enough, all three projects foundered in part because he
refused to cut or alter the original texts. He was also, at points, attached to
The French Connection III
and
The Odder Couple.

“In the end, the only feature he made here was the low-budget horror flick
Succubi!
He later undertook a series of shorts, which drew inspiration from his growing fascination with the occult. An intended trilogy, only the first two parts were ever made. They were shot mainly at his home, a run-down mansion on a road off Laurel Canyon, and apparently detailed some of the odd goings-on—orgies, rituals and what have you. The whereabouts of these films are unknown. They have never been publicly shown.”

He subsided again, eyelids slipping, only this time his head fell forward to his chest and I thought perhaps he had fainted. Again I looked quizzically at Milo, who shrugged. I sat back. Several minutes passed in silence. Finally, I stood, waved my thanks to Milo, and took a step toward the door, but Peaches barked at me and Jerry’s eyes opened again. I hopped back into my seat like a student caught passing notes in class. He cleared his throat.

“Lastly we arrive at his final and most notorious work. A depressive gun lover, Naught had long insisted that he would die at his own hand and film it. The last years of his life were difficult: The final cut of
Succubi!
was taken from him, slashed to bits, and dumped on the home video market. He owed a fortune to bankers and tax collectors in several countries, and apparently also to gangsters. Finally, he was indicted for embezzlement and tax fraud. His health, after decades of abuse, was poor. One night, he shot himself in the head. Legend has it the camera was running, and that this film is actually the last third of the Infernal Trilogy, but no one can even prove it exists.”

“What can you tell me about his wife?” I asked.

“Mona? She was a Hollywood kid who met Naught when she was fifteen. At sixteen they married. He was forty-five. It was scandalous but it seems they were really very deeply in love. Apparently she was watching when he killed himself, some say running the camera, and
she was never the same. She took off, to New York, Paris, Bangkok, Tokyo, further and further, living in exile as a kind of underground celebrity. She came home, broken, and I’m told, still lives in an institution.”

“She killed herself a week ago, in Big Sur,” I said.

“Ah, well. Poor girl.” He took a rattling breath, drank some water, and went on. “As I said, the films are hard to find.
Succubi!
you have.
6X
₄
is still in a private collection. As for
Ladbroke Grove,
there are three copies. One in the vault of the Kulchurbunker in Zurich. One at MOMA in New York, where an injunction prevents it from being shown until the litigation, which has been going on for decades, is resolved.” He paused to draw another long, creaky breath. There was silence.

“And the third?” I asked.

He gasped. His hand quivered in the air, one finger pointing at the corner. Milo jumped up and offered him the inhaler. The dog barked and howled.

“Should I call for an ambulance?” I asked.

Jerry shook his head fervently and pushed the inhaler away. He drew in a long, rattling breath and pointed again. Milo grabbed the water, but Jerry brushed it off, shook his head, tried to speak.

“Um, should I leave?” I wondered aloud.

“Light,” Jerry whispered. “Off.”

“OK.” Milo nodded. While I watched awkwardly, he lowered Jerry’s recliner into relax position and fitted the mask. The oxygen sighed peacefully. Then Milo strode purposely out of the room. I smiled uncomfortably at Jerry, who stared back from beyond his mask, blue eyes like twin moons. The poodle bared its little fangs.

“Thanks,” I said. “For telling me all this.”

He waved a finger.

Milo returned with a bowl of popcorn and two Cokes and set them on the table before me. Then he turned out the light and started up the projector.

36

LADBROKE GROVE
IS SET
in an old creaky house in a private walled garden on a small street in a then broken-down part of London. It’s a dingy gray London, resting between up times, no longer the swinging scene of
Blow-Up,
but with the yuppie-trashy “cool Britannia” of hip nineties bankers still far off. This is a London of smoky pubs, council flats, and skinheads, of wankers and kebabs and chips. Of skies the color of overdone meat, old rain that barely fell, shoulder-high clouds, and ancient libraries where wind groaned through the shelves. Of lamplights on cracked wet cement, bad teeth, warm beer, ten-packs of fags, and the dole. Of taking the piss. Pissing down. Pissing off. Every sort of piss.

In the film’s opening scene, Garreth Barke, a scruffy young artistic type, accidentally brains a cop in a demonstration and goes on the run with a mournfully beautiful dark-eyed commie-waif who hides him in a squat (the doomed Maxine). When the cops show, they hop the garden wall and are taken in by the neighbor, a glamorous blond who lives in a mansion owned by her husband, whom we’ve seen pull away in his Bentley on a business trip. Most of the movie takes place in this house, which was in fact owned by a baroness or marquise, an art supporter Naught knew, and actually located miles from the neighborhood that gives the film its name.

It is, I suppose, my kind of movie, an artsy talkfest where pretty people blab about big ideas, then strip down to roll around in bed or argue, the edges singed here and there with random beauty: grim sun through dusty windows, cracked plaster walls, bed heads brooding over chipped cups of tea, nimble fingers rolling cigarettes in fascinated close-up, pale asses by moonlight in rumpled sheets, eyes in smoke, the scene where they play records and dance. I won’t soon forget the part where the two girls bathe, dousing each other with that handheld hose thing, the blond’s white legs rising from the suds
and dipping over the rim like twin swans, or the brunette’s miraculous, twenty-year-old tits, perfectly round and aloft, as she stares into the camera and delivers a passionate diatribe on American imperialism, while lucky Garreth, lean and naked with a bad tooth and itchy pubes, broods and blows smoke across the screen.

In the end, what climax there is gets generated by the imminent return of the industrialist husband and a vague plot to hold him for ransom and smuggle Garreth to freedom. Police surround the house and Garreth is shot. Then, either there is an avant-garde twist that went over my head (it had been hours now, in the close heat of Jerry’s apartment, and I hadn’t eaten anything but popcorn all day), or maybe Milo jumbled the reels, or else Jerry, who was fading in and out of a snooze or coma, had mislabeled them decades ago: now the brunette is the one living with the rich husband, looking moody in a lot of eye makeup and a superchic gown, staring out the window of the chauffeured Bentley, while Garreth and the blond sneak through the garden naked and back into the squat. Or perhaps she is imagining this as she stares into the rainy twinkling night traffic. It’s hard to say. Then we pull back and see that in fact it is Garreth in the Bentley with her. She pulls out a small pistol and shoots him. Next we see the two women burying Garreth in the garden. They climb into the Bentley together and we see them kiss through the rainy windshield before driving off under the credits.

37

DID I MISS MY WIFE?
I was too angry to miss her. And yet the old wiring remained, the neural paths that lit up at the sound her name, the sight of her vitamins forgotten in the fridge, her scent afloat in a sweater hung in the closet. I didn’t miss her, but I ached in the places she once touched me, like a fresh blister rising still tingles
with the kiss of the flame: I remembered. I remembered her that last day at the therapist, her green eyes aglitter with mean joy. I remembered her narrow shoulders in my arms when we hugged awkwardly on the street after, and how easy it might have been then to break her lovely neck. I remembered when she left me, cheekbones crossed with tears like that Indian who hates pollution, banging her Louis Vuitton case down the stairs, baby feet sweet as always in high heels, each toe dipped in pink like a perfect pebble. I remembered our first nights together when, after we fucked, I realized she was crying there in the dark, and I was frightened that something was wrong, until she told me she was crying because it was all so beautiful. I remembered when her nails bit my chest during sex and I’d have to pin her hands. I remembered her ass in a thousand ways, in thongs and panties and frills and ribbons. I remembered the impressions her tight jeans left on her hips. I remembered the pimples on her back that she hated, from her salty sweat and hair grease in the summer. I remembered how to save time in the mornings we’d just shower together and fuck while we were in there, before heading out for the day, since we were both too tired at night. I remembered when she started peeing in front of me (the first night actually, she wasn’t shy) and when she gave me permission to fart in her presence and then tried to retract it, since she felt I abused the right. I remembered in the winter when she got in bed in long underwear, a knit wool hat, her thick nerd glasses, and the retainer that was supposed to stop her from grinding her teeth. She looked retarded, but I couldn’t wait to wrap her in my arms and squeeze. I remembered how she talked in her sleep, and sat up one night while I read beside her, eyes shut, and in her dream announced: I’m so sleepy. Lie down then honey, I told her, go to sleep, and she did. I remembered that I loved her and then I remembered how she’d stopped loving me and how that made our whole life and love together and everything I remembered a lie. And then I remembered to hate her again.

38

THANKS TO JERRY, I
got in touch with Daemonica, the blond actress from the film. (Much married and divorced, she was currently known in full as Daemonica Angelika Uta-Floss-MacTeague-Goiter-Goldstein.) She lived in Brentwood, in a big house with a Ford Navigator out front and many large, mostly nude photos of herself all over the walls. A round-faced Mexican housekeeper opened the door and with a sweet smile told me: “She on the deck.”

I passed through a room displaying a number of gold records, a few framed and signed guitars, and a large naked oil of the mistress supine over the mantel, and stepped onto a deck overlooking an oval pool, still and blue as an opal. There I encountered a woman, Madam Whatever I assumed, folded over in a yoga pose, her body encased in a black unitard, while a nimble young man in white karate pants helped hold her in place.

“Does my enormous ass look absurd?” The woman’s voice rose, thick and throaty, from the upside-down face between the legs.