Rubicon Beach (19 page)

“No,” Maddy heard someone say; it wasn’t lane. She stopped on the stairs and stared down into the living room. “No,” Catherine said again, quietly, the first word Maddy had ever heard from her; and Catherine pointed to herself and pointed at the pieces of the mirror on the floor. She was shaking, struggling for composure. Then Maddy saw her hands. They were slivered with glass, small dots of blood turning to wild streaks down her arms.

With one shard of the mirror and her own bloody hands wrapped in the skirt of her dress, the girl ran from the living room out to the back of the house.

Maddy stood on the stairs several moments before she realized her daughter was watching her, looking up. “Go to your room,” the mother said quietly, “it’s all right. Just go play in your room awhile, okay?” Jane walked slowly to her room, and Maddy finally came down the stairs to pick up some of the glass. She watched in the direction of the kitchen, expecting to see or hear something unimaginable. Then she turned to the front door and said, “Lew?” as though he would arrive on command.

Catherine lay naked on her bed, her hands wrapped in what had been her dress. Her white kitten dozed on her chest between her small breasts, and in her sink lay small pink pieces of glass from her arms. Occasionally she would hold up in front of her the shard of mirror and look into it several moments, for as long as she could stand it. When she didn’t look in the shard she saw her face anyway on the wall in front of her. Over all the months between the jungle and Los Angeles, over the thousands of miles, there was no telling how many hundreds of times her reflection must have flown past her in a mirror, or a window, or on a bright metallic surface. In ears, in boats, in the backs of houses, in entryways and pyramids, in the passage of place and time, opportunities abound for those who know their own faces. She had never known her face. She was as unconscious of its existence as she was of her heart, of which one is aware only when one stops to listen for it. She’d never looked for the image of her face by which she blended into jungles and houses, by which she signaled ships and persuaded men to wager all they had. When she stepped before the Edgars’ mirror, she saw what she’d come to know as the image of treachery and cowardice, by which her father had died, her village had been ripped asunder, and her life changed forever. That the image belonged to her, that it was attached to her hands and body, didn’t aIter what it embodied to her. That it was not a shivering creature in water, that the Edgars’ large living room mirror placed her face in another context (when she raised her hands, the image raised its hands; when she gasped, it gasped) did not aIter either the treachery or the cowardice but only attached those things to her. All those people, she thought bitterly to herself now, who’ve considered me a fool were right. I’ve betrayed myself with my stupidity, I’ve worn on the front of my head the villainies I loathed. She put the shard down on the bed and grabbed at her face; had her hands not been wrapped in the dress she would have torn at herself. Murderer of my father! she said to her face. She stumbled to the sink crying, to put her head under the water of the faucet, but when she got there she saw little pink pieces of her face staring up at her.

First of all, it bothered him that they called her Catherine when it wasn’t her name. His wife thought he was being silly about it, but perhaps the housekeeper liked her real name; perhaps, more to the point, she despised it, as he despised his; and therefore changing it took on all the more importance. In a town that exalted self-invention one struggled to reinvent oneself properly; what dismayed and destroyed people here was to find they had no control even over their processes of self-invention, to find they created themselves all over again only to fuck it up the second time even more than the first, and with fewer excuses. Somewhere in the last twenty years Llewellyn Edgar, so named by his heartland American parents, who thought such a name would give him a head start because it sounded like the moniker of money and status, somewhere in the last twenty years Llewellyn Edgar had lost control of his own re-creation. It was a small defeat, as defeats in this particular city went, but it still struck him as fundamental; if he were to throw away the name he hated for something else, he would as soon have it something of his own authorship. Rather, it was an invention of accident, the lining up of letters like the lining up of stars in constellations, an amalgam of initials, Lee (his middle name was Evan). Only his wife called him Lew. The studios credited his scripts to Lee Edward, a name anyone could have, not calling much attention to itself. It was the idea in this town, it was an art and science, to call attention to one self but not too much so and not before the public was ready for it. The industry was never really ready for it, even when it made them a profit.

At the age of seventeen Llewellyn Edgar received a poetry scholarship to Princeton, an occasion propitious enough, he would have thought, to convince his heartland parents that the name they gave him was every bit as good an idea as they had originally supposed. In fact his parents thought American children left the heartland to become tycoons. Llewellyn’s new assignment in life led him to New York City, where he commuted to school in New Jersey and spent his time with other poets and the Village theater scene then in flower. It didn’t bother him that the only time he could bear New York was at night when the dark swallowed up everything but the windows, which hung like boxes of light strung along the gutters. Everything was connected. Those that lived there dazzled themselves. They were stunned by their own explosions and pretended to understand them; there was no one else who understood enough to argue that they didn’t. It was in a lower East Side drama company that Lew met Richard, who was well into his early thirties and, the generational ethic of the era notwithstanding, all the more impressive to Lew for it. Richard spent most of his time hustling Off Broadway work and trying to conceal his homosexuality; in fact, the only person he fooled was Lew, who didn’t recognize it until long afterward. The friendship between the thirty-something-year-old actor and the young poet was cause for some titters around the Village. By the time Lew would learn to care, the others had stopped caring and the titters stopped; by then he had slept with too many women to fuel the rumors further. The friendship was also strong enough to blind Lew, for a while, to the fact that Richard was only a dependable and unextraordinary actor and would never be more; and Richard was just finding this out about himself and just beginning to admit it. Faced with the truth of his sexuality and talent, Richard learned his life didn’t belong to him anymore but rather to his dreams, which had been repossessed by age. Not much later Lew realized this period in New York was the first and last time his life really belonged to him.

He never went through the moral dilemma of his friends in New York, which was whether to go to Los Angeles. They discussed this prospect with the urgency and irrevocability of those considering a journey of light years to another celestial system, understanding that if they ever returned everyone they knew would have grown old and died while their own lives passed no more than two or three months. For those going on such a journey there was the abhorrence of losing family, lovers, everything they’d known of their lives, while at the same time there was the unspoken thrill of immortality: returning to new lovers and new lives. Though the choice was theirs to make, they could still blame the outcome on outer space and relativity physics. Outer space would persuade them they were not who they were and they were who they were not.

When Llewellyn came to Los Angeles at the age of nine teen it was for a reason he thought had nothing to do with the real drift of his life, though in a funny way it did have something to do with poetry. Funny because that year a poet was running for President, funny because it was not the poet but rather the other man in whose cause Llewellyn had come to enlist while in New York. The climactic California primary was in June. Llewellyn’s candidate won. Llewellyn stood in the ballroom of the hotel where the victor claimed the election, and as the young poet went up to his room to pack for his return east, the would-be President crossed from the podium to the hotel pantry where a man fired a shot that killed him in a way protracted and bitterly inefficient. Llewellyn waited the twenty-five damn hours or whatever till the man died. I was a poet, he thought to himself one day at the end of an altogether different decade as he was driving up Sunset Boulevard, and I supported the man who quoted poetry rather than the man who wrote it. If I’d supported the man who wrote poetry, I would have been on the losing side of that campaign, and while I would have grieved for the martyr, as did everyone, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to stay while he died. I would have gone back to New York and continued being a poet. Moreover, if enough people like myself had supported the man who wrote poetry rather than the man who quoted it, the man who wrote it might have won the primary. This means the man who quoted poetry might not have been at the podium that night claiming victory; he might have come at a later hour or the next morning or not at all. There’s a strong possibility that he would not have been murdered, and would have become President, not that year but another year. This logic led Llewellyn to believe that in choosing the man who quoted poetry rather than the man who wrote it, whatever the political virtues of such a choice might have been, he had changed his whole fate and betrayed his own destiny. He never went back to New York. He was no longer a poet. Who’s to say, Llewellyn asked himself, how many others made such choices and betrayed themselves, not with choices that in themselves might have been meritorious but with choices that were wrong for the individuals who made them, with choices not in the spirit of those who made them? A country is different today because of it, because I’m different, and everyone is different.

It was on the day he died, the man who quoted poetry, that Llewellyn first became a part of the city in which he now lived. But it was not the city that made the choice, it was not relativity physics that chose who he was rather than who he was not. He chose to let them call him Lee but he did not choose the name himself, and almost any name he had chosen himself, even his own name he hated, would have been better.

He lived in Venice Beach two years, his only address a local café on the boardwalk to which his furious father sent a stream of letters. When Llewellyn’s younger sister drowned that first summer in Lake Michigan, the tragedy reinforced both the son’s alienation and the parents’ burden of heartland dreams. Llewellyn found a group of poets at the beach who published a little magazine and turned their verses into rock-and-roll songs. He wrote his first movie with a local filmmaker who saw his work as personal exorcism; when he felt nothing left to exorcise, he committed suicide by wrapping himself in a bed sheet and lying on the southbound San Diego Freeway just beyond the Mulholland off-ramp. By the time someone got him out of the road he’d been hit by twenty-three cars in less than a minute; the obituary mentioned his ironically titled sixteen-minute movie,
Unmarked Graves
, which had no narrative or characters or dialogue but rather the hallucinatory images of martial nightmare that were the vocabulary of the day. The “screenplay” was credited to L. E. Edgar.

 This bit of dilettantism notwithstanding, in four years Lew found himself, in large part through his proximity to a friend of a friend, working on a screenplay with an Italian director who’d been brought over by a major studio to make his American debut. The project had all the earmarks of disaster; the writer and director disagreed bitterly over a climactic section of the picture. The studios were wary of the director as a successful but mischievous maker of successful but mischievous art films, their wariness justified by the director’s conflict with the writer, who fought for a resolution more in line with what the studios wanted. The director won the conflict because he was somebody and Lew was nobody; but the incident endeared the young man to the studios, who saw in him a possible “quality” writer with the right instincts, that is the studios’ instincts. To Llewellyn this was a peculiar paradox. At that point he still saw in himself someone who might be an artist someday, if anything destined to be at odds with the marketplace; that he wound up on the studio’s side of things in this particular picture was an accident, he’d opted to resolve this particular picture in this particular way because he thought the dynamics of the picture called for such a resolution; the embrace of the studios was quite unforeseen. At least that was what he told himself at the time. Later, in the midst of his ongoing paroxysms of self-doubt, in the midst of the crisis of integrity that was beginning to overwhelm him, he questioned that he’d ever believed such a thing at all. He questioned whether in fact his instincts were not those of the studios and the industry all along, and whether his new crisis was not one that found him at war with those instincts, trying to persuade himself he was not who he was and that he was who he was not.

This movie, which opened in America as
White Liars
, was a success, the director’s prevalent instincts to the contrary. It proved fortunate for all parties involved, even as none of them was on speaking terms with the others. The studio scheduled a festival of the director’s films at a museum in Pasadena, to be climaxed by a screening of
White Liars
and a discussion of the film among its participants, warring director and writer included. Llewellyn sat through the event sullenly, barely seeing the movie and contributing nothing to the discussion. Only some months afterward, when he went to see the film in a theater still trying to figure out who was right and who was wrong about it or, more accurately, why he was right about it, did he note the screenplay was credited to L. E. Edward. He never knew if this was the director’s final revenge—which was his immediate conclusion—or a bit of studio machiavellia, the industry having appropriated his soul as theirs and thus giving the ownership a kind of institutional reality by changing his name. He could have taken the matter to the Guild of course. I submitted to it so easily, he would come to tell himself; it absolved me of so much responsibility.