Scarface (18 page)

Alice and Edgar mounted two or three productions a year, hugely elaborate and rococo, of plays so obscure and Rumanian that even the translators didn’t understand them. Nobody ever came to see them either, but nobody ever said art was easy. Alice and Edgar produced and drank, produced and drank, till they’d finally exhausted all the steering pin money. The morning after the flop of their final production—
While Nero Fiddled
, nine hours long, with a cast of sixty-six, in which the only line of dialogue was “Lost, all lost,” in a hundred and nineteen languages—Alice and Edgar limped home to her ancient baronial lands in Maryland.

Which lands were mostly suburbs now, and mostly in the hands of others.

With what little remained of the family fortune, Alice and Edgar settled down in a lopsided stone house on the western edge of Baltimore. The house had once been part of the slave quarters of the Saint James plantation. And there Alice and Edgar produced their truly final production: a child they called Elvira. After that, they turned all their considerable creative energy to drink. They drank whole vats of gin and lay abed for days at a time, while the last of the Saint James monies evaporated into thin air.

Somehow Elvira Vale managed to grow up. She toddled off to the public school, not feeling very different from her friends, some of whose blue-collar parents were as drunk as her own. She did not pay much attention to her mother’s incoherent tales of the previous eight generations. All she knew was this: she would flee the gray suburbs of Baltimore as soon as she could; and no matter what, she would never marry. Elvira Vale, growing up as she did tough and lower-middle-class, was not really aware of the three things rooted in her blood.

First was the desire to flee Maryland, which her people had been doing for generations. Second was the love of the theater, which had funded all those ballets and wrong-headed plays. Third and most significant was the love of intoxication. The Saint James family had been drinking for three hundred years.

Yet the day that Elvira left Baltimore and went to New York, she was eighteen years old and was sure she had no past at all. As if life were out to prove this point, Alice and Edgar had died within six months of each other. Liver complications. As soon as Elvira had buried them, there seemed no reason to finish high school. She had a friend who’d gone to Manhattan to be an actress/model, which meant Elvira not only had a place to stay but an in in the business as well.

She worked as a waitress for about a year, first at a Walgreen’s in the garment district, then at a late-night hangout on 45th just off Broadway, where most of the waitresses hooked on the side. Everybody hooked on the side, Elvira soon found out, including her girlfriend from Baltimore. It turned out a girl made better connections hooking than she did in a dim-lit restaurant, though the chances of being “discovered” were about equal in both professions.

Elvira appeared in a couple of Equity-waiver plays, which meant she didn’t get paid. The productions took place in spaces that didn’t even look like theaters. Forty folding chairs were grouped around a makeshift set, and hardly anybody ever sat in the forty seats. But Elvira managed to meet a lot of feisty independent girls, and they helped her get a portfolio together and introduced her around to the modeling agencies. Now and then she’d land a couple of hours work and actually get paid, but nothing ever really led to anything concrete. More often than not the agencies told her she was too pretty. Pretty was not the right type that year.

So she hooked a little. The girl she shared the apartment with on 59th and Second Avenue introduced her to the man who ran her “agency,” an outrageous queen who looked and acted like Divine out of drag, whose name was Norman Desmond. Norman set the girls up on very Class A dates—the theater, dinner at Sardi’s afterwards, and then a couple of hours’ sex in a midtown hotel, usually the Hilton. Elvira always wondered if Norman didn’t have a contract with the Hilton. The john paid a hundred and twenty-five, of which the girls received seventy-five. This was in the late seventies, when three hundred a week still bought you some time.

Elvira hooked maybe twice a week, and the johns were as predictable as the Hilton. Midwest; in for a convention; got it up fast and popped their load in ten minutes. It was very, very easy. But Elvira also had dates of her own on Friday and Saturday, with powerful men who worked like bandits in the cul-de-sacs of Manhattan, managing real estate and making book and selling information. Men who weren’t exactly gangsters but just about. They took her out very fancy, to hundred-dollar dinners and dance places that didn’t even open till two
A.M.
A weekend went on all weekend.

And she didn’t really drink much. Just a beer. Just a double Stolichnaya on the rocks, which she sipped all night. But she did try a little cocaine when they had it. She never took as much as the men did, and anyway she didn’t like the way it made her nose run. She hated being hung over. But the thing about cocaine was this: though people always said it was libido-suppressive, it made Elvira horny. The weekend men were very aggressive types, and they wanted to jump into bed three or four times a day, as if they had to make up for lost time. Elvira tended to feel smothered by all that desire, abused even. But if she tooted a little coke she figured what the hell and went in for some kicks of her own.

By the time she was twenty she’d become aware that certain girls in the actress/model class had made it to the top. They no longer needed a waitress job on the side, and they even stopped hooking except for an occasional regular. Luck and the right connections had led them into modeling gigs where they could pull down five hundred dollars a day. They no longer had to rely on their Saturday dates to provide them with cocaine; they had their own supply. These were girls who had come to the city at the same time Elvira did, and somehow they’d gotten ahead of her.

She began to get impatient, panicky even, fearful that she might end up just another hooker. Her roommate, only three years older, no longer even talked about actress/model matters. Hooking had ceased to be part-time. Elvira began to look at herself in the mirror and wonder if she was losing her looks. How long did pretty last anyway? Twenty-five? Not thirty. Deliberately she began to cast about for a way out. It was time she found some security. She zeroed in on her johns and Saturday gangsters, looking for a proper situation. She fantasized about finding one who would set her up in a swank apartment and be away on business two out of every three weeks.

She settled for Harry Sullivan, mostly because it got her out of New York, which had come to seem like a dead-end trip. Harry was a Hollywood producer. Though Elvira could never get it clear what he was a producer
of,
there being no correlation between the projects Harry talked about and what actually opened in theaters and showed on CBS, still he seemed to have a lot of money. And though he was manic and a lousy drunk and his skin was pocked and he bragged too much, he had a passion for “saving” girls like Elvira. He whisked them away from the hand-to-mouth and the degradation of whoring. He kept them safe in his house in the Hollywood Hills, coddling them and showering them with gifts.

Why not? Elvira knew it wasn’t going to be forever. She knew she was only the next in line in a man’s elaborate dream-life; but then, that’s what a pretty girl always was, in her experience anyway. At least she didn’t have to deal with Norman Desmond any more. And once she moved to Los Angeles and Harry gave her her own gold American Express, she was doing a hell of a lot better than seventy-five bucks a throw. Harry only required it once a week, and he didn’t even have any kinks to speak of.

It was practically a dream come true, except for one thing. She missed the cocaine. Harry was pushing forty-five, and he was a drunk of the old school, Irish and red-faced. He didn’t indulge in the white lady, and neither did his old-school friends. Not that Elvira couldn’t live without it; not that she was an addict or anything. Cocaine wasn’t heroin. It was simply her drug of choice, and she found she missed the couple-of-grams-a-weekend men she used to see in New York.

And in spite of the Spanish bungalow with the oval pool and the drop-dead view of the city lights, in spite of Harry’s Eldorado and the charge account at Neiman’s, Elvira began to see that, by Hollywood terms at least, Harry Sullivan was middle-middle at best. She watched the pretty girls—no prettier than she—exit the stretch limousines and enter the swank restaurants, laughing and tossing their sunstruck hair. Elvira felt the same pang of distance that she used to feel in New York when she caught a glimpse of a star model ducking into Studio 54—the signature models, rich and free, with faces kings dreamed of. But whereas in New York there was always the chance that the next connection would land her in clover, in Hollywood she was just another housegirl, wandering around a swimming pool. It was worse than being married, if she wasn’t going to be very rich.

It was around this time, as she turned twenty-one, that she started to call herself Elvira Saint James. She had never felt the need of the nine generations before, but now she figured a measure of class was every bit as important as pretty, especially if she meant to find a zillionaire. In the back of her mind she decided she would probably do best with somebody even older and more old-school than Harry. As long as he had a fortune that could choke a horse, it didn’t matter how middle-middle he was at heart. Thus she began to flirt boldly with Harry’s set, casting about for the right situation.

At the same time she reactivated her modeling career. Harry wouldn’t have allowed her to do it for the money, but she convinced him she simply needed to get out and do something—
anything.
She had a whole new portfolio made up, and she carted it around to the agencies and soon lucked out with a lucrative stint as a hand model, painting her nails for a TV spot that flashed her image into millions of homes for weeks on end, though only as far as her elbows.

But it wasn’t the work that drove her. She wanted to get back in the hustle, meet the girls who were trying to break in, find out who they were dating. Within a month she was part of a nice little group, and of course they introduced her to their coke connection. It was as natural as sharing the name of one’s hairdresser, or one’s gynecologist. And anyway, Elvira didn’t spend very much, only what was left over from what she made as a model. Say a gram a week. It took the edge off the weekend nights, when she went out to long dreary restaurant dinners with Harry and his friends from the slow lane.

For a while it worked very well, this living a double life. She spent her days with the girls and her evenings with Harry and never really had to be alone. She’d always hated to be alone. The only problem was, she wasn’t in love. Listening to the other models spill their stories of the men who obsessed them, the ones who fucked them over and the ones who swore they’d kill them if they looked at another man, Elvira wondered if she hadn’t made a secret vow against love as well as marriage. Every other pretty girl she met was a deep romantic, with one eye always on the door, waiting for her prince to come riding in. Elvira hated to think she was a cynic. She was sure it was only that the right man hadn’t come along yet. She more or less hoped he’d wait till she’d got herself settled down with a rich man. She was certainly too much a realist to suppose the prince and the zillionaire were one.

Six months later she was up to two grams a week, still a very manageable amount, and in any case the dealer wasn’t out to screw the girls. That is, he
was
out to screw the girls, but not out of money. He sold them snow at eighty dollars a gram, a good twenty-five percent below retail, and all they had to do was go to bed with him now and then. Elvira didn’t mind a bit, since sex and cocaine went together so well. “Like gin and tonic,” she used to tell the other girls. And the dealer liked her attitude so well, he began to give her Quaaludes free.

She started to sleep like a baby.

Unfortunately, she also started to fight with Harry. She made scenes at the table in the boring restaurants, disdainful of all that sloppy Irish drunkenness. She flirted with every man who looked twice at her, just to get Harry upset. And he wouldn’t fight back. He developed a wounded, long-suffering look like a beaten puppy, and the more Elvira raged and threw tantrums, the more did Harry shower her with middle-middle presents. He begged her to tell him what she wanted.

She wanted a better deal. She was sick of everyone and everything, and the only thing that made sense any more was her temper, which flashed like a brush fire at the slightest provocation. She blew up at salespeople and sent the maid away in tears. She stalked out of a restaurant in Beverly Hills one night, flinging a drink in Harry’s face just because he happened to ask her why she kept going to the bathroom. It was none of his goddam business. If her dealer was feeling romantic and wanted to lay a free gram on her, why shouldn’t she blow it all in one night?

She didn’t even bother to retrieve her coat as she left the restaurant. She hurried away along Rodeo Drive, high as a kite, convinced she would never return to Harry Sullivan again. You had to close a door before the next one opened. By the time she reached Wilshire Boulevard she realized she didn’t need anything but the clothes on her back and the half gram in her purse. It was as if she was daring the world to show her something new. She’d cut her losses, just as she had in Baltimore and later on in New York. She’d never felt as free as she did that night.

She stood on the corner of Wilshire and Rodeo, waiting for the light to change. A limousine drew up at the curb beside her, its windows black and impenetrable. Suddenly one of the windows purred open, and a dark-eyed man with bushy hair, exuding money and power like radiation, leaned out and said: “You need a lift?”

“I’m not hooking, if that’s what you mean,” said Elvira.

“Don’t worry, I’m not paying,” said Frank Lopez with a grin. “But you look like you need a lift. How far you going?”