The Cracked Earth (16 page)

“Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on.”

“You don't think you ought to offer a little deference to my advanced age?”

“Not your kind, I know old people like you.” She trembled with indignation. “You just curdle up in your head and everything in there gels into idea aspic and you close your mind up tight and forget what it was like to get excited about something like poetry or semiotics. ‘I grow old, I grow old … do I dare to eat a peach?' ”

I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach, he thought, but he let it go. “You don't always have to be the brightest light in the room,” he said. “It can be enough to be someone others can depend on. Smart or not, curious or not, maybe not even passionate or quick, just dependable.”

“Windup clocks are dependable.”

No wonder she and her mother threw sparks.

“Truce,” he said. “You're stuck with me now, Miss Borowsky, because I know your terrible secret. I'll let you forgive me for growing old, and I'll forgive you for being a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

She laughed, but it was a phony laugh, trying to be knowing and streetwise. “Okay, you read books, too. I'll accept the truce if I don't have to go home.”

“While we're thinking about what to do with you, why don't we get something wholesome to eat. I'll bet you haven't eaten properly in days.”

She turned sideways and sucked in her stomach. “You must be referring to my svelte looks. I am not anorexic, I'll have you know. Did you know that anorexia is often linked to cats? Some of the girls act like cats, let their claws grow, lounge and move like cats, sometimes they can even trace it to witnessing one of those dreadful acts of feline infanticide when a mother cat eats her young. It's probably a kind of species adaptation to the pressures of overpopulation and underfeeding. Maybe anorexia is, too.”

The water wasn't quite hot enough, but it wasn't going to make much difference with instant coffee, so he poured the cup full just to get it over with.

She kept moving, bobbing, peering at things and poking at herself as she talked.

“It's probably like homeostasis in the human body, you know, the self-regulating mechanism with hormones pouring into your bloodstream until you reach some state where the deactivating hormone starts to flow. In machines, the same thing was called cybernetics by Norbert Weiner back in 1948—the same year Orwell wrote
1984,
by the way—and in programming the exact same thing is called error-correction coding. Even in the nineteenth century they had governors on steam engines that released some of the steam pressure if the machine began turning too fast. It's all just a branch of information theory really, the use of feedback for control.”

The coffee was too terrible even to pretend he could drink it. She poked at the dishes in the sink and cringed as a minor avalanche revealed further depths of the unwashed, but it didn't even slow her down.

“Wouldn't it be funny if cancer turned out to be feedback, too, just a kind of homeostasis for the whole race, some kind of yearning leaking out of our DNA or something to get back to a manageable population level. Actually, I think I'd be pretty pissed if I found out that's true and my granddad died of a brain tumor because a hundred thousand Dexter Weenies overpopulated his area of the world and overused his allotment of resources. That would be cold.”

“Do you carry one of those little cards in your wallet?” he asked. “You know, ‘in case I die in a traffic accident, I donate my ego to science.' ”

She looked sharply at him as if about to launch herself across the room with fangs bared, but then without warning she burst out laughing. It got more and more convulsive and she didn't seem to be able to stop it. Tears rolled down her cheeks, then her eyes went wide as she lost her footing on something on the floor and went down hard on her bottom. After a moment's stunned lull, the laughter came back redoubled. He'd never seen anyone actually roll on the floor laughing, and he wondered if it was a kind of epilepsy. A kind only geniuses got, of course.

He waited it out, holding his coffee cup at half-mast, trying not to see the evil foam on the surface of the brown liquid.

“What's your name?” she said finally, levering herself up to a sit.

“Jack Liffey.”

“Pleased to meet you, Jack Liffey.”

O
N
the way, she launched into an earnest discourse on how Coco's was
much
better than Spires which was better than Norm's which was better than Denny's, but the Hojos that were just moving into Southern California, they were unspeakable. It seemed to him a ridiculous subject to waste all those powers of distinction on, like a sensitive grading system for brands of kitty litter, but it mattered a lot to her, and it mattered that she always chose the very best of everything. He wondered where his 1979 AMC Concord would lie in her hierarchy of automobiles. Probably just above a Yugo. Hopefully.

There was a Coco's not far from Cal-Arts. It was a short run through an earth-tone postmodern suburb where every front window was topped by a pompous Spade & Archer fanlight. He smiled at himself. With a little effort he could become as pointlessly opinionated as this poor lonely girl.

Every once in a while the staccato of data and lore would shift down a gear and she'd launch a little trial emissary of a question in his direction.

“Did you grow up in L.A.?”

But it didn't really matter what he replied, her mind would be off somewhere else on its careening getaway from the ordinary. Then there was a lull in her hubbub, and he followed her gaze to a candy-green football field, and mesmerized, he pulled the car over at a hand-lettered sign that read,
POP'S WARNERS' CHEAR TYROUTS.

In the distance, what looked like six-year-old boys in full football pads and helmets ran at each other with abandon, under the direction of men who looked like giants. Nearer, just beyond the chain-link fence, a line of perhaps twenty-five six-year-old girls danced and kicked in approximate unison in gold-and-blue uniforms, waving pom-poms half-heartedly. A woman in a big version of the same outfit walked along the chorus line pointing and blowing a whistle. Those she pointed to came forward and worked harder, shaking their gold puffs into fits of abandon. The little girls all spun around and flipped the tails of their miniskirts up to show gold panties. The chosen ones executed a rolling somersault forward, but about a quarter of them didn't make it and had to right themselves by main force. At one end, two girls were suddenly pulling each other's hair and then they locked together and went to the ground. As if on cue, two more fights broke out.

Through all this, Lee Borowsky sat with her jaw dropped open an inch.

“Man,” she said finally, “I escaped some stuff. If somebody dropped down from Mars now, I don't think I could explain this.”

“Mars, hell. England.”

“ ‘
Tyr
-out,' ” she said scornfully.

“Look carefully. Every word on that sign is wrong.”

She snorted once, but she was quiet for another minute as he drove, and then the eye of the storm passed and she launched into a treatise on how it was only the teaching of structural linguistics in high school that could possibly save the American language from galloping illiteracy.

“I
want two eggs over medium, so the yellows are still runny but the white isn't runny at all. They have to be taken off the grill at just the right moment. I hate runny egg white. I want four bacon rashers well done but not burned. I don't want any glistening transparent fat, I want it all white and translucent, but I definitely don't want that charred taste when it's overdone.”

The waitress was being remarkably tolerant, appearing to add codes to the order form that would record all this.

“I want hash browns cooked in butter, but make sure it's hot enough so they don't absorb a lot of the butter and get gummy and greasy. They should be separate little shreds of potato. And I want sourdough toast with the butter on the side and a decent jam like strawberry or orange marmalade not grape or that horrible stuff they call allfruit. A tiny glass of orange juice, but only if it's fresh-squeezed.”

“It is. For you, sir?”

“Coffee and wheat toast, but only if the bread is sliced north to south.”

The waitress tried hard not to laugh as she walked away.

“That wasn't necessary.”

“You sure you wouldn't like a little food with your cholesterol?”

Lee Borowsky started laughing again, but reined herself in before it went out of control. “It's been a long time since somebody's teased me without being mean about it. I know I can be a pain in the ass, but I think more people should insist on getting things right. Or getting things the way they
want
them, even if it isn't right. There's nothing worse than a bunch of Milquetoasts who never get what they want because they're afraid to make a tiny little peep of complaint.”

For a moment her voice had trembled with messianic energy.

“I can think of a few worse things, actually. But let's try another subject. Let's try you and your mother.”

The fidgeting changed gears immediately. “Out come the testicles,” she said.

“I'm paying, I choose the subject.”

She made a lot of expressions with her mouth, one after another, then with her eyebrows, then she seemed to subside into a guarded neutrality that made him sad for some reason. “Mom's a subject, all right. They do master's theses on her, you know. Really—at least on her famous image—the whore from next door. And they do features in the press all the time: Where is the delicious Lori Bright now? Whole books on her career have been written in French, La Bright, la Grande Voluptueuse. In France, she's as famous as Jerry Lewis. They have festivals of her movies at the Cinematheque, they even throw in that early softcore movie where she bares her big tit to the vampire. She gets a kick out of all the fags making a cult out of her dress epics, but she denies it. You probably know that. Hell, you probably fucked her. Everyone else has. Did you fuck her?”

One way or another she was going to make him pay for choosing this subject. “Tell me about growing up with her.”

She was so self-focused that she didn't even notice he had ducked the question. Her hands worked in her lap like live animals.

“What was your family life like?”

It took her a while to decide to go on. “Living with Mom was a daily depletion allowance. It was a steady drain on your headway in the world. She grabbed everything around her for herself—food, friends, light,
air
—she couldn't bear anyone else having anything. If I came in second in a spelling bee, she'd find fifty ways to remind me of the word I missed. She had to trash it if she couldn't have it. The big cheese in the cosmos, the only cheese.

“I once had a birthday party, I think I was eleven, and she flounced all around the house in that blue satin ball dress they'd all seen in
Time of Trial.
Nobody even remembered me at my own party, and even my best friend couldn't understand why I was getting so mad. And later I'd have a boy over and she'd come in with some shirt unbuttoned down to her belly button and bend over to give him a Coke. Dad couldn't take it and he was gone by the time I was four. He was no angel, but he didn't have to own the fillings out of your teeth. I can't even listen to her talk, you know? I can't listen to one goddamn word without hearing the subtext screaming at me, ‘Look at me, Look at me, Look at me!'

“Yeah, she's insecure, sure, but I get tired of making excuses. Some insecure people are modest or quiet or generous.
I'd
like to be modest and generous, but she's made me what I am now. I had to scream and fight and grab for any space at all in the world. She would have crowded me right off the edge of the goddamn planet.”

The food came and Lee Borowsky tore into it as if she'd been starving for days. The coffee was only tolerable, but even that gave him a little rush of pleasure.

“She didn't seem insecure to me,” he said.

“She's an
actress,
you berk. What do you think? She's played Catherine the Great, she can't fool you about something like that? You don't really have a clue.”

His mental image of Lori Bright hadn't shifted much, but it had grown fuzzier at the edge, as if preparing to move when more evidence was in. It was amazing what a second viewpoint could do to what you thought you knew of someone. He figured the daughter was overstating, caricaturing her mother because of a thousand resentments, but there was probably truth there, too.

“Actually, I was always surprised they didn't put the famous horse in that movie. Mom would have loved that.”

“That's a folk myth,” he said. “Catherine the Great didn't die trying to screw a horse. She died of a stroke.”

Lee Borowsky wagged her fork in the air like a conductor's baton. “Some things
should
be true and that's that, man. It's just like this town. All those stories of old Hollywood that I've heard ad nauseam, blah-blah-blah. Gable and Lombard falling in love and Bogie and his first wife punching each other up on their yacht and Tracy and Hepburn not being able to marry, and Rosebud being the pet name for Marion Davies's clitoris, and the one-way mirrors on Errol Flynn's ceilings, and Steve McQueen doing his own motorcycle stunts in
The Great Escape,
which I know for a fact is bullshit, I've met his stuntman. Who knows what's true? It's a kind of epistemology of lies, and it's all about people whose careers are a kind of telling lies about who they are every day. I can't deal with any of it anymore.”

“You don't look much like your mom, either.”

She met his eyes fiercely, as if wondering why he'd said that. “I'm adopted, didn't she tell you?”