CHAPTER 16

Pick could almost feel the legal noose chafe her skin. She’d ignored incoming communications for weeks. A growing stack of unopened mail sat on a kitchen counter, and she no longer signed on to the Internet. She might occasionally play her phone messages but was likely to walk into the next room, out of earshot. Maybe this Officer Blue could divert her from her increasingly morbid thoughts. In his first message he claimed he was checking on her safety, but the messages became increasingly personal, and the last one closed with “What’ve you got to lose?” So she popped a Xanax and called him back.

Driving toward the rendezvous in West Hollywood, she said a little prayer to Venus that he’d be safely married. Also that his shaving lotion wouldn’t be too blue collar. After finding a parking space, she checked herself out in the car mirror and what the hell, unbuttoned yet another button on her blouse as she dabbed a touch more perfume across her neck. She despised her totally unremarkable features but was reassured by her ability to overcome them somehow. Well, whatever happened was likely to be memorable.

Spotting him on a bar stool, she nearly backed out of the place. He was even bluer than she remembered. They could stick him in the Star Wars bar scene without changing a thing. The idea of this escapade seemed faintly attractive from a distance, but up close it was starting to look more like bat shit.

The joint had about fifty overhead TVs showing various sporting events and perhaps a dozen customers scattered around. Music blared over cheap speakers at such volume that it was crazy for anyone to stay and endure it. But everyone seemed to think it was quite normal for the bartender to have to lean close so they could shout drink orders into his ear. Sit-and-talk places were almost extinct, swept away when bar owners discovered they could boost sales by stifling conversation. People who wanted to talk went to the movies.

It took money to insulate yourself from the sights, smells, noise, and danger of the herd. When Sussman was on his island, Pick had become accustomed to buying herself that separation. Now she’d probably wind up sleeping with her head next to a prison toilet. Not thinking about it wasn’t working anymore. It was like telling yourself not to think about elephants.

Pick passed two yuppies at the end of the bar waging a penis-measuring contest over which one had the cooler phone. A couple of lesbians shot pool in the corner. There was nothing terribly Hollywood about the place. It would be at home in Davenport. And it didn’t appear to be a cop hangout. Officer Blue must have picked a place where no one would know him. The two of them exchanged phony smiles and shook hands. He wore a tight sleeveless T-shirt. He had toned arms and appeared to have trimmed his armpit hair. She thought about a gun. He had to be carrying one somewhere, probably at the waist, concealed by the untucked T-shirt. Or strapped to his ankle or something. Did movies and TV depict cops as they were? Or did cops copy the fake cops from movies and TV? Another chicken or egg question. She rather enjoyed the fact he was packing heat. It hinted at danger.

They took their drinks—a Manhattan for her, another draught for him—to a booth. All the while they sneaked glances at each other. In order to make polite conversation over the dreadful music she found herself hollering like Fay Wray in King Kong’s fist. Pick decided to get past the small talk.

“Why’d you call anyway?” she yelled.

“Because I want to know you,” she thought he said. His voice was loud enough to get through, but the words were squeezed from a mouth that remained pretty much closed.

“Look, I don’t want to be bitchy, but I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. This is probably a mistake.”

He leaned in and yelled in her ear. “Maybe I can help.”

But Officer Blue didn’t look like the kindly type. In fact, he looked nuts. Sounded a little nuts too. You didn’t have to be Freud to understand why someone would muffle his conversation the way he did.

He suggested they take their drinks outside. There were wooden benches out back, practically noise-free, she discovered, although from time to time conversation drifted their way from the next bench, where a drone on furlough from his cubicle complained about his carpal tunnel syndrome to a coworker.

“How’d you ever get tied up with him? Sussman?” the cop asked her.

“I decided to become a groupie,” Pick explained. “A long time ago. I was bored.” When she spoke, she realized her vocal chords were sore from the indoor shouting.

“Come on, really,” he said.

“Really. I wasn’t out to fuck just any writer. I was a Roland Sussman specialist.” She withheld one little detail—maybe she’d share it with him later. It always turned guys on, especially working-class prudes like Officer Blue—that to get to Sussman she first had to blow a member of his entourage in a hotel stairwell. Sussman was like a rock star in those days, with a publicist, booking manager, and sycophants whose serious faces told you they trailed a serious writer. It was Pick’s introduction to the commercial role of blowjobs in the celebrity world, where they were a currency considered less tawdry than a cash bribe and nearly as portable. She should have centered her doctoral thesis on it.

For years afterward Pick tried to relive the thrill she’d felt when Ken, the assistant, brought her up the elevator and, just as he’d promised, escorted her into a suite where she found herself ten feet from Sussman. Feet on a coffee table, he watched TV with three or four others. Enthralled, Pick was swept at once into a secret universe where gods might speak to you.

They were watching a French film—a videotape that was pretty much unintelligible. Lots of camera jiggling and darkness. No one introduced her, and Pick just stood there debating whether she ought to sit down too. She’d been watching the screen about five minutes, no conversation in the room, when the film took what appeared to be a violent turn, but the necessary details were missing. In darkness, the camera nervously targeted the actors’ stomachs, necks, that sort of thing. Characters didn’t say much, and when they did, it didn’t explain much about whatever pretentious crap was going on. Finally she said to no one in particular, “What the hell is this?”

“A Claire Denis film,” said Sussman, eyes on the screen. Then after a pause, “It’s like being inside her dream. You just float.”

“She dreams about stomachs?”

He chuckled and made a show of scratching his head. “You make a good point,” he said. And without asking anyone’s permission he stopped the recording. He acted more like royalty in those days. Turning to Pick for the first time, he said, “You should have rescued us earlier.”

That was fourteen years ago. Even then Sussman didn’t look terribly healthy and smelled from cigarettes, but he was really sexy, casting the same rueful aura up close as he did in photographs, a persistent but subdued melancholy that may have been passed down from his Russian grandmother, who, as a teenager, had been raped by a Gypsy passing through her village in the shtetl. The Gypsy, the father of Sussman’s father, “might have been the link to whatever creative aptitude I have,” Sussman told her. “Though not everyone agrees it exists.” He was a mother lode of self-deprecation. In the old days Pick found it endearing but decided later he was only inviting others to contradict him and call him a genius. It’s possible Sussman’s Gypsy grandfather actually was a prodigy of some kind. The talent had to come from somewhere, but it would be of little use to someone driving a Gypsy wagon around one of the world’s most obscure corners. Maybe that’s why he was driven to mad acts such as the rape of Sussman’s grandmother. There must have been millions of people like that down through time, people stuck in the wrong time or place. What if a girl who should have been an astrophysicist had to cope with life in a twelfth-century African village? She must have sensed something was missing. Maybe she believed she was crazy. Maybe everyone else thought so too. That could explain at least some of those burned witches. “Leave it to you,” Sussman had quipped, “to find sympathy for a rapist.” The presence of a felonious Gypsy forebear in his family tree wasn’t a fact he tried to hide, but the media, for some reason, never picked up on it.

These days Pick no longer attempted to recapture the electric rapture she once felt for Sussman. But she gradually noticed that remarks she used to find droll often had cruel underpinnings. Like the time he stopped cold in the midst of a feverish session in bed and asked her, “You know what I think about when we make love?”

“No,” she said, dreading the answer.

“I think about us making love, dummy. What did you think? I’m mulling over Main Currents in American Thought?”

Pick never forgave him for that half second when she visualized an entire catalog of her disgraceful failings, fears, and dark secrets. Her bricklayer ankles, skunky farts, an invented brother, plus she was practically an English PhD but kept stumbling across words she didn’t know the meaning of. She’d expected to be called out at last as a horse-faced banal charity fuck. Sussman inflicted all that terror just to crack a bad joke, and her infatuation took a hard turn. Now any thoughts of him were wrapped in her dread of a future she couldn’t bear to analyze in any detail. She knew she ought to pack for a getaway, but once she fled, the game would be up. After coming this far with no regard for consequences, it was too late to apply rational thought now. So she treaded water in a dark sea.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Officer Blue, “but looks to me like you’re not exactly crazy about your boss, right?”

She let out an embarrassing giggly half snort. How could she possibly explain it to this Visigoth? Even now, despite all her revulsion, if Sussman’s face were to form that hopeful, poor soul look of his, she might once again be unable to resist getting him whatever it was he wanted.

“I think we’ve been through this before,” she said. “He’s not my boss, not my boyfriend, not . . . I don’t even know what he is. It’s complicated.”

Officer Blue smiled out of one corner of his mouth and gave two quick, almost imperceptible nods, as if to say he understood everything.