THERE WERE TWO restaurants in Beverly Hills that I considered for my dinner with Leila. Both were appropriately pretentious and suitably overpriced, but I had eaten at Spago’s too many times before, so I chose Nestor’s. The chances of running into movie people were not as high at Nestor’s, another reason for my selection. I made a reservation for two at eight o’clock.
Since she neither drove nor had a car, I offered to come and pick her up, but Nestor’s was located in the heart of Beverly Hills and she thought it would be silly for me to drive all the way to Venice to pick her up and then all the way back to Beverly Hills.
“The more you drive,” she told me, “the more likely you are to have an accident and the last thing I want on my conscience is to have somebody killed or maimed in a car wreck while coming to pick me up for dinner. I’ll take a cab.”
You had to wear a jacket and tie to Nestor’s and so I did. On my way there that evening, I tried to delete from my memory all those deleted scenes of hers I had seen in the screening room the day before, but it sometimes happens that the very effort to forget something enhances its presence in your mind.
I arrived at Nestor’s, as was my way, ten minutes too early but, approaching the canopied entrance of the restaurant, I was stunned to see Leila standing outside. She was chatting with a tall young man in charge of valet parking.
Never, not once in my entire life, had a woman with whom I had a date arrived before me.
I stopped the car just to savor the sight of her standing there.
She was dressed for an evening out in a fancy restaurant, but the way she stood there, chatting with that tall young man, the way she held her purse by the straps so that it hung down to her ankles, the way she kicked the purse playfully while she chatted, now with her foot, now with her knees, made her seem like a schoolgirl kicking her school bag.
Our table in the smoking section, like all the other tables at Nestor’s, had a candle burning in the center, and although it was there more as decoration than as a source of light, in the mood I was in, it was by candlelight that I saw Leila that evening.
We started drinking. Since it no longer made any difference to me what I drank, I joined her by drinking Scotch. After several stumpy glasses of Scotch, we decided to move on to taller, more graceful glasses of champagne. Her posture, her whole appearance, changed and lengthened with a champagne glass in her hand. We had two bottles before dinner. She got higher and higher and I did my best to appear likewise.
She wore her hair up in a style I associated with classical ballerinas. It made her long white neck seem longer and very fragile, as if it could be broken with terrifying ease. Two shiny black earrings dangled from her earlobes. She kept worrying them with her fingers, as if checking to make sure they were still there.
Her fancy black dress was cut low, revealing two-thirds of her breasts. As she inhaled and exhaled, her breasts rose and fell like white-plumed, sleeping seabirds nestled down for the night inside her bodice.
But it was her long white arms that tempted me more than anything else. Her black dress had long sleeves gathered at the wrist, but the sleeves were made of transparent gauze which created the illusion (by candlelight) that each arm was a body of a young, ravishing girl encased in a negligee. Whenever she moved one of her arms, my center of gravity shifted to the pit of my stomach and blood disgorged into my groin.
The drunker she got, the more her eyes narrowed, until they became almost Asian in appearance. She kept them focused on me the whole night, peering into my soul or letting me peer into hers.
When I talked, her lips moved ever so slightly, as if she were taking the words from my mouth into hers to see what they tasted like.
It thrilled me that she was, or appeared to be by candlelight, so beautiful.
And it thrilled me, of course, that this beautiful woman with those ravishing arms (like two young daughters, one on either side of her) could be attracted to me. Her attraction for me, which I could not but notice and which grew as the night went on, was not based on any physical allure I possessed. What she was attracted to, I concluded, was something else. Something spiritual within me. The real me. Since I had no idea who that person was, feeling, as I had always felt, that I could be anybody, the possibility that somewhere deep within me the genuine article existed, the real me, and that perhaps Leila saw it, made me hope that in time I too would get to know it.
In time, I told myself. In time, I will not only tell her everything but share with her things I have not shared with anyone else.
Rebirth. Renewal. It seemed not only possible but imminent, by candlelight.
Over dinner, I told her about my apartment in Manhattan. How big it was. How it was too big for just one person. I described the view I had of Riverside Drive and Riverside Park and the Hudson River.
I was a fount of information. Since the essentials between us could not be discussed (her child, her movie), I described the inessentials in great detail.
I told her that I had six large windows facing the Hudson and that if I opened one of them and looked right, I could see the George Washington Bridge to the north, and, if I looked left, the Seventy-ninth Street marina to the south, and further south, the piers where the big liners docked. Circle Line boats, I told her, went past my windows, loaded with sightseers. Barges. Oil tankers. Tugboats. Foreign vessels with foreign flags. I told her how I had seen Long Island ducks flying south for the winter and how, when I opened my windows, I heard the sound of their ghostly cries. I described the intense but short-lived cold spell that hit New York right after Christmas and how, when it was over, I saw huge flotillas of ice moving down the Hudson from upstate New York, as if the Adirondacks were some arctic continent breaking up and drifting in pieces into the Atlantic.
“I’ve never been to New York.”
“You’d like it there,” I told her.
“Really?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it.”
In this way, in my own way, I was inviting her, and in her own way she was considering the invitation.
I told her about my marriage and about my separation from Dianah.
How long had I been married, she wanted to know.
“Over twenty years.”
“Only once?”
“Yes, only once.”
“Any children?”
“He’s not a child anymore, but yes. A son.”
(It occurred to me that between the three of us we only had one child.)
I told her all about Billy, or all that I could tell her. How handsome he was. How tall. How self-conscious of his height. How bashful he could be and how eloquent. How much I loved him.
Smiling softly, her quarter-moon eyes glistening by candlelight, she listened to me. It was my impression that she could have listened to me talking about Billy and my love for him for hours and hours.
A man who loves his son.
I could see the impression I was making.
The more details I divulged of my love for him, the more she seemed to be handing herself over to me, falling in love with me, with the father within me who loved his child.
My bill arrived.
When we stood up to go, Leila had to grip the back of her chair in order to steady herself. And then, although drunk, she let go of the chair and, performing a half-curtsy, leaned her rigid torso forward at some precise angle known only to her and blew out the candle on our table. She did it with such dignity and grace, complying, as it were, with laws of some higher etiquette known only to the drunken few, that even the haughty waiters were impressed by what she had just done. It seemed right. As soon as she had done it, it simply seemed right that the candle should be blown out before we left.
She gave the tall young valet in livery two smacking kisses, one on each cheek, when he brought my car.
“Take good care of yourself,” she told him.
Inside the car, while I drove, she told me about him.
“I got here early. I was going to go inside and wait for you, but I started talking to him. He’s so sweet. He really is. From Iowa. Wants to be an actor. What else? He kept calling me ma’am. Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. Boys like that—” she sighed “—I don’t know. You just want to … I don’t know. But you just want to … something, when you see boys like that. Like a sweet ear of corn, that’s how sweet he was. And I kept giving him advice about the movie business.” She laughed. “Me!”
“Careful!” she screamed suddenly and gripped my shoulder.
I slammed on the brakes just as I was about to pass a slow-moving car. She apparently didn’t realize that I had two lanes to myself and that the oncoming traffic was not a threat.
We continued, but whenever I approached the legal speed limit, she got nervous.
“Not so fast.”
“We’re not going fast.”
“Feels fast to me. This is why I take cabs everywhere. Nobody ever gets killed in a cab.”
Her anxiety bothered me.
“Don’t worry, I’m an excellent driver,” I tried to reassure her.
“How could you be, you’re drunk.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“But you drank as much as I did.”
“I can take it,” I told her.
I got on the freeway and headed toward Venice.
“Do you think I’m going to be a movie star?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
“A big star?”
“Maybe.”
“Then it’ll all be worth it.”
She slid down in her seat, her knees pressed against the dashboard.
I was taking her home, but I didn’t feel like taking her home. I felt like driving and driving. I felt like getting lost, getting both of us lost, and having a common starting point for ourselves, a brand-new beginning for both.
It took me a while to realize that she was crying.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“This is not what I had in mind,” she sobbed.
“What’s not?”
“This life I’m having. When I was a young girl, I had a whole other life in mind.”
Moments later, smiling through tears, she said, “Your face looks like a ratty old sweater. But a nice ratty old sweater.”
And then she started crying again.
I slowed down and came to a gentle stop on the shoulder of the freeway.
“What’re you doing?” she wanted to know.
“I can’t bear the thought of you being home and crying alone. I thought we’d stop here for a while so you can cry your eyes out.”
With an exuberance that belied both her age and her drunkenness, she sprang to life and flung her arms around my neck. Sobbing and laughing, she began kissing me all over my face. I had never been kissed like that before. Rapid little kisses, too fast to count. Kisses all over my face and eyes, as if there were no end to them.
“You know how to sweep a woman off her feet, don’t you,” she said, and kept on kissing me. “Most men go stiff and cold when I start crying. They feel all put upon. But not you. You’re a strange man, mister. Yes, you are. Maybe we’re meant for each other.”
How was it, I wondered, that I had lived as long as I had lived and never been kissed like that?
She just kept crying and kissing me.
When we kissed on the lips moments later, an odd thought accompanied the kiss.
I’m putting my lying tongue in her mouth, I thought.
“We’re too old to be doing this on the shoulder of the freeway,” I said.
She didn’t want to go home. I invited her to spend the night at my hotel.
I drove back as slowly and carefully as I could bear to drive. We rode in silence, as if everything had been said that could be said until after we slept together.
Headlights from oncoming cars came and went, and although they looked nothing like projector lights they brought back memories of the cut scenes I had seen in the screening room yesterday.
She stumbled and almost fell as we walked across the nearly deserted lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I caught her just in time.
“How drunk am I?” she wanted to know.
“Very drunk,” I told her. “But don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you.”
“You will?”
“Yes.”
“Will you take me under your wing?” she asked as we got on the elevator.
“I will.”
“I was just a little girl when I heard that expression and ever since then I’ve yearned for it to come true. To find someone who would take me under his wing. Oh, God, dear God, how lovely it still sounds.” She started crying again, as only drunks can cry.
Being undressed, I had come to think, was the same thing as being naked, but Leila reminded me that night that it was not the same thing at all.
I was coming out of the bathroom, where I had taken a hurried shower in order to be fresh and clean before I got into bed with her. The lights were on in the bedroom when I came out, and I saw her lying there on my huge bed.
The sight of her stopped me dead in my tracks.
The closest I had ever come to seeing human nakedness before was in a movie. A documentary. It showed hundreds and hundreds of naked Jews, men, women, and children, being escorted by armed Nazi guards and barking German shepherds to their deaths. All the Jews were naked. Not undressed. Naked. And it seemed to me then, while I watched that documentary, that it wasn’t just the Jews that the Nazis wanted annihilated but the very concept of nakedness as well. What was troublesome to me was that I found myself approving of the annihilation of that concept. I am no historian, but as far as I can tell, I was not alone in feeling that way. As far as I can tell, those images of those naked people stumbling to their deaths were the last recorded images of human nakedness in the twentieth century.
I had of course come to terms with all that a long time ago. With history. And with the history of history that followed. And with my own feelings about it all.
So it was not pleasant to be confronted with something I had assumed no longer existed.
Leila lying naked on my bed.
Her nakedness covered not just the huge bed but filled my whole suite. It wasn’t just that her eyes, looking directly at me, were naked. Nor that her long white arms and her breasts were naked. Nor that her legs were naked and parted. It was as if she had brought her whole deleted past with her, and her past lay there alongside her, naked as well. The fourteen-year-old girl to whom I had only talked on the telephone lay there alongside her and she too was naked. The young mother. The young mother deprived of her child. The woman. The actress. The parts she had played in life and in films were all there on the same bed, waiting for me to take them under my wing, and all were as naked as those Jews trekking across that barren landscape to their deaths.
I hurriedly turned off the lights in order to clothe myself in darkness and avoid the suffocating multiplicity of meanings of that one naked body on my bed.
And then, a few fumbling moments later, either because I lacked the capacity or the courage or the wingspan to take all those Leilas under my wing, I had to decide which Leila I would embrace in the darkness and to which Leila I would make love.
I chose, for the record, the fourteen-year-old girl. When I say chose, I mean I consciously imagined myself making love to that young girl, and while I made love to her, the rewriter in me was rewriting the screenplay of her life. The two of us were reconceiving Billy. I was rewriting the events that would follow, so that in the end there would be a happy ending for everyone. I was fixing it all.