Playland Read online

  There was a baby seat in the back, facing the rear as it was supposed to, the baby seat another surprise, a child not an element I had factored in when I winnowed through the list of singles’ mixers in the Free Press, and some pink and yellow hair bows suggesting that the child who used the baby seat was a girl. She was talking now, something about Humacao, on the Atlantic coast of Puerto Rico, had I ever been there, the swimming was dangerous on the Atlantic, then something about a Club Med somewhere, then something about Cozumel, resorts, she was a travel agent, that explained the resort chat, she was a part owner of a travel agency in one of the lesser Pointes. A less Grosse Pointe. Joke. Pointless-thought division. Not a particularly felicitous time to be in the travel business, I had volunteered, looking out the car window and wondering exactly where we were, and she had said why, and I said that from my limited exposure to the city, Detroit seemed to be in the grip of hard times, a fucking disaster area, I wanted to say, the South Bronx looks like Humacao compared with this, and she had said, I get by, things will get better, I have to believe that. A depressive, I thought. Just what I need. One to match me.

  But a direct one at least. With no bullshit about what we were going to do when we reached our destination. We had already made a pit stop, at an all night minimall. The drugstore had decals of all the credit card companies in the window, as well as the health care prescription programs, PCS and RECAP, and underneath the decals two signs, one that said THIS STORE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF JESUS CHRIST, and right below another that said CONDOMS AVAILABLE AT CHECKOUT COUNTER. Which was where she was headed, even as I was wondering if Jesus Christ had staked out a position on safe sex. “Lubricated or unlubricated?” she said, and I realized she was talking to me, my choice, and all I could do was give a ponderously rakish nod as the black woman behind the cash register impassively monitored my response, the black woman wearing dreadlocks that reminded me, a sharp unexpected pain, of the late Shaamel Boudreau, and then I followed up the nod with a silly little comme ci, comme ça smile, even in this liberated age the first time a woman had ever asked me a question like that, why not ask if I want extra ribbing, too, although I suppose that’s her call, not mine.

  Now she got back into bed. For a moment I panicked. I was not all that sure about Fern. Maybe it was Fawn. Shit, maybe even Caroline or Beth.

  “Fern was crying.”

  There. That was it. Fern was the daughter, the Mensa child with an IQ of 179, with a bullet. Terence was Fern’s baby brother. Fern and Terence. Fern wouldn’t go to bed, the babysitter had said. A pain in the ass is what the babysitter, with all her heavy sighs, had meant about Fern. The babysitter was seventeen, overweight, a blimp with zits like BBs (except kids don’t have BB guns anymore, they buy the real thing, a semiautomatic with extra clips), three Milky Way wrappers and an empty bag of nacho-flavored corn chips on the coffee table, and she looked me up and down, a knowing goddamn look, like she was wondering if I could still get it up, figuring that was what I was there for. Fern’s mother said she would clean up, would I give the sitter a ride home in the Cressida. The sitter sat close, hip to hip, as if she was my date, and when I stopped in front of her apartment complex she just waited there, and finally she said, You can feel me up if you want. Going to the slam for criminal trespass of a minor was not on my agenda, thank you very much. I kept my hands firmly on the steering wheel until she flounced out of the car. She fucks everybody, you know, the babysitter said. Her parting shot. Jesus God, what a day, what a night, how do I get out of this? No way. I had to bring the fucking Cressida back. And now, please, what in the name of Christ is the name of this woman lying next to me who had the genes to produce a Mensa child and whose fat babysitter says she fucks everybody. Maybe that’s how she learned to do it so great. With all that experience.

  I had an erection. If we began to get it on again maybe I could remember her name. A hard-on to jog the memory. A new physiological concept. Something for the medical journals. The Broderick Effect. Try the Beth area. Liz. Betsy.

  Lily.

  A sigh of relief. Lily. Lily what. Lily White. That was it. Lily White.

  Her fingers moved down my stomach. Like a centipede. She touched me. Then she licked my cock, and quickly put it in her mouth, as if to see if it was a good fit. “Thumping and beating and hard as a rock,” she said when she just as quickly removed it, every syllable equally stressed. “We used to say that in the girl’s locker room at Mount St. Mary’s. None of us knew what it meant.”

  She had learned.

  “Lily. Jesus. Lily. Jesus. Jesus. Mama.” Wait a minute. I didn’t say Mama.

  “Mama.”

  Oh, shit. Fern. Lily scrambled up as I tried to pull the sheet over me. The sheet stuck up in the air.

  “Why is the man making so much noise?”

  “It’s all right, Fern.” She was surreptitiously removing a hair from her tongue. Things to dislike about sex. God. We had talked about that earlier, after the first time. What do you dislike most about sex, she had said, after I had fucked her backside front, her choice, her tits hanging down like triangular bugger grips. The question an indication of the quirkiness of her mind. Most people want to know what you like best, what kinkiness, what equipment, what multiple of participants, what obscure position, what melding of what member or aid to what orifice or protuberance, primary or secondary. Dislike? What is there to dislike? Lots, she said. The bad breath in the morning. Agreed. The curly strand of pubic hair on the tongue. Absolutely. The dab of shit on the rubber. Definitely. The acrid smell of postcoital micturition. Ah, yes. She was a tenured professor of fucking’s downside. Your turn, she had said. All the above, I said. No, no, something just yours. Ah. Okay. Taking off my clothes, I said finally. No one looks good taking off his clothes. It was too humiliating to elucidate, but she insisted. Well. Does your stomach fall out over the elastic band of your shorts? A concern at my suck-it-up-suck-it-in age. Is there a small embarrassing streak on your underwear? Sit down to take off your shoes and socks, stand up to take off pants and underwear. Leave your pants on the floor or hang them over a chair. One way a slob, the other a priss. Rip off your shirt the way they do it in the movies and you can’t put it on again afterward. There is no rakish way to undress.

  Why is that fucking child staring at me?

  “Were you hurting the man, Mama, when you were biting him?”

  Something else to dislike about sex. A precocious child catching you in the act.

  “No, Fern.” Lily could not seem to find her robe. Nor her slippers. Her shoes were under a chair. She put them on, using Fern’s shoulder for support. I tried not to laugh. A naked woman with black high-heel Charles Jourdan pumps. “See, Fern, he’s laughing. I didn’t hurt him. How’s Terence?”

  “Terence never wakes up. When he sleeps, his peepee sometimes sticks up like the man’s.”

  I thought, Terence’s peepee probably had more resonance than mine right now.

  “Let’s go back to bed.” She took her daughter by the hand, a naked woman in black pumps. “School day tomorrow.”

  She came back a few moments later, carrying a terrycloth bathrobe. She—why do I have such trouble calling her Lily?—said she must have left it in Fern’s room earlier. Now she rearranged the robe on the foot of the bed, then got in under the sheets. Her hand found me again. No answer. She said, “I guess we can forget about that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Listen. A seven-year-old who strolls in wondering why Mommy is biting the man’s peepee is not one of the greatest turn-ons in the world.” She ran her hands through her hair. “You think she’ll be telling that to some shrink when she’s the same age as I am now, and wondering why she’s so fucked up?”

  I made a noise in my throat signifying yes, no, or maybe.

  “You don’t even like to think of your mother going down on someone. My mother’s sixty-two now. I can’t imagine her giving head to some guy, carries a return ticket in his pocket.”

  “Oh.” Guil
ty as charged. Sexual harassment, one-night-stand subsection.

  “I looked at it. It’s on the desk. Next to your money clip and your Hertz rental agreement and a dollar ninety-seven in coins.” Bed talk. It seemed nonjudgmental. But rarely, of course, does postcoital tristesse not find fault. “You’re a divorced woman with two small children, thirty-three years old, no alimony, chancey child support, you notice things about men. Like a return ticket. If I ever write my autobiography, I think I’ll call it Open Return.”

  “Mmmmmmmm.” Or no comment.

  “I’ve been divorced three years in July, and I haven’t had a single relationship with a man since.” Why do women feel this compulsion to talk to me? This human sponge soaking up confidences I would prefer not to hear. “The perils of living in Detroit. Oh, I get laid. Getting laid is never the problem. Not for a socially responsible single.” Lizzie used to say I was not giving. If this was giving I would prefer not to give. “I’ve slept with thirty-one men since my divorce. Once each. I mean, one weekend, one Super Bowl week, one night. I think every one of them had an open-return ticket. In the travel business, you tend to meet people with return tickets.”

  I wondered how many of those weekends she had spent at Humacao or Cozumel or that Club Med somewhere.

  “They never call the next time they come back through town. Adultery on the road.” I thought she was careering toward commitment, and her inability to attract it, perhaps even to give it. In my experience, conversations about commitment usually ended with tears, or recriminations, usually both. “Do you think I’m a slut?”

  “Of course not.” A discussion I would rather not have in a terrace condominium in a suburb of Detroit whose name I could not remember. As I had not remembered the name of the condo’s owner. I should have bailed out when I was asked my preference in condoms. Unlubricated was what she had bought, it turned out, lubricity not being her problem. And she had bought a dozen. Either she was expecting me to stay a long time, or her motto was Semper Paratus. Was I number thirty-one or thirty-two? And how could she remember so exactly? Did she keep a dossier on all of us? And know the cities we returned to?

  “I don’t think so either. Although I think I’d have a hard time proving it if I ever got involved in a custody fight. Which I won’t. Harry has the kids every Christmas and for three weeks every summer. He and Patty’ve gone skiing the last two Christmases, and left them with me, and he’s never kept them the full three weeks in the summer.”

  I thought, I am on information overload. Whatever happened to name, rank, serial number. Harry and Patty. Two new players. The ex-husband and new wife. Or maybe live-in?

  Lily felt me again. That was more like it. Or should have been. No luck. Suddenly she sat up, leaned over, and kissed me on the forehead. Her voice was insistent. “Would you please go? Just call a cab and go. Go. Please go.”

  It was not until later that I thought putting on your clothes in such a situation is at least as humiliating as taking them off.

  But:

  Had Lily White not told me to go, please go, I would not have been in that taxi, at nearly five o’clock in the morning, sitting behind a hopelessly lost Chaldean driver, a stranger in a strange land, a stranger to its customs and its language and especially to the geography of the city where he was plying his trade, illegally so, of course, without a green card and using the hack license of his wife’s cousin, violating in the process God knows how many ordinances in the transportation codes of metropolitan Detroit and Wayne County (the storyteller always accumulating stories and coincidences to explicate and preserve the moment); then, to repeat, I would not have been in that taxi out near Hamtramck, the cab heading in a direction exactly opposite that in which I wanted to be going, when at nearly five o’clock in the morning it hit a dog, a mangy mongrel dog that belonged to Melba Mae Toolate.

  “You murdering asshole” were the first words Blue Tyler ever spoke to me.

  BLUE

  “… one of the most mysterious and potent figures in the history of cinema … she was that rare performer, and certainly the only child, to penetrate to the heart of screen acting … a wanton presence provoked by the idea of being seen.”

  —Barton Turnbull, Sight & Sound

  I

  Meeting cute” was the way Chuckie O’Hara described the way I met Blue Tyler. That most basic and most enduring (some might even say endearing) of Hollywood clichés. Meet cute, you save time and eliminate dialogue. Example: A man and a woman meet at a pajama counter. He only wants the bottom, she only wants the top. They share the pair, complications ensue, and when they finally make it to bed a hundred and twenty script pages later, the soundtrack plays “But if, baby, I’m the bottom, you’re the top,” slow fade to black.

  It was Chuckie’s contention that Blue had always known in some inchoate way, because she was a creature of the movies and because the films she made at Cosmopolitan Pictures, by edict of J. F. French, always had happy endings, that one day someone would rediscover her, and the more unlikely the locale the more dramatic, the more cinematic, that rediscovery would be. It was not a conscious move that had brought her to Detroit and the wrong side of the tracks, but with her innate story sense, that ability she never lost, even when she was at her most down-and-out, to project what was best for her character, Detroit and her menagerie of house pets and the multiple husbands, many of whose names she claimed not to remember, and the endocarditis and the emphysema—all the factors real and fancied—provided the perfect contrast to the life that late she had led, the star that once she had been.

  Like most actors and actresses, Blue Tyler preferred anecdote to fact and mistook, as if by act of will, one for the other. Anecdotes are nothing but factoids of questionable provenance, burnished to a high gloss and purged of subtext in the interest of keeping the narrative flowing, for best effect usually set against gilded venues (or mean streets for contrary effect) and populated with the famous and the familiar as background atmosphere, as if the famous names and the gilded venues and mean streets certified authenticity. Whether biographical or autobiographical, all anecdote is essentially self-aggrandizing, allowing the anecdotalist to bask in his or her own created (or someone else’s reflected) glory, and to demonstrate whatever it is in the anecdotalist’s interest to demonstrate, either for his or her own good, or for someone else’s ill fortune (an equally winning hand under certain propitious conditions). As these anecdotes are usually provided by professional storytellers, the not-altogether-unbecoming result is that the stories show folk tell about themselves have the shorthand sense of being scenes from a screenplay, with dialogue, set decoration, and camera movements. In such circumstances, truth is an acceptable casualty, the narrative all.

  Fame once experienced is a narcotic. In the theater of her dreams Melba Mae Toolate was still the famous Blue Tyler, and like so many famous people, she accepted the kindness of strangers as natural acts of fealty, no more than what she was due. At Cosmopolitan’s Little Red Schoolhouse (so called because studio art directors had built it on a soundstage and dressed it to resemble a prairie school, which it often was, in Cosmo’s low-budget program Westerns), it had been drilled into her that the toughest audience of all was that soundstage dress circle of hardened grips, gaffers, best boys, makeup men, and wardrobe mistresses, those who even in her adversity she still regarded as “the little people.” As I was a writer, and therefore fore in her hierarchical scale a little person, I could never be immunized against her magic; in her mind her wish must always be my command. If she was to be rediscovered, if that was what the fates had ordained, then the denouement must be playable in a Blue Tyler vehicle. Little Sister Susan and Lily of the Valley transmogrified by the ravages of time into Apple Annie, a comeback vehicle she might consider if the billing and the money were right, and if the shitbirds in charge did not try to bring her to heel, harness her spirit, as they had always tried to do when she was on top. (Fuck them, she would say, suddenly, venomously, eyes aflame, like sulphur mat
ches, the old memories like fishhooks caught in her gills, and fuck them again!) Admittedly a risky bet, a long shot, but if it worked, what a payoff.

  II

  Maury Ahearne’s watch commander said he was in court testifying. I found him in the cafeteria during a recess. He did not seem surprised to see me. Nor curious about what might have happened after he threw me out of his car the previous day. To me a century before. “Say hello to Jerome Highsmith,” he said, waving in the general direction of a huge black man standing in front of the cafeteria’s bank of vending machines.

  Jerome Highsmith kicked a candy machine with the toe of a steel-plated industrial work shoe. It teetered until I thought it was going to topple over on him before rocking back into place. A second kick, and a third. Still no coins in the coin return, no candy bar in the tray. Jerome Highsmith stepped back, taking the measure of the machine, then removed his moth-eaten brown sweater. Deliberately he wrapped it over his right hand and made a fist, clenching and unclenching it. Suddenly glass shattered as Jerome Highsmith smashed his covered fist through the vending machine’s display window. I started as if a gun had gone off. Jerome Highsmith stared belligerently at me, daring me to object, then reached through the shards of glass and removed a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. He stripped away the foil, licking his fingers for any chocolate that might have stuck to them, then pushed the whole bar into his mouth, closing his eyes as he chewed, a dreamy look on his face.