CHAPTER 31




Louise had long since figured out what was going on between her roommate and the man on the second floor. She didn't disapprove, although she thought he was too old for Van. Twenty-four was already a man. And she was sorry she didn't see more of Vanessa now, but she had her own friends too, and Barnard kept them more than busy enough with assignments and projects and homework and exams. The months flew by and it was hard to believe that Christmas vacation had already rolled around. The weather was cold and crisp, and just after Thanksgiving, they had had their first snow.

Vanessa was enchanted with it and she and Jason had thrown snowballs at each other in Riverside Park. There was always so much for them to do, the Cloisters, the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, the opera, the ballet, concerts at Carnegie Hall, and always the lure of Off Broadway for him. Jason led a full cultural life, and now he always took Vanessa along. She hadn't seen a movie with him since she'd arrived, except some old ones at a festival at the Museum of Modern Art. He continued to disapprove of all that, and he worked on his thesis while she studied for exams. Somehow she loved his seriousness, and his purism about his philosophies. To her, it made him not rigid, but more lovable.

'I'm going to miss you a lot over the holidays.” She was lying on his couch with a book on her lap, as she looked at him. He looked terribly serious with his glasses on, and he peered over them with a smile.

“It'll probably be a relief to get back to Plastic Land,” which was what he called L.A., “you can go to the movies with your friends every day, and eat tacos and french fries,” he had a horror of those things too, “before you have to come back here again.” She laughed at his visions of Los Angeles. According to him, people were running everywhere, with hamburgers and tacos and pizzas in their hands, wearing curlers in their hair, dancing to rock, and going to trashy films. It made her laugh even more to think of what he would have thought of Val. She was making another horror film, and in this one she was covered in green slime, hardly his idea of what fine cinema should be. But it would be fun to see them all again too. Sometimes she thought Jason took himself too seriously, but she was enjoying their affair, and she had told the truth. She would miss him over the holidays.

“What are you going to do?” He still hadn't decided the last time they'd talked about it. She thought he should go home, but he didn't seem keen on the idea. She noticed that his parents never called, and that he rarely mentioned them. She didn't call home that often either, but she still considered herself close to all of them. But as Vanessa looked up, she saw Jason smiling at her. There was a tender side of him that she really loved and she could see it now. She reached out a hand to where he sat at his desk, and he kissed it and smiled.

“I'm going to miss you too, you know. And it'll probably take me weeks to straighten you out again.”

“One of these days, you'll have to come to California with me.” But neither of them was ready for that. Her family sounded terrifying to him, and the prospect of bringing him home frightened her too. That would mean that it was serious, or so her parents would think, and it was not. It was just a lovely first affair. She expected nothing more of it than that or so she told herself. “I'll call you, Jase.”

She repeated exactly the same words to him as they stood at the airport on December 23. He had decided not to go home, but to work on his thesis instead, which sounded like a lonely way to spend the holidays to her. But he said he'd be fine, and she promised to call every day. He kissed her long and hard before she boarded the plane, and then she was gone in the huge silver bird in the air, and he dug his hands into his pockets, and wrapped his scarf around his neck, and went back out into the cold air. It was snowing again. And it frightened him to realize how much he had fallen in love with her. He had wanted it to be a casual affair, even the convenience of living in the same building appealed to him. And that had nothing to do with it now. He liked everything about her, she was serious, intelligent, beautiful, kind, and wonderful in bed, and his apartment seemed like a tomb as he unlocked the door, and sat down at his desk and stared. Maybe he should have gone home after all. But it was so depressing for him. Life in their small town was so limited, and his parents always smothered him, he couldn't stand it anymore. As much as he loved them, he wanted to be free. And his father drank too much. His mother had gotten so old, he knew it would depress the hell out of him, and he was happier in New York alone. It had been almost impossible to explain to Vanessa before she left, her family was so different from his. She had actually been happy to go back. And he could hear it in her voice when she called him that night. She called almost as soon as she got off the plane.

“Well, how's Plastic Land?” He tried to sound less glum than he was and she laughed.

“Still the same. Except you're not here, and that's what's wrong with it.” She loved L.A., but now she had come to love New York too. Because of him. “Next time you have to come out.” He almost shuddered at the thought. He couldn't face a family like that, high-powered, shiny, totally involved in the movie world. He could imagine Faye cooking breakfast in gold lame high heels, and the image of it made him laugh as he talked to Van.

“How's your twin?”

“I haven't seen her yet. I thought I'd drop by tonight. It's only eight o'clock here.”

“That's because they don't know how to tell time,” he teased, and his face looked youthful and sad as he did. He missed her so much. The next two weeks were going to be unbearable. “Give her my best.” They had talked to each other on the phone several times, and she sounded like fun, although totally different from Van.

“I will.”

“Let me know if she's turned green.” She had told him about the movie in green slime, and he had teased her about it mercilessly, telling her that that was typical Hollywood and probably the best they could do. Except Vanessa had taken umbrage at that. Her mother had made some beautiful films in her life, and one day they'd probably be in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art too. She was still eighteen, and they were her family, and he went easy on it after that. But he would have been horrified, Vanessa thought, if he could have seen the place where Val lived.

She had borrowed her father's car and driven to the place Val shared with at least a dozen other girls. And Vanessa thought she'd never seen such chaos and filth in her entire life. There was stale food left on plates in the living room from God knew when, and unmade beds in every room, some even without sheets, an empty tequila bottle lay on the floor, there were stockings hung in the bathrooms in all shapes and hues, and everywhere hung the rancid smell of too many perfumes. And in the midst of it all sat Val, happily doing her nails and telling Vanessa about her part in the film.

“And then I come out of this swamp … I hold out my arms like this” she did so, almost knocking over a lamp, “and I scream …” She demonstrated that too, and Vanessa covered her ears. It seemed to go on for hours, and she was actually impressed, as she grinned at her twin. It was good to see her again, even here.

“You've developed quite a range with that in the last few months.”

Val laughed. “I get plenty of practice every day.”

Vanessa looked around again. “How do you stand this place?” Between the smell, the filth, the disorder, and the girls, Vanessa knew she would have gone mad in two days, but Valerie seemed oblivious to it all, in fact she seemed happy there, happier than she had been at home by far, and she said as much to her twin.

“I can do whatever I want here.”

“And what does that include?” Vanessa was curious about what she'd been up to in the last three months. Val knew about Jason, although Vanessa hadn't gone into details about her affair, and she didn't intend to now. “Any big new heart throbs since I left?”

Valerie shrugged. There were a number of men in her life, one she cared about, and three she was sleeping with, but she knew her sister would be shocked so she didn't say anything. It didn't mean that much to her. A little dope, a little booze, a terrific piece of ass in some boy's apartment or rented room. There was so much going on in Hollywood that it didn't seem so terrible to be a part of it, and all of them in her apartment passed the pill around like after-dinner mints. There was always an open box somewhere in the house, and someone had told her not to mix brands, but they seemed to work anyway. And if there was a slip, she could always get rid of it. She wasn't as dumb as her little sister, Anne. “What about you?” Valerie turned the tables on her, as she started on the nails on the other hand. “What's that guy like you're with all the time?”

“Jason?” Vanessa feigned innocence and Val laughed.

“No. King Kong. Is he cute?”

“By my standards yes, but probably not by yours.”

“That means he has a harelip and a club foot, but he's cute and you think he's serious.”

“More or less. He's working on his Ph.D.” Vanessa sounded proud of him and Valerie stared at her. He sounded horrible to her. She hated intellectuals, she liked all the Hollywood types, especially long hair, open shirts, the California beach-boy look.

She looked at Vanessa suspiciously. “How old is this guy?”

“Twenty-four.”

“You think he wants to marry you?” That horrified her, but Vanessa was quick to shake her head.

“He's not that type and neither am 1.1 want to finish school, and come back here to write screenplays.” She and Jason argued about that all the time. He thought she had too much talent to write “junk,” but she insisted that some films were very good. “It's just nice for now.”

“Well, watch out you don't get knocked up. Do you take the pill?” Vanessa was embarrassed by the directness of her twin, and shook her head. She hadn't even admitted that she was sleeping with him, but Val knew her better than anyone. “You're not?” Valerie was appalled at her naïveté.

“Jason takes care of it.” She blushed beet red and Valerie laughed as a girl in a red satin G-string walked through the room. And with that, she glanced at Val again. “Has Mom seen this place?” She couldn't imagine that she had, or she would have had Valerie out of it in two hours, or possibly less.

“Just once. And we cleaned it up pretty good before she came. No one was here that day.”

“Thank God. She'd have your head for this, my friend.” But that would have applied to just about anything Val was doing these days, from the little snorts of cocaine, to the pipes filled with hashish, to the men she was experimenting with to the roles she played in horror films. As she said to Van bitterly, “She never wants me to have any fun.” And someone had just offered her her first porno role but she had turned it down. She had been terrified her mother would hear of it. But as Vanessa drove back to the house, she had the feeling that Valerie was going bad. She was way out of control, and she was just eighteen. But she knew her well enough to know that there was no stopping her. She was rolling wildly down a hill, and it would all end somewhere. Vanessa just hoped she didn't get hurt on the way.

“How was Val?” Her father glanced at her as she came in, and read something in her eyes that she wouldn't have said to him.

“Okay.”

And then, “Just how bad is that place?” They couldn't have known how bad it really was. But she wondered if they knew other things. Hollywood was a small town, and if she was sleeping around, they were liable to hear of it.

“It's not that bad. Just a lot of girls running around making a mess, and leaving dirty dishes on the floor.” That was the least of it, but it was all she felt safe telling him. She tried to make it sound better than it was, for Valerie's sake. “Just a magnified version of our rooms.”

“As bad as that?” He laughed, and reported that Greg was coming home the next day. And a little while later, Anne came in with a glow in her eyes that Vanessa had never seen before.

“Hi, kiddo.” She stood up and kissed her cheek, and she could have sworn that she smelled a man's after-shave in her hair, but she wasn't sure. Little Anne was growing up. She was about to turn sixteen after the holidays, and Vanessa noticed that she was growing beautiful. Her dress was short, and her legs were long and slim, and she was wearing beautiful little red shoes and a ribbon in her hair. Vanessa smiled at the image that had developed in three short months. She looked as old as Vanessa herself. “When did you get so grown-up?” Ward glanced at her admiringly too. She had settled down beautifully in the last few months, and she had made new friends in her new school. Especially Gail Stein, who seemed like an awfully nice girl, even if she was a little spoiled. So what if she wore Vuitton bags and Jourdan shoes, she was a nice, decent, wholesome girl, and her father took good care of her. It was a pleasant change from the agony of what had happened in the Haight, and he and Faye were both grateful for that.