“Are you okay, Gail? Everything’s good on your end?” She had little to tell us. Her home in Baie-D’Urfé, the animal rights organizations she was volunteering with. When it came time to order, she dug her heels in, “No vegetarian dishes?” In the end she had a tomato salad, barely ripe, their hearts still white, and mineral water. She pecked at her food, a hand gripping the shawl around her small breasts, throwing haughty looks at our plates full of pastrami.
“You keep going like this, boys, and you’ll be dead at fifty.”
What had I felt? Pity. Pity and a little anger. I was wondering why she’d come to see me. What was the point? After a taxi dropped all three of us at Rockefeller Center, we began walking towards the New York Times building where Moïse worked. A fine but abundant snow was falling over the city, its chaos now muted like a mountain in winter. Moïse was playing the fool, catching snowflakes on his tongue, and Gail walked ahead of us, head down, splitting the crowd like a ship racing for port after months of hard sailing. I escorted her to her hotel near Broadway. What could we say to each other? Between us, there was the weight of the separation for which she was ultimately responsible. She had behaved reprehensibly, egotistically. And we both feared our words would wake the monsters of our shared past. The events of summer 1962 had shattered our lives, marking us for the rest of our days, though it had affected Gail even more than me, I would come to discover.
She said, shame-faced, absorbed by the tip of her boot drawing strange shapes on the snowy sidewalk, “Well, see you next time.”
“See you next time.…”
I remember the small furtive pecks we gave each other on our frozen cheeks, then her hand buried in a large mitten pushing the woollen hat she wore down over her sad eyes. Forty-two years old, lost in a man’s coat, successive layers of shawls and scarfs, she looked like one of those students in Washington Square who found their clothes in an Army surplus store on Canal Street.
After that I wouldn’t see her again. It had been my choice, my decision. Turn the page for good.
4
“You’re not saying anything?” Ann asked in the Pathfinder.
In front of us, Laurel Canyon Boulevard was paralyzed by a long line of stopped vehicles, their brake lights diluted in the fog.
“We can’t know about Gail,” I said. “It might be another of her tantrums.”
She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, more surprised than indignant. “A tantrum? You don’t call people to your death bed for a tantrum. How can you say such a thing?”
She turned the radio on, cycling through the stations. Traffic reports, the same as usual; streets were clogged throughout the city. Then a couple of ads shouting at us. Exasperated, she lowered the volume and continued, “What you just said about Gail is pretty terrible, isn’t it?”
Yes and no. Gail wasn’t easy to live with. She always thought of herself first and expected everyone to yield to her suddenly changing moods. A woman of fifty-one now, perhaps she’d softened with time. I turned to Ann, “You’re right. But things were complicated with Gail. Not like they are with you, honey.”
And that was true. With Ann, there never were any real fights. We had a bond that our married friends admired, a fulfilling sex life — just like they talked about on the covers of women’s magazines. Of Gail, only a memory of something unsound, a thin crack in a windshield, a misunderstanding, long-winded shouting matches to get her to come to bed with me, one of those women whom despair and anger light like a match, distress a constant in her eyes. I always came away from her unnerved.
Ann measured her smile, not wanting it to be triumphant. I knew her, she wasn’t jealous or the type to delight in easy flattery, not like they are with you, honey. At least she wouldn’t show it.
Ann. Lord, her beauty had cast a spell on me seven years earlier, when we first met at the art gallery on Rodeo Drive, where I worked to help pay the bills. Her mother, a regular customer of the Kyser Gallery, had introduced us. “My daughter studies film at UCLA. I thought you might give her a few tips.”
“Tips? You know, I might not be the best one for.…”
“Come now! Don’t be modest! Sure, there’s your talent, but there’s also that nice mug of yours, young man.…” Followed by a hearty wink. Meanwhile, behind her back, her daughter rolled her eyes.
Laureen Heller was a small skinny woman, moved by the morbid fear of gaining any weight at all, her face worn smooth by too many facelifts. Her taste in art was exuberant — charged, gaudy, garish, like the décor in her large Tudor home in Brentwood. She was a great customer and Ted Kyser, the owner, couldn’t afford to lose her. She bought two or three paintings a year, sometimes more, a welcome relief in the summer of 1988, when business was particularly slow because of the seemingly endless writer’s strike.
While her mother scampered about the gallery, Ann spoke into my ear, “Can I take you out for a drink?” Stunned by her advance, I burst out laughing, charmed by this young woman, so sure of herself. We ended the night a bit past sober in an Italian restaurant in Venice Beach. I was enchanted by her eyes in the flickering candlelight, her jokes and funny faces, her brown braids, thick and heavy like hemp rope.
Seven years later, Ann no longer looked like that young slip of a girl who had so easily charmed me, but she was still as beautiful, with more sensible hair, her pearl grey suit and her immaculate blouse. She’d gained a warm maturity, acquired a profound sense of responsibility. We were a couple, yes, and also business partners in In Gad We Trust. Without Ann, none of it would have happened.
She continued, going through her bag, “We’re going to be cannon fodder for Dick. Not sure we’ll make it out alive this time. One hour late. And maybe two if we don’t start moving soon. Why can’t we just have a phone in the car?”
“Because it’s the only place I can get a moment’s peace.”
My tone had been unintentionally dry. Ann hunkered down in her seat, sighed. Yes of course, a phone. It would certainly be safer. And with all the complaints we’d been getting at It’s All Comedy! you never knew, there were all sorts of crazies in this country, like the guy who’d shot Lennon in New York, and the other one, something like Hickey? Hinckley? Who’d almost got Reagan in Washington to impress Jodie Foster, like in Taxi Driver. There were crazies by the barrelful hearing voices and not seeking help.
I told Ann, “Okay.”
“What, okay?”
“For the phone. I’ll take care of it. I promise.”
That’s how it was with Ann. Simple, easy. I drove in silence and thought back to the time Gail had come to live with me in San Francisco. Nineteen seventy-one. All of it seemed so very far away now. The large apartment on Telegraph Hill that cost me an arm and a leg, an aberration so that Gail might live comfortably, so that she wouldn’t feel too much out of her element. But she didn’t care. In fact, she cared about very little at all. With her, I was constantly navigating some tortured roller coaster. In the dizzying highs, she could disappear for days. Or drag me against my will and with five minutes’ notice to some nudism and primal scream expedition somewhere in the Sierra Nevada. Or force me to follow her to a retreat at Shasta Abbey, the Buddhist monastery in northern California where all the hippies loved to go back in those blessed days, in order to “learn how to accept one’s sexual impulses without surrendering to them or suppressing them.”
When she began writing long condemnatory letters to her father in Montreal, I knew she was entering one of her agitated phases. Or if she began sending him Allen Ginsberg’s amphetamine-laced