JACARANDA OFTEN HEARD about Etienne Vassily. People were surprised that she hadn’t met him.
“You mean,” someone would ask, “you know Max but you don’t know Etienne?”
If Max was nothing more than one of Etienne’s paid amusements, like a dance band, a servant, then he was obviously the best. Nobody cooked half so well.
It was one of the basic wonders of Max’s personality in those first two years that he could tell her, “You are the best-dressed woman in L.A.,” or that New Yorkers were “provincial,” with such glee that it was dazzling and somehow tender-hearted.
Social Direction
Until the night, at a black-tie supper for sixty for the opening of the Venice Biennale, when Etienne first met Max, Etienne’s ambitious practical jokes had an unfortunate likelihood of being unforgivable. This interfered with Etienne’s main ambition—to take over the world.
Max and Etienne sat down as strangers to dine in formal splendor and before dessert, slipped out as dear friends. They left the party together and it was discovered that they’d taken off in Etienne’s plane. For three days and nights they were “missing”—even the plane radio had been shut down. News that Etienne was dead did beady-eyed little things to the stock market. (News that Max was “missing” was simply not news, since he was never supposed to be anywhere.) Finally, Etienne’s third wife caught up with them. They were in jail in Kyoto for lewd conduct; they’d been found naked tied to an orphanage post and were being beaten by little girls, with real whips, who were trying hard to draw blood (it was reported), flogging their best.
“. . . and my husband didn’t even go on to the art opening,” Etienne’s third wife testified as she told the judge the mental torment she’d undergone that made her demand a divorce and a cool million, though they’d only been married for two months. The judge in Kyoto was understanding and let Etienne off with a warning not to get caught doing that again. The judge in New York gave Etienne’s third wife $100,000 and told her that a woman who marries a man of Etienne’s reputation doesn’t deserve a penny more for just two months.
Once Etienne met Max, he could devote himself to taking over the world and know that the half of him that only wanted to play was being fully seen to, and could be dished up, unimpeded by last-minute lack of plans, like a flaming shish kebab in a cornball tourist trap. Max, it was said, was simply brought in as Vice-President in charge of the Latin-American press for one of Etienne’s Venezuelan companies that lost money and would now lose a fortune owing to the high cost of Max’s salary—it supposedly dovetailed into some kind of tax loop that was more beautiful, almost, to Etienne than Gelsey Kirkland. Etienne, it was said on the barge, could put any amount of money into this Vice-President’s “entertainment fund” and it still made money for him.
Meanwhile, Max, like Michelangelo being given an open-ended budget by the Medicis, went ahead designing the architecture of particular places for Etienne, which were in as many cities as Max could arrange. Etienne liked different backdrops and colorful native customs. Etienne loved it, for example, that Jacaranda actually painted surfboards for a living. But Max, with his quick gaming eye, knew it was not even necessary that she paint surfboards for she was a rare enough thing—a native-born Angeleno grown up at the edge of America with her feet in the ocean and her head in the breaking waves, with a bookcase full of the kind of reading matter that put her in touch with the rest of the world. She was without any spiritual taint; she had neglected (she’d tried, but it was too boring) to read the Bible and, in fact, all religious books just failed to capture her imagination—she was without the “civilizing influence” that mankind has always enforced upon its young. She only knew about Adam and Eve the way a classical scholar immersed in Aristotle’s Ethics would know that Liz and Dick were holding up production on Cleopatra— by passing the newsstand on his way to the coffee shop. She had no sense of “sin” and no manners. She was the way she was by the Levens’ letting her alone to read, and she knew her way around Los Angeles like a Bedouin on his own two thousand square miles of trackless waste.
Max decided to arrange a meeting between Jacaranda and Etienne on the spur of the moment, one afternoon, when Max was visiting Jacaranda’s and Etienne was in town. Max had been visiting Jacaranda every day for two months. Every day, around three, Max would “just drop by for tea or a beer, I’ve brought the beer,” and every day, Jacaranda got more and more used to it. There Max would be. She couldn’t get used to Max but she got used to his being there. Her heart still turned four golden beats whenever he stayed late and the sun would shine a certain way across his profile.
That day Max asked if Jacaranda minded if he used her phone. “I would like you to meet a friend of mine. But I’m going to play a trick on him. Is that O.K. with you?” Jacaranda’s days had become so full of Max’s tricks, his laughter and his blue, blue eyes, that naturally it was all right with her. She just waited, looking out the window at the smoggy afternoon, while Max dialed.
“Hello?” Max began, “You’re there! . . . Listen, I want you to come over right away, it’s important. . . . No, I met a woman in the supermarket. . . . Her husband is in . . . [“By the Time I Get to Phoenix” was playing across the street on someone’s radio] Phoenix. So you’ve got to come at once. . . . No. Now. It’s important; they’ll understand. Here’s the address. . . . I know it’s far away from Beverly Hills. But she says she wants to meet you. She says she makes the best frozen potatoes au gratin in L.A.” His eyes grew demoniacally bluer, impossibly bluer. “Of course if you can’t make it . . .”—bluer still—”all right, then, we’ll be expecting you.”
“I don’t look like a housewife!” Jacaranda protested. “He’ll never believe this. Besides, there’s no furniture.”
It was true. Jacaranda had been living in the apartment for almost a year and all she had was Emilio. In the living room, she had two folding chairs and an orange crate on which to put the ashtray. Her clothes, in one of the back closets, were all of her really that was there. Except that the living room was pillared with a surfboard. It leaned against the wall, dry and waiting for the owner to come with the truck to pick it up.
Twenty minutes later, a new beige Lincoln Continental pulled up sharply across the street.
“He’s here,” Max said, lighting a cigarette.
“What do I do?” Jacaranda was wondering how her life had gotten so impossible when only last year she’d retired.
Out of the Lincoln stepped one of the most powerful men in the world.
He was about fifty years old and had thick gray hair that had been gracefully shaped so that his Byzantine classicism was visible. His eyes were rounded and dark, with black lashes, and his mouth was thick and dark red. He had a gray-black mustache and nice eyebrows, but his eyes, surrounded by their black lashes, were purple velvet. It wasn’t fair, Jacaranda was