“Have you known Gilbert long?” Jacaranda asked, watching their smoke lured out the window by the sun.
“Have you?” he asked. He raised his eyebrows in elegant curiosity with a sort of stillness, an attitude of delight. It was as though at last he’d found her and now they had nothing else to do but spend the rest of their lives discovering the mysteries of each other’s perfection. The joy that came spilling off the way Max’s shoulders drew toward her in rapt attention was the joy she knew they meant by something being “bigger than both of us.”
“I haven’t really known Gilbert that long,” she said, “but I’m real close to his apartment.”
“Gilbert,” Max said, with a brilliant smile, “has the finest instinct for interior decoration in West Hollywood.”
She didn’t feel like laughing exactly, though what rose up in her was glee; she felt if only she and Max could sit this way, their cigarette smoke spiraling forever and Gilbert just inside their sight—well, if only they could.
Gilbert got off the phone. Instead of feeling, as she’d supposed she might feel, that Max would wreck her Sunday and that she’d want him to leave, she felt as though Gilbert were crude and inept. Gilbert’s dangerous face, at that point, looked almost stylized, like a mask.
Once she noticed Max, everything else seemed only half true.
“Who was that?” Max asked. “On the phone?”
“Sandy Ryder,” Gilbert said, pouring himself some more coffee.
“Oh,” Max said, and a look crossed his face that was so sad and polite that one might think he was at a funeral and Sandy Ryder was the body.
“He’s not so bad,” Gilbert said. Jacaranda had never heard Gilbert say that someone wasn’t so bad. She thought it was a trick.
“Not so bad!” Max cried, so excited he stood up and scowled. “Do you know what he said? Last time I saw him he told me: ‘Truth is like old brandy; it should only be brought out late at night among close friends.’”
Max stepped on a ceramic ashtray in his indignation, striding to the window.
Gilbert looked innocent. He’d tricked Max into anger. “Truth should be carried like a banner before you!” Max went on.
“But don’t you have any secrets?” Jacaranda asked.
“Secrets?” he replied. “Secrets are lies that you tell to your friends.”
He turned to look out the window and she saw his profile against an enormous bush, blooming with white oleanders. Her mother had always warned her about oleanders; they were poisonous and one was never to eat them.
The white flowers threw Max’s elegant silhouette into a sort of bas-relief, like Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, in Florence, golden. The sunshine was golden. The cigarette smoke and coffee smelled golden.
Max sighed, paused a moment, and then turned to her. “Are you coming tonight?” he asked.
“Coming?” she asked.
“Didn’t Gilbert invite you? I’m having a few people over. For drinks. I’m at the Sacramento. Wear anything.”
Diogenes was yawning and wagging and then Max was outside, a loudly backfiring carburetor, backing out of the driveway, and silence.
All that remained were the dead roses on the window and Gilbert, who raised one eyebrow crossly like a brown-haired child who won’t eat.
“Amazing, isn’t he?” Gilbert said.
He got to his feet and then, suddenly, crude, stylized Gilbert, with his flat-footed crouch and his vanity and his doomed mouth, turned into Max, languid and intense, with Max’s fancy drawl.
“Secrets,” he said, “are lies that you tell to your friends!”
Jacaranda gathered together the broken ashtray, so no one would get cut, as she wondered what she’d wear that night, now that everything was going to be perfect.
The Little Black Dress
She wore a little black dress, which in a mad dash she had borrowed from April. It was the kind of little black dress that Mae Leven always described as “decent.” April and Mae had found it on one of their perpetual treks out to Pasadena where two city blocks were lined with Salvation Army–type thrift stores. This little black dress cost $3.49 and was a Dior. With the jacket, it could be worn to court or to a funeral. Without the jacket, it was no longer quite so decent and Jacaranda was sure it would be the right thing to wear around someone like Max, who was ten years older than Gilbert (Gilbert was two years older than she). With little gold sandals, the dress was fine.
She spent about an hour in the bathtub crooning “I’m So Lonesome I Could Die” to her black cat Emiliano (his nickname, after she remembered Viva Zapata!).
She brought fresh flowers in from the tumbling-down hill where her landlady threw handfuls of wildflower seeds each spring. She stuck the wildflowers into a glass; and sang her entire repertoire of Hank Williams songs, which she had only recently begun to appreciate.
In the little black dress, with its square neckline and Paris, France, drape, she looked all wrong in L.A., especially in her old station wagon with surfboards on top. But if she’d been in Paris or Rome or New York, she’d have looked smart.
It wasn’t until it was too late that she realized she had only a large straw purse and not the little clutch purse the dress called for. On the phone April said, “A what?”
“A clutch purse,” Jacaranda repeated.
“Me?” April said.
Jacaranda’s hair was even blonder after Hawaii and her skin was tanner than usual. She painted her toenails grape, which matched her eye shadow. Her eyes, lined in brown pencil, looked out with innocent-virgin deception and complemented her large mouth with its expression of eager vulnerability. Her hair, parted in the middle, hung straight down untangled.
She looked as though she’d just stepped out of an opening-night intermission in London and not at all as if she lived on a hill apartment in Santa Monica with a roof that leaked.
Outside, the ocean was spread out in a blue line, and the sun, an orange circle, hung just above it, about to set.
She sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart” all the way into Hollywood.
The Sacramento Apts.
The Sacramento was smack in the middle of Hollywood—the neighborhood called Hollywood, not the mystical state. It wasn’t in Beverly Hills or West Hollywood, which were both All Right, and it wasn’t down by the beach or in Trousdale or Bel Air or Encino, which were all All Right, too. It was in Hollywood, smack in the middle, which was not All Right. It never was All Right, even back in the twenties when Valentino, an unknown, got all dressed up and strolled down Hollywood Boulevard, hoping to be noticed and put into a movie.
Of course, a few New York types thought “the Coast” was simply “the Coast” and that it didn’t make any difference where one stayed because it was only for two weeks and then one could go home to civilization,