no, darling,” he lied. “That’s got nothing to do with it. I love this place. Really. I do.”
She’d spent five whole years inland so that Colman could drop over in the daytime. She couldn’t help it. She’d never told him this thing about herself but now he’d have to know.
“Colman,” she burst out, “I usually wake up at seven. In the morning.”
“Oh,” he said. He thought about this, and then, “You mean, you sleep when it gets dark outside? At night?”
She’d only seen him in the afternoons when he’d just woken up, and naturally he assumed she had, too.
“Hey,” he said, “did I tell you about this graffiti I saw in the men’s room at the Knife and Fork? Someone printed: ‘I’m ten inches long and three inches wide. Interested?’ and wrote his phone number down. And then, in pencil underneath, someone else said, ‘Fascinated. How big’s your cock?’”
As Colman walked down the hill toward his old Buick, she knew he would have nothing more to do with her now that light was in her apartment.
The next day she found Emilio, a black satin cat with ambitions that seemed more peaceful than the ones alive in Colman or West Hollywood. Emilio specialized in patches of sunshine and sharpening his claws on her one chair and purring if she so much as uttered his camellia name, “Emilio.”
About fifty of her friends continued to speak to her after she turned against rock-’n’-roll and they braved Olympic Boulevard down to the wilds of Santa Monica (not the beach her friends meant when they said “the beach”; they meant Malibu).
“I don’t know,” most of her friends said, “it’s so far . . .”
“From what?” Jacaranda asked.
“The Troubadour, Tana’s, everything!” they replied.
Jacaranda didn’t care if rock-’n’-roll was the pulse beat of art in America, or a massive connection to everyone her age, or the background wallpaper of a generation that didn’t seem to be dropping off and giving in to Frank Sinatra. She was tired of it.
“Maybe you’re turning into an adult,” April suggested.
“Me?” Jacaranda cried.
Surely there was something one could do besides becoming an adult just because she didn’t want to live in West Hollywood or stand in a crush of eighteen thousand people at the Forum, listening to a white boy making all that money singing “Love in Vain.”
But what?
“Will you feed my cat for me next week?” Jacaranda asked.
“Where are you going?” April asked.
A week later, Jacaranda boarded the plane in Oahu.
The Innocent Virgin
Jacaranda had taken the plane to Oahu to catch the smaller plane to Maui. She felt as if life contained nothing but odds and ends. She had always presumed that once people got to be twenty-three, they were Too Old, yet she was not old enough to content herself with brooding over the past like Marcel Proust, whose book she was reading on the plane, and who obviously had nothing more pressing to do than regard the years as a museum filled with beautiful reproductions of lost jealousy and bygone fashion. In another sense, she felt herself to be an Innocent Virgin—too young.
And so she began to see that instead of life becoming subdued as in Jane Austen novels, things were not to be that simple. Maybe the sixties had been too much for life ever to be that simple again. But rock-’n’-roll was behind her. And beneath her was the blue, blue sea.
She was wearing white jeans and a white Mexican blouse with a big pink silk rose pinned to it. She had only brought very little with her; she knew someone would loan her a surfboard.
The air felt funny when she landed, humid and ominous. They said a hurricane was on its way and that all inter-island planes for Maui were canceled.
In the Honolulu airport Jacaranda bumped into Shelby Coryell, her old boyfriend from the beach. He was in the airport to pick up some air freight. He’d graduated from Chouinard Art Institute and, she’d been told, had gone to the islands for a two-week vacation the year before but had never come home. He was still out in the water in Hawaii.
“I’m living with a girl on the North Shore,” he said, “at Sunset Beach.”
“Oh,” she said.
How dare he live with someone, she thought as they drove off to Shelby’s motel. She had always planned that Shelby would end up as hers. She decided to pull herself together and take him home to L.A. where he belonged, but when she got to his motel, she went for a walk on Sunset Beach, and there was Gilbert Wood.
In the hurricane, while everyone was home drinking rum and listening to ham radios about rooftops and towns being lifted out to sea, Gilbert Wood was surfing.
The waves were fifteen feet high and roared like lions and volcanoes. Gilbert Wood just crouched farther down on his surfboard and flattened his feet more. His left side, the side parallel to the waves, tilted slightly to enable him to drag his hand along inside the water, which left a white trail behind him the way his surfboard did, two white trails of foam and folly. He used his hand to practically confound the ocean, the day, and the hurricane. He was like a great beauty reaching for a cigarette in an officers’ club.
And he was a great danger. He had ashy-colored hair, and in profile one side of his face was vicious. His mouth looked as though he’d just been hit with the news that he had a week to live and he didn’t care.
Gilbert was an actor; he knew every last detail perfectly, of how beautiful he was. He was vain about danger, for hurricanes don’t care if one is an actor or beautiful.
•
ON THE PLANE going back to L.A., Gilbert said, “Have you met Max yet?”
“Max who?” she asked.
Gilbert did two things that impressed her. One was to bite the back of her neck with his sharp teeth so that time stood still. The other was to introduce her to Max.
Max
Once Max noticed her, the only truth was Max’s truth.
At Gilbert’s every morning at seven, the phone would ring. It would be Max. The first time this happened, Gilbert talked for a whole hour, laughing away throughout. Jacaranda asked, “Who was that at this hour?”
“Oh, just Max,” Gilbert said, closing back up into his vain and dangerous self. There they were, in Gilbert’s apartment—the place she and Colman had always gone to before she left West Hollywood forever.
“Max?”
“Just some fag I met at Jerry Getz’s opening,” Gilbert said.
Max noticed Jacaranda a whole month before she noticed him. She didn’t know that Max was bristling with curiosity over her affair with Gilbert, but it was, in fact, Max’s intense desire to uncover Gilbert’s secrets that kept
