Mystery Girl: A Novel Read online

  Text copyright © 2013 by David Gordon

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Lynn Buckley

  Author photograph © Michael Sharkey

  Cover art © Gil Elvgren

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477800799

  ISBN-10: 1477800794

  To the girls who mystified me

  CONTENTS

  PART I IN SEARCH OF LOST MINDS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  PART II THE MAN WITHOUT QUALIFICATIONS

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  PART III PORTRAITS OF SOME LADIES

  31 THE CASE OF THE CLUELESS HUSBAND

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  PART IV ANXIETY’S RAINBOW

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  PART V THE MISRECOGNITIONS

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  PART VI LALALAND

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  86

  PART VII ASCENSION

  87

  88

  89

  90

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PART I

  IN SEARCH OF LOST MINDS

  1

  I BECAME AN ASSISTANT detective, and solved my first murder, right after my wife left me, when I went a little mad. Never as crazy as the master detective himself, of course; he was completely nuts. Certifiable with the papers to prove it. Madder than a shithouse rat. He was (and you’ll pardon the bad pun, but I’m a frustrated writer and we’re the worst, with our brittle, bitter brilliance now confined to the Scrabble board) mentally detective in every possible sense. And trust me, I know from crazy, being, as I admit right here at the outset, no poster child for emotional health myself.

  But in truth, I knew I wasn’t really nuts, just angry and scared and lonely and so, so very sad. The disease wasn’t in my head, but in my heart. My heart was terribly sick. I could feel it carrying on in there all night: feverish, mumbling, tossing in its sleep, waking up in shivers from sweat-drenched nightmares, unable to keep anything down. I felt like an ambulance carting it around, siren moaning, expecting traffic to part and cops to clear my way. But there was no trauma center for me to come screeching up to. No winged nurses awaiting me in white. I just drove around in circles, wailing, Emergency, Emergency!

  In the end, I diagnosed myself. The sickness I had was just life. And the only known cure for the malady of existence—although deeply tempting on certain endless white nights and empty black hole mornings—was too radical, too uncertain, too irrevocable to try until all other means had been exhausted.

  2

  AS I SAID, THIS all began the day Lala, my wife, walked into my office and said the scariest, most stomach-curdling words in the language: “We have to talk.” (It’s never good news. Never: “We have to talk. I’m horny, but let’s hurry because there’s pizza on the way.”) She was leaving, she told me, and we were going into couple’s therapy, and I was getting a job.

  Now I don’t want you to think I’m lazy, although that’s obviously what she thought. I’d always had jobs, in fact, far too many. My primary job, of course, was novelist. But it’s hard to make a good living as a novelist. After twenty years at it, my total earnings to date were $0, and I’d been forced to set my latest unfinished experimental fiasco, Perineum, aside in a drawer atop my other ill born unnovels, Toilet and Slow Motion Holocaust, and become a screenwriter for hire, since if there’s anything in this world I love as much as, or sometimes even more than, books, it’s movies. (And my wife of course.) Screenwriting proved to be far more lucrative than novelizing, as I was quickly recruited to polish a low-budget foreign-produced horror-sci-fi-softcore feature working-titled Dark Probings, for a small upfront sum and a larger share of the profits. The producer explained it all to me after he arrived in his Porsche at our lunch meeting when I turned in my work. His English wasn’t great, and I didn’t quite follow the math, and anyway he forgot his checkbook, but at least he bought me lunch ($13.25). Otherwise, my total film-career intake up till that fateful morning amounted to $180.00 net, which my friend Milo paid me, in twenty-dollar increments, for writing up the monthly New Releases and News To Us! notices at the video store where he worked.

  So, while I went on “being” a novelist in my head if not on paper, and developing screenplays in my darkened bedroom by night, over the years I supplemented this base income with many, many other jobs: messenger, delivery boy, survey taker, phone answerer, photocopier, assistant file clerk, assistant painter, assistant/driver, assistant copy editor, assistant office manager at a temp agency, temporary office assistant at an ad agency, office temp at an assisted living agency, assistant to the assistant of a motivator, (I’m not even sure what that was), and finally, the pinnacle of my assistancy: assistant manager of Bartleby’s Scrivenings, a secondhand bookshop managed and owned by the sole other employee, Mary Jane Rutherford, and located near my house in the beautiful and trendy Silver Lake neighborhood of LA. The job didn’t pay much, but then again I didn’t have to do much besides sit at the counter, dust desultorily, argue with my boss about literary theory, and chitchat with Milo, who knew more about movies than I knew about anything and assistant-managed Videolatry next door. Both shops were going under, it being a race to the bottom between our respective industries, and MJ (she started using her initials in college when she started dating women and her real name only appeared on her checks), who had retired from a long career as a graduate student in early modernist poetry to open this shop with the last of her student loan money, retired still further, into her tiny back office, and left me out front, alone at the foremast, holding the tattered flag of Literature.

  At first I assumed she was just watching porn or googling back there, which was what I did when I retired to my own office at home, and which I referred to as “thinking.” Then I heard strange mutterings and saw her slinking around in dark glasses, clutching 100 percent biodegradable recycled paper bags to her chest, and I understood: she was on a self-destructive
poetry binge, drinking Trader Joe’s wine and reading Stevens and Yeats, aloud, to herself. Sometimes she declaimed so boldly that it scared the rare customer who’d wandered in out of the sun to kill time waiting for a bus. She even alarmed Peaches, the toy poodle that lived upstairs with Jerry, Milo’s boss.

  Though both stores were sinking, ours drowned first, as our lease ran out and we could no longer afford the rent in a neighborhood like Silver Lake, which had become highly popular because it was full of quaint, neighborhoody features like secondhand bookshops and cinephile video stores. Jerry, who’d arrived with the early gay pioneers in the ’70s, had a long-term lease at preboom, barrio prices. He’d first hired Milo as a projectionist at The Alleycat, a gay porn theater he owned, while Milo worked on his MA in queer cinema studies. (He still claimed that his thesis project, Undergrowth: Body Hair and Gay Avant-Garde Cinema, would shift the whole field, if he ever finished it.) The communal movie theater gave way to lonely video booths, and then to the rental shop, as the Internet and gentrification drove the hairy and scary away. Now Videolatry was declining in turn, but Jerry’s own health was failing even faster, and he cared less about the future of cinema than about having Milo on hand to plump his pillows and bring up his soup.

  First MJ sold online the few really valuable books we had: a nearly fine first American edition of Naked Lunch (the Paris edition, published by Olympia was worth much more); a nice if slightly too-loved set of Narnia firsts; several good-to-fair Jim Thompson paperbacks (The Alcoholics, A Hell of A Woman, Savage Night), which I had spotted in someone’s dead uncle’s carton and acquired for the shop but couldn’t afford for myself); the less rare 1935 edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence; Casanova’s Memoirs in six water-stained volumes; a paperback original, in fair condition, of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick. Then she tried to unload the rest of her stock wholesale to another dealer but got nowhere. Then she tried donating them to the library for a write-off, but even they wouldn’t take the paperbacks. Finally, we snuck over to our local branch in the dead of night, MJ driving her wagon and Milo and I riding along, dressed in dark clothing. We abandoned the thousands of orphaned books on the library’s back steps and raced off, as if dumping a murder victim, wine bottles and salvaged poetry rolling around in the back.

  3

  YOU SEE, MY WIFE had me all wrong: I wasn’t lazy. Lazy bums don’t give a damn. They relax. They enjoy life. They kick back in a quiet shady alley all day, sprawled in a heap of old clothes and snoozing dogs, whittling and whistling and guzzling hooch from a jug. I’m not a bum. I’ve slaved away desperately my whole life. What I am is a failure.

  And I suppose I had her all wrong too, because I was utterly shocked, astounded really, when, after nearly five years of coupledom, she walked into my “office” that day, where I was busy “thinking,” to tell me she was leaving. Up till that moment, I’d thought everything was fine, if by fine you mean barely talking, rarely fucking, occasionally yelling, and mostly just lying listlessly side by side, watching TV and eating Nestlé chocolate chip cookies that we sliced up and baked from a tube. But I didn’t mind, not really. This, I’d been told, was marriage. I’d been warned what to expect. And those instant cookies are actually pretty amazing when they’re hot and soft and melty. Not gourmet chocolate truffles, or exotic rare-fruit sorbets, or even homemade pie, but they hit the spot. And if our marriage was no longer a Valentine’s box full of rich, dark, 99 percent pure happiness, it still seemed like the kind of warm, sweet, chewy nonhappiness I could settle for. Plus I loved her. I really did. And she loved me, or at least that’s what she said, declaring it passionately, repeatedly, as she knelt on the carpet, tears streaming down her face, and dumped me.

  “I love you,” she kept saying, “I fucking love you, but things have to change. And they’re not changing. You’re not hearing me. I love you so much it tears my heart out, but this is the only way to make you understand.”

  It’s true. I didn’t understand. But I heard. At least I thought I did. Maybe I didn’t.

  “I hear you,” I said. “I do. And I’ll find a job. I’m already looking, but I’ll look harder. And the therapy, fine. No problem. Just tell me when and I’ll be there. But don’t leave me. Please. I don’t deserve it.” I dropped to the floor beside her, tried to make her look me in the eyes, her green eyes, always greener when polished with tears. “You promised you’d never leave me,” I told her. “You promised me, no matter what. Remember?” She nodded, weeping now. “Please. Don’t do this. Don’t.”

  But she did it, she walked away, dragging the good luggage down the steps, getting into the good car. I guess she wanted to leave me in style. Then I shut the light and curled into a ball on the bed, cradling my heart as if it were a sick baby. How did I feel? I don’t know what to say. Alone. As if in one moment, she had turned herself into a stranger and me into an exile. But I didn’t cry. Why not? Because the only person in the world I trusted to hold me while I cried was gone.

  4

  THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up blank, expecting her warm, lumpy form beside me, and had to remember all over again. This kept happening, like an emotional amnesia, forgetting and then remembering: she’s gone. Then I started job-hunting like a madman. I felt a desperate need to show up at our first therapy appointment on Friday holding a job like a bouquet. I scoured the Internet and fired off a dozen résumés. I posted my CV on a local job-hunting search engine site. I called the couple of old employers I could remember and let them know I was available, on the odd chance they’d been up all night wondering. Then, when I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I cleaned the house, just in case she came back.

  It was amazing, the mess I’d made. In only twenty-four hours I’d reduced our lovely home to such a state of cluttered, dingy, smelly bachelordom that even I was appalled. Newspapers were everywhere. The sheets were pulled off the mattress. I’d somehow managed to drink out of a dozen glasses and coffee cups and leave them scattered around. I began to clean in a panic, knowing I couldn’t let myself fall so far so fast, especially since under normal circumstances I’m not really that bad of a slob. She was neater, sure—she’s a girl. But I held down my end. I did the cooking and took out the trash. I did laundry regularly and ran the dishwasher when it was full. But I would never do it on my own. When she left, even just for a night, I fell into a shambles, the very same shambles I’d lived in before she came along, the shambles of single straight guyhood. Because the world of straight men without women, frankly, is a sad, brutal place. It’s a place where breakfast is canned peanuts, and dinner is eaten straight from the frying pan, so you don’t have to wash a plate. It’s a place where everyone has one sheet and one towel forever. Nothing matches. We don’t even know what matching means. To get two socks the same shade of black is a miracle. When you’re sick, nobody cares, even your best friends don’t think to make you tea, you just lie there, febrily sweating and seething, and you have to blow your nose into a T-shirt because there are no tissues, ever, and the only toilet paper is napkins you stole from McDonald’s. You don’t want to live there? Of course not. No one does. Not even us. But, like dogs in the pound or enchanted toads, we can’t escape on our own.

  That was where she’d first found me, cast adrift on a salvaged futon in an empty room with a cardboard box as a table, wearing the same clothes I’d been wearing since, well, since the last girlfriend, the one I broke up with when I moved out here to not-write screenplays. Now, as half of a married couple, my hair looked good and my clothes fit. I smelled sweet. Thanks to marriage, I was finally dateable. And we lived in amazing luxury. We had a whole closet full of just towels and linens and extra quilts. We woke up in a sunny house and all our furniture came from the same period. Modern, I think. We’d painted the walls, something that had never crossed my mind before. We owned a vacuum cleaner and had organic stuff in the fridge, and I don’t mean growing in there. We had all kinds of nice things in the bathroom, too, that I’d rub loving
ly on my face and hair and feet. I’d never even considered that my feet, so far away, so lonesome, might deserve to be loved, until she taught me. And I appreciated it, I really did. We all do, believe me, I can speak for the assembly of heterosexual mankind on this. We’re grateful. We know it’s a better life, a more beautiful, sweeter, gentler life. We just can’t help ourselves. Without you we’re brutal, even the best of us, we’re brutal, even if only to ourselves, because to care for yourself, you have to care about yourself, even love yourself a little. And in our land there is no love but you.

  5

  I GOT HIS EMAIL on the fifth day, when I was getting a little desperate. The big therapy session was that afternoon, and I’d been on only two job interviews. They didn’t go well. I wanted to ask, in my follow-up email: Can’t we just forget this ever happened? Please delete. It had taken an enormous amount of effort merely to make myself presentable in the first place. I had to find a clean shirt and unwrinkled pants and do the buttons up right and tuck it in. I had to shave, which was awful. My hands shook from all the coffee, and I accidentally slashed my throat, but the hardest part was facing myself in the mirror. I’d lost weight, burning off my happy husband paunch in a marathon of distress, so I actually looked pretty trim, and my spouse-supervised haircut was top-notch, but there was something terribly wrong with my eyes. I couldn’t blame my interviewers for wanting me gone: these people are trained to give you a firm handshake and a straight look. But when they grasped my clammy, shaky fingers and gazed into my bloody blues, they saw something even I didn’t want to know.

  So as I said, by day five, things were getting rough. I sat up, abruptly, at dawn. I didn’t sleep much during this period, or slept only in snatches, during which I had nightmares that were identical to my waking life: I dreamed that what was happening to me was actually happening, and woke up every hour or so, exhausted.

  First I rose and checked my empty email. Next I made coffee. Then, exhausted already, I took a self-pity break on the couch, face down, nose in the crack between cushions, as if sniffing for lost change. What job did I (or she, really) think I could get? By training and nature, I was equipped to do nothing but lie thusly and think deep thoughts. I blamed my hardworking parents for encouraging me to obtain a useless, outrageously expensive, and still unpaid-for education best suited to a minor nineteenth-century aristocrat. I could read philosophy and discuss paintings. Not that I ever did, but I could, if I had to, in an emergency. I could charm elegant dinner parties with witty patter, if anyone ever invited me to one. I could articulate my misery with great precision. If only I had learned to cut hair, or cook, or fix something! The mailman startled me, and I jumped to my feet as a clutch of bills shot through the slot and splattered onto the floor. Rent. Power. Student loans. How much was left in our joint account anyway? Would Lala continue to pay her share? How much did this therapy cost? What was today’s date, anyway?