Dan Wakefield - Home Free

Gene was glad he wasn’t in town when the rain came, he figured it would just be depressing there but out by the beach it was beautiful as well as terrible, it was raw and elemental, real and cleansing. He walked in it, soaked in it, wandered in it, held up his face to it, took off his shoes and socks and waded in it, rolled up his pants and walked along the beach in it, slept through it, woke to it, felt he was in it and wanted to be, wanted to feel rained on rained out drenched clean of the crud in and on him.

But not even the great torrential rain dispelled the horrible blood-dripping seal. It would come before him in a flash, while drinking beer or walking down the street and he would stop and squeeze his eyes shut, holding his breath, clenching his fists, trying to will it away and it would go then leaving him exhausted, spent, but he knew it was not gone for good it could flash back anytime and would. And he couldn’t talk about it. Who could you tell you were frightened by a seal? Maybe someone else who’d had a bad acid trip, maybe Uncle Phil, but the hitch was talking about it brought it back and so it was best to try to keep it at bay, do battle with it each time, try as well as you could to forget till it wouldn’t let you.

One of the first days after the rain stopped, leaving the whole place bright and dripping, fresh and new, Belle dropped by the A&W. She wanted to invite Gene to come and have dinner with her and Barnes. She picked him up after work, seeming unnaturally subdued. Even the trip into town in her red Triumph was prosaic, lacking the customary spirit of adventure and sense of narrowly escaping danger by bizarre maneuvers and a benevolent fate. When they got to her place she pulled up next to the curb and said, “Let’s take a walk.”

“It’s nice out,” she said, as if in explanation. But it usually was.

“See these houses?” she said.

“Yes?”

They were the small, one-story frame or brick or stucco houses that lined so many of the streets in this area of Hollywood, between Santa Monica and Hollywood boulevards, between La Cienega and Doheny. Quiet little streets with quiet little houses, none of them grand or opulent, their charm of a modest kind, coming from trim lawns and trellises, well-tended shrubs and flower-bordered porches.

“Don’t you think they’re wonderful?”

“Well, yes. I like them a lot.”

Belle giggled.

“See that one?”

It was one of the frame ones with a pointed roof, a front porch with trellises, the sort of house you could find in any quiet street in the Midwest, like Iowa City.

“See, the people who built these came from Ohio and places like that, and they thought you always had to have those pointed roofs because of the snow, and so when they came to live here they built them the same way even though they didn’t have to. Anyway I think it’s kind of nice, all these people from those places like Ohio coming out here and building their little houses because they knew it was better out here.”

She pronounced the word “Ohio” as if it were something outlandish, as if it were a wonder such a place as that even existed.

“I dunno,” Gene said, “I kind of like the Spanish-style jobs. The stucco ones with the red tile roofs.”

“Oh, they’re wonderful, too ,” Belle said. “I sort of prefer the little wooden Ohio ones but all the ones on these streets around here are wonderful. I’d love to live in almost any of them.”

Gene understood now.

“But Barnes wouldn’t,” he said.

Belle sighed and put her fists on her hips.

“That fool . See, he says he would like to live in one of those houses but then he gets all these excuses.”

“Like what?”

“Well, the stupidest one of all is, he says he wants to wait to see if his movie gets made and then he could actually buy a house.”

“You don’t think the movie’ll happen?”

“I don’t know. All I know is he shouldn’t count on it happening. I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve seen all these people come out here, writers and actors and people who want to direct, and they believe what everyone tells them and then they’re heartbroken. I said to Barnes with my utmost sincerity, I said, ‘Please,’ I said, ‘Don’t believe in Hollywood!’ I meant the movie part, of course, not the wonderful little streets and houses.”

They had strolled back to Belle’s, and sat down on the little slope of lawn in front of the big house she lived behind. It was dusk, quiet, you could see the Hollywood Hills in the distance, green and blue, unexpected, too steep to be all built up, leaving lots of wild unsettled space, a frontier feeling. He understood Belle’s loving it here.

“Maybe Barnes is afraid,” he said.

“Well, he shouldn’t be afraid. He’s too old for that.”

“In Boston he never took his books out of the boxes.”

“What boxes?”

“You know, cardboard boxes he had packed his books in when he moved there. He was afraid if he put the books up on shelves he’d be there permanent.”

“Well, I can understand feeling that way in Boston . It’s too cold there. But now he should want to be permanent.”

“Sounds like a good deal to me, anyway.”

“Well, you should tell him that. It’s for his own good.”

Gene said he’d try.

At dinner Barnes seemed grumpy, and Belle banged the dishes and silverware around a lot. Afterward they sat around smoking grass and listening to Finian’s Rainbow . Gene said he ought to be heading back and Belle said why didn’t he spend the night in Barnes’s room at the Marmont, then she’d drive him out to Venice in the morning when she went to her studio.

“Besides,” she said, “somebody might as well get some money’s worth out of that expensive room nobody sleeps in.”

Barnes pretended not to hear.

Belle suggested Barnes walk over to the Marmont with Gene while she cleaned up the dinner.

Barnes stopped at a liquor store on Sunset and bought a bottle of Courvoisier.

“We’ll have a nightcap,” he said.

The nightcap turned out to be the whole bottle. Barnes killed most of it.

“How come you keep it, man?” Gene said. “The room here?”

“I like it. It’s great to work in.”

“Isn’t it kind of steep, just for that?”

“Then if anything happened, I’d still have my own place.”

“If what happened?”

“If me and Belle split.”

“You want to?”

“No.”

“Does she?”

“She wants a little house. For us to live in together.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“How do you get out of it?”

“Of the house?”

“Of the whole thing.”

“Somebody leaves.”

“Yeh, but then it’s a mess. It hurts more then. Everybody. Besides, it makes me nervous. Living in houses. You can’t just up and walk out of a house. It’s more of a permanent type thing. Here, I could leave any day, any time of night or day. Or I can stay. I like knowing that. It’s the way things are. Things change. People move on. Nothing stays the same. That’s what life is.”

“A hotel.”

“Yeh. So you might as well stay in one. Isn’t that how it is?”

“I guess,” Gene said.

He was sorry though. About Belle. And Barnes. About himself. About the way it all was.

The Life Hotel.

Gene was glad to get back to Venice. Not just to get away from Barnes and Belle’s troubles. He felt at ease there, like he blended in. It was funny. He wouldn’t have felt that way at all in Marina del Rey or Santa Monica, the communities bordering Venice to the north and south. If you just walked south across Washington Street you were in Marina del Rey, a whole other scene, streets with cutesy nautical names like Buccaneer and Outrigger, fancy expensive new houses that Gene thought of as phony Spanish-modern with lots of glass, swinging singles apartment settlements for thirty-five-year-olds trying to live a perpetual college life of beer blasts and water polo, sleek expensive restaurants serving lobster and candlelight. People said Marina del Rey was the future, the affluent leisure life of the smiling upward mobile, and to Gene the idea was so awful he figured it might be true.