Steve Erickson - Zeroville

140.

Zazi comes to live in Vikar’s house. She takes the spare bedroom on the second level; her window faces the side of the hill, so there’s not much of a view. In the mornings, Vikar cooks Zazi the Basque Breakfast that he used to eat in the middle of the night in Madrid, eggs and potatoes and chopped tomatoes out of a skillet. The first night she says to him, “Does this mean you’re not going to get to make your movie?” and Vikar, staring out at the city and at his reflection in the windows, turning his head from side to side and from profile to profile, says, “I don’t know how to direct a movie anyway. I did once before, in Spain, and it didn’t look so much like Buñuel.”

139.

Vikar wonders what he’ll do if the police come to try and take Zazi away. But as Zazi said, the police don’t come: If I had been singing when I hit him, they would have come. I would have sung the song from the radio about Montgomery Clift.

138.

Zazi is gone the next day when Vikar rises, like the time she slept in his suite at the Sherry-Netherland and all that was left in the morning was a blanket draped over the end of the couch. She returns that afternoon and is putting a Marianne Faithfull poster up in her bedroom when Vikar, standing in the doorway, says, “Did he do anything to you?” The guitar case that Zazi brought with her to the Fine Arts to see A Place in the Sun stands upright in the corner.

She finishes with the poster and steps back to survey the result. “Is it O.K. if I put up a poster or two?”

“You can put up what you want.”

“No, he didn’t do anything to me,” she says, “but I’m old enough to know the look in guys’ eyes.” She chews her lip for a moment. “I’m still a virgin,” she says.

“So am I,” says Vikar.

137.

Vikar goes to see a mid-sixties movie about an ex-race-car driver who teaches blind children until two hit men come to kill him. The ex-race-car driver/teacher is played by the director who told Vikar the story about hating A Place in the Sun and seeing it eight times in a row before realizing he loved it. In this film, the hit men are sent by a dark crime lord who slaps around his girlfriend; when Vikar leaves the theater, darkness has fallen and he wanders across the street into a paperback store where a television shows the same dark crime lord in another movie — until Vikar realizes it’s not a movie but the news, and that the crime lord has been elected President of the United States.

Zazi comes and goes at all hours. She receives strange telephone calls, and sometimes strange cars pick her up at the house. Vikar has no idea how he’s supposed to take care of her; he doesn’t know what to ask or insist upon. “Shouldn’t you go to school?” he says to her one afternoon after she’s been out all night. Sitting in the kitchen eating a tuna sandwich, she nods slowly. “I don’t,” she says, even though she’s nodding, “want to go to school.” She says, “I’m learning more from being in a band.”

“How long have you been in a band?”

“About eight months. I’m the weak link — the others have all played awhile. The Starwood gave us the small room one night last week and Rhino may let us play their store some afternoon.” She says, “It’s your fault. I never would have seen Lora Logic and Poly Styrene at CBGB’s if you hadn’t taken Mom there.”

He says, “I promised her I would take care of you.”

She stops chewing the sandwich. “What?”

“I promised your mother I—”

“When?”

Vikar thinks. “Five or six weeks ago.”

“Five or six weeks ago?” She says, “You saw Mom five or six weeks ago? When were you going to mention this?”

“I’m mentioning it now.”

“A little late maybe?”

He considers this. “I don’t believe so.”

With deliberation, almost methodically, Zazi throws the plate and the tuna sandwich at the kitchen wall. Just missing the cork bulletin board and the phone — where the plate breaks into pieces and leaves the wall mottled with tuna — she stalks from the house.

136.

She returns a few hours later and finds him down in the film library on the bottom level of the house. “Sorry,” she says. “You let me come live here and I’m acting like a teenager.”

“You are a teenager,” says Vikar.

“I just didn’t know you had been seeing Mom.”

“I wasn’t seeing her. It was at a movie. She came over afterward and said take care of you.”

“Just like that?”

“Yes.”

“Like she knew, huh?”

“Yes.”

“She said to take care of me.”

“Take care of my girl if something happens, she said.”

For a moment Zazi doesn’t move, gazing at her feet. When Vikar steps toward her, she raises one hand and he stops; for a while the two don’t speak. Finally she says, “So let’s go to another movie sometime.”

135.

Vikar doesn’t really want to go with Zazi to the movies again, but one night the following week they meet at the Nuart in West Los Angeles. Afterward, as they’re walking to the bus down Santa Monica Boulevard beneath the overpass of the 405, with the roar of the freeway above them, he says, “It’s all right if you didn’t like it.”

“Actually I liked it a lot,” she says, “except one thing. I really liked the main guy, the one who runs the bar … that Bogart guy, right?”

“Yes.”

“And actually the whole cast was really great and it was funny in places, some good lines that I’ve heard before … did all those lines come from other places, or did they come from this movie first?”

“They came from this one first.”

“I didn’t get the political stuff. All the stuff about the good French and bad French. But it was all pretty cool — except for this one thing.”

“What?”

“‘Someday you’ll understand that.’”

“What?”

“He says, ‘Someday you’ll understand that.’ There at the end, when the Bogart guy is telling her why she can’t stay with him, he gives this big speech about how their problems aren’t worth beans and they have to do what’s right and her place is with her husband because he’s fighting the Nazis and it’s important — and then he says, ‘Someday you’ll understand that’ … and that was kind of infuriating, if you want to know the truth. Because if you want to know the truth, she’s the one who’s understood it all along. It’s why she left him to begin with, why she’s spent the whole movie trying to explain it to him, trying to get him to understand — and now he’s telling her ? It’s bullshit, it comes off as, what’s the word? sanctimonious, and Bogart, he seems a lot of things, he feels sorry for himself a lot and he’s bitter … but sanctimonious? That didn’t seem like him. He doesn’t seem like a guy who puts up with that kind of bullshit. So I just don’t think he would have said that. He would have said, ‘Finally I understand.’ Or something like that.”

“It’s one line,” Vikar says.

“But it’s an important line. In a way, the whole movie comes down to that line.”

134.

There’s a contradiction between the way things happen like a movie yet don’t feel like a movie. The things in life that are like movies have profiles as well, the profile of how they happen and the profile of how they feel. When the stranger emerges from the shadows of the 405 with the gun, Zazi lets out a small scream; out of fear for the girl, Vikar resists the inclination to reach over and gouge out the stranger’s eyes behind the stocking over his head. It’s not clear at first whether this is a burglary or an act of random violence.