Robert Stone - Fun With Problems

I felt I had to do this. I had made a jocular reference to this scheme in the presence of Ace, and Lucy and Ace called me on it. While I was trying to prod the powers above to spring and assign a photographer, the two of them went and did it. Would Lucy descend into the ponderosa-scented void after her paramour? A thing never in question. It was an eminence she'd sought lifelong, a Fuji-disposable Lover's Leap. They survived.

All my life I have regretted not being there. For one thing, regarding Mac lure, I held my manhood cheap. He had foxed me and bonded with her in a way that I, who had made something of a career out of witnessing Lucy's beau gestes, would never experience. She hurt me bad.

Suffering is illuminating, as they say, and in my pain I almost learned something about myself. I repressed the insight. I was not ready, then, to yield to it.

"I wanted it to be you," Lucy said, like a deflowered prom queen apologizing to the high school athlete whose lettered jersey she had worn and dishonored.

"I wanted it to be me too," I said. "Why did you go and do it?"

"I was afraid I wouldn't do it if we waited."

I shouted at her, something I very rarely did.

"You'd have done it with me! You goddamn well would have!"

Of course this exchange was as juvenile as the rest of the incident, but it stirred the unconsidered home truth I had been resisting. This kind of juvenility goes deep, and you can also approach self-awareness after acting childishly.

Still, I wasn't up to facing it. For days and days I went to sleep stoned, half drunk, whispering: What was it like, Lucy? I meant the leap. I very nearly went bungee jumping by myself, but it seemed a sterile exercise.

I was bitter. I had excuses to avoid her and I used them all. She called me at the office and in Laguna, but I was tired of it. The next thing I knew I had quit my job and gone over to England to find Jennifer.

Jen had got a Green Book and was teaching dance with some friends in Chester. When we saw each other I knew it was on again. I had to peel her loose from some painter from over the border. Another fucking Welsh boyfriend!

I took her home to Dallas and met the high-toned folks and married her in the high-toned Episcopal equivalent of a nuptial Mass, dressed up like a character out of Oscar Wilde. She conscientiously wore red, though I pointed out that neither of us had been married before. We moved to Laguna and, lovely and smart as she was, Jen got herself a tenure-track job in dance at UC San Diego. I watched her work, and she was peppy and the good-cop bad-cop kind of teacher, and you never saw a prettier backside in a leotard. We moved to Encinitas.

My bride all but supported me while I worked on a few scripts. She had loans from her parents and the UC salary. I don't know exactly what had changed in the movie business; I hadn't noticed anything good. However, I optioned two scripts right away.

One day I was coming out of the HBO offices on Olympic when I ran into Asa Maclure. The sight of him froze my heart. In those years you knew what the way he looked meant. He was altogether too thin for his big frame; his cool drape sagged around him. The worst of it was his voice, always rich, Shakespearean, his preacher father's voice. It had become a rasp. He sounded old and he looked sad and wise, a demeanor that he used to assume in jest. I hoped he wouldn't mention the bungee jump, but he did. Plainly it meant a lot to him. From a different perspective, it did to me too. We traded a few marginally insincere laughs about how absurd the whole thing had been. He looked so doomed I couldn't begrudge him the high they must have had. I didn't ask him how he was.

A couple of weeks later I got a call from Lucy, and she wanted to see me. She was still in Silver Lake. I lied to Jennifer when I drove up to visit Lucy. Jen had not asked where I was going, but I volunteered false information. I felt profoundly unfaithful, though I realized that there was not much likelihood of my sleeping with Lucy. No possibility at all, from my point of view. So I felt unfaithful to her too.

Lucy, in Silver Lake, seemed at once agitated and exhausted.

"Ace said he saw you," she told me when we were seated on the patio dead Heathcliff had demolished.

Passing through her living room I noticed that the house was in a squalid state. The floors were littered with plastic flowers and charred metal cylinders. There were roaches on the floor and in the ashtrays, along with beer cans and other post-party knickknacks. Lucy had been running with a new set of friends. I imagined these people as a kind of simian troop, although I never got it clear who exactly they were and how Lucy had been impressed into being their hostess. I did know that it had somehow to do with supply and demand.

I had been out of town and was not familiar with freebasing. I can't be sure that Asa turned her on to it. Basing was the rage then in extremist circles like his. She talked about it with a rapturous smile. I had been around long enough to remember when street drugs hit the industry big-time, and I remembered that smile from the days when each new advance in narcosis had been acclaimed as somebody's personal Fourth of July. A life-changing event. To cool the rock's edges Lucy had taken to easing down behind a few upscale pharmaceuticals: 'ludes, opiate pills. Unfortunately for all of us, genuine Quaaludes were disappearing, even south of the border. This left the opiates, which were still dispensed with relative liberality. While I watched, Lucy cooked up the brew in her kitchen as she had been instructed. She told me she had always liked to cook, though this was a side of her I'd never seen.

Cooking base, we ancients of art will recall, involved a number of tools. 7-Elevens then sold single artificial flowers in test-tube-like containers, so that crack scenes were sometimes adorned with sad, false blossoms. Lucy mixed quite a few gram baggies with baking soda and heated them in a cunning little Oriental pot. The devil of details was in the mix, which Lucy approached with brisk confidence. Alarmingly, the coke turned into viscous liquid. People who have put in time in really crappy motels may recall finding burned pieces of coat hanger on the floor of the closets or wardrobes. Lucy had one, and she used it to fish the brew out so it could cool and congeal. It was then that the stem came into play, and a plastic baby bottle, and a burned wad of Chore Boy. On the business end of the stem, appropriately enough, was the bottle's nipple, which the adept lipped like a grouper on brain coral.

We did it and at first it reminded me of how, when I was a child, my mother would have me inhale pine needle oil to cure a chest cold. The effect of freebasing was different, although if someone had told me it cured colds I wouldn't have argued. It was quite blissful for a time and we were impelled toward animated chatter. I commenced to instruct Lucy on the joys of marriage, for which I was then an enthusiast. She soared with me; her eyes flashed. In this state she was always something to see.

"I'm so happy for you. No, I'm really not. Yes I am."

We smoked for an hour or more. As she plied the hanger end to scrape residue from the filter and stem, she told me about her career prospects, which seemed stellar. She had been cast for what seemed a good part in a film by a notoriously eccentric but gifted director who had assembled a kind of repertory company for his pictures. Some of these made money, some tanked, but all of them got some respect. For Lucy, this job was a good thing. And not only was there the film part. As schedules permitted, she was going to do Elena in Uncle Vanya at a prestigious neighborhood playhouse. I rejoiced for her. As I was leaving, supremely confident and looking forward to the drive, I kissed her. Her response seemed less sensual than emotional. I was hurt, although I had no intention of suggesting anything beyond our embrace. Sometimes you just don't know what you want.