Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

That was my magic at work. I had to show Layla that I could succeed on my own, without her help. But something kept me from stopping there. I rubbed it in, like she’d done with her spooky laughter at the winery after I’d let her touch me.

So I gave the columnist what I refused Layla, and laughter didn’t go along with it. We kept at it way past the point where pleasure turned to something raw and unstoppable. And the woman — who looked nothing like Layla — became Layla for me. I wanted a piece of her. A real big piece. I pinned her to that wall of cold glass and kept her there until the smell of her perfume was long gone.

That’s when the fog went wild and tore itself apart.

And then the morning brought the sun.

It was hard work, that picture. I got to know the little starlet, and she had about a million questions for me. The only problem was that she didn’t pay too much attention to my answers.

We wrapped on schedule. Before I could blink, the studio tossed me into a picture about the oil business. I didn’t get the lead, but I was going to be working shoulder to shoulder with some of the biggest names in the business. Believe me, I was nervous about it.

Location shooting was starting right away. I only had a couple days to get myself ready and head down to Texas. Things were moving fast and I was flying pretty high, but I wanted to see Layla before I left. This was the second big gig I’d gotten on my own, and I wanted to let her know it. But there was something else. Something in me wanted to keep her interested, too. I didn’t want to lose her. Maybe I felt like we were even now, like we’d come to a new point in our relationship. A place where I might be able to let her touch me without worrying that she’d take something away. A place where I could touch her, and make her smile, and hear her breath catch in her throat, and not stop there… and go on with the rest of it without wanting anything else from her.

A place where we could meet as equals.

I phoned her.

She said, “I’d love to see you.”

For a gag, I bought one of those rubber shrunken heads with wild red eyes that glowed like embers. It was intended as a peace offering, really, something that would make Layla laugh in a way I wouldn’t mind.

I never did give her that head, though.

Layla didn’t want a peace offering.

She wanted some kind of cheap revenge.

I parked the Spyder in front of her little bungalow and trotted up the steps. Just when I was about to bang on the screen door, a little whimper came from inside.

I hung back from the door, my back against a tangle of bougainvillea that climbed a web of trelliswork screening the front porch. Though the layout of the living room was second nature to me, it was pretty dark in there — all the drapes were closed, and I had trouble making things out. Fortunately, a few candles glowed in the far corners of the room, guttering when caught by the feeble breeze of an oscillating fan.

Layla sat on the couch, naked, not moving at all. A yellow summer dress surrounded her feet as if she’d just slipped out of it, a pool of silk on the hardwood floor. A man sat beside her. He was fully dressed, and every now and then his big shoulders heaved.

I recognized his voice. It was the guy who had directed my first picture. He was busy spinning stories of his long friendship with Layla, hinting that he needed some payback from her. “You know how it is,” he told her. “I’m not the fair-haired boy anymore. Back when I started it was genius -this and prodigy -that. You remember. What a future I had. But now it’s nothing but complaints. Can’t he do anything new? What happened to his spark? His daring? All that high-hopes-gone-for-naught crap.”

Layla laughed.

It was almost as if her laughter was a reward for his wit in the face of doom, but I knew better. She was laughing at me. Me, crouching against a nest of sweet bougainvillea like a cheap voyeur. Me, stiff and straight and breathless as a corpse, honeybees buzzing around my head.

The director moved closer to her — nuzzled her neck, ran eager fingers over her breasts — but she only laughed some more, as though a particularly precocious child were tickling her. It was plain that he didn’t have a damn thing that she wanted. Not anymore. The sly old puppeteer had given everything to Layla long ago. Layla was the director of this little scene, and she was determined to give me a glimpse of my future.

She thought she was that smart.

She thought I was that stupid.

Somehow, I couldn’t believe that she thought so little of me.

I was pissed.

I tied the rubber shrunken head to the rear-view mirror of the director’s Mercedes.

I got in the Spyder and drove all the way to Marfa, Texas.

I ate up the sunshine down there in Texas. Couldn’t get enough of it. I tried to do good work on the picture, and I think I succeeded. For the first time in a long time, I was way past worrying.

The pressure was off, and I was on my own.

It was funny to be there in the middle of the whole thing (and a world away from Layla), not giving a damn one way or another while the rest of them scurried around as if their lives depended on their next move. The reigning big stars wearing big star masks, not even daring to be themselves when the lights went off and the camera lenses were covered. The studio boys downing Pepto, having anxiety attacks over the tiniest screw-ups. Only the union laborers seemed sane, showing up day after day, knowing checks would be waiting at the end of the week and in years to come regardless of rain or hail, sleet or snow.

Weird to see the whole situation so clearly, so suddenly.

A bunch of kids hung around the set. I did rope tricks for the little ones and told dirty jokes to the older kids. One little girl asked me for a lock of my hair, and I traded her for a box of color crayons.

The crayons were a lot of fun. I had a copy of Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon with me, and I highlighted it with the enthusiasm of a demented English major. Passages to do with disability, I shaded green. Disfigurement was blue. Yellow was degradation.

Death was red.

There was a whole lot of red in that book.

The red crayon was nothing but a nub by the time I finished reading. With the last bit of it, I wrote nasty letters to the director of my first picture and the woman who lived in a glass house. I told them that they were both dead and weren’t smart enough to be down.

I sent the Hemingway book to Layla’s favorite starlet, air-mail.

Then I spent a glorious day under the Texas sun, covered in black oil and laughing like a hyena.

The best thing about coming back to California was the smell of the ocean. I sucked it in while I drove to the little starlet’s beach cottage. The Spyder’s lights cut through the evening fog. The salty air burned my lips, which were chapped courtesy of the Texas sun.

The starlet was surprised to see me. At least she pretended to be. We sat in her living room, which was pretty spare except for a hi-fi and a bunch of 45’s. There was only one book in the room, and it lay among the records like a machine gun in a water pistol armory.

“I haven’t had a chance to read it yet,” she said, her eyes searching the sharp stands of beach grass that dotted the dunes outside the room’s large picture window.

The grass leaned with the wind, slicing wisps of fog that haunted the beach. I shot a knowing glance at the fog, and the starlet was smart enough to catch it. “She wants a lot, doesn’t she?” I said, and the girl who liked to ask so many questions nodded, her eyes suddenly wary, as if she could actually see Layla pressing her ear to the window.