These Dreams of You (22 page)

S
he has an affair with a black session keyboardist who has a wife in Atlantic City. She breaks it off after eight months; to her surprise, since she never suspected such inclinations in herself, she has a longer relationship with a young white woman out of college named Kelly who designs album covers for artists that the public hasn't heard of. The covers fill the walls of the little house on the edge of Hancock Park that the women move into together.

Though the break-up takes a couple months, the relationship ends after three and a half years when Jasmine wakes in the middle of the night realizing she wants a child. “We can adopt!” Kelly wails desperately; but Jasmine already feels her womb invaded by the future. Hating herself, pulling away from the house with Kelly sobbing in the rearview mirror, she drives and keeps driving all night, trying to escape the melody of “Tezeta” in her ears until she realizes that the song comes from the vapor within her. “Are you a ghost?” the future mother cries out loud to the daughter who haunts her before she's conceived.

J
asmine has been working for the record company four years when she's assigned its biggest client. “See what you can do with him,” says the executive across the desk from her, in an office overlooking Highland Avenue, “this calls for personal attention.”

“What do you mean personal attention?” Jasmine says suspiciously.

“At the rate he's going, he'll be dead within the year.”

“Drugs.”

“Kilos.”

“He's a Nazi,” she says.

“Those,” sighs the executive, “were just silly things he said to an interviewer.”

“Sieg heil from the back of a car at Victoria Station?”

“He loves black music!” the executive exclaims, and Jasmine stares at him stonily. “You've got to learn not to take these things personally.”

“I once learned from someone,” says Jasmine, “to take everything personally.”

“Was he in music?”

“He ran for president. Does our rock and roll spaceman from Mars or Nuremberg or wherever it is this month still wear dresses?”

“That was one album jacket five years ago.” Jasmine tries to remember if Kelly designed it. “He'll be back in town in the next couple days and has rented a house over off Doheny. Why don't you drive out there? Talk to Anna, his personal-assistant/backup-singer/girlfriend.”

“So he does fancy girls then.”

“He's always liked girls. Don't tell anybody, at least not yet. Our marketing on him is just entering its heterosexual phase.”

“He's in his Nazi phase now,” nods Jasmine.

I
n the driveway of the house, she stops the car aghast. The abode is Southern Californian Egyptian—white pyramid with gas jets at the top spouting fire, a flaming sarcophagus. When she rings the doorbell, the woman who answers coolly appraises Jasmine half a minute before letting her in.

“Why did they send you?” asks Anna, lit joint between her fingers as the two black women make their way down the hall. She considers her manners long and hard before offering it. “No, thanks,” says Jasmine. “I think they thought I might help.”

“I'm sure they did,” the other woman says, “but let me be fucking direct. His pasty white English ass likes the sisters. There was one before me and may be one after but it sure as shit isn't going to be you.”

“That's not what I'm here for.”

“Groovy, but wake up.
That's
why they sent you.”

“The last thing they want is more drama. They're worried about him.”

A
nna softens a bit. “Can't say he's not worrisome.” She takes a chair and indicates the sofa across from her. “Coke,” she says, “amphetamines.
Lots
of coke. More coke than I've seen a single human being suck up. Problem is he still does function, still gets it done. I know that's what they all say but in his case it happens to be so. Five albums in two years? And the last two sold best of all. It'd be better for him if they hadn't. Course I know you folks just want to squeeze another out of him before it's too late.”

“They don't want to squeeze another,” says Jasmine, “they want to squeeze another five. If they cared only about another they'd be less worried about trying to save him and more worried about getting him into the studio every available moment while they have the chance.”

Anna leans forward as if divulging a secret. “
He's losing his mind.
You hear what I'm saying? Down that hallway,” Anna points back to where the women came in, “behind that door is some extremely strange shit—black magic, voodoo, old nefertiti wah-wah,” indicating the house with the sweep of her hand.

“I'm aware,” says Jasmine, “that I'm house-mothering a Nazi.”

Anna laughs. “I know—and he's with me? But the man,” she says with some weariness, “is not a Nazi. He's not into the politics, he's into the
weirdness
. Maybe that's no better but when he's got it together, he's smarter than any musician I've known. Reads all the time, always onto whatever's coming next before anybody else—and someday if he hasn't killed himself he's going to look back on the Nazi nonsense and think, What the fuck? In the meantime he's coming undone. In hotel rooms he sees people fall from the sky. In the backseat of the car he hears kids' voices crying from the trunk. Swears up and down bodies are buried in the walls of whatever room he's in.”

“When is the tour over?”

“Tonight's the last night. He's in . . . Denver? How he's managed to pull it off this long nobody can figure. Gets back day after tomorrow.”

“Mind if I go meet his flight?”

“Flight?” Anna laughs again. “My dear, Mister Twenty-First Century travels by good old fashioned train.”

T
wo nights later at Union Station, Jasmine waits at the end of the long amber tunnel beneath the tracks that funnel from the trains to the lobby. Disgorged passengers flood the exits. Only when everyone else is gone do two men appear, one small and wiry, cropped dark hair with a cap, the other emaciated in a black overcoat. The ends of his flaming crimson hair stick out from under a wide-brimmed black fedora; the last time Jasmine felt a man's handshake so weak, he changed her life. At first he calls her Anna, then stops with a slight start. “You're not Anna,” he mutters.

“Anna's at home,” she answers.

“Home?” he says, perplexed.

“The house. I'm Jasmine.”

“From the record company?” and then, “This is Jim,” introducing the other man. “Charmed,” says Jim, kissing her hand, not exactly elegant but courtly. On the way back to Doheny the singer with the red hair announces sweepingly that Jim is “the greatest rock and roll singer in the world,” but the only Jim that Jasmine has heard of flashed his willy at a concert years ago and is now dead. “Sings back-up,” Anna snorts dismissively at the house after the two travelers have collapsed, one in the mysterious backroom and the other on the same couch where Jasmine sat a couple of days before. “I seem to remember that was
my
job before I started sleeping with the star. Jim made a couple of albums with his own band a few years back—lunatics . . . I won't even go into the fucked up shit that man did on stage. His raggedy junkie ass,” she confirms, “is crazier than the other one,” nodding at the room down the hall. “Was locked up in a mental ward over at UCLA before we sprang him.”

“You,” Jim announces from the couch without twitching a finger, startling Jasmine who thought he was unconscious, “didn't spring anyone.
He
did.”

W
hen Jasmine returns to the house the next morning, the front door is open. No one answers when she rings the bell. She walks into the house and down the hall, bracing for what she might find, which is Jim sitting in the chair wearing no shirt but owl-rimmed glasses, across from the couch where he passed out the night before. He drinks hot tea and is buried in the
Wall Street Journal
.

Five televisions are on in the room, three of them on the same channel, all with the sound down. Jasmine never noticed the TVs before and now that she looks closer she sees there are two more, turned off. She's trying to compute the incongruity of this not to mention the
Wall Street Journal
when—having in no other way acknowledged her entrance—Jim says from behind the newspaper, “Little doll with gray eyes. What it is.” The only other person who's ever commented on her eyes was Kelly. “Primordial,” she called them, “from the beginning of time.”

“Everything all right, then?” she says.

“Anna left,” now peering at Jasmine for a moment around the edge of Dow Jones before disappearing back.

“Left? You mean left left?”

“Yes she did.”

Jasmine pokes her head into other rooms. “Why?”

“You'll have to discuss that with her or, more likely, him. I believe,” Jim says, “they had a falling out.” He adds, “The Communists won an election in Italy.”

“They had a falling out because the Communists won an election in Italy?” Jim looks at her around the newspaper again to see if she's kidding. “Shots weren't fired?” she says. “Knives drawn?”

“Oh, worse,” Jim answers, “
words were spoken
. Everyone's still alive, though, if that's what you mean—or
she
was, anyway, last I saw her. Being the shiny red cockroach of rock and roll who will survive atomic meltdown, he is as well, I assume.”

Jasmine walks down the long hallway to the room in back and knocks on the door. “Hello?” Pressing her ear to the door she can hear music playing, and knocks again more assertively. “Are you all right in there?” The song she heard before begins playing again. “Look here,” she says, “I'm going to have to ring the police if you don't answer—”

The door opens abruptly. He wears a thin burgundy robe undone at the waist that he ties now; in the dim hall he shields his eyes as if from some blinding light, though she can barely see in front of her. “Oh,” he mutters. He pulls open the door.

“Sorry to bother, just want to make sure you're all right then . . . Mister—”

“No, no, not
Mister
Anything,” and he has to muster up a tone of insistence, “come in.” There's the scent of smoked Gitanes, and on the drawn window blinds that allow only a brown light, pentagrams have been scrawled. One is drawn on the floor as well. A row of small stubby candles burn on the shelf perilously near books that age has rendered immediately flammable; a couple of other candles burn on the floor. A guitar resting against the wall doesn't appear to have been moved in a while, and there's a small synthesizer keyboard. The music comes from a turntable on a wooden chest beneath the windows, hooked up to two small speakers, the cover to one of which has a gouge administered by something sharp. He says, “Right. Jasmine,” demonstrating a memory more acute than she would have predicted.

“Where's Anna?” she asks.

“Anna has left.”

“Why?”

“Well, Jasmine,” he almost drawls, “you seem very pleasant but I'm not sure that's your business, is it?”

“Rather it is and rather it isn't. Your management has asked—”

“Yes, I just fired them,” and he looks at a dusty telephone that shows no sign of having been disturbed. She can't be certain if he's high or exhausted; everything seems to take an effort. “Before you came. I need you to work for me now.”

It's hard to tell whether he's thought of this on the spur of the moment or it's something he's been considering more than five minutes. “I shall pay you better than whatever they—”

“You fired them?” she says. “What for? And don't tell me it's not my business.”

“They were . . . ” He shakes his head and looks at the phone with dread. He says, “
People
. . . have been ringing me up . . . I don't know how they found me here . . . ”

“The management?”

“Ringing me up . . . no, not the management, uh . . . need to put a stop to it. Need to stop with . . . ” he waves his arm at the pentagrams on the floor and blinds, “ . . . all this. It's . . . stirring up what should be left unstirred and now they're ringing . . . excuse me,” and at the turntable he puts the stylus back at the beginning of the record he's been playing. The song begins again. He looks up from the chair. “What were we—”

“You fired—”

“Yes. Well, they really weren't handling my affairs properly, were they? I believe that they're stealing my money. It's happened before, you know. It's my fault, really . . . I signed the contract, knew I shouldn't . . . ”

“That's why Anna left?”

“Anna . . . no, Anna and I . . . that's not why. This is
fantastic
,” he says, leaning toward the record that's playing, “I'm thinking of covering this song,” and now there's a spark of something in his speech, “it's from an old . . . what was his name . . . played Zorba the Greek, and Gauguin. Anthony . . .” He's wracking his brain. “God I hate it that I can't remember anything. Anyway it's from a movie with him and . . . Anna Magnani perhaps? Of course I can never do it like Nina Simone, I wouldn't bother trying. That's about as perfect a vocal as anyone is going to sing—no affectation, no posturing, not a false moment. Perhaps I'll do it like, you know . . . Neu! or one of the German bands . . . are you familiar with the German bands?”

“No.”

“Most Yanks aren't. Bloody stupid. Not you, of course, but then you're a homegirl, aren't you,” he smiles.

“London.”

“There you go . . . but that's why I need you, you see? There they are, all the reasons . . . for your very, very, very,
very
special combination of, of, of, of, of, of, of . . .
attributes
. . . ”

“I'm certain I don't know what combination that might be,” says Jasmine. “What happened with you and Anna has nothing to do with me, does it?”

He looks at her completely mystified. “Why would it have anything to do with you?” He thinks. “Didn't you and I just meet?” as though the possibility occurs to him, with some horror, that maybe they've known each other for years and he doesn't remember. “I mean . . . ” slightly alarmed, “ . . . didn't we?”

“Yesterday.”

“That's what I thought. At the train station, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

He's relieved. “Yes.” Then, “So what do you say? I'm leaving Los Angeles, of course.”

“You are?”

“Oh yes. Didn't I say?”

“No.”

“That was part of it with Anna.”

“Where are you going?”

“I'm leaving this very, very vile place full of very, very vile people,” he says. “Vile. Place. Full of. Very. Vile. People.”

“Where are you going?”

“If I stay one more moment, I'll be very vile too. Perhaps,” his voice falls to a hush, “I already am.”

In the same hush he says, “I'm holding onto reality by a thread, really. Don't you know? And, and, and sometimes, sometimes I think I'm getting through, I think I'm getting things done, I think the work is happening . . . and then,” he says, “then I realize, you know,
hours
have gone by, hours and hours and hours, and I've written, like, three or four or five bars of a melody and that's all. It's all I've done. It feels like I've written an entire song in minutes, when I've taken
days
to write the fragment of a
single verse
, and then I've written the fragment backwards and from the inside out and upside down. Do you know who I met here?”

“Are you going to answer my question?” she says.

“I
am
answering your question. Wait a minute. What question?”

“Where are you going?”

“Yes, that one. I
am
answering. Don't get tough with me, young lady,” he says, half mocking, “I run things around here.” He laughs. “Do you know who I met?” He picks the needle up from the record and begins playing it again. “Can't get enough of this bloody song,” he mutters. “It was in a movie—perhaps not Nina's version, I'm not sure. Who was in that movie . . . ?”

“Who did you meet, then?” trying to keep him on any track at all.

“I said that, didn't I. About the movie. Sophia Loren. No, Anna Magnani.”

“You met Anna Magnani?”

“No.” Worried. “Did I?”

“Someone vile, you said.”

“Not vile—
very
vile. Anthony
Quinn
. Mid-Fifties. No, not everyone here is very vile. Not every single last someone. Christopher Isherwood. Do you know who he is?”

“A writer?”

“My God! Another literate person in the music business, besides Jim and myself, that is.”

“Can't say I know his work, mind.”

“That's three literate people in the music business
and we're all in the same house
. An aeroplane crashes into this house and the literacy level of Los Angeles plummets . . . ” He shakes his head, the math eludes him. “ . . . plummets . . . three hundred percent. By the way, I see that look on your face. Don't discount Jim,” he nods toward the living room from where Jasmine came, “when he's not being his iguanan self onstage, he's better read than the two of us put together. Well, not me.”

“He was deep in the
Wall Street Journal
when I came in.”

“There you are,” he nods.

“Are you two . . . ?”

For a moment he's waiting for her to finish the sentence, then, “What? Oh. No! No, we're just trying to keep each other out of trouble. When we're not getting each other in trouble. And he's a huge talent. Huge influence on me, so if I can, uh, help . . . ” He shrugs.

“I've never heard of him.”

“Well,” he shrugs again. “Jim is his proper name, of course.”

“Are you going to tell me, then, where you're going? When you leave L.A.?”

“I
was
telling you. Christopher Isherwood used to live in Berlin. Back before the war. Wrote some very famous stories.”

“Is he a Nazi too?”