What her hand needs now is someone to hold it. Nola needs her boyfriend, and in particular the part of him that does Warm’n’Sensitive. But then by coming home when she’s not expected, when she’s too upset to bother with the garage, she winds up first having to deal with some asshole who, it turns out after a minute or two, calls himself Laverne.
She discovers the guy with his hands all over her G-lord, the two young men coiled together giggling and whispering at one end of the futon, naked except for the newcomer’s disgusting eye shadow. An oily powder-blue like you’d see on some freak out of Satyricon, one of those mulattos Fellini always threw in somewhere (Laverne’s dark, a caramel topping over G’s Ivy League cream)—the lover’s eye shadow stings the sharpest, a finicky veil draped over something just the opposite, over clutching and grinding absolute in its blunt rapacity. And Nola too feels like just the opposite, fumbling and confused, while these two were dead certain in their blood rush. That’s what bothers her worst, the paint that fails to mask, that in fact highlights the true and ineradicable. It’s far more disturbing than the final wave goodbye that Laverne gives his still-distended cock. The guy flips his russet meat first at his lunchtime trick and then at the so-called girlfriend, before he finishes pulling his pants back on (shorts, since G and Swee live a long way from those San Pedro breezes).
And after Laverne trots away, for minutes on end, Magnolia can hardly hear the things said by the man who remains. She can’t tell the apologies from the rationalizations, something about something bound to happen sooner or later. Something about a conversation on their first date and the homoerotic subtext in Jerome Kern. She doesn’t realize he’s poured her a shot of Absolut Citron, chilled and neat, till she raises it to her lips. Maybe she tastes some Cointreau in there as well, a very civilized trank, and meanwhile he keeps at it, her well-spoken Gaylord, entirely presentable though naked above his unbelted ducks. God, he must’ve made the boys’ mouths water. He seems to be arguing that it’s better this way.
Nola, don’t you see? They weren’t working for the Peace Corps here. They were going for the mega-dollars and the metrosexual freedoms, and the sooner he and she came to an understanding, the better. Their relationship was a benefit to them both, certainly. Himself, in all of Hollywood he had no better pal than Sweet Magnolia, and nothing on the resume so useful as a girlfriend, either—an actor couldn’t risk coming out before he got his card. But the two of them alone could hardly be expected to satisfy all their shadow selves. The last thing a pair of players needed were delusions about… about some totalizing peak experience…
The G has more to say, more wool to pull over the now-absent eyes of Laverne. Those painted yet candid eyes. Finally, though, with a whistling sigh and a silencing finger, the Lady gulps her biggest shot of courage yet and tells him there’s something she’s got to tell him.
And whatever he is to her now, a boyfriend or who knows, he proves in fact an excellent listener—well he’d better, hadn’t he?—settling with one knee over the other at the same end of the futon at which she’d discovered him when she stumbled in. Gaylord inserts a thoughtful hmm now and again, always in the right place, and he makes a neat connection to classical mythology, the manifestations of Zeus or Apollo. When she takes a break from storytelling he’s there with the reassurances, all therapeutic as he reminds her that there’s nothing crazy about visualization. Nothing nutso. Anyone with a goal needs to picture it first, to establish its dimensions, before they plunge into the welter…
Oh, Gaylord, a hothouse flower so willing to share the warm spot. Never mind that he carried on with the same equanimity as half an hour earlier, when he’d been suggesting, between them, “a more open arrangement.” Nola can hear that, she can see right through the man, yet nevertheless she finds herself nodding along when he says they’ve got to try it again. They’ve got to see if Miss Magnolia can do it again, the bookstore trick. If she could cast her shadows a hundred feet high, cast the spells she claimed she could, just think of what it would mean for the career. Just think of the elephant dollars, breaking into a stampede. G-Lord tucks right into it, as easily as he tucks in his J. Crew top. The Lady Swee has got to give it another try, and this time she’s got to have a—a friend—there with his digital video.
She’s nodding, yielding to the undertow. He and she come to understand without a word spoken about it that now they’ve got to turn on the news, the early show, the local. Our Lady finds herself thrown off by the anchor-woman’s makeup, heavy on the eye shadow. But she picks up enough of the newscast to confirm, along with Her Man in the Closet, that no one managed to get a moving picture of this afternoon’s craziness. A thousand video hawks in LA but none of them quick enough on the iPhone. The networks had to make do with a still that suggested a side view of an old riverboat, with the mall the body of the boat and Nola’s magic theater the half of the paddlewheel that’s up out of the water. You couldn’t even tell that the two figures up on the screen wore costumes that didn’t match. Besides that, the story ran at the close of the show, in the thirty seconds set aside for the Hey-Maude stories, Hey-Maude-Looka-This. Speculation had it that the quirky business had been intended as some sort of promotion, but since the technology had failed to come through as planned, the major studios were all denying any connection.
So what then for our Lady and her Lord, except to prepare for bed? She stumbles upon an appreciation of him as something else again: a person nearby in the night, a solidity amid the dim flapping laundry of the future. Plus this housemate always set up the espresso for the following morning. Nola discovers herself incapable of telling the guy to go spend the night with Laverne. She can’t even say to him: Hey, you’re the one who likes the futon. Rather, she counts on his reading between the lines, and she sees he gets the message in his choice of pajamas, long-legged and formal. Gaylord does up all the buttons too.
Still the girl stalls a while, as if the woven rattan of the bedroom chair has her caged. She might even be nattering. A couple of possibilities for an appointment occur to her, times when she and G could try out her new gift.
Wednesday p.m., Thursday a.m., mustn’t dawdle. Another hour another elephant.
The next morning she tiptoes around behind ballooning personal boundaries, she can barely find the voice for Have a nice day, but then before her first espresso break Nola taps out an email for her accomplice. A couple more appointment possibilities. Gaylord proves likewise quick to make arrangements, both with the agency in the Hills and with the clearinghouse for under-the-table gigs. The following afternoon the two of them hit the highway, taking separate cars to a very different Barnes & Noble. A mall far upslope and inland, out where the Okies live. Still, the shelves hold the same chockablock narrative and the café sells the same milkshakes. It’s their best opportunity, if you ask the G-Lord, and the uneasy star of the show has to agree. Their best shot is to recreate the same conditions while steering clear of anyone who was there the first time.
Urban sprawl is itself a kind of magic, thinks our Good Witch in Black. Wherever the city seeps outward it turns to forking byways, to spirals and cul-de-sacs, its roads change name and number and create, finally, the sort of asphalt bayous that hold the potential for reinvention without end. Case in point, the latest chameleonic turn in her, umm, her cinematographer or whoever. Gaylord tools into the bookstore lot in, umm, a fully loaded Hummer. He claims he borrowed the wheels from a friend, but Nola’s been watching him for a while now, it’s been almost a year, and today at last she could’ve told him: Brother, the car’s the least of what you’re going to get away with. Brother, you’re fixing to steal yourself a whole ’nother life. This pretty young buck in his bling of a ride is going to grow up into a one-man showboat, a producer, a mogul—and multiple degrees of separation apart from his former Lady.