“Yes, you told me.”
“I did?”
“That afternoon at Paramount. There was a limousine for you and you were going to Spain.” She says, “I was supposed to play the gangster’s girlfriend.”
“The scene with the Coke bottle.”
“At the last minute, the director decided no one would smash my face with a Coke bottle. They needed a more … disposable actress with a more disposable face. I lost the lead in L’Avventura for the same reason.”
“The woman who disappears on the island.”
“She was the second lead,” Soledad corrects herself, “she was a disposable character too. As with Altman, Antonioni said, ‘No one would lose you on an island.’ Driver, turn left here please.”
187.
The taxi turns on Thirty-Fourth Street. “Another block and a half,” Soledad says to the driver.
The taxi crosses Park Avenue.
“Pull over here please.” The taxi pulls in front of a parking structure. “I will be right back,” she says to Vikar, opening the door.
“Where are you going?” Vikar says.
“I will be right back.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Stay and hold the taxi. I will be back.”
188.
Inside the club, Soledad says, “What is this?”
“Why did we stop at that parking structure?” asks Vikar.
She gazes around her. “I thought we were going to a club.”
“I believe this is a very good club.”
“I thought we were going to a disco, I thought we were going dancing.” She’s stricken by the spectacle; for a moment, her accent flares. “Everyone is looking at me,” in her short sexy dress, there among the ripped jeans and leather.
“They’re looking at me,” Vikar says. They’re both right.
“I don’t like this club.”
“I believe it’s a very good—”
“I hate this music. It’s not even music.”
“No,” Vikar agrees, “it’s the Sound.”
“It’s …” she thinks, “bárbaro. Barbaric.”
“Yes,” he says, “that’s it, barbaric,” and throws himself into the roiling pit of the audience.
189.
Outside, he tries to hail a cab while she waits under the awning. Standing in the empty street he turns to see Soledad gazing down at the sidewalk and the dirty barefooted woman in the hospital gown who always sleeps in the club doorway.
To Vikar’s astonishment, Soledad pulls off over her head her flimsy black dress, laying it over the woman as though it could keep her warm, and stands on the freezing New York sidewalk in nothing but her panties, high heels and a glimmer of recognition rooted seven years before and three thousand miles away, on Pacific Coast Highway.
Vikar looks around to see if anyone is watching. Some people stop to stare at the nearly naked woman but others just pass by; finally flagging the attention of a distant taxi, Vikar dashes to Soledad and removes his coat, draping it around her shoulders.
190.
“As we get older,” Soledad says in the cab back to the hotel, shivering in Vikar’s coat, “does the wall between youth and madness become higher? Or do we just learn how to … better stay on our side of the wall?”
“I don’t know,” Vikar answers.
“That club,” she says softly. “There was no wall.”
“No.”
“The bathroom was a cesspool.”
After a while Vikar says, “How is Zazi?” Soledad turns to him in the backseat; her breasts fall out of his open coat and press against his sweat-soaked shirt. “I wonder if I know what you mean, Mister Film Editor,” she says, and this time he knows she doesn’t wonder at all. “I wonder why you ask about that. She’s in L.A. With friends. With her father.” She whispers, “You want to get bárbaro, Mister Film Editor?” inches from his mouth, the passing lights from the street outside rolling across her face. She pulls his belt out of the loops of his pants and unbuttons the front and takes him in her hand.
191.
Back at his suite in the hotel, she says, “What’s this?” She holds it up before her eyes. In her other hand she still has his belt, carried defiantly through the hotel lobby.
“Something I made,” he says, “a long time ago.”
She examines it. “A toy house?”
“It’s not a toy, it’s not a house.” Vikar takes two small bottles of vodka and red wine from the mini-bar. Is this the moment for such autobiography? Is there any moment for such autobiography? “It’s a model of a church.”
She turns the model in her hand. “You take it with you wherever you go?”
“I was an architecture student.”
“I remember.” She points at one wall. “It’s bent.”
“From the earthquake. The big one, seven years ago.”
She studies the small steeple with its crowned lion holding a gold axe. “There is,” her eyes narrow at the other tiny walls, “no way out.”
“That’s what I believed. The review committee,” he says, “saw it as no way in.”
She smiles at him and hurls the model into the wall, like a champagne glass into the fireplace.
192.
He stares at the shards of the smashed model on the floor. She reaches over to the wall and flips off the light; in the dark, his coat slides off her bare body and she wraps his belt around his neck, running it through the buckle and tightening it. “When we fuck, Mister Barbaric Church Builder,” she says, giving the belt a yank, “do we make death an ecstatic experience rather than a lonely one?” What? thinks Vikar. She takes him out of his pants again and gets on her knees and puts him in her mouth; he stares through the window at the lights on the park outside. After a while she pulls herself back to her feet by the belt around his neck and says, “Put it inside me.” He sways where he stands and she pulls him into the other room as if she’s been in this suite a hundred nights. In the dark, she stretches herself out on the bed. “Put it inside me.”
193.
He sways where he stands, caught in the lights off the park. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” she says.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re hard.”
“That’s not why.”
For a moment nothing happens and then she says, “O.K.” In the dark she pulls him by the belt onto the bed where she curls between his legs, breasts pressed against his thighs, and takes him in her mouth again.
194.
Afterward she says, “It’s O.K. We can do it however you like,” and he drifts to sleep.
195.
He wakes a couple of hours later. It’s still the middle of the night; she’s sitting at the edge of the bed in the dark, with her back to him. “What?” he says. He can’t hear her when she answers. “What is it?” he says.
He hears her say, “You should not have used what I told you in that way.”
“Used what?”
“It was cruel.”
196.
Vikar says, “I don’t understand.”
“Your little church. I know it’s not a church.”
No, he admits to himself, it’s a movie theater: Did she see the tiny blank screen when she threw it at the wall?
“It’s a private thing,” she says, “that belongs to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know.”
“No.” He sits up in bed.
“The institution.”
“What institution?”
“I told you. When I was a teenager, in Oslo.”
“Oslo?” he says.
“In the institution there.”
He remembers about the institutions. “I remember now about the institutions, but not Oslo.”
“You made a toy of it.”