143.
Zazi walks over to Rondell, who lies in a daze; she leans over and whispers something in his ear. She looks him in the eye and whispers it again, as though to make sure it’s registered. Then she strides from the house and Vikar follows.
142.
“That’s not my name, what he called me,” she says. By the time they’re out to the street, Viking Man has run after them.
“Vicar,” he says, “you got a ride?”
“I walked here,” Vikar says.
“Let me give you a ride.” Viking Man indicates a Toyota with a surfboard on top. “I don’t think it makes sense to wait for the cops.”
“They won’t come,” Zazi says.
“The police never come,” agrees Vikar.
“You fucked him up pretty good,” Viking Man says.
“He’s not,” Zazi answers calmly, “going to call the police.”
141.
The last time Vikar saw his father was the night the divinity student mortified the review committee with the model church that had no door. He returned home to find the house dark: “Oh, Mother?” he called to no answer. At the top of the darkened stairs, at the edge of the bed where he lay as a small boy the night his father came into his room, Vikar now found his father sitting and holding a long knife. It gleamed in the light of the tiny lamp that stood on the night stand for as long as Vikar could remember. “Where’s Mother?” said Vikar, and turned and went into his mother’s room; the closet and drawers were cleaned out. He went back into his own room, and his father, face distorted and wet, looked at his son with the newly shaved head as though the son had become exactly what the father always knew and feared. The father turned the blade over and over in the palm of his hand, contemplating its destiny. But the blade was not for Vikar’s mother, and it was not for Vikar; and that was the moment Vikar hated God most.
140.
Zazi comes to live in Vikar’s house. She takes the spare bedroom on the second level; her window faces the side of the hill, so there’s not much of a view. In the mornings, Vikar cooks Zazi the Basque Breakfast that he used to eat in the middle of the night in Madrid, eggs and potatoes and chopped tomatoes out of a skillet. The first night she says to him, “Does this mean you’re not going to get to make your movie?” and Vikar, staring out at the city and at his reflection in the windows, turning his head from side to side and from profile to profile, says, “I don’t know how to direct a movie anyway. I did once before, in Spain, and it didn’t look so much like Buñuel.”
139.
Vikar wonders what he’ll do if the police come to try and take Zazi away. But as Zazi said, the police don’t come: If I had been singing when I hit him, they would have come. I would have sung the song from the radio about Montgomery Clift.
138.
Zazi is gone the next day when Vikar rises, like the time she slept in his suite at the Sherry-Netherland and all that was left in the morning was a blanket draped over the end of the couch. She returns that afternoon and is putting a Marianne Faithfull poster up in her bedroom when Vikar, standing in the doorway, says, “Did he do anything to you?” The guitar case that Zazi brought with her to the Fine Arts to see A Place in the Sun stands upright in the corner.
She finishes with the poster and steps back to survey the result. “Is it O.K. if I put up a poster or two?”
“You can put up what you want.”
“No, he didn’t do anything to me,” she says, “but I’m old enough to know the look in guys’ eyes.” She chews her lip for a moment. “I’m still a virgin,” she says.
“So am I,” says Vikar.
137.
Vikar goes to see a mid-sixties movie about an ex-race-car driver who teaches blind children until two hit men come to kill him. The ex-race-car driver/teacher is played by the director who told Vikar the story about hating A Place in the Sun and seeing it eight times in a row before realizing he loved it. In this film, the hit men are sent by a dark crime lord who slaps around his girlfriend; when Vikar leaves the theater, darkness has fallen and he wanders across the street into a paperback store where a television shows the same dark crime lord in another movie — until Vikar realizes it’s not a movie but the news, and that the crime lord has been elected President of the United States.
Zazi comes and goes at all hours. She receives strange telephone calls, and sometimes strange cars pick her up at the house. Vikar has no idea how he’s supposed to take care of her; he doesn’t know what to ask or insist upon. “Shouldn’t you go to school?” he says to her one afternoon after she’s been out all night. Sitting in the kitchen eating a tuna sandwich, she nods slowly. “I don’t,” she says, even though she’s nodding, “want to go to school.” She says, “I’m learning more from being in a band.”
“How long have you been in a band?”
“About eight months. I’m the weak link — the others have all played awhile. The Starwood gave us the small room one night last week and Rhino may let us play their store some afternoon.” She says, “It’s your fault. I never would have seen Lora Logic and Poly Styrene at CBGB’s if you hadn’t taken Mom there.”
He says, “I promised her I would take care of you.”
She stops chewing the sandwich. “What?”
“I promised your mother I—”
“When?”
Vikar thinks. “Five or six weeks ago.”
“Five or six weeks ago?” She says, “You saw Mom five or six weeks ago? When were you going to mention this?”
“I’m mentioning it now.”
“A little late maybe?”
He considers this. “I don’t believe so.”
With deliberation, almost methodically, Zazi throws the plate and the tuna sandwich at the kitchen wall. Just missing the cork bulletin board and the phone — where the plate breaks into pieces and leaves the wall mottled with tuna — she stalks from the house.
136.
She returns a few hours later and finds him down in the film library on the bottom level of the house. “Sorry,” she says. “You let me come live here and I’m acting like a teenager.”
“You are a teenager,” says Vikar.
“I just didn’t know you had been seeing Mom.”
“I wasn’t seeing her. It was at a movie. She came over afterward and said take care of you.”
“Just like that?”
“Yes.”
“Like she knew, huh?”
“Yes.”
“She said to take care of me.”
“Take care of my girl if something happens, she said.”
For a moment Zazi doesn’t move, gazing at her feet. When Vikar steps toward her, she raises one hand and he stops; for a while the two don’t speak. Finally she says, “So let’s go to another movie sometime.”
135.
Vikar doesn’t really want to go with Zazi to the movies again, but one night the following week they meet at the Nuart in West Los Angeles. Afterward, as they’re walking to the bus down Santa Monica Boulevard beneath the overpass of the 405, with the roar of the freeway above them, he says, “It’s all right if you didn’t like it.”
“Actually I liked it a lot,” she says, “except one thing. I really liked the main guy, the one who runs the bar … that Bogart guy, right?”