The Black Marble (14 page)

“My mother used to bake delicious sweets on Christmas,” Valnikov smiled, shambling off in the darkness.

Merry Christmas, she thought. On January 7th. Crazy.

7

The Tragic Muse

On Saturday, January 8th, Madeline Whitfield did something she had never done before: She visited the Huntington Library on a crowded weekend day. She had to do something. It was impossible to sit at home and watch Chester doing his last-minute work with Vickie. She had been over the hill on Friday, prowling through the boutiques, so Beverly Hills was out. It wasn't ladies' day at the Country Club, so golf was out. She had old friends she could visit, but most of their children were home from prep school on weekends and it was … awkward. It was always awkward for a single woman. As repugnant as it sounded, she thought about going to the Valley Hunt Club to play some mixed doubles. But no, Saturday the men dominated the courts. A single woman. Discomfiture.

Or she could go to the Hunt Room and
drink.
She opted for the Huntington Library. If only she could have remained thirty-nine forever. If only the Junior League would raise the age limit for
active
members. There had always been something to occupy her there. Dozens of fund-raising projects for everything from planned parenthood to alcoholic rehabilitation.

The library grounds were overrun, not just by the regular crush of tourists and weekend visitors, but by two busloads of children on charter buses. Madeline had to park three blocks away and walk to the gates.

At least the “sustainers” of the Junior League could still be docents at the Huntington Library. Madeline adored taking tenth graders through the art gallery to point out the magnificent collection of French and English works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She loved to escort even younger children through on the rare occasions it was permitted, children from barrios and ghettos, seeing for the first time idyllic cherubic portraits of children from another time.
The Beck-ford Children
by Romney.
The Young Fortune Teller
by Reynolds. Children dressed and posed out of period by English artists copying the extravagant whimsical style of seventeenth-century Italians.

The boys and girls from the barrios and ghetto would look at the priceless works of art and follow Madeline through the former mansion of Henry and Arabella Huntington, past Houdon's great bronze,
Diana
, who always disappointed them because the naked woman wasn't built much better than the broad leading them, and what kinda jive-ass bullshit is this when that twat on the statue don't look like no twat I ever seen. And past
Venus
, by Giovanni Bologna (same complaint: nice ass, no twat). Through the main gallery where, voice trembling with emotion, Madeline would show the scruffy band of children the library's most famous painting, Gainsborough's
Blue Boy.

“A ass-twitchin sissy if ever I seen one,” said a young basketball star in a green and yellow apple hat.

Then to Madeline Whitfield's personal favorite, the greatest work of Reynolds and an eternal tribute to the leading actress of the English stage:
Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse.
Madeline would explain to the children in great detail how Reynolds applied his paint to probe and penetrate and reveal the very
soul
of the great actress. Madeline would turn in three-quarter profile when she pointed out the dignity, the nobility in that famous face. Mrs. Siddons staring off with sad dreamy eyes, and pouting lips, and yes, children, some people have even said that if I turn like this, well (Madeline always blushed), that I bear a
slight
resemblance to the lady.

“I kin dig it,” the stringbean in the apple hat nodded. “She do look somethin like that dumpy consti-pated broad in the pitcher.”

But there'd be no docent tours for Madeline today.

Just a leisurely stroll about the grounds where Henry and Arabella Huntington once lived so sumptuously. Just to make this day pass. Just to avoid thinking about tomorrow, when Vickie would become a
champion.

Madeline strolled first through the cactus garden where some 2500 species never failed to surprise her though she had come this way perhaps a thousand times. Spined cactus, spineless cactus, giant cactus, creeping cactus. Cactus which flowered at night.
Easter Echinopsis
, with night flowers like trumpets.
Living rock
, a spineless variety which protects through camouflage.
Milk barrel, Cow's horns
, the shaggy
Desert fans
, the massive
Golden barrel
as old as Madeline. The magnificent yuccas, over twenty feet tall.

There was no natural landscape on earth as quixotic as this. An alien landscape. As a child she imagined it as a garden on the moon.

It was
too
other-worldly today. She even passed the Japanese Gardens, wanting to avoid the exotic. She wanted to feel comfortable today. To belong. She headed for the Shakespeare Garden. Madeline needed the reassurance of Elizabethan flowers and the forest of azalea and camellia surrounding the north vista.

Here she felt safe. She'd played hide-and-seek through every path as a little girl, breaking the rules to pluck a pink camellia and pin it in her hair. She could run splashing in the Italian fountain in those days, able to see clear to Mount Baldy every day of the year. That was how she always wanted to remember Old Pasadena: a child doing cartwheels in the grass, surrounded by azalea and camellia, the mountain-tops snowy and smog-free and as reassuring as Old Pasadena itself. Before the decline.

There was no place to sit today. Tourists occupied every bench. But there was an escape: Few tourists bothered to walk north by the orange and avocado groves. There wasn't much up there, just the mausoleum, the last vain act of Henry and Arabella Huntington.

Five Japanese tourists were there, taking pictures. She sat on the cool marble bench. It was always cool, the marble of the mausoleum, even in summer. She waited until the tourists left, then climbed the few steps and imagined the pinched dour face of Arabella Huntington, glaring at the world through bottle spectacles, swathed in black, hiding under a black hat anchored by a dozen glinting hat pins. Madeline could imagine Arabella walking these grounds. The incredible story went that she never wanted to see a gardener or servant as she walked, preferring to dream that all the beauty around her was manicured by God. When the hell did they work? As she slept? And there you lie, Arabella. And do you give a damn whether or not Victoria Regina of Pasadena is a champion tomorrow?

Then Madeline Whitfield sat on the mausoleum steps and wiped her eyes because those ghetto and barrio children didn't see a whit of beauty in Lawrence's
Pinkie.
Not a whit. And what would they say if they knew that she would not sleep this night with or without sixty milligrams of sedative, because of an honor to befall a
dog.
Well, it might just make
more
sense to those children than the Gainsborough or Reynolds or Romney she showed them.

They said that Constable's
Salisbury Cathedral
and
View on the Stour
was only the way some old dead white punk
wanted
things to look like, but you know nothin ain't
never
looked like that

Would her dream for Vickie make any
less
sense to a group of ghetto schoolchildren than Constable's dream? Or Turner's? Or Arabella Huntington's?

Don't laugh at my dream, and I won't laugh at yours, Arabella.

On Saturday, January 8th, Philo Skinner spent a frantic, destructive, furtive day at his kennel grooming Tutu and working with her, trying desperately to prepare her in a single afternoon, having to run to the toilet every time the phone rang. No, Mavis, I
won't
be home early. No, goddamnit, there are no little birds here. Call every goddamn one of them. Call Pattie Mae's house if you think I have her here. Call every kidthat ever worked for us. Call the fucking chief of police … No, wait, just don't call
anybody.
Jesus Christ! I am here
alone
catching up on the book work! And cleaning the shitty kennel because we can't afford Saturday help, and … no, don't come, I don't
need
any help. I'll see you tonight. What do I have to do, lay you to prove I wasn't screwing around this afternoon! Yeah, that's right, I
couldn't
do it twice in one day! Bang went the phone on the cradle. He needed an Alka-Seltzer. That cunt! Tongue like a stripping knife. Philo Skinner lit his forty-ninth cigarette of the day and began coughing.

They say the streets of Puerto Vallarta are cobblestone. And that you can see a flower-covered bridge where Richard used to sneak across at night to see Liz when he was still married to the other woman. They say a gringo can live down there like a sultan with a houseful of whores for $200 a month.

“How many months can I live like a sultan, Tutu, with seventy thousand bucks?”

The little dog wagged and whimpered every time he spoke to her.

“I'll tell you, Tutu,” he said, trimming her leg furnishings. “Hold still, sweetheart, that's it. I'll tell you, sweetheart, a man can't
live
long enough to spend seventy thousand tax-free American greenbacks. That's how long.”

Then he put down the shears and held Tutu's face in his tobacco stained fingers and said, “I'd take you with me if I could, you know I would.”

Then he broke out in a coughing spasm and went to the sink to spit up a massive wad of phlegm. The little schnauzer cried mournfully when he left her side even for a moment. Tutu was the only creature on the face of the earth who
loved
Philo Skinner.

On Saturday, January 8th, Valnikov got blind drunk on Stolichnaya vodka. And sat for the better part of the day and night in front of his stereo set listening to Feodor Chaliapin singing the farewell from
Boris Godunov.
When he got too drunk to understand the words he listened to the Osipov Balalaika Orchestra. When he got tired of that he did what he always did before falling unconscious. He listened to heartbreaking Russian Gypsy songs.

Then he lapsed into a deep drunken slumber and dreamed about the rabbit hopping through the snow. He knew there was no escaping the hunter. He knew the hunter would kill the rabbit and cut his throat, and break his jaws, and peel the face back away from the skull with the muscle hissing as it tore in the powerful hands of the hunter. As always, he sobbed while he dreamed.

8

The Cathedral

In many ways the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena was not unlike the Russian Orthodox cathedral on Sunday morning, January 9th. Thirty men were crawling all over the arena floor laying a thousand square yards of vivid red carpet and placing stanchions joined by yellow ribbon. Sprays of chrysanthemum and bouquets of carnation and Black Swan gladiolus were for this ceremony as well. Only the incense was lacking. The ikons were certainly there—by the
thousands.

The ikons wore the faces of Alaskan malamutes, Belgian sheepdogs, Welsh terriers, dachshunds, beagles, Samoyeds, chow chows, pugs and Pekingese.

In addition to ikons there were medals and medallions with the faces of Pomeranians, Dobermans, boxers and Basenjis. Added to ikon and medallion were more secular objects, such as letter openers bearing the likenesses of Vizslas and Brittany spaniels. There were paintings, posters, plaques of bloodhounds, coonhounds, Akitas and bull mastiffs. There were T-shirts, pin-up posters, glow-in-the-dark key chains, cups and plates bearing the faces of collies, poodles, St. Bernards.

The concessionaires were ready for action, all right. One tasteless concessionaire experimenting with plastic rosary beads actually sold several before the sponsors closed him down and banished him. That very day, there were two prayerful exhibitors with those beads, fingering the likeness of a plastic Italian greyhound.

There, in the cathedral of the West Coast dog world, before the light of dawn, with a thousand other souls, was a man infinitely more tense than any dog owner, or any member of the Oakland Raiders or Minnesota Vikings. Philo Skinner had already smoked 13 of what would be a record 105 cigarettes that day.