My Dark Places - James Ellroy [151]
I stayed in touch with my aunt Leoda. She told me things about Geneva. She praised Geneva. She lauded her. I couldn’t remember a thing she said. I hated Leoda. I was the con man and she was the mark with the cash.
I had lies to build from. I couldn’t discount them. I wanted to build perception from contradictory viewpoints. I had my own memory. It was in sound working order. I test-fired it after the Beckett trial. I remembered the names of old classmates. I remembered every park and jail I ever crashed out in. I had my chronological life with my mother mapped out year by year. I remembered the names of old dope connections and all my junior-high teachers. My mind was sharp. My memory was strong. I could counter synaptic failures with fantasy riffs. I could run alternative scenes in my head. What if she did this. Maybe she did that. She might have reacted thusly. The literal truth was crucial. It might come in limited quantities. My memory wasn’t repressed. My memory might lack resiliency.
I had no family photographs. I had no pictures of her at 10, 20 and 30. I had pictures of her at 42 and on her way down and pictures of her dead. I didn’t know much about our ancestry. She never mentioned her parents or her favorite aunts and uncles.
I had a strong mental will. I remembered my thoughts from light years ago. I could strip-mine my brain and replay my old thoughts about her. My imagination might help me. It might hinder me. It might shut down at lustful junctures. I had to get explicit. I owed her that. I had to take her further.
Bill was up in L.A. He was waiting out the Beckett verdict. I told him I wanted to get lost for a while. He said he understood. He had Tracy Stewart on the brain bad.
I was test-fired and ready. I unplugged the phone and turned the lights off. I stretched out on the bed and closed my eyes.
She came from Tunnel City, Wisconsin. Tunnel City was a railroad stop and not much else. She moved to Chicago. She moved to San Diego. My father said he met her at the Del Coronado Hotel. He said it was 1939. He said they heard the second Louis-Schmeling fight together. The fight occurred in ’38. She was 23 then. He was 40. He dressed to the nines. He wore prewar suits all the time I knew him. They looked incongruous in 1960. They got more and more raggedy as our living standard declined. They were au courant in ’38. He looked good. She fell hard. He had a hot girl-woman he thought he could control forever. He probably took her to the bullfights down in T.J. He spoke fluent Spanish. He ordered all her food in Spanish. He took her to Mexico to woo her and control her. They drove down to Ensenada. She took me to Ensenada in 1956. She wore a white off-the-shoulder dress. I watched her shave her underarms. I wanted to kiss her there. He got her torched on margaritas. She wasn’t a drunk yet. He poured salt and squeezed lime juice on her hand and licked it off. He was desperately attentive. She didn’t have his number yet. She got it over time. I worked on a time-lost/time-regained dynamic. She viewed her lost time as unregainable. She pinned her loss on my father. She lowered her sights. Bourbon highballs made machine-shop studs controllable and alluring. She never asked herself why she craved weak and cheap men.
She had superb carriage. She seemed taller than the recorded height on her autopsy report. She had big hands and feet. She had delicate shoulders. I wanted to kiss her neck and smell her perfume and cup her breasts from behind. She wore Tweed perfume. She kept a bottle on her nightstand in El Monte. I poured some on a handkerchief once and took it to school with me.
She had long legs. She had stretch marks across her stomach. The autopsy pictures were shocking and instructive. Her breasts were smaller than I remembered. She was slender throughout her upper body and thick