West of Rome Read online

  He was a dog, not a man, but an animal, and in time he would be my friend, filling my skull with pride and fun and nonsense. He was closer to God than I would ever be, he could neither read nor write, and that was good too. He was a misfit and I was a misfit. I would fight and lose, and he would fight and win. The haughty Great Danes, the proud German shepherds, he would kick the shit out of them all, and fuck them too, and I would have my kicks.

  SIX

  Harriet was harvesting the day’s crop of bills from the mailbox as we approached. Her mouth dropped open at the sight of the dog and anger boiled in her eyes.

  “Call your agent,” she snapped.

  That was all. She turned into the gate and up the path to the front door, never looking back as she entered the house. We brought Stupid to the backyard and fed him canned horsemeat left over from Rocco’s time. He slurped down four cans at forty cents a can and was still hungry.

  ‘You can’t afford this dog,” Jamie said. ‘You don’t even have an assignment.”

  “The Lord will provide.”

  We gave him another can and I went inside to phone my agent. Harriet sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by volumes of Bernard Shaw. She shrank from me as I dialled.

  The agent said he had something promising. Joe Crispi out at Universal wanted to see me. Crispi and I were old friends and had done a collaboration at Columbia years before. The date was for three o’clock that afternoon. I said I’d be there.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked.

  “It’s top secret,” the agent said, which meant that every writer and agent in town had wind of it.

  “T.V. or pictures?”

  “I can’t tell you anything,” the agent said. “I’m pledged to secrecy.” Which meant T.V. But it didn’t matter. I needed money so badly I would have gone down on Joe Crispi in front of the Century-Plaza if the price was right.

  I took almost an hour to shave, shower, and get into my writer’s gear. I even put on a checkered vest under my cashmere sport coat. On the way out through the kitchen I couldn’t find Harriet. She was ducking me, sore about the dog. I went up and down both halls calling her, and finally came to a closed bathroom door. I rapped.

  “Harriet?”

  No answer, but I knew she was in there. I rapped again.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “I’m leaving now.”

  Not a word.

  “You want to talk about it before I go?”

  “Will you please leave me alone and get out of here? I’m sitting on the John.”

  I said so long and walked out to the garage. Jamie was shooting baskets and Stupid was asleep on the lawn. Already he seemed one of us, in harmony with the grass and trees and part of a warm January afternoon. Backing the Porsche out of the garage I sensed the flat deadness of my cheek, the place where Harriet had not kissed me goodbye. For a quarter of a century the habit of a goodbye kiss had been part of our lives. Now I missed it the way a monk missed a bead in his rosary.

  SEVEN

  It was forty minutes to Universal. I zipped through the coastal mountains by way of Malibu Canyon to the Valley, where I hit the freeway all the way to Universal City. The situation at home had me worried. Harriet’s mood was ominous. She was usually docile and pliant and quick to forgive, but there were limits to her restraint, and then she walked out.

  It had happened twice before, and in each case it involved an animal. In the first year of our marriage, when we lived in San Francisco, I brought home to our apartment a white rat in a cage, intending to make a pet of it. The rat escaped into the springs of the divan and was almost impossible to extricate. Harriet gave me an hour to get rid of him, and when I failed she packed up and walked out, boarding a Greyhound to her aunt’s farm in Grass Valley. It was a month before I got her back. I had to drive up to Grass Valley and there in the presence of her aunt, I got down on my knees and begged her to come home. She finally agreed, but only after a complete revision of the marriage contract. In those days I was young and stupid and screwing her three times a day in love and willing to debase myself.

  Ten years later Mingo, my first bull terrier, ate her Siamese cat, and she split again, leaving me with a houseful of kids, cats and dogs. Back to Grass Valley once more, days of negotiations, proposals and counterproposals by mail and telephone and the tiresome bit of the prostrate, brokenhearted husband, until a new pact was agreed upon. One of the conditions I was forced to accept was that Mingo had to go. It was a horrible demand, but she had me by the balls, and I took Mingo away to an orange grove in Tarzana where a nice old man bred bull terriers and where, eventually, my great Rocco was born, sired by Mingo.

  Now it appeared that she was conditioning herself for another flight to Grass Valley. I knew the symptoms: the porcelain smile, the tight mouth, silent meditations in the bathroom, snarling hostility. But I had changed through the years, my values were different now. A dog was a beautiful creature, but he couldn’t iron a shirt or prepare fettuccini or chicken marsala, or write an essay on Bernard Shaw and he’d look silly as hell in black stockings. By the time I pulled into the Universal parking lot I had convinced myself that Stupid had to go.

  With ten minutes to spare before my meeting with Joe Crispi I ducked into a pay station and phoned the house.

  Denny answered and I asked him to call his mother to the phone.

  He said, “Look, Dad. Haven’t you caused enough trouble?”

  I screamed at him.

  “Don’t lecture me, you prick. Call my wife to the phone.”

  It was more than a minute before he spoke again.

  “She’s in the tub.”

  “Tell her this is important.”

  There was a pause.

  “She’s leaving you, Dad.”

  ‘That’s why I’m calling. Tell her the dog goes. Just as soon as I get home.”

  He left the phone for three minutes, during which I pumped another quarter into the slot.

  “Sorry, Dad. She doesn’t believe you.”

  I groaned. “What is it, Denny? Grass Valley again?”

  “I guess so. She booked a seat on the seven o’clock plane for Sacramento.”

  “Stop her! Talk her out of it!”

  “You think I’m not trying? What happens to my term paper if she splits outa here?”

  “Keep trying. I’ll get home as soon as I can.”

  I hung up, groggy and sweating in the Valley heat, and walked a block to Joe Crispi’s office in Building C. I could feel the old ache returning to my duodenum, the twinge that always nipped me before a meeting with a producer.

  But this time I knew it had nothing to do with Joe Crispi. It was the thought of Harriet walking out and the exhausting process of getting her back. I couldn’t negotiate it any more. I was too fucking old. I’d rather shoot myself than make that Grass Valley pilgrimage again, that doddering old aunt, now ninety, that 1890 parlor of hers, that dreary town where I was still known as “that Eyetalian boy.” I mumbled aloud a prayer, “San Gennaro, help me, in the name of God.”

  In front of Building C a waspish little fox terrier barked at me from inside a ten thousand dollar Mercedes coupe with a red leather interior, a rich snotty little bitch who thought she owned the world. I went up to the car and stuck out my tongue at her. She pushed her frenzied jaws through a slight opening in the window and shrieked at me insanely. Taking dead aim I spat in her face and hoped she belonged to Jacqueline Susann.

  I had not seen Joe Crispi in seven years, not since the days when we used to meet at the State Office in Santa Monica to pick up our unemployment checks. Now he was a millionaire with three successful television shows and one heart attack. He was heavier, jowls framing his dark Sicilian face. Too much and too little had happened for us to recapture the warmth of earlier times. He had even forgotten my wife’s name and called her Hazel.

  All business, he zeroed in on the subject at hand. He had just finished the pilot of a new series, a comedy, a very human comedy
, he said, and he felt that it suited my talents perfectly. The show was already sponsored and he planned to do twenty-six segments.

  “You can do as many as you like,” he said. “How’s your time? I mean, are you doing anything?”

  I told him I was free and ready to work.

  “Great,” he said, getting out of his chair. “Let’s go to the projection room. I’ve arranged a screening of the pilot for you.”

  “Tell me a little about it first.”

  “Look at it. Then we’ll rap. I want you to see it with an open mind.”

  I thanked him for going to all the trouble of a special screening.

  “Forget it. That’s the way I work with writers. Cards on the table, no razzle dazzle.”

  That was characteristic of Joe Crispi. He had come out of the coal fields of Pennsylvania, published a novel that dealt with the poverty and despair of Italian miners, and then moved on to films dealing with stevedores, prize fighters and gangsters. He looked tough, he wrote tough and he tried to be honest at all times. If he was preparing a comedy series, then it had to be about the rugged, earthy people he knew so well—Italians, Poles, Negroes. I could write about people like that.

  He led me down two flights of stairs to the projection room, and I made up my mind to like the pilot under any circumstances, for I needed the bread and the chance to latch onto a successful show.

  Crispi opened the projection room door and we walked in. It was a small room with about fifty seats and I got a jolt when I saw that every seat was taken, and many people stood in back and along the walls. They were writers, of course, young writers, Princeton and Dartmouth writers, New York writers, in mod clothes, mostly in long hair and with beards. There were female writers too, chic and attractive enough to be actresses. I was the oldest jerk in the room. Except for Joe and me, everyone present was under thirty, quiet, eager young people. And deadly. Crispi seated himself at the place of honor behind a desk wired with telephones and electronic connections to the projection room.

  The duodenum was squirting acid as the lights darkened, the old ulcer warning me to flee the scene as I groped for a place to stand in the doorway. The screen flashed and the special showing for my benefit began.

  My gut knotted like a tangled fishline as the thing unfolded. The series was titled, “Lucky Pierre,” and wouldn’t you know it! the hero was a dog, a fucking little French poodle named Pierre, and his mistress was fourteen-year-old Melinda, and there was Daddy, a Wall Street banker, and her overbearing, snobbish Mommy, and the wretched thing had a laugh track, which was unnecessary since the fawning writers howled at every foot of film and cracked up at every line of dialogue.

  It was stark, overpowering drama, right out of Joe Crispi’s coal mine background. Melinda and Mommy and Daddy are flying home from Paris on a 747, and Melinda has secreted cute Pierre in an airline tote bag and not a soul among passengers and crew knows he’s there, and as they fly out over the Atlantic these two hijackers, black enough to be Cubans, take over the airliner, and out of the bag pops Pierre amid the screams of the passengers and the yuks of the assembled writers. I knew I was going to vomit or die. I felt it rising rancid and boiling in my gullet, and I quietly opened the door and faded away.

  At the tobacco stand outside the commissary I bought a couple of rolls of Turns and headed for my car. The first roll got me along the freeway to Calabasas. By then it was almost five, with plenty of time to reach home before Harriet left for the airport. The ulcer was so becalmed that I risked a cigarette, but the pain was back in force as I turned into the driveway.

  Denny was carrying Harriet’s luggage to his car.

  ‘Too late,” he called, watching me hurry into the house.

  Harriet sat at her dressing table in a robe, applying nail polish. Steam from her bath clouded the windows and the voluptuous aroma of bath oils and perfumes hung in the air. I thought of jumping her but the pinched area between her brows indicated she was in no sporting mood.

  “So you’re running out,” I said, sitting on the bed.

  “You’re goddamn right I am.”

  “Why? You’ve made your point. The dog goes.”

  She wasn’t talking.

  “Maybe it’s not the dog at all, maybe it’s me,” I admitted. “I’ve done a little soul-searching the last hour or two, and what I’ve found isn’t pleasant. I’m a rotten husband, a lousy father, a bad provider, a total failure. No wonder you’re getting out. You’re sick of me, sick of my crooked ways. I’m not much to look at, either. Maybe you should go to San Francisco for a few days and find some nice young guy and get balled. It’s great therapy, and God knows you’re entitled to a little fun in your life.”

  Her face softened as she watched me in the mirror.

  “If I change my mind, will you promise me something?”

  “Anything.”

  “Keep the dog out of the house.”

  ‘The dog goes. He’s finished around here.”

  “I don’t want you to get rid of him. You need a dog. You haven’t been the same since Rocco died.”

  “You’re not leaving?”

  “I really can’t. I’ve got to turn in that Shaw paper by next week or Denny won’t pass.”

  She stood up and peeled off her robe. Zap! She was wearing a garter belt over bikini panties, black elastic with a yellow fringe and embossed yellow roses. The waist band was black satin dotted with more roses. And black stockings.

  “Holy Mother of God!” I said.

  She walked away from me to close the door and lock it, and I sat there watching the undulations of her sweet ass and feeling like a plucked guitar. The ulcer pain had vanished.

  EIGHT

  Stupid was strictly no sweat. He never wandered away though both gates were left open, and there was no problem keeping him out of the house. He preferred the outdoors, enjoyed sleeping on the lawn raining or not, and rarely used the bed we provided in the garage.

  A cold weather animal, he burst into energy when thunder rolled and the temperature dropped. If it got above seventy-five he folded up in the ivy or under a tree.

  I made a half-hearted effort to find his owner, but it was only a gesture to ease my conscience when I placed an ad in the small local paper claiming to have found a large male dog and asking the owner to declare himself. I deliberately avoided the huge L.A. Times, which covered every town and street in the southwest. After the ad ran for a week locally I cancelled it, bought Stupid a license and had him inoculated against rabies and distemper.

  The officer who issued the license put him down as a thoroughbred Akita. The Oxnard veterinarian who administered the shots thought he was a mixture of malamute and Akita, and his assistant guessed he was half chow and half Akita.

  My own hunch was that he was a thoroughbred Akita, for I went to a dog show and saw others of his kind—the slant eyes, web feet and plumed tail of the breed. Stupid was exactly like the Akitas at the show.

  Certainly he was a foreigner, with a foreigner’s adjustment problems in a Wasp neighborhood, scorned by all the Anglo dogs and hated by the German breeds. He fared well among mongrels, but he tried to jump all males without exception. He loathed females, and if they were in heat he tore into them unmercifully. He had Mrs. Epstein’s Gracie terrified. After that first encounter I never saw Gracie again, though I often heard her barking behind the Epstein house. Naturally the Epsteins stopped talking to us, and we avoided one another as we pushed our shopping carts through the corridors of the supermarket.

  Dogs ran free on Point Dume, and when an unruly mob of males trooped past the house in pursuit of a bitch in heat, Stupid charged out of the yard, dispersed the males, and had the bitch to himself. She stood waiting with engaging coyness as he came trotting up. Then she got the shock of her life as he knocked her down and mauled her unmercifully until she fled in confusion.

  I had two theories about Stupid’s maladjustment. First, that in his weaning puppy days he was one of a large litter with nine or ten brothers a
nd sisters, all more vigorous than himself, so that, at feeding time all but he had a teat to pull on. Not until the others had gorged themselves could he find an available font, but by then his mother was drained out, or bored with the whole thing, and cast him aside.

  Stupid resented this early treatment bitterly, and as time went on, particularly during puberty, he brooded over the maternal rejection and ultimately came to hate all females.

  Either that or, having reached maturity with no parental hangups, he met with disaster in his first attempt at coitus. She might have been an insensitive Great Dane, or some tough bitch who not only rejected him but thrashed him as well.

  Additionally, there was the matter of his origins. Convinced as I was of his Japanese origins, I could have been wrong in judging him a pure-bred Akita. It was barely possible that his mother was a German shepherd. That being so, the clash of Oriental and Teutonic cultures could produce fantastic genetic complications. Germanic belligerence combined with oriental cunning was an unpredictable fusion, like gasoline and sake. These elements might remain stabilized for a time, but sooner or later a conflagration was inevitable.

  The way to a dog’s heart is the same as the way to a man’s, and in two weeks Stupid reckoned me the one on whom he depended for food, and he was mine.

  I needed a dog. He simplified the circle of my life. He was there in the yard, alive and friendly, taking the place of other dogs who were dead and in the same ground over which he roamed. I could understand that—my dog friends, living and dead, joined together on the same piece of ground. It made sense. My father and mother lay in a graveyard up north and I was still alive on Point Dume, walking the same crust of California earth that held them. I understood that too.