High Life Read Free Page A

dead wife lay.
    Back on the street. The leaves in the park went copper-red as the sun rose, and the sky started moving through a spectrum of pastels toward its daily trademark blue. The policemen were still telling jokes and their laughter carried well on the warming air. It came in snorts, like animals grunting.
    I drove to Venice as the world woke up.
    The picture in my head was pornographic in detail.

Chapter Two
     
    Speedway runs parallel to Ocean Front Walk, one block back. The beachfront buildings are several stories high and the only time you can see the ocean is when you pass a cross street. Away from the commercial fronts on the beach the houses and apartment blocks are funkily shabby and sun-bleached and dusted with salt. It isn’t a ghetto, but you don’t see too many photo teams from Architectural Digest setting up.
    Venice has a reputation for being wacky and fun and full of counterculture freaks. But like Sunset Strip and Hollywood Boulevard, a lot of this is just PR to drag the tourists in. What Venice really is is a lot of different places. Bohemia for artists, rich pickings for the renovation-mad people they used to call yuppies, a place of sandy roots for the old folks who’ve been there forever, a carefully dressed-down place to have a pad if you’re on the way to celebrity. And it’s cool to watch the women rollerblading on the weekends.
    For me, when I moved there, it had held the scent of possibility, of potential. The colors—the blue ocean, the white walls and red roof tiles—the soft air, the unexpected lushness of the vegetation, all that space on your doorstep, stretching out across the water to China, had all been ingredients I’d mixed into a metaphor for my future—optimism, bright light, movement, success.
    I’d lived there two years and all of it had been unhappy.
    I parked the car between two garbage dumpsters and just sat—windows tight, engine off. I felt zoned, separated from all human babble and activity. A riot could have broken out around me and I wouldn’t have seen it. The only thing I was looking at right then was what had been in the park.
    I’d recognized Karen instantly, though of course she’d been very much changed.
    Faceup, laid out as heavy and awkward as all the corpses on TV. I’d always imagined a real dead body would impact on the senses more violently than the slumped and spattered actors in cop shows. But Karen had seemed robbed of color, even of some amount of substance, compared to those nightly small-screen copyings.
    She was naked, too, sports fans. Legs spread, one arm crossing her chest below her breasts, the other flung straight out to the side. Her eyes were closed, but her belly was open—sliced from sternum, through navel, to a couple of inches above her pubic bone, then T’ed there with a horizontal stroke to make flaps of her abdominal wall. It looked like the left flap had had a piece cut out of it.
    I stayed in the car a long time trying to work out how I felt. In the end I gave up, my ambivalence was insurmountable. Instead, I thought about how easy it must have been to dump her—just pull up, open the door, and give her a shove, she’d disappear from view immediately. And how she must have looked as she fell, her legs falling loosely apart.
    After that I figured I should hold a picture of her face in my mind, it seemed to be what people on TV did when they’d just lost someone. But the only picture that came to me was of water running between her legs over the wet concrete of the drain.
    The apartment was the apartment. As it always was. Second floor in a poorly stuccoed fifties block. One room with a bed and a couch, kitchen and bathroom off it.
    The place smelled stale. I could have opened a window for air, but that would have meant letting the world in, and this was one Venice morning when I needed to shut it down.
    I fired up the VCR and ran last night’s edition of 28 FPS , a weekly late-night movie-gossip show, pumped out by a