Page 115 of The Happy Month
“That’s okay. Impact was lovely.”
In the drawer, the cassettes marked with the letter P were still there. I took them out and set them on top of the desk. There were thirteen of them, labeled P1-P13.
“What happened to that funky word processor thing from the seventies?”
“I took over the lease on the storage units. I’ve cleared out two of them and let them go. That word processor and a bunch of other stuff is in the remainingunit.”
“I want to find out what’s on these tapes.”
Afew days later, Ronnie, John and I drove up to the storage place near Silver Lake. There was no electricity in the storage unit itself. Ronnie had called ahead and arranged for an extension cord to be waiting for us at the front desk. We had a one-hour window. They didn’t want to pay for the electricity.
Of course, we weren’t even sure we could get the thing running again. The one unit left was three quarters full of things Ronnie was still trying to sell or otherwise dispose of. We moved things around so we could get to the word processor—which John called a Wang, so that’s probably what it was.
Luckily, there was a handbook. John, I’d learned, had put himself through nursing school as an office temp, so he actually had some experience with typewriters and computers and all of that. He read through the computer while Ronnie and I figured out how to plug it in. There was a moment of suspense as we actually waited to see if it would come on. It did.
I had a bag filled with the tapes labeled with a P, which I assume meant Patrick, though it could also have meant personal. I’d also brought a ream of paper snagged from Ronnie’s office. John put one of the cassettes into the machine, rolled a piece of paper into the typewriter part, and then hit the special key on the side that said AUTO START.
Miraculously, it began typing. It took a few hours to go through the thirteen tapes. Eventually, I had to go downstairs and give the kid at the desk forty bucks to ignore thefact that we were taking too long. Two of the tapes wouldn’t play, one was actually broken. The remaining tapes only contained a page or two of broken text.
I was immediately excited because the first page contained Vera’s name and a date: February 1973. Sometime shortly after Ivan’s death. I imagined that Patrick had created these documents himself, without the help of a secretary. Patrick’s private grief and the personal nature of his relationship with Vera almost demanded it. I imagined him in an office, waiting for his secretary to go home so he could make these tapes.
Something else became apparent quickly. Patrick didn’t have a grasp of how the processor worked. The pages John printed out had long gaps, repeated lines, and multiple errors. Some lines just simply stopped, words like lemmings falling off a cliff… abrupt endings, half-thoughts. Reading through the pages John printed out, it felt like the first draft of a story that longed to end differently. In its way, it was a confession from someone who wasn’t guilty.
Patrick and Vera met during a sheriff’s raid of the Blue Fox. Ivan was there, so was Gigi. None of them were arrested. Afterward, they went to Ivan’s home in Holmby Hills. The four of them got on well. Initially, Patrick liked Vera quite a lot.
A week or so later, she called his office and asked to have lunch. He’d thought she wanted a secretarial job, and he was inclined to give her one. But, no, what she proposed was a proposal. During the raid of The Blue Fox, they’d pretended to be a straight couple. Vera had the idea they could both benefit by doing that more often.
She offered to pose as his fiancée for his family and business associates. In return, he went on double dates with Gigi and her husband, Manny Marker. It was a simple rusethat worked well for six months or so. Then, Patrick began to be annoyed by Vera’s independence. She was quick to state an opinion and slow to consider its impact. His family didn’t really like her and neither did his co-workers.
And the time he spent with the Markers was increasingly unbearable. In the spring of forty-nine, he began making himself less and less available to Vera. He also stopped bringing her around his family. The less he relied on her the less he owed her.
Meanwhile, Vera’s relationship with Gigi was deepening. Vera wanted Patrick to help with getting Gigi out of the marriage. But he wasn’t a divorce lawyer. And divorce was not as easy as it was in 1973 when Patrick was writing these. In the late summer of 1949, Manny Marker was putting pressure on Patrick to get Vera in-line and keep her away from Gigi.
And that’s where it ended. P13 was one of the tapes that had broken. I could only assume that things continued to get worse. At some point, Patrick cut Vera out of his life. She didn’t give up; she continued trying to rescue Gigi. And then Manny Marker killed her.
EPILOGUE
September 30, 1949
The sun was setting in a swirl of Easter pastels. The waves beat against the sand like a pulse. They walked along the water’s edge, fingers inches apart, making Patrick want to reach out and take his lover’s hand. He knew better.
There was no one to be seen, but that didn’t matter. There could be someone unseen in one of the cottages crowding the shore, many of which were still under construction. It couldn’t be risked. It could never be risked.
They were quiet. They’d barely said a thing since they left the house Ivan had designed for eighteen-year-old movie star Jane Van Houten, who’d been a second-rate Shirley Temple and was now an aspiring sexpot. Her gratitude—he’d sent the bill to Monumental—resulted in the loan of the house several times a year.
“You’re feeling bad, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine,” Patrick replied, though it soundedthe opposite.
“You did what you had to do.”
And for a moment, Patrick was back on the phone, a bag of ice pressed against his face, telling Vera it was over. “We can’t continue like this. It’s too dangerous.”
“Patrick, it’s perfect. Your family believes you’re in love with me. So does your boss.”
“And your girlfriend’s husband beat me up. Vera, you have to stop seeing her. I don’t know what he’ll do next.”
“I love her. I have to get her away from him.”
