by Samuel Holt
That was when I remembered that Bly has, among her research tools, a book called The Concise Dictionary of 26 Languages. I phoned her and said I was looking forward to dinner tonight and then mentioned the 26 Language book and asked her if “lightning” was among the thousand words therein. She went away and came back and said, “Yes. Number five forty-seven, in fact.”
“In Hebrew it’s barak, right?”
“What is this, a card trick on the phone?”
“No, just a little research help for a friend. Is Arabic one of your twenty-six languages?”
“Just a second.” A faint rushing, as of batwings, was followed by her suddenly saying, in a stretched-out nasal voice, “Naam.”
“What the heck is that?”
“ ‘Yes’ in Arabic. Number nine ninety-seven.”
“Hilarious. What about number five forty-whatever? Lightning.”
“Cat got your sense of humor? Here it is: Barq” She spelled it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Do you know it’s eclair in French? Isn’t that wild?”
“Very,” I said.
“Let’s see, let’s see. Blitz. Bliksem, that’s the Dutch. Do you suppose that’s where Donder and Blitzen come from? Thunder and lightning? I like that!”
“Me too. See you at seven.”
“Wait, wait, you’ve got me interested. It’s salama in Finnish, or at least in Finnish delicatessens. Listen to this! In Japanese it’s denkoo, so if you’re in Japan and there’s lightning, you turn around and say, ‘You’re welcome.’ ”
“Good-bye, Bly, I’ll be there at seven.”
“I’m going to look up ‘thunder,’ ” she was saying as I hung up. Which is her great weakness and also her great strength; everything distracts her, but sooner or later she puts every bit of it to use.
Usually a conversation with Bly makes me smile, but not this time. I sat looking at the phone, remembering that scruffy van parked beside Ross’s house. The old name painted out, barq haphazardly painted on.
Lightning pool service.
And who’s going to be in the pool when the lightning strikes?
15
Bly Quinn is going to be thirty any minute now, and is dragging her feet. She would much rather be a kid with promise than a grown-up to be judged on accomplishment, and of course thirty is the big milestone between what you’re going to do and what you’re doing.
She came from somewhere in Maryland’s horse country to begin with, a smart, good-looking, athletic blond girl with a mean tennis forehand and a knack of knowing when people are lying. She went to New York to be a film student at NYU, dropped out, started writing brief ironic short stories, and became fairly successful at it, with appearances in Ms. and Harper's and small literary magazines and even once The New Yorker. A small press in Chicago put out a collection of her stories called Hesitation Cuts, which led to a producer hiring her as a staff writer on one of the prime time soaps, to give an edge to the female villains, which was when Bly moved to Los Angeles. Her soap was one that didn’t make it to a second season, but by then Bly had fallen in love with Los Angeles and television and her entire life. She had always looked like a California girl, and now she is one, without the slightest regret. She has become rabidly anti-New York, anti-East Coast, even anti-Maryland. If she takes some time off and leaves town, she goes to Hawaii.
These days Bly works steadily and profitably as a sitcom writer. She does the episodes in which the teenagers run out of gas and get home late and the parents misunderstand, and the episodes in which father makes dinner, and the episodes in which the new next-door neighbors turn out to be black or Russian or homosexual or the husband’s now married college girlfriend or a free-love religious cult or (more recently) Hispanic. She has a true genius for the lines that go in front of the laugh track.
Bly makes fun of what she does, of course, even though she’s good at it, because she doesn’t think being a mere craftsman is a high enough goal. Her reasons for struggling against that thirtieth birthday have nothing—or very little—to do with the usual fears of growing old, losing one’s looks, running out of time, all of that. No; Bly now sees herself as a very promising person currently disguised as a sitcom writer, and I know—because she’s made several oblique references to it—that she’s afraid she’ll wake up on her thirtieth birthday to find it’s no longer a disguise.
She lives over the hills in Sherman Oaks, just beyond the pale into 818, high on the slope with a view northward over the great flat desert of the San Fernando Valley, that rigid-grid waffle iron where little white stucco houses and big black Pontiac TransAms fry where oranges once grew. For some reason, I didn’t feel like taking the San Diego Freeway for the second time that day, so I traveled a more circuitous route involving Beverly Glen Boulevard and some switch-backing among the ranch-styles-on-stilts up to Bly’s place, a small peach-colored stucco house tucked into a fold of the hill up near the crest; only three houses were higher than hers, up toward the dead end sign.
Bly’s house is actually bigger than it looks from the road, which is fairly common in these hills. The front shows a wide peach garage door and a broad expanse of little louvered windows, all under a flat white roof dotted with white stones. Behind the louvered windows is a small slate-floored porch Bly has converted to a library chock-a-block with all the books she’d had trucked out from the East, and beyond that and the garage is the living room, the full width of the house, with a gas-fired fireplace at one end. Beyond the living room the house narrows, so that its shape is like a lower-case d> with garage and porch and living room in the ball of the d, while kitchen, office, bedrooms, and baths are in the extended line. The last quarter of the area is dominated by her swimming pool, with glass door entrances from living room and office and master bedroom. Behind all this, on cunningly leveled land, is a tennis court, which she owns jointly with three neighbors.
She never locks her door. Does she think she lives in the countryside? I don’t know, but she never locks her door, so I went on in, through the library and into the empty living room. Was she in the pool? A sensible place to be, and the lights were on out there, it now being seven in the evening, but no; when I went out from the living room, the pool, too, was empty.
The office. I looked through the glass doors and there she was, in profile to me, in a cone of light, typing away, looking fierce. She scorns her work afterward, but she’s deadly serious about it when doing it.
Standing in her view, I took my clothes off. This being only February, there was a nip in the air, but I knew she kept the pool heated and cold air doesn’t bother me at first. I had to be present in her peripheral vision, but she remained unaware of me, pounding away at her word processor, glaring at the screen. I waited, but the air was cool, so finally I leaned forward and knocked on the glass.
She looked up, frowning, deep in Mom and Junior’s repartee, then saw me, looked startled, then grinned. I, too, looked startled, pretended I was flustered at having been found naked, and stepped backward, as though forgetting the pool was there. As I toppled over backward into the water, I saw her laughing, but when I came up, she was already typing again.
The warm water was delicious. With the underwater light at the deep end illuminating the entire long cream bowl of the pool, and the surface of the water steaming slightly in the cool air, I seemed to be paddling around in a great tureen of clear broth; and I was the only oyster.
About ten minutes later I heard the office door slide open and Bly, also naked, came quickly across the terracotta tiles and dove into the water. She looked beautiful under there, passing the light, bubbles sweeping around behind her in a comet’s tail. She surfaced, we swam to meet in the middle of the pool, and kissed, and she said, “Thunder in German is Donner.”
“Oh, poo,” I said, and ducked her, and we played for a while, which became more serious at the shallow end, and then more serious yet on the shag carpet in the master bedroom; we didn’t want to soak the bed.
&
nbsp; Then it was time to see what, if anything, had gone wrong with dinner. Bly can do anything involving machines, from word processors to single-engine airplanes, and she keeps demanding that the machines in her kitchen behave themselves and act right. Sometimes they do, but more often not. She follows recipes, sets timers, sets heat, sets memory, brings in satellite electric pots and pans, and in theory what comes out should be edible.
I think maybe the problem is machines can’t themselves cook any more than they can write sitcoms. I don’t know how to tell Bly she has to give the stove as much creative attention as she does the word processor, or else give up the whole idea of cooking, so from time to time I permit myself to go through this trauma with her. So far she hasn’t poisoned anybody.
Tonight’s meal was on the better side, in fact, when we finally got to it, a chicken casserole with a nice California Riesling. We also shared a bottle of San Pellegrino, Bly having picked up that habit from me. We ate in the living room, seated on the floor on opposite sides of the glass coffee table, swathed in our terry robes and with an honest wood fire in the fireplace. Mostly during dinner we talked about Zack Novak’s idea—or his brilliant friend Danny Silvermine’s idea— for me to take Packard on the road.
“Do you want to do it?’’ she asked me. She was giving me the same kind of intense look she gives her word processor, so I knew I had her attention.
“I want to do somethingI said. “I just feel Packard’s a graveyard now. He made me, he made me what I am today, and he made me rich, but at this point he’s also made me unemployable. Do I take this thing in the hope Zack’s right, the new setting, even with the old character, will make me look more like a real-life actor? Or am I just going to confirm everybody’s opinion that I’m Johnny One-Note?”
“If it’s everybody’s opinion anyway, what difference does it make if you confirm it?”
“Because I’m trying to change their minds. Also, if I go on the road for no money with a play, that argues against me still being the viable film star I say I am.”
“So you want to do an Ilya Morometz,” she said, nodding. “Stay on the mountaintop, think beautiful thoughts, and wait for God to give you the call. ‘Rise, Sam Holt, and save Holy Mother Russia.’ But what if the call never comes?”
I stared at her. “Who the hell is Ilya Morometz? Where do you get these allusions?”
“I make them up,” she said, which might even be true, but I don’t think so.
I said, “I have to give Zack an answer pretty soon.”
She shook her head, tasted some food, and said, “It’s still cold in the middle.”
“It’s fine.” She was right, it was still cold in the middle.
“Oh, well. Sam, you play a character named Jack Packard and you have an agent named Zack Novak. Do you realize how absurd that is?”
“It just happened,” I said. “I know, you’d never name your characters like that.” Bly was the second of the three people I’d shown my first PACKARD script to, and along with some very good advice she’d also given me a hard time about my characters’ names because they weren’t ethnic enough.
“Of course I’d name them like that,” she said. “Zack Novak and Jack Packard. But I’d do it for comic effect.”
“Thanks a lot. The question is, do I do this dinner theater thing or not?”
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “The question is, you don’t want to do this dinner theater thing, so what are your reasons?”
I laughed at that, and we spent the rest of the meal working out my reasons. You can, too.
After dinner and wash-up, we sat on the sofa near the fire and Bly brooded at the flames, saying, “I’m not taking your problem lightly, Sam, I’m really not. I know you’re stuck, but we all are, aren’t we?”
“Maybe so.”
“I’ve had some intimations of mortality recently,” she said, and shivered, pulling the robe tighter around herself.
“The big three-oh, you mean.”
“That too. But I was at a funeral last Friday, and it was such a waste.”
“A relative?”
“No, an actor, he played an aging hippie car salesman sometimes on Gandy and Son. Not really a regular, you know, maybe four or six episodes a year. I liked to write for him, I could slip across some sneaky anti-Americanisms.”
‘‘And he died.”
‘‘Car crash, at forty-seven. Isn’t that stupid?” Thinking of my own almost car crash of today, at thirty-four, I said, ‘‘Very.”
‘‘Nobody knows how it happened. Middle of the day, good weather, on the Ventura Freeway way out by Hidden Hills, he just lost control of the car, went off an overpass into the roof of a store. Two people killed.”
“He had a passenger?”
“Some friend of his who did makeup over at Universal.”
I stared at her. “Makeup?”
She stared right back. “Sam? What’s the matter?”
“Do you have an Academy Guide?”
“Sure. What do you need?”
“Your friend that died.”
“Beau Sheridan.”
“I want to see him.”
“Okay,” she said, and shrugged, and went away to her office, coming back with the volume of the Academy Guide that includes the male character people. She opened it, put it in my lap, tapped a photo, and said, “There he is.”
There he was. All the union actors and actresses are listed in the Academy Guide, with photo and telephone contact and usually a list of credits. So here was Beau Sheridan, smiling into the camera, giving one of the better-known agencies as his contact, with a modestly short list of TV series on which he’d worked.
He didn’t look that much like Ross Ferguson, but the potential was there. The high balding forehead, the wide-set eyes. The jawline was good. This was the fellow, all right.
“Sam? What is it?”
I sighed. “I wasn’t going to tell you about this,” I said, “because I didn’t want you to worry, and I figured it’d all be over by tomorrow anyway. But now maybe I will. Maybe I’d like to know what you think of it.”
She sat beside me, all eyes. “Tell.”
I told: The attempt on my life, the conversation with the police. “Then I realized it had to do with a problem of Ross Ferguson’s from last November.”
“Do I know about this problem?”
“No. It was his secret, not mine, so I didn’t tell anybody.”
“I had to drop the aspic,” she said, nodding.
I frowned at her. “Is that another reference?”
“Yes. Dinner at Eight. But never mind, tell me chapter two of this story. The Secret of Ross Ferguson.” So I did, and she said, “You’ve been keeping this inside you for three months? You’ve come over here, we’ve had dinner, we’ve screwed, we’ve driven up to Femdale together, I’ve stayed at your place, and all this time you had this thing, this murdered woman in extreme close-up, and you never showed it?”
“I wasn’t trying to insult you, Bly,” I said, “or keep you out of my life or any of that. It wasn’t my secret.”
“Jeepers,” she said, and turned to frown briefly at the fire, which was almost out. She nodded at the fire, and looked back at me, and said, “Okay, you’re an actor. You acted the pants off me.”
“Bly, it really wasn’t my secret to tell.”
“It is now. Once they start trying to run you off the road, it—” She stopped, wide-eyed, and looked at the Academy Guide in my lap. “Oh,” she said.
“He couldn’t have known what they wanted the tape for,” I said. “They probably told him it was a birthday gag or something like that.”
“And the makeup man, sure. But why now! If they did the thing— My God, that was months ago!”
I said, “I think it’s because they’re making their move now. They’ve been setting it up for a long, long time, but until they actually do whatever it is they have in mind, nobody’s dangerous to them. But now several of us are.”
“Did you
talk with Ross about this?”
“I tried,” I said, and told her about that part, including Malibu and Doreen. Under other circumstances she might have made a couple of fake-jealous jokes about Doreen winding up at my house, but now she just stayed silent and absorbed. At the finish I said, “I figure Ross’ll phone Malibu again tomorrow morning at ten, to be sure Doreen’s alive and well. This time I’ll be the one to answer the phone.”
“But what’s he doing with them? You think he’s made some sort of deal with them?”
“I’m pretty sure he has. But it seems to me he’s wrong; once they’re finished with him they’ll kill him too.”
“It’s all so elaborate. And ruthless. What can it be for?”
“I haven’t the vaguest idea.”
“I bet you haven’t called the police yet, have you?”
“Tomorrow,” I promised. “After I finally talk to Ross, I’ll call the police. I just think I have to give him one chance before I do.”
“Chance for what?”
“Maybe he can still get away from them.” I told her about the poolman’s van. “If they’re in there with him, maybe he can get out before the police arrive.”
“Sam,” she said, “I wish you’d call the cops right now.”
“In the first place,” I told her, “it’s after midnight. In the second place, all I’ve wanted to do since this afternoon was have one phone conversation with Ross. After that I’ll tell the police everything. Including the death of your actor friend Beau.”
She looked at the Academy Guide and shook her head. “These are really bad people, aren’t they?”
“They haven’t shown any redeeming features yet.” We talked about the mysterious “they” a while longer, without accomplishing anything. Bly asked me if I wanted to stay over, but I felt I ought to be at my place in the morning to talk with Doreen before going on to Malibu, so a little after one I left, promising to phone her in the morning, after my conversations with Ross and the law.
It was just a little out of my way, and I stopped for only a second in front of Ross’s house. A couple of lights were showing, not many. The van from Barq Pool Service was still there.
