Then Lassiter walked in the door, suave as ever, his ancient shorts a perfect tartan, along with high white socks and loafers. But the shirt was as ever crisp and clean as a whistle. He came for desserts, he said, which consisted of a pitcher of Martinis he made up himself. He regaled them with tales of Kaye Starr and Mary Martin, and all but repeated verbatim their shows he’d accompanied at Stars and Bars, the little club at the top of Radio City in Manhattan.
Despite this wonderful distraction, clearly something was up among the hosts. When he left, Lass took Victor aside and said, “Whatever’s going on with those two, stay out of it!”
Victor hoped to hell he could stay out and not be drawn in. No sooner was he up then he quietly snuck into the aquarium dining room. Food was spread upon the table: French toast, bacon, cream cheese, coffee, marmalade. But only one setting had an empty plate. They’d eaten and already dropped their plates into the sink. So Victor settled down and looked over the local paper, The Desert Sun, which Andy had spoken of as “Slightly to the right of The Wall Street Journal. It advocates the skinning alive, if not the drawing and quartering, of illegal immigrants,” making gagging motions with his finger and mouth. But at least it reprinted day-old New York Times crossword puzzles, and Victor began one.
The Shelties came clambering in, astoundingly clumsy and noisy given their tiny size, and huddled under the table around his unshod feet. As a token of gratitude, he dropped tidbits for them while he hummed away in satisfaction as he planned out his day. There was a used bookstore he could visit; he’d passed it on Sunrise. Maybe he’d take a hike in one of the Indian Canyon trails later this afternoon. An Italian film said to be rather good was playing at the Camelot Cinema on Baristo. (It had played for about a minute in El Lay, so naturally he’d missed it.) If no plans for dinner were announced, he just might take in an evening show, then go to Johns on Palm Canyon Drive for a cheap burrito dinner; stay out and check out the Rainbow Café and Bar; leave tomorrow early.
He’d just gotten comfortable when the phone rang and was picked up. Two minutes later, Andy stomped into the room looking sleep-deprived.
“It’s for you,” he reported.
“For me?” He told no one he was coming here. Who was there to tell, anyway? Who was there to call him? He, who had easily fielded thirteen calls on any given day in New York City only a few years ago, half of them from Mark, now got at most two phone calls a week, and one of those was usually a wrong number for someone named—as far as he could figure out, given the various accents—Lebchuck Vermacularis.
“You’ve got to do a big favor,” Andy said tonelessly. “When are you driving back?”
“Depends.” Victor answered with the utmost delicacy. “I was thinking tomorrow, around 10:00 a.m.”
“Perfect. She has to be home by two. That’s plenty of time. She’ll give you the address and directions. Go. Take the phone. She’s waiting.”
Andy vanished.
Victor slowly got up, wondering what he was getting into. The iridescent Princess phone lay open on one of the sofas. Outside he heard buzzing and saw though the filmy curtains that Andy was trimming the hedges with a gas-powered clippers.
“Hello?” he tried into the receiver.
“Hello.” A woman’s voice. Small, clear as a bell, precise. Possibly elderly. “Are you the young man who’s going to drive to Los Angeles tomorrow?” Yes, elderly.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“I was going to call a limo to take me. I don’t drive anymore.”
“That would cost a couple of hundred dollars. I’ll take you. Where are you going?”
She gave him an address he didn’t know and said it was off Bundy Drive in Brentwood. She was afraid it was out of his way.
Victor almost asked, “The famous Bundy Drive? Like in the O. J. murder trial?” Instead he acted grown up, “No problema!”
After she had given him her address and directions, she added, “Carol said you’re a published author. Would I know any of your books? I mostly read mysteries. Sometimes romances. And of course, biographies. Carol said you write literary fiction.”
“That’s right.” So this must be one of Carol’s “Brassy Old Dames.” He just wished he knew who she was. From various visits out here, he knew he wasn’t as up on them as the other guys were. “I’ll tell you all about my writing tomorrow, and maybe you’ll tell me a little about yourself, since we’ll have a longish drive.”
“Oh, I’m long-retired. There’s nothing to tell about my life,” she assured him.
“Anyway, it’ll be fun having company,” he told her before replacing the receiver.
Outside, Andy was furiously trimming away. The path was already littered up to his ankles and yet the endless Oleander hedge looked barely clipped. Victor waited until Andy noticed him and shut off the machine.
“It’s all settled! I’ll get her at ten.”
“I would do it myself . . . “
“Why? I’m going back anyway.” Long pause. “It’ll be fun.”
Andy turned the machine back on and went back to his anger-management intensive-labor.
Victor soon left and didn’t return to the house until nearly midnight. Tobey had gone to bed. But Andy was still up. He was by the pool smoking a joint. Clouds enfolded most of hulking San Jacinto Mountain as though it was a Chinese scroll, and the night sky was flecked with clouds that played hide and seek with the stars. The Shelties were nowhere to be seen.
“Don’t go in yet,” Andy said. “I apologize. I invited you out here and then I was a lousy host.”
“Not a problem.”
“Here!” The joint as a peace-offering.
Victor went closer and sat and toked on the joint.
“The Fundies want this house.” Andy said. “They’ve made that clear. I don’t know what they’re prepared to do to get it. I’m guessing they’ll do just about anything.”
“Tobey’s not that sick. It could be years.”
“They’ll wait. And Tobey’s a lot sicker than he looks. He’s got half a year at most, more likely a month or two.”
Victor wanted to commiserate and at the same time ask why this was so important to Andy.
“It’s not just the principle involved,” Andy said. Then admitted, “Although that is a big part of it.”
“The principle being that you’re opposed to these Angels of Death. Whereas Tobey—“
“Whereas Tobey grew up with this kind of shit happening all the time in Asswipe, Missouri, and he considers it business as usual.”
“And so the lines are drawn.”
“We’re refusing to bring anyone else in on it,” Andy said. “At least so far. Who knows what’ll happen down the line.”
“If you do, I’ll stop coming.”
“I know that.”
“I like Tobey,” Victor said.
“I love Tobey like a brother. We’ve known each other most of my adult life. He was like my mentor when I came out here. My tiny gay mother. This is all so utterly out of character for him. I can’t believe he’d stoop to it.”
“Oh. I get it. He’s betraying you.”
“He’s betraying everything he stood for and said for decades. Everything I bought. Yes, a simple case of betrayal.”
They passed the joint back and forth in silence.
“You’re totally objective about this, right?” Andy asked. “So now, you’ve got to tell me what I should do. As you see it.”
“Nothing. Nothing until Tobey does something.”
“You mean like changing his will?”
“Did he will the house to you before?”
“This house? No. To some cousin in Asswipe.”
“Then just monitor the situation. He may never do anything.”
“Come on! They’re vultures. More come every time. You saw them!”
“Do nothing until you know for certain that he’s changed his will in their favor.”
“Okay
,” Andy said. “Then what?”
“Then, as soon as you know that fact, you move out.”
“Abandon him to them? No way!”
“You’re shrieking, Andy. If Tobey’s made that decision, then Tobey knows what your reaction will be. You have to leave and never see him again.”
“I can’t do that.”
He was really shrieking, albeit in a whisper.
“What about your principle? How else can you uphold it?” Victor argued. And when he didn’t answer: “An-dy?”
“Of course you’re a hundred percent right . . .”
Andy was silent a long while, then asked:
“But that’s not the only solution, is it, Victor?”
“No. The other is that you love Tobey unconditionally and you help him die and you don’t argue with him. And you quietly leave when it’s all over. You don’t trash the house. You don’t burn it down. You do nothing.”
“That would be the other Andrew Grant . . . Saint Andrew Grant.”
“Well, you fucking asked!”
“And you fucking told me!”
“And now I’m going to bed and I’m going to forget this conversation happened, and instead I’m going to remember the to-die-for handsome Italian actors I saw in that movie tonight and I’m going to jerk off till my dick falls off.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-seven
She was small and she was old. Eighty-five? Ninety? Who could tell? Her hair was white and curly. Sort of wrapped about with a colorful scarf, but not as a kerchief, more as a headband. Her clothing too, seemed a little Hippy-Dippy to him, which was exceptional here in Ultra-Republican-for-anyone-over-fifty Palm Springs. She wore a colorful vest over a pale pink silk blouse and a wide skirt with colored panels in it. Her shoes were deep red, flat, strappy, and they reminded him of a ten-year-old’s patent leathers.
She was waiting for him in the high-ceilinged foyer of the big old Spanish Style house, seated like a little girl with her bags at her feet, as though she were going off on her first vacation without her parents and family. She was sitting in profile, as though in thought, or in reverie—and he didn’t want to disturb her. But after a minute or two, he tapped lightly on the glass separating them.
She almost leapt up and opened the door for him, amazingly spry.
“I’m so glad you didn’t ring,” she stage-whispered. Adding, “I think she’s taking a nap.” Speaking of her hostess. “Poor thing! I probably wore her out. Let me get my bags.”
There were only two of them and they were light enough. Victor got them easily into the trunk along with his own multiple bags—he never traveled lightly in his own car if he could help it. He opened the door of his low-slung Japanese coupe for her, concerned about her age and flexibility, and showed how the seat belt just folded over her once she was seated.
She slid right in. “Comfortable?” he asked before he went around to his side.
“I used to have an Alfa-Romeo Spider,” she said, gleefully. “Not that long ago, either. I like small, fast cars.”
“I drive fast but carefully,” he assured her.
Once they were on Palm Canyon Drive, headed out of town, he sped up to sixty. She seemed unfazed.
“I love the desert!” Her eyes were bright and her complexion clear, her skin not all crepey, and her arms and legs looked pretty solid. She was in fact, lovely. Yet she had played a woman about a hundred in Titanic, hadn’t she? At the beginning and at the end of the movie? “It’s so wild and so—clean. I really ought to come out here more often. But I get so busy,” she confided.
“I’ve begun visiting people who live in the higher desert, two, three thousand feet higher,” Victor nodded northerly, in the direction they were headed just before they would turn onto the freeway. “Morongo Valley. Yucca Valley. Joshua Tree. It’s so amazingly filled with wild life. You almost trip over it, there is so much.”
“Calling it a desert is a real misnomer,” she agreed. “You may have noticed one of my bags was filled with my paint supplies. I’m usually a water-colorist. But out here, I layer one color slapdash over another, because it’s all so intense and bright!”
She began telling him about her painting, how she’d begun it as a hobby, and how eventually she’d ended up doing it all the time, shown in galleries and sold substantial amounts.
“Of course that was an outgrowth of another craft that I’d been doing for some years,” she said, “making books. Well, mostly little art and poetry books. From the bottom up. Making my own paper and book covers out of rag and all.”
By the time they’d passed Banning and were headed down into the first of the enormous valleys they would pass through, Victor and Gloria Stuart were chatting like old friends.
By the time they’d reached the next one, the San Gabriel Valley, he felt comfortable enough to say, “You must get this question all the time, but weren’t you in old-time black and white movies in the 1930’s? Or was that someone else? I remember growing up watching this 4:00 p.m. movie program called Million Dollar Movies. It showed all these Thirties, Forties and Fifties films. So, in a sense, I was able to grow up with Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi, with Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck, and all the rest of them. Occasionally, silent stars like Chaplin and Arbuckle and Buster Keaton, too.
“We would watch those movies over and over. They never played in movie theaters, the way they sometimes do now, you know, at repertory houses and festivals and the like. And there were no film classes in schools then, either. Cinema was considered merely a popular art. But lucky us got to know these movies pretty well because they played them twice a year or so. And even though it’s difficult to say for sure now, I recall a very pretty young blonde woman named Gloria Stuart in two of my favorites, The Old Dark House, and The Invisible Man.”
“That was me,” she said, without any false modesty or boasting. “I began young and made maybe twenty movies in those years, before the war. Then I became interested in the U.S.O. and helping our enlisted men at The Old Garden of Allah, which used to be on Sunset Boulevard not far from where you live now.”
“I can’t believe it. This is so exciting!” he said.
“Virtually no one ever talks about all that,” she admitted. “Oh, of course when Titanic came out, they mentioned it a little during all the publicity. Right now, they’re completing a documentary about the making of that movie, which should be out in the summer or fall, and in that I talk a little about my past in films. But no one knew, really.”
“So . . .” Victor didn’t know how to phrase it. “So, if I may ask, what happened? I mean between, what was it? 1939 and 1997. It’s a pretty big gap.”
“Isn’t it? I did some TV, and my one speech was cut from My Favorite Year when I danced with Peter O’Toole. Still it’s sort of a miracle that I was chosen for this role. I don’t know if it will lead to anything, beyond the documentary, of course, but if so I’m ready for it.”
She took a breath then said, “What happened, Victor, to be perfectly frank, was that I met a young man. Isn’t that what always happens? This young man came to Hollywood from New York. He was a young theater critic for several papers there and his reviews were syndicated elsewhere in the country.
“Well, the Marx Brothers had their plays on in Chicago, written by them, and, of course, starring themselves, and he reviewed the plays. It wasn’t just that he reviewed them well, Groucho later said. It was that he reviewed them intelligently, with complete understanding of their madcap brand of humor. So Groucho asked to meet him and they met and soon they discovered that they shared that same zany sense of humor. So after their last show closed in Chicago, the Marx Brothers brought him out to Hollywood to be their writer on the film versions of the plays: Coconuts and then Duck Soup and then other movies, too.”
“His name was Arthur Sheekman, and he and Groucho remained lifelong friends. They died only a month or so apart, you know. Tha
t’s about twenty years ago, and from the same cause, believe it or not. I met him doing a Broadway show called Roman Scandals with Eddie Cantor. Are you old enough to remember him? Then Arthur was the screenwriter on the movie The Invisible Man. I was the very visible girlfriend of the Invisible Man. I married Arthur, and in effect I married the Marx brothers, too! Mostly Groucho, because Arthur and he were so close. Groucho found us a house to live in where our back yard connected to his back yard. So they were in and out and we were in and out and the house was filled with them and with their family all the time.
“Being in that situation and raising children and all, it was like . . . unending pandemonium. But of a good kind. I was certainly never for one instant bored. Arthur worked with Groucho and the other brothers on their books, and helped write their touring shows, and he wrote their radio shows, and he also wrote some other movies. Oh, a lot of those! He always made a wonderful living.”
Victor discovered that, as Gloria’s career failed to go big-time in the late 1930’s, unlike many Hollywood actresses she found being a wife and mother satisfying and also discovered her own creative pursuits away from film and television. First, decoupage when they were living in Italy. Then oil-painting, and she showed in major American galleries and sold well. Later on, she became fascinated with the art of making fine and rare books. She still had a studio and worked most days, and so remained open to new things.
She had evidently asked around a little about Victor, and so she knew he’d been involved in various kinds of gay rights issues and she spoke very positively about it. She told him about some of her own involvement in women’s rights during the 1930s and 40s, and how she and other women had made demands on the studios for equal pay and equal rights. They had won several important victories, way before the 1970s when it became, in her words, “So popular and fashionable to do that.”
Justify My Sins Page 31
