Once Upon a Day: A Novel

by Lisa Tucker

  A grossly inflated view of himself? Maybe, but what struck Lucy more and more was how inflated her own view of him had become over the years. When they met, she thought he was powerful, but now he was almost godlike to her. Sometimes she even let herself give in to the urge to pray to him for mercy. Other times, she would wake up from another nightmare and go out into the garden and scream into the night sky, “Haven’t I been punished enough, Charles? How can you keep doing this to me?”

  That she deserved some punishment, Lucy never doubted. Her memory of the day it happened was as fresh now as it was nineteen years ago, because she’d spent so many hours, week after week, year after year reliving it all in her mind. She knew she was sticking her finger in a wound, torturing herself with feelings of blame, but what difference did it make? The therapists she’d seen were wrong. Her guilt wasn’t standing in the way of her life; it was her life now.

  Tragedy, loss and especially guilt: these were the real truths of the world, and Lucy knew it. God help the person who didn’t understand this, she thought. God help them if they have to find out the hard way that the life they’re taking for granted is as fragile as a naked heart.

  seven

  THEY HAD MET at a party, twenty-seven years ago. He was thirty-five, not old by any means, but a lot older than she was—and about twelve million dollars more successful. Twelve million 1976 dollars, that is. He was just coming off a series of Westerns that had done so well at the box office, he’d become known in Hollywood as the man who’d single-handedly brought the genre back to life. The party was at his house in Beverly Hills, to celebrate his latest, A Silver Dollar and a Gun.

  Lucy was only nineteen then. (So young! Yet not young enough to forgive herself for what happened. Never young enough for that.) She’d arrived in L.A. fresh from a bad year spent in Nashville, trying to break into country, and before that, a childhood spent in a tiny town in the southeastern part of Missouri, only a few miles from the Arkansas border. A hick from the sticks, when you got right down to it. Only in L.A. for a few months when she snuck into that party with her roommate, Janice. So impressed with the heavy silverware at the famous director’s home that, in the first ten minutes she was there, she slipped a spoon into her purse.

  “How Les Misérables of you,” Charles’s mother had said, when she took Lucy’s wrist in her hand and very softly—they were dozens of people around the table—asked her to return the spoon and follow her upstairs.

  As his mother led her to one of the empty guest rooms, Lucy didn’t say anything to defend herself. There was no point, she thought. Might as well save all her pleading for the police.

  She was only nineteen, but in some ways, she was already very old. She’d almost starved in Nashville, and when she was reduced to eating popcorn and fried flour month after month, when she was about to be thrown into the street because she couldn’t meet her rent, she’d let her landlord pay her for sex. Only a few times, but it was enough to change her view of herself forever. Back in Missouri, when her uncle would get drunk and yell at her for dressing/talking/looking like a slut, she’d had innocence on her side. She’d never even had a real boyfriend; she was saving herself for the wonderful future her mother had always talked about. As far back as she could remember, when she was so little she could barely stand, her mother would kneel down and peer into her face and tell her, “You are special, my Lucy, remember that. Mark my words, you are going to grow up and leave this town and become something great. Maybe you’ll even live by the ocean someday.”

  Lucy never had a father, but her mother adored her. She treated Lucy like a winning lottery ticket, the glittering prize that made up for everything in her otherwise tough life working long shifts on the line at the paint factory. But when Lucy was ten, her mother got sick and died, leaving her to an aunt and uncle who’d already raised six children. Lucy was no prize to them. They didn’t want another mouth to feed, and sometimes they didn’t feed her for several days. They would go on trips to the Ozarks in their RV and leave Lucy to herself. Even when they were home, they only gave her attention when they were telling her what not to do—don’t leave this house, don’t eat that, don’t use the phone—unless her uncle was drunk, when he would turn his attention to Lucy and accuse her of things she didn’t even understand. It was during one of these nights, when Lucy was a junior in high school, that she ran away and hitchhiked to Nashville, to become a country singer. Everyone said she had a good voice. Even when her mother was so sick she couldn’t leave the bed, she said hearing Lucy sing made her know everything would be all right.

  After her failure in Nashville, she couldn’t go back to Missouri, not after what she’d done. She got lucky when she ran into a group of kids heading for L.A. She loved that she’d be near the ocean, just like her mother always dreamed. Once she was there, she claimed she was an actress just like everybody did.

  She got lucky again when, after four nights of sleeping on the beach alone—because the kids she’d ridden with turned out to have family or friends in the area, and places to stay—she met Janice. She’d gone into a coffee shop to use their bathroom. The manager told her no, not without buying something, but Janice felt sorry for her and snuck her in the back way. When Lucy admitted she had no place to live, Janice took her in. “You can pay me your half of the rent later, after you get a job,” Janice said, and then proceeded to find Lucy work as a waitress at another Venice restaurant.

  They lived in a tiny cottage about four blocks from the beach. The floors were so warped they had to put magazines under one leg of the TV stand; the kitchen sink had rusted from a constant leak, and the bathroom was home to a family of cockroaches that kept coming back even though Lucy and Janice always managed to squish at least two before the rest escaped into the crack between the tub and the wall. Janice liked to joke that they’d be moving somewhere far more glamorous as soon as they got a chance to jump on the casting couch. “I’d do it in a minute,” Janice would say. “The number of lines for the part depends on the size of the director’s dick. If he’s over nine, then I’ll go under nine, but otherwise, I need a real supporting role. I’m not a total whore, you know!”

  Lucy would laugh with Janice, but inside she vowed she would never do anything like that again. Nothing was worth the awful feeling she had with Mr. Smitty—Smutty, as some of the tenants called him—in Nashville. Sometimes when she closed her eyes, she still saw him groping her and breathing on her and climbing on top of her. He seemed to like it when she cried out, which she usually did. She was skinny and small. He didn’t take his time. He’d hurt her.

  But now she was starting over. Her new life in L.A. Except here she was, sitting on the bed in an empty guest room, waiting for the police to haul her off to jail.

  When the door suddenly opened and Charles Keenan himself walked in, she flashed to a scene in one of his movies. “I’ll give you another chance, outlaw. You leave now and don’t darken my door again, and I won’t kill you for the cattle thief you are.” What was it called? The Last Train?

  Janice had pointed him out downstairs, but up close he looked much taller and scarier. He was wearing a suit rather than the casual California clothes everyone else at the party wore. And he had very strange eyes: blue gray, with one eye, the left one, noticeably larger than the right. The closer he came, the more she noticed it. It was ridiculous, but she felt that one eye could see right down into her soul.

  He didn’t speak as he came toward her. She wanted to ask him what he was doing, but she couldn’t find her voice. She watched with a growing sense of horror as he sat down on the bed and started untying his shoes.

  She had no idea whether Keenan was considered attractive. Probably, but even if he wasn’t, he could have all the dates he wanted. Lucy herself had seen three model types hanging on him downstairs. So what was he doing up here with her?

  He sat very still for a moment before slipping off the shoes. The way he placed them carefully at the side of the bed reminded her of Smitty. Some
thing very mechanical about it. No passion like she’d seen in the movies, where a man wants a woman so much that the whereabouts of his clothes afterward is the last thing on his mind.

  Finally, he twisted his body around to face her. He still hadn’t spoken. The look on his face was so confident, like he had an absolute right.

  “How dare you!” Lucy’s voice was louder than she expected, and she realized she was furious. “This is about a lousy spoon?”

  The big eye was staring at her, and she could feel herself becoming awkward in her own body. “My mother told me you were up here waiting for me.”

  “Well, I’m not going to do it,” Lucy said, quieter now, but with a firmness that surprised herself. “I’d rather go to jail than … than …”

  “What?” He took a long look at her. She felt her cheeks get warm. He sounded annoyed. “I only came up here to talk to you.”

  “But you took off your shoes. You’re on the bed!”

  “I have blisters on the bottoms of my feet. An accident I had on the last day of shooting, when I was supposed to be showing one of my actors the right way to walk across hot coals.” He inhaled. “I’m on the bed because the room isn’t finished. It’s the only place to sit. I assume that’s why you’re sitting here too.”

  She’d already breathed a sigh of relief when he said, “Let me make sure I understand. Were you telling me that you’d rather go to jail than have sex with me?”

  She sat up straighter. “Yes, yes, I was.”

  “And you know who I am?”

  “Of course. You’re Charles Keenan, the great director.” Her voice grew defiant. “But do you know who I am?”

  “Your name is Lucy.”

  “That’s all you know? Because I’m—”

  “I know you tried to steal from me. Solid silver, worth …” He rubbed his forehead. “I have no idea.”

  “Big deal. You have enough already, don’t you think? My entire place isn’t as big as this guest room. The spread you have on your table would feed me and my roommate for a year.”

  “So you think you had a right to do this?”

  “Of course not! I’ve never done anything like this before in my life. What do you think I am, a criminal?” Her top lip was quivering a little, but she flipped her hair and forced a smirk. “Look, just tell me what you’re going to do and get it over with. Call the police. Blacklist me all over town. I don’t care.”

  He was staring at her with both eyes now. “As long as you don’t have to have sex with me.”

  “Sex is for love. I don’t care how insane that sounds to someone like you. It’s the way I’m going to live. Even if you offered me a starring role in your next movie and half this house, I still wouldn’t sleep with you.”

  He didn’t say anything as he reached for his shoes, but he groaned a little when he put them on. Maybe it was true about the blisters.

  When he stood up, she was struck again by how tall he was. Tall and intimidating. She stood up too, but it didn’t help.

  “Let’s go.” He waved his hand in the direction of the door.

  “Where?”

  “Back to the party.”

  “Both of us?”

  He was already opening the door, and then they were in the hall, crowded with guests. His mother, Margaret, was taking them to the screening room in the west wing of the house. It was time to watch A Silver Dollar and a Gun.

  “Would you sit with me?” he said to Lucy.

  She was very surprised, but she said okay. At least she’d have a good seat, she thought, though it didn’t turn out to be true. Charles always sat in the back so he could watch everyone’s reactions. He said these closed preview screenings were a farce—no one ever said what they really thought—but he could tell whether the scenes were working by the way the audience breathed and moved in their seats. Too much sighing or squirming was obviously bad, but none was bad too. “If the hero is in danger,” he told Lucy, “everyone should be uncomfortable.”

  Lucy was uncomfortable, no problem there. Before the movie started, at least half the room turned around to catch a glimpse of her. Later, she would discover that Charles had never had a woman sit with him during a screening. He said he’d never trusted any woman he’d been with not to distract him with false praise.

  After the movie was over, he asked if she’d stay at his side while he suffered through the applause and backslapping. When her roommate, Janice, came up to ask what was going on, Lucy shrugged, but Charles said the explanation was simple.

  “Lucy is not corrupt.”

  Janice’s eyes were on her. Several other people had gathered in a circle around Charles, and they were looking at her too. One of them was the actress Belinda Holmes, who had been the female lead in several of Keenan’s movies.

  Lucy wondered if he’d been drinking, but then she realized she’d been with him for more than two hours. Even if he had, it would have worn off by now.

  “This girl has moral values,” he said, emphasizing his point with one hand slicing the air. His tone became loud, as if he were giving a speech. Which he was. The crowd around them was growing with his every word. “Too many people in this business don’t even know what that means anymore. Immoral behavior has become so commonplace that they don’t even call it that, they call it ‘looking out for your career. Doing what you have to do.’ There’s no such thing as bad or good, only the next big score.”

  The longer Charles talked, the more Lucy thought he sounded like one of the monologues that were considered the “signatures” of his movies. Unlike old-fashioned Westerns, Keenan’s films always contained at least one direct address to the audience, usually by the sheriff. Movie critics loved to talk about the meaning of these monologues, claiming they were really about Watergate, the Vietnam War, feminism, race relations, all the issues of the day. Lucy never really caught any of that. To her, the sheriff sounded like her grandpa, spinning a tale of the old days when good was good and bad was bad and people had faith in each other and the world.

  Charles himself had moved back to the topic of Lucy and was spinning a dream of the little town she must have come from. Her accent gave her away, he said. It was Southern, wholesome, without a hint of sarcasm.

  She winced a little at the word “wholesome.” Smitty had called her “wholesome looking”—while he was laughing and pinching her butt.

  She’d let herself drift into a daydream by the time Belinda Holmes suddenly said, “Tell us, Lucy, are you really such a good person?”

  “You don’t have to answer that,” he said irritably.

  “Why not let her answer?” Belinda said, tossing her head back. When she turned to Lucy, her voice was a challenge. “Unless for some reason you don’t want to.”

  Lucy’s eyes darted around the room, but she didn’t see one person crack a smile. Even the group of actors who were rumored to be twenty-four-hour speed freaks looked as serious as if they were in church.

  The church of Charles Keenan, she thought. She figured he was waiting for her to say yes, so his speech would make sense, but she was so nervous, she blurted out the truth. “No,” she said. She looked down at the beautiful wood floor, each plank gleaming, not a speck of dust in sight. “I want to be a good person, but I don’t think I am.”

  She looked up when Charles started clapping. A slow, steady clap, each one loud enough that she wondered it didn’t hurt his hands. Soon the rest of the crowd had joined him and she realized she’d never been more confused in her life. But she wasn’t angry. Maybe she really was meant to be an actress, she thought, since she liked even this bizarre applause.

  Over the next hour or so, two agents slipped her their cards. One said, “You are incredible,” and the other simply told her to call him tomorrow. It felt exciting, even though she knew it was only because of Charles Keenan’s interest that they were interested in her. And that won’t last, she thought later, sitting next to him on a white couch that had to be eighteen feet long, eating slices of the most delicio
us strawberries and mangoes she’d ever tasted in her life. Now that she wasn’t angry, she couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him. Even when he asked what she thought of his movie, she said, “Great.” It was her true reaction, but how boring.

  By the time the guests started leaving, she was mainly just relieved. She was dying to be back with Janice in Janice’s old VW, smoking a joint and laughing, rehashing all the strange details of this very strange night.

  She did manage to tell him she was going. When he asked her to come into the dining room for a moment first, she nodded and let him lead her into the deserted room.

  The chandeliers were dark, but the room wasn’t, thanks to the shadows of the giant floodlights outside playing on the wall. She could see a tennis court and swimming pool in back of the house, and she remembered again that this man was a millionaire many times over.

  “Before you leave, I’d like to kiss you,” he said. “Is that all right?”

  He must have taken her silence as a sign that she didn’t mind because he leaned down and put his lips on hers, surprisingly lightly and gently, as if he were kissing a newborn baby. It was so different from the way Mr. Smitty had kissed her that she felt tears spring to her eyes.

  “Is something wrong?” he said. His voice had become so kind, and she felt foolish but even sadder.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “May I kiss you again then?”

  May I? she thought. Like something from one of his movies. Next thing you knew, he’d be calling her “ma’am,” and she’d be wearing gingham and calico.