Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  * * *

  First of all, it bothered him that they called her Catherine when it wasn’t her name. His wife thought he was being silly about it, but perhaps the housekeeper liked her real name; perhaps, more to the point, she despised it, as he despised his; and therefore changing it took on all the more importance. In a town that exalted self-invention one struggled to reinvent oneself properly; what dismayed and destroyed people here was to find they had no control even over their processes of self-invention, to find they created themselves all over again only to fuck it up the second time even more than the first, and with fewer excuses. Somewhere in the last twenty years Llewellyn Edgar, so named by his heartland American parents, who thought such a name would give him a head start because it sounded like the moniker of money and status, somewhere in the last twenty years Llewellyn Edgar had lost control of his own re-creation. It was a small defeat, as defeats in this particular city went, but it still struck him as fundamental; if he were to throw away the name he hated for something else, he would as soon have it something of his own authorship. Rather, it was an invention of accident, the lining up of letters like the lining up of stars in constellations, an amalgam of initials, Lee (his middle name was Evan). Only his wife called him Lew. The studios credited his scripts to Lee Edward, a name anyone could have, not calling much attention to itself. It was the idea in this town, it was an art and science, to call attention to one self but not too much so and not before the public was ready for it. The industry was never really ready for it, even when it made them a profit.

  * * *

  At the age of seventeen Llewellyn Edgar received a poetry scholarship to Princeton, an occasion propitious enough, he would have thought, to convince his heartland parents that the name they gave him was every bit as good an idea as they had originally supposed. In fact his parents thought American children left the heartland to become tycoons. Llewellyn’s new assignment in life led him to New York City, where he commuted to school in New Jersey and spent his time with other poets and the Village theater scene then in flower. It didn’t bother him that the only time he could bear New York was at night when the dark swallowed up everything but the windows, which hung like boxes of light strung along the gutters. Everything was connected. Those that lived there dazzled themselves. They were stunned by their own explosions and pretended to understand them; there was no one else who understood enough to argue that they didn’t. It was in a lower East Side drama company that Lew met Richard, who was well into his early thirties and, the generational ethic of the era notwithstanding, all the more impressive to Lew for it. Richard spent most of his time hustling Off Broadway work and trying to conceal his homosexuality; in fact, the only person he fooled was Lew, who didn’t recognize it until long afterward. The friendship between the thirty-something-year-old actor and the young poet was cause for some titters around the Village. By the time Lew would learn to care, the others had stopped caring and the titters stopped; by then he had slept with too many women to fuel the rumors further. The friendship was also strong enough to blind Lew, for a while, to the fact that Richard was only a dependable and unextraordinary actor and would never be more; and Richard was just finding this out about himself and just beginning to admit it. Faced with the truth of his sexuality and talent, Richard learned his life didn’t belong to him anymore but rather to his dreams, which had been repossessed by age. Not much later Lew realized this period in New York was the first and last time his life really belonged to him.

  * * *

  He never went through the moral dilemma of his friends in New York, which was whether to go to Los Angeles. They discussed this prospect with the urgency and irrevocability of those considering a journey of light years to another celestial system, understanding that if they ever returned everyone they knew would have grown old and died while their own lives passed no more than two or three months. For those going on such a journey there was the abhorrence of losing family, lovers, everything they’d known of their lives, while at the same time there was the unspoken thrill of immortality: returning to new lovers and new lives. Though the choice was theirs to make, they could still blame the outcome on outer space and relativity physics. Outer space would persuade them they were not who they were and they were who they were not.

  When Llewellyn came to Los Angeles at the age of nine teen it was for a reason he thought had nothing to do with the real drift of his life, though in a funny way it did have something to do with poetry. Funny because that year a poet was running for President, funny because it was not the poet but rather the other man in whose cause Llewellyn had come to enlist while in New York. The climactic California primary was in June. Llewellyn’s candidate won. Llewellyn stood in the ballroom of the hotel where the victor claimed the election, and as the young poet went up to his room to pack for his return east, the would-be President crossed from the podium to the hotel pantry where a man fired a shot that killed him in a way protracted and bitterly inefficient. Llewellyn waited the twenty-five damn hours or whatever till the man died. I was a poet, he thought to himself one day at the end of an altogether different decade as he was driving up Sunset Boulevard, and I supported the man who quoted poetry rather than the man who wrote it. If I’d supported the man who wrote poetry, I would have been on the losing side of that campaign, and while I would have grieved for the martyr, as did everyone, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to stay while he died. I would have gone back to New York and continued being a poet. Moreover, if enough people like myself had supported the man who wrote poetry rather than the man who quoted it, the man who wrote it might have won the primary. This means the man who quoted poetry might not have been at the podium that night claiming victory; he might have come at a later hour or the next morning or not at all. There’s a strong possibility that he would not have been murdered, and would have become President, not that year but another year. This logic led Llewellyn to believe that in choosing the man who quoted poetry rather than the man who wrote it, whatever the political virtues of such a choice might have been, he had changed his whole fate and betrayed his own destiny. He never went back to New York. He was no longer a poet. Who’s to say, Llewellyn asked himself, how many others made such choices and betrayed themselves, not with choices that in themselves might have been meritorious but with choices that were wrong for the individuals who made them, with choices not in the spirit of those who made them? A country is different today because of it, because I’m different, and everyone is different.

  It was on the day he died, the man who quoted poetry, that Llewellyn first became a part of the city in which he now lived. But it was not the city that made the choice, it was not relativity physics that chose who he was rather than who he was not. He chose to let them call him Lee but he did not choose the name himself, and almost any name he had chosen himself, even his own name he hated, would have been better.

  * * *

  He lived in Venice Beach two years, his only address a local café on the boardwalk to which his furious father sent a stream of letters. When Llewellyn’s younger sister drowned that first summer in Lake Michigan, the tragedy reinforced both the son’s alienation and the parents’ burden of heartland dreams. Llewellyn found a group of poets at the beach who published a little magazine and turned their verses into rock-and-roll songs. He wrote his first movie with a local filmmaker who saw his work as personal exorcism; when he felt nothing left to exorcise, he committed suicide by wrapping himself in a bed sheet and lying on the southbound San Diego Freeway just beyond the Mulholland off-ramp. By the time someone got him out of the road he’d been hit by twenty-three cars in less than a minute; the obituary mentioned his ironically titled sixteen-minute movie, Unmarked Graves, which had no narrative or characters or dialogue but rather the hallucinatory images of martial nightmare that were the vocabulary of the day. The “screenplay” was credited to L. E. Edgar.

  This bit of dilettantism notwithstanding, in four years Lew found himself, in large part through his pr
oximity to a friend of a friend, working on a screenplay with an Italian director who’d been brought over by a major studio to make his American debut. The project had all the earmarks of disaster; the writer and director disagreed bitterly over a climactic section of the picture. The studios were wary of the director as a successful but mischievous maker of successful but mischievous art films, their wariness justified by the director’s conflict with the writer, who fought for a resolution more in line with what the studios wanted. The director won the conflict because he was somebody and Lew was nobody; but the incident endeared the young man to the studios, who saw in him a possible “quality” writer with the right instincts, that is the studios’ instincts. To Llewellyn this was a peculiar paradox. At that point he still saw in himself someone who might be an artist someday, if anything destined to be at odds with the marketplace; that he wound up on the studio’s side of things in this particular picture was an accident, he’d opted to resolve this particular picture in this particular way because he thought the dynamics of the picture called for such a resolution; the embrace of the studios was quite unforeseen. At least that was what he told himself at the time. Later, in the midst of his ongoing paroxysms of self-doubt, in the midst of the crisis of integrity that was beginning to overwhelm him, he questioned that he’d ever believed such a thing at all. He questioned whether in fact his instincts were not those of the studios and the industry all along, and whether his new crisis was not one that found him at war with those instincts, trying to persuade himself he was not who he was and that he was who he was not.

  * * *

  This movie, which opened in America as White Liars, was a success, the director’s prevalent instincts to the contrary. It proved fortunate for all parties involved, even as none of them was on speaking terms with the others. The studio scheduled a festival of the director’s films at a museum in Pasadena, to be climaxed by a screening of White Liars and a discussion of the film among its participants, warring director and writer included. Llewellyn sat through the event sullenly, barely seeing the movie and contributing nothing to the discussion. Only some months afterward, when he went to see the film in a theater still trying to figure out who was right and who was wrong about it or, more accurately, why he was right about it, did he note the screenplay was credited to L. E. Edward. He never knew if this was the director’s final revenge—which was his immediate conclusion—or a bit of studio machiavellia, the industry having appropriated his soul as theirs and thus giving the ownership a kind of institutional reality by changing his name. He could have taken the matter to the Guild of course. I submitted to it so easily, he would come to tell himself; it absolved me of so much responsibility.

  At the Pasadena festival he also met Madeline Weiss, a girl of nineteen who had grown up very much on the right side of Pasadena’s tracks. It was indicative of Maddy’s station and status that working for the museum archives was directed not so much at making an income as accumulating some “life experience,” as her father called it: he considered it part of the business of maturation, somewhere between piano lessons and debutante nocturnes. Of course it had to be the right sort of life experience; she wasn’t slinging hamburgers. Her family, of the upper crust, regarded writing for the movies in the same way as did Llewellyn’s family of the lower crust; contempt for the profession was utterly democratic, crossing all boundaries of class and money. To Maddy’s credit, she didn’t wait for Lew’s success to fall in love with him; she didn’t even wait for his peak before she married him, though by then, when he was twenty-eight and she was twenty-three, he was on a definite ascent. Maddy had a cynicism that seemingly came from nowhere, an errant gene that might have been un attractive in someone else but was enough to keep her from appearing as superficial as most Pasadena girls; it also kept her at odds with her family’s exalted plans, in the way Llewellyn’s romanticism kept him at odds with his family’s practical plans. It did not, however, prevent her from wanting the house in Hancock Park.

  * * *

  The house in Hancock Park was too big for two people, bigger for that matter than was necessary for two people planning on being three, as was to be the case several years after their marriage. It was also beyond the means of even a successful screenwriter. It was barely within the means of a successful screenwriter whose Pasadena father-in-law contributed half the down payment. For Maddy this fact under cut her reasons for wanting the house: Hancock Park was not only not Hollywood, despite the residence of one or two aberrational rock stars, it was the only thing about Los Angeles that old established Pasadena respected and envied. Thus Maddy aspired to the house in Hancock Park to prove something to her father, only to have her father bail out the couple on the finances. By the time she realized that none of this made any sense, by the time she realized that her father had proven something to her rather than the other way around, they’d gotten the house.

  Llewellyn didn’t want to live in Hancock Park. Its history denied the ever-transitory truth of the city. He didn’t want the burden of the expense either, meaning he didn’t want the burden of Hollywood success. In his own way Hollywood success was something he wanted to live down, in his own mind it only ascertained his corruption. It proved he was who he really was, he was not who he was really not. He capitulated in the end because Maddy was adamant and because of the house itself: red brick with white edgings, smaller than most of the houses in the park, with a door right in the middle and two large windows upstairs; and though he wasn’t a child, it reminded him of Christmas when he was and the family—Lew and his sister and his mother and father—got in the car at night to drive through the upper-class neighborhoods of the heartland, looking at the lights and decorations. A very similar house of red brick and white edgings, with a center door and two upstairs windows, was bedecked with a string of nothing but white lights that flickered on and off. Llewellyn and Maddy drove up to the house in Hancock Park twenty years later, and he sighed heavily knowing he’d regret whatever he chose to do. Perhaps he believed that his mother and father might relive some memory of their own; he imagined a reconciliation at the airport, and driving them up to the house and sitting there in the front seat of the car watching them, recognizing on their faces dreams the dreamers could not name.

  * * *

  Ten years after White Liars Llewellyn had his greatest success with a picture called Toward Caliente. The picture had been conceived and written by Llewellyn, and in the early stages of the project he had made a bid to direct. This plan was aborted by what he saw as his own lack of temperament conducive to direction and also by the birth of his daughter, Jane. By the time Toward Caliente was released, Jane was two years old; Lew and Maddy had been in the Hancock Park house five years. Toward Caliente provided an experience for Llewellyn similar to that of White Liars, with the writer and director at odds over a crucial resolution. Since Llewellyn believed this to be his movie, with the director merely the pilot of a vehicle the writer had constructed, he warred heatedly for the resolution he favored. The fundamental difference between Toward Caliente and White Liars was that this time the studio sided with the director in the conflict. In a high-level meeting with the studio executives Llewellyn was gently admonished for what were now considered his “arcane” instincts; the director’s position was praised as providing the audience with a “stronger emotional identification.” Llewellyn said, “If I hear another word about ‘strong emotional identification’ from another idiot who’s never written a sentence or directed a foot of film, I’m going to slug him.” It said much about the talent of Hollywood executives for self-abasement that those to whom Llewellyn directed this outburst took it sanguinely; there was, after all, a good deal of money involved in Toward Caliente. “We’ve made our decision,” the production chief explained. “We realize, Lee, you have your artistic conscience to live with in this matter. If you wish, we’d be willing to remove your name from the picture.” Lew was aghast. “This is my picture,” he said.

  A woman named Eileen
Rader was brought into the conflict. Rader was the head of the studio’s script department. She’d been with the department thirty-five years, having begun in her early twenties. She’d become particularly adept at dealing with what the studios called their literary prima donnas, writers who had detoured through the studios on their way to careers as poets or playwrights or novelists. Only after these writers realized how far they’d detoured and how unlikely they were ever to return to the main thoroughfare did they become reasonable. Rader was successful with this kind of writer because she affected empathy with them; she was admired by the studio for her soft touch. While some complained that she coddled them, the evidence was the writers came around. She demonstrated to them, in ways they found irrefutable, how they could live with the studio’s position and still consider themselves artists. Invariably Eileen reduced the problem to a single question. “Listen to me,” she would say, “we both know these guys are bastards. We both know their taste is what they sit on. But ask yourself this. Will anyone be better off if this picture doesn’t get released? Do you really want to punish the public, who’d be better off with ninety percent of a Lee Edward movie than none at all, in order to try and punish the studio, which you can’t hurt anyway because it’s too callous and bloated to feel pain? I’m not on either your side or the studio’s in this,” Eileen would say, “I’m on the side of this picture which, even slightly compromised, is too good to lose in a world of bad movies. I think that’s the side you’re really on too.” Implicit in all this was the inescapable reality that the studio was going to win and the writer was going to lose. Once the writer accepted this, even subconsciously, it was a matter of time before he relented.