Arc, Caleb said, would be a story about power and passion and innocence and the loss of it, and would proceed on the thesis that Saint Joan had not, after all, been burned at the stake in 1431, but had recanted and lived, and had a passionate affair with the French monarch who was supposed to have abandoned her to her fate, and had, as he said, “changed history another way entirely. I’m not going to tell you just how, because that’s the kernel of the movie and Laura will tell you that I never talk about that, but it’s delicious just the same, and powerful. I want that delicate and battering sense of passion corrupted, of innocence transmuted into power of another sort, of obsession, of purity given over to the service of…the world, I guess you could say. Can’t you just imagine all that religious frenzy, that virginal rapture, put to the use of the body? It could blow a world apart. It will, in Arc. The focus will be on the mature Joan, the lover of the monarch; the young Joan will be only a prelude, for contrast. Joan the woman will carry the load. And what a woman: tormented, passionate, guilty, hungry, sated, rapturous, humble, exalted—it will be an unforgettable role.”
“Who will play the Dauphin?” I said. The concept made me recoil, but it undeniably had power as well as perversity. I could see why Laura was so enraptured by the prospect of playing the adult Joan. It would have everything for an actress.
“I don’t know. I haven’t cast that yet, either,” Caleb Pringle said. “And it won’t be the Dauphin. It’ll be the Dauphine.”
“Oh, my God,” breathed Laura into the silence. “Of course. How perfect. Saint Joan would never have been seduced by a man, but a woman? A woman with sleekness and subtlety and a great worldliness—”
“A woman like that would be a monster if she did that to a young saint,” I said.
“Ah, but Joan was not a saint,” Caleb Pringle said. “Not until after her death was she canonized, and of course in Arc she will not die, but you’re right. The Dauphine will be a monster. The exact opposite of what the French call a monstre sacre, a sacred monster. My Dauphine will be a profane monster. A profane, monstrous, enchanting ghoul, stronger than Medea or Lilith. All evil. Totally depraved. An eater of flesh. Irresistible. It will play wonderfully off all that vast, untouchable innocence.”
“It will be a masterpiece,” Laura said. Her voice was hushed.
“It sounds like the worst of Roman Polanski,” I said sourly. The whole Arc thing made me unreasonably angry and disgusted. Just like, I told myself, somebody’s relative in an aqua polyester pantsuit.
“Well, I’ve heard that before,” he said mildly. “Glynn? What do you think?”
“I think,” Glynn said, “that I see what you mean. All that…untouchedness…spoiled with hands. Like snow when feet have trampled it. It’s still snow, only is it, really?”
He clapped his hands lightly.
“Exactly. Exactly. Innocence corrupted is still innocence, only soiled. Or is it? The conundrum at the heart of the matter. Are you sure you don’t write screenplays on the side?”
She laughed, embarrassed, and dropped her eyes. I stared from one of them to the other. Where had she gotten that? What could there possibly have been in her short experience to enable her to grasp it?
Then she said, “Will Rocky, you know, MacPherson? Will he be at the restaurant, do you know?” and she sounded so much like the teenager I knew that I smiled in the dark in sheer relief.
“I believe Rocky is in the slammer in Carmel as we speak,” Caleb said. “He seems to have taken a dislike to his room at the Pebble Beach Lodge and trashed it. This time I’m not going to bail him. Let him sit there and miss the screening and all the petting and the ink. I’ll send somebody down there to get him out tomorrow. Maybe. Or maybe I won’t. He’s been told what would happen if he did it again.”
“Oh, nuts,” Glynn said, and then buried her face in her hands.
“Don’t be upset,” Caleb said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll get him out in the morning if it will please you.”
“I’m not upset,” she said from between her fingers. “I’m embarrassed. Nobody says nuts, absolutely nobody.”
He laughed for a long time, a young, free sound, and she laughed too, behind her long fingers; her old, froggy belly laugh. Then we had some more champagne, and Laura fixed her makeup, and Caleb thumbed the dial and soft rock poured into the car, and we were there.
At first glance Spago looks like a diner made of double-wide trailers set side by side. At second glance it doesn’t matter what it looks like. One glance at the army of shoving, shouting, sweating photographers mobbing the entrance and you know you are in one of those rare places on the earth where powerful forces converge.
“Who are they waiting for?” Glynn whispered in awe.
“Anybody famous who happens to come in,” Caleb said. “And anyone who looks like they ought to be famous. You. Your mother. Your Aunt Laura.”
“Yeah, right,” Glynn said, but when Jesus helped us from the car the paparazzi did indeed rush at us, frantically, shooting rapidly into our faces, mine and Glynn’s as well as Laura’s and Caleb’s. The little Hispanic darted at them making fierce shooing sounds, and they parted just enough for us to run into the restaurant.
“Wow,” Glynn said, lifting a luminous face to mine. “Did you see that, Mom? Did you?”
“I did,” I said. “Ridiculous. Don’t let it go to your head. You’re flown enough with yourself tonight.”
“No! I want to be more flown! I want to be flown all the way to the moon!” she caroled, and did a little pirouette in the restaurant’s foyer. Her hair fanned out in a surge of silk, and her eyes closed in rapture. Caleb stood and watched her, unsmiling once more.
“Glynn,” I said warningly. Enough was enough.
Caleb Pringle scanned the crowd inside. I looked, too. It seemed to me that every beautiful woman in Los Angeles was in Spago tonight, and every older man, and all of them were rich. Everyone could have been Someone, but I could not tell who all those someones were.
“Are all these women in movies?” I whispered to Laura. “If so, who are they? I never saw so many beautiful women and so many gorgeous clothes, but I don’t know who anybody is. Am I supposed to?”
Caleb overheard me and laughed.
“No, you’re not, mostly. Who they are is women who go to Spago.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that’s what they do. They get invited to Spago and then they spend the rest of the week, day and night, getting ready to go. And after they’ve gone they kick back and wait until they’re invited again, and the whole thing starts over.”
I looked at him in disbelief.
“You’re kidding.”
“Only a little. Look, there’s somebody I want you to meet. Let’s go over, and then we’ll find the rest of the gang. I think they put us in a private room.”
We followed him through the thronged room, and again, as I had in the movie theater, I felt rather than saw eyes follow us, heard a small, windlike sigh ruffle the surface of the room. Ahead of me Laura pulled her shoulders back and tucked her buttocks in and fell into her prowl. My own shoulders went back and my spine straightened automatically. Next to Laura, Glynn was floating again.
Laura stopped suddenly. She looked up at Caleb.
“That’s Margolies over there,” she said, and her voice was low and angry. “That’s who you want us to meet, isn’t it? No way, Pring, absolutely no way in hell am I going to go over there and make nice on the bastard who cut me out of that movie. No way. Nada. What are you trying to do to me?”
“I’m trying to save you a little face, my beautiful ass. That’s what I’m trying to do,” Caleb Pringle said lazily, but there was something urgent in his voice. “Listen, Margolies doesn’t have any idea who you are; the cut wasn’t personal. It was for his Jacuzzi-brained honey, I told you that. He wouldn’t recognize your face if it got up off the cutting room floor and bit him. As far as he knows, you’re somebody he’s meeting for the first time, some
body he knows I want for Arc. He’ll be charming and polite and think you’re entirely as fetching as you are, and how smart I am to put you in the picture, and that’ll be that. And nobody else in here knows you’ve been cut from Margolies’s new picture, because nobody at all does, but they soon will. And what will they remember? They’ll remember that you sat at Margolies’s table the night of the screening and he slobbered over you and everybody smiled and giggled and yukked, and you were with me, and I’m doing another hot picture with Margolies, and they’ll go around telling the whole industry that they were here the night he hired you for Arc. The fact that you weren’t in Right Time after all will be forgotten because Arc is going to be newer and ten times hotter than that. Capice?”
“I do. Yes,” Laura said. “Thank you, Pring. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” he said, and tugged her braid, and we moved toward the corner booth where the little man who had sat beside me at the screening shoveled in pasta, head down over his plate. He was, oddly, alone. I would have thought studio heads traveled with retinues.
He looked up when we stopped beside him and smiled. It reminded me of the smile on the face of Bruce, the mechanical shark they used in Jaws. The eyes above the smile were chips of basalt, old and cold and long dead. I thought that I had far rather meet Bruce in the water than this man.
“Caleb,” he said, and his voice was smooth and thick, a flowery oil. “Dear boy. We meet again. Yes. Sit down and introduce me to these pretty things with you. Yes.”
Caleb handed us into the empty seats in the booth, putting Laura across from Margolies so, I thought, he could better look at her. He motioned me in beside her. He put Glynn next to the little man, and nodded to a waiter, who produced a chair as swiftly as if he had woven it out of air and set it at the end of the booth. Caleb Pringle draped his long frame over it.
“Leonard, this is Laura Mason, about whom I have told you an enormous amount,” he said. “I want her very badly for Arc, and I know that after you have looked at her for a few minutes you are going to let me have her with abiding joy. And this is her beautiful big sister, Merritt Fowler, from Atlanta, and the stunning child beside you is her daughter and Laura’s niece, Glynn Fowler. Maybe we should put them all in Arc. What do you think?”
Leonard Margolies nodded sleepily at us, and the shark’s smile widened. “Yes. Lovely, both of them. Yes, we should probably do that, my boy. If indeed there is going, as you seem to think, to be an Arc. Yes.”
I wondered if the repeated “Yes” meant anything, or was just a habit peculiar to Leonard Margolies. It was disconcerting, like hearing a toad hiss. Or a penguin. Or, of course, a shark.
“Oh, there must be an Arc, Leonard. It will be the jewel in your crown, as it were,” said Caleb evenly. “Especially with Laura here on board. I take it from your comment, or lack of same, that you think Right Time might use a little touching up.”
“Well, my boy, yes. A tad of cosmetic dentistry, shall we say. Yes. We will, of course, discuss that in the morning. I’m staying in town just to talk to you about it. See what I do for you? Come to my office about seven. We’ll order in.”
Caleb laughed. I did not think there was much humor in it.
“It will be,” he said, grinning around the table at us all, “in the nature of the condemned man’s last meal. Never mind. Let’s order something wonderful to eat and drink, and be very merry, for tomorrow, et cetera.”
Leonard Margolies raised a limp white hand and two waiters collided with each other trying to reach him first.
“Bring us something bubbly and so expensive for these pretties here,” he said. “Yes. Lots of it. We’ll order for them after we’ve toasted them; I want to think about what they should eat. Yes. I assume,” he said, looking at Laura and me and then at Glynn, “that you belles drink something besides bourbon and branch water.”
We smiled and nodded and he said, “Good. Good,” and looked at Glynn again.
In the low light of the restaurant she had the afternoon’s unearthly shine back, the shine that made me think of alabaster and medieval effigies. Excitement flamed along her cheekbones, but shyness paled the rest of her face to pearl-white. Her eyelashes lay along her cheeks, and I knew that she was struggling with shyness, struggling not to seem what she was: a sixteen-year-old sitting beside one of the world’s legendary restaurants. My heart squeezed in empathy. If I was tongue-tied here, how much worse for her. Too much; we had heaped too much on her tonight.
Abruptly Margolies leaned over and whispered into her ear, and she started and turned to look at him, the satiny hair swinging out, and then she began to laugh. It was the belly laugh. Margolies smiled conspiratorially at her, his eyes alive now, and heads turned toward us, and faces smiled. I had seen the effect of Glynn’s infectious croak before.
“What on earth did you say to her, Leonard?” Caleb grinned.
“That will be our secret, won’t it…is it Glynn? Yes. Glynn. We shall never tell, shall we?”
“Never,” Glynn said. The shyness was gone. She looked at him as one might a favored uncle. Forever after, she never told me what he said.
Margolies studied her openly, turning his head this way and that, smiling a faint smile. It was a gentler smile, but I thought the shark ghosted just below the surface. I was suddenly glad we would be going home the next day.
“Tell me, Glynn, do you want to be an actress like your pretty aunt?” Margolies said. It was more than a casual question; he sounded genuinely interested. I thought that this sudden, real charm was not the least of his power.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I have, you know, the looks and everything for it. I think I might like to write or paint, though. Or maybe do something with music.”
“Ah, then, the creative urge is there,” he said.
“As well as a rather startling perception,” Caleb Pringle said. “She caught the absolute essence of Arc before I’d even worked it out for myself.”
Margolies looked at her some more.
“You like Arc, my little Glynn? Yes?”
“I don’t think anyone is going to like Arc, exactly,” she said shyly. “But I think everybody is going to be, you know, different after they see it.”
He did not reply, but nodded several times.
We sat quietly for a bit, a silence that puzzled me but did not seem strained. Into it, Caleb Pringle said presently, “Well, if she doesn’t want to be in the movies like her aunt she could always save France.”
Leonard Margolies looked at him and then at Glynn again. The smile deepened.
“She could indeed,” he said. “Yes. She could indeed do that.”
Glynn looked puzzled and started to say something, but Laura made a small motion toward her and smiled, and she fell silent. There was a kind of suppressed glee in Laura’s face that I could not read, and a sleepy sort of triumph in Caleb Pringle’s. But no one said anything else.
The champagne came and was uncorked, and Leonard Margolies tasted it and said, “Yes,” and the waiter poured it all around. Margolies lifted his glass.
“To Miss Laura Mason and her pretty sister and niece. To a wonderful visit with us. May the magic of Hollywood never fade.”
We drank.
“Now. What can I do to make your trip memorable?” Leonard Margolies said, putting his glass down. “What have you seen? What would you like to see? Have you seen a real studio, had a Hollywood tour? I like to think Vega is one of the great ones. I would be most happy to show you around it. Yes.”
“I can’t think of anything any more special, than to see Vega in the presence of the man who built it,” Laura said. Her cheeks were flaming, and her eyes glittered. She had drunk her champagne rather faster than I liked to see. Laura never could hold her liquor.
“Oh,” Glynn cried in delight. “Could we? Mom? Could we do that? Oh, Jess and Marcia would just die!”
“Glynn, you know we’re going home at noon tomorrow—”<
br />
“But if we went early? Maybe we could do it real early?” her voice broke in something near despair.
“Mr. Margolies has an early breakfast meeting. You heard him. No, darling, he’s been kind enough to us as it is.”
“Wouldn’t it be fun if we gave her a test?” Caleb said, as if I had not spoken. “It only takes a few minutes. Glynn, would you like to have a real screen test? We could send you home with a tape of it, so you could make sure Marcia and Jess die. Leonard, we could do that, couldn’t we? We can meet afterward—”
“We could do that, yes. The meeting can wait,” Leonard Margolies said. He sat back, hands together like a Buddha, smiling. Shark, penguin, and toad had fled, leaving an indulgent uncle.
“Mom—”
“Why not, Merritt?” Caleb said. “We could have you on the plane in plenty of time. I’ll send Jesus with the car for you and he can wait, and take you to the airport afterward. Send you both off like royalty. It would be something to tell the gang, wouldn’t it?”
He was looking at Glynn.
“Oh, really, Caleb, I don’t think—” I began.
“It would give me great pleasure,” Leonard Margolies said. “Yes.”
“Oh, come on, Met. There’s no earthly reason not to do it,” Laura said. “How many young girls in the world will ever be able to say that Leonard Margolies personally gave them a screen test? Let her have something wonderful of her very own.”
And of course, there was no reason not to do it. It seemed to disaccommodate no one, and we would make our plane home with time to spare. And Laura was right; after that, there was not apt to be anything special for Glynn for a long time. Why not let her have this luminous moment without spoiling it? I did not know where my reluctance was coming from.
Fault Lines Page 19
