The Player

by Michael Tolkin

  The black Saab was in the driveway, the glue from the dealer’s sticker still in the window.

  When the door opened, June started to say hello, but he watched her stop for a second as she looked over his shoulder to the limousine at the curb and the driver standing beside it. She shook Griffin’s hand and led him inside. She wore a pretty gown that combined midnight blue and a bit of black.

  “You look great,” said Griffin.

  “Come inside.”

  “We’re sort of in a rush.”

  “Just let me get off the phone.” She walked quickly back to the kitchen. She was arguing with a printer about a late order. “The bank is very unhappy,” she said. “Do you understand? The bank is very unhappy. It’s Wednesday or never, Ben. Deliver the brochures by Wednesday or throw them out. It’s up to you.”

  She came out of the kitchen, her eyes bright.

  “Sounds like you were having fun,” said Griffin.

  “Actually we have two weeks before we need the brochures, and Ben knows that, but he’s slow. Anyway, would you like a glass of wine? No, of course not, we have to go.”

  “Beautiful house.”

  “It was either clean it up or find something to wear. I’ll give you the tour another time.”

  As they walked to the car, Griffin realized that if he slept with her in the house, he’d probably make love in David Kahane’s bed. If he needed to brush his teeth, he’d be given Kahane’s toothbrush. Well, not his actual toothbrush—she would have thrown it out—but unless she bought new brushes after his death, any brushes hidden in a drawer might have been chosen by the man he murdered. This was the most gruesome thought he’d had since the night in the parking lot.

  June accepted the limousine driver’s official servant’s nod as she got into the car. She took her seat in the limousine and started talking to Griffin as though this happened to her every day, to be called to a charity ball with three hours’ notice and to be driven there by a chauffeur. Griffin wanted to make a joke about the car, but he couldn’t think of something that wouldn’t make fun of the luxury. He didn’t know whether it would be more amusing to act as though he was used to it or that it was new to him. He said nothing.

  “Tell me about yourself,” she said.

  “What would you like to know?”

  “The usual.”

  “Where I went to high school, what my major is, what dorm I live in, that sort of stuff?”

  “Yes.” She really wanted to know, and she didn’t want to make a joke about it. The impatience carried by her tone of voice started a faster pace in Griffin’s pulse. It scared him.

  “I’m from Michigan. Lansing. Have you ever met anyone from Lansing?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You haven’t, I know. I’ve never met anyone else from Lansing, Michigan, either. Anyway, my father was a judge, my mother was head of the board of education. She died three years ago. He’s retired and lives in Georgia, on the coast. I went to the University of Michigan. I was an art major.”

  “An art major.” She put the emphasis on art; everyone was always surprised when they found that out.

  “What’s the surprise, that a studio executive was an art major, or that I was, I mean, the person you see in front of you, this bland-looking kind of square guy. Can’t picture him worried about paint?”

  “Is that how I sounded?”

  “It’s all right. I’m used to it. I really was a painter. I was very good, actually, by the standards of the art department. It was sort of like cooking; I knew the recipe. I knew how to get the faculty jury to give me the prizes. Then I figured out how to get on the jury, to get on all the right committees. I always got along great with adults. I went to New York after Michigan, graduate school at NYU, and I was friendlier with film-school people than painters, and I dropped out of the painting program. Then I spent a few months in the film school and got friendly with the faculty, and one day the head of a big agency came to lecture, and I had to pick him up at the airport. I left for Los Angeles with him the next day. He put me in the mail room. I worked there for two months, I read every script I could. I decided I didn’t want to be an agent, I got a job as a reader, and one thing led to another and here I am. I’ve always been lucky about being in the right place.”

  “Do you still paint?”

  “Sometimes. I was okay. I wasn’t fooling anyone. I also knew that I wasn’t great. I was a good academic painter. But I was stuck in abstract expressionism. When the conceptualists came long, I was dead. I would have made an excellent teacher, but things went a different way. It’s not this big from-Art-to-Hollywood story. It didn’t work like that.”

  “You sound a little defensive.”

  “It’s an easy thing for people to pick on.”

  “Who?”

  “The people who pick on Hollywood for being artless. The people who still believe in capital-A Art.”

  “Now you sound cynical.”

  “No, now I’m being defensive.” It was fun talking in a limousine. You could look at each other. It was like a party.

  There were other limousines on Santa Monica Boulevard, a long line of them turning right to the Hilton. The great moment of the limousine is the arrival. June reached overhead to a makeup light and took a compact from her purse. How did she know the light was there? She finished putting on her makeup and then smiled at Griffin. The smile was forced. Hadn’t she taken a limousine to Kahane’s burial? That’s where she learned about the makeup light. No. The Saab was at the funeral home. Someone else had driven the Saab. She looked away from Griffin and held the compact in her hand. He thought by the way she held it, measuring the weight, that it might have been a gift from Kahane, although he didn’t think it looked like a gift, it was just a department-store compact. It was a brief glimpse into the sadness she still felt at David Kahane’s death. The limousine was at the entrance. Someone was opening her door.

  “Look,” she said, “there’s Robin Williams.”

  The driver opened Griffin’s door. He had something to say.

  “We were followed. From the time we left the studio. I wasn’t sure until we picked up your friend, but the car that followed us drove past her house on Outpost, and then, when we started back down the hill, he was after us again. It pulled into the public parking lot as we pulled in here. A Dodge Charger.”

  “Did you see the driver?”

  “I think so. Some guy with short hair and a mustache.”

  “Thanks.”

  “See you later.”

  June waited for Griffin on the sidewalk. He came around the back of the limousine and took her arm and brought her to the center of the red carpet, where Robin Williams faced a half dozen photographers. He pretended to be Mighty Joe Young in chains, in the nightclub scene where he comes out of the pit while Terry Moore plays “Beautiful Dreamer” on the piano. Then he turned into King Kong frightened by flashbulbs and driven insane. He started to make Terry Moore into Nancy Reagan. Griffin called out to him, “Robin!”

  The actor smiled. “Hello, Mr. Thalberg,” he said. Someone took their picture together.

  Griffin introduced him to June. She seemed polite, not too star-struck, but not diffident, either. She seemed more impressed with Griffin for knowing Robin Williams than for actually shaking the actor’s hand.

  There was no one with short hair and a mustache hanging around the edge of the crowd. As they followed the red carpet to the ballroom, Griffin wondered how he looked to June. He was aware of himself the way he might be aware of his house if he walked a prospective buyer through it, noticing all the details he’d taken for granted. Did he really know so many people as he was greeting? There were fifteen hundred people in the room, and he knew their faces the way a popular senior knows his class in high school. When they greeted him, they studied June Mercator, though only for a second. Griffin didn’t make an effort to introduce her, so she didn’t register. How did he look to the man with short hair?

  “Why did h
e call you Mr. Thalberg?” asked June.

  “Irving Thalberg was the boy wonder of 1933. He was Louis B. Mayer’s head of production.”

  “They give that award at the Oscars. What’s it for?”

  “Contributions to the industry. I’m not up for it.” She laughed at this in a way that suggested friendship, how a friend would tease someone without drawing blood, the issue here was professional self-respect, not an area Griffin dwelt upon too often, but it was the kind of question he could imagine worrying about when he was old—what was his life worth?—and June’s laugh said she forgave him. So she was starting to like him. When he’d called David Kahane and June answered the phone, she had been impressed with him, not that he’d done anything, just the fact that he’d called, that it was really Griffin Mill on the line. Since then, even through her brief period of mourning, she’d watched him, tested him. Now he knew she was ready to have fun with him, she was ready for a thrill. He wanted to tell her it wasn’t him, it was the limousine, it was Robin Williams. No, he thought, what else am I but these little pieces?

  The studio’s table was close to the stage. Levison was there with his wife, Andrea. Her father had been on the board of MGM in the old days, and she knew three generations of everyone. She worked for a few charities, but tonight’s wasn’t one of them. She’d started a mail-order business with two other wives, but nothing had come of it. Sometimes he thought she seemed trapped inside herself, or someone did, someone who hated her husband and hated California, someone who would be happier selling hooked rugs in Vermont. Griffin always asked about the children, and she was always glad to answer him. They liked each other. She understood the politics of the office, and so there was always this awareness between them; that was all there had to be to kill the possible friendship, just an awareness of the office. Griffin introduced June to the Levisons, and then to the others at the table. Andrea greeted June with glazed good manners, never expecting to see her again. There was no reason for Andrea to know that Griffin had been talking to Bonnie Sherow again, although Andrea had liked her and, after their breakup, asked after her a few times.

  Levison had also invited the head of the legal department and his wife, and a few people from Business Affairs, the television division, and his doctor, a serious and quiet man who ran marathons.

  It was the doctor who found the postcard, under his dinner plate. “Look at this,” he said, holding up a picture of a naked Polynesian woman standing in a Tahitian waterfall.

  “Did we all get one?” asked Andrea. Everyone looked under their plates. Griffin couldn’t see if there was anything written on the back. He waited for someone to ask if there was a message.

  “Maybe it’s part of a door-prize drawing,” said one of the Business Affairs people.

  “How so?” asked Greene.

  “Maybe the person who finds it gets a trip to Tahiti.”

  “No,” said the head of the legal department. “They wouldn’t just hand out a trip by sticking it at the table of a big studio. It’s just a busboy’s idea of a practical joke.”

  “Does it say anything?” asked June. Griffin felt that he had willed her to ask this.

  “No,” said Greene.

  No one at the table thought the mystery of the card was worth pursuing, and the doctor slipped it next to the floral centerpiece. Would normal curiosity allow Griffin to ask to see the card? The card was a long reach over June’s section of the table. If she left for the bathroom, he could get it easily. He’d wait. No, he decided, since there was no message, he should ignore it.

  Dessert was over. The house lights dimmed. Joan Rivers was at the podium. Griffin excused himself from the table. June squeezed his hand as he got up. He patted her shoulder. If he asked her to marry him tonight, fly to Las Vegas and do it in an all-night wedding chapel, she’d probably say yes.

  He walked around the edge of the ballroom as the crowd laughed. The smell of perfume, makeup, shoe polish, food, a few cigarettes, the waves of laughter, the overwhelming mood of satisfaction and the tincture of panic within that happiness, from those who were worried about their jobs, or about their next project, this flood of sensations was suddenly overwhelmingly poignant to Griffin, sunset over Rome from a hotel window. This is my life, he wanted to tell them all. You are my people, I am one of you. This party is not just a thing I have to do. I am happy here.

  An usher held a curtain aside for him, and he went through a door into the lobby, to find a man with short hair and a mustache. The photographers waited outside the hotel’s entrance. Griffin walked through the lobby toward the coffee shop, around a corner. In the coffee shop he bought a Milky Way bar and tore off the wrapper while the woman at the cash register made his change. Then he walked outside to Wilshire Boulevard. Here he was, in a tuxedo, eating chocolate in Beverly Hills. He walked west on Wilshire, around the hotel’s offices, then back to the front entrance. No one was following him.

  Inside the lobby again, he went to the elevators. He saw the short-haired man as he passed the entrance to the ballroom. He was about thirty-five, Griffin thought, and he couldn’t remember the face at all. He was well groomed, his hair was cut short, with slightly long sideburns. His face was weathered. How could a writer get so much sun? He wore dark gray slacks and a blue blazer with a brown tie. Griffin didn’t remember him at all. This nonrecognition came with a tide of regret. How often does this happen? thought Griffin, feeling sorry for the Writer. How many people do I meet who don’t register? If I was as frustrated as this man, would I have sent those silly postcards? Would I have killed?

  He’d been gone from the table for almost ten minutes. It was a long time, but it couldn’t be helped. He could go back into the ballroom, but he thought that if this was a movie, then it was time to confront the dragon. He wanted the third act now.

  He turned away from the ballroom and headed to the elevators. The short-haired man stayed behind him. Griffin nodded to him, and the man joined him in an elevator going up. A bellboy with a cart stacked with luggage waited until they were inside and then joined them.

  The bellboy asked Griffin for his floor.

  “Five,” said Griffin. The bellboy touched the button for him. Then the bellboy got off on three. As soon as the doors closed behind him, Griffin turned to face the short-haired man.

  “You have to understand, it’s a very difficult job. I see people all day long. My phone rings a hundred times a day. Take all the stories that are presented to the studio, either in pitches, as scripts, or as books and magazine articles that get covered, and we are talking about seventy thousand stories in a year.”

  The door opened. Griffin got out. The short-haired man stayed with him, watching him. The hallway was quiet.

  “I don’t know how I can make it up to you. I’m sorry that I hurt people’s feelings along the way. I’m trying to be better, I really am. But you’re going too far. It’s an incredibly difficult business. You can have great ideas, you can have all the talent in the world, but you have to get lucky. And no one has the formula for luck. The only consolation to this is that once you get lucky, you look different, and then it gets easier.”

  Griffin watched for a response. The man stared at him. Griffin pushed for the elevator, pressing both the up and down buttons. He wanted to get away.

  “I have to get back to the party. Maybe you should come in again and tell me a story. Tell me everything you’ve got. Usually we only like to hear one at a time, but obviously you’ve got an active imagination; maybe we can channel all that anger to something good.” Griffin tried to get the man to smile. He didn’t.

  “You’re not going to kill me, are you?” asked Griffin.

  “No. Why should I kill you?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m not who you think I am.”

  An elevator going up stopped at the floor. Griffin got in, the man followed. They rode to the top floor and back to the lobby.

  If this man was the postcard Writer, then either Griffin had a terrib
le memory or this man was a blank who made no impression on anyone and walked the earth indignant. If this man was not the postcard Writer, then either he was the man the limousine driver had seen following them or he was not that man, he was just a person in the hotel. But if he was just a person in the hotel, then why did he ride the elevator with Griffin? Was he homosexual, had he interpreted Griffin’s stroll around the hotel as a cruise? If this man had not followed him all night, then either the limousine driver was mistaken and no one had followed them, or the person in the Dodge Charger was the postcard Writer and he was elsewhere in the hotel. Dressed as a waiter? How else could he have found Griffin’s table? There was another possibility. That this man was not the person in the Dodge Charger, and the driver of the Charger, though he was somewhere else, was also not the postcard Writer. Or this man drove the Dodge Charger but was not the Writer.

  Griffin didn’t know if he should be scared of this man or embarrassed that he’d just given a speech that sounded insane to someone who didn’t care. If the man was homosexual, then by now he knew that following Griffin had been a mistake, and was he scared of him? If this man wasn’t the Writer, then where was he? Who was in the Dodge Charger?

  When they left the elevator, the man turned toward the lobby as Griffin headed toward the ballroom. Before he went in, he looked back to see if the man was still there. He was at a display of tour brochures next to the bell captain’s desk.

  Griffin showed his pass and walked into the ballroom, where Neil Diamond was on the stage, and the crowd was clapping in time to the song. Someone—Griffin couldn’t see who—put out a hand to greet him as he passed a table in the dark. He touched it lightly and moved ahead to find his own table, and June Mercator.