Three by Finney

by Jack Finney

  The only other thing that happened is that I found myself struggling with the big wooden steering wheel, the speedometer at 65, which is very, very fast for the Packard, the tires howling on a curve.

  I was able to hold it to the road, decelerating cautiously, till we hit the straightaway again; Marion’s scarf was around my neck, streaming romantically back over the rear of the car. “What happened?”

  “Rudy was driving,” she said apologetically. “Said he’d spell you for a while.”

  “Well, he’s one lousy driver!”

  “I know. He said it was handling a lot harder than his Isotta-Fraschini and that he’d better let you take over again.”

  “On a curve!?”

  “I know; he’s coo-coo.”

  • • •

  Around ten-forty that night Jan and I had dinner in the coffee shop of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Sitting in a booth waiting for it, we were so tired we just sat and stared at each other stupidly. “I get left with her headaches, hangovers, and now her exhaustion,” Jan said, massaging her forehead. Her hand brushed her hairline, and she reached up, felt the blond wig, and dragged it off, shrugging. We skipped the delicious-looking bread-pudding dessert and were in bed and asleep by eleven-ten, the blond wig on a bedpost.

  I woke up once and knew Jan was awake, too.

  “Nick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not so sure I want to go through with this. What do you think?”

  “Decide in the morning.” I was asleep again.

  It was daylight the next time I woke, and Marion, in wig and Jan’s orange dress, sat on the edge of the bed, an open phone book beside her, eyes on the little traveling clock. “Is six-forty-five too early to phone, Nickie?”

  “Yeah.” I went back to sleep.

  I woke up again to the sound of dialing and looked at the clock; it was 8:01. “It’s not too early!” Marion said defensively, and then into the phone, “Hello? Mr. Dahl, please. Mr. Hugo Dahl?” She listened. “I see. I wonder if I could reach him there?” She listened, then nodded. “On North Gower Street; thank you very much.” She put the phone aside slowly and looked over at me, her face suddenly frightened. “He’s on his way to the studio—he’s still in pictures. Oh, Nickie, I’m scared! He’s my only hope, really; I’ve been hunting through the phone books, and of all the people I knew there’s no one else could possibly still be in pictures. What if he doesn’t remember me?” I didn’t see how he could, but didn’t say anything, and she jumped up to run over and sit on the edge of my bed. “Nickie, you’re coming with me today, aren’t you? I can’t go to the studios alone! I’m scared, I really am!”

  “All right.”

  She looked relieved and glanced over at the clock. “It’s too early to go now; he’s not there yet. Why don’t we just—”

  “Nope.”

  “We could at least neck a little. For luck.”

  “Bad luck.” I rolled to the other side of the bed, sat up, dragged the phone book across the bed, found the B’s, and found “Bollinghurst, Theo N, 1101 Keever Street.” I looked up at Marion and grinned. “HOO-ray for HOLLywood!” I began singing, and jumped up and took a shower, still singing.

  Downstairs in the cab, I sat back to look out the window as we headed east on Wilshire Boulevard. I didn’t know much about this town and was curious. But every block we drove through, stopping often for lights, seemed just about like the last one—the buildings generally white, new or looking new, and of a general height, so that they merged into sameness. Yet I noticed that their individual designs were often striking, sometimes unique or even bizarre. Any one of a lot of the buildings we were passing would have been memorable anywhere else, a town monument. But here there were so many of them trying for distinctiveness that the total effect was blandness. They were of stone, but it was hard to believe anyone really meant them to last. And in the queer washed-out Los Angeles sunlight that comes filtering down through the haze of perpetual smog, these featureless blocks after block seemed insubstantial, ownerless, and without significance. There are nonbooks and noncelebrities; people whose only fame is that somehow their names are known. It seemed to me that we were in a nonplace, and I said so to Marion.

  “It used to be, though. It was a wonderful place once; a town, and a real one.” She looked out the window, then shook her head and sat back as though withdrawing from the scene around us. “But I don’t like this, I could never like it. I don’t see how anyone could.” Suddenly she leaned forward to speak to the driver. “Take us back to the hotel!”

  “Okay.” The cabby shrugged, and checking his rear-view mirror for cops, he slowed, waiting for a break in the approaching traffic. Then he swung his wheel in a quick, illegal U-turn.

  I sat waiting for an explanation, and after a moment or so she reached up with both hands and lifted off her wig.

  “Jan?”

  She nodded defiantly. “I don’t know that I want to go through with this, Nick, now that we’re here. I don’t like this place! What are we doing here!” She blinked suddenly, jumping slightly, then leaned forward. “Take us to Gower Street!” she said, and pulled the wig back on.

  “Oh, God.” I slumped far down in my seat, turning to the window, disassociating myself from whoever the hell was beside me now.

  “Lady, I don’t mind.” The driver turned to smile with forced calm. “Do this all day if you want, round and round, long as you pay the meter. But if I get grabbed for this turn, you pay the fine!” Directly in front of the hotel again, he swung in a tight U-turn and we headed back east on Wilshire.

  “Back to the hotel!” She snatched off the wig.

  “No!” Braking hard, he swung in to the curb and stopped. “I won’t do it! Nothing could make me! Get another ca—”

  “Hold it,” I said placatingly. “Wait a second; we’ll make up for it with the tip.” Murmuring quietly, I talked to Jan, reminding her that she’d promised, urging her to hold off and see what happened, and finally she agreed. “Go ahead,” I said to the cabby. “North Gower Street, and this time we won’t change our mind.”

  I was disappointed, really let down, by the outside of the studio. I don’t know what I’d expected, except that I thought it would be at least a little glamorous. But this was just a high, block-long, almost blank stucco wall directly beside the public sidewalk across from a mangy, broken-asphalted public parking lot with a broken-down white fence, and strewn with papers no one was ever going to pick up. Mounted on the studio walls were a few billboards advertising motion pictures, otherwise this could have been a warehouse. And the door, apparently the main entrance to a world-famous studio, was an ordinary street-level door, the varnish worn off around the handles, the glass a little dirty. If I’d found a cut-rate dentist’s office inside I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  What we did find was a cubicle just about large enough for us and the small desk we stood facing, which looked as though a Goodwill Thrift Shop had thrown it out. On the plywood walls hung a few large tinted photographs of two or three movie actors and television stars, and behind the desk a pleasant-faced, middle-aged man in a vaguely coplike uniform looked up from a copy of The Hollywood Reporter. “Can I help you?”

  If I’d been worried about Marion’s reception here, I stopped when her smile came on; I saw from the man’s eyes that he appreciated it. “If you would, please,” she said, looking at him with what seemed to be genuine interest, and clearly wishing she could spend an hour or so talking with him. “I’d like to see Mr. Hugo Dahl.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” He began nodding unconsciously, trying to will an appointment into being for her.

  “No, but I’m an old friend. If you could let him know Marion Marsh is here, I think he might see me.”

  The man consulted a printed, much marked over phone list taped to his desk top with yellowing Scotch tape, then he dialed. “Reception: Miss Marion Marsh to see Mr. Dahl.” He listened, then waited, smiling up at Marion. “Just a second,” he said int
o the phone, then to Marion, “You did say Marion Marsh?” She nodded, giving him another great smile, and he returned it. “Yep,” he said firmly into the phone, then hung up. “He’ll be right down.”

  I didn’t say anything. Had Marion actually forgotten that Hugo Dahl was going to see Jan’s face? We waited, taking the few paces the little room allowed, looking at the big grainy photographic enlargements. Pretty soon I heard elevator doors open somewhere down the hall to the left of the entrance, footsteps approaching, then a tall, still thin but now paunchy man of maybe seventy wearing a dark-blue suit and turtle-neck sweater walked in. He was bald, his longish hair fringe and sideburns gray, his face lined and sagging, permanently tired. But his eyes were alert and wary. “You’re—Marion Marsh?”

  Staring at the late-middle-aged or early-elderly man, she didn’t answer for a moment. Then, dazzlingly, she smiled, and his mouth opened in incredulous surprise. “I’m the granddaughter of the Marion Marsh you knew. But maybe you don’t remember her?”

  He was smiling back at her, the lines of his face momentarily lifted, and now you could see what he’d looked like when he was younger. “Nobody ever forgot Marion Marsh. I remember her ten times better than the people I had lunch with yesterday. You’re her granddaughter?” he said incredulously, and Marion nodded, still smiling. “You don’t look like her, except for your smile; the smile is hers, exactly. How come your name’s Marsh?”

  “I was named Marion after her. And I admired her so much—she was so talented—that I took Marsh as my stage name.” Shyly she added, “Movie name, I should say. Or at least I hope so.”

  He smiled, knowingly but nicely. “And that’s why you’re here. She mentioned me, did she? Is she . . . still alive? Seems to me I heard—”

  “Oh, yes! Very much! She was badly hurt. Years ago. But she recovered. And she’s mentioned you often.” She hesitated convincingly. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but . . . I’ve always had the feeling she liked you. Something in her voice whenever she mentioned your name.”

  He laughed. “If that’s not true—and it’s not—I don’t want to hear it. Well, I’m running auditions this morning, and if Marion Marsh’s granddaughter wants in, she’s in. Come on along.” He started to turn, remembered me, and said, “You coming, too?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” Marion said. “I’m terribly nervous. This is my friend who’s . . . he’s an actor, too! Giving me moral support. I’m scared to death.”

  “Well, come on, both of you, and we’ll get you outfitted, Marion.” We walked out of the little reception room to the right, Marion turning to smile back at the reception cop, then down a corridor lined with flush doors and white-on-black plastic name plates. We stepped out onto a narrow asphalted street or alley—very narrow—and walked past an old-fashioned, one-story wooden building of clapboarded sides painted gray, white double-sash window frames, and a peaked shingle roof. Behind several of the windows women sat typing under brilliant fluorescent light.

  Far ahead down the narrow street a row of grimy brick buildings extended, each four or five stories high; there were very few windows in any of them and the few there were seemed scattered randomly, so you couldn’t count stories. Fire escapes cluttered their sides, people lounging on most of them. For at least a city block we walked along past them, building after building, and I was proud of Marion—and a little surprised, I’ll admit—because she remembered me. “There’s someone else I’m supposed to look up,” she said to Dahl. “Ted Bollinghurst; did you ever know him?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure, we were all at the same studio. He moved on then. To United Artists, I think. But I’d run into him every once in a while all through the Twenties and into the Thirties. Hollywood was a lot smaller then. Then I heard he’d left the picture business and gone into real estate, and after that I didn’t hear of him for years. If you’re not in pictures, you know, you don’t exist. But years later I read about him, and he was rich. Like a lot of people who got into Hollywood real estate at the right time. Jesus, when I think of the land I could have bought. In the summer of 1928 I bought a secondhand Dodge roadster for exactly the price of six acres of useless land that is now downtown Beverly Hills. If I’d bought that instead and hung onto it, I’d be rich today and wouldn’t have to—ah, to hell with it. Bollinghurst and lots of others did, and I didn’t. Last I heard of him, some time in the Fifties, he’d bought Graustark.”

  “Bought what?” I said.

  “Graustark, the old Vilma Banky mansion; you never heard of it?” I shook my head. “It was like Pickfair, the Doug Fairbanks-Mary Pickford place. At one time everyone in the civilized world knew about Pickfair and Graustark. Fabulous places. Built on eight or ten acres, a million rooms. Swimming pools. Tennis courts. Stables. Garages full of Daimlers, Duesenbergs and Hispano-Suizas. Well, Ted bought Graustark. Because it had been Vilma Banky’s, I’m sure; he was a real movie nut. It was run-down, gone to seed, empty for years; a white elephant. Even the real estate wasn’t particularly valuable for Hollywood. But he bought it and restored it, even the grounds. And moved in. For a while you’d hear about parties he gave; the place had its own ballroom. I never went, but I heard. But I haven’t heard of any parties for years now. He was a lot older than the rest of us, and I doubt if he’s alive any more. Or whether Graustark’s still there; probably a parking lot now.”

  I said, “Where was it?”

  He thought for a moment. “Keever Street. Out on Keever Street somewhere.”

  “Eleven-hundred block?”

  “Be about it. Why?”

  “Just wondered.”

  Up ahead a pair of gray-painted steel doors stood ajar, and a thin black-haired woman of forty walked out and turned up the street ahead of us. “Marie,” Dahl called, and the woman turned and stood waiting. “I’ve got one more for you,” he said as we came up, and he nodded toward Marion. “Could you outfit her? Quick? We’ll take care of the paper work later.” The woman measured Marion with her eyes, then nodded. “Sure.” She gestured with her chin at Marion. “Come on.”

  They walked off ahead, and Dahl motioned me toward the open gray-painted doors of the same brick warehouse-like building, and we walked in. I had nothing better to do and was curious. The interior was enormous, the building all floor space, the ceiling lost in darkness. I couldn’t see much. Except for a few scattered light bulbs that illuminated very little, and the red glow of exit signs, most of the building was dark except for a corner far ahead. Off in the gloom I could see vague bulky objects and a great wooden scaffolding of some kind.

  We were walking ahead, toward the one lighted area of the huge warehouse-like space. This was a brick-walled corner starkly lit by a pair of powerful work lights mounted on portable standards. Under their light a dozen people, mostly men, two or three women, stood talking idly, most of them holding plastic coffee cups. One of them spotted us, a youngish partly bald man in blue slacks and jacket, and came walking toward us, carrying a clipboard. “Fred,” said Dahl as he stopped before us, “here’s another prospect. Talk to him,” he said, his interest in me fading fast. “Find out his specialty if any. If you can work him in, do it.” To me he said, “Fred’s head of the exterior unit,” whatever that meant, and he walked on toward the group around the work lights.

  “Name?” Fred said, pencil poised over his clipboard. We were at the very outer edge of the circle of light, but I could see eight or ten names penciled on the mimeographed form in Fred’s clipboard. I was about to reply to tell him there’d been a mistake, when I was horrified; I seemed about to faint. The man before me and the building we stood in had begun to disappear. I’d once fainted in college from economizing by not eating breakfasts; it had begun like this, and now I wondered if I’d hit my head when I fell. But I didn’t fall. Dim as things were becoming—sounds growing fainter too—I heard my faraway voice reply, and its tone was calm, assured, and several notes deeper.

  “Rod. Rod Guglielmi.”

  “Rod for Rodney?”

 
“No. Rodolpho.”

  “Any specialty?”

  “Anything you want.” The scene was shrinking fast, the sound fading with it.

  “Well, we need a stunt man, that’s about all.”

  A moment’s hesitation, then my mouth spoke the words: “I can do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Whatever you want. Race-car driving. Wing-walking. Plane-to-train transfers. Parachu—” Nothingness, then; not even blackness, only pure colorless nothingness.

  Just as you can tell awakening from sleep about how much time has passed, I knew that it was no more than an hour later. But this was like awakening from an unnatural fevered sleep for only a moment or so of superclarity. I was in a closetlike space, a dressing room with a mirrored table, a chair, and wall hooks on which my clothes hung. I was standing, I realized, one foot on the floor, the other on the chair, staring down at myself. My upper body, I saw, wore a white nylon shirt open at the collar and cut very full in the chest and sleeves. My pants were whipcord jodhpurs. I was wearing blunt-toed shoes laced up over the ankles, and the leg on the floor was wrapped in a leather puttee fastened with two brass buckles. The other puttee was in my hands; apparently I was about to fit it around the other leg. Then the faintness, the rushing diminishing of everything I saw into nothingness.

  Again, I knew that more time—an hour and a half, maybe two—had passed. I simply opened my eyes as though from a dreamless sleep and saw—I didn’t know what I was seeing. It was a floor, an enormous endless floor, but not in a room. I was staring down at it through an evenly distributed haze, puzzling over a random pattern of gray-white lines, sometimes straight, sometimes curving, and a succession of fingernail-sized green and red squares in parallel rows. Far, far away, near the edge of the floor, lay a thicker, irregular lead-gray curve, and then I saw a momentary glint of light on its surface and realized that I was seeing an actual river. And that the gray-white lines were roads, the red and green squares were rooftops, and that this enormous floor stretched out before me just past the edge of a fabric-covered surface on which my laced shoes were standing side by side.