“Got yourself a new dress for the premiere?” I asked.
“No, but I have to,” she said, looking worried. “I guess I have to buy a lot of clothes now. Maybe it’s about time.”
“I figured out the real difference between you and me,” I said. “You’re compulsively honest and I’m compulsively dishonest. Who do you suppose does the most harm?”
“Oh, I do,” she said. “All your ladies seem to sail right off into the sunset, fat and happy.” She looked straight at the palm tree, as if she might climb it.
“You’re too balanced,” she added, as if it had just occurred to her. “Everything you say is balanced. I couldn’t live with it.” She gave me a kiss anyhow, and started back down the hill.
EARLY MONDAY MORNING, WHILE I was making coffee and sorting through lies, I heard the phone ring. It was Marta Lundsgaarde, old Aaron’s hatchet-woman. Her official title was publicist, but, first and last, she was a hatchet-woman.
“I guess they let you sleep late at Warners,” she said. It was seven-thirty. Her voice would have clipped fingernails.
“Hello, Marta,” I said. “You’re right. Things are slower over in the Valley.”
“Why can’t my life be that relaxed?” she said. “Miss Peel says you’re staying with her, in New York. Mr. Mond don’t think that looks so nice.”
“She’s a little nervous,” I said. “I’m an old friend, I’m sort of the equivalent of a tranquilizer.”
“We’ll get her some Valium,” she said. “Mr. Mond thinks maybe you should stay somewhere else.”
“Like at home, you mean?”
“Whatever,” Marta said.
“Marta, my breakfast is burning,” I said. “I think I’ll just let you take it up with Jill.”
There was silence on the other end. Marta was sorting through her hatchets, the way I had been sorting through lies.
“You’re older,” she said. “You could give her some good advice. She doesn’t understand PR.”
“Oops, got to get to my eggs,” I said.
I was on my second cup of coffee when Jill walked in. Her hair was brushed nicely and she had on a blue sweater with white bands around it. She looked fresh and unperturbed.
“Marta’s in a snit,” she said. She poured herself some coffee and took my last grapefruit out of the refrigerator.
“I don’t want grapefruit,” I said, but she set half of one in front of me anyway. Then she ate the other half.
“So what did you tell her?”
“I told her anyone can have a roommate,” she said. “There’s not much she can do to me at this point. If the picture flops I could room with King Kong and nobody would care. If it’s a success nobody will dare complain, for a while. I might as well do what I want to.”
She had figured it perfectly. Hatchet-persons don’t throw at directors when the directors are on their way up. It’s when they falter and start to descend that the hatchets start thonking in. Marta would just have to bide her time, which was precisely what she would do. Twenty years with Aaron Mondschiem had made her the perfect extension of her boss. She lived for combat, and she never forgot.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll be roomies. But if the picture does well, I hope you change studios. I don’t want to worry about Marta Lundsgaarde every day of my life.”
Jill was unfolding my morning paper. “We’ll see,” she said.
PAGE LIKED TO PUT her car in my garage, out of sight. Her car was a maroon Mercedes convertible. My car was a Morgan, with righthand steering, ancient but still vigorous enough to get me over the hill to Burbank every day. At the moment, I was working on an episode for a TV show called Lineman, a not-very-promising series based on a ballad by Glen Campbell. It dealt with a stout fellow who worked for the telephone company, repairing breaks in the lines. This required a lot of climbing, and a good many near-electrocutions.
In the episode I was at work on, the victim threatened with electrocution was a lovable black bear cub. I had worked the cub into a ticklish spot and was trying to think of a way to get him out. Obviously all the children in America would have brain spasms if a bear cub got fried by an electric wire, right in the middle of the family hour. I was beginning to wish the bear-cub episode were over, so I could start on one in which a bunch of phone freaks kidnap the lineman and hold him for ransom. Their demand is that the phone company give everyone in America free phone service for one week—otherwise the lineman dies. It was a desperate act, and I seemed to think better when desperate acts were involved. Bear cubs didn’t really stimulate me creatively.
The Morgan and I meandered over the hill from Warners and pulled into the deep garage that slants down under my house. Once there, out of the sun, I decided to sit in the car and wait for Page. I could go in and have a drink and wait, but if I sat in the car perhaps I could force myself to think about the bear cub a little while longer. An ideal solution would be a friendly bird, one big enough to swoop the cub off the wire and drop it in a lake or something. The trouble with that was that the only birds big enough to fly off with bear cubs were condors and eagles, neither of them too friendly.
Still, the idea had possibilities. Condors were topical at the moment, thanks to their impending extinction. Perhaps it could be a friendly condor, one that had been hit by a car at some point and rescued and nursed back to health by a little old lady from Encino—something like that. It might want to show civilization that it was grateful for such little old ladies, even though big businessmen were out to build condos in its nesting grounds. In fact, if we used a condor, we could probably get a condo builder to sponsor the segment. Condor Condominiums wouldn’t be a bad name for a condo company.
On the whole, I felt the idea had promise. Who’s to say but that a condor might take it into his head to rescue a bear cub from an electric wire? It was incongruous, of course, but no more so than what I hoped was about to happen to me.
While I was mulling over the condor solution, Page drove in. A maroon Mercedes convertible stopped alongside the Morgan. I hit my remote-control button and the garage doors slid down behind us, leaving us safe from detection, more or less. It also left us in the dark. Since I was on the right side of my car and Page on the left side of hers, we were not far apart. I put out my hand and she took it. The garage was no darker than the inside of a movie theater, and when my eyes adjusted a little I looked over.
“Why are you always so calm?” she said. “You always are.” She was wearing tennis clothes.
“Because I’ve done a lot of things,” I said. “I really have done a great many things, and none of them have killed me. Maybe it’s given me serenity.”
“Let’s fuck in the car,” she said, changing the subject.
“What a thing to say,” I said, momentarily appalled by my own handiwork. After all, I had taught the girl her vulgarity—at one time she needed it as one needs a tonic. Her painter hadn’t taught her much about language, and Preston, having no language of his own, had contributed even less. It was left to me to show her how words can add tone to acts.
“No, I mean it,” she said. “I just got this car—I don’t know if the seats will always smell this good.”
The convertible was indeed just a week old—a birthday gift from Preston to celebrate the fact that a comic horror picture of his called Ghoul’s Gardenia had astonished everyone by its first month’s gross. The expensive leather seats did smell good and, of course, so did Page. Her smell was compounded of sun, sweat, and clean skin.
“Page, I’m a fat man,” I said.
“Yeah, but the back seat’s really roomy,” she said. “We can just leave the doors open.” And, to my amusement, she stood right up on the front seat and began to peel out of her tennis outfit, which I had found more than sexy enough to tolerate. But Page peeled as the young seem to now, with a few practical motions, done with impatience—done, certainly, without the slightest awareness that it used to be considered that there was something romantic about undressing. But then th
at was when it had been considered that there was something romantic about sex. Page and her young friends approached sex in the casual spirit that I might adopt toward a warm bath. It was just another of the day-to-day sensual experiences of life. Candle-light and flowers didn’t interest them. Guilt and remorse didn’t titillate them. They took it straight, the way I took good whiskey, and were downright surprised when a little tenderness was offered them, as a mixer.
“Come on, I mean it,” she said, putting one foot on the door of the car in order to peel off a tennis sock. “It’ll be perfect.”
That was her favorite word: “perfect.” Every time it crossed her mind to want something she said it: “That’d be perfect, wouldn’t it?” She was as unself-conscious about her desires as she was about her young body. Things were either perfect, or they were disgusting. She was not old enough to have observed that a lot of life lies somewhere in between.
Her intimations of the perfect kept striking me as poignant, for some reason, and I hustled to try and help her sustain this one. Once her mind sketched out a fantasy, her body accommodatingly drew within those bold lines, I guess. I wedged in the back seat with her, and the good-smelling leather seats immediately became so slippery with sweat that if there had been room we would have slid right out onto the cold cement floor of the garage. From my point of view it was not perfect, but Page bucked around intently, one leg hooked over the front seat. In the dim garage, her eyes were luminous.
“See, I told you,” she said, locking hands and legs behind me, to see that I kept still. My balance was too precarious to permit me the liberty of conversation, but somehow I felt a little sad. Page was wonderful, really—innocent and unmalicious. She should get to fuck in the back seat whenever she wanted to. For a while her body nipped at me, fishlike, so I guess perfection of a sort had been achieved. Watching her at rest, I decided I was sad for her, not me. I had Keatsian feelings. Page at twenty-five was more perfect than anything that would ever happen to her, and she should never have to change, grow up, grow old, grow pale, or tired, or bitter. It was the thought that those states would come to her too that made me sad. I wanted, this once, for life to make an exception.
When I managed to unwedge myself I discovered that in my haste to be obliging I had kicked one of my shoes so far under the Mercedes that I couldn’t reach it. I stood barefooted and pantless in my own garage, feeling too old for such foolishness.
Page got out, sweaty and nonchalant, and peeked under at the shoe. “You can just wait,” she said. “After all, I won’t run over it.” She shook her hair loose from her damp neck and went up the steps to my kitchen, carrying her bikini briefs in one hand. When I got to the kitchen she was sitting on a stool, eating peanut butter on a cracker and calling her maid to check on her year-old son. A couple of my gray hairs were stuck to her young breasts, and she casually picked them off as she talked, smiling happily at me when I straggled in, shoeless and unzippered.
“I think he said a word today,” she said, when she hung up. “It was a Spanish word, though. I ought to spend more time with him.”
“Now’s your chance,” I said. “I have to go to New York this week.”
She looked at me over the jar of peanut butter—it was something Jill had foisted on me.
“I don’t want you to,” she said. “Preston’s going to be gone.” Then she frowned, as if it had just occurred to her to question something.
“You never go anywhere,” she said.
I put my arm around her, thinking a physical gesture might get me out of a lie, but Page casually shrugged off my arm and just as casually stuck a hand in my pants and caught my cock. Her look, as she continued to eat her peanut butter and cracker, was contemplative—so was her fondling, for that matter. Both things suggested a mood of light investigation.
“Do you ever hear from that woman?” she asked.
“Which woman?” I said, thinking she meant Jill.
“That woman who gave the party where I met you,” she said. “You used to sleep in her house at night, when you got too drunk. Patsy something.”
She meant Patsy Fairchild, an old, old friend of mine whose husband—former husband now—was the movie stars’ architect. It was at her house that I had met not only Page but most of Page’s predecessors.
“Oh, Patsy,” I said. “She left her husband. She’s living in Mendocino now, with her girls.”
I was so relieved that she hadn’t meant Jill that all of a sudden her fondling had a happy effect. There was no reason it shouldn’t have, since I hadn’t gotten any rocks off in the car. Page, who seemed to have experienced a good deal of premature ejaculation in her life, had never really perceived that the reason I was able to keep up with her, more or less, was because I only occasionally actually dropped any rocks. In the Mercedes I had concentrated on not falling into the crevice between the seats. At about the time Page’s bucking had reached its peak, my mind, rising free both of emotion and of desire, had returned unbeckoned to the problem of the bear cub, though still inconclusively.
Age can be a godsend. The seed slows in the stem, but the stem still quickens. Page’s cool tongue tasted of peanut butter. She put her elbows back against the edge of Claudia’s ancient dishwasher, a Maytag, probably one of the first models made, and wrapped her sunny legs around my fat old hips, and lifted her haunches and squeezed and grunted and squealed and sighed. Since a saltshaker lay to hand I salted her nipples lightly and licked it off, causing them to turn the color of raspberries. “Oh, that’s perfect,” she said. “That’s perfect.”
Above her shivering breasts, out my kitchen window, I could see the milky hills. I did love her, some—enough to want to see her there again, digging carelessly into Jill’s jar of peanut butter. When she left, a half hour later than she meant to, she didn’t seem to need to talk about New York. I mentioned—vaguely—some narration I had to write; just as vaguely, she thought she might go to Tahoe, to visit a friend. We parted in easy peace, Page sucking a lemon she found in the fridge.
6
JILL HAD ACTUALLY BOUGHT HERSELF A WHITE PANTSUIT. I couldn’t believe it, and said as much. “I can’t believe you bought that pantsuit,” I said.
“Shut up, I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. She was standing on the sidewalk, looking despairingly at her bungalow, as if she might never see it again. A driver was holding the door of a big black limo for us. Jill looked inside the car as one might look into an abyss. Of course, the inside of the limo was not much smaller than an abyss. Being in it was like being in a leathery blue cave.
Jill was obviously more nervous than ever. “That’s a very attractive pantsuit,” I said, for emphasis.
“I told you to shut up about it,” she said. “I hate to talk about clothes.”
She was too nervous to tease, and I couldn’t think of anything serious to say, so we stopped talking and let ourselves be driven to the airport. Jill’s tension infected me and I became nervous, too. I decided my houndstooth sports coat was all wrong, my new red tie also all wrong.
After a long silence we eventually boarded a 747. We were in first class, which was like being in an elegant living room, with gracious maids serving drinks and salted almonds. After a while the elegant living room roared a little and rose into the air, above the smog. The blue Pacific lay below us. Jill clutched my hand.
“I always expect them to crash,” she said. “This is when they crash, if they’re going to.”
“If we’re not going to talk about clothes, let’s not talk about disaster,” I said.
I was not used to traveling first class on a huge plane, or, for that matter, any class on any plane, having been Hollywood-bound for the last several years. Fortunately I can quickly accustom myself to almost any degree of luxury. I put down three vodka martinis before we crossed the Grand Canyon and after that was in the mood to appreciate what was happening to me.
“Variety isn’t going to get many names for its boxes off this airplane,” I said, looking arou
nd. The other guests were tastefully spaced out around the perimeter of the living room. The only movie person I spotted was Marilyn Monroe’s manager’s former wife.
“A lot you know,” Jill said. “Bertolucci’s behind us.”
She had gained a certain amount of confidence in the plane, I guess—enough to allow her to read magazines. At the moment, she was leafing through a copy of Sports Illustrated that I had managed to grab at the airport newsstand. I had plenty of books to read in my little satchel, but I wasn’t reading. I was drinking vodka martinis and watching America pass beneath me.
“I don’t think that’s Bertolucci,” I said, taking a squint at the guy behind us, who had on Levis. “I think that’s a dope lawyer.”
“A lot you know,” she repeated. “Do you know anything about athletes?”
“Married one,” I said. “I eventually got to know her a little. Why?”
“It must be different from being like me,” she said. “The body must have the upper hand, instead of the mind. It even shows in these pictures.”
I was soon in the process of eating the surprisingly good meal that began to arrive over Arizona and was not really finished until we were nearly across Ohio. Caviar over the Canyon, duck à l’orange as we crossed the Rockies, baked Alaska just east of the Mississippi. I tried without much success to remember if Claudia’s body had had the upper hand, or her mind. Both of them had always had the upper hand over me, so I don’t know that it mattered.
“Of course it’s true that you think too much,” I remarked, over dessert.
“Is that supposed to be a helpful remark?” she asked.
By the time the land darkened beneath us and lights began to wink on in what I guess were little Allegheny towns, Jill was relaxed and I was nervous and a little depressed, despite all I’d drunk and eaten and the brandy I was even then drinking.
Somebody's Darling Page 5
