In order to drive the notion away, I sat down and wrote a self-justificatory note:
DEAR JILL:
In your absence I will do my best to have an intellectually fulfilling time. I will undoubtedly devote many hours to museums, parceling my time out judiciously.
Be careful. I mean it.
LOVE, JOE
It seemed silly, so I threw it in the wastebasket. I have never been a good note writer.
Jill had a rave review in The Times, naturally. It was obvious to me that everyone would overrate her movie. In ten years’ time those who had overrated it wouldn’t be able to remember it, but the damage would have been done.
I lunched alone and got tipsy enough to distract myself from the sense that everything was slipping away. In the afternoon I went back to the Algonquin and saw Page. In the evening I drank for a bit in the bar at the Sherry and went to bed early, hoping Jill would show up; but she didn’t come in that night, and there were no more notes.
The next morning I stayed in bed so late that I began to get bedsores. Jill and I were to catch a plane to the Coast late in the afternoon. The phone didn’t ring even once, which meant that all calls were being caught at the switchboard. Finally I got up and fuddled around a bit, thinking about T. S. Eliot, or at least about his famous line to the effect that there would be time to murder and create. In my case there was no longer time to create, and probably not time to murder either, since the latter probably takes as much passion as the former, though perhaps only passion of a momentary, inconsistent nature.
I put on some checks and my old green overcoat and went out on Fifth Avenue, which was just as cold as ever and just as crowded with ruddy New Yorkers. Somewhere up the avenue there were undoubtedly great museums, filled with the imperishable efforts of those who had found time to create, but I cheerfully turned my back on intellectual improvement and went bouncing down to the Algonquin in a Checker cab, where Page and I had lunch and sought, once again, the fulfilling fuck.
“I like it at your house better,” Page said later, a little glumly. We were both staring at the brick wall out the window. It was a chill, gray day, and we had had an unusual amount of difficulty with the covers on the bed, a new thing for us. At home covers were seldom involved. Page had a point, even if she hadn’t quite bothered to think it through. If we had been fresh to adultery, or a little more driven, the neutrality of a hotel room in New York would have been fine. But Page and I were casual—there had never been anything resembling a barricade put in our path. A sawhorse now and then, maybe, but nothing more serious.
“Some folks need their rituals,” I said. Page stared at me blankly.
All I had meant was that we were both homesick. We missed the smell of California: open windows, sunshine on the sheets, my plants in their pots, the dusty hills above us.
“Don’t you remember?” I said. “We have rituals. We meet in my garage, where it’s cool. Then we sometimes make it upstairs and have fun in the sun. Then we have a swim in the world’s smallest swimming pool, and you eat half my peanut butter and go home.”
“Yeah?” Page said, her face brightening a bit at the memory of such a pleasant routine.
“Yeah, that was perfect,” she added. I began to feel better just from hearing her utter her magic word. I tipped her back in the pillows and indulged myself in what in her view was a perfect thing, which was to lick her pale little cunt for ten or fifteen minutes. It may have been longer—I’ve never been a man who could lick a cunt and keep up with the time—but however long it was, we both enjoyed it. Page clasped her arms tightly over her eyes, and the muscles of her flat little stomach jerked and quivered. As for me, I tried to summon some smidgin of self-reproach, inasmuch as I could have been looking at Giotto or somebody instead of getting my nose wet, but Page came a couple of times, and self-reproach didn’t. Her cunt was as alkaline and slippery as a mussel, and rose-pink, like the color inside the curl of a shell. After a time, I rested my cheek on her springy gold fleece and picked some of the nap out of my teeth while she, for her part, took another snooze.
That was about it for New York. When I got back to the other hotel Jill’s bags were packed, but she wasn’t there. As I was packing mine the doorbell rang and Folsom marched in and began to gather up suitcases.
“We go,” he said, as if he were Tonto delivering a message to the Lone Ranger.
“Would you mind sitting on my suitcase?” I asked.
Folsom frowned—it was an unconventional request. “Why?” he wanted to know.
“Because otherwise it won’t close.”
“Naw, I almost got fired,” Folsom said, retreating to the hall. I decided that that meant Abe had found out about my using the limo. I sat on my own suitcase.
I watched the gray buildings of Manhattan as we departed—watched the hurrying people on the sidewalk, some of them tilted slightly as they stood just off the curb, waiting for the length of the limo to slide past. I regretted, almost, that I didn’t have another life to live—it would take that long, I figured, to become a real citizen of New York.
The driver, another Mediterranean, decided that reason dictated a route through Queens, which didn’t help my mood any. Certain surroundings force one to imagine the lives of the people who have to live in them. Queens was probably not much different from Van Nuys, just colder and less neat, but on the other hand it was sort of the diametric opposite of Beverly Hills. Instead of smooth streets and green lawns and new cars, Queens offered cracked streets, no lawns, buildings as badly painted as old whores, and cars that all seemed to have competed in demolition derbies.
Folsom was in the front seat, chewing his lip. He was always chewing his lip. I was alone in the vast back seat. I could have been a cadaver in a hearse, for all the human contact available. I decided never to go anywhere again: it stirred me up too much. To go somewhere is to edge out of one life and into another. Some people probably found that stimulating, but I just found it confusing. It multiplied my choices, and I had too many choices as it was.
As I approached my flight gate I could see a vast white 747 out a window, waiting for me and a few hundred other people. Just as I was steeling myself to try and be nice to Owen Oarson, I saw Jill standing with Marta by a kind of velvet rope. Jill was wearing the white pantsuit she had worn when we flew to New York.
“Look, he’s going’ back,” Marta said when I walked up. “We thought maybe you’d found work in the East.”
The way she sounded was worse than what she said. Also, she was squinting, which eliminated her eyes but exposed her turquoise eye makeup. I had almost forgotten how awful she was, but the sight of her skunk wig, turquoise eyelids, and liverish lipstick brought me back to reality.
“Go fuck yourself, Marta,” I said, reverting to basic California speech before I even stepped on the plane.
Hate was not too strong a word for what I felt looking at her—nor for what she clearly felt looking at me.
Jill looked at us both, shook her head with quick impatience, and took my arm. “Bye, Marta, thanks,” she said, and walked me onto the plane.
12
ONCE AGAIN WE WERE IN A GRACIOUS LIVING ROOM. ONCE again we were offered nuts, and I received the first of several vodka martinis—this before a word was uttered. Jill was totally silent, obviously offended by my rudeness to Marta.
“All right, I’m sorry,” I said. “I hate her. If she could she’d not only get me fired, she’d see that I starved. I’ve always hated her. You don’t know her like I do.”
“You could be big enough just to ignore her,” Jill said. “After all, she’s not happy.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “Oh, god in heaven. You mean I’ve been boorish to an unhappy person? Of course it is true that some people retain their manners and decency even when they’re unhappy, but those are usually people with manners to retain.”
Jill made a little fist, but she didn’t hit me with it. She just looked hurt, “It doesn’t surprise me that you’re rude to
her, but I didn’t think you’d be so rude to me,” she said.
I watched her for a minute. She didn’t seem so changed. All that I had been imagining about her was probably just paranoia. Maybe she wasn’t slipping away.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
We looked at one another a long time, without piling any more words on the situation. I believe she was grateful for my apology. Just as a weak sun was going down into the Eastern clouds, our great white plane took off. I caught one last glimpse of the gray towers of New York. Then we shot upward, into bright crystalline air. The bottoms of the clouds had been grimy, but the tops were a brilliant shining white, whiter even than the plane itself. The bright blue air made me feel friendlier.
Jill was looking out the window. For all her frequent bluntness, she was an extremely refined woman; so refined—when one thought about it—that it was almost impossible to deal with her. The cast of her eye, the set of her mouth, had so much mentality, so much consciousness, so much checked emotion behind them that sometimes, when I caught her looking a certain way, I was filled with both love and trepidation.
She offered me her eyes from time to time but spoke no words, and her eyes said, All right, say something, don’t wait for me. People who think friendship is the stablest condition or relation or whatever haven’t been friends with Jill Peel. Here we were, acquaintances for fifteen years and good friends for eight or nine; I was sixty-three, she was thirty-seven; we might have been judged to be mature people, stable, all that, and yet for a time both of us were afraid to say a word. Friendship, too, is ruinable, and can be destroyed as quickly and as absolutely as love. Neither of us wanted to ruin ours. A lot of emotion coursed beneath our silence, as the plane coursed over the brilliant clouds. A tall, surefooted stewardess began to a lay a cart with caviar, crackers, and pâté.
Fortunately, the bright air eased us. I had some caviar, Jill some pâté. Beyond the Allegheny the clouds began to thin, and I saw that we were mated to the sunset, our speed evidently equal to the turn of the earth. Far below I caught glimpses of orange-and-gold forest—evening on the autumn land.
“Why’d we suddenly lose track of one another?” I ventured finally.
Jill shrugged. “I was busy and you were busy,” she said. “Neither of us wanted to hang around.”
“It’s all right—we can blame it on your premiere,” I said. “It’s not every day we experience a world premiere.”
“Right,” Jill said. “I’m sure my premiere quite justifies you keeping your nose in a cunt for three days.”
I thought that one over for a bit. In a way, it was a brilliant shot, but a shot of a sort that most women produce routinely, out of the small change of their instincts. She went on eating her pâté, calmly.
“For god’s sake,” I said. “Why are you so hostile to me? You’ve never been this hostile to me!”
“Why, it’s just my premiere,” she said coolly. “We famous are known for our cruelty. However, you’re just as hostile to me, and you’re not famous. Maybe you can explain that.”
“I’m not hostile,” I said, though I was getting hostile. Her tone was infuriating.
“You could have told me you brought your girl friend to New York,” she said. “I might have known you would, but I didn’t. You don’t have to keep reminding me of how naive I am.”
I felt a certain sense of relief. Men sometimes stop being men and become neuters for a while, but women never stop being women. I would think it would tire them, being women constantly, but if it does, they don’t show it.
“Is that all you’re mad about?” I asked. “I didn’t arrange that. I still don’t know how Preston got her to come. She was going to Tahoe. I didn’t know she was here until I walked into Elaine’s. Seeing her at that table was a big shock, believe me.”
“You absorbed it smoothly enough,” she said. “Some shock.”
My relief had been premature. I thought that what was bothering her was a misunderstanding. Explain it away and all would be harmony and affection again, right?
Not right. Wrong. Women are like lawyers and torturers, more interested in process than in result. Explanations may be part of the process, but they seldom affect the result.
“Jill, this is ruining my digestion,” I said. “I didn’t plan anything. Page turned up, that’s all. Frankly, you seemed to be occupied, and it never occurred to me that I would be missed. Until this minute I had no idea that I was missed.”
She shook her head. “You gave me the nicest present anyone’s ever given me in my life, and you didn’t think I’d want to come home and thank you for it? Just because I was talking to Owen didn’t mean I’d forgotten that. I wasn’t going to talk all night, and I wasn’t going to dash right out and fuck him either—which is obviously what you thought.”
“I guess the firing squad is what I deserve,” I said. “Irony of ironies. Page zonked out and all I did was sit in the Algonquin lobby and drink brandy. You could have come. It’s a great place to drink brandy.”
“Good. You only had your nose in a cunt for two and a half days,” she said. “It’s not as bad as I thought.”
But she said it companionably. I guess she had extracted her pound of flesh. She was even looking at me fondly. Awkwardly, I turned to kiss her. Our embrace was spoiled only by the fact that the seatbelt was crushing my nuts.
There had been some long, hostile pauses in our approach to a rapprochement. The plane was almost to the Mississippi. The sun was not much lower than it had been when we left the ground, but it was larger and more golden.
“What possessed you to buy me that sapphire?” she asked. “You’re not rich.”
“It was the hour for it,” I said, and we argued companionably about the propriety of my action across most of the West—literally the Golden West in this case, thanks to the sun. It seemed to hang immobile in the lower quadrant of the sky, coloring the snowy Rockies and the mauve-and-crimson desert beyond them. I ate a lot, and Jill ate a little. Our companions in the first-class cabin strolled around looking thoughtful. They talked about Las Vegas, Baja, Acapulco, Mazatlán, and points south.
We were happy for an hour. Jill told me about her lunches, her offers, her adventures, but she never mentioned Owen Oarson or referred to the night she hadn’t been in the hotel. No reason she should have, of course. I didn’t say much about my activities with Page, either. Jill and I had left together, and we were returning together—more or less—and not too much else mattered.
Actually, though, it was less rather than more. Jill had secrets, and I had none. People in our profession are always saying “more or less,” or “in some sense,” or simply “whatever.” I sometimes think “whatever” should be the true motto of Hollywood. I think they ought to letter it on the Goodyear Blimp and anchor the damn thing to the Beverly Hills Hotel, as a reminder to us all of how vague we are.
As the plane began to descend, I descended too, in spirit. Jill became very quiet. We had not kept up with the sun after all. It beat us over the coastal mountains, so that when we finally eased over them ourselves the Basin was smoky with dusk, purple in the foothills and up the Valley. People like myself, who are on the lip of age, get paranoid about slipping over. I never had worried about it much, but that was because I was in the habit of fantasizing myself a sudden, freakishly accidental, and painless end. I had been expecting a totally unexpected death since I was about sixteen, and the fact that in all those years I had seldom so much as cut my finger did nothing to dim the expectation. I’d be carried off some way, someday: a wave would smash me against a rock and knock me cuckoo, or a ball bearing would fly out of a skateboard and hit me right between the eyes, killing me instantly. Stravinsky had escaped the skateboards, but I wouldn’t be so lucky. Naturally, I would feel nothing. Something would happen pretty soon, sparing me impotence, senility, loneliness, arthritis, and bad breath.
As we descended into the smoky, rushing L.A. dusk, with the reptilian coil of freeways rippling like golden bo
as underneath us, I momentarily stopped believing in my own fantasy. Maybe I was not going to die suddenly. Maybe I was just going to get old.
Going to New York had been a mistake. Lots of people go away for a week and come home and step right back into their lives. That was the normally normal way. Having once been normal, I had even done it that way myself; but not this time. My life had no more permanence than a movie set. Turn your back for two minutes and someone would hitch it to a tractor and pull it to another part of the lot. It was a collapsible, storefront life, because it was without hope, the brick and mortar of any life.
I don’t mean to say that I lived in despair, like the victims of tragedy. No—my life was without despair, too. I had no pain, and not even a specific sadness, but somewhere along the way I had lost the habit of hope. Everything I did was a repeat; I hadn’t the energy for anything new. Page would waltz off soon. I wouldn’t be able to stop her, and probably wouldn’t even try. In all likelihood she would be the last. She was perfect, though she would never believe it, and I doubted that I could accommodate myself to anyone who wasn’t. Basta! Enough of fucking. Let the stem droop.
Then we roared over the back of one of the golden boas, half hidden in its swamp of dusk and smog, and touched down. We were home, what was left of us. Jill was very quiet, and so was I, possessed all of a sudden by the sense of age. It seemed we would never get through the egg-white tunnel that led to the lobby. A driver met us, bags were secured, and we became one of the scales on the serpent of cars.
Somebody's Darling Page 12
