“There’s something I want to ask you,” Jill said as we turned onto the San Diego Freeway. “How come you’re always fucking other men’s wives?”
I was surprised. “Are you planning to come to the defense of the nuclear family?” I asked.
“No, I just want to understand that one thing about you,” she said.
“I wasn’t that way my whole life, you know. I came to it late.”
“That doesn’t tell me why,” she said.
“Because I don’t want all of anybody any more,” I said. “I only want the parts that nobody else is using. Most married women are half unused—maybe more than half, I don’t know. The unused parts usually turn out to be the most interesting parts, for some reason.”
We rode for a while.
“Anyway, part of somebody is really more interesting than all of somebody,” I said. “Certainly part of me is enough for anyone. I’m fun for two hours but a week of me is damn boring.”
Jill listened, but I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. We were cruising up La Brea.
“I don’t know why we’re talking like this,” I said. “This is your town, for the time being, you know. I hope you plan to enjoy it while it’s yours.”
“How long will it be mine?” she asked.
“About six weeks. If you’re lucky you’ll get an office with its own bathroom.”
“Lulu Dickey asked me to do a picture,” she said. “Leon O’Reilly’s producing it. A Western of some kind.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I know about it. With Duke Wayne and Kate Hepburn. I can do better than that. I can offer you an actual script.”
I opened my briefcase and pulled out The Rosebud of Love. Despite good intentions, I had yet to crack its covers. I handed it to Jill.
“Where’d you get that?” she asked.
“It’s a by-product of your premiere,” I said.
“Oh. What’s it about?”
“Da Bronx,” I said.
It was only early evening as we made our way up into the hills. The sight of the purple sky over the familiar palms reminded me that we were in California again, California where autumn never comes. We put the windows down. Instead of the chill wind, whirling like a saw, there was the swish of sprinklers from the warm lawns.
“I guess he better let me off at my house first,” Jill said. “I have to meet somebody.”
There was in her eyes that look—I’d seen it a thousand times—of a woman with a new prospect. It brought a sharpness, a touch of incipience, not merely carnal but not wholly of the spirit either. Most of all, it was self-pleased. To see it in Jill, who had spent her life dissatisfied with herself, was very gratifying, much as I disapproved of the slob who had prompted the look. Her eyes shone the way Page’s did when things were perfect. She was coming home keen about something, and for once it wasn’t just more work. I had never seen her look so expectant.
I put no questions to the look. Whatever had happened or was about to, she was concentrating on it hungrily, assuredly, inscrutably. I had a feeling that I had better scoot on out of the way.
I helped the driver carry her bags up the steps, waited for her to extract her keys, and gave her a hug before scooting.
“Oh, Joe,” she said, managing to focus on me for just a moment. “I’m sorry I was so cutting. I’m very grateful you went. I’m not sure I would have gone if you hadn’t.”
“Fiddle,” I said, and went to the car.
The skinny little driver, who hadn’t said a word once he introduced himself, suddenly said a word.
“Know da lady long?” he asked.
“Yeah, quite a while,” I said.
“A nice lady,” he said. “Believe me, I know a nice lady when I see one come down da pike. Real nice, this one. She never criticized da driving’ once. Jesus, I drove for Miss Solaré when they made Fancy Pants and I got this bleeding ulcer. Fucking’ thing bled for a year, all because of her. You think she’s got consideration?—forget it. Not her and not that punk she’s going’ to bed with. I miss a light taking’ her home an’ that punk would call me names, Jesus.”
“Where you from, buddy?” I asked.
“Da Bronx, originally,” he said. “I was Mr. Mond’s driver in New Yoik, in da old days. You know, the forties, you know. He was there a lot, in the forties. Pretty soon he wouldn’t let nobody else drive him, because I was so smooth, ya know, no bumps. Mr. Mond don’t like da bumps. So one day, forty-seven it was, he says,” Bernie, go pack da bags, you’re going’ west.’ My missus was game, so dat was dat. I been his poisonal driver ever since. Of course it took me some time to learn da town.”
Instead of looking like a root he looked like a fence post, that thin and straight in his black suit. There should have been wires running out of his ears. But he knew the town. He put me at my doorstep, and I live in a one-block cul-de-sac.
“How is Mr. Mond these days?” I asked as I was unloading.
“I worry about him,” Bernie said. “He sits in da sun. Don’t go to da office no more. Sits in da sun, and he’s already too brown. So I don’t have much driving to do. Mostly just like tonight—trips to da airport to pick up da dignitaries.
“But he ain’t slippin’,” Bernie added, as if worried that he might have given the appearance of disloyalty. “Mr. Mond, he keeps up. He reads da trades, ya know, an’ all day by da pool he’s getting’ calls. Still got his hearing, too. He can hear a pin drop.”
“My name’s Percy,” I said. “I used to write for him once in a while. Give him my best.”
“Poicy, when was that?” he asked.
“In the old days,” I said. “He’ll remember.”
“Aw, Mr. Mond, does he have a memory,” Bernie said. “” Bernie, maybe we’ll take a trip to the East an’ just drive around, da both of us,’ he said the other day.” Da pastrami ain’t so good out here. I’d like a real sandwich before I die.’ Gives me the shivers to hear it, ya know? I mean, New Yoik, I’ve forgotten da town. I’d get lost coming’ in from da airport. But Mr. Mond, he’s still got in mind a place on Eighth Avenue where he likes da pickles. Dat’s a memory.”
He tipped his hat, and the long dark car slid away into the night.
I had never thought to hear myself send salutations to Aaron Mondschiem—either age had mellowed me, or the melancholy of homecoming had weakened me. His house was only about a mile above mine—he was probably sitting up there under a sunlamp, getting littler and littler and browner and browner as he peered at the trades, the telegrams, the reports from the studio, trying to hang on to it all for a little longer.
I dumped my bags on the living room floor and got a drink and took it out on my patio. My conviction, which had been slipping for three thousand miles, continued to slip. Jill was about to get involved, Page would soon be on the wing, and my old chum Patsy Fairchild had divorced and moved to the north. Most of my drinking buddies were either dead already or so busy trying to hang on to the woman of the moment that they had no time to drink.
Probably I should go look for a woman my own age and make a companionable marriage, but I wasn’t going to. In the last few years I had fallen into bad habits, such as making out with young women, all of them absurdly easy to impress. I probably couldn’t impress a mature woman any more, and what’s more, I didn’t care. The daily sparring, jockeying, redressing, the little advances and setbacks of marriage, the necessity of dealing with a person when one barely felt like dealing with a game of solitaire, the Saturday night fuck and the Sunday afternoon drives to the beach: I just didn’t want it. Solitude was like the winds of New York: it might singe the cheeks but it also quickened the blood, mine anyway. Pump a little alcohol into solitude and it could make one witty and wry.
As I sat by my midget pool, a pale-blue kidney bean in my back yard—two strokes got you across it—I felt like I had floated free of everything, or that everything had dropped away from me, even memory, the last thing to go. I didn’t want to die, but I had to admit to a diminished inter
est in living. Not for me either ebb or flood—I was living in a kind of midness, kept going mostly by curiosity about my friends.
The house no longer even reminded me of Claudia: of her movements, her confident voice and even more confident ways. Fourteen years had passed, time enough for even those memories to leak out under the door. Old Claudia, my tiger woman, my jungle queen, only visited me in dreams now and then—I didn’t hear her in the bedroom, modestly changing clothes behind the closet door, any more. Her ghost, like the ghosts of the Stravinskys, was a rare visitor now, good only for a drippy hour of drinking and snuffling in front of the TV late at night. I did remember how her eyes used to cut sideways whenever the name of one of her boyfriends—two of them stunt men, one a grip—came up at parties.
But then, eyes are always the easiest things to remember, eyes and smells—if one is speaking of women, that is, because the smells of women are as individual as sauces; some smell cool as crocks, others as hot as bricks in the sun or babies in fever; some chaste women always smell slightly musky, and some constant and incontinent fuckers have odorless bodies but somehow manage to leave the covers smelling of milkweed and damp sponges.
I used to imagine that I would sit down someday and write a book called Remembering Women, or Women Remembered, or For the Love of Ladies, or something like that, but despite my frequent fantasizing about it, I was never able to come up with a really good title, much less the book itself. Anyway, I had stopped wanting to be a Proust of women. I didn’t even particularly want to remember them, not any more. As memory atrophies, so does desire. Homecoming is heart-hurting, and it was easier and just as much fun to remember the men I had known—those guys whose boyish laughter, in a hundred or a thousand bars, had been the background music for my life in Hollywood. It had been punctuated often, I admit, interrupted by sighings and shriekings, sobbing, querulousness and teeth-clicking—the general incessancies of women—but eventually, after the interruption, there remained the men and the bars.
It came to me that I could always call that old one-eyed fucker Bruno Himmel and get him out this very night, to drink and talk over the old days, when both of us had done much of our work for the terrible Tony Maury. In those days there was nothing we had to take seriously. Like many a man who doesn’t know what to do with himself after work except womanize, Bruno was always happy to be invited to escape the ladies for a little while.
But even after three drinks I still felt disquiet. Staring into the blue-green water of my little pool didn’t hypnotize me, and drinking good Scotch didn’t fuzz me much. For a while a grainy moon was visible above the crest of the hill, a moon the color of oatmeal, probably dulled by high-lying smog. I couldn’t get Jill out of mind—my daughter, neighbor, pet, chum, conscience, and last love. I liked to think of her, with her headshakes, her clear eyes, and her abruptness, as the most lucid of women. Maybe she was lucid, but she was also talent-cursed. All of us are born to die, but only a few are born to work, and Jill was one of the few. I wasn’t, and so I had never had to try to balance work with love. What I was good at was chases: Nazis after gallant Resistance fighters, posses after horse thieves, leopards after lost white maidens whose planes, fortunately, had crashed near Tarzan’s tree house. Now I was down to stalwart linemen and endangered bear cubs, but the quality of the product, and of the effort, had not really changed.
But Jill was the real thing. She wasn’t great, but neither was she cheap. Hers was the madness of monks. How had I let that Goth get into her life? Of course she would rush to exchange her lonely madness and lovely lines for something cheaper and more common. Nothing was more natural. Probably all those who live for work imagine that love will someday arrive and save them from it. Jill should get to feel like a woman for a while, even if it didn’t work out—and how could it work out, with Owen Oarson?
I felt a poor guardian, which was totally irrational but a hard feeling to shake. After living with the feeling for three-quarters of an hour, I went in and called Anna Lyle, thinking she might be home and bored, but nope, not home, so for the hell, of it I called Bruno. The phone rang a few times and then he answered. In his brusque, continental way, he merely said “Who?” Then he breathed loudly into the receiver. “Moon Over Miami” was on his phonograph, probably his idea of seduction music. Bruno was even more dated than me—the thought cheered me up a little.
“Poked out your other eye yet?” I said, knowing that he liked it—as he always said—“straight from the elbow.” Effort to explain that the phrase was “straight from the shoulder” got nowhere with Bruno.
“Ah, Joey,” he said. “Straight from the elbow. How many balls you still got?”
“It’s not the motor, it’s the spark plugs,” I said elliptically. “Let’s go have a drink.”
“Oh, my old friend,” Bruno said. I sensed a dilemma, and listened to “Moon Over Miami” for a bit as he pondered it.
“But of course, Joey,” he said, smoothly and confidently, a moment later. “After all, you move to Rome, I don’t get to Rome, so how long has it been, ten year, twelve year, I only get news from Tony Maury, and you know he is crazy. I will come—half an hour maybe. Where you want to meet?”
“The Honeysuckle,” I said.
“Of course, Joey,” he said. “Ah, the old days. Dietrich—where you got sick on the Pernod. You could never drink, Joey.”
His little act must not have been too convincing, because I heard a girlish voice say, “Fucker,” not softly either, before I hung up the phone. I guess it takes more than an eye patch to fool the young these days.
I opened a bag, but I didn’t want to unpack. I just took out my trusty green overcoat and hung it back out to pasture in the closet; with any luck it would never have to work again. Then I put on some checks: sport coat, houndstooth pants, polka-dot shirt, blue neckerchief, and a tweedy little hat John Ford had given me because it didn’t fit him. I lingered on my porch a minute, smelling the night. The kids next door had the stereo turned up and music floated over the hedge:
Everybody’s gone a-waay,
Says they’re moving’ to L.A.aa . . . aa . . . a . . .
It was about a good-time Charlie who had the blues. After I listened to it for a while I dragged my hose out of the garage and turned on my sprinklers. The water fell gently on the sunburned grass, and the sweet smell of dust and wet grass rose from my lawn.
My ol’ heart keeps telling’ me,
Not a kid at thirty-three . . .
Make that sixty-three. I set the sprinkler near the hedges and turned the hose down low, then set off along the bluish street, the worldly screenwriter returning from a casual jaunt to New York. The melancholy song had cheered me somehow. I was a good-time Charlie myself, and I was already in L.A., so whoever had left wherever the song was about ought to arrive pretty soon and keep me company.
Meanwhile, I would frequent my old haunts. One light was on at Jill’s, the one she always left on, over her forsaken drawing board. Bruno and I would sit in the Honeysuckle, actually a horseplayer’s bar on North Wilcox—it had never seen Dietrich, and they wouldn’t know Pernod from shoe polish. We would drain many a glass, Bruno and I. We would pretend it was London, the Blitz; I should have worn my ascot. Bruno, of course, would be pretending he was overhead in a Messerschmitt, helping to bomb the Limeys—he had once, in fact, thrown a defused grenade at Carol Reed and gotten fired for his trouble—and while he was pretending to be having it out with the R.A.F. I would pretend to be in a bunker with a pretty nurse, someone on the order of Anna Neagle or Virginia McKenna.
The blue street curved downward under the silent palms—an empty desert river: Lee Marvin should have been dragging a mule across it, with a wounded comrade, or maybe Claudia Cardinale, tied to the mule. I strolled cheerily on downhill, expecting at any moment the fatal skateboard, the one going ninety around a curve with no lights; or, if not that, then the leopard, the Nazi, the kamikaze diving for the aircraft carrier through clouds of flak; or the bullet, ricocheti
ng off the boulder; or the quicksand; or the croc that could swim faster than anybody but Johnny Weissmuller (since I was the faithful gunbearer, not the pretty girl, no danger of my getting saved); or the sudden loss of balance, the waving arms, the long fall over the cliff; or the school bus careening downhill (someone had cut the brake-lines), smushed like old Max Maryland; or, most likely of all, the evil teenager, the dope freak, sniper, or psycho, crouched in a eucalyptus tree with his slingshot and his poison pellets. It was all right—I wasn’t worried. It’s a fast town, never long at a loss for an ending. The oatmeal moon had disappeared, probably to go shine over Miami. Bruno was probably already there, already drunk. I didn’t care. Everyone was busy now. All it would take was a gimmick—Hollywood would think of something. The guest at the party, though he had loved the party—those toothy girls, those puzzled drunks—really sort of felt like getting home.
BOOK II
1
JILL WAS IDIOTIC ABOUT THE PAST. SHE HAD A THING ABOUT old men, fucking bores, most of them, big drinkers and big talkers. I couldn’t stand any of them. The cameraman on Womanly Ways, old Henley Bowditch, was one of the worst.
The morning after the Oscars she woke up and started moaning about him. The picture had won three Oscars, which would have satisfied most people, but of course old Henley didn’t get one, so it didn’t satisfy her. “He’s too old,” she kept saying. “He won’t get another chance. They should have given it to him. My god, think of the pictures he’s done!”
I couldn’t have named two of Henley Bowditch’s pictures if my ass had depended on it, but of course Jill remembered about thirty. She sat up in bed and went on talking about it. “He needed it!” she said. “I didn’t need it, I already had one. They gave me a writing award, for god’s sake. I’m not a writer!”
“Will you fuck off?” I said. “He didn’t get an Oscar because he’s mediocre. He’s always been mediocre, or he would have had one by now. He ought to be out where I came from, making demonstration films for Massey-Harris tractors.”
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