“I don’t think I’d want to share it with a cunt like that,” I said.
“Well, you won’t get it without her,” she said. “You aren’t smart enough. Bo can think circles around you. Hell, I can think circles around you and I can hardly think at all. You want to know something? I’m glad you fucked her. It proves what I really already knew: how dumb you are. It will help me a lot, your doing that. Now I won’t bother to count on us any more. I just won’t bother . . . to pretend it’s going to work.”
Then she turned and left. She was about to burst into tears, but I wasn’t going to get to see that.
I called the answering service and found a few calls from Bo and some from Lulu. But Jill had thrown my head off. I had no taste for business.
I got in my Mercedes and drove down to Redondo Beach, taking along the script Jill had thrown at me. I spent the afternoon reading the script and watching the little teenage truants in their mini-kinis flop around in the sand. About half of them had middle-aged lovers with gray hair and potbellies. It was a revolting sight, but I preferred Redondo Beach to the spiffier beaches. It was sort of the equivalent of my apartment, only with an ocean to look at.
I was mad at myself for not stopping Jill, making her cry, having a real fight, fucking her, something to take the edge out of the day. As it was, I was all edge. I couldn’t tell what was happening, or what I wanted to happen. It was all crazy. At last I had what I had been looking for, a little start, and instead of being over at Universal, conning Bo up one side and down the other, I was sitting on Redondo Beach, getting sand in my asshole and watching the kiddies getting ready to fuck the grandads.
It was all because of Jill. For someone who was supposed to be leeching off her, I wasn’t getting much. It was like she had broken my concentration. The same kind of thing had happened to me in high school, only then I had been lucky: the cunt jilted me for a fullback. If that hadn’t happened, I’d still probably be back in Plainview, Texas, hoping it didn’t hail out the fucking wheat.
It was a big irony, really. Joe Percy and Henley Bowditch and all those other old turds were sitting around commiserating about how I’d ruined Jill, and instead of me ruining her, she was ruining me. They thought I had her bewitched or something, which was horseshit. If I had left a mark on her anywhere, it didn’t show. I could fuck her silly, but that wasn’t a mark. I could act shitty and make her cry and walk out, but that only lasted a day or two. So far as I knew, she was an unchangeable woman. I didn’t love her, I didn’t know her. I just knew I was the one who was losing his bearings, not her. She had her bearings, okay. She wasn’t sitting around Redondo Beach.
I was too disgusted with myself to be in the mood to do much of anything, but eventually I got through most of the script Jill had thrown at me. It was a Western, set in West Texas, about a frontier madam who gets hung because the big ranchers think she’s helping the little ranchers rustle their cattle. The script was by somebody I had never heard of, and it was good: if it hadn’t been good, I wouldn’t have read ten pages of it, in the mood I was in.
Eventually it got to be twilight. The sky, the beach, and the ocean all got gray and gloomy—as gray and gloomy as the flats of the Panhandle on a March evening. It didn’t drive the teenagers off, though. Some of them had on fluorescent bikinis—they flitted around on the beach like fireflies. Behind me I heard the roar of traffic on the San Diego Freeway, louder than the surf.
I got in the Mercedes and let the traffic suck me in. It carried me for a while, like a long wave, and threw me ashore in Hollywood. My mind started working a little bit again. I drove up to Jill’s house. She was sitting at her drawing board, with a cup of tea on the window ledge beside her.
“Hi,” she said. “Are you feeling any better?”
“I’m feeling dumb,” I said. “I’d like to go someplace for a couple of days. Maybe out in the desert somewhere. You want to come?”
“Sure. Let’s go,” she said.
We were out past San Bernardino before we said two words. We didn’t even look at one another. Somewhere near Riverside we stopped at a diner and ate. Jill ate some fried shrimp—she always ate shrimp if they were on the menu.
“You’d eat those things anywhere,” I said. “Why do you want to eat shrimp in a desert?”
“I like them,” she said.
We stared at one another for a while. At least she had a sense of humor. She knew what a big joke we were. She was happy to be chewing on shrimp in the desert, and began to smile at me.
“I don’t know why you came,” I said.
“You asked me,” she said. “A lot of people respond to being asked. I’m glad you brought yourself to do that, though I have no idea why you did.”
“Probably inertia,” I said.
“I’m sure,” she said. “Men are so goddamn lazy. Once they find someone who’ll fuck them steady, they just go right on, click, clock, click, clock. I don’t know why women are thought to be the passive sex.”
We ended up in a motel in Glamis. I wanted to go on to Yuma, but Jill had been wanting to stop for an hour, so I stopped. It was a big deal for her, coming to the desert. The motel was crappy, not enough towels. Her legs were still damp when she came to bed.
“Someday I’ll find out something about you,” she said. “You can’t hide forever.”
It was crazy, being with a woman who would make a remark like that just when we were getting ready to fuck. I let it go. What was I supposed to say? She couldn’t seem to shut up, even when she was excited. I had even got so I could sleep while she was talking, which is what I eventually did.
10
THE NEXT DAY I FELT LIKE I WAS GOING OUT OF MY SKULL, life was such a blank. I smoked some dope, which didn’t help much, and we lay around in the crappy motel in Glamis until the middle of the afternoon. Jill was happy as a fucking lark, but I wasn’t. It’s depressing to look out the window of a third-rate motel and see a desert, particularly if you’re in the motel fucking a woman you don’t even know why you’re involved with. We couldn’t even get any fresh towels. The three we had got damper and damper.
In the middle of the afternoon I had a few minutes when I thought I might kill her if she said another word. I guess she sensed it, because she shut up. We had to go somewhere, so we went to San Diego. I didn’t really feel like driving off into Arizona. Jill said we could go to the zoo, but actually I think she was just hoping for about a three-day fuck in a nice motel. I sure as hell meant to have a better motel, whatever else happened.
We got a great one in San Diego, and eventually I smoked enough dope to stop feeling depressed. We spent a couple of days ordering too much from room service, fucking too much, and watching too much television. We even went to the zoo at one point. I could tell it was a good zoo, but zoos bore me. Maybe I catch it from the animals.
When whatever mood we were in finally wore off, we dragged out the script of the Western—Bo had offered it to her—and went through it.
“I want to do it and I want you to help,” she said. “We’ll have to do it in Texas, so I’ll get to see where you come from.”
“That’s a reason to do a movie?” I said.
“One reason,” she said, “Of course he wants Sherry to play the madam.”
We talked script for about a day, or rather she talked and I listened. On the third night we started back to L.A. Jill had had some pretty good ideas, such as that Sherry would have a youthful lover, the son of one of the big ranchers who wanted to kill her.
“I want you to work on it,” she said. “Maybe you can produce it.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m tired of being Mr. Jill.”
She started looking depressed. I guess she thought a couple of days in a king-size bed had changed everything.
“I wish you wouldn’t feel that way,” she said.
“Don’t start whining. I do feel that way. You make your pictures and I’ll make mine.”
“I wish you were the most famous person in
the world,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t have to prove anything, and we could do something together.”
I was tired of her being so nice to me. That always makes me nervous, when somebody’s nice. We argued most of the way home, and when we got back to L.A. I asked her whether she wanted to go to her place or mine.
“I wish there was an our place,” she said. “But you don’t want that, do you?”
“I sure don’t,” I said. “We see enough of one another. Any more and we just fight.”
“I don’t mind fighting,” she said. Then she fell into one of her silences. It wasn’t exactly a hurt silence, but it was hard to live with. I could never think of a thing to say to her when she stopped talking. When I pulled into my garage she still hadn’t spoken. She gave no sign of having noticed that the car had stopped. I finally got irritated.
“I’m going up,” I said. “You can sit here and stare at the wall if you want to.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to shake herself out of it. “Going away is always more fun than coming back, isn’t it?”
For some of us it’s just the same, but she didn’t know that. She had natural highs, which I never get, not like hers anyway.
This time she couldn’t really get out of her mood, even after we were in bed. Her eyes stayed open—it made me uncomfortable, having her there. I was too conscious of her. We were fucked out, or I was at least, but we didn’t have anything to say to one another. We were just wide awake in the same bed.
“Maybe you can’t really know someone unless you live with them,” she said. “I guess that doesn’t really bother you because you don’t really want to know anyone. You certainly don’t really want to know me. I’ve forced myself on you and insisted you have what knowledge you do have. I know you don’t like it.”
“Then why don’t you stop it?” I said.
WHEN I WOKE UP the next morning she was sitting up in bed drawing pictures of my feet. She was using some old stationery I had that had the name of my so-called production company on it. Sunset Productions, it was called. She had made about forty sketches of one of my feet.
“You have extraordinary feet,” she said. “If it wasn’t for them maybe you could convince me that you had no character. I guess all your character just slid down to the bottom. They’re Renaissance feet.”
She was determined to look on the bright side. Probably half the assholes in the world had interesting feet. When she got tired of drawing mine she drew two or three pages full of breasts. “These are for you to fantasize about, since I don’t have any,” she said. She was always making tit jokes designed to get me to reassure her about being flat-chested.
“Not tits again,” I said. “For god’s sakes, I thought you were liberated. You don’t fuck a tit.”
She stretched and I rubbed her nipples for her. “All the same, a bosom ought to be bigger than an egg,” she said.
We ate, and talked some more script. I changed my mind again. Maybe I would do the picture with her after all. When I sifted through all the pros and cons it seemed to make sense. At least Jill was on my side, and she had brains. Besides, if Bo and Sherry were going to team up again, it wouldn’t hurt to be on the scene.
“Maybe we’ll try it,” I said.
“Try what?” she asked.
“Doing the picture together.”
“Oh, yeah?” she said. “What made you change your mind?”
“It wasn’t your tits,” I said.
THEN, FOR SOME REASON, Bo Brimmer backed out. Not only did he change his mind and turn us down, he dropped his option on the script altogether. I was the one who got the news. Outtake had just had a very good preview in San Francisco, and I went in to receive congratulations and was told the Western was no go.
Of course the little fucker was looking smart and cheerful, as if he had just won a chess match.
“Why not?” I said. “I thought you liked the script.”
“I do like the script,” he said. “What I don’t like is the mix. It needs to be either better or worse. It won’t be a masterpiece, and it won’t be a blockbuster either. What it’ll be is a small winner, and we ain’t hurtin’ for small winners right now. What we’d like is a big winner.”
“But you’ve got Sherry Solaré,” I said. “That’s not going to hurt you.”
He looked a little irritated. “Sherry Solaré is a fact of life, like the common cold,” he said. “Only she’s more like walkin’ pneumonia. I think we might do well to let this little opportunity pass. If you’ll remember, I said I didn’t like the mix.”
“What mix?”
“You and Jill are a bad mix, to start with,” he said. “Jill and Sherry are a bad mix, and you and Jill and Sherry are a worse mix.”
“What’s wrong with me and Jill?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You probably know, but I doubt you’d come right out and tell me. I just know that I decline to get involved.”
I WAS REALLY UPSET. It had never occurred to me that he’d change his mind. Maybe I am more naive than Jill.
“You’re not more naive,” she said when she came in that night and found me. I was fairly drunk, from drinking all afternoon while I waited for her to get home.
“You just don’t know Bo as well as I do,” she said. “I’m not surprised he backed out.”
“Hell, I thought he was in love with you once,” I said.
“He was, but I never fucked him,” she said. “If I had, it might have been okay, even if I’d only fucked him once. Sometimes it works that way. He’s just one of those men who need to fuck a woman in order to forget her. Until he’s done it the power is still hers.”
“Why didn’t you fuck him?” I said.
She just kicked my foot and went off to the bathroom to wash her face. She wasn’t mad. It was all irritating. She must have kept her legs crossed for about ten years, before she met me. If she’d fucked him, she might have been able to disarm him, and I’d dearly love to see the little fucker disarmed.
“So why didn’t you fuck him?” I asked when she came out of the bathroom.
“He really wanted Jacqueline Bisset,” she said.
“You’re too goddamn hard to get,” I said.
“And you’re drunk and upset and don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You got me, so I must not be that hard.”
She sat down on the couch and tried to take my hand, but I shoved her off.
“Look, you’re overreacting,” she said. “I tried to tell you Bo was tricky. He probably only offered me the script in order to be able to back out and upset our applecart. He’s probably jealous of you, among other things.”
“Who did you fuck, before I came along?” I asked.
She just looked at me. I was beginning to find her very irritating again.
“I’m not going to talk to you about things like that when you’re drunk,” she said. “If you can’t be nice, then it’s none of your business.”
“It’s my business if I want to know,” I said.
She sighed and shook her head. “You should eat something,” she said.
“Did you fuck any of those old guys?” I asked.
She got up and left the room. When she didn’t come back I finally got up and found her in the bedroom, reading a script.
“It’s all right if you fucked one,” I said. “I guess senior citizens need groupies, too.”
“Shut up, Owen,” she said. “Go to your place if you want to get stewed. You don’t have to bother showing me how obnoxious you can be because I already know.”
“You’re not helping,” I said. “You’re just sitting there reading some fucking script.”
She looked up. “What did you have in mind?” she asked. “You’re too drunk to drive, too drunk to eat, too drunk to talk rationally, and too drunk to fuck. That doesn’t leave us too many options.”
I wanted to kick the shit out of her, but I controlled it. I went out and walked up the hill. One nice thing about the plain
s, when you want to take a walk you don’t have to go uphill. Old Percy was out squirting water on his bushes. I guess he had decided I wasn’t going to axe murder his darling, because he offered me a drink. When we went in, an old one-eyed German of some kind came out of the kitchen, stirring his drink with his finger.
“Joey, see you later,” he said, and went out the door.
“Bring the glass back,” Joe said.
“Who’s that?”
“Bruno Himmel,” he said. “He’s got a girl friend in the neighborhood. He just came to my house because he knows I stock Irish whisky.”
I drank with him for a while, mostly because my head was swimming and I needed a place to sit down. I wasn’t in the mood to puke in the gutter. Old Percy told me about his wife, the serial queen. I had heard about her already from Jill, but I heard it again.
“Quite a woman,” he said. “Quite a woman.”
We watched about three innings of a baseball game. He wasn’t as bad to be with as he was to think about. “I don’t know why we take this poison into our bodies,” he said, meaning the whisky. He was drinking two to my one.
On the way downhill I puked in the gutter. It had been years since I’d drunk that much. I don’t know why I did it, instead of going and fucking Lulu or something. Jill was still reading scripts, in her bed. I stood in the shower because I’ve discovered that if I run enough water on my head when I’m drunk, I don’t have as bad a hangover. Maybe Jill thought I drowned in the shower, I don’t know. She came and peeked in, wearing her nightgown. When she saw that I wasn’t coming out, she slipped off her nightgown and got in with me.
“It’s really amazing how much bigger you are than me,” she said. “Your bones must be twice as thick as my bones.”
I was twice as big as she was—maybe that was her turn-on, I don’t know. We made a game of it when we first started out. She weighed 108, and I got down to 216 so I’d be exactly twice as big. But we had forgotten about the game and I was back up to about 225.
Somebody's Darling Page 20
