Somebody's Darling

by Somebody's Darling (retail) (epub)

Jerry and Gauldin stared at me all afternoon, love in their big eyes. I just had no airspace, not a bit, even though we were right in the middle of one of the biggest plains in the world. I had no time to feel, or to allow myself the slightest reflection. People noticed I was grim, I guess, but I’m always grim when I’m working, because I’m so scared.

  As for the golf ball of feeling in my chest, there was just no chance to get it out. I was in a crowd, I had a decision to make about every twenty seconds, and there was no time for those feelings—not that I wanted to face them. I was grateful for the work, if not for the crowd. Several times I hoped it would cloud up and rain again, so I could just get a horse and ride away from the whole mess for a while: the trucks and trailers, the lights, wires, cables, work, love. The love was sort of like a big tangle of cables itself, none of them really plugged in any more—not so far as I was concerned.

  But of course the sun shone like a million dollars all afternoon, and we worked until we were all dull with fatigue.

  I concentrated like hell on the shooting—I always do, I have to, if I’m to make any sense of it at all—but even so, I was aware of a slight change in the atmosphere around me. Theroux Wickes, the cameraman, or director of photography, as he liked to style it, was actually nice to me, for the first time since production started. Theroux was a shit of the first water, a pompous little half-French, half-Upper-West-Side protégé of Jilly Legendre’s. I didn’t respect him as a person or as a craftsman, though Jilly, by bullying him constantly, had got fairly competent work out of him on Burning Deck. But I didn’t like Theroux, and I only used him because the cameramen I would have preferred were all busy. We had rushed into production too quickly to have had much hope of putting together an ideal crew. Sherry’s change of heart was responsible for that—Mr. Mond wanted to get the cameras rolling before she thought it over and backed out.

  People were too nice to me, all afternoon. I noticed it, underneath the work. The old scrappy, brassy, fuck-you, don’t-tell-me-how-to-do-my-job ambiance that makes a crew endearing, such a bunch of show-offy, soft-hearted, vulnerable overgrown boys, had shifted tone slightly, into something protective and subdued. It just meant everyone already knew that Owen was fucking Sherry, so they were being nice and cooperative out of sympathy. I guess I couldn’t blame them, but it made my heart sink. I hate certain kinds of sympathy, most particularly that kind.

  Finally it was evening. Big clouds were beginning to roll back in, meaning trouble for tomorrow. The crew piled into its bus and I waited as long as I could, hoping something nice would happen, something to convince me it had all been a mistake. Then Sherry and Owen got in her limousine, or rather Sherry did. Owen came over to where I was standing with Sammy. He looked sulky—not mad, just sulky, as if it annoyed him to be obliged to speak to me.

  “Going with us?” he asked.

  Wynkyn was having a fit of some kind—I could see his nurse dragging him toward the limo.

  “No, go ahead,” I said, as if I still had duties to attend to.

  “I’ll just ride in with the boys,” I said. “Are you coming to rushes?”

  “Sure,” he said. He punched Sammy lightly on the shoulder, and left.

  So I rode in with the boys. The road to town ran along a ridge—you could see for many miles across West Texas, probably into New Mexico. I loved the ride in—usually I could lose myself, staring at the plains and the sky; but not today. I had meant to sit by Sammy, to take comfort from his cheer, his good humor, his friendliness, from the mere fact that I knew a happy person, but it didn’t work out that way. Theroux Wickes sat down by me while Sammy was joking with the driver.

  “It was okay, it was okay,” he said. He often said things twice. I guess he was referring to the day’s shooting.

  “You’re a hell of a woman,” he added, in his most intimate tones. He had told me that twenty or thirty times during the course of the production. Despite the fact that he didn’t like me, couldn’t stand me, and would go back and bad-mouth me around Hollywood for years, for the duration of the shooting he felt obliged to flirt.

  “We should go out sometime,” he said. “I mean it, Jill. I know some nice places.”

  It was a formality, what he was doing. I wanted to tell him I hated his mustache, but I held my tongue. Obviously, we knew the same places—which I also wanted to tell him. Finally, I wanted to tell him that I thought he was a third-rate cameraman. But I didn’t tell him any of those things.

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  I guess he thought that was encouragement, because he put his hand on my leg and began to tell me why he had left his wife. Par for the course. I had heard why about ten other divorced men on the crew had left their wives, why not Theroux? The Texas dusk was heavy—I felt oppressed, as if I were crossing the Russian steppes with a busload of convicts, probably an image I’d kept from some forgotten film. Instead of feeling in tearing pain, I just felt flat. A big effort had failed—my effort with Owen—and the rope had suddenly gone slack, at least for the course of the bus ride.

  I didn’t tell Theroux to get his hand off my leg, but in my slackness I felt flickering, warring impulses. If I had had a machete handy, I would have reached down and cut his fucking hand off at the wrist, just to see him look surprised.

  Of course Owen didn’t come to the rushes. We were screening them in a big ballroom of the motel where we were all staying, and everybody was there who was supposed to be there except Owen and Sherry. Zack Kelly, the big kid who played Sherry’s lover, had found a local girl friend; he was dancing around, sparring with one of the production people, showing off for his date. The little girl was overawed. She wouldn’t have said a word if the ceiling had fallen in. Zack’s high spirits cut the gloom a little, but not much. There was lots of tension in the room, all of it centered on me. How would I take it, how badly would I be hurt? I couldn’t have clarified that for anyone. I didn’t know. Like everyone else, I was sort of waiting for signals.

  I gave them ten minutes, then called Sherry’s room. After all, if I was anything, I was still the director. Up to me to give the signals, not wait for them, particularly with ten tired hungry people standing around, wanting to have the day over with. Maybe the two of them up there were on the threshold of a great romance, or even over the threshold: it still didn’t justify inconsideration. It’s the one thing I won’t accept, because all the people I really admire manage to be considerate no matter what state their life is in. I had been exempting Owen from that standard for over a year, and it was time to quit, even though I knew that to judge him for being ill-mannered was mostly irrelevant. Manners hadn’t occurred to Owen, and had no meaning for him. Maybe he had never been secure enough to approach life on that level, I don’t know. He lived in his gut, not his head, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t judging him, I was judging me, and I was tired of hearing myself make excuses for him.

  Sherry’s room was busy. I tried a few times and gave up. We saw the rushes, and later encountered Wynkyn and his nurse in the coffee shop, Wynkyn staring with infinite melancholy at an uneaten hamburger. If there’s tragedy in Hollywood, it has to be the children. I sat down with them, perhaps to avoid having to eat with Jerry, who had not got three steps from me all day. I guess he saw this contretemps as his big chance.

  “I’m going to sit with you and help you stare at that hamburger,” I said to Wynkyn. “Then when mine comes you can help me stare at mine.”

  Wynkyn smiled wanly and took a small bite of the hamburger, only to spit it out. His nanny, a totally disoriented Englishwoman who always wore gray, made a bit of a flutter at that, but I think she was grateful for my company. Every time I looked up I caught Jerry looking at me.

  “Do you think they have ratshit in them?” Wynkyn asked. “Swan says most hamburgers have ratshit in them.”

  “Why’d you order it, then?” I said. “There are other things to eat.”

  “It was Miss Solaré,” the nanny said. “She did specify a hamburger.”


  “Oh, specify, specify,” I said. “Would you like a grilled cheese sandwich, Wynkyn?”

  “Could I?” he asked, looking at his nanny and back at me. “Even if Sherry said hamburger?”

  “We directors have some authority,” I said. A small revenge, getting her kid a grilled cheese sandwich, but not insignificant. Mrs. Hoops, the nanny, absented herself to the ladies’ room, doubtless to escape responsibility.

  Wynkyn ate all his grilled cheese, and I stared at a hamburger. Wynkyn got into the spirit of the thing and stared at it with me. I crossed my eyes and stared at it, which perked him up considerably. Mrs. Hoops came back, having freshened her makeup, but she still couldn’t make any sense of the two of us.

  “Do you really believe that about ratshit?” Wynkyn asked. “Swan really believes it.

  “They don’t have very good TV up here,” he added sadly. “I’ve seen almost every one of the cartoons.”

  Seeing a sad child always makes me wonder if my own was ever that sad. A child whose best friend is Swan Bunting was in pretty sad shape, although if Sherry could abuse him to the point of tears, perhaps there was a human being there somewhere, after all. He was due back in two or three days, which was going to be interesting.

  “I wish we could do something exciting,” Wynkyn said.

  “Oh, Wynkyn, don’t sound like that,” I said. “What would you consider exciting? Think of something and I’ll do it with you.”

  “Seeing the buffaloes,” he said. “I can’t get enough of them.”

  “Now, Wynkyn, you know your mother wants you in bed early,” Mrs. Hoops began. Wynkyn’s face immediately reflected defeat. I couldn’t stand it. I made him look at me.

  “Listen, buster, you’ve got to learn not to give up so easily,” I said. “It’s only eight. There’s absolutely no reason why we can’t sneak a look at the buffaloes. I’d like a look at them myself. Do you want some ice cream first?”

  Mrs. Hoops, though she knew she was placing herself in peril, seemed relieved at not having to disappoint Wynkyn yet again. I borrowed Jerry’s rented car, and Wynkyn and I drove out of town about twelve miles, to the ranch that had the buffalo we were using. There were about twenty of them. Wynkyn delivered an extensive critique of Texas television programming while I drove. I couldn’t disagree with him because I hadn’t had time to watch any.

  “I guess you don’t really care what Sherry thinks, do you?” he asked, out of the blue.

  “No, Wynkyn, I don’t,” I said.

  “I don’t either, half the time,” he said, rather proudly.

  The dogs at the ranch barked like crazy, until they figured out it was me. The rancher, Mr. Debo, stepped out of the front door of his ranch house, but I guess he recognized the car because he went right back in. The buffalo were in a big pen, standing around a hayrack. Wynkyn and I climbed up on the board fence and sat and watched them. It was cool, and Wynkyn let me hug him. There was a moon, riding in and out of thinning clouds. One or two of the buffalo turned and looked at us, but mostly they just kept eating hay. Then, to Wynkyn’s extreme delight, one of them got enough hay and came over near the fence. He grunted a few times, sighed the way everyone sighs when it’s finally time to go to bed, and sank down. Wynkyn took my hand—at last something exciting was happening. We could have stepped off the fence onto the buffalo’s back.

  “Is he going to have a dream?” Wynkyn asked.

  “What would a buffalo dream about?”

  Wynkyn giggled, almost the first normal sound I had ever heard him make. “Maybe he’ll dream he was going to be in a movie,” he said. “Maybe he thinks that’s exciting.”

  “On the other hand, maybe he’ll dream we all dropped dead,” I suggested. “Then he and his friends could have all these plains to themselves again, like they did in olden days.

  “There were millions of them,” I added. “Millions and millions. Think about that.”

  Wynkyn thought about it. We sat on the fence for half an hour, listening to the buffalo breathe. When the clouds hid the moon it would get so dark we could barely see the others, but we could hear them pulling hay out of the hayrack. Then the moon would come out again, very white, and we could see their horns and even their shadows, and could smell the dusty hair of the one underneath us. Wynkyn never moved. With the great sea of grass around us, the white moon, vast sky, and quiet beasts, we were both lifted out of our lives for a little time, and felt the breath of the immemorial—maybe the only time Wynkyn had ever had such an experience. I think he could have sat there all night, but eventually we both realized that we had had our fun. We were just sitting on the fence in order to postpone our lives.

  “Let’s go, kid,” I said. “There’s no point in getting your mother too outraged.”

  Wynkyn made a face. “I don’t need half as much steep as she thinks I do,” he said.

  The prairie was really nicer at night than it was in the daytime. We could see a red light high up on a radio tower as we drove back into town. For a few minutes I felt a sort of contentment—Wynkyn felt it, too. I felt almost tempted to kidnap him. Sherry probably wouldn’t care, as long as I left a note. We could drive up to Wyoming, to the mountains, and do some more exciting things. Wynkyn might make a mother of me, and I might even show him how to be a child.

  Instead, I delivered him to a worried—indeed, quietly frantic—Mrs. Hoops. She had been growing more and more worried about what she would say if Sherry called.

  I got my messages, found that the weather report was good and that we had a five-o’clock call, and managed to get to my room without meeting anyone sympathetic. The room was in an unbelievable state: I give up on order during a movie production, and the maids at the motel were so in awe of us and so afraid of doing something wrong that they never did much more than make the beds and replenish the towels. They had to do the latter, because Owen had a thing about towels. There couldn’t be enough of them, not for him. The nicest he ever was to me was when we spent a weekend in San Francisco in a hotel that not only had a lot of towels but towel-warmers as well. To Owen, warm towels were really the last word. I never figured that out, except that it had to do with playing football and showering a lot.

  Otherwise he was hardly a fastidious man. I had to clean his apartment about once a month or the litter would have buried him. He’d rather buy a new shirt than take one to the laundry—I found thirty in a closet in his bedroom, all worn once and all ugly. Of course he had that Mercedes that every homosexual in Hollywood wept at the sight of, but other than that, everything he had was tacky, and even the Mercedes didn’t really fit with him. He would have looked more in place in a Buick, and been happier probably, only I don’t think he ever realized that. Maybe the fact that he knew so little about himself was what made him interesting. I’d had too many men who were too self-aware, who knew too much about themselves and too much about me. Owen really knew next to nothing about either one of us—all he knew was what he called the basics, such as that he liked motels with lots of towels.

  He hadn’t cleared his stuff out of the room yet—I could see that just by turning on the bedside light, the only light I cared to risk. I wasn’t in the room much in the daylight, and if I just turned on the bedside light, I didn’t have to face the full evidence of the chaos of my existence: the ever-increasing confusion of clothes, books, suitcases, scripts, tapes, telexes, shoes, boots, Kleenex, pills, magazines, that the room contained. Owen was almost as compulsive about magazines as he was about towels. He read dozens, leafing through them petulantly and then dropping them on the floor. His fascination and disappointment with them was intriguing, another aspect of him that I never got to the bottom of. Probably he was just hoping to see a picture of a woman he’d like to fuck.

  After a while I found myself sitting in the bathtub, with the water cold around my belly. It had been hot when I got in, so I must have fallen asleep sitting in the tub. I seemed to have reached a level of fatigue where there were spaces in my consciousness. I would wake
in the midst of some action or other and have no memory or knowledge of how I’d gotten that far along in it. Probably I went around half-asleep all the time—at least I was always coming awake into a sense of limbo. Maybe I would be combing my hair and have no sense of having gotten out of bed and dressed.

  I got from bath to bed, and just when it seemed I was getting firmly to sleep again, Jerry hit the door. The night had passed. Jerry knew I hated alarm clocks, and knocking on the door to wake me was just another way he could demonstrate his love.

  “Jill?” he said. “Jill, are you ready?”

  “Right, meet you in the coffee shop,” I said, wondering if I even had a semi-clean pair of pants to put on.

  2

  OWEN DIDN’T COME TO THE SET THAT DAY. I DON’T KNOW what he was doing—it nagged at my mind all day that what he was doing was getting his things out of our suite so that maybe I wouldn’t even get him to face me. But that was paranoia. He was co-producer—he would have to show up somewhere, sooner or later.

  We were shooting a scene in which Sherry sent Zack, her youthful lover, off on an errand, to get him out of the way of the trouble that she knew was coming. He didn’t know he’d never see her alive again, and neither did she, but she at least knew it was likely to be a rough day.

  I guess Sherry thought she had me on the ropes emotionally, where she’d wanted me all the time. It had even crossed my mind that her interest in Owen was no more than that: a way of getting me on the ropes. Anyway, she chose the morning for a contest of wills.

  To make matters worse, Abe Mondschiem was around. Mr. Mond sent him up once in a while to check on things. It didn’t matter much, since Abe couldn’t be bothered to do any thorough checking, but it did involve a good deal of protocol: treating him like a king, in other words. He generally had two or three teenyboppers with him, and this time was no exception. They say he was into group balling, or at least group lolling around, but I don’t know. Abe was always fairly nice to me, out of fear of his grandfather, and I didn’t ordinarily mind his visits, since all he did was lie around the motel with the teenyboppers and eat a meal or two and maybe see some rushes. He hated sets and avoided them when he could, but for some reason he was there that morning when I arrived. Gauldin Edwards told me later that he was just passing through on his way in from an all-night binge in Lubbock. When it came to finding all-night binges, Abe was resourceful. He was wearing a Levi jacket and was drinking coffee with the rest of us when Bobbie, the woman who dresses Sherry, came over to the group.