“Do you think I should have taken that man’s twenty dollars?” Wynkyn asked me later, when we were watching them move the cameras.
“No, and I thought I told you not to use that bad word again,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “I forgot.”
When you disapproved of him, even mildly, Wynkyn looked like he was ready to commit suicide.
“Don’t look that way,” I said. “It’s not that important. It’s just not a word you should use.”
They were positioning the buffalo on a nearby hill, and one of the wranglers, a tall cowboy named Jimbo, came and asked Wynkyn if he’d like to go over in a pickup and see them. Wynkyn was ecstatic, as much at getting to ride in a pickup with a cowboy as at getting to see the buffalo again. Jimbo had a fat wife—I had seen them eating at one of the local cafes several times. I tried to imagine my life if I had just married a nice man, a local of somewhere—would it all still be turmoil and churning inside, or would it be quietude and happiness, or would it just be boredom? Unanswerable.
That afternoon I was passing one of the pickups and looked in and saw Owen, slumped behind the wheel. At first I thought he had died, and I sort of went cold—but then I saw that he was just sleeping. The sun was blazing and he was really hot. He was leaning forward, with his head on his arms, and the back of his shirt was wet and stuck to his back. I couldn’t just walk past—I had to stop and look, to see if I could pick up any clues at all from looking at him. Of course I couldn’t, but my looking woke him up. He was sleeping with the pickup door open and suddenly there I was, three feet away, staring at him. I wasn’t staring hostilely, either, though he probably thought so. Emotion wore him out—he often collapsed and slept for hours, after our fights. Three days, and she had worn him so that he could drop off in a blazing-hot pickup.
When he opened his eyes he seemed happy to see me, almost.
“I gotta see you tonight,” he said, to my great surprise.
“That’s a change,” I said.
“Sherry’s accountant’s comin’,” he said. “She doesn’t want me to be there because she doesn’t want me to know how rich she is.”
“So you want to kill time while you’re banished?” I said.
Then Jerry came running up. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else. Someone came running up every thirty seconds.
“I’ll be at the rushes,” Owen said.
HE WAS. BY THAT time I was tired. I had decided over and over again, all afternoon, that I wouldn’t see him. What point? I ought to behave with pride, though I didn’t know why. I had been lonely and proud for most of my thirty-seven years, and had come to think of the two states as mutually linked. The more proud, the more lonely. I had not found it to be true, in the long run, that my difficulty made men the more determined to win me. Most of them took my difficulty at face value and went elsewhere, to win easier women.
But then curiosity was working in me, as well as pride. I wanted to know what he thought was going on, between him and Sherry. I could at least try to find out.
Then when he showed up in the room he did the predictable thing and tried to fuck me. Even though it was perfectly predictable—having already happened once that day—it once again took me by surprise. I am the opposite of a good boy scout: I am never prepared.
But prepared or not, I was a wall of resistance. Right after work I had heard that Joe Percy had had a stroke—not a terribly bad one, evidently, but a stroke, and I felt blocked and frightened. The hospital wouldn’t let me talk to Joe, and I thought, My god, what if he gets worse and dies before I can talk to him? That was really all I could think about, and when Owen came in and cornered me near my dresser I was really much more absent than I had been that morning. I resisted mechanically, not very involved in what was happening—it was only because he was so big that he was even able to push and shove me into paying attention to him.
I got my head clear, for a little, and tried to look at him, really look at him, since I have the belief that if I can really look close at a man, I can always know what’s true about him. There was no point in listening to Owen—he lied all the time, with his mouth and with his flesh too. I would have to find out what was true in my own way.
“Owen, please stop,” I said. “Just stop for a little while. We can’t fuck our way out of this, for god’s sake.”
“If you love me, we can,” he said. “If you love me, why can’t you show me?”
“Because there are some basic questions I need to have answered first,” I said. “Such as why, if you still want me to love you, you’re spending your nights with Sherry now. That’s pretty damn basic.”
“I don’t know!” he said. “You think people know everything. If you love me, why don’t you fight for me? Maybe I haven’t decided yet.”
Once again I had a strong impulse to laugh. This man who was trying to drag me into bed had a less sophisticated intelligence than Wynkyn Weil. He was telling me to fuck him so he could decide between me and another woman. Would any man really be dumb enough to say that?
Yet something very intense was working in him, because he had seldom pursued me so hard. Normally he preferred to lie back and be enticed, but this time there was something desperate in his single-mindedness. I told him I was just getting my period, but I don’t think he even heard me, though he usually disdained me at such times, not from fastidiousness but because it gave him a convenient excuse to prowl.
My mind was more confused than my body, which was totally resistant. Owen was virtually a textbook case: a man who violated all the rules, who had shown zero consideration for me and my feelings; and yet I guess I still would have slept with him if my body hadn’t been suddenly like a rock. All the feeling in it had been quelled, yet in my mind I felt the sort of tenderness for him that I usually feel bodily—a kind of pity that he was so desperate and I couldn’t seem to help.
Finally he saw that nothing was working and stopped wrestling. He went and dropped in a chair and stared out the window of the motel, where there was nothing to see except an occasional truck passing on the highway.
I made him a drink. Until Sherry came along, all he had done at night was drink.
“Joe Percy had a stroke today,” I said. “One reason I’m upset is because of that. He’s really an old, old friend, though I know you disapprove.”
“He’s not so bad,” he said. He took the drink and was silent. I turned off the light in the room, so we could see out the window better. I had a drink, too, to be friendly. I thought maybe if we drank for a while, something might get said. But we drank for quite a while, until I realized nothing was getting said, and nothing would, because Owen had no need for things to be said. We were totally unlike one another in that regard: I’m the one with a crazy need for words, descriptions, analyses, all things I don’t particularly respect but which seem to be necessary to my relationships—or at least always had, until Owen came along.
Talk had been the center of my existence, but it was only something that occurred now and then, to little purpose, on the periphery of his.
After we had both been drinking for a while, Owen just sitting there, quite silent, I began to feel forgiving, not of what he had done with Sherry but of the fact that he wouldn’t talk. He was not really to be blamed: I was just trying to force my way of being onto a man who had a way of being all his own. I went on and got drunk with him in order to try and wipe out my own craving for talk, to try and approach wordlessness in order to show him that I did care. We sat by the window for about four hours, drinking—I had the phone off the hook so Sherry couldn’t summon him back. The drunker I got, the more contemptuous I became of what everyone would say if they knew what I was doing. They would say I was letting an awful man walk all over me. But then it’s so trite and shallow, so limited in intricacy, what people reason about other people’s relationships. Owen could manifest only needs, not affections. He was manifesting one now, by sitting with me for hours and assuring himself of the wrath
of a superabundantly wrathful woman. His need had something of love in it, not the nice outgoing parts but the harsher, more clutching parts. My habit had been to go where I was asked, but of course I had never expected to be asked to share anyone with Sherry Solaré. That was not quite the kind of demand I had hoped to answer.
I hung on to his hand and put my head against his leg as we watched the trucks, and then, since Owen was so silent, so lost in himself, my mind went back to Joe and I tried to figure out when I could go see him. I got very worried, imagining how it would be if Joe couldn’t talk and I had to try and explain my life to him without him being able to answer. Horrible.
Owen slept with me. I got too sentimental, or too scared, and he got it after all, not one to remember, in the state we were in by that time. Watching those trucks had something to do with it. There was a red light opposite the exit to the motel; a lot of the trucks had to stop at it and when it changed they would grunt and start off slowly, like big funny buffalo, picking up speed as they disappeared into Texas. I got to thinking of the loneliness of those guys, those men who drive trucks. Owen was not unlike them. It was a miracle he was not out there, speeding down some road, with headlights and pills and hillbilly music to pass the night with instead of a strange woman like myself. I guess I just decided to give it one more night, in the hope that whatever had called us together in the first place would get stronger if I didn’t give up on it.
Anyway, I didn’t expect it to resolve anything, and it didn’t. I had a five-thirty call, and was actually awake, listening to Owen breathe, when Jerry tapped on my door. It was just getting light—I couldn’t see Owen’s features, but when I looked across him I could see the light through the hairs on his chest, even see the little line of hair on his shoulder, which was near my face. For a moment I felt a childish yearning for the day not to come, and even when I forced myself up and got dressed I had the urge—it was more than fatigue—to sink back down.
I went away and left Owen sleeping, and the only time I saw him that day was from a distance, sitting in Sherry’s limousine, a sight that upset me so I couldn’t hold my hand steady. Obviously he had gotten away with me, somehow. Maybe she had fucked the accountant—not unlikely, since he was very good looking and also a financial genius of some kind, able to make her millions multiply like rabbits.
I didn’t regret the night, exactly, but it was still a long, awful day, during which Theroux Wickes demonstrated once and for all that he was not competent to be the cameraman on a picture as costly as One Tree. I started hating him for his preening and his incompetence, and then late in the afternoon somebody told me that Anna Lyle was fucking him, which made me furious with her. For an hour or so I even regretted my casting: as I reasoned, if she could sleep with Theroux, after hating him for two months, then she must be a bad actress. Years later we laughed about it, but at the time I was so angry that I avoided her all day.
That night, when I got in, there was no Owen at the rushes and no Owen in my room. I ordered a cheese sandwich and some chicken soup and ate it in my room so I wouldn’t have to make conversation with anyone. I sat in the chair where he had sat the night before, and watched some more trucks—not feeling sorry for myself at least, too tired for that, but feeling sort of temporarily out on my feet. Was this a life? And if so, how did I get to such a strange place in it?
I fell asleep over that one, woke up some time in the night, started for the bathroom, stepped on the tray I had put on the floor, broke the saucer the soup had been in, and almost cut my little toe off, something I didn’t realize until the morning, when I woke up with my foot stuck to the bloody sheet. Jerry came in and tenderly peeled it off and took me to the hospital; fourteen stitches were taken, more than I would have thought a little toe was worth. To make up for my injury, the crew was all tenderness and cooperation that day, and we finished the hanging scene, Sherry’s last. I was civil. She was no more than adequate in the scene, but we finished by midafternoon and she left.
That night, in a fight with Owen, using a gun nobody even knew she had, she accidentally shot Wynkyn dead. Nobody remembered hearing the shot, but everybody in the motel heard her scream. We were all in the coffee shop, and it was only a two-story motel. The scream rose like an aria above us and our wretched food—only it was more terrible than any aria: we all knew instantly that our minor troubles were as naught. Then Owen ran down the stairs with that poor dying child in his arms and rushed to the hospital where they had stitched my toe, but too late. Sherry never worked again. None of us who heard the scream expected that she would. She might not have known how to raise Wynkyn, but I guess she had loyalty enough not to want to outlive him. Eight months later, expertly and ingeniously, using a hose she had cut off her vacuum cleaner, she gassed herself in her custom-made BMW, with the radio on, in her seven-car garage in Beverly Hills.
4
I DON’T KNOW HOW WE FINISHED THAT PICTURE. OF COURSE, in a major sense we didn’t, as the footage clearly shows, but when Wynkyn was killed we still had a certain number of pages to shoot, and we shot them. Gauldin Edwards, who tried gallantly to joke some of the gloom away, said we ought to retitle the picture and call it Zombies of the Panhandle—his effort didn’t make anyone laugh.
I came to hate the media before they were finished with us. I mourned Wynkyn—we all did—but the publicity that followed his death was just despicable. It made it seem that what had happened could only have happened to a little boy who had grown up in Beverly Hills, the son of a superstar. That there is domestic violence elsewhere—in Ohio, for example—and that kids get blown away by it, was hardly dwelt on. It seemed to me that Wynkyn was an all-too-common kind of casualty, and I resented everything about the coverage.
Owen, of course, left when Sherry left. The local police made no real trouble for them, but then, two days later, they caught Zack with some cocaine and came down on him like he had invented drugs. I guess the local people had had about enough of us—the new had worn off and their minds had had time to dwell upon all the debauched and depraved things we probably did every night in that motel.
The bust was a pity: Zack only had a couple of scenes left to do. I don’t think he was even into cocaine: having the drugs was just part of his image or something. Mr. Mond sent up some legal weight and we got him out of jail and finished his scenes and shipped him home to L.A., but that too had its effect on the picture. In his last two scenes he just wasn’t the same Zack. The spring had gone out of his step, and his face had changed.
In the last ten days of the production I felt such a slippage of spirit, not just in myself but all around me, that I felt we weren’t going to get through it. I hit Jerry one day, furious because I had heard him say for the tenth time that Wynkyn’s life had been ruined anyway. Of course he was just saying it to make himself feel better, but I didn’t think Wynkyn had been that totally ruined, and I hit out.
That same day, out of nothing but weakness, I started an affair with Gauldin. It was not fair to him, poor man—God knows he got me at my absolute worst. I quickly made his inadequacies—all of them quite normal—into the cause of all wrong in the world, but I couldn’t face being alone and I did care for him, in a sort of motherly way. At least he was divorced at the time, so I wasn’t breaking up any home by sleeping with him. But it was still a wrong thing to do.
When finally, on a smoggy day in August, we returned to Hollywood, I tried to break with Gauldin, tried to thank him, tried to explain what I had hoped he realized anyway, how desperately but temporarily I had needed him. I tried to explain that on the porch of my house, when we drove up to it and I realized—maybe faced just then—that I didn’t want him to come in, didn’t want him to bring his bags up on the porch, didn’t want him getting his hopes rooted in me any deeper. If I let him bring those bags in, I would be months and years getting him out, during which time it would never be more than half right. I just couldn’t: I had to stop it there; hard, for the man had treated me with great generosity. He had so
ft blue eyes and a face, like Sammy’s, that would always be mostly boyish.
“Oh, Gauldin, you know what it was,” I said. “You can’t come in. But you have my love.”
He was not a fighter. His blue eyes just looked hurt. “How do I have it?” he asked, with a little shrug, and picked up his bags and went down the hill. It was not the last of him, of course; he came back, we worked out some uneasy terms for a while, then I got him a job which he desperately needed to pay his alimony and child support, and when he came back from that he had a new girl; and I was able, through the years, to show him that he did have my love, some of it, a lot of it in fact—though always there was a touch of puzzlement in his eyes when he looked at me. Fortunately, Gauldin was too healthy a man to be able to convince me that he was really one of my victims.
The minute he left I went up the hill to see Joe. He had been home from the hospital about a week; I had talked to him, finally, and he hadn’t sounded too bad. When I got to his house, I sneaked a look. I could see through his front window, peek through his plants. He was sitting in a chair, reading Playboy—not half so fat as he had been when I left.
“A lech to the end,” I said, stepping through the door. It startled him greatly—all men hate to be caught reading Playboy. They hate to have it thought that their imaginations really operate at that level.
The flesh had begun to leave his face; he was almost gaunt—unimaginable, but there it was. I surprised him more than I knew. He was unable to come up with an immediate sassy reply: instead, he stood up, tears welling in his eyes. Probably none of his girls even knew he was ill. We embraced and I held him close, to calm my own feelings, for I had never thought of Joe as other than essentially jolly, despite having witnessed his many drunken depressions. Above all, he was jolly.
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