“Died about a month ago,” Wanda said. “Hiram was the last link, you know. Everybody’s got their links—even him. I think we all better get ready to move.”
I was very taken aback. I had been blindly counting on Mr. Mond’s support. If Wanda was right and he had stopped caring, there was no telling what would happen.
“Did he love you?” Wanda asked. It was strange to hear the word come out of such a face.
“Mr. Mond?”
“No, the big guy,” she said. “The one that’s with Miss Solaré.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, I don’t think so.”
“The way she’s acting, he did.”
I didn’t try to discuss it. The suggestion stirred too many feelings—it just confused me. I went to the commisary, but I couldn’t find Sammy, and our cutting room was locked, which was stupid. Finally I stopped looking for Sammy and left the studio. Wanda had mixed me up. Why would she ask if Owen loved me?
I drove aimlessly around Hollywood for a while. Maybe if I had known how to shop, I would have gone shopping, but I’ve always been terrible at it and as a means of getting my mind off other things it’s no good to me.
Finally I drove down Western Avenue, to a section that had gone heavily to seed, where there was a big secondhand book shop I liked to poke around in. It was called the Past Tense and was in an old frame house that had somehow managed not to get knocked down. The owner was a huge man named Tub McDowell—I guess he fascinated me because he was so unlike anyone else I knew in Hollywood. He weighed about three hundred pounds, and wore fatigue pants and an old flannel shirt, the same fatigues and the same flannel shirt for months at a time, until they were absolutely black with book dust, as were his hands and sometimes his forehead and chin. He lived amid his books like a bear in a cave—in fact, poking around on the second floor one day, looking for some books on costume, I found the cave—a cubbyhole where he slept: just a mattress on a cot, no sheets, and a television set sitting on a whisky crate near the bed. The mattress was black, too—it was kind of awful—and as years passed and Tub and I got to know one another in a casual, shop-owner-to-more-or-less-regular-customer kind of way, I often wanted to ask him to at least turn the mattress over and sleep on the clean side for a while—or better yet, to burn it and get a new one from the Goodwill or somewhere. But he was very shy with me and I could never bring myself to mention it.
It was quite obvious how he had got the name Tub. He had an enormous belly, bulging over his fatigues and somehow never quite covered by his shirttails—the portion of it below his navel was always visible. A few drunks and bums occasionally came in, to panhandle, but I seldom encountered another customer. It seemed to me Tub only bought books, rather than sold them, but if so, it didn’t seem to dampen his enthusiasm for the enterprise.
Despite his belly, which moved when he walked almost as if it were an independent thing—a kingdom of flesh bearing only a casual relation to the body it was attached to—I didn’t find Tub gross. Mentally, he was a delicate person, far more so than most of the men I dealt with, and though his hands were big and fat, he handled books as lightly as if he were handling lace or fine porcelain. Also, though he himself was invariably filthy and begrimed, his books were immaculate, not dirty at all, the many thousands of them. It was as if somehow Tub had managed to absorb all their sins and soilings himself, as they passed into his possession.
At times of deep stress I sometimes used the book shop as my hiding place. Tub always left me alone, and I could sit on the floor and read, in an alley between the shelves, and feel quite safe. I suppose the shop was Tub’s hiding place, too, though I had no idea what he might be hiding from; but another thing I loved about it was that if I really wanted a book, he seemed always to have it, unless it was a book he disapproved of or considered inferior. He seemed to have taken the proper measure of every book on every subject, and if I asked him for a worthless book, a frown would flicker briefly across his big face and he would get off his stool and pad off through his rows of shelves like a bear, the untied strings of his tennis shoes rattling on the floor like claws; in a moment he would pad back, smiling happily, and hand me the book I should, in his view, be looking for.
“This one’s much better,” he would say, a little apologetically, and if I decided actually to buy the book—something I did only once in a while, out of shame over all the free reading—Tub would frown and smile and manage to arrive at a figure much lower than the one he had marked in the book.
“Hi, Tub,” I said when I came in, and he grinned and nodded shyly. I had almost overcome his inhibitions about talking to me—if I stayed around a while and he was in the right mood, he would talk to me freely about his life, much of which had been spent in the navy; but in this instance I was not much in the mood for talk myself, and I drifted on upstairs to where the costume books were, taking a quick peek to see if perhaps he had done anything about the mattress. Of course he hadn’t.
I sat for an hour, looking at costume books and listening to the buses run on Western Avenue, and then went down to get some tea. Another of Tub’s delicacies was that he drank tea all day. When I came down, a young man with very long hair was standing at the counter, showing Tub some books. The young man was overpale and dressed in Levis and an old tie-dyed shirt. I was struck by the reserve in his face. When I see men, I know right away whether they’re going to try to speak to me, and this young man wasn’t. He didn’t even glance at me. There was something monastic about the scene: Tub was the big old monk, the young man the respectful novitiate. Tub was grimacing and looking anguished. There were three books before him, and he stared at them as if they were gems.
“I guess about three hundred dollars,” he said.
The young man immediately nodded. Tub stood up, and his belly shook as he dug into his fatigues and came out with a wad of bills. The young man took the money and folded it carefully, then nodded at Tub and went out the door. Tub handed me my tea, evidently a little embarrassed that I had caught him actually conducting business.
“That was Doug,” he said, by way of explanation. “He’s a book scout.”
“I’ve heard of boy scouts, but not book scouts,” I said. “What does he do, camp out in book stores?”
“Oh, he travels,” Tub said. “He makes the rounds—estate sales, junk shops, places I never get time to hit.”
“Can I look?” I asked, setting my tea to one side of the books. Tub nodded. The first book I picked up was a brown leather-bound one.
“That’s Mackenzie,” he said, as if I would automatically know what he meant.
I had never heard of a Mackenzie. The title page said Voyage From Montreal on the River St Lawrence Through the Continent of North America. It had a big map in it, but I didn’t unfold it. The name of the river caused a memory to snake through me, wriggling through the barriers of years and experience like the line of a river on a map, all the way back to a lover, my kindest lover, a boy named Danny Deck, who used to sit on a mattress with me in an apartment we shared briefly in San Francisco and read books about great rivers. It was such a soft memory, after the harshness of the last few weeks, that in a moment I found I was crying, without having consciously come to tears. I only knew it when I noticed that Tub McDowell seemed greatly disturbed: frightened to death, to be more accurate.
It was true. I was dripping on the book, which I think ordinarily would have appalled Tub, had he not been too disturbed to notice.
“Did we do something wrong?” he asked, as if posing the question to himself, trying to think what social error had caused such a calamity to happen.
“No, no, I’m fine,” I said, and it was true. I felt much better.
“Wipe your book,” I said. He was glad to have that to do, though I think I had made him almost not like the book, as if it were somehow at fault for such an outburst.
I don’t cry much, never liked to. For one thing, it always makes men feel so guilty and insecure that it’s less trouble all around to
suppress it. Such jags as I have are usually solitary. When I recovered from the memory of Danny I drank my tea, though to my embarrassment, spurts continued to wet my cheeks. I felt like my tear ducts were out of control, like the wash part of the windshield-wiping mechanism. Someone kept pushing the wash button, inside me. I was left with only the delicate problem of explaining myself to Tub.
“You mustn’t take that personally,” I said. “I once had a boyfriend who spent all his time reading about rivers. The book reminded me of him, that’s all.”
“I’ve got a lot of books about rivers,” he said, as if it were the only comment he was qualified to make about such a situation.
“Actually, he was a writer—my boyfriend,” I said. “He wrote a novel called The Restless Grass.”
Tub’s huge face changed, became excited. “Danny Deck?” he said. “You knew him?”
He went padding off into the aisles. In a minute he came back, Danny’s book in his hand.
“Doug found it in San Francisco,” he said. “It’s inscribed.”
I had never really looked at the book—even now didn’t entirely want to. Danny had disappeared only a few days after it was published—drowned in the Rio Grande, everyone assumed; at least they found his car parked near it. I never knew what I thought about that, except that whatever he had done with himself was partly my fault, for giving up on us—although I knew he understood that I couldn’t help it. Still, I had never wanted to read the book. He had read most of it to me, sitting on the mattress in our apartment, and I was satisfied with that.
But when Tub put it before me, I opened it and there was Danny’s large, hasty handwriting on the flyleaf: “To Wu, only man to beat me at Ping-Pong seventeen times running, in friendship, Danny.”
“But I knew that man,” I said. “I knew Wu. How could he sell this book?”
Tub shrugged. “Maybe he died and his widow sold it,” he suggested. “It’s worth some money.”
“How much?”
“About a hundred dollars.”
I turned the book over and looked at the picture. There he was, too dressed up and consequently stiff. So like me in some ways—no wonder we couldn’t work out. Only he was infinitely more generous than me. I handed the book back to Tub. It was practically the one romance I didn’t feel bad about, even though it had failed.
I even remembered when I was leaving him, early in the morning, with San Francisco fog all around us. I wanted to hit him for being so lovable and yet not holding me, but at the same time I was determined to go. It was the only one of my partings that hadn’t been bitter and vengeful, yet if Danny had been bitter and vengeful and had accused me of the very things that were true, I probably would have stayed. A few weeks later I went to Europe with another man and didn’t know for a long time that Danny had disappeared. By then my life was moving so fast that I never quite found time in which to feel a true sorrow, or even decide if I really believed he was dead.
“Do you want it?” Tub said. “I mean, since you knew him. You could just have it.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “You just said it was worth a hundred dollars.”
He ducked his big head, embarrassed. “Well, technically,” he said. “But books should belong to the people who need them.”
Why do you need so many, Mr. McDowell? I might have asked, but I didn’t. Let people have their needs. Why did I need an asshole like Owen Oarson?
“No thank you,” I said. “It would mean more to someone who didn’t know him, someone who just read it and loved it.”
THAT NIGHT, AFTER JOE was asleep, I went down the hill and poked in my closets, in my piles of drawings, trying to find the ones of Danny and the apartment in San Francisco, but I never managed to find them. They were there, but too many years of life, all unsorted, lay on top of them. I thought when I started the search that it might be fun to live in memories for a few days, since the present was so intractable, but I soon got impatient with it. All it did was make me miss my son, of whom there were drawings at every level. He was still in New Mexico.
While I was looking at drawings of him, Gauldin called, drunk. I don’t know where he was. Despite the fact that it was totally pointless, we wrangled on the phone for nearly two hours. I felt like beating my head on the floor for having been such a fool as to let the whole thing start. In the end I told him he could come over, regretted it, and waited to repulse him, only to fall asleep on my couch. Next morning he wasn’t there—I found out later from a mutual friend that he had been stopped for drunk driving, sassed the cop, and had had to spend the night in jail. The next time he called, three or four days later, he was so sheepish that I temporarily broke down. By then I had figured out that the thing to do about it was to get him a job for a while, and I was working on it.
Poor Gauldin got such a bad bargain with me, but then probably he never realized it. I guess it says something about the intimacy if I had to be the one to feel cheated for both of us, but that was where things had come to, and for a while that was where things stayed.
6
IT’S AN ODD FEELING TO DIRECT A PICTURE AND THEN return to Hollywood only to find that you’ve been removed from it. Odd, and confusing to the emotions, sort of like it would be to get married and divorced before you even made love. In my case it was even more confusing because no one would admit that anything unusual was happening. Most of the principals didn’t have to admit anything, because they weren’t there. Sherry was up at Tahoe, in one of her numerous retreats. Abe was in Mexico, and Mr. Mond was sick. I was left to get what I could out of the likes of Barry Filson.
Finally, in considerable confusion, I had dinner with Bo Brimmer. Of course I knew it would drive Gauldin up the wall, and it did. He even hit me, evidence of more fury than I would have expected of him. I didn’t blame him for it a bit, since it was purely my weakness that had brought him to the point where he could be so goaded. He had the insecurity of the working man, always afraid of losing his woman to the boss, the brain guy. Who could blame him? I tried not to make Gauldin feel threatened, but then he had every right to feel threatened. There was nothing wrong with his heart, and nothing wrong with him as a man, and even though he went off cursing and crying and left his suitcase and had to send a friend back for it—he was so proud—I wasn’t worried about him, or very upset. He would always find women to respect him.
Bo had his problems, of course: too little, too smart, no sexual confidence. He was seen around town with a lot of women, but I doubt if he ever slept with any of them. He took me to the Bistro, a very dressed-up place. It always startles me a little to come into a dressed-up place—makes me realize how odd I am, how blind to a lot of styles and ways of life. I hadn’t dressed beautifully ten times in my life. I hated trying to make up my mind what to wear. I always postponed my decision until the last minute, and then I chose wrong. To conceal the fact that I was overawed, I told Bo that he should stop wearing bow ties, which he always wore and which I hated.
His eyes were methodically going over the room, to see if anyone important was there. “I wear them because they’re disarming,” he said. “People in bow ties look like rubes.”
Although he seemed to be his normal, perfectly controlled self, I knew he was really very nervous. His face was tight with it, and he smiled too continually. Bo lived with an even higher charge of tension than I do—our charges had never quite gotten aligned, but his tension certainly gave off signals. It made me wonder if he was going to try to fuck me. He had always intrigued me, in a strange way, and I felt sort of curious as to what he would do. My curiosity had some sexual content. Not a lot, but some. I felt a breath or two of interest as he gave the waiter precise commands and got us some mussels and some white wine.
But his talk, perhaps because he was nervous, was all business. He told me about the books he had bought, about the projects he had available, ready for me to produce.
“Sherry hates you,” he said, when One Tree came up.
�
�I know that, but we’re not talking about that,” I said. “We’re talking about the picture, and Sherry can’t possibly care about that. Not now. All I want is to see that the actors get a decent break.”
Bo shrugged. “Hating you might be her way to handle the grief,” he said. “Sometimes people stay alive that way.”
“So what do I do?” I asked. “Some of those actors are hanging their hopes on that picture.”
Instead of answering the question, he spun brilliant conversation around me for an hour, a lovely cocoon of words, observations, comments on food, criticisms of pictures currently playing, remarks about the nature of women, even a quick list of the painters my eyes reminded him of. Somehow he managed to eat without its affecting the rhythms of his sentences. I got a little fascinated with it—he had breath control like a singer.
The talk continued right up to my doorstep, and woven into it were a couple of subtle proposals of marriage. Each time he mentioned it, the little breaths of interest I felt in him died out. Nothing is more abstract than the concept of marriage apart from knowledge of a body—at least to me. He should have tried something first. On the other hand, he probably used the talk to ease himself past something he knew he didn’t want. We retreated from one another smoothly enough, when we got to my house, but I felt a little disturbed anyway, because a small but interesting possibility kept advancing and receding and never coming to anything.
In the morning Mr. Mond called, his voice as different from the voice I knew as if he had moved to a different planet.
“Come up here, my da’lin’,” he said, with an awful tonelessness.
“This dope I had to take, ya know,” he said. “I didn’t know what was happenin’, not until yesterday. I want ya to come up.”
I didn’t feel much like seeing him fade out before my eyes, but of course I had to go.
When I got there he made them wheel him out to the poolside, by all the telephones, where he had spent the better part of the last fifteen years. The better part in every sense, I guess. That little blue pool of water, in the beautifully green lawn, with the trees hanging over it and the flowers and the grass always freshly watered, had been his real place ever since I’d known him.
Somebody's Darling Page 27
