by Paul Monette
“Well, I’m not,” Greg retorted with sudden annoyance. He snatched up the cap to the felt-tip pen, brought the two parts together, and scored a sea-blue line along his thumb. The second time he connected. “I bet I’m the only man in L.A. who’s not knee-deep in a script. It shows a certain sort of valor, wouldn’t you say?”
“You think so? It never seems to prevent you acting like you’re in a movie, does it?”
She disappeared into the kitchen. He wiped at the mark on his thumb and determined not to care what Edna thought. The Moorish room he sat in was an octagon. It peaked above him in a beamed and vaulted ceiling pierced eight times by pointed amber windows. It was very difficult, frankly—what with the golden light forever flooding in and the field of vision ten miles wide off the balcony rail—not to feel tracked by a camera. All the scenes that had ever wised him up had been shot right here, in the same bright weather. The cast of thousands had all been drawn from the streets that gridded this neighborhood—recruited, Greg felt certain, right off the corner of Cherokee and Franklin, eleven floors below his terrace. Little wonder, then, he was all wound up like a film. Edna was right. Since the day he landed in Hollywood, he secretly thought he was in a story bigger than the sum of what he saw.
Edna called out from the kitchen, as if she’d followed his train of thought: “I’m not saying it’s wrong, you understand. Maybe you are in a movie.”
If this is a movie, he thought, it’s a bomb. The next thing he knew, she was back. She gripped a can of tuna in the teeth of an opener, and winced as she cranked it round.
“If it’s one thing I don’t question,” she said, “it’s a person’s right to get pissed. You don’t see me before noon, do you? Sid’s got his Jim Beam, don’t he? You know what your problem is? You don’t enjoy a crappy mood.”
Abruptly, she fled away a second time, the oil spilling out of the sides of the tin. He raised one hand and made a vague gesture, as if to wave goodbye. Fuck that, he thought. Since when was she the authority on moods? Though he had to admit he always listened, he wondered why he bothered. It wasn’t as if she altered his behavior. When he once got the word how he came across to someone, he usually dug in his heels and did it in spades. The clue to his darker hours was the art of acting opposite. Though he sometimes seemed on the edge of easing up, likely as not he was preparing for a further turn to the ornery.
He picked up the morning’s second-class mail from a wicker basket at his feet. Then he settled back to get a bead on the competition. On top was a flyer from a dealer out in Van Nuys who must have bought a lot of junk at auction. For three hundred bucks, a person could own the model boat they used for distance shots in The African Queen. There was a rusty gun from High Noon. Then a chaos of fans and batons and sparklers from various tin-ear musicals—including an actual Carmen Miranda headgear, all gourds and paper hibiscus. The whole package was terribly sleazy, but Greg put it all to one side, since dancing was Sid’s department. Most of these offers he tore up in little pieces. The counterfeit autographs notwithstanding, Greg was a moral absolutist. He hated the gyps and fly-by-nights.
The Monday mail was always fat with movie mags. He riffled through them one by one and scanned the last few pages. There, among dog tags and rubber underwear, was where he took his ads. The market was hard, and the stuff back here was as actual as the real world ever got. He spotted himself right off: The United Fans of America. “Who is the brightest star of all?” was written out in italic caps. Then there was a ballot attached, as if every vote were being gravely counted. Membership fee, six-fifty. And to the first five hundred lucky fans, a studio shot of the star of one’s dreams would arrive in the mail posthaste. All of this spoken in breathless abbreviation, as space was at such a premium. Greg took a close look at his three-by-five bit of media, as if it were his own name seeing print at last. It was hardly War and Peace, of course, but the big thing here was going public. As things fell out, in two short years the UFA had grown to sixty-seven hundred strong, with no end in sight. There was a vast, undreamed-of market out there, burning for an autograph. The UFA was bidding fair to become the giant in the field.
Yet it didn’t matter a whit to him as the night came down on April third. What mattered was this: The boy in 2C had broken his word, and it made him the same as anyone else. When he left this morning, downing half a quart of milk while Greg put together a cup of coffee, he swore he’d be back before dark, to leave off the book. Nothing more. They weren’t about to go another night together yet. They went out of their way, it almost seemed, to pretend the night before had hardly taken place. One or the other was still too shy. So they breakfasted on chitchat—no more intimate, all of a sudden, than if they’d met each other waiting for a bus.
So forget it, he thought. Just let it go.
He dropped the magazines back in the basket. He itched for something tough to do, so he wouldn’t have to think. In the end he lit on Edna—i.e., what the fuck was she up to? It didn’t take this long to doctor a can of tuna. He stood up and made for the butler’s-pantry door, feeling all his juices rise to a wave of irritation. He only hoped she was doing something wrong, so he could go in hurling accusations. Halfway across the octagon, he suddenly saw an orange glow reflected in the mirrored wall. Of course: the TV out in the other room. He couldn’t make the image out. It was all a blur. It had the effect of a manufactured sunset, packaged for use in the home. He came up close to the dusky mirror and peered in across the apartment, as if he didn’t dare turn and face it straight on. As if it would turn him to stone. He could see two stars at the podium, having a bit of patter before they got to the list of nominees. They were too far off for him to see exactly who they were.
He was lost, and he knew it. His line of defense had vanished. Edna was all distracted now, layering a casserole half a foot thick. Sid was siphoning bourbon out of a litter of bottles, on his bedside table. The whole day’s drama of monkish unconcern, in which he had refused to be involved and changed the subject time and again, had fizzled now to a stop. The figures shining in the screen’s raw light had struck him dumb with memories. He turned like somebody hypnotized. He walked across to the Sony, perfectly still inside, as rosy as a drowning man sent ranging through the flood of years.
What the hell, he thought, why not? The Oscar show was long ago his first real glimmer of life Out There. He’d never missed it once in aver twenty years, no matter how broke and horny. He stood two feet from the screen and watched. Oh kid, he thought, where are you? Even now, if the doorbell rang, he could have torn himself away. As it was, he didn’t stand a chance. The winner was named, the audience clapped, and a man ran up the aisle to get his prize. Greg didn’t move a muscle.
The smell of lilies was so intense that after a while it began to seem not real—as cheap as the dollar toilet water they bottled to sell at the airport. Vivien’s first few hours on the island were always more like a memory coming back than something happening here and now. The lilies were part of the given—a four-acre field on the side of the hill above the house. The view to Harrington Sound across the ranks of fat white blooms was literally out of this world, as her mother used to say, though nobody ever went up there anymore except for the farmer who leased the land. Every April, as soon as the plane touched down in Bermuda, Vivien swore she’d climb way up through the cedar grove, to stand again knee-deep in flowers. As things turned out, she never seemed to get around to it. Somehow, she had all the lilies she needed, just keeping the windows open.
She was all alone in her mother’s house—a limestone cottage with a white slate roof, of an indeterminate age and breeding. The land it stood on, some four hundred acres along the neck between the sound and Castle Harbor, had been in the family since New Year’s Day in 1615. Deeded by Governor Moore to the mate of the feisty ship that brought the Bermuda settlers here from the damps of England. Before he ran off to sea, this mate had done a season acting at the Globe. The letters he wrote to his cronies still on the boards in London, letter
s drunk on paradise, had made him the model for Prospero, or so the story went. Even as a schoolgirl, Vivien Willis understood that the island estate on her mother’s side was classier in the way of pedigree than that which attached to her father’s ancient lands—those flat square miles of desert scrub that grew to be Orange County, going up a hundredfold in value just in twenty years.
Vivien’s mother had kept the Bermuda house as a refuge from her husband, Jacob Willis. There was no paved road or a telephone. The water was out of a pump. As she pointed out to Vivien every spring, the only guidebook a body needed to roam these woods and raw pink beaches was a copy of The Tempest. And though the warring parties of her parents’ marriage were now long dead and done with, Vivien saw no reason to improve the old stone house. Not that she needed a place to hide from Jasper Cokes, the husband of her dreams. They were far too busy, she and Jasper, to bother each other with marital ties, skirmishes or otherwise. She came here once a year in April to flee the larger matter of herself.
But she couldn’t always shake it. It was just after midnight on Monday the third when she gave up and got out of bed. She left the lights all off and took no robe. She made her way out of the house, down the overgrown path to the water. From the close and crooked bushes, she came to a ledge. The nearest lights were far away along the sound, the water as black as the moonless sky. She could have dived in without a light, since she knew the depth at every point for a quarter mile on either side. But she knew she’d never sleep at all if her hair got wet, and she didn’t dare risk losing the thin gold chain at her neck, pendant from which was the Willis diamond.
A thing she only wore when she left L.A., in case she was caught in a world depression and needed cash in a hurry.
She knelt into a tangle of ice plant that cascaded along the ledge. She gripped a rusted iron ring that had been in the stone, for all she knew, these past three hundred years. Then she put a foot over the edge, felt for the first step carved in the face of the rock, and made her way down. She reached the water line between the sixth and seventh steps. The water lilted and lapped against her as she went in. Irresistible as ever, warm as the air and supple as silk. When she was in hip deep, she let go the ladder cut in the stone and lay back limply and floated out, like somebody sinking to sleep.
She started to drift, the diamond still as an anchor on her throat. Jasper wasn’t the type, she thought, to swim on a sleepless night. If he had no boyfriend current, he still had Artie and Carl, his bodyguard and manager, right at the flick of an intercom. He buzzed them up on a moment’s notice whenever he couldn’t sleep, and they took up where they had left off in a running game of Chinese checkers. Jasper knew not to dial his wife’s room after hours. It was one of the countless rules that allowed them to survive. What was strange just now was thinking about him at all, since she hadn’t been home in over two months. Stranger still, she missed him.
They’d talked at ten o’clock, when she called him from a phone booth at the Mid-Ocean Club to let him know she’d detoured here. He’d finished shooting on the new film only a couple of hours before. Already he was beside himself with boredom. She told him to get coked up and go to the Oscars, but that was the one thing he wouldn’t do without her. Besides, if you weren’t awfully sure you were going to win, it was too much trouble just to get out of the parking garage at the end. Jasper was always the first to admit: He was a moneymaker, not a performer. He only got nominated now and again to put a pretty face in the lineup.
“So,” he said, through the crackle of static, “you getting laid?”
“Not really. And you?”
“Me? I haven’t got the strength.”
“Not even to fuck?”
“It’s not that,” he said, and he seemed to grope for a reason that would travel all that way. For a moment she thought they’d lost the connection. Then: “It’s the small talk, mostly.”
Vivien fell into a lazy backstroke, covering thirty or forty yards from shore before she stopped to look around. In Harrington Sound, she was wholly without the fear of drowning. Not like the ocean she grew up on—the brute Pacific, chill as ice and churning riptide. In some unaccountable way, she felt safer here than anywhere, as if a place survived where she might recover the stillness she lived in as a child—where nothing seemed to happen unless she wanted, and never till she was ready. She paddled about in total darkness, under a sky that ached with stars, and puzzled out the paradox of being Jasper’s wife. She didn’t know she had it in her to think of the two of them tenderly. Reading the gossip day after day, forever avoiding questions, she thought she’d surrendered her opinion long ago.
Jasper and I, she thought drowsily, turning wide and heading back to land. Jasper and I are only—
Only what? Friends? Perhaps it was best to call them partners. Colleagues in a single profession, successful all on their own, who decided to get together to make a deal. A deal too big for one to carry off. How else was one to explain the clash of cultures? That he, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, should end up hitched to the zillionaire heiress whose every change of clothes was news. Between them, they had the cover of every magazine in the free world sewn up—and this before they even met. When they met, it was more of a merger than a meeting.
Now, for the first time in over two months, she missed him and wished she was back in L.A., so they could be at loose ends together. They had these occasional days when they stuck together like a comedy team. It was them against everyone else, and they loved it. And when it worked, they could always count on being good for about five days—generous, giddy, and tuned to somebody else besides the face in the mirror. It didn’t matter what they did. They’d deck themselves in doubleknits and shades and order a platter of ribs at Bob’s Big Boy. They’d browse around in dirty bookstores, or stand around on corners and watch the hookers traffic. Anything not to be stars.
The fucking was the least of it, right from the start.
She was just twenty-four when her father, Jacob Willis, missed the hairpin turn at a hundred and five on a road he’d graded himself, between his ranch house and his landing strip. Vivien, in fact, was the one who was landing that day—as it turned out, into the arms of weeping ranch hands. Always after that, she had a certain horror of getting off planes. It was cars she should have been wary of, since her mother got picked off too, just eight months farther down the road, by a taxi in the Place Vendôme. The last thing she ever said to her only child was, like the lady herself, entirely sugarless: “Whatever else is out to break you, baby, don’t forget: You don’t have to marry money.”
Three weeks later, the orphan Vivien, last of the Willis line, fell heir to about a third of Newport Beach.
It was past time, meanwhile, for Jasper Cokes to take a wife. At twenty-eight, he ought to have had a first marriage over and done with. Not that the public suspected any irregularities. The public believed what it wanted to—that a man with everything ate up life like candy, girls included. Concern over Jasper’s waking hours in bed came down direct from the executive suite, where the Gelusil accountants toted up the grosses. Given that Jasper Cokes was altogether too pretty for their taste anyway—the Apollo physique toughed up with a day-old beard, the jeans and moccasins tattered—they wanted the satyr’s lust he gave off channeled into a proper deathless passion for a lady. They had no evidence whatever of the men in his life. But they spied an edge of danger in his eyes and, for the sake of their investment, saw they had no choice but to fence it in.
When Jasper and Vivien caught up with each other, in the commissary at Universal, they both couldn’t move a muscle if they tried. Each was stuck in the middle of a green banquette, pinned in by prattling fools on either side. Though she looked terrific in gray and dark green, the kinks of her chestnut hair stiff as a broad-brimmed hat, she was fading fast in the midst of preening moguls. She picked over a salad as dead as the days gone by. At the facing table, Jasper sat in a space suit minus the helmet, waiting out the shouting match between the publici
st on his left and the producer on his right. He looked up at the selfsame moment Vivien did.
And there they were in person, the rich girl and the movie star. As they stared for a moment eye to eye, they passed the first level of liaison, moving all the way up to invasion of privacy. Seeming to understand on the instant that they, at least, didn’t have to go to bed.
“I’ll trade you,” she said straight at him, “this whole shrimp salad for an onion ring.”
Only Jasper heard her. It was the curve of the green banquettes, perhaps, that let their voices leap across the aisle—the way it is said to happen under a dome. They were suddenly all alone.
“It’s a deal,” he answered with a grin. “But you have to promise to come for a ride.”
“Where to? Are you from Mars?”
“Not anymore,” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the Mylar sleeve of his space suit. “Now I live on the moon. It’s less of a commute. You’ll come?”
“Does it have enough closets? They say I have the most clothes of anyone on earth.”
“You won’t need them. On the moon, we go around naked.”
“Well, then,” she said, “I can’t come with you, Captain. But let’s have a drink when you’re back in town. You can teach me to tell the stars apart.”
She pulled the spotted carnation out of the bud vase next to the sugar bowl, snapped it off at the stem, and pitched it across. He dropped his fork with a clatter to catch it. The publicist and the producer, roused from their dogfight, looked at Jasper furiously, while Vivien’s moguls gathered her up and bore her away to sign her proxies. As she passed in front of Jasper’s table, he whispered: “Before I’m through, we’ll find you a planet nobody’s put a flag on yet. You can have it all to yourself.”
“As long as it has a Bonwit’s,” Vivien said.
And that was that.
