Long Shot

by Paul Monette

  Anyone would have thought it was a romance she was casting. It was lucky for her that no one knew where she was right now. Ringing bells at eight A.M., like somebody serving a warrant. He didn’t answer, but then who would, at the crack of dawn? She waited around till a groggy type came through the lobby door on the way to work. Then she slipped in quick before it shut. She tapped the eleven on the elevator panel, as if to knock on wood.

  But no one came when she knocked on the door of 11D. She refused to accept that he was out, since she thought of him safe at home compared to her. He’d never told her in so many words that he was a budding agoraphobe, but she always had the feeling that he preferred things done on his own turf. She knocked in sets of three, ten seconds in between. For a while, she beat with the palm of one hand, keeping up a steady thud. But a minute could hardly have passed before she had quite let go. She pounded with both fists, drumming hard. To hell with 11A through C. There must be something wrong.

  When the elevator door creaked open behind her, she spun around in a flash of terror. For that one instant, she was convinced someone had followed her all the way from Steep-side. False alarm—it was only Edna Temple.

  “Help me,” Vivien pleaded. “I think he may be sick.”

  “No,” said Edna flatly, padding forward. Very unsurprised. She might have been expecting it. “He’s away on business. You want me to tell him you dropped by?”

  “Do you have a number? I have to talk to him—right away.”

  “I’m not allowed to give out that information,” Edna said—fiddling the keys to Greg’s apartment, but not yet approaching the door. She made it clear she wasn’t going in till Vivien had safely left the premises.

  “I’m Vivien Cokes,” she explained, wishing it didn’t sound so pushy. She only meant to say she was his friend. She wasn’t trying to act VIP.

  “Really? You could have fooled me. You’re thinner in pictures, huh?” And she bent to the door as if she meant to crack it like a safe. Using one key after another, she started releasing the locks. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll get it for you. I’d ask you in, but I’m just a neighbor. He pays me to water his plants.”

  With that, she opened the door and pressed on through. She would have closed it tight behind her, not allowing so much as a look, if Vivien hadn’t spoken up.

  “You’re Edna Temple, aren’t you?”

  Edna stopped with the door between them almost shut. A moment later, silent and grave as a footman, she opened it wide. The visitor’s credentials were too good to argue. Vivien fell into step beside her, all the way through to the dining room. It wasn’t a bit like she thought it would be. She’d expected a lot of silver frames, clustered about on blond-wood tables, with studio shots of faded stars. But in spite of the phony wall reliefs from Nineveh, and a pair of seated panthers holding up the mantel, it was just another single man’s apartment. Haphazard chairs and things from people’s attics.

  “I would have thought you’d be the first to know where to find him,” Edna said, laying the stress on the rank like mortar on a brick. She pulled the string on the dining-room light and threw the domed ceiling into Moorish shadows. She picked up a stack of paper slips and began to go through them, dealing them out in different piles like somebody playing solitaire. “I thought he was doing an errand for you.”

  “Is he?” Vivien asked, sitting down on the edge of a bent-wood chair. “Already? I didn’t expect him to leave so soon. It’s not what you’d call an emergency.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Edna crisply, “he was out of here at the crack of dawn on Tuesday. I remember, he put the number on one of these orders. But I didn’t think we’d need it, see? We don’t keep a phone ourselves.”

  She refused to identify Sid by name, because Vivien seemed to know this part already. Let her ask if she didn’t get it. Vivien recognized the attitude right off. She’d used it for years with Carl.

  “But there is no number,” protested Vivien. “The house in Bermuda is half a mile from the nearest phone. He’s totally out of touch.”

  “Bermuda?” Edna pulled up the collar of her housecoat as she squinted down her arm at a square of paper. “I wouldn’t know about that. Vermont’s what I heard.” Pause. “Aha!”

  She reached the memo across the table, as if she had no further use for it herself. Vivien took it between two fingers. An order blank from the UFA, made out to a country inn at Hamilton Falls, Vermont.

  “Vermont?” she echoed. Totally thrown.

  “Why? You got another errand? Maybe he didn’t tell you this, but we’re up to our ass in business.”

  “What’s he doing there?”

  “Working for you, as I understand it,” retorted Edna dryly, unconvinced by all this protestation. “For his usual fee of zip, I might add.”

  They stood on opposite sides of the table, the stuff of the UFA between them. They took stock. With Greg not here, they were on their own. And the longer the thing drew out, the more did they seem to feel they had nothing whatever to lose.

  “It must be Carbon Mountain,” Vivien said at last.

  “There, now. I thought you’d remember, once you put your mind to it. Must be a bitch to keep track. You probably got an army out there, huh?”

  “Maybe now you’ll tell me what it is I’ve done.”

  “Done?” she asked. “Not a goddam thing.”

  “I mean, to make you so mad.”

  “You know,” said Edna, leaving her place to pace about, “I was the one used to sell the maps in front of the Chinese theater. This was when you were a kid.” She couldn’t have been more amiable. Though she seemed to have let the barb go by, in fact she had changed completely. Vivien started to breathe again. “It was mostly the homes of the stars,” said Edna. “But every now and then, I’d put a few people in who were very rich—like the Willises. And you know what happened? The stars moved every six months—I couldn’t keep up with it. The rich men all stayed put. They’d build themselves a house, and that was that. I always thought there was a parable in there somewhere.” She stopped at the end of a pace, spun round, and lobbed the last bit gently. “Maybe you can tell me,” Edna said.

  Vivien shook her head. She saw they were getting down to basics, but by the same token, the current stop was slightly out of her league. She dropped her eyes to the table, where a stack of glossies stood at her place. On top was Katharine Hepburn, a little over thirty. There were dozens more, from five or six different pictures, but in every one, she was just that certain age. Vivien sifted through them as she talked—as if she were trying to fill a part that required a bit more than a pretty face.

  “Jasper’s the only star I ever really knew,” she said. “Beyond a certain point, I mean. Did you ever think maybe the rich men wanted their houses behind them? Then they could just go back to making money. That’s what they’re good at, isn’t it? Houses are something else.”

  She paused at a still from Adam’s Rib. Hepburn and Tracy nuzzling in a roadster, surrounded by the midtown traffic of a generation past. It all looked kind of pastoral, somehow. Vivien flashed on Jasper, doing it raw onscreen with a string of vapid women. She thought: They just don’t make ’em like they used to.

  “I don’t know why I never moved,” she said, going on from still to still. “It’s not that I’m so in love with Steepside. To me, it feels like a waiting room.”

  “You want a cup of coffee?”

  “Sure,” she said. She held up the paper bag like she’d pulled it out of a hat. “You can help me eat my breakfast, so I won’t get fat.”

  “Me, I’ve been on a diet since 1935,” said Edna, as they threaded through the pantry, single file. The cream-colored kitchen was wall-to-wall with painted wooden cupboards. Edna knew just where everything was. “I make a lot of exceptions,” she said.

  What was it, Vivien wondered, that turned these things around? She washed away Tuesday’s eggs from a delft-blue plate, then arranged the croissants in a ring. It was nothing she herself ha
d done. Edna had simply finished up the agenda of private resentments. Partly it was jealousy, with a certain measure of bruised maternal pride on Greg’s account. But it didn’t matter now. Vivien wouldn’t hold the grudge if Edna wasn’t going to. Besides, it had been a bit of a lark, to have somebody treat her without kid gloves, as if she were no one at all.

  “Do people ask for Jasper Cokes?” she wondered aloud, as she searched the fridge for jam.

  “Not us they don’t,” said Edna. “Our cutoff date is the fifties.”

  She handed over a chipped white diner mug. Then she picked a croissant off the plate, put it between her teeth so she could take another, and led the way back to the dining room.

  “It’s not my idea,” she protested as they both sat down—just at the places where they’d stood, five minutes since, in combat. “I think we ought to pick up on every overnight sensation. It’s because he got burned when he tried to be a writer—he’s put all his money on the good old days. I say you got to adjust to the times. It’s bigger than just the movies now. There’s stars in every walk of life.” She gave a heavy shrug, as she talked around half a roll she gobbled up in a single bite. “He’s the boss,” she said. “Either we do it his way, or we go get another job. So we do it his way. Hell, I’d include someone like you in a minute.”

  “Oh, I don’t think you’ll ever get people buying pictures of me. They’re everywhere.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” retorted Edna grandly, finger raised. “Depends on the picture.”

  “Without any clothes on, maybe.”

  “I should say not,” she sniffed. She patted a hand against her breast, as if the mere idea made her queasy. “On the contrary—I’d have you just the way you are. Sitting down over a cup of coffee. Like you slept in your clothes. There’s too much of you all dolled up.”

  “I see what you mean,” said Vivien politely.

  She thought: If only the Hollywood Midnite types were all like this. Perhaps she wasn’t meant to take the whole thing personally. She could sit here, calm as you please, and discuss her image bloodlessly. With the same detachment she would have had if Edna had been a GYN, and they’d gotten together to talk about her body.

  “But Edna,” she said, “would it make me seem any nicer? How do you make a regular guy out of somebody rich?”

  Edna shook her head. “Money’s not the issue,” she said. “All stars have too much. Your bad press has to do with you and Jasper. People hate what they don’t understand—you must know that.”

  Vivien saw she was being invited to talk about her marriage. Dared to, almost. Too bad for her, she had nothing to say. If she and Jasper had been, hands down, the loneliest people they’d ever met, at least they were the only ones who knew. It had been clear to them both from the start that they had no private lives. In all those years together, they never got a whit less lonely. All they achieved was this: to know there was someone else who felt it about the same. Now, with Jasper gone, it seemed she’d inherited his half.

  “But listen,” she answered with some authority, “nobody really believes the things they read. Do they?”

  “Maybe so,” said Edna, nodding slowly, “maybe so. But it’s not so much what’s printed—all the affairs you’re supposed to have had, or the money you throw away. It’s that the two of you survived. You never seemed to want a thing from him—and him vice versa. It makes people mad, because they want something all the time.”

  “What is it they want?” she asked, though without much hope of an answer.

  “Attention,” said Edna, prompt and cheerful. She dipped her hand in a shoebox full of orders, pulled up a handful, and fanned them out on the table like a hand of gin. “That’s what they can’t get enough of.”

  But if you’re so smart, thought Vivien, heartsick all of a sudden, then why are you poor and old like this?

  “What am I going to do?” she asked, as practically as she could. How was it she hadn’t a clue what people wanted? Hadn’t she ever asked?

  Clearly, this was the perfect time to change her image. She had a head start, what with all the allowances made for the lot of the grieving widow. Here she was, on her own again.

  Edna dabbed a fingertip in the pastry crumbs on the table, transferring them bit by bit to her tongue. She let go by a little digestive pause, and then said, with a tinge of disapproval: “Well, I guess you’re going to Vermont, though I can’t imagine why. If Greg said he’ll do it, he’ll do it. You’ll just be in the way.”

  “But this is something else,” said Vivien, trying to play it all down. Then the rest came blurting out, because she couldn’t keep up with who knew what. “See, that’s where they went to college. It must have to do with—you know—the killing.”

  “Oh I see,” said Edna, as if to say: So he told you all about that. “I didn’t know. I thought that part was over with.”

  Without another word, she bent her head at a swanlike tilt and studied her fan of orders like a fortune teller. From the look of things, the prospects weren’t auspicious. She gathered it all in a pile again, as if to wipe the image out.

  “If you know who it is,” she said with dangerous calm, “you better not tell me. He’d be dead by noon. I’m one of those redneck nuts, you know. I think the law’s too slow.”

  “It’s the strangest thing,” said Vivien. “I suppose I’m the only one who knows. I’m not even scared. I feel—”

  She couldn’t think what she felt. She looked across at Edna, woman to woman. There, in the puffs and crisscross lines of those great exhausted eyes, she saw it did no good to talk too much of feelings. One thing was sure: Her fear of death had dwindled to a breeze. But it struck her now—as she sat with a finger curled at her empty cup, her sentence broken off—that another edge of fear began where the old one drew its border. Like a longing for things she used to think she’d give anything to lose. She was scared that she couldn’t go back to her loneliness in peace. Scared that she wasn’t a star anymore. They would no longer save up the days of her life, investing her every gesture with the weight of instant replay.

  “But I never make plans,” she said. “How do you know where I’m going, if I don’t.”

  “Looks to me like you’re out to prove yourself. Why,”—she shrugged—“I couldn’t say.”

  She took a deep breath. Gathering up her pile of orders in one hand, she stood as if it were time to get to work at last. She went to the stand-up card file by the window and leaned on one big hip as she opened a drawer. She flipped from folder to folder, pulling out this one and that one. “You want the killer punished,” she said. “Him, I don’t think he cares. Why is all he ever wants to know.”

  It was true, she thought, as she watched this clear-eyed, solid woman elide into daily life. She knew now just how justice ought to be: inexorable. She couldn’t say when it had changed for her, but she had the taste for blood. She shrank from none of the scenes that waited up ahead. When they came for Carl, she’d be holding the door wide open as they muscled him off to jail. She would go to court day after day, and gladly fight through a crowd of reporters, till the jury asked no mercy. Thus would the world be put to rights, like a mended vase.

  She knew, if she plannned to be somebody else at the other end, she would have to be very deliberate. None of the details left to chance. So she picked up both their cups and bussed them back to the kitchen. She rinsed and stacked them neatly in the drainer. Then she went through half a dozen drawers. When she found the aluminum foil, she tore off a good three feet and covered the last two croissants tightly. Every act, however small, drew her that much closer toward control.

  “Goodbye,” she said airily, passing through. She had learned the business of moving on in the course of a starless night beyond the mountains.

  “Tell Greg to bring us a box of maple sugar,” Edna said, as she looked up briefly from her deskwork. “Whatever it is they’re selling.”

  “We’ll get you one of everything,” she shouted over her shoulder, flying
out the door.

  The elevator hadn’t moved. She swept inside and punched the 1 and capered about in a space no bigger than a closet. As they sank the eleven floors, she thought: I can fly. By which she meant she had to catch a plane. New York or Boston, whichever left first. Say Boston. Then a short hop to the northern woods, in a little two-engine Cessna. Couldn’t be simpler. She could do it blindfolded.

  She breezed outside to the waiting Rolls, where she picked a ticket from under the wiper and flung it into the street. She got inside and did a U and pointed west-southwest. The silver-wingèd zephyr butterflied on the hood was aquiver with expectation. Now that they were bound for LAX, the portal of all her dreams, there was nothing could stop them. She knew, as she sailed down La Cienega—half a hundred street-front shows, mile after mile of the marginal life, the oil fields, the cat’s-cradle freeways, the raw sea air—she was rid of all but the smallest pull of the old life, up on the hill.

  Goodbye, she thought over and over, goodbye.

  With a twinge of something sad, like seasons.

  chapter 5

  Oh, it’s all my fault, he thought ruefully, as he inched the minuscule Dodge from Hertz up the muddy road to the inn. But he simply couldn’t help it. He hated this gray and lunar weather. He’d probably been in the sun too long. For all he knew, he’d developed a toothy grin as well, like an overage surfer.

  If only the clouds would be done with it and rain. They’d settled in so low, they threatened any moment to sweep down like a plague. The bare black limbs of wintered trees were hung with drops of condensation. They would have looked terrific with the light refracted through them, but there was no light to speak of. The night came down a little after five—the regulation time—yet the day had made so little headway, the gesture hardly mattered.

  He had in his head, he realized now, what amounted to a coffee-table book. He passed the main lodge, in its oaken gloom, and went through a tunnel of graveyard trees. He’d always thought Vermont was a mix of covered bridges and barns in pastures, with the forest floored in red and yellow leaves. The Vermont of the national anthem. But now he was here for real, he hated it. It was cold as Eastern Europe, and Appalachian-poor. Dotted with mingy local markets that stocked the meanest, drabbest goods. He was practically sprouting moss from two straight days of lowering skies. Still, he grew faint from thirst for want of a little Perrier.