by Paul Monette
She didn’t see, did she? Telling his stories to people who found them not quite right had been the very thing that made him stop. Too odd, they told him. What was he doing, changing the plot in the middle? His people went off on so many detours, they ended up in a whole new story before they were done. You either did it straight or not at all.
“Last Wish,” he said, “by R. Greg Cannon.”
“What’s the R stand for?”
“Ronald,” he said, “and don’t you dare ever say it. These two drunks meet in a bar and get to talking. One of them’s just been writing his will, and he has to have it witnessed. He’s left all his money so people can have a party when he dies. They’re bums, you know? It’s late at night. They get some men to sign it. This one guy, Chuck, agrees to be named executor. Everyone thinks it’s a big joke.”
“They’re gay?”
“No—why?”
“I don’t know. They sound it.”
“Anyway—a couple years go by, and the guy gets cancer and dies in the poorhouse. You don’t see any of that. Turns out he’s got six hundred thousand bucks in the bank. Every cent of it’s earmarked for the party. Chuck’s got to put it on.”
“It’d never hold up in court,” she said.
“Look, why don’t you write your own fucking movie?” Greg retorted, lapsing into silence.
She suddenly saw that he might be telling the truth—he was glad he wasn’t a writer anymore. She had lived so long with wild ambition, in the upper reaches of Steepside, she never gave much thought to the setting of modest sights. Perhaps he preferred his three-man operation. What if he wasn’t a failure at all? She hadn’t ever held a job herself, so could only guess what made a person work and like it. What if he’d found a job that fit him exactly right? Perhaps it never crossed his mind to guess how well he was doing.
“Now you,” he said abruptly, turning the tables. “What’s it like, being a star?”
“It’s not like anything, really,” Vivien replied evasively. She gathered she’d had as much synopsis as she was likely to get. “You want me to say I like it? I like it okay.”
“Does it make you feel invulnerable?”
“Hmm,” she considered, slowing to forty-five for a moment. “Not exactly. I know I’ll get a good table, of course, but that’s just money. You think it really gets me anywhere? I can’t buy time, you know.”
“Didn’t you ever decide you ought to earn your keep? Why don’t you run the March of Dimes?”
“I thought we’d agreed about what it is I do,” she said, ignoring the dose of guilt. “I’m a star.”
There was enough of an edge of irony to show she thought it an outrage—even she. Crazier, in its way, than the overpaid work of Jasper Cokes, at a million bucks a week—because in her case neither craft nor talent was required. Greg had always refused to take the broader view that Edna pushed, whereby one went with the stars the age provided, no matter who they were. He was fired, just now, with a burst of his oldest loyalty. A star, he thought, was something quite particular. It had to do with movies.
“I wouldn’t be you for anything,” he said.
It wasn’t as if he’d been asked.
“Noble of you, I’m sure. You’re right, of course—I don’t do a hell of a lot. But you keep confusing me with her. This Vivien woman doesn’t exist, except in photographs. It’s a lot of bullshit, just like everything else in Hollywood.”
“Some of them made some fabulous pictures.”
“Unlike us good-for-nothing types. You’re such a purist, aren’t you? It’s such a funny place for a virgin.”
They’d had enough for a while. The next hour passed in silence, while they crossed the border and into the Berkshires. Here, the trees were much advanced. It wasn’t the dream of green, as it was high up at Carbon Mountain, but green itself, completely grown.
When it got to be time to switch, she stopped at a roadside stand. She nosed the car in among Sunday drivers and went to root in the bins of country goods. Greg trailed along behind for a while, as she filled a market basket full of dubious homemade stuffs. Pepper relish and candied pumpkin. Jugs of maple cream. A burlap pouch full of pine needles, meant to be a sachet. This was not a down-home girl, he thought, perplexed and slightly annoyed. She didn’t need to buy condiments to make her dinners vivid. The help did all of that.
He broke away and loped across Route 7, to a blank-eyed gas pump standing all alone in front of a tin-roofed shed. The dozing mechanic had given away his last free map a few years back, but he jerked his thumb toward the wall above his workbench, where he had one pinned, so old it looked pre-Revolutionary. Greg got up close and traced their route for the next two hours—south to the Mass. Pike, west to the New York Thruway. He noted the names of the towns they’d pass. Checked out the peaks and bodies of water. By the time he sauntered back, he had the territory fixed. He couldn’t get tricked off course, no matter how the weather turned.
She’d meanwhile rung up forty-six dollars in crafts and folkways. They were stowing it all in a shopping bag when Greg appeared at the wooden counter. He was struck right off by the turmoil that attended her, even here. The hillbilly granny who kept the cash box was visibly shaken and couldn’t make change. Her wizened sister, bagging it up, went on and on about canning. The browsing tourists were openmouthed and mute. Greg wanted to pound the counter with his fist. Did they have to act quite so much as if it were an appearance by Our Lady? What were they doing reading People, when they had these ripening fields and virgin hills to look out on?
“Do you always have to have souvenirs?” he asked with some contempt, as he set the bag on the back seat.
“It’s just a few things for Edna,” she said lightly. “After all, everyone can’t have the same taste, can they?”
Oh, it was insupportable. Here was Vivien, calling him a snob for implying her rural goods were tacky. A total misrepresentation. She was the one who shrank from the crap that littered the world at large. Still, it was only the mildest sort of sniping, so far. They had so much ammunition about each other now, they could have hit every shot below the belt.
“What’s with you and Edna?” Greg asked bluntly.
She’d explained how Edna had put her onto him. The Vermont address had passed between them. It wasn’t clear what else. Just now, he made it sound like she’d been trying to hire away his second-in-command.
“Nothing,” she said, with an air of reassurance. “I just like her. Things seem to please her. The people I meet are usually so displeased.”
“She’s got a hell of a temper,” said Greg, not really to contradict her. “But she loves life most obscenely. Not one of your biggest fans, I might add.”
“I know,” she replied resignedly. Was nothing ever news to her, he wondered. “You can hardly blame her, though. I’m disapproved of so. Princess Margaret doesn’t get the heat I get.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, relenting some. “With Edna, a lot of it’s just hot air. Actually, we’re all very live-and-let-live.”
“Oh, so are we,” she said. “It’s every man for himself at Steepside.”
Once they got to the highway, you couldn’t any longer call it country life—even with all the miles of spring in the forested hills on either side. They were clearly going back. Already, the moment of stasis out in the rain must have seemed all but irretrievable. Yet, if it made them sorry to go, they didn’t say as much to one another. It would have tipped them over into the sort of excess sentiment they dreaded. Thus, they began to brood about their suspects.
Vivien already had the table set for lunch, next day at Ma Maison. All she had to do was make the reservation. She wanted to put it to Carl in public, so as to keep them out of a shouting match. She’d permit no refuge in hysterics. It happened that nowhere in all the world assured her better treatment. She was one of the trends that made it trendy. She could see herself sitting across from Carl, alone at last in the middle of things, with all the power on her side.
&nb
sp; Greg, meanwhile, had decided not to have his confrontation by appointment. He planned to walk in unexpected. Let Artie discover him with his feet up, smoking a dollar cigar. This would be in the nature of reparations, paying Steepside back for the night they muscled him out of there. He meant to tell the tale to Artie’s face, with a most deliberate slowness.
“I made us reservations,” she said, when they were about an hour north of New York. He didn’t bother to ask what time the flight took off, or how she knew they’d make it, because he seemed to understand she was an expert in these matters. “I forgot to ask what the movie is,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter. They’re all shit.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “we could get them to show Birth of a Nation.”
As the city grew, they crossed a lot of bridges, slung low above iron-dark waters. The expressways, routing them through the peripheries, then on out to Kennedy, skirted mile after cratered mile of bombed-out neighborhoods. The shells of long-abandoned industries stood fast in vacant lots. Spring had gained a good deal of ground as they traveled south, but it vanished as if behind a curtain, now they were in the arteries of New York. Thoreau, she thought, would have shaken his fist at the shell-shocked war zone of city life. She and Greg, at heart two Angelenos used to greener pastures, reacted instead in a purely provincial way: Thank God I don’t live here. One could not stay forever at Walden, of course. In the end, one had to return dead center. But really, there were limits.
“It’s two weeks tomorrow,” she said.
“Yeah, right,” he nodded, and flexed his hands on the steering wheel. “I think Lew Archer gets it all done in one.”
He meant the time it took to bring the killer in. She was referring to the stage they’d reached in being widowed. Just now, out of nowhere, she recalled how Jasper never flew till he knew the movie. He preferred to go up with one of his own, to watch the people watch it. He wanted to know what went over best, so as to give them more the next time round. Today, this struck her as somehow rather endearing.
She used to tell him he gave up far too much to the man onscreen, who was after all not real. But who was she to say? He was happier being Jasper Cokes, boyish redneck sexpot, than he ever was in street clothes. Contrary to Hollywood form, he went into raptures over his public image. And he took on a vast enthusiastic grace, like an athlete striking matches wherever he went. Shadowboxing, half the time, if that was the only game in town.
“I wonder if Harry was Jasper’s type,” she said.
“Did he like them young?”
“I don’t know. They always seemed to me, the few I saw, like men with lousy jobs. Like they worked in a liquor store.”
“I’m sure he would have found Harry too romantic.”
“Talk about him,” Vivien said, though here she was pretty sure he’d refuse.
“Well, he was always out collecting up experience,” said Greg, so easily she wondered why she’d never asked before. “That’s the reason he probably went with Artie—he thought he could find out Jasper Cokes’ story. He’d practically stop a person in the street. You’d think they’d take offense, but I guess they didn’t. He was so earnest, you couldn’t turn him down.” He paused for a moment, to catch his breath, and felt this stupid lump across his throat, as if someone had just delivered a blow to his windpipe. He said: “It was like he was writing a book. And all of us were the evidence.”
“Well, if he got you to talk,” she said, “he must have been something. He must have been a goddam hypnotist.”
“But that’s the irony, you see. I was the one he didn’t ask. Because of how he felt, I guess. I made him very shy. Everything I just told you—that’s from Sid and Edna. Like I said, I hardly knew him. We only spent one night together.”
“Really?” she said. “I thought you never touched him.”
“Yes, I know,” replied Greg quietly. He hoped this part didn’t sound too much like a bad apology. He willed himself to leave it at that, then blurted out one thing more. “It was just that once,” he said.
“Well, that’s once more than me and Jasper,” Vivien said.
She hardly knew what she felt anymore. Three days ago, she’d have said it was nothing at all. But ever since she left L.A., there was something there—some phantom pain that cast about for a hollow spot to root in. Grief? Remorse? She couldn’t say. Perhaps she saw that, if she always fled in the face of death, she would never get the hang of hating it on sight. It fed off her indifference, somehow.
They were almost there. He parked in an empty bay at Hertz and waited outside in the chilly wind while she went in and settled her account. They’d divvy it up later on. He knew he would have to be the one to bring it up, but that was part of the clumsy bargain rich men struck with poor. The reason he didn’t go in, though his poor teeth chattered like a teletype, was because he couldn’t stand to watch another clerk go limp with awe. It did no good to put the blame on Vivien herself. He wasn’t sure she didn’t lead them on, but then, they fell for it all on their own.
The air was thick with the shriek of jets. The sky was shot with a shade of gray that glimmered now with the risk of snow. He was suddenly full of doom and feeling all alone. He wished he could tell her that what he feared most just now was finishing up this case. Because then he would have no more excuse.
It would have to wait till they got on the plane. They couldn’t talk right now. The Hertz girl drove them, three in the front, through the loop-the-loop to TWA. She chatted as if they were all just folks, but Greg could tell she was secretly crazed with fascination. He knew he was being ornery, of course. What were people supposed to do with Vivien, if they couldn’t affect stunned silence and couldn’t chitchat either? He acted as if there were some third path that he alone had mapped. He sat between them and looked out at the exit ramps and hangars, on across a plain of cars, and thought with an air of resignation: What the hell, it’s all the same.
“You know what I left in my room?” he asked, very sotto voce, cutting the Hertz girl out.
“No, what?” she asked. As far as she could tell, he’d left the sum of his worldly goods. She’d decided, though, that it wasn’t her affair to ask. At least they had the diamond and the leather-bound Thoreau. The rest was probably expendable.
“It’s this perfume, made out of lilies,” he said. “I picked it up on the island. It’s just junk—only cost a buck and a half. I wasn’t planning to wear it,” he insisted, mocking himself with the queerness of the thought. “I got it to prove how far I went. Like Columbus, bringing a load of spices back to Spain.”
“Mid-Ocean,” she replied.
She meant the brand. She wasn’t plotting coordinates. In fact, she knew the very shop he must have gone to, half a mile down the St. George’s road from the house. The lilies were out of her very own field.
They came in under the swooping wing of the terminal. Now he saw they were going public with a vengeance. Vivien got out first. As he followed, he planned to call to the trio of skycaps standing by. But before he could draw the breath to do it, he saw they were already zombie-eyed. They’d seen her in a flash. One now came to greet her. The second went round to the trunk, to fetch the luggage. The third picked up the phone and called ahead. It was all in all like a princess making an entrance. The skycaps even dressed the part of footmen.
Greg got very tongue-tied, feeling so left out. He brought up the rear as best he could, while she walked on ahead, flanked by bearers left and right. One had her overnighter. The other, her bag of country goods. Greg fished his pocket for a proper tip. He’d carried his own bags, unassisted, through all the terminals of his life. He would no more have hired a bearer here than he would have let another man shine his shoes. Certain things a person did himself, if only to keep two feet in the real world.
The skycaps could probably spot the type a mile away. It was doubtful they chalked up the dollar lost to higher principles. All Greg had was eighty cents in change and a crinkled five. He was heavily ar
med with traveler’s checks and credit cards, but so what? As they reached the check-in counter and the porters wished her well, he knew he would have to lay out the fin, for want of a couple of singles.
The two men turned in a friendly way. He palmed the bill to the older one—discreetly, so he wouldn’t have to watch them trade an antic look. The five, he thought, would have bought him a shot of Bristol Cream, as well as the headphones for the movie. For Christ’s sake, let it go, he thought. As he sidled into place beside her, he saw that Vivien—huddled in league with the airline clerk—was already plotting their transcontinental phase. She put out a hand and rested it on Greg’s arm, then spoke his name for the second reservation. Greg smiled wanly at the lanky clerk. He didn’t begrudge the two guys their tip. For all he knew, a five was peanuts nowadays. Jasper probably tipped in twenties.
“Yes, Mr. Cannon, here you are,” said the clerk. A bit like Henry Fonda, way back when.
What was it in his voice that alerted Greg to something fishy? Some note of gravity had crept in—as if they all had better things to do. He peered over Vivien’s shoulder at the code thrown up by the IBM. His boarding pass was clearly marked with an F—like he’d flunked the final in English Lit.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I believe I’m flying coach.”
“What? But I thought you were going out together,” the clerk threw back defensively. He looked to Vivien for support.
“Greg,” she said evenly, putting an arm across his shoulder like a quarterback, “I appreciate your attitude—the simple life and all. I’m sure the whole of TWA would appreciate it if they knew. But I’m not free like you are. If I travel coach, the press will pick it up. Do it my way, will you?”
“Sounds a little paranoid, if you ask me,” said Greg.
Of course he knew exactly what she meant. But he’d had enough of being eyed and treated VIP. The longer he stuck around, the more he found himself preempted. People were much too nice when they got within her orbit. They seemed, like stiffly mannered kids, to keep mum unless they had something good to say. If he once agreed to fly first class, they’d stuff him like a Strasbourg goose.
