West of Sunset

by Stewart O'Nan

  That she was strong enough to tell the story was a good sign. After listening to her confession, he asked if she wanted him to come over.

  “No, I need to sleep. I’ve got an early call at Republic, out in the valley.”

  He offered again, to show he was in earnest, but she was sure. They’d have dinner tomorrow, somewhere nice—not in Hollywood. She seemed calm, back to the brassy, practical Sheilah he admired, and after saying good night, alone again in the quiet bungalow, he was embarrassed and a little ashamed that he’d panicked. By any measure, he did love her. As his past was with Zelda, realistically his future was with her.

  Which was why he was puzzled, a few nights later, after several gimlets poolside, to find himself leaning against the mantel, phone in hand, speaking with Ginevra.

  For a few weeks he chatted with her regularly, never telling Sheilah, but though they always said they should get together again, they never did, and when she returned to Chicago to finalize her divorce, they fell out of touch. He wasn’t entirely surprised when, just before Armistice Day, he received in the mail an invitation to her wedding at her parents’ home in Lake Forest. He still had the invitation to her first, baled with her letters, and like that painful reminder, this less ostentatious version he couldn’t throw away either, stowing it in an old hatbox of his mother’s beneath his royalty statements and cancelled checks and Zelda’s and Scottie’s letters, a hiding place from which, occasionally, to distract himself while he was writing, he would take it out and reread the gilt embossed script and remember how he’d felt the first time she kissed him in the shadows of the boathouse, holding his face in her hands, pulling back and looking at him with those lucent eyes, and how, like the silly children they were, with the greatest seriousness and most honest hearts, they vowed to love each other forever.

  LILY

  All fall he missed the East, the melancholy turning of the leaves and the smell of woodsmoke as the days grew shorter. He missed the gloomy rains and darkening afternoons, the squirrels busy burying acorns for winter. Here the sun burned down clear and unchanging on the palms and cars and boulevards. Hot winds blew in from the desert, and the hillsides caught fire, a mockery of his favorite season.

  This time of year Princeton was at its neo-Gothic best. At dusk the lancet windows of Old Nassau glowed like a monastery, and walking across the quad as the carillon struck the quarter-hour and swallows darted round the bell tower, one could believe it was England a hundred, two hundred years ago. Perhaps it was a matter of sensibility, or maybe just fatigue, but he saw nothing romantic in brilliant, half-built California.

  UCLA was a bricklayer’s idea of a campus, the halls stark boxes. Even the football stadium was new, a concrete copy of the Coliseum left over from the Olympics, far too large. Every Saturday he and Sheilah joined the student body in the bleachers to watch Kenny Washington run the single wing. In prep school Scott had been a second-string quarterback, small but shifty, with a popgun arm. One of his fondest memories was the muddy November afternoon at Groton he’d relieved their injured starter and led Newman to a late victory. He’d taken a beating, plunging through the line time and again on the winning drive, defenders gouging him while he was at the bottom of the pile. What he thought was a cramp turned out, in the training room, to be a broken rib. It had sealed his reputation on campus, after an inauspicious beginning, and though at Princeton he was cut after the very first tryout for being too small, he had a reverence for the heroic nature of the game and anyone who played it with grit and grace.

  As the lone negro in a collegiate arena, Kenny Washington was subject to hits after the whistle and all kinds of punk stuff, yet never complained to the officials. He took his revenge directly, doling out straight-arms like left hooks and trampling defenders, and then, on the other side of the ball, knifing in from linebacker and riding their quarterback down. Scott tried to impress upon Sheilah how singular a player they were witnessing, but she had no appreciation of the game. She was only there to be with him.

  Since she’d thrown over Donegall, they both made an effort to spend more time together. He wasn’t used to dating a working woman, forever waiting for her to be done. Her schedule was exhausting—she always seemed to be in her car. Part of her job was being out on the town, and they savored their rare free weekends like a married couple, waking late and eating breakfast on her balcony. He was at her place more than he was at the Garden, yet, despite the extra toothbrush and dresser drawer ceded him, he was still a visitor. The newspaper’s idea of propriety was the same as the studio’s. He could accompany her to premieres and awards ceremonies, but couldn’t move in with her.

  She didn’t want him to, or so she said, as if this munificence were to her credit. She liked living alone and just assumed he did too. He didn’t, but over the last few years had grown used to it, an accidental recluse. Having his own place made it easier to keep his old and new lives separate. He was also secretly relieved he wouldn’t have to actively hide his drinking from her. And yet, like her wearing her brassiere while they made love, her assuming he didn’t want to live with her bothered him, as if she were keeping something from him.

  For someone whose job was gossip, she rarely talked about herself. He’d told her about his father’s failures, and the family’s wanderings from St. Paul to Syracuse and Buffalo and back again, the townhouse on Summit Avenue and his grandparents intervening to send him to Newman. All he knew about her was that she had a younger sister Alicia who lived in London and at sixteen she’d been presented at the Court of St. James. Conveniently, she had pictures illuminating both of these facts, framed and facing each other on her mantel. Of her parents she said little. They were dead—her father, who was older, shortly after her birth, her mother in a car accident when Sheilah was seventeen—leaving only an Aunt Mary to look after her. For a society girl her education was spotty. She claimed to have been on the stage yet didn’t know Ibsen from Strindberg, and occasionally, when tired, dropped her aitches, stopping herself before she could break into full-blown Cockney. Though they’d been intimate for months in some novel ways he and Zelda never were, he still didn’t know Sheilah.

  “That’s good,” Bogart said. “A woman should have a little mystery. Take Sluggy—I never know what’s in her head. The other day I’m reading the paper and she hauls off and socks me in the arm. ‘What was that for?’ I say, and she says, ‘Because I love you.’ It keeps things interesting.”

  “I’ve had interesting. It’s not interesting after a while.”

  He didn’t tell him about the bra. He thought it must cover a secret from her past—a scar or tattoo. His imagination flashed on childhood accidents, mutilation, white slavery. Though he himself had been naked with her only in the dark, under the covers, he suspected her reticence was more than simple modesty.

  Like a lecher, he peeked at her in the shower and when she was dressing behind her japanned bamboo screen, using the mirror on her dresser to get another angle. She pulled the curtain to, turned her back on him. All he caught were illicit, thrilling glimpses of her sugar-white skin, soap bubbles foaming over her curves, nothing definitive, until one lazy Saturday morning before the California game.

  They’d made love so heartily that his chest ached and his blood beat in his ears. She went to take her shower, leaving him to recover. He lounged a minute, letting his breathing settle, listening to the toilet flush, the creak of the knobs and then the pattering in the tub before he swung his legs out of bed and crept to the door. She liked it scalding. Steam roiled, wetting the ceiling. By chance she’d left the curtain open an inch. He craned forward, an eye to the slit, as if at a peep show. She was shampooing her hair, leaning back into the stream, her face tipped up, water rilling off her chin. She wasn’t deformed or marked or bristling with dark hairs, but beautifully made—a mystery in itself.

  As he gazed on her, slaking his curiosity, she opened her eyes.

  She crossed an ar
m over her chest and with the other drew the curtain. “Go away.”

  “I’m just admiring you.”

  “I don’t appreciate people staring at me, thank you.”

  “You look positively classical.”

  “Thank you, now go away.”

  He didn’t have to ask. He’d been so obvious—so obnoxious—that after she’d gotten dressed she explained she wore a bra all the time because when she didn’t, her back hurt. It had nothing to do with him or with sex, it was just more comfortable. She said she wasn’t angry with him, but the next morning she locked the door. From then on she guarded her privacy so tightly that he kept his one vision of her like treasure, giving it to his producer to revisit whenever disillusion threatened.

  The weekends were theirs, mostly. The week meant punching the clock, eight a.m. to six p.m., plus the twenty-minute drive, a schedule he wasn’t accustomed to. Some nights she had to make staged appearances at clubs or restaurants, arriving on a rising star’s arm, and as well as missing her, he was jealous, brooding by the pool, trying to fill the evening with gin and charades.

  At the studio, when she interviewed one of Metro’s own, he ate lunch with her, sharing a table at the commissary or, when there was time, taking a box lunch and roaming the false-fronted metropolises and midwestern towns and medieval villages of the back lot till they found a quiet spot. The courtyard set from Romeo and Juliet was a favorite. One of his conceits was that he could have been an actor—Lois Moran once offered to get him a screen test—and there, on the same balcony where Leslie Howard entreated Norma Shearer, Scott recreated the famous scene, feeding Sheilah her lines, his accent making her laugh.

  The back lot was a playground free of the real world. Even the sporadic gunfire in the distance came from the Western set. It was an endless adventure finding new places, because there was one around every corner. New York, Paris, Rome—everywhere they went was elemental and enchanted. They ate chicken salad sandwiches in the train station from Anna Karenina, BLTs on the Shanghai docks, Reubens in the Casbah, then walked back through the fogless streets of Whitechapel, holding hands.

  He kissed her a last time before they crossed Overland to the main lot, then let go. Though by now their affair was an open secret throughout the Iron Lung, during work hours they pretended to be no more than good friends, a role he resented and at which he was certain he was unconvincing.

  He felt equally false telling Zelda he was hoping to come East for Christmas, depending on the shooting schedule for Three Comrades. While it was true, and beyond his control, in the face of her helplessness the greater omission shamed him, and his usual rationalizations seemed cold-blooded and convenient. He didn’t believe in divorce—not as a Catholic, which by now he was only nominally, but as a romantic—yet he understood that while a bond remained, that aspect of their love was over, ruined by anger and sickness and grief, by too many others and too many nights apart. If he’d fooled himself these last few years, thinking she might recover and be his again, he also never expected to find anyone else. Drunk, he might take confused comfort in a fellow lost soul, but the old hurt would immediately return, reinforcing the fact that there was no one like Zelda, and the Zelda he knew was gone. He was never unhappier than when he woke, not quite sober, and realized he’d done what he promised he’d never do again. With Sheilah he didn’t have that excuse, which made this betrayal worse, and worrisome.

  The arrangement didn’t seem to bother Sheilah. She didn’t demand, as most women would, that he marry her. She was happy with her job and her place and her car, and while he admired her independence, on those nights he wasn’t invited over, he sulked. Occasionally, unable to stop himself, he headed down Sunset and up into the hills, only to find her driveway empty and her windows dark—expected, yet less than reassuring.

  Like everyone in the Iron Lung, he made it through the days by thinking of the weekend. He was sick of fixing Three Comrades, which should have been done a month ago. Paramore had a terrible ear yet kept making changes to the dialogue Scott then had to restore. Heeding Ernest’s advice, he’d fortified the original ending, knowing the studio would want to soften it. In the final scene at the cemetery, after the local brownshirts have killed their friend, and the girl they both love has died, the two survivors hear gunfire coming from the town and head toward it, ready to fight for their country again. While he felt nothing for the script at this point—the freshest part had been ruined by a thousand compromises—he was prepared to defend his work. At the end of December his contract was up for renewal, and after A Yank at Oxford he needed to show at least one screen credit for his six months there. If Metro didn’t pick him up, he’d catch on somewhere else. He’d already decided he wasn’t going back to Tryon.

  “Not on my account,” Sheilah said.

  “Entirely on your account,” he joked, because, though he’d never told her how much he owed, she knew he needed the money.

  With no family to host, they spent Thankgiving together, taking the day boat to Catalina. The white villas and dusty olive trees reminded him of Greece, and the time the goat stole Scottie’s straw hat.

  “I’ve never been,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said, “we should go.”

  Instead of turkey they had lobster, with a view of the harbor. Returning on the last ferry, they stood at the rail and watched the searchlights crisscross the sky.

  “Someone’s opening,” he said.

  “And I don’t care.”

  “It’s still pretty.”

  “It is.”

  She was free for the whole weekend. He packed a bag, sneaking out the side entrance of the Garden, and stayed at her place. As if to appease him, that night she took off her bra. She stopped kissing him, rolled away to unhook the catch, then turned back to him, resplendent. Afterwards, she retrieved it from the floor and refastened it in the bathroom.

  The next morning while she was in the shower, he made an inventory of the top of her bureau—perfumes, a modest jewelry box, a monogrammed silver comb-and-brush set. She was neat, everything square, her hairpins entombed in a glass sarcophagus, all facing the same way. He ranged the room, inspecting the alarm clock on her nightstand and the unlit candles on the mantel. Except for the mussed sheets, it might have been a film set. There were no silly knickknacks or pictures of her as a girl, no clues to her as a person. He suspected the closet held a deeper knowledge of her, one’s wardrobe being a kind of self-portrait. He was reaching for the knob when the water stopped.

  He had time for just a quick peek. What struck him was how bright and bold her clothes were, compared to the decor. She loved color—greens and pinks and crimsons. It was like opening a door on a garden. With a stir of pleasure, he recognized some of her dresses from their evenings out, and her gold sandals. A high shelf was piled with hatboxes, and he wondered if she’d kept Donegall’s letters, or her other lovers’. Would he find his own among them, alternately flirting and begging forgiveness, or were his kept closer, being current?

  He shut the door before she finished in the bathroom, but the thought of her past lingered, needling. While he liked to think of her as young and innocent, in this city a woman of her charms would be besieged. It had made her strong, but because his own history was rife with misadventures, he feared hers was too. To share her with anyone was unbearable, yet at some time, irrefutably, she had been another’s. He knew he shouldn’t care, that he was being a fool. For all his modern thinking, in personal matters he had a midwesterner’s insistence on virtue, making him eternally prey to shame, and prone, in his weaker moments, to ascribing it blindly to others.

  She came out in a towel, routing his thoughts, and dressed behind her screen. “Hurry up and take yours. I’m famished.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I was thinking Tom Breneman’s. I have a craving for ham and eggs.”

  “Doesn’t it have to be four in the mor
ning for Breneman’s?”

  “Bogie?” she guessed.

  “It was Mayo’s idea.”

  “I didn’t know she had ideas.”

  “She has about Bogie.”

  “I wouldn’t call that an idea, really.”

  The day was theirs. The city was sleeping off the feast. After breakfast they drove up to Malibu and walked barefoot on the beach, deserted now that the weather had cooled. She wore a baggy oatmeal sweater and had her hair pulled back in a black elastic band, her face rosy without makeup. As the casting directors said, she could play younger. Every so often she knelt to inspect a shell or stone, holding out her palm like Scottie to show him her treasure. The strand and sky made him think of Long Island, those years when the world was full of promise. Was that still true? It was only Friday. He was tired, despite taking his wake-up pills, and thought of Prufrock.

  Ahead curved the arm of the movie colony, the cottages of the stars ranked side-by-side like miners’ shacks boarded up for the season, the patio furniture shrouded. In its exquisite emptiness, it might have been a ghost town.

  “I’m surprised,” he said.

  “It’s always like this. I know someone who owns one. He only comes out for the Fourth of July.”

  “Producer?”

  “Don’t. He’s a proper gentleman, and old enough to be my father.”

  “I didn’t say anything.” But thought: like Donegall. Like me.

  She ignored him, walking on, then stopped, making him turn to her. “Isn’t it enough that I gave him up?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I haven’t asked a thing of you.”

  “And you have every right to.”

  “I shouldn’t have to ask. Anyway, it wouldn’t do anything but make us unhappy.”

  “I wish I could promise you more.”

  “You can’t, so why ruin a perfectly beautiful day?”