West of Sunset

by Stewart O'Nan

  “And this is the raw stuff,” Alan said. “Wait till they cut it.”

  The prospect made him wish he’d never seen the footage. Now he felt truly powerless, and the next day struggled to make headway on Fidelity. To catch up he took it home, working at the kitchen table until the rest of the Garden had gone to bed. He brought it to Sheilah’s for the weekend, stealing a few hours Sunday afternoon. He was going to make himself sick, she predicted, and as if she’d jinxed him, he did.

  It started as a cough, a dry catch at the back of his throat and then a hollow racking that left him gasping and teary, his lungs tight. He blamed the dampness, fashioning an ascot from a hand towel to wear around the house, as he had that wet summer in Baltimore when he was trying to finish his novel and Zelda, out of her mind, set the place on fire. He was certain it was a recurrence of his TB, the beginning of the inevitable weakening, his only recourse, like Stevenson or Lawrence before him, a desert sanitarium, and then one morning after not sleeping all night he spat in the sink and it was green. Just a chest cold.

  He recovered enough by Valentine’s Day to take Sheilah to the Cocoanut Grove. It didn’t matter that it rained. Inside, the palms swayed, the waterfall cascaded softly behind the orchestra. They danced every dance, and between sets, at the same table where they’d first flirted, he gave her a pair of earrings with her birthstone, sapphire, which made her cry. He didn’t tell her that Zelda had sent him a card, or how strange he felt, spending the day with someone else.

  By the end of the night he was tired, and though it was late and he had to go to work the next day, he knew she expected him to stay over. It had become a pattern with them, the long droughts and tender reconciliations, and as they climbed the hill to her place they were silent in anticipation. He walked her to the door, and she held it open for him.

  He was grateful, after blundering once again, that she wanted him back, and did everything, short of promising the impossible, to be worthy of another chance. They talked best in bed, as if making love was just a preface. She compared her weakness for him to a sickness, or a sin. She didn’t care. In some way she didn’t understand, she needed him. When they were apart, she confessed, sprawled across him, she starved herself.

  “Feel my ribs. Here.”

  He didn’t know whether to be frightened or flattered. He was sorry for her, and resolved to do better. He’d had a talent for happiness once, though he was young then, and lucky. But wasn’t he lucky now, again? When he was with her like this, he could forget the past. No one else had that power, and yet in the end he feared he would disappoint her.

  They were making love a second time, well after midnight, meeting each other sweetly, when, at the edge of release, straining to his limit, he felt dizzy. He was on his knees behind her, arching, his whole body clenched, and the room, dark save moonlight, dimmed briefly as if the power had flickered. A curtain of purple spangles swam before his eyes like the afterimage of a flashbulb. An exalted, floating sensation buoyed him, as if he were drifting up out of himself. He thought he might faint. To keep from toppling off the bed, he held on to her waist.

  “Don’t stop,” she said.

  He kept going. The feeling was momentary, as in boxing, shaking off the shock of being hit in the face. He was back inside his skin again. As he breathed, the world returned in all its fullness, warm and soft and dark, and he gave himself to it without regret.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, lying beside him afterwards, because he was still panting.

  “You’re going to wear me out.”

  In the morning, pondering that rapture as he stood at his window, watching the door of the drugstore, he supposed it was a kind of ecstasy, an overload of the nervous system. Part of it was working too hard, and a lack of sleep. He couldn’t help but think of Zelda. They’d been dedicated to pleasure, yet even at their wildest, raging on Pernod and cocaine, reproducing the Kama Sutra page by page, he’d never been transported like that.

  He waited for it to happen again, those nights he stayed over, waking her for athletic seconds, trying to recreate the same conditions until she protested. Did he know what time it was?

  Fidelity eluded him as well. He wasn’t going to make eight weeks. Easter was coming, and he feared that Stromberg, like Mank, would assign it to someone else while he was gone. He had no choice. He’d promised Scottie.

  His solution, as always, was to put in longer hours. He came home from the studio, started a pot of coffee and kept going.

  “You’d think you owned stock in it,” Bogie said, dropping off some of Mayo’s chicken soup. He knew not to linger, just set the bowl in the fridge and tiptoed away again.

  It was easier late at night, with the Garden asleep, but then, stuck on a line of dialogue, he looked up and the clock on the stove said it was a quarter to three. He’d wasted too much time on the beginning. Now all he could do was block out the remaining scenes and fill them in after he got back.

  In the midst of this, as anyone could have predicted, Hitler invaded Austria, making Fidelity not merely tiresome but pointless as well. Dottie, in solidarity, quit work on her picture and dedicated herself to fundraising for the displaced. Scott envied her the luxury. Like Oppy, he wasn’t allowed to stop.

  Two weeks before Easter, he finished a big scene and stood up from the table, dazed and achy. He wasn’t done, but he needed a break, and he was running low on cigarettes. The clock said he could make it to Schwab’s before midnight, so he grabbed his keys and jacket and set off down the steps and across the patio. A wet mist hung in the air, the lamps along the walkway haloed. Though it was too cold to swim, the pool was lit, and the ringed trunks of the palms, their fronds rattling in the breeze. On the top floor of the main house, like a beacon through the murk, a single window glowed yellow. In it, featureless, centered as in a formal portrait, stood the silhouette of a figure.

  He stopped, the only sound a fountain splashing.

  The figure didn’t move. He thought it might be a joke—a clothestree or dressmaker’s dummy placed there by Benchley to scare him.

  Why should he be frightened? He wasn’t a child. He had his own ghosts, one he would never outrun, no matter how far he fled.

  If it was Alla, though. He waited to see if, as before, she might give him a sign.

  The figure looked down at him—in judgment or with mutual curiosity, he couldn’t say.

  He waved in acknowledgment, then felt silly. He checked his watch: five minutes.

  When he looked again, the window—the whole house—was dark.

  “Okay,” he said, “you got me,” and walked on, frowning and peering up as if, from the dark, the figure were still watching him. It was no specter, probably just an overnight guest staying at the main house, tired like him but unable to sleep.

  Crossing Sunset in the middle of the block, he had to wait for a car. As it approached, the racket of the engine growing, its headlights threw shadows across the palms. As if he’d conjured it from his imagination, it was the Daimler from Three Comrades—a black phaeton gleaming under the streetlamps. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find Reinecke behind the wheel, a Luger in his gloved fist. That was the problem with Hollywood: everything turned into a plot. He could picture the car swerving, and a flash of his own last-minute reaction. Dottie and Alan and Ernest would band together to avenge him.

  The car roared past, racing to make the light at the corner, sped through the wash of red neon that marked Schwab’s and down the long straightway to LaBrea, growing fainter and fainter in the mist till there was only the buzzing of the sign. Empty, the road was wide as a river. He crossed at an angle, trying to save time. Before he reached the far curb, the neon blinked off.

  His instinct was to run, but after sitting all day the best he could muster was a hobbling trot. Once again, the world had conspired to remind him of his age. He was almost angrier at his own debility than the store c
losing early.

  Inside, the lights were still on. A counterman he knew from too many chili dinners and late night forays was emptying the register. The clock behind the soda fountain said he had three minutes left.

  He tried the door, expecting it to be locked. It swung open, but only halfway. He had to give it an extra tug, grunting with the effort, and felt a twinge in the shoulder he’d broken a few years ago showing off his diving skills. He gritted his teeth, afraid he’d torn something, when the lights around him dimmed. He recognized the feeling as the one he’d desired, only he was alone. Even now, as the aisles of Schwab’s turned purple, part of him thought he must be wrong, his body confused. How was it possible, all this time, that he’d mistaken oblivion for joy? He opened his mouth to call for help, but his breath left him, and before he could grab the magazine rack along the wall, he was gone.

  THE CURE

  The doctor wouldn’t call it a heart attack. His diagnosis was angina, for which he prescribed Scott injections of calcium and iron and a vial of tiny nitroglycerin pills he was supposed to carry everywhere. He needed to rest and cut back on the cigarettes. No running, no stairs, and for the next few weeks at least, no sex, rules Sheilah enforced with a nun’s humorless efficiency.

  She installed herself at the Garden, limiting his visitors, not letting him out of bed. Stromberg was fine with him turning in the script late, which gave Scott the opportunity to catch up. He fashioned a lapdesk out of a tea tray and wrote like Flaubert, propped on his pillows. At five she stopped him, taking away his yellow pad, gathering the draft pages strewn about the floor to type up later. He could read or listen to the news from Europe while she made dinner, when all he wanted was to go join Bogie and Mayo for a stiff gin. As much as he enjoyed being pampered, he resented being treated like an invalid, and by the third day he was planning his escape.

  They were skirmishing over his trip East. She was afraid it would be too strenuous, despite the doctor giving Scott his express permission. She petitioned him daily, saying Scottie would understand. She was coming out later this summer anyway. Bedridden, he couldn’t evade the question, and fielding each new argument wearied him. He could only hold to what he’d told her in the first place: he’d promised Scottie, plus he’d already made the arrangements.

  “It’s only a week.”

  “And then a month to recover. It’s not good for you, especially now.”

  “I have to go. You know that.”

  “I wish you didn’t.”

  “I wish I didn’t either.” He could give her that, though it wasn’t nearly enough. Nothing would be, short of renunciation, a complete break. He could see why lovers sometimes turned to murder.

  Their last night, she changed the sheets and they slept together in his narrow bed, overly conscious of the doctor’s orders. She hadn’t relented. She needed to remind him of all that he was leaving behind. Even in his baggy pajamas, with her bra on, she incited him. She rolled over and he pressed against her soft bottom.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You have to wait.”

  “It’s not going to kill me.”

  “You’re right, it’s not.”

  “I’m willing to chance it.”

  “That’s very generous, but you’re not the one who’d have to tell the doctor what happened.”

  “What would you tell him?”

  “I’d tell him I tried to help you but you wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “That’s a bit cold, isn’t it, considering I just died.”

  “It’s true,” she said. “You don’t listen. You do what you want to do and then expect me to take care of you when you fall apart.”

  He wanted to deny it for the gross oversimplification it was, but couldn’t.

  “It’s my fault,” she said.

  “It’s not.”

  “Listen, I’m trying to tell you. I used to do for my mum the same way. She’d get on a kick and I’d have to make supper and put the boys to bed. I was ten or eleven then. Nothing’s changed.”

  He wanted to say he’d been better lately, but knew not to contradict her.

  “I understand,” she said. “People are the way they are. Will you do me a favor this time and try not to hurt yourself? I can’t bear to see you like that.”

  Why should he feel cornered by the one person who cared for him? To anyone else he could have lied.

  “I’ll try,” he said, and then regretted it.

  In the morning her request had the weight of prophecy, lingering as he kissed her good-bye and boarded the plane, though gradually, as they cleared the Sierras and cruised over the trackless stretches of desert, it lifted, and he fixed on what lay ahead, as if in these long hours aloft he might come up with some ingenious plan—impossible, not knowing how Zelda was. Scottie would be cool to her regardless, setting herself apart, leaving him, as always, to draw them together. He’d brought along his script, hoping, before Easter, to cable Stromberg that it was finished, but instead canvassed the cabin, taking notes on his fellow passengers. Salt Lake City, Denver, Omaha. They tacked across the continent, the stewardess loading on sandwiches and fresh newspapers at each stop, helping them make up their sleeping berths. Rather than risk spilling it, he drank his two tablespoons of chloral straight from the bottle and was under in minutes. When she woke him, they were almost to Baltimore, dawn streaming in the windows. He sipped his coffee and thought of Sheilah, still asleep in the hills, and wished the trip were over.

  Scottie was waiting for him at the train station in a smart navy outfit he’d never seen before, doubtless the work of Anne Ober. Jesus, what he owed them.

  “Don’t you look swellegant,” he said, holding her by the shoulders. “Remind me to thank her. How’s the Latin?”

  “Bonum.”

  “Ah, bene factum. I’m telling you, it’ll come in handy this summer.”

  “In case I meet a nice cardinal.”

  “By the way, not a word to your mother. I haven’t told her. Did you write her like I asked you?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” she said glumly.

  “Don’t act like it’s such a burden. One letter a month isn’t asking too much.”

  “I don’t mind writing, it’s what she writes back. Did she tell you she’s bicycling through Provence?”

  “No.” He looked at her as if it might be a joke.

  “According to her, she’s going there this fall with some woman from the hospital. They’re going to stay at a chateau.”

  “She’s confused.”

  “I figured.”

  “What it actually is is the doctor doesn’t want her to take any more vacations without supervision. I guess they’ve had problems.”

  “I can imagine,” she said. “So she’s not going to Provence.”

  “No, but she is going to have a nurse with her.”

  “Goody.”

  “I think it might help.” He understood her worry. A stranger was one more complication, one more witness to their embarrassment. He didn’t tell her how much he was paying for it.

  When the train came, though he knew he shouldn’t, he took her bag and lugged it up the steps with his. The line ran along the shore, and he found two seats on the left side of the car so they could watch the inlets and marshes scroll by. The tide was out, gulls stalking the mudflats. A fishing shack he remembered from the last time had burned down. She was quiet, copying a list of verb declensions while he leafed through Collier’s. As father and daughter they’d reached the stage where the only time they saw each other was on holiday, their real lives rarely intersecting. She was a dependable traveling companion, sharp-eyed and quick-witted, but often he felt a distance engendered by the time they’d spent apart, as if she wasn’t interested in him. It would only get worse. In the fall she was off to college.

  “Want to read something?” he asked, pulling out his script. “You have to pro
mise to be merciless.”

  “I promise. Has anyone else read it?”

  “You’re the first.”

  She stashed her Latin and dug in with a pencil, bent over the pages like a copy editor, occasionally releasing a chuckle or thoughtful murmur. When she sat up straight, the pencil scratched. Like any child, she couldn’t resist correcting a parent. He was content to hide behind his magazine, skimming yet another dissection of the crisis in Europe, peeking from time to time to see how far she’d gotten. If only she concentrated as hard on her studies, though at that age he’d been the same way—worse, to be honest. At Princeton he’d lost the better part of his sophomore year to the late-night ecstasies of theater life. Impossibly, he wanted to save her from his mistakes.

  When she turned the last page, he pretended not to notice.

  She slapped at his leg, a playful backhand. “So, what happens?”

  “What do you think should happen?”

  “There are only two things that can happen in a love story,” she began, quoting his own advice.

  “Only two?”

  “Happiness or heartbreak.”

  “So which is it?”

  If he’d instilled anything in her, it was a love of storytelling. They were batting around the possibilities when the conductor passed through the car. “Norfolk, Norfolk is next.”

  He thought: if they could just stay on, keep rolling down the coast till they hit Florida.

  He expected the nurse to be in uniform like at the hospital, a matron ushering her charge through the chaos of the waiting room, but the blonde with Zelda was stooped and wore a brown sweater and skirt ensemble like a schoolteacher. With their matching bobs and skimpy figures they might have been spinster twins, except up close the woman was rucked and crepey beneath her makeup and had a tragically upturned nub of a nose that made her appear perpetually stunned, as if she’d just run into a glass door.

  Zelda looked the same as she had at Christmas till she smiled. Somehow she’d chipped her new tooth and the canine beside it, a jagged break. As always, seeing her, he realized how little he knew of her life at Highland. He held her a moment before giving way to Scottie.