The Woman Lit by Fireflies

by Jim Harrison

  “The American consul showed me that sheet of paper,” she continued. “I suppose I’m an innocent in these matters but nowhere does it say he was convicted of anything. It just shows where he’s been and who he’s been with—”

  “Every insurgent and leftist terrorist group in Peru, Panama, Guatemala, southern Mexico . . . I mean, my God Gwen . . .”

  “You’ve developed a touching belief in our government’s spies. Does that go with all of this?” She remained cool as she looked around the office which could not be more expensively subdued. She smiled as lights began to blink on Billy’s three phones and the intercom. “You certainly don’t get a chance to be lonely.”

  Billy stared down at his blinking desk, picked up a phone and blew it. “No fucking calls!” he shouted. “And I mean no fucking calls!” Now all the blood was back in his face as he looked up at Gwen and finally directly into her eyes. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know. I do know I was at the butcher shop in town the other day and I got this.” She passed Zip’s note across the desk. “It looks like after things calm down he’s going to be killed.”

  Billy looked long and hard at the note as if there were something beyond the few sentences. To his relief she stood as if to go.

  “I’m going to meet Patty. I know you’re busy but can I see you after work?”

  He asked her to come to dinner and gave her his home address and phone number. After he escorted her out of his office and out the main door and returned to his desk he remembered he was flying up to San Francisco for a ball game. He could still catch the first game and be home by early evening. He didn’t know where she was staying but would have his secretary call Patty. He slid Zip’s folder back in the desk, then sat there until tears formed and he couldn’t swallow.

  III

  When Gwen called at seven in the morning Patricia had only been asleep for two hours. When she heard Gwen’s voice she thought she was back in prison and Gwen was waking her for the pre-breakfast exercise period. If you didn’t show up for exercise you got a demerit and no dessert with lunch. The dessert was usually awful but it was more awful to be deprived of it and have to watch everyone else eat theirs. The first two months Patty had been so depressed that Gwen had to help her bathe and dress, and after they got out Patty resented Gwen for her own weakness. Gwen’s parents appeared once a month for a visit but Patty’s parents never did show up from Chicago. Gwen’s mother knitted Patty a wonderful sweater, and Gwen’s dad, who was a cowboy and smelled of Old Spice and whiskey, gave her earrings that were tiny silver spurs. Patty had the uncomfortable feeling that Gwen’s dad wanted to make love to her, but then Gwen told her that her dad was a “saddle tramp,” which seemed to have a sexual connotation.

  But Patty looked around her bedroom and at the phone in her hand and decided she wasn’t in prison. There was also a bird at the window she had failed to identify in her newly purchased bird book. She listened to Gwen carefully—movie executives are used to early calls, usually from New York City, because of the time difference. She told Gwen she had had a difficult night but would drive by her hotel by mid-morning. Then she quickly decided that this was insufficiently warm and added that she had expected Gwen’s call and looked forward to seeing her.

  Patricia got up then, broke a 5 mg Valium in half and swallowed it with a swig of Evian. She tiptoed to the window and parted the shade, but her movement had alarmed the bird and it flew away, still smudgy and indeterminate. She turned off the bedside phone and remembered how Sam, coarse and unmannerly as he was, always could identify any bird they saw together. At first she thought Sam was faking it but Gwen knew enough about birds to advise her that this wasn’t so. Patty’s suspicious nature had done well by her in the movie business which, because of its surface extravagance, was susceptible to fraud of a thousand varieties.

  Patty was the youngest of three daughters of a Chicago mill worker who would line up the girls, he thought innocently, each morning and make a mock decision on who was the prettiest. In this manner the father cursed his daughters into becoming overly competitive and feminine. Patty was the first in the entire history of the family to go to college, winning a National Merit Scholarship and choosing Colorado because her favorite girlhood book had been Heidi and she wanted to live among mountains. When she was sent off to prison in the middle of her junior year her parents felt a transcendent sense of betrayal, partly because they could no longer brag about “our Patty” along the row houses and at union hall social functions. They allowed Patty to disappear for seven years then, finally tracking her down for a funeral when the oldest sister died in a car accident in Galesburg. Later on, with Patty’s success, the family rupture seemed unthinkable.

  Patty was a little uncomfortable with the amount of money she made and tended to live well under her income. She stayed in the same bungalow she had bought thirteen years before in Sherman Oaks, which was now worth over five times its purchase price. Her only extravagances were a Porsche Carrera and the fact that she always exceeded her per diem when she traveled. Travel meant a specific loss of control and she wanted to live as comfortably as possible. It also exposed her to the sort of rich men she apparently liked to disappoint. She had had a dozen actual affairs and one failed marriage and resented the simple fact that Sam had been the love of her life. In the very recent years she had simply been too busy to be in love.

  Her entire career had been spent with the largest of the studios and her mixture of femininity and abrasiveness made underlings cautious and equals very nervous. To superiors, however, Patty simply delivered the goods. She saved them from the mistakes the imperial purple is heir to, the mistakes powerful men make when they’re simply acting powerful. She was instrumental in turning down projects such as Heaven’s Gate, Rhinestone and Ishtar. The CEO had quipped that Patty would be rich if she had spent her career selling short on the market. Unfortunately, her reputation lay in preventing failures rather than backing successes. Her intelligence wasn’t skewed politically but to problem solving. In short, Patty was unshakably reliable. The joke around the studio, which was true, was that Patty even studied and filed interoffice memos. But there was a bit more snazz and fire to her than her enemies would admit. Years before when she was still a continuity girl she had had a run-in with a bankable star. He hadn’t been smoking in previous takes and had lit up on number eight after a long break. She told him to put out the cigarette and he refused, saying that he had been smoking before. His secretary, makeup girl and wardrobe boy agreed. Then the queasy director decided to agree.

  “If you were smoking, then I shouldn’t be working here,” Patty said, walking off the set.

  The producer fired her on the way out but she was rehired by the president of the studio as she was packing up the contents of her meager cubicle. He hated the fucking actor and wanted a showdown. Besides, he had stopped by earlier and remembered the actor wasn’t smoking and knew the “dailies” would prove him right. The upshot continued to grow, as it were. The actor, at the urging of his agent, called her and apologized. It turned out he was also from Chicago, which she already knew, and they began going out, and continued doing so for three years, during which time he signed for two more immensely profitable films for the studio. Patty, to her advantage, was modest about taking credit, though she admitted that the actor didn’t like to read so she would read a sampling of scripts to him while he was getting stoned. She actually cared for him and they had spent truly fantastic hours in bed before he had decided that cocaine was his drug of choice.

  Cocaine had also been the problem the night before, she thought as she had drifted off to sleep. Patty had been responsible for getting a TV starlet cast in her first movie. The girl was lovely and talented, and though Patty had heard there had been a minor drug problem in New York, the girl had shown no signs of recent abuse. In fact, the whole problem seemed to be fading away somewhat in the movie business. Patty’s private analysis of the situation was that success is an abstr
action, and recently successful people don’t get the jolt from their accomplishments that they had so long anticipated. Cocaine simply provided that jolt. The downside was that continual snorting over a long period of time turned the user into a spit-dribbling borderline psychotic. One morning Patty’s actor boyfriend had looked at his cowboy boots and wept long and hard because the boots were getting old.

  The evening before there was an after-midnight call from the starlet’s boyfriend at the Sunset Marquis. He had noted that her call sheet said a driver would pick her up at five A.M. and that she was presently puffy and hysterical behind a locked bathroom door. On the way over to the hotel Patty suspected that the boyfriend would be another of the scumbag peacocks who tended to attach themselves to models and actresses. The boyfriend, however, turned out to be a rather portly middle-aged midwestern writer whose name Patty recognized, and who turned out to be quite helpful, though it took until three A.M. to get the actress asleep. By this time Patty had made a tentative screenplay deal with the writer at barely above Writers Guild scale, so it was a pretty good night though she expected a nasty call from his agent the next day. She had been a little alarmed by the way the writer drank whiskey though it didn’t seem to change his behavior. When they warmed to each other she asked him why he drank so much and he said that he had no idea.

  Patty might not have heard of Zip’s problems, and thus would not have anticipated Gwen’s call, if it hadn’t been for Harold, her gay confidant and script reader. Harold read all the newspapers and had a tremendous memory, so when he had seen a small piece on Ted Frazer in the New York Times he clipped it. Not wanting to be a bearer of bad tidings Harold waited a full day before giving Patty a call. They had been close for a dozen years and Harold knew intimately all the details of Patty’s life, including what he thought of as her thrilling revolutionary period. He had been mindful enough to call an Associated Press man he knew who supplied a great deal of extra information on Zip, much of it quite disturbing. Harold and Patty had discussed the situation at length and, quite properly he thought, Patty had decided to do nothing about getting in touch with her wild bunch.

  On her way to Gwen’s hotel Patty rehearsed some of the things that were going well in her life in anticipation of a potential mud bath. She was a secretly generous person to Harold who spent all of his money on books, to the two sons of her dead sister whom she was putting through the University of Illinois, and to her parents whom she had bought one of those expensive motor homes that clutter the highways of Florida and the Southwest during the winter months. That was all well and good enough, as they say in the Midwest, but the uncomfortable lump beneath her breastbone had begun to enlarge as she came closer to Le Parc. Rather than struggle with the feeling, she identified it as a mixture of guilt and shame. Gwen had quite literally saved her life during her prolonged depression in prison and, after they got out, this fact repelled Patty. She, frankly, had been the weak sister and Gwen’s capacity for endurance had finally angered her. But now that was so far in the past that Patty intended to apologize for not keeping in touch, if only to get rid of the baggage of guilt. She would also contribute liberally to Zip’s defense fund if that was required, though the AP man had insisted that at least on the surface Zip was probably a terrorist who should be locked up forever. When she had questioned this “surface” comment the AP man said that all the information on Zip came from the U.S. and Mexican governments, and governments had dropped well below lawyers and stockbrokers on the credibility scale. She had enjoyed this comment and it now reminded her of Billy who Gwen said she was going to see this morning.

  If anyone kicked in money it should be Billy. She had run into him at the Bradley fund raiser and he had been sitting with the true California fat cats. She had brought Harold along and had sent him off to eavesdrop, finding out that these men had been talking about the pros and cons of buying professional sports teams. Billy hadn’t noticed her in the crowd so she had put herself in the way when he tried to disappear early. She admitted to herself that he seemed to be trying desperately to be friendly while she punished him, as subtly as possible. Her depression during the year in prison had been exacerbated by the news that had reached them that Billy had been released after three months and his charges reduced to a misdemeanor. The news hadn’t upset Gwen who properly attributed it to the expensive lawyers Billy’s family could afford. Sam’s sentence had also been reduced upon his agreement to go to Vietnam as a medic but that was acceptable to Patty on the basis of his claustrophobia. By then Sam was merely trading six months for three more years just to get out of a prison cell.

  At the hotel the desk clerk said Gwen left word that she would be up at the small flower garden and pool on the roof. Patty knew the hotel, as she tended to put writers and young directors there who were either intimidated or bored by the grander establishments, and disliked the cruddy but pretentious nonchalance of the Château Marmont.

  Gwen’s back was turned and Patty’s first impression was that Gwen should change hairdressers. But then Gwen glanced around, jumped to her feet and embraced Patty with the sort of unaffected radiance that is not habitual in Southern California.

  “I know the story and I want to help,” Patty found herself saying before freezing in hesitation. She wasn’t used to throwing down her cards. “I want to do what I can.” It made good sense to add this qualifier.

  “You sure look wonderful. I got crow’s feet from being in the sun too much.” Gwen put her fingers against her temples, still beaming at Patty who began to feel uncomfortable.

  “What do you expect to get out of this? I mean what’s the bottom line?” They sat down and Patty assumed the role of the interrogator to avoid an oncoming sense of emotional soreness. She did not care for the immediate impression—really the same as twenty years before—that Gwen was far nobler than she herself was.

  “It’s easy to do nothing. It makes a lot of sense to do nothing because it’s so hard to think of the right thing to do.” She handed Patty Zip’s note and continued. “He’s asking us to help him. Maybe all we can do is go down there and say good-bye.”

  “I did some research with a reliable source. There’s the question of whether he’s worth the trip.” Patty had filmed in Arizona and the thought of actually going to Nogales in the early summer appalled her. She was the sort of Nordic mid-westerner who had never quite adjusted to the heat of the Southwest.

  “You won’t know if he’s worth the trip until you see him. It’s not the sort of thing anyone wants to do but I felt obligated to tell you.”

  “What did Billy have to say?”

  “Pretty much the same thing you’re saying. But he’s looking into it. I’m going to see him later and I thought we could all have dinner.”

  “I don’t want to see Billy. I think he sold us out. I’ve always thought that. I saw him four years ago by accident and he wouldn’t answer my questions.” Patty was flushed now and felt her anger in her stomach. She saw Gwen wince and simply didn’t care.

  “Billy just had better lawyers. How is it his fault his father could afford the best lawyers? Besides, what does it matter? This isn’t about you or Billy or me but about a man who’s going to be killed. We both used to love him, didn’t we?” Now there were tears in Gwen’s eyes that she wished very much weren’t there. Her parents had told her when she was a little girl that it was unthinkable to cry in order to get your way.

  But this evident grief had a powerful effect on Patty. She drew her chair closer to Gwen and took her hand. She really has no idea what she’s doing, Patty thought. Here she is and she doesn’t know what to do other than ask us to help a lost cause.

  “Oh, fuck it,” Patty said, “count me in for anything. What if we didn’t go and read the obituary? What would we feel like? Did you get in touch with Sam?”

  “I was saving him for the last because I think of him as a sure thing. Did you ever see him?” Gwen dabbed her eyes with the cocktail napkin she took from under her glass of water. Gwen
watched Patty sink into herself, then looked off to the east and the peculiar way the smog was gathering in the late morning heat. She felt confused enough to plan a drive out to the ocean in the afternoon.

  “A few years after we got out of prison he wrote to me from a hospital, one of those veterans’ mental wards. My parents forwarded the letter. It sounded so terrible I never wrote him back. I was terrible myself at the time and I didn’t see the point in two fucked-up people getting back together. It’s strange how we all thought we were so wonderful together and then it was nothing.”

  They made a grand effort at small talk then, as if the strain could no longer be endured. Gwen asked Patty how to get to the ocean. They actually laughed remembering a time in San Francisco when they all had driven north across the Golden Gate in Billy’s van. It had taken them hours to find the ocean because they were stoned, which they only got away with because Zip was on a mattress in the back sleeping off an all-night antiwar strategy meeting.

  IV

  The moment Gwen had left his office Billy called the Mexican consul and asked a few questions, then set up an appointment. He had his secretary give Fred a fifteen-minute alert down in the garage out of consideration for a poker game the drivers maintained. Billy reminded himself not to ask questions about his ex-wife, then wondered if Fred was lying and Sarah was taking a boyfriend to Paris. He felt a stirring when he thought of Gwen’s fanny in her jeans, the splendid shape of which had not diminished. It must be the horses. Riding horses builds fine fannies, he thought. Billy’s errant and often wild sense of humor made him keep leatherbound copies of Charles Dickens’s novel about the legal profession, Bleak House, in the office library. He occasionally handed the novel out, straight-faced, as gifts to clients he disliked. It was partly Rebecca’s idea. When she was home they liked to cook together and dream up practical jokes, many of which were dangerous and insensitive, but the planning itself was the release.