by Oakley Hall
I shook my head. Payment for first draft screenplay was about fifty thousand dollars, which I might be blasé about, but the actual sale of the screen rights, if they decided to make the film, was big, big bucks.
I snapped my fingers beneath the tabletop, smiling at Liz. The spectacles of the producer, Toby Schlicter, sported individual dark wings of glass that folded down over the lenses, turning them into dark glasses, or that could be raised into a kind of shelf that made him look like a Nazi interrogator. He had announced that he had little faith in the ability of novelists to “lick” the film adaptations of their novels.
A breath of breeze rippled the swimming pool and blew the curtains in soft insistent folds.
Liz’s smile had a sweet/sad good-bye quality to it. When I rose, she offered her makeupless cheek for me to kiss.
“Please call me next time you’re in town, Payton,” she said. “We can drink some more Veuve Clicquot!”
“Sounds great!” I said.
* * *
It may be that the reappearance of Liz Fletcher in my life wrecked my marriage, for it was as though Norma knew intuitively of my disloyalty, and nothing between us seemed to work after that.
I had rather willfully rejected a lot of money on the film United Artists might have made of Gates of Bone, about which there were to be some bitter recriminations. Norma wanted more money than I provided, and she found a job at the University of California Press. She went to live in Berkeley with our children, whom she was to retain as the “nurturer.” Divorced, I left the left coast for New York and some publisher negotiations, then went to Northern Ireland to accumulate the facts and wisdom to write a book about the Troubles. Wasn’t it my ambition to try to make the world a better place? At least I had not contributed to the delinquency of Gates of Bone, which, if it was not the Great American Novel, was at least the Great San Diego Novel.
2
1971
When my second wife, Gretchen Fairchild, and I returned from Indonesia, she spent most of a month in the darkroom working on the photographs for the book on East Timor. When she was done, and the text and photographs sent off to Viking, we flew off to Paris on a vacation and a whim of mine.
We prowled Montmartre, heading down from Sacre Coeur on the steep, narrow streets. I assured myself that I was not looking for Corinne exactly, but there seemed a possibility that I would run into her, on the streets or in some bistro, and she would (I knew she wouldn’t) look exactly the same. Ever since the war, maybe once a month I had experienced a little cold shot of shame for my casual mistreatment of her.
Montmartre had the feel of a village: open-air markets, blue-collar people, a general workaday bustle. In the Place des Abbesses, Gretchen and I drank vermouth in a brasserie, with advertisements for Corsican wine on the walls and that exhalation of vin ordinaire that Dos Passos had likened to the smell of sawdust. I remembered the brasserie but could not connect it to Corinne’s parc in the tangle of cobbled streets.
Outside, the Parisian spring was not warm enough for the bright silk dress Gretchen was wearing—goose bumps noticeable on her arms, white beret on her red hair, her Hasselblad hanging like a sawed-off bazooka under her arm. Parisians, who were sick of tourists with their cameras, took her seriously because she carried a serious camera. She was not, however, photographically impressed with Sacre Coeur or Montmartre in general, except for the tangle of stone of the cemetery.
“So you can’t locate your wartime love nest, mon vieux?” she said.
“She had a room in the attic of a building across from a little parc. I have the unlikely thought that I’ll meet her on the street and ask her to forgive me, and she will. And I can forget about her.”
I had explained to my wife what there was to forgive. There had been a tincture of A Farewell to Arms in my relationship with Corinne. I had given her the expectation that I was going to desert the war for love of her. Instead I had deserted her to return to the Battle of the Bulge. It was as though the war had provided me with an opportunity to be a shit, like the officers of whom I disapproved, and I had taken it.
She may have thought I had been killed in the Ardennes. After the war, when I was in Paris writing for Soldiers’ Monthly, I had never tried to find her.
“There are many excuses in wartime,” Gretchen said. “Sacre bleu!” She was having fun with French expletives.
We trod the narrow sidewalks. An old gent in a kind of frock coat, with a voluminous bow tie, raised his hat to Gretchen, who rewarded him with her lovely smile.
“I remember that place,” I said, pointing to a corner café. “They used to sing ‘Quatre-vingt Chasseurs’ in there. Just roaring out the verses. Night after night, as I recall it.”
“I heard it sung by a gang of Frenchmen at Namche Bazar on the route up to Everest Base Camp,” Gretchen said. “Yes, all its verses.”
“Perhaps it sounded better in the thin air of the Himalayas.”
“I believe it did not!” She laughed her joyful laugh.
“She was no more a professional prostitute than I was a professional soldier,” I said.
“You have been to Paris several times,” Gretchen said. “Why this now, parbleu?”
The recollection of having acted badly pestered me like the mouse behind the headboard.
“My thing,” I said.
“Surely it is a stretch for even your so-expansible complaint, mon ami,” Gretchen said. She unshipped her camera and went into photographer mode, long-legged, gawky, and very deft. Across the street in a second-story window, a girl child with an unkempt pouf of black hair was revealed with her doll held against her breast, three electric or telephone wires paralleling across the window in front of her. Before Gretchen could snap her picture, the girl had vanished.
“Merde alors!” Gretchen said, reassembling herself.
* * *
At that time of our happiness together, she must have already harbored the evil cells that were to molest her to death.
She and I collaborated on two books of photographs by her and text by me, including a high degree of social conscience on Tibet and East Timor, books that were popular enough to sell well, and make me proud besides.
Chapter 16
1985
Elizabeth Fletcher’s funeral was, of course, at Forest Lawn, a rolling green campus, with views out over Glendale, and black-clad ranks of Hollywood elderly attending the services for one of their own.
Across a crowded room, in a fume of calla lilies and expensive perfume, I glimpsed Dr. Barbara Rothenberg. She wore a long-sleeved black dress and raised a gloved hand to lift a fringe of veil on her black velvet crush hat. Her face was appropriately pale.
This was December 1985. As we listened to the eulogies, Bonny shifted her weight from one black nylon leg to the other, slim if not as slender as she was as the eighteen-year-old flame of my life. Errol Flynn had called her “the fair one,” as I had been “the young Martin Eden.” Under the expensive hat a lock of silver hair slid back like a curtain as she smiled stiffly at me, pink-faced with the recognition of the old boyfriend.
She was a divorcée, I knew. She had served on the board of Stanford Hospital. She had been an important figure in Planned Parenthood, perhaps a director. Once I had glimpsed her on CNN amid a squad of stern-looking women, with a banner overhead.
The drill now was to file past the casket where Liz Fletcher lay in beige silk upholstery, powdered, rouged, long-lashed old eyes closed. The pink lips of that famous pouty mouth gave me my first blow job. I followed a skinny lady with a cane, following an aged gent in an Armani suit.
Bonny was somewhere behind me.
I had had occasion to compare memorial services. This did not seem as classy as Liz deserved. She was a considerable star, briefly of the brightest luminosity. For a time she had the power to induce United Artists to contract for films she might star in, such as Gates of Bone.
Alzheimer’s struck her down at what seemed a young age by my sexagenarian standard. She
spent her last years diapered and wheelchaired in a home, her medication-swollen face with an eternal blank and pouty smile. When I visited her I had been able to rouse her interest by speaking of my brother, Richard, but the interest had faded quickly.
Bonny and I faced each other again as I started out the door, and I blessed the fact that I did not have a substantial gut and did possess a good proportion of my hair as well as a soon-to-be-surgically-corrected limp. I waited for her outside, feeling superior to the frailer elderly passing out of the mortuary. Below us lay miles of suburban Glendale, preternaturally clear in the smog-controlled and winter air.
Bonny appeared out of the farther doorway, donning dark glasses. I hastened to join her in the general exodus. There was a moment of indecision as both of us wondered whether or not to brush lips. She extended a gloved hand. “Hello, Payton.”
“Can I bear you away from here?”
“I have a car. I’m staying with my daughter in Santa Monica.”
We moved together onto the asphalt expanse of the parking lot, behind a man in a wheelchair pushed by a Filipino attendant.
When Bonny took my arm I felt a laughable electric chill.
“What a sad occasion for us to meet again,” she said. “Your old flame.”
“No, Bonny, you were my flame. She was my brother’s fiancée.”
She tossed her head in a recollecting way. “Those old ambiguities.”
I prayed that she would not utter some cliché that would turn me off like a cold shower. Holding my arm, she stretched her legs to keep pace, her black-stockinged calf a precise distance from my gray flannel, not too close nor too far, either.
Once I had shouted at her that she would end up like her mother.
“That first time I met your mother,” I said, “she looked at me as though I was Jack the Ripper.”
“She’s still alive,” Bonny said. “Still playing bridge.”
I directed her toward my car and opened the door for her. LA sunshine darted along the fenders.
“What about my car?”
“We’ll come back for it later.”
She slipped inside, tucking the seat of her skirt beneath her with a grace I admired. She sat with her handbag in her lap, hands clasped on top of it. Around us people slammed car doors; a black Chrysler headed past. The Jag’s engine hummed to life.
Where were we headed? Down into LA. In my youth Los Angeles had been the City of Evil.
“So famous authors drive Jaguars,” Bonny says.
“It was Gretchen’s.”
“I heard she died of cancer,” she murmured.
“A folly of the Lord’s.” I could hear the clutch in my voice that I had meant to be light. “She was one of the good ones,” I added.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me, too.”
“Two wives?” Bonny asked.
I nodded. “And you are divorced?”
“Dan wanted a younger wife.” She laid her hands to her cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m not,” Bonny said.
“Are you still in practice?”
“Mostly retired. I don’t take on new patients. I do some tours with DWW.”
“What’s DWW?”
“Doctors with Wings. It’s an American version of Doctors Without Borders.”
“Good for you.”
“And you?” Bonny said.
“Researching a book on California water.”
“Good for you. Where are we going?”
“To have a drink. Then dinner.”
“I’m having dinner with my daughter and her family.”
“Call her and call it off. Surely you knew you’d see me at Liz’s funeral, and surely you knew I’d invite you for a drink and dinner.”
Her blue eye flashed at me.
“Pick up where we left off,” I said.
“That’s so romantic!” she said, but not as though she really thought so.
It seemed that everything I said was off target, and maybe Bonny was feeling the same thing.
“You ruined my reputation with Gates of Bone,” she said cheerfully. “I can never go back to San Diego. I’m so grateful!”
“The writer contrives character and situation from primary felt experience,” I said. “I apologized lengthily in a letter I never sent you.”
Her eye flicked at me again, and away.
“Call your daughter and tell her you are having dinner with an old, old boyfriend.”
“All right,” she said.
* * *
We ate dinner in a shadowy Los Angeles clip joint called the San Andreas Fault, at a corner table with a bottle of forty-two-dollar cabernet before us, discussing our families. I had two children whom I did not know very well because they had been raised by their mother after the divorce: Jonathan, who taught English lit at the University of Wisconsin, and Diane, who lived in Denver with her stock-salesman husband and two children and who had a good backhand.
Bonny had two children also, both girls; grandchildren also. I lived in San Francisco, on Telegraph Hill, mostly alone. She had a condo in Palo Alto, a condo on the island of Hawaii, and a shared apartment in Paris. She had taken up golf. There were hints of men in her life. In politics we were both old-fashioned tax-and-spend liberals. Her Santa Monica daughter was a Republican, which was lamented. I pointed out that I disapproved of golf. I recalled having seen her in a newspaper photograph of Planned Parenthood brass.
“I held opinions that were not always popular with those good people,” she said. “I held that the right or wrong of abortion is not the issue. A girl’s body is her own, not government property. She makes her decision, right or wrong. Period.”
And, as the waiter poured the last of the wine, she said, “What happened to your—social interests? You were so earnest about them.”
“You may have seen my books on Tibet and East Timor, with my wife’s photographs. I’m proud of those. I’m on some boards. Trying to do something about land mines, for one.”
There was a fine pink glow to her cheeks from the wine. She said, “You know, I worry about sin. What is it that such a religious fuss is made over it? That Jesus died to save us from? Sleeping with someone whose divorce is not yet final? Coveting a friend’s fancy car? I think sin is land mines. This nation has been at war almost continually since World War II, and everywhere we’ve fought we’ve left land mines to blow the feet and legs off children. I remember once you said Manzanar was our fault. Land mines are our fault! We will be punished for them!”
I said I agreed, and she nodded with a sharp dip of her chin.
“May I inquire what caused the change in you?” I asked. “Bonny to Barbara.”
“Let’s just have a pleasant time denouncing land mines, shall we?”
She sat with her face turned down in the candlelight. She said, “What did you want of me back then? Just—physical? I thought there was something else.”
“You were Mission Hills, and the Daltreys had been ejected from that promised land, so to speak. Well, and I thought you were beautiful. If not beautiful, infinitely attractive. It had something to do with my exposure to those tot molestation clippings at the brand. That obsessed me then. You seemed to me to be some kind of armored rebuke to any such disasters. You were a symbol for the way things ought to be.”
Bonny laid her hands to her cheeks again, as though to conceal her face from me. “Can I see you up north?” I asked.
“Of course.” She smiled with a queer stiffness of her cheek muscles, rose, put down her napkin, and took up her purse. Dinner was over.
I parked beside her rental Ford, but she made no move to open the door. We sat in the Jag looking out over the lights of Glendale as we had spent a host of nights, aroused and unsatisfied in each other’s arms, looking from Point Loma to the lights of San Diego.
“I was pregnant,” she said.
I understood, like a roof falling in. “Coming down from LA?”
“Yes.”
/>
Premature ejaculation is the curse of the American male. I thought it best not to enunciate that. “Sorry,” I said.
“I was very angry,” Bonny said. “I was angry at you, at the whole trap of women, gender, God, San Diego, Johnny Pierce, my mother, myself getting pregnant at the drop of a sperm, the games you and I played that of course I should have known were Russian roulette. Mostly you. You told me you hadn’t—connected. But a sperm had crash-landed in the Zona Pellucida.”
“Sorry.”
“Wasn’t there a way of fizzing a Coke bottle—?” She made a sound like a laugh, not as though she thought anything was funny.
“Back to Tijuana?”
“I wasn’t going to do that. I finished the year at State, then I went up to Menlo Park to my aunt Honey. I stayed with her till I had it. The baby. A girl.”
“Sorry,” I said again.
“They took her away immediately. I hardly saw her. That was the way you did things then. Gone. Out of my life. I was furious all over again. I was a furious girl. I got straight A’s in premed in my fury. I tried to write you letters as though nothing had happened.”
“By the time I got the telegram you were engaged.”
“I thought you should come home and marry me,” she said. “But you didn’t respond. Let me tell you,” she went on. “That first year of medical school. There were two women. Gloria and me. The demands for sexual favors were—just intolerable. It was what you would have called molestation. You know, it still goes on. I was on the ethics committee for two years—” She blew her breath out in a hard sigh.
“Gloria and I decided if we were married they couldn’t hit on us so. I’d read a book about the female prisoners on the convict ships sent to Australia. They had to take on one crewman, or all. I sent the telegram to you. I don’t know how I thought you could have flown home from Europe just because I needed you. I guess I thought you’d be wounded, and I’d nurse you and they wouldn’t keep after me because I was the wife of a wounded hero. But you didn’t answer, and there was a nice young intern named Dan I liked. He and I and Gloria and Jim Higgins were married. It was supposed to be temporary. Gloria and Jim divorced right after med school, but Dan and I just went along.” She said bitterly, “Until a young bimbo with a cute bottom and a talent for oral sex got after him.”
