Arriving in Taft, California was like landing on another planet. Nothing had prepared me for the alien landscape of brown dust and oil rigs as far as the eye could see. I’d expected palm trees. Or at least some cacti.
Alistair greeted me with cool aplomb, looking as if he’d stepped out of a 1930s film in his white linen suit. I was still dressed in my graduation finery—a hot pink halter dress with a matching jacket, but it was much the worse for wear after waiting for a standby night flight out of Philadelphia, an endless layover at O’Hare, and hours at LAX waiting for the puddle jumper to Taft. As usual, I felt as if my looks didn’t quite measure up to Alistair’s standards.
“Welcome to Hades,” he said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. “Yes, this place is as dismal as it looks.”
The worst part was I had to act grateful. After all, he had rescued me from homelessness and/or dealing with Mary Margaret’s righteous fury. So I didn’t even mention his outrageous lies to Aunt Livy. I simply said she “asked to be remembered” to him. I figured he could pick up on my irony if he chose.
But my greeting from Pandora almost made up for the disasters of the last two days. She burst from a motel door and hurtled herself across the parking lot into my arms.
“You came! You came! Alistair promised me you would. You’re my very best American lady friend. There’s no piano. I have a xylophone.”
I gave Alistair a sideways look to see if the revelation that he’d “promised” I’d come would move him to acknowledge his subterfuge, but his attention was on Delia, now following Pandora across the dusty parking lot.
Delia didn’t seem to share her daughter’s joy at seeing me. She gave me a look that hovered between disappointment and disapproval.
“We thought you weren’t coming, you know. Alistair had to hire another girl and then let her go. She wasn’t pleased. We had to pay her for two weeks, even though she’d only worked five days.”
“That’s all right,” Pandora said. “She doesn’t like the Beatles. She made me watch He-Haw on American telly.”
“That’s how long you’ve been here—five days?” I looked around at the barren parking lot, still emitting heat waves although it was nearly six in the evening.
“I have no idea,” Alistair said. “Time stands still in Taft.” He turned to me for acknowledgment of his angst.
But at that moment, Sam Calhoun emerged from the other end of the motel. I recognized him instantly—tan and glossy as he sauntered across the tarmac. His teeth seemed to have their own internal light source.
But as he gave my hand a quick shake, he looked me up and down like a disapproving father.
“You can’t go to a bar around here dressed like that.”
“It’s my graduation dress. I graduated from Bryn Mawr yesterday morning.” It would have been so nice if somebody would acknowledge it.
“She’s not going to join us for happy hour.” Delia gave a dismissive wave in my direction. “She’s here to watch Pandora. That’s what nannies do.”
“Good. I don’t want to have to fight a bunch of locals for a lady’s honor again tonight.” Sam draped an arm around Delia. “Our leading lady stirred up quite a ruckus last night at the local saloon. I had to punch a few noses.”
“Oh, it was awful,” Delia said. “We’re not going to that place again.”
The arm drape was eloquent. Alistair’s face confirmed its message. Sam and Delia had a thing going and Sam wanted me to know it. Alistair’s cold rage made me shiver in spite of the desert heat.
I tried to calm him down with a little arm-draping of my own. I gave him a big hug and said, “I don’t think Alistair is a big fan of saloons. After Pandora goes to bed, we’ll enjoy spending the evening catching up.”
Alistair’s look was grateful. So was Delia’s.
The suite at the Knight’s Rest motel looked comfortable enough. Pandora had her own bedroom and I was to sleep in the outer room, which had a small living area with a couple of easy chairs, a coffee table and a couch. Enough room for us to play a bit. Our suite opened to Delia’s with a conjoining door. The décor was cheap 1930s motel-modern, updated for the seventies with brown shag carpeting and orange plaid bedspreads, but the room was spacious and air-conditioned. And there was a television. I hadn’t had time for TV in months. It would be a fun guilty pleasure.
As Alistair ushered me around, he showed his distain for the ambiance with frequent eye rolls. But I could tell his disgust wasn’t really aimed at the interior decoration.
“They’ve gone out every night since we arrived,” Alistair said. “Drinking with the extras. They say they need to prepare for their parts.” Another eye roll.
I’m going to play my xylophone for you,” Pandora said. She ran to get a toy music maker about a foot long, with an octave of colored keys, and proceeded to bang on it with a yellow plastic mallet. “I’m playing Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.”
“Not while I’m in here, you aren’t.” Alistair grabbed the mallet and absently stuffed it in a drawer.
I retrieved it and handed it back to Pandora. “Alistair is going to go to his room so you can play for me.” I turned to him. “Then we’ll have something to eat, read a story and tuck Pandora in. Why don’t you come back around eight? Bring gin.”
This seemed to satisfy him and he toddled off, leaving Pandora and me to have a lovely time before she snuggled into bed.
When Alistair returned, he carried a bottle—not quite full—of Beefeaters, another of Schweppes tonic, two limes and a bottle of bitters. He went into a complicated explanation of why his gin and tonics were the best in the world. His mood had much improved.
After mixing the drinks, he gave me a huge friendly hug.
“You have no idea how happy I am to see you, Nicky dear. I don’t know what I was thinking when I agreed to take this on. Delia’s become the character she’s playing in the film—a sleazy saloon whore. I can’t even reach her inside that head of hers. And this place…” He waved his hand at an unfortunate mustard-colored lamp. “There are no words...”
After a few moments of chitchat—and some gin—I decided to broach the subject of his recent visit to Goose Hill.
“Aunt Livy enjoyed your visit,” I said. “Too bad you didn’t tell me you were going. I could have had you take some things up there for me. I take it you were on a mission to persuade me to take this job?”
“Partly.” His eyes twinkled at his own mischief. “I had a number of things to do on the east coast before I was going to meet Delia out here, and Sir Thomas has some friends in Kennebunkport…”
“I get it. You had to keep up the pretense that you’re about to marry into the Conway family, right?”
“I have to admit it was something interesting to drop into conversation with Sir Thom’s friends. You see, they have a lovely guest house where I was able to stay rent-free for a couple of weeks.” He twinkled again and squeezed my shoulder. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here, Nick.”
I, on the other hand, was not particularly glad to be in Taft. Things weren’t so bad the first week, although twice I had to go searching for Pandora’s xylophone mallet. Once I found it in my suitcase and another time it was in Delia’s room. Delia said she didn’t know how it got there, but of course I did.
Things took a precipitous drop into ickiness the Saturday after I arrived, when one of the extras called Alistair “Alice” to his face. Not that Alistair didn’t invite it. He kept lurking around the set, poking his nose in everything and giving orders as if he were someone of importance. Sometimes he’d bring his camera with the pretense of taking publicity photos, but mostly he was embarrassingly in the way.
The truth was he didn’t have a thing to do. Mostly he sat in his tiny room and read whatever books he could find in the newsstand that was Taft’s only source of literary stimulation. Alistair’s room was in the building behind ours and about a third the size. He had to walk by Sam’s suite to get to mine, and no doubt he was aware how often Delia was a visitor there.
In the evenings after Pandora went to sleep, he’d come to my room. Sometimes we drank too much and things devolved into sex.
I guess that started on the Alice night. I knew he was feeling awful and figured a little roll in the hay would re-establish his sense of virility. But he didn’t seem to enjoy himself much. I had already figured out that his tomcatting around had a lot more to do with the thrill of the hunt than sexual desire.
One night he came into my room in an unusually manic mood. He’d been writing all day, he said. A wonderful new play. Perfect for Delia. Without a whiff of Fitzgerald. More like Pinter or Osborne. Set in London during the blitz.
I gushed enthusiasm.
“I’m so glad you’ve put Gatsby to rest. He’s such an unhappy character to have moping around in your head.”
“You’re right! I’m through with Gatsby—through with the whole Gatsby game. Who wants to be a man who had nobody show up for his funeral?”
“You need to create your own hero. Somebody with real friends.” I did hope he’d follow through on the project. Nothing sadder than a writer who doesn’t write.
“At least I can be an angry young man instead of a pathetic, lovesick one.”
We toasted the death of Gatsby with Beefeaters and Schweppes and even held a little mock funeral for him, using the dead Beefeaters bottle for a body. We buried it in the dusty scrap of dirt by the front door and tossed some purloined bougainvillea petals on top to mark the spot.
Then we made drunken, giggly love. I think it was the only time either of us really enjoyed our sexual encounters the whole time we were in Taft.
I didn’t ask about his writing unless he volunteered something and mostly he didn’t. I had to hope he was actually writing a play and not jotting down lists of creepy things to do like the ones I found in London, but Pandora and I were never invited to his room, so I couldn’t tell.
He treated Pandora as some sort of messy pet that should be kept out-of-doors and at a good distance. I don’t think he ever exchanged two words with her. Mostly their only interaction was his routine confiscation of her xylophone mallet.
Alistair’s obsession with Delia was not subsiding with his new angry young playwright persona—in fact it got worse. At one point I tried to talk to him about it.
“She’s an actor, Alistair. She does what good actors do—she lives inside a role. Hanging around with Sam is part of that.”
But Alistair went on and on about how she was “betraying” Sir Thomas.
Finally I stopped him.
“Alistair, you know and I know you’re in love with her. You’re jealous. I don’t blame you. But…”
“I’m not in love with her.” He threw a plastic cup across the room in sudden rage. I’ll swear his eyes turned flaming red. His face certainly did. “Not like you think. It’s not…sordid.” He hissed the word, hovering above me. For a moment I was afraid he was going to hit me. “She’s like a mother to me, don’t you know that? She nurtures me. My writing. My gifts. She’s the mother I never had.”
Oh, geez. Maybe I had Oedipus on my hands.
Whatever his motivations, Alistair was obsessed with the Delia/Sam thing. On the nights Delia didn’t go out drinking with the locals, Alistair would come to my room to listen through Delia’s door for Sam’s voice, and on nights when she went out, he’d come to my room to rant about her infidelity.
I’d always argue strongly in favor of letting sleeping dogs lie—Sam Calhoun being a dangerous dog to arouse. That wasn’t all publicity hype about his fighting. Punching people was the talent that got him into show business. He’d been a Golden Gloves champion and stunt man before he got his acting break.
Alistair mostly gave Sam himself a wide berth—a smart idea under the circumstances—but he complained about Sam to anybody who would listen. Which was pretty much only me. And poor Delia, of course. Alistair became more and more brutal in his criticism of her and I could hear their screaming fights through the connecting door every time she let him in. As the days wore on, I was increasingly afraid the feud would erupt in violence.
Which it did, of course, on that infamous night of June 22nd.
When I heard the crash-and-clatter of something large being thrown against our connecting wall, I knew things had gone way beyond arguing. I had to do something. I didn’t think he’d actually hurt Delia on purpose, but his rage was so out of control, anything could happen.
I contemplated calling the police. But I’d been around the shoot long enough to understand the fear of bad publicity. Plus I knew how furious everybody would be if bureaucratic delays kept us in Taft any longer than necessary.
So I decided to phone Sam: one of a series of bad decisions I made that night. I should explain that I didn’t intend for Sam to give Alistair a beating. I hoped that Sam’s arrival would scare Alistair enough to stop him from throwing things. I figured Alistair would be embarrassed enough to leave the scene and go to his room to cool off.
But I should have realized the worst might happen.
As of course, it did.