Marcus picked up Truck Stop Secrets and hurled it across his living room. It hit the wall behind the white and aubergine Lady’s Slipper orchid Gwendolyn had given him for his birthday, which by some miracle hadn’t died. My Purple Summer followed soon after.
“Two books a month?” he yelled at the paperbacks cowering in the corner. “What a joke! I can’t even do two chapters.”
Truck Stop Secrets and My Purple Summer were the literary equivalent of potato chips. Delicious on the way down, but after you were done, you couldn’t remember much about what you had just consumed.
When reduced to their essence, Secrets and Summer were the same story. Two guys meet; they find each other attractive but can’t admit it, so nothing happens until some sort of fluke occurrence throws them into a situation where their forbidden passions overcome society’s conventions.
It was so formulaic that Marcus had figured he could concoct a tale like that if he was in a coma. He had been so confident of it that he hadn’t even bothered trying for a couple of weeks. For the first time in his life, he had become easily distracted. After repainting the inside of his villa, he’d given Nelson a hand doing some of the legwork on digging into the names on Kathryn’s list—not that it had unveiled anything. The names were as bogus as Kathryn suspected they’d be.
And all the while, he kept expecting to hear from Windermere. The four days it had taken to get from LA to New York by train were more than enough to read a screenplay. Although Windermere had his hands full coordinating the nationwide launches for Around the World in 80 Days, couldn’t he spare the five minutes it would take to pick up the phone or send a telegram?
Why waste time on some trashy novel if Windermere was able to connect him with someone who could bring Horatius at the Bridge to the screen?
But by the time May had bled into June, cash was running low. So Marcus had sat at his typewriter and knocked out the first chapter of a story based on his teenage encounter with Dwight Brewster, the son of McKeesport’s chief of police. In a masterstroke of bad timing, Marcus’s father had walked in on them mid-passion; two hours later, Roland Adler was putting his son on the midnight train to Chicago.
Sitting at his desk, Marcus had been surprised—and a little bamboozled—to discover that churning out florid prose wasn’t the mindless hamster run he expected. He told himself that he was more of a screenwriter and this sort of stuff required a different set of cerebral muscles. Not that there was anything cerebral about describing a couple of guys mauling each other in a small-town jail. It had been a struggle, but he’d got there and had been sufficiently satisfied with the result. He’d dispatched his sample chapter to Capulet Books and a few weeks later, the mail had brought a check for two hundred and fifty dollars and an October 31st deadline.
And that’s where Marcus had made the imprudent choice that had led him to his current pickle. Did he start work? No. Did he pencil an outline for the story so that when the mood took him, he could sit down and hammer out the yarn he had in mind? No. He’d already overcome the hard part—switching to novel writing—and presumed that the rest would flow as easily as The 34th Parallel. Meanwhile, summer had arrived. There were pools to swim in, tans to be worked on, parties to attend, drive-in movies to enjoy, strangers to tempt. Jail Bait could wait.
But he had been dead wrong.
He hadn’t started work on this trashy novel nobody would read until well into August, and when he had, the story wouldn’t come. It was like Horatius at the Bridge all over again.
He crushed his empty pack of cigarettes and asked himself why he’d wasted a whole summer. The answer came to him with surprising speed.
Because of what you’ve been avoiding.
Marcus had spent too long crafting artificial love stories to be fooled by the concept of “love at first sight.” If love worked like that, he’d still be with Ramon, or Oliver, or Domenico. He believed in love—he’d loved all three of those men—but not at first sight. Love took time. It required patience and persistence to see the person behind the handsome face or piercing eyes. Attraction at first sight, yes, but not love.
And then: Rex Halliday.
When Gwendolyn had introduced him the night of his fiftieth birthday party, Marcus could have sworn he’d heard a lush Max Steiner score swell around them as the gentle lights strung up in the trees landed on Rex’s face in an exquisite close-up.
But what did it matter? He was with Luckie so that was that.
He’d done his best to busy himself with the parade of temptations that a California summer brought, but the old “plenty of fish in the sea” bromide didn’t sustain him. Nor did booze. Nor did exhausting laps in the pool. Nor the hundred other activities he’d used to fill his sunshiny days and sultry nights.
His thoughts returned again and again to Rex.
What was he doing right this very second? How did he take his coffee? Was he content with Luckie? Would it be strange if he invited Rex and Luckie over for gin-and-gin-rummy? No, of course it wouldn’t. But could he stop himself from staring into that face like a hypnotized puppy? Probably not. He wondered who Rex’s favorite movies stars were. Judy Garland over Betty Grable? Ronald Colman or Cary Grant? Did he drool over Rock Hudson like everybody else? It wasn’t until Marcus started doodling Rex’s name with a heart over the ‘i’ in Halliday that he realized he’d turned into a lovesick teenager who’d frittered away the summer mooning over a guy when he should have been working hard to meet a deadline.
He couldn’t be bothered retrieving Truck Stop Secrets and My Purple Summer from the floor, and the sight of the blank page jutting out of his typewriter gave him the dry heaves.
Ripping open a fresh pack of Camels, he crossed over to his bookshelf and pulled out his oldest photo album. His father had given him fifteen minutes to pack before hauling him off to the McKeesport railway station, so he only had a couple of photographs from his childhood.
His favorite was one of him and Dwight at their first Boy Rangers of America meeting. They’d been only nine or ten years old and had gotten worked up about everything: meeting the new boys, the uniform, using the official password. He remembered posing for the photo; he and Dwight had stood with their arms slung around each other, grinning like hyenas.
October was slipping away. With only five days left, all he had was a dubious first chapter and a bunch of half-baked ideas and clichéd characters constipating his imagination and weighing him down like that brick he’d appropriated from the Hollywood Hotel demolition site. He had hoped that when he found the photo, inspiration might flint a shower of sparks that would set alight the blank page in his typewriter. But instead, it just lay there. No sparks, no inspiration, just memories of a painful time when his own father had run him out of town.
The bottle of Four Roses cooed from his brass tea wagon, which doubled as a bar.
“No,” he muttered. “You’re not Hemingway. How he managed to work half-drunk off his ass is beyond me. You have a deadline and Sheppard said ‘No excuses.’”
A babble of laughter gurgled through his open living room window. It was his neighbor, Arlene with a voice he didn’t recognize.
“We’ve already done tulips,” Arlene said. “Lovely as they are, we should try something new.”
“Like what? Zinnias? Marigolds? What about asters? They’re pretty.”
“I was thinking maybe herbs.”
“Yes!” the other girl replied. “Sage or thyme?”
“What about lavender?” Arlene asked.
“Who cooks with that? Uck! Can you imagine?”
“I was thinking we could fill little cotton sachets with potpourri and give them as Christmas presents.”
“But we’ve only got two months till the holidays—can we grow lavender in that amount of time?”
“I doubt it,” Arlene conceded, “but I have a gardening book that’ll tell us.”
As their footsteps receded into the distance, Marcus was already thinking of that box of scripts he’d come across in the basement: A Dash of Lavender.
Don’t even, he told himself.
He squeezed his legs together in an attempt to prevent himself from running out the door. It worked—for all of five minutes.
Don’t do it. You’ll regret it. Maybe not now, but eventually. He was still saying it when he got to the door that led to the basement. And as he descended the stairs. And as he stood at the bottom, looking at the spot where he’d found that box of scripts. He was still warning himself as he removed the stack of hatboxes and pile of old bedsheets on top of it.
He opened the flaps and pulled out the announcement for the 3/3/33 party and the MGM screenplay contest advertisement. He hesitated when he saw the words neatly typed on the top page: A Dash of Lavender by Claude Roundtree.
He wrote this in 1933. Or earlier. That’s nearly a quarter of a century ago. If this Roundtree guy wanted them, he would’ve taken them with him. He’s probably forgotten about them. Even if he hasn’t, he’s got no use for them now. What good are they to anyone sitting in the dark, in the dust, in the basement?
Marcus lifted the script out of the box.
I bet it’s terrible. That’d explain why he never sold it. I probably can’t even use it.
He turned over the cover sheet.
I’m going to read the first page and if it doesn’t grab me, I’ll put it back and forget I ever found it.
Even as his eyes wound down the page, a voice in the back of his head berated Marcus that he was taking the easy way out; that he knew it was a hard deadline when he’d banked the check; that he couldn’t blame the luscious lips of Mister Rex Halliday on the tight spot he’d painted himself into.
Roundtree evoked a vivid opening scene with a gush of steam from an Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway engine arriving in Los Angeles, just like Marcus had done all those years ago. A lone figure holding a cardboard suitcase belted around the middle steps out of a third-class carriage, just like Marcus had done, and asks a redcap for directions to the streetcar. Marcus had done that too. The redcap asks the traveler if he is new to town. No, the guy with the suitcase tells him. I’m coming home, but it’s been a while.
That’s where Roundtree’s story and Marcus’s history diverged, but Marcus was already hooked and turned to page two knowing he wouldn’t stop until he reached the end.