TWENTY-TWO

If I had been in any state to appreciate irony, I probably would have found it amusing that it was an amateur movie that brought down the movie studio. Accounts of Devlin and Irma’s taped confession were in the papers, snippets of it played on the radio, a handful of daring movie theaters even played the whole thing in their newsreels. I missed all of that. If you want to avoid having to spend a month in the mental hospital, I would recommend not telling the doctor who is resetting your broken nose that you have also been hallucinating noises from the vacant upstairs apartment for the last month and a half.

The time I spent in the hospital was mostly a blur, days that blended together with nothing to pass the hours besides sleep, which was nearly impossible to come by given the constant agitated noises of my fellow neurotics. The police came several times in the first few days to take statements from me, although none of them were Misters Kiblowski or Cooper. If that had anything to do with them losing their jobs for taking bribes from Pacific Pictures to cover up a murder, I could only speculate.

Sometime early on, I was told I had visitors, and my heart leapt at the thought of seeing June, Jack, Vic, and Terry again. Imagine my disappointment when my old acquaintances from college, Mr. and Mrs. Adam Cook, strolled in.

“You know, you’re a hero,” said Adam at one point, and Beverly nodded enthusiastically in agreement, too-blond curls bouncing. “You managed to stop Devlin Murray before he killed again.”

“It wasn’t even the first time, you know,” added Beverly. “He had some actor’s mistress killed back in ’39 when she threatened to go public about their relationship. And he tampered with a crime scene to cover up for a star who had killed her lover.”

“Everyone’s talking about you,” said Adam. “The whole world will want an interview once you’re out of here.”

He said it like it was exciting news, something I should look forward to. “That sounds exhausting,” I said.

“No, you should be thrilled!” cried Beverly. “Every studio will want to turn this into a movie! You’d better start thinking about who you want to play you.” She batted her eyelashes and giggled.

“This has been the worst year of my life. I’m not turning it into a movie,” I snapped.

She forced a smile. “You’re tired,” she said. “We’ll come back another time, how’s that?”

They never came back.

It was June who came next, strolling into my room about two weeks later, two cigarettes dangling from her mouth. She lit them both and handed one to me as she perched on the edge of my bed. “Okay, so here’s the latest,” she began, like we were two friends catching up for drinks and not two neurotics who had both accused the other of murder. “After the public outcry and the arrest, Devlin appointed his kid to take over, but of course no one wants the kid of the murderer running the studio, so the board is trying to oust him. He’s holding firm, but the studio’s hemorrhaging money. Everyone’s either leaving on principle or the kid’s selling contracts to try to get enough money to fight the takeover.”

“Hi, June,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose at me, as if to ask why I would waste time on greeting her when there were more important things to discuss. “Hi, Annie? So the point is, Terry got a job at Paramount, I’m following her there, and she dispatched me to come see you because, apparently, you’ve got a script with a great part for me.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. It felt like I hadn’t ever written a word. Finally, it came back to me. “Oh, you mean Don’t Count Your Coconuts? It’s not great. Terry read it. She liked the dialogue I wrote for you but that was it.”

“Not that,” said June. “I’m not making another movie where I play a sexy Asian lady on a beach—fuck no. She meant Altogether Too Many Murders.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “Good title. Has a ring of truth to it.”

“Terry wants to make that?” I said. “And you want to be in it?”

“Terry said it was good. Is it not good?”

“No, it’s good,” I said. “I meant…after everything I did.”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “I did some stuff to you too. Jack told me you guessed it, actually. Remember?”

“Memory’s not my strong suit these days,” I remarked.

“The detectives asked me to spy on the club for them and report back,” said June. “And I agreed. I told them all about you and Jack—I saw that made it to the papers, how you got your Commie boyfriend to cover for you. So you and Jack embarrassed me at the Canteen, and I got you arrested. Let’s call it even. I’d rather hold grudges against people who are less fun.”

“It’s forgotten,” I said. “Figuratively and literally.”

“Terry wants me in the part your ex-girlfriend played,” said June, her eyes twinkling. “Hope you’re okay with that. You weren’t planning to take it to MGM and try and win her back?”

“No,” I said, so quickly that both of us laughed. “No, I… I wasn’t planning on that.”

“How did that even work?” she asked. “All three of you, together? Like, if you and Mrs. Cook wanted to have a round, did you have to wait for Mr. Cook to come home first…?”

I laughed, and blushed, and buried my head in my hands. “No!” I said.

“So you all must have been constantly going at it, like, all the time.”

“A usual amount, it was a—”

“Just a den of sin over there, huh.”

I hadn’t laughed in a very long time, and my abdominals were hurting already. “It was mostly very dull,” I said. “I would write, Adam would read Russian literature, Beverly would play the piano…”

“Oh, that does sound boring. At least Vic will be jealous. He’s thought for years he’s so interesting because he’s queer, and now here you come along, liking them both.”

“How is he?” I asked.

June pursed her lips, took another drag on her cigarette. “He’s been holed up in his house for three weeks. We all have, I suppose. I went to see him a couple days ago, and he didn’t say a word to me the whole time, just sat there and played Chopin. I’d ask him how he was feeling or if he’s been sleeping all right, and be met with an unblinking stare and a nocturne. It was terrifying.” She paused. “It’s hitting Jack hard. He met Vic when he was like fourteen, you know? Fourteen and on his own in New York City, and Vic kind of took him in. I think he always looked up to him, like an older brother. You don’t want to find out your older brother’s been lying to you for a decade. Especially if the reason is because…because he thought you wouldn’t be happy for him.”

“Would you have been?” I asked. “If everyone knew, if he was beloved by the world…would you have been happy for him?”

She exhaled, picking a piece of lint off her black skirt. “I can’t answer that,” she said finally. “At least, not any answer that makes any sense. Yes, I would have been happy for him. I would have been thrilled for him. And no, I wouldn’t have been happy for him; I would have been bitter and jealous and mean. I’d take every chance to stick it to him and pretend I was doing it for his own good. I did that already—why flatter myself and think I’d be any better if he were more famous? But on the other hand, maybe I would have… I don’t know. Taken some comfort in it all. If he could do it, if he could break free of the nonsense, make things, be rewarded for it, be seen for it… Who knows? It might have given me some hope.” She laughed a bit. “So, yes and no, and I don’t know, and the question’s a dumb one anyway. How’s that?”

“Makes sense to me,” I said.

“So, Paramount,” she said. “You coming?”

“Are we going right now?” I asked.

“Nah, we can wait until you’re busted out of the loony bin first.”

“I suppose if that’s happening, there’s something else I’ll have to do,” I said.

“What’s that?”

I laughed. “I’ll have to buy some furniture.”

June laughed too. “About time, Annie Laurence. About time.”

Hollywood Memorial Park was only a few blocks away from the lot. I had to walk past it each Thursday night when heading from set to Paramount night at the Hollywood Canteen. Each week I thought perhaps I’d stop in; each week I found I wasn’t ready. July 25, 1944—one year to the day since she died—I decided it was time.

I went in the morning. The air was already thick with July heat. The woman at the front had directed me straight ahead, and as I crossed the lawn, I recognized a familiar figure in a wrinkled white shirt, undoubtedly standing where I intended to go.

I almost turned back. He’d dodged seeing me face-to-face so many times over the last eleven months, I had assumed he never wanted to speak to me again.

So imagine my surprise when I tapped him on the shoulder and his eyes went joyfully wide, pulling me into a hug. He smelled the same, clean and oaky with an aftertaste of booze. I inhaled. “Annie Laurence,” he whispered. “You have no idea how good it is to see you.”

“Interesting to hear, Jack Kott,” I replied. “You’ve been doing a pretty spectacular job of not taking my calls.”

“Yeah, I… I’m sorry about that, kid. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I understand.”

I put a hand on his shoulder, and together we looked down at the simple flat stone marking Fiona’s interred ashes.

FIONA ACKERMAN FARRIS

22 April 1908–25 July 1943

“The show was rubbish, but the ending was killer.”

“Who wrote that?” I asked.

“She did,” Jack replied. “It was in her will.”

“She thought of everything,” I said.

“Want to share a drink with her?” asked Jack, producing a flask from his pocket. “One last time?”

It was 8:30 in the morning, but I did. We settled on the grass, Jack pouring a little out before handing it to me. “I saw your movie, you know,” he said as I took a sip. “Altogether Too Many Murders. It was really something. You can actually write; June can actually act—who knew?”

The movie had been doing surprisingly well, with June’s performance in particular receiving raves. I was already hard at work on the next one, spending my days typing away in my office on the Paramount lot and my nights drinking with Terry, June, and a handful of others. But I wasn’t sure Jack—who, as far as I knew, hadn’t worked or even left the house in a year—would want to hear about all that. “How’s the book coming along?” I asked, returning the flask.

He rolled his eyes. “A stupid obsession. I don’t want to talk about it.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Last I remember, you might have found an agent interested in it.”

He smiled, and his eyes dropped to the ground. “Didn’t pan out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I’m over at Warners now. They’re making a series of B pictures around me, where I go to different exotic places and have adventures. The first one’s called Kott Goes to Cairo. I get cursed by a mummy. Not exactly high art, but something’s gotta pay the bar tabs, right?”

I couldn’t figure out a way to ask the next question on my mind. “I have to say something, Jack, and it’s going to sound stupid at first, but you have to promise to push past that. I’m going somewhere with this.”

“You can’t say anything as stupid as Kott Goes to Cairo.”

“When I was in jail those few days, I fell sick. I’d stopped taking all those pills Irma gave me, and I was vomiting constantly. They called a doctor in to see me, and he said I was pregnant.” Jack’s eyes widened, and I could see the math turning in his head. “No, no. I wasn’t pregnant. He was just a shit doctor. But for a moment there, I thought—Well, what if? And the answer wasn’t the worst thing in the world.”

“You want to bear my fruit, Annie?” he deadpanned.

I laughed. “No. Not yet, at least. Only that there was a moment where I saw us together, and I didn’t hate it. I thought maybe you might be up for…trying something like that.”

For a writer who’d had an entire year to prepare this speech, I mangled it horribly, but I hoped I had gotten my point across.

Jack was silent for a moment, looking out across the lawn. “Annie, you don’t want to do that. You’re the new thing now. You’re it. You don’t want to tie yourself to a lead brick like me.”

“We don’t have to get tied,” I said. “Let’s start with dinner.”

“There’s no point,” he said, chuckling. “I can see how it will all play out—can’t you?”

“Enlighten me,” I said.

“All right. Fine.” He took a breath and another sip. “I take you to dinner, and then another dinner, and another, and unless you wise up and drop me before then, I marry you within a year. Why wouldn’t I? Look at you; look at me. I’d be a fool not to.

“Meanwhile, my career keeps dwindling off because I’m a miserable drunk Commie who’s only talented unintentionally. And your career takes off, you’re the talented, fresh-faced writer of Altogether Too Many Murders starring June Lee, after all.

“I’ll try to be happy for you, but I’m not. You understand that—I’m incapable of it. Vic lied to me for a decade ’cause he understood that. But you won’t be able to lie to me, so instead you’ll resent me, for being jealous and angry all the time. For spending my nights at the bar instead of home with you. I’ll grow to resent you because when I look at you, I see you seeing my potential, and if I can’t see my own potential, I don’t have to feel bad for not living up to it. Failing is fine. I can numb the pain of failing, but I can’t numb the pain of you watching me fail.

“I’ll become bitter; so will you because you don’t understand why I hate you so much when you did nothing wrong, and you’ll be right. When you’re at the peak of your success, you’ll feel guilty instead of proud. You’ll write a movie for me instead of the big stars you could be working with, but I won’t be grateful for that—no, I’ll grow even more bitter. I’ll feel like less of a man, whose wife has to dim her light to help him shine. And you’ll say it’s not like that, that you genuinely want to work with me, but I’ll know it’s a lie, and the whole crew will know it’s a lie, and I’ll have to hear every time the director yells, ‘Cut,’ little whispers here and there about how, oh, a serious actor like John Garfield would be so much better in this role, how it’s a good story but Jack Kott is ruining it.

“And they’ll be right too. The picture will be a dud, and you and I, we’ll plod along for a few more years just to keep up appearances, not wanting to admit that it was the thing we tried to make together that ruined us, but it will already be over. I’ll sleep with some chorus girl, and you’ll be relieved to have a reason to divorce me. You’ll have tanked your career with our movie and be stuck writing B pictures the rest of your life. If you’re lucky, being married to me will only leave you with a drinking problem and not a pill problem too. We can’t be together; we can’t be an item. I can see how it all plays out, Annie. It’s not good.”

“None of that is real,” I said. “The only thing that’s real, the only thing that counts, is how we feel about each other right now.”

Jack smiled, sadly and gently. “And you deserve to find someone else who thinks like that,” he said. “’Cause it ain’t me.”

“Well, then,” I said, feeling the warmth of the California sun on my face. “Maybe sometime you could meet me and some friends at the Ambassador Hotel for a drink.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’d like that.”