WILLA ASKED HIM to lunch at Munn Café. She had an idea she wanted to explore, and also she wanted to apologize for the behavior of her uncle Reinhold. They met in the back room as before, and when Willa started in on Reinhold as a throwback, a peasant pig without manners, Greenwood waved her silent. It was an interesting afternoon for him, Reinhold’s search for the ur-boar. A mysterious encounter all the way around. Even the conclusion was mysterious, and perhaps the conclusion most of all. Willa seemed grateful for the reassurance. The Vietnamese served them beer and she asked question after question about him and Claire, the life they had together, and the Hollywood of the sixties and seventies. She believed those two decades were the golden age of the Industry, Bonnie and Clyde, Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy, MASH, Cabaret, both Godfathers, Chinatown, and of course your own, Dix. Summer, 1921 and Anna’s Magic. Almost as an afterthought she asked him about their children. How did children grow up in such an atmosphere, so feverish and extravagant, everyone always so busy. Didn’t the children get in the way?
He told her the story of a down-on-his-luck poet who arrived in Los Angeles from Greenwich Village in the early seventies, staying with a cousin who worked for one of the studios. The poet had had some unspecified trouble in New York and was asked to leave. Greenwood owed the cousin a favor so he hired the poet to write additional dialogue for a film then in production. We called it a mercy fuck, Greenwood said to Willa. Every film had one, usually more than one. The poet was amusing and reasonably hard-working and did what he was told to do, and was not bad at what he did. He loved Los Angeles. He loved the beaches, the girls, and the freeways. He said he would never leave. He said the Industry, in its maliciousness, spite, insecurity, and flashes of brilliance, reminded him of the Partisan Review in the thirties and forties. What Delmore said to Mary and what Mary said to Bunny and what Bunny said to Philip, and what Philip did. At Partisan it was the romance of politics and the integrity of the intellectual, and in Hollywood it was the romance of celebrity and the integrity of the accountant. For Trotsky, substitute Darryl Zanuck. So it was not surprising that a tremendous amount of work got done, and now and then something superb. Not often. Often enough, when you considered the odds against.
Later on, the poet wrote some not-half-bad celebrity biographies and ended with a starlet in his bed at the beach house in Malibu. But every now and then he’d return to New York to see how everyone was getting on; and they were not getting on very well, at least compared with him. And so many were dead. So he stopped going.
The children weren’t a nuisance, Greenwood said.
Willa looked at him strangely.
So many narcissists, she began.
The children fit right in, Greenwood said. He signaled for more beer and started to reminisce about Jerry’s birth, a difficult cesarean. They were filming in Baja and he gave the crew the day off so he could be with his wife. The doctor had asked if he wanted to be present at the birth, and Claire looked up in alarm and said, No, it’s impossible. It’s the modern way, the doctor said, and Claire replied that they were modern people but not that modern. Greenwood held her hand while they wheeled her down the long hall to the delivery room, and then he went back to her room in Maternity and opened the window and lit a cigarette. The day was fine. He smoked and watched the cars in the parking lot, making bets with himself whether his first child would be a boy or a girl. When a Porsche scooted into the lot with a young blonde at the helm, he guessed girl; he thought probably the blonde was one of his fans, a member of the audience. She wore a linen miniskirt and carried a thick paperback book under her arm. He remembered standing at the window, thinking about the particularly demanding scene he would shoot the next day. Billy Jeidels had one idea and he had another. Probably he would do it Billy’s way but the scene was salient; the back half of the movie depended on it. He imagined the blond girl in the theater, it would be Brentwood or the Palisades or Santa Monica, her eyes narrowing at the scene bleached white by the sun. Two lovers were on the run and she would be pulling for them, except the man was a sonofabitch.
Cars came and went. The white Porsche baked in the sun. Greenwood pitched the cigarette out the window, watching it tumble end over end and bounce on the asphalt in a little shower of sparks. That gave him an idea so he stayed at the window for another thirty minutes, thinking the way people on the run thought, thinking about camera angles and the bright splash of light on the surface of the water at Baja. He was back in Baja, thinking about the next day’s shoot, the preparations for it and the consequences of it. The runaways meet an ingratiating stranger, and their lives unravel from that moment of carelessness. He began to make notes, losing himself inside the idea and the technical details surrounding it. Did the scene begin from the point of view of the lovers or from the point of view of the stranger? He was searching for more paper when Dr. Andaman arrived to tell him that the birth had been difficult, more difficult than expected. He described the complications in language Greenwood did not understand. When he repeated himself in plain English, Greenwood was still at sea. Then the doctor explained that Claire had lost blood and had not yet regained consciousness.
No, you can’t see her yet.
Another hour, maybe.
Stay here, Dr. Andaman said. Where I can find you when there’s news. He was looking into the mirror, holding his own steady gaze. Morris Andaman was blandly handsome, with curly hair and a button nose, a stethoscope around his neck and a Rolex on his wrist. He was a great favorite of the Industry. Everyone went to Morris Andaman for their children and every so often someone would cast him as a walk-on when they needed a sympathetic doctor to deliver bad news. His looks were safe and the audience would know without being told that he had done everything he could, everything humanly possible. He would be well paid for his morning’s work on the set. That was the point, putting a bonus in the doctor’s pocket.
Now Andaman frowned and, almost as an afterthought, added that the baby was healthy. A fine seven-pound boy, he said, with a crown of silky blond hair and the lungs of a stevedore. Greenwood smiled wanly. A boy, not a girl, and his father had been fair. Both he and Claire were dark.
Who does he look like?
Not you, Andaman said.
Well, then—
For Christ’s sake, Dix. The baby’s less than an hour old.
He said, How serious is it?
It’s serious.
When Andaman went away, Dix turned from the window and sat heavily on the high hospital bed. The room was flooded with afternoon light. He wished he were practiced in prayer. He did not want to think of Claire in pain or distress of any kind and hoped that if God existed, he was on her side. Dix was thinking in the abstract. You could not put yourself into the mind or body of another and to think otherwise was sentimental, the sort of thing they did in movies. When he had been so crazy after his accident, Claire listened patiently and at length, but she was on the outside looking in. She was an observer looking at the cracked glass and wondering how the pieces fit together. The inside was his alone, and the same would be true for her now, in seclusion in her bed in the recovery room. Even their sense of time would be at odds, she unconscious of it and he praying that it would be slow-footed, dilatory, sluggish in its retreat. What he could do now was think about her and pull for her, all the while wishing that the clock would stop.
Yet there was responsibility. The baby was not her idea, she wanted to wait another year, perhaps two. What’s the rush, Dix? If we wait a year, it’ll be the Year of the Owl and she’ll be a genius, so smart and good-natured, a painter maybe, or a musician. Claire had gained thirty pounds during her pregnancy and hated each pound. She waddled about the house like a duck and took to calling Andaman Dr. Quack. She was often dizzy and her back hurt. She missed her evening martini. She could not concentrate enough to read and at night was plagued with sleeplessness. She thought she had lost her youth for keeps and was angry at him for wanting the baby and for his frequent absences, shooting film in Baja where the light was bleached, everyone hot. At least Ada Hart was not on the set. There were the usual rumors concerning the young French actress but Claire chose to ignore them, except when she was sleepless at two in the morning, prowling her house like an overweight cat, self-conscious, surly, always hungry, wondering who had caught her husband’s attention on the set in sunny, sandy, romantic Baja. At that time they were citizens of hostile nations, each with its borders, each with its own language and laws. Hers was a nation of one, his teeming—usually with intrigue, occasionally as sedate as Switzerland, everyone retired by ten, no heavy drinking or all-night poker, no drugs, no sexual turbulence. There was no sense complaining because their nations were stronger than they were, and they loved them equally. She remembered the rough judgment of the Miami gangster in the second Godfather: “This is the business we have chosen.” Strasberg had added a little metallic click to his voice, so it went, “This click is the business we have chosen click.” And then something later to the effect that some sudden execution wasn’t personal, it was business: “I didn’t inquire.” Sometimes that was the way adults got on, not inquiring too closely.
When she was pregnant they talked for an hour each night on the telephone, Greenwood exhilarated at the end of the day, Claire exhausted and peevish, too, because it seemed to her that everyone she knew was on location and unreachable. She hated being out of touch, ignorant of the news of the day, meaning the latest gossip, who was screwing whom literally and figuratively, and which productions were in trouble and which not. During her early morning prowling she wondered if the business they had chosen was one that would admit children or whether the children were walk-ons, grace-and-favor cameos like the roles Andaman played. Dix always called each evening to ask how her day had gone and she described the garden, the fifteen varieties of roses and the twenty-year-old rhododendron; and just think, when you call me this time next year I’ll be able to tell you about our child, the cute words and phrases, et cetera, et cetera. She had half a dozen scripts to read but so far hadn’t gotten to them. Not in the mood, Dix. When she asked how things were in Baja, he replied with a merry story filled with innuendo; he made her laugh and she thought that was better than the usual you-can’t-believe-how-hot-it-is-on-the-beach. He always said, Don’t worry, meaning it, assuring her that the set was turbulent, as usual, but nothing that would interfere with them. The French actress had all she could handle with Billy Jeidels.
Interfere? she asked, laughing in a strangled sort of way.
Interfere, he repeated, laughing also. Interference was general in the movie business, was that not so? Quack quack, she said, wishing him a good night and sweet dreams. She knew she had many hours before sleep came, if it did. She knew, and he knew, that she was dispirited, her voice disappointed. And he always replied, after a moment’s pause, “I love you, Claire,” meaning that, too. By day they lived in the Industry’s make-believe world. They did not have to live in it at night as well.
The Vietnamese arrived with schnitzel and tall glasses of dark German beer, Frau Munn in his wake, supervising the placement of the food and beer, squaring the flatware next to the plates. She had a word to say about the weather, filthy, and the forecast, encouraging. She left them with the photographs she had neglected to show them the last time, Gestapo headquarters brilliant with flags and eager young officers in uniform gathered in Anhalterstrasse to greet the Führer, Adolf Hitler languid in the rear seat of a giant open Mercedes. The other photograph showed a street full of rubble, children and old people picking through it, date 1945.
Bon appétit, Frau Munn said, and went away chortling.
Dix took a long swallow of beer and a forkful of schnitzel, still remembering the hospital. He was restless, pacing Claire’s room, filled with energy thinking about Baja and the shoot in the morning, and foreboding thinking about Claire, recalling his own time in the hospital near Tahoe, how dispirited and unstable he was, and how superb Claire had been. He stared out the window at the parking lot baking in the heat, and then walked into the corridor looking for a drinking fountain but hoping Andaman had returned with news, whatever it was. Two elderly men attached to metal trees were having a walkabout in the corridor. The trees were festooned with bottles, IV spaghetti wires running from the bottles. They were discussing the afternoon races at Santa Anita. The girl in the Porsche was standing with her back to the corridor wall, her bare arms limp at her side. She still held the book, her finger marking the place. Up close she was a different girl, not the Apache who had loped across the asphalt, gaily it seemed, as if she had been summoned from the country club pool for a date with a doctor. She was out of place in her miniskirt and polo shirt and tanned arms, a thin gold chain around her throat, all but the worried expression on her face. The two old men were arguing about a longshot in the sixth race. She noticed Dix, then resumed her contemplation of the floor. She was tracing the bold chevron pattern with the toe of her sandal. She looked up then and smiled nervously.
She said, My brother.
My wife, Greenwood answered.
Is it serious?
He paused, glancing down the corridor at the nurses’ station. It was empty and there was no sign of Andaman. He said, I’m sure she’ll be fine.
Motorcycle, she said. My brother and his Harleys.
They called me at school, she went on. I’m a teacher. The principal walked into my class and said my brother was hurt, they didn’t know how badly, and fifteen minutes later I was here. I think I broke all the speed records. They said he was lucky he was wearing a helmet and leather pads. He’s always been in shape, strong. He’s a horse. Has the brains of one, too. Eddie, she said.
Greenwood smiled at that.
She said, Do I know you?
He said, I don’t think so.
You’re in the movies, she said.
Dixon Greenwood, he said. And you?
Sharon Hamel, she said. What’s wrong with your leg?
Accident, he said.
Like Eddie, she said.
Not like Eddie, he said. I drove a car off a mountain.
Ouch, she said. She peered at his bent leg, then broke into a grin. Nice cane, she said. It’s a sort of Astaire cane, the cane he used in Top Hat. Did he give it to you?
The cane was an ordinary birch cane, curved at the top. It was about as Astaire as a pair of Wellington boots. Dix said, My wife bought it for me.
It’s very handsome, she said. Then, after a pause, You probably know my father, Shay Hamel. Everyone seems to.
The critic, he said.
I don’t like him either, she said.
I don’t know him, Dix said.
That’s strange, she said. He’s everywhere, my father. No gathering too large or too small. He likes being seen. He likes the bright lights. He likes meeting people whose work he’s trashed. He thinks it’s cool. He likes to see how they react to him, whether they turn their back or give that Hollywood shit-eating grin. He particularly likes it when they claim to have forgotten his review, or never to have seen it at all. He most particularly likes it when they say they never read reviews, because then he can tell them what he said and how much pleasure it gave him to say it. He offers to send them a copy, so they’ll know what they missed. He hated Summer, 1921. Too much indirection. Too many Germans. He didn’t care for your politics, either. Marxist impressionism, he called it. And the girls couldn’t act. He coined a word for them, pornolitarians. And your last film, too, was a failure in his eyes. And I think I can promise that he’ll hate your next one.
Poor sap, Dix said.
That’s what he’s good at, hating.
When she put her hand to her mouth and grinned, he noticed that her fingernails were ragged, bitten haphazardly. Eddie doesn’t like him either, she added in a confidential tone that indicated approval that Eddie was in the majority, for once.
Good for Eddie, Dix said.
I loved Summer, 1921. I loved it to death.
What did you love about it?
The boys, she said. I loved the boys, the way they stood up for themselves. The way they didn’t give a shit about anything except their work and the girls. And I loved the girls, too, how they looked out for each other and refused to be taken advantage of. All of them were outsiders, exiles trying to make their way in the world, and the world wasn’t making it easy for them. The movie made me wish I was one of them, lost for a summer in a place I had never been and would probably never get back to. But I wouldn’t think about that. I’d live in the present, as they did. If you had a summer like that one, the future would take care of itself, wouldn’t it?
I suppose it would sometimes, Dix said. Not always.
And I wouldn’t have this stupid job, teaching English to jerks. I suppose you’re working on a new one.
We’re filming in Baja now.
I can’t wait, she said. Is it like Summer, 1921?
Not much, he said.
I’ll like it anyway.
You can come to the opening. Bring your father.
He has to retire one of these days, Sharon said. But he’s like Eddie, strong as a horse. He works out every day with weights. She paused, evidently trying to make up her mind about something. You’re his bête noire, she said finally. Lots of directors he hates, but you have a special place in his black book. And one more thing about him. He never forgets. He never gives up because he loves hating, just loves it to death. So you’ve got that to look forward to, Dixon Greenwood.
She had moved close to him, talking so rapidly her words ran into themselves. Then she wheeled toward the nurses’ station, squeezed his hand, and hurried down the corridor where she was met by a serious-looking intern in a white coat, a clipboard in his hand. They spoke a few moments and at last she laughed, putting her palm on his chest. He continued to talk earnestly but she did not seem to be listening, her head turned away as she pushed at his chest. When he broke away to take a telephone call, Sharon sauntered back to Dix, smiling happily. Eddie would be all right, cuts and bruises and a sprained ankle and something nasty to his knees, maybe surgery later. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed. Eddie dodged the bullet, she said. Lucky boy. The Harley was totaled. He wants me to call our father and give him the good news but I don’t see why I should do that. Let’s leave old dad in the dark a little longer. He wasn’t around when it counted. She raised herself on tiptoe and kissed Dix full on the lips, her arms around his neck, hanging there. She smelled like peaches.
I’m in the book, she said. Call anytime.
My boyfriend wouldn’t mind, she added after a moment.
Can I come down to see you in Baja? I won’t cause any trouble. I’ll be helpful.
We can go in there right now if you want. She spoke into his ear, indicating the door behind them. That’s my brother’s room but he won’t be up for at least another hour. You want to, I can tell. I can feel it, Dixon. You want to fool around just like I do. What’s the harm? You’re not going anywhere, and anything I have to do, I can put off. We have the whole day ahead of us and tomorrow, too, if we want. I’ll call in sick. I’ll tell them Eddie’s near death and he needs me. She stepped back and smiled. The day that had begun so routinely in her classroom now showed promise in a hospital. Hospitals were sexy, so long as you were not sick yourself, and everything happened for a reason. She said, We’ve both had lousy days and now we’re owed. Injuries are hard on the survivors, too, because we’re the ones who care. We’re the ones pacing the floor, waiting for the doctor to give us bad news. Saying our prayers. God, it’s a beautiful day. So what do you think?
Dix said, Go home, Sharon.
That’s no fun, she said. That’s no fun at all. Fun’s now. You remember what the girl said in Summer, 1921. I’ve remembered it my whole life, it’s what I live by. I fell in love with the writer of that line. They’re at the lake. The girl has taken her clothes off to go swimming. He’s taken up his brush and begins to sketch. His eyes go to her, and then to the canvas. You, he says. Don’t move, ever. You will never be more alive than right now, at this moment, living through my brush on the canvas. She laughs and says she’s living whether she’s on his canvas or not. He’s living on the canvas. She’s living in her own skin. They go back and forth, he’s irritated with her. He tells her she has no imagination. She doesn’t understand that she can be in two places at once, and one of them is on his canvas. Then there’s something else, I’ve forgotten. Sharon impatiently slapped the book against her thigh and he saw it was de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
He tells her to stop breathing, Greenwood said.
And she refuses!
She does not. She holds her breath, posing. And then she laughs, not pleasantly.
She goes for a swim, Sharon said.
And she raises her arms over her head, does a little turn, and sails off the cliff in a perfect swan dive.
She never holds her breath, never. She would never do that. That would violate her code of conduct.
Nevertheless, Dix said.
Sharon turned away with a little irritated shrug.
And that’s what you live by?
Being in two places at once, Sharon said.
What does that give you?
She smiled and said, Perfect pitch.
He said, Give my regards to your father.
The moment was lost, and she knew it. She said, What fun we could’ve had in Baja.
Baja’s work, he said.
And that’s the trouble with Baja, she replied.
Greenwood turned when he heard movement close by.
If you have a minute, Dix, Andaman said.
Bye, then, Sharon said. She disengaged herself and strolled off down the corridor, waving at the intern, performing a little above-the-waist shimmy before she turned the corner and disappeared.
He said, How’s Claire?
Who was that? Andaman asked.
A fan, Dix replied.