HER NAME WAS Leila Millar. Millar with an a but pronounced, as the ever-helpful Brad in Cromwell’s office had hastened to inform me, “Miller.”
I was flying to LA to meet her.
When I called Brad, my intention was only to get her name and phone number. The rest, I thought, would follow in the days to come. But the rest followed right away.
Brad told me that there were quite a few scenes “with the young lady in question” that had been cut from the print I saw. If I wanted to see any of those scenes, or any of the other scenes Mr. Houseman had cut, all I had to do was say when.
“She lives in Venice,” Brad said and then laughed in that bleating way of his. “The one in California.”
He gave me her address. I wrote it down.
I was about to thank him and hang up, when he asked, “Would you like me to take care of your travel arrangements?”
Why not, I thought. If I’m going to do what I’m going to do sooner or later anyway.
“Why not?” I told Brad.
Brad took care of everything, the flight, the limo to Kennedy and from LA, the hotel, the rent-a-car waiting for me in the hotel parking lot.
In the aria of accommodations, his mellifluous, self-effacing voice almost put me in a hypnotic trance. Hearing him talk was like getting a haircut, a manicure, and having my shoes shined at the same time. The details of my trip, as rendered by his voice, were made to seem matters of vital importance. It made me want to have a Brad of my own.
I was half-napping when our pilot announced over the PA system that we were flying over Chicago.
He sounded like an honest man and I took his word for it, because when I opened my eyes and looked down, all I saw were clouds.
Chicago served as a marker on my trips to LA, indicating that we were a third of the way there.
A pang for my mother, like the sound of one of those submarine sonar devices, bounced off my heart.
I was very familiar, too familiar, with the house down below in which she now lived alone. Perhaps she was at this very moment walking aimlessly through it, east to west, and, perhaps, as the plane flew over it, the two of us were in synch for a split second, heading aimlessly in the same direction.
I hadn’t seen her since my father’s funeral.
There were no unresolved issues between us. We had both resolved them a long time ago. We had come to terms with each other in what’s popularly known as a very healthy way. There was no hostility between us. No scores to settle. No need to get even. My relationship with my mother was in many respects exactly the same as my relationship with Dianah. We were separated, but not completely divorced as yet. No hard feelings on either side.
The only real thing left between my mother and me was a memory of a single moment. For all I knew, she had forgotten all about it.
On my way to LA, I had stopped over to see my dad and her. He was still healthy and sane at the time and was working in court that afternoon. I sat in the kitchen, smoking and drinking tea, watching my mother wipe the dust off the wooden windowsill above the sink.
Our teas together were always like this. She would ask me if I wanted a cup of tea. If I said yes, she made a cup for me, but not for herself. If I said no, it was the other way around. One of us was always watching the other drink tea.
She had watched me drink mine and then, driven by some addiction for doing useless chores in my presence, she began wiping the dust off the windowsill with a damp cloth.
The kitchen window faced west, and by the light of the afternoon sun, as if she were illuminated by a spotlight, I saw how old she had become. The thought that this old woman had given birth to me made my own life seem as ancient as something written on clay tablets in cuneiform.
Suddenly, as she moved her hand across the wooden sill, she cried out in pain and pulled back her hand.
I stood up and said, “Mom, are you all right?”
She shuffled toward me, holding out her right index finger.
There, in that old index finger she brought for my inspection, I saw a thin splinter of wood and a small droplet of blood.
What I saw didn’t look like a living human finger at all but a dead piece of wood which the splinter, wood itself, had entered. The thought that this old piece of wood could feel pain and bleed horrified me.
I pulled back from her. From that fingertip and that trembling droplet of blood. I couldn’t bring myself to touch it.
My mother, realizing the mistake she had made in bringing her little hurt to me, came to her senses and almost apologized for the blunder. Contrite and embarrassed, she turned around and shuffled back to the kitchen sink, where she let some water from the tap run on her fingertip.
The next day I left, as planned, for LA.
The tiny splinter, I knew, had long departed from her flesh. The broken epidermal cells, even at her age, had long since replicated themselves and covered the break in the skin, so that no visible mark remained of the incident.
Like some miser, however, I clung to the memory of that afternoon, as if it were a precious stone.
It required a conscious effort on my part to keep my mind from dissolving the memory of that moment in the kitchen with my mother. It took work to keep the splinter in my mind. What I got in return was that each time I flew over Chicago, I had the satisfaction of feeling a little discomfort for the way I had behaved that day. This discomfort was neither intense nor prolonged, but it sufficed to persuade me that I was still an active member of the human race.
It was almost eight P.M. when we arrived in L.A. A tall limo driver met me at the baggage area, holding up a sign with my name on it.
The baggage carousel began to turn. For the first time in my life at any airport, domestic or foreign, my suitcase was the first one to appear. I took it as a good omen of something.
The limo that Brad had arranged to pick me up was a stretch limo, but try as I might, I couldn’t stretch myself out far enough to take full advantage of all the comfort and space it offered.
It was dark outside, and made to seem even darker by the limousine’s tinted windows. I cracked open a window and lit a cigarette.
Venice was close to the airport, and as we drove past several exits that could have taken us there, I couldn’t help thinking about Leila. But since I didn’t really know her, I didn’t really know what to think about her. Lacking any specifics, or freed from the burden of specifics, I let myself think anything I wanted to think about her, meaning, I suppose, that what I was doing was thinking about myself.
My lobster-pink sixth-floor suite was enormous, but I had expected nothing less. I have been flown out to LA enough times to be able to predict the sumptuousness of my accommodations by the size of the limo that picks me up at the airport. No limo means a single room. A town car means a junior suite. A stretch limo, a stretch suite.
Awaiting me were two bottles of champagne and two baskets of fruit. The smaller basket of fruit and the smaller, less expensive bottle of champagne were from the hotel management, a token of their appreciation for my being a loyal customer. The other, larger basket and the other, much larger and much more expensive bottle of champagne were from Cromwell. A faxed note came with them, written in longhand and sent from Leningrad.
“Saul, you bloody genius, welcome on board. If you need anything, just call Brad.
“Looking forward to seeing you in person next Saturday. Regards, Jay.”
It was late. I was tired but not sleepy and there was nowhere to go, so I unpacked slowly, methodically, trying to stretch out the activity for as long as possible.
It pleased me to learn that Cromwell had been informed about my trip to LA.
After taking care of my accommodations, Brad had returned to the topic of the cut footage from the film. When was I interested in seeing it? I wasn’t interested in seeing it at all but I had to justify my stay in LA somehow, so I agreed to see it on Monday. Brad told me that he would reserve a screening room for me.
Cromwell, I was sure, knew all about it and was probably interpreting my arrival and my arrangements to see the cut footage as a sign that I was seriously considering accepting the assignment. It wasn’t often that I was in this wonderful fail-safe position of being able to arouse and then to dash Cromwell’s expectations in such a pleasant way. It pleased me to think of him being somewhere in Leningrad and counting on me.
This was Friday. According to his note, he would be back in LA next Saturday. I would be back in New York by then. It pleased me to imagine him calling my hotel only to be informed that I had checked out the night before.
If there was one thing I was certain of, it was that I could do nothing to damage the brilliant film I had seen. Its integrity was safe from me, not because of any personal integrity I possessed but because the film itself was so perfect. Even had I been eager to alter it, I could have found nothing there to alter.
I had, it’s true, been involved in the ruin of other films in the past, but they were all of a different kind. All of them, in one way or another, had been compromised in their very conception, before I ever got to them. The very best of these films, that young man’s film in Pittsburgh, for example, had as their goal a certain level of commercial competence, and although my involvement lowered that level a notch or two, it did not deprive the world of any great work of art.
Arthur Houseman’s film was something else. It was a masterpiece. It called upon the best in me just to be able to appreciate it properly, and even in that regard I felt a little inadequate. I was a hack, but I was not a vandal. I could as easily go to the Art Institute in Chicago and attack my favorite Van Gogh there with a butcher knife as be responsible for even the slightest change in the film I had seen. For once, I was protected from my own moody and unreliable nature by the artistic integrity of the work itself.
All Cromwell was doing was paying for my little getaway from New York. Although I knew that he could afford it, that the costs I would incur were negligible to somebody of his resources, it still pleased me that for once I was getting something from him in return for nothing.
Having unpacked, I uncorked his bottle of champagne.
A faint hope lurked in my mind that perhaps my inability to get drunk was a regional disease, confined to the East Coast. Perhaps here in LA, where I hadn’t been since the onset of my drunk disease, things would be different.
I drank until both bottles of champagne were empty, only to reconfirm yet again that my mind was a fortress impervious to alcohol.
On the positive side, however, my drinking did use up time. It was now almost two hours later than when I began. Almost midnight. Time, even by LA time, to call it a night.
I lay in a bed that was large enough to be a small island. I lay waiting for sleep. Friday was over, but the remainder of the LA weekend loomed in front of me like some sea I would have to traverse.
The motive that had brought me to LA appeared to me in all its absurdity.
What in the world was I doing here?
Loneliness, like leaking gas, began to seep into the darkness of my suite.