IT WAS FRIDAY again, just as it had been Friday when I arrived in LA. Cromwell was coming back from Europe tomorrow and I was supposed to be in New York when he arrived.
But that would not happen. I no longer had any hopes of leaving. I was stranded by circumstances.
Most of the time, I come to terms with things after the fact, after I have done the wrongs I’ve done. This time was different. This time, I had to come to terms with things ahead of time in order to free myself to commit the wrongs I planned to do.
I chose the poolside of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as my designated spot for coming to terms with my future crimes.
It was not yet noon, but it was hot. It would turn out to be the hottest day of the year, but it was plenty hot already. Not a hint of breeze. Heat fell down from the hazy blue sky like a torrential downpour. A deluge of heat.
Following the young pool attendant (in white shorts) to my poolside chair, I was sure that I would be unable to take the heat for long. A few minutes at best and then I would return to my air-conditioned suite and come to terms with things there. But once I lay down in my chaise longue, it was all over. A Niagara Falls of heat fell upon me, pinning me in place. I was trapped. I might as well have been strapped to a poolside electric chair.
There were others there, lying in chaises longues of their own all around me. Men. Women. Young girls. A little boy with red hair. All of them, I assumed, were trapped just as I was. They too had probably thought that they would only stay a few minutes and then leave. Scattered around the pool, we lay in our reclining chairs like so many victims of nerve gas.
The sound of falling water from the recycled water fountain had a hallucinatory quality to it in all that heat. Like the sound of something sizzling.
I had Leila on the brain. Her life. The many losses of her life.
Her baby was her first loss, and that loss paved the way for all the others. That loss led to a choice of a career, and that career in turn turned out to be nothing but one loss after another.
In my own defense, I could not be blamed for anything. I did not take her child away either by force or cunning. It would have been taken away from her by somebody else if not by me. I was merely a random man who paid, with his wife’s money, for the implementation of its removal, and was therefore, at worst, only the recipient of her loss, not the cause of it.
As far as that original loss went, I was now more than willing, eager in fact, to do the right thing and reunite her with her child. To serve as the agent of their reunion.
But to do that was not enough anymore.
She had incurred too many other losses along the way. If she got Billy back, but at the same time discovered that she had yet again been cut from a film and not just any film but a film in which she finally got to play a major part, that might turn her reunion with her son into yet another loss. The reunion, I was determined, had to be a triumph. A total triumph. Nothing must be allowed to detract from the joy of that occasion, or undermine the happy ending I had in mind for the two of them.
Had I known at the start what I knew about her now, I never would have come to LA.
But it was too late now. We can’t unknow what we know.
I agonized over my dilemma (as I lay there by the poolside) not out of any genuine irresolution about what I planned to do but merely to be on record with myself that I had agonized over it. It was part of the procedure of coming to terms with things ahead of time. It was important to leave a trail of torment behind, so that if unexpected consequences occurred as a result of my actions, I could exonerate myself on the grounds of the torment I had felt prior to causing them.
I agonized over the unthinkable act I was prepared to commit in order to have a happy ending for Leila and Billy.
The more I agonized over it, the more familiar the unthinkable became, until it was not unthinkable anymore.
But it was not easy, even for someone as gifted as myself with coming to terms with things, to contemplate desecrating a work of art.
Being an out-and-out hack who had never even come close to conceiving a true work of art, I worshiped Art in a way that a practicing artist could not possibly understand. To a practicing artist, it was something one did. To me, Art was a miracle, the only man-made miracle on earth.
How then was it possible, I agonized by the poolside, that I could lie there and plot its undoing?
The more I castigated myself and the more I agonized over something I knew I would do, the more I came to terms with it. My savage self-criticism licensed me to proceed.
Most of the horrors committed in my time (I waxed philosophical) were not the work of evil men bent on committing evil deeds. Rather they were the acts of men like myself. Men with moral and aesthetic standards of high order when the mood was upon them. Men who knew right from wrong and who did right when the mood was upon them. But men with no moorings to hold those convictions and standards in place. Men subject to changing winds and moods, who were doomed to reverse themselves completely when another, contradictory mood was upon them. They would always, these mood men, find a way to justify their actions and come to terms with the consequences. The terminology they used in coming to terms with their crimes constituted, in large part, what we referred to as history.
Listening to myself, while I lay there by the poolside, was an education. The philosopher within me philosophized, the psychologist within me psychologized, the moral man moralized, but all to no avail. Their voices had a fatalistic keening quality, as if they had all gathered within me to eulogize the victim of my upcoming crime rather than to keep me from committing the crime itself.
Throughout the long hot afternoon, while I lay there sweating in my poolside chair, a woman’s voice came over the poolside PA system to say that one of us lying there had a telephone call.
“Telephone call for Mr. Stump.”
“Telephone call for Ms. Florio.”
“Telephone call for Mr. Messer.”
Those called, as if paged back to life, awoke from their deathlike stupor and arose to answer the call. Not one of them came back from his telephone call to lie there among us. They were saved. The rest of us, the damned, the uncalled, remained to broil in that terrible heat.
Perhaps, I thought, Judgment Day would be something like this. There would be no trumpet blasts to raise the dead. Telephone calls instead. You’d either get called our you wouldn’t.
The earth revolved around the sun (while I lay there), spinning on its axis and creating the illusion that the sun above me was sailing across the sky, east to west.
Shadows lengthened, creeping across the pavement like sprung leaks.
The heat of the day began to subside.
I lit a cigarette. Some process had been concluded. Something within me had been metabolized, digested, eliminated.
So much life (the third-person narrator within me narrated) had been sacrificed over the years for the sake of Art, that it was high time for Art to be sacrificed for the sake of someone’s life.
I arose and left the pool, having successfully concluded the business I had come to accomplish.
And so Friday came and went.