In the middle of my first night in California I woke feeling that I was on a boat and lay awake trying to think why that might be. After a moment of profound disorientation, in which the light of a whiter moon than any I knew at home flooded a room I could not put a name to, I remembered where I was and why, and sat up. The green glow from Laura’s digital bedside clock said four ten a.m. I sat listening, holding my breath, but heard no sound that would account for the boat notion. The house was silent and still, and presently I got up and pulled on my robe and went into the adjacent bathroom. The top floor of the condominium was chilly, and the air that poured in through the window I had opened was dry and sharp and smelled of the desert. I thought of my child sleeping in a narrow twin bed across the hall from me, in Laura’s guest room, and wondered if her sleep was troubled, and if she, too, dreamed of boats. I had a sudden, nearly irresistible urge to tiptoe across and open the door and look at her, but hesitated to wake her. She needed respite from the tension of the night before, and so did I. Tomorrow, I thought. We can sort it all out tomorrow. Or rather, later today.
I had turned on the cold water tap and was bending to splash my face when the cold tile floor beneath my bare feet rolled greasily, as if it were the deck of a boat. It rolled again, more strongly. I clutched the sides of the washbasin, thinking that I had not, after all, dreamed the motion. But what could it be? The floor seemed to undulate, and I felt queasy and queer. Was I going to faint, had an illness of some sort overtaken me? It was not until I noticed that the glass accessories on the countertop were tinkling and the towels were swaying on their bars that I thought: earthquake. By the time the terror hit, the motion had stopped.
I cannot remember a simpler and deeper fear. It had never occurred to me that the real terror of an earthquake is not, in its first instant, the threat of injury or death, but the simple betrayal of one’s primal covenant with the earth. With that connection gone, anything at all is possible; no horror imaginable is beyond possibility. It is the old, cold, howling terror of the abyss, that black and limitless space that underlies all the armaments and rituals of the human condition. We all sense it is there, in the deepest and most unexamined core of us, but there are few things that call it out past the careful layers of civilization. The convulsing of the earth is one.
I froze to the washbasin, holding my breath, and then turned and fled from the bathroom straight downstairs, where a light burned. I would remember that flight with shame for the rest of my life. When the earth began to retch, I ran, not to my child, but to the light. The fact that there was no light and no stirring in Laura and Glynn’s bedroom assuaged the guilt only slightly. I like to think that if I had heard evidence of alarm from my daughter I would have gone there instantly, but now I will never know for sure. It was the first chink in the surface of my selfhood, the first of my intimations that Merritt Fowler might not be Merritt at all, but someone unknown to me.
Downstairs a single lamp burned, and Stuart Feinstein sat on the sofa wrapped in a beautiful, dark fur throw, sipping from a glass of amber liquid. His face was so gray and ravaged that at first I thought the same fear that had frozen me had gripped him, but then he saw me and gave me the sweet child’s smile, and the grayness receded somewhat. It was not fear, I saw, but illness and despair.
“Did our little twitch wake you, dollbaby?” he said.
“Twitch! My God! It felt like…I thought for a minute I was on a boat! The floor rolled—”
“About a three point eight or a four,” he said. “A mere shiver. We get one like that about twice a week, maybe more this summer. We have ever since I came out here. I don’t even get out of bed anymore unless I hear wood splintering. I used to lie there and listen to the Waterford crashing, until I got smart and packed it all up. This was nothing, I promise. Come here and have a snort with me.”
I went over and sat on the opposite end of the sofa. He tossed the end of the throw over me and passed me his glass, and I drank. It was scotch, very good scotch. Even I could tell that. My usual drink is vodka in whatever is tart or sweet, and then not often.
“Thanks,” I said, passing the glass back to him. “I needed that, as they say.”
“Thank you,” he said, and when I looked at him inquiringly, he said, “For not being afraid to drink after me. Or for not showing it if you were. Is this your first earthquake?”
“I work with AIDS patients at home,” I said. “I’m not afraid. And yes, it is my first earthquake. Now that I am afraid of.”
“Don’t be. Like I said, we get them all the time. We’re close to the San Andreas here, and it grumbles constantly. But it’s already had its big one; we’re not scheduled for another thirty years. San Francisco, now, that’s another story. The Hayward is ripe.”
“How do you know? How can you be sure of all that?”
“I can’t, of course,” he said, running his hand over the rich, shining folds of the mink. “But the odds are good. That’s about all anybody can hope for, isn’t it?”
I could see blue veins through the dry, crepey skin of his hands, and fancied that I could see the bird’s bones themselves. Stuart Feinstein was a man who would know about odds. Somehow the thought, or perhaps the whiskey, made me relax.
“I’ll go back to bed and let you get some sleep in a minute,” I said. “But first, tell me about this movie Laura is in. Tell me about this Caleb Pringle. There’s something there, isn’t there? They’re something to each other, or were…?”
He took a deep swallow and made a face and put the glass down on the coffee table.
“The movie’s good. Her part is good, and she’s very good in it. She’s a real actress, you know; this part could be the one that gets these schmucks out here to see that in her, and not just her tits and ass. There’s a lot riding on it. She’s almost past the age where she can play babes; she’ll have to do it on the acting from here on out. Pringle sees that in her, and he can get it out. I’ll give him that. Yeah, there’s something between them; I think that’s why he put himself on the line with the studio over this part of hers. He almost doubled her pages. From what I hear, it paid off. I don’t hear much anymore. I’m a has-been. I was that before the disease was obvious. I was never all that much of an agent; she was the best thing I ever had or ever will, now, and I called in an awful lot of chips to get Pringle to let her test for this one. Once he did, she did the rest. The chemistry was there between them from the first. You could see the lightning hit. They were together all through the filming, hot and heavy. I was welcome on the set because of that, and that only. No, don’t protest, dollbaby, I know I’m done in the industry. I don’t care, really, except for her. I’m sick of it; it eats you alive. Makes you little. I’d have pulled out of it long ago except for her. The last thing I could do for her was to get her this interview with Billy Poythress. It was the last chip I had. The production office wouldn’t even tell me when the screening is, but she can find out when she’s up there. Poythress will know. After today there’s nothing much I can do for her except hold her hand and pray.”
“Does this Pringle care for her? Is he good to her?”
He made an impatient gesture.
“He was while they were shooting last winter. He couldn’t do enough for her. Everybody knew about them. The media was all over it. As for now, I don’t know. He hasn’t been around. He’s off chasing down money for a new film. I heard he was in Europe for a while; he may still be there. If he is, he hasn’t let her know. I don’t think she’s heard from him in a month or so, but she wouldn’t tell me that. Tells me what she has from the beginning: It’s the real thing for her, the rest of her life, and so forth, and so forth. Says he feels the same. But I’ve got a bad feeling about it. She doesn’t look good to me. She’s thin, she acts like she’s somewhere else most of the time. Sleeps too much. Sometimes her eyes are red like she’s been crying. Like I said, she’s not going to tell me. Doesn’t want to worry a sick man. Like she could help it.”
“So what kind of person is he? Would he dump her; does he do that?”
“He’s an asshole jerk, is what I think. He’s a phony. Wears tennis sweaters and a baseball cap, drives an old woody, got freckles and a gap in his teeth and a big, crooked grin. His name isn’t Caleb Pringle; it’s Sherman Goetz, but I don’t care about that. Nobody out here uses their real name. Yeah, he’d dump her. He sure does do that. He does it after every film. It’s his schtick, ditching his last film’s squeeze when shooting’s over, just like copping ideas is his schtick. He calls it derivative filmmaking, says it’s an art unto itself, to take a film that’s already been done and do it better. Some other folks call it stealing. But he’s good at it. He has the touch. He makes big bucks. I just want to make sure that he does right by her in this movie, no matter what he does to her personally. After it comes out she’s not going to need him.”
“I don’t like the sound of this stuff.”
“Neither do I, dollbaby. That’s why this interview is so important. It’s her ticket to ride. You make her promise to dress up pretty and be polite to Poythress. You look after your little sister for me.”
“You’re not going with her?”
“No. I think I’ll stay here and kick back a little. Lie in the sun by her pool, sleep in, have some friends over. We worked it out last night. She’s going to stay at my place above Sunset. You really ought to go. It’s a great location. Right near all the things she’ll want to show Glynn. The Sunset Marquis, where the interview will be, is right down below. And you’d have a terrific view. All of Hollywood at your feet, as it were. And I wouldn’t exactly be an asset to her at this stage.”
“Stuart, I just have to get Glynn home. But I really wish we could stay, just to get to know you better,” I said. “I wish there was some way I could thank you for being so good to my sister.”
“You can go up there with her. You can give her moral support and have a good time yourself, is what you can do, dollbaby. She says you haven’t had much of one lately. You or that pretty child of yours, either. Go. Enjoy. Giggle. Drink things with flowers in them. Eat only things that will make you fat. Ask for autographs. Drive that little red car too fast. Wear things that let your pretty tchotchkes hang out. That’s what you can do. What’s two more days out of your young life?”
“They are long days, believe me. But I think you’re the best thing that’s happened to Laura since she came out here,” I said, getting up and kissing him on the cheek. “I wish you’d stick around to take care of her.”
Then I winced, remembering why he could not. He smiled.
“I wish I could,” he said. “Somebody is always going to have to do it. But now there’s you. God looks after fools and actresses.”
“But I can’t do it indefinitely,” I said.
“Why not?” he said. “Haven’t you almost always, one way or another?”
“Oh, Mom, look! Oh, it’s just so cool!”
Glynn stood on Stuart Feinstein’s tiny balcony, staring out at the valley that cradled Los Angeles. I went out and stood beside her. The valley looked to me like two dirty cupped hands holding a city captive; the gray-yellow smog that lay thickly over it seemed the foul breath of the captor. It was not cool to me or beautiful; the sense of alienation I had felt at the airport the day before was back full force. But she was right in a way. It was a stunning vista. It had the impact of a slap.
We had left Palm Springs at seven, and Laura had kept the car at a steady eighty miles per hour through the desert, until the clutter of small towns and shopping centers began. We had gotten into L.A. well before ten, and wound our way through the stalled traffic on back streets, up into the hills to Sunset and across it. Stuart Feinstein’s building rode the crest of one of the canyon ridges directly above Sunset, and we pulled into his parking lot just at ten. After Amy’s call at six, there did not seem to be any point in going back to bed, so I woke Laura and Glynn. Over bagels and coffee I told them we were going to Los Angeles after all. They were both jubilant; last night’s conflict melted with the cold desert dew. The careening drive was brushed with a magical giddiness.
We were flushed from wind and sun—Laura had kept the top down all the way this time—and from laughter. The minute she had pulled out of her own driveway a great gust of liberation and silliness had swept us all, and we had laughed and shouted and sung songs out of our respective girlhoods all the way to the L.A. suburbs. I had not felt anything like it since college. Once or twice then my sorority sisters and I had driven in someone’s convertible over to the Gulf Coast for spring break, crowded and sunburned and giddy and drunk on wind and speed and possibility, singing endlessly, laughing, laughing. This trip felt like that. In the hurtling Mustang, my blowing hair stinging my face and desert grit peppering my bare arms, I was someone else entirely than the angry, worried woman who had driven this road not twenty-four hours before. I had no sense, for that space of time, that Glynn and Laura were daughter and sister to me. We were, for those few hours, all young and all free and all waiting to see who we would be when the car finally stopped. I don’t think I will ever forget that windborne flight through the California desert.
Back inside, Glynn and I prowled the small apartment while Laura closeted herself in the bathroom with Stuart’s cellular phone. She had turned back into Laura when we opened the door to the apartment, kicking off her shoes and padding restlessly about, humming, picking up bric-a-brac and putting them down, straightening pillows, riffling through the opened mail in a shallow copper bowl on the coffee table. Finally she said she needed to make a call or two and then we’d change clothes and go prowl around Sunset a little.
“I don’t have much to change into,” Glynn said hesitantly.
“I don’t have anything, to speak of,” I said. “Do you have to dress for Sunset Boulevard?”
“Not the way you mean,” Laura said, looking me over lazily. I was wearing the knit pantsuit I had worn yesterday, the one I usually travel in. “But not the way you are, either. Glynn’s fine in her jeans and tee, but you are definitely from Away. Waiters will snub you. Street people will howl with laughter. Let me see what Stuart’s got. He’s about your size now, with all the weight he’s lost. You can bet he’ll have the right stuff.”
“I can’t wear Stuart’s clothes, Laura,” I said. “That’s a terrible presumption. I’ll see if I can find something on Sunset, maybe. You can bear the shame of being seen with me that long.”
“Nonsense,” she said, and went into the bedroom and began pulling open drawers and tossing clothes onto the huge, canopied bed. It was ornate and theatrical, by far the most imposing piece in the apartment. Somehow it made me want to avert my eyes. I hoped Glynn and I would not have to sleep in it, but I saw no other bed.
“Anything on Sunset will cost you an arm and a leg,” Laura went on. “I wear his clothes all the time. He probably wears mine, too, when he’s at my place. He’ll be flattered.”
She brought me out a couple of pairs of blue jeans, faded almost to white and beautifully pressed, and an armful of T-shirts, and went to make her phone calls. Glynn and I explored, the clothes slung over my arm. The apartment was small and low-ceilinged, and almost bare of furniture. Indentations on the thick, gray carpet spoke of furniture recently removed, and lighter places on the walls of vanished paintings, as they had in Laura’s place. This place was much less opulent, much more utilitarian, than her condo, but it had the same air of transience, of waiting. The air was stale and close, and the few pieces of furniture left were lightly skinned with dust. Plants and a large ficus in a corner drooped, and in the tiny kitchen dishes sat in a rubber drainer on the counter, washed but not put away. They were yellow melamine, patterned with ivy. I could not imagine a Hollywood agent eating off them. I could not imagine a Hollywood agent living so meanly as this, especially in an aerie above Xanadu. Automatically I picked up the dishes and put them away in the cupboard over the sink, and filled a plastic pitcher with water for the plants.
“You’re at it again,” Glynn said, grinning at me from the doorway.
“At what?”
“Taking care of people. Of things.”
“Well, the plants are in dire straits, and Stuart was dear to let us stay here. I thought I might as well—”
“It’s a nice thing to do. You’re a nice lady. I wasn’t criticizing you.”
Laura came into the kitchen, a tiny white frown furrowing her forehead.
“Nobody in this asshole place answers their phone anymore,” she said. “Billy Poythress’s oh-so-excruciatingly British secretary said he was tied up with the East Coast but would see me this afternoon at two at the Sunset Marquis for lunch as planned, unless, of course, his plans changed, and then she’d let me know. That is, if I could be reached at this numbah. I said I would be out all morning and would just have to take a chance. She said she quite understood. Bitch. I’d say he was screwing her, but I don’t think he does women. Maybe she gives good—”
“Laura.”
“Sorry. Go on and get dressed. I could use a cup of coffee and all Stu has got is instant.”
“Did you get the production office?” Glynn said as I went into the bedroom. Something in her voice told me she enjoyed saying the words.
“Nobody’s answering there, either,” Laura said. “Which doesn’t surprise me. If the receptionist isn’t around, and she almost never is, nobody else will answer. Too demeaning for filmmakers.”
In Stuart Feinstein’s bedroom, cell-like except for the towering Egyptian barge of a bed, I took off my pantsuit and panty hose and pulled on a pair of the blue jeans. They were so tight that I could scarcely zip them, but the other pair was tighter still, so I put them back on and riffled through the T-shirts. They, too, fit so snugly that I could see every rib on my torso. I chose the largest, a white one that had faded Day-Glo fried eggs and bacon strips on it and said “Eat your breakfast.” I looked at myself in the large mirror on the bathroom door and laughed. I looked like a punk adolescent boy in the alien clothes, angular and slouching and high-rumped. It was not, somehow, a bad look. I would never have worn the clothes in Atlanta, but seeing that I had no other choice, I was not going to worry about it here. Nobody knew me. Impulsively I took off the barrette that held my hair back and shook it out, bending at the waist. When I straightened up it flew about my head in a mass of tangles and ringlets and snarls that looked, in this place, not so wrong either. I went out and stood still for inspection by Laura and Glynn.
“Jesus, that’s perfect, except for the shoes,” Laura said, and Glynn said in surprise, “You don’t look in the least like you. Not in the least. It’s terrific. I think. You sure don’t look like anybody’s mom. Dad would die.”
Then she dropped her eyes. I knew how she felt. I had forgotten Pom for the moment, too. I felt the familiar flush of guilt start, and pushed it back. I would call home that evening, I thought. No matter how angry I was at him, he could not be having an easy time.
Laura went back into the bedroom and returned with a pair of beautiful boots, pointed of toe and with a slight, undercut heel. They were worn but carefully tended, and looked expensive.
“Put them on,” she said. “They may be a little big but you can stuff the toes. You can’t go out in those Hush Puppies.”
“They’re not Hush Puppies, they’re Ferragamos,” I said indignantly, but I took them off and put on the boots. They were only a little loose. I went to the mirror and looked. Laura was right. The boots were perfect. I could not help swaggering just a little when we left the apartment. It was a feeling that seemed to start in my hip joints.
“These boots were made for walkin’,” Glynn sang, and I hugged her and we all laughed and went down into the fever dream that is Sunset Boulevard.
An hour later we were sitting at an outdoor cafe, drinking iced lattes against the sultry heat and watching the passing parade. Sunset Boulevard never fails you. Anywhere else it might seem freakish, almost grotesque, a Fellini street, but here the streams of strolling denizens looked charming, stylish, festive, funny, each in his own costume like people in a Mardi Gras parade. Everyone seemed either very old or young; I saw no one who appeared to be my age, and certainly no one who appeared to be my age as I was at home in Atlanta. Women were thin and striking and either wore chic black or chic jeans or so little of anything that they should have been on beaches. Men wore virtually the same thing, except the ones in outright costumes. There was enough spiky hair and pierced body parts and leather to break the monotony, and a careful scattering of Gap Prep, as Laura called it, but these last were, she said, almost surely visitors from the Valley. The rest belonged. We sat with our jeaned legs stretched out, sipping the lattes and watching, eyes shielded by sunglasses. I stared through mine at my daughter and watched heads turn as people passed her. She eclipsed all the passing young women, with a beauty built of chiseled bones and taut, polished bare skin and the wheat sheaf of hair. Why did she look so different than she did at home? I wondered. She wore almost exactly what she would wear there on any given day. But a flame, a new kind of blood, seemed to shimmer under her skin. Here, in this thick, metallic sunlight, Glynn shone like a tall candle.
A skeletal man on Rollerblades wearing a house dress and ankle socks and carrying a Vuitton tote whirred by and gave us a smile and a nod.
“Pretty ladies,” he singsonged.
“Thanks,” we all yelled after him, and laughed again.
“Don’t mention it,” floated back on the little hot wind he left in his wake. In a moment he was lost in the slowly roiling crowd.
“I love this place,” Glynn said dreamily. “Everybody is so happy.”
“Everybody is stoned on something,” Laura said, smiling at her, “but I know what you mean. Sunset always makes me feel like something funny and fine is about to happen.”
For no reason at all I thought of Stuart Feinstein, back in Palm Springs, huddled like an old, ossified baby in his nest of dark mink. Some of the silly shine went off the morning. I doubted whether, despite his proximity to Sunset Boulevard, anything funny and fine was left for him.
“I wish we could do something especially nice for Stuart,” I said. “I can’t get him out of my mind. He seems so vulnerable. Is there anything that you know of that he needs, Laura?”
“Oh, Met,” she said, and smiled an exasperated smile. “Don’t start trying to fix things up for Stuart, for God’s sake. He doesn’t need anything you could give him. You happen to have a cure for AIDS on you?”
“I just thought…his apartment is so bare. There’s almost nothing in it. I thought maybe we could find some pretty pottery dishes, or a print or something—”
“He doesn’t buy things that will last anymore,” she said. “It depresses him to shop for things that will outlast him. He had some really nice things, or at least Bobby did, his lover who died a few months ago. They lived very well indeed. But Bobby’s family from Iowa or some awful place came and took all his things away while Stuart was out of town, even the paintings and china and silver and crystal. There was some gorgeous Waterford. The only thing they left was the bed. Left it sitting there like a slap in Stuart’s face when he got back. He hasn’t seemed to want to make much of an effort about anything since then.”
“Does he have, you know, enough money? He said he didn’t handle clients anymore, except you. Does he have enough for food and medicine and all?”
“He has enough. I give him some every month. I know he’s okay that way.”
I looked at her. In the brassy sunlight she looked bleached and a little shrunken, even though she was still so beautiful that it was hard to look away from her. My careening, wind-scattered little sister caring for someone else?
“He doesn’t seem the type to take it, somehow,” I said.
“He doesn’t know it comes from me. I deposit it to his account every month on the condition that it stays anonymous. He thinks Bobby did it just before he died. It gives him a lot of comfort to think that, that Bobby died thinking about his welfare. If the truth be known, Bobby was a little shit who never once thought about any welfare but his own. His only gift to Stu was HIV.”
“It’s a wonderful thing to do, Pie,” I said, meaning it.
“It was part of the settlement with old No-Nose,” she said, stretching lazily. “He thinks the extra was for massages for me. Fought it tooth and nail. But we got it. He’d shit sunflowers if he knew it went to Stu. He always hated him. Listen, gang, we’ve got time to do some serious shopping. Y’all game? I want something drop-dead-fuck-you to wear to this interview. This guy’s got prettier clothes than I do.”
The Sunset Marquis Hotel lay halfway down North Alta Loma, on a hill so steep that you practically had to cling to walls to walk down it. I thought that climbing it to Sunset must be sheer torture for leg muscles. Stuart Feinstein’s cowboy boots were wobbling on my feet after two hours of shopping, and Glynn tottered in new high wedgies. Laura, in stiletto-heeled sandals and a new black mini so tight that she had to take tiny, Chinese-empress steps, could navigate scarcely any better than we two. The three of us clung together, arm in arm, wavering and laughing and looking, I imagined, like those old cartoon posters with the characters leaning far back, front foot far forward, that read, “Keep on Truckin’.” We were out of breath and dripping sweat when we reached the little hotel.
Inside it was cool and shadowy, with a tiny lounge on the left, full of people looking as if they were closing enormous deals, and a little restaurant on the right full of very young men and women who all looked like Glynn. Rock stars, I thought; Laura had said this place was a hangout for traveling rock bands. Glynn gave them all long, devouring looks. They all looked back at her. One half-raised a hand as if to greet her, then dropped it. He leaned over and said something to the others at his table, and they all turned and studied Glynn. Even in the artificial dusk, I saw her neck and cheeks redden, and she turned away. We went into the chic little ladies’ lounge and combed our hair and washed our hands and put on fresh lipstick, and then headed for the dazzle of light at the back, where the hotel opened into a tree-and-flower shaded patio around a brilliant blue pool. Laura stopped beside the maître d’s desk, and I took a deep breath, and heard Glynn take a similar one. Then we were following a young waiter in white shorts and shirt around the pool to a round table in a corner, shaded with wisteria and some other red-flowered vine I could not identify. Every other table was crowded with people, most of them men in jackets and no ties, and there was a constant low chiming of telephones. Almost every table seemed to harbor someone talking on a phone. The drink of choice, I noticed, was mineral water with lime. So much for the legends of Babylonian excess I had cherished since girlhood.
“Mr. Poythress is running a little late, and says please order drinks or anything else you want and he’ll be right along,” the young waiter said.
“What a pity,” Laura drawled, giving him a slantwise smile from under the brim of a huge, new, black straw hat. In it she looked enchanting, mysterious, completely feminine, something out of the forties, out of the time of Gene Tierney and Veronica Lake. The young man smiled back, dazzled. He looked over at Glynn and smiled even wider. She, too, had a hat, a slouchy canvas affair with a flower the blue of her eyes tucked under its brim. With the sunglasses and the tight blue jeans and wedgies she looked somehow androgynous, like a pretty medieval boy. I felt rather than saw eyes all over the patio swing toward our table and stop. Glynn and Laura made a riveting pair. I settled my sunglasses more firmly over my eyes, hoping I did not look too much like their duenna.
“Enjoy,” said the waiter, and hustled off to get our Calistoga water.
“You might know the bastard would be late,” Laura said. “He’s probably watching from the men’s room window, going to let us sit here just long enough to be insulted but not long enough to be righteously indignant about it.”
From another table a voice called, “Laura!” and we turned. A thin, brown young man in the inevitable sunglasses and baseball cap got up from a table full of similarly dressed young men and women and came toward us, smiling and holding out his arms. He bent over Laura and kissed the air on either side of her face, and then stepped back and studied her, head to one side. He seemed not much older than Glynn.
“You look absolutely fabulous, lovey,” he said. “Are you in town for the screening? I heard you were in Palm—”
“Corky, love,” Laura said. “How good to see you. No, I’m really just up for an interview. I’m meeting Billy Poythress, if he ever gets here. Corky, this is my big sister, Merritt Fowler, and my niece, Glynn. This, you two, is Corky Tucker, who wrote The Right Time and is going to make us all rich and famous.”
“From your lips to God’s ear,” he said. “It’s nice to meet you both. I can see now where Laura gets it.”
His smile slid with equal approval over Glynn and me, and I smiled back. “Hello,” I said. Glynn said nothing, but smiled, a small, three-cornered smile with her mouth closed. I had never seen that smile before. Mona Lisa now…
“Will you sit for a minute?” Laura said. “Catch me up on the buzz about the film. I’ve been out of town, and I’m dying to hear—”
“Just for a second,” he said, slipping into the fourth chair. “Billy Poythress scares the shit out of me. I doubt that I know anything you don’t, though. Tomorrow night’s going to be a complete surprise to all of us. Caleb isn’t talking about it, but I hear some big changes have been made. Margolies insisted after he saw the rough cut. Nobody knows what they are. I wouldn’t even speculate, knowing Margolies. A chorus line and a collie dog, probably. Maybe a black tap dancer. But you know all that, of course. Caleb’s undoubtedly told you. You’re the one who should be spilling the buzz—”
“Pring is back then,” Laura said carelessly. “No, I’ve not seen him yet. I’ve been at home, back in Atlanta, just got in this morning. I brought Merritt and Glynn back with me for the screening, but I haven’t had time to call Pring. Is he at home, do you know?”
I stared at her. Atlanta? She did not look at me.
“I hear he’s holed up out at Margolies’s place in Malibu, pitching the new film. It’s about Joan of Arc, or some saint. God knows. Margolies probably remembers Ingrid Bergman in the original. The skinny is that he’ll let go the money only if he likes this version of Right Time and if Caleb can find the right saint for the new one. He’s talking about a nationwide talent search, the old GWTW business—”
“My God, Joan of Arc,” Laura said, and laughed indulgently. “Maybe they can get the collie to play Joan. Burn a saintly dog. That ought to part Margolies with some dough. What does he think of Right Time, have you heard?”
“I don’t think he’s seen it since he asked for the changes,” Corky Tucker said. “Tomorrow night’s the night for all of us. I heard that somebody from the production met him at a party in Malibu and he smiled, though.”
I laughed, thinking he was making a joke, but Laura looked over at me and said, “Whole films, whole careers, have risen and fallen on Margolies’s smile,” she said. “Listen, Corks, do you think you could get three tickets for tomorrow night for me? I’m not going to be any place Pring can call me, and I really do want these two to see the film. I think they think I do porno flicks, or something.”
“Sure, I’ll have three left at the box office for you. It’s at the metroplex in Century City, you know, where we screened Burn. I hear Margolies will be there with most of the Vega brass. Probably won’t be able to hear for all the folding money rustling. Maybe he’ll put all the Fowler-Mason women in the Joan thing. You three are turning heads all over this patio, you know that?”
“Go on with you, you big old tease,” Laura said in a mock belle’s drawl. “You’re just trying to turn our poor heads. Thanks for the tickets, Corky. We’ll see you tomorrow night.”
“Six o’clock. Everybody’s going on to Spago after. Say hi to Caleb for me if you see him before then.”
“I will,” Laura said, and he went back to his table. Everybody at it waved at Laura. Laura waved back, smiling widely. She still did not look at me. I felt the strangeness and unease rise like mercury in a hot thermometer.
“What’s this business about being in Atlanta?” I said.
“I’ll tell you later,” Laura said. “Here comes Poythress.”
Over the years since I left the agency I have formed the habit of talking silently to Crisscross. I tell her things that I somehow never tell other people; when something particularly absurd or embarrassing or appalling occurs I tell her. When I am happiest or saddest or silliest I sometimes tell her, too. I tell her these things in person, of course, when we do meet, but I talk with Crisscross far more often than I see her. When I saw Billy Poythress approaching us around the pool I tuned her in.
“Lord, CC, he looks just like Porky Pig,” I radioed across the miles home. “His cheeks hang down and jiggle and he has a round little butt and little plump bow legs, and that snouty nose. He should have an apple in his mouth. And you should see what he’s got on!”
Billy Poythress did indeed look like Porky Pig, but a corrupted, faintly malevolent Porky. There was something dried-out and unhealthy about him, even though he literally shone. His cheeks and forehead glistened with sweat or lotion, his little eyes glittered in folds of flesh, and he wore a lilac and purple satin baseball jacket and cap that gave back light like sunlit lava. Clay-red hair curled from under the cap. His teeth flashed white in a wide smile, and rings on the hands he held out to us as he trotted across the pool apron glittered, too. Heads at every table swiveled to follow him. Hands lifted in salute. Voices called after him. He acknowledged them all with little nods, but he kept his eyes on us. The eyes on the patio found us and lingered, to see who was, this day, Billy Poythress’s anointed.
He stopped and looked at us, hands clasped under his chin.
“I couldn’t even guess,” he said in a lilting falsetto. “You three have utterly confounded me!”
“I’m Laura Mason,” Laura said, uncoiling herself from her chair and extending her hand to him. He mopped his brow in mock relief, even though he was, I was sure, well aware which of us was Laura.
“As good a guess as any,” he said, and I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. It was a purely visceral reaction. Nothing good was going to come to Laura from this posturing little man.
She introduced us and he kissed us on our cheeks and patted our hands and said that he should be doing an interview with all three Fowler-Mason girls, and then he settled himself into his seat and looked around the patio. At a slight lift of his plump hand the waiter scurried over, nearly tripping in his haste.
“You’re not Clint; where is Clint?” Billy Poythress said. There was a slight petulance in his voice. Sulky Porky.
“Clint tore his rotator cuff playing volleyball yesterday and had to have surgery,” the young waiter said. “My name is Charles. The maître d’ asked me to take special care of you.”
“Oh, screw his rotator cuff,” Billy said. “What a bother. He knows exactly what I want when. I hate having to go over it all again.”
“I’ll get it right, I promise,” said the waiter, smiling winningly. I felt a curl of anger at Billy Poythress. What a spoiled brat.
“Well, then, I’ll have a split of chilled D’Iberville water, no ice, one wedge of lemon, not lime. You have it; Clint keeps it on ice for me. And then I’ll have a wedge of papaya with the tuna carpaccio and the gazpacho verde with plain croutons, not the garlic, and a plate of polenta with parmesan. You don’t have to shake your head at me; I know it’s not on the menu. Clint always tells the kitchen when I first come in. Make sure the parmesan is Reggiano. And I’ll finish with the lemon crème brûlée and decaf espresso. Lime there, not lemon. Oh, dear. How rude. I’ve gone bumbling ahead of you ladies. Please…”
And he gestured for us to order. The young waiter, scribbling furiously, cast us a wild look.
“Caesar salad and iced decaf,” I said, picking the simplest thing I could find on the menu.
“That sounds good,” Laura said, and smiled at the waiter.
“Same for me,” Glynn said. He smiled so broadly that I thought his peach-fuzz cheeks were going to split. He dashed away.
He was back in an instant.
“No papaya today, but there’s some pretty passion fruit,” he said anxiously. “And the polenta’s gone, but the cook has some nice potato and rosemary risotto, a fresh batch. And just between you and me the crème brûlée has seen better days.…”
His voice trailed off and I looked at Billy Poythress. His face had swelled and gone deep red, and his eyes were lost in slitted folds of flesh, but his smile remained fixed.
“Get Tony for me,” he said, gesturing at the maître d’.
“Sir, I can—”
“Get Tony!”
The boy turned and fled. Billy Poythress turned to us, face still vermilion with temper, smile still fixed, and said, “This is insupportable. I eat lunch or dinner here two and three times a week. I always mention this place in my columns. I absolutely rave about the food, even though there’s better at half a dozen places on Sunset alone. I put this place on the map with anybody who counts the day it opened; half the people come here because I do. I will not put up with this sort of treatment.”
The maître d’ arrived, lean and saturnine in a dark suit, bending slightly and correctly from the waist over Billy Poythress.
“There is some dissatisfaction?” he said in a flat, precise voice. It occurred to me that this was far from the first time he had stood here like this.
“I ordered papaya and polenta, and that’s what I want,” Billy said tightly. “You’ve never run out before. This waiter, this Charles person, is totally incompetent, and I want him fired. On top of everything else he was extremely rude to me. Extremely rude.”
His voice had risen to a treble shout, and I felt rather than saw heads turn all over the patio. I looked down into my Calistoga water. I felt my face begin to burn. Across the table from me I felt Glynn flinch. Laura sat very still.
“No, he wasn’t,” she said then, sweetly, and smiled up at the maître d’. “I thought he was perfectly polite and charming, and most attentive. It’s scarcely his fault if the kitchen is out of something. I’m afraid Mr. Poythress is upset at me, and spoke before he thought. I apologize to both of you.”
And she smiled her enchanting triangular smile, the one that mesmerized cops and directors and older sisters alike, and sat silently, looking obliquely up at Billy Poythress under the brim of the hat.
He flushed an even deeper magenta, but dropped his eyes.
“My apologies, too, Tony,” he muttered. “The young lady has better manners than I do. I will expect some adjustment on the bill, however.”
“The house will be happy to have all of you as its guests,” the maître d’ said stiffly, and turned and walked away. We four sat in silence, and then Billy Poythress said, “You are an example to us all, Laura Mason. At least I saved you a hefty check; I make it a policy never to pick up a tab. Now. Let’s finish our drinks and then we’ll have our little interview. Let me tell you about this place; did you know that Van Heflin drowned in the pool here?”
I glanced involuntarily at the azure pool and turned away. So did Glynn. I knew that whenever after we thought of the Sunset Marquis, we would both see the body bobbing in the bright water, facedown, like a dark, drowned bird. What a terrible man this Hollywood columnist was. I thought that Laura would pay dearly for her courage.
Our food came and we picked at it in silence, listening as Billy Poythress, good temper restored, regaled us with industry gossip, most of it scurrilous and some of it, I thought, actionable. Then he told us about his boyhood in St. Louis and how he had come West to be a journalist, but found that he was “too sensitive, too vulnerable,” for that hard-edged profession, and so had drifted into what he called the people game.
“Everyone wants to know everything about everybody with any celebrity, and I have contacts that no one else has,” he said. “I give enjoyment to a great many people every week. It makes them happy and it makes me happy. It’s an ideal way to make a nice little living.”
Better than nice, I thought. I would wager that Billy Poythress had not paid for a meal in twenty years.
We finished our coffee and he pushed away his cup and took out a little leather notebook. I saw the tiny Hermès logo stamped inconspicuously on it.
“Now,” he said. “I’m going to do something a little different with you, Laura Mason. From what I hear—and I hear everything—this role of yours in Caleb’s new movie is soon going to be the talk of the industry, so I thought we’d talk today about you and Caleb instead. Simply everybody will be wild to know about that. He hasn’t had anybody on the side since way before Jazz; there was some buzz that he was leaning toward little boys. But you’ve put an end to that. So do tell me all, my dear. I promise to give you as many inches as you give me dish.”
We were all silent. I did not dare look at Laura. Every instinct told me to simply grab her and hustle her out of there, but this was, after all, her territory and her career, and I had to trust that she knew best how to navigate in it. But the sense of danger was almost palpable.
“Stuart told me this would be about my part in Right Time,” she said finally. Her voice was low and level and pleasant.
“Well, we all know that Stuart isn’t exactly at his best these days, don’t we?” Billy said, smiling. Smiling. “I really don’t think you’re very well served there, dear, but you know best about that. No, I told him quite plainly that I wanted to know about your little affaire d’amour. He said he didn’t think you would have any problem with that. After all, it’s been getting beaucoup ink ever since filming started.”
“I don’t know if I can do that,” Laura said presently, and looked over at me. Her face was strained and set. I knew what this interview meant to her. Nevertheless, “Don’t,” I said back to her with my eyes. “Don’t.”
“Well, it’s your call,” Billy Poythress said, putting his notebook back in the pocket of the bizarre jacket and lifting his hand for the waiter.
“Wait,” Laura said. “Let’s talk some more about this.”
“Good,” he said, settling back.
“You’ll want to be private for this, so Glynn and I will walk around on Sunset for a while,” I said. “Why don’t you meet us at that bookstore you like when you’re done?”
She nodded, not looking at me. I stood, and Glynn did, too.
“It was nice meeting you, Mr. Poythress,” I said tightly. Glynn mumbled something I did not catch.
“You too, pretty ones,” he said, beaming. “Enjoy your day.”
When we finally reached the crest of Sunset, breathing hard, Glynn said, her voice subdued, “He’s awful, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” I said, but said nothing more about Billy Poythress. What, after all, was there to say? What he was burned in the air like the afterimage of a great blast.
We had a pleasant stroll in the cooling afternoon, and bought a couple more odds and ends to flesh out Glynn’s Hollywood wardrobe. I had thought to find something I could wear tomorrow night to the screening and Spago, but did not, after all, have the heart to look. I did not think I wanted to go. I would let Laura take Glynn. Billy Poythress had been all I wanted to know about Hollywood.
We did not speak of him again until Laura joined us at the bookstore, and then only briefly.
“Did it go okay?” I said. She was distracted and pale.
“I don’t know,” she said. “God, what an asshole. It may have been all right. There’s no way to tell until I can talk to Pring. I’m going to go back to the apartment and try to call him. Then we’ll go get some early supper. We’ve had a long day.”
“Good idea,” I said. “We’ll get a Coke or something and walk on up, give you a little time.”
“Thanks,” she said briefly, and walked out of the store. Her head and shoulders were erect, but there was no lithe spring in her step, none of the old Laura prowl. My heart hurt for that.
When we finally got back to the apartment the shadows were long across Sunset below us, and the hills behind us were blue. A few lights had come on far across the valley and twinkled like fallen stars. In the spreading stain of twilight the view really was beautiful, soft and somehow tender. Nighttime must be the real time, here.
Laura was not about, but I heard the shower running. Presently she came out, wrapped in a white terry robe that must have been the departed Bobby’s, her face scrubbed shiny, blond hair dark and wet down her back. Her eyes were very red. I knew that she had been crying.
“Any luck?” I said casually, avoiding looking into her face.
“No. I can’t reach him. He’s probably still out at Margolies’s and that number wouldn’t be listed. He’s probably called here, but I forgot to turn on the answering machine. Stu doesn’t use it anymore. Let me get dressed and we’ll go get something to eat. I think I’ll take you to Orso’s. Best pasta in the world.”
And it was good. We sat at a candlelit corner table in a little walled patio, under the branches of a huge, low-spreading tree, and ate sublime pasta and drank red wine and looked as Laura pointed out this industry notable and that one, and laughed when she told stories about them only slightly less scurrilous than Billy Poythress’s had been. We did not mention him, and she did not mention Caleb Pringle again, but both men were as surely present at the table as if they sat across from us. We finished early and left, and it was scarcely ten when we went to bed.
Glynn fell asleep almost instantly, but I lay awake for a long time in the outrageous bed of Stuart Feinstein’s, which turned out to be a waterbed and sloshed disconcertingly whenever one of us moved. There would be no question of feeling an earthquake in this bed, I thought, but tonight, unlike the last one, the idea brought me no alarm. The damage tonight was inside Laura and not the earth.
Sometime deep in the night I thought I heard her crying softly on the living-room couch, but when I slid out of bed to go to her the sound stopped, and I stood for a while at the closed door and then got back into the waterbed beside Glynn. The last thing I remembered as I slid into thin, restless sleep was that I had not, after all, called Pom.