Equally more hopeful, if equally dim, Victor asked, “And who’s to stop you from using those directions?”
This rhetorical query went unanswered, as it deserved to be, as several people Victor didn’t know came up to them in their exposed position and grabbed at and cheered Colin, who seemed to know them all pretty well, and who was all but borne aloft by them to the other end of the party to meet some people he knew from some other film they’d all worked on together some time ago. Oh well, Victor figured, maybe Sam will get his wish another time.
Then he glanced at Loretta, who was much more clearly signaling, “Get me outta here!”
So he did.
As they got into the car, Loretta was thoughtful. She sat back in the passenger seat of the Rice Rocket and Victor thought for the first time since he’d met her that she did not appear completely serene and peaceful.
“Events like these must bring back all kinds of memories for you,” he suggested.
“Yes,” she said, and the luminous eyes were fully on him, even in the dark, as he pulled away from the parking lot on South Crescent Heights Boulevard. “They really do!” She seemed a little surprised to admit it. “One in particular, oh, forty-odd years ago.”
Victor drove on through the tangle of side streets until he’d reached Third and could move freely.
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not really. Well, why not?” She answered herself. “It was a studio date, put together by the Fox publicity department to boost both myself and the young man. We were about to open together in a comedy, Love is News, I believe was its awful title. He was the serious young reporter, I was the snobbish heiress in the news all the time. I guess you can figure out where that script went.”
“And . . . ?”
“And I was thinking how blue he was. I don’t mean just that festive Oscar evening. I meant in life. How nothing could surprise him, or therefore, really please him. Most young actors would have thrilled by it all. But not him . . . Ten years later, when I saw him in the film they made of Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, it seemed to me for the first time that he was playing himself. You know, that finally all of us were seeing the real Tyrone. But even at the beginning he was unsatisfiable, somehow . . . And then he died so young!”
“Didn’t I read somewhere that the action he saw in the Pacific Theater during the war turned him into a nihilist?” Victor asked.
“That’s just it, Victor. I think he was one from the beginning.”
They’d gone a few minutes when she suddenly turned her entire little body toward Victor and said, “It must be fascinating to an observant person like a writer to see all that going on around you, including me having my memories.”
“It is.”
“Won’t you want to write about it some day? To write your very own ‘Hollywood Novel’?”
“I’ve never given thought to anything like that. I don’t know . . . Maybe . . . Someday . . . “ Victor wavered. Then, thinking about what had happened to him that evening, “But if I ever do, I’ve already got a title for it.” He’d stopped for a red light, and looked at her, “I’ll call it, No More Happy Endings.”
“Oh! That’s too bad. I love happy endings,” she said.
“Me too,” he confessed. Then he added, “And you got a happy ending yourself, at long last.”
“You mean with my daughter? Yes. At long last, the truth came out!”
He wondered if she was one of the actresses Carol didn’t respect because they’d let their private lives be dictated to by studio bosses. But he was afraid to ask, so they didn’t speak again.
When they arrived at the house where she was staying, he got out and saw her to the door.
She’d still been thinking.
“I’m sorry,” she now said, seemingly out of nowhere, “that you got bad news this evening about your movie!”
“In fact,” he replied, “it was more like good news. A green-light, as they say in the Biz. The problem is, I don’t know how much I want to involve myself with people whose motives seem so . . . I don’t know. I want to say harebrained, but that’s not true. Just . . . weird. At least to me. Am I being too judgmental? What do you think?”
“You must aim for the happy ending,” she instructed.
“Got it! Still, in my gut, I believe the movie will never be made.”
“You say that with such finality! If you’re so certain, you can’t be disappointed, can you?”
“Should I take the money and whatever other goodies and run?”
“No. Take the money and whatever other goodies and stay!”
She had to reach way up to kiss Victor on the cheek. He could see she was on her tippy toes, just as she must have had to stand when she kissed John Wayne and Tyrone Power.
“Whatever happens,” Victor said, with a deep-voiced, fake Bogart accent, “I’ll always have this memory!
“Oh! You big tease!” she laughed and went inside.
It was only ten o’clock; early, as Carol had predicted. At home fifteen minutes later, Victor changed into a close fitting sweat shirt and black workout pants and sat drinking out of a bottle of cold Semillon he’d kept in the fridge. He sat for a long time sipping, trying not to think about the evening, trying not to think about the past.
Fog had begun to settle over the L.A. basin, and it was coming on so quickly that it was affecting all those revolving klieg lights from all those Oscar parties along Sunset, Hollywood Boulevard, and upper La Cienaga—from all around town, softening their light and at the same time extending their bright cones almost limitlessly on all sides, so that now they were filling the entire sky and softly brushing edges with each other, colliding, drawing all together. It was kind of lovely, Victor was musing, when the phone rang.
Carol checking up on him? Or her date, the evening’s organizer, checking to see that he’d gotten Miss Young home?
“I’m on Laurel Canyon driving north and the fog is dropping like a stone. I know I turn off _____. Then what?”
It was neither Carol nor her date. The Commonwealth accent was unmistakable.
“Is that you, Colin? You’re headed here?”
“You invited me, remember? Should I not? Here’s the turn! Quick! What do I do?”
“Left! Turn left!”
“Okay, left. It’s a sweeping ess-turn upward. Now what?”
“Keep going. Make a right at the first stop-sign.”
“Here we go! You did want me to come, didn’t you? I thought I detected an actual invite.”
“Yes. Of course. Yes.”
Victor went to the balcony and looked down. Only one car was moving, seemingly led by its headlights amid the maze of streets and houses below
“I can see your head-lamps from here!” Victor reported.
“That’s reassuring. You see, I’m a bit tanked. Actually a bit more than tanked. I haven’t a clue what I’m doing.”
“I’ll guide you. I can see you from here.”
“All right. But I meant that about something else, you know. About more than just driving.”
Victor kept silent.
“You’re still there?”
“I’m still here. You’re telling me that you’re not responsible for your actions because of what you’ve just been through.”
“No, of course not. That’s all over with.”
“I can see you’re one big ess-curve away.”
“Here it is. The ess-curve.”
“Are people pressuring you?” You, too? Victor had almost asked. He answered himself aloud. “Of course, they’re pressuring you.”
“They mean it for the best, you understand. They think I’m ruining my life. I’m passing a white house with a solid red door. I can’t completely say they’re wrong,” Colin added. “I see numbers on the curb-side.” Colin gave out the numbers. He was at Don Wright’s house.
“I’m the next driveway up the hill,” Victor said. “The real question is, what do you think?”
“He
re I am, at your driveway. Obviously I’m beyond knowing what to think! I’m acting completely on impulse! . . . Okay, I’m here and I’m driving in.”
Victor left the balcony and went to the entry. When he opened the door, Colin was just arriving down the steps from the parking area, walking rather carefully and then forward along the path. He had a bottle of champagne in one jacket pocket—Victor could see the Moët label—and two champagne flutes in the other pocket. His cell phone was still up to his ear.
“There you are! I’ve made it!” Colin reported into the phone and then closed it and put in into his pants pocket.
He didn’t look drunk, although his bow tie was loosened and his cummerbund missing and his shirt front was open four buttons down, revealing blond chest hair.
A tall handsome blond man in a white tuxedo with champagne and glasses in his pockets? Where have I seen this astonishingly inviting image before? Victor asked himself. Then answered himself: Bill Holden! In Sabrina! Look how everything conspires to rope me in so I take the jump and I’m back riding the Wheel of Fortune again, he thought. Look! How everything conspires!
“I look a fright, do I?” Colin asked.
“You look terrific!” Victor said. Like a movie star at his handsomest, he could have added, but didn’t.
“I was right to come, was I?”
“You were right to come!” Victor let him inside and turned to see Colin holding out the champagne and glasses, then setting them down and taking off his jacket.
Colin barely looked around the dim room, but went—almost as though drawn—past the open glass doorway to the balcony sharply overhanging the hillside.
The klieg lights now spun gigantic misted cones through an ever-deepening charcoal gray fog. They completely filled the night sky with their lunatic gyrations.
“Now that’s something one doesn’t see every day! I always wondered why people would want to live way up here!”
Victor joined him on the balcony in the oddly illuminated night. Colin took one arm familiarly.
“Doesn’t that pretty fellow we met tonight whom Edison wants in our film live somewhere nearby?”
“Right down there.” Victor pointed to the dimly lit, temporarily unoccupied house.
“I thought for certain you’d be interested in him.”
“Too young. Also, to my knowledge, he never carries champagne in his tux pockets.”
“I can’t possibly drive back down that unbelievable road, you understand,” Colin said with total seriousness. “You must be Mario Andretti or some gymkhana whiz to do it daily. I made it up on sheer nerve!”
“So you’ll have to stay the night.”
Colin faced him and put both arms around his shoulders.
“You understand, of course, that you’re letting yourself in for a world of trouble, having anything at all to do with me?”
Everything conspired. And I even got the warning, Victor thought. How kind.
“I understand, yes.”
“I felt it my bounden duty to warn you. But if you’re that far gone into equal madness, I suppose it’s okay,” Colin said rather recklessly.
He had to lift Victor by the shoulders till their faces met and he could kiss him.
Look at me, Victor thought. I’m on a balcony in the Hollywood Hills, kissing a lovable foreigner, and I’m up on tippy toes. Just like Loretta Young!
Fin
Acknowledgments
None of the previous story would have happened if I hadn’t in the first place been invited by people in the film and television industries to adapt my novel into their media—several times! When possible, they are named. Similarly, if I had not moved to Los Angeles in 1995, I wouldn’t have encountered and been befriended by the many talented men and especially women who worked in classic Hollywood films and TV. They are also named. Of equal importance, my thanks to those fiction anthology editors who published excerpts from this novel-in-progress over the years, in effect convincing me that it had some merit: Steve Soucy in 90069, Timothy Lambert in Fool For Love, and Torstjen Hoejer in Speak My Language. Last, not least, I thank Louis Flint Ceci who read the manuscript closely many times without losing consciousness and who actually helped get it into its current condition.
About the Author
Despite his Bachelor’s Degree and evident visual and draughting skills, no one wanted to hire Felice Picano as an artist or even as an art director after college. Instead he was roped into a series of moderately entertaining, barely paid, minimally creative editorial and writing jobs. These led nowhere important, and Picano ended up alternately book selling on the outskirts of the Warhol Factory among hangers-on, and at minimal pay occupations too embarrassing to recount. Somehow, one or other of these led to Rizzoli Bookstore, where eventually someone on staff thought him too pretentious for even that high falutin’ store. They found him a literary agent who was beginning her own agency. She was desperate for anyone knowing the rudiments of the English language to flog to corporate-publishers, who should have known better. That madness led to repeated publication, a prestigious award nomination, book club and foreign language sales, and eventually best sellers. Everything since then—and it wasn’t far to go—has been downhill.
Until this book, which has been one of the most rational, pleasant, and easy experiences he can recall.
More at FelicePicano.net
Justify My Sins Page 36