Destiny

by Sally Beauman

  His head sagged forward. He traced the mark of his wet glass on the tabletop. He wondered, in a fumbling fashion, his brain refusing to work very clearly, whether the feelings he was experiencing were the result of thwarted lust, or jealousy, or betrayal, or love. And who, exactly, had aroused those feelings?

  It could have been Helen. It should have been Helen. He was almost certain it was Helen.

  On the other hand, it could have been Thad.

  He had met Thad by accident; it was an accident that changed his life. Sometimes, Lewis felt as if he’d been looking for Thad all his life. He had been in a bad way at the time; the immediate pre-Thad era of his life was one Lewis preferred to forget. He had left Harvard behind, he had escaped from Boston, he had been having a good time—and all at once, he had started to worry. He couldn’t remember quite why now—perhaps it was just that he noticed the faces at the parties he attended were getting younger, and he himself older. He wasn’t sure.

  All he knew was that it suddenly seemed urgent that he should stop drifting, and make a success of his life. In his worst moments, Lewis had always doubted his ability to do that, but at other times he felt a euphoric certainty that somehow, somewhere, he would make the grade. He saw himself, the prodigal son, returning to Boston: a success—but as what precisely?

  His mother had always favored politics. She had hinted at her hopes wistfully. She noted the meteoric rise of John F. Kennedy, and hinted more openly. To Emily Sinclair, the Kennedys were Irish-Catholic upstarts. If John Kennedy could achieve so much, what might Lewis, that tall handsome scion of the Sinclairs, do? Lewis’s father was more direct. Lewis would go into the family bank, and his refusal to do so immediately after leaving Harvard was wayward and inexplicable.

  Lewis meant to have nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with the bank. But when he tried to decide on a profession which would bring him the success he craved, he vacillated. One of the new careers, he felt that instinctively—the kind of thing he read about in newspapers, the kind of thing no Sinclair ever did. Advertising. The music industry. Journalism. Show business. The new make-it-fast professions, where what mattered were your wits and your stamina, not the fact that your parents adorned the Social Register and you had a father to pull strings.

  Lewis dabbled with these ideas, pursuing none of them with great vigor, and then, on a whim and a casual invitation from an actress he’d been seeing in New York, he went out to the West Coast. There, quite suddenly, he felt he had found his métier. Not to act—he couldn’t act. Not to direct—Lewis was aware of his own limitations. But to produce movies, now that attracted him. He liked the fact that it was fluid and unpredictable. It was a little shady, you had to hustle, and he liked that too. The wheeling and dealing, the hype, the gab: he liked all those—he also liked the parties and the girls.

  He met a number of young producers while he was out there, and watched them, fascinated. It took quite a while for the obvious to sink in: they were all different from him; they were all Jewish. He confided his ambition to the actress one night, when he was drunk and incautious. She nearly fell out of bed laughing.

  Reluctantly, Lewis decided she was right. He grew tired of the actress, tired of Hollywood, tired of the fantasy. He bought a ticket back to the East Coast. It was actually in the back pocket of the jeans he had adopted as California camouflage, when—late one afternoon—the actress announced they were going to a party. His last night in California. Lewis shrugged and agreed.

  The party was at a beach house in Venice. It was at that party he felt his life really started, because it was at that party he met Thad.

  The actress had introduced him, with a wave of the hand, as “the Toad.” She moved quickly away to some guy who was rumored to have a line into MGM casting.

  Lewis, hemmed in and unable to escape, learned the Toad’s name was Thaddeus Angelini. He was second-generation Italian-American, born and raised in L.A. The Toad provided this brief information, and then lapsed into silence. Lewis squirmed. He still had some residue of Boston manners. He had yet to perfect the Hollywood art of cutting stone-dead someone who had neither reputation, nor influence, nor money, nor hope. So, when his fund of conversation had dried up, and the fat sweating man was still silent, Lewis, growing desperate, asked him what he did.

  “I make movies.”

  The fat man blinked up at him behind shaded glasses.

  Lewis, who was naïve, looked at him with marginally more interest. In Hollywood he had met a lot of people with projects, no one with anything under his belt.

  “I—er—would I have seen them?”

  “It’s unlikely. None of them have been made yet.”

  The fat man giggled—that was the nearest word Lewis could think of to describe the nervous high-pitched rasping sound he made. Lewis swayed on his feet. He thought: Jesus, just my luck; a nut case.

  “They’re in my head. For the present. At this moment in time.” He giggled again, and Lewis decided that he was either nuts, or drunk, or high, or possibly all three. Then he noticed that the man was drinking tea, and didn’t seem to smoke. He peered at him more closely through the haze, at which point the fat man gave him a singularly sweet smile, marred only by irregular yellowing teeth.

  “Fuck off if you want,” he said, in an obliging tone. “I won’t mind. Most people do.”

  It wasn’t intended as a challenge, but Lewis interpreted it as such. He had always been contra-suggestible; now, glorying in that, as well as in the cheap white California wine, he pushed past a shrieking group of Venice fairies and sat down next to the fat man on a cushion on the floor. The fat man regarded him equably.

  “So stay,” he said. “Tell me what you’re looking for in life.”

  To his own everlasting surprise, Lewis did.

  They talked for an hour—Lewis talked, with occasional interjections. Then they went back to the fat man’s fourth floor walkup downtown, and talked some more. At dawn, Lewis bedded down on the floor, and when the hangover wore off the next day, they began talking again. That evening, they went to a Bergman film, The Seventh Seal, at a movie theater near the UCLA campus. Lewis had seen part of it once, at Harvard. The fat man had seen it thirty-five times. They returned to his apartment, and this time Thad talked. He talked for four hours without drawing breath. He talked about that film, and Bergman’s other films.

  Lewis understood about fifty percent of what he said, and that fifty percent seemed to him pure genius. Thad made him see meaning behind meaning, the way movies related to life; he showed him how it was possible, technically, to make these meanings mesh, to disguise them in the form of a story. Lewis listened; art made sense; life made sense.

  The next day he couldn’t remember the details as clearly as he had the night before, but he was still impressed—more than that, he was hooked. He and Thad became friends. He supposed that was the word, though he had never experienced friendship like this before.

  For a period of two months, the two were rarely apart. They lived on junk food from takeouts; Lewis continued to sleep on Thad’s floor. They spent most of each day watching movies, and most of each night talking about them. Thad’s benevolent obsession made Lewis relax. For the first time in his life he felt totally unpressured. Thad expected nothing from him: if he wanted to come to the movie, he was welcome; if he didn’t, Thad shrugged, and went alone. He was uninterested in Lewis’s background, and never questioned him about it, but when Lewis felt the need to talk, Thad would listen, like a fat, wise father confessor. He never passed judgment; he never apportioned blame; indeed, he seemed to Lewis curiously above all moral questions: for Thad, such concepts as duty, honor, and truth—the code of the Boston Brahmin—did not exist. Except in movies.

  Lewis, sitting cross-legged on the floor, forking up Chinese takeout, halfway through a bottle of wine, suddenly realized that he felt free, and because he felt free, he felt great. By the time he had finished the bottle of wine, his concept of freedom had grown still wider. The probl
em with his parents, he saw it now, was that they were old. Most of his Harvard contemporaries were old—they were born that way. Like his family, they belonged to the past, Lewis explained, to the gray postwar Eisenhower world. He and Thad were different. They didn’t give a shit about conventions and codes. They didn’t need things the way Lewis’s family did—houses and cars and college degrees and—Lewis cast about wildly—and money.

  He collapsed exhausted at the end of this emotional speech, and Thad sat quietly nodding. Finally, he spoke.

  “Yeah.” He paused. “We might need money, though, Lewis. We might need that.”

  “Money? Money? Who needs it?” Lewis, forgetting about his trust fund in the emotion of the moment, threw his Chinese takeout box high in the air.

  “We need it, Lewis. To make movies.”

  Lewis instantly sobered. He stared at Thad.

  “We do?”

  “Sure. You and I. When we make movies together.” Thad yawned, and stood up. “Let’s sleep now, yeah?”

  “Okay, Thad,” Lewis said as meekly as a child.

  He bedded down on the floor as usual, and lay awake for hours, staring up at the ceiling. He felt transfigured, remade. Thad wanted to make movies, with him. He had announced it casually, as if it were a matter of course, something they both understood. Lewis felt humble, he felt honored, he felt purposeful. When he woke up next morning, he had a hangover, but he still felt the same.

  Five words and a yawn, and Thad had given him his métier. No one except his football coach had ever shown such simple confidence in him; Lewis felt then as he had felt on the football field, when he caught a perfect pass, feinted, and then ran, winging past the defense, knowing, just knowing, he could make it all the way to the goal line.

  Lewis’s mind grew foggier; the voice of the television football commentator rose to a screaming pitch. Lewis let his head fall forward on his arms; he slept.

  He was still sleeping, some half an hour later, when Thad’s cinematographer, Victor—whom Thad had just released—walked past the small bar, whistling, and thinking with some pleasure of the party that night.

  In the room in Trastevere, Thad finished loading his camera, and with an odd expression on his face, turned away from Hélène, went to the door, and locked it.

  “You do understand?” Thad turned back to her, smiling. “Victor was in the way. It’ll go better now. You’ll get it.”

  Hélène looked at him uncertainly. They had been working on this last sequence now for hours, and she knew she wasn’t getting it right. He wanted something, a certain look, he said, and she couldn’t give it to him.

  All afternoon, she’d been unable to understand why. At that moment, when Thad locked the door, and turned around and smiled at her, she knew why, quite suddenly. She didn’t feel safe anymore. She felt afraid.

  “What are you doing?” she said, hearing her own voice rise. It was a stupid question, and Thad didn’t bother to answer it. After all, she could see what he was doing well enough.

  He was holding his camera tenderly, and rubbing grease across the lens.

  When Lewis finally woke, it was late afternoon. He lurched out of the bar. As soon as he was in the fresh air, and vertical, he began to feel violently sick. He weaved his way down an alley, vomited over an earthenware pot of geraniums, and felt slightly better.

  He staggered a few more yards to the location house, found Fabian had left, and sank down weakly on the stairs. Above him, the door was still closed. He heard the drone of Thad’s voice, and then silence.

  He had a vision of Thad, at some point in the past, probably in Los Angeles, explaining that yes, of course, he and Lewis were a team, that was decided, but that as a team, they were not complete. They needed another element, a third factor. They needed, Thad had said, a woman, an actress, only her acting ability was not of primary importance: what they needed, above all, was the right woman, with the right face.

  In the three months in Paris, when Lewis had worked at the Café Strasbourg, Thad had spent a lot of time looking for that face. He had interviewed and auditioned about sixty women, as far as Lewis could make out, also behind closed doors. None of them had been right. And then, one night, Thad had turned up at the Strasbourg, sweating, out of breath, gleaming with excitement: he had found her, just met her, in the street, outside the Cinemathèque. And she was perfect. She was waiting back in their room now. Thad had told her he’d find her a place to stay.

  They’d left the café and gone straight home. And there, waiting for him, sitting on the sofa in that attic room, was Helen. Her face swam before Lewis’s eyes now. He groaned, and slumped back on the stairs, his mind swooping toward a dizzying unconsciousness again. Helen and Thad. Thad and Helen. Helen and Thad and Lewis…

  He was not sure if he slept, but he felt as if he dreamed. When he surfaced again, Thad was standing over him. For a moment, Lewis couldn’t think where he was, and couldn’t remember what had happened, he was only aware that his head was throbbing painfully, and that his throat felt parched.

  Then something in Thad’s manner, something odd, brought his memory rushing back. His head cleared; he looked up at Thad, newly alert.

  Thad was shifting about on his feet—always a sign of nervousness in him. The expression on his face was a sickly mixture of suppressed excitement and alarm. He was sweating, though the evening was cool. His hands were in the pockets of his grease-stained jeans, and he jiggled the change and keys that always made his pockets bulge.

  “Lewis. It’s Helen. She’s kind of upset. Can you come up?”

  Lewis stood. He gave Thad one long look, and then bounded up the stairs. He came to an abrupt halt in the doorway.

  The room was empty, he thought at first. Victor had gone. All the film lights had been switched off, and only one small table lamp was on. Cables snaked all over the floor; equipment was stacked in a corner. By the door was a neat pile of film cans.

  The bed that dominated the small room was unmade, and it was a moment before Lewis realized that it must be Helen who was making that horrible noise. He crossed the room in two strides, and pulled the sheet back, his heart hammering fast, an awful sick dread rising in the pit of his stomach.

  He didn’t know what he expected to see—blood, perhaps, because it sounded as if she were in pain. But there was no blood. Just Helen, crouched in the fetal position in the middle of the bed, making the dry gasping sound people made when they’d been punched in the stomach.

  Lewis leaned across and put his arms around her, aware that he was trembling almost as much as she was. Carefully, he lifted her arms away from her face. No bruises, no cuts, no swellings, no apparent injury; wet cheeks. She wouldn’t open her eyes. She wouldn’t look at him. She just went on making that horrible dry noise. Lewis was so frightened that it was a moment before he realized she was wearing only a thin dressing gown of some silky stuff, and that, under it, she was naked.

  He laid her back gently against the pillow, and then drew the sheet up to her shoulders. Then he rounded on Thad, who was shifting from foot to foot in the doorway.

  “You bastard. You fucking pervert. Where’s Victor? What have you been doing to her?”

  He could hardly speak for the choking anger he felt. Thad’s gaze slid away from his face. He took his hands out of his pockets and waved them in the air.

  “Nothing. Nothing. I didn’t touch her.”

  “Liar. You goddamned liar.” Lewis lurched across the room and grabbed Thad by the shirt. He slammed him back against the wall.

  “Did you hit her? Did you?”

  “Hit her? Of course I didn’t fucking well hit her.” Thad wriggled his fat body ineffectively. “You think I’d get a kick out of beating up a woman? I never touched her. I didn’t do a thing—Lewis, fucking well put me down, will you?”

  Slowly Lewis relaxed his grip, letting Thad slide down against the wall. Thad started gabbling nervously.

  “I let Victor go. Not long ago. An hour. Maybe two. I lose track wh
en I’m working. I wanted to shoot the very last part myself. I needed to, Lewis. Victor being there, it wasn’t right, he was in the way, I could feel it. The vibes were all wrong. It’s hand-held, the last bit, and I wanted to do it myself. That’s all. That’s all we’ve been doing, Lewis.”

  “You fat prick. So how come she’s in this state now? Look at her—go on, take a really good look…”

  He twisted Thad’s head around in the direction of the bed. Thad squirmed. “I don’t know. I swear to you, Lewis, I don’t know. I said some things, maybe—I can’t remember. It wasn’t going right. She wouldn’t give me the look, not the look I wanted, and I had to get it, Lewis. Today’s the final day. I said six weeks two days, and that’s what it is. Lewis, let go of me, for fuck’s sake. What are you—drunk or something? You’re hurting me, Lewis. Let go…”

  “If you’ve touched her, you asshole—if you’ve screwed up—I’ll hurt you a whole lot more. I’ll…”

  “It’s all right, Lewis.”

  Her voice made him jump. He swung around and saw that she was sitting up in bed, the sheet drawn around her shoulders. She had stopped crying. Later—many years later—Lewis was to realize that that was the first, and the last, occasion on which he saw her cry.

  “It’s all right, Lewis. Really.” She swallowed. Her face was chalk-white under her makeup, and her eyes were enormous and dark against its pallor. Lewis let go of Thad, and crossed slowly back to the bed.

  He stood at the edge of it, hesitating, confused, aware that something was happening to him, something in him was changing. Then, awkwardly, he simply held out his hand, and Helen took it.

  “It’s my fault.” Her voice steadied. “Thad was just doing his job. He needed that shot, and I couldn’t get it right. He said a few things, that’s all. And he—upset me.”

  She looked up at Thad as she said that. Lewis saw their gazes intersect for a moment, coldly, with a kind of perfect understanding. Then she looked away. Lewis had no doubt she was lying.