Rubicon Beach

by Steve Erickson

  In the case of Toward Caliente the time was long and uneasy. Toward Caliente was Llewellyn’s attempt to turn back the clock and win the battle over White Liars, where his name had changed and he had lost control of those things to which he had once given passion. One night he went home, to the house that reminded him he badly needed another success, and tried to convince himself there was something he needed more and that it was still within his reach. He tried to convince himself there was a way back to the main thoroughfare. Had he convinced himself of this that night, he honestly believed he would have summoned the will for it: he’d have gone into his bedroom and said to his sleeping wife, I’m going to be a poet again, and if it means losing this house, if it means losing my family, if it means losing everything, then so be it. So he tried to be a poet again that night; he sat himself in the study and went to work. All night he worked at writing a single poem, there in the dark of the study with a single light burning over the desk. At four in the morning, after sitting at the desk seven hours, he had written the following:

  My love is like a red red pose

  He looked at this “poem” and heavily, slowly, picked up the telephone and made a call. “Eileen,” he said, and to his horror felt a sob bubbling up from his throat. To cut it off he croaked, “Give them what they want,” and quickly got the phone back in its cradle before it was too late.

  * * *

  At dawn a few hours later Llewellyn staggered into his kitchen where Maddy was feeding Jane. She looked up and was dismayed at the sight of him. “I gave them what they wanted,” he said in an abysmal voice.

  “You couldn’t help it,” she said, “it’s like that in this business. “That’s a lie,” he answered. “That’s what everyone says and it’s a lie. Anyone can help it. It’s not something they do to someone, it’s a choice they give you and you take it or you leave it.” He swallowed; the same sob had been bubbling up all morning. “I tried to be a poet last night,” he explained. “I spent all night trying to write a poem and this is what I came up with.” He handed it to her. “All night and what I came up with was, My love is like a red red rose.”

  He turned and left. She looked at the poem. “You wrote pose,” she said to the kitchen door. She heard the front door close.

  * * *

  Toward Caliente was an impressive success in Los Angeles and New York and Toronto and Boston and did surprisingly well in such cities as Dallas and Santa Fe and Seattle. It got good reviews and, some months later, three Academy Award nominations for the performance of the lead actress, editing and screenplay. That his only Academy Award nomination should feel like such a stab in the back was beyond the understanding of those around Llewellyn, including his close friends and family. As with White Liars, Llewellyn found himself on the losing side of a creative conflict only to see the judgment of the winning side vindicated. The studio was not so heavy-handed as to call this to his attention. They thought it ungracious, though, that he didn’t thank them for making his movie a hit. Part of him genuinely hoped he would lose the award, as though that would somehow prove something to the studio and justify himself; part of him wanted to win so that he might lambaste them from the podium, though in such a triumphant context this action wouldn’t carry much logic, let alone appear particularly at tractive. In fact the worst thing that could happen did: Toward Caliente won the Writers Guild award but lost the Oscar, thus giving Lew’s compromised script the esteem of his peers while denying it the somewhat more tarnished sanction of the industry as a whole. “Don’t you understand they fucked with my script?” he railed at the members the night of his honor, weaving drunkenly behind the microphone. The writers burst into laughter. Since Guild winners usually went on to win the big prize, it could later be assumed the rest of Hollywood didn’t find the spectacle amusing. After that there was nothing like a palpable blackout of his career, it was just that the phone didn’t ring so much. The city assumed that with Toward Caliente something of Llewellyn’s career was dying by his own hand, and they were right.

  * * *

  In the two years after his Guild award and Academy Award nomination he wrote and delivered one complete script, a quite mediocre television movie, for which he’d been commissioned. After that he wrote nothing at all. The mortgage on the house was salvaged by Maddy’s father, who was less interested in the property investment than in the contemplation of his daughter’s unseemly pending reemployment with the Pasadena museum. Your father’s absolutely prehistoric, Llewellyn snarled at his wife, to which she answered, God, are you so beyond gratitude? Gratitude! he cried.

  Then he got a call one day from Eileen Rader, who offered him a job. He would be writing the sequel of a very successful picture of the previous summer, with a cowriter; this meant he’d do a treatment and first draft which someone else would then rewrite. It was the studio’s way of protecting itself from any possible idiosyncrasies on Llewellyn’s part. “Listen to me,” Eileen said, “this assignment isn’t art, Lee, we both know that, this is you getting back into action, this is you becoming a working writer again,” and he read between all the lines right there on the phone: Eileen had pulled strings to get him this gig, she had swung weight. Accept it with good humor and a sigh of relief. So he did, with no enthusiasm. Among those around him there was enthusiasm enough: Maddy, his father-in-law, and his friends, including Richard, who was out from New York for the third time in five years, living at the Ambassador, a fifty-something-year old actor who couldn’t get so much as a commercial. “Write me a part,” Richard said when he heard, and didn’t even have the pride to laugh as though he were joking.

  * * *

  Now, in the last years of his fourth decade, Llewellyn had found himself thinking about his life and everything it meant in the manner of a man who’s at the end of that life. When I was a young man, he told himself one day, I fell in love with women who made my heart stop. When I became older, I fell in love with women who made my heart melt. That pivotal transition came with Maddy, whom he’d known at least a year before he loved, and it came one lunch when she pushed her caustic cynicism too far in his direction (now he couldn’t even remember what it was she said) and he withered her with a look. The blood ran from her face. She was like a child, stricken by the way his gaze turned cold; and in that moment, having hurt her, his heart melted for her and he loved her.

  On the day he saw the new housekeeper in the kitchen he heard the actual stop of his heart, a thump as though it had fallen from his chest onto the floor. He wrenched his eyes from her so that his heart might begin again; by the time he was in the other room he was suffocating. He ran into Maddy. “Going to the studio?” she asked, and he just answered, “We can’t afford her.” At the door he said it again, and got in the car and drove up Sixth Street to La Cienega, north on La Cienega to Burton Way, and out Burton Way into Beverly Hills, where he crossed Little Santa Monica Boulevard to Big Santa Monica and turned west. Not the beach, I can’t take the beach today, he said to himself half a mile from the beach. He turned around. He paid three dollars to park in a lot in Westwood where he just sat in the car. On the street adjacent to where he sat beautiful women passed him by, dressed and toned and carnivorous. You’re nothing, he whispered to them: don’t you know what I’ve seen? He had red visions of The Beast mounting The Earth and fertilizing it, the soil splitting open and the housekeeper emerging, her hair a hollow black and her mouth the drooling purple of carnage. He sat five hours trying to remember the faces of his wife and child.

  * * *

  After that he went out each day, driving aimlessly. Maddy kept telling herself he was going to the studio. Are you going to the studio? she would ask him on his way out. Yeah, he’d say, the studio. When his friends like Richard called, she said, He’s at the studio. Richard said, Yeah but is he working? One day the studio called looking for him. He’s in the study working, she told them.

  On the day Catherine broke the mirror in the Edgars’ living room Llewellyn was sitting in his car parked on Ca
non Drive. A New Jersey photographer he knew named Larry Crow was walking up the sidewalk, and Llewellyn sank down into his seat so Crow wouldn’t see him. He closed his eyes and the next thing he heard was the car door on the passenger side opening and closing; he could feel the weight and heat of someone sitting next to him. Crow, he said, his eyes still closed. Crow was a man of such odious self-assurance that no amount of hostility or indifference could discourage him. He’d been in Los Angeles eighteen months pushing very hard; unfortunately he was a very good photographer, and he was good at persuading the magazines and agencies for whom he worked what it was they really wanted and believed. He understood that he lived in a world where the arbiters of taste and trend and image had no idea what they wanted or believed; they were in a race to discover what their competitors wanted and believed before their competitors discovered it for themselves. Crow had been introduced to Llewellyn by Eileen Rader six months before at a party. The acquaintance of the two men had gone through three stages. The first was the stage in which Crow learned Llewellyn was the writer of Toward Caliente and had received an Academy Award nomination for it. The second was the stage in which Crow learned Llewellyn hadn’t worked in two years. The third was the stage in which Crow learned Llewellyn had just gotten the Nightshade Part II assignment. The first and third stages found Crow very interested in Llewellyn, and the second stage found him not the least interested. If Nightshade II is a disaster, Lew thought hopefully, I won’t have to put up with this asshole sitting in my car anymore.

  Llewellyn opened his eyes. He was always disconcerted to find Crow a more pleasant-looking man than he appeared in Llewellyn’s mind. Crow had a large envelope with him filled with photographs; they were all pictures of women. Crow had found working in Los Angeles exactly the same as working in New York except that there were more beautiful women in Los Angeles and the venality of the city was closer to the surface; in Los Angeles, Crow could identify more readily what he was dealing with. All the women Crow showed Llewellyn in the car were predictably gorgeous, in all hues and variations of gorgeousness. “Check this one out,” Crow said. “This one here.” He moved through the photographs. “This one. This one.”

  He looked at Llewellyn. Llewellyn looked back at him with something resembling superior benignity. “They’re nothing,” he said to him.

  “Shit,” said Crow in disbelief.

  “I know a face that will crack your lens like a diamond.”

  “All right,” said Crow, “let’s see her.”

  Lew was disgusted with both of them. “I gotta go.” He motioned to the door.

  “Maybe another time,” said Crow, out of the car and leaning in the window.

  “I gotta go.” Llewellyn pulled from the curb and headed up Wilshire.

  * * *

  I think you’re right we can’t afford her, Maddy said in a rush before he’d gotten in the door; her voice expanded and tottered. He saw the mirror. What happened? he asked calmly. She broke the mirror with her hands there’s blood on the carpet: our good mirror, said Maddy. Forget the carpet and the mirror, Llewellyn said, what about the girl? Is that all you care about, Maddy cried; she could hear the sound of Catherine’s blood in her voice. I think she’s disturbed, Maddy said.

  Then let this disturbance pass, he said, before we deal with it.

  * * *

  Catherine fell asleep still naked on the bed, the remains of the dress unraveling from her hands and her white kitten asleep on her thighs. She was awakened in the middle of the night by something moving like a web across her eyes. It was several moments before she realized her face was alive. It was inching slowly, almost imperceptibly across the front of her head, a large flesh spider attaching itself to her and spinning its web in her hair. She panicked, believing her own face would smother her. She wrestled with it and soon fell back in exhaustion from the effort. When she slept again she was aware of the face slithering off her and crawling across the bed and floor to the other side of the room. It settled over the fragments of glass still lying at the bottom of the sink, and there in the night she could hear it breed, until the room was filled with them.

  In the mornings Catherine took a small bowl of cold water from the kitchen and dabbed at the blood on the living room carpet. Maddy found her doing this after two days of avoiding her completely. It doesn’t matter, she said to the girl, the frenzy of her expression barely containing itself. Catherine looked up at her and continued what she was doing. Maddy began staying more and more in her bedroom upstairs and kept Jane upstairs with her.

  Llewellyn would not look at Catherine. After years of knowing nothing but men’s looks Catherine was now con fronted with a new phenomenon, a man who always looked away. As Catherine spent her mornings slowly but surely removing the blood from the carpet, the entire Edgar family situated itself on her perimeters. Every day Maddy remained upstairs, every day Llewellyn went out driving. Two months had passed since he had gotten the Elm assignment from Eileen Rader. In the past weeks the studio had called each afternoon, only to be told by Maddy that Llewellyn was working. Llewellyn never returned the calls; he had not written a single word of the script.

  The less he saw of Catherine, the more he saw of her. The less he saw of her in his life, the more he saw of her in his head. He took to seeing her around town, not as an actress or model or any of the beautiful women in town but as a house keeper in a light-brown dress with no shoes. He saw her in the places where he knew it was impossible for her to be. He was hounded by her captivity in his house, though he began to believe it was the house held captive by her. Finally one night, after sitting awake in his study until four in the morning, he picked up the telephone, heavily, slowly, and made a call. “Crow,” he said, a familiar sob bubbling up from inside; to cut it off he croaked, “The girl I told you about. Want to shoot her?”

  On the other end Crow was barely cognizant. “Is it daytime?” he kept saying.

  “Now, if you want to shoot it,” Llewellyn said.

  “What time is it,” said Crow. “Lee Edward? Is this Lee?”

  “Come now.”

  * * *

  She woke to find two men standing over her, watching her. She touched her face. One of the men was Llewellyn and the other she didn’t recognize, though she remembered the camera as a source of rituals at the pyramids of Mexico. The men were staring at her intently; they didn’t see the glass still in the sink after a week’s time, or the kitten sleeping in the drawer of the chest, or the outline of her naked form beneath the bed sheet. They motioned for her to come with them. She wrapped the sheet around her and went into the kitchen; she was surprised to see that outside it was still dark.

  Crow set up the camera. Llewellyn was looking out the window. Crow looked back and forth from Llewellyn to Catherine with a strange expression on his face. These aren’t exactly ideal circumstances, he said to the other man. Five in the morning in a kitchen, l don’t know what l can make her look like. Llewellyn said, after several long moments, Don’t make her look like anything. Crow spent thirty minutes moving Catherine nearer and farther from the wall, under his lights. He touched her hair to arrange it and she jerked away. Llewellyn said, watching from the corner of his eye, Don’t make her look like anything I told you. Just shoot it.

  Maddy came in. She was wearing a robe. She looked at Llewellyn and Catherine and Crow and said, What’s going on? Her voice was little when she said it, as if it were the voice of only half of her. Llewellyn? she said, and he didn’t answer. Her voice kept getting smaller, and when he finally glanced in her direction, he saw the look on her face she had the first time she made his heart melt. He turned back to the window, and she brushed her red hair from her eyes and looked straight into Catherine’s eyes and backed out of the room silently, through the door, never taking her eyes away.

  Crow took a long time. At five-thirty the sky was a shade lighter. Finally Crow took a picture and then set up for a few more. I think I fucked that one up, he said to Llewellyn, who realized Crow
was procrastinating. He realized Crow was afraid, maybe for the first time he was ever afraid, that he had a picture he couldn’t get. Llewellyn never turned from the window. The sky grew lighter and lighter, and after an hour Crow finished. In all the time he had taken the pictures Catherine just remained with her eyes open, in the same place; neither man understood she was sleeping.