Three Balconies

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  “Listen,” he said, “this is none of my business, but I’m making it my business. The idea of a financial person uttering a single word about your private life . . .”

  He became so choked up with anger that he was forced to stop and collect himself.

  “You don’t know Ian,” said Hatcher despairingly.

  “I don’t have to,” said Jack. “I know all about him from what you’ve told me.”

  “We’re locked together in a hundred situations,” said Hatcher. “I can’t very well just dump all of my affairs on someone else’s desk. I’d be ruined.”

  “I don’t care how brilliant he is,” said Jack. “There are other brilliant people. By six o’clock tonight, you can have a line of them circling your house. And they won’t have a word to say about your wife.”

  “You know,” said Hatcher to Hillary. “I believe old Jack here may be on to something?”

  Taking Hillary by the hand, he disappeared into the study. After ten minutes or so, Hillary appeared, the tears erased. Handing Jack a cassette, she said, “This is Marty’s response to Ian.”

  Jack slipped it into a cassette player and heard the following, in the voice of the famed comedian.

  “My dear Ian. Stop. My wife is an utter delight. Stop. She has only been a comfort to me. Stop. If Hillary is hurting me, then the Queen Mother is a dyke. Stop. Why are you trying to spoil our fine relationship of five years? Stop. Your totally confused friend. Stop. Marty.

  “It’s quite forceful, don’t you feel?” said Hillary.

  “Can we take a drive?” said Jack.

  By late afternoon, some of the color had come back into Hatcher’s face. Emerging from his study, he broke into an imitation of an aging third-rate French nightclub singer, moving through imaginary ringside tables on flat feet, with microphone in hand. It was quite heartbreaking. The three of them drove out to a favorite local vineyard, Hatcher at the wheel, Hillary uncharacteristically at his side, as if the film star had arrived at some confident new truth in his life. By silent agreement, it was decided that they would discontinue the work for the time being. Jack would gather up the tapes, return to the States, work on the script and return in a couple of months with a first draft. That night, they went to a legendary French restaurant with amazingly tall waiters. After a highly satisfactory dinner, Hatcher asked one of them if he could sniff the bouquet of all the fruit brandies.

  “And perhaps a shoe if you’ve got a loose one about.”

  The brandies were presented by an unflappable waiter, but not the shoe. All of this fell short of being hysterically funny, but indicated to Jack that his friend may at least have come out of the woods.

  “I’m sorry you had to be subjected to all that unpleasantness,” said Hatcher.

  “I was only concerned about you,” said Jack.

  Outside, what appeared to be a whole season’s worth of rain suddenly came down. Hatcher insisted on going to get the car, more evidence of returning vigor. Jack and Hillary waited beneath an awning. Almost imperceptibly, she moved her hair against his face. He tried to ignore this. In the car, she said: “I was only doing what I felt a wife should do. Marty’s wife, your wife, Jack, anyone’s wife.”

  “I don’t relish the prospect,” said Hatcher, not hearing this, “but I’m afraid I’ll have to go to London tomorrow and thrash this out with Ian.”

  At the villa, they said a quick goodbye. Jack was always more brisk in these situations than his heart wanted him to be. He would have to get around to correcting that. He kissed Hillary on the cheek and she offered her other cheek as well. He started to hug Hatcher, who moved forward as if to return the expected embrace. But they both drew back and settled for claps on the back and a good handshake.

  “I’ll see you in a month or so,” said Jack. “Thanks for the many kindnesses.”

  “Be well, dear boy,” said Hatcher.

  It was Jack’s daughter who told him the news. She met him at the airport and they decided to have dinner in town, jet lag or no jet lag.

  “Have you heard about Mr. Hatcher?” she asked. She was a quiet girl who always looked at him out of the corner of her eye. She was sixteen, lived with her mother, and kept a key to Jack’s apartment.

  “He had some kind of attack,” she said. “It was on the six o’clock news.”

  Back at his apartment, Jack called his French producer, who was a giggler, and who reported the following information: While en route to London, Marty Hatcher had suffered an attack of food poisoning. The doctors were not taking any chances. Considering the actor’s history of poor health, they had taken him to Charing Cross Hospital for observation. (The French producer even worked a giggle into this conversation.)

  Jack went ahead and had dinner with his daughter.

  “I saw it coming,” he said and told her the story of Hatcher and the financial adviser.

  “Maybe it’s cheap psychology, but he did not want to go to that meeting with St. Clair. He was afraid of him, and, either consciously or not, he got himself good and sick so he could avoid it.”

  Jack’s daughter wanted to hear Hatcher on the cassettes; at his apartment, they listened to the actor do a demented English schoolteacher, a mad archaeologist who’d been lost in the jungle, and an Hispanic drug dealer. (This last was off by a hair.) That night, Jack worried about Hatcher and had to admit to himself that he was concerned about their project as well. Did that make him a selfish individual?

  The food poisoning turned out to be a cover story designed to mask a serious heart attack. Hatcher died the next day. It was apparently not the first heart attack; the actor had been secretly wearing a pacemaker. The death received a huge amount of press coverage, which pleased Jack, who had been disappointed when the food poisoning got only a few lines in the press. He had all kinds of thoughts. The wildest and most presumptuous one had to do with whether Hatcher, on his deathbed, had willed him something – a piece of sensitive high-tech recording equipment, for example. He was glad that he had attacked the guru financier. What he was sorriest about was that he hadn’t gone ahead and given Hatcher the farewell hug. He talked to his daughter about Hatcher a lot.

  “You couldn’t make it stick in a normal court,” he said, “but that son of a bitch St. Clair is guilty of murder. I run into that more and more in Hollywood, some bean counter telling me how to tell a story. And this is where it can lead.”

  He thought of flying to London and confronting St. Clair with the accusation, but he knew he never would. Though he considered himself a moral man, he was aware that he lacked a moral follow-through. The film project, of course, foundered. No one who was available could quite fill Hatcher’s shoes. There was some talk of the great Vittorio Gassman, but it would have meant starting from scratch, and Jack had no heart to do so. The French producer paid him half the money that was due – a fairly honorable gesture as these things go.

  Jack was not astonished when Hillary called from London after several weeks and said that she and her mother were going to be visiting the States and could they all get together. Jack felt a buzzing in his legs as he talked to her and said of course, yes. She arrived without her mother. And she brought along the news that she was being considered for a role in a major film that would feature several international stars. All were on the level of Maximilian Schell, who had already been signed. Hillary had gained some weight and was now hopelessly beautiful. Other than to say it was awful, they did not discuss Hatcher. There didn’t seem to be much more to be said. Jack took her to his apartment, which was somewhat lavish, at least in size. He quickly explained that it had been leased for him as part of a film deal. They had never kissed before, but made love almost immediately, as if by pre-arrangement. He hadn’t felt they were far enough along in their affair for this to happen, but she turned her back and did a slow, naked dance for him against the blinds. Of course, he made love to her again. She decided that night that she would give up acting, which had never interested her, and enroll in a graduate course in
international law. And if it was all right with Jack, she would stay with him for a while. It was all right with Jack, although he had lived alone for several years and had to wonder if he would be able to function with someone in residence.

  It worked out decently in some respects. Hillary turned out to be a magnificent cook, her specialization being the sauces of Provence. Part of his regimen had been an almost reflexive nightly visit to a saloon whose raffish following included writers, artists, film types, and the like. She became his companion on these visits, which soon tapered off. They stayed in much of the time, making love at a civilized pace until one of them picked up the tempo. He felt that it was Hillary. Though twenty years her senior, he managed, though barely, to keep stride.

  Jack did not get much work done, although he played at it, putting in the requisite time, attacking a new project with his usual thoroughness. But he felt self-conscious all the while. There was a very large pebble in his shoe. One night, after he had finished going through the motions at his desk, he lay back on his recliner and his thoughts drifted to poor Hatcher, his brilliant improvisations, his drained and befuddled look as he emerged from his bedroom suite each day at noon. This in turn led him to reflect on Ian St. Clair, whose attempt to separate Hillary and Hatcher had, in Jack’s view, sent the poor actor to his grave.

  Hillary returned from class soon after and immediately came up behind him, smelling of the street, her hair brushing up against his cheek. She bit his earlobe gently, reminding him of her fierce and exquisite teeth.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Nothing, darling,” she said. “I was wondering if you had any plans for the evening.”

  It occurred to him that they had made love that morning and the night before and in the afternoon of the previous day as well, when her class had been canceled. And, since she had moved in, on more occasions than he dared to remember.

  Nonetheless, he got to his feet, took her appealingly damp hand, and wearily followed her into the bedroom, thinking that he had done Ian St. Clair a grave injustice.

  The Thespian

  YEARS BACK, when Harry had the Two Big Pictures and was considered (there was no other way to put this) a hot young Hollywood screenwriter – the interviewer at a Los Angeles radio station had asked him how and when he got his ideas. It was a nice soft pitch and Harry got some good wood on it. He said he read five newspapers in the morning, which was not only accurate but also guaranteed a “wow” or some other awed response. Harry said he also read books – a little dig here at his Hollywood colleagues, which probably didn’t register. And he built on his personal experiences.

  “But I only build on them,” he said, throwing in a little charming self-deprecation, “since my life isn’t all that fascinating.”

  Harry then said that his best ideas – and he used this as his capper – were the ones that came to him out of nowhere.

  “They just land on my shoulder, like a butterfly.”

  No such idea had landed on Harry’s shoulder for quite some time. He was waiting for one to land – or “alight” – he may have said “alight” – in a hotel in Miami when the call came through, offering him a small part in a movie (which he would later refer to as a “feature film”).

  The caller was an old – or make that ex-girlfriend – named Vera Landers. Harry had not heard from her in decades. Having felt rejected by New York (and possibly by Harry) Vera, who’d been the assistant editor of a magazine for the dry-cleaning trade, had moved to Los Angeles and reinvented herself as a screenwriter. Rising quickly through the ranks of what not only Charlton Heston, but Harry himself had once called “the industry,” she had recently joined Jane Campion, Penny Marshall, Nora Ephron and a handful of others as a member of that elite group of women who got to write and direct their own movies.

  “Why me?” asked Harry, after telling Vera how delighted he was to hear from her. He saw no need to point out that there were plenty of SAG members around who could use the work. “I’m no actor.”

  “You don’t have to be,” said Vera. “You just have to be yourself. You play the owner of a shop that specializes in rare books.”

  Setting aside the question of whether he wanted to do any acting at all, Harry saw immediately that he would be able to handle a role of that type. And at least she had not asked him to be a burned-out screenwriter, which he sort of was. But it had never even crossed his mind to be an actor. (Although, come to think of it, Robert Duvall – or someone who looked like Robert Duvall – an attractively chiseled bald guy – had once seen Harry climb out of the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel and told him his face was meant for the Big Screen. Of course, that was twenty years back. And it may have been a gay thing.)

  “Let me talk to my ‘people’,” said Harry, a little levity here, since it had been some time since he had any people. He had a feeling that Vera knew that.

  “Terrific,” said Vera, using that all-purpose Hollywood description for things terrific or not. “But don’t take forever. And I’ll fax you the sides.”

  “What was that all about?” asked Harry’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who was spending part of her school break with him. She had been waiting to use the phone so she could tell people she had just gotten back from a school trip to Barcelona. Harry had taught Megan that the most important thing about going to places like Barcelona is that you get to tell people that you just got back from them. And she had learned her lessons well.

  “Somebody offered me a part in a movie.”

  “Why?” she asked, somehow managing to squeeze two syllables out of one word, in the manner of teen actresses in the sitcoms that Harry denied watching.

  Harry was disappointed by the question. Wasn’t a daughter supposed to think her father could do anything? Every time Harry thought he had the hang of having a daughter, he was back at square one.

  “They seem to think I’d be good at it.”

  Megan picked up the phone, then checked her hair in the mirror, as if she wanted to look good for the call she was about to make.

  “How big a part is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Harry. “They’re faxing me the sides.”

  “Sides?” she said. “You mean there’s more than one?”

  “It can be misleading. It might be just one side – and they send you the surrounding sides – so that you know what the movie is about.”

  “I’ll bet it’s big,” said Megan after consideration. “And you’ve got to do it. If my friends found out you’d been offered a part in a movie and turned it down, they’d never forgive me.”

  “Then I guess that settles it,” said Harry, letting the slight disjunction in logic go by.

  “It’s real little,” said Megan, after a glance at the sides. She’d been reading The Mill On The Floss, a school assignment, and at the same time keeping one eye on the fax machine. “You have three lines and one of them is ‘hi.’”

  Before he’d even looked at the pages, Harry found himself defending the size of the role.

  “There are no small parts,” he said, quoting someone he’d heard on the Bravo channel, “only small actors.”

  He could tell that Megan didn’t really buy that particular wisdom, but she had the good grace to be silent.

  Harry looked at the pages and saw that “Hi” was indeed one of his lines; another was “Need some help?” But he was relieved to see that his third line had to do with Pushkin and seemed to be central to the plot. Harry had never actually read Pushkin, but he knew a lot about Pushkin. He felt he could really sink his teeth into the Pushkin line.

  “Maybe when they see you, they’ll think of another part you can do,” said Megan.

  Harry told her it didn’t work that way.

  “Besides,” he said, testing her, “I’m not sure it’s worth it to fly all the way back to Manhattan just to be an actor.”

  “Dad . . .” said Megan, going for the bait. “How can you say that? I looked at it again, and it’s a great part. I’ll even
rehearse it with you.

  “And I think I’ll put some blonde streaks in for the premiere.”

  Before he got carried away and actually committed to the role, Harry thought he’d better run the proposal past Julie. She had given up her old job in carpentry and was now counseling troubled Hispanics in Manhattan. So she was unable to be in Miami with him. But she knew that Harry was going through a “rough patch” (her phrase, not Harry’s). It had been a while since he had gotten a call from anybody to do anything.

  “Your name,” a Hollywood agent had told him, “no longer comes up on the radar screen.”

  Harry had begun, with less than amusement, to look at want ads for Security Guards. And since she loved Harry and always wanted the best for him, Julie had encouraged him to forget about the money and go to Miami to “refocus” or “regroup” or whatever he said he needed to do down there. (“Ramp up” was another one. He may have told her he needed to “ramp up.”) And of course she wanted him to spend some time with their daughter.

  Years back, when Harry had been having what he thought of as a casual, lightly-tethered affair with Vera Landers, he had met Julie behind a police barricade at a Gay and Lesbian parade in the West Village. And that was the end of that for Harry and other women – except for flirting, which he would never give up. Vera, it later dawned on him, had not been as casual as he thought about their affair – and had gone off to Hollywood at that point, possibly in a huff.

  “I think you should do the part,” said Julie, “but remember, she is after you.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Harry, who, after consideration, decided it wasn’t that ridiculous. “Didn’t I read somewhere that she had a kid with a guitar player?”

  “I don’t care how many kids she’s had. She wants your bones. So watch yourself, big guy. And I love you.”