“Nothing,” Betty said hastily. “Give my love to Leland, when you see him.”
Slim nodded and remained where she was; she should go back to her own room, she knew, but she was too comfortable sprawled all over the easy chair, the wine bottles too convenient. She opened another and took a swig, felt the raw, young wine—so common in Spain—burn down her throat, but still she drank more.
And she remembered another story. A story she had no desire to tell Betty Bacall.
Another story about a bullet.
This story was not one she liked to revisit; it was not one she could embellish for effect, get a few laughs, a few shocked gasps, a few Christ, Slims, like she’d just gotten out of Betty. This story was hers, and Papa’s, and Mary’s. Alone.
A raw afternoon, as raw as her red-rimmed eyes. She had found herself in a mess, a bigger mess than she’d ever been in in her life. And so, of course, she’d come running to Papa.
He was in Sun Valley, hunting. With Mary.
“Don’t say a thing,” Papa told her with that solid confidence he still had back then. What was it now? Twelve, thirteen years ago—1946.
Slim was still married to Howard Hawks, but she’d fallen in love with Leland Hayward. Fallen hard. So hard, so deep, she found it difficult to walk upright when she wasn’t with him.
But she was married, with a young child. So was Leland.
(You can’t talk about this kind of thing with a widow, Slim reflected, thinking of Betty alone in her big, unfamiliar bed on the other side of the closed door. You can’t speak of leaving a husband, discarding him like last year’s fashion. Even if it was never that easy, still. You can’t expect a widow to have any sympathy.)
Howard had had affairs—starting on their honeymoon, she suspected. Maybe before. His affairs had driven her to Papa more than once, just so she could experience that desire in his eyes. So Slim shouldn’t have felt a qualm about leaving Howard for Leland, except, surprisingly—she did. Having a child changed things, even if that child was nothing in her father’s eyes. Howard could scarcely remember his daughter’s name, it seemed; he was too busy being Howard Hawks, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, a sought-after director.
Howard was too sure of that, too secure, to ever suspect that his wife would fall for someone else, and when she did, he couldn’t forgive her. But he also couldn’t let her leave; it would reflect badly on him.
But then the gossip columns started rumbling; Hedda Hopper ran an item and took to calling Slim night and day. And so Slim fled, to Papa, who was in Sun Valley. It was partridge season.
“Don’t tell them a damn thing,” he counseled her. Then, in Mary’s hearing, he also asked wistfully, “Why is it we’re never available at the same time, Miss Slimsky? Why can we never be between marriages at the same time?”
Mary blanched, but said nothing. Neither did Slim.
So they loaded their guns and set out in a Jeep, with a pack of dogs to flush the partridges out. It was a good day, cold and blustery but the sun shining, and as she strode about in the mud, the grass, with nothing more complicated to think of than loading the gun, raising it, aiming it, pulling the trigger, Slim relaxed some. It was good to be here; she’d done the right thing. She had to get away from both Howard and Leland, and clear her head, and be braced by Papa’s gaze, his warm words, his solid intelligence. He laughed, his big white teeth snapping against the brilliant blue sky. His voice rang out, echoing in the hills. They shared flasks of whiskey; Papa made fun of Slim’s unwieldy old Browning 16-gauge automatic—“Jesus, Slim, give the birds a chance!”
“I usually do—I usually put a plug in it so I can only load two shells at a time! But I took it out today. I have to have a fighting chance to keep up with you!”
“You’ll need it,” Papa teased. Even so, none of them bagged much, but it didn’t matter, somehow. Although usually it did; Papa took his hunting seriously. Today, however, he shrugged it off, and even Mary seemed to relax. At one point the two women looked at each other and shook their heads as Papa began yet another story about the liberation of Paris.
“And then I showed up at the Ritz, and who was there but Marlene Dietrich! She took one look at me, sent me to her room, and made me take a bath. Then she shaved me herself! Best little barber in the world. I tipped her a dollar, and she took it! You know how frugal Germans can be.”
“You’re lucky she didn’t slit your throat,” Mary said, and Slim laughed, and her laughter was like a gossamer tie binding the three of them together, and Slim wondered why she had never liked Mary before. Then she drank more whiskey.
Finally they called it a day; the partridge seemed to have developed a sixth sense, as they sometimes did, and there were no more birds to be found. So they loaded everything into the Jeep and headed back to the cabin.
“Wait!” Papa shouted, braking so abruptly, whiskey sloshed out of the open flask in Slim’s hand. “Hark! I sense the enemy is close at hand!”
They all piled out again, and Slim reached for her gun. She held it, tense, waiting for the telltale flap of the birds’ wings, but there was nothing, only an insistent rush of wind, the whispering of tall evergreens, a dog barking somewhere, lonely and far away.
Without a word, then, everyone began to unload their guns. The afternoon was well and truly over.
Slim perched on the fender of the Jeep, shaking out her two bullets. Then she pulled the trigger and locked the safety, as she always did.
A roar split the air as the gun fired, knocking her back against the car, her ears ringing. And when she was able to register what had happened—she’d forgotten she’d taken out the plug, so there were still bullets in the chamber—she looked at Papa, about to make some joke about her forgetfulness.
Papa was holding the back of his neck, his eyes wide and blinking in surprise. Mary stood with her mouth open, no sound coming out.
“Christ, Slim—just because I told you about Dietrich doesn’t mean you have to try to shave me, too. And with your gun!”
He took away his hand, revealing a red burn across the back of his neck. His hair was singed.
Slim threw the gun down; she began to scream, something she had never done before. But the words tore out of her throat; the tension, the stress of the last few weeks pushed them out, and she was as close to hysterics as she’d ever been in her life.
“I almost killed you! I almost killed my very best friend, the very best man in the world!”
“I’m fine,” Papa said, his voice quiet, even. He was gray beneath his ever-present tan, and his lips were two rigid lines, his fingers, where he’d grabbed his neck, now faintly smudged with blood, but he was, apparently, just that. Fine.
“No, it’s not! I almost killed you! I forgot that I’d taken out the plug—how could I have forgotten? My God, what would have happened? What would people have said?”
“They would have lauded you for being the woman who killed Hemingway, when so many have tried before.”
“It’s not funny!” And Slim burst into tears, shaking; she didn’t stop even when Papa pulled her to him in a bear hug, and she could hear his heart still beating, strong and steady, and feel his breath upon her hair, warm and life-giving.
Mary, meanwhile, remained silent, still. Only her eyes moved, taking in the scene.
At last, Slim slid out of Papa’s arms, dried her eyes, wiped her nose. But she couldn’t touch the gun lying on the ground; she recoiled from it, shaking her head. “I don’t want this. I’m going to leave it right here, where it can rust over until it’s no good to anyone. I never want to touch it again.”
“Nonsense,” Papa said, striding over and picking up the gun, exhibiting no fear, no resentment. “It’s a fine gun. It’s expensive.”
“Then you can have it. I never want to see it again.”
Papa shook his head and put it in the back of the Jeep next to his own gun. “You’re acting hysterical, Slim,” he snapped, and for the first time Slim heard disapproval in his voice.
Still, she couldn’t calm herself down; her chest felt hollow, her head light, her fingers cold. With one careless act, she had almost murdered the best man in the world.
Just as Slim, shakily, was climbing into the Jeep, Mary came back to life. She threw her own rifle in with the others, and marched up to the passenger seat.
“One bullet,” she hissed in Slim’s ear. “One bullet. You could have killed him with just one bullet. That’s all it takes. And then I would have killed you, with the same.”
Slim couldn’t reply; she knew she would have picked up the gun and spared Mary the task, had Papa been felled by her own hand. She would have put that one bullet into her own heart.
Papa climbed into the driver’s seat, so alive, so massive—she found herself gazing at his broad hands, bigger than any other man’s, as he grasped the steering wheel. His head, square on those mountains other people called shoulders, was so huge, it cast a shadow across her. His thighs, as he hit the accelerator, strained against his filthy khaki pants; his calves bulged out of his tight leather boots.
And she knew she couldn’t have killed him, after all. No one could.
No mere mortal, that is.
—
Slim sighed, ground out her last cigarette. She rose, her back stiff from being seated so long, her ass numb. Christ, it was hell getting old. They all were. Even Papa, finally, was showing wear and tear. But she couldn’t imagine Papa aging, not really. She knew old men: stooped, tufts of hair in places no hair should grow, ears sagging, eyes watery, emotions too close at hand so that they cried at the beauty of an ordinary sunset, raged at a world that continued to thrive even as they diminished. She couldn’t picture Papa as one of them. Somehow, he would always be enormous, bigger than the world, his heart beating steadily, so loud she could hear it, no matter where she was. Until he simply—
Stopped.
—
Slim’s suspicions were confirmed a couple of weeks later; Leland Hayward asked for a divorce so that he could marry Pam Churchill. Slim was alone again, in her early forties and between men, but she didn’t run to Papa this time. She couldn’t exactly explain why; she simply understood that he was no longer the man who made her feel desirable and wanted. He was still large in her life; they wrote, talked by phone. But she hesitated to be in his—and Mary’s—presence again, after Spain.
Betty Bacall had an affair with Frank Sinatra, then she married Jason Robards, but it wouldn’t last, Slim knew it. Because Betty was still in love with a dead man, and she always would be. It was romantic, it was epic, it was life-affirming, in its own way. And so that was the romance that would endure, not these other earthly attachments; of that much, Slim was certain. Bogie and Bacall—the names would always be uttered together, neither one alone. And Slim was envious that she had never had that kind of love in her own life; she probably would never have it.
Maybe she could have had it with Papa, in the very beginning, back when they were both new to each other, but she doubted it. Still, sometimes Slim imagined that she could have, which was one more reason not to see him now, now that their relationship had patched-over potholes; now that they were both beaten down by life. Because Papa was no longer the man she remembered. There were stays in hospitals, bizarre episodes in which he spoke loudly, grandly, of death, a good death. He evaded her now—she called, but Mary said he wouldn’t come to the phone and Slim knew that she wasn’t lying, she wasn’t trying to keep Papa from her. Slim heard honest desperation in Mary’s voice, suppressed tears as she confessed she did not know what was wrong.
So Slim wrote, instead; she assured him she was his, his Miss Slimsky, and she always would be. And that he shouldn’t forget her, he shouldn’t forget who he was.
And she remembered something he once told her, years ago. They were at a bullfight in Spain—Papa loved the bullfights, and he especially loved a woman who loved the bullfights. A beautiful woman who could handle the heat, the stench, the bloodlust of the crowds, the magnificent bravery of both the bull and the matador, the crimson splashes of gore in the sand. During an especially protracted, gruesome fight—the bull refused to die, its heart continued to beat despite the swords sticking out of its hide, and the crowd was on its feet in a stamping, roaring tribute—Papa turned to her. His face was strangely serious; he seemed oblivious to the bloody spectacle surrounding him.
“Miss Slimsky, I can promise you something.” He said it quietly, but still his voice reached her ears, cutting through the shouts and cries. “We’ll spend the end of our lives together, just the two of us. We should always have been together, and we weren’t because of all these other people. But we’ll be together at the end.”
Slim had laughed, even as she felt her blood turn cold. This was what she’d always wanted to hear from him—and now that she had, it seemed impossible. Terrifying, even.
“You’re married, Papa, and your wife loves you. Besides, I’d be a disaster as your wife. You want too much, and I’m too selfish. We’d despise each other, in the end.”
Papa held her gaze with those piercing eyes that never blinked; Slim wondered if she’d ever seen him blink, and thought that she had not.
“I promise you” was all he said. Then he turned back to the arena, raised his hands over his head, clasping them together in one enormous fist. His big mouth opened, he grinned and it was as blinding as the sun. Slim had to shade her eyes to look at him.
—
It was July 1961. Slim, on the run from life but with no finish line in sight, was spending some time on Cape Cod. She and Kitty, her daughter by Howard Hawks, spent most of their time on the beach, reading and staring at the ocean. Kitty was now a teenager, and Slim often caught herself gazing at her daughter, marveling at her ripe perfection, her endless legs, her poreless skin, firm and always burnished with that glow of youth, kissed by the sun even when the sun was in hiding.
She also couldn’t help comparing herself to her daughter. Her skin no longer snapped back firmly against her enviable bone structure; her hair was coarser, not the smooth silken curtain of her youth. “Slim” seemed less a nickname and more an affront, given the way her body had thickened. For so long, she’d been able to eat like a lumberjack and not gain an ounce. She remembered Papa expressing concern that when she dove into his pool, she’d slide right down the drain, she was so willowy. Now she had to watch every bite and she didn’t like to do that; life was to be enjoyed, good food one of its many rewards. So she didn’t deprive herself, but she did often disappear to Elizabeth Arden’s camp to lose a few pounds, when her clothes got too tight.
She was forty-four.
Christ. Her mother had been the same age when Slim was first married, and she had seemed ancient to her then, a matron, no longer a person with desires and dreams, some placid cow who always seemed content to fade into the background and watch her daughter seize life with both hands and tame it to her will.
But Slim, even as she did watch Kitty frolic on the beach in a bikini, attracting the attention of local boys without even realizing it, had no wish to fade into the background. Desire still made her thighs twitch, caused her heart to sometimes beat more strongly against her flesh, as if to send a message to the world, “Look at me! Notice me! Make me quiver and shiver and flush!” Slim still wanted to walk into a room and make every man present turn to her, catch his breath, and ball his hands into fists. She wanted to make every woman reach out to touch her husband, pull him close, claim him, as she walked by.
Naturally, then, with these thoughts crowding all others out of her mind, she wondered about Papa. Where was he right now? What was he thinking? Was he dreaming of her, as she always assumed he was—needed to assume he was? But she didn’t reach for the phone; something prevented her, some wish to preserve the perfect past, maybe. Or perhaps she needed someone new; maybe she was weary of hearing the same things from the same man who would never be hers, not even in the end, despite what he had promised.
So Slim tied a scarf around her head and
went on a long walk on the beach, fighting the sand for each step but rejoicing in the pleasant ache in her calf muscles, for it meant she was still alive, still moving, not fading into the background. She walked for a very long time, until the sun began to yawn and call it a day, and then she turned around and walked back. The lights were on in her little beachside house. One of her neighbors, a longtime friend—Shipwreck Kelly, one of the few men in Slim’s life who had never wanted her, and so she admired him almost more than anyone else she knew—was sitting on the faded wooden porch steps, two martinis already poured and ready.
“Slim,” he said, rising. “I sent Kitty off for a while. Ernest is dead.”
“Ernest?” Slim didn’t know an Ernest.
“Slimsky, he killed himself. Papa.”
And then Slim realized that she did.
And that she’d been expecting this for a very long time.
And that this was why they’d never be together, in the end.
“Oh.”
Slim sat down on the porch next to Ship; the big man—he’d been a great football star in his youth—didn’t even put an arm around her. But she was glad for that; it helped her believe that what he had said was true, then.
Of course it was.
“Oh, Papa,” Slim said, shaking her head, but her eyes were dry, even if her heart was numb. “I couldn’t have killed him. Mary couldn’t have killed him. Disease couldn’t have killed him. Nothing—no one—could have killed him. Except himself.”
Ship nodded, gazing out at the purple clouds hanging low over the water.
“How?” Slim asked, finally.
“A gun. He shot himself. They let him out of the clinic because he’d been good for a while, and he came home to the place in Idaho with Mary. She left him alone for a minute and he ran to a closet where he’d hidden one of his guns from her. And he put it to his head and pulled the trigger.”
“One bullet,” Slim whispered, swallowing, even though her throat was dry, her skin cold.
Reckless Hearts Page 3