by John Fowles
Dan came to the airport to meet me at Los Angeles. With the studio publicity woman and her photographer and roses in cellophane. He claimed it was because Bill couldn’t make it, he was just standing in. Which spoilt it. A little. But he wasn’t drunk, he was dry and rather paternal, a different person from Claridges. And when we were at last in the limo away into the land of the fries and the burgers he described his own first arrival years before, unmet. The feeling totally alien and lost. He saw me look at one of the monopod hoardings, with some absurd giantess of a drum-majorette slowly spiralling on top. He said, You have to decide one thing here—which is real, you or Los Angeles. Right?
I said, Right.
I turned that into a mantra. It was the nicest, the best thing he ever gave me. ‘Los Angeles’ means anywhere.
I was in flakes and they made me go straight to bed when we got to the hotel. I was to have a free day before the publicity grind and fittings and the rest. There was a list of flats, apartments, to look at. I’d decided that somehow living in an apartment would mean like being in digs in rep. A tin of coffee, a box of detergent, a kettle to boil. I might need that. The publicity woman had planned to take me looking, but Dan offered to combine it with a drive round the sights. I think he saw something in my face, she wasn’t my cup of tea at all. Frightened me with all that career-woman processed-cheesecake charm.
He picked me up at ten next morning. I hadn’t been able to sleep well, I kept on getting up and staring out of the window. So this is America, this is the place, that’s Sunset Boulevard down there. Nine-tenths of me was still in London, dear little Belsize Park. I was scared, I was glad Dan was going to be there to shepherd me in the morning. He was in the Polo Lounge, drinking coffee and reading the day before’s London Times. Very reassuring. And I even felt excited for a while, just a tourist. But it got too much, we saw too many places too far apart and I began to get in a panic again, going all instinctive instead of practical. He was patient and neutral. Like an estate agent, bored but hiding it, with a rich client. And then I began to think he was secretly watching me, trying to make up his mind whether I really was right for the part and I felt annoyed that he wasn’t sure. He said later he liked what he called my being choosy. He’d just been curious, ‘anthropological’. I didn’t think of him in a bed way at all. No. I did once, in a ghastly bedroom we were both standing in. And dismissed him at once. He tried to put me off the place I finally said yes to. But I fell for the view. I’d realized by then that I’d never find room-shapes and furniture I could happily live with. So I hired the view. We had a late lunch back at the hotel. He offered to drive me round some more, but by then I wanted to get rid of him. I went and slept.
That same day’s evening Bill had flown back from New York and he and his wife and Dan took me out to dinner. It was for me to meet Steve as well, but he hadn’t turned up, though he’d been supposed to make the same flight as Bill. Who brought profuse apologies. Steve was busy laying, of course (as he told me as soon as we did meet, the next afternoon). It was like the birds-of-paradise with the note from him (Thrilled to be working with you—Steve) I found waiting with all the rest of the florist’s shop. From the hotel, and Bill, and the man Gold, and the studio, none from Dan, though in my suite when I arrived. Each card written in the same hand. When I thanked Steve for flowers and message, he just opened his hands, a typically lousy piece of acting. He didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.
But I’d already heard enough about him by then. At dinner that first evening Bill and Dan had finally drunk enough to be bitchy and more honest. I learnt for the first time that Steve was neither of them’s first choice the man Gold had pulled box-office.
Steve has some hang-ups, said Bill.
He’s a prick, said Dan.
I can handle it, said Bill. It is there.
And then Dan smiled at me, the faintest wink, partly at that clumsy use of ‘it’, but something nicer. Both tender and wry, some kind of simple English current between us in the posh-lousy eating-place. An alliance. And it said he’d decided to like me, we’d find a way to cope with the Prick. Which we didn’t, but never mind.
Then next days: meeting the Prick, fighting wardrobe, the awful run-throughs, rewrites, arguments. Trying to get it to the P. that I didn’t want to make it quite yet in the sack, thanks very much all the same. One god-awful statutory evening alone with him and his hang-ups well, what Dan would call anthropologically quite interesting, they all seemed so calculated, part of his image, and ludicrously dolled up with Nam and all the okay political attitudes. I got very prim and English with all his sloppy clichés. He’d have done fine as a beach bum or a gigolo. It was trying to be a thinking actor. And irresistible penis. I let him kiss me at the end. Killed the groping before it got anywhere, and any repetition of it.
All this was against the (for me) whole freak background of the thing, making a movie in Hollywood for gosh sake, maybe we should start an industry here. Ha ha. Of course I knew my real career (thou dark enigma) didn’t depend on this very much, if at all Dan didn’t have to teach me that. But I had some sort of culture shock. I couldn’t tell the P. what I really thought of him, as I would have back home. He had to be made to want to help me a little, with all the sex scenes ahead. And then the awful synthetic gloss (I hadn’t met Abe and Mildred then, remember) over the other people in this world, the constant gescheffting, gossiping, organizing, like hundreds of little plastic cogs in a clock that won’t keep real time anyway. Nothing ever seemed to stop, one always had to be doing something, planning something, saying something that was ‘meaningful’. It was like a foreign language I couldn’t speak (not American English, the movie-biz use of it) yet had to listen to because I could understand it. All those boring evenings with people I never wanted to see again. Worse even than boring publicity. Feeling I was being dragged down into the gloss and the plastic and the piddling self-importance, all of which made me long for England and people who do their own thing naturally and not because it’s a trendy little phrase. Long for hours that drift and conversation that hops about and has silences, with nobody really believing one another or expecting to be believed, because it’s all a game. All you pointed out to me later about old and recent users of a language. The awful giveaway of trying to be ‘meaningful’.
Sorry. All Dan pointed out to me.
Which made me look forward more to that than to Dan to an evening with him. His suggestion, very tentative, an English exiles’ evening, just the two of us. I had lost touch with him a little after that first day. He was around during the read-throughs and I’d got to admire him professionally. The P. was always coming up with ‘better’ (shorter) lines, or no lines at all because he could get it across by some piece of fantastically subtle sub-sub-Brando (Jesus) stifle which he could never quite demonstrate, let alone explain. Bill and Dan must have agreed how to handle it. Bill would sound sympathetic and interested, Dan would finally shoot him down. I think they were right, it was the only way. But it was so longwinded. And the P. started taking against Dan and the whole script and tried to enlist my support. I used to sit there silent in all the gas and think how much simpler the whole bloody process was at home.
So our evening. We drove back over the hills to the San Fernando Valley and some dotty Russian place, where the food came in dribs and drabs, with endless pauses, and not what we’d thought we’d ordered anyway, but delicious. I pumped him discreetly, his past. Learnt he was divorced, one daughter only three years younger than me and trespassers keep out. I did. But his career, his plays, why he’d stopped writing them, movies, America… he talked a lot and I responded and he listened when I began unloading all my own naive feelings about California. I knew we had a wavelength, something I’d doubted before. He came in for a nightcap when we got back to my apartment. Ten minutes later he pecked my cheek and left. I wanted him to. Which doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a lovely evening and a great relief.
Shooting began, locations, and I hardly saw h
im then. Just very occasionally he would appear, he’d already started on the Kitchener script. But then he was there one day during the sequences at Malibu and we had a talk between takes. I was getting pissed off, they seemed to need so long to set things up and Bill never seemed satisfied until we’d done three takes more than necessary. I used to get driven straight home after shooting and then stay in, go to bed at eleven, ten sometimes. A model young actress. But compared to dressing up and going out and being a sex-object and wildly bored I started turning down everything. I had a courtesy meal with Bill and his wife, but I think that was all for a whole week. It was strange, I rather enjoyed it. Cooking the bits I’d scribble Martha to buy when she came in to clean. Or sometimes I’d stop off in the studio car and pop into a health-food place or a delicatessen. Kitchen around a bit, watch the inane TV. Read. Write home like a schoolgirl. It was Dan’s fault. I was trying too hard to prove California was unreal, not me.
Some of which (not that last bit) I found myself telling Dan between takes at Malibu. We were paddling, like elderly trippers at Southend. The stills man took a photo of us I’ve kept. Both staring at the sea at our feet. I suppose I was trying to tell him my simple Anglo-Scottishness was stronger than this alien culture. And honestly no, I didn’t feel lonely at all. Yes, of course I’d ring if… and suddenly knowing I was lonely. That was where the digs illusion broke down. The other girl I’d have had to chatter with and moan to. It was a kind of bottling up, that was why I was writing so many letters. It was just someone to talk to, no more than that. I’d stopped the jack-and-jill, I was getting on perfectly well as a temporary nun.
I said, I’ve discovered a sensational health-food store.
He gave me a side-look. Is that an invitation, Jenny?
It hadn’t really been. Then suddenly was.
Tonight? If I promise to leave by ten?
I knew I had to come to a decision, as soon as I’d said yes. It had all been very guarded, casual, space for withdrawal on both sides. But I knew ‘check’ would be attempted. I thought about it a lot, that is, about a whole aspect of Dan I haven’t mentioned before the fact that he has a name. On the other hand, knowing that by the highest standards he never quite got there, that his plays are really rather square, that among my generation in the theatre there are a dozen other writers we are more interested in, more “with’… which he knows, though it’s always been a taboo subject between us. He assumes I despise him theatrically, at best a sort of toleration. And perhaps I always assumed too much that he didn’t really care. Then something else: the fact that, in (silly) terms of having your name in the papers, I’ve always before gone down rather than up for my men. I’d known for some time that that wasn’t healthy. As if it wasn’t enough to give my delightful body-and-soul to them, but there had to be the press cuttings as well.
It was partly vanity. Handing out the privilege of sleeping with Jenny McNeil in return for her privilege of despising them for not having made it—which is exactly how Timothy once put it. And outraged me, I was so sure my living with him proved I was a democrat, that I saw through all the ballyhoo, I might be an embryo star but my feet were on the ground. It was also a fear, almost a little girl’s fear that I should one day wake up and all this would burst like a bubble, so better not risk too much. But the other thing was paramount. I always felt safer when there was something in lovers I could despise. I couldn’t even call it political, a justifiable Women’s Lib attitude. It went much deeper, to a nasty little self-centred terror of being challenged and disturbed. Reduced to equality.
I’d thought often about all this since I came to California. It may shock Dan, but it did play quite a part. He wasn’t very famous, or someone I admired deeply as a writer. Just quite famous and quite respected which meant I could still despise him a little and still feel he was a long step up from nonentity. He was perhaps going down and I was perhaps coming up, but for now the balance of success and experience and professional respect and everything else was heavily on his side. Except physically, I’d be doing him no favours.
This all sounds so vilely calculated. I kept changing my mind about him (or it) through the rest of that day at work. And there were honestly all kinds of simpler things. Wanting to know him better, thinking how it would put the Prick’s nose out, feeling excited, both emotionally and sexually. I suppose I saw Dan as a sort of challenge. I remember having had a shower and staring at myself naked in the mirror, before he came. Feeling strange. Just not knowing. I’ve always known before.
Then wanting, much later that evening, after eleven, him to make a move. He’d been pumping me, much better than my attempt at it during our Russian evening. I suppose the Cats are right, you do need regular confession. Like menstruation. He’d coaxed out of me what I really felt about the film, about Bill, about the Prick (we agreed for that name for Steve that evening). Everything. My never being quite sure what Bill wanted or what dotty new improvisations the P. would suddenly introduce into a scene, and why Bill let him get away with it so often. Dan was nice: the rushes I’m not allowed to see, I was doing fine. Even the ever-pessimistic Gold was impressed. But what I liked best was knowing Dan himself had passed me.
Then the talk finally wearing thin, as if I was hinting that he should go, but it was only because I didn’t know how to say that he didn’t have to.
A fantastic silence. It seemed to last for ever. He was lying on the couch, feet up, staring at the ceiling. I was sitting on the rug beside the log-place, hearth is too nice and old a word for it, back to the wall, staring at my toes. I was wearing a shirt, no bra, a long skirt. No makeup. He’d come in a blazer, foulard, studious informal like a smart Angeleno. Only he’d taken the blazer off. A blue flowered shirt.
He said, If this was a script, I’d have the man get up and go. Or the girl get up and come. We’re wasting footage.
He turned his head on the couch and looked across at me. I didn’t like that corny way he’d put it. He wasn’t smiling and I didn’t smile back. After a moment I stared down at my feet again. He got up, picked his blazer off a chair and just exited. Without a word. Not even a goodnight or a thank you for the meal. The door closed and I was left sitting there. Perverse: he’d have to do better than that and I still didn’t want him to go.
But he went. I heard the outside door open and then it was slammed shut. Silence. I ran to… I don’t know, at least say something. And he was there, leaning by the front door, inside, staring down at the ground. The old trick.
I turned back into the room and he came after me, switching off the lights. I remember he put his arms round my back and kissed the back of my head.
I said, Dan, I’m not on the pill at the moment. That’s all.
No problem. If that really is all.
I put my hands down on his and said, I didn’t want you to go.
He began to unbutton my shirt, undressed me, without kissing me again after that first touch. Then himself, and I was still half perverse, I just stood there waiting, looking out at the lights all the long way to the ocean, hearing the freeway traffic down below: all those funny, streaky, wobbling thoughts when you know it’s this, a new thing, a new man, where is this room, who am I, who cares, why.
He came and put his arms round my shoulders and led me to the couch. We lay down side by side and he ran his hand down my body, watching me. Almost as if he thought I might flinch. As if I’d never had sex before.
He said, I’ve been wanting to ring you all week.
I said, I wish you had.
We kissed then. I was simple, passive, no games, I let him do what he wanted, responded just enough to show him I wanted him to do what he wanted there was still something uncertain, I wasn’t sure I wanted him for this, though I didn’t mind. Anyway, it never is natural the first time, one’s taking notes, comparing, remembering, waiting. In the end we went on the floor and I thought of tomorrow. Seeing him again, after this. Then his body. How lucky men are to have it so simple.
He didn’t s
ay anything. Neither of us said anything for some time. We just lay there, the way you come out of a film sometimes and you don’t want to talk about it. I thought how little I knew about him. Wondered how much he did this sort of thing. There was very little unit gossip about him. Wondered what he really thought about me. His age, his past, my age, my past. He broke the silence. First he reached out and traced the line of my mouth.
Jenny, in the argot of this barbarous province what I’ve just done is lay a broad. The only way to kill that argot is to break the rules of the ritual that accompanies it. By the rules I should thank you for a nice fuck, dress and drive home. But I’m going to take you to bed and sleep, just sleep, beside you. Kiss you in the morning. Make your coffee when your call comes. You understand, if tomorrow you feel it’s all a mistake, fine. I just want to be sure that for now we behave like European humans. Not movie-land apes.
He was leaning on his elbow, watching me in the darkness.
I said, It already is tomorrow. I’m still here.
He kissed my hand.
Okay, then just one more speech. I’ve been in love often enough in my life to know the symptoms. As opposed to the lay-the-broad ones. But love is a sickness of my generation. Not yours. I don’t expect you at any point to catch it from me.
Is that a request or a prediction?
Both.
And that was it. We went to bed. We didn’t sleep. There’s something about one’s own bed, most belonging there. And the way he held me. And thinking about what he’d said, and how it hadn’t needed saying, it was almost insulting because it really meant I might just be a broad who went in for one-night stands and then that I was too young and shallow and Irish to understand love. It was square, anyway. But it also said he was less cool, or more vulnerable, than I believed. And something wicked: Daddyo wants me. All his years, his women. Till suddenly I wanted, and truly to say yes, and turned to tell him.