“Well, I wouldn’t have to think so hard at this hour on Sundays,” I said. “This is a freakish conversation. Why can’t we just talk about deals and box office, like normal people?”
“Let’s go,” she said. “I’m tired of guarding a coffee cup.”
I reached for the check, but she was quicker. “I’m the one that’s going to be rich,” she said. “You can tip.”
She was at the cash register, waiting none too patiently, when I finally unwedged myself from what had been our booth.
4
OUTSIDE, WE WALKED DOWN SUNSET BOULEVARD, TOWARD La Brea. It was early November and cool enough that the smog looked milky in the hills. Jill walked along with her hands in the pockets of her jeans for a block or two. Then, abrupt and awkward as ever, she came over and tucked one arm in mine. She even put her cheek against my arm for a moment, like a girl come to Daddy.
“Maybe it will be a terrible flop,” she said. “Maybe I’ve really wasted all that money.”
I put my arm around her and we walked along for a time.
“I wonder how long it would take to walk to San Bernardino?” she asked.
I had nothing to say to that either. The concept of walking to San Bernardino was one no sane mind would admit.
“I think they all thought I was frigid,” she said a little later.
“Who?”
“Those guys at Warners,” she said. “Those boys you bored to death. I bet a lot of people still think that.”
“What brought this on?”
“You did,” she said. “I was fine until you pointed out that if I travel with anyone it’s supposed to be a boyfriend. Where am I going to get a boyfriend, in two days’ time?”
The way she said it struck me as so funny that I sat down on a bench at a bus stop, to laugh my fill. It embarrassed Jill. “Stop laughing,” she said. It did no good. A car full of chicanos slowed down as they passed us, to take in the spectacle of a fat man laughing on a bench at a bus stop while a skinny woman in jeans looked at him helplessly. Finally Jill sat down by me on the bench.
“You have a perverse sense of humor,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was just the way you said it. That’s your essence, or something.”
She looked at me, as if perhaps suddenly mindful that I might have problems, too, and began to rub the back of my neck. “I don’t have an essence,” she said, “I used to, but I lost it. I could just sit here on this old bus bench forever, talking to you, and I’d be just as happy as I’ll be otherwise.”
I think I was laughing just to keep from crying, although at the moment it would have been hard to put a finger on what I might have had to cry about. Jill has a strange effect on me. Statements that are perfectly innocent, maybe just a little droll because of her odd way of putting things, turn out to be piercing in a lot of cases. I end up laughing too much. Of course it’s just a sign that I’m slightly cracked, but that’s no secret.
“You could get a boyfriend instantly, if you really want one,” I said. “You’re one of the most sought-after women in Hollywood.”
She ignored me. “I would have been perfectly happy to go to New York if I could have had you stay with me,” she said. “Of course that won’t do because I might get in the way of some conquest. Far be it from me to ask you to do without a debutante for a whole week.”
“All right, stop it,” I said. “Debutantes are people, too.”
“I apologize,” she said. “I’m sure you’re right. You if anyone should know.”
She didn’t say it nicely. In fact, there was an edge to the remark that I found intolerable.
“Don’t talk like that to me,” I said. “So what? I’m not the soul of convention, like yourself. You’re so fucking proper you can’t even take a simple trip without wondering whether some asshole will think badly of you because you don’t have a boyfriend. Why do you always try to do what you think people expect of you?”
“Probably because I know I never can,” she said. Her eyes cleared—they had darkened with hostility for a moment.
“What a screwy outlook you have,” I said. “It’s nobody’s fucking business what you do. Do you really care what people think about your love life? If you do, you’re not going about it right. The only suitable boyfriends for promising young female directors are rock stars, politicians, studio heads, and French photographers. Take your pick and get busy.”
I have a wicked tongue, but then so does she.
Her eyes darkened again. “Perhaps I’ll take Preston Sibley,” she said. “He’s a studio head. If I take him, maybe you’ll get to keep his wife for a few more weeks.”
She got up and walked across the Boulevard and up toward the hills. I got up and followed. Her house was up there, and mine too. She got about two blocks ahead of me and then went up a curving road, out of sight. I found her sitting on the pink steps of the little four-room bungalow she had lived in for the last several years. Her face was red but I didn’t notice any tears.
“Terrible behavior on my part,” I said. “On the Sabbath, too. I feel you deserve a refund on a breakfast.”
“Shut up,” she said. “Come on in.”
Just as I stepped into her yard, a kid whizzed down past me on a skateboard. If he had hit me, at the speed he was going, it would have turned us to peanut butter. The kid had so much hair that, if he hadn’t had on tie-dyes, I would have thought it was just a blond sheep dog skateboarding by. Then three bicyclists sliced down the street, their teeth clenched. I couldn’t tell what sex they were: all I saw was teeth. Hollywood was waking up, just at the hour when I felt most in need of a nap.
I went in and lay down on the large white wicker couch that covered one wall of Jill’s small living room. A while later, when I woke up, she was sitting across the room on a blue pillow, talking quietly on the telephone. Sunlight filled the room behind her, the only spacious room in the house. It was supposed to be a dining room, but Jill used it for a studio. Her drawing board was there, and piles of magazines, books, sketches, and scripts were arranged in neat stacks under the large windows.
A bloody Mary sat on a little teak coffee table, almost within reach of my hand. It had a large stick of celery in it. What a thoughtful woman she was. I demonstrated my own thoughtfulness by eating the stick of celery as loudly as possible. It was the only way to keep myself from eavesdropping on her conversation. In the light of my recent boorishness, such an effort seemed only fair.
I was mean to Jill because I couldn’t afford to be mean to Page Sibley, wife of Preston Sibley III. Page had just about completed the Joe Percy tutorial in Real Life, and would soon go back to being a Beautiful Person. Real life wasn’t going to last, which was the main reason I had been a little reluctant to accompany Jill to New York in the first place. Preston Sibley was going to New York for the Festival, even though he didn’t have a picture in it. The Festival was an excuse to go east, and any excuse was good enough for Preston.
At the same time, he would not be likely to encourage Page to go, since the lover she had had before me lived there. He was one of America’s better painters, and, like me, he was much too old for Page, herself a tawny twenty-five.
She hadn’t been tawny before she married Preston and moved to L.A., but now she had that irresistible golden hue that is to be found only on women who happen to inhabit the tiny area of the earth’s surface that lies between Wilshire Boulevard and the Bel Air Hotel. Examples of this extraordinary hue will sometimes occur as far afield as Westwood or even Santa Monica, in certain seasons, but those will seldom be the finest examples. Perfection, whether of leg, shoulder, upper arm, or midriff, will usually be confined to those living within the area specified: elsewhere the color is apt to be too light, evocative of wheat-germ breakfasts and an obsessive interest in health, or else too dark, meaning too much time spent on the beach.
Page lived about 400 yards from the Bel Air Hotel, and her skin was all you could ask for, when it came to skin. If her mind had b
een the equal of her skin, there would have been no stopping her—which is not to derogate her mind. She had a fair mind. Certainly it had picked mine clean in about six months. But her mind, as a mind, couldn’t begin to compete with her skin as skin. Page was the Einstein of tawny young women, and I had been lucky to see as much of her as I had.
Preston Sibley didn’t know about me—he would have had trouble believing it if he had—but he did know about her artist lover on the Upper West Side. Unfortunately for his marriage, Preston was the sort of producer who could not believe that his wife could be as interested in him as she would naturally be in any artist, however decrepit, repulsive, and foul. Obviously a woman like Page would prefer an artist to an executive—obviously to Preston, that is. It probably surprised the hell out of him when she broke it off with the artist and married him. He was a nice, sweet man, but if you tried to explain to him that an intelligent woman’s instincts are invariably conservative, he wouldn’t believe you.
He and Page had been married three or four years, but Preston didn’t trust it yet. He wouldn’t take Page back to the New York Film Festival, not if he could possibly get out of it. That could make for a very nice week, if I stayed in Hollywood; and it would probably mark the end of Page’s little fling with me if I didn’t. Page couldn’t tolerate any mention of Jill, as it was, and she was hardly going to welcome the news that I had decided to accompany Jill to New York in order to be a reassuring presence. Page didn’t trust me any farther than Preston trusted her. If I told her I was going to New York because an old, old friend needed moral support, her scorn would know no bounds. Indeed, when I thought about it, I had so much to think about that a little eavesdropping could only be a welcome distraction.
However, Jill was too quick for me. “We’ll just play it by ear, okay?” she was saying when I finished munching the celery. “You call me or something. Maybe we’ll end up at the same party.”
Then she put down the phone and silence fell. She sat on her pillow for a while, and I sipped my bloody Mary.
“That was Bo,” she said finally.
“Those Southern boys can be persistent,” I said. “The ones of them that aren’t lazy fuck-ups. Old Bo does keep trying.”
“I don’t know why,” she said. “It’s ridiculous. Everyone knows he’s in love with Jacqueline Bisset.”
She was right—the whole world knew that, or at least that portion of the world that followed the sexual and emotional writhings of the movie colony, so-called. I have to admit that I follow these things fairly closely myself, being a lifelong gossip. Still, I try to preserve something like proportion, the virtue of which I preach constantly, mostly to Jill—it’s a ridiculous habit, since she has a lot more proportion than I do. The point, in her case, is that she has too much.
“Bo Brimmer’s long, unrequited passion for Miss Bisset is probably the best-known non-love affair of our times,” I said. “Think about it. It’s one of the best-known facts of Western civilization. Why should that be? People in Africa know it. People in Australia know it. Even people in Antarctica know it. I repeat, why should that be?”
“I think it’s a very healthy sign,” Jill said. “Bo’s a man who makes news by not getting fucked. Usually the only way a woman can make news is by doing the opposite.”
“Oh, horseshit,” I said. “Don’t bore me with your polemics. Women make enough news. I’ve never even met Jacqueline Bisset, come to think of it.”
“She’s fully pretty enough for you,” Jill said. “She’s world class, in the looks department, but you just stay away from her. She has enough trouble, and so do you.”
“Hasn’t it ever occurred to you what a convenience that non-love affair is to Bo?” I asked. “He could be in love with a secretary, and the secretary could be just as beautiful, and it could be just as unrequited, but there would be no publicity. Without the publicity there’s no psychic kick.”
“On the other hand, he could really love her, and it could be painful,” she said. “He had a few dates with her—maybe it’s real. After all, Bo is human. It could happen to him.”
“All Southerners are human,” I said. “You don’t need to remind me of that. I still say it’s convenient. It gives him something of the dignity of passion, plus it leaves him free to run his studio.”
Jill got up and disappeared. I picked up the L.A. Times, which was on the floor by the couch. The lead story was about the capture of a ring of poodle-nappers, who had been kidnapping poodles in Beverly Hills and making them into poodle stew. The poodle-nappers were a small band of American Indians who had holed up somewhere in Coldwater Canyon. Their leader, though captured, was not cowed. His name was Jimmy Thunder. “If we cannot consume our enemy, we will consume his poodles,” Jimmy Thunder said. So far the gang had eaten sixty poodles, a few Shih Tzus, and a Great Pyrenees.
The L.A. Times was about the height of a small stool, and I decided I would rather have it for a stool than to read it, so I put my feet on it. Jill came back with a pitcher of bloody Marys and some more celery.
“I hope you put in the vodka,” I said. “That last one was mostly tomato juice.”
“Have you always been this churlish on Sundays?” she asked.
“Since infancy. I don’t like days when the stores are closed.”
“Bo asked me to do a picture,” she said.
“So why’d you put him off?”
She shrugged. “Maybe he should just stay in love with Jacqueline Bisset,” she said. “He might get her someday, if he keeps at it. You can’t tell.”
“In a pig’s ear,” I said, and went in and sloshed some more vodka into the pitcher.
Jill was in her studio, digging in a pile of scripts. She came back with a fat green script and pitched it on the couch. I glanced at the title, which was Ladies’ Night.
“Bo likes this script,” she said. “It was written by a woman in St. Louis.”
“I don’t think you should do it,” I said. “I’ve worked on several movies about St. Louis, and they were all flops. I think you should make a movie about me.”
She smiled. “That’d be sweet,” she said. “Would it be funny or tragic?”
“Tragi-funny,” I said. “There’s never been a good movie about a screenwriter. With luck it could gross in the thousands. Actually I heard my story the other day, done as a hillbilly song. It was called” Popcorn and Diamonds.’ I was the popcorn, needless to say.”
“Sing it for me.”
“Can’t, I only heard it once,” I said, “I was stuck in a traffic jam on the Ventura Freeway—I didn’t realize I was hearing the story of my life until it was almost over. It was sort of bittersweet.”
I set my bloody Mary down and she reached over and took a swallow of it. “Too much vodka,” she said.
“Oh, well,” I said. “Maybe I will stay in your suite at the Sherry. That way I can watch your metamorphosis at close range. So I miss out on a few debutantes, so what?”
She gave a little nod and handed me back the glass. Nothing more was said, but Jill looked happy. I drank the pitcher of bloody Marys while she reread the script that had been written by a woman in St. Louis. We kept the radio tuned to a hillbilly station all afternoon, hoping to hear my song again, but it didn’t come on.
5
AT MY AGE—SIXTY-THREE—ANY DECISION IS ONLY A KIND of reckless prelude to the obstacles it creates. I make decisions easily, but only because I know I can double back behind nine out of ten of them, if I need to. So few things are fixed in my life that I seldom have to reckon with the pinchers of finality—pinchers not unlike those that blacksmiths and torturers use.
The decision to go to New York with Jill was not a decision that permitted waffling. As a contract writer at Warners—one of a vanishing, bilious breed—I deal with equivocators every day, if not every hour. The studio equivocates about deals, producers equivocate about projects, directors equivocate about stories, agents equivocate about terms, unions equivocate about payoffs, actors and actr
esses equivocate about interpretations, cameramen equivocate about where to put the camera, writers equivocate about dialogue, and so on down the line to gofers, who probably equivocate about routes to the cigarette machines. The whole industry only moves in fits and starts, and I’ve never seen any reason to try and be better than my peers.
At some point during the afternoon, to celebrate my decision, Jill marched over to her drawing board and did a cartoon of our arrival in New York. “I can’t imagine you going anyplace without your Morgan,” she said, so she drew a sketch of a potbellied man helping a car the height of a dachshund out of a limousine, I seemed to be leading the Morgan on a dog leash, while holding hands with a thin woman who was balancing several cans of film on her head. We were both being regarded with disdain by the doorman of a ritzy hotel.
“That’s how it will be, too,” I said, and when I finished the bloody Marys I took the sketch and went along home—fortunately I only lived about two hundred yards up the hill. I put the sketch with the thirty or forty others I’ve managed to accumulate, over the years, and then I sat on my patio most of the afternoon, thinking up lies to tell Page. I had about twenty-four hours in which to assemble an assortment of lies, from which, hopefully, I would then pick out the best.
“You could just tell her the truth,” Jill said, when I mentioned that I had to get home and think up some lies.
“I cannot just tell her the truth,” I said. “The truth would cause hurt and confusion—not to mention anger.”
“Why do you see her if you’re scared of her?” she asked.
I stood with my mouth open. “Are you crazy?” I said. “I’ve never met a woman I wasn’t scared of. Aren’t you ever scared of the men you’re involved with?”
“I can’t remember,” she said. “Mostly I’ve been involved with Europeans. They’re not as scary as Americans.”
She walked me halfway home while we talked. It was one of our rituals. When we got to a particular palm tree she stopped. It was sort of on a crest, so we could look across the city, as far as the haze permitted. Often I took a little rest at the palm, so we could continue whatever weighty conversation we had under way.
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