Bobbie was all right—I think she sort of liked me, even—but she was a loyal factotum, and I knew there was trouble when I saw her approach.
“Hi, Jill,” she said. “Sherry’s asked me to tell you she’s made a dress change. She doesn’t want to wear the yellow dress. She wants to wear black.”
It had to be just to irritate me. The lady she was playing certainly wouldn’t be likely to wear black in the scene we were about to shoot. I just shook my head.
“Maybe she’s got the scene mixed up,” I said. “Black is out of the question. It has to be the yellow dress. That was all decided day before yesterday.”
“I know it was,” Bobbie said, “but Sherry’s been rereading the scene and I guess she’s changed her mind. She wants to be more somber.”
“I’m sorry, Bobbie,” I said. “Black is out of the question. She’ll have to change again if that’s what she’s got on.”
I guess when you make a profession of dealing with whims you become professional at it, just as you would about directing traffic if you became a traffic cop. Bobbie got a cup of coffee and made her way back to the dressing room, to deliver the news.
“You want me to see what I can do?” Jerry asked. He was bird-dogging me again, his face as bulbous as ever.
“Would you give it a try?” I said. “The black dress is ridiculous in this scene.”
Abe was sitting on the fender of his limousine, drinking coffee. He took his dark glasses off when I came over, and I saw that his eyes were soon going to disappear in fat. He was already too fat to move his body naturally. Most of the time only his head moved—this way, that way—while his body sort of slumped there. His belly was trying to pop out of the silk shirt he wore under the Levi jacket. Folsom, his gofer, was standing off to one side, glum as usual.
“Hello, Abe, good morning, Folsom,” I said.
Folsom twitched. Abe had started to yawn but stifled it.
“I don’t know why we didn’t film in Stockton,” he said. “Ain’t it flat around Stockton?”
“I don’t want to know,” I said. “It’s too late to move.”
Abe was not deeply curious. “Want some coke?” he asked. I didn’t but he did. Folsom got the cocaine out of the limo and Abe snorted a little, sitting on the fender. It caused no immediate change in his disposition.
“Folsom’s taking the rap if they bust us,” Abe said, conversationally. “I told him he could keep drawing his salary. Be a nice change for ya, Folsom. Maybe they’ll even send you to Folsom prison.”
Abe got a laugh out of that. Folsom looked uncomfortable, probably because he realized that the part about continuing his salary was not likely to be true. While Folsom and I stood around uncomfortably, Jerry came up. His face was so anxious it had stopped bulging.
“She had a fit,” he said. “She’s still having it. She demands to wear the black dress.”
“Sherry’s mad?” Abe said. His face turned as pale as oil can turn. I had forgotten he was terrified of her. He had inadvertently crossed her once, long ago, and her fury had made a deep impression on him.
“Shit, let her wear fucking overalls if she wants to,” he said when he found out what it was about. “We don’t want no trouble with her. Trouble with her is real trouble. It usually costs a million, just to make peace.”
“It won’t cost a million this time,” I said. “I’ll go talk to her.”
“She called me terrible names,” Jerry said, which amused me. He was genuinely shocked. Name-calling of that sort, like robbery and murder, was supposed to happen to somebody else.
“Consider it a baptism of fire,” I said, but I don’t think he got the point, or knew what a baptism of fire was, for that matter.
“I wish I owned a truckin’ company or somethin’ simple,” Abe said, looking more and more pained. “How many people in the world are going to know the dress is wrong? Five hundred? A thousand? It’s Sherry they care about, not the dress.”
By this time half the crew had wandered up, clustering, as usual, but also maybe hoping for a little early-morning drama, something to cut the boredom.
I was sorry they were bored, but in no mood for early-morning drama. I just turned and walked off, with Jerry stumbling after me.
“She’s really in a fury,” he said. “Maybe you better let her cool down.”
“She was probably acting,” I said.
I wasn’t full of fury, but I felt a growing outrage. Not only was she fucking my boyfriend, she was trying to have her way about the picture too. I’m sure she was banking on the fact that Abe was around, because she knew she could bully him into anything. She would threaten to destroy the picture if necessary.
What she didn’t know was that I didn’t wholly care. I was ambivalent about the picture anyway, and always had been. I don’t know that I would have done it if it hadn’t been for Owen. I guess I saw it as representing our chance. If the picture worked out and he got a little more position and a little real confidence in himself, things might be a lot better. It might be just what we needed.
So in truth my motive was illegitimate and had nothing to do with art. The material itself was sort of borderline, and I had no deep confidence in it. There were some good things in it, but they needed to be built on skillfully, and I didn’t know if I was doing that. At bottom, I guess I doubted myself too much—myself as a director, anyway. I was so seldom sure. I had to anguish over practically every decision and in the meanwhile had sort of lost focus on the whole. The picture had become as confused as my love affair, and also confused with my love affair, and I was proceeding with it, day by day, with very little real conviction.
Sherry was sitting there in the black dress, cool as ice, no sign of temper. I couldn’t hate her—it’s my limitation. Her compulsions were too naked, her needs too intense. It was a wonder she could live with them. Her face had a flat expression, not friendly, not quite sullen.
“Okay, what about it?” I said.
“I want to wear the black dress,” she said. “That’s all there is to it.”
We stared at one another for a while. There was always a certain air of entreaty about Sherry, no matter how imperious she was being. Please let me, she was asking. Her son had picked up the habit.
“I’m glad you’re not bothering to rationalize this esthetically,” I said. “A woman who wants to give her lover a gay send-off wouldn’t ordinarily choose widow’s weeds, would she?”
She pouched her mouth, briefly. “I don’t care,” she said. “It’s what I want. “It’s how I feel. I’ll make it seem right.”
“Nope,” I said. “You have to wear the yellow dress.”
“Don’t boss,” she said. “Even if I liked the yellow dress I couldn’t wear it now.”
“Why not?”
“Because everybody knows I wanted to wear the black dress,” she said. “Everybody knows it. I just can’t seem wrong. You know what I mean?”
“Sure,” I said, “but you’re being ridiculous. Not much loss of face is involved in changing dresses. So you changed your mind. The crew can put it down to a mood. Maybe you’re getting your period, or something. You better hurry up and change. We’re nearly ready for you.”
“Do you want Swan?” she asked.
“What are you talking about?”
“He’ll be back tomorrow,” she said. “Take Swan. He’s not so bad. He’s even a pretty good fuck, when he feels okay. I just have to wear this dress.”
For a moment I was too startled to know what to do. I guess Bobbie was, too. Swan and Sherry had been together four years. That’s not to say they had been a love idyll for four years, but still. No wonder the poor bastard cried a lot.
What was terrible was that she was a greatly gifted woman, with talents far beyond mine. I felt embarrassed for a moment, that someone with so great a gift could be so small of heart.
I just shook my head. “You have to wear the yellow dress,” I said—my one small certainty.
“Look, I have appr
oval of everything,” she said, sort of tonelessly. “I have approval of you, you know. Why should I do what you want?”
I was sick of thinking about Sherry and Owen. I reached down with both hands, caught the throat of the black dress, and ripped the whole front out of it. Buttons flew everywhere. Sherry’s eyes flared—I guess she thought I was going to strangle her, but I turned aside as quickly as I could, because I didn’t want to see what Owen was fucking. There were three other dresses hanging in the trailer, the yellow one and two others. I took two of them and left the yellow one. Sherry sat there with the torn front of the black dress in her lap, looking frightened. Or maybe she was acting, I’m not sure.
“Twenty minutes,” I said, “and if you don’t put that dress on I’m going to rewrite the scene and give it to Anna.”
Then I left, feeling very depressed. Ripping the dress had been momentarily satisfying, because I beat her and she knew it, but the thrill wore off immediately. It lasted about two hot seconds, and then I felt very twisted. Beating Sherry wasn’t really any fun, no more so than beating Owen. Some people really need to win, and beating them, even when it’s the only thing to do, just brings them a little closer to giving up. They manage not to let you enjoy your victory, somehow.
I took the other two dresses back to costume, ignoring the nervous cluster of men around Abe’s limo.
SHE PUT ON THE yellow dress and played the scene like she had lead weights in her jaw, for eleven takes. She might have been a housewife acting for the first time in a detergent commercial. Then she changed. On the thirteenth take she was stunning, a woman taking leave of a boy she deeply loved, gaiety in her mouth and melancholy in an occasional cast of profile, in her eyes, in the way her long fingers toyed with the necklace she wore with the yellow dress.
I didn’t direct it, she just did it, I think probably as a gesture of contempt, to show us how far above us she was when she cared to try. It was a wonderful, transcendent piece of acting. Everybody cried when they saw it in the rushes, and I cried, too, and felt hopeless, because it was no wonder he wanted her, a woman with gifts like that. More hopeless-making was that everyone gave me credit for making her do it. Bobbie had spread the story of the ripped dress, and I was hailed as a heroine for standing up to Sherry when in fact I had just remembered Owen at the right moment and had my own back in a small way. I never considered that my ripping the dress produced that moment of acting—the fact that it happened just emphasized to me that I wasn’t strong enough or knowing enough to direct her.
I didn’t see Owen for two more days—to this moment I don’t know what he did during all that time. I had almost turned from raw to numb before I saw him, and I prepared and discarded—all in my head—speeches that would have rivaled the Gettysburg Address in eloquence. It wasn’t just the matter of ourselves that I needed to talk to him about, either. Production problems were piling up, things I didn’t really have the time to deal with, yet somehow I couldn’t bring myself to call him, or actually track him down. My hand wouldn’t pick up the phone. He would just have to come out from somewhere and make some acknowledgment about our former existence.
At night I kept falling asleep in the bathtub, or on the commode, or on the floor by my bed with the script on my lap or my address book open to addresses I couldn’t later remember why I was looking up. Joe Percy was the only person I called, and he was so unrelenting in his self-righteousness about Owen that I got furious with him. He considered that he had predicted it all the moment he saw Owen squatting by my chair at Elaine’s.
“I knew it from the first,” he said, about twenty times. It was a safe bet that he was drunk.
“We all knew it,” he went on. “Pete Sweet knew it. We knew he’d do this.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said. “I don’t need to hear you be smug. Of course you and Pete never try to do anything in the present. It’s too much easier to judge the past.”
“We do things,” he said, defensively.
“Right,” I said. “You both fuck the easiest, most compliant women you can find. They’re just sort of pillows with cunts. Watching me and Owen is like watching a football game, to you. You can’t be a quarterback, but you always know what the quarterback’s doing wrong.”
We argued some more and I hung up and took the phone off the hook so he couldn’t call back. Then I cried myself to sleep—tired as I was, it only took about two sobs.
A few hours later, when I woke up, I called back and apologized. It was unfair of me to be mad at Joe for failing to help me civilize Owen, when for all I knew it was the bad things about Owen that attracted me. It was all I could do just to keep him within the boundaries of the decent. I even lied to him, telling him he was gifted when he wasn’t. He was a schemer, of course, but his schemes were immature and amateur. Even now he probably had some muddled scheme in the back of his mind: he would ball Sherry until she was batty and make her let him produce her next picture, or something. That was just stupidity. Swan Bunting, her lover for four years and supposedly her Svengali, had quickly been shown to have absolutely no influence with her when it came to pictures. Sherry walked right over him, and she would do the same with Owen when the time came. He would be the one with his brains fucked out, not her.
IN FACT, SWAN GOT back to town before I even saw Owen again. I was standing in the lobby of the motel, trying to explain to Gauldin Edwards why I didn’t think I could fall in love with him, a conversation some black humorist would have loved, considering the fragmented state of my emotions, our mutual affection, my total exhaustion, and the fact that Gauldin was such a nice man that not loving him a little bit was almost impossible. I guess I was just trying to explain to him that I couldn’t sleep with him, ever, I didn’t think. He of course was making patient sounds and not allowing anything to sound final—he knew he’d bring me around eventually. I was just trying to think of a way to unstick myself from the conversation so I could go up and fall asleep in the bathtub—the circles under my eyes by that time were so heavy I could almost feel them while I was standing talking—when all of a sudden Swan piled out of a limo and came rushing into the motel. He was wearing a striped Australian rugby shirt, dirty jeans, and sandals. He started to rush right to the elevator, but then he saw me and came over. His mouth was hanging open, and he was panting, as if he had run all the way from Hollywood.
“Jill, what the fuck’s happening?” he said. “I can’t believe any of this. Sherry’s phone’s been off the hook for three days. I’ve left about fifty messages and she hasn’t called in. Is she sick or something?”
I sort of gave Gauldin the nudge—go away, Gauldin. He kissed me and went.
“No, she’s fine, Swan,” I said. “To tell the truth, I think she’s having an affair with Owen.”
Swan turned white. Obviously I had confirmed his worst fears. He stopped panting and rubbed his face, which was unshaven.
“With Wynkyn here?” he asked. “How could she do that with Wynkyn here? Wynkyn loves me.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “He told me you were his best friend.”
Swan stared out the door at the limo, as if uncertain whether to go and get back in it. Then he smiled at me.
“Fun and games,” he said, and started for the elevator again. He actually pushed the up button, but he didn’t really want to go up. The elevator opened, an old lady got out, and Swan just stood there. The elevator closed and he came back over to me.
“Do you think I should go fight him?” he said. “Do you think that would impress her?”
“It might if you won,” I said, “but I don’t think you could win.”
“I don’t either,” he said, sort of reflectively. “I didn’t the first time. Besides, it might upset Wynkyn. He’s very easily upset. Sherry just has no understanding of that kid. Do you want to eat supper?
“I guess you don’t,” he added before I could answer.
I ate with him—what else to do? I didn’t want to take him to my room, and it seemed wrong just to le
ave him there, vague and hurt in the lobby.
“Did you know she makes me pay rent?” he said. “She says it’s her accountant that makes her do it, but her accountant doesn’t make her do anything. She fucking makes me pay rent! Can you believe that? Since I gave up my show and my psychiatric practice all I’ve done is spend money on her. Shit, I was worth a half a million at one time, and now I’d be lucky to put my hands on five thousand. She soaks up money like fucking water. She says it would be bad for our dynamic for me to live off her, but you know what? She’s just tight. She never spends a cent except on goddamn hat-pin holders.”
“Maybe you should kidnap her collection and hold it for ransom,” I said, so tired I felt like laughing and crying both.
“Otherwise you’ll be broke pretty soon.”
“I’m broke now,” he said. “I’ve been broke for months. She could have given me a point or two on this picture, but she didn’t.
“I don’t think we’re in love any more,” he said, pulling on his beard. His eyes weren’t focused on the room, but on some scene invisible to me, some scene with Sherry, past or future, who knows? What a movie it would make if someone could photograph the scenes people have with their loved ones, in their minds. I had been having them with Owen in my mind for three days, so many I couldn’t even remember them. Of course, the scene I would eventually have with him face to face wouldn’t resemble any of them. When it finally happened it would all get mixed up, and I wouldn’t be so clearly in the right. In fact, it would all probably get turned around so that I was clearly in the wrong—he had been driven to Sherry because I wasn’t a good enough lay, or something.
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