“But I guess you have your problems, too,” Swan said. It had taken him a while to think of that, but it at least indicated that people weren’t such total shits as you can make them in your mind. I had the impulse to leave the table, before I got really sympathetic to Swan and let myself forget all the brutally discourteous things I had seen him do, some of which he had done to me.
“In fact,” he said, “I guess we’re in the same boat, only you’re a nice person and everybody will be on your side. Nobody will be on my side, not that I deserve it. I was a poor winner, you know. When you’re a winner on the scale of Sherry something happens. You just think, Fuck it, why bother being nice, it takes too much time. It’s fun to be able just to trample ass, particularly since most people deserve to be trampled.”
“It’s the other way around,” I said. “Most people deserve to be treated nice.”
“Not really,” he said. “You’re just sentimental. Most people will fuck you if you don’t fuck them first, and the minute they get more power than you they trample your ass. I know, because I’m about to be the victim of a fucking stampede.”
Evidence of that was all around us, in the stern disapproval of the crew, who came in twos and threes to eat and didn’t stop to jolly me or make small talk. Swan had treated them all like shit, so how dare I eat with him? As the evening wore on, I had trouble explaining that to myself. For some foolish reason—probably hatred of the clutter and the silence in my room—I kept sitting there with him, long past the point when I could have made an excuse and left. Tired as I was, I wouldn’t have even needed an excuse.
Even more foolishly, I got drunk. Not on very much liquor, I admit, but combined with fatigue and emotion it was enough. Then, to my total surprise and horror, Swan tried to seduce me. I had been with him for about three hours, which I guess is a long time, in our trade, but when I suddenly realized, outside the door of my room, that he was trying to kiss me, I could hardly speak or act. It was like the gears of my speech had jammed. I had the presence of mind to duck, but even that was slow, and his kiss landed somewhere near my eye; all I could think was, My god, doesn’t he know this is just what she wants? But of course he didn’t know that. He was only trying to seduce me because he was in Texas and his girl friend wasn’t his girl friend any more and he didn’t know what to do with himself.
As it was, I wasn’t sober enough to see what he did do with himself—but then, why worry? The whole motel was full of restless, confused men, and Swan was no worse off than most of the rest of them. I guess he wandered off down the hall or maybe went and slept in the airport—I understand he left the next morning, after a wild argument with Sherry that took place through a door that she refused to open. I didn’t see him again until months later, when I ran into him in the Polo Lounge.
There was a brief moment during the night when I woke up half undressed and with sexual feelings and thought, My god, did I sleep with Swan? I managed to assure myself that I hadn’t only by remembering that I had carefully brushed my teeth after I came in, and while I was doing that there had been no one there. So I couldn’t have slept with him, and the sexual feeling had to have come from a dream, though what or who I dreamed of, I couldn’t remember.
I hadn’t drunk enough to make me vomit, only enough to make me queasy in the morning; and it was in the morning, while I was standing in the bathroom contemplating my unwashed hair, that Owen returned.
3
I HAD A LATE CALL THAT MORNING—WE WERE MOVING THE set—and when I heard the door open I just thought it was the maid. I was more interested in the deteriorating state of my health and looks—when I had left Hollywood five weeks before I was in excellent shape, and I looked like I had spent the five weeks being in a war. In fact, it had just crossed my mind that maybe Owen left me because I was working so hard I had let myself get ugly. Then I turned back to the bedroom, to look for a shirt, and there he was, looking for a shirt himself. He turned with one in his hand just as I came into the room, and we saw one another more or less at the same moment—in that moment I saw his face change from cheerful to surly, which was very discouraging. It was as if the sight of me had spoiled what might have been a perfect day. By being there at a time when I would normally be on the set, I had interfered with his perfectly innocent need for a clean shirt, and he didn’t like it.
If his face was the mirror of his soul, then he had a pretty ungrateful soul. I felt a need to cover myself and stepped back into the bathroom and wrapped a big towel around me.
I contemplated not coming out of the bathroom at all. Why bother, if the mere sight of me was going to make him unhappy? He never had been particularly eager to be involved with me, except right at the first. Why drag at him?
But shit, I thought. We could at least talk. So I secured myself in the towel and went back out.
“I didn’t know you were here,” he said.
“If you took any interest in the production schedule, you would have known it,” I said. “Are you going to keep working, or what?”
The sight of him had sort of paralyzed my feelings. I felt no urge at all to spill out the hundreds of bitter comments I had been stockpiling.
“Yeah,” he said, in answer to my question. “Sure.”
I felt the need to be immensely cautious—not to look him too much in the eye, not to ask blunt questions. Also, I was acutely conscious of what a mess the room was in. All the chairs were full of scripts or clothes or junk, not to mention most of the floor, so it was very difficult to know how to go about having a dignified conversation. There was no place very clean except the bed.
“Well, when do you mean to start coming to the set again?” I asked. What I wanted was for him to start talking, and hopefully issue precise statements. I didn’t care how distasteful and final they were, just so long as they were precise and would leave me knowing what was what. Sometimes pulling words out of Owen was like pulling buckets of water out of a deep well. You have to wind the old windlass for many, many turns, and I didn’t feel like winding right then. He was fucking the queen of America: surely that would give him enough juice to allow him to talk plainly to me.
But no. He just sort of stood there, with two ugly flowered shirts in his hand, as if my presence had confounded what otherwise would have been a simple decision about which ugly flowered shirt to wear. I felt, wistfully, like appealing to the Deity, to make this man before me talk, so I wouldn’t have to do it. I felt like my vocal organs—in fact, all my organs—were numb. If one of us didn’t speak, we would have to stand there all day, amid the messy residue of our life together. Finally I went and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Aren’t you going to talk?” I said. “I don’t want you to apologize or violate Sherry’s sacred trust in you or anything, I’d just like it if you could tell me what’s happening. Maybe I could rearrange my life so it wouldn’t be so painful.”
He looked more sullen, as if he had known I would make just that kind of demand. I began to feel that I was probably crazy, or at least highly untypical. Maybe I was the only person who thought all the time. Maybe other people’s brains went on and off, like stoplights.
“I was coming to the set,” he said finally. “We broke up.”
My dirty heart took hope. “Broke up?” I said. “After three days? What are you talking about?”
“Cunt,” he said bitterly—a reference to Sherry, but hardly an explanation. Before I could ask him to be more explicit he was on top of me. At the feel of his breath on my face all my quelled feelings awoke, the hatred as well as the love. I was not about to be the answer to whatever rejection he had just received, but I was at a disadvantage. He was a lot bigger than me, and as recently as three days before, I had still been fucking him.
Still, if there is one thing I’m good at, it’s balking. The fact that I had wrapped the large bath towel around me two or three times was also helpful. I hugged my arms to my sides and ducked my chin, which didn’t give him a lot to get at. The fact that I w
as hunched within the protection of the tightly wrapped towel made him furious. He yanked at the top of the towel so hard that it snapped my head back.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, as if it were evidence of the most extreme perversity on my part, that I was resisting him when he needed me. He had even managed to get his pants open and there his need was, plain to see—but the fact that he had felt that sure of me just made me set my brakes the harder. His eyes, above me, were blind, so far as any knowledge of my feelings went. When he figured out that he couldn’t simply yank the towel off he just sort of sat there, waiting for the physical blessing I was expected to dispense. He kept trying to kiss me, if only to keep me from talking. He knew me well enough to know that if I ever started talking, I’d only get madder. He had that much instinct. If he could have brought it off, he would have had me too. The sex act would have amounted to forgiveness, would have wiped the slate clean. After that, complaint would only have been petty.
He tried to get his hand under the towel, but I caught it and hung on.
“No,” I said. “I want to know what happened. Don’t you know how cruel it is to leave people in the dark like that? I’ve been half out of my mind, and I have a picture to direct.”
“Are you my wife?” he said. “Did we get married?”
He loved that comeback. He used it all the time. It was his way out of every tight corner. If we’re not married, baby, you got no right to ask. It was such a trite line of defense that it usually threw me off stride for a second. In this case, just as he said it, the phone rang. That was annoying, because I had told the switchboard to hold my messages until 9 A.M., thinking by some miracle I might sleep late. It kept ringing, and finally I answered it.
“Is Owen there?” Sherry said.
“He’s here,” I said, annoyed that I hadn’t realized it would be her. Nobody else would bully the switchboard into putting them through.
“Tell him to hurry, I’m hungry,” she said. “Wait a minute, let me speak to him.”
I hung up, took the receiver off, and covered it with two pillows.
Owen had lost his erection, but not his look of little-boy belligerence. I got off the bed and stood over him.
“I guess your friend doesn’t regard the split as final,” I said.
“She informs me that she’s hungry and wishes you to hurry up. She doesn’t like to be kept waiting, as you certainly must know. You better stuff it back in your pants and get snapping.”
Any sarcasm invariably made him insolent. “I was just letting you look,” he said. “For old times’ sake.”
I almost laughed at him.
“Why’d you lie?” I said. “Why’d you say you’d broken up if you were about to go eat breakfast with her?”
He got off the bed and began to change shirts. “Because you crowded me,” he said. “She crowds me. Both of you always want some answer. How the fuck would I know the answer? Maybe I will break up. She’s just as bad as you.”
His stomach bulged, paunchy, until he shrugged on the clean shirt and straightened himself to button it; then, briefly, it flattened. Owen stuffed his penis back in his underpants, treating it like it no longer belonged to him. It all seemed a shame. I had genuinely tender feelings for his body, only his dumb personality kept getting in the way. I should have fucked him—Sherry would have smelled it. Let him try to explain that. I never think fast enough, or feel truly enough, or something.
When he buttoned up he looked at me defensively; he had still not forgiven me for being in the room when I wasn’t supposed to be, thus occasioning a conflict.
“You’re not coming back to me if you go up there,” I said, trying to make it sound like a resolution writ in stone. I meant it, of course, but Owen flicked off final statements like he flicked off sweat.
“If you’re going, I want you to get your stuff out of here,” I said. “At least it would reduce the mess. And I’d appreciate it if you’d come back to work. The picture has to get finished some way.”
“She wants to fire you,” he said. “She’s talking to Abe about it. She says she can’t work with you.”
With that unsatisfactory statement, he left. Not a word about us. I would never know what was in the man’s mind. Maybe I would just have to forget about knowing.
I FELT GHASTLY, AND looked worse than that. Then I accidentally saw the two of them getting into a limo to go to the set, which didn’t help any. I found Sammy and made him stop work and drive me out. I needed the comfort of someone older. In fact, I was so jangled I was forced to broach my troubles. Sammy listened, and drove. He had on a sweater with a cow on it, bought in a local feed store.
Sammy acknowledged trouble reluctantly. “Everybody’s on your side,” he said. “Everybody. Not to say nothing against Owen, but we all know he’s done you bad. And not to say nothing against Miss Solaré, but she ain’t popular, you know. She’s got no respect, so she’s got no friends.”
He gave my leg a pat. “We all love you,” he said. “Even Theroux. He loves you.”
“No, he doesn’t, Sammy,” I said. “Theroux dislikes me.”
“Well, he’s a hard guy to know,” he conceded. “But we all love you.”
Didn’t I know it? I had more general love than anybody. I was their wronged darling, a role I was thoroughly tired of.
When we got to the set, Abe was there to put the fear of God in me. His approach to it was to put his arm around me, something he didn’t do gracefully. He wasn’t used to putting his arm around anyone older than sixteen. In the distance, Texas was as brown as a buffalo.
Folsom tagged along behind us, and when we got near the coffee machine he veered off and caught up with us a few steps later, bringing Abe his coffee.
“I tell you, I’m getting bad vibes,” Abe said. “Sherry’s not happy, and you know what that means.”
“Just calm down, Abe,” I said. “Sherry’s been complaining for the last ten years. That’s just her style. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“You’re wrong, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said, stepping back so he could point his finger at me. Somewhere he had learned to point his finger like a real executive.
“It means fights,” he said. “It means money lost, trouble all down the line. It means I get a fuckin’ ulcer. That’s just some of the things it means.”
I had a slight headache, from my drunkenness, and I wanted badly to be let alone for a few minutes, to look at the new set and talk to the boys about it. While I was considering how best to deal with Abe’s anxiety Wynkyn came out of Sherry’s dressing room and walked slowly across to where we were talking. He walked like an old man, not a seven-year-old. He walked right up and took my hand, standing there politely, so as not to interrupt. The sight of him disconcerted Abe; he immediately stopped talking.
“Abe, go on back to Hollywood and don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’ll be done in two and a half weeks, maybe a little more. Nothing’s going to go wrong.”
Abe didn’t listen. He was concentrating on the new problem, which was Wynkyn.
“Listen, Wynkyn,” he said, “would you mind excusing us for a few minutes? I have to talk some grown-up talk with Jill.”
Wynkyn simply ignored the sounds, in the maddening way he had. He stood there squeezing my hand, busy with his own thoughts. Abe couldn’t stand it. He reached in his pocket, pulled out a wad of bills, and peeled off a twenty. He extended the bill to Wynkyn.
“Look, buddy, here’s twenty bucks if you’ll get lost for ten minutes,” he said. “Go and make ’em let you look through the camera.”
I was stunned by the gesture, Wynkyn merely contemptuous. “I’ve seen through the camera a million times,” he said. “If you want to talk about fucking, go ahead. I know all about fucking.”
Abe looked like he would like to stuff the twenty-dollar bill down Wynkyn’s throat, but he restrained himself.
“All right,” he said. “If he hears, he hears. Sherry says you’re ruining her part
because of Owen. She says you can’t handle it and you’re making her do everything wrong. She wants to take you off the picture.”
“With two and a half weeks to go?”
“Listen, a lot of bad things can happen in two and a half weeks. I can tell you some stories.”
“It’s nonsense,” I said. “Her scenes are fine. You’ve seen the rushes.”
“Yeah, but that was before!” he said.
“I’ve got to go to work,” I said. “We’re wasting some great light. If you want to fire me go ahead, but I don’t think your grandfather will like it much.”
Of course, if he had not already known that, he would have disposed of me on the spot. He made a vague wave, which must have meant for Folsom to get the car. Folsom made a beeline for it and Wynkyn and I walked over to the set.
“Blubber-gut,” Wynkyn said. “That’s what Owen calls him.”
Owen was standing by the boom, talking to Gauldin and Jerry and a couple of the light men. Theroux Wickes was flirting with Anna, who couldn’t stand him. The tension in the group was so intense it almost gave off its own light. Only Owen was confident and at ease. It must give a man a great lift for everybody to know he’s fucking a movie star, even if the movie star isn’t particularly nice. As I approached the group I began to be disgusted with myself, for being such a masochist. Why didn’t I just quit? I didn’t want to have to talk to Owen with Gauldin and Jerry standing there. The movie wasn’t worth it. Unspoken emotions are probably as deadly as X rays: if so, me and Wynkyn and Jerry and Gauldin were all being quietly fried to a crisp.
But I walked on into the group and pointed out what I didn’t like about the set. Hearing my voice making more or less pertinent professional comments was a shock to me, as it often is. How can my voice keep talking and my head keep operating when the rest of me is such a mass of unsorted emotion? I’ve never understood it. I think I would respect myself more if the woman could obliterate the professional once in a while. Why should a man love me if I’m that mechanical about things? On the other hand, I would hate to be the kind of woman who flings her emotion at the world until she has nothing left to fling.
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