I tried it. Not only did I not raise the shades in the motel, I didn’t try to raise the shades to Owen’s mind either. I would keep the lion at rest except to mate, and if it took a lot of mating to keep those eyes empty, that was all right, too. It was hard for me to disconnect my curiosity, but in this case I made every effort. I didn’t ask him about Sherry or Raven or much of anything. For once, I let him be the curious one. He wanted to know about Gauldin, and I told him. He wanted to know what picture I was doing next, and I said none.
Of course, I didn’t get away with it. Owen didn’t like my new uncaring ways. Sex had nothing to do with his dropping back into my life—for me, maybe, but not for him. He wanted my talk, after all. I guess he liked to hear it in his ear as he lay there daydreaming. In fact, he wanted all the things I had given up on—or rather, what he wanted was for me to keep wanting them, grasping for them. He didn’t want the life I wanted: just the emotion that flowed from my wanting it. I guess it was richer and more involving than what he got from Sherry and Raven, both of whom were too self-centered to keep his resistance engaged. I kept it engaged and he liked it.
Of course everyone who knew us thought I was an utter fool. Everyone assumed that he’d probably murder me this time, and they didn’t want to be implicated, so we were simply dropped. Rationally I couldn’t blame people, but emotionally I blamed them a lot. Despite myself, I guess I entertained social hopes. I even went out and bought Owen some decent shirts. Probably he hasn’t bothered to take the pins out of half of them.
In a town where the most bizarre couplings are commonplace, our rather ordinary mismating was somehow considered offensive. It was as if I were the homecoming queen, or the nice girl next door. I wasn’t supposed to be fucking a thug.
One day I ran into Winfield, the first time I had seen him since the party. He was at a sidewalk Mexican restaurant on La Brea, staring moodily at some tacos.
“Hello, Gohagen,” I said. “What’s the matter with those tacos?”
He smiled faintly. “They look kind of rubbery, but that don’t matter,” he said. “I’ve eaten many a rubber taco. It’s continual domestic crisis that’s put me off my feed. Sit down and eat ’em for me.”
I took him up on it. “What kind of domestic crisis?” I asked.
“Ol’ Sheila’s having her baby,” he said. “She’s in the throes of labor at this very minute.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“Evading responsibility,” he said. His hair was too long for a fat man, but there was still a certain spirit in his eyes, hard-pressed as he said he was.
“You mean no one’s with her?”
“Elmo’s with her,” he said. “Elmo don’t mind childbirth as long as he ain’t the father. Besides, him and Sheila’s in love now, so that makes it appropriate.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “How long have they been in love?”
“That’s a good question,” Winfield said. “A very fucking good question. An even better question is when did they first fuck? If it was nine and a half months ago, then that’s another can of worms. However, Elmo won’t admit to more than three months, and Sheila will only admit to about three weeks ago, when she oughtn’t to have been fucking anyhow. It’s enough to make me want to go to Texas.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I miss the bleakness.”
I ate all his tacos while he contented himself with a pitcher of beer. He looked at me admiringly.
“Always like to see a woman with an appetite,” he said. “How’s your fuck-fest going?”
“My what?” I said, shocked for a moment.
Winfield grinned. “That’s what I always call it when I find myself involved with someone without no smarts,” he said. “A woman of the people, as it were. Ain’t that what it amounts to?”
“Maybe so,” I said.
Whatever it was, it ended that day. We were going to dinner, but Owen didn’t come, nor did he call. At first I didn’t give it a thought. He was probably gambling. It was not unusual for him to gamble for a day and a night, all engagements forgotten. If I mentioned to him later that he had had a dinner date with me, he would only look mildly surprised, not guilty or apologetic or even defensive. In fact, plans of any kind were less than useless with him. His planning was only rhetoric, having no connection with his real life. Perhaps he had the instinct to know that his only chance with people, particularly women, lay in catching them unawares. If they thought about it much, he wouldn’t catch them. He depended on the sudden force of his presence. I could understand that, and I had even learned not to project, to entertain no visions of what tomorrow would be like, or this evening, or any particular time.
It was not until a day and a half after the broken date that I realized what had happened. Sherry had come back. I had known it, of course—her picture was in the paper—but I hadn’t connected the two things. I was sitting on my porch, reading a script, when it dawned on me.
A few days later he was seen at a party with her. The longer I thought about it, the more indignant I became, not so much at the desertion—I knew that would happen sometime—but at his lack of manners. It was not quick anger I felt but a kind of deep, volcanic indignation. A few days later I let it erupt. He drank at a bar on Hollywood Boulevard, and it was simple to ambush him. When he came out, the late afternoon sun on Hollywood Boulevard was fairly blinding, and I stepped in front of him and slapped him just as he was putting on his sunglasses. It came as a complete surprise—I knocked his dark glasses flying.
“You should learn to use the telephone, Owen,” I said.
Something, maybe my finger, maybe the earpiece of his glasses, must have hit him in the eye, because he immediately put his hand over it. It was too much of a surprise for him to react angrily. He just stood there, huge in his tacky sport coat and slick slacks and white shoes, one hand over an eye and the other eye looking at me without comprehension. I got in my car and left. Skateboarders were doing curlicues on the sidewalk, that slick, expensive sidewalk near Hollywood and Vine. On the Boulevard the incident had gone unnoticed. Girls with great legs, in hot pants that were about three years out of style, walked on the sidewalk, sipping Orange Julius or eating slices of pizza, and cocksmen and hustlers stood in the doorways of shops, looking at them. Most of the hustlers were dressed more or less like Owen. I saw him pick his dark glasses out of the gutter, but he didn’t put them on. He stood on the sidewalk, squinting in my direction, his glasses in one hand and the other hand over his eye.
LATE THAT NIGHT, WAKEFUL, watching the hands of my clock, I felt awful. It’s sad to call a lover by his name for the last time. The name is part of the pith, after all, part of the luxury. If Owen showed up again, I wouldn’t be calling him Owen. I would descend to pronouns and just call him you. His name was the first thing I got from him, when he squatted down by me in New York, and the last thing he got from me, there at Hollywood and Vine.
Indeed he did show up, about four months after Sherry’s death—I just called him you.
The morning after I slapped him, Sherry Solaré decided I had to be punished for my trespass—the screwing, not the slap. She informed Abe that she wanted to recut the picture, which she had evidently seen a few days before. Abe, coward that he was, hadn’t told me he was screening it for her, but I knew it would happen eventually.
I wasn’t surprised by any of it, and I was calm as morning when Abe called, very nervous, and asked me to come in for a conference.
“I didn’t think it would happen,” he said, after telling me what had happened. “I thought she forgot it, you know. But I guess when she seen the cut she got ideas.”
He was watching me closely, to see how high my resistance was going to mount.
“Calm down, Abe,” I said. “I’m not going to make any trouble. Why should I make trouble, when you and your grandfather have been so nice to me? Stars are like that—we all know it. I can live with it. I don’t want the studio to lose another cent
over my differences with Sherry.”
Abe could hardly believe it, which is some credit to him—it was hardly true. Still, he soon convinced himself that he was having unbelievable luck. No trauma, no lawsuits, no fits.
Overwhelmed, he walked me all the way out of the studio, to my car.
“Listen,” he said, looking at me in a new way, “Grandpa was right. You’re some lady. We’re gonna get you another picture to do, one that bitch ain’t in. You know, a quality picture.”
“That’d be fine,” I said. Having learned to slap, I was apparently even learning to act.
Abe kissed me goodbye, leaving sweat on my cheek, and started off, then turned and shuffled back to my car after I started the motor.
“An’ hey, maybe we could even have dinner sometime,” he said. “Talk over some projects—you know? Or whatever?”
“Why not?” I said.
“I’ll call ya,” he said, looking suddenly confident. He straightened his cuffs, as triumphant as if he’d already fucked me.
9
IN A LIGHT MOOD, VERY RELAXED, I DROVE TO TUJUNGA Canyon. I found Elmo and Winfield out in their yard with their shirts off, idly throwing a hunting knife at a tree.
“Shit, we could become goddamn urban guerrillas, Elmo, if we could ever get the hang of how to make this knife stick,” Winfield said. “We could go throw knives at all the studio heads and destroy capitalism.”
“I like capitalism,” Elmo said. “I’m just out here trying to master the simple art of knife throwing.”
Neither of them managed to get the knife to stick in the tree even once. I tried but missed the tree completely. Winfield got frustrated and threw the knife harder and harder, but it only whanged harmlessly off the tree trunk. Finally he got disgusted and threw it up on the roof of his house.
“It’s a lemon, why keep it?” he said when Elmo looked pained.
“Because I paid a hundred and seventy-five dollars for it,” Elmo said. “That was a handmade knife.”
“Fuck, it wouldn’t cut the hand that made it,” Winfield said.
“How’s the baby?” I asked. Both men looked uncomfortable.
“Sheila’s mother come and got her and it both,” Winfield said. “They decided to take it back to its roots.”
“Him back to his roots,” Elmo corrected. “The child was a boy. Little Winfield the second.”
Winfield sighed. “Here I done accepted the paternity of the little tyke, even though not entirely satisfied in my own mind on that score, and now he’s gone. I never even got to change a diaper.”
Elmo went in and got some wine glasses and some wine, and he and I sat on the lawn and drank wine while Winfield drank beer. Most of the witticisms were about what an uncouth slob he was, but he ignored them. Actually he was not much less couth than Elmo, who had lost a couple of teeth since I had seen him last.
“Broke ’em on a toilet rim, one night when I went to puke,” he said when I asked him about it. He seemed indifferent to their absence.
Then the two of them had an argument about whether a hairy belly was automatic evidence of sexual prowess. Winfield had a line of hair running from his crotch to his navel, while Elmo’s torso was almost hairless and unappealingly white.
“I’m going to steal my film,” I said, as a way of interrupting the argument. “If you really want to be urban guerrillas, here’s your chance. You can help me.”
“Steal a whole film?” Elmo said. It stunned them both.
“Enough of it to keep them from releasing it, at least.”
“Is stealing a film a felonious act?” Winfield asked. “I’d lose my visitation rights to half my kids if I committed a felonious act.”
“Aw, come on, Winfield,” Elmo said. “Let’s help the lady. You don’t like your kids anyway. I don’t blame you. They’re the worst-mannered bunch of runts this side of North Dallas.”
“I guess I’m game,” Winfield said. “Can we take the hunting knife?”
“No, ’cause you threw it on the fucking roof just as I was about to get the hang of throwing it,” Elmo said.
“What do we do with it after we steal it?” Winfield asked. “Ain’t it going to be kinda heavy?”
I hadn’t really given that significant question much thought, but the two of them, veterans of several caper movies, were quick to supply a number of possibilities.
“This is big-time stuff, you know,” Winfield said. “Sherry Solaré’s involved. That bitch will have the S.W.A.T. on us by morning.”
“Just because she said you had a short cock don’t mean she controls the S.W.A.T. team,” Elmo said.
They continued to spin out plans, and I listened. I was determined to do it—for complex reasons. Owen was just a small part of it. For one thing, the film was bad enough as it was: I really didn’t want her to recut it. Also, it sort of amused me to think of Mr. Mond getting his way beyond the grave.
Mainly, though, I think it was that I was just through, in some ways. Certainly through with directing. I had been lucky with Womanly Ways, but I really wasn’t crazed enough to direct, or smart enough either, and I wasn’t going to get any better. Somehow my stupid affair had left me obsessed, for the first time in years, and I felt no need to hang on to my chance to work. Maybe Elmo and Winfield would let me sit around and write scripts with them, when I felt like doing something again.
“I know,” Winfield said finally. “We can just steal the film and take it to Texas.”
“Why Texas?”
“Texas is the ultimate last resort,” he said. “It’s always a good idea to go to Texas, if you can’t think of anything else to do. Me and Elmo got to go to Rome to write a Western for old Sergio Leone next month, and we was planning to go home first anyway. Besides, my baby boy’s in Texas. Maybe I’d get to sit and watch him suck on a teat sometime.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?” Elmo said.
“Because you’re drunk on the fruit of the grape,” Winfield said. “You’re not nice and mellow from drinking good brew, like I am. Good brew kinda detaches the brain, you know.”
“I guess the fact that your brain’s detached explains why you fuck so many worthless women,” Elmo said.
Winfield took it mildly. “Same ones you fuck,” he said.
“Let’s steal the motherfucker and take it to the Blue Dog,” Elmo said. The Blue Dog was the evidently fabulous estate the two of them owned outside of Austin.
“Naw, let’s avoid the Blue Dog until we see how the S.W.A.T. team reacts,” Winfield said. “We could go down to the Rio Chickpea and visit old Donny de Lorn.”
“But Donny ain’t our friend no more,” Elmo said. “Remember, he fucked old Sarah? Or have you got so permissive you don’t care about things like that?”
Donny de Lorn was a country singer, bigger in Texas than anywhere else, though he had made a kind of flash on the national scene thanks to a movie in which he played a psychopathic truck driver.
Before I left, an hour later, Elmo and Winfield were already packing for Texas—the packing consisted of putting an ice chest in the back of their pink Cadillac convertible.
“If I wasn’t too old to handle drugs, we’d have a trip to make ol’ Hunter Thompson eat his heart out,” Winfield said. “We can always buy some Levis along the way if our clothes get dirty.”
They followed me to my house and left the Cadillac. It was beginning to feel a little like an adventure. As we started for the studio in my car, Elmo at the wheel, wearing an immense leather cowboy hat he sometimes fancied, I thought of Joe. There was a man who needed an adventure. Maybe it would put a little life into him again.
“How about Uncle Joe?” I said. “Why don’t we take him?”
“Happy to,” Elmo said. “You an’ him can cuddle up there in the back seat and keep us amused with civilized talk of the sort we don’t often hear.”
I left them in the car, drinking and talking about the possibility of doing a script about our forthcoming caper, and went up to see Joe. H
e was sitting on his couch with some racing forms in his hand, watching television and drinking a martini.
“All right,” I said. “I’m tired of you sitting there, and us never talking or doing anything. Let’s go see the world.”
“Any particular part?” He was amused at me.
“Texas,” I said. “We’re going to steal my film and put it in Elmo’s Cadillac and drive to Texas to a place called the Rio Chickpea. Are you so apathetic that you can resist that?”
“No,” he said, killing the TV with his remote control button. “I’ll go anywhere with you and those Texans, even to Texas, where I’ve had bitter experiences.”
I think he was as happy as the rest of us, to be leaving. Some life came into his eyes. He brought a huge shaker of martinis, an overnight bag, and for some reason, a green overcoat.
“For the chill nights of the desert,” he said, with a touch of the old melodrama.
Our caper was absurdly easy, so easy that it was almost a letdown. A movie about stealing a movie could be made complex and hilarious, but stealing mine was simple, and not even particularly amusing. Joe knew both of the night men, from the old days, and gave them some martinis in their coffee cups. Of course both of the night men trusted me as if I’d been the Virgin Mary, and when I told them I needed some of the film they didn’t even ask me why. It would have been hard to convince them that a nice girl like me was pulling a caper. They sat around with Joe talking about minor actresses they had been in love with, while Winfield and I went in and stole some film. Elmo insisted that he was a wheel man, and refused to leave the car.
We ended up stealing the sound track and three or four miscellaneous reels of film, enough to cause a lot of confusion. Joe and the night men were out drinking martinis under the stars. I guess the night men thought I was taking the film to another lab. They even offered to help us carry it, but I wouldn’t let them. The one thing I felt guilty about was the trouble they were probably going to be in.
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