The Perfect Ghost

by Linda Barnes

  TB: Haven’t got any. Kids.

  PFO: Oh, well. That’s okay though, you got books. Send ’em off in the world, see if they sink or swim, just like kids, huh? Think you’ll send me a copy of this one when it’s done? I’d like that.

  TB: I’ll make sure you’re on the list.

  CHAPTER

  twenty-seven

  I felt angry on Malcolm’s behalf: unsubstantiated rumors weren’t our usual fare. When I’d listened to the tape for the first time, when I’d transcribed and essentially dismissed it, I’d wondered why you’d bothered interviewing a washed-up hack politician. Now, I felt I knew at least part of the answer: McKenna.

  You could hardly have believed Malcolm guilty of involvement in the Forrester killing. The case was solved, the killer in jail, serving life with no possibility of parole. McKenna might have sicced O’Toole on Malcolm; a photo of the famous director entering the District Attorney’s office, posted online alongside some scurrilous accusation, would have been milk and honey to him. It was possible, even likely, that McKenna invented some of his own gossip. But you’d never pay for that sort of rubbish.

  A man like Malcolm, a wealthy landowner, a handsome Hollywood star, might stir neighborhood passions. His cousin probably wasn’t the only one jealous of Malcolm’s possessions and success. I tried to put myself in your shoes, Teddy, decode the DA’s interview from the point of view of a writer in touch with Glenn McKenna. Were you hoping to find some hint that local gossip—or the DA’s overreaction to local gossip—changed Malcolm’s mind about fighting Claire for Jenna’s custody?

  I reread each grubby letter, studied each photo. On the fourth page, faint hand-drawn circles appeared around occasional letters and numerals. Someone had scrawled “0 = pswd” on the reverse side of the same page, an equation I hadn’t previously noticed. I located the e-mails Jonathan had forwarded after your death, quickly isolated the message from which I now recalled in sharp detail, an e-mail that led to a password-protected site, a dead end at the time.

  0 = pswd. Circled digits equal password. I printed the circled letters and numerals on a scrap of paper. Hands poised at the keyboard, I felt the manic joy of the puzzle solver, but I hesitated, pondering the choice: To enter or to ignore. Information is a strange and unruly beast. Once you know, you can’t unknow, can’t unlearn or conveniently forget. Once you leap into the abyss, you can’t tread air like a cartoon character with pinwheeling feet, reverse gravity, and regain the cliff.

  I closed my eyes as my fingers keyed the password. The screen flickered and changed.

  A less polished site than CCtruthtelling.com, this seemed to be McKenna’s preview site, the private pages where he stashed materials prior to publication, perhaps while taking time to check their veracity or, more likely, their potential for attracting lawsuits. The printed material McKenna had given me was taken directly from this work space, the photographs far clearer in full color. The carefree sunbathers gamboled in the waves. Were the girls recognizable celebrities? None of the faces seemed familiar.

  Several shots featured broad expanses of water in the foreground, figures in the background on a distant beach. I focused on the far background, a small building, a wooden shack, visible behind the laughing people.

  I scrolled down. Yes, that was definitely Malcolm, a younger Garrett Malcolm, the shot reframed so that he held hands with a partial woman who disappeared out of the frame. The woman’s features were blurred, as though she’d abruptly turned her head. Her dark hair flew outward in a wedge that obscured her profile. Underneath the picture, a caption, no, not a caption, but a string of numbers: 939495?

  I wondered whether there ought to be spaces between the numbers, whether they represented years: ’93? ’94? ’95? Malcolm had married the glamorous Claire Gregory in 1992. I studied each screen of McKenna’s preview site, hunting for another version of the shot, one in which the woman’s face was clear, her identity revealed. I compared the woman with other women on the site, to the frolicking sun worshippers enjoying the crashing waves, but I didn’t find a match.

  Maybe, I thought, it was nothing more than a shot of Malcolm and a casual acquaintance, someone he’d bumped into on a street in a nearby town. I studied the twined hands in the photo. The pose suggested a certain intimacy, a quality of urgency, almost secrecy.

  Malcolm’s marriage to Claire had lasted six years. The one characteristic of the woman in the photo that stood out, that was absolutely clear, was the color of her dark hair, brunette, almost black. Claire Gregory, like Harlow and Monroe before her, was a legendary blonde.

  CHAPTER

  twenty-eight

  Yanking shirt over rose-colored bra, I viewed my shadowy reflection in the mirror with a degree of satisfaction. The blue V-neck was pale and worn, but with new underpinnings it felt and looked subtly different. I wished I could have said my new underwear made me feel confident as I drove off to beard the dragon in his den, but it didn’t. A friendly dragon, an admired dragon, a dragon who insisted I needn’t dress up for him, granted. But a dragon nonetheless.

  Once I’d capped last night’s obsessive Web site viewing, I’d wrestled sentences into their best order, voicing Malcolm’s thoughts about costars and colleagues till well past three in the morning. I’d finished a new chapter and buffed an early section to a polished shine. I’d been lost in his voice, Teddy, possessed by it. Remember what he told you: The great thing about acting is for ninety minutes I get to be somebody else. Alone, working, writing, I felt like somebody else, like some exalted species of recording angel privy to Malcolm’s innermost thoughts. The prospect of his actual presence, his male scent, his watchful eyes, clouded my mind. What was the best way to get him to open up and really talk to me about his daughter and his relationship with her? If Jenna’s portrait were hung alongside her mother’s, I could get the ball rolling by admiring it, but I’d seen no photos of Jenna Malcolm. Unless she was one of the girls frolicking on the beach in McKenna’s soft-porn candids.

  Malcolm awaited me with his assistant nowhere in sight, glory hallelujah. After spending the better part of the night listening to the man’s voice, I still found it thrilling, a supple device that made each utterance seem meaningful. Coupled with his sheer physical attractiveness, the wide cheekbones and crinkling good-humored eyes, the effectiveness of his voice doubled. He wore a dark sweater that melted into velvety corduroy trousers.

  “How’s Hamlet shaping up?” It wasn’t my first official question, but I wanted to know and the words helped fill an awkward interval as he ushered me down a hallway.

  “‘Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt thou the sun doth move.’”

  “‘Doubt truth to be a liar,’” I said. “Act Two, scene two.”

  “‘But never doubt I love.’ An intriguing poem, isn’t it?”

  “Hamlet doesn’t think so. What does he say? ‘I am ill at these numbers.’”

  “Meaning my verses suck.”

  “And then he calls himself a machine, right?”

  “‘Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him.’”

  His dazzling smile was like a reward for remembering the lines. As he turned a corner, the hallway narrowed and dipped. He paused, took my hand, and led me down the single step with a courtly move lifted from an Elizabethan dance.

  “You’d make a nice Ophelia,” he said.

  Nice, I thought, in something like despair. Sexy underwear and the best he could do was nice, nice and reliable, like a plain vanilla ice-cream cone.

  When he led me to a room less than a quarter the size of the one with the Claire portrait and the window wall, I was disappointed at first. Then he pressed a button near the light switch and with a faint buzz of machinery, wide roman shades began to climb the walls and peel down from the sloped ceiling. I inhaled sharply and stifled a delighted gasp.

  It must have been a conservatory once. There were still pots of greenery, ranging from delicate ferns to hardy rubber plants. Three walls and
half the roof, now revealed, were tinted glass, and the ocean view was incredible, the water shimmering, close, and of such an intense blue-green that I almost didn’t notice the remaining solid wall, which was covered with photos so densely grouped they might have been wallpaper. Wrought-iron chairs and a big rattan sofa piled with flowered pillows made the room feel like a summer porch or a cozy outdoor patio. On a desk, an Oscar statuette, cocktail umbrella perched rakishly on one shoulder, did paperweight duty next to an ornate clock.

  “Pick a chair,” Malcolm said.

  They formed a semicircle near the desk. I chose the one at the right because it had a convenient small table nearby. Instead of sitting behind the desk as I’d assumed he would, Malcolm sank into the chair next to mine, rearranged the cushions, put his feet up on a settee, and gave a satisfied sigh. The chairs were definitely worthy of sighs, big comfortably padded monsters. With the sun beating down and the view of the ocean, it felt magical, as if the room had fast-forwarded the calendar and transformed the chill April day into a late summer holiday. I set the recorder on the table and repositioned my notebook, thinking that when it came time to choose the author photo, I’d recommend a shot of Malcolm at this desk, the Academy Award beside him and the wall of photos in the background.

  “Would you care for a drink?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He got up, went to the desk, poured three fingers of decanted amber. “You don’t have to drink Scotch. You can have water, my child. Or Coke?”

  “I’m fine. I had a beer last night.” God, why had I told him that?

  He raised an eyebrow. “At a bar?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

  “And you got carded, didn’t you?”

  “They checked my ID,” I admitted.

  “I’ll bet they did.” His tone was light, teasing. “So, the last time you got me to gossip about my colleagues. I hope I didn’t say anything too rotten.” He brought the drink back to the chair, did the settling business with cushions and footstool again.

  “You’ll get to review the whole thing when I’m done.”

  “And you’ll take out the objectionable parts?”

  “If you object, I’ll tell you why I thought it was important to include it in the first place.”

  “Doesn’t the ocean look great? Why don’t we go lie on the dunes, play hooky, and to hell with this stuff?”

  “If I lived here, I don’t think I’d get anything done. I’d lie on the beach every day.” I finished checking the levels and flipped on the tape. The click and whirr were tiny sounds, but they effectively shifted the tone.

  He was suddenly all business. “Last time, you wanted me to tell you about Claire.”

  “You talked to Teddy about film, acting, directing, vision and technique, but now we need to get more personal, to balance the book.” I nodded encouragement, but I think he’d already decided to talk about her, chosen this particular room as the stage set for his revelations. I wondered if this had been Claire’s hideaway, her study.

  “No one realized how smart and funny she was, not at first, and that’s the daily double in Hollywood, funny and beautiful. If I hadn’t lived with her I’d have been as awestruck as anyone, but when you see somebody fall out of bed in the morning and struggle to crack eggs into a pan, you lose that sense of worship pretty quickly. God, she could destroy anything in the kitchen and look so demure and devilish while she was doing it.” He paused and pressed his lips together. “I like the way you listen. Claire was a good listener. Actors need to listen.”

  I flushed. “How did you meet?”

  “The real story or the made-up story?”

  “Both?”

  “We were in the public eye. I was much older than she was. We saw each other on the set, something clicked, and we spent the night screwing ourselves stupid. Then we tried to keep it under wraps.”

  “That’s the made-up story?”

  He laughed. “Oh, yes, the real one is much more sordid.”

  “You were dating Sybilla Jackson.”

  “God, Sybilla, yes. Dating’s a quaint word.”

  “The supermodel. You were living with her.”

  “We were fucking, but we weren’t exclusive. Syb knew what she was getting into. I didn’t fool her, or anybody, with chitchat about orange blossoms and happily-ever-after. I was an old-school bachelor. And don’t ask what it was about Claire, because I don’t know and I never will. Going into it, I thought it would be another fling, a week, a month, a year, and I didn’t care. I needed to be with her. And she needed to be with me.”

  “You have something of a reputation for sleeping with your leading ladies.”

  “Only something of a reputation? Anything I tell you, I can take out of the book, right?”

  I nodded.

  “I like to know everything about the people I work with, and sex is one of the ways I work, or used to work. I was always a little bit sorry I was so determinedly hetero because there were men in the movies and in the plays that I never knew as well as I knew the women, unless, well, sometimes we shared the women. All my films, at the core, are about relationships, and the more relationships I have, the more I understand them, or maybe the less I understand them. But that chemistry, that first time, there’s nothing more compelling than the moment when two strangers glance at each other and yearn to be naked in bed together. As a director, as a writer, I specialize in that chemistry.”

  I stared out the window, pretending to be transfixed by the view. I was probably reading more into the situation than he intended, but he was definitely different today, more casual, more relaxed. Even the room was less formal; the couch, more a daybed than a traditional sofa, seemed to loom portentously in the foreground.

  “That’s why I’m pounding my head over Hamlet and Ophelia this morning,” he continued. “Because when people come to see the play, I want them transfixed by the soliloquies, yes, but I want them to taste the passion behind them. I want them to smell it. I want Hamlet, the love story, as well as Hamlet, the revenge play. I want the audience to know in their bones that Claudius lusted for Gertrude long before he killed Hamlet’s father. I want them to know that Gertrude flirted shamelessly with Claudius before he killed the king, that she couldn’t wait to bed him once her old king was dead. I want those ‘incestuous sheets’ to underscore the entire production, to permeate it. Hamlet knows about them because he sees how his mother looks at Claudius, and he understands them because of the way he feels for Ophelia.”

  I’d stopped taking notes. Malcolm noticed and I hastily bent to my task, the color rising in my cheeks.

  “Think about what Hamlet says about his father, how he’s a ‘paragon and every virtue sits upon his brow.’ And yet Gertrude goes berserk for Claudius. Why? Is she a cliché, the woman who loves an outlaw? Is she a strumpet, a classic bad girl who values hot sex more than she values dignity or class? Is there something Hamlet is completely missing? Was his father a cold and upright man, a man who ignored his wife? And then think about Elizabeth, think of the Virgin Queen in the audience, confronted by this other Queen who gave it all for love, who dies for love.”

  “How would you play Claudius?” It wasn’t the question I intended to ask.

  His face split in a wide grin. “I’d make him sexy as hell. Even Ophelia wouldn’t be safe in my castle.”

  I swallowed, tried to get my breath. The sun danced on the waves and glittered in my eyes. I glanced down at my notes and changed the subject. “You moved here before Claire got sick, right?”

  He stared out the window at the sea. “Yes, this house, the way it used to be, was our first home. Dad was getting old. The place was all but empty, run down. The Amphitheater hadn’t been used in three, four years. I thought I’d retreat here, become my father, but then I had an idea for the movies, the Justice films, somehow I saw them taking place on this coast, right here. Because it wasn’t used much for movies, because there was the hardship of winter, one more thing to fight again
st. It was far away from the craziness on the other coast. Claire loved it.”

  “But you broke up.”

  “We couldn’t sustain it. That first-time thing; I think it was important for both of us.”

  “You couldn’t sustain it for Jenna’s sake?”

  “There speaks the child of divorce.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “I speculate about people. Actors do. Directors do. I can’t see you growing up in the bosom of a loving family.”

  I wanted to demand why almost as much as I wanted him to shut up.

  “You bite your nails. You try to seem cold. You have no idea how attractive you are. You know you’re clever, but you don’t want anyone else to know.”

  “Jenna is your only child, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “You wanted her to grow up here, like you did?”

  “Yes.”

  I sucked in a breath. This was disastrous. I was pummeling the man with questions he could answer in monosyllables. “Tell me something about her.”

  “Such as?”

  I tried to smile. “Does she bite her nails?”

  “Actresses tend to treat their bodies well unless they tip over the edge into anorexia. Jenna is spectacularly beautiful. I can say that because she looks like her mother, not me.”

  “Would you cast her as Ophelia?”

  “Not in my production. I can’t imagine listening to Hamlet yell at her, ‘Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.’ My impulse would be to keep her safe and a director can never keep his actors safe. Sometimes I wonder how Peter Hall feels when he sees his Rebecca in film and onstage, when she’s half naked, seducing some man.”

  While he spoke, my eyes searched the photo wall. “Is that Jenna?”

  He stood, removed the framed snapshot from its hook, and graciously handed it to me. “At the age of ten.”

  “My God.”

  “Does that look like any ten-year-old you’ve ever seen?”

  “She’s in costume.”

  “No one could keep her out of costume. She danced, she sang, she was a hell of a little actress.”