“Margaret, that’s enough.”
“I see that Sabrina can’t keep her mouth from flapping.”
“Come on Margaret, you knew she’d tell me.”
“Then you should be pleased.”
“Not with the way you spoke to her.”
“That girl’s got a short fuse, I tell you.”
“Did you have one of your famous arguments?”
“People don’t argue with me, darling. They listen to me. And your girl listened to my plans about your next big show. I didn’t tell her all the details but I told her enough.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that you might ask me about the show first?”
“Why you’ll love it darling. It’ll make you rich. It’s high time for another splashy display. I’m getting claustrophobic with all this art work staring at me in here.” Margaret was moving her body around as we spoke, bringing attention to her figure, trying to prove that she was on equal or superior ground to Sabrina.
“And I don’t intend on putting on another show with that toy thing of yours running the gallery.”
“She’s not running the gallery.”
“She’s running you.”
“Margaret, that’s crazy.”
“I have eyes don’t I? That girl is jealous of me.”
“Jealous? Why would she be jealous?”
“Do I have to tell you?”
“Yes, Margaret, you do.” I grabbed the hand without the cigarette and pulled it up to my lips. I kissed it and she smiled at me.
“Alex, don’t think that I’m going to fall for that. You like that girl.”
“I only have eyes for you.”
“Hah!” She pulled her hand back. “If only that were true, Alex.”
“Sabrina’s just a kid.”
“A kid who’s grown up in all the right places.”
“You can’t really believe that I would take up with my assistant. I need her to keep the gallery going.”
“That’s another thing Alex, I don’t think she’s doing you service.”
“Why not?”
“She draws attention to herself, not the paintings. Why, if I decided to sell my Rembrandt, she’d probably dress up like the girl in the painting.”
Margaret sat herself in one of her enormous chairs. “I’m so tired of this.”
“Of what?”
“Of the little pets in your life.”
“There’s nothing between me and Sabrina.”
“Oh, don’t give me that lie.”
“I can’t do the show without her.”
“I’ll find someone else for you.”
“I won’t do the show without her.” I got up and walked out on Margaret.
The next evening, I talked about the show with Billy. His response was to practically fall down in his chair. This was not the wisecracking Billy that I knew. He didn’t look at me. He just polished off his drink.
“So, has this show made Margaret become Sabrina’s best friend yet?”
“Margaret’s not too happy about her.”
“There’s the surprise of the month.”
Billy stopped speaking, made himself another drink. Then, he turned to me. “You can’t do that show.”
“Why?”
“If she displays her work, the art police will crash the little party you have planned.”
“Do you know Margaret?”
“I knew her biblically in the days I was also with Judy.”
“When Margaret was still married?”
“Shocking,” Billy smiled. “Isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“It’s been almost twenty years.”
“You met at one of her gala parties back then?”
“I sold her some of my old art works.”
“And you regret it?”
“Not at all. I picked up the works she got for peanuts. And besides, I had to sell – things weren’t going too well on the career front.”
“Are you worried about your pieces?”
“Not just mine. Half of her paintings were stolen property.”
“I have papers that prove the provenance of every work.”
“So, Margaret’s been running a forgery racket there?”
“Well, not every piece has a squeaky clean history I suppose, but Margaret isn’t inviting any art investigators to the show.”
Billy returned to the bottle. He started drinking silently and poking at his typewriter.
“Don’t tell me you’re jealous?”
“Margaret came by our apartment the other day.”
“That must have gone nicely.”
“I wasn’t in. Audrey received her. Margaret started touring the place, selecting works she wanted to sell.”
“Bet Audrey loved that!”
Billy laughed. “She practically threw Margaret over the balcony.”
“A pleasant thought,” I responded, “even if I do want this show to go on.”
“Why is it a pleasant thought?”
“Because of the way she’s treating Sabrina.”
“Did she try to kill her yet?”
I chuckled. “What are you telling me, Billy?”
“I’m the one that broke it off with Margaret way back before the cows came home.” Billy walked around his office a bit. “You see, Margaret didn’t treat Judy too well.”
“How badly did she treat her?”
“You said Sabrina will be helping Margaret on this show?”
“That’s the plan now.”
Billy looked ill but it was really disgust. “You like this girl Sabrina don’t you?”
What was he getting at? I nodded and Billy lowered the boom. “Then don’t let Margaret get within a mile of her.”
I put down my drink.
“Margaret almost put an end to my marriage with Judy before I even proposed to her.”
“Judy found out?”
“It almost killed her.” Billy started walking around the office, too furious to say a word. And when he did, I needed more of Alice’s pills.
“When Margaret thought that I was getting too serious about Judy, spending too much time and money on her, she moved in on our relationship the way a cat moves into a bird’s cage.”
I took three Provenance pills.
“Where do you think I got the idea for Norma Desmond’s gun,” Billy asked. “Margaret had a small pistol that she carried with her all the time but I didn’t find out until the time she tried to use it on Judy.”
“Margaret has a gun?”
“I was out with Judy at a party and Margaret was laying in wait for her when we stepped out on the balcony. Judy was admiring the view when the pistol’s barrel reflected light from inside the house. Margaret’s finger was on the trigger. If I didn’t jump at her when I did, Judy would be dead.”
I sat there dazed for a moment, then looked up at Billy.
MENTAL INDIGESTION
I saw Margaret the next night – ostensibly just to talk a bit. In reality, it was to find the gun.
“Have you missed me Darling?”
“I’ve been busy Margaret.”
“With the whore no doubt.”
“You’ve no right to call her that!”
“No right?” she said, “I invented her game, her midnight appearances, the sly curves that hypnotize and make you imagine that you’re at the top of the food chain. Well, you’re not.”
“Margaret.”
“I want to make some changes in the show. I don’t want your eager assistant, fawning about your work. I’ll bring my own assistant, someone who’ll plaster the wall, not plaster you.”
I wanted to tell her to stay put in her Holmby Hills hell but there was a gnawing pain in my temples, like something was eating my brain as I sat there. She ignored my silence; saw it as acquiescence and I slumped back into my chair. Was I poisoned?
The pain in my head grew stronger and I almost yelled in agony as Margaret’s spider like form leaned over me. She was maki
ng a web out of her clothes, forcing me down.
“Margaret,” I called out, “I’m sick.”
“Get the doctor Reginald.”
“What, you even have your own doctor in this prison?”
“He lives next door. He’d be better for you than anyone in a hospital.”
I felt Katharine and Sabrina. They were both in the room there with me. They were spirits, though. They attacked Margaret but none of the hits stuck. Their fists went through her head and, then, as they looked at me in a confused despair and helplessness, they began to vanish.
The next moments were hard to remember. I was led up to a bedroom where I was unclothed and placed in an enormous bed. The room was filled with paintings – on the walls, on the floor, leaning up against the furniture.
“These are for our next show,” Margaret explained, impervious to the work that the doctor was doing.
“We should call an ambulance,” I heard her doctor say.
“What’s wrong with you? You have medicine in your black bag there. Give something to him, make him behave like my little man again.”
“But we don’t have enough opiates,” he explained.
“What,” I asked. “Is this doctor actually going to fill me with opiates?”
“You’ll feel much better, darling. You’ll have a rest and then we can start working on the details for our show’s opening night.”
“Margaret you’re mad.” I began to get up from the bed but, in doing so, I fell on the floor, then into unconsciousness.
I saw paintings and they weren’t Margaret’s. I was no longer in her bedroom. I was in a dream. The images on the canvas were beautiful but I personally found them repulsive. They were strewn all about the cabin of the sailboat I was in. I didn’t know who was at the helm. I wasn’t sure why I was in the cabin but I felt a pounding in my chest. Was I about to have a heart attack or was it the oils from these paintings that were filling my lungs with some noxious toxins?
Looking through a porthole, I could see the trademark mountain seascape of Bora Bora Island. I was in Tahiti.
“Alex, come up here!!”
It was my brother’s voice. It was Michel. Then I remembered that I was in his sailboat. But how did I get there and why was I not at home? It was a bright day, the afternoon sun blazed through the porthole. Maybe that’s what I smelled. Maybe the sun was melting Michel’s canvases.
The bastard, I thought to myself, why couldn’t I paint like him?
“Alex!!!”
Michel needed me but I couldn’t make it out of the cabin. I kept tripping over his paintings. I started to hear him struggling and moaning, calling me again.
I stepped into one of his Gauguin-like landscapes, ripping the canvas. I almost made it out of the cabin when, suddenly, I found myself on the deck right behind Michel. I could see his hands gripping frantically at the helm. Then I saw blood gushing out of my brother’s head. His body collapsed to the boat’s spotless deck, staining it with blood that seemed more massive than Michel’s body.
Who did this to him?
I thought I heard someone but I ran about the deck and all I could see was my brother’s blood spilling into the crystal clear waters of Bora Bora’s lagoon.
I ran back to Michel. I just stood there, unable to do anything. And what would be the point anyway. He was clearly dead, beaten to death… and I was the only one left on the sailboat.
There wasn’t a witness in sight. Then my chest began to pound again and I realized that I had hit a parked car. I wasn’t in Tahiti any longer. I was in a Santa Monica beach parking lot.
A young girl was outside the car pointing at me.
“We know it’s the man,” she said.
“Did you do it Daddy?” Mara said.
I turned to her. Mara began crying. “I don’t believe it,” she said as she covered her face with her hands.
I tried backing up but just as I was about to do so, dozens of children surrounded the car.
There was nothing I could do so I locked the doors and tried to secure the lock in the convertible’s roof clamps.
“Did you call the police?” an approaching adult asked another one.
Horns were honking in a kind of rhythmic Morse code, telling the story of what I did. They had discovered me! They knew I killed Michel but I didn’t know how!
“Mara,” I yelled to my daughter, “We have to get out of here.” I reached over and unlocked her door but it locked itself back again.
“What’s going on,” I muttered to myself.
Now, the police had arrived. There must have been a dozen patrol cars; the smell of their burnt rubber reminded me of Michel’s paintings. My chest hurt again but then I realized that it was meant to hurt. I had to pay a price for what I had done.
I got out of the car. As I did, there was a little girl pointing at me, yelling to an approaching policeman. “He did it!” she accused me. The girl’s mother pulled her back from me like I was a dangerous man, as if being in my proximity would injure her daughter’s future. A man from another time would rape and murder her because she had been near me.
I didn’t belong in this hell. I belonged in another hell, maybe, but not this one.
They opened up the passenger door and started talking to Mara. “Is this your father, young lady?”
Four officers approached me. “Sir, would you step away from the car?” They were calm and they were gentle. I’d never been treated so politely by the police before. I would get berated for speeding but now that it was a serious crime, they treated the monster so gingerly.
The parking lot was being cordoned off. They had a “situation” as they called it. They were moving people back. The policeman who approached with the handcuffs did it stealthily, like he was just putting an identification tag on my wrist, like he was taking me to a hospital where I’d be dealt with by experts.
They were too certain I was their man. Did I really kill my brother? That’s what it felt like. I had the guilt. I was born with it. It was working its wonders as they began to whisk me away. I resisted. I panicked. Now they’d certainly think I had done it.
But how could they connect the Tahiti murder with the man in his car at a Santa Monica beach?
I began to regret everything I ever did, had that feeling that if I could only go back and live my life over again that everything would be all right, that I’d have my daughter back, that I’d have a home to go to without all these criminal police invading my space.
Then the handcuffs ratcheted on my wrists and I suddenly felt like I was falling. I saw flashes of San Francisco Bay, of the 1905 Pan Pacific Exposition building, of the Presidio.
“Now, Mr. Lumiere, if you would just come this way.”
How did they know my name? And then, I couldn’t move. My body became a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife. Ha! Let them try and move me now! They’d forget about me, just grab pieces of my salted body to put into their sandwiches.
But no, this was real, now they were shining a bright light in my eyes and the children there, in unison, were chanting: “Electric Chair. Razz, razz, razz. His head will explode with the real true light. His head will explode like it’s dynamite!”
Then, there was another light in my eye but it was just the sun. It was rising. It was early in the morning. I was in bed with Margaret. I sat up knowing that De Colette would still come for me. I did murder my brother – the dream proved it.
NEW YEAR’S EVE
It was New Year’s Eve that day, not in any reality I knew but at Paramount Studios, at the elaborately lugubrious set that Hans Dreier had made for the New Year’s Eve party at Norma’s house, a party that no one but Gillis had been invited to. There was a four-man orchestra, playing Charmaine as Gillis sat next to Norma, as he passively listened to her describing the plans for them in the next year.
“I felt caught like that cigarette in that contraption on her finger,” he narrated in the finished film.
Norma exhaled her cigarette in great pleas
ure. “What a wonderful next year it’s going to be, what fun we’ll have.” Then, with a nod towards Gillis she says “I’ll fill the pool for you. I’ll open my house in Malibu and you can have the whole ocean. And when our picture’s finished, I’ll buy you a boat and we’ll sail to Hawaii…”
“Stop it,” Gillis says, “You’re not going to buy me anything more.”
“Don’t be silly,” Norma responds before picking up a golden cigarette case. She hands it to Gillis. “Here, I was going to give it to you at midnight.”
“Norma, I can’t take it. You’ve bought me enough.”
“Shut up. I’m rich. I’m richer than all this new Hollywood trash. Ha. Ha. I’ve got a million dollars.”
“Keep it.”
“Own three blocks downtown, I’ve got oil in Bakersfield, pumping, pumping, pumping. What’s it for but to buy us anything we want?”
Gillis stood up, “Cut out this ‘us’ business.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“What right have you got to take me for granted?” By her expression, Norma seemed to think that she has every right. “Has it ever occurred to you,” Gillis continued, “that I might have a life of my own, …that there may be some girl that I’m crazy about?”
“Who? Some car hop or dress extra?”
“What I’m trying to say is that I’m all wrong for you. You need a Valentino, someone with polo ponies, a big shot.”
Norma got up. “What you’re trying to say is that you don’t want me to love you. Say it. Say it!” And then she slapped him and rushed upstairs to her room.
I was thinking of Margaret of course, of the web that she placed me in, the same kind of web that led to her suicide attempt when Billy got tired of her. And the same thing was about to happen in the movie.
Norma had just slapped some sense into Gillis, a slap that I needed to experience from Margaret.
Gillis took a look around and felt trapped. He looked at the orchestra that continued to play calmly as the drama unfolded, at Max who seemed to be directing this elaborate charade that the unassuming Gillis had fallen prey to. He grabbed his vicuna overcoat and escaped from the house.
As we left the studio that night, as our own real rain shaded us with a taste of the sameness between the story and the world, the ignorant movie crew was surprised at the shower, they made with little laughs about what they needed to warm them up. I needed it too.
Duplicitous Page 12