Later that night, I got praise for talents as a lover and a potential mate. My adventures in bed with Sabrina had risen to the level of maximum tension – and I gave in before the whole thing collapsed. I let myself be lost in her love for me and momentarily forgot about Katharine.
I was changing, at last. I was proof that sexual passion lit up the well-hidden spark of self-respect and self-love. By the time my night was over, I could leave behind my nostalgia and look forward, foolishly perhaps, to a new beginning with Sabrina. Foolish because I had the same thought ten years before when I had begun again with Katharine.
FLORAL TRIBUTE
Margaret’s abusive actions were about to reach new heights. And this was accomplished by her inviting Sabrina to her house when I was at work. Sabrina, hoping to bury the hatchet, stood before the wealthy matron’s door. She rang the bell and could hear it from outside. It was a pock marked sound, like an old rusty boat bell, scratchy and unsure of itself.
While the scripted story of Norma Desmond’s manic trainings for Salome was being shot, I could see, in a portion of my besotted brain, the travails that Sabrina was going through. I knew she was visiting Margaret and I feared for her after what Billy had told me about Margaret’s treatment of Billy’s first wife.
In the film, though Gillis was at home during the day, every night he crept out to meet with the young writer, Betty Schaefer. They’d work at Paramount while the studio was asleep, collaborating on something contemporary, something with a little more than Salome to offer filmgoers that were going about their life in the mid-twentieth century.
Norma discovered his absences. One night, she confronted Gillis, told him she knew he was going out at nights, pleaded with him to stay, that she needed his support while she was going through this terrible strain. Gillis remained cool, telling her that he just had to get out, that he hadn’t done anything.
“Of course not,” Norma rejoined while grasping Gillis’s hair and pulling it up a little, “I wouldn’t let you.” She returned to her room, like the temptress Delilah, threatening to weaken Gillis’s hold onto his powers, fooling with his hair just as Delilah had done with Samson’s.
I had a date at the Bel-Air Hotel bar with Sabrina after the shooting but time went by and she never showed up. I picked up the phone and called her apartment and the gallery and heard the repetitiously dead rings that wouldn’t summon her. Then, I called Margaret to see if Sabrina was still there, to find out if she was in danger. There was no answer from Margaret’s phone.
I went to the gallery and couldn’t find Sabrina. Then, as my mind was introducing an image of a prostrate Sabrina, the real person rang me. When I picked up the phone, the hallucination turned into a real life catastrophe. Sabrina was calling me from the hospital where she had the wisdom to go after incessant vomiting had hit her on her drive home.
I raced to the UCLA emergency with a self-loathing regret that I didn’t keep Sabrina under my wing. I hadn’t even told her about Margaret’s attempt to murder Billy’s first fiancée.
When I arrived at the hospital, I ran through the treatment areas, searching for her. I was stopped by gatekeepers who worried about my frantic behaviour. The guards restraining me took me to a supervisor’s office where I was reassured that the danger had passed, that the poison Sabrina ingested had done little if any permanent damage. While waiting, I called Billy. He was working late, as usual, with Charlie Brackett.
“I’ll come right over,” Billy assured me. And he did. But not before the circus performers showed off their tricks in the waiting room. An old woman, whose husband must have had a stroke or a heart attack, suddenly became young and started dancing in front of me. She had a twinkle in her eye, Margaret’s twinkle. There was no doubt, then, in my mind, that I would be arrested for murder. Michel’s death would soon become a footnote to what I was going to do to Margaret.
Billy rushed inside the room and found me in a chair, confined to my own morbid imaginings. He had to shake me to pull me out of my dream and bring me back to the reality that Sabrina had survived, that I could go see her.
When we got to her room, instead of Sabrina, I saw Katharine, drugged out and dying. It took Billy’s voice to bring me back to the present.
“Look, Alex,” Billy said, “she’s survived the reaper.”
“That’s not funny,” I protested.
“It’s funnier than what could have happened to her. I warned you, Alex.”
“Warned about what,” Sabrina asked weakly.
Billy was suddenly silent, letting me be the one to apologize for not keeping my eye on her every minute.
“But that’s absurd,” she complained, “You’re not to blame for what Margaret did.”
“How did she do it?”
“It was my fault. She took one of her tropical flowers and mixed it in my drink, telling me that it would give me energy.”
The doctor came in, examined Sabrina, then spoke with Billy and I in the hallway. “She came through fine but she wouldn’t have had she arrived a minute later.”
I was prepared to go to Margaret right away and relieve her of her painful life but Billy talked sense into me. “You’ll have your chance,” he assured me. “She’s having dinner with Audrey and I a few nights from now. We can deal with it over loaded cocktails if necessary. Sabrina’s fine and the picture is about to be finished. We’ll settle up with Margaret then…and by the time she leaves the dinner table, she’ll be well taken care of.”
“Why wait,” I asked.
“Because we can hurt her more deeply this way,” the compassionate director explained to me. “She’ll collapse at my home and we can get her put away like she should have been years ago.”
Before leaving, I entered Sabrina’s room and saw her sleeping peacefully. There wasn’t a sign of strain on her darkened face. She seemed, to me, to be smiling inside, a far cry from the face of death that I saw on Katharine a year earlier.
THE SET-UP
After the next day’s work, I had a meeting at Angler’s office. We discussed the murder case that was on my back. Angler had found that the Lumiere family had great investments in Tahiti, that they were disappointed that the murderer of Michel wasn’t discovered and punished.
“They found out that you didn’t leave the island until after the murder. You had told them you left the day before. How do you explain this?”
“It was a hard time.”
“Murder usually is.”
“I was on the boat when Michel was killed.”
“You What?”
“I forgot.”
“What do you mean you forgot?”
“I’ve been having problems…in my head. My memory was blocked. It was too horrible to see such a wish come true.”
“How did it come true?”
“I was on the boat – with Michel and the man who killed him.”
“And do you know who that man is?”
“His name is Hitu. He’s a native of Bora Bora. He’s somewhere on the island, I’m sure.”
“All right.”
“I’ll draw you a sketch of him.”
I went home and did a drawing of Hitu. Then, I tore it up and painted a picture of Hitu and Katharine on the Bora Bora beach. While I was letting this dry, I painted another, traditional mug shot sketch for my attorney.
I went to my meditation room, tried the simple breathing meditation but found I was too anxious to just sit there and breathe. I was losing control of myself. I had to find Hitu and I needed help. At midnight, I called Greece and spoke with Katsimbalis; the anthropologist who I might interest in going on a search for Hitu.
“Bora Bora,” he said. “That’s home to the Toomatakuls, just about the most violent people in the Pacific Ocean.” I thought again of the head bashing I witnessed as Katsimbalis spoke these words.
“I know,” I told him.
Pause.
“All right,” he said, “I can go there but I’ll have to be prepared for the worst, equipped with
weapons that will stop them. Even then, I might be ambushed. I’d be in their territory, don’t forget.”
“So?”
“Well, it’s quite a risk.”
“Would ten thousand cover the danger?”
Katsimbalis cleared his throat, and then asked me when I wanted him to arrive in Tahiti.
“Tomorrow.”
“All right,” he said, “Well, there are certain things I’ll have to get before we start out on…”
“I’ll wire you five thousand. Will that be enough?”
“Why, yes, of course. I’ll start my research right away.”
As soon as I put down the phone, I got a call from Sabrina. “Just checking on how you’re doing, sweetie.”
“I should be checking on you!”
“I’m fine. No residual effects, just like the doctor said. And I’m already back home. Can you come over,” she asked.
“I think I need to,” I confessed.
I left my home and drove through the suddenly claustrophobic streets to Sabrina’s apartment. It was eerie. I felt like I was in one of those German Expressionist films that I’d worked on twenty years before. The foreground was too stretched out; funnels of light drew yellow shafts of brightness on the streets. And there was no one else on the road.
When I arrived at her place, Sabrina was in front of her courtyard apartment entrance. When I approached her, she threw her arms around me. “Are we going to be all right?”
“We? Why, we’re going to be fine. It’s Hitu you should be worried about.”
“Hitu?”
“Let’s go inside,” I said
Once settled in a chair and with a Scotch and soda, I told Sabrina that I hired an attorney and an anthropologist.
“Anthropologist?”
I explained the difficulties involved in ferreting Hitu out and, therefore, the need of someone to work our way through the cultural obstacles.
Sabrina gestured to me; she wanted me to sit on the couch next to her. I got up and as I approached the couch, I grew dizzy and just managed to collapse on her sofa.
“What’s wrong, Alex?”
“Overworked.”
“Overtormented, you mean.”
I finished my drink, but slowly. And as I drank, I watched Sabrina’s naked arms. They were pristine, flawless, not like Katharine’s. I remembered the tracks on Katharine’s arms. Then, I thought about when I caught her shooting up heroin in the bedroom just a few months before her suicide. I put my hands over my face to blot out the memory.
“Alex?” Sabrina gently pulled the hands down from my face and saw my tears.
“There were some things I never told you about Katharine.”
“I know she was your brother’s lover.”
“That was only a mild offense to herself.”
“What is it?”
“She was an addict.”
“Opium?”
“Heroin…and I did everything possible to try and stop her. She went into treatment centers, got off the stuff. Then, as soon as she had a little more stress, she’d be shooting up again. I had to watch her all the time. And it grew even worse after Michel’s death,” I said as I got up to pour myself another drink.
Sabrina stopped me, got the Scotch for me.
“Mara was fourteen, innocent in her own peculiar way but she knew what was wrong with her mother. She would grow angry with her, refuse to obey her. I’d send her to her room– but I knew it was Katharine’s fault.”
Sabrina gave me my drink, sat down next to me.
“It’s strange when you think that you’ve ruined your life,” I told her, “only to find out that your wife has ruined hers even more.” I took a long drink. “And I’m ashamed to say that it made me feel good, to know that she was in worse shape than me.”
Sabrina looked at me, non-judgmentally. She started stroking my arm; then she put my arm around her shoulders and got comfortable. “You’re in fine shape, amazing really, when you think what you’ve been through.”
“I talked to Mara one night after I sent her to her room. I went in there to apologize. We talked about her mother. Mara hated her, hated the way she was ruining our family. That night, I discovered that Mara had learned about her mother’s affair with Michel. She’d confessed to reading Katharine’s diary and there were all those references to the most important man in her life. ‘I thought she was talking about you,’ Mara said, ‘then I realized that it was Uncle Michel.’ She started crying, she moved forward, threw her arms around me and clung to me.”
A week later, after her mother’s suicide, she was clinging to me again. She just wouldn’t stop sobbing. I told Mara then, and I told myself, that Katharine was just mourning Michel when she took her life, that it didn’t reflect on her love for Mara.”
“Did she believe you?”
“She had to. The alternative was too difficult for her to accept, that her mother was nothing more than a drug addict who’d cheated on her father and who treated her like dirt.”
Pause.
“I had compassion back then.”
“You’ve still got it,” Sabrina said, embracing my arm, “You’ve got too much.”
“Not for very long.”
“What does that mean?”
THE MAGIC CARPET
Billy didn’t tell Margaret that he also invited me for dinner on that Tuesday night as we were nearing the end of our Sunset Boulevard shoot. I was sitting in Billy’s study discussing our plan. If she didn’t commit herself to a mental institution, we would turn over evidence to the D.A. that Margaret tried to poison Sabrina. We had the hospital records with a clear report on an ingestion of aconite that nearly led to Sabrina’s death.
It was a warm evening in Westwood and Billy had central air conditioning in his penthouse apartment but, as happened frequently, it stopped functioning before Margaret’s arrival and the sliding windows in the living room had to be opened to cool off the home.
Billy’s wife, Audrey, had a strict no shoes policy and everyone had to change into slippers when they entered. The slippers were quite light and when you stepped on things like sliding door frames, you could hurt your feet. Audrey solved this problem by placing a rug over the frame that led out to the living room’s balcony. It was an Indian rug, some priceless 18th Century piece that Billy had acquired on his travels.
Billy puffed on the cigar as he gave his opinion on our gambit. It was his intention to bring up Sabrina during dinner, commenting on her health and how unfortunate it would be if the police were clued in on the poison. Billy’s connections at UCLA made it possible to write a report on the incident that explained it as ingestion from a flower, that Margaret had set things up to poison her.
The door buzzer rang from downstairs and Margaret’s butler’s voice came over the intercom, announcing his employer’s arrival. She was buzzed into the building while Arthur returned to Margaret’s limousine to wait until the dinner party was concluded.
Audrey opened the door when Margaret arrived and was stunned by the mourning clothes that she was wearing. A black suit with a black hat and a veil. “Hello darling,” Margaret said as she entered. “Your home looks marvelous.”
“Thank you,” Audrey said.
Margaret took an uninvited tour of the sitting room that housed Billy’s collection of swords and knives. “I didn’t know about these charming items,” Margaret said. Billy had a dagger from Roman times, something that might have been used to kill Julius Caesar. He also had a Samurai sword. And in another part of the room, Billy had his gun collection on the wall. “Are these guns loaded?”
“I doubt it, but knowing Billy he might just have loaded them to add a thrill to his exhibition.”
“His exhibition, yes,” Margaret replied softly as she touched a forty year old derringer.
“I understand that your exhibition with Alex was nearly a sellout.”
“An interesting choice of words, Audrey. I think you can say that Alex sold out everything lately. In fact,�
�� Margaret continued, “I’m a little disappointed in him.”
“Why is that?”
“He’s always springing surprises on me.” And just then, Billy and Audrey sprung their new surprise on Margaret.
Margaret’s eyes hardened at the sight of him.
“I hope you don’t mind our inviting Alex. He was working late with Billy after the shoot today and we thought it would be nice to invite him to dine with us.”
Margaret extended her arm to me. I took her black satin-gloved hand but didn’t kiss it. “I’m sure we’ll have a lot to discuss,” he said.
As we drank cocktails, Margaret and I wandered out onto Billy’s living room balcony. “I feel terrible about walking on this rug, Billy. This must be a hundred years old,” she said.
“Three hundred, Margaret. It was made for a maharajah.”
The rug depicted a rather violent scene. An invader being attacked by a tiger, an early home defense system.
“How is your Sabrina? I hope she recovered sufficiently from that unfortunate encounter with the flora in my living room.”
“They had to pump her stomach, Margaret.”
“But all she did was touch the plant.”
“Yes, well it made a mysterious trip to her stomach. She almost didn’t make it.”
“But she’s fine now?”
“The picture of health.”
“Then, why didn’t you bring her?”
“Perhaps because she didn’t want to be poisoned again.”
“Poisoned? Why that’s ridiculous!”
Billy then joined us on the balcony, handing us champagne. Margaret raised her glass; “Let’s make this toast to Sabrina’s speedy recovery.” The four of us drank as Audrey’s maid was rolling out a table with caviar.
Margaret picked up a small slice of bread and spread the caviar. “Just like old times, isn’t it Billy?”
Audrey stood there awkwardly, aware of the murder attempt that Margaret had made on Billy’s first wife. Margaret was a strange woman who could discuss her past crimes as if they were dinner topics.
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