“And leaving me behind,” Pauline said. “Me and our boys. I should sue him for support.”
Hector didn’t have anything to say to that. Pauline rose from the couch, patting his thigh as she did. “Guess neither of us will forget this sorry day.”
“No.”
She said, “It’s funny...well, not funny. But Papa wrote a long letter that arrived the other day. Posted from Paris...I guess he’s heading back to tell me face-to-face. He wrote about this woman, Alva...and about you having been arrested. Charged with spying. Seems everyone in Spain thought you were spying for Hoover.”
“It didn’t start that way.”
Pauline paused. “So, it’s true.” She said, “We need a drink for this, I think.”
She came back with two glasses and a green bottle. Hector said, “Oh Jesus, absinthe?”
“Yes,” Pauline said. “You said it tastes of regret. I want the taste now. The numbing. And it’ll infuriate Papa...he’s been sparing in using it. This is bottle number two of three.”
Hector said, “Let’s at least do it right.” He went to the kitchen and got the drip spoons and glasses.
Watching him, Pauline said, “So you were really were there as a spy, then?”
Hector shook his head. “That’s vastly overstating it. I was stopped by the feds in New York. It’s supposed to be illegal to travel to Spain now. I got caught. I explained I was going over to kind of stand watch on Hem and maybe to gather material for my own novel. I insisted I wasn’t going over as a combatant or because I was a communist. That’s all true. Then a nice young man in a blue suit told me what fate I might expect when I came back. They’ve already decided on the terminology they’ll use to discredit the Americans over there. They’ll be called ‘premature anti-fascists.’ They’ll be blacklisted...treated as communist fifth-columnists back here. They won’t be permitted to fight in the coming war. Their careers — be they literary, journalistic or cinematic — will be over when they get back to America. I figured by agreeing to come back and report what I’ve seen, I could at least protect Hem and Dos. Insulate them from the ostracizing to come for the rest here at home.”
“Have you? Have you done that?”
“I think, like me, that they’ll be all right. But many of our other friends won’t be — not because of me. There are other, real FBI spies over there to see to that.” Hector drank some absinthe, still hating the taste. He said, his voice raw, “Alva would have been all right.”
They sipped their absinthe and Pauline hugged Hector, long and hard. “I’m so sorry for you. First Rachel, and now this...”
“I’m sorry for you too,” Hector said. He untangled himself from her arms and sipped more absinthe. “Where are Patrick and Gig?”
“The boys are out with Toby, fishing for the day.”
“Place is sure quiet.”
“Quiet, and quite empty. Especially upstairs. It’s a very big bed for one person.” She hesitated, then said, “You didn’t approve of me, and what happened, I knew that. You took Hadley’s side.”
Hector wanted to say, Somebody had to.
He said, “Hadley was my friend. She treated me like a kid brother. I was dreadfully fond of her.”
“Now here I am, right where she was. Probably the same reasons, too. We have the child...gain weight...stop being seen as a sex partner...as a bedmate. As a chum. Look at me — I’m a mother, twice over. Terrible scars from the Cesareans...”
Hector wasn’t liking the drift of the conversation. He drained his absinthe and poured himself some more. Pauline slammed hers back and slapped her glass down on the table. “See, I can still be a chum...can still drink like a chap. But Ernest doesn’t see that. He hasn’t slept with me in two years.”
Oh God. Hector wanted to check his watch — make some excuse to leave. Go home with his absinthe buzz and mourn Alva. Or maybe go to a sporting house. Find himself some hot little Cuban whore who’d scar his back with her nails...bite his shoulder as she was peaking.
And he certainly didn’t need this insight into Ernest’s most private life.
“For what my opinion’s worth, I don’t think it’s about you, Pauline,” Hector said. “You’re still an attractive woman,” he said it more than a bit disingenuously. “Scott has a theory. I think he might be right. He told me that Hem needs a new wife for every big novel. He had Hadley for The Sun Also Rises. He had you for A Farewell to Arms. I suppose he’ll have Martha for his Spanish Civil War novel. Then, when it’s time for the next big novel after that, I suspect we’ll start getting inklings of the fourth Mrs. Hemingway.”
Pauline nodded. She looked fairly smashed...even blowsy.
She prepared them both some more absinthe.
“Go easy on that for me,” Hector said. “It hits me hard and wrong and with my head like it is now, after Alva...”
“I’m going to get drunk,” Pauline said. “Well, I’m already drunk. But I mean to keep drinking a while longer. I shouldn’t drink alone, should I?”
“I do it all the time.”
“Fine, so we’ll drink alone together.”
She got up and put on some music: Marlene Dietrich singing “La vie en rose.”
She pulled her frock away from her breast with a fluttering motion a few times. “So hot. Well, at least when he gives me the heave-ho, I’ll have reason to leave this damned oven of an island.”
Hector nodded. “Where will you go? Back to Arkansas? Maybe back to Paris?”
“Arkansas is no place to live after the life I’ve had with Ernest,” she said. “And Paris? Hadley is still there. Can’t have the City of Lights becoming a repository for former Mrs. Hemingways.”
“I suppose not.”
Pauline sat back down next to Hector. Very close. She said, “So you think I’m still attractive?”
Christ. Hector put his drink down. He was about to stand up when she threw a leg over him. Her mouth found his. He didn’t really respond, and she began dry humping his thigh. Her hands found his and she lifted them to her breasts...pressed them there.
Hector was trying to disentangle himself when he sensed motion in the hall — saw Hem standing there with his suitcases, watching them.
Pauline looked over her shoulder, drunk, and said, “Don’t stop, Hector. Please. Don’t mind Hem. He doesn’t love me anymore. You know better than anyone. Don’t stop — it’s been so long. You’re ‘the man who writes what he lives and lives what he writes.’ You’ve written about things like this. Don’t stop now, Hector.”
Hem just stood there, watching them. Hector pushed Pauline off his lap. Hector stood up, shakily. He said, “Sometimes we bin what we write, Pauline. When it’s not right. I’ll leave you two to talk.”
Hem stood in the middle of the doorway to the hall. He wouldn’t step aside and Hector had to squeeze past, brushing shoulders. Hem hesitated and said, “You should know something, Hector.”
“I already know it, Ernest. Dos wired me.”
“You going to do what Dos did? Go back there and try and find answers?”
Hector shook his head. “Dead is dead. What’s the point?”
***
Hector was continuing packing when he heard the knock at the door. He opened it and Ernest caught him on the jaw, just below his left ear, sending him to the floor.
Hector struggled up onto one elbow, massaging his jaw. “Christ, I’m sorry, okay,” Hector said. “I didn’t do anything, not really. She was high on that damned absinthe...feeling rejected. I’m not attracted to her.”
“Guess that makes two of us,” Hem said, red-faced. “Hell, I’d probably be grateful if you two did end up together. Like Hadley and Paul Mowrer...good to know she’s found a good man.”
“Not this man,” Hector said. “Jesus, Hem.”
Hem glared at him. “Well, anyway, that was for the other — this spying shit. You goddamned traitor.”
“Did Pauline explain why I was ‘spying’ for the FBI?”
Hem said nothing. So Hector explained ag
ain. When he was finished, Hem said, “Don’t do me favors like that ever again. And you know what, the more I think on it, that slug was for insulting my wife by not sleeping with her. It’s been fun, Hec. Sorry about Alva and all that, but you know, you’re just bad news for me, Lasso.”
Hem slammed the door behind himself.
Hector lay on his floor, rubbing his jaw and trying to make sense of the logic of insulting a man by refusing to fuck his drunken wife.
PART THREE:
FILM NOIR
(1947)
“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”— Orson Welles
THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI
28
Hector was at the wheel of his new blue Chevrolet Fleetmaster convertible. It was raining hard and the wipers were slapping...the only real noise in the car.
Conversation had been stingy for miles, so Hector turned on the radio. He was captured by Billie Holiday’s moody, even sinister cover of “Deep Song.”
It was January. Shivering, Hector clicked the car heater up a notch.
Orson promptly wiped his forehead and turned down the heater. He lit a cigarette. Welles was not much of a cigarette smoker, but his current on-screen character was and Orson seemed to be getting the habit. The butt of the cigarette jittered in the dark...hinting of shaking hands. Orson, in rumbling voice, finally spoke from the darkness. “Thank-you again for coming to help, Hector, old friend. My nerves...”
Invisible as he nearly was next to Hector, and with that famous voice, it made Hector feel a little as though he was giving a lift to one of Orson’s famous radio characters — The Shadow — “Never seen, only heard. As haunting to superstitious minds as a ghost; as inevitable as a guilty conscience.”
Hector shook his head. “Nerves” was a face-saving euphemism on Orson’s part. Near as Hector could tell, Orson was stretched to the breaking point by all the “pep” pills he was popping to keep his weight down. Orson had resorted to amphetamines to keep himself trim enough to be convincing in the role of “Michael O’Hara,” a two-fisted “Black Irish” sailor and wanted man in Spain for killing a Franco spy during the Spanish Civil War. O’Hara was conceived as a scrappy, lonely, haunted man and struggling novelist.
Orson had lured Hector to Hollywood in late December for $300 a week to serve as a kind of off-screen consultant for his new thriller, The Lady From Shanghai. Orson had feverishly made the pitch, citing parallels between Hector’s picaresque biography and that of the fictional O’Hara.
In addition to his wife, as he often did, Orson had salted the cast with old friends from his Mercury Theatre Days. But even Orson’s band of friends was in near revolt, too. The production was frenetically moving north and south of the Mexican border and back again — zigzagging between Mexico, San Francisco, Acapulco and the studio lot. Nearly all the cast and crew members had contracted various intestinal diseases or other exotic maladies during one or another of the trips south.
Perhaps most devastating of all, a union strike was threatening completion of a set critical to the film’s climax — a surrealistic boardwalk “funhouse” that looked, at least on paper, to evoke something closer to images ripped from Bosch than Barnum and Bailey...a surrealist nightmare.
Pressed for time, unable to sleep from the mixture of anxiety and all the pep pills and gallons of black coffee sustaining him, Orson was risking a union backlash spending nights at the studio painting his own lurid images on the walls of his funhouse.
It was vintage Orson: trying to do it all — turning limitations and setbacks into inspired innovations and ingenious solutions. But this time, Orson seemed to Hector in danger of hitting the wall. Orson must have sensed it, too, because he’d actually signed on some hired hands, out-of-pocket: Hector as undesignated batman, and a couple of young women to help with the painting of the funhouse set.
Orson had personally recruited the “girls,” one “a serious if unknown painter in her own right,” Orson insisted, who was helping him create the funhouse’s lurid wall illustrations. The other was an “aspiring, no-talent wannabe actress” as Orson described her, some Massachusetts girl come out to Hollywood named Beth, or Betty, or some such. He was using the second young woman to mix paints, clean brushes and to fill in the monochromatic backgrounds — what Orson, sniffing, declared “the drudge painting.”
“Invisible” Orson gestured at the radio with the glowing end of his cigarette. “Billie and me, we used to date, did you know that?”
“No,” Hector said. Given the racial backlash that might have resulted, Hector wasn’t surprised their affair came as news to him. “When was that?”
“During Kane...the filming and a bit after the release.”
Billie Holiday’s tune ended; Jo Stafford was crooning “Haunted Heart,” “backed by Paul Weston and his fine fine orchestra.”
Hector said, “Painting this set yourself — all night, every night — it’s going to kill you, Orson.”
“But I have my help now, Hector,” Orson said. “And the whole film turns on the climax, as it should. And I have my pride. Hitchcock hired Dali to formulate a key sequence in Spellbound a couple of years ago. I mean to out-Hitch Hitchcock...to out-Dali Dali.”
Hector slowed and a studio guard checked his Chevy’s license plate, and then waved them through the gate.
“I’d sure like to get a look at this funhouse set,” Hector said, steering onto the studio’s back lot.
“Not yet, Hector. I do crave your take, but only when my vision is closer to complete. Another day, two at most. You’ll pick me up at six tomorrow?”
“Whatever’s left of you, sure,” Hector said. “Six a.m. it is. You’ve got to sleep sometime, you know. And these women? You’ve got something going with them?”
“Not yet, not both.”
“Well, there’s still time,” Hector said dryly. Then, “I thought you and Rita had moved back in together.”
Orson shook his head. “Only for the duration of filming. She talks of going longer, of trying to patch things up, but the essential problems between us remain. Living together again has only reminded me of all that. But until the filming is over...”
“Sacrifices must be made for art?”
“Always.” Orson laughed and slapped Hector’s knee. “God, it’s good to have you seeing me through this. This is the critical one, Hector. It can turn it all around for me.”
“So meet me halfway and don’t make my caretaking impossible,” Hector said. “Go easy with these women tonight.”
“Of course. We’re racing a deadline prepping the set. Two more days, and much of the pressure will be off. I’ll see you in the morning, Hector. Oh, and bring plenty of coffee.”
“It’s your funeral,” Hector said. “You might as well be awake for it.”
Orson opened the door of the Chevy and the interior light came on. Hector got another look at Welles in the unflattering light and shuddered: Orson looked bad.
Hector watched Orson run hunched through the rain into the studio warehouse in which he was fashioning his hellish sounding funhouse. With some deft editing, the ersatz amusement attraction would appear to be located at Whitney’s Playland in San Francisco.
A woman dressed in black opened the soundstage door for Orson. She had long blond hair and looked to be tall, athletic. Built like a dancer, maybe. Orson was quite tall by Hollywood standards, and she stood up well against him. She also looked pretty enough, but Hector couldn’t see much more than that through his Chevy’s rain streaked windshield. Hector saw the other woman, smaller, strangely pale and raven-haired, embrace Orson.
Hector shook his head, checked his wristwatch, and then got his car in gear. He turned around and drove down out of the studio, waved back through the gates by the old, bored-looking guard.
Hector fiddled with the radio and found Billie Holiday again, this time crooning “Lover Come Back To Me.”
The past six years had found Hector drifting away from screenwork and back to writing novel
s — a string of increasingly successful thrillers that had found their own way to the screen.
As he half-listened to Holiday’s haunted tune, Hector thought about his latest gig as paid babysitter to Hollywood’s hopped-up enfant terrible. Hector was increasingly tempted to leave Los Angeles. Hector had recently divorced and he was weighing going back to his new home in New Mexico. His big hacienda shouldered right up to the border and Hector yearned to stray across that line. He could spend some time in Mexico. He’d find himself some dark-haired, dark-eyed señorita who had never heard of Hector Lassiter, author and screenwriter. He could reinvent himself for a wanton weekend. He’d maybe pretend to be a merchant marine with a dark secret. Or perhaps, like Welles’ Michael O’Hara, he’d be a soldier of fortune, running from something ominous tied to the Spanish Civil War.
It was tempting...
Cracking his window so he could smell the winter California rain, Hector turned the wipers up a notch, and then shook loose a cigarette. He pushed in the car lighter and twisted the radio tuner, waiting for the lighter to prime and pop out.
Fiddling more with the radio, he settled on an instrumental version of Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” The lighter clicked and Hector pulled it out and held the glowing orange coils up to his cigarette.
Hector had been invited as guest to the home of some art collectors in Laurel Canyon. The party promised to be mix of other art collectors, on- and off-screen Hollywood movers-and-shakers, free-thinkers and Bohemians. There would also be the requisite suspect writers and actors and artists being badgered by the House Un-American Activities Committee. As a result of those party guests, there would also probably be some snitches and spies for HUAC and for the FBI — a designation Hector, happily, could no longer claim.
But there would be women there, too. Probably young and available, free-thinking women of forgiving morals.
The latter prospect decided it for Hector. He checked his scribbled-down directions and headed towards Laurel Canyon.
“If the crowd really knew who we were and what we represented, we’d probably be lynched.”— Man Ray
Toros & Torsos (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 19