by Paul Monette
“I think we better call it a draw for a while,” he said.
The road had forked at last. He smiled so wide it hurt, so eager was he to show there were no hard feelings. He didn’t for a moment think she ought to change the class she flew for him. It wasn’t a case of right and wrong. After all, he thought, the irony was no greater in their flying separate fares than it was in a hundred other things, from their household goods to their bank accounts. They’d have plenty of time to sort each other out when all of this was done. For now, they simply had to go the way they came. Not like a couple in Vogue.
“As long as it’s not the money,” she said.
“Money? What’s that?” he retorted. “Didn’t you know? I carry a bag of cloves and gold dust. I barter my way from place to place.”
“But why do you go in steerage?”
“To keep a low profile, of course. I don’t want anyone wondering who I am.”
“But I thought you liked celebrity. Haven’t you got a franchise?”
Somehow, she hadn’t realized—not till now—how much of their time together had passed in private. If he’d been her lover instead, they’d have surfaced in a dozen places where cameras clicked and the walls had ears. Because that was the nature of love. And this was something else.
“We’re both so cute when we’re mad,” he said. “We ought to do it more often.”
His manner, just then, was so easy, it seemed he ought to be signing on, not off. But that was the catch, she thought. Since they weren’t together to fall in love, since they had no deals in effect between them, their freedom was what they shared. They were free to break off, whenever they wished—for however long. Mid-sentence, if need be.
“I’ll think of you,” she said dryly, “while I’m picking at my lobster.” She opened her lizard bag and drew out Emerson’s old Thoreau. “This is yours,” she said, as she handed it over. “I don’t suppose you’re insured for a thing like this.”
“Not a penny,” he said, as he tucked it under his arm and stepped up close to the counter. He handed the clerk his original ticket.
“Wouldn’t do you a bit of good,” she said. “There isn’t but just this one. How could you put a price on it? It’s just what it is.”
This was begging the question some, since she’d dropped a little over seven thousand for it, Friday afternoon on the way to the airport. She’d started to write out the check before the dealer could say the price. But she probably would have defended the casual nature of it all. For a woman with money to burn, what difference did it make? Freely given away like this, it meant the one particular Walden could go back to what it ought to be. Worth what it said inside.
While the clerk put Greg through the computer, he turned and smiled serenely at her. If he hadn’t made the first move, she thought, she’d have never guessed how relieved she’d be to be left alone—just her and the public. Nobody understood, not even Greg, what care she took to give them something back. Some minimal return for all that humanness.
“I’ll see you at the other end,” he said, for his papers were all in order.
He sounded chipper, like they were going off to battle and mightn’t make it through. He fluttered one hand in a cheery wave and sauntered off to the gate. The hunting shirt was so bright, she followed him like a cardinal, darting away in the woods.
“Who’s that?” asked the clerk conspiratorially. He seemed to mean that anyone walking in with Vivien Cokes ought to be some big shot.
“That,” she said, “is the last of a breed. I don’t think it answers to a name.”
“How come he has no luggage?”
“Oh, but he does,” she said, as her face flowered open in a sudden smile. She threw down a credit card, slap on the counter, to bring them back to business. “With him,” she said, “it’s all in his head.”
chapter 7
“OH, ARTIE,” SHE SAID, as the Rolls swung over and pulled to the curb to let her out. “I forgot—it’s Monday. You got a show tonight.”
“Two shows,” Artie answered automatically, smiling wanly in the rear-view mirror.
“You think we can have a drink after?” she asked.
She sounded as if she’d only thought of it now. Already the kid who valeted the cars had come to hold her door, so the moment couldn’t last. They had to get the date down fast. Her entrance was in progress.
“Sure,” he said, “why not? You’ll wait up for me?”
“Of course. What time should I expect you?”
“One, one-thirty,” he said, but as if to apologize for the lateness of the hour.
“Fine,” she smiled.
She was out of the car so fast that he had no time to ask her why. He was amenable, of course. After all, she’d been away three days, and he hadn’t dreamt of asking where. Saturday morning, when Erika called hysterical from the dock, he’d produced all the proper excuses. The fielding of other people’s outrage came to him second nature. Sudden had always been Vivien’s way. He’d learned to keep his remarks to a brief hello when she finally got back from the places she went. Just as he had this morning, when he came in the kitchen and found her frying bacon, like she’d been there all along. It was Artie’s perfect feel for accommodation—ready to pick up where they left off—that let him drive away now and leave her be. They had an understanding.
Vivien walked across the parking lot to Ma Maison, steeling herself for the weather ahead. Here in the forecourt, the costliest cars were lined up, L.A. style, like guardian figures before a temple. The garden room of the restaurant proper was screened from the street—like a one-ring circus, under canvas. Thus, no one ever got distracted looking out a window. All the sights that needed seeing were gathered on the inside, wall to wall like a diorama.
The best place to glimpse a star was coming up the trellised alley that ran along the garden room’s right side. This is where all eyes turned as Vivien entered now from the world outside. She moved with an air of strolling down a boulevard, counting cracks in the pavement. To them, she must have seemed like an ivory queen gliding over a chessboard. For one split second of perfect silence, the whole room held its breath.
It was the first time she’d been here since she was widowed. No—since she left L.A. two months ago, the day they started shooting. Everyone’s still here, she thought. Ma’s hadn’t folded its tents on account of her. Its number stood unlisted. Still, between twelve-thirty and two, its quota of who was hot was the highest in the city. All the same, it seemed to heave a sigh when she walked in. The canvas walls belled out, as if a sea breeze had blown through.
She drifted up to the maïtre d’. He gave her the barest nod and led her in. He was trained, in fact, to effuse in roughly inverse proportion to the degree of a client’s celebrity. They walked down three steps into the garden proper. Every eye was riveted. This crowd was full of pros, of course—more in the taking of lunch, perhaps, than anything. They managed to watch transfixed and keep the drone of conversation steady. Kept an eye on Vivien the way they kept one on the clock.
Though she was prone as anyone else to checking out the clientele, passing recognition on some interstellar few, today she fell back on all her prerogatives—staring into the air as if she were miles away. She noticed, though, as they came to the table, that Carl was the only one who pretended not to see her. He made a big show of reading two thick documents, one in either hand, with a look of vague dismay that meant that neither side could win.
When she got so close as to cast a shadow, he looked up startled and said: “Aha.” His attendant tight-lipped smile, his bowing her into her chair, may have hid his fury from the others, all of whom were fixed on her. She saw, well enough.
“Campari-Perrier?” asked the maître d’ respectfully—addressing this to Vivien as if it were her royal title. She wondered, as she nodded, if she couldn’t go the whole way through a meal not saying a word out loud, counting on everyone knowing what she liked. Sometimes it made her feel caged. Today, she was glad of any pow
er she might command.
“I wouldn’t have known you were back,” said Carl, opting to start in a wounded tone, “if I hadn’t got the message to meet you here.”
“But that’s why we’re here,” she said. “So you’ll know.”
“What about when you left? Did you leave a message then? If you did, I didn’t get it.”
“But Carl, you saw me leave, remember? We had that nice little chat in the driveway. You told me not to go sailing with Erika and Felix. And I didn’t.”
Her drink arrived. Carl asked for another vodka-tonic, snappishly. Her coyness drove him mad, but as he’d never had any luck in stopping it before, he wasn’t likely to make much progress now. Still, he ought to have known her long enough to know how best to disarm her. He did the same old thing that always got him nowhere: lost his temper.
“Where the fuck were you?” Low and ugly.
“None of your business,” Vivien said, darting a look at a laughing starlet just beside them.
“You know, we almost called the cops,” he said. “Wouldn’t that have been peachy, two weeks after Jasper?”
“You suspected foul play, did you?” she asked in a mocking way. She could see him sitting rigid by the phone while he waited for the ransom call. But she couldn’t send him up as high as she was used to. Not today. She made a lateral move instead. “Tell me,” she said, “how much money do we have?”
Carl drew back offended. “I don’t think anyone knows,” he said, with enormous condescension. “Not exactly, anyway.”
And not including him, of course. There was no question but that Carl would know to the penny—projected into the next two quarters, with allowance made for inflation. There was always chaos, with movie money. For months at a time, the cash fairly rained from the sky. It was often difficult to see, in the general melee, who got fat and who got screwed. Due to the prodigies of studio accounting, profit points were eaten into everywhere. An army of clerks and specialists endlessly rearranged the figures.
The money Jasper had made was like a treasure house, she thought, hip deep in gold. You couldn’t even see beneath the surface. After a certain point, you could only imagine.
“I daresay it’s more than I can spend,” said Vivien dryly.
“You better not let that out, honey. You wouldn’t want to cause a panic.”
“I never had Jasper’s range,” she said. “He used to say that if he were me, he’d buy himself a tanker. Or was it the Plaza? Some great thing.”
“You want to hear what the specials are?” the waiter asked rhetorically.
As far back as she could remember, her money was all in the hands of managers and brokers. Jacob Willis believed his only daughter ought to grow up careless and capricious, letting button-down types do the paperwork. Long ago, she thought—tuning out the waiter’s list of butter-and-cream confections—when they all first came together, Carl had tried to make her more demanding of her money men. At the time, she told him she couldn’t be bothered. Until she was twenty-five, she’d rarely had occasion to carry around the movables of power. Not cash, nor credit cards—not even a checkbook. Her credit was on a much higher level. It was always left in such a way that the world should send her a bill for everything she got.
“Cold bass, white wine,” she ordered, when the waiter was done with his list.
“Steak sandwich,” said Carl. “Hold the bread, okay? And another vodka-tonic.”
The waiter went away wounded. He felt it as a personal failure, not to be able to get them to opt for the serious stuff. The drift at lunch was toward a side of asparagus vinaigrette, with perhaps a sliver of brie. Though they charged an arm and a leg for these, it wasn’t the same as veal.
“Last night,” she said, “I was up in his study, looking around. I couldn’t find his yearbook.”
“Oh?” he retorted, bored to tears. “Well, you can have a look at mine—or Artie’s.”
“I already checked in both your rooms—this morning. They’re gone.”
“They’re around somewhere,” he said. There was a warning there, but she could have sworn he didn’t know what he was warning her against.
“They’ve closed it,” she said. “Did you know that? It’s overrun with monks.”
“Who cares?” he snarled. “It was always a place that barely made ends meet. Marginal—you know? There isn’t room anymore for things like that.”
You either had a big deal, she thought, or else you were lost in the shuffle. There was no third route by way of Walden Pond—not in this dogged world, at least.
“He used to tell me about this secret club,” she said, as she unwrapped a pat of butter for a roll she wouldn’t eat.
“Who did? Jasper?”
She nodded. “I gather it met in a sort of temple, way up in the mountains. No road up except a goat path. Meadows,” she said, “as far as the eye could see.”
She thought she’d described it rather well. Yet Carl shook his head the whole while she was speaking—rhythmically, side to side. It only made her want to say more, since how could he deny what she knew for a fact?
“I remember, he said it was very exclusive,” she persisted. “You used to meet and tell each other the story of your life.”
Still he shook his head—so finally and grimly, people all around them must have seen. It looked like he was calling her a liar. What did he want—some password? She wished she could pull out some crumb of a clue, to show she’d been there only yesterday. Because the mountain temple was Greg’s preserve, along with the snowed-in expedition, she hadn’t expected to bring up Vermont at all. She didn’t know why she had, in fact, except that she’d crossed swords with this man’s past. It wanted connecting up, somehow.
“He never would have mentioned it,” said Carl. “We’re bound by oath. Just what are you after?”
Something broke. She wasn’t afraid anymore.
“You,” she said coldly. “I’m after you, you bastard.”
The look that passed between them then was the stuff of spells and curses. For half a minute, they sat there locked in combat, wrestling eye to eye like a couple of enemy hypnotists. The waiter poured them water, lined up a vodka-tonic beside the one Carl gripped in his hand, and generally put their silence down to keeping mum in front of the servants. It wasn’t clear whose move it was, but at least, she thought, he knew she knew. Let him think of something to say.
“Well, look at this—” said a sudden voice close behind her. “The principals have ventured into camera range.”
She knew it was Maxim Brearley, but she didn’t turn. She almost would have cut him—knowing he would have table-hopped to his next acquaintance, scarcely missing a beat. It was Carl who wavered and looked away.
“She decided to drop back in,” he announced, grinning up at Max. “We didn’t have to send a posse, after all.”
“Oh, she’s not so hard to find,” replied the director ripely. “Most days, all you have to do is pick up the papers. There she is, plain as day. Viv, darling, how come you never return my calls?”
“Nothing personal, Max,” she said. “I don’t return anyone’s.”
“Now you see what we’re up against,” bantered Carl in mock despair. Turning it all to a joke, though she’d meant to be quite blunt. She didn’t care if she never saw Max again.
“Not so fast,” he said. He rested the tips of his fingers on the back of her hand, as it lay on the table. “When can I bring up the film?”
“How about Friday?” Carl suggested, looking from one to the other brightly. A press agent, of which there were several dotted about the room, couldn’t have been more cheerfully disposed.
“I’d really rather not,” she said, with only the barest flicker of apology. “It’s not—I’m just not ready.”
“Listen, you bitch,” breathed Carl in a low fury, “it doesn’t matter what you’d rather do.”
Max laid a hand on his shoulder, to make him yield the floor. Now he was touching both of them. She thought: It
must look like we’re having a seance.
“You have to see the rough cut, Viv,” said Max with forceful calm. “It’s a keg of dynamite, whether we like it or not. The media’s going to be on top of it like a pack of dogs. We better decide real early how we want to pitch it.”
He dropped his voice to an intimate level she didn’t want any part of. Everyone sounded rehearsed, she thought. Everyone but she.
“You do understand, I hope—he’s not a pretty sight. He’s sad and tired and out of focus. He’s got death all over his face.”
“Friday,” she said, “will be fine.”
If only to make him stop his gallows portrait. It sounded like he might go on for several minutes. But it wasn’t just delicate feelings that made her agree to it here. It struck her she might have grounds to prevent release of the picture altogether. Perhaps the untold millions she’d come into would come in handy after all. Jasper may have left enough to stop this final marketing. She’d better see it right away.
“Till then, dear Viv,” said Maxim Brearley.
He glanced off over the crowd and broke into a boyish grin. He looked as if he’d been seized with a marvelous idea. But all it was was a face he knew, a couple of tables away. Suddenly, there was business to attend to. Now that he’d got what he wanted here, he was off. He made his rounds like a country parson. Frantic to get his movie out before the legend died, she thought, as he bent and kissed her rigid cheek.
“Bright guy,” said Carl with a certain fondness, as the director sailed away.
“Asshole,” she retorted dully.
The food arrived. Off to one side, she saw Max kiss the gloss-lipped starlet. She cut a flake of pearly fish and dabbed it in capered mayonnaise. One thing puzzled her: What made Max and Carl so chummy? Carl treated everyone like a hack, because hacks were what he worked with most. He liked his movies grainy, shabby, and amateurish, knowing they’d find an audience just like him. So why was he coming on slick with Brearley—treating a cheap-shot drone as if he were Jean Renoir? There must be something not yet settled. She wondered again how big the deal between them was.