by Paul Monette
“Did you talk to Jasper the day he died?”
“Yes,” Carl volunteered, as he snipped his steak into bite-size bits. “I called him that morning. I was at the Pierre.”
By which he meant there was proof of it. The call would appear on his bill, with the time noted down to the minute.
“Did he sound—ravaged?”
“He sounded pissed, as a matter of fact. It seems I woke him up.”
“And what did he say?”
“Not much,” he assured her in a garbled way, talking around the meat in his mouth like an agent in a deli. “We just talked business, same as always.”
He gobbled up his kiddie cubes of steak, filling his cheeks like a squirrel. He wasn’t about to expatiate as to Jasper’s degree of dissolution. He probably figured the movie would do all that part for him. Vivien noticed that he seemed to take the greatest care to paint his own relations as financial. Nothing more. It was a little late in the game, she thought, for innocence of that sort.
“But Carl—what kind of business? Was he giving you a raise? Did he want a new toy?”
“I don’t remember,” Carl said stiffly. “I suppose we discussed the picture. What does it matter now?”
“Bullshit, honey. I happen to know—you talked about unemployment.”
The silence struck like lightning. Just five seconds, maybe ten at most. It seemed like half an hour. She studied the one pale rose in the bud vase, pinning it down like a botanist, naming the sum of its parts. Then:
“You have no case, I hope you know,” he said. His voice was hard and tearless, dry like the tinder hills at the end of summer. To her it was like a song. She liked him mean. It made him real. “Sure, we fought,” he said. “We always did, at the end of a shoot. What the fuck does that prove? Listen, bitch—I got twenty cents on the dollar coming to me. Don’t try to get in my way.”
“But I have your ticket,” she said. Though perhaps it was only another brand of cruelty, she sounded almost sorry.
He darted a hand to his inside jacket pocket, as if she’d just held out to him the billfold or the fountain pen that never left his side.
“What ticket would that be?”
“You know—April third.”
He stopped. The fork fell to the plate with a clatter, like he’d just had a minor stroke on the right. As if on cue, she picked up her own fork, broke off another flake of bass, and ate it, dainty as hell. She’d had about sixty calories. All the same, she felt quite full. The silence here in this one corner was absolute as a mountaintop. At the level where they were fighting it out, the fact of other people ceased to register.
He spoke at last, a bit too loud. “It was just between him and me,” he said with a jittery smile. “He wouldn’t let me talk till he finished the picture. When he finally did—well, it just wouldn’t wait.”
She didn’t say anything back, but sipped her drink in a languid way. She wasn’t trying to be clever. She simply couldn’t think what she ought to ask.
“You know what he was like when he was working, Viv. You ran away yourself.”
He reasoned this so swiftly that he managed to graze her with a dart of guilt. The accusation hung in the air, as if there were no end to the ways they had betrayed him. Touché, she thought.
“By the final week of the shoot,” he said, “it wasn’t even Jasper. He was just some cowboy drunk, like the guy he played in the picture. The rest of the world could fuck itself.”
But wait, she thought, which was it?
Did he fall apart in fact, or was it just a spell of method acting? There were altogether too many versions of Jasper’s crack-up. Not that she’d gotten hers across. Because she had not said murder—not in so many words—he was pleading guilty now to a lesser crime. His only sin was keeping that final meeting secret. In a second, of course, she could have turned the whole thing round. All she had to do was say it. But, though the power cried to be used, she couldn’t bear the intimacy of it. Now they’d arrived at the moment itself, she felt as if she’d pointed a gun and pulled the trigger—and nothing happened.
“What about Harry Dawes?” she asked, as if it were all much clearer over on Greg’s side.
“What about him?”
“How did he get from nowhere all the way to Steepside?”
She could have asked the same of Jasper.
“I already told you,” he said with a cold dismissive shrug, “I never met him. He must have come in later.”
Really, she thought, she just didn’t have the energy. She knew that if she asked for details—what went on that day and what they said—he’d give her a script that made them look like princes, him and Jasper both. Carl could always come up with a lie on a moment’s notice. He had them drafted and filed away for all eventualities. Which is why he was so good at marketing, she thought. She wondered how she had ever supposed she would have the upper hand. She sipped her drink and tried to recall what she used to think the ticket proved.
She decided she must be as shallow as everyone said. It was doubtless a flaw that came of being rich. Once again, it struck her that Jasper’s dying was so bound up with these other men—with Carl, with Artie, with the dozens who came and went. In the end, it came down to a duel—in the old style, where somebody won and somebody lost, and the dead were buried with honor. It wasn’t her affair. Just now, she had a yearning to be out in the open air. This garden beneath the tent was muggy and close as a funeral.
She wouldn’t have minded him saying it was none of her affair. Then, though she might well dash a glass of water in his face and storm away in a photogenic rage, at least she would be relieved of this awful moral posture. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t turn him in. The moment she reached a phone, she’d get hold of someone official—someone preferably armed. She just couldn’t say it herself.
That’s what cops were for.
“Would you like me to tell you how much I loved him?”
She looked up startled. He had tears in his eyes, like an ethnic father. Fountaining up out of nowhere.
“God, no,” she pleaded, squirming slightly. Jesus, she thought, what an asshole.
“He was the loneliest man I ever knew.”
There were limits to how far down she’d let this sink. He was starting to sound like an Irish wake. She’d always wanted to scream when Carl let loose with sentiments. They came out neatly packaged, like half a minute of advertising. Very seamy stuff.
“Look,” she said, “it isn’t anyone’s fault—he just didn’t love us back. Love wasn’t one of his talents. He never pretended it was.”
At that, the waiter came and whisked away their plates, as if some phase of the ritual was done. She didn’t mean to say there was nothing there at all in Jasper. Love simply didn’t come into it. They were rather more like a family business. Not, she thought, so very unlike the mail-order thing that Greg oversaw in his dining room—except, at Steepside, it was Jasper that they sold.
They stared at the tablecloth while the crumbs were cleared away. They both seemed vaguely sheepish. They didn’t look up till the waiter asked—pessimistically, it sounded like—if they would have dessert. Of course not. Coffee, then? Well, half a cup.
They sat with nothing to say and waited. Oddly enough, they had come full circle. Neither could even count the times they’d found themselves talked out in public places. Together with Artie and Jasper, on junkets and tours or on location, they’d eaten a thousand meals, no more aware of each other than if they’d sat at a counter in a diner. Some things got to be habit. With four lives going at different speeds, they met like folks in a boardinghouse, to feed.
“It’s about a treasure, is it?”
“The movie? Yeah,” said Carl. “This bandit, see—he hid a whole shitload of gold.”
“Well,” she said, when he didn’t go on, “where’d he put it?”
“Buried it in a graveyard.”
“Behind a mission—right?”
“Yup.”
“And Jas
per finds it?”
“Yes and no,” he answered coyly—and she felt a wave of déjà vu. For this was just what he’d said before, the night he picked her up at the house on the sound. “Just when he’s digging it up,” Carl said, “the cops arrive. He tries to run, and he’s shot.”
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
“But he’s done nothing, has he? I thought the guy died a hundred years ago.”
“You’re forgetting something. He had to escape from prison, before he could pick up the trail. He’s an outlaw, just like the other guy.”
Now she got the picture. She thought she’d read this script, but it must have been some other. She’d imagined Jasper astride a horse, in a Stetson and black yoked shirt. It was a western, after all. He’d made a couple a few years back, very law-and-order and Texas flat, with a shootout on the quarter hour. She’d assumed The Broken Trail was fashioned from the mold.
But here she came to find out Jasper Cokes did not survive. She wondered who slipped that in. How did they ever get Jasper to okay it? He might not always get the girl. The money would sometimes fall just out of reach. But he sure as hell never failed to walk away in the final scene. No one rode into the sunset quite like Jasper.
They’d simply have to change the ending.
“Have you seen it?” she asked. “Is it any good?”
“I’ve been waiting till you got back.”
“Who else is going to be there?”
“You know me better than that,” he said. “This is just for us—just you and me and Artie.”
“I’ll be bringing a friend of mine,” she announced—cutting through all the sanctimony, as if it hung like vines across the path.
“Whatever you say,” he replied with a starchy primness. “I give up.”
By then, their cups were empty. The coffee part was so painless, in fact, they allowed themselves another half as they sent the waiter off to do his sums. The movie talk had braced them, as if it were the only ground they both could stand on. Here they were, in the one place in all the world where film was the actual currency. After all, no cash changed hands at Ma Maison—except, of course, in the parking lot, where fives and tens were lavished on the valets. Vivien usually didn’t get the hang of picture talk. When they used to be four at table, she tuned it out.
But she saw that the power this picture brought about was up for grabs. She had slipped right into negotiations. She was the only one Jasper could count on. It was up to her to keep his image from going out of kilter. She would not leave it to his killer to resolve.
The waiter laid the bill face down and vanished. She plucked up the square of cardboard, flipping it over like a hand of blackjack. Forty-four dollars even. Carl made no move. He was still as a deer in a gunsight, trying to blend with the background. He always let Vivien pay, from time immemorial. They’d have saved more money in the end, no doubt, if he’d kept the stub from a lunch like this and put it down on the books as business, to take out of Jasper’s taxes. But he didn’t think at a time like this. He flinched.
She did a vague calculation, added fifteen dollars for the tip, and signed her name like an autograph. They would send the bill to the bank or something. Then she got up without a word and turned and walked away. She would have stopped if he’d called her name. If she thought he had something else to say, she’d have stayed all afternoon. If not, she wanted out of here, pronto.
She passed between two rows of tables, making for the stairs. She had no purse or packages. For all they knew in the garden room, she could have been casting about for a near acquaintance. She probably knew a dozen people well enough to kiss. As she made her way along, each place she passed, the volume was lowered a notch or two. By the time she reached the end of the room and climbed the stairs, she could feel herself starting to hurry. She turned around to see if Carl was following, but no. He was just now crossing over to where Max stood, hand to shoulder with a rabid agent who would have sold his mother to clinch a deal.
She retraced her steps in the trellised alley and gave them a hasty exit. She came out into the forecourt, passed between a regular Rolls and a Silver Shadow, and faced the empty, sunlit street. In the rush to make the date with Artie later, she’d forgotten to tell him when to pick her up. No doubt he assumed that Carl would take her home. Since Jasper died, she was out of practice, arranging services door to door. She hadn’t a penny on her. Hadn’t a dime to call a cab. Whatever else it was, it was a moment fraught with bankruptcy.
She jaywalked the street through two-way traffic, hurrying out of sight. She had no particular plan, except to be all alone. She turned off Melrose up a side street. Right away, she was walking in the shade of high-frilled palms, with bungalows on either side. She knew she wouldn’t be walking far on three-inch heels, but all the same, for the hell of it, she made a rough attempt to figure out the distance home.
Offhand, it had to be six or eight miles to the top of Steepside. How long would it take? Three hours? Four? What with being driven about so long, she’d never been required to be very good at distances. Besides, no one in L.A. ever walked, except perhaps the mailman. People who didn’t keep up the automotive pace were by definition vagrants.
She had finished Walden the night before, and couldn’t get it out of her mind. Thoreau traversed the mile between the pond and Concord one last time. Somehow, she’d always supposed he stayed in the woods forever. What was he doing going home? He didn’t even wrestle with it. One September afternoon, he shrugged his shoulders, closed the cabin door behind him, and headed back to town. It made her want to know what a mile was all about. There was no indication he ever went back to the house on the pebbled shore. If he passed that way on the path to other fields, he never said so.
By the time she had traveled north to Santa Monica Boulevard, the heel of one of her shoes had commenced to wobble and she to sway. She could feel the bud of a blister between two toes. Clearly, she had to rethink her equipment, but first she had to call Greg. She limped a hundred yards along the storefronts, holing up at last in a phone booth on the curb. It made no sense, since the dime she didn’t have to call the cab was the same as the one that eluded her here, but she had a certain faith in the force of circumstance. She pulled at the coin return—empty. She banged the side and heard the jiggle of dimes, but nothing gave.
Discreetly, she stood against the accordion door of the booth and watched the people pass. Since she knew she didn’t have the guts to ask it twice, she had to be very choosy. Because she kept her eyes down and her shoulders kind of hunched, nobody took much notice of her. Even Vivien didn’t get recognized unless she really felt like it.
She let dozens go by for the simple reason they were younger. She didn’t consider the men at all. The women her age were only one in ten, but she needed someone close to a mirror image—who would understand instinctively how a woman might get caught without resources. She had it narrowed down to a matronly type in nurse’s whites, reading a magazine as she walked, and a woman with a Vuitton purse the size of a suitcase, stopped in front of a window. Then, out of nowhere, a girl appeared from around the corner and made a beeline to Vivien’s phone. She stopped a couple of feet away, as if to wait till Vivien was done, and rummaged in a ratty bag.
“You want to make a call?” asked Vivien mildly.
“Huh?” the girl replied, still fishing among her things. “No, thanks. I’m waiting for the bus.”
Suddenly, Vivien noticed slatted benches and a bus-stop sign on the curb beside the booth—as if they’d just materialized. With every day that passed, it seemed, she filled in more of the city’s details.
The girl straightened up, having scavenged the proper change, and smiled through a row of off-color teeth. Her red hair sprang from her head like a fright wig. Not a girl at all, of course, except she seemed so careless. Over thirty, Vivien thought—just how far, she couldn’t say. As to the clothes, it looked as if the cat had dragged them in, but on her they weren’t half bad. She g
ave off a certain blowsy cheer, like the star of a traveling show. She was someone who clearly sang for her supper.
“Excuse me,” Vivien said, “I don’t have any money.”
They exchanged a neutral glance, perhaps half a moment long—enough so Vivien knew there was no connection made to who she was. Even so, she felt as if she had price tags all about her person, in amounts she couldn’t begin to hide. Yet the girl held out her open palm without a second thought. Vivien had her choice of a quarter, a dime, and three dull nickels. She took up the dime with a little thrill of victory. She said a quick thanks and ducked inside.
Once she’d dialed the number, she turned to shut the door. They both smiled broadly a second time, but already, she thought, they’d begun the retreat to their private lives. As it rang in Greg’s apartment, Vivien wondered if she would have moved to help as quickly as the redhead did. Probably not. Though she wrote her share of checks to worthy causes, she couldn’t recall that she’d ever been asked for a dime. Perhaps she looked too tight.
“Sid Sheehan here,” came the voice from the other end.
“Hi,” she said. “It’s Vivien.”
“Well, well, well—speak of the devil. You lookin’ to buy an autograph?”
“Me? Oh, I don’t think so, Sid. I’m not a fan of anyone. Is Greg home?”
“Yup. Doin’ a full day’s work for a change. Can Edna and me come over and see your house?”
“Of course,” she said. “Whenever you like.”
A scuffle ensued at his end of the phone. They fought for control at the Cherokee Nile, and while they did, she watched the bus come lumbering up the boulevard, bearing down on the corner where they stood. The motley woman was frantic, as she rooted through her purse to find another dime. The bus hissed to a stop. She sat on the edge of the bench and dumped the whole thing in her lap. The bus door opened with a sucking sound. A kid with a book bag darted down the stairs and sprinted off.