Fun With Problems

by Robert Stone

  I had batted out three original scripts in London. Mysteriously, the first two drew from my then agent—Mike? Marty?—more apparent sympathy than admiration. Out in the movie world, two of the three were promptly skunked. I was still used to being the boy wonder, and a midlife bout of rejection was unappealing. I didn't much like rejection. Maybe I had tried too hard, attempting to scale the new peaks of serious and adult, naively imagining for myself an autonomy that neither I nor anyone in the industry possessed. The third one, anyway, was optioned, went into turnaround and years later actually got made. But my deathless number expired.

  Frustrated and depressed, I postponed calling Lucy. During my third week back I finally invited her down for another walk on the beach.

  Climbing out of her dusty Jag, she looked nothing but fine. She wore turquoise and a deerskin jacket, my Fresno Indian. With her smooth tan, her skin was the color of coffee ice cream and her eyes were bright. Ever since watching her perform in the soap I had begun to think of her as beautiful.

  As we set out down the beach, beside the Pacific again, she put on a baseball cap that said "Hussong's Cantina," promoting the joint in Ensenada. It was a sunny day even at the shore, and you might have called the sea sparkling. A pod of dolphins patrolled outside the point break, gliding on air, making everything in life look easy. Lucy told me she had tested for a part in our friend John's next movie, a horror picture. She was still worried about whether he had spotted the two of us walking out of Grauman's. The horror flick sounded like another bomb at best. This time Lucy had read the shooting script and knew what there was to know of the plot.

  "She's a best friend. Supposed to be cute and funny. She dies."

  I said that in my opinion she, Lucy, was ready for comedy.

  "Tom, everyone pretty much dies horribly except the leads. It's a horror flick."

  We had a nice day and night.

  A week later I went up to Silver Lake, where Lucy had moved after selling her trailer in Malibu. Her bungalow had some plants out front with an orangy spotlight playing on them, and in its beam I saw that the glass panels on her front door were smashed and the shards scattered across her doorway. Among them were pieces of what looked like a dun-colored Mexican pot. This was all alarming, since her door would now admit all that lived, crawled and trawled in greater L.A. Moreover, there was blood. When she let me in I asked her about it but got no answer. She brought us drinks and I lit a joint I had brought and she began to cry. Suddenly she gave me a sly smile that in the half darkness of the patio reminded me of the weeping Indian maid I had rescued on the next seat at Grauman's.

  "I'm in difficulty," she said.

  I said I could see that. It turned out to be all about bloody Heathcliff, Brion Pritchard, still on the scene and newly cast in the horror movie. Third-rate art was staggering toward real life again: Brion was the man who got to stab her repeatedly in the forthcoming vehicle.

  "How can they do that?" I asked her. "Another of John's movies and Pritchard gets to kill you again. Isn't that like stupid?"

  "He's relentless," she said. "Tommy, don't ask! What do I know?"

  I suppose it was I who should have known. Brion was in serious decline, succumbing to occupational ailments in a tradition that went back to the time of nickelodeons. He drank. A man of robust appetites, he also smoked and snorted and stuffed and swallowed. On top of it all, he had started lifting weights and pioneering steroids. He boozed all day and through the night, drove drunk, punched some of the wrong people. Along the Rialto, all this was being noted and remarked upon. He was a violent working-class guy, one of A. E. Houseman's beautiful doomed ploughboys, who but for talent and fortune would have drunk himself into Penrhyndeudraeth churchyard long before. Predictably, he had identified Lucy as the font of his troubles.

  Shortly after dawn on the morning before my visit, Brion had come banging on Lucy's door, haranguing her in elegant English and low Welsh. Impatient to enter and mess with her, he had taken her ornamental pot and shoved in the door, cutting himself in the process, badly enough to sober him slightly and slow him down. This bought time for Lucy to call 911. She told me that when the cops came Brion gave them the old Royal Shakespeare, which by then in Hollywoodland impressed no one. They all but begged her to press charges, although he had succeeded in hitting her only once, hard. Naturally she denied it heroically—I could well picture her playing that one—and sent them away. At least she hadn't raced to his side at the hospital.

  That evening it was plain we were not going to have much of a party. I asked Lucy to come down to Laguna with me. She dawdled and I hung around until she turned me out. I was angry; moreover, I was feeling too much like what you might call a confidant. In the end I made her swear to get the door fixed or replaced, and I said I'd do it if she wouldn't. I told her to call the cops and me if the loutish Welshman accosted her again. I have to admit that if it came to action, I wanted the cops on my side.

  Driving back that night I was unhappy. I had expected to stay with her. I should mention that in this period there occurred the last brief gas panic—odd- and even-numbered days and so on. In my opinion the fuel shortages of those years played their part in the vagaries of romance. People often went to bed with each other because their gas tanks were low.

  I picked up work at that point with HBO, which had then started showing its own productions. The project involved several interviews around the country in the subjects' hometowns. It was a Vietnam War story, echoing the anger of the recent past. This took me out of town for the next three weeks. In a hotel in Minneapolis I picked up a USA Today with a back-page story announcing that Brion Pritchard was dead. It was shocking, of course, but in fact with the advent of AIDS a sense of mortality increasingly pervaded. We could not know it, but death was coming big-time. In that innocent age no one had imagined that anything more serious would happen to Brion than his dropping a barbell on his foot. I felt nothing at first, no relief, no regret. He was no friend of mine. On the way back to L.A., though, I became drunk and depressed, as if a fellow circus performer had fallen from a high wire. All of us worked without a net.

  I had some doubts about calling Lucy too soon, mainly because I no longer fancied the role of consoler. Eventually I realized that if I wanted to see her again, I would have to endure it. When I called she sounded more confused than stricken. At first I couldn't be sure I had the right person on the line. My thought was: She doesn't know how she feels. This is a role thrust on her, and her feelings are down in some dark inaccessible region much overlaid. With what? Childish hungers, history, drama school? Capped by unacknowledged work and guilty ambition. A little undeserved notoriety of the tabloid sort. By then I thought I knew a few things about actors. I had been one myself years before.

  When I saw Lucy next she gave a display of what I now recognized as false cheer. In this dangerous state she could appear downright joyous. When I expressed sympathy over Brion she gave me an utterly blank look. Being the pro she was, Lucy was almost always aware of how she looked, but the expression she showed me was unpremeditated, unintentionally conveying to me that Pritchard's death was literally none of my business, that neither I nor anyone else shared enough common ground with her and the late Heath-cliff, ensemble, for even polite condolences. But somehow, a couple of weeks later we found ourselves on the road to Ensenada. Ensenada and Tijuana could still be raggedy fun in those days. We managed to borrow a warped convertible from an actor pal and took off down the coast road. I hope we told him we were crossing the border.

  The drive was an idyll, precisely defined, I was unsurprised to learn, as a happy episode, typically an idealized or unsustainable one. Down south that April afternoon there were still a few blossoming orange groves to mix memory and desire on the ocean breeze. Over the emerald cliffs people were hang-gliding, boys and alpha girls swooping like buzzards on the updrafts. In the sea below surfers were bobbing, pawing ahead of the rollers to catch the curl. And on the right, a gorgeous gilded—no, golden—dom
e displayed a sign that read, as I recall, SELF-REALIZATION GOLDEN WORLD FELLOWSHIP. It was the place the surfer kids called Yogi Beach, and there we overcame Lucy's peculiar grief and spent the happiest half day of our lives.

  In Tijuana, which was as far as we got, we put the convertible in Caesar's protected parking and ate the good steak and the famous salad. We did not talk about Brion. For a while we traded recollections of Brooklyn College drama school, where, strangely, both of us had put in time.

  It seemed, as the day lengthened, that the elations of our trip stirred a mutual yearning. Not about the night, because of course the night would be ours. I thought we might find our way through the dazzle of our confusions to something beyond. In my memory of that day—or in my fond dream of a memory—I was about to guide us there. In this waking dream I'm suspended at the edge of a gesture or the right words. All at once a glimmer of caution flickers, goes out, flashes again. Who was she, after all? An actor, above all. I was wary of how she brought out the performer in me. I mean the performer at the core, ready to follow her out on the wire where she lived her life. At that age I thought I might walk it too.

  I could have been a moment short of giving her the sign she wanted, whatever it was. These days I sometimes imagine that with the right words, a touch, a look, I might have snatched her out of disaster's path, away from the oncoming life that was gathering ahead of her. I held back. Surely that was wise. The moment passed and then Lucy simply got distracted.

  I let us drift down the colonnades of the farmacia tour at the busy end of Revolución, chasing green crosses and phosphorescence. I wanted a party too. Joy's hand, they say, is always at his lips bidding adieu. That melancholy truth drove us.

  We crossed back to Yanquilandia without incident. On the drive up the freeway we talked about ourselves.

  "You and me," Lucy asked. "What is that?"

  I didn't know. I said it was a good thing.

  "Where would it go?"

  Not into the sunset, I thought. I said exactly that. Lucy was ripped. She chattered.

  "Everything goes there," she told me.

  I ought not to have been driving. I was stoned myself.

  As Lucy talked on I kept changing the subject, or at least tweaking it.

  "I have a kind of plan for my life," she said. "Part of it is career shit." She had picked up the contemporary habit of referring to people's film and stage work that way, including her own. As in "I want to get my shit up there." Or "I saw you in whatever it was and I loved your shit." It was thought to be unpretentious and hip, one social deviant to another. I particularly hated it, perhaps for pertinent but at the time unconscious reasons. "Actually," she went on with an embarrassed laugh, "artistic ambitions."

  "Why not?"

  Her fancies involved going east, to off-Broadway. Or working in Europe. Or doing something in one of the independent productions that were beginning to find distribution. Besides the artistic ambitions she entertained some secular schemes for earning lots of money in pictures. In retrospect, these were unrealistic. We found ourselves back on the subject of us.

  "Don't you love me?" she asked.

  "You know I do."

  "I hope so. You're the only one who ever knew I was real."

  I politely denied that, but I thought about it frequently thereafter.

  "What about Brion?"

  "Poor Brion was a phantom himself," she said.

  "Really? He threw a pretty solid punch for a phantom."

  "I wasn't there that time either," she said. "I hardly felt it."

  As we passed the refinery lights of Long Beach, she shook her head as though she were trying to clear it of whispers.

  "You know," she said, "as far as shadows and ghosts go, I fear my own."

  "I understand," I said. Hearing her say it chilled me, but for some reason I did understand, thoroughly. I was coming to know her as well as was possible.

  "Why do you always treat me with tea-party manners, Tom?"

  "I don't. I don't even know what you mean."

  "You're always trying to be funny."

  I said that didn't mean I didn't love her. "It's all I know," I said.

  We were driving along the margins of a tank farm that stood beside the freeway. Its barbed chain-link fence was lined with harsh prison-yard arc lights that lit our car interior as we passed and framed us in successive bursts of white glare. In my delusion, the light put me in mind of overbright motel corridors with stained walls tunneling through gnomish darkness. My head hurt. In the spattered white flashes I caught her watching me. I thought I could see the reflected arc lights in her eyes and the enlarged pupils almost covering their irises, black on black.

  "Everybody loves you, Tom," she said. "Don't they?"

  How sad and lonely that made me feel. Out of selfishness and need I grieved for myself. It passed.

  "Yes, I'm sure everyone does. It's great."

  "Do I count?" she asked.

  Yes and no. But of course I didn't say that. In the twisted light I saw her out there sauntering toward a brass horizon and I wanted to follow after. But I was not so foolish nor had I the generosity of spirit. I was running out of heart.

  "You more than anyone, Lucy," I said. "Only you, really."

  That's how I remember it. As we drove on Lucy began to complain about a letter she said I'd written.

  "You used these exquisite phrases. Avoiding the nitty-gritty. All fancy dancing."

  "I don't do that. I don't know what letter you mean. Come on—'exquisite phrases'?" I laughed at her.

  A couple of miles later she informed me she had written the letter to herself. "In your style," she said.

  "So," I asked her, "what were the phrases you liked?"

  "I don't remember. I wanted to get it down. The way you are."

  "Lucy, please don't write letters from me to yourself. I can do it."

  "You never wrote me," she said, which I guess was partly the point. "Anyone can jump out of a phone."

  Suddenly, but without apparent spite, she declared, "John's going to expand my part." She was talking about the now revived horror movie in which John had hired a live British actor to strangle her. However, on consideration she thought he might transform her into a surviving heroine. I said it was great but that it probably wouldn't be as much fun.

  "You know," she said, "you don't get credit for being scared and dying. It doesn't count as acting. Anyway, I can live without fun."

  "If you say so."

  "John," she said, "wants to marry me." For some reason, at that point she put her hand on my knee and turned her face to me. "Seriously."

  I wondered about that in the weeks following. Once she showed me a postcard of the Empire State Building he had sent her from New York. He had adorned it with embarrassing jokey scribbles about his erection. One day I took John to Musso's for lunch but he said not a word to me about her. Over our pasta I asked him if it was true that he was sparing Lucy's character in the thing forthcoming.

  "Oh," he said, as though it were something that had slipped his mind. "Absolutely. Lucy's time has come."

  I suspected that the lead would be the kind of supposed-to-be-feisty female lately appearing as part of the serious and adult wave. I knew Lucy would deliver that one all the way from Avenida Revolución.

  "She can give a character some inner aspects," I told him.

  "You're so right."

  "Good actress," I suggested. "Great kid."

  John went radiant, but he didn't look like a bridegroom to me. "You know it, Tom. Tops."

  He didn't marry Lucy. Instead, when the funeral-baked meats had cooled he married Brion Pritchard's widow, Maerwyn. He didn't even promote Lucy to insipid ingénue. Halfway through the horror movie her character died like a trouper. In spite of my infatuation, I had to admit there were many great things one could do with Lucy, but marrying her was probably not one of them.

  We went out a few times. She began to seem to me—for lack of a better word—unreal. I kept
trying to get close to her again. At the time I was selling neither scripts nor story ideas. There were no calls. I might have tried for an acting gig; I was owed a few favors. I had no illusions about my talent, but I was cheap and willing, well spoken enough for walk-ons as a mad monk or warmongering general. I offered a Brooklyn Heights accent, which sounds not at all the way you think. But I had grown self-conscious and all the yoga in the world wasn't going to bring back my chops or my youthful arrogance. That was what I'd need in front of a camera. My main drawback as an actor had always been a tendency to perform from the neck up. I might have thrived in the great days of radio.

  Eventually I got a job with a newspaper chain working as their "West Coast editor." It took up a lot of my time, and part of my work was resisting being transformed into a gossip columnist. I almost got fired for doing a piece for the New York Times Arts and Leisure section. The news chain paid a lot less than writing for the movies, but it paid regularly. I had plans to engineer a spread for Lucy, but nothing came along to hang it on.

  Out of what seemed like nowhere, she took up with a friend of mine named Asa Maclure, pronounced Maclure, whom people called Ace. Ace was an actor and occasional writer (mostly of blaxploitation flix during the seventies) with whom I had liked to go out drinking and drugging and what we insensitively called wenching. Ace was a wild man. What inclined me to forgive him all was a telegram he had once sent to a director in Washington for whom he was going to act Othello: CANT WAIT TO GET MY HANDS AROUND THAT WHITE WOMANS THROAT.

  Ace had just arrived back in L.A. from Africa, where he had portrayed a loyal askari who saved a blond white child from swart Moorish bandits in the Sahara. The child, supposed to be French, was from eastern Europe somewhere. Ace was unclear as to which country. She had gone on location with her mother along as chaperone. The mom was, as Ace put it, a babe. Ace was suave and beautiful, the kind of guy they would cast as Othello. In no time at all his romance, as they say, with Mrs. Vraniuk was the talk of every location poker game. Restless under the desert sky, Ace decided to shift his attention to young Miss Vraniuk. Consummation followed, producing some uneasiness since the kid was not yet twenty-one. Nor was she eighteen. Nor, it seemed, perhaps, was she fifteen. But it was in another country, another century, a different world. At the time, in the circumstances, it represented no more than a merry tale.