At last they were reunited. Mike was vindicated. Susan’s heroin addiction could be controlled. The honeymoon could resume. But then Vargas suddenly noticed the difference.
“Susie. What happened to your plaster?”
“Oh Mike … they took everything.”
“They cut the plaster off your arm?”
“They must have.”
“Such animals!”
“I know, dear, I know.”
“But doesn’t it hurt?”
“Not as much as I expected. It must be mending.”
“We must immediately go to another hospital and have you replastered.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
It was years before the whisper reached as far as Miguel’s ears that the “plaster” had contained four kilos of cocaine that Susan had been smuggling across the border. By then, it was too foolish to discuss, and too ridiculous to have investigated.
Miguel Vargas has been for many years the senior official in that branch of the Mexican government in touch with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. He is experienced in all matters of the border and he has collaborated with Professor David Gregory in preparing briefs for new legislation. He is kept very busy and has probably not yet heard the reports that his wife is having an adulterous lunchtime liaison with a man close to the American ambassador in Mexico.
JEFF BAILEY
Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past, 1947,
directed by Jacques Tourneur
When he was just a little boy in Bedford Falls, Jeff said, “I like the bad guys.” We were alone, at the far end of the yard. The last clumps of old snow were still on the ground, gray and hard. I think he was hoping I would explain it to him. Jeff was the youngest of the three of us. It was only later that someone told me how, when I went into the water to rescue Harry, the brother in the middle, Jeff had just watched from the shore. He never moved. But he was only seven. Still, he went dull afterward with me the hero and Harry the lucky survivor. There was no role for Jeff. Maybe the watcher had begun to ask himself why he only watched.
I asked him, “How’s that?”
“I don’t know.” He kicked a stone and it hit the watering can, a dead shot, twenty feet away. He stared at his own skill, without pleasure.
“You don’t like what they do, do you?”
“I s’pose not.”
“Suppose, Jeff.”
“Oh, George!”
“I’m only helping you.”
“Maybe it’s because they’re so alone.”
“The bad guys?”
“Yeah. I feel sorry for them. I mean, everyone’s against them.”
“I know,” I said. “You have to wonder about them.”
“Right, you wonder why they’re bad. You think it’s because they’re lonely. And things.”
“What things?”
“Well, don’t you ever wonder what it would be like to do a bad thing?” I was thinking how to answer him; he must have looked up at me. “No, I s’pose you don’t, Georgie.” The sneer made me angry. My hand came up and hit him on the back of the head. It made him stagger, and I saw tears he couldn’t squeeze back.
We always ended up laughing about it, but he kept that dark, thoughtful expression. I never felt I’d shaken the idea out of his head. It wasn’t loose in there, it was part of the way he saw things. Mary Frances was afraid of Jeff; she never knew whether he was laughing at her or waiting for her to make a mistake. “He’s too quiet,” she said. “And too smart. I get frightened watching him think. He’s gloomy, George.” Was she trying to signal me about her frailty when faced with that mood?
Jeff never said he’d been warning me, but I think it was what we both thought of before he left town. He had some feeling that I was too good to be true, too noble for my own sake, that I was stuffy, solemn, a dead weight. He never apologized or explained. He never said he’d loved Mary Frances, or hated me. I don’t believe either would have been quite true, and Jeff never bothered to say anything for conversation or kindness. He was attracted to her, I’m sure—that wasn’t hard—but it was more that he had glimpsed the outline of a trap and was too proud or too black to walk away from it.
It was almost as if I’d set it up by meeting Mary Frances and marrying her. Neither he nor she ever bothered with justification. It was not something put down to my being so lousy depressed and such a pain to be with. They didn’t say anything. Jeff just told me to forget about it, it was nothing, and Mary Frances said, “Don’t let’s mention it.” She stayed with me, and he went away—so action settled it, if you weren’t disposed to go on thinking about where he was and whether they were communicating. It makes me feel helpless to remember it this way, like a train rumbling along and we’re all passengers who get on and off, and the train never knows or notices. That’s what Jeff was like. But he was wrong if he thought I was only good, or that good is not difficult too.
So in 1937, Jeff went away, when he was twenty-two. He went to New York, the city, and I’ll bet he was in his element there. The cities are made for watching and not talking, so you pass through the crowds untouched by all the stories you see and hear. You have to be unmoved in cities; you have to be able to look at the bums and the hopeless cases and say, “So?” to yourself. Jeff could do that.
He became a private detective and he called himself Jeff Markham. I don’t know why he picked that name, but I can guess why he wanted a change. In the city you are free to be whomever you want, a hundred people a day. It’s like picking a name for a character. You make yourself up; you decide on this raincoat and that hat. So he was Jeff Markham, with a partner named Fisher.
They had a fair business, and Jeff lived in Brooklyn. Then in 1943 they were hired by Whit Sterling. He was a businessman of some kind, but it was crooked, even if you didn’t know how. Fisher said to leave him out of it, but Jeff said no need, the case was just personal. Sterling had had this woman, Kathy Moffat, and they’d lived together for a time. Then one day she had shot Sterling and vanished with $40,000 of his money.
“Why’d she do that?” said Jeff.
He grinned. “I don’t know. I still don’t know.”
“What do you want back, her or the money?”
“I want it all.”
Fisher told Jeff it was his case, and so Jeff started tracing her. He was good at it, I think, and not everyone is. If I look for someone, I don’t know how to start. Jeff knew the system and he tracked her down inside three months. She was in Acapulco and he found her one day when she walked into the bar where he was waiting. Perhaps it was one of those moments when he looked at her and said, “I can’t help it,” to himself. Fate. He could pass by the bums, and harden himself to wrecks dying on doorsteps, but then there was a providence he couldn’t resist.
So Jeff and Kathy started a love affair. I don’t know what it meant to her. Jeff was handsome. Maybe she loved him. Or maybe she had the same kind of irresistible impulse. Maybe they were both people who trusted the smell of their own weakness, who felt temptation more than anything. They stayed down in Mexico. He told her about Whit Sterling and his assignment. She said that Sterling was a monster. She had shot him because he was so bad to her—yet from the way she said it, he could have sold her mother to a glue factory or just failed to notice her new earrings. That cool way of talking blurs all iniquities. But, no, she’d taken no money. That was her lie, the moment when coolness fell away and the eyes ached with sincerity.
They moved on to San Francisco, afraid that someone would be coming after them. It was Fisher who came, tickled to be dogging his own partner. Sterling had called on him and Fisher was upset that he’d not heard from Jeff. He saw Jeff at the races and he followed him back to a cabin up in Marin where he and Kathy were living. When he realized what had happened, Fisher asked for some money to keep him quiet. The two men fought, and from somewhere Kathy had a gun and she shot Fisher dead. Then she got in their car and drove off, leaving Jeff to get home on his own. The gun was
one surprise. The other was finding a bankbook and seeing that Kathy had a while before deposited $40,000. There’s always some $40,000 or other, as solid as a gun.
So Jeff buried Fisher up in the forest, and he moved away. He didn’t want to go on being a detective, and he decided he didn’t enjoy cities anymore. So he went to a place called Bridgeport, in California, up in the Sierras, and he opened a filling station there. He kept to himself, but he made a couple of friends: Dickie, a mute kid who helped at the station, and Ann Ferguson, the dentist’s daughter.
She didn’t have what Kathy had had—not the danger or the duplicity—but he might have married her. Then one day in 1947, a fellow named Joe Stefanos stopped off at Jeff’s place. You don’t have to be looking for someone to find him. Stefanos was an associate of Sterling’s and he remembered Jeff. So he told Sterling, and soon Jeff got a call to come on up to Tahoe for a talk.
Sterling was all smiles. No problems, he said. “It’s all in the past, and anyway, I got Kathy back. What else do I care? She’s in the next room.” She was, too, the same as ever, lovely but slinky, with eyes like beads you couldn’t pick up. And Jeff was still hooked. So he went along with Sterling’s suggestion that he work for him again, especially after a quiet moment together when Kathy tells him that she still loves him, that she only came back to Whit out of fear. That’s when a man has to see there’s nothing so stupid he wouldn’t do it. There might be a last intelligence in recognizing that compulsion, when desire triumphs over all reason and honor, when it banishes the fear of wickedness or shame.
So Jeff got involved, and it gets worse, with him ready to wipe out strangers for a chance of holding her cold hand. A lawyer is killed in San Francisco, and he is blamed for it. He’s on the run, and Ann is helping him but she knows he’s still fixed on Kathy and he can’t see what she’s giving up to be with him. All that desperation. By now, Jeff has guessed Kathy’s behind it all—he wants it like that—even if he can’t always admit it. She has to be other than ordinary. He could have been something decent and valuable—a doctor, a teacher or a man who gave his life to the building-and-loan business, so that he had nothing for himself.
He went back to Tahoe at night and found Kathy had killed Whit. He never knew or bothered to ask why. Reasons and explanations were like aging; they would dull Kathy’s shine. She told him they must go off together again, to Mexico, and it would be like it was before. Day after day, if he wanted, she’d come strolling into that first bar and it could start again. Jeff may have agreed. But as she packed he called the police. When the two of them set out, they drove into a roadblock. Kathy knew what it meant. She shot Jeff and the police shot her; the first shot condones all the others. The police pour in fire these days, they’re so edgy. The chief there wrote me a well-meant letter. He said that Jeff had gotten in with the wrong kind. For he had left a diary, with a clear, unbiased account and a note with my address and what the finder was to do in the event of his demise.
I could never believe a life like this in our family, only a few years away from me. I roughhoused Jeff and I could handle him then. But when I write about him I see the self- destructiveness we shared—he in Mexico, on the road, in the lap of a tramp; and I safe and sound in Nebraska, a little deaf and going to waste. Maybe he knew more and opted for quickness. I found Travis once pretending to be his Uncle Jeff, and Mary Frances vomiting with fear.
BREE DANIELS
Jane Fonda in Klute, 1971,
directed by Alan J. Pakula
Those murders were bottomless holes they tried to walk around, always with a dread of falling. Yet the murders were also incidental to the uneasiness between the two of them. So, as they inched their way through the night they watched out for the murderer, but they waited for each other. There were moments when she lost sight of the two threats, the two men who wanted her, when Bree Daniels was not certain she could tell them apart in the dark with only sound, smell and touch to rely on.
She had been born in Los Angeles in 1941, the daughter of a doctor whose Camden Drive practice included several show-business luminaries. Bree grew up with an uncertain sense (for her father was proud but discreet) of movie stars having small holes or imperfections in their glowing looks, too humiliating to discuss in public, but attended to by her father. When Bree was a little girl, she sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, crying for help. She had a flaring appendix, a detached retina, a bone disease, a migraine, and so on. Her father came to her room to deal with her. The first few times, he carried the old stethoscope he kept at home and put the cold metal disc on the troubled parts of her body. Playing the game, he said to himself.
But he became bored with having his sleep disturbed. “You have hypochondria,” he told her one night. “What’s that?” asked Bree, hushed by fear. “Is it serious?”
“Who knows?” said her father. “It’s when imagination makes up illnesses to get attention. Go to sleep.”
It sank in slowly on Bree, only just before sleep; her father believed she was lying. But she woke up every time with the true throb of pain or worry. She could not believe she was acting. It was pain, something wrong, and her father’s presence did ease it, as if that cold metal disc sucked the hurt out of her. But her father stopped coming. He shouted out in the dark house, “Stop it, Bree.” And she lay there in terror that she was dying, forbidding sleep.
When she grew older she realized that many of her father’s best patients had imaginary complaints too. He took them at their word, and he would not be her doctor. Bree broke her foot in basketball when she was thirteen. She limped home and her father said it was bruising, without touching the foot. In the middle of the night her mother had to rush her to the hospital. Her father never mentioned it afterward.
She went to UCLA in 1959, a theater arts major, and she fell in with a group of young film-makers that included Francis Coppola, Carroll Ballard and, the most original and interesting of them all, Dennis Jakob. He asked Bree to act in a film he was making. It was about a young woman who pretends to be a ghost every once in a while, goes out in the night, and finds some young man to haunt.
They shot the film late in the fall of 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. As they worked, often at night, in a deserted house on Sunset, in Topanga Canyon, on the beach and by the Sepulveda reservoir, the student crew had a radio bringing in bulletins of impending war. Bree felt this might be the last film ever made, and she put the force of her life into it, exhilarated and emboldened by the crisis. She loved doing it, having the crew so quiet you could hear small creatures ticking in the undergrowth, having the passwords—Camera … Speed … Action—and then partaking of her passionate reverie, a mood of ghostliness or materiality, while the camera sucked on her. She felt as if she had had sex after every take. She looked at the camera, awed by its desire and the implacable composure marking it.
The film didn’t work. It didn’t all cut together; the transitions were jagged; people said Bree was riveting, but why was so much of the other acting stilted? Don’t all actors inhabit the same story? Dennis told her she should use the footage to get real work in pictures.
She called on agents. Her father gave her one name—just one, to satisfy her mother. She carried around the sixteen-millimeter film. Some people looked at it, or said they had; they said it was interesting, or they could not recall the big scenes. But it was hard to have the picture synchronised in double system so that they could hear her breathy silences conspiring with the night. There were promises made, odd, strained meetings; she was invited to some parties, and to Mexico. She was asked to read a few times, but nothing transpired. She made it as clear as she could that she would go to bed if necessary. They said, “Oh no,” with a smile. “What do you think we are?” Integrity smothered her every wile.
As she waited for calls, a friend asked her to be in a play. It was A Doll’s House, a cold Norway Christmas done in the Valley in July, sweating in the flannel costumes, but loving to have the audience under her spell. It fill
ed two months of her life, as good as the film, but she had not been paid for either. Then another company asked her to take a small part in The Mousetrap, and they would pay her. For a few years in California she was in theater. Everyone said she should try New York: her hard edge would go down well there.
She moved east in 1966, and she had to start again. She got a few parts, but people told her to go for modeling jobs as protection. They said she had a new look, California Kennedy. Another model, Arlyn Page, asked her one day if she wanted to make a hundred dollars. Arlyn had a job on Long Island and it clashed with a “date” set up in the city. “A hundred dollars for a date?” said Bree, and Arlyn answered, “Sure, you know.” The date was a teacher from upstate New York in for a conference. He gave her five old twenties and all she had to do was fuck him once and stay the night. He was a sad optimist and it was easy making him feel better.
It got to be that it was always there if nothing else came along. There was no need to be poor. And if there wasn’t an audience or a camera to command, then she could soak up the authority of providing fulfillment for some timid, inexperienced man. It was acting for an audience of one. After a few months, she realized she was good at it; people were asking for her. She had calls in a way she never had from producers or agents. She was something like a star, and she got a service. There were some bad times. Tricks who wanted her to stand on them and pee on them, one man who had beaten her up—but he’d paid her and paid her extra when he cut her. Apparently, there was a rate he knew for such mishaps. There were others who admired her, and told her she was magnificent. There was one gentle old man who just liked to meet her somewhere and watch her undress in as slow and thoughtful a way as she could manage. He told her she was a goddess, and he murmured to her in a language she did not know.
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