People in that other world screamed and fled. Buddy, in this world, stared in horror at that knife but stayed rooted to the spot. Jack launched himself at Buddy like a tiger, the knife flashing in the sun, slashing down across Buddy's chest.
Buddy screamed. He recoiled, falling back a step, putting up his hands in a vain attempt to defend himself. Jack slashed with the knife, his arm raising and lowering, again and again, the blade gleaming and gleaming, until finally Buddy managed to push him away and back out of range, staggering, shocked, outraged. "Ow!" Buddy cried. "That hurts!"
Jack, out of breath, stood spraddle-legged in the dust where Buddy had pushed him, the knife hanging from his hand at his side. Face dulled again, he gazed bleakly at Buddy and panted like a dog on a summer day.
Meanwhile, Buddy was realizing he hadn't been cut. Looking down at himself, seeing no blood, seeing his clothes intact and not cut to ribbons, he stared in wonder and then pointed at the knife, saying, "What is that?"
A number of crew members, finally getting over their first shock, had now run forward to grasp the unresisting Jack by the arms and shoulders and waist. One of these men unbent Jack's unprotesting fingers and removed the knife from his grip. Holding it up, showing it to Buddy, he bent the blade back and forth, showing its resilience. "Rubber," he said.
"Well, it hurts," Buddy said, no longer frightened, beginning to be both embarrassed and aggrieved. Rubbing his arms and chest, he said, "I'm gonna be all over bruises."
The crew members turned the now-catatonic Jack and began to lead him away toward his dressing trailer. Buddy looked up, saw Jack leaving, and put out his hand, calling, "Stop! Wait! Let him go."
The group of men holding Jack stopped and turned around so Jack was facing Buddy again, but they didn’t let him go. Stepping forward, speaking loudly enough for everyone present to hear him, Buddy said, "It's all right, it really is. I deserved that. I won't tell you what I did to this fine man, but I deserved even more than a rubber knife. I destroyed the finest friendship a man ever had."
Slowly Jack lifted his head. Slowly his eyes focused on Buddy, seeing him through a haze of despair. Slowly Buddy's words made their way into his brain.
Buddy stepped forward, closer to his old friend. The group holding Jack released him and faded away. Speaking more softly, Buddy said, "Nobody's ever had a finer friend than I had in Jack Pine."
Buddy's eyes locked on Jack's. Jack's eyes locked on Buddy's. Buddy said, with simple intensity, "I would have laid down my life for you, Dad, and I know you would have done the same for me."
Over behind the sound equipment, a fella with a guitar began softly to play a lonesome tune. With unembellished frankness, Buddy said, "We go back a long ways together, Jack Pine, a long ways. To the very beginning."
Jack raised his head, sunlight refracting from the despair in his eyes. Speaking from a throat as dry and dusty as the ground they stood on, he said, "That doesn't matter anymore, Buddy. Nothing matters anymore, not what anybody knows, not what anybody did. None of it matters, Buddy."
"You're right, Jack Pine," Buddy said. "In one careless, thoughtless moment of selfishness, I threw it all away. I didn't deserve your friendship, Jack Pine. I never did."
His passion spent, wanting nothing but to be alone in his trailer with his personal silence and darkness, Jack shook his head and made a vague gesture and said, "Oh, sure you did, Buddy. You deserved my friendship, sure you did. Lots of times."
"Never, Jack Pine," Buddy said. "Never."
Jack Pine was an actor. How could he help but get caught up in the mood of the scene? How could he help but begin to feel the emotion of the scene? How could he help but say, "You know what I owe you, Buddy Pal. You know, more than anyone else. I owe you my life, Buddy Pal. I owe you everything I have. You saved me back there when . . ."
screams, screaming, engine roars, flashing lights in red and white reflecting from the bumper chrome, slicking on the heaving trunk of the car, madness, danger, movement, peril, speed . . .
“Nnn-a/z/z/z-ah!"
“Jack Pine!"
“Buddy Pal! Buddy Pal!" Back from terror, Jack stared in dread at his oldest friend. “You know, Buddy Pal!" he cried. “I owe you everything. Do you know what I mean?"
“But not that, Jack," Buddy insisted, shaking his head. “Not to take that from you, Jack Pine. What I did in your bed was unforgivable, I know it was. I know you can never forgive me, and I know I don't deserve to be forgiven."
“But I do forgive you, Buddy," Jack said, raising hands that trembled.
“You can't, Jack, you cant”
“I can, Buddy," Jack said, a crazed and holy smile forming on his lips. “I can, and I do, and I will, and you can't stop me. I forgive you!"
“Jack! Jack!"
“I forgive you, Buddy Pal! I forgive you!"
“Oh, Jack! Jack!"
Jack pulled Buddy into his arms. Tightly they embraced, eyes squeezed shut, faces buried in each other's shoulders. A collective sigh rose from the semicircle of assembled spectators. Strong men were seen to wipe away a tear. Women were seen thoughtfully to lick a lip. The guitar music flowed its mournful message. Then the applause started, slight at first, but growing, mingling with the guitar.
Jack and Buddy reared back so they could see each other, but still held tightly to each other's arms. Both men were crying for happiness. The applause continued, and beneath it Buddy said, his voice throbbing with sincerity, “But the most important person to forgive, Jack Pine, is your little Marcia."
Weeping, tears and makeup commingling on his face, Jack shook his head. “Buddy, Buddy," he said, “you don't know what you're asking."
“She needs you, Jack Pine," Buddy told him. “Your little Marcia needs you."
"Oh, no, she doesn't," Jack said, his voice hardening.
"Oh, yes, she does," Buddy said. "She's going to have your baby."
I wipe away a tear. Then I taste it. It tastes like the sea. I think I like the sea better than I like swimming pools. I think I don't like swimming pools the way I used to. I smile sadly—I feel myself doing it, smiling sadly—I smile sadly at the interviewer and I say, "That was the last time Buddy and I ever fought about anything."
He seems surprised. As though challenging me, he says, "The last time?"
But it's the truth, the simple truth. All truth is simple. "The last time," I say.
"And Marcia Callahan was pregnant with your first child at that time?"
Less simple. "The blood test was inconclusive," I say. "But when Buddy brought me the news, what could I do? I went back to the nasty bitch. And you know the first thing I said to her?"
"What was that?"
FLASHBACK 13
The shades were drawn against the California sun. In the rose-colored light in the same bedroom in which Jack found that awful scene, Jack and Marcia lay in bed, half-covered by wrinkled sheets, both warm, perspiring, Marcia in a glow of reconciliation, Jack puffing on a cigarette as he lay half-propped against the soft headboard, Marcia's head against his shoulder. He turned her face toward his, and she gazed up at him with melting eyes. His free hand smoothed her hair as he looked deep into those eyes. Gently, he said, “He better look a lot like me."
15
"And did he?"
I shrug; a dangerous gesture. Perhaps a simple and dignified nod in future. But now I shrugged, and recovered, and I say, "She was a girl. Took after her mother, in fact, in more ways than one."
"Let's see," the interviewer says, annoyingly tapping his pencil against his notebook as he gazes out over my head and over the swimming pool behind me and into the middle distance. "That would be your daughter Rosalia, wouldn't it?"
"That's right." I grin the grin I used when I played Satan that time. "I named her after a lady in Mexico that helped me during the movie down there."
The interviewer nods and reels in his glance to look again at me, saying, "How old would she be now?"
"Well, she would be about thirty-five," I say
, "but the fact is she's nineteen. Last I heard, she's living in Colombia with some big dope dealer down there." I feel a crooked and half-proud grin coming to my lips. I say, "Smart for a kid of mine, huh? Cuts out the middleman."
"You and Marcia Callahan had three children together, didn't you?" .
This time I remember not to shrug. I perform a simple and dignified nod. I say, "She had three kids while we were married. I suppose I had something to do with it. But the marriage, you know, never really did survive that first big shock."
"Even after Buddy Pal came to Mexico to try to make things up with you?"
"Didn't matter," I say. "It's a funny thing, but I really did forgive Buddy. We got to be best friends again just as though nothing had ever happened. But I never in my heart forgave Marcia. I guess in her heart she must have known that. She was never stupid, the bitch."
"And all," the interviewer says, "because of one simple mistake."
"Well, at least one. But also, there was our careers. The movie of Tupelo didn't do business, and you know what that means out here. They blame everybody but the producer, and Marcia got her share of the debit. After that, her career just sort of stuttered along for a while, so-so roles in nothing pictures, no build-up, just the gradual realization on everybody's part that the industry could get along just as well without her."
"Tough on her, I guess."
"You bet. Particularly because, for me, it went just the other way. I hit with the biker, consolidated with the pathological killer, and got my first Oscar nomination with the patient picture."
“Slip of the Knife” the interviewer says, nodding yet again at the brilliance of his own research.
"Yeah, that's right. That's the picture where I first really got it together, my own talent and the technology of film. Where the camera and I blended into one creature, one omnivorous animal that could eat anything and not die. Slip of the Knife; that's when I hit my stride, got a bridle and bit on my powers, became the superstar. After Slip of the Knife, I was one of those very few stars that could do anything at all and the people still come, they pay the money, they sit down, they watch. I could read the phone book and they'd come. I could read the Valley phone book and they'd come."
"I guess that's true," he says, thoughtfully, as though it hadn't occurred to him before why he should be interviewing me.
"It is," I assure him. I stretch my arms and legs, bend from the waist. My entire skeleton aches. What have I been doing with this body, this instrument of my talent? Fucking it over, man.
And worse. I suspect, I suspect worse.
No no no, there are things I must not know.
Do not look toward the swimming pool.
Patiently my interviewer sits, awaiting the dropping of further pearls from these lips, and so I oblige him. "After Slip of the Knife,” I tell him, "just like Irwin said, I could do anything I wanted, the industry was mine. I had to hire a girl just to read the scripts they sent me. As for Marcia, well, around town, more and more she was getting to be known as Mrs. Jack Pine, with fewer and fewer parts coming her way. She couldn't stand that. So, one day, when Rosalia was four and Indira was two and Little Buddy was five months . . ."
FLASHBACK 14
I his living room, large and airy, expensively and artfully furnished in shades of gray and blond and white, with owned original oil paintings on the walls, was up in the hills of Beverly Hills. The view out the large but well-curtained windows was of green hillsides tastefully decorated with mansions. Jack, in cashmere pullover and flannel slacks, barefoot, strolled up and down the thick pile shag rug, studying a movie script, silently mouthing his lines. In his other hand was a bottle of Tuborg beer from which he occasionally sipped.
Marcia entered from deeper in the house, wearing a well-tailored gray suit and a small hat with a veil. She looked elegant and handsome, but older. She was pulling on suede gloves. She stood a moment watching Jack, but he remained absorbed in his script, pacing back and forth, lips moving, expressions flowing and changing on his face.
At last Marcia moved over directly in his path and watched without expression as he paced away from her, swiveled, and came pacing back. Even then he might have simply angled around her if she hadn't, in a low and cold and emotionless voice, said "Jack?"
He stopped in front of her. He looked up inquiringly from his script. Marcia reared back and gave him an open-handed walloping roundhouse gloved right across the face. The script went flying. The Tuborg bottle went flying. Jack himself went flying, backward and over the nearest low white suede sofa.
Marcia waited, adjusting her right glove, face still expressionless, until Jack righted himself on the floor over there and his bewildered face appeared above the sofa back. Then she nodded. “Good-bye,” she said.
Open-mouthed, Jack watched her stride across the living room and out the front door. His slack jaw, the left side of it reddening, rested on the cool suede of the sofa back.
16
I lean forward. Elbow resting on my interviewer's gray-clad, bony, silently protesting knee, I reminiscently rub my jaw, where the ghost of Marcia's departing hand still shimmers and burns. With two fingers and thumb, I check the working of my jaw hinge. All aches are psychosomatic, aren't they?
I can tell my interviewer is feeling sympathetic at this moment because, though his face remains frozen in that blank look of reception, he is not pushing my elbow off his person. He is restraining his prissiness. Even to the extent of letting sympathy seep into his voice as he says, "She left you just like that, huh? No warning, no discussion, just up and walked out, just like that."
"Just like that," I agree. "She took the kids. Boy, the books they'll write some day."
"And they're all still in their teens."
"The Sargasso Sea of the teens," I say. "In their teens. The penal colony of the teens. I remember my tee— No, I don't! Memory begone!"
"There's something back there, isn't there?" my interviewer asks me. “Something that explains everything that followed. That's what it's all about, isn't it?"
This knee is too bony, too gray-clad, too prissy. I withdraw my friendly elbow, I turn away—not toward the pool!—I turn back, I find my place on the teleprompter of my eyelids, I say, “Marcia."
“Yes?"
“She left."
“Yes."
“I gave her the house, three pints of blood, and Ventnor Avenue, and after that Buddy and I moved into a place out on the beach."
“Buddy again? Just the two of you?"
“Heck, no," I say, smiling at the memory. Well, the beginning of the memory, anyway. “I got to fulfill an old dream. I brought my mom and dad out to live with me."
FLASHBACK 15
The bedroom was small and square, with off-white walls and blond wood floor and very prominent electric outlets, prominent because the room was not yet furnished. The only objects in it were two white wooden kitchen chairs without arms, facing each other. On one stood a portable TV set, its black wire reaching back to a cable outlet low on the wall. To one side, plate-glass doors showed a broad gray wood deck in blinding sunlight, with the broad gray Pacific heaving like chicken soup beyond.
The room's interior door—flush, painted white—opened and Jack entered, smiling, sweating, awkward, trying to please, ushering in his mom and dad. Mom was short and buxom, round-faced, jolly; she wore an old print dress and a gray cardigan. Her hands were full of snapshots. Dad, short and skinny and dry, wore white shirt and black pants and shoes, all too big for him. His face had a collapsed look around the mouth.
"And this is your room!" Jack exclaimed, pumping up his enthusiasm, giving one of the very few poor performances of his acting career, Gesturing madly at the bare walls, the white chairs, the ocean outside, he said, “Furniture's going to be delivered by noon! All brand new!"
Mom had been waiting impatiently for Jack to shut up or at least pause for a breath. When he finally did so, she shuffled toward him, holding up snapshots, saying, “Here's cousin Rosie with
the twins. And here's the twins with Blair's dog. And this is the Flynns' new car.''
“TV," Dad said.
As Jack smiled and nodded and stared glaze-eyed at Mom's photographs, Buddy entered, smiling, hands clasped in front of him, nodding like the co-host he was, and Dad crossed the room to switch on the television set and seat himself expectantly on the edge of the other chair.
“Great reception here, Dad,'' Jack told him.
The picture blossomed on the screen. Dad leaned forward to start switching channels.
Mom held up more snapshots. “Here's the laurel tree out behind Margaret's house. Look how it's grown! Can you see, Jack?''
Jack tore his eyes away from the back of Dad's head. As Dad went on switching among the channels, Jack looked at the picture of the laurel tree out behind Margaret's house. “Yeah, gosh,'' he said. “Sure has grown."
“You look, too, Buddy," Mom said.
“Okay, Mom Pine." Buddy obediently leaned forward, gazing with pleased interest at the picture of the laurel tree out behind Margaret's house.
Dad, his voice testy, his manner testy, even his shoulder blades testy, said, “Where's the sports?"
Grinning spastically, like a lion tamer who's just heard a low growl from behind him, Jack said, “There might not be any sports right now, Dad."
Dad stopped switching channels, sat back with an air of triumph, and pointed at the set. “Wrong again, Sonny. Tennis.
“That's nice," Jack said.
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 50 Page 7