The front door of the antiques shop burst open, slamming back against the set wall. Jack reeled in, off balance, the door having weighed less than it looked so that he'd given it a little too much push when he'd opened it, and then he'd tried to overcompensate in the other direction, and now all he was trying to do was stay on his feet.
His waving arms sent a candelabra flying toward the camera, bouncing on the floor at the director's feet. Next, a stuffed owl was knocked the other way off a crowded shelf, taking a kerosene lantern along with a crash and a clatter.
The sudden noise startled Jack just as he was getting his equilibrium back, and he staggered sideways into a row of porcelain beer steins, sending them into and through a display of old doll furniture. Lunging away from all that, Jack became entangled with an old wooden rocking chair, fought manfully to free himself from the thing, and only succeeded by reducing the rocking chair to kindling, some of which swept nearby shelves clean of apothecary bottles, tea sets, samovars, and stereopticons.
Each move Jack made caused a separate and distinct crash, smash, thunk, tinkle, thud, bang, crumple, snap, jingle, gong, crack, and/or pit-a-pat, and every noise made Jack try again to correct his course by making another move. Thus, by an irregular series of tattoos, detonations, and dying falls, he crossed the set from right to left. Never quite toppling over, never quite getting his balance, never quite managing to just stand still, Jack swept like the angel of death across the antiques shop set, leaving hurricane news footage in his wake.
At the far end of the set, he brought up against the interior door, which was not in fact a working door at all, so that he didn't pass through it but merely brought up hard against it, with force enough to make the whole set tremble. Recoiling from this encounter, he reeled back through his previous carnage to the middle of the set, where at last he managed to come to something like a stop; though he trembled all over, like a race horse after the meet.
And he wasn't quite finished yet. Turning to say something to the director, raising one expressive hand, index finger upthrust, he lost his balance yet again. This time, he tottered backward, feet fumbling and stumbling with the shards and shreds of his previous passage, until he reached the wall of the set. Here he flung his arms out to the sides as though crucified and leaned back against the wall, which gave way, the whole canvas rear wall of the set slowly falling over, Jack riding it down backward, arms outspread, an expression of harried but mild surprise on his face as he and the wall went completely over and landed with a mighty whoosh and great puffs of dust.
No one said a word. A final clink was heard from somewhere. The dust slowly settled. And then the director spoke. "Cut," he said.
31
“But I didn't care, not then, as I was drunk, I just thought life was one big party.”
FLASHBACK 20
Another transformation had come to the living room of the house in Malibu. The books and bookcases were gone, as though they had never been. The furniture, pushed back against the walls, was scruffier, showing signs of hard wear. Five television sets in various parts of the room were all switched on, but the sounds they might have been making were impossible to hear because the room was jammed with partygoers: a young and hedonistic crowd, laughing and shouting, scoffing down the bottomless supply of liquor and the endlessly refilled side table of finger foods. Jack reeled among his guests, a glazed look in his eyes and a glazed smile on his face. He held a quart bottle of Jack Daniel's Black Label by the neck and paused from time to time to knock back a slug.
Buddy moved toward Jack through the partygoers. He was sober, neatly dressed in pale sports jacket and opennecked shirt, and in his eyes was a faint expression of disapproval of the scene swirling around him. That expression disappeared when he reached the sozzled Jack, to be replaced by his usual look of aggressive and selfconfident comradeship. Never had the familial similarity between these two been less noticeable;.Buddy was trim and neat, clearly in good physical shape, while Jack was getting jowly, his body sagging within his rumpled clothing. The parallels between them had become obscured by their very different ways of caring for themselves.
“Hey, Buddy!" Jack called, seeing his oldest friend, turning to stagger toward him. “Hey, my Buddy!"
"Listen, Dad," Buddy said, low and confidential, "could I have the car?"
“Sure, Buddy." Jack frisked himself with uncertain gestures, switching the bottle from hand to hand, until he found a set of car keys, which he handed over.
Buddy nodded, pocketing the keys, but said, "No, Dad, I meant could I have the car."
"Whuzza?"
Buddy brought out of his inside jacket pocket automotive sale documents and a pen. Leading Jack to a nearby table, spreading the papers on it, handing Jack the pen, he said, "Just sign here, Dad. You see, I got a little something to take care of south of the border."
"Oh, sure, Buddy," Jack said. An amiable drunk, he put the bottle down, scrawled his name with a flourish, dropped the pen, picked the bottle up, and drank.
Buddy retrieved documents and pen. "Thanks, Dad," he said, patted Jack on the shoulder, and left.
A girl who'd been sitting on the sofa beside the table grinned up at Jack and said, "Hey, baby. You got a car for me?
"That's my oldest friend in all the world," Jack told her.
"Yeah?" the girl said. "He doesn't look that old."
Jack thought about that, nodding, smiling in a distracted way, and then he got it, and it broke him up. His eyes came to life! His smile beamed like the sun! His arms shot up! He slopped Tennessee sour mash whiskey all over the place! He yelled, "Oh, wow! Holy—oh, gee!"
"It wasn't that good," the girl said, beginning to get worried.
“Wasn't—Comere! Comere!”
Jack dragged the girl up off the sofa and threw his arm around her shoulders. While she held her head drawn as far as possible away from him, looking sideways at his manic profile with only semicomic revulsion and alarm, he dragged her toward the hot center of the party, crying, “Hey, come here! Hey, listen to this! Wit? Holy shit!"
32
“But it all came to a head the night I won my Academy Award.”
FLASHBACK 21
“And now, to present the award for Best Actor, Dori Lunsford!”
The band played. The audience applauded. The billions watching on television all around the world watched Dori Lunsford approach the lectern. A big-boned, good-looking blonde, Dori Lunsford was the sex symbol of the moment, a big girl whose stock in trade was giggly little-girl movements, as though she didn't know she was voluptuous. Tonight she wore an extremely low-cut white gown, the hot television lights gleaming on the upper hemispheres of her breasts.
At the lectern, she bowed slightly, presenting those breasts to the world, or at least the half of the world watching her on television. The plain forgettable man from Price Waterhouse—rather like Michael O'Connor he was, in fact—came out and handed Dori Lunsford the envelope and went away again, immediately forgotten.
"Oh, I'm so excited!" Dori told the billions, and jiggled a little. (She was having her period, which always made her breasts swell.) Tearing open the envelope with a
pleasing clumsiness, she said, “And the winner isssss ..." She pulled the card most of the way from the envelope, and squealed. “EEEEEEEEEEEE!!! Jack Pinel”
In the audience, as it burst into applause, competing with the band's breaking into the theme music of the film for which Jack was getting his award, Buddy poked at Jack, who was sound asleep in the aisle seat beside him. Knowing he was on television, Buddy did his poking with a good-natured grin on his lips, as though congratulating his pal rather than waking him, but his knuckles were hard and sharp, digging into Jack's ribs, yanking him unpleasurably up from alcoholic stupor.
Jack roused himself, hearing the confused noises, seeing the lights, feeling Buddy's sharp fists prod him up out of the seat and into the aisle. “Go on, Dad!" Buddy yelled, through the music and applause. “Go get it!"
&nbs
p; Befuddled but moving, Jack made his way down the aisle. Like a rat in a maze, he was constricted to this route by the applauding hands and beaming faces on both sides. Sensing the urgency all around him, he broke into a shambling trot, found himself abruptly in front of steps, and ran up them only because the alternative would have been to sprawl across them in a painful heap.
At the top of the stairs, Jack hesitated for just a second, unsure what he was supposed to do next, having not the slightest idea what was going on. Several tuxedoed and gowned people behind a curtain, within his line of sight but out of camera range, stopped applauding to wave at him frantically to hang a left and get going. He hung a left. He got going.
And here was Dori Lunsford. And here was some sort of elbow-height piece of furniture to lean on. Feeling an intense need to lean on something, Jack approached that piece of furniture, but before he could get his body on it Dori Lunsford smiled like the sun in Bangkok and handed him something. Jack grasped at it, whatever it was, and Dori kissed his cheek, pressing her great globes against his arm and chest.
Jack weaved slightly, not leaning against anything. He looked at the shiny thing in his hands and recognized it, but didn't quite yet dope out its meaning or implications. With a piteous look at Dori, begging for enlightenment, he said, "This is for me?”
The microphone on the lectern picked up the question, of course. The audience, which had quieted enough to hear what Jack might say, naturally thought it was meant to be a joke, and responded with good-natured laughter and more applause. Jack looked out toward the great hall, saw it full of people, and began to catch on. He looked back at Dori. He had it together now, and his trouper's spirit took over.
The famous Jack Pine smile flashed. The famous Jack Pine voice spoke: "Well, thank you, Dori.”
At which point, Dori was supposed to leave, backing smiling away from the lectern to give the recipient of the award his opportunity to thank everybody on God's green earth for having made this moment possible. Preparatory to this rearward departure, Dori did smile her farewell smile, but then something went wrong. Jack reached out his right hand—the left hand still clutching Oscar about the head, as though he were a bottle of Jack Daniel's— dipped the hand into the open top of Dori's dress, and grasped her right, or downstage, breast.
Dori gasped. The whole audience gasped, but Dori gasped on television. Dori started to pull away, to make her scheduled departure anyway, but then she realized— as her expression told the half of the world's population watching—that she'd better not.
With his left hand clutching Oscar and his right hand clutching Dori's breast, Jack turned toward an audience suddenly grown deathly still. "And thank all of you,” he said. "I mean it, honest to God I do.”
Dori stood frozen, a terrified smile on her face. She had no choice but to remain there throughout Jack's acceptance speech, and in her panic she had clearly come to the conclusion that the best thing to do was look as happy and bubbly as possible, just as though nothing had gone terribly wrong, just as though her breast was not now in the tight and unrelenting grip of a madman.
Jack went on, addressing the audience, saying, "I really thank you all for this, uh, Tony, Emmy, what the hell is it?" He held up the statuette, studied it closely. "Oscar," he decided. Lowering the statuette again, but still holding on to Dori, he looked out at the oil painting of an audience and said, "I thank you. And I want to thank everybody who made this moment possible. I want to thank every ass I ever had to kiss. I want to thank every prick who ever turned me down for a rotten picture so I was forced to do the good ones. I want to thank Marty Friedman, my director, that traffic cop, for staying the hell away from me and letting me get the job done. And I want to thank my co-star, Sandra Shaw, for doing such a tight-ass, piss-poor, lamebrain job of it that I had to look good in comparison. You notice she didn't get a nomination. But mostly, I want to thank all those little people out there, all those little people out there, those little people, all those goddamn little people. There's more of them around all the time, you know? I think they live in the plumbing."
Finished, befuddled again, his mind full of lurking, crawling, slithering little people, Jack turned and walked off stage, leaving a stunned silence behind, but taking Dori Lunsford along by the breast.
33
"Six weeks later, I married that bitch."
Michael O'Connor is at last surprised by something. "Dori Lunsford?" he says. "I didn't know you were ever married to Dori Lunsford."
A flaw in his impeccable research, eh? I smile at him in triumph—we keep our secrets, yes we do, when we want, large and small—and I say, "It didn’t last."
"I guess it didn’t."
I lean forward slightly, feeling extremely healthy, a sound body in a sound mind—no, that's the other way around, isn't it? Doesn't matter—and I rest my elbows on my spread knees, and I gaze into the middle distance of time. "How different that was," I say, "from my first wedding, even though they both took place in the same church."
"Same church?" O'Connor echoes. "Isn’t that unusual?"
"Very photogenic church," I explain. "Great for the press. You fellas. Well, you know that. And this time, of course, we didn't have to hire a crowd. We both had our fans, our agents, household staffs, attorneys, accountants, stand-ins, hangers-on, the whole crowd. The media was out in force, a lot more so than when Marcia and I tied the knot. We all had to work our asses off to suppress those pictures, let me tell you."
"Pictures?" O'Connor looks bewildered, poor fella; I'm surprised he doesn't already know this part, being in the journalism racket and all. He says, "Suppress pictures? What pictures?"
"Of the wedding," I tell him.
Which doesn't seem to help him much. Shaking his head as though there's a bee in his ear, he says, "Suppress pictures of the wedding. Your old wedding with Marcia, you mean? So people wouldn't know it was the same church?"
"Oh, who cares about that?" I ask him. "One of the very few good qualities of the press is that it has no memory. No, it was the pictures of the wedding with Dori we had to suppress. And a hell of a job it was, too."
"I don't understand," he confesses. "If the whole thing was meant to be a publicity stunt, why suppress the pictures?"
"Because things went a little bit wrong," I explain.
"What things?"
"Well, we were both of us drinking pretty heavy then," I tell him. "It was the only way we could put up with each other, or anything else, or get through the day. So, we handled the ceremony okay, but on the way back down the aisle—or is it back up the aisle?—anyway, on our way back from the altar, Dori's drunk said something that irritated my drunk just a little."
FLASHBACK 22
The lovely white chapel in Santa Monica had been freshly painted for the occasion, and parts of the gleaming green grass had been resodded. Hundreds and hundreds of wedding guests and media people milled about in front of the chapel, held back from the gray cement walk leading from front steps to street by police sawhorses and stern-looking, blue uniformed, white helmeted policemen. A red carpet had been unrolled from the church door down the steps and across the gray cement walk and the sidewalk to the waiting limo. Organ music and the sound of an expensive imported choir rang out from within as the ushers opened the twin front doors.
Jack and Dori came out, he in tux, she in a different white gown from the one she'd worn to the Academy Awards, this one showing a bit less cleavage. Jack and Dori were yelling and screaming at each other, both red-faced, both waving their arms around. Jack shoved Dori when they reached the top step, but instead of falling, Dori swung around and smashed him across the head with her bouquet. He then took a swing at her, but she ducked and kicked him in the shin.
Ushers and friends, paralyzed with shock in the first few seconds, at last hurried forward to break up the newlyweds, both of whom now swung and missed, Jack's overhand right taking out a flower girl, while Dori's left uppercut sent an usher flying off the steps and into the crowd below. Ja
ck finally connected with a straight left to Dori's forehead, driving her back into an off-balance wedding guest, who in his turn fell backward into two photographers, who shoved him unceremoniously out of the way. The wedding guest, not taking kindly to this opening of a second front at his rear, turned around and popped a photographer. So then the second photographer popped the wedding guest. So then another wedding guest popped the second photographer.
Jack and Dori meanwhile, weaving and staggering in the church doorway, had entered upon a hair-and-clothes- ripping contest, their elbows and knees doing much damage among those well-wishers who tried to intervene. And the more people were knocked off the steps into the people below, the more the fight spread.
In no time at all, it had become a general brawl, its turmoil reverberating out from the epicenter of the happy couple. Policemen and police sawhorses alike were trampled into the fresh sod as the fight spilled over onto the lawn, engulfing more and more of the wedding guests and then the media people, and then the fans, extending even into the two TV remote vans parked just down the block. The limo driver, seeing which way the wind was blowing and not expecting his fares to make it to curbside today anyway, decided to get his vehicle out of the danger zone, but in moving it he made both the car and himself moving targets, obvious and irritating to the mob at large. Although he locked himself in, and the crowd never did get at him, the limo itself was never the same again and shortly thereafter was sold for cash to a Columbian who wanted the comforts of air-conditioning and television while overseeing the work of his farm in the uplands.
As the brawl spread to the street, cars and trucks, blocked in their passage, disgorged their drivers and passengers to enter into the fray. A school bus full of bored teenagers on their way back to school from a field trip to the La Brea tarpits added its own dollop of youthful enthusiasm to the developing stew.
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 50 Page 12