West of Sunset

by Stewart O'Nan

  “You must think I’m an awful person.”

  “Not at all.”

  He said he understood. As a child he’d learned the need to conceal the family’s true situation. Her striving reminded him of his Saturday mornings at Miss Van Arnum’s and the sting of his classmates at Newman knowing he was on scholarship. She might have been describing his life. He remembered that first heady success, when the whole world wanted him, except, dreamy egotist he’d been, he’d thought it would last forever. He told her he didn’t care that she’d been married, which was only partially true. The past was the past, there was nothing to be done about it. She was teary, relieved. All weekend they clung to each other as if they’d survived a sudden wrenching tragedy, staying in and making confused, desperate love, confiding smaller, less damning deceptions they could laugh at. It was only when he left her for work on Monday that he felt bereft, as if this were the end of them.

  It was cloudy, and his office, like the entire building, was cold. Again, for no good reason, he reworked Paramore’s dialogue, getting up from his desk and pacing, standing at the window and rubbing the back of his neck, searching the yards and porches for Mr. Ito. The streetlamps were hung with silver bells and gold stars made of wire and tinsel, and as he tried to picture the boulevard and red-car tracks smoothed over by snow as they would be in St. Paul, what came to him instead was the image of the teenaged Sheilah onstage, bare-shouldered and spotlit, the audience watching from the dark all men. He banished it, scowling, and shoved the armchair against the vent.

  A blind woman with a long white cane was navigating the entrance of the drugstore when, behind him, the doorknob rattled. Wisely he’d locked it.

  “Open up.”

  It was Mank. He’d never descended from the fourth floor to visit him before, and Scott figured it was bad news.

  Mank shut the door, frowning as if unhappy to be kept waiting. He had Ernest’s thick build, and the same bluff certainty, only more animated. With his chomped-on stogie and scuffed brogans, he resembled the owner of a traveling circus.

  “Tracy’s out—busted his appendix. He’s fine, just laid up for a while. I got Mayer to give us Franchot Tone. I know, he’s not perfect, but he’s as close as we’re going to get. We’ve got two weeks to rewrite it for him.”

  Two weeks meant four, meaning Scott wouldn’t be going East for Christmas—another promise broken. And Tracy was the draw. Without him they had no box office, a fact Variety would trumpet from their front page.

  “We’re lucky,” Mank said. “It could have happened in the middle of shooting.”

  “That’s true.”

  “The good news is we like your work. I already told Eddie, but I wanted to tell you in person, we’re picking you up for next year.”

  “That is good news. Thank you.” Scott shook hands with him to seal the deal and saw him out.

  He was surprised they’d decided to keep him, and grateful, after how little he’d accomplished these last six months. He’d have to write Zelda and Scottie and tell them he wasn’t coming, but that would have to wait. First he needed to call Sheilah. If not an outright sign, the renewal was something to celebrate, reassuring, he hoped, for both of them.

  She wasn’t home, which meant nothing. She wasn’t at her office either, and he set the phone down and slouched in his chair, the good news cooling, draining away. How easily she’d fooled him, and how long. He wasn’t so different from Donegall. She’d never intended to tell him the truth. She was only with him because he was married and there was no chance of him asking her to change her life, when all along he’d felt terrible for not being able to make that exact promise.

  All day he was prey to venomous thoughts, calling and calling until he was afraid something had happened. On his way home he drove by her place. Her car was gone, the drapes pulled. He thought, with the wild illogic of romantic comedies, that maybe she was waiting for him at his place, and raced home to an empty villa.

  Obviously she was off doing her job, but the knowledge didn’t appease him. She would be on some fledging Lothario’s arm, posing for the shutterbugs like they were a couple while he sat home alone. Monday was a quiet night at the Garden, everyone recovering from the weekend. Bogie and Mayo were on location, so he ordered in from Schwab’s and tried to distract himself with yesterday’s paper, willing the phone at his elbow to ring, ready to pretend he was glad to hear her voice.

  When it did, at half-past ten, it startled him. He waited three more rings to pick up, as if he were busy.

  She apologized. She’d wanted to call him earlier, but at the last minute she’d been offered the chance to do the interview she’d had to cancel, and naturally she’d taken it, except she had to drive all the way up to San Simeon.

  It took a second to register, and then didn’t seem real. She’d stood up Marion Davies for him.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that on Friday? I would have understood.”

  “I wasn’t allowed. It’s all hush-hush until it runs. Anyway, it went long, and then they invited me to stay for dinner, and I couldn’t honestly say no, could I? Marion’s lovely but she does go on. It was very strange being there, with the servants hovering about. I felt like I was in Dracula’s castle. You know she calls him the Chief—he thinks it’s funny—but they were very nice, and the piece is going to be very good.”

  “I’ll bet.” He’d wanted to be hard and distant, but couldn’t resist her excitement. He could picture it: little Lily Shiel sitting down to dinner with William Randolph Hearst. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you. How was your day?”

  “Metro renewed my contract, so you’re stuck with me.”

  “That’s wonderful. We’ll have to go out and celebrate. I can’t tomorrow, but Wednesday, definitely.”

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  “There’s a big museum benefit at the Egyptian.”

  “I like the museum.”

  “I’m sorry, I wish I could take you.”

  “Who’s your date?”

  “Leslie Howard.”

  “I guess that’s all right.”

  He told her about Tracy.

  “I heard.”

  “It really is a small town.”

  “A small town full of busybodies.”

  “And you’re the busiest.”

  “I try. Wednesday then.”

  “Wednesday,” he said, and let her go.

  After the weekend’s hysterics, it nagged at him that they’d spoken so casually, as if nothing had changed. She was a completely different person, one she’d trusted him to meet only after he’d fallen for her outward image. Perhaps that was always true. It had been with Zelda, though in her case he’d fooled himself. Why was he drawn to complicated women, or were all women—all people, finally—complicated? He didn’t think he was, particularly. He’d done everything he could to simplify his life, winnowing the confusion down to a room, a desk, a lamp. Pencil and paper.

  After fretting for months over whether or not I will earn a blessed credit, he wrote, Metro has decided I’m good enough to keep even without one. I’m glad for the vote of confidence and the opportunity to continue digging us out of debt, but it means I have to postpone our Christmas plans till mid-January at the earliest. We just replaced Spencer Tracy, whose appendix didn’t like the script. I’m most sorry for Scottie, who I’d wanted to take to see the windows at Gimbel’s and Macy’s for old times’ sake, and maybe stop in at the Plaza and see the tree. The Obers will be happy to have her, but I remember staying over in the dorms at Newman one Thanksgiving, and it’s not a proper holiday. We’ll have to do something special for her at Easter. If your mother isn’t able to take you home for Christmas, maybe we can make a side trip to Montgomery next month. Dr. Carroll agrees that you should be visiting there regularly if that’s where you ultimately want to be.

  When he was finis
hed it was nearly midnight. He took his keys and walked by the quiet pool and down the drive of the main house and across Sunset to the mailbox outside of Schwab’s, opening the weighted lid, then letting it clang shut. While everything he’d said was true, he felt duplicitous and cowardly, and coming back he searched the darkened windows for the accusing specter of Alla. There was nothing, just the stars, the palms, the black hedges flanking the paths. His footsteps echoed as if someone were following him, and when he reached his villa he locked the door.

  The next night, as if to reassure him, Sheilah called him after her benefit. Leslie Howard had been a perfect gentleman.

  “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “Stop.”

  “Was he a good dancer?”

  “Not quite as good as Hemingway.”

  “What did you wear?”

  They stayed on the phone, unable to say good night. Again, there was no mention of her revelations, and out of delicacy he didn’t bring them up.

  Wednesday they ditched Hollywood altogether and dined downtown, in the Palm Court of the Biltmore, a salon of mahogany, brass and marble favored by bankers and oilmen. He asked for a table next to the fountain in the center of the room. There, beside the plashing waters, they batted around plans for Christmas like newlyweds choosing a honeymoon.

  Catalina would be too crowded, Santa Barbara too far. She was leaning toward Malibu, if she could arrange for the cottage. He wanted to go somewhere with no history, like the mountains. Wouldn’t she rather have snow? They could rent a cabin on Lake Arrowhead or Big Bear and lounge by the fire.

  “They’re so damp, and there’s nowhere to eat.”

  “Frank Case doesn’t have a place up there too?”

  Deliberately she set down her butter knife and fixed on him. “If you must know, I was there for a friend’s wedding. I have witnesses if you need them. And if I was with someone, why should that matter?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Obviously it does.”

  He didn’t want to argue in front of the other guests, and softly apologized. This was supposed to be a happy occasion.

  He was used to scenes—screaming, glasses smashing—but she wasn’t Zelda. She’d begun her newspaper career as a stringer, and had that scavenger’s obdurate patience. She tacitly agreed with him not to ruin dinner, and was pleasant all the way through dessert, in the cloakroom letting him drape her fox stole over her shoulders. She waited until they were in the car, safely out of earshot.

  “You cannot speak to me like that,” she said before he could turn the key. “I will not stand for it.”

  He apologized again, hoping it was over.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I knew it would be too much.”

  “I’m glad you told me. You have to admit, it is a lot.”

  “You have no reason to be jealous.”

  “I’m not jealous because of that. I’m jealous because I’m a man and you’re a beautiful woman. If I weren’t jealous, there’d be something wrong with me.”

  “I meant what I said before. You need to think before you say things.”

  While he contritely agreed, privately he thought the fault lay somewhere between them, both being overly sensitive on the topic.

  The evening was supposed to be a celebration, but as they wound into the hills above Sunset, she announced that she had an early call tomorrow. He escorted her to her door and kissed her goodnight, waited for the outside light to go off, then walked back to the car, poring over what had gone wrong. He should have said that in a way he liked her better now. As a midwesterner, and one himself, he had a deep-seated reverence for the self-made.

  If, as he thought, she was punishing him for his lack of faith, then what was she rewarding him for Saturday morning, when she came to him pink and warm from the shower? Apology or reconciliation, it didn’t approach the sad abandon of the previous weekend. There was a languorous playfulness to her, laughing when the pillow half eclipsed her face, and again he wondered what had changed, if anything, or was this her way of saying they’d passed through the worst unscathed?

  He wasn’t a strong man. He could never deny a woman anything. Against his better instincts, he agreed to Christmas in Malibu.

  He’d spent Christmas far from home most of his life. Part of celebrating the holidays in Paris or Rome or the North Shore of Long Island was the melancholy casting back to his wide-eyed boyhood, the snowbanks piled high along Summit Avenue, the chilly cathedral redolent with freshly cut pine boughs and smoking tapers, or later, coming home from Newman with his fellow boarders, taking the night train up from Chicago, the snow streaking through the blackness outside like comets. Christmas was candles on the mantel, and his father carving the goose his Grandmother McQuillan had bought, and his mother asking him to say grace—the same simple rituals performed the world over and all the sweeter now that they were gone, except here in the thin desert air with the bougainvillea blooming, that quaint candlelit past seemed impossibly far away, as if it had never happened.

  He was getting old, yes, but it wasn’t sheer nostalgia. Like its motley architecture, the city’s traditions were borrowed, and in many cases the transplants hadn’t taken. Winding strings of lights around the trunks of palm trees and trimming every roadside orange juice and hot dog stand with shimmering tinsel icicles didn’t make them any more festive. On the shadowless street corners of Beverly Hills, holy-roller bell ringers and dime-store Santas and scarf-wearing carolers sweltered, pestering tourists in shirtsleeves for a holiday that felt months off. His distrust was natural, ingrained. His skin told him it wasn’t the right season—the sun was too close.

  I was sorry to hear about your car, Zelda wrote, and glad you have it back from those enterprising Mexicans. Congratulations on being renewed, though it is a shame you and Scottina can’t be here for Christmas. The great hall is done up in Venetian red and gold and there are flocks of cotton ball angels made by the schoolchildren who visited and put on a lovely concert. I have a chance to go to the Ringling Museum in Sarasota next week and take a life study class if you think we can afford it. I hope we can, because I really do need to improve my musculature. That could be my present, if you like. Mama says she’d love to have me home for the holidays as long as Sara is there to help. I said I can help, to which she replied, Sara makes things easier. I wish I made things easier for her and for you but I suppose we all have our lot in life, n’est-ce pas, Do-Do? Mine right now is to keep busy and organize myself for the future rather than despair of it ever arriving. I promise, all of this will be forgotten by the time you arrive next month. Till then, I am yours, as always, gratefully.

  Her writing was neat and even, and as he had since Mank told him, he protested that it wasn’t his fault he couldn’t be with her. It wasn’t a lie, and yet it stung him, just as, later, he was ashamed of shopping for her and Scottie’s and Sheilah’s presents all at the same time.

  Though technically she was Jewish, as Mrs. Gillam, Sheilah had embraced the Nativity with the fervor of a convert, and insisted on a tree. In St. Paul he would have hopped in the car and struck out for the country where a farmer sipping hot chocolate by a bonfire would hand him a saw and point him toward a field of blue spruce and Norwegian firs loaded with snow. Here they drove to a used-car lot on Pico and chose from a few drooping specimens lined up against a fence like prisoners while a loudspeaker hectored them with tinny carols. The salesman charged him an extra fifty cents to wrap the tree in burlap and lash it to the roof of the Ford, and then, on Ocean Boulevard, as Scott braked for a light, it slipped its bonds, sailed free like a torpedo or a body prepared for burial at sea, banged off the hood and continued into the intersection where it finally came to a stop. They saved it with the help of an amused Okie who happened to have a length of clothesline among the water bags hanging off his Model A, but not before a brief panic seized Scott, hardening to a bitter resentment
of the tree and the reason they needed one in the first place. When they finally got it to the cottage, she wanted it not inside by the fireplace but out on the patio, centered in the picture window overlooking the ocean, as if she’d done this before.

  They combed the wrack for a suitable starfish. He stretched to fix it on top.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  “For now. Isn’t it perfection?”

  Metro’s Christmas party further confounded him, a daylong, lotwide bacchanal sponsored by his Jewish bosses from which they were conspicuously absent.

  “No one loves Main Street more than L.B.,” Dottie explained.

  “Therefore,” Alan said, “L.B. loves Christmas.”

  “I love Christmas,” Dottie said. “It’s Main Street I hate.”

  “And L.B.”

  “And L.B.” She and Alan clinked glasses.

  Even though his contract had been extended, Scott abstained, making the day that much stranger. The studio was an open house, stars and carpenters and secretaries mingling freely, the commissary turned into a dancehall. The projection rooms, normally reserved for the producers’ more serious deliberations, played stag films from someone’s private collection to hooting standing-room crowds bombed on eggnog. Couples necked in stairwells, and from locked offices came tender and profane urgings. The elevator in the Iron Lung stank of reefer. When he left, Oppy was perched like a jockey astride the lion that guarded the front steps.

  Scott offered him a ride, but he declined. “The night is young. Listen, can you spare a pal a fiver? I’m a little short.”

  Though he knew better, Scott did.

  Driving away, instead of relief he felt adrift, and wished he’d stayed. Through all of their problems, he’d managed to be with Zelda and Scottie for the holidays, even if it meant eating Christmas dinner in the hospital cafeteria, and as he tooled up the coast highway into the blinding sun, leaving the city behind, he was certain he was making a mistake.