Crossroads (22 page)

“Oh, snow flurries. It's clear and cool in L.A.”

“Well, New York should have sunshine tomorrow. We had sunshine today. What're you doing there?”

“Visiting friends. Why don't you go back to sleep?”

Sean pulled the covers up to his shoulder. “You check into a hotel with your lover and call your parents. I've seen everything now.”

“Deborah.”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hold on,” she said. “I want to take this call in the kitchen.”

“Mom, please don't get up. I'm fine. I wanted to say hello.”

“Come on, Marge, get off the phone. The boys are picking me up at nine.”

“Nothing's wrong, dear, right?” I told her nothing was wrong, except that I'd thought they were two hours behind, not ahead.

When I hung up, Sean stared at me. “Was that necessary?”

“I wanted to let them know where I am.”

“I'd love to know where you are.”

My universe had begun in a small town and in a sense all I'd done was extend myself like the spokes of a wheel from the spot, but in truth I'd never left home. For the world of my childhood was the world of order. If you had work to do, you did it. If you married someone, you stayed with him. Projects that failed, marriages that didn't work out, children that turned bad. These things only occurred to those who had suffered a failure of vision. Even natural disasters happened only to people who didn't think carefully about where they'd live. Earthquakes, unemployment, divorce, such things could never happen to me.

So here I was, drifting off to sleep with a man who was not the man I'd picked to spend my life with, having jeopardized my already shaky position at the New York Center of Urban Advancement by coming to this plaid hotel room, resting just a few feet from the San Andreas fault.

The next morning I met the devil. I'd set off early with my map of Los Angeles, heading toward the Chinese Theater to look at the immortalized footprints of America's immortals, and was just a few blocks away when a rather fat, round man passed me on the street. “Hey,” he called as he caught up with me, “I don't believe it. You're a dead ringer for Ava Gardner.”

“Oh, yeah?” I was deeply flattered.

“Oh, definitely around the eyes, especially the eyes. Just need to lose a few pounds, change your hair.” He brushed the hair away from my face and handed me his card. “I look for look-alikes. That's my job. You know Johnny Travolta? Well, I found his look-alike and that guy's making millions working for Wrangler.”

“I can make money?”

“Lots. More money than you make right now. You a secretary? Whatta ya make? Fifteen, twenty? You can make that in a
month. See that drug store? They found Lana Turner in that drug store.”

“I met the dentist who did her teeth.”

“See, she was just buying Kleenex or something. So maybe I'll discover you right here.”

Discover me, I thought. Dress me in mink. The little round man looked at me and it took me a few minutes to realize he was the devil. I don't say such a thing lightly, but he really was the devil. Even today I am sure of it. I looked at him carefully. He had a peculiar physical trait I'd never seen before. He had long black hairs growing down from his pointed earlobes. Not hairs that bristled out of his ears, but hairs that grew down from the lobes themselves. “I'm telling you,” he went on. “You're just a dead ringer for Ava Gardner. Course, we're not looking for Ava Gardner types, but if we were, you'd be it, kiddo.”

“You mean I'm an anachronism?”

“Naw.” He shook his head.“You're very pretty.” He caught me by the arm. I stared at the long hair, then turned quickly and started to walk away. “Wait, come back. Will you have dinner with me? Will you have drinks?”

 

“He was the devil?” Sean said as we dressed to go to dinner that night in Venice to meet friends of his.

“He looked like the devil. I think it was a warning. I don't think you should take a job in Los Angeles.”

He kissed me. “I think you look like Marilyn Monroe. Hey, you wanta skip dinner and just fool around?” He tried to pull me onto the bed.

“Hey, it's your friends we're meeting. You made the date.” He'd met me at the hotel that evening with a bouquet of spring flowers and a big smile. I knew something was wrong.

“Remember Roxanne? She's going to be there.”

We drove our rented car, compliments of Four Tracks
Films, down to Venice and looked for the restaurant, the Jetty Sunset. We missed the sunset but got a table near the water. The restaurant was all done in bleached wood and hanging plants. The salad bar, with its red beets, its squash yellow, its spinach green, its twelve kinds of herb dressings, its bacon, egg, and chickpeas, looked more like decoration than food. All the clientele wore jeans and T-shirts and drank gin and tonics, flavored with fresh mint sprigs, with the well-rehearsed casualness that had become the cliché of California. Our waitress, who had thick braids, came over and introduced herself. “Hi, my name's Karen and I'm going to take care of you. For starters we've got our great salad bar and there's a terrific roast beef special.” I watched the ocean lap just outside the window some fifty feet away and I was gripped with the insecure feeling that prefabricated housing and insecure relations can give.

Roxanne had had a ghastly day with some producer who wanted her to dye her hair red, and Jill, her friend, didn't talk much because she'd missed a call-back. She worked at Kroch's in Beverly Hills and said if she didn't make it as an actress, she thought she could make it as a writer. All she wanted to do was express herself, but she couldn't say why she was so upset that evening. Jill's boyfriend, Sam, did back-up for Earth, Wind and Fire. He was black and said he could never get a cab when he went to New York. “That city's fucked, man.” Art, Roxanne's “man,” produced musical events and said he'd rather work with Diana Ross over Stevie Wonder any day.

Sean sat stone-faced throughout the meal and I knew something had happened in one of his meetings that day. After dinner, we all walked along the pier, but Sean and I walked ahead, arm in arm. He told me very quietly that Arthur Hansom wanted him to co-author his next script with him and was grooming him to direct. “They made me an offer I couldn't refuse.”

“Oh, I'm really happy for you.” I really was happy for him.

He went on. “They definitely want me based here.” He let his hand rest on my shoulder.

“Starting when?”

“Probably next month. I don't know what I should do.”

“Well, you should take it. That's what you should do.”

A tall, skinny girl on white roller skates, with golden hair and a skimpy halter top, skated past us, hurling an electric F^isbee into the air. She had those smooth, dumb features and wonderful camel-like legs and I wondered if she was the kind of woman Sean would start sleeping with when he moved west. Overhead I saw a giant balloon, a red and blue balloon that seemed to come out of nowhere. I saw it turn so that the light off the pier illuminated the sign it was trailing, which read, “Eat my Conch—Ricki's Fish Place.”

 

Two days later Art and Roxanne and Sean and myself were driving along the Pacific Coast Highway en route to San Francisco. “I thought we were going to make this trip alone,” I'd said to Sean as we began packing our things and leaving the plaid hotel room. He had told me just as we were getting ready to go that they were coming with us. “I thought the whole purpose was so we'd have a few days to ourselves.”

“Look, they just wanted a ride to San Francisco. I couldn't say no. Besides, I hardly get to see them.”

“You're hardly going to get to see me pretty soon.”

He slammed the suitcase shut. “Debbie, you just can't have it all. You have your own life, your own friends, your own work. I'm going to be working out here again soon. They just asked for a ride, so we're giving them a ride.”

“When did they ask you?”

“Yesterday.”

I decided not to go with them. “So why did you wait to tell me now? Because you knew what I'd say. That I thought we'd planned to have that time to ourselves.”

“I'm not the one who pushed you away our first night in LA. I'm not the one who pushed you away in Nantucket and a million other times. I want us to have time to ourselves, but we don't have to have twenty-four hours a day to ourselves.”

I wondered if there was a flight back to New York that afternoon. “You know, I don't really believe you. I don't think you want us to be alone at all. I think you want us to have lots of people around. I think you're afraid of something. It seems to me that the minute I start caring about you, you find ways to disappear.”

He threw some things into his shaving kit. “Did it ever occur to you that I just gave up, that I ran out of patience? That enough was enough? You didn't even want me until I stopped wanting you. I think that's more accurate. It took me four months to get your attention and that was when I'd pretty much had it.”

I threw my arms up. So he thought I didn't start caring about him until he stopped trying to be with me, and I thought he stopped trying to be with me the minute I started caring. Sean slumped into the yellow plaid armchair and put his feet on the red and yellow plaid bedspread. “All I'm saying”—he sounded very exasperated—“is that things are complicated. You were just getting over Mark when we met, and I was out of work. Now I've got a lot of work and you're pretty much over Mark, or so it seems. Things are just turned around . . . come here.” I sat down on his lap. “I really care about you. More than you know. Let's just not make any big decisions about the future, about what's going to happen. Let's just take things as they come.”

Roxanne got very carsick on the winding roads. At first she was fine and she thought the scenery was gorgeous. “I should get out more often. Drive around. See the country.” Art was more blasé. He'd made this trip dozens of times and just went along because she wanted to. Roxanne claimed producers were more blasé than actresses in general. Art thought that it
was a difference between men and women. They'd lived together for two years, which was some kind of a record for both of them.

“How long have you guys been at it?” Art asked. Roxanne jabbed him in the ribs.

“Just since last summer,” Sean said. “God, look at those cliffs, those waves.”

“Feel like driving the car into them?” Art laughed.

“No more of that kind of stuff for me.”

“You drive cars off cliffs?” I asked, incredulous.

“Not very often, really. I was the worst stuntman they ever had at Twentieth Century.”

That was when Roxanne really began to get carsick. “Oh, God,” she said; “falling off cliffs.”

We stopped at a restaurant on the road so that Roxanne could put something into her stomach. We ordered tea and rolls. Sean went to the bathroom and he was gone for a long time. Art was the first one to hear the banging. “He must have locked himself in the bathroom.”

The waiter had to kick the door very hard to open it. When Sean finally got out, he pretended nothing had happened, but Roxanne started to laugh and so did I. Then Sean laughed and for a few moments we all laughed. It was the last time we'd all be laughing together.

When we got back in the car, Sean asked me to take out the map. “What do you need a map for?” I asked. “Aren't we just going in a straight line?”

He frowned, reached across the glove compartment, and pulled out all the maps, along with everything else that was in the glove compartment of the rented car. “I want the map.”

“O.K.,” I said. “I'll get you the goddamn map. I just don't know why you need one when you're driving between two points.”

A mist was rising and Roxanne groaned from the back seat. “Oh, God, what if we get stuck in the fog?” Sean said it was just
a mist and he'd checked with the U.S. Naval weather station and had been assured that U.S. 1 was clear for the day. He studied the map and I glanced over his shoulder. “Deb, would you let me handle this?”

We were driving in sunshine and suddenly we were in a cloud and we couldn't see in front of us. It was as if the road just ended. The redwoods, the Panoramic Highway, Stinson Beach, the mating whales, the cliffs, the coastline of America were all hidden in fog and left to the imagination. Roxanne stared straight ahead, taking deep breaths. I moved closer to Sean, hoping he wouldn't drive the car over the cliff this time. I put my head on his shoulder and reached for his hand, just as he reached for the gearshift. “Don't do that,” he said. The car swerved and for an instant I had a glimpse of the very edge of the country. “Can't you relax?” he said. “Can't you take it easy?”

“Would you guys quit acting like New Yorkers?” Art said. “That's it, baby, breathe deep.”

“I don't feel very well,” Roxanne said. She was a little green.

“I'll relax if you'll relax,” I said to Sean.

“I'm just trying to drive,” he replied.

In a little while he'd leave me. I knew the end when I saw it. We'd been miserable from the start. We'd been miserable in New Jersey, at Times Square, in the plaid hotel room. We fought over a map. We were miserable because I didn't want him until he didn't want me, or vice versa.

I'd made my mistakes in love. The first time I ever tried to use a diaphragm, it flipped out of my hands and fell into the toilet. Maybe I should have given up then. Where was the guidepost to tell me what to do? My parents had met on a blind date and my father agreed to marry my mother because a Gypsy had told him to. My father, a confirmed bachelor in his late thirties, had gone to see a Gypsy because his Gentile girlfriend asked him to. She wanted to know if they'd marry.
The Gypsy said no, but she told my father he'd change jobs, return to his home town in Illinois, meet a woman, and marry her. So he went home, met my mother, and married her. So where is the wonder of love? Perhaps it's mostly fate, circumstance, and learning to live with our mistakes.