Destiny (101 page)

Helene looked at him, and then at the room in which she sat. It was on the first floor of this enormous house, in which Thad had lived for the past four years. It looked, it always looked, as if he had moved in yesterday. There was virtually no furniture, no carpets, and the long rank of windows that led out onto the balcony had no draperies. One wall was stacked with packing cases, most of them still sealed. On top of them was a pile of debris: old magazines, yellowing newspapers, bundles of scripts, some books, and a small mountain of dirty aluminum takeout dishes; it was higher than it had been; each time she came here it seemed to Helene that it grew.

On the opposite wall was a long shelf, from which wires and cables looped. It bent under the weight of expensive and elaborate hi-fi equipment —players, tuners, tall stereo speakers, a mass of gleaming materiel. On this stereo, Thad claimed to listen to Wagner; he said he had a passion for Wagner. There were no records of any kind visible, however; Helene had never heard the stereo switched on.

Behind her there was a cavernous fireplace, in which no fire was ever lit. And in front of the fireplace were two low backless seats covered in dirty graying fabric; it was on one of these that she sat, the only alternative being the floor. She folded her hands on her lap and waited. Thad was sniffing at cartons of milk; the kettle took a century to boil.

There were only two other objects in the room of any significance, and they were both television sets. As always, they were both on, tuned to different stations, the sound turned all the way down. Helene stared at them, first one, then the other.

On the first, a quiz show was coming to its climax. A very fat woman.

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dressed as a chicken, had just won a car. The car was a Chevrolet; it was on a stand, and tied up Uke a present with huge red bows. It revolved and revolved: when the chicken-woman saw it, she went wild.

The second set was tuned to NBC. It was the evening news. President Johnson was making a speech, his skin an odd orange, because the color adjustment was wrong. After a while Johnson disappeared, and there was footage from Vietnam. Guns fired. On the other side of the Pacific, an orange village burned.

Helene looked at the sets for a while. Then, quietly, she rose, and switched them off". She sat down again.

She had been good in Ellis. Watching the film, with a dispassion she had never felt before, she had been able to see exactly how she had done it. This technique; that technique; each tiny component part—she could identify each one, she could see precisely how they linked together; she could see why she had selected them, and how she had deployed them. They made absolute sense to her, and no sense at all. It was easy to be Lise, so easy that it had seemed to her, as she watched, quite without point. Lise was a figment; she hved on celluloid. She would be there forever, living her own eternal independent life, and that frightened Helene. As she sat there in the screening room she had thought, suddenly: what about my life?

She had only one, and unlike Lise's life, it was finite. It grew shorter with each second that passed.

Thad came across with the tea. He said apologetically, "Fm afraid there's no milk."

Then he sat down opposite her, on the other backless seat, and beamed at her through the steam from his tea. Helene looked at him: she had not seen Thad now for months, not seen him, not spoken to him. She had changed in that time, and for a moment she felt absolutely sure that Thad must see that. Helene felt that her ambivalence, her dissatisfaction, must be naked in her face: but Thad seemed not to see it—or, if he noted it, he let it pass without remark. He behaved precisely as he always did; he ignored the gap of time; he continued where they had left off", as if he had last seen her not months before, but merely minutes.

True, he went through a certain number of ritual inquiries—he always did that; it amused him. He inquired after what he sometimes called her entourage: her press agent; her business manager; her three accountants; her two secretaries; her four lawyers, who, he claimed, intimidated him, though he employed equally astute lawyers himself. He inquired as to the welfare of her two agents: mainly, Helene thought, because their names were an unending source of amusement to him: Homer on the East Coast, Milton on the West: Homer and Milton, Thad would say—now that's really poetic. . . .

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Her answers were duller and less animated than usual, but Thad appeared not to notice. He passed on to her masseur, to Cassie, who intrigued him, and finally, last of all, to Lewis. Cat he never—ever—mentioned at all.

As he made these inquiries, the answers to which never seemed to interest him very much, Thad's small eyes winked and blinked behind his glasses. With her new detachment Helene watched him, and wondered. She sensed some purpose behind these questions, that they were a prelude to something else, perhaps. She thought, for a moment, that it might have been Lewis, because after she had given a routine answer to Thad's routine question, Thad did seem to react.

"Oh, Lewis," he said. "I'm glad he's okay. I worry about Lewis, you know. I asked him to come back and produce with me again—did he tell you that?"

Helene shook her head.

"Better not mention it. It's a sore point. He wouldn't—Lewis can be kind of obstinate, don't you find? And anyway, I shouldn't have asked him, really. Sphere doesn't want him. That man Scher—he's had Lewis up to here. Because of the drinking, I think. I don't know. Is he still drinking?"

Helene looked at the floor. "Not excessively," she said in a flat careful voice. It was a lie, yet Thad let it go by.

He talked about Ellis then. He talked about the work he had done, in the post-production period. He talked about the music, and the editing. He talked about the first reactions from Sphere; about the premiere, which would be in September—the date was now fixed. He talked about its release, and its promotion. He outlined his strategy: this time, he said, with a little benign smile, he wanted the kudos and the box office. He wanted record-breaking returns, and he also wanted the Oscars.

He talked on and on, and the more he talked, the more distanced Helene felt. She found it hard to believe, now, that she had once been so influenced by Thad. On the set, at least, she had never doubted him; off" the set, she had sometimes laughed at him, and even mocked him, but she had felt, even then, a respect.

Now she wondered: was it respect she had felt, or was it dependence? She was not sure; all she knew was that it had left her, and in its place was a colder emotion. She admired him still, but she felt she did not like him very much. She could feel the force of his egocentricity, the pressure of his will, and now something within her resisted it, and resented it.

Thad does not know me. He does not understand me at all: the thought came to her, quite suddenly, the thought, and the rider that came with it. Thad not only did not know or understand her, he had no wish to do so.

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Who she was, and what she was, were quite unimportant to him. To Thad, she was a vehicle, or an instrument, and that was all.

She leaned forward and she interrupted him. "Thad," she said, "do you need me in your films? Do you?"

He looked a little taken aback; slightly irritated that she should have cut him off in full flow.

"Need you?" He tilted his head a httle to one side. "Of course I need you. I created you."

"You created me?" She stared at him in disbelief.

Thad gave a small rusty giggle.

"Well, obviously, you have the right face. You have the right voice—or you do now. And you can act. So, yes, I suppose you could say I needed you. I just never thought of it like that."

"You always work with me." She hesitated, and the conversation with Gregory Gertz came back into her mind. "Couldn't you work with someone else?"

"No. Why? That's a dumb question. I work with you. I want it to be you. You're—" He paused, as if searching for the exact term, and failing to find it. He began to smile in a way Helene disliked, craftily.

"What am I?"

Thad gave a small impatient sigh. "You're mine, " he said, as if it were too obvious to be stated.

There was a silence. Helene looked at him. Just for a moment, something in the way he spoke, something in his expression, made her afraid. Then the fear passed, and she realized she was angry, angrier than she had been for many years. She looked at Thad coldly, and under her gaze, he began—to her surprise—to blush. It was something she had seen him do on only one other occasion; she knew he was remembering it, just as she, then, remembered it too.

He was thinking about that room in a small house in Trastevere five years ago, which was the only occasion when Thad had ever demonstrated the fact that he wanted the same kind of possession as other men. Except that it had not been the same kind of possession, it had been an ugly desperate and distorted version of it, sex in a fairground mirror, sex that was both pathetic, and crazed.

They had never discussed that episode. It was a taboo between them that they both understood. Thad had never attempted a repetition of it; Helene, revolted, but pitying, had behaved, always, as if it had never happened.

Now, suddenly, the memory of it lay between them again. Helene again heard him pant; try to speak and then stop; she felt again the slow, the terribly slow realization that he was not just filming her anymore, and that

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something was beginning to go horribly wrong. In a car accident, she had heard, people's sense of time slowed. They saw an eighty-mile-an-hour collision very slowly, at a dreamlike pace: and it had been like that then. The slow, extremely slow, realization of exactly what Thad was trying to do with his hand-held camera, in which the film still whirred.

She had kicked him then, hard, in the pit of the stomach. And he had stopped, and then he had done precisely what he was doing now. He had looked at her, and she had watched the blood seep up his neck and suffuse his face. Then he had taken his glasses oflf, and rubbed at his eyes. He looked defenseless without his glasses. The skin around his eyes was flabby, and pale, unexposed to the hght. He made her think of a turtle, with its shell ripped oflF, and then—just when she had been thinking that— he had, briefly, cried.

He was not crying now. But he had removed his glasses and was rubbing his eyehds irritably, as if some speck of dust were hurting him. Not a word was said. After a pause, Thad put his glasses back on. He looked at her slightly uncertainly.

"I guess you know that anyway," he said.

Helene stood up. She knew she could not bear to be in the room a moment longer. She could not bear to sit and hsten to Thad, who wanted to own her, and who perhaps believed that he did. "I have to go now," she said, and walked out onto the balcony.

She stood there for a moment, looking at the view. The house, hke her own, was set in the hills. In the bowl of the valley below lay Los Angeles itself. It was six o'clock in the evening, and the air felt metallic and hot. Over the city, in a band between buildings and sky, lay a layer of smog. It was purplish, shaded by the softening light to a delicate rose. It looked as if the sky were bruised.

Thad came up behind her. She turned around, and he pushed a large and heavy envelope into her hands. It looked like the size of a script; it was the weight of a script. Helene felt a sense of despair. She looked up at Thad.

"What is it?"

"It's the reason I asked you to come. You didn't think I wanted to talk about Lewis, did you—or the movie? Why should I? All that's in the past."

"It's a new script?"

"I finished it last week." He stopped. "It's the second part of Ellis. There will be a third part, too, eventually. It's a trilogy."

Helene stared at him. "You never told me that," she began slowly. "I thought ..."

"You thought there was only the first part." Thad had now recovered.

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He giggled. "That's all right. So did everyone. Except me. I knew it was the first of three all along. I just wanted to keep it to myself for a while. A secret, you know?" He paused. "No one else knows, not yet. Not even Sphere. I'll send it to Scher next week. But you'll be the first to read it. Don't tell anyone. Don't tell Lewis even. Not yet."

Helene drew in her breath. She thought about time. Two more films; two more parts. It would be next year at the earliest before they could begin on this project. One year. Two years. Three possibly, to complete the trilogy, even four. Four years like the last four years; four years in which, whatever else she did, she would be tied to Thad.

Thad shifted slightly on his feet; he glanced up at her. And then, immediately, she knew—why he had shown her Ellis, why he had asked her back here.

"You've heard about Gregory Gertz's film, haven't you?" She looked at Thad directly. "You've heard about it, and you've heard I may do it, and that's why you called. It's why you've given me this."

"No, it isn't." Thad's mouth set in an obstinate hne. "You can work with Gertz if you want to. If you like making movies with a jerk like that, go ahead. He doesn't have any talent. He isn't an artist. He doesn't understand you the way I do, but why should that matter? It's work. But you have to do this script first. It's all Hned up for next spring. I've worked out a shooting schedule—everything. And Sphere will give us the go-ahead. We'll be able to capitalize on the success of part one ..."

"Next spring. I see."

Helene turned away. She began to walk down the steps that led from the balcony to the garden. She always came into the house this way; she always left it this way. She had never seen the rest of the house. Below the large room where they always sat, there was a whole floor of other rooms, ten, maybe twelve, of them. As she went down the steps, she passed their windows: the shades, as always, were fully lowered.

She stopped for a moment at the foot of the steps. She did not even know if Thad used those rooms, she realized. Maybe he slept in one of them, maybe not. Maybe he worked in them. Maybe they were empty. She knew no more about his house, she realized, than she did about Thad himself.