Hollywood Boulevard (28 page)

    "I am going to a hotel to get some rest. Good night."

    "You're in a hotel," I said, but not loudly. He nodded once and left. "He's in a hotel," I told myself, finding that enormously funny. "He's already in a hotel!" I started to laugh, but not for long.

    Now what? The vacuum left in Andre's wake pressed in on the pit of my stomach, and cold radiated out of me like I was sinking into a swamp and couldn't possibly survive the night, the hour, even the next five minutes. It was a familiar miasma: the mire of other people and my utter inability to swim successfully among them. Darkness spread in me, a heavy black blanket. I did not want that blanket on top of me. I did not want that blanket smothering me ever again. I lay on the bed in an agony of flailing emotions: doubt, fear, and failure, a loathsome stew of chaotic yearning with no end in sight.

    What did I dread so in Andre's leaving? What could I do to not smother in my sudden solitude? And these people are telling me to go back to work! Look at me! How could I ever think I could be an actor? That arrogant Campion and all the others this afternoon . . . Jonas Campion . . . I felt filthy just thinking his name, yet what is he? A harmless businessman, he's successful, so what? No, wrong, he is
not
harmless; none of them are. I wish I could tell Fits. I
should
tell Fits. He would know Jonas Campion's tone; he'd know the presumption of the producer class, "gilded pigs," he called them. And he knew Kurt Tayker. He had a special loathing for "that pus- brain prick," he called him. Fits told me he'd once asked Kurt if he had a wife, and if his wife could stand him. Kurt's response? A shrug. Fits was an insect to Kurt; the only difference between him and all the other insects was that Fits wouldn't stay in line. Maybe Fits could walk me out of this quicksand.

    Or should I call Billy? And say what? Rescue me; I've been abandoned? I looked at the clock by the bed; it wasn't that late, just midnight. Maybe I should call Joe. Oh, that had to be the bottom line of desperation.

    I grabbed the phone and dialed Fits. I got my voice under control, "I'm a mess," I said.

"Move over," Fits answered.

" Where are you; is there a free stool at that bar?"

"I don't know. I can't see that far."

"Fits . . ."

    "Darlin', I'm sitting here smoking a little weed, petting my favorite cat, with a six a.m. call staring me in the eye."

    "Oh. You should be getting your beauty rest."

    "But I ain't. So what's the hurt?"

    I let out a hiccup. I told him about Andre walking out, the meeting, and the proposal I replace Luce Bouclé, adding, who Andre'd fired today, and that he had probably done the whole thing on purpose to trick me into taking the part.

    Fits was characteristically unmoved. "I don't get it," he said. "What's so bad about jumping into the role? You took a vow or something, like a fast not to act? What is it,
religious
? I got an actor friend with bone cancer, sometimes the morphine doesn't do the trick, and she's on the way out and would give a hipbone to act one more time. Why? Who knows? Never quite showed them what she had, and now she finally
gets
acting and it's too late? Or am I bringing you down?"

    "That's terrible, Fits." I hiccupped loudly.

    "Is it? As bad as figuring out the business you gave your heart and soul to is filthy rotten stinking and you're good but not up to incorporating the stench into your immaculate worldview? We get used to it, darlin', we get used to it, and once we do it gets better; you only have to relearn how to breathe."

    "Fits . . ." I stopped myself from mentioning the Detective. I saw the whole thing through his eyes, and even I would have to laugh given Fits's probable take:
You slept with the law? Was his gun
on and everything; he hot or what? Then— bang— you try and jump your
old man? C'mon over and do me. Jesus, Ardennes, you're on a freakin' roll.
I'm hip. Not to the cop, maybe, but a good lay is a good lay. I guess.

    To my silence Fits said, "Okay, Andre walked out. Ya want me to come over and tuck you in, sing 'Kumbaya'? Ride, the storm, baby, ride the storm."

    "How long does it last, Fits?"

    "As long as it has to." He yawned loudly into the phone, and I saw his face as clearly as if he were seated next to me on the bed. "You figure out the dead roses?"

    "No . . . an admirer, I guess." He laughed, and we said good- night. Before hanging up he said he'd give me a call after work tomorrow. There
would
be a tomorrow. . . .

I 
came across some papers while clearing out the old Riverdale apartment. My mother was gone and I was left to sort through her and my father's effects. Her dying had been so sudden— a massive stroke— that there was a teacup and plate still on the kitchen table. She was a tea drinker like me— or me like her. My half- brother had been Dad's executor, which years ago had taken care of what he'd meant Alec and Arlene to have. I called them both to see if they wanted anything else, like Daddy's military dress uniform and two pistols from the war. Both said they didn't think so, but then Alec called back to say he would stop by if that was all right. Considering he lived in Maryland he would hardly be stopping by, but I said sure, okay. Arlene chatted for a few minutes but had no interest whatsoever in revisiting Daddy's past. She did say she'd seen my movies and that her husband thought me "top drawer." Arlene was leading what my mother would call a purposeless life of expensive distractions.

    The apartment walls echoed with the silence of my missing family. The little stage by the windows would hold no more performances, at least not by me. My audience was gone. Mom and I went to see every one of my movies; I'd fly back to New York for one day sometimes just so we could go together. Sometimes I had to warn her that she might not like what she saw. Joe joined us once or twice. Anyhow, I sat on the floor by the stage leafing through Dad's army papers, thinking I'd make a bundle for Alec of his war history, when I came across a disturbing couple of documents. There had been a complaint, all the way up to the Pentagon, against Dad regarding what had gone on in the Ardennes Forest. A wounded soldier, it seemed, had been left behind to die, to bleed to death, I imagined, on the pine needles amid spotty snow and the roar of German guns, the day my father led the others out. I looked up at the empty stage. "Dad?"

    My mother died nine months earlier, and I'd been paying the maintenance fees on the apartment. My accountant was after me to sell or rent, so I was there to clear the place out, a chore I would gladly have put off another six months and equally gladly gone on paying. Joe and I were on the rocks we'd be shipwrecked on until we finally ended the misery, so I planned to stay in my old bedroom rather than in the West Side apartment among our anger and lusty hope, at least for a day or two. I had a fire going in the fireplace, though it was spring. I wish I'd left the old army papers alone. When I read the complaint I felt as if I'd sailed out of my body. Dad had always been modest and pooh- poohing of the whole Ardennes affair, never talked directly about his feelings about the war, and that incident in particular. "Soldiers don't discuss what they've seen," my mother cautioned— more than once to my prying questions. She let me know not to expect too much from Daddy in that way. He did tell me of the first time he'd seen a dead German soldier. The corpse had been abused by passing GIs: propped against a tree, a rigor mortis hand held up by a branch, pointing the way for the Allied troops coming up behind. What sickened my dad was seeing that they'd placed the dead soldier's family photos in his other hand. He said you had to respect your enemy, and the dead. Now here I was reading a complaint that said he'd abandoned one of his own.

    I right away called Joe. He took the subway up, and we sat in the apartment after I showed him the report, then had sex in my childhood bedroom and slept cramped together in the twin bed. We went to a diner for breakfast the next day, the same one where I used to hang out with my friends. We talked sweetly, steered clear of any
topics of disruption
, and he told me to come home that night and to quit talking to the dead. "Most people don't have heroes for daddies anyhow, Ardennes," he said. I felt the space where he left out the words that I should grow up.

    We kissed on the corner near the subway entrance and I went back to the apartment that had been my home. But what was home now? Riverdale? L.A., where most of my work was centered? Or the small West Side flat with Joe? By then we could have afforded a bigger place, maybe even a three- bedroom. But it would be on my dime and that apparently did not sit well with Joe. My grandmother once told me a man does not want a woman supporting him. That sounded like prehistoric news to me, and still does, but I suppose there's something to it in a never- make- it- to- the- top- of- the- brain sort of way. Did Joe think I was trying to emasculate him? Why would I do that? I adored his penis— in a non- Freudian sense. He didn't act insecure; why would a smart, talented guy care where the rent money came from? Dottie once said, "The caveman is there underneath every one of them, Ard, honey, they just put loincloths and leather over that detail. Keep the info tucked in your mind so you don't accidentally get clubbed." We'd both laughed.

    I returned to the pile of papers on the floor and found I hadn't read the whole story. The case against my dad had been dismissed after all. No verification, no corroboration to the complaint, the army report went, concluding no wrong done. My dad always said the army never admits a mistake, and it had decorated him, so, while it looked as if the situation ended there, I had a lingering sense that my dad might have done something less than on the up- and- up: like left a wounded soldier on the forest floor. He didn't desert because he went on to other battles. But you're not supposed to walk away from a fight. But are you required to commit suicide?

    I started imagining the scene— colored by too many war movies watched growing up with Dad narrating, telling me what was fake, what rang true in a battle scene, or with the guys sitting around waiting for orders, which, he let me know, was mostly what soldiers did when they weren't being shot at or bombed. So I pictured him with the dying man. Half his men thinking: The guy's a goner, no saving him, load him up on morphine and get the hell outta here before it's all of us lying with holes in our guts. And the others, the altruistic half, saying, Captain, we can't leave him like that. Make a stretcher out of a blanket and carry him out— under heavy assault.

    And Dad standing there, figuring what to do with the soldier— just a kid, who'd blacked out again anyway, so at least he couldn't hear his fate being decided by a twenty soldier- year- old newly minted U.S. Army captain. The greatest moral dilemma of Dad's young life, maybe of his whole life, and what was right and what was wrong and couldn't someone else make the decision for him? If it was a horse, he could shoot it. He could pull out his gun to force any soldiers who objected to leaving the good- looking kid behind (he would be good- looking in the movie version, to wring out one more tear). So, did Captain Thrush give the order to retreat? Who would have ratted out whatever happened that day? Who talked out of school? Which soldier under Dad's command was bitten by remorse or doubts or post- traumatic stress or plain old fear? Who had a conscience that wouldn't leave him alone? The documents in my hand didn't say.

    Did my father kneel down briefly by the unconscious maybe already dead kid and say,
Sorry. Soldier, be at peace
, and then give the order to move out? Is that what happened? Or did he pass sentence and live with that the rest of his life so that the decision made him a better man when it could easily have gone the other way and turned him into a mean and haunted cynic, even a criminal? Had Daddy lived his whole life with an awful secret buried in his heart?

    I was left with a tugging undercurrent, a nagging doubt that he might have been a quitter— at least in that one instance— in the midst of a battle no one had excused him from fighting. And if he was, wasn't I one too — just a plain old common ordinary quitter?

    It turned out Alec didn't come up after all, and I was relieved. The thought of spending a night in the apartment with him had made me uneasy. I ended up sending him the uniform. I carried the pistols down to the West Side on the subway and stuck them in a shoe box, with the plan to sell them to a World War II gun buff. I didn't, and for all I know Joe still has them somewhere in his life.

    I don't know what made me think of that episode in the Ardennes, though it has long been there at my emotional fingertips, rearing up at the worst possible moments— like now— to remind me that I can never be certain. But through the fog of all the doubting and smothering I was able to see that Fits, for all his nonchalance, had caught me and was there for me. Fits would be there for anyone in trouble. He'd have come over if I'd asked, or I could have gone to him. Not a thing was solved, but there
was
Fits, and that was a candle glow in the dark. And this brought up the Detective, my supposed protector in what was or was not a real situation of someone stalking me. It was close on one a.m. Where was Andre now? Probably sound asleep wherever he'd checked in for the night. Was Andre a glow in the dark? I'd been careful never to test him. Of course he was, at least as a director. . . .