Stages (35 page)

“I’m fine, how are you?” the boy wonder replied generously.

“No complaints,” Janet said, relaxing. “Richard, here’s someone I wanted you to meet because she likes your work. Veronica Simmons.”

“Hi,” Richard said, extending his hand a bit tentatively.

“It’s really nice to meet you,” said Veronica, taking it.

“Excuse me,” Richard said, “but I always feel a little awkward meeting a celebrity—having somebody tell me what the person’s name is when I know it perfectly well, along with the face.”

“I haven’t got the ego to
expect
to be
known,
”
Veronica said. “In fact it makes me feel weird when people…you know, take for granted who I am.”

“I’ve seen all your pictures,” Richard said to Veronica. “Some of them I’ve seen twice.”

“I only saw your film once,” Veronica replied. “But it’s stayed with me. Every scene, and a lot of the lines. There’s so many movies that go right out of my head, completely, like a book you know you read in high school but can’t remember at all.”

“
My Antonia,
” Janet put in. Her head jerked to the left.

“Oh, look,” she said. “There’s one of those two Israeli guys that’ve been making such a splash. I know someone who has something she’d like to sneak to them…. Excuse me.”

“Sure,” said Richard.

“See you,” said Veronica.

“She smells a deal,” Richard said as soon as Janet was out of earshot. He scratched his scruffy blond beard thoughtfully.

“I’d offer her a percentage—and a bib,” Veronica said.

“She did make kind of a mess of herself, didn’t she?” Richard said. “That should be a lesson to me. Don’t plot while you’re eating.”

“Oh, it’s all such a game,” Veronica sighed. “It’s a mistake ever to take any of it seriously.”

“A lot of games are taken seriously when there’s money or ego riding on them,” Richard said.

“Promise me you won’t laugh,” Veronica said. “But the truth is, I don’t do what I do out of ego, or even for the money. I do it…” She seemed unsure if she’d be forgiven after making this confession. “Out of love for…
art
.”

Apparently Richard wasn’t taken aback.

“Art, ego,” he said. “Is there a difference? Look at Picasso. All those naked women with vases and mandolins. He was driven to keep visual records of his sex life. Plenty of guys with Polaroid cameras have done the same thing. It’s all maniacal ego. Sometimes it’s also considered art.”

“Are you telling me I’m out of my mind with ego?” Veronica asked.

“You’re in L.A., aren’t you?” Richard replied.

“So are you,” said Veronica.

“I can’t deny it,” Richard said. “Look. My father lives with my mother in Clearwater, Florida. There’s a vice-president in the bank my father uses who thinks he’s a song writer. My father sent me a batch of his stuff to see if it could go anywhere. Try and imagine a love song with lyrics about a guy cooking hamburgers on a charcoal grill, with his kids playing on the swings, and the wife mixing up potato salad—and God up above watching it all, benevolently.”

“Sounds like ‘Highway to Heaven,’” Veronica said.

“Doesn’t it?” said Richard. “The point is, this bank guy is in Clearwater, Florida, with his grill and all, and I’m here. I could have lived out my life in Clearwater too. What can you say, except ‘There but for the grace of ego go I.’”

“You make me feel so good about myself—and my work,” Veronica said. “No wonder Marilyn Monroe was attracted to Arthur Miller.”

“I think Arthur Miller was more attracted to Marilyn Monroe,” Richard said.

“Maybe it was mutual,” Veronica said.

They stood there looking at each other for a long moment, both of them wearing on their faces little, hesitant smiles.

*

“I think you should know something,” Richard said dreamily.

“Mm,” said Veronica in a voice just as cozy. “What’s that?”

“I’ve always wanted to sleep with a movie star.”

“Really, even when you were in kindergarten?”

“Almost that long. When I was in kindergarten all I wanted was to be rich and famous. That’s what I told the teacher. Her name was Miss Edgar. She was young…and busty. She was very indulgent with me. Indulgence is a characteristic of the young and busty.”

“I guess it’s human nature to want to be rich and famous,” Veronica murmured. “But wanting to sleep with a movie star—where’s the challenge in doing anything so
easy
?”
Richard’s arm lay across her stomach. The golden hairs on it were standing up, as if from static electricity. She felt the pressure of his fingers underneath one of her breasts, and his thumbnail was ever so gently drawing lines around her taut, sweetly aching nipple.

“Fantasy is my life blood,” Richard said.

“Being in the movies doesn’t make you any better or worse in bed,” Veronica told him.

“Wanna bet?” His hand was moving slowly down her stomach. She felt him touching the corolla of her pubic hair, and squirmed a little in spite of herself.

“There is a difference,” he said into her ear.
“
You
are different. You’re the embodiment of a million guys’ dreams.”

“Is this for them, then?” Veronica asked. She felt him probing her, slipping into her with perfect ease. Every breath she was taking felt like joy surging against the inside of her chest.

“If I’m at all different,” she said, “it’s because I’ve made myself that way. What makes people the same…what they have in common…is the whole world of things…that they never have the courage to
do.
”

Richard withdrew his hand. He sighed and smiled at her, broadly.

“People don’t appreciate what they’ve got,” he said. “The more you take for granted, the less there will be for you. They wonder why nothing ever happens to them, and the irony is that things do, but they don’t appreciate them ’cause they have no
sense
of
wonder.
That’s all that’s made me different.”

He pushed back the sheets.

“Here, look,” he said. Richard rolled over onto his back, and his erection stood straight up, gleaming in the morning light. “It still impresses me now as much as it did when I was twelve,” he said.

“Speaking of having the courage to
do
things,” Veronica said. She curled her fingers around him, and felt a tickle from the hairs on his chest as she moved her body across his.

She made him crazy. He moaned and came in heavy spurts.

Afterward, she lay atop him for a while, her skin damp and sensitive as they kissed, her heart flickering.

It was almost noon before they got up. They had gone to Richard’s rented house in Laurel Canyon, and very little there was his—his clothes all bunched up in one closet, and his typewriter, surrounded on its steel stand by what looked like a volcanic output of paper. While Richard was in the bathroom, Veronica, wearing one of his sweatshirts and her panties, and with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, lifted the cover of a manuscript box with one of her ruby-colored fingernails. She saw inside the title page of a screenplay.
Hello,
she said to herself with a secret smile,
what’s this?

“It’s nothing,” Richard said to her later, while they were eating a breakfast of three-day-old croissants. “It’s just something I was working on that I’ve decided to put on the shelf.”

“What’s it about?” Veronica asked. “It can’t be about
nothing.
”

Richard shrugged. He said, “It’s about a retarded girl who gets herself out of a state mental institution, and then gets married to a retarded guy—so they can try and make it on their own. Sort of a combination of
The Snake Pit
and
David and Lisa.
Box office, it ain’t. So sayeth my agent.”

“Why don’t you let me take a look at it?” Veronica suggested. She picked up her coffee cup and held it in front of her with both hands, her elbows resting on the marble-topped table, her gaze steady. Richard pursed his lips.

“Nobody’s seen it except my agent,” he said, still sounding rather doubtful. “Then again, it hasn’t been
shopped
or anything,” he added with a throwaway note of optimism. “I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm if you read the first couple of pages….
”

Boy oh boy,
he was thinking,
do I know what I’m doing or what?

He sure was right, he told himself, to dig that screenplay out last night and leave it where she’d be sure to find it.

59

“You’ve known this individual—what, a week?—and already you want to make a picture with him?” Victor was saying.

Veronica nodded solemnly. Solemnity, and steadiness of purpose were vital, she had learned, when you were dealing with Victor, for he was not a typical agent. Though he was not really old—maybe he was forty-five—Victor was old school in a show business sense. He had styled himself after Noel Coward. His clothes were mostly from Dunhill, and he always wore a carnation in his lapel. His hair was wavy and he wore it closely cropped and oiled, in the fashion of the thirties. And like someone out of a thirties drawing-room comedy, Victor was constantly fidgeting with a cigarette. Watching him, you were afraid if you got him upset or even distracted, he’d go up in flames. Those who would have just as soon seen Victor burned to a crisp had to deal with his wit.

“But of course,” he said to Veronica with acidic elegance, “it makes perfect sense. Why shouldn’t you want to make a picture with this fellow? If Miss Streisand can make a movie with some hair burner she’s taken a shine to, why shouldn’t you do a film about Mongolism with a boy who got lucky with a screenplay that was little more than
Dead End
with the sentimentality edited out?”

“Look,” Veronica said. “I believe in this project. I really do. I’m willing to work for scale if I have to just to get it made.”

“I can’t understand why people can’t cohabitate anymore without also having to collaborate,” Victor said. “My young Mexican friend Miguel waters the lawn, and I encourage him as much as I can in that direction. He makes fewer longdistance phone calls, I find. But beyond that—”

“I’d want to make this movie even if I’d never met Richard,” Veronica insisted.

“Why don’t you just spend the weekend with him, at that mental institution, as you say you’re going to, among those people who I imagine all look like something out of a Diane Arbus photograph, and then tell me what your sentiments are?” Victor counseled her.

“I’m already committed,” Veronica replied. “I’m going there for the weekend
and
I’m making this movie.”

“You’re already
committed
,”
said Victor, looking as though he had just tasted the tobacco on his tongue, “to the mental institution. That
was
a deliberate pun, wasn’t it?”

Veronica nodded.

“It was an unforgivable one,” Victor replied, “except in the case of someone with your grosses, in which case all is forgiven. I suppose I shall have to yield. Perhaps I shall go mad myself, and do a remake of that Disney movie about the Mexican boy and his bull.
The Brave One.
With Miguel
The Brazen One
might be a more fitting title. Have you run this by Bruce yet, my dear?”

Bruce was Veronica’s manager and a Valium addict.

“Not yet,” Veronica replied.

“I would do so today if I were you,” Victor advised. “So he can get over the heartbreak before the Jewish holidays.”

“Victor,” Veronica said.

“Yes?”

“I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“That’s one thing you have in common with Miguel.”

“You’ve just got to trust me,” Veronica replied.

“That’s what Miguel tells me.”

“He doesn’t have my grosses, does he? I’ve never made a mistake, have I? I
know
when a part is right for me. I trust my instincts. And all my instincts say
this
part is right for me, Richard notwithstanding. My instincts say,
Do it,
and all you and Bruce have a right to say is
Okay.
”

“Are they your instincts or voices you hear at night?”

“All I’ve heard the last few nights is Richard breathing next to me, and I like that. But that doesn’t affect my judgment. Nothing does. And
nobody
.”

Victor lit an unfiltered Pall Mall. “All right,” he said. “We shall have, it seems, a
Love Story
for mental defectives—that may be an unnecessary distinction, now that I think about it. You’ve reached the stage in your career, my dear, where you can always get your way. It will be amusing to see what the next stage will be….”

*

Mel Harris, the director, had balked when Veronica announced that she wanted Richard on the set every day.