Stages (38 page)

The bill for the routine maintenance on Kathy’s 450SL was four hundred dollars and a few cents.

“What did you do? Root canal?” she asked the service manager.

“It was mostly the labor,” he replied. Putting Kathy’s American Express card through the wringer, he returned it to her. Kathy looked at the receipt to confirm the frightful total and then stuffed it in along with all the other American Express receipts that were now as numerous in her billfold as dollar bills once were.

“Bruce here worked on your car,” the service manager added. “He’s probably the best mechanic we’ve got.”

Kathy glanced at Bruce, who was getting himself a cup of instant soup from a machine. Bruce grinned at Kathy. He was wearing sunglasses with mirrored lenses and cowboy boots. It occurred to Kathy that he might be an actor waiting to be discovered, like Clint Eastwood working in the gas station. Of course it was one thing to pump gas and another thing to work on Mercedes Benz automobiles. So maybe this guy was a
serious
actor waiting to be discovered, or a very bad actor with a future ahead of him that California was going to alter in some bizarre way, like Ronald Reagan at the time he was doing “G.E. Theater.”

Facing off Bruce the mechanic’s enigmatic mirrored lenses with her own very expensive and very formidable Carrera design sunglasses, Kathy saw her own reflection on his face. For an instant, it seemed to her that the familiar infinity of mirror reflecting mirror finally had moved, along with all the other phenomena, to Southern California.

“Classy car you got there, lady,” Bruce said with a smile.

“It’s the company’s car,” Kathy pointed out. “I could never afford it on my own. And I wouldn’t want it even if I could.”

“I think the car is really
you,
though,” Bruce replied. “You know what I’m saying?”

“If you mean that as a compliment, thanks,” said Kathy. “But I’m not a native Californian, so I’m not really the car I drive. I’m from Queens, and at heart I am what I eat.”

Bruce drank off his cup of soup, letting a little of it dribble down his chin, and then wiping his chin with the back of his hand.

He’s closer to Clint Eastwood than he is to Ronald Reagan,
Kathy thought.

“Seeya ’round,” Bruce said, and he turned and walked back out to the service bays.

“He’s something of a character, isn’t he?” Kathy said to the service manager when she was sure Bruce was out of earshot. “How does he see to work on cars with those sunglasses on?”

“A good mechanic is hard to find,” the service manager said. “I’ve learned not to ask too many questions. The last one we had who was as good as this guy used to travel with chickens.”

“Chickens?”

“Yeah. Hens. Six of ’em. And one rooster. He’d keep them in his car. With all the windows rolled up. He’d go out there and sit with them when it was time to eat his lunch. The boys said that the whole backseat was full of chicken shi—uh, droppings.”

“What does Bruce keep in his car?” Kathy asked. “Baby alligators?”

“No,” the service manager replied. “Bruce’s car is full of Reagan-Bush bumper stickers. He’s an absolute fanati—”

“Please,” said Kathy holding up her hand. “Don’t tell me any more. Can I have my keys now? I have to go check out a new listing.”

“Here you go,” said the manager, handing them to her. “Come back and see us again real soon.”

“I will.”

That Bruce was actually kind of attractive in his oddball way,
Kathy thought as she started her car.
Maybe I’m getting too used to it out here.
She switched on the air conditioning, and her body was bathed immediately in its small, cool jet-streams. What a consolation this car was. If she didn’t talk to her mother twice a week, Kathy thought, she’d probably be able to rid herself of her lingering self-consciousness and stop parking it two blocks away whenever she took Alison to temple.

A moment later Kathy’s thoughts were interrupted by a tapping on her window. Startled, she turned and saw yet another pair of sunglasses staring her in the face.

Lowering the window, she heard her name spoken.

“Kathy? Kathy Lowenthal?”

“Oh, my God,” said Kathy.

It was David Whitman. Kathy couldn’t believe the change in him. His beard was gone, he was much thinner—he looked almost gaunt in the face, but that, Kathy assumed, was because she’d never seen him before without the beard—and his curly hair was no longer black. It was the same off-blond color one of Kathy’s aunts had switched to recently. David was wearing a silk sports jacket and a polo shirt of that variety so expensively made that each stitch, like a diamond, seems to have its own setting.

Recovering from her astonishment, Kathy turned off her car’s engine and leaped out of it, shouting, “David,
David
!”

They grabbed each other and whirled around and around in the parking lot, hugging and kissing.

“I knew you were out here, but I never dreamed I’d run into you,” Kathy said when their whirlwind of affection had settled down.

“What are
you
doing out here?” David asked.

“Selling real estate,” Kathy replied.

“You’re kidding.”

“Who would kid about a thing like real estate?”

“How long have you been out here?”

“Going on three years now. I got married. Then I got divorced. Then I came out here with my little girl, to seek my fortune. You know, the usual. Just like Veronica Simmons!”

“Trying to follow in Bigfoot’s footsteps, huh?”

“Don’t say that, you stinker. Paula was a size seven and a half and I’m an eight. You better be careful. If anybody heard you saying anything about Veronica Simmons. She is a
star,
and you’re just an
agent.
”

“You’ve got the facts right, Kath, but you’re twisting them around. I’m an agent, and she’s just a star. And I’m also a producer now.”

“Okay, okay, so you’re
both
on top of the heap. All kidding aside, I think it’s wonderful what’s happened to you guys. Wait’ll I tell my mother I saw you. She’ll
plotz.
No, come to think of it, she’ll ask me, ‘Is he married?’ Are you?”

“No, but I have a real commitment. I’ve been with the same woman for a long time now. Kath, she’s the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. Really. Seriously. We’re even working together, on a new movie project. It’s going to be incredible. And you won’t believe this, but we’re going to get you-know-who to star in it,”

“Not Paula…”

“No, Arlene Dahl.”

“David, this is just so fantastic—you and Paula making a movie together. When did you see her? I haven’t spoken to her in years, I’d love to know how she is, I mean, really—not what you see in the magazines.”

David sniffed a couple of times and rubbed his nose with his fingers, and Kathy was about to say,
Ahah, the smog bothers you too,
but before she could David said, “I haven’t actually seen her. I spoke to her manager on the phone, and I sent a copy of the screenplay out to her—she’s on location—but there’s no way she’s not going to want to do this. Any actress would want to do it. I’m so sure of this project in fact, that I’m pumping my own money into it.”

David went on for another five minutes about his movie while Kathy just stood there nodding and smiling. It seemed to her that he couldn’t get the words out fast enough in his enthusiasm. He kept remembering things about it that he had to pour out all at once. There was something in the way he was talking that made Kathy blink, something that flashed and almost moved before your eyes, like the sunlight glinting on the automobile bumpers all around them.

Through the rush of David’s words, though, Kathy could make out one thing pretty clearly. She kept listening to David, and she kept thinking,
This stinks.

61

Bruce Ward stepped gingerly over the tangle of cables and rapped on the door of the Winnebago. An elfin fellow with a face framed by a receding hairline and a conscientiously trimmed beard, he had been Veronica Simmons’ manager for three years. And they’d had an excellent relationship, he thought, agreeing on just about everything. Bruce knew there were some problems with the script that the Whitman organization had sent, but those problems were more than outweighed by the accompanying offer. Two million dollars. Or one million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars more than Bruce had been offered for any of his clients, ever. Veronica had promised that she would be finished reading the script by this morning. It was almost 6:00 A.M. The Winnebagos and the rented Ryder trucks were lined up along Bleecker Street, and the lighting crew had almost finished setting up in front of the little Italian bakery where the morning’s shooting would take place.

Veronica would already be in makeup and costume, and Bruce hoped to have everything settled in the few minutes before she had to start work. He’d been in a state of mild apprehension ever since his alarm had gone off, and he would be relieved to have this over and done with. His face twitched when he heard Veronica’s voice saying, “Come in.”

Stepping into the Winnebago, Bruce was surprised to see Veronica in the kitchenette. She was ready to go all right—wearing that wig of black hair that looked like skeins of yarn piled up and the Marks-a-Lot eyeliner and the bakery uniform with its mini-apron—but she was not saying her lines to herself, which she was almost always doing at this point. Instead she was cranking away at that crazy ice cream maker of hers. The script from Whitman, Bruce saw, was sitting on the coffee table.

“Not more coffee ice cream?” he said.

“This is a special batch I’m making,” Veronica replied, in the voice of the character she was playing, Gina Iantosca. It was uncanny, even after you thought you’d gotten used to it. She actually could have been one of the women who lived in this neighborhood, with their daughters in the plaid parochial school uniforms and their cousins in the Mafia. As well as he knew Veronica, Bruce still felt a stranger to her in some ways. A talent like hers was and always would be unknowable, and inexplicable. That was why
People
magazine, profiling her, had wound up sounding like the Carvel guy getting through one of his commercials in fits and starts, and had been driven even to quote some bit-part nobody who’d known her in college to the effect that “being a star is like what Truman Capote wrote about Marlon Brando once. You sit on top of a mountain—made of ice cream.”

“Did you see Nan around?” Veronica was saying. “I’d like her to see if she can get some dry ice—that’s the only way I’ll be able to ship this.”

“No, I haven’t seen her,” Bruce replied. “Why don’t you just leave a note for her?”

“Yeah, I guess I’ll have to,” Veronica said. “There, this is ready. Could you hand me one of those gallon containers in the closet?”

Looking at his watch, Bruce said, “Why do you have to be doing this
now.
”

“You said you wanted my reaction to the Whitman project this morning.”

Bruce removed his glasses and looked at his star client as if she were making snowballs in a threatening way. “This is your reaction?” he replied. “Making more coffee ice cream?”

“I’m sending it to David,” said Veronica. “With my love. I don’t know what else to do.”

Bruce felt gripped around his throat. His glance fell to the script on the coffee table and rose again to Veronica’s placid, olive-skinned face, with its heavy, blackened eyelashes.

Already pleading, Bruce said to her, “What are you saying to me?”

“You’ve read this script,” Veronica replied.

“Of course I’ve read it. I know it’s not perfect…yet. I know it has some problems, but none that—”

“It has one central problem,” Veronica said. She was packing ice cream into the container, pressing it down hard with the back of a heavy spoon. “It’s no good,” she said. Then she licked her fingers.

Bruce sat down on the sofa, hard. He rubbed the indentations on the sides of his nose that his glasses had made.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said.

“I was really surprised, Bruce, you know?” said Veronica. “That you and Victor would hand me something like this. A woman whose truckdriver husband gets killed—that’s
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—
who starts driving a truck herself, and winds up with a whole fleet of trucks and a daughter on drugs—that’s
Mildred Pierce,
roughly—then she’s presto on a ranch in a riding outfit giving orders to a bunch of cowpokes—that’s Barbara Stanwyck in
The Big Valley.
The only thing that’s original or interesting about this script is the dialogue, and that’s because it sounds like eighth-graders translating Latin into English.”

“So they can hire new screenwriters,” Bruce said. “I’m sure they’ll give you any changes you want.”

“It isn’t just the script, Bruce, it’s the people involved. This director—he works with detergents and underarms—and the rest of them, who
are
they, anyway? They couldn’t even have come from TV—and at least with television, what you see is what you get.”

“Honey, sweetie, let me try to explain my and Victor’s position here.
Our
position. Two. Million. Dollars. That’s what we’re talking,
two million.
That’s what you’ll get for this and that’s what you’ll be getting from now on, upward of two million, even. That puts you in another realm, Ronnie, in another
dimension.
”