West of Sunset (28 page)

He'd done nothing strenuous, yet his arm throbbed. He rubbed it as if that might get rid of the ache, opened and closed one hand experimentally. A dull pang like heartburn made him wince and grit his teeth.

“Blast it,” he said, and groped his way to a stool.

The darkness held off. In minutes he was fine, just clammy, blotting his brow with his handkerchief. He could stand, walk.

“Mister,” the clerk stopped him. “Your cigarettes.”

The doctor called it a spasm, not an actual attack. He upped his dosage to the limit and told him he needed to quit smoking. No sex, no stairs. The most important thing was rest. He shouldn't work more than a few hours a day.

Sheilah didn't think he should be alone and moved him into her spare bedroom.

“All it took was a heart attack,” he joked.

He didn't feel weak but, like Stahr, distrusted his heart, knowing it was faulty. He stuck the unopened pack in a drawer, stopped drinking his Cokes. He couldn't send Frances to rescue the half-pint and for the first time in his life became a bona fide teetotaler. His only vices now were Mildred's pies and poring over yesterday's pages when he couldn't sleep.

The voice was right. The novel was solid. He should have worried yet he was madly happy. He wasn't mistaken. Three hours a day wasn't enough. The room was too small. There was no desk, there was barely room for a chair. Frances sat by his head like a nurse, taking dictation in shorthand. At noon she ran the new pages around the corner to his place and came back with fresh typescript. His schedule slipped to February, March at the latest. Max didn't care. He'd already missed his deadline by three years.

It was just a mild episode, not an attack, and I'm feeling much better,
he wrote Scottie.
I want your mother to have a good Christmas, so while you're down there please don't mention it. Be especially patient with her and with your grandmother. They've had a trying year.

For several weeks he didn't leave the apartment, and then, Friday the thirteenth, he and Sheilah trekked over the pass to Pep and Eileen's in North Hollywood for a dinner party. The weather was warm, and they sat in the backyard around a trestle table while on a great stone barbecue Pep roasted woodcock he'd shot, telling them it was pigeon from Pershing Square. The talk was of London, three months into the Blitz. Sections of the East End had been leveled. To give them a sense of the destruction, Sheilah used Los Angeles as a stand-in.

“Imagine all of Hollywood and half of Beverly Hills gone.”

“With pleasure,” Dottie said.

Scott couldn't dance, and after dinner sat out with her, watching Alan and Sheilah and Bogie and Mayo swaying beneath the night sky. Dottie had been drinking scotch since they'd arrived and had reached a scowling, foul-mouthed state. He wasn't used to being the sober one and was ready to go home. On his lap desk today's pages waited.

“What a cunt,” she said.

“Stop.”

“Alan, I mean. Did I tell you, they cut my insides out. Snip snip.”

“I'm sorry.”

“They were all rotted anyway. Now he doesn't have to worry about having kids, the bugger. What about you?”

“What?”

“Kids.” She waggled a hand at Sheilah. “She's got all the right parts.”

“Oh, I don't know.”

“You should. Everyone should have kids.”

“I don't know if she wants them.”

“She's crazy. They'd be beautiful. You were beautiful.”

“Thank you,” he said. “You were too.”

“We should've had kids. To our beautiful children.”
Byooful.

She crashed her tumbler into his, spilling whiskey on the tablecloth. She dabbed her fingers in the wet spot and flicked droplets over her shoulder for luck.

“Look at him,” she said. “If I ever kill him, you'll know why.”

On the ride home he told Sheilah a bowdlerized version.

“I think I knew about the surgery.”

“I didn't,” he said.

“It's also going around that he's seeing another woman.”

“A woman.”

“Believe it or not.”

“No wonder she's angry.” He watched the shadows from the streetlights slide across her face. “She asked if we're going to have children.”

“Did she?”

“She did.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I didn't know if you wanted them.”

“I do,” she said, glancing at him, her smile a dare.

“She'll be happy to hear it.”

“I wouldn't go that far,” she said.

It was the last week before Christmas, and she needed her tree. He was still forbidden to lift anything, so Frances helped her get it in the stand. It stood a little crooked, topped with a gold star made in Japan. With a pair of pinking shears she pruned away the ragged branches until she was pleased with its shape. She'd listened to his boyhood tales and set bayberry candles on the mantel, nestled in the fresh-smelling boughs. At dusk she lit the wicks and the apartment might have been his Grandmother McQuillan's parlor, a dry snow falling outside.

For Scottie's big present, as a surprise he hired Frances's father to alter one of Sheilah's old furs, a silver fox she no longer wore. He'd spent his life in the business, a true professional. When she saw it on Frances, she wanted it back.

Friday they ventured out again, to a special press premiere at the Pantages:
This
Thing Called Love
, starring Melvyn Douglas and Rosalind Russell as newlyweds. The premise was at once quaint and risqué and utterly moronic. To make sure they were compatible, for the first three months the wife insisted they remain celibate. Scott savored his free chocolate bar and watched the audience as Stahr would have, concerned about the low turnout. Publicity should have known, it was too close to Christmas. With each cut the light from the screen jumped, revealing the pendulous chandeliers and gilded bas-relief on the ceiling. It might have been the season, but in their scale and splendor there was something religious about movie houses. Every day the faithful came by the millions to witness new parables. If the actors were their saints, what were the producers?

Melvyn Douglas tried every angle and in the end was on the verge of sweet success when he contracted a bad case of poison oak. He and the audience both had to settle for a rain check, a cheat Stahr would have caught in a story conference. With the logy indifference of the newly awoken, the crowd stretched and gathered its belongings. He stood and edged his way to the end of the row, and as he turned and started up the aisle behind Sheilah, the house lights flickered and an electric jolt sizzled up his arm into his neck and lodged there, tingling.

He lurched and grasped an armrest to stay upright, managed a breath. Ahead, Sheilah kept going.

“Sheilo. Wait.”

She glanced back, puzzled, unsure what he was doing, then seemed to understand and came to save him. She took his elbow, steadying him as the crowd filed past.

“It's all right, I feel better now.”

“Do you want to sit?”

“They'll think I'm drunk.”

“They won't think anything.”

“I can walk.”

“Can you?”

He could, with her help, propping him on one side as if he had a bad leg. In the lobby there was a water fountain where he could take his pills. She watched him like a mother, her lips pursed in worry.

Outside on Hollywood Boulevard the night air revived him. He was fine. He could drive—“If no one's stolen the car,” he joked. There was no need to call the doctor. He was coming tomorrow anyway. What would he do for him, tell him to get some rest?

“When we get home you're going straight to bed,” she said.

“Yes ma'am.”

He took an extra spoonful of chloral and slept till noon.

He felt fine, just tired, his back kinked from sleep. He could have used a cup of coffee or a Coke. It was a brilliant day, the sun sharp on the carpet, twinkling off the ornaments on the lower branches. In London it was nighttime and bombs were falling around Edward R. Murrow, sirens keening. The docks were on fire. All of Hollywood, Sheilah had said, and half of Beverly Hills. They listened till the end, unable to turn away.

Around one Frances popped by with the mail from his place and Sheilah told her what had happened.

“Comment allez-vous, monsieur?”

“Bien. Ce n'est pas grave. Merci, Françoise. Au revoir.”

“Au revoir, monsieur.”

Sheilah made deviled ham sandwiches for them, and when she finished with the dishes, put on the last movement of Beethoven's
Eroica
Symphony. She was reading a big biography of him, and stretched out on the settee while Scott took the wing chair by the fireplace, leafing through the
Alumni Weekly
. The doctor was coming at two to take a new cardiogram. He expected another setback, and stewed, skimming an article on who was the greatest Tiger gridder of all time. While he was still at Newman he'd seen Hobey Baker run back a punt late in the Yale game and would never forget it. That year's team was legendary, undefeated. Three would die in the trenches, Baker in a plane crash. He'd thought of them as men but of course they were just boys.

To test his memory he took a pencil and in the margin tried to name the starting eleven. Prescott at center, Holloway and Stanton at guard, Dietz and someone at tackle. Chewing his lip, he filled in the roster as the
Eroica
built to its finish, Sheilah nodding to the ponderous chords, a symphonic bombardment inspired by another war. Why did Beethoven idolize Napoleon? He'd have to ask her.

The needle lifted, the arm retracting, clicking in place, leaving silence. Sheilah looked over and smiled. He smiled back to reassure her.

“Do we have anything sweet?” he asked.

“I have a Hershey bar if you want it. I'll get it, you stay there.”

She traded it for a kiss and retreated to the settee.

He opened it, broke off a pane, then snapped that into three pieces. The chocolate dissolved on his tongue.

“Sure you don't want some?”

“I'm sure.”

“It's delicious.”

“Shh.”

The backfield was easy, and the ends. Dietz and who else at tackle? Carroll, Coffin. Something with a hard C. He could see the team picture in the trophy case in Old Nassau, the unit insignias of the dead. Baker had died in his Spad, nosing it in. Collins. Carrington.

That quickly the bar was gone, the empty wrapper a shed skin. He stood to throw it away, the distraction just enough to dislodge the name—Carpenter!—when a tremor shocked his heart.

It was more than a twinge. A bolt shot up his arm, and his teeth clenched. A bubble burst in his shoulder, then a prickly fizzing in his neck, the tide of blood rising inside him, cutting off breath. He staggered, reaching for the mantel, caught it and hung on, seizing, trying to signal Sheilah in the mirror, the scent of pine and bayberry dizzying, calling him back to St. Paul, to the view from the attic window and his mother combing his hair with her fingers, his father's whiskery jaw. The room flickered, dimmed. Stahr was with him, standing to one side like a kindly spirit, his plane doomed to crash, his girl out there somewhere in the sprawling, limitless city. He tried to breathe but his throat closed and he gagged. He lost his grip and felt himself falling, flailing blindly, and with his last helpless thought before the darkness swallowed him, protested:
But I'm not done.

 • • • 

F
rom all accounts,
Sheilah wrote,
your father would have been very pleased with your words at his service. I wish I could have been there but Frances and I have been busy taking care of arrangements on this end. I'm hoping we can get together in New York late next week. I'm flying in on Tuesday and will be bringing some personal things of his I know he would have wanted you to have, including several notebooks and photo albums as well as the presents you sent. I'm not sure he had a chance to tell you how proud he was of your story in the
New Yorker.
He had poor Frances running all over town trying to find copies for his friends. She sends her condolences. We're still in shock, as I'm sure you are, and will be for some time. This last year he was taking better care of himself and was genuinely happy, working on his book. I miss the sound of him whistling away in the other room. The place is too quiet without him.

 • • • 

I
t hardly seems possible,
Zelda wrote,
that Daddy will no longer be coming East bearing gifts and stimulating news and audacious plans for the future. I am necessarily here for the time being after some difficulties owing to real rather than imaginary sadness. I would rather be at home but am decidedly poor company, I've been told, and must agree. The days are haunted with vagrant memories this holiest of seasons and not even the prospect of a new year affords pleasure.

The soul aspires to be known. Mine will never be again so deeply now that he is gone. As creatures we are here so precariously. Death reminds us of Time's exigencies and the transience of this corporeal world. At times like these we are grateful for the inalienable bonds of family and the blessings of faith, without which life would be a succession of inevitable tragedies. Christ the King knows—only in love are we redeemed. Rejoice. God answers all prayers.

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