Westlake, Donald E - Novel 50 (11 page)

 
          
The
shades were drawn against the
California
sun. In the rose-colored light in the same
bedroom in which Jack found that awful scene, Jack and Marcia lay in bed,
half-covered by wrinkled sheets, both warm, perspiring, Marcia in a glow of
reconciliation, Jack puffing on a cigarette as he lay half-propped against the
soft headboard, Marcia's head against his shoulder. He turned her face toward
his, and she gazed up at him with melting eyes. His free hand smoothed her hair
as he looked deep into those eyes. Gently, he said, “He better look a lot like
me."

 
          
"And
did he?"

           
I shrug; a dangerous gesture.
Perhaps a simple and dignified nod in future.
But now I
shrugged, and recovered, and I say, "She was a girl.
Took
after her mother, in fact, in more ways than one."

 
          
"Let's
see," the interviewer says, annoyingly tapping his pencil against his
notebook as he gazes out over my head and over the swimming pool behind me and
into the middle distance. "That would be your daughter Rosalia, wouldn't
it?"

 
          
"That's
right." I
grin
the grin I used when I played Satan
that time. "I named her after a lady in
Mexico
that helped me during the movie down
there."

 
          
The
interviewer nods and reels in his glance to look again at me, saying, "How
old would she be now?"

 
          
"Well,
she
would
be about thirty-five,"
I say, "but the fact is she's nineteen. Last I heard
,
she's living in
Colombia
with some big dope dealer down there."
I feel a crooked and half-proud grin coming to my lips. I say, "Smart for
a kid of mine, huh?
Cuts out the middleman."

 
          
"You
and Marcia Callahan had three children together, didn't
you?"      .

 
          
This
time I remember not to shrug. I perform a simple and dignified nod. I say,
"She had three kids while we were married. I suppose I had something to do
with it. But the marriage, you know, never really did survive that first big
shock."

 
          
"Even after Buddy Pal came to
Mexico
to try to make things up
with you?"

 
          
"Didn't
matter," I say. "It's a funny thing, but I really
did
forgive Buddy. We got to be best
friends again just as though nothing had ever happened. But I never in my heart
forgave Marcia. I guess in
her
heart
she must have known that. She was never stupid, the bitch."

 
          
"And
all," the interviewer says, "because of one simple mistake."

 
          
"Well,
at least one. But also, there
was our careers
. The
movie of
Tupelo
didn't do business, and you know what that
means out here. They blame everybody but the producer, and Marcia got her share
of the debit. After that, her career just sort of stuttered along for a while,
so-so roles in nothing pictures, no build-up, just the gradual realization on
everybody's part that the industry could get along just as well without
her."

 
          
"Tough
on her, I guess."

 
          
"You
bet.
Particularly because, for me, it went just the other
way.
I hit with the biker, consolidated with the pathological killer,
and got my first Oscar nomination with the patient picture."

 
          
“Slip of the Knife”
the interviewer
says, nodding yet again at the brilliance of his own research.

 
          
"Yeah,
that's right. That's the picture where I first really got it together, my own
talent and the technology of film.
Where the camera and I
blended into one creature, one omnivorous animal that could eat
anything
and not die.
Slip of the Knife
; that's when I hit my
stride, got a bridle and bit on my powers,
became
the superstar. After
Slip of the Knife
,
I was one of those very few stars that could do anything at all and the people
still come, they pay the money, they sit down, they watch. I could read the
phone book and they'd come. I could read the
Valley
phone book and they'd come."

 
          
"I
guess that's true," he says, thoughtfully, as though it hadn't occurred to
him before why
he
should be
interviewing
me.

 
          
"It
is," I assure him. I stretch my arms and legs, bend from the waist. My
entire skeleton aches. What have I been doing with this body, this instrument
of my talent?
Fucking it over, man.

 
          
And worse.
I suspect, I suspect worse.

 
          
No
no no, there are things I must not know.

 
          
Do
not look toward the swimming pool.

 
          
Patiently
my interviewer sits, awaiting the dropping of further pearls from these lips,
and so I oblige him. "After
Slip of
the Knife,”
I tell him, "just like Irwin said, I could do anything I
wanted, the industry was mine. I had to hire a girl just to read the scripts
they sent me. As for Marcia, well, around town, more and more she was getting
to be known as Mrs. Jack Pine, with fewer and fewer parts coming her way. She
couldn't stand that. So, one day, when Rosalia was four and Indira was two and
Little Buddy was five months . . ."

 
          
I
his living room, large and airy, expensively and artfully furnished in shades
of gray and blond and white, with
owned
original oil paintings on the walls, was up in the hills of
Beverly Hills
. The view out the large but well-curtained
windows was of green hillsides tastefully decorated with mansions. Jack, in
cashmere pullover and flannel slacks, barefoot, strolled up and down the thick
pile shag rug, studying a movie script, silently mouthing his lines. In his
other hand was a bottle of Tuborg beer from which he occasionally sipped.

 
          
Marcia
entered from deeper in the house, wearing a well-tailored gray suit and a small
hat with a veil. She looked elegant and handsome, but older. She was pulling on
suede gloves. She stood a moment watching Jack, but he remained absorbed in his
script, pacing back and forth, lips moving,
expressions
flowing and changing on his face.

 
          
At
last Marcia moved over directly in his path and watched without expression as
he paced away from her, swiveled, and came pacing back. Even then he might have
simply angled around her if she hadn't, in a low and cold and emotionless
voice, said "Jack?"

 
          
He
stopped in front of her. He looked up inquiringly from his script. Marcia
reared back and gave him an open-handed walloping roundhouse gloved right
across the face. The script went flying. The Tuborg bottle went flying. Jack
himself went flying, backward and over the nearest low white suede sofa.

 
          
Marcia
waited, adjusting her right glove, face still expressionless, until Jack
righted himself on the floor over there and his bewildered face appeared above
the sofa back. Then she nodded. “Good-bye,” she said.

 
          
Open-mouthed,
Jack watched her stride across the living room and out the front door. His
slack jaw, the left side of it reddening, rested on the cool suede of the sofa
back.

 
          
I
lean forward. Elbow resting on my interviewer's gray-clad, bony, silently
protesting knee, I reminiscently rub my jaw,
where
the
ghost of Marcia's departing hand still shimmers and burns. With two fingers and
thumb, I check the working of my jaw hinge. All aches are psychosomatic, aren't
they?

 
          
I
can tell my interviewer is feeling sympathetic at this moment because, though
his face remains frozen in that blank look of reception, he is not pushing my
elbow off his person. He is restraining his prissiness. Even to the extent of
letting sympathy seep into his voice as he says, "She left you just like
that, huh? No warning, no discussion, just up and walked out, just like
that."

 
          
"Just
like that," I agree. "She took the kids. Boy, the books
they'll
write some day."

 
          
"And
they're all still in their teens."

 
          
"The
Sargasso Sea
of the teens," I say.
"In their teens.
The penal colony of
the teens.
I remember my tee— No, I don't! Memory
begone
!"

 
          
"There's
something back there, isn't there?" my interviewer asks me. “Something
that explains everything that followed. That's what it's all about, isn't
it?"

 
          
This
knee is too bony, too gray-clad,
too
prissy. I
withdraw my friendly elbow, I turn away
—not
toward the pool!—I turn back, I find my place on the teleprompter of my
eyelids, I say, “Marcia."

 
          
“Yes?"

 
          
“She
left."

 
          
“Yes."

 
          
“I
gave her the house, three pints of blood, and
Ventnor Avenue
, and after that Buddy and I moved into a
place out on the beach."

 
          
“Buddy
again?
Just the two of you?"

 
          
“Heck,
no," I say, smiling at the memory. Well, the beginning of the memory,
anyway. “I got to fulfill an old dream. I brought my mom and dad out to live
with me."

 
          
The
bedroom was small and square, with off-white walls and blond wood floor and
very prominent electric outlets, prominent because the room was not yet
furnished. The only objects in it were two white wooden kitchen chairs without
arms, facing each other. On one stood a portable TV set, its black wire
reaching back to a cable outlet low on the wall. To one side, plate-glass doors
showed a broad gray wood deck in blinding sunlight, with the broad gray Pacific
heaving like chicken soup beyond.

 
          
The
room's interior door—flush, painted white—opened and Jack entered, smiling,
sweating, awkward, trying to please, ushering in his mom and dad. Mom was short
and buxom, round-faced, jolly; she wore an old print dress and a gray cardigan.
Her hands were full of snapshots. Dad, short and skinny and dry, wore white
shirt and black pants and shoes, all too big for him. His face had a collapsed
look around the mouth.

 
          
"And
this is
your
room!" Jack
exclaimed, pumping up his enthusiasm, giving one of the very few poor performances
of his acting career, Gesturing madly at the bare walls, the white chairs, the
ocean outside, he said, “Furniture's going to be delivered by noon!
All brand new!"

 
          
Mom
had been waiting impatiently for Jack to shut up or at least pause for a
breath. When he finally did so, she shuffled toward him, holding up snapshots,
saying, “Here's
cousin
Rosie with the twins. And
here's the twins
with Blair's dog. And this is the Flynns'
new car.''

 
          
“TV,"
Dad said.

 
          
As
Jack smiled and nodded and stared glaze-eyed at Mom's photographs, Buddy
entered, smiling, hands clasped in front of him, nodding like the co-host he
was, and Dad crossed the room to switch on the television set and seat himself
expectantly on the edge of the other chair.

 
          
“Great reception here, Dad,'' Jack told him.

 
          
The
picture blossomed on the screen. Dad leaned forward to start switching
channels.

 
          
Mom
held up more snapshots. “Here's the laurel tree out behind Margaret's house.
Look how it's grown! Can you see, Jack?''

 
          
Jack
tore his eyes away from the back of Dad's head. As Dad went on switching among
the channels, Jack looked at the picture of the laurel tree out behind
Margaret's house. “Yeah, gosh,'' he said. “Sure has grown."

 
          
“You
look, too, Buddy," Mom said.

 
          
“Okay,
Mom Pine." Buddy obediently leaned forward, gazing with pleased interest
at the picture of the laurel tree out behind Margaret's house.

 
          
Dad,
his voice testy, his manner testy, even his shoulder blades testy, said,
“Where's the sports?"

 
          
Grinning
spastically, like a lion tamer who's just heard a low growl from behind him,
Jack said, “There might not be any sports right now, Dad."

 
          
Dad
stopped switching channels, sat back with an air of triumph, and pointed at the
set. “Wrong again, Sonny.
Tennis.

 
          
“That's
nice," Jack said.

 
          
“There,
now," Mom said, “just leave your father to his sports. We'll all go sit on
the sofa and look at pictures."

           
“Okay, Mom Pine," Buddy said.

 
          
Jack
flashed a dozen smiles toward his father's impervious profile. “See you later,
Dad."

 
          
Dad
ignored him. Mom hustled the two younger men out of the room and firmly shut
the door. Sunshine bleached the world beyond the glass doors. Dad watched
tennis.