Westlake, Donald E - Novel 50 (8 page)

 
          
“It
was a wonderful wedding,” I say.

           
I sit and smile in the sunlight,
remembering. It was a lovely white chapel in
Santa Monica
; it had been used in the movies more than
once to suggest firm, small-town American values. It had that traditional
shape, the narrow front with the arched doors, the clapboard wall angling
inward on both sides above the doors, then straightening again to reach upward,
forming the steeple. In front of this setting, the gray cement walk came out
straight and true from the front steps, flanked by gleaming green grass, mowed
as tightly as a golf course. Two dozen clean and presentable well-wishers
waited on this walk and this grass for Marcia and me to emerge from the chapel,
hitched. On the fringes, a few reporters and photographers hovered, waiting to
record the event.

 
          
I
smile upon the dour interviewer; even upon him I smile. "I really
believe," I tell him, "
that first weddings
are very important. They set the whole tone for your marriages to come. Buddy
flew out from New York, of course, to be best man, and Marcia's
public-relations man set up the whole thing with a great deal of care and
taste. The media were there, and the whole scene played just terrific."

 
          
I
can still see it, in fact. Out of the chapel we came at the end of the
ceremony, Jack Pine and Marcia “The First Mrs. Pine" Callahan. The
gathered well-wishers crowded around us, wishing us well. Buddy came grinning
out behind us, along with Marcia's PR man’s secretary, the matron of honor.
Rice was thrown. The driver got out of the white stretch limo waiting at the
curb and opened the rear door. Photographers took pictures. We made our way,
laughing and happy, through the laughing and happy throng. At the limo, Marcia
turned and threw her bouquet. One of the female well-wishers caught it and
squealed, and the other female well-wishers congratulated her with happy envy.
Marcia and I waved and turned and entered the limo. It was
swell
!

 
          
I
say to the interviewer, “We didn't know anybody on the Coast then, of course,
so we hired a crowd from Central
Casting,
and those
kids just did a super job. Later, some of them became personal friends."

 
          
The
interviewer stares at me. “You mean
,
the whole scene
was a fake?"

 
          
“Certainly
not," I tell him. These little nobodies
never
understand a thing, you ever notice that? “The emotions expressed that
day," I assure this little nobody, “were absolutely real. And if some real
nice
kids,
swell young talents struggling to make it,
could earn a dollar wishing us well as we launched ourselves onto the sea of
matrimony, what's wrong with that? Good for their income, good for our image,
good for the press,
good
for the people who read that
kind of thing—well,
you
know
that—good for everybody."

 
          
“I
never looked at it like that," the interviewer confesses. But he still
looks dubious.

 
          
“You
have to see the big picture," I tell him gently, trying to be kind.

 
          
“I
guess so," he says.

 
          
Well,
how can you explain it? You had to be there. You had to look out the rear
window of the limo the way I did as we drove away and see Buddy bring that big
wad of bills out of his pocket, and see the happy expressions on all those
swell young kids as they lined up on the church lawn to be paid. You don't
think they were sincere?

 
          
"Anyway,"
I say, nodding, my mind brimful of fuzzy drink and fuzzy memories, "that
was the best part of our marriage, the wedding. After that, it was pretty much
all downhill, though I didn't know it at first."

 
          
"You
didn't know you were having trouble in your own marriage?"

 
          
"Well,"
I say, brushing the back of one hand across my brow, feeling how the fuzzy
drink presses against my skull, called to by your friend and mine, Big Sol, old
Mister Sun, "well," I say, "I was pretty much concentrating on
my career then. Or lack of career, I should say."

 
          
"Things
didn't go well, at first, in
Hollywood
?"

 
          
"You
could put it that way," I tell him, since he just did put it that way.
"I had my
New York
reviews, my regional reviews, but no movie credits, and I just couldn't
figure out what to do next, careerwise. Ever have one of those years where you
just can't seem to get started?"

 
          
"No,
sir," he says—of
course
he
says!—and looks solemn and wimpish, gazing at me over his notebook (how
full
that notebook must be getting) as
he says, "I don't believe I ever have had a year like that."

 
          
"Well,
I have," I say, and nod, and decide it's better not to nod, and stop.
"It's no fun, believe me," I say, and bring a shimmering hand up to
my shimmering forehead.

 
          
"I'm
sure it is," he agrees.
Being polite, the little
bastard.

 
          
"If
I'd stayed in the theater," I say, and my hand waves in front of me in a
negative way, outward, in a stop-frame sequence, the individual shots
overlapping, the hand seeming to stay and to go, my life seeming to stay and to
go, the career . . . "But," I say, and let it go at that.

 
          
Can't.
The interviewer leans toward me, button eyes alight
like a minor character in a minor sequel to
The
Wizard of Oz~ Tick-Tock and the Interviewer
of Oz. I must perform. .

           
"Oh, well," I say.
"All right.
I did some Shakespeare, regional things,
some Moliere, Mosca in a 'Volpone' in
St. Louis
they're
still
cackling over, but there's no coherence out there in the provinces, no career.
You're not building anything; you aren't even making a living. Unemployment
insurance—at a certain age, unemployment insurance can begin to seem like a
sign of potential failure, you know what I mean?"

 
          
Is
there a ghost of a smile hovering around my ghost of an interviewer's lips?
Have I reached him on a human- to-human level yet again, man-to-man,
soul-to-soul? Christ, what a thought. "Here's the thing of it," I
say. "I had my reviews, I had my comparisons with Booth and
Burton
, but I wasn't
going
anywhere. Jack Schullmann was not a man to forgive and
forget—well, few agents are—so every time my career seemed to come to life in
some place like Minneapolis or Miami, he made sure to piss on it all over again
back in New York. And theater
is
New York
, it just is, no matter how much anybody
else tries, anywhere at all. They build these theaters, flies that could fly a
battleship, lightboards God would envy, and it doesn't matter. They could hire
me and love me, weep when I wept, laugh when I laughed, die when I died, but it
didn't matter, because the provinces never hear about
each other
, except through
New York
. And back in
New York
, there was Jack Schullmann, sitting on me,
farting in my face."

 
          
"That's
terrible," my interviewer says, whether at the fact or the image I do not
know.

 
          
"I
suppose I should have been able to outwait it," I say, "or walk away
from it, but
how could
I
? Acting was the only thing I had, the
only thing that
used
me. I'd sell my
soul to act," I say, and hear myself saying it, and laugh: "Well, I
did, didn't I?
But not to Jack Schullmann.
He wasn't
buying, not then."

 
          
"Does
he still feel that way?" my interviewer asks, thereby disclosing not the
depths of his research, but its shallowness. This guy doesn't know diddly about
showbiz.

 
          
“Jack
Schullmann died a few years ago," I say, smiling at the memory. "I
sent a pizza to the funeral."

 
          
He
stares at me. "You didn't."

 
          
"I
did.
so
long, pal,
was spelled out on it, in provolone. By then, of course, we loved each
other; I was too big for him to hate. He had to love me for the sake of clients
I might want to work with. But back in the early days, it was a different
story. And it wasn't just Jack, either. It was his friends, too, and Miriam's
old friends—
thee-ah-tah
friends, you
know. They wouldn't walk down the
block
past
a theater I was working in. So it was LA or nothing."

 
          
"The
usual story about fine actors, the way I've always heard it," my
interviewer says, rather disconcertingly suggesting that his boringly round
little head might contain ideas of its own after all, "is that the movies
seduce them away from what might have been great stage careers."

 
          
"There
are
no great stage careers, not
anymore," I tell him. "And nobody seduced me into the movies. In
fact, at first, nobody
wanted
me in
the movies. It wasn't a blacklist out here, it was just indifference. My own,
too. I was worn out, I was losing faith in my talent,
I
didn't know what to do or how to start all over." I smile reminiscently.
"I owe my stardom to Marcia, really," I say, demonstrating my
world-renowned generosity. "She encouraged me in those darkest
hours."

 
          
On
her way home from the studio, Marcia picked up her and Jack’s dry cleaning,
then
continued on up and over
Beverly Glen Boulevard
out of the Valley and into Westwood to the
furnished rental she now shared with her husband. She thumbed the garage-
opener button as she made the turn into her driveway, and the broad blank door
folded up and back, accepting its daily diet of Porsche.

 
          
Marcia
collected the plastic dry-cleaner bag, which had been draped over the back of
the passenger seat, then climbed from the car, and went through the connecting
door and through the kitchen and the corner of the living room and down the
hall, the dry-cleaner bag held over her shoulder like Frank Sinatra’s jacket.
Walking down the hall, Marcia glanced leftward and saw, in profile, Jack.

 
          
Still there.
In the same old cowboy hat and fringed jacket
and high decorated boots, he sat in his favorite canvas chair at the deep end
of the pool, seated well down and back so his head and knees were at the same
height, cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes to shade them from the afternoon
sun, booted legs stretched far out in front of him over the redwood deck with
ankles crossed, hands folded casually in lap. From a cigarette in the corner of
his mouth, a slender pale tendril of smoke wavered upward past his ear and the
brim of his hat.

 
          
Marcia
did not break stride. Her eyes narrowed slightly, she gazed steadily at that
self-absorbed profile out there, and she kept walking, on down to the end of
the hall, where she faced front again at last, moving through the doorway into
the master bedroom.

 
          
Clean
laundry stood in neat folded piles on the bed. Nodding as though to say her
expectations had been fulfilled, she walked around the bed to the wall of
closets and hung the dry-cleaning bag on the rod. Then she turned, looked again
at the laundry on the bed, took a long, slow breath, and glanced across the
room at her reflection in the dresser mirror there. No expression showed in the
face looking back at her.

 
          
Marcia
stepped through the sliding glass door to the outside, slid it shut behind her,
and stood at the shallow end of the pool, looking down across the water at
Jack, who hadn't moved. An almost inaudible sigh parted her lips, which then
pressed shut again. Deliberately she strode around the pool; he finally—as she
was halfway to him—lifted his head and lifted his hand to lift his cowboy hat
away from his eyes to watch her. Nothing else on him moved.

 
          
Marcia
stopped in front of him. They looked at each other for a long silent moment,
and then, with a kind of grim fatalism, she said, "Get off your dead
ass."

 
          
"Hi,
honey," he said mildly, a happy smile playing at the corners of his lips.
"How'd things go today at the studio?"

 
          
She
shook her head, pushing that aside, saying, "What did
you
do today?"

 
          
He
considered. "Well," he said, "the laundry."

 
          
"Jack,"
she said, "you've got to get
out
of this house, you've got to get
moving,
you've
got to get your life
going
again. Do you want to spend the rest of your life as a kept man?

           
He considered that question, giving
it careful thought, and then a sunny smile glowed all over his face and he
looked up at her and said, "Yes!"

 
          
"No!"
she told him, and pointed a rigid finger at his nose. "You," she
said, "are going to get a job."

 
          
Mildly,
the smile still faintly lighting his features, he gazed up at her, blinking.