Driver's Education (24 page)

“I come here all the time,” she said as we slid into a red vinyl booth. She reached out and began rearranging the ketchup and mustard bottles, the salt. “I can never seem to get anyone to recognize me, though. Or even remember me.”

I unfolded the menu. “I hardly recognized you.” I added, “You'd been hiding those legs.”

“Knock it off.”

We ordered two vodkas and stabbed at the ice with our thin plastic straws.

“So how long have you been out here?” I asked her.

“Six years, I guess? Seven? I don't know. Too long, but not long enough.”

She'd moved west to act when she was twenty-one, she told me.

“It was the only thing that seemed to make sense. I'd spent my life figuring out how to do things like other people did them, so I figured I might as well start getting paid for it.”

In the meantime, she'd worked at one of the theaters in L.A. to make ends meet. She'd fallen in love with the pictures she'd seen of the Chinese Theatre, of the El Rey and Grauman's Egyptian and the El Capitan. The glossy images of four-story marquees and lines of limousines and red carpets unfurling like so many tongues. Of the theaters' staffs aligned out in front of them in smart, pressed uniforms. These were places that weren't like the Avalon; there were spotlights that tracked outside in great arcing swoops every weekend—not just opening night.

“Crazy, isn't it? Moving across the country to shovel popcorn and tear tickets?”

“How did you make your way out here?”

“The bus at first. But in Cleveland I got bored and bought a plane ticket.”

When she arrived on an August afternoon in 1968, though, she was greeted by a rude awakening: the Hollywood Boulevard that she stepped
onto wasn't the same Hollywood Boulevard from the pictures that she'd pinned to her bedroom wall in Sleepy Hollow. The dazzling glitz had somehow faded—now, everything just looked drab. Or not just drab, but dangerous. As she made her way between the different theaters along the boulevard, she was accosted by the women who worked it—girls in miniskirts and halter tops, girls with calves that'd grown too thick, too muscular from spending ten hours a night in heels, treading along an uneven and canyoned sidewalk. Girls who smelled like mouthwash and cigarettes and the leftovers of so many men. They screeched at Clare if she stood on a particular corner for too long. They stabbed their veiny fingers into her chest; they left bits of their acrylic nails in the seams of her shirt.

“I paid money to sit in one of those viewing booths at a porn store. Just so I could have a private place to cry.”

She was tough, though—she always had been—and eventually, she ended up getting a job ushering four days a week at Grauman's Egyptian, but that proved to be a disappointment as well. The annoyances she'd faced at the Avalon were ever present at the Egyptian, except now on a grander scale: the smells more nauseating, the stains on the carpet in new, larger shapes. The posh premieres she'd been anticipating didn't happen as often as she thought they would, and when they did, they were a nightmare. So much running around, and yelling, and fulfilling strange demands (“There was one actress—I won't say who, but take my word that it's someone you know—who insisted that her seat be blessed by a Santeria shaman before she arrived. I'll also add this: many Santeria blessings include blood from a recently killed chicken.”)

“I did get to see a lot of movies, though.”

Clare flagged down the waitress and asked for a second vodka.

“And the acting?”

“I kept at it, but it wasn't panning out like I thought it would. The farthest I got was a callback for this B-horror thing. Something about people who turn into fish. I don't think it ever got made.” The straw that she'd been chewing on—the one from the empty first drink—she now tied into a knot. “But then I met Ron and things started turning around.”

Ron. Ron Wagner. Taller than her, than me, not as lean as he could've
been, and a decade older than either of us. Hair that was then brown, but that I imagine has since gone grey, or silver, or whichever shade carries with it that cheap sense of distinction characteristic of state college professors or car salesmen or—in his case—a man who directed commercials. She said he was a frequent customer of the Egyptian; he'd been coming twice a week since long before she arrived. He'd sit quietly, alone in the back row of the theater, polishing his Coke-bottle glasses, occasionally slipping his pudgy fingers into a tub of buttered popcorn, which he never finished. For the first few weeks, he saw Clare only as she passed in the dark (after each movie began, she'd peek into the theater to count empty seats). But then, as those first few weeks turned into a month, there was an issue with the projector during the second showing on a Thursday night, and Clare was sent in by the head usher to quell the anxious audience.

“You did that like a movie star,” Ron said to her as she made her way from the front of the house to the exit. The bottom half of his glasses was fogged. She had her palm pressed against one of the giant swinging doors.

“What?”

“The way you got everyone's attention. A real movie star.”

“Buddy,” she told him, “in this town, everyone's a goddamned movie star.”

And she left.

A few days later, though, he returned. Over the next few months, his twice-a-week routine quickly became a four-a-week routine (a showing on Tuesday, a showing on Thursday, two matinees each weekend). He'd arrive early to find her, wherever she was working. He'd wait in interminable lines at the concession stands; he'd stand next to her while she swept the littered corners of the lobby.

“Ron,” she'd say to him, maneuvering the broom around his feet. “I'm trying to work.”

He'd crane his neck upward to inspect the ceiling's inlays. The carvings of suns, of palm trees, of a crowned, stoic pharaoh. He'd tell her, “I'm just admiring the architecture.” Then he'd tell her, “The way you've got her hair today. It reminds me of Audrey Hepburn in
Charade
.”

“Oh, cut it out.” She'd slip the broom and the dustpan into the utility
closet, taking too long with the lock. She'd pull straight the wrinkles from her uniform and tell him, again, that she wanted him to leave her alone.

But that was a lie, of course. She didn't want to be left alone by him, at least not anymore. Because what Ron had said was precisely what Clare had wanted to hear. It was, in fact, what she'd come to that goddamned town to hear; while most women want to be told that they're beautiful, Clare had come to Hollywood to hear that she was as beautiful as someone else. That she'd become expertly capable of being someone else. And so, as they're wont to do, the tables began to turn. Subtly, self-consciously, she began to seek Ron out during her shifts at the Egyptian. Then, when she found him, she'd perform for him. She'd shove her fists into the pockets of her uniform like Annie Hall; when she tore ticket stubs, she'd give him her best Faye Dunaway.

The waitress returned and we ordered two steaks.

“He ended up casting me in a shampoo commercial, which led to a bit part in a soap opera.”

“Oh, I bet he did.”

“Don't be coy. He's a lovely man. He really got me started.” She added, “He took me to dinner first.”

“What a gentleman.”

She spoke of him admiringly, reverently. She praised his soft demeanor and quiet masculinity.

I said, “We're talking about a man who directs shampoo commercials.”

But she ignored me. While she buttered a triangle of bread, she described, twice, how endearing it was when his glasses fogged, how she thought it betrayed a vulnerability and innocence.

When I asked her what drew her to him most, she told me, “Certainty. And unless you're an actress, you can't understand how appealing that is.”

“You mean attention.”

She tore the bread in half. She set both pieces on her plate but ate neither. “I think I mean certainty. I don't know. Yes—I think I mean certainty.”

Our steaks arrived. As Clare cut away strips of wrinkled fat, she
begged me, “But please—let's change the subject, all right? How was I today? You can be honest. In fact, please, be honest.”

And because I was a man in love, and what men in love do most often is lie, I said, “You were the best.”

•  •  •

The next morning I wrote her the first letter, and it went something like this:

Dear Ms. Moore,

Your performance last night at the Rainbow Bar and Grill was groundbreaking. I was moved by your beauty, your poise, and the passion with which you spoke about serving popcorn in a cinema. I wish you wouldn't end up with that Ron fellow. He seems a bit of a bore and entirely undeserving of you. I anxiously await the sequel.

Signed, with adoration,

Colin McPhee

P.S. Marry me?

A fan letter, I told myself, as I creased the paper in half and slipped it into an envelope bearing her address. And a good one, honed from my years of reading and stealing and copying similar notes from Capitol Records. I'd typed it on my Smith Corona in the tiny studio on Gower and Afton. Even though I'd come into a not-unimpressive amount of money when I sold
The Family Room,
I was still there, and in fact very little had changed. The futon still dipped on the floor; the posters still wrapped around the walls. The only change, I think, was that I'd swapped out
Jaws
for
Jaws 2
in the bathroom.

The next day, I waited for her to call. And then when she didn't, I wrote another letter. I folded it into a second envelope, and I licked the sweet adhesive from a stamp's back. And then the next day, another, and the next day, another, and the next day, another.
Dear Ms. Moore, I—. Dear Ms. Moore, You—. Dear Ms. Moore, We—.
And always—always:
Marry me?
I'd walk them to the mailbox on the far corner of Afton, and I'd slip them into the slot. I'd peek my head into the small darkness, conferring with the box:
Okay, we have a deal here. I've done my part, now it's your turn. It's your job to get it to her.

When I'd return home, I'd stare at the phone and I'd will it to ring; I'd curse myself every time my eyes became so dry that I had to blink. I'd crack open beers before noon. I'd drink three in a row, but it wouldn't work: it'd turn me drunk and anxious, instead of just anxious. Often, I cleaned manically. I burrowed around in corners I hadn't peered into in years, sweeping away dust, and hair, and little bits of torn paper; I vacuumed the colorless wall-to-wall carpet with a handheld Dust Buster.

After two months of this, on a morning when I was foggy and gossamer brained, and when the day's light was just starting to trickle into the basin, I loaded a fresh sheet of paper into the Smith Corona. I wrote:

Dear Ms. Moore,

You're doing spectacularly in the role of my negligent childhood heartbreak. It's reminiscent, in fact, of the time you played the role of the girl who kissed me during “Cleopatra” only to tell me, immediately afterward, that you weren't in love with me. It's a good thing I didn't believe you then, either, ha ha, right?

Sitting, as always, on the edge of my seat,

Colin McPhee

My offer still stands.

This time, though, I delivered the letter myself. I waited until it was eleven in the morning, when the sun had crested the wraiths of smog, when I knew that Ron would be at work, and I drove to the house in which he and Clare lived, on the outskirts of Griffith Park. I slipped the letter beneath the welcome mat on the front porch. I rang the doorbell, and before she had time to answer, I left. I hiked into the park, on a trail that coiled under the shadow of the observatory.

That evening, half an hour before the floodlights illuminated the
Hollywood sign, the phone rang. As I leapt from my futon to reach for it, I knocked over a draft of a screenplay I'd never finish and I slammed my knee against the sharp corner of a table.

“Colin.”

“A-ha!”

“What are you doing?”

“Watching
Taxi
in my underwear.”

“No, Colin. With these letters,
what are you doing
?”

“So you've been getting them.”

“Yes, I've been getting them. I've—”

“Are you saving them?”

I imagined shoeboxes stuffed under beds. The well-read corners of folded and unfolded paper sticking out from underneath the lids.

She said, “I—no. No, I can't. I've had to get rid of them.”

“I see.” Then: “But after reading them, right?”

She sighed. There was a delicate crunching sound as she shifted the phone to her shoulder. The volume of her voice slipped lower. “Yes. After reading them.”

“So—there's that.”

“You need to stop sending them, Colin.”

“Because you love me?”

She didn't answer, and so I asked again: “Because you love me?”

“Because you're going to get me into a lot of trouble.”

“So you do—you do love me.”

“Colin, stop sending them.”

“Is that it?”

“
Please
stop sending them?”

•  •  •

I respected her—at least for the most part, I'd like to think. There were moments, of course. Points of weakness during which the pang of loneliness and/or infatuation became too acute, and when its normal cures seemed not enough, leaving me still hungry, still dizzy. And during those instances I'd pull the Smith Corona from the desk to floor. I'd cradle it up to me and I'd feel its heat spread across my lap as I wrote to her. But this
only happened two times, three times, four times. Six times. At the most.

And maybe those unexpected teases—“uninvited invitations” might be a better way to describe them—helped to influence what happened next, and what happened after that. Maybe she held on to those final letters—the ones she thought she hadn't wanted—and during the evenings when Ron had gone to bed, she'd creep outside into the halfhearted L.A. night. She'd read them beneath the buzzing yellow glow of a streetlamp. She'd read them over again, until she could recite the words. And then she'd look up at the observatory, with its strange curved walls and eerie protrusions. She'd think about the stars that it watched and tracked. Stars that—like love—had to be trusted on a matter of faith, especially here, in Los Angeles, where the industrial lights of the studios eclipsed them.