Establishment (40 page)

A short, fat, bald man was pleading, “Once more, Sally, please.”

“Christ, Alex,” she shouted, “you've done six takes! It's one lousy, simple scene. I've done it. I've had it.”

“Darling, darling, please. It's so simple, it's impossible.” He turned to a good-looking, well-built man, shirtless, wearing a pair of soaking wet pants. “Once more, yes, Walter?”

“If it's O.K. with Sally, sure.”

“See, see,” the fat man pleaded. “It's O.K. with Walter.”

“All right. Get it over with. We've been in this miserable sewer all afternoon.”

“Positions!” the fat man shouted. “Lights!”

The big kliegs blazed on the scene. The shirtless man took his place at one side of the set. A make-up man poured a scarlet fluid that looked like blood or catsup onto his shoulder so that it dripped over his chest.

A young man, holding a scissor-like contraption on which was lettered
scene 42, take 7, hargasey
, stepped out in front of the set. “Camera,” Hargasey said. The young man snapped his contraption together and then retreated. “Action,” Hargasey said.

The man in the wet trousers, his chest now covered with the fake blood, staggered into the scene. He saw Sally. Tense and rigid, Sally saw him. She tried to speak, but the words would not come. Billy found himself drawn into the scene. The agony on Sally's face was so real that for an instant he forgot his surroundings. The man tried to take another step toward Sally. His knees gave, and he crumpled into the water. Sally bent over him, reached out one shaking hand to touch him.

“Cut!” Hargasey shouted. “Oh, beautiful, darling. Beautiful. We wrap it for today and do the close-ups tomorrow.”

“Thank God,” Sally said.

The kliegs went off. The man with the blood was toweling himself dry. Sally came off the set, and as she was about to pass him, Billy said, “Hey, Sally, I'm here.” He spoke uncertainly, as if to suggest that if she desired to ignore his presence, why, that would be all right too.

She paused and stared at him, then her face lit up and she ran to him and threw her arms around him. “Oh, Billy, Billy, how good to see you! Only who could ever recognize you, you look so absolutely divine.” She linked her arm in his. “Come with me. Oh, I'm so glad to see you.”

Her dressing room had a tiny sitting room attached to it. “You stay right there so we can talk while I change. It's been so long. I know that Boyle Heights and Beverly Hills are two different worlds, but they're not a thousand miles apart. And you're only here now because I practically dragged you here by sheer force because I made you think it was some awful crisis. It isn't. But I do want to talk to you.”

She had changed into a pleated skirt and a cashmere sweater, and she looked like a schoolgirl. The make-up was gone. “Now look at me, Billy,” she said. “Am I so different?”

“You look splendid. How's the baby?”

“Not a baby at all. May Ling walks and talks a blue streak. You'll see her, because I want you to come home with me.”

“I thought I might take you to dinner.”

“Dinner is waiting at home. You have your car here. I'm on Rexford Drive in Beverly Hills, which is very easy to find. You just stay on Melrose until you hit Santa Monica, and then turn right off Santa Monica onto Rexford. I'll write down the address. We'll go straight there, and we'll have time for drinks and a good talk.”

At home in Beverly Hills, Sally paraded him through the house, with May Ling running back and forth, chattering on with her own commentary. Billy, charmed by the child, decided that she looked like a Chinese doll.

“She does take after Joe,” Sally said. “Or after his mother, perhaps. Well, Billy, what do you think of my house?”

“I like it. But I can understand why Joe wouldn't feel comfortable here. I've lived in a house like this. He hasn't.”

“And I haven't—until now. I will not talk about Joe. He's impossible. Impossible! Oh, I wish I were in love with someone else! Sometimes I'm ready to say to him, ‘All right. Divorce me and get it over with.'”

“Does he really want a divorce?”

“How can anyone know what Joe really wants? He doesn't know. He thinks it would be noble to divorce me. He and his shitty nobility. Oh, I'm sorry. You always look so hurt when I use gutter talk. But it's perfectly natural with me, Billy. I was always that way.”

“Joe is a wonderful guy. I hate to see either of you hurt.”

“Who is he wonderful to? If he could only find two hours a day to be wonderful to me and his daughter, we'd make out fine. No, let's not talk about that. We'll have dinner and we'll talk about Higate. Do you ever go up there? Eloise's new baby is delicious. Now, there you are. She has two kids, and still, Adam never blinked an eyelash when Eloise and Jean became partners in the new gallery.”

Billy smiled. “I don't think Eloise could do anything that Adam would disapprove of. He adores her.”

“Supposedly Joe adores me.”

“It's different. Raising kids up there in the valley is different from raising them here in Los Angeles.”

“I grew up there, so I ought to know.”

After dinner, the baby asleep, the house quiet, sitting with Billy on the couch in front of a gas-log fire in the living room, Sally said, “I simply had to talk to you. If I don't talk to someone about this I'll go out of my mind. I can't talk to my mother and father. I mean, they have no notion of this industry. Pop had a sister, whose name was Martha. She wanted to be in pictures, and she came down here to Hollywood, where she was taken by a couple of cheap swindlers. I don't know the whole story exactly. Maybe it was dope and liquor or something like that. Anyway, she ended up by killing herself. Drove off a cliff up on Mulholland Drive, so you can imagine how much sympathy they have for the movie business. I'd talk to Barbara, because I love her so and she's such a great person, but she's Joe's sister and she has her own misery, and anyway, Billy, you are a clergyman, sort of, and you're the only clergyman I know, and you must have solved a lot of problems, all those years in the Pacific.”

“Sally, darling, I'm not really a clergyman. I can't tell you what to do. Anyway—” He stopped and shook his head.

“Well, go on. What were you going to say?”

“I haven't any right to say it.”

“To say what? Oh, I hate people who do that!”

“All right. I can't tell you what to do because I love you. You know that. I've loved you ever since that day we met in Joe's office.”

“Is that so awful?”

“It's awful. Joe's my friend. I suppose I worship Joe in a way.” Sally shook her head hopelessly. “Not only that,” Billy went on, “I never made out with women. Oh, God, I don't know what's wrong with me. Funny, you coming to me for answers.”

“If you think you love me,” Sally said slowly, “why don't you do something about it? Why don't you kiss me? Why don't you take my hand? Why don't you touch me?”

He took a while to answer, and then he said, “Because you're you. You're Sally Lavette. You're Joe's wife. You're a film star.” He added lamely, “I'm an Episcopal priest.”

She began to giggle.

“Don't laugh at me, please.”

“Still? I mean, are you still an Episcopal priest? You haven't done any priesting for a long time now. Isn't there a statute of limitations or something? Actually, I don't know a thing about Episcopal priests, except for that silly story about the two Irishmen standing in front of an Episcopal church, and the priest comes out, and Pat says to Mike, ‘Will you look at him, with five children, and he calls himself father.'”

“Now you're laughing at me again.”

“Oh, no, no. I'm trying to make you laugh. Billy, you're so kind and gentle, and you're very good-looking. One of the grips thought you were a star from another studio, honest. So why can't you touch me? God won't strike you dead. Billy, I haven't slept with Joe for a year and a half—and not with anyone else either, if you're convinced that actresses are whores in plainclothes.”

“Oh, no. I don't think that at all. I'm not an idiot.”

“I'm sure you're not. But you do act like one at times.” She moved close to him. “Look at me, Billy.” He turned and stared at her. “Now kiss me.”

He leaned over and kissed her gently.

“There. It wasn't too bad, was it?”

“Please don't laugh at me again, Sally. I couldn't stand that.”

“I won't laugh at you.”

He put his arm around her, and she laid her head against his chest. “I guess,” he said, “I'm as happy now as I've ever been.”

“But you still think it's sinful.”

“No. No, Sally. I gave up on sin a long time ago. Once, in the Solomons, I took the confession of a kid who was dying. He thought I was a Catholic priest, and I let him think so because he was all shot to pieces and there was no time to find a Catholic chaplain, even if I had known where one was, which I didn't. The kid was a murderer. He had stuck up a gas station and shot the owner, and now he was dying with such fear and terror that you can't imagine. He died in my arms. I suppose if it made any sense I'd send in my resignation. Take my name off the books. I'm not a priest anymore. Only it doesn't matter. I just stopped thinking about God. It's too confusing. I'm lucky because I have enough money not to have to work at a job, so I can help people at the clinic. It's the only thing that makes me feel good. Until tonight. This makes me feel good, sitting here with my arm around you. I feel guilty and rotten, but I also feel good.”

“Do you want to go to bed with me?” Sally asked softly.

“I've wanted to from the first day I saw you.”

“Then come upstairs with me, and we'll make love, and then we'll sleep. I'm starved, Billy, starved. You were never cut out to be a priest, and I make a lousy nun. It's almost nine o'clock, and I'm up at six and at the studio at seven.”

***

The earth turned, and day followed night. At the corner of Market and Fifth, four armed men gunned down a police officer. In the heavy fog off the Golden Gate, a navy hospital ship sank after colliding with a freighter. There was a day when 742 young Americans became casualties in Korea. Foreign Minister Robert Schuman of France and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin of England began discussions on the prospect of rearming Germany. There was a day when an advance post of sixty-three Americans was wiped out in Korea, and the dead lay with their eyes open and their bodies shattered. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran went home after telling the people of San Francisco that their city was a jewel in the crown of this mighty nation. A six-year-old boy in Ingleside shot himself to death with his father's pistol. Queen Mother Nazli of Egypt visited San Francisco. “Your city is like a jewel,” she said. In the most powerful and secure of nations, Arthur W. Wallander, director of civil defense for the City of New York, put the city on a twenty-four-hour-a-day alert. “We don't know when it will happen,” he said. Fire burst out in the dome of San Francisco's City Hall, and there were suspicions of arson. General Douglas MacArthur came to San Francisco. General Douglas MacArthur came to New York City. The President had fired him with deep regret. Prime Minister Yoshida of Japan arrived in San Francisco. At ceremonies held at the Opera House, he signed the peace treaty that formally ended World War II. General Douglas MacArthur broke his silence and said, in an address to the Congress of the United States, “It has been said, in effect, that I am a warmonger. Nothing could be further from the truth.” Jerome David Salinger wrote a book called
Catcher in the Rye
. It was called the best book about a young boy since Mark Twain.

***

Barbara was reading
Catcher in the Rye
when Boyd Kimmelman rang her doorbell. She had been expecting him. He had called, oddly enough, on a Sunday morning, asking whether he might drop by and spend a few minutes with her. When he came into the house, Barbara said, “You catch me at my worst moment, Boyd. Do you know what my worst moment is? It happens when I read a book that absolutely delights me, and I say to myself that I wish I had written it, and then I have that awful feeling of knowing I never could have written it, not in a hundred years.” She held it up. “Have you read it?”

“Not yet, no.”

“Well, you'll like it, I think. You don't have to buy it. I'll lend you my copy when I'm finished. Now come on in and sit down. I sent Sam out to the park with Anna so that we might talk in peace. Sam gets larger and more obstreperous by the day, and I shudder to think of where it might end. With an oversized mother and an oversized father—well, who knows?” Kimmelman was nervous and unsure of himself. Barbara chattered away to put him at ease. “Come on, now, Boyd, sit down and make yourself comfortable. I think this is the first time you've ever been in my home. Now isn't that awful? We've had a hundred meetings, at your office and at the foundation, and this is the first time you've ever been here. I feel so ashamed. It's tiny and vertical, but that's the way all these old Victorian houses are. But it is nice, don't you think?”

He sank into a chair, nodded, and stared at her.

“For heaven's sake, Boyd, you must know by now that I don't warrant kid glove treatment. You call up and ask to see me on a Sunday. I know only too well that the Supreme Court decision comes down on Monday. It is that, isn't it?”

He nodded again. “An old law school buddy clerks for Douglas. I asked him to telephone me first thing with whatever might come down. He called last night. They're denying certiorari. God, how I hate to have to sit here and tell you this after all this time.”

“Which means that finally they have decided that they will not hear argument on my case.”