Fun With Problems (14 page)

Across the street, appropriately, a country-and-western hat band from Kyoto was crooning rural melodies. The two of us jaywalked across Hollywood and into the lobby of the faded hotel where the band was performing. A man in a stained tuxedo—an unwelcoming figure—directed us to a table against one wall. I ordered a Pacifico; Lucy had Pellegrino and a Valium.

"It's Canada," Lucy told me.

"What is?"

"The scenery. In the thing over there."

"The thing? You don't remember what the picture's called?"

"I like repressed it," she said, and gritted her teeth. "Sure I know what it's called. It had different titles postproduction."

"Such as?"

"
Unbound. Unleashed. Uncooked.
"

We introduced ourselves and claimed we had heard of each other. For a while we watched the hat act sing and swing. The lads looked formidable under their tilted sombreros. Their lead singer sang lyrics phonetically, rendering interpretations of "I Can't Stop Loving You," "Walking the Floor Over You" and other favorites. Their audience was scant and boozy. There were a few other bold escapees from the premiere across the street.

"You were a great Apache."

She only shook her head. Plainly, even qualified professional regard would take us nowhere. For some reason I persisted.

"Come on, I was moved. You dying. Featured role."

"Dying is easy," she said. "Ever hear that one?"

I had. It was an old actor's joke about the supposed last words of Boris Thomashevsky, an immortal of the Yiddish stage. Surrounded by weeping admirers seeking to comfort him, he gave them a farewell message. "Dying is easy," said the old man. "Comedy is hard."

"They shot different endings," Lucy explained. "One sad, one happy."

"Really?" It was hard to believe they would perpetrate a sad ending with the two beloveds, which would only have made a fatuous movie even worse. When riding a turkey, I believe, cleave to the saddle horn of tradition. But sad endings were a new thing in those years—the era of the worst movies ever made. Industry supremos who hadn't been on the street unaccompanied for forty years were still trying to locate the next generation of dimwits. So they tried sad endings and dirty words and nude body doubles. There was no more production code; movies were supposed to get serious and adult. Sad endings were as close as most of them could reach.

"So I hear. I wasn't there. I didn't read the endings. Like I had other things on my mind. I didn't see it, did I? We're over here."

"Okay."

"I bet they went with the happy, though." She sneaked a quick look around and bit a half of her second ten-milligram Valium. I told her the happy seemed likely.

"Oh," she said, and she smiled for the first time in our acquaintance. "Tom Loving. You're a writer." She either guessed or had somehow heard of me. Her smile was appropriately sympathetic.

She told me they had reshot a lot during the filming, different versions of different scenes.

"I die in all of them," she said.

Eventually we drove our separate cars to an anchored trailer she was living in on the beach in Malibu. As I remember, she was tooling around in a big Jaguar XJ6. We sat under her wind-tattered awning on the trailer's oceanfront deck and a west wind peeled wisps of cold briny fog off the water. It was refreshing after the sickly perfume of the theater and the haze of booze and smoke in the lounge.

"I'm not happy," Lucy told me. "I'm sure you could tell, right?"

"I saw you were crying. I thought it was over the movie."

"If we'd stayed," she said, "you would have cried too."

"Was it that bad?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes! It was deeply bad. And on top of it that bastard Pritchard whom I've always loved." She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. "You know?"

"I do," I said. "We've all been there."

She looked away and laughed bitterly, as though her lofty grief must be beyond the limits of my imagination. I was annoyed, since I had hoped to divert her from pining. On the other hand, it was entertaining to watch her doing unrequited love with restraint and a touch of self-scorning irony.

"This man is deliberately trying to make me crazy," she said. "And to kill himself."

"It's a type," I explained.

"Oh yeah?" She gave me another pitying glance. "You think so?"

She had crushed my helpful routine. I put it aside. "Was that the wife?" I asked. "The blonde?"

"Yes," Lucy said. "Think she's attractive?"

"Well," I said, "on a scale of yes or no..."

"All right, all right," she said. "All right."

"Met her?"

"I have met her," said Lucy. "When I did, I thought, Hey, she's not a bad kid. But she's a fucking bitch, it turns out."

I kept my advice to myself, and little by little Lucy detached herself from her regrets. Later I came to know how suddenly her moods could change. It was of course an affliction, in her case untreatable. She kept her ghosts close at hand and always on call. They were present as a glimmer of surprise behind her eyes that never disappeared.

After a while I got her to walk with me; we shed our shoes and went across the moonlit beach. Brion seemed to be off her mind.

The sand at the water's edge had a steep dropoff to the
surf. We clambered down to the wet sand where the waves broke. The sea's withdrawing force was nearly enough to pull us off our feet. Lucy lost her balance and I had to put an arm around her waist to preserve her.

"It could take you away," Lucy said.

We climbed the four feet or so to the looser sand, which left us out of breath. As we walked back, Lucy told a story from her earliest days in town. She had fallen in with some fast-lane hipsters. Many of them came from industry families. One night she and a friend found themselves on the beach with the daughter of a world-famous entertainment figure. The daughter passed out, so when Lucy and her friend saw somebody coming they ran off into the nearby shadows. Two men arrived, equally world-famous. They encountered the daughter sprawled on the sand and tried to rouse her. The adolescent responded with dazed, rude mutterings. One man told the other whose daughter she was. Lucy always remembered his Viennese accent.

"
Ja
," the man said to his friend. "Kid's a valking disaster."

Lucy and her friend giggled in the dark. Who could walk?

"I don't drink anymore," Lucy told me.

In spite of her solemn reflections, when we got back to the trailer she produced some Quaaludes and cocaine for me. I did a sopor and a couple of lines on her beautiful goatskin table. We drank champagne with it, which I feared would be a mistake. We were ready to get it on, both of us, but I wondered briefly if she might not suffer a morning-after-the-fact change of heart. She was a woman on the rebound; I was a stranger and afraid there might be recriminations. That was not Lucy, but I didn't know it then. She seemed so mercurial. I think we watched a little of Carson that night and found it uproariously funny in the wrong places. It was true that she smoked incessantly and smelled of tobacco. Otherwise she was a Levantine angel, one of the celestial damsels awarded to the devout and to me. In the sack she told me about her early life in Fresno.

"Know what people called Armenians?" she asked.

"What, baby?" We had gone to bed to Otis Redding, "Dock of the Bay," and there beside me Lucy addressed her après cigarette with such intensity and style that, after three years clean, I wanted one too. "Tell what they called the poor Armenians."

"They called us the Fresno Indians. Not so much people in Fresno. But in other towns. Modesto."

"How appropriate in your case."

She daintily set her smoke down, turned around and poked me in the ribs, hard, forcing me back into focus. She was wild-eyed. "Don't fucking say 'poor Armenians'! You're disrespecting my parents."

She was not really angry, although she had me fooled for a moment. She ran her fingers down my bones like a harpist and we slept the sleep of the whacked until drizzly dawn. Getting up, it struck me that I was due in New York in less than a week and what fun Lucy was. She would be on location in Mendocino until I left. This saddened our morning. We swore to keep in touch, the contemporary West Coast vow of enduring passion.

The gig in New York was the rewrite of a script that had been worked by two different writers unaware of each other's efforts. The dawning era of serious adult movies (a term that did not then altogether carry the meaning it has today) had inspired them to attempts at revolutionizing the film idiom. They both seemed to think that some ideal director would be guided by their novel scene settings and subtle dialogue. The thing had to be done in New York because the indispensable star lived in Bucks County and hated the coast. Naturally the synthesis was a turgid rat's nest and the job shameful and distressing. It was a project only God could have saved; I failed. I didn't like failing but I got paid, and thanks to Him the thing never got made. If it had, you can be sure I would have eaten the rap for it all by myself.

Then a doctoring job on a picture in production in England came my way. The project was an Englishing of a French movie for which the producers had actually paid money, and the translation of it by a British writer with a good command of French was not at all bad. But the setting had been transferred to Queens, and the producers thought his draft both too faithful to the original and too un-American. This was one to grab, though, a worthwhile credit. I went over to London, got hired and started looking for an apartment. Meanwhile the producers put me up in a crummy room at Brown's. The weather was sleety so I read my way through Olivia Manning's trilogies, Balkan and Levant. At this time Britain had little daytime television, lest weak-minded people play hooky from their dark satanic mills. For the same reason, nighttime television went off around eleven, to the national anthem.

One night I turned on the tube to see that ITV was running a soap Lucy had done two years before. The moment I recognized her I felt a rush, a fond longing. I wasn't inclined to explore the feeling. Without prejudice—I think without prejudice—I was struck by how good she was in it. She looked altogether youthful and lovely, and she had a substance in the role that was worlds away from the poor Pocahontas routine my pal John had thrust on her. Days later I watched another episode. She played a villainous character—slim sexy brunettes were usually villainesses then—who did a lot of lying. She managed to render deceit without sideward glances or eye rolling. Her character had heart and mystery. Also intelligence. Vanished were the trace elements of Valley Girl adolescence that I had become rather fond of. But I preferred Lucy the pro because in those days I loved watching real artists deliver.

Now I wonder whether it wasn't about then—that early in the game—that I started doubting myself, distrusting the quality of the silence in which I worked. Anyway, in Lucy's performance on that soap I thought I recognized the effort of one who lived for doing the voices, the way good writers did. Equipped with a sheath of fictional identity, she turned incandescent.

In the morning, I phoned her across eight time zones and tried to tell her what I had seen her do. She tried to tell me how she'd done it. Neither of us in that sudden conversation quite succeeded.

So I asked her: "How's life?"

She said: "Oh, man, don't ask me. I don't know, you know? Sometimes bearable. At others fucked."

"The pains of love or what?"

"I miss you," she said all at once, and I told her, from the
heart, that I missed her too. I hadn't been asking her about us, but I can tell you she put me in the moment.

The next day I got a call from John, the perpetrator of
Unbound Unleashed Uncooked.
During my conversation with Lucy I had mentioned that I was house hunting. Now John told me that none other than Heathcliff, Brion Pritchard, had a place in St. John's Wood I could borrow for a moderate fee. I was so enthused, and tired of hearing landlords either hang up or purr with greed at the sound of an American voice, that I went for it at once. The studio that had green-lighted us paid. Distracted, I failed to focus on the distaste-fulness of this arrangement. Anyway, prowling and prying about the place when I should have been writing, I discovered many amusing and scandalous things about Mr. and Mrs. Heathcliff that sort of endeared them to me.

Then a strange and wonderful thing happened. One evening at the interval of a play at the Royal Court I saw a girl—she was so lovely and gamine that I could not think of that creature as anything but a girl—who was speaking American English to a female friend she had come with. I noticed that she was wearing Capezios. Catching her alone for a moment, I made my move. My predations at that time often had a theatrical background.

"You're a dancer," I told her.

She was in fact a dancer. I asked her if she cared for dinner or coffee or a drink after the play, but she didn't want to leave her friend alone. Today I would have given her my phone number, but not then, so I asked for hers and she gave it to me. On our first date we went to an Italian place in Hampstead. Jennifer had spent two years with the Frankfurt Ballet, and when we met she was in England pondering options. European cities were losing their state art subsidies, and there was no shortage of young dancers from Britain and the States. I took her home, not pressing it. Our second meeting was on Highgate Hill, and as we walked to Ken Wood we told each other the story of our lives. This was the wonder-of-me stage of our courtship and it was genuinely sweet.

It turned out that Jennifer, notwithstanding her adorable long-toothed smile and freckled nose, had been around the block, a runaway child and an exotic dancer—a teenage stripper—in New Orleans. Her nice parents in Oak Lawn had reclaimed her and sent her back to ballet school, first in Dallas, finally in New York. As a student she had gotten into cocaine and danced a
Nutcracker
in Princeton, where the falling-snow effects, she said, made her sneeze. We were so easy with each other, at the same time so intoxicated. It was lovely.