Girl of My Dreams (17 page)

“I did not lose Jesus until I went to the Sorbonne and was talked out of him by the philosophy professor who spoke about Ypres and Verdun where perhaps a million died. He said if God exists and lets such things happen I don't want to know him. If God is good he wouldn't let this slaughter occur, and if God is bad I want nothing to do with him anyway. He told us to watch the unequal contest of labor and capital as France settled down again after the war. It was all around me—the selfishness, class boundaries, inequality in the land of
égalité
, the way the rich took one look at the poor and sneered. The poor had really saved the rich in the war—and for what? To return to the same arrangement, the same fixed order. Sister Jeanmaire and Sister Maria Christina were my Ypres and Verdun. It was a narrow view but I bought it, you might say I succumbed to it. This left a hole in me where God had been. I had hated the nuns, but now I pitied them and envied them too, for their certainty. In Paris I read the
Manifesto
and as much of
Das Kapital
as I could get through. Profit and exploitation. Workers in chains. Surplus value. Infinite wealth accumulation. Time started over again, the way time started over with Christ. The year zero. Nothing is left, nothing but music and martyrdom and the year zero. When I met Marx I thought, ah, the hole is filled.”

I said nothing.

Pammy was in Hollywood when the wave of disillusionment with capitalism became intense after the market crash in 1929. She had seen class disparity in Europe, but in the picture business the outsized salaries of the few at the top, overlording the many low-wage toilers, were baffling. When she found herself making huge money in bad movies, she thought surely a socialist country would have better art, a more equal distribution of capital. Hollywood people have too much time and money on their hands, a Red organizer telegraphed the functionary who had sent him west. We'll give them something to do with both, the New York commissar wired back.

We had returned to the pool, to some Chassagne-Montrachet that had been placed there in an ice bucket while we walked, and to the script Dunster Clapp had sent me out to Red Woods with. She frowned at the script. Distractedly, she poured the golden wine into two goblets. As soon as I felt I was with the real Palmyra, she slipped away. I was convinced that even if I had the courage to touch her, my hands would feel nothing and I'd hear her tittering at me impishly from the other side of the pool, a mermaid's ghost.

Again her mood shifted. She focused sternly, her lower lip over her upper, her brows knitted. “What do you think of Mossy?” she asked, still looking at the script. “I mean really think of him as a person.”

I didn't know him as a person. I only knew him as lord and master. I managed to stammer that he had so much power I hoped he used it wisely.

“The hardest part for me,” she said looking at her wine, “is to figure out his intentions so I can resist them.” She returned to the script and flipped the pages with curiosity but with none of the scrutiny of an actor considering a possible role.

What was she seeing in the script? In the stories we wrote we needed to make life bearable both for ourselves and our audiences. We worked from some controlled recess of what we were pleased to call imagination to make the palatable fate—it was Hollywood after all—unconfused, triumphant, mostly happy.

Pammy slammed down the script on the flagstones. Her face was like gristle. I had never seen her ugly before. Could you take a picture, I briefly wondered, of the mood in her face? Her eyes were cold, her mouth hard. “You don't much care for it?” I said.

“It's only a little stupider than the last one they sent. What makes me furious is he thinks he can do whatever he wants with any of us. Power is his life. Go here to this restaurant with this escort, don't go to that opening, make this picture, don't be seen with that actor. Well, he knows what he can do with his power.” Pammy gulped the last of her Montrachet, and I thought for an instant she was going to spit it out.

I was helpless to help her. Still it seemed cruel not to try. But before I'd uttered a whole sentence—“Why don't you let me talk to someone in the story dep … ” she came down on me like rain. “You men! One of you talks to another and figures out how you can control some woman. You're all alike!”

I apologized, scurrying out of her path. This was the tyranny of weakness; the person with the complaint, the grief, the illness, has to be attended. Don't argue. But there was also the tyranny of strength, of the person who can do to you whatever he likes because he holds the cards. Just now Pammy had the former, Mossy the latter. In service to both, I was vassal to each of their tyrannies. Her look was tough as a boot.

Abruptly, the pendulum swung back again. “Let's sing,” she said. “I may be with song.” She pulled out a folded page and made some scribbles. I've heard pretentious writers, usually men, compare their inspirations to pregnancy; with Pammy, who had actually borne a child, this seemed a comparison she'd earned. I saw some words, a musical measure, then a burst of more words. I looked away, not daring to move. When she stopped scribbling, she asked kindly, “Would you like to hear?”

I said sure, anything she wanted to sing. She apparently was able to get herself out of gloom or anger—and she'd just been possessed by both—by impregnating herself with music. If she'd signaled a gestation period, I was in the delivery room.

No fool like a young fool; I was back to wishing I could be her cocker spaniel.

“This one's not quite ready. I fooled with it this morning. It would be better if I played the piano but I don't want to go up to the house, so we'll just try it here.” In those days most songs had verses before their choruses; I regret their passing.

“Ever since you went away,” she began in a key lower than I'd heard her before,

I've waited to hold you again,

Now the train whispers along the nighttime track

Bringing my faraway honey back

Back to me where you belong,

Where I can sing my nighttime song.

I'll sing to you and hold you tight

And won't let go the whole dark night.

She paused, “Okay, okay, I need some dibbling in the whisper line, but here's the up-tempo chorus:

Oh I've been brokenhearted

Since the last time we parted,

I've been brokenhearted 'cause of how much we started—

How I wish you'd see to

The matter of loving me, too,

You'll never know how much I care

No matter when or where.

Oh I'll be brokenhearted till the next time I kiss you,

I'll be brokenhearted 'cause of how much I miss you—

I'll be brokenhearted till the next time we kiss,

I'll be brokenhearted—it started when we parted—

I'll be brokenhearted … like this.

She held the last word to become thiii-iiisss. “What do you think? Is it stillborn?”

“It'll be all over the radio,” I said.

Millie ran down to join us at the pool. “Are you still reading the screamplay?” she asked. She had been calling scripts that since she was three.

“Shhh,” Pammy said, “don't you know Owen's a screamwriter?”

“Hopes he is,” I said.

Costanza appeared through the wisteria with a package. “Oooh, look at the present for me,” Millie said.

The package, large enough for a football, was elaborately wrapped in purple tissue paper with gold stars on it, tied in a pink ribbon. “For you, Mrs. Pammy,” Costanza said. She called Pammy Mrs. as if to confer more respectability on her unmarried motherhood. “I know this address is a big secret, but it was outside the front door.”

Pammy said she wished fans could understand how desperately performers needed their small portion of privacy. It wasn't fair, not on a Sunday, way out in the country like this. Millie said, “Come on, maybe it's a toy for your adorable daughter.”

Idly, Pammy unwrapped the package. When she had the outer paper off, the box indeed appeared to hold a piece of sporting goods, some kind of ball. “Yay,” Millie said, doing a little dance, “It'll be something for me.” I was sitting very near Pammy, and I thought an odd essence came from the box. Pammy opened it. More tissue paper. She plunged ahead until she beheld the gift, in the center at the bottom of the box, and gasped. It was a lengthy, perhaps nine- or ten-inch, gray penis, the gray of a storm cloud, fishbelly gray. Underneath it, on a greeting card that had a color picture of a clown in a wide-mouthed laugh, was scrawled in what looked and smelled like feces, “For the Perfict Horr of Jaabalee—use as nieded.”

I jumped up and clapped the box shut, I hoped before Millie had seen it.

“Can I play with it?” Millie asked. Then she hadn't seen. Had she?

Pammy was the color of the gift. “What the hell else do they want?” she said.

10

The Rite Spot

Driving home across the dusty wastes of the parasitic outskirts and finally the nowhere downtown, I thought I might propose a little charter revision to the city council. Add one letter to the first word of your city and rename it Lost Angeles. A city with the dwindles. By this time my shock over Pammy's grisly present had waned into the usual late Sunday drear. I wished I could repair the damage, protect Millie.

In an alley off skidrow I heaved the package into a garbage can. We had first thought I should take it to the police; then we thought about my turning it over to studio security. We finally decided anything I did would be sure to leak either to
Variety
, the
Examiner
, or the
Times
, so I simply threw it away. Destroying fingerprint possibilities, of course, but the lowlife probably wore gloves.

Reaching Beverly Hills, I was momentarily startled by the gaudy combination of Tudor, French provincial, Spanish colonial, tropical, antebellum, glass and wood modern, and English manor architecture. For the stars and other movie creators, these were the most luxurious slave quarters in the world, the people in them manacled not only to their studios but to their fans. Anyone could have a run of flops, anyone could be fired. Pammy might get two thousand roses and ten thousand fan letters a week, but she also attracted the rage and craziness crammed into the package I'd just thrown away.

By the time I'd gone out Sunset and followed Amalfi Drive down its curves to Sumac Lane, I was hungry. I parked in front of my little house but didn't go inside. I walked to the mouth of Santa Monica Canyon where I knew I could get something quick and filling at Sam's Rite Spot, a dark dive across the road from the beach, red and white checked oilcloths covering the dozen tables. A couple with two toddlers were the only other diners I saw, and I saw them only because the children were noisy.

I was halfway through a chili size and sucking on my root beer when I noticed, or didn't quite notice, a shadow gesture in my direction from two tables away. She asked me the time, the clock in the place being broken at a quarter to twelve; it was always deep in the eleventh hour at Sam's Rite Spot. A plea was just visible in her eyes, as if some dire consequence such as a scheduled execution might be disclosed by what time it turned out to be. When I said six she was relieved. “Thank goodness it's only that,” she said, “because I have to drive all the way to Arcadia.” She had an hour to travel across the same broad expanse of municipal basin I had just driven.

“I was afraid it was later,” she said. “Do you have as far to go as I do?”

“About a block and a half,” I said. The woman was eating fried oysters and I thought about ordering some for myself. She was skinny, with an athlete's body. Little bumplets showed on her chest beneath a light blue closefitting jersey. Her hair was sandy, a little stringy from the ocean. When she smiled I saw a small gap between her two front teeth, a space that would never be permitted by a studio but was not unpleasing to look at. Same with her jaw: too elongated for a cinematographer yet it was faun-like.

“Lucky you,” she said. “My mother's watching my little girl while I came down for a swim.” She was almost boyish. I didn't see how she could have a baby. Besides the light blue jersey, she wore a dark blue cotton skirt with little white musical staves on it.

“So early in the season,” I said. “The ocean must be freezing.” It was barely April, warm enough for an inland pool such as Pammy's but not for the chilly Pacific.

“Not to me,” she said. “I'm warm-blooded, and the water makes me feel so alive.”

Her flesh, what little there was of it, did actually look warm. Her arms glowed with the sun they'd had. She was not what producers called pretty, but she was appealing, and her manner, once she had relaxed about the time, was engaging.

“Excuse me for asking,” she said, “but do you really live only a block away?”

“Yeah, a little more.” As I answered I saw her more attractive aspects. Her face was not boyish as I'd thought, merely thin like the rest of her. Her body at first looked to be that of a teenager, but her hips were a woman's. Her nose had an almost imperceptible (though not to a camera) hook in it yet in an agreeable way so that she might have been a schoolteacher the kids made fun of but also really liked. Her eyes, nearly round, were swampy green and gave onto crinkly laugh lines at the corners. Her legs were long and tightly muscled. Probably an excellent swimmer. The bumplets under her jersey actually resembled, I saw as she savored her last oyster, small pieces of fruit, not kumquats after all but possibly damson plums with baby mulberries perched on top of them. Though she'd looked thin as an X-ray, the transparency was filled out with more flesh than I'd first perceived in the Rite Spot's shadows. Until it wasn't transparent anymore. She was squinting at me now, appraising me.

“I'm very salty from the ocean and I have this long drive. Would it be awfully forward of me to ask if I could wash up at your place?”