Long Shot (2 page)

It was really Edna's job that Greg was horning in on here. The division of labor was strict: She did all the ladies, Sid did all the men. Doubtless Edna would find Greg's signature work too cramped and cautious, incompatible with a name once written in lights. Greg was mostly left to the accounting work—publicity, banking, and postal rates. But not tonight. Taxes were a shade too gray and common, somehow. He needed to be in the thick of an outsize dream, whatever dream he wished. Stanwyck was just the ticket.

He'd fallen into mail order quite by chance. From the stroke of puberty on, to the day he went over the cliff at thirty, he was always shooting a movie in his head. He was his own most passionate apprentice, preparing the way for the grave and complicated artist he planned to be at twenty-five. At seventeen he took to sporting scarves indoors, with a clipboard under his arm, somewhat after the manner of a shot of Cukor on the cover of
Life
. In the suburbs north of Chicago, along the lake, it might have gone over as chic, but he lived too deep in the city. The wearing of berets could only mean one thing: Greg Cannon was a fairy. Tight-assed and wholly alone, he got back at the bullies and toughs for the names they called him by standing apart entirely from the animal mess of sex. He shook the immediate wilderness—high school, no money, no car—by living his real life somewhere else, in the silvery dark of a movie house.

At seventeen, Greg would have been in a state of rapture to think he would one day autograph Stanwyck's picture. He wouldn't have given a second thought to the moral dimension at all—whether or not it was right to deal in phony artifacts, purveyed to innocent rubes at six-fifty a throw. On the contrary. Until he was twenty-five, he figured a film like
Stella Dallas
told a brand of naked truth you couldn't find in Illinois. In his formative years, he stuck with
The Late Show
all night long, while down the hall his workaday family dreamed in the properly Freudian way. The studio films of the thirties and forties served him much as a liberal education was supposed to, in the sense that it gave him something to say about anything at all. Of course, his College Boards were very low, since relative clauses and algebra had never made it big at MGM. Still, Greg at seventeen would have defended the morals of himself at thirty-two, most nobly. His was an essential service, after all. There were people lost in the middle of nowhere. They needed a dose of Hollywood something terribly. Besides, who was to say the autographs he sold weren't real, if the buyers out there thought they were? To Greg, an artifact was nothing more than how it made you feel.

By the time he finished the batch of Barbara Stanwyck orders, he realized he was signing a still from another picture. He couldn't place it right away. She looked a bit the way she did in
Sorry Wrong Number
, lonely and trapped, except here she wasn't in bed and didn't have both hands glued to the phone. Almost without thinking, Greg's hand shot out to the folder and patted it nervously, as if to measure its thickness. The moment gave him sudden pause—to think he'd used up all of what he had of
Stella Dallas
. Ever since the day he sank his savings in these stacks and stacks of photographs, buying out the back room of a camera store on Sunset, he'd never yet run out of any item. He'd vaguely assumed his stock was inexhaustible, but then, he hardly could have predicted how the whole thing would snowball. At the beginning, he could do the week's business Sunday morning, over a bloody mary. Now they were sending out a hundred and fifty packages every Friday. He'd even had to liberate a shopping cart at Safeway, just to truck his orders to the post office.

“Honey,” Edna said, appearing at his elbow, “we're going to faint if we don't eat. We gotta stick to a schedule, see? Sid, he can't stand fluctuation.”

She nodded over her shoulder, as if to say it was out of her hands. As to dinner, she didn't appear to be after anything fancy. Greg shouldn't lift a finger. She'd rather be left to herself in the zinc-lined kitchen, where she'd root around, carte blanche, among the tins and dry goods, throwing together enough for three.

“What's this from?” he asked her suddenly, holding up the shot of Stanwyck looking raw and anxious.

“Don't she look great?” said Edna, beaming. “Like she don't fool around with love at all.” They seemed to be intimates, she and Stanwyck, in matters of the heart. “And while you're at it, please get a load of the shoes. Now
that
's what you call high heels.”

Edna appraised the total look as if she'd had a hand in it. She was by her own admission the total fan, made special by indirection, like the moon. The candlepower of stars had been established by the loyalty of those who didn't miss the resonance of alligator shoes. From the beginning, Edna was hooked on the heavy stuff. Her first film was
Queen Cristina
. Though she was only fifteen—and overweight and pug-nosed—she stared straight ahead for several days, totally expressionless, in homage to the final shot of Garbo. When she grew up to be temperamentally sassy, with a lilt about the eye and a cutting edge like Claudette Colbert, she went on loving every star, and not one kind or another. She didn't require them to be like her, for one thing.

“
Jeopardy
,” she said, shaking her head with a little sigh. “But it wasn't really her.” Though it pained her to have to give a bad notice, she seemed to feel there was something extra required of a star performance. She couldn't define it in so many words. She only knew when it wasn't there.

“Aren't you missing the best part?” he asked her, tossing aside the photograph. He meant the Oscars.

“They're having a slew of ads,” she said, “and then they got the documentaries.” She pinched her nose between two fingers. “The middle always stinks. Sid's gone down to get the bourbon.”

“Why? Doesn't he know by now he can drink my liquor?”

“And bother
you?
” She was at the doorway into the butler's pantry. “Sid thinks you're very grand, you know, when you got a lousy mood on. He thinks you must be working on a script.”

“Well, I'm not,” Greg retorted with sudden annoyance. He snatched up the cap to the felt-tip pen, brought the two parts together, and scored a sea-blue line along his thumb. The second time he connected. “I bet I'm the only man in L.A. who's
not
knee-deep in a script. It shows a certain sort of valor, wouldn't you say?”

“You think so? It never seems to prevent you acting like you're
in
a movie, does it?”

She disappeared into the kitchen. He wiped at the mark on his thumb and determined not to care what Edna thought. The Moorish room he sat in was an octagon. It peaked above him in a beamed and vaulted ceiling pierced eight times by pointed amber windows. It was very difficult, frankly—what with the golden light forever flooding in and the field of vision ten miles wide off the balcony rail—not to feel tracked by a camera. All the scenes that had ever wised him up had been shot right here, in the same bright weather. The cast of thousands had all been drawn from the streets that gridded this neighborhood—recruited, Greg felt certain, right off the corner of Cherokee and Franklin, eleven floors below his terrace. Little wonder, then, he was all wound up like a film. Edna was right. Since the day he landed in Hollywood, he secretly thought he was in a story bigger than the sum of what he saw.

Edna called out from the kitchen, as if she'd followed his train of thought: “I'm not saying it's wrong, you understand. Maybe you
are
in a movie.”

If this is a movie, he thought, it's a bomb. The next thing he knew, she was back. She gripped a can of tuna in the teeth of an opener, and winced as she cranked it round.

“If it's one thing I don't question,” she said, “it's a person's right to get pissed. You don't see
me
before noon, do you? Sid's got his Jim Beam, don't he? You know what your problem is? You don't
enjoy
a crappy mood.”

Abruptly, she fled away a second time, the oil spilling out of the sides of the tin. He raised one hand and made a vague gesture, as if to wave goodbye. Fuck that, he thought. Since when was
she
the authority on moods? Though he had to admit he always listened, he wondered why he bothered. It wasn't as if she altered his behavior. When he once got the word how he came across to someone, he usually dug in his heels and did it in spades. The clue to his darker hours was the art of acting opposite. Though he sometimes seemed on the edge of easing up, likely as not he was preparing for a further turn to the ornery.

He picked up the morning's second-class mail from a wicker basket at his feet. Then he settled back to get a bead on the competition. On top was a flyer from a dealer out in Van Nuys who must have bought a lot of junk at auction. For three hundred bucks, a person could own the model boat they used for distance shots in
The African Queen
. There was a rusty gun from
High Noon
. Then a chaos of fans and batons and sparklers from various tin-ear musicals—including an actual Carmen Miranda headgear, all gourds and paper hibiscus. The whole package was terribly sleazy, but Greg put it all to one side, since dancing was Sid's department. Most of these offers he tore up in little pieces. The counterfeit autographs notwithstanding, Greg was a moral absolutist. He hated the gyps and fly-by-nights.

The Monday mail was always fat with movie mags. He riffled through them one by one and scanned the last few pages. There, among dog tags and rubber underwear, was where he took his ads. The market was hard, and the stuff back here was as actual as the real world ever got. He spotted himself right off:
The United Fans of America
. “Who is the brightest star of all?” was written out in italic caps. Then there was a ballot attached, as if every vote were being gravely counted. Membership fee, six-fifty. And to the first five hundred lucky fans, a studio shot of the star of one's dreams would arrive in the mail posthaste. All of this spoken in breathless abbreviation, as space was at such a premium. Greg took a close look at his three-by-five bit of media, as if it were his own name seeing print at last. It was hardly
War and Peace
, of course, but the big thing here was going public. As things fell out, in two short years the UFA had grown to sixty-seven hundred strong, with no end in sight. There was a vast, undreamed-of market out there, burning for an autograph. The UFA was bidding fair to become the giant in the field.

Yet it didn't matter a whit to him as the night came down on April third. What mattered was this: The boy in 2C had broken his word, and it made him the same as anyone else. When he left this morning, downing half a quart of milk while Greg put together a cup of coffee, he swore he'd be back before dark, to leave off the book. Nothing more. They weren't about to go another night together yet. They went out of their way, it almost seemed, to pretend the night before had hardly taken place. One or the other was still too shy. So they breakfasted on chitchat—no more intimate, all of a sudden, than if they'd met each other waiting for a bus.

So forget it
, he thought.
Just let it go
.

He dropped the magazines back in the basket. He itched for something tough to do, so he wouldn't have to think. In the end he lit on Edna—i.e., what the fuck was she up to? It didn't take this long to doctor a can of tuna. He stood up and made for the butler's-pantry door, feeling all his juices rise to a wave of irritation. He only hoped she was doing something wrong, so he could go in hurling accusations. Halfway across the octagon, he suddenly saw an orange glow reflected in the mirrored wall. Of course: the TV out in the other room. He couldn't make the image out. It was all a blur. It had the effect of a manufactured sunset, packaged for use in the home. He came up close to the dusky mirror and peered in across the apartment, as if he didn't dare turn and face it straight on. As if it would turn him to stone. He could see two stars at the podium, having a bit of patter before they got to the list of nominees. They were too far off for him to see exactly who they were.

He was lost, and he knew it. His line of defense had vanished. Edna was all distracted now, layering a casserole half a foot thick. Sid was siphoning bourbon out of a litter of bottles, on his bedside table. The whole day's drama of monkish unconcern, in which he had refused to be involved and changed the subject time and again, had fizzled now to a stop. The figures shining in the screen's raw light had struck him dumb with memories. He turned like somebody hypnotized. He walked across to the Sony, perfectly still inside, as rosy as a drowning man sent ranging through the flood of years.

What the hell
, he thought,
why not?
The Oscar show was long ago his first real glimmer of life Out There. He'd never missed it once in aver twenty years, no matter how broke and horny. He stood two feet from the screen and watched.
Oh kid
, he thought,
where are you?
Even now, if the doorbell rang, he could have torn himself away. As it was, he didn't stand a chance. The winner was named, the audience clapped, and a man ran up the aisle to get his prize. Greg didn't move a muscle.

The smell of lilies was so intense that after a while it began to seem not real—as cheap as the dollar toilet water they bottled to sell at the airport. Vivien's first few hours on the island were always more like a memory coming back than something happening here and now. The lilies were part of the given—a four-acre field on the side of the hill above the house. The view to Harrington Sound across the ranks of fat white blooms was literally out of this world, as her mother used to say, though nobody ever went up there anymore except for the farmer who leased the land. Every April, as soon as the plane touched down in Bermuda, Vivien swore she'd climb way up through the cedar grove, to stand again knee-deep in flowers. As things turned out, she never seemed to get around to it. Somehow, she had all the lilies she needed, just keeping the windows open.