Long Shot (27 page)

“This is all I really need,” he said, hunching the woolen shoulders of his shirt.

“Gee, and I thought
I
was a light packer. What about your car?”

“Could we just get out of here?”

Of course. She beckoned him in without another word, then backed and turned and headed out. They stopped at the inn, where they dropped their keys and paid in full. Greg owed ninety dollars for three nights running, Vivien a hundred and thirty for one. It gave him a rough idea what it cost to have birchwood logs on the fire and rain gear hung in the closet. Coming out to the car again, they flipped a coin to see who'd drive. Vivien won the toss. He made a mental note not to bet with her at cards.

She did without maps entirely, while he, who loved them all—from bus routes to folio atlas—had left his own in the Dodge. Worse still, she had no apparent route. She seemed to make do with any road that came to hand and headed south. He tried to put it out of his mind till it came around to
his
turn. At which point, he would stop at the very first service station and get all the data he needed. For now, he rested his head against the window and looked across three counties.

They ran for half an hour through a north-south valley hollowed out by a glacier, with a perfectly beveled slope on either side. He was getting a cosmic picture of the ice, as it shouldered its way between two ranges, when he caught a glimpse of coursing water beyond the roadside brush.
So that's what it is
, he thought:
The river
. The same as bore the eight men down to a fatal crossroads ten years past. How little he really understood the flow of forces. If he couldn't tell, in the valleys he traversed, an ice cut from a river cut, how did he ever expect to follow out the trails of vanished men?

“How far do you think it is?” she asked.

“New York? About four hours.”

“No—Walden Pond.”

He looked at her sidelong, to get some clue in the squint of her eye. She had a finger pointed at his lap—where, much to his chagrin, he found he was cradling Thoreau, flipping the pages aimlessly. He hadn't been conscious of slipping it out of his pocket. Now he was caught in the act. He laid it down between them on the seat and edged it closer to her.

“Who knows?” he answered, bored at the mere idea. But the words were scarcely out of his mouth before he was hit with an opposite whim, to show what he knew of the lay of the land. “Say an hour south and three hours east.”

“Really? As close as that? It's almost worth a detour.”

All this got her was half a mile of silence.

“Wouldn't you like to see it?” she asked.

“Not especially.”

“You'd rather I didn't talk about it, right?”

“
I
don't care,” he said wearily, wishing he had a map to see how far the road kept pace with the river.

“Yes, you do. We'll change the subject. Tell me about your movies.”

“You must be thinking of someone else.
I
never did a movie.”

“Well, your scripts, then.”

“Oh, them,” he scoffed. “Didn't you know—there's an epidemic. The girl at the dry cleaner's got three scripts. The bag boys at Ralph's spend half their money on their Xerox bill.”

“Didn't you write some comedy?” she asked. “Didn't somebody option it?”

He exploded: “Why don't
you
tell
me?
I gather it's part of my file.”

“Listen, honey,” Vivien said, “I'm sorry you never made it. Don't let it turn you into a prick. Okay?”

Okay. He counted to ten, or thereabouts. Relieved to be rid of this whiny brand of sensitive that made him cringe when he saw it in anyone else. She'd gotten too close for comfort. Seemed to know how he got to sleep on sleepless nights: still fashioning scenes and great locations, adding fresh snippets of dialogue, though he hadn't had them out of the drawer in two and a half years. It wasn't that he was afraid of Vivien's bad opinion. She'd probably love them. Then what? Why undo his two good years of getting slowly better every day?

“Option is far too grand,” he said. He kept an eye on the trees outside, to cover his line of retreat if he found his confession getting out of hand. “Guy paid me twenty-five thousand to rewrite one of my scripts. Make it funny, he says. What the hell, I was broke. I would have made it a
western
, to pull in that kind of money.” And he shrugged in such a way that his shoulders stayed up till he finished speaking. “Didn't matter. By the time I was done, he had a better deal, and I got shelved. End of story.”

“But don't you see,” she said, who had all the deals she needed, “that's what I want to hear. Tell me the story.”

She didn't see, did she? Telling his stories to people who found them not quite right had been the very thing that made him stop. Too odd, they told him. What was he doing, changing the plot in the middle? His people went off on so many detours, they ended up in a whole new story before they were done. You either did it straight or not at all.

“
Last Wish
,” he said, “by R. Greg Cannon.”

“What's the R stand for?”

“Ronald,” he said, “and don't you dare ever say it. These two drunks meet in a bar and get to talking. One of them's just been writing his will, and he has to have it witnessed. He's left all his money so people can have a party when he dies. They're bums, you know? It's late at night. They get some men to sign it. This one guy, Chuck, agrees to be named executor. Everyone thinks it's a big joke.”

“They're gay?”

“No—why?”

“I don't know. They sound it.”

“Anyway—a couple years go by, and the guy gets cancer and dies in the poorhouse. You don't see any of that. Turns out he's got six hundred thousand bucks in the bank. Every cent of it's earmarked for the party. Chuck's got to put it on.”

“It'd never hold up in court,” she said.

“Look, why don't you write your own fucking movie?” Greg retorted, lapsing into silence.

She suddenly saw that he might be telling the truth—he was glad he wasn't a writer anymore. She had lived so long with wild ambition, in the upper reaches of Steepside, she never gave much thought to the setting of modest sights. Perhaps he preferred his three-man operation. What if he wasn't a failure at all? She hadn't ever held a job herself, so could only guess what made a person work and like it. What if he'd found a job that fit him exactly right? Perhaps it never crossed his mind to guess how well he was doing.

“Now you,” he said abruptly, turning the tables. “What's it like, being a star?”

“It's not like anything, really,” Vivien replied evasively. She gathered she'd had as much synopsis as she was likely to get. “You want me to say I like it? I like it okay.”

“Does it make you feel invulnerable?”

“Hmm,” she considered, slowing to forty-five for a moment. “Not exactly. I know I'll get a good table, of course, but that's just money. You think it really gets me anywhere? I can't buy time, you know.”

“Didn't you ever decide you ought to earn your keep? Why don't you run the March of Dimes?”

“I thought we'd agreed about what it is I do,” she said, ignoring the dose of guilt. “I'm a star.”

There was enough of an edge of irony to show she thought it an outrage—even she. Crazier, in its way, than the overpaid work of Jasper Cokes, at a million bucks a week—because in her case neither craft nor talent was required. Greg had always refused to take the broader view that Edna pushed, whereby one went with the stars the age provided, no matter who they were. He was fired, just now, with a burst of his oldest loyalty. A star, he thought, was something quite particular. It had to do with movies.

“I wouldn't be you for anything,” he said.

It wasn't as if he'd been asked.

“Noble of you, I'm sure. You're right, of course—I don't do a hell of a lot. But you keep confusing me with
her
. This Vivien woman doesn't exist, except in photographs. It's a lot of bullshit, just like everything else in Hollywood.”

“Some of them made some fabulous pictures.”

“Unlike us good-for-nothing types. You're such a purist, aren't you? It's such a funny place for a virgin.”

They'd had enough for a while. The next hour passed in silence, while they crossed the border and into the Berkshires. Here, the trees were much advanced. It wasn't the dream of green, as it was high up at Carbon Mountain, but green itself, completely grown.

When it got to be time to switch, she stopped at a roadside stand. She nosed the car in among Sunday drivers and went to root in the bins of country goods. Greg trailed along behind for a while, as she filled a market basket full of dubious homemade stuffs. Pepper relish and candied pumpkin. Jugs of maple cream. A burlap pouch full of pine needles, meant to be a sachet. This was not a down-home girl, he thought, perplexed and slightly annoyed. She didn't need to buy condiments to make her dinners vivid. The help did all of that.

He broke away and loped across Route 7, to a blank-eyed gas pump standing all alone in front of a tin-roofed shed. The dozing mechanic had given away his last free map a few years back, but he jerked his thumb toward the wall above his workbench, where he had one pinned, so old it looked pre-Revolutionary. Greg got up close and traced their route for the next two hours—south to the Mass. Pike, west to the New York Thruway. He noted the names of the towns they'd pass. Checked out the peaks and bodies of water. By the time he sauntered back, he had the territory fixed. He couldn't get tricked off course, no matter how the weather turned.

She'd meanwhile rung up forty-six dollars in crafts and folkways. They were stowing it all in a shopping bag when Greg appeared at the wooden counter. He was struck right off by the turmoil that attended her, even here. The hillbilly granny who kept the cash box was visibly shaken and couldn't make change. Her wizened sister, bagging it up, went on and on about canning. The browsing tourists were openmouthed and mute. Greg wanted to pound the counter with his fist. Did they have to act quite so much as if it were an appearance by Our Lady? What were they doing reading
People
, when they had these ripening fields and virgin hills to look out on?

“Do you always have to have souvenirs?” he asked with some contempt, as he set the bag on the back seat.

“It's just a few things for Edna,” she said lightly. “After all, everyone can't have the same taste, can they?”

Oh, it was insupportable. Here was Vivien, calling him a snob for implying her rural goods were tacky. A total misrepresentation. She was the one who shrank from the crap that littered the world at large. Still, it was only the mildest sort of sniping, so far. They had so much ammunition about each other now, they could have hit every shot below the belt.

“What's with you and Edna?” Greg asked bluntly.

She'd explained how Edna had put her onto him. The Vermont address had passed between them. It wasn't clear what else. Just now, he made it sound like she'd been trying to hire away his second-in-command.

“Nothing,” she said, with an air of reassurance. “I just like her. Things seem to please her. The people I meet are usually so displeased.”

“She's got a hell of a temper,” said Greg, not really to contradict her. “But she loves life most obscenely. Not one of your biggest fans, I might add.”

“I know,” she replied resignedly. Was nothing ever news to her, he wondered. “You can hardly blame her, though. I'm disapproved of so. Princess Margaret doesn't get the heat I get.”

“Don't worry,” he said, relenting some. “With Edna, a lot of it's just hot air. Actually, we're all very live-and-let-live.”

“Oh, so are we,” she said. “It's every man for himself at Steepside.”

Once they got to the highway, you couldn't any longer call it country life—even with all the miles of spring in the forested hills on either side. They were clearly going back. Already, the moment of stasis out in the rain must have seemed all but irretrievable. Yet, if it made them sorry to go, they didn't say as much to one another. It would have tipped them over into the sort of excess sentiment they dreaded. Thus, they began to brood about their suspects.

Vivien already had the table set for lunch, next day at Ma Maison. All she had to do was make the reservation. She wanted to put it to Carl in public, so as to keep them out of a shouting match. She'd permit no refuge in hysterics. It happened that nowhere in all the world assured her better treatment. She was one of the trends that made it trendy. She could see herself sitting across from Carl, alone at last in the middle of things, with all the power on her side.

Greg, meanwhile, had decided not to have his confrontation by appointment. He planned to walk in unexpected. Let Artie discover him with his feet up, smoking a dollar cigar. This would be in the nature of reparations, paying Steepside back for the night they muscled him out of there. He meant to tell the tale to Artie's face, with a most deliberate slowness.

“I made us reservations,” she said, when they were about an hour north of New York. He didn't bother to ask what time the flight took off, or how she knew they'd make it, because he seemed to understand she was an expert in these matters. “I forgot to ask what the movie is,” she said.

“It doesn't matter. They're all shit.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “we could get them to show
Birth of a Nation
.”

As the city grew, they crossed a lot of bridges, slung low above iron-dark waters. The expressways, routing them through the peripheries, then on out to Kennedy, skirted mile after cratered mile of bombed-out neighborhoods. The shells of long-abandoned industries stood fast in vacant lots. Spring had gained a good deal of ground as they traveled south, but it vanished as if behind a curtain, now they were in the arteries of New York. Thoreau, she thought, would have shaken his fist at the shell-shocked war zone of city life. She and Greg, at heart two Angelenos used to greener pastures, reacted instead in a purely provincial way:
Thank God I don't live here
. One could not stay forever at Walden, of course. In the end, one had to return dead center. But really, there were limits.