The Book of Illusions (17 page)

So plotted the clear-thinking and resourceful Brigid O’Fallon, and for a time it looked as though she would catch her man. Hector, embroiled in his various disputes with Hunt, struggling against fatigue and the pressures of having to crank out a new film every month, became less inclined to fritter away his nights in jazz clubs and speakeasys, to expend his strength on pointless seductions. O’Fallon’s apartment became a refuge for him, and the quiet evenings they spent there together helped keep his head and groin in balance. Brigid was an incisive critic, and because she was savvier about the movie business than he was, he came to rely more and more on her judgment. It was she, in fact, who suggested that he audition Dolores Saint John for the role of the sheriff’s daughter in
The Prop Man
, his upcoming two-reeler. Brigid had been studying Saint John’s career for the past several months, and in her opinion the twenty-one-year-old actress had the potential to become the next big thing, another Mabel Normand or Gloria Swanson, another Norma Talmadge.

Hector followed her advice. When Saint John walked into his office three days later, he had already watched a couple of her films and was committed to offering her the job. Brigid had been right about Saint John’s talent, but nothing she had said and nothing he had seen of Saint John’s work on film had prepared Hector for the overwhelming effect her presence would have on him. It was one thing to watch a person act in a silent movie; it was quite another to shake that person’s hand and look into her eyes. Other actresses were more impressive on celluloid, perhaps, but in the real world of sound and color, in the fleshed-out, three-dimensional world of the five senses and the four elements and the two sexes, he had never met a creature to compare with this one. It wasn’t that Saint John was more beautiful than other women, and it wasn’t that she said anything remarkable to him during the twenty-five minutes they spent together that afternoon. To be perfectly honest, she seemed to be a bit on the dull side, of no more than average intelligence, but there was a feral quality to her, an animal energy coursing along her skin and radiating from her gestures that made it impossible for him to stop looking at her. The eyes that looked back at him were of the palest Siberian blue. Her skin was white, and her hair was the darkest shade of red, a red verging on mahogany. Unlike the hair of most American women in June of 1928, it was long, and it hung down to her shoulders. They talked for a while about nothing in particular. Then, without any preamble, Hector told her that the part was hers if she wanted it, and she accepted. She had never worked in physical comedy before, she said, and she was looking forward to the challenge. Then she rose from her chair, shook his hand, and left the office. Ten minutes later, with the image of her face still burning in his head, Hector decided that Dolores Saint John was the woman he was going to marry. She was the woman of his life, and if it turned out that she wouldn’t have him, then he would never marry anyone.

She performed ably in
The Prop Man
, doing all that Hector asked of her and even contributing some clever flourishes of her own, but when he tried to sign her up for his next film, she demurred. She had been offered the main role in an Allan Dwan feature, and the opportunity was simply too great for her to turn it down. Hector, who was supposed to have the magic touch with women, was getting nowhere with her. He couldn’t find the words to express himself in English, and every time he was on the point of declaring his intentions to her, he would draw back at the last moment. If the words came out wrong, he felt that he would scare her off and ruin his chances forever. Meanwhile, he continued spending several nights a week at Brigid’s apartment, and because he had made no promises to her, because he was free to love any person he wanted, he said nothing to her about Saint John. When shooting on
The Prop
Man
wrapped in late June, Saint John went off on location to the Tehachapi Mountains. She worked on the Dwan film for four weeks, and during that time Hector wrote her sixty-seven letters. What he hadn’t been able to say to her in person, he finally found the courage to put down on paper. He said it again and again, and even though he said it differently each time he wrote, the message was always the same. At first, Saint John was puzzled. Then she was flattered. Then she began to look forward to the letters, and by the end she realized that she couldn’t live without them. When she returned to Los Angeles at the beginning of August, she told Hector that the answer was yes. Yes, she loved him. Yes, she would become his wife.

No date was set for the wedding, but they were talking about January or February—time enough for Hector to have fulfilled his contract with Hunt and to have worked out his next move. The moment had come to talk to Brigid, but he kept putting it off, could never quite get around to doing it. He was working late with Blaustein and Murphy, he said, he was in the editing room, he was on a location scout, he was under the weather. Between the beginning of August and the middle of October, he invented dozens of excuses for not seeing her, but still he couldn’t bring himself to break it off entirely. Even in the throes of his infatuation with Saint John, he went on visiting Brigid once or twice a week, and every time he walked through the door of the apartment, he slipped back into the same old cozy setup. One could accuse him of being a coward, of course, but one could just as easily assert that he was a man in conflict. Perhaps he was having second thoughts about marrying Saint John. Perhaps he wasn’t ready to give up O’Fallon. Perhaps he was torn between the two women and felt that he needed them both. Guilt can cause a man to act against his own best interests, but desire can do that as well, and when guilt and desire are mixed up equally in a man’s heart, that man is apt to do strange things.

O’Fallon suspected nothing. In September, when Hector engaged Saint John to play the role of his wife in
Mr. Nobody
, she congratulated him on the intelligence of his choice. Even when rumors filtered back from the set that there was a special
closeness
between Hector and his leading lady, she wasn’t unduly alarmed. Hector liked to flirt. He always fell for the actresses he worked with, but once the shooting was finished and everyone went home, he quickly forgot about them. In this case, however, the stories persisted. Hector had already moved on to
Double or Nothing
, his last picture at Kaleidoscope, and Gordon Fly was whispering in his column that wedding bells were about to ring for a certain long-haired siren and her mustachioed, funny-man beau. It was mid-October by then, and O’Fallon, who hadn’t heard from Hector in five or six days, called the editing room and asked him to come to her apartment that night. She had never asked him to do anything like that before, and so he canceled his dinner plans with Dolores and went to Brigid’s place instead. And there, confronted by the question he had put off answering for the past two months, he finally told her the truth.

Hector had been praying for something decisive, an eruption of female fury that would send him staggering out onto the street and end things once and for all, but Brigid merely looked at him when he broke the news to her, took a deep breath, and said that it wasn’t possible for him to love Saint John. It wasn’t possible because he loved her. Yes, Hector said, he did love her, he would always love her, but the fact was that he was going to marry Saint John. Brigid started to cry then, but still she didn’t accuse him of betrayal, didn’t argue for herself or shout out in anger about how terribly he had wronged her. He was wrong about himself, she said, and once he realized that no one would ever love him as she loved him, he would come back to her. Dolores Saint John was a thing, she said, not a person. She was a luminous and intoxicating thing, but underneath her skin she was coarse and shallow and stupid, and she didn’t deserve to be his wife. Hector should have said something to her at that point. The occasion demanded that he deliver some brutal, piercing remark that would destroy her hope forever, but Brigid’s grief was too strong for him, her devotion was too strong for him, and as he listened to her speak in those small, gasping sentences of hers, he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. You’re right, he answered. It probably won’t last more than a year or two. But I have to go through with it. I have to have her, and once I do, everything else will take care of itself.

He wound up spending the night in Brigid’s apartment. Not because he thought it would do them any good, but because she begged him to stay there one last time, and he couldn’t say no to her. The next morning, he slipped out before she woke up, and from that moment on, things began to change for him. The contract with Hunt ended; he started working on
Dot and
Dash
with Blaustein; his wedding plans took shape. After two and a half months, he still hadn’t heard from Brigid. He found her silence a little troublesome, but the truth was that he was too preoccupied with Saint John to give the matter much thought. If Brigid had disappeared, it could only be because she was a person of her word and was too proud to stand in his way. Now that he had made his intentions clear, she had backed off to let him sink or swim on his own. If he swam, he probably wouldn’t see her again. If he sank, she would probably turn up at the last minute and try to pull him out of the water.

It must have soothed Hector’s conscience to think these things about O’Fallon, to turn her into a form of superior being who felt no pain when knives were stuck into her body, who didn’t bleed when she was wounded. But in the absence of any verifiable facts, why not indulge in a little wishful thinking? He wanted to believe that she was doing well, that she was carrying on boldly with her life. He noticed that her articles had stopped appearing in
Photoplay
, but that could have meant that she was out of town or that she had taken another job somewhere else, and for the moment he refused to look at any of the darker possibilities. It wasn’t until she finally surfaced again (by slipping a letter under his door on New Year’s Eve) that he learned how miserably he had fooled himself. Two days after he had walked out on her in October, she had slit her wrists in the bathtub. If not for the water that had dripped down into the apartment below, the landlady never would have unlocked the door, and Brigid wouldn’t have been found until it was too late. An ambulance took her to the hospital. She pulled through after a couple of days, but her mind had crumbled, she wrote, she was incoherent and weeping all the time, and the doctors decided to hold her for observation. That led to a two-month stay in the mental ward. She was prepared to spend the rest of her life there, but that was only because her one purpose in life now was to find a way to kill herself, and it made no difference where she was. Then, just as she was gearing up for her next attempt, a miracle happened. Or rather, she discovered that a miracle had already happened and that she had been living under its spell for the past two months. Once the doctors confirmed that it was a real event and not something she had imagined, she no longer wanted to die. She had lost her faith years ago, she continued. She hadn’t been to confession since high school, but when the nurse came in that morning to give her the results of the test, she felt as if God had put his mouth against her mouth and breathed life into her again. She was pregnant. It had happened in the fall, on the last night they had spent together, and now she was carrying Hector’s baby inside her.

After they discharged her from the hospital, she had moved out of her apartment. She had a little money saved up, but not enough to go on paying the rent without returning to work—and she couldn’t do that now, since she had already quit her job at the magazine. She had found a cheap room somewhere, the letter went on, a place with an iron bedstead and a wooden cross on the wall and a colony of mice living under the floorboards, but she wasn’t going to tell him the name of the hotel or even what town it was in. It would be useless for him to go out looking for her. She was registered under a false name, and she meant to lie low until her pregnancy was a little further along, when it would no longer be possible for him to try to talk her into having an abortion. She had made up her mind to let the baby live, and whether Hector was willing to marry her or not, she was determined to become the mother of his child. Her letter concluded:
Fate has brought us together, my darling,
and wherever I am now, you will always be with me
.

Then more silence. Another two weeks went by, and Brigid stuck to her promise and kept herself hidden. Hector said nothing to Saint John about O’Fallon’s letter, but he knew that his chances of marrying her were probably dead. He couldn’t think about their future life together without also thinking about Brigid, without tormenting himself with images of his pregnant ex-lover lying in a fleabag hotel in some derelict neighborhood, slowly pushing herself into madness as his child grew within her. He didn’t want to give up Saint John. He didn’t want to let go of the dream of crawling into her bed every night and feeling that smooth, electric body against his naked skin, but men were responsible for their actions, and if the child was going to be born, then there was no escape from what he had done. Hunt killed himself on January eleventh, but Hector was no longer thinking about Hunt, and when he heard the news on January twelfth, he felt nothing. The past was of no importance. Only the future mattered to him, and the future was suddenly in doubt. He was going to have to break off his engagement with Dolores, but he couldn’t do that until Brigid surfaced again, and because he didn’t know where to find her, he couldn’t move, couldn’t budge from the spot where the present had stranded him. As time went on, he began to feel like a man whose feet had been nailed to the floor.

On the night of January fourteenth, he knocked off work with Blaustein at seven o’clock. Saint John was expecting him for dinner at her house in Topanga Canyon at eight. Hector would have been there well before then, but he had car trouble along the way, and by the time he finished changing the tire on his blue DeSoto, he had lost three-quarters of an hour. If not for that flat tire, the event that altered the course of his life might never have happened, for it was precisely then, as he crouched down in the darkness just off La Cienega Boulevard and began jacking up the front end of his car, that Brigid O’Fallon knocked on the door of Dolores Saint John’s house, and by the time Hector had completed his little task and was back behind the wheel of the car, Saint John had accidentally fired a thirty-two-caliber bullet into O’Fallon’s left eye.