The Fame Thief (17 page)

“He’s
here
,” Tyrone called, turning his head in the direction of Rina’s room in the house that used to be mine, back before Kathy and I split up. Tyrone was almost improbably black, so dark his skin had bluish highlights, but his eyes were the dry, pale brown of a pile of fallen leaves. I glanced at his midsection, hoping he had packed on some unsightly weight, but his form-fitting T-shirt showed off the form it was made to fit, and his waist was still narrower than Rush Limbaugh’s worldview. He was also, apparently, still an important part of my
daughter’s
worldview.

“Hey, Tyrone.” I looked at my watch: 4:50
P.M.
“Kathy around?”

He wiggled his head, side to side. “Not so’s you’d notice. But don’t worry, we’re being so good my own mama wouldn’t—”

“I trust both of you completely.” I put a lot of honesty into it, but the word
completely
was oversell, and Tyrone’s eyes gleamed with amusement.

“Even if I tried to be bad,” he said, “which I wouldn’t, your daughter knows what’s what.”

“Thank you, Tyrone,” I said. “As a parent, that’s very reassuring.”

“Daddy,” Rina said, materializing in the hallway door. “You owe me money.”

“What have you got?”

“This and that.” She whirled around, giving me a quick shot of a long tear in the rump of her jeans. “Come on down.”

Tyrone bowed slightly from the waist and dipped a long arm through the air to usher me in. His fingers looked as long as my legs. “After you.”

“What’s the thing with her pants?” I said.

“Her pants?” Tyrone’s Teflon-smooth brow wrinkled and then cleared, and I got the smile that would probably make the kid rich someday. “Ah, the
pants
. Fashion. Valley tartlet style. You know, a little bit bad but not too bad.”

“You like it?”

“Daddy,” Rina called from her room. “Come in here.”

“I could lie,” Tyrone said, “but—” He lowered his voice a surprising octave. “
But that would be wrong
. Quick, what president said that?”

“Nixon. And he’s not a role model I’d suggest to any kid who wants to keep seeing his, uhh, his, uhh—”

“Girlfriend. Naw, I can see that. No daddy gonna want a guy who sweated like that, guy who got five o’clock shadow at one o’clock. Guy who got little bubbles of spit at the corners of his mouth. Uh-
uh
. But, you know, the pants? You probably ought to talk to
her
about them.”

“I was kind of hoping to avoid that.”

“I’ll bet,” Tyrone said.

“Well.” I took off down the hall, Tyrone following me noiselessly. As we passed my old bedroom, now shared by my former wife and God knows who, I said, as nonchalantly as possible, “Is what’s-his-name still around?”

“Naw. She got a new one now. Probably shouldn’t be telling you that.”

“What’s he like?”

“Old. Even older than you. Got different-color eyes.”

“What, like brown and blue?”

“Red and green,” Tyrone said. “You don’t know whether you’re coming or going. Yeah, sure, brown and blue. What you think?”

“I think no one with different-colored eyes should be trusted. What’s his name?”

“You asked,” Tyrone said.

“Yes,” I said. “It was such a short time ago that I still remember it.”

“Just reminding you. Name of Dick.”

I stopped. “This is way too trite.”

“Dick Stivik. S-T-I-V-I-K.”

“Tyrone,” Rina called from her room, “you’re a gossip.”

“Man asked,” Tyrone said, following me in. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Dick’s okay,” Rina said to me. “Not anyone you’d lend ten dollars to, but nice enough. I guess.” She was sitting at her computer, which was where she seemed to spend most of her time when she wasn’t in school, and when she was there she probably spent most of her time in front of a school computer. She’d swiveled the office chair I’d bought her part of the way around, giving me a glance of a piquant profile, heartbreakingly young, that was, thanks to whoever is in charge of such things, inherited largely from her mother.

“Where’s your mom?’

She didn’t even dodge the question, just rolled right through it. “To be precise, you owe me sixty-six dollars and sixty-two, no, round it up to sixty-three cents.”

“Ho,” Tyrone said. “
Round it up
, she says. Try that with someone you’re not related to.”

“Tyrone—”

“That’s not what the world
does
,” Tyrone said. “Get out of school, the world’s gonna round you down. Every chance it gets.”

“Five hours and twenty-six minutes,” Rina said. “Twelve-fifty times five-point-three-three and a little more. Sixty-six dollars and sixty-three cents.”

“Roundin’ up,” Tyrone said.

“Here.” I took out a fifty and a twenty and held them out. “Seventy bucks. You owe me three dollars and thirty-eight cents’ worth of work. Where’s your mom?”

“With Dick.” She got up to take the money, but I pulled it back.

“That’s swell,” I said. “Doing what, at this hour of the day?”

She stopped, her hand still out. “I don’t want to tell you.”

“Why not? What in the world could she be doing that I shouldn’t know about?”

Tyrone said, “
Listen
to the man.”

“Well, sure, there’s
that
,” I said. “But we’re not married any more, right? So that’s stopped bothering me.” I looked at Tyrone, who had made a sound that was too close to a snicker to be mistaken for anything else. “Any more,” I said. “After that duck hunter.”

“Give me my money,” Rina said, snatching it from my hand, “and listen to what I’ve got.”

Something glittered on her face. I squinted at her and took a step forward, and she instantly backed up, sat down, and gave me the right profile again. I said, “What the hell is that?”

Rina said, “It’s my nose.”

“I’m well aware it’s your nose. What have you done to it?”

“I meant
it’s my nose
in the sense that it’s not anyone else’s nose. Yours, for example.”

“That doesn’t give you a license to poke holes in it. Did your mother say—”

“This?” she turned the chair to face me again and pointed at the golden ring in her left nostril. “Is
this
what you’re talking about?” She sounded quite a lot like her mother.

“Yes, that, that and … and … 
look
at you, your butt is hanging out of your pants, you’ve practically installed plumbing in your nose. Where’s your mother in all this? Too busy hanging with Dick, or—”

I stopped because they were both laughing. Tyrone sat down on the bed heavily enough to bounce, and Rina had both hands over her face. I stood there, feeling my heart rate triple. The childish piping treble of youthful laughter, no matter what the poets say, is one of the most profoundly irritating sounds in all of human experience.

“What?” I demanded. “What?”

“You got to be an honest man,” Tyrone said, wiping tears from his eyes. “ ’Cause you’ll believe
anything
.”

Rina drummed the heels of her shoes against the floor. “Your face,” she said. “If you could have seen your—” She dissolved again, bent so far forward her chin practically touched her knees.

“I’ve already seen it. What the hell is so—”

“Look,” Rina said. She reached up and yanked the ring out of her nose and then bounced it on her palm. “One of mom’s clip-on earrings.” She started laughing again.

“The pants,” Tyrone said, way too happily. “Tell him about the—”

“You know the bench out by the pool? The one mom was always asking you to drive the nails into?” She put her palms to her eyes and rubbed them dry. “I sat on it today and when I scooted down to make room for Tyrone—”

“Valley
tartlet
,” Tyrone said. He fell over sideways, emitting a falsetto laugh that sounded like someone ironing a puppy. “Little bit bad but not
too—
”

“Dick Stivik?” I said. “Different-colored eyes?”

They both stopped laughing, so abruptly it sounded like the power had been cut. “Well, no,” Rina said. “He’s as real as acne.”

“And where are they? What are they—”

“I’ll tell you after I show you this stuff, okay? Otherwise we’ll never get to it.”

“That’s not very reassuring.”

“You’re a grownup, Daddy. It’s not my job to reassure you.”

“You’ll be a grownup someday yourself,” I said, “and believe me, you’re going to want some reassuring.”

“Dolores La Marr,” she said, over me. “God she was beautiful.” She spun to the computer and hit a few keys with the assurance of Vladimir Horowitz, and Dolores La Marr popped onto the screen in high-def black-and-white. A moment later, the picture faded, to be replaced by another. “Slide show,” Rina said. “There are five websites just about her and four others she’s featured on, and she’s all over some of the gangster-groupie sites, guys who think of gangsters as action figures.”

“She really was something,” I said, watching the pictures succeed each other.

“Wanda Altshuler from Scranton,” Rina said. She cocked her head to the left, as though she saw better, or at least differently, that way. “Jewish on her father’s side, but her mother wouldn’t go for it, so she was raised a generic blue-stripe gentile. Her mother was apparently a total dragon. Wait a minute, here she is.”

La Marr’s face was replaced by an angular woman as thin as the Duchess of Windsor but not as warm-looking. Her face was a collage of acute angles culminating in a mouth with a pronounced trumpeter’s lip and a chin sharp enough to puncture balloons. I could see a hint of her daughter in the cheekbones
and the shape of the forehead, but otherwise there was no resemblance. “A dragon how?”

“Fought with everybody. Wanda—I mean, Dolores—was a minor when she did her first movie, like sixteen, although they tried to pretend she was seventeen. Anyway, young enough that she needed her mother on the set with her, but mom kept getting tossed off. Which meant there had to be like a social worker or something, which meant extra money, which meant Wanda got fired off a couple of pictures, poor kid.”

“What happened to her mom?”

“After Wanda turned eighteen, mom married some guy she met on a set, a guy who later turned into a big deal in the union. There was some kind of power struggle, and he was out front, like a vice president, but then they split up or something. Look here. Isn’t she phenomenal?”

Filling the screen was a picture from the
Life
session. I recognized the lighting and the gown. Dolly was laughing and looking past the camera, probably at the person who’d cracked the joke. It was enough to make me jealous.

“She’s so young,” I said.

“Not really,” Rina said with the mercilessness of youth. “Twenty-one.”

“That is
fine
,” Tyrone said behind me, and I stepped aside to let him get closer to the screen. His arm was touching mine. I put my hand on my daughter’s shoulder, and for a moment, we had a circuit: there were three of us, and it felt all right.

“You’ve got a good eye, Tyrone,” I said.

“Have to be blind,” Tyrone said, “not to see
that
. She’d be beautiful through a wall.”

“Here’s a poster from the good movie.” Rina hit a key and I was staring at Dolores, looking apprehensive in close-up. She was strongly lighted from the left, the pale eyes drinking in the light
and giving nothing back, while a sharp-featured Olivia Dupont, her hair drawn back in a bun so tight it looked painful, glared at the back of Dolly’s head, one hand raised with the fingers curled into claws. Behind them was your basic spooky house, all dark shadows and curving stairs. Lurid, flame-edged type stretched across the image to inform us it was from
HELL’S SISTERS
, and below that was the cutline:
They were sisters IN MURDER!
Way down toward the bottom, in the kind of print mortgage lenders use for foreclosure conditions, it said,
Directed by Douglas Trent
.

“They weren’t sisters in murder, you know,” Rina said. “The awful one pushed the good one down the stairs once and tried to scare her to death about a hundred times. Not a bad movie, but they saved a fortune on light bulbs.”

“Big film
noir
trick,” Tyrone volunteered. “Keep the light low, you can fill the set with junk.”

I looked around the room and said, “Who said that?”

“Gonna be a film student.” Tyrone said. “Document racial injustice.”

“You’ll need a lot of film.”

“Film,” Tyrone said, although “scoffed” would be a more precise word. “Pixels. Drive space. Processing power.”

I said, “Talent.”

“You guys interested in this?” Rina said. “What
is
it about men?”

“I’m interested.”

“Good. Because look.” She hit a key hard enough to make it snap, and the screen was flooded with the words
FALLING STAR
, a headline from somewhere or other, the paper creased diagonally through the type. She hit the key again, and there was Dolly. She was a nightmare: her hair in knots, stalactites of mascara streaking her cheeks, her hands wrapped around the bars, her mouth wide, screaming at the photographers.

Rina said, “The end. Everywhere, this was everywhere. I mean, every paper in the country, seems like. And these, too.” Dolores La Marr in an off-the-shoulder gown in some dark color, sitting looking baffled and dazed on a bed with its blankets and sheets rumpled suggestively and pulled back to the foot of the mattress and behind her, glaring at the camera, three unusually swarthy Guidos, one of whom I recognized as Johnny Stamponato.