The Missing Person (20 page)

This day she had been working since seven thirty. The cameramen had been ready to shoot at nine and puttered around ever since trying to appear busy, because Franny Fuller had not arrived. Everyone on the set was trying hard to keep his temper, but every now and then a small ugliness broke out in some corner of the set: there was too little to do.

At the edge of the set Charlene was knitting another in an interminable series of sweaters for her nieces and nephews. On Franny Fuller's pictures the assistants cultivated hobbies, played tournaments of gin rummy or cribbage, began ambitious pieces of petitpoint with every expectation of finishing them during the inevitable delays in production.

Dolores had finished her posing. She came to sit beside Charlene, stretching her arms above her head, free to do this for the first time in hours. Often she was grateful for delays, but today discontent with the long wait had infected even her.

“I wish she'd get here. It's damn hot under those lights. I think they do all that fiddling around just to kill time.”

“You can't prove it by me,” said Charlene, her favorite expression for every contingency. Once Charlene, too, had dreamed of stardom. Now she despised every star on whose picture she'd ever worked. Close to forty, she looked faded and bitter. Her lost hopes colored her conversations.

“She sick—as usual?” she asked Dolores.

Dolores liked Franny, with a fondness born of intense, female, creature sympathy. She viewed her from her own secure, if lower, position, understanding the precariousness of Franny's elevation, and the price in terrible self-doubt she paid for her eminence. Dolores thought about Gloria Gibson, at the end of her career. Married six times, and then left alone by her last husband, she was ending her life in Palm Springs with a nurse in a cottage on the grounds of Rest Haven Sanatorium. Blank-eyed, her skin pink and dry under layers of badly applied pancake make-up, her eyes blackened by crusted mascara, the Star had not recognized Dolores when last she visited her.

Gloria asked: “Seen Norman lately?” Dolores remembered that Norman was the Star's second husband who had died fifteen years ago in an airplane crash. Dolores said no, she had not seen him recently. The aging Star then lost interest and turned away to talk to her nurse. Dolores said goodbye. For a moment, intelligence returned to the still-bright, famous blue eyes under the familiar, triangular, penciled brows. “My new picture starts next week,” Gloria told Dolores. “I must be ready. I'm resting up here.” Then her eyes clouded over as though Dolores, by making no response, had failed her in some obscure but crucial way.

The lives of those afflicted by fame were part of Dolores's Hollywood education. Other stand-ins were similarly learned. They belonged to an unofficial underground of mutual sympathy. Whenever they happened to meet they exchanged information about their “people,” inside tidbits and gossip about their current loves and enduring terrors, their escapes into marriage, love affairs, alcohol, drugs, and delusion. For those forced to live out their sicknesses and ruined affairs in the public eye, Dolores felt genuine sympathy, almost sisterly love. She took no pleasure in their falls from glory, their plunges into the abyss of public neglect.

“This part has been hard on her,” she said. She watched Charlene's hands whip yarn over the needle with one extended finger. “You really knit very fast.”

“
Hard
on her? At fifty thousand for sixteen weeks' work? I should suffer so.”

“You know what I mean. Working with someone like Brock Currier.”

“Because he was a New York stage actor? What's that mean?”

Dolores was accustomed to defending Franny against all criticism. “Not only that. He's such a bastard, so hard on women.”

Charlene smirked and brought forth her usual sentence for actors whose looks she admired. “Well, he can put his shoes under my bed any time.”

Dolores laughed half-heartedly, and returned to the defense. “Franny can't take criticism too well. Every time he raises that eyebrow and smiles his crooked smile down at her she gets sick, I think.”

“Tough.”

“It is. You don't know her.”

“For crissake, Dolores, how can a woman with those breasts and that fanny and that widow's peak have an inferiority complex?”

Dolores said nothing.

“Where is she this morning? Her call was for eight, wasn't it?”

“It could be that she overslept.”

“Oh, come on. Arnold Franklin wouldn't let her. I hear he starts writing at five thirty in the morning.”

“Maybe she really is sick. She's not very strong.”

Charlene snorted.

The set emptied for lunch. Reuben Rubin stopped at Charlene's chair. Since the start of this picture he had grown thinner and looked more boyish. Dressed as he was in a gray striped suit, a vest, and a wide, gray-silk tie (as if to belie the stereotype of the Director) he looked like a worried haberdasher. He pointed to the script in her lap.

“See that for a moment, could I?” he said in his public-school, Brooklynese accent, superimposed on a thin base of Hollywood.

Charlene looked annoyed. She had a proprietary feeling about the heavy, bound volume, and disliked letting it out of her hands. Gathering her wool, needles, and knitting bag to her chest, she indicated by a shrug of her shoulders that Reuben could have the script.

“Bastard,” she said after he had walked away, searching for something in the script as he went.

“No,” said Dolores who liked Reuben's gentleness. “He's not. He worries about all the delays. They can never tell up above whose fault they are. I think he often takes the blame for Franny.”

At two, everyone was back, slumped in chairs or leaning against the back of the set, the actors standing in attitudes that displayed their good features, their better profile. An air of universal impatience hung over the set.

Reuben Rubin had retreated into himself. Although the lighting on the set was now dimmed, he still wore his sunglasses, staring through them at the elaborate southern mansion which stood ready for use, like a vacant battlefield waiting for the moment soldiers would arrive to enliven it. He thought about the meaninglessness of everything here, the complex of lights strung up and wheeled into place, the make-up tables laden with restorative potions for faces and hair, the costume racks, the soundmen and cameramen mounted and ready, when nothing was being done, no pretenses being acted out.
The set
, he thought,
is like a track without runners, like an office building before and after hours, like a college dormitory during summer recess. It seems sullen, resentful of its desertion, reproaching its human defectors
.

Brock Currier shouted from where he leaned against a cardboard magnolia tree. “Did you ring her again, Rube?” Currier was dressed in a southern colonel's frilled shirt, immaculate white pants, and white shoes. His full, handsome mouth was tight with annoyance. He had been in this stiff outfit since eight in the morning. Now he felt deeply, personally offended, like a bridegroom who has been stood up.

“The boys did. Arnold Franklin said she'd be right here after lunch.”

“It's right after lunch now. What lunch does the Great Poet refer to? I had mine an hour ago.”

“Oh, come on, Brock. She'll be here.…”

“Look, Roo-bin boy, I'm damned sick of this, and you, and her. My contract doesn't call for …”

Reuben turned and walked to the other side of the colonnade, wanting to hear no more of Brock's self-righteousness. He disliked the actor, so ordinarily he was careful to treat him with consideration. But today his patience was worn thin. Between him and Brock Currier the weight of unspoken truths hung heavy. Brock's usual manner of drawing out Reuben's name was a subtle nudge at his Jewishness. It always succeeded in activating Reuben's memory: When first he had met Brock Currier as a boy in Chicago Brock's name had been Aaron Feldstein.

Another hour went by. Reuben came out of the tall box that served as his office and told his assistant to let everyone go home. He skirted the façade of the mansion and knocked on the door of an upright, coffin-shaped dressing room in which Dolores was redoing her make-up for the third time that day.

“Charlene there?”

“No. I think she went to lie down in the little girl's room.” Charlene suffered from her “period,” especially in the afternoon after a large lunch, and was often to be found resting in the ladies' lounge.

“Oh. Well. Tell her I've left her script on your step.”

“Do you need me?”

“No. You might as well cut out. We can't do anything more today.”

Dolores opened her door, holding her wraparound makeup coat to her chest. In half make-up she looked pale. The normal lines in her face had been erased by pancake covering and nothing had as yet been restored. She smiled at Reuben.

“No word from FF?”

“No word. No appearance. Nothing. You look like Ben Blue in that stuff.”

“Pretty ghastly, eh?” Dolores said, agreeably. “Not much better underneath, either.”

“Your call is for seven thirty tomorrow morning.”

“Okay. Will she be here, do you think?”

“Better be. Brock's about to call his agent. Maybe even his congressman. A few more of these delays and Fleischer will drop her even if she is the Name in this epic.”

The set was almost dark. Brock slammed the door of his dressing room and came down the two little steps, his crisp hair still wet from the dousing he had just given his head. Without make-up he was swarthy, masculine, and angry-looking. His fans mistook this look for passion and adored him for it. He himself mistook it for acting talent and overrated his abilities. On his way to beatification as one of Hollywood's “Greats” almost entirely on the strength of this expression, his hair curled endearingly about his ears, his vulgar, piratical teeth shone out of his dark face, and his one, perpetually elevated eyebrow suggested a subtle sexual invitation.

To him Franny Fuller was nothing special, just another dumb, blond female with a famous name, big boobs, a fat ass, and something loose in her belfry. Once, working close to her, he caught a warning look, a quick facial sign, of retreat into herself. Her lids had fallen as if loosened like a venetian blind, and her mouth opened, ripe and desperate for air. He thought he recognized that look as a cry for rescue, a signal of impending disaster.

Brock had long ago armed himself against the needs of others. Any suggestion that someone required something of him, anything more than a handout or an autograph, put him on his guard. He did not talk to his costar when the scene was over, and never after that was able to respond to her unspoken appeal. Today, in her absence, he felt afraid of her. He feared being halted on his way up by sympathy for anyone but Brock Currier of Beverly Hills, born Aaron Feldstein of Chicago, a boy-self buried so deep now that he rarely remembered it had ever existed.

He walked across the lot and toward his assigned parking space, saying nothing to anyone, trusting to the look he knew was on his face to convey his irritation.

Reuben saw him go and smiled at his back.
That horse's ass. Living in his dream of himself. The gentile loverboy
. Brock,
yet. All he is to me is a thin shadow on the screen, a name on a marquee, designed to rivet girls' eyes on my picture. That's all
.

The set was almost deserted. Except for one guide lamp, the lights were out. Seated low in his canvas-backed chair, Reuben looked at the fake door into “the downstairs hall of Colonel Ashby's majestic plantation home, Ashend,” as the script described it. He thought of Franny, who had failed to come out of that door this morning costumed in white southern-girlish splendor. Dolores passed him leaving the set, he waved to her, and went on thinking of Franny. Loving her in the cerebral, hopeless, boyish way that he did, he wondered what new hell she was inhabiting today, what there was within his poor power to do for her, how he would explain this expensive lost day to Fleischer.

Dolores, her face clean of make-up, with that curiously blank, mannequin look women have after they've scrubbed their faces, finally gave in to the fact that the empty day had tired her. She put on a long-sleeved cotton blouse, believing as did her mother that complete covering kept away the heat, and a white pleated skirt. Her car had been parked in a pool of afternoon sunshine, so she sat in it for a few minutes with the door open, the windows down. Then she drove her yellow Chevy slowly toward the studio gates. The guard waved, a gesture that always warmed her because it made her remember the days when, using every facial expression she thought to be effective (she had practiced them before a mirror), she could not get past this same gate. Once it had seemed like the Pearly Gates into Heaven for the Elect, the stellar Greats. She waved back and smiled wearily at the guard.
In and out without any trouble
, she thought.
Think of that
.

Her apartment was cool. Billie-Jo was in Alabama, visiting an old friend who was dying. Dolores had left the windows closed and the shades down when she went to work in the morning, unlike her mother's habit of opening everything to the California sun under the illusion that “the air is always cool.” Dolores stood for a minute at the door, basking in the boxed-up cool air. Then she crossed to the window and opened it a crack.

Fragrant bakery smells came in, an odor she loved although she never ate the rolls and bread it emanated from. She ran too easily to fat.

After her shower she put on a kimono, a word her mother always used for “robe,” and stretched out on the chesterfield with the telephone beside her. She dialed Franny's unlisted number.

Arnold Franklin answered.

“Yes?”

“This is Dolores Jenkins. I'm worried about Franny.”

“Welcome to the battalion of the worried,” Arnold said. “Don't ask me where she is because I haven't the faintest idea. She left here for the Studio at one thirty. Said you were picking her up at the gate. I've looked everywhere I could think of and called some other places, likely and unlikely. Nobody's seen her.”