Two Weeks in Another Town (26 page)

He closed his eyes conscientiously, for Delaney’s sake. But he had never felt more awake. He remembered Hélène’s voice over the phone, the small, unobtrusive, delightful lilt of France embedded in the English language.
(“I’m getting tired of men who sleep with me,”
said the other voice,
“and tell me how much they love their wives.”)
In the darkness, he thought of Hélène, still awake in the Continental darkness a thousand miles away, thinking of him, disturbed for him, obscurely informed by love’s telepathy that all was not well with him. He pictured her lying neatly in her bed, in her boy’s pajamas, small, lovely, warm, with her hair in curlers (she always took advantage of his trips to pay attention to her hair), thinking about him, linked to him by their thousand lines and strands, listening to the sounds from the next room, where the children slept. Solid, competent, and wary, his wife lay at the warm center of the family web, worrying, protecting, loving, enjoying, offering up her secret nighttime prayers against the perils of absence, offering up prayers for his return, for health, safety, normalcy, love…If he had been in the bed beside her, he told himself, he would not have played that ghostly poker game, he would not have seen the bald men in aprons at their sinister labors.

Jack pushed the soaked handkerchief gently against his face. The bleeding seemed to be coming to an end. He remembered his dream, thinking, How wise of wives to pray in the uneasy hours after midnight.

Hating to examine the dream, with its dead players who were once his friends, and the hideous meaning of the body on the table, he made himself think of his son, sleeping this moment with his hand to his threatened ear. Jack smiled, death pushed back now by that small hand. He remembered an evening during the winter when he came back from work and went into the bathroom where his son was drying himself after his bath. He kissed the damp head, watched thoughtfully as the boy dabbed inaccurately with the towel at the sturdy, smooth body. Suddenly the boy turned to him with a conspiratorial smile. “Daddy,” he said, touching the tip of his penis with one finger, speaking resonantly, proudly, “This is me.”

“Yes, indeed,” Jack said gravely. “That’s you.”

At the age of five, we draw wisdom from the air, revelations from the wind, the sages of the race whisper confidently in our ears.

Lying awake in the shadowed, dream-haunted room, Jack touched himself. “This is me,” he whispered, smiling, joining his son in the magic male incantation, turning back the powers of darkness, using the secret ceremony that his son, in his wisdom and innocence, had discovered, to put down the foul and cowardly temptations of oblivion.

But the magic was not potent enough. When he closed his eyes he could not sleep and the memories stirred by the dream and by the conversation in the car with Veronica began to crowd in on him…

“There were several men killed in our army, too…”

The farmhouse was burning. It was built of stone, but there were a surprising number of filings in it that had started burning when the shell hit. He had been asleep on the kitchen floor and when he woke up he had somehow been blown through a wall and his leg was broken and a blanket was on fire around his head and none of the other men who had been in the farmhouse with him were to be seen. They had been luckier than he. They had escaped, in the darkness. In the confusion they had missed him, and after that it was too late, nobody could get near the house.

It took him five hours to crawl across the room to the window. He passed out again and again, with the stink of his own burning hair and flesh in his nostrils, and his foot twisted completely around and the smoke smothering him. But he was very sure he didn’t want to die and he used the fingernails of his good hand to draw himself along the splintered farmhouse floor, and finally, he got to the window and pulled himself up so that he could look out over the sill. The field in front of the house was being sporadically explored by machine-gun fire, but someone saw his head poking above the window sill and came and got him. He didn’t remember any of that, because when he was pulled out over the window sill, he passed out again. Then they gave him morphine and the next few weeks were a vague, floating blur, and he never found out who had come to get him and whether he was alive or dead. And then the two years in all the hospitals and the eighteen operations and the young doctor who said, “That hand will never be any good again…” And Carlotta, with her huge telegraphed bouquets of flowers, and not much else…”

“Look, where the youths are coming, lightly up they spring, and not for nothing, hark! It’s good to hear them sing, Hymen O Hymenaeus Hymen hither O Hymenaeus.”

It was a curious wedding reception. Conceivably, weddings like it took place all over the world, but while it was happening you had the feeling that it was special to Hollywood, that only in Hollywood would two hundred and fifty people gather to celebrate the marriage of two people who had divorced each other, married other mates, divorced
them
and then remarried. Anywhere else, you felt, the principals would at least have gone off to some obscure country town and been quietly (and, as it turned out, impermanently) joined by a justice of the peace and two witnesses. But not in Hollywood. Not in 1937. Two hundred and fifty guests, with photographers and newspapermen and heads of studios, and the full casts of the two pictures in which the bride and groom were working at the moment, and the bride in a dazzling white gown that had been made for her as a present by the wardrobe department of the studio.

Delaney was the host. He was married at that time to the wife who was later to shoot at him with a hunting rifle. She did not work in the movies, and to keep herself from being bored she gave parties. She was handsome and frivolous and, luckily, a bad shot. Delaney, who did not like parties, but who paid for them to keep peace in the family, spent most of the evening in the bar, playing gin rummy.

The groom, Otis Carrington, tall, courtly, rich-voiced, smiling, was sitting between two of his ex-wives on the sweeping Colonial staircase. He was sipping black coffee out of a large cup, because he was fighting the drink. He never even glanced at the woman he had married that afternoon, and said to his ex-wives, “I don’t have to go to a psychiatrist. I know what’s wrong with me. I was in love with my sister until I was thirty years old. The day I realized that I knew I could finally lick the bottle.” He also said, “The time I knew I’d eventually have to give up the drink was the morning I woke up in Naples. I’d gone to a party in Chicago two and a half weeks before and I woke up in Naples in a first-class cabin full of flowers and empty whisky bottles and I didn’t remember crossing the ocean—in fact, I didn’t remember getting to the Dearborn Station.”

When sober, he was gentle, witty and considerate and had the best manners of any man Jack had ever met. But when under the influence, he had been known to break up saloons, house parties, dramatic presentations, marriages, old friendships, political meetings. In later years, when, after months of abstinence, he felt a binge coming on, he hired a burly male nurse to accompany him and minimize the violence until he was too spent and sick to go on. Sometimes, the male nurse would be on duty two weeks on end. Carrington was of that old line of actors, disappearing even then, who behaved like actors, profligate, showily dressed, gallant, improvident, given to gestures. On the first day of the war in 1917, he had walked out of the theatre in which he was starring in New York, put a flower in the buttonhole of his expensive suit, and, swinging a cane, had strolled down to the nearest recruiting office to enlist as a private soldier. Born in a different era, brought up in other, less romantic schools, Jack nevertheless admired Carrington enormously, and when his own war came (it was in the middle of a picture), it took all of Delaney’s arguments and the pleadings of his agent to keep Jack from following Carrington’s example.

Once, on the set, a young actor had come up to Carrington and had asked him to tell him, in just a short sentence, what the secret was of being a good actor. Carrington had pretended to be thinking deeply, had rubbed the big, impressive nose judiciously and had answered, “Be delighted, my boy, be delighted.”

On this wedding night, Carrington also spoke of the night of his first marriage to the bride. “It was an even fancier party than this,” Carrington said to his ex-wives, as he sat between them, fastidiously sipping his coffee, “and I happened to pass behind a couch on which my new wife was sitting with an English earl whom I had met when I was playing in London, and she was saying, ‘Of course, my dear, everyone knows Carrington is impotent.’” He chuckled good-naturedly, thinking of those distant, vernal festivities.

Jack spent most of the evening arguing. In fact, it seemed that ever since he had come to Hollywood two months before, he had spent almost every evening arguing. There were many things to argue about, of course, but for the most part what people argued about in the drawing rooms of Beverly Hills during that time was how good or bad the movies were and about the Spanish Civil War. “Making a good movie here,” Jack said, out of the ripeness of his two months’ experience as a featured player, “is a pure freak of luck. If anybody ever says an honest word in a movie it’s the craziest kind of accident. Nobody must be offended—not the rich, not the poor, not labor, not capital, not the Jews, not the Gentiles, not mothers, not priests, not politicians, not businessmen, not the English, not the Germans, not the Turks, not anybody. The word above every studio gateway is COWARDICE, written in letters of fire. So nobody ever says a word of truth on any subject. Since I’ve come out here I’ve hardly met anybody over the age of twenty who hasn’t been married at least twice and yet every picture that comes out is a poem in praise of monogamy. Just about everybody between the Pacific Ocean and the Los Angeles City Hall is chasing the dollar so hard they only have time to breathe on Sundays, and yet if you believed the movies, you’d be sure the only way to be happy is to live in a garret on twelve dollars a week. Ninety percent of the people here are so scared of Hitler they have nightmares about him every night of the year, and there hasn’t been a whisper yet in any picture I’ve seen suggesting that he might be more dangerous than my Aunt Milly. There’s more talk against Franco in Lucey’s Bar during one lunchtime than there is in the trenches before Madrid and every time somebody announces he’s going to make a picture about the Spanish Civil War, one letter from a follower of Father Coughlin stops it dead. Christ, this room is full of people who’ve spent most of their lives cheating and breaking laws and sleeping with other peoples’ wives and they’re all as fat and happy and respected as can be, and yet they keep making pictures in which crime never pays, in which the evildoer is always punished, in which a girl has to die or wind up in a life of shame if she as much as sleeps with her fiancé before she gets married. This is the first time in the history of any art that so many people, so much wealth, so much talent and machinery have been collected in one place to create a total disguise…the billion-dollar mask, the great big happy American smile…”

Standing in the middle of the room, dressed in a new dinner jacket made for him by a tailor to whom Delaney had introduced him, surrounded by handsome, tanned, perfumed, well-dressed people whose names were constantly in the newspaper, Jack rattled on happily, high on the unaccustomed wedding champagne, enjoying himself, orating, laying down the law, confident of himself and careless of consequences. He had a scornful feeling of superiority over the well-known people who were listening to him, some of them shamefacedly agreeing with him, others flushed and hating him. They were hungry for money, he felt, and would do anything necessary to gain it or hold onto it, while he, with no bank accounts, no stocks and bonds, no real-estate holdings or interests in oil companies, with only his youth and his talent at his disposal, believed that he didn’t care a damn whether he was rich or poor. It was like being invincibly healthy and walking through a hospital ward for the incurably ill, the incurably ill who gluttonously kept feeding on the poison that was killing them. While he was talking, too, with the glass in his hand, and the good feel of the new suit on his shoulders, he was conscious of Carlotta Lee standing among the others, watching him with a hidden, tiny smile on her lips. The smile seemed to say that she had been judging him and had finally made up her mind this evening and that the judgment would please him. He had kissed her that afternoon—but only on the set, before a hundred actors, extras, grips, and he hadn’t said more than a few words to her, outside the demands of the script, since he had started working on the picture, but he had decided that afternoon that he was in love with her and the smile, secret and inviting in the swirl of celebration, seemed to say, “Yes, of course.”

It was the kind of evening that he had dreamed of for himself all through the awkwardness and hesitations of adolescence, and he was making the most of it. It was frivolous and garish and the arguments, at a time and in a place like that, were mere verbal exercises, and he knew after three or four evenings like this they would bore him forever more, but tonight he was making the most of it.

“Now, look here,” said a man by the name of Bernstein, who had produced dozens of movies and who had been listening to Jack with a sullen pout on his heavy, sunburned face, “you’re shooting a picture right now, with Delaney, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” Jack said, nodding at Delaney, who had come up to join the group.

“I suppose that’s the big holy exception,” Bernstein said, sneering. “I suppose that’s a big fat work of Art.”

“No,” Jack said. “It’s a piece of crap, like everything else.”

There was a little hush and then Delaney laughed and everybody, with the exception of Bernstein, laughed with him. Delaney patted Jack on the shoulder. “The lad’s only been out here two months,” he said. “His vocabulary is still vigorous. He’ll tone down.”

“What the hell are you doing out here, if that’s the way you feel?” Bernstein asked pugnaciously. “Why don’t you go back to Broadway with the rest of the Communists?”