The plane began its descent. He could feel the subtle pitch forward, the shift in engine noise. Soon it would be worse, his ears would pop, the seat-belt sign would come on. A vivid picture of his plane lancing into another jet filled his mind — he saw his limbs fly off, his head roll into a stranger’s lap. And he would be nothing. Dead, he would be forgotten in weeks, talked of occasionally as a tragic case of a young artist whose chance was robbed by cruel fate, killed not only figuratively but also literally by the movie business.
He sat rigid during the landing, closing his eyes when the wheels touched down and the ferocious roar of the engines crashed over him like the ocean’s surf. He saw himself skipping, flying through the air amid wreckage, a bright ball of fire, his life consumed.
During the long moment of his imagined death, he remembered arching into Lois, her body sighing with pleasure, and then she opened her eyes, saying. “I love your penis inside me,” in a rushed whisper.
He was met by a limousine, a prerequisite he had forgone after his first trip to LA, but Lois had insisted he take it this time: “Cheer you up for the rewrite,” she said. When they weren’t screwing — it was screwing, all right, done casually, in the middle of breakfast, or desperately, tragically, at dawn, a lovemaking that transited from ordinary conversation to naked embrace with the fluidness of a movie — Lois kept encouraging him, telling stories of famous screenwriters doing draft after draft of scripts, reviled throughout by the studio, director, and star, only to triumph in the end with the ultimate rewards, a hit and an Oscar. People in LA finished stories with “And he won the Academy Award,” or more often, “And it grossed a hundred million,” the way a Christian might finish a tale of someone’s life by saying, “And he went to heaven.”
He made fun of her, belittling her values, and she went on undaunted, without anger at his resistance. She knew, unlike Betty, how much he really wanted all of it, the money, the stupid award, the interview on Entertainment Tonight, and she persisted in her whisper of ambition, “You can do this rewrite. You didn’t really concentrate on the first draft. You know what they want. Your ideas are brilliant. You’ll knock ’em dead with a new draft. Garth wouldn’t have flown you out and spent all that time meeting with you unless he had confidence in you.” And so on, her energy for feeding his ego rivaling a doting grandmother’s. She told him he was a genius. Handsome. Kind. A great lover. There was no virtue he didn’t possess, according to Lois, and he believed her, cherishing some of her more outrageous compliments, especially the sexual ones. She claimed he moved inside her so well that foreplay was either unnecessary or overkill.
He started each conversation skeptically, convinced her view of him was too good to be true, watching patiently for a giveaway of her true feeling. She wants me to leave Betty and knows she can’t afford to criticize me, he thought, feeling quite sympathetic with her circumstance. In her position he would also try this tactic.
But two of her friends had told Tony, during brief private conversations, that they had never seen her happier, and she did seem different than when they first met. Her thin glum face had relaxed, her unsmiling expression becoming wistful and soft. She laughed easily, had boundless energy, and, according to his mother (when he asked, as a preliminary to confessing the affair, which he then abandoned), had become so good at supervising scripts that offers for other series were coming in at a regular flow, forcing the executive producer to sweeten her deal.
“Listen to any advice she gives you about the business,” his mother had said in her guttural, slightly drunk voice (warmly cynical, a critic had called it). “She’s got the Midas touch.” The last said so that you knew she both admired and despised such a gift. But it was the best she could ever say about someone who “is absolutely without talent, who wouldn’t know a Ming vase from a Tupperware container,” a contemptuous phrase Maureen Winters had been using since her nervous breakdown about anyone who wasn’t an artist and yet had succeeded in show business. But Tony didn’t feel contemptuous of Lois — the confidence with which she moved in the Hollywood world dazzled him.
It was ten o’clock at night when he arrived in New York. The city, unlike LA, was alive at that hour, in the pale faces of the pedestrians Tony saw weariness, anger, forced gaiety — as opposed to the tanned, rested, self-assured countenances of the LA movie people. But there was something much more daunting in the eyes of the New Yorkers, something much more difficult for him to match than the breezy confidence of the West Coast. There was the fierce will to succeed: eyes assuming each passerby was hostile: the walk brisk, as though stillness meant vulnerability. They moved, amid the cars, the drunks, the pickpockets, the drug dealers, they moved armored, bubbled in little worlds, smiling only for their companions, and turning masks to the outside world. In LA, people wanted to win; in New York, they had to. In LA, people did win; in New York, they were more often crushed. In LA, failure was death; in New York, it was merely a pause before another round of fighting. He didn’t want to struggle anymore — the armor weighed too much.
Tomorrow the friends would call, wanting to know if he was getting a movie made, expecting stories of how he had been lionized. The writers would phone one by one, asking how it had gone, but really wanting to know if he had stepped up in class, out of the range of their punches, or whether he had taken a cut on the eye and would miss the next few events against them. I’m gonna write another play, he thought as the limo approached his apartment building. He had come home, the cold anger of the struggle infiltrating his sun-warmed West Coast heart. “I’ll write another play,” he said, nodding to himself, pumping his muscles for strength.
The doorman hustled out of the lobby, almost wrestling with the chauffeur over his bag. Tony noted the difference in the doorman’s attitude between his arrival in a limo as opposed to a taxi. That a man who saw him every day changed his attitude over such a detail of success made the fierce blizzard of his soul complete.
He put his key in the lock in a rage.
Betty pulled it open before he was finished. She was dressed in a black silk nightgown (new to him) and holding a glass of champagne, smiling gleefully. “Darling!” she said, her thin voice vainly attempting to sound throaty and seductive. “Back from the Coast so soon?” She shook her red curls.
He stared at her dully. The man who had always been too quick with an answer. On their first date she had been scared to talk much, afraid he would cut her to pieces over a naive comment. Her silence had seemed to him mysterious, a hint at profound secrets and knowledge. Now he stood stupidly, dumbstruck, not getting the joke, like a dullard from the Midwest flabbergasted by some arch, obscene New York play.
“Come in, darling!” she continued bravely, sweeping her arm dramatically to welcome an entrance. “The caviar is on ice, the champagne on little pieces of funny brown bread with the crusts missing. Or vice versa.”
“Hi,” he said, his voice tired. “That’s beautiful,” he added without enthusiasm, nodding at her nightgown. “When did you buy it?”
“Buy it? Buy it? I didn’t buy it. Someone left it here last night — with his hat.” She broke herself up with this one, laughing so hard that her little breasts trembled against the lace frill at the top of her low-cut gown, bobbing into and out of view like buoys on a stormy sea. They were pretty— impertinent, cheerful, like her little girl’s face, her nipples smiling brilliantly, eager to please and yet sure of their ultimate distance and superiority. Laughing, she put the glass of champagne down and moved into his arms, holding him tight (the only suggestion that there was more to her mood than gaiety), and holding her mouth up to be kissed, closing her eyes before the contact. He watched himself kiss her, his hands sliding on the silk that made the curves of her body like a sculpture’s, flowing and smooth.