Standing in her view, I took my clothes off. This being only February, there was a nip in the air, but I knew she kept the pool heated and cold air doesn’t bother me at first. I had to be present in her peripheral vision, but she remained unaware of me, pounding away at her word processor, glaring at the screen. I waited, but the air was cool, so finally I leaned forward and knocked on the glass.
She looked up, frowning, deep in Mom and Junior’s repartee, then saw me, looked startled, then grinned. I, too, looked startled, pretended I was flustered at having been found naked, and stepped backward, as though forgetting the pool was there. As I toppled over backward into the water, I saw her laughing, but when I came up, she was already typing again.
The warm water was delicious. With the underwater light at the deep end illuminating the entire long cream bowl of the pool, and the surface of the water steaming slightly in the cool air, I seemed to be paddling around in a great tureen of clear broth; and I was the only oyster.
About ten minutes later I heard the office door slide open and Bly, also naked, came quickly across the terracotta tiles and dove into the water. She looked beautiful under there, passing the light, bubbles sweeping around behind her in a comet’s tail. She surfaced, we swam to meet in the middle of the pool, and kissed, and she said, “Thunder in German is Donner.”
“Oh, poo,” I said, and ducked her, and we played for a while, which became more serious at the shallow end, and then more serious yet on the shag carpet in the master bedroom; we didn’t want to soak the bed.
Then it was time to see what, if anything, had gone wrong with dinner. Bly can do anything involving machines, from word processors to single-engine airplanes, and she keeps demanding that the machines in her kitchen behave themselves and act right. Sometimes they do, but more often not. She follows recipes, sets timers, sets heat, sets memory, brings in satellite electric pots and pans, and in theory what comes out should be edible.
I think maybe the problem is machines can’t themselves cook any more than they can write sitcoms. I don’t know how to tell Bly she has to give the stove as much creative attention as she does the word processor, or else give up the whole idea of cooking, so from time to time I permit myself to go through this trauma with her. So far she hasn’t poisoned anybody.
Tonight’s meal was on the better side, in fact, when we finally got to it, a chicken casserole with a nice California Riesling. We also shared a bottle of San Pellegrino, Bly having picked up that habit from me. We ate in the living room, seated on the floor on opposite sides of the glass coffee table, swathed in our terry robes and with an honest wood fire in the fireplace. Mostly during dinner we talked about Zack Novak’s idea — or his brilliant friend Danny Silvermine’s idea — for me to take Packard on the road.
“Do you want to do it?” she asked me. She was giving me the same kind of intense look she gives her word processor, so I knew I had her attention.
“I want to do something,” I said. “I just feel Packard’s a graveyard now. He made me, he made me what I am today, and he made me rich, but at this point he’s also made me unemployable. Do I take this thing in the hope Zack’s right, the new setting, even with the old character, will make me look more like a real-life actor? Or am I just going to confirm everybody’s opinion that I’m Johnny One-Note?”
“If it’s everybody’s opinion anyway, what difference does it make if you confirm it?”
“Because I’m trying to change their minds. Also, if I go on the road for no money with a play, that argues against me still being the viable film star I say I am.”
“So you want to do an Ilya Morometz,” she said, nodding. “Stay on the mountaintop, think beautiful thoughts, and wait for God to give you the call. ‘Rise, Sam Holt, and save Holy Mother Russia.’ But what if the call never comes?”
I stared at her. “Who the hell is Ilya Morometz? Where do you get these allusions?”
“I make them up,” she said, which might even be true, but I don’t think so.
I said, “I have to give Zack an answer pretty soon.”
She shook her head, tasted some food, and said, “It’s still cold in the middle.”
“It’s fine.” She was right, it was still cold in the middle.
“Oh, well. Sam, you play a character named Jack Packard and you have an agent named Zack Novak. Do you realize how absurd that is?”
“It just happened,” I said. “I know, you’d never name your characters like that.” Bly was the second of the three people I’d shown my first PACKARD script to, and along with some very good advice she’d also given me a hard time about my characters’ names because they weren’t ethnic enough.
“Of course I’d name them like that,” she said. “Zack Novak and Jack Packard. But I’d do it for comic effect.”
“Thanks a lot. The question is, do I do this dinner theater thing or not?”
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “The question is, you don’t want to do this dinner theater thing, so what are your reasons?”
I laughed at that, and we spent the rest of the meal working out my reasons. You can, too.
After dinner and wash-up, we sat on the sofa near the fire and Bly brooded at the flames, saying, “I’m not taking your problem lightly, Sam, I’m really not. I know you’re stuck, but we all are, aren’t we?”
“Maybe so.”
“I’ve had some intimations of mortality recently,” she said, and shivered, pulling the robe tighter around herself.
“The big three-oh, you mean.”
“That too. But I was at a funeral last Friday, and it was such a waste.”
“A relative?”
“No, an actor, he played an aging hippie car salesman sometimes on Gandy and Son. Not really a regular, you know, maybe four or six episodes a year. I liked to write for him, I could slip across some sneaky anti-Americanisms.”
“And he died.”
“Car crash, at forty-seven. Isn’t that stupid?” Thinking of my own almost car crash of today, at thirty-four, I said, “Very.”
“Nobody knows how it happened. Middle of the day, good weather, on the Ventura Freeway way out by Hidden Hills, he just lost control of the car, went off an overpass into the roof of a store. Two people killed.”
“He had a passenger?”
“Some friend of his who did makeup over at Universal.”
I stared at her. “Makeup?”
She stared right back. “Sam? What’s the matter?”
“Do you have an Academy Guide?”
“Sure. What do you need?”
“Your friend that died.”
“Beau Sheridan.”
“I want to see him.”
“Okay,” she said, and shrugged, and went away to her office, coming back with the volume of the Academy Guide that includes the male character people. She opened it, put it in my lap, tapped a photo, and said, “There he is.”
There he was. All the union actors and actresses are listed in the Academy Guide, with photo and telephone contact and usually a list of credits. So here was Beau Sheridan, smiling into the camera, giving one of the better-known agencies as his contact, with a modestly short list of TV series on which he’d worked.
He didn’t look that much like Ross Ferguson, but the potential was there. The high balding forehead, the wide-set eyes. The jawline was good. This was the fellow, all right.
“Sam? What is it?”
I sighed. “I wasn’t going to tell you about this,” I said, “because I didn’t want you to worry, and I figured it’d all be over by tomorrow anyway. But now maybe I will. Maybe I’d like to know what you think of it.”