She watched silently as he put it carefully in his wallet in the same place that he had kept his son’s picture.
“You know,” she said, “I feel closer to you somehow than to anybody in the whole world. We’re the same kind of people. We’re simple. Not like your sister and your brother. I love Rudy, I suppose, and I should, but I don’t understand him. And sometimes I’m just afraid of him. While you …” She laughed. “Such a big, strong young man, a man who makes his living with his fists.… But I feel so at home with you, almost as though we were the same age, almost as though I had a brother. And today … today was so wonderful. I’m a prisoner who has just come out from behind the walls.”
He kissed her and held her and she clutched at him briefly.
“Do you know,” she said, “I haven’t smoked a single cigarette since you arrived.”
He drove down slowly through the dusk, thinking about the afternoon. He came to a roadhouse and went in and sat at the empty bar and had a whiskey. He took out his wallet and stared at the young girl who had turned into his mother. He was glad he had come to see her. Perhaps her favor wasn’t worth much, but in the long race for that meager trophy he had finally won. Alone in the quiet bar he enjoyed an unaccustomed tranquillity. For an hour, at least, he was at peace. Today, there was one less person in the world that he had to hate.
PART THREE
Chapter 1
1960
The morning was a pleasant one, except for the smog that lay cupped, a thin, metallic soup, in the Los Angeles basin. Barefooted, in her nightgown, Gretchen went through the open French windows, sliding between the still curtains, out onto the terrace, and looked down from her mountain top at the stained but sunlit city and the distant flat sea below her. She breathed deeply of the September morning air, smelling of wet grass and opening flowers. No sound came from the city and the early silence was broken only by the calls of a covey of quail crossing the lawn.
Better than New York, she thought for the hundredth time, much better than New York.
She would have liked a cup of coffee, but it was too early for Doris, the maid, to be up, and if she went into the kitchen to make the coffee herself, Doris would be awakened by the sound of running water and clinking metal and would come fussing out, apologizing but aggrieved at being deprived of rightful sleep. It was too early to awake Billy, too, especially with the day he had ahead of him, and she knew better than to rouse Colin, whom she had left sleeping in the big bed, flat on his back, frowning, his arms crossed tightly, as though in his dreams he was watching a performance of which he could not possibly approve.
She smiled, thinking of Colin, sleeping, as she sometimes told him, in his important position. His other positions, and she had told him about them in detail, were amused, vulnerable, pornographic, and horrified. She had been awakened by a thin shaft of sunlight coming through a rift in the curtains and had been tempted to reach for him and unfold those clenched arms. But Colin never made love in the morning. Mornings were for murder, he said. Used to New York theatrical hours, he was, as he freely admitted, a savage before noon.
She went around to the front of the house, padding happily through the dewy grass with her bare feet, her transparent cotton nightgown blowing around her body as she walked. They had no neighbors and the chance of any cars passing by at this hour was almost nil. Anyway, in California, nobody cared how you dressed. She often sunbathed naked in the garden and her body was a deep brown after the summer. Back East she had always been careful to stay out of the sun, but if you weren’t brown in California people assumed that you were either ill or too poor to take a holiday.
The newspaper was lying in the front driveway, folded and bound by a rubber band. She opened it up and glanced at the headlines as she walked slowly back around the house. Nixon and Kennedy had their pictures on the front page and they were promising everybody everything. She mourned briefly for Adlai Stevenson and wondered if it was morally right for somebody as young and as good looking as John Fitzgerald Kennedy to run for the Presidency. “Charm boy,” Colin called him, but Colin had charm thrown at him every day by actors and its effect on him was almost invariably negative.
She reminded herself to make sure to apply for absentee ballots for herself and Colin, because they were going to be in New York in November and every vote against Nixon was going to be precious. Although now that she no longer wrote for magazines she didn’t get too worked up about politics. The McCarthy period had disillusioned her with the value of private righteousness and alarmed public utterance. Her love for Colin, whose politics were, to say the least, capricious, had led her to abandon old attitudes along with old friends. Colin described himself at various times as a socialist without hope, a nihilist, a single-taxer, and a monarchist, depending upon whom he was arguing with at the moment, although he usually wound up voting for Democrats. Neither he nor Gretchen was involved in the passionate political activities of the movie colony, the feting of candidates, the signing of advertisements, the fund-raising cocktail parties. In fact, they hardly went to any parties at all. Colin didn’t like to drink much and he found the boozy, aimless conversation of the usual Hollywood gatherings intolerable. He never flirted, so the presence of battalions of pretty ladies available at the functions of the rich and famous had no attraction for him. After the loose, gregarious years with Willie, Gretchen welcomed the domestic days and quiet nights with her second husband.
Colin’s refusal to “go public,” as he phrased it, had not damaged his career. As he said, “Only people without talent have to play the Hollywood game.” He had asserted his talent with his first picture, confirmed it with his second, and now, with his third picture in five years in the final cutting and mixing stage, was established as one of the most gifted directors of his generation. His only failure had come when he had gone back to New York, after completing his first picture, to put on a play that closed after only eight performances. He had disappeared for three weeks after that. When he returned he was morose and silent and it had been months before he felt he was ready to go to work again. He was not a man designed for failure and he had made Gretchen suffer along with him. It had not helped, either, that Gretchen had told him in advance that she didn’t think the play was ready for production. Still, he always asked for her opinions on every aspect of his work and demanded absolute frankness, which she gave him. Right now she was troubled by a sequence in his new film, which they had seen together in rough cut at the studio the night before. Only Colin, she, and Sam Corey, the cutter, had seen it. She had felt there was something wrong, but couldn’t give coherent reasons why. She hadn’t said anything after the running, but she knew he would question her at breakfast. As she went back into the bedroom, where Colin was still sleeping in his important position, she tried to remember the sequence of the film, frame by frame, so that she could make sense when she spoke about it.
She looked at the bedside clock and saw that it was still too early to wake Colin. She put on a robe and went into the living room. The desk in the corner of the room was strewn with books and manuscripts and reviews of novels torn out of the Sunday Times Book Review section and Publisher’s Weekly and the London newspapers. The house was not a large one and there was no other place for the never-diminishing pile of print that they both attacked methodically, searching for possible ideas for films.