“Your first wife, I believe,” the interviewer says. They love to show how they’ve researched you, how they’ve studied up on you, how they’ve done their homework. There are times when I hate being other people’s homework.
I taste the shimmer in the glass, and it is like all the finest things of our planet gathered together into one foamy tube. The clean chill of Antarctica, the breezy pure sweetness of the Caribbean, the tang of giant cities everywhere. Oh, my goodness me!
“Marcia Callahan,” I say, and pause to lick ambrosia from my upper lip. “I guess you could call it love-hate at first sight. We never had any illusions about each other, Marcia and me, but maybe that was why we were so drawn together. We were naked for each other. I was certainly naked for her.”
I smile, thinking back, reliving again our most famous scene from the play: Marcia, in various shawls and laces, sits on a park bench. I, in T-shirt and jeans and heavy workboots, roam the stage, circling her, ranting and raging. She replies in soft but compelling counterpoint, fighting back with tattered dignity. And night after night, alone in the forwardmost box to stage left, his marine uniform replaced by a gleaming new tux I’d bought him, Buddy Pal sat and watched. In my pacing of the stage, flinging my arms about, roaring, letting it all out, I would sometimes look up and see him there, a faint smile on his face as he watched Marcia. And from time to time, in her self-defense, Marcia would look bravely up past me at that box high on the theater’s side wall, where Buddy sat concealed from the rest of the audience by plush drapes. I sigh and smile, and the shimmery glass trembles in my trembling hand.
“After Buddy got out of the marines,” I say, “the three of us were inseparable. It was like old times, but even better. We were going to be together forever.”
“But you weren’t,” the interviewer says.
“The show closed. They made a movie out of it, and they hired Marcia to what they call re-create the role. But they didn’t want me.”
“I’m surprised,” the interviewer says.
“Are you? Well, you don’t know shit about showbiz, do you? No,” I say quickly, “forget that, sorry, that was just this drink talking, nice fuzzy drink.”
“I imagine,” he says, gently, forgiving me, “I imagine the memory of that can still hurt.”
“Most memories still hurt,” I say, and laugh, and catch myself before I spill this wonderful fuzzy drink. “The thing is,” I say, “they had some guy under contract, some guy they were grooming. Marcia was already a star, and I was just some guy that was in her last play. So they put in this fucking twerp they were grooming. Eventually, the critics told them they were crazy, but by then it was too late.”
The interviewer nods. I have his sympathy back, all right; there’s nothing they hate more than success, and nothing they love more than failure. Feed them great fat shovelfuls of humility and abasement and defeat, and they’ll feed you more and more success. Love it!
He says, with his new sympathetic voice, “What did you do then?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Marcia moved out to the Coast, of course, to make the movie. George and I broke up as soon as the play closed — funny thing, it was as much his doing as mine — and Buddy and I went on living together in a little place I had on East 18th Street.”
Wide-eyed, about to call back his sympathy vote, my interviewer said, “You were having an affair with Buddy Pal?”
I stare at him, truly shocked and outraged. “Are you crazy? I’m not that way! Buddy isn’t — for God’s sake, man, we’re both straight!”
Confused, abashed, the interviewer leans back in his chair, nodding agreement with me, saying, “Sorry, sorry, I just got a little confused there, you know, after George Castleberry and all that kind of—”
“That, fella,” I say, “is what we in the biz call a career move. It has nothing to do with the inner man, you see what I mean?”
“It’s cynical, you mean,” he says.
I beam at him. Dear fuzzy drink, fuzzing around through all my suburbs, turning me on like neons at nighttime. “My friend,” I say, “you just used a word that has no meaning.”
His face is blank. “I did?”
“Cynical. You see, my friend, it’s a spectrum,” I say, and spread my hands like a fisherman lying, and very nearly, very nearly, very damn nearly spill the remains of my fuzzy drink, but recover in time and continue: “It’s a spectrum,” I say. “Here at this end is the romantic, and over here at this end is the cynic. So wherever you are on this here spectrum here, you’re the realist, and everybody on that side is too much of a romantic, and everybody on that side is too much of a cynic.”
“Is that right?”
“That’s right,” I say, seeing no need to disagree with myself. “More examples. You take a normal interest in your job. Everybody on this side of you is lazy, and everybody on that side of you is a workaholic. Or everybody on one side is frigid, and everybody on the other side’s a nymphomaniac. Or everybody over here’s—”
“I get the idea,” he assures me loudly, interrupting a fine flow, a fine fuzzy-drink-induced flow, and then he hurries on to keep that fine flow from starting up again, asking me, “Did you get another part in a play after Last Seen in Tupelo closed?”
“No,” I tell him, clouding over slightly, the fuzzy drink beginning to curdle within me at the memory of that empty time in my life, Buddy pressing me to bring in some money, the great lethargy creeping over me, all my troubles and woes, the memories I hadn’t learned how to jam... “Jack Schullmann’s blackball against me was still alive then,” I explain to this button-eyed interviewer, “and during that time I was with George I did more drinking than maybe I should have at such a tender age — not like now! Hah!” And I finish the fuzzy drink!
“So what did you do?” this dull fellow asks me.
I radiate pleasure in his direction. “I got married,” I say simply.
Flashback 9
On her way home from the studio, Marcia picked up her dry cleaning, then continued on up and over Beverly Glen Boulevard out of the Valley and into Westwood to the furnished rental she’d taken while shooting Tupelo. The house was modified mission-style, one story high, with red tiled roof and beige stucco walls, the structure sprawling over most of the available property, with neat lawn and shrubbery in front and a large swimming pool filling the space in back.
Hooked to the visor of the rented Porsche was the box that controlled the door of the attached garage; Marcia thumbed the button on that box as she made the turn into her driveway, and the broad blank door folded up and back, receding into the open mouth of the garage like a piece of stage magician’s equipment. Marcia drove from the sunny exterior to the dark oily-smelling interior of the garage, unnaturally bare and neat inside (this being a short-term rental), and behind her the door slid out and swept down, as though the house had just ingested another victim.
Marcia collected the plastic dry-cleaner bag, which had been draped over the back of the passenger seat, then climbed from the car and went through the connecting door into the kitchen. She passed through the kitchen and out the other side, then moved diagonally across one corner of the long, low living room with its low beige furniture and broad, chrome-faced fireplace. A long hall led from there, with more rooms to the right and a wall of glass on the left overlooking the swimming pool and its redwood surround. Walking down this hall, the dry-cleaner bag held over her shoulder like Frank Sinatra’s jacket, Marcia glanced leftward and saw, in profile, Jack Pine.