Finished, befuddled again, his mind full of lurking, crawling, slithering little people, Jack turned and walked offstage, leaving a stunned silence behind, but taking Dori Lunsford along by the breast.
“Six weeks later, I married that bitch.”
Michael O’Connor is at last surprised by something. “Dori Lunsford?” he says. “I didn’t know you were ever married to Dori Lunsford.”
A flaw in his impeccable research, eh? I smile at him in triumph — we keep our secrets, yes we do, when we want, large and small — and I say, “It didn’t last.”
“I guess it didn’t.”
I lean forward slightly, feeling extremely healthy, a sound body in a sound mind — no, that’s the other way around, isn’t it? Doesn’t matter — and I rest my elbows on my spread knees, and I gaze into the middle distance of time. “How different that was,” I say, “from my first wedding, even though they both took place in the same church.”
“Same church?” O’Connor echoes. “Isn’t that unusual?”
“Very photogenic church,” I explain. “Great for the press. You fellas. Well, you know that. And this time, of course, we didn’t have to hire a crowd. We both had our fans, our agents, household staffs, attorneys, accountants, standins, hangers-on, the whole crowd. The media was out in force, a lot more so than when Marcia and I tied the knot. We all had to work our asses off to suppress those pictures, let me tell you.”
“Pictures?” O’Connor looks bewildered, poor fella; I’m surprised he doesn’t already know this part, being in the journalism racket and all. He says, “Suppress pictures? What pictures?”
“Of the wedding,” I tell him.
Which doesn’t seem to help him much. Shaking his head as though there’s a bee in his ear, he says, “Suppress pictures of the wedding. Your old wedding with Marcia, you mean? So people wouldn’t know it was the same church?”
“Oh, who cares about that?” I ask him. “One of the very few good qualities of the press is that it has no memory. No, it was the pictures of the wedding with Dori we had to suppress. And a hell of a job it was, too.”
“I don’t understand,” he confesses. “If the whole thing was meant to be a publicity stunt, why suppress the pictures?”
“Because things went a little bit wrong,” I explain.
“What things?”
“Well, we were both of us drinking pretty heavy then,” I tell him. “It was the only way we could put up with each other, or anything else, or get through the day. So, we handled the ceremony okay, but on the way back down the aisle — or is it back up the aisle? — anyway, on our way back from the altar, Dori’s drunk said something that irritated my drunk just a little.”
Flashback 22
The lovely white chapel in Santa Monica had been freshly painted for the occasion, and parts of the gleaming green grass had been resodded. Hundreds and hundreds of wedding guests and media people milled about in front of the chapel, held back from the gray cement walk leading from front steps to street by police sawhorses and stern-looking, blue uniformed, white helmeted policemen. A red carpet had been unrolled from the church door down the steps and across the gray cement walk and the sidewalk to the waiting limo. Organ music and the sound of an expensive imported choir rang out from within as the ushers opened the twin front doors.
Jack and Dori came out, he in tux, she in a different white gown from the one she’d worn to the Academy Awards, this one showing a bit less cleavage. Jack and Dori were yelling and screaming at each other, both red-faced, both waving their arms around. Jack shoved Dori when they reached the top step, but instead of falling, Dori swung around and smashed him across the head with her bouquet. He then took a swing at her, but she ducked and kicked him in the shin.
Ushers and friends, paralyzed with shock in the first few seconds, at last hurried forward to break up the newly-weds, both of whom now swung and missed, Jack’s overhand right taking out a flower girl, while Dori’s left uppercut sent an usher flying off the steps and into the crowd below. Jack finally connected with a straight left to Dori’s forehead, driving her back into an off-balance wedding guest, who in his turn fell backward into two photographers, who shoved him unceremoniously out of the way. The wedding guest, not taking kindly to this opening of a second front at his rear, turned around and popped a photographer. So then the second photographer popped the wedding guest. So then another wedding guest popped the second photographer.
Jack and Dori meanwhile, weaving and staggering in the church doorway, had entered upon a hair-and-clothes-ripping contest, their elbows and knees doing much damage among those well-wishers who tried to intervene. And the more people were knocked off the steps into the people below, the more the fight spread.
In no time at all, it had become a general brawl, its turmoil reverberating out from the epicenter of the happy couple. Policemen and police sawhorses alike were trampled into the fresh sod as the fight spilled over onto the lawn, engulfing more and more of the wedding guests and then the media people, and then the fans, extending even into the two TV remote vans parked just down the block. The limo driver, seeing which way the wind was blowing and not expecting his fares to make it to curbside today anyway, decided to get his vehicle out of the danger zone, but in moving it he made both the car and himself moving targets, obvious and irritating to the mob at large. Although he locked himself in, and the crowd never did get at him, the limo itself was never the same again and shortly thereafter was sold for cash to a Columbian who wanted the comforts of air-conditioning and television while overseeing the work of his farm in the uplands.
As the brawl spread to the street, cars and trucks, blocked in their passage, disgorged their drivers and passengers to enter into the fray. A school bus full of bored teenagers on their way back to school from a field trip to the La Brea tarpits added its own dollop of youthful enthusiasm to the developing stew.
Jack and Dori, both off their feet now, clutched in each other’s violent embrace, kicked and bit and scratched and punched and rolled around on the red carpet among the feet of the nearer brawlers. Being down there, intent on their pummeling, each with an earlobe of the other clenched in their teeth, they were among the last to hear the wail of the approaching sirens.
“We were going to honeymoon in Brazil,” I tell O’Connor, “but the marriage didn’t last that long, so I went with Buddy instead.”
So many things startle and perplex this fellow. He goggles at me. “You had the honeymoon anyway?” he demands. “With Buddy?”
“Well,” I explain, “it was never going to be just a honeymoon, anyway. It was always going to be a deductible expense.”
He doesn’t get that part either. “A trip to Brazil? A honeymoon in Brazil? With or without the bride? A deductible expense?”
He is beginning to astonish me as much as I’m astonishing him. For a media maven, he sure as hell doesn’t know much. I say, “Don’t you know what Brazil’s famous for?”
“Coffee,” he says.
“No.”
“Inflation.”
“No.”
“Brazil nuts?”
“Faces,” I tell him.
His face is one of which they would never approve. He gapes at me with it. “Faces?”
“They’ve got a clinic down there,” I tell him. “It’s the most complete plastic-surgery operation in the world.”