Death of a Blue Movie Star (42 page)

Rune went for a long walk and ended up—surprised to find herself there—in Times Square. She walked into the
old Nathan’s Famous and ordered a Coke and a cardboard carton of crusty French fries, which she covered with sauerkraut and ketchup and mustard and ate as best she could with the little red skewer they give you instead of a fork.

She hadn’t quite finished when she got up suddenly and went outside to a pay phone. She made two long-distance phone calls and in five minutes was in a cab on the way back to her houseboat, wondering if Sam would loan her the money for a plane ticket.

Beneath the 727, the sheet of Lake Michigan—so much bluer than New York Harbor—met the North Shore somewhere near Wilmette. The fragile lattice dome of the Baha’i temple rose just above the dark green sponge of late-summer trees.

Rune, looking through the viewfinder of the little JVC video camera, lost sight of the temple as the plane eased out of its bank. She released the shutter. The wheels lowered with a quivering rush of protest against the slipstream, bells sounded and lights came on and in five minutes they were on the ground at O’Hare. With the roar of the reverse thrusters, the final-approach thoughts of mortality vanished.

“Welcome to Chicago,” the steward said.

I don’t know about that, Rune thought, and unbuckled her seat belt.

“This city is flat…. It’s not like New York, where all the energy is crowded onto a rocky island. It’s a sprawl, it stretches out, it’s weak, it’s …” Rune’s voice faded; the miniature tape recorder sagged.

“Dissipated?” The cabdriver offered.

“Dissipated?”
Click
. She shut off the recorder.

Rune glanced at his head, balding on top but hair pulled back from the sides and tied into a long ponytail. In the rearview mirror she noticed he had a demonic goatee.

“Diffused?” he tried.

Click
.

“… It’s weak and diffused…. Great expanses of land stretch between the pockets of …”

“How about
extend?”
the driver said. “You used
stretch
earlier.”

“I did?” The train of her poetic thought vanished. Rune dropped the tape recorder in her bag.

“What are you, a writer?” he asked.

“I’m a film maker,” she said. Which she wasn’t exactly, she figured, if being something had to do with making regular money while you did it. On the other hand,
filmmaker
had a lot more class than
occasional waitress at a bagel restaurant on Sixth Avenue
, a job she’d just accepted.

Anyway, who was going to check?

The driver—actually part-time student, part-time driver—loved movies and concluded by the time the cab cruised past Lawrence Avenue that Rune should do a film on Chicago.

He shut off the meter and for the next half hour took her on a tour of the city.

“Chicago means Wild Onion,’ “he said. “That’d be a good way to open the film.”

He told her about Captain Streeter, the Haymarket Riots, Colonel McCormick, William Wrigley, Carl Sandburg, Sullivan and Adler, the Sox and the Cubs, the Eastland boat disaster, the Water Tower, Steve Goodman, Big Bill Thompson, Mayor Daley, the ugly Picasso monkey woman, snow and wind and humidity, Saul Bellow and Polish, German and Swedish food.

“Kielbasa,” he said with admiration in his voice.

He talked a lot about the Great Fire and showed her
where it began, west, near the river, and where it ended, up north.

“Hey, that’d be great.” He looked back at her. “A film about city disasters. San Francisco, Dresden, Nagasaki …”

They arrived at her hotel. Rune thanked him and decided that, while she appreciated his thoughts, it was a film she’d never make. She’d had enough cataclysm.

They exchanged names and phone numbers. He wouldn’t take a tip but she promised to get some footage of him to use for atmosphere if she ever needed to.

Rune checked into the small hotel just off Lincoln Park. The room overlooked the lake and she sat looking at it for a while.

The bathroom was fantastic—enough towels so she could dry every limb with a different one. Enough mirrors so that she found she had a birthmark in the small of her back that she’d never known she had. Rune used the tiny scented cake of soap to wash her face, then the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner. That was a real treat; at home she used an old bar of Ivory for everything, including dishes. She stole the complimentary shower cap. After the shower Rune put on her one dress—a blue silk number her mother had sent her four years ago (but since she’d only worn it three times she figured it still qualified as new).

She looked at herself in the full-length mirror.

Me, in a dress, staying in a hotel that overlooks a beautiful lake with rocking, blue-green waves, in a city that burned down and has come back from the ashes …

Rune then turned on the desk lamp and took out her makeup kit. She began to do something she hadn’t done for almost a year—put on nail polish. A dark red. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d picked this shade, but it seemed sophisticated, cultured—the color you’d want to wear if you were going to the theater.

“That’s where John Dillinger bought the big one,” a square-jawed, sandy-haired young man told her. She was eating a hamburger in a half-deserted folk music club. He’d leaned along the bar and pointed to the old Biograph movie house across the street.

“He was betrayed by a woman in a red dress,” the man said, adding some flirt to his voice.

But Rune scared the guy off when she asked with gleaming eyes if you could still see the bloodstains.

The Haymarket Theater was in a small two-story Victorian building, on Lincoln Avenue, just north of Fullerton, up the street from the Biograph. She picked up her ticket at the box office and wandered into the small auditorium. She found her seat and thumbed through the program. At one minute after eight the lights went down and the curtain rose.

Rune wasn’t sure what to think about the play. As much as she loved movies, she generally didn’t like plays very much. Just when you started to believe the painted sets and the funny way everyone talked and walked, the two hours were up, and you had to go back to reality. It could be very jarring.

But this wasn’t bad at all. At least, unlike a lot of modern plays, it had a story you could follow. It was about a young woman—played by a pretty brunette actress named Rebecca Hanson—who kept postponing her romantic life because of her family. The major incident in the play was her decision to leave home at the age of thirty-two.

There was some very clever stuff in it, like the scene where one actor’s talking to another actor who suddenly becomes someone else in a flashback. It was funny in parts, then sad, then funny again. Rune cried when the
actress left her small-town boyfriend and headed off for Europe.

The audience loved it and about half of them gave the star a standing ovation. The play was long; by the time the curtain calls were over, it was 10:45. The audience, all except for Rune, left soon after the lights came up.

She waited until the actors and actresses had disappeared, then strolled backstage.

No one stopped her.

Rebecca Hanson’s dressing room was at the end of the corridor.

Rune paused in front of it, collected herself, then knocked.

“Yes?”

Rune opened the door.

Shelly Lowe finished wiping the cold cream off her face and gave Rune a smile. It was pretty bleak, Rune decided.

“I thought I saw you in the audience,” she said. “Well, I guess we better have a little talk.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

The two women walked down Lincoln Avenue past the closed shops and mostly empty bars to the broad intersection at Halsted and Fullerton, then they turned east.

In front of them the street and apartment lights disappeared into an expanse of blackness. Rune wondered if that void was the lake or the park or the sky.

She glanced at Shelly, who was wearing blue jeans, a silk blouse and Reeboks.

“You don’t quite look the same. Close, though.”

“A little plastic surgery. Eyes and nose. Always wanted it bobbed.”

“Arthur Tucker knew all along, didn’t he?” Rune asked.

“It was his idea, in a way. About six months ago he found out about my movie career—of course, I didn’t exactly keep it a secret. We had this terrible fight.”

“I met him. He doesn’t like pornography very much.”

“No, but it wasn’t the morality of it. He thought making the movies—what’s the word?—diminished me. That’s what he said. That it was holding me back from being great. It dulled me creatively. Like drinking or drugs. I thought about it. He was right. I told him, though, I couldn’t afford just to quit cold. I wasn’t used to being poor. I said I’d have to be crazy to quit what I’m doing. Crazy, or dead.

“He said, ‘So, die.’ Well, I thought about disappearing the way Gauguin did. But every city that was big enough to have good theater would also have a porn market; there was a risk I’d be recognized. Unless …” She smiled. “Unless I was actually dead. A week later, that religious group set off the first bomb in the theater. The news report said some bodies had been unidentified because the blast was so bad. I got into fantasizing about what if someone had mistaken that body for me. I could go to San Francisco, L.A., even London….