Fun With Problems (16 page)

"Everybody loves you, Tom," she said. "Don't they?"

How sad and lonely that made me feel. Out of selfishness and need I grieved for myself. It passed.

"Yes, I'm sure everyone does. It's great."

"Do I count?" she asked.

Yes and no. But of course I didn't say that. In the twisted light I saw her out there sauntering toward a brass horizon and I wanted to follow after. But I was not so foolish nor had I the generosity of spirit. I was running out of heart.

"You more than anyone, Lucy," I said. "Only you, really."

That's how I remember it. As we drove on Lucy began to complain about a letter she said I'd written.

"You used these exquisite phrases. Avoiding the nitty-gritty. All fancy dancing."

"I don't do that. I don't know what letter you mean. Come on—'exquisite phrases'?" I laughed at her.

A couple of miles later she informed me she had written the letter to herself. "In your style," she said.

"So," I asked her, "what were the phrases you liked?"

"I don't remember. I wanted to get it down. The way you are."

"Lucy, please don't write letters from me to yourself. I can do it."

"You never wrote me," she said, which I guess was partly the point. "Anyone can jump out of a phone."

Suddenly, but without apparent spite, she declared, "John's going to expand my part." She was talking about the now revived horror movie in which John had hired a live British actor to strangle her. However, on consideration she thought he might transform her into a surviving heroine. I said it was great but that it probably wouldn't be as much fun.

"You know," she said, "you don't get credit for being scared and dying. It doesn't count as acting. Anyway, I can live without fun."

"If you say so."

"John," she said, "wants to marry me." For some reason, at that point she put her hand on my knee and turned her face to me. "Seriously."

I wondered about that in the weeks following. Once she showed me a postcard of the Empire State Building he had sent her from New York. He had adorned it with embarrassing jokey scribbles about his erection. One day I took John to Musso's for lunch but he said not a word to me about her. Over our pasta I asked him if it was true that he was sparing Lucy's character in the thing forthcoming.

"Oh," he said, as though it were something that had slipped his mind. "Absolutely. Lucy's time has come."

I suspected that the lead would be the kind of supposed-to-be-feisty female lately appearing as part of the serious and adult wave. I knew Lucy would deliver that one all the way from Avenida Revolución.

"She can give a character some inner aspects," I told him.

"You're so right."

"Good actress," I suggested. "Great kid."

John went radiant, but he didn't look like a bridegroom to me. "You know it, Tom. Tops."

He didn't marry Lucy. Instead, when the funeral-baked meats had cooled he married Brion Pritchard's widow, Maerwyn. He didn't even promote Lucy to insipid ingénue. Halfway through the horror movie her character died like a trouper. In spite of my infatuation, I had to admit there were many great things one could do with Lucy, but marrying her was probably not one of them.

We went out a few times. She began to seem to me—for lack of a better word—unreal. I kept trying to get close to her again. At the time I was selling neither scripts nor story ideas. There were no calls. I might have tried for an acting gig; I was owed a few favors. I had no illusions about my talent, but I was cheap and willing, well spoken enough for walk-ons as a mad monk or warmongering general. I offered a Brooklyn Heights accent, which sounds not at all the way you think. But I had grown self-conscious and all the yoga in the world wasn't going to bring back my chops or my youthful arrogance. That was what I'd need in front of a camera. My main drawback as an actor had always been a tendency to perform from the neck up. I might have thrived in the great days of radio.

Eventually I got a job with a newspaper chain working as their "West Coast editor." It took up a lot of my time, and part of my work was resisting being transformed into a gossip columnist. I almost got fired for doing a piece for the
New York Times
Arts and Leisure section. The news chain paid a lot less than writing for the movies, but it paid regularly. I had plans to engineer a spread for Lucy, but nothing came along to hang it on.

Out of what seemed like nowhere, she took up with a friend of mine named Asa Maclure, pronounced
Maclure,
whom people called Ace. Ace was an actor and occasional writer (mostly of blaxploitation flix during the seventies) with whom I had liked to go out drinking and drugging and what we insensitively called wenching. Ace was a wild man. What inclined me to forgive him all was a telegram he had once sent to a director in Washington for whom he was going to act Othello:
CANT WAIT TO GET MY HANDS AROUND THAT WHITE WOMANS THROAT
.

Ace had just arrived back in L.A. from Africa, where he had portrayed a loyal askari who saved a blond white child from swart Moorish bandits in the Sahara. The child, supposed to be French, was from eastern Europe somewhere. Ace was unclear as to which country. She had gone on location with her mother along as chaperone. The mom was, as Ace put it, a babe. Ace was suave and beautiful, the kind of guy they would cast as Othello. In no time at all his romance, as they say, with Mrs. Vraniuk was the talk of every location poker game. Restless under the desert sky, Ace decided to shift his attention to young Miss Vraniuk. Consummation followed, producing some uneasiness since the kid was not yet twenty-one. Nor was she eighteen. Nor, it seemed, perhaps, was she fifteen. But it was in another country, another century, a different world. At the time, in the circumstances, it represented no more than a merry tale.

"This child was ageless, man," Ace told us. "She had the wiles of Eve."

If any images or other evidence of desert passion existed, no one worried much about it. Talk was cheap. And most American tabloids then did not even buy pictures.

Ace and Lucy became a prominent item, appearing in the very papers that now employed me. The stories were fueled by Ace's sudden trajectory toward stardom. Though she was blooming, grew more beautiful as she aged, Lucy was noticed only as Ace's companion.

It happened that one week the papers dispatched me with a photographer to do a story on kids in South Central who rode high-stakes bike races. The races ran on barrio streets, inviting the wagers of high-rolling meth barons and senior gangbangers. Lucy decided to come with me, and when I went down a second time she came along again. Both times she seemed a little hammered and could not be discouraged from flirting with a few speed-addled pistoleros. A local actually approached me with a warning that she was behaving unwisely. Driving back to Silver Lake, she said: "You and I are sleepwalking."

"How do you mean?" I asked her.

"We're unconscious. Living parallel lives. We never see each other."

I said I thought she was involved with Ace.

"I mean really see each other, Tommy. The way people can see each other."

"You're the one who's sleepwalking, Lucy."

"Oh," she said, "don't say that about me." She sounded as if she had been caught out, trapped in something like a lie. "That's frightening."

"That's what you said about both of us. I thought you were on to something."

Maybe she was confounded by her own inconsistency. More likely she never got there. She sat silent for a while. Then she said: "Don't you understand, Tommy? It's always you with me. Ever since Grauman's."

It was not a joke. I don't think she meant to hurt or deceive me with the things she said. For some reason, though, she could leave me feeling abandoned and without hope. Not only about us but about everything. She was concerned with being there. And with whom to be. It occurred to me that perhaps she was going through life without, in a sense, knowing what she was doing. Or that she was not doing anything but forever being done. Waiting for a cue, a line, a vehicle, marks, blocking. Somewhere to stand and be whoever she might decide she was, even for a moment.

"That can't be true, Lucy."

"Oh, yes," she said, urgently, deeply disturbed. "Oh, yes, baby, it is true."

There was no point in arguing. A couple of miles along, she put her hand on my driving arm, holding it hard, and I suspected she might force the wheel.

"I have such strength," she said. "I don't know how to use it. Or when. I accommodate. That's the trouble."

One strange afternoon, Asa Maclure, Lucy and I decided to go bungee jumping. Seriously. It might have represented the zenith of our tattered glory days. The place we chose to jump from was a mountainside high above the desert, reachable by tram from Palm Springs. There, over a rock face that rose a sheer few hundred feet from the valley floor, two actual Australians, a boy and a girl, had the jump concession.

I might say that I can't imagine how we came to plan this, but in fact I know how. Ace was well aware of the fraught status between Lucy and me. I'm sure she talked about me to him, maybe a lot. He would tease me, or both of us, when we were together.

"You all are pathetic," he declared once. "A gruesome twosome. Tommy, she sighs and pines over you. I believe you do the same. I don't mind."

I was provoked. He was saying that our strange affair notwithstanding, he—Mister Mens Sana in Corpore Sano—was the one she turned to for good loving. It was a taunt. So I decided I'd play some soul poker with him for Lucy and win and take her away. Thereafter he tried to see that she avoided me. When we were all together Ace and I would watch each other for cracks in which to place a wedge. Though I liked to believe I was smarter than Ace, he was verbally quite agile.

The bungee incident began as a bad joke and started overheating, the way one kid's playful punch of another will gradually lead to an angry fistfight. In fact it was completely childish, nothing less than a dare. It was I who made the mistake of talking bungee-jump; I'd seen the Australians referred to in the
Times
's weekend supplement and it occurred to me I might get my employers to pay for us. Ace was famous, Lucy semifamous, beginning to get noticed, frequently called in to test, and cast at times to help lesser actors look good. There were also reruns of her several soaps.

I felt I had to do this. I had made a jocular reference to this scheme in the presence of Ace, and Lucy and Ace called me on it. While I was trying to prod the powers above to spring and assign a photographer, the two of them went and did it. Would Lucy descend into the ponderosa-scented void after her paramour? A thing never in question. It was an eminence she'd sought lifelong, a Fuji-disposable Lover's Leap. They survived.

All my life I have regretted not being there. For one thing, regarding
Mac
lure, I held my manhood cheap. He had foxed me and bonded with her in a way that I, who had made something of a career out of witnessing Lucy's beau gestes, would never experience. She hurt me bad.

Suffering is illuminating, as they say, and in my pain I almost learned something about myself. I repressed the insight. I was not ready, then, to yield to it.

"I wanted it to be you," Lucy said, like a deflowered prom queen apologizing to the high school athlete whose lettered jersey she had worn and dishonored.

"I wanted it to be me too," I said. "Why did you go and do it?"

"I was afraid I wouldn't do it if we waited."

I shouted at her, something I very rarely did.

"You'd have done it with me! You goddamn well would have!"

Of course this exchange was as juvenile as the rest of the incident, but it stirred the unconsidered home truth I had been resisting. This kind of juvenility goes deep, and you can also approach self-awareness after acting childishly.

Still, I wasn't up to facing it. For days and days I went to sleep stoned, half drunk, whispering: What was it like, Lucy? I meant the leap. I very nearly went bungee jumping by myself, but it seemed a sterile exercise.

I was bitter. I had excuses to avoid her and I used them all. She called me at the office and in Laguna, but I was tired of it. The next thing I knew I had quit my job and gone over to England to find Jennifer.

Jen had got a Green Book and was teaching dance with some friends in Chester. When we saw each other I knew it was on again. I had to peel her loose from some painter from over the border. Another fucking Welsh boyfriend!

I took her home to Dallas and met the high-toned folks and married her in the high-toned Episcopal equivalent of a nuptial Mass, dressed up like a character out of Oscar Wilde. She conscientiously wore red, though I pointed out that neither of us had been married before. We moved to Laguna and, lovely and smart as she was, Jen got herself a tenure-track job in dance at UC San Diego. I watched her work, and she was peppy and the good-cop bad-cop kind of teacher, and you never saw a prettier backside in a leotard. We moved to Encinitas.

My bride all but supported me while I worked on a few scripts. She had loans from her parents and the UC salary. I don't know exactly what had changed in the movie business; I hadn't noticed anything good. However, I optioned two scripts right away.

One day I was coming out of the HBO offices on Olympic when I ran into Asa Maclure. The sight of him froze my heart. In those years you knew what the way he looked meant. He was altogether too thin for his big frame; his cool drape sagged around him. The worst of it was his voice, always rich, Shakespearean, his preacher father's voice. It had become a rasp. He sounded old and he looked sad and wise, a demeanor that he used to assume in jest. I hoped he wouldn't mention the bungee jump, but he did. Plainly it meant a lot to him. From a different perspective, it did to me too. We traded a few marginally insincere laughs about how absurd the whole thing had been. He looked so doomed I couldn't begrudge him the high they must have had. I didn't ask him how he was.

A couple of weeks later I got a call from Lucy, and she wanted to see me. She was still in Silver Lake. I lied to Jennifer when I drove up to visit Lucy. Jen had not asked where I was going, but I volunteered false information. I felt profoundly unfaithful, though I realized that there was not much likelihood of my sleeping with Lucy. No possibility at all, from my point of view. So I felt unfaithful to her too.