Hollywood Gothic (3 page)

Challis looked at his typewriter and the half-filled sheet of yellow foolscap. He looked at the television set, where the Dodgers were beating the Cardinals and Vin Scully was quoting Aeschylus and Euripides. His glass of gin and tonic—the sixth in this series, by actual count—was sweating like a fat umpire in the St. Louis sun. Goldie turned over, lay on her belly, spread her legs, and began flexing her ass. Challis frowned. He wondered who was sleeping with her these days. One of his friends? Maybe somebody right here in the Colony … it would be a nice humiliating touch at parties, and she rather liked humiliating touches. The thing was, did he care anymore? He didn’t think so. And he wouldn’t care until the last liquor store had sold its last bottle of gin, to paraphrase Margo Channing
à la
Joe Mankiewicz. And the next thing was, so far as he was concerned, what exactly did he care about anymore?

He stared at the Oscar, which was at the moment using its great marble base to hold down a ratty, slowly growing, marked-up stack of yellow paper.

“Well,” he said to the Oscar. “What?”

Oscar didn’t give a fig, as they used to say in olden days when Cornell Wilde and Tony Curtis and Donald Crisp had kept the surly barons in order.

Five years further on, the body of Goldie was at his feet. She wore a heavy sweater with a thick rolled turtleneck. No pants. A tank watch with the sapphire on the winding stem: was he crazy? Why else catalog these details while his wife cashed in her chips, bought the farm, shuffled off this—ah, let’s see, on the floor a Vuitton address book swept off the desk as she had clawed the air, grabbed at the last strands of life. All the Rodeo Drive loot scattered across the remains of poor, bitchy old Goldie. … The honey-streaked hair with undiminished thickness and sheen and heft: blood caked; her skull battered in, a fury of hatred and frustration; and the Oscar smeared with her blood and hair. … The statuette replaced on the desk, gazing down sightlessly at the murdered woman. A trophy used to kill another trophy.

Challis saw the flash of the Oscar reflecting the firelight, slicing through the air again and again as it must have done, Goldie going down, the base of the statuette smashing through the skull’s shell, spraying blood and the brains, pounding bits of bone into the slippery gray matter. He saw it, he heard the awful wet sound, and he woke up screaming. …

He opened his eyes, winced as a coughing fit racked his stiff, snow-covered body. Somehow he’d gotten out of the wreckage. Unlike the movies, there had been no fire, no exploding fuel tanks, despite the odor he recognized, and he was alive, in one piece. He lay in the mud and snow, the afternoon sky effectively blotted out by the dark trees and mist. He looked at his watch. Only an hour before, he’d been standing in the hangar, waiting.

Moving gingerly, he got up and walked back to the battered fuselage, which had acquired the sad look of a broken toy under a gigantic Christmas tree. He looked in past the broken glass of the windshield. Snow had blown in. The two bodies were white with it. He wasn’t quite sure of what he was seeing, then realized he was staring into the raw stump where the pilot’s head had been. Gagging, he staggered back, slipped in the icy mud, and fell down. He shook his head, clearing the image away. A clump of wet, heavy snow fell off the boughs above him, slid down, and glanced off his shoulder. He stood up, stumbled away into the trees.

He woke up again lying against a tree trunk. The cold was eating at him. He was so stiff that he assumed for a moment that he was freezing. His leg pained him, and his head, where it had struck the side window glass, was tender to the touch, throbbed mightily. The sky was finally visible, a dirty late-afternoon gray with snow blowing steadily from every direction at once. He wondered, almost objectively, how he was going to keep from freezing to death during the night. Leaning back against the tree, he swept his eyes out across the valley. The snow obscured details, but he saw far below him the ribbon of black road, which seemed flat from his perspective but which was in fact working its way up the mountainside. Nothing moved anywhere in his field of vision, nothing but the ceaseless shifting snow. He closed his eyes, but what he saw frightened him: the Oscar, gleaming brightly, flashing through the air, chopping again and again, growing a dripping coat of blood on its base. …

He came to again. Darkness was lowering across the valley like the final curtain on a bad play, and he knew he was going to die. He was alone on the side of the mountain and the snow was deepening all around him. When he opened his mouth to take a deep breath, he heard his snow-caked beard crack like breaking glass. His brain was still ticking over … Warren Beatty dying in the snow at the end of
McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Challis decided he was going to die wishing he’d written a movie that fine. Christ, he knew it was the end for sure—he heard voices. High, piping voices getting closer, the heavenly choir. So, this was it, they came piping and they led you away, just like Frank Capra had always sort of hinted they would. …

’Twas brillig and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe

All mimsy were the borogroves,

And the momeraths outgrabe …

The voices were coming closer. Challis smiled, felt his beard crack again. The subconscious was such a peculiar place, he mused quite calmly. He would never have guessed that his dying hallucination would have been of “Jabberwocky.” My God, his life could have flashed before his eyes, but instead, from a burying place deep in the heaped-over mounds of childhood, the Lewis Carroll poem had worked its way back to the surface. Then, much to his own surprise, he began to wonder, when would the processional of his life, the long march past, the final review, begin? Come to think of it, he’d always counted on that final view of who and what he’d been, the last chance to wave a cheery farewell to the young man, and before that the boy that he’d once been. As the sound of the voices came closer, he decided that the least he could do was stand up and meet his fate while foursquare, a beamish boy on his own two feet. Well, he could have used a drink, but … He slid up the tree trunk, the snow drifting off his shoulders. His eyelashes were stuck together with snow and his mustache was frozen solid like a brush made of ice, weighing ten pounds. Spooky business, dying, but his spirits had actually lightened a good deal. He was beginning to feel rather silly. And he began walking toward the piping, chanting voices. Which was when he stepped over the edge of a small cliff and tumbled through the bracken and snow and brambles onto a frozen, muddy pathway edging narrowly along the mountainside.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The Jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

By God, they were getting closer still. He peered out from inside his head, through the bars of his eyelashes. He rubbed at the snot dripping from his nose, laughed, and felt his beard crack again. Ice cut into his face, and he stopped laughing. He stood up slowly, feeling a sharp pain in his side. His leg hurt and his head hurt. As long as he had the symptoms, he wished he were drunk. When was all the hurting going to stop?

Beware the Jubjub bird and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!

He took a few faltering steps and caught his breath.

Good Lord, but they were small!

Somehow—aside from all that dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin bullshit—he’d always assumed that angels were, well,
big.
Majestic, magnificent, terrific wingspread and all … of course, Capra had seen them as sort of cuddly old men, chummy and good-natured and hesitant. Anyway, it didn’t matter, because that had been the movies and this was something else and he’d have to break that habit—this was real life, dying and angel visitation, hallucinatory or not. But they were so small, these funny looking little creatures, brightly colored, puffy parkas where there should have been those long creamy robes, and they weren’t flying or floating … they were staggering along and looking down at the path, and the lead angel couldn’t have been more than four feet high!

Challis drew himself up to his full six feet and began to say something. “Hey there!”

The first angel’s eyes widened. The mouth fell open. Snow blew thickly between Challis and the angel.

“Bandersnatch!” the angel shrieked. “The Bandersnatch!” Then he turned tail and ran smack into the following angels.

Challis scowled and fell face forward in the mud and snow, dead to the world and feeling no pain.

C
HALLIS HAD TAKEN A SOMEWHAT
earlier flight than he’d planned. Being summoned to an Australian location to doctor somebody else’s screenplay had taken its toll both physically and mentally. For a week he’d tried to put some life into the stoic, stalwart characters drawn from a wooden best-selling novel: he’d given them verbal habits, physical twitches, taken a tuck here and there, restructured the second half of the story. He turned a solemn, boring sermon into a rather base caricature and picked up fifty thousand in the process. Somebody from the studio had suggested that he might want screen credit. A bad joke? No, the man had been well-intentioned, and Challis had politely declined. The director, a mature hell-raiser of seventy, had insisted on getting drunk every night in Challis’ hotel room. “Challis,” he kept saying, “they don’t understand me, they never have. First, I was, I still am, a writer … don’t ask me how I got into the goddamn director’s chair—I don’t know. Any asshole from a sheep station in the outback can
direct
a picture. But they’ve forgotten I’m a writer. Now, let me tell you how this piece of shit should play, never forgetting we’ve got a couple of talking bogies for actors.” The week had taken a considerable toll, all right, and Challis had stopped off in Fiji for a couple of days to dry out. But he’d wanted to get home. He’d wanted to see Goldie, and he’d wanted to be sober.

So he’d gotten in earlier than planned; the standard gold 450SL had started after the week’s rest, and he headed up the Pacific Coast Highway from LAX with the morning sun glowing brightly behind the fog crouching over the city. The ocean was calm and peaceful and white sails slid across the surface like enormous shark’s fins. What traffic there was as he reached Malibu was coming the other way, and he drove fast with the top down, letting the moist breeze wake him up. He turned left and went through the Colony’s gates. It was a beautiful morning, clean and wet and the sun glowing brighter every minute. Christmas was only a week away, and he’d survived a week with the temperature hitting 120 every day and he was glad to be home.

He was surprised to smell coffee in the kitchen. The container had dripped halfway full. A radio was playing softly somewhere. He heard the surf in the particular way that meant the sliding glass door onto the long deck was open. There was wet sand on the kitchen floor.

Still carrying his bag, he walked into the living room and stood quietly by the desk that looked out at the water. A fire had burned down in the grate and the wind coming up off the beach fluttered papers on the desk. It was cool, dim, fresh in the room.

Goldie was screwing some guy on the rug. They were naked and there was wet sand ground into the rug, and her hair was wet. As far as Challis knew, this was the first time, but then, it would be, wouldn’t it? He felt the sickness in his stomach and went back into the kitchen. They hadn’t noticed him. He mechanically got a cup and poured himself coffee, put cream in it, added brown-sugar crystals because in California everybody said brown-sugar crystals wouldn’t give you cancer and if you couldn’t believe everybody, who the hell could you believe? With his bag in one hand, the hot coffee in the other, he went back to the living room.

Goldie’s eyes were tightly closed and her jaw was clenched and she was shaking. They were just getting there, and the conversation was about par for the particular course they were playing. In times of crisis, Challis habitually fell back on composing dialogue in his mind and then saying it, thereby removing himself slightly from the unpleasant reality of the moment. He put the suitcase down softly, walked across the room, stood looking down at them.

“When you two are done,” he said, “I’d like just a moment of your time.”

The effect was all that he could have hoped for. The sexual act, the ardor itself, was dampened with a pathetic suddenness. He looked past the steaming coffee into four terrified glazed eyes and two flushed faces. The scene became one from a very amateurish porno movie or one’s worst private nightmares. Naked bodies were rolling in all directions, limbs flailing, voices crying out. He was surprised that they didn’t handle it with rather more aplomb. In his gut, he probably felt a good deal worse than they did. But, of course, he made his living writing words for people to say in equally unlikely and melodramatic situations. He watched them struggling to their feet. There were no robes or shirts or towels in the room. In a movie the scene might just conceivably have been played for laughs.

“Look at the bright side,” he said. “I’m not carrying a gun.”

“Oh, shit!” the man said. His chest was hairless, and sprinkled with red splotches, decorated with the standard terrace of awful gold chains. He looked terribly ordinary: middle-aged, tanned down to his neck, gray hair, splay-footed. Goldie didn’t look so hot either. Her mouth looked sort of raw and smudged.

Challis walked past them and went out on the deck. He sipped the coffee, scratched his beard, leaned on the railing looking out at the water. What in the world were his next lines? He couldn’t seem to get a grip on the scene, and he loathed the idea of crying, which was what he felt like doing. Goldie had frequently accused him of being buttoned-up, buttoned-down, but never unbuttoned. Inhibitions were his “bag,” as she was fond of saying; he was afraid of his emotions. He blinked back the tears and waited while he heard the sounds of the unidentified chap packing it up. Eventually he heard Goldie’s voice: “Toby …” He turned around. She was standing in the doorway, leaning against the rough wood of the siding. She wore Levi’s and a sweater, and her face, expressionless, was impossible to read.