Misfit (16 page)

The lip of a champagne bottle pokes out from under the bed, on its side. She rolls her heel over the curved glass, rocking it back and forth.

It's all spiraled so quickly. She can't remember if she told Arthur to get his own room, or if he came to that himself. She can barely remember when the conversation took place. Only that she screamed. But that was that. Again she finds herself huddled in her own room. And while it's always been lousy being by herself, there is a comforting familiarity. She's begun to accept that every step forward is really just a step into the past.

Negative forces exist. They're part of the electricity that turns the world, the essential charge that comes from the polarity of the negative trying to touch the positive. And in the past, the solution has been simple: Just don't show up. A tactic that's always been more than basic avoidance, one that's about survival—not having the internal wherewithal to deal with the crap being thrown at you. It's overwhelming enough trying
to battle your own complexities, but to step out the door and be assaulted by everyone else's is a near-impossible task. Especially when you're just trying to stay steady—keep a clear head and an even presence. So it becomes easier not to go (or at least delay going as long as you can). And, yes, it's annoying to the others, she knows that, she's no fool; but what they don't understand is that it's better for everyone in the end, because if she succumbed to pressure and expectation and showed up when she wasn't ready, then her defenses couldn't handle it; her state of mind would be left completely vulnerable. She'd fall apart right then and there. And, yes, maybe she is like a child, unwilling to believe that bad things in the world can't be kept away. But she still can't help but cling to the long-held belief that if she closes her eyes, then those bad things won't exist in the first place.

She looks at the phone and considers calling downstairs again. The car should've been here already. It's Gable she worries about, waiting under the desert sun, how the heat can burden a man his age. He's been looking a little more peaked each day. And, as with her, it's seemed harder and harder for him to maintain the energy; he too comes alive only when the cameras roll. She's never meant to keep him waiting, and she thinks he knows that. He understands how hard it can be. You never mean to bring harm. You're actually trying to keep it away. She reaches for the phone, about to turn the rotary, but the wire hood is still clamped over her
finger. She tries to shake it off. And then, pinching the pointed end, she twists it just enough to slide her finger out. But it seems her twisting actually compresses the hood, and before she can stop, a thin line of blood bands under the ring. And she sits there, staring at it, her mouth as dry as can be, unsure of what to do, her foot still on the bottle, watching the blood pool and fall in small drops on the sheet, where it expands and blends like watercolor. Should she loosen or tighten the hood? What would best keep the blood in?

From the Mapes, it's still an hour-long ride out to Pyramid Lake. She pictures the day turning cloudy, with maybe even some rain coming. And everyone waiting for her. But no matter what the sky ends up looking like, the desert will still be unbearably hot. It's impossible to imagine being out there, lousy under that heat. But that's not why she's running late. Nothing's ever as simple as the weather.

She channels Lee Strasberg, hearing his instructions over and over (contact those memories of emotion,
remember the emotions
, keep them in storage,
always be emotionally available
). And she stands by herself on the dry bed of Pyramid Lake, facing a semicircled crew that's drawn far back, setting up the long shot of Roslyn screaming against the vast plain, ringed by the
snowcapped Sierras. A single boom is set behind her. She wears a denim jacket that matches her Levi's, and she tugs on the collar of her white shirt as she thinks through her lines. She's confused herself about how to play the scene. Caught up in the logic of the sequence, when she knows it's really about the unconscious.
Acting
, she can hear Mr. Strasberg say,
is not something you do. It occurs
. And there she stands, preparing for what very well may be the soul of the picture, seeing Roslyn in the terms of the cultural world she's become part of in New York, but still not sure if she can connect with the emotional world that Strasberg has taught her is so critical.

The choreography requires her to spin and to turn and to fall apart while calling out the men who've captured the horses, telling them they're murderers. Her final monologue is a plea to keep things from falling apart. There will be no close-ups. Just a body trying to keep upright and balanced on a world spinning too fast.

Arthur paces, almost nervously, jabbering at Huston, scribbling notes and changes, then leaning over to show Huston the clipboard. Gable slumps in a director's chair, the one with her name written in script. He pulls his jacket closed; his ten-gallon hat shades his eyes. He'll be dragged around the lake bed shortly—he insists on doing his own stunts—and for the first time in the past three months he looks truly exhausted. Earlier in the day, he announced that his
wife, Kay, is expecting. That thought alone must have drained him, maybe even scared him. But he took the handshakes and the hugs with a joyfully honest reception. Since then, he's barely moved from the chair. Just stared down at his feet.

Everyone huddles around the cameras, waiting for instructions. She stays put on her mark, trying to keep her character until Huston calls action. Then Huston slips behind a curtain in the back of a truck, coughing his way in like a sputtering engine. He probably needs to review the second-unit footage to make sure all the values match before they do anything else.

Arthur continues to pace, inching toward Paula. Marilyn has hardly talked with him since they've taken separate rooms. It isn't because she's angry or resentful. She just has nothing to say. He's been keeping his distance. Trying not to incite anything. He looks so prepared for the movie to fall apart. So nervous. Afraid that in these final days she'll fail before the camera. He says something to Paula, and she nods slowly, as she always does, and then gives Marilyn a hand signal, pushing her open palms up and down as a reminder to keep calm. What strange bedfellows: Arthur, who's detested Paula all along, who thinks of the Strasbergs as cultish, now seeks camaraderie with her. Is he that worried? Has he not noticed that the
least
likely place she'll fall apart is before the camera?

Wind rises. Shadows creep along with the dust. But she keeps moving. Dancing in place. Shaking her
arms out. Rolling her neck. Mouthing her lines over and over. Just holding out for the clapboard. A rag doll waiting to come to life.

Huston pushes back out through the black curtain and climbs down off the flatbed. He claps his hands, and stamps his boot, and, as though it's a staged illusion, momentarily disappears amid a cloud of alkali dust. The crew gathers around him. He swats away the dirt. Turns his head to cough behind his back. Paula motions for Marilyn to come in. Shooting is suspended, Huston declares. He explains that full daylight is needed to match the scenes, and the overcast sky and late-afternoon shadows make that impossible. They'll resume tomorrow. Marilyn senses some people looking at her, as if the weather too is her fault.

Gable jumps up and dusts off his jeans. “Well, then,” he says. “I'll gladly be taking the afternoon off.” He's going to go look at Bill Harrah's car collection, he says. It's the one thing in Reno he actually wants to do. Someone asks if arrangements should be made for Kay to go along—have her picked up at the Mapes. Gable shakes his head, saying the only old things she likes are actors. Others follow with their own plans, laughing about how the whole picture is so over budget that it hardly makes a difference.

Marilyn isn't paying attention. She watches the sky, willing the clouds to move, to blow on by. But they stretch as far as she can see. Covering the blue. Hiding the mountain peaks. She doesn't want Huston
to strike the set. She's fixed to shoot the scene. It isn't about knowing her lines, or about being prepared with her blocking. It's about that unexpected moment when the character completely overwhelms you, and is ready to come out. Sometimes it just strikes. Like that. And she would use all her remaining breath to blow away the clouds if she could, saving just enough life to release before the camera.

Forgetting the people around her, Marilyn walks back out across the lake bed, almost wandering, and ends up returning to the spot for Roslyn's soliloquy. The desert light turns yellow, almost opaque, with the smell of a sky about to change, a fragrance somewhere between sweet and stale. The boom has been collapsed and taken down. The horse trailers are driving away. The spots are already in their crates. Gable has left, followed by much of the crew. Alone, she forces herself to inventory the exact emotion of what it feels like to be Roslyn in this moment, but she tells herself not to think about it, and hates herself when she does.

The camera pulls in tight on Gable. He's laid out on the ground, dressed in leather chaps and boots, his gloved hands holding on to a rope tied to a truck, preparing for a stunt that will simulate him being pulled by a wild horse. His hair is mussed, and his face, sweaty and chapped
from the wind, looks both worn and rugged. Makeup will be applied to further the appearance of wear, but salty dust from the lake has stuck to his face as though expertly detailed. It takes strength just to lie there and wait. Huston leans over him, moving the tripod a little more to the left, framing the shot, and then saying to pull the camera in tighter.

The exterior scenes have been shot. It's how time was utilized when Marilyn showed up late, or when they weren't sure if she'd show up at all. The second unit filmed horses running wild across the plains. Even though Gable declared he was doing all his own stunts, his stunt double, Jim Palen, still came in for the rougher long-distance scenes involving the horses. Even Gable knew that was too dangerous. It was further emphasized when Palen was kicked in the side of the head by a wild stallion named Boots during the second-unit takes in which the horse is supposed to simulate kicking a fallen Gay. A hoof landed right near the temple. When Palen just lay there, some thought he was dead, or at least brain-damaged, until he finally muttered a few words and sat up. But he was lucky, if it can be called luck. And no one could really call it an accident, because they were wild horses, and that's what wild horses do. It's been noticed, but never said, that danger seems to come only when Marilyn throws off the schedule. It's occurred to her, too. The idea that coincidence might be the true link between apparent cause and effect scares her, and rarely does it exhilarate.

Gable is to be dragged by the truck across the lake bed, about four hundred feet, while the camera hangs back for the long shot. Then they'll take it again, shooting in tight from another camera mounted on the side of the flatbed. Gable agrees that the truck should drive at a regular speed, about thirty-five miles per hour, the pace of a horse, so that his body will twist and bump the way it should, because for all the time it's been taking to make this picture, already twenty-five days over schedule, they might as well get it right. They'll have plenty of time, he says. It ought to be at least a couple of hours more before Marilyn makes it out there. After all, the call is only two hours old.

With a parched voice, Gable says, “Can we get this thing going, already?”

Huston, squinting through the Mitchell's lens, mumbles it will be a few more minutes.

“A few more minutes,” Gable says. “A few more minutes.” In order to rest his neck, he puts his head down, then lifts it back up quickly, spitting off a layer of dirt stuck to his lips. “This whole film's been a
few more minutes.
”

Marilyn arrives as he's being dragged for the second time. The flatbed is driving in a straight line, with a cameraman tilted over the side, and Gable just barely hanging on to the end of the rope, snaking in all directions. He's on his side, and his body bounces and twists, and for a moment it seems it could be a stuffed dummy (not even a stuntman!), because the body bounces
so freely, rising up with a floating lightness, and then thudding down violently, in a way no one should have to endure. And it pains her to see Gable as just a body, one that's easily beaten and easily bruised, no different from the next. There was a dog who once lived next door to one of her foster homes, and one day a neighbor came out holding a hoe, and he told the barking dog to keep quiet, and when the dog kept at it, the man lifted up his hoe and he sliced the dog in half. That's how it is when people are after something for themselves. There are no concerns about consequences. They'll rip you to shreds. Just to keep their world in order.

 

The news from Vegas is good today. Bookmakers there have posted Kennedy as a 6 to 5 favorite over Nixon in next month's election. The shift is major, as Nixon had been running 8 to 6 just last week, perhaps upstaging the report in the papers that George Gallup believes neither he nor anyone else can “predict the outcome of the November presidential election with scientific accuracy,” a reminder that the real forecasting always falls to the oddsmakers. And maybe this news brings a sense of hope, especially given a recent report, called “Community of Fear,” released by the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, that anticipates that as the arms race grows, the United States will be forced to move underground, to build factories inside caves, along with apartment buildings and stores. Meanwhile, the
New York Times
has
posted a headline that warns “Caution Is Advised With Dark Lipstick,” and the article goes on to say that “when wearing a blackened red lipstick, do not wear brightly colored eye make-up. The new black eye-shadow looks best or a dark blue shade. Do not wear rouge.” This evening she's going with Arthur to a party Huston is throwing at the Christmas Tree Restaurant in honor of Arthur's and Monty's birthdays, and she's conscious of wearing a darker eye shadow, not because of how it looks but because it feels a little less dangerous, which she understands is not the same as safe. And she will accompany Arthur because it's his birthday, and they are still married, and those things still matter, even if it means she'll sit sideways, scrunching herself against the town car's window, watching the pines cascade down the side of the Mt. Rose Highway, not saying a word the entire ride up the twisting hill, sick with an unidentified nervousness that she figures will only be cured by a shaker of gin and one of the loose Nembutals at the bottom of her purse, cure enough until she can get back to her own bed, and back in front of the camera the following day.