Naked in LA (18 page)

We were driving down to the valley, it was early morning and the sun was just rising over the hills. Reyes wanted to get breakfast down on the Strip.

“I want to play a game,” I said.

“What sort of game, princess?”

“The game where you pretend to be a gun-runner being chased by the CIA.”

“The CIA wouldn’t chase me for being a gun-runner. They’d be chasing after me to give me the guns to run.”

“The FBI then.”

“Yeah, that’s possible.”

“So let’s just suppose. Because that could never happen, right?”

“Never. I’m not that sort of guy. I wouldn’t get involved in shady dealings.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

“So let’s suppose someone was following us right now, what would you do?”

“I’d pull over and tell them you were Fidel Castro’s niece and you were in the country on a spying mission. And they’d arrest you and I’d go to the airport, go to one of the lockers and pick up a carpet bag full of hand grenades and fly to Cuba.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, if we were being followed by the FBI, I’d give you up. You haven’t seen me at my ruthless best.”

“Let’s say I wasn’t in the car. What would you do?”

“Well, first thing I’d check to see if they really were following me.” There was a filter lane off to the right at the stop sign and he pulled in to it. He checked the mirror and then pulled out into the left lane again and accelerated through the lights just as the lights turned red.

“Neat,” I said.

“If they follow me through the red light when they were stopped behind me, then I’d know they were following me.”

“How would you lose them?”

“Well, this is just a game right because it couldn’t really happen, right?”

“Correct.”

“Well then I’d get into heavy traffic and I’d weave through it. Like this.” I screamed as he squeezed between a bus and a Cadillac. The driver leaned on his horn as he cut in front of him again. “I’d try that a few times and if that didn’t work I’d pull into that gas station over there.”

“Why?”

“Because then they have to find somewhere to park, or else drive in right behind me. If they drive past, I reverse out and go the other way, and if they pull in behind me I go up to them and shoot them.”

“Joking, right?”

“Sure. And if I lose them and I’m still being followed, then I pull into another gas station.”

“And shoot whoever’s parked at the pump behind you?”

“No, then I check to see if they’ve smashed a taillight.”

“Vandalism?”

“At night they can follow your car through heavy traffic because you only have one taillight and that makes you stand out. They can tag team you all night. So if they’ve already smashed my taillight, I leave the car and steal another one. But I’d never do that because I’d never find myself running from the FBI or any other police agency. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

He grinned at me. I grinned back. I realized that for the first time in a very long time I was happy. Now how did that happen?

It was my first day filming
Wings of Eagles
. I still hadn’t met Steve McQueen. But I had my own trailer, at least, out back of the lot, and it had air conditioning, even though it didn’t work that well.

Still, I felt that I’d arrived.

The television was on: the news anchor said that a US spy plane had discovered Russian missiles on Cuba, and that they were close enough to attack America. Rosie, the make-up girl, had finished the pancake and was adding the finishing touches to my mascara and lipstick. I was possibly the first Austrian novice to wear lipstick, but this was the movies, and this was done for the camera, not for historical accuracy.

An assistant knocked on the door; “Three minutes, Miss Montes.”

I looked in the mirror at the woman in the black and white habit, clutching the silver crucifix at her throat. Finally I was a nun. I thought about the irony of it; Papi had threatened me with the convent once when he found out I had gone to the Shanghai with Angel.

“How’s that?” Rosie asked me.

I nodded. I was too nervous to speak. I just wanted to be left alone for a while so I could prepare.

After she had gone, I took some deep breaths and admired my roses in their vase. They were from Reyes. Not the two dozen long stemmed roses Marilyn had had, but then Reyes wasn’t the President of the United States.

I flicked through the script to the last page, where Steve has survived everything that Herman Goerring and the Luftwaffe has thrown at him and asked Kim Novak to marry him.
It’s what everyone wants, isn’t it?
I thought,
On both sides of the screen - a happily ever after ending
.

Would I have a happy ending with Reyes?

How could that possibly happen with a man who disappeared for months at a time, who ran bars and guns, who could never tell you where he was going and when he was coming back? Sometimes I heard him talking on the telephone in another room, I caught scraps of conversation: Saigon, Castro and someone called Rattakone. Once I got to his house in the Canyon and found him talking out on the deck with one of the men he had been with that day at the Fontainebleau. When they saw me come out they stopped talking and didn’t start up again until I went back inside.

I had no idea what they were discussing, but it wasn’t baseball.

Last night Reyes had made love to me in the pool, again on a lounger, and finally, at midnight, in the front seat of the Roadster in a secluded lookout with a view over the lights of the city.

In a few moments I would be wearing a nun’s habit and trying not to surrender to a carnal and unexpressed longing for Steve McQueen.

No wonder I was confused about what I really wanted.

I lay face down and naked on Reyes” bed, staring at the television screen, the volume turned off. It was midnight and we had just been for a swim in the saltwater pool. The breeze rustled the fronds of the palm trees outside the window and I could feel the salt crusting on my bare skin. Reyes lay beside me, nursing a Bacardi and lime. He rubbed the condensation off the outside of the glass and touched it to my shoulder. Then he put his finger to his lips. “Rum with salt and lime. I could make you into a cocktail.”

“You can do whatever you want with me.”

He laughed, deep in his chest. “I plan to, later.”

The flickering black and white images on the TV were from somewhere in Asia; there were bodies lying in a rice paddy, American helicopters flying foreign soldiers over the jungle.

“Reyes, where the hell is Vietnam?”

“It’s in Indochina.”

“You mean it’s a part of China?”

“No, it’s further south. They share a border. Laos and Cambodia are to the west. It was called French Indochina for about fifty years, then the communists threw them out. That’s when Eisenhower stepped in.”

“I guess you got an “A” in geography, huh?”

He smiled. “Guess I did.”

“Have you been there?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to check my file at the CIA.” He dropped an ice cube on my back to distract me. “Talking about state secrets, I hear you met the President’s brother-in-law at one of Ted’s parties while I was away.”

“Peter Lawford, yes. Do you mind?”

“Why should I mind? As long as you didn’t sleep with Jack.”

“Why would you say that?”

“You know Lawford pimps for him.”

“He’s the President, and he’s married.”

“Being married has never stopped a Kennedy doing what he wants. They’re royalty, and royalty live by different rules than everyone else. Especially our chief executive, they say Jack gets a migraine if he doesn’t get a strange piece of ass every day.”

“I think he’s charming.”

“Well charming is how it starts. What did you think of Bobby?”

“He reminds me of Crusader Rabbit. He’s passionate about everything.”

“What I can never figure is how Bobby squares things away in his own mind. On the one hand he’s waging a war against the mafia, but it’s these same mob guys that got his brother into the White House, the same ones who are helping him to try to assassinate Castro.”

“He strikes me as a very smart guy.”

“Yeah, he’s smart and he’ll have to get a lot smarter if he’s going to keep his brother out of trouble. You can’t play those double games with the guys I know, even if you’re ruler of the Free World. The Crooked World is a lot damned bigger and a lot more powerful.”

I thought nothing about what he said at the time. How could anyone be bigger than the President of the United States?

He ran a hand along my spine and it made me shiver. “You’re getting to be a celebrity and you haven’t even starred in a picture yet. Enjoy it; this is the best part, everything’s still in front of you. This time next year you’re going to have something flash every time you smile. You think you can handle it?”

“I hope so.”

“But this is what you want, right?”

“I know what I don’t want: I don’t ever want to be poor again.”

“So is that it? Just the money?”

“No, it’s not
just
money, Reyes. But you’ve got to be used to having money to even say “just the money” like that. It’s still too raw for me, that dread you get in the pit of your stomach, wondering how you’re going to pay the rent, watching your own father die by inches and knowing if you had money you could get him a better bed in the hospital, a better doctor. What will happen to me if I don’t think about money, Reyes? I’ve no family, no inheritance. All I have are my looks, and who looks at an actress in this town when she’s past thirty? So you bet I think about money. Money is the most important thing in the whole world. I’m not going to eat last night’s stale bread for breakfast again, I’m going to put a headstone on my father’s grave, a proper one, and no one,
no one
, is ever going to look at me like I’m nothing again.”

“But do you think when you’re rich and famous you’re going to be happy?”

“No, I’m just not going to be afraid anymore. Seems to me happiness is just another luxury rich people have.”

“You think happiness is a luxury?”

“Sure it is. But what good’s happiness if you don’t have enough to eat and somewhere dry and safe to sleep at night? What’s so funny?”

“When I first met you, the only things you ever cared about were shoes and boys.”

“Well I guess I grew up somewhere along the way. What about you, what do you want?”

“I want you, princess. I’ve always wanted you. I just don’t know that I can afford you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means falling in love with you is about the stupidest thing I could ever do.”

“How do you figure that?”

He grinned, which I didn’t expect. “You really want to know? All right, because I think if you ever had the chance to be happy with a man, you’d run a mile. You say it’s what you want, but if happiness ever got close, I think it would scare you to death. Happiness comes and goes but regret and hurt are for life. What was it Marilyn said to you? You told me once. “Love something and it leaves you.” So why would you want to fool around with being happy when it can lead to so much hurt, right?”