Passing Through the Flame (96 page)

BOOK: Passing Through the Flame

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“Do you want to call it quits between us, Paul?” she suddenly blurted.

“No!” he said instantly, his voice slightly shrill with guilt, but carrying a sincerity that was ultimately reassuring. “I mean... I’m a little confused, it’s just that...”

Poor baby, she thought, squeezing his hand. He really cares about me. He’s really involved with her. And maybe he’s never gone through this before. Maybe he’s still innocent enough to think it has to be either or. He’s never been pulled two ways, never found himself in a crazy stable triangle. Like Rod and Jango and me, for a long time. Like Jango and me... and Paul? Am I really through with Jango? Or is he who I’m going to arrange to be tied up with tomorrow night? Well, why not?

“I know,” she said. “I really do.”

“I’ve gone through so many changes so fast, Sandy,” he said. “I don’t think I’m capable of making any decisions now. I mean, I feel I’m not the guy I was, but I’m not yet the guy I’m becoming. I don’t want to fuck you over....”

“You’re not, love.”

He smiled one of those rare pure little-boy smiles, and it made her kiss him lightly on the lips. “I’m not your mother,” she said. “I’m just your lover.” She forced a laugh. “We don’t even have to go steady,” she said.

“You’re an okay lady,” Paul said, kissing her back, long and lingeringly. “Thursday night,” he said, walking toward the mixing stage building. He waved once, then disappeared behind a sound stage.

Sandra Bayne watched him go with a warmth in her heart, a chill in her stomach, a slight burning in her eyes that might or might not be the light smog. Am I losing you, Paul? She didn’t know, but she had learned enough to know that trying to hold him now would guarantee that loss. I’ve got to tough it out; I’ve got to play it cool. I can’t own him now; I can only love him. I can’t grasp at him; I can only be me and hope that in the end that’ll be good enough. As Jango would say, it’s the nature of the game.

It was already dark when Paul emerged from the mixing stage, calling it a day, and the studio streets were even more empty than usual as he walked to his car. The papers were signed, the announcements had been made; these rows of huge barnlike buildings, this world within a world, and ultimately the whole major Hollywood studio reality, were all slated for demolition.
Passing Through the Flame
may be the last film cut here. In a year or two, all this will probably be a shopping-center parking lot.

His footfalls echoed hollowly on the asphalt studio street. He felt almost as if he were walking through a cemetery: sad, melancholy, filled with a reasonless sense of loss. Six months ago this was the world I wanted to crash my way into, the major-league Hollywood studio scene, the Promised Land. And now, here I am, a pallbearer at the funeral.

He reached the MG—the car Jango had given him—opened the low-cut door and sat there in the open car, with the cavernous emptiness of the all-but-abandoned studio surrounding him like the skeleton of some enormous prehistoric monster bleaching in the moonlight.

Out there beyond the studio gates was an old world that was now a new world to him. A Sandy he might be drifting away from, a Velva he might be drifting toward—two women he cared about in different ways, two women who cared for him out of two different kinds of consciousness. A choice he would eventually have to make—or was the present nonchoice a choice in itself?

And a crummy apartment full of the artifacts of his past, that until this very moment, he had felt he could not walk away from. Until this moment, he had been Paul Conrad, pornie film failure trying to make it in the major-league filmmaking world. Even after the shooting was over, even during the cutting, until I saw the rough cut straight through, I was still the kid in the process of making the jump, still becoming, and Paul Conrad, successful filmmaker, was a character in a movie I was trying to make about myself.

And now it’s real. Now I’m here, wherever that is. Now I’m gonna get rid of every old possession I have, everything from that old reality, and get me a house in the hills, and find out what it’s like to be Paul Conrad, filmmaker, the hottest thing in town. He turned on the ignition and kicked the engine into life. I think I’m going to get rid of this car too, he thought. It’s not part of my concept of me; it’s Jango Beck’s version of Paul Conrad.

He put the car into gear and drove out the studio gate, out of the Hollywood success movie he had written for himself, and out into the streets of Los Angeles, into the unscripted unknown, into the rest of his life.

The warm noonday sun poured down like thick yellow syrup from the strip of clear blue sky that parted the canopy of redwood forest above the stream. The shallow running water was bracingly cold, creating a sharp line of hot-cold contrast just above Bill Horvath’s knees. Beside him, Susan squatted down on her haunches, immersing all but her head and shoulders in the refreshing waters.

Their clothes, piled on the sandy bank of the stream, were the only man-made intrusions in the forest solitude, and the only sounds he heard were the calls of birds, the gurgling of the stream, and Susan’s splashings. The van was invisible, parked just off the road, at least three hundred yards away through the cool brown shadows of the redwood forest. It seemed as if they were alone at last, naked to each other, naked to the world.

High above, the white contrail of a jet gently reminded him of the world beyond these woods, of who they were, of who they had been, and of who they might yet be forced to become again. Three months of wandering through Northern California in the anonymous Dodge van, just the two of them, their gear, and an acoustic guitar, had made the house in LA, the two Porsches, the whole scene, seem blissfully and totally unreal.

Staying mostly by themselves, camping out, spending a few nights in funky hotels each week, driving an ordinary van, they had managed to be just Bill and Susan again most of the time and they had the money to make this fantasy never end. Up here, even the few scattered people who recognized them had been cool and mellow, as if what went on in the cities far to the south was nothing but vague travelers’ tales.

Susan rose out of the stream in a sheath of glistening water, her wet flesh shining in the sun. She laughed and splashed his hot bare chest with fistfuls of icy coldness that made him wince and shiver.

“Ah, feel the cool blue emptiness!” she said. “I feel so golden!”

Horvath frowned. That was the only worm of discontent in the apple—she was talking like that more often than not now, and her eyes looked off into that place he couldn’t see almost all the time, even when they were alone together. Star was Susan was Star, and there was no more fighting it.

Susan suddenly froze at the sound of voices in the woods on the far bank. A few moments later, two young dudes in denim shorts and a girl wearing only the bottom half of a blue bikini emerged from the redwoods. They waved and began wading across the stream toward them. The girl was brown-haired, with small pointy breasts and a warm smile. The taller guy had long stringy blond hair, and the shorter one carried a jug of apple cider.

Laughing and grinning, they splashed through the water and stood in front of Horvath and Star, casually not reacting to their nakedness. Horvath decided he liked them.

They passed Susan the jug, and she took a long drink.

“Hey, aren’t you—”

“Yes, we are,” Susan said, passing the jug to Horvath.

“Far out!” the blond kid said, grinning. It was respectful, and wide-eyed, and cool, all at once. Horvath took a drink of the cider: cold, sweet, and refreshing.

“We’ve got a camp about a mile from here,” the girl said. “A couple dozen really groovy people, a little village in the woods, it’s really neat.”

“Would you like to have dinner with us and stay the night? Maybe play a little music?”

Star smiled at them. She looked at Horvath, her big green eyes luminescent with reflected sunlight.

“Sure,” he said. “For a little while. For tonight, we’re all yours.”

He took her hand, and together they followed their new companions across the waters, toward the towering catacombs of the shadowy redwood forest, under the eternal life-giving sun.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Norman Spinrad is the author of over twenty novels, including the acclaimed

BUG JACK BARRON.

He is a multiple nominee for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for science fiction achievement, an American Book Award Nominee writer, and winner of the Prix Apollo. He has written scripts for Star Trek and produced two feature films. He has also published over 60 short stories collected in half a dozen volumes, and his novels and stories have been published in over a dozen languages.

He has been President of Science Fiction Writers of America, Inc. (SFWA) three times.

He is a tireless campaigner for authors’ rights and is the creator of the “model contract” now in use by several writers’ organizations. He’s been a literary agent, President of World SF, briefly a radio phone show host, has appeared as a vocal artist on three albums, and occassionally performs live. He is a long time literary critic, sometime film critic, perpetual political analyst, and sometime songwriter.

He grew up in New York, has lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Paris, and travelled widely in Europe and rather less so in Latin America, Asia, and Oceania.