The Missing Person (29 page)

The four glass sides of the telephone booth opened him to the silent street. Yet, without the camera on him he felt quite safe. He lifted the directory to within a few inches of his face and found the name of an old acquaintance who, Delphine had informed him, had risen from assistant director on one of Willis's pictures to producer.

“Tony,” Willis said when the ringing stopped and he could hear the receiver raised. “This is Willis Lord. Do you remember me?”

“One moment, sir,” a voice said. “I will call Mr. Partridge.”

Then he heard, “Willis! How wonderful! How are you?
Where
are you? What can I do for you?”

There was a silence. Willis could not remember, for a moment, why he had made the call.

“Are you still there, Willis?”

“Yes, I'm here. Do you by any chance … do you know of a new actress in Hollywood named Franny Fuller. Or perhaps it is
Frances
Fuller …?”

“Sure thing. Who doesn't. Not so new, though. She's with Premium, or was, last I knew. She's had some trouble, I've heard.”

“I'd like to have her telephone number.”

“Yes. Sure thing. Wait up, I'll see if I have it here.”

He heard her say she would come. She was indefinite about the time on Thursday, but she would be there. She would ask someone to drive her over. Of course she remembered him. She had seen and loved all his pictures.

Thursday he waited from nine thirty in the morning on. He fixed a little salad lunch. When she had not appeared by dinnertime, and after he had played out twenty-four games of solitaire without, happily, winning once, he converted the lunch into
hors d'oeuvres
for a dinner he had in mind to serve. By nine in the evening he was very drunk because he had eaten none of the food he had prepared, clinging to his superstition that she would come if only he left the spaghetti and garlic bread untouched.

At midnight he was still on the couch, groggy with gin, the camera recording the fact that he was seated erect and therefore in readiness to go to the door when the bell rang. Just after midnight he thought he heard someone at the door. He rose abruptly, upsetting his glass over the failed card game on the coffee table. But Franny Fuller was already in the room.

He stared at her, unable to say anything. She looked magnificent, dressed as she was in a long white chiffon dress, pleated about her bosom and falling off her magnificent shoulders, a wide, abandoned expanse of flesh and material. After he had greeted her: “How do you do, Miss Fuller,” he went on staring at her. She seemed so familiar, as though he had seen her before, many times: that dress, that glowing yellow hair, that seductive, uplifted face. For the first time, since the day he had seen Delphine Lacy on the set of
Passion Flowers
, he felt a surge of warmth in his chest. He dug his hands into the pockets of his smoking jacket, realizing that the heat came from his groin, and hoping the swelling was well covered by the folds of his robe.

“Sit down, sit down, won't you? I'm so glad you could come.” His tongue, tied to the top of his mouth for so long, had suddenly, like the member in his crotch, become freed. He could not stop babbling. “Over here, right here. This is a better chair.”

He swept a jacket from the recliner to the floor and ushered her, holding her elbow as though it was in danger of breaking, onto it. He watched, fascinated, as she sank down, her body undulating to accommodate the tightness of her long draped dress. Every move of this beautiful girl was sumptuous. He was enchanted.

Franny Fuller looked at him, he thought, with pleasure. She said nothing, and he admired her silence, her way of suggesting interest without uttering a stream of stupidities to match his own. He offered her a drink. She shook her head. “Some food? I could heat it up in no time,” he said. She waved her hand as though to indicate that she was fine, she wanted nothing.

He sat beside her on the hassock, almost at her chiffon-swathed knees and then, for no reason he was ever after able to understand, he began to pour out to her, for hours it seemed to him, all the frustrations and resentments of his life since his fame had deserted him. She listened gravely, shaking her head often, as if to let him know she understood the agony of his present existence as well as the glories of his past. Now and then she smiled, telling him, he thought, that she recognized the tragic truth of his statements but making no attempts at interpretation. He moved back to the couch and went on talking:

“You thought I was dead, did you say, when I called? That's what I thought you said.” With a sideward motion of her head she seemed to be denying it. “Yes, I know I heard you: ‘Willis Lord? I thought he was dead.'

“Well, he, that is, I, am not dead, although sometimes it seems so, even to me. I have been at it a long time, dying that is. I have a long jump on the embalming process, my doctor tells me.” He laughed as he told her about the hardening of his liver the doctor had referred to, waving his empty glass at Franny Fuller to show her what he meant. She smiled at him.

He could not stop. “You may think I am talkative but I am not usually. I swallow words or else I bury them. Dampen and put out sounds. I live in a soundless well most of the time. No, not a well, because I hear no echoes. My residence is a hollow set, all front, no rooms or closets or plumbing, just doors that open onto space. There is no content to my words, to myself, for that matter.

“Would you care to play a game of gin? Double solitaire, perhaps?” When she said nothing but continued to smile gently at him, he swept the damp cards from the coffee table onto the floor, and went on:

“Have you seen those coloring books in the drugstores, those paint books for children? Sonja Henie, Queen of the Ice, Coloring Book, and the Betty Grable Coloring Book? On every page is a new costume with the figure of the silent Star hovering behind it in black and white, waiting for the thick wax color of the crayon to be applied. I am the coloring-book hero of the twenties, in hard-and-fast black-and-white lines. I wait for some child-God to bestow Technicolor sound on me. But realize this, Miss Fuller, I did not
fade
to this state. I never lost color in my rage at Fate: I was always, like the Star in the book, in black-and-white. The way you see me now.

“The only difference is that ordinarily I am silent. I can't think what has come over me. It must be your beauty that has untied my tongue.…” She smiled as though to acknowledge his compliment, but he waved her smile aside:

“Have you thought what the next step is, away from color, turned into black-and-white? Disappearance. Not being there at all. I am waiting patiently for that to happen. But my friend Delphine Lacy—you must know of her—tells me you have practiced this art. I have asked you here because I think we may be very much alike. Lost in the ruins of Hollywood lots, and needing …”

He did not finish. Overcome by his unaccustomed talkativeness and the gin, his eyes closed and his head fell to his shoulder. He was in a deep, unhearing sleep, enveloped in the familiar blackness of his drunken nightly despair, and did not know whether she left at once or stayed on watching him as he slept. He never heard the door, and when he awoke the next morning, cold, stiff and very thirsty, she was not there. The room smelled of spilled wine and garlic. Beside the recliner was a full glass of red wine he remembered pouring for her and his own empty one. Had she answered him, and did he not remember?

All day he tried to remember what she had said to him. He sat on the couch, sipping slowly at his glass of gin, looking at the seat he was sure she had occupied, seeing her there almost as clearly in the growing dusk of the living room as he had the night before. By midnight his eyes had closed, his head had fallen back against the couch. But his vision of her was still strong. Just before he slid into his nightly oblivion he thought:
She will come back, she will
.…
Now she has a place to escape to
.…

Willis Lord was to live two years longer. Even without the weekly visits of Delphine Lacy, who was killed in an automobile accident in France just before she was due to return to the United States from her three months' holiday, he was never again to be lonely. He had Franny Fuller often, on the chair opposite him. They talked at length or, more accurately, he talked and she listened to him, with her charming, soft smile directed at him. Knowing her aversion to being seen by strangers, he had ordered the camera in the corner to be still in her presence.

Edna-Mae, Dempsey Butts's second wife, said: “Did you know an actor named Willis Lord when you were in Hollywood?” She moved the
Des Moines Register
away from her face and looked at her husband.

Dempsey looked up from
Newsweek
. He was reading a piece about the Green Bay Packers. “No, I don't think so. Why?”

“Nothing. Only I see in Walter Winchell that he died.”

“I got to know very few people there in those days.”

Edna-Mae smiled coyly. “Just the beautiful ones, huh?” She was a sturdy blond woman from Ames whom he had known briefly in his college days and met again when he went back to coach for Iowa State.

Dempsey looked at her a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Just one beautiful one.”

The funeral director, a slender, white-haired man in a black suit and shined black shoes, shook hands with Billie-Jo Jenkins.

“Everything will be very nice, don't worry about anything, Mrs. Jenkins. We do our best for our customers.”

Billie-Jo mumbled: “For the price, you should.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Thank you.” Her eyes filled with tears at the prospect of a pinched and lonely old age:
the money these people took from you in your sorrow
. She pulled on her white cotton gloves against the heat of the noonday street, set her lips firmly together, and left the funeral parlor. As she walked toward her apartment she said aloud to herself, her voice low and angry: “Robbers.”

Mrs. Fanny Marker tried many times, without success, to contact her daughter after she realized who Franny Fuller was. Franny would not talk to her or respond to letters sent to the studio. Mrs. Fanny Marker settled for fame by association.

She took a copy of
Silver Screen
to her customer whose head was encased in a large metal bubble. Knowing she could not be heard over the electric din within it, she opened the magazine at an article headlined in bold black letters, IS FF IN LOVE AGAIN? and pointed to it. The customer under the dryer blinked her thanks.

Fanny had already read the story and was prepared to call it to the attention of captive readers in her shop. She had not seen or heard from her daughter in twenty-five years, but that was okay with her. She got much mileage out of the kid during manicures and while fastening white pin curls to the pink scalps of elderly women. In the stories to her customers her daughter was pure, beautiful, and devoted to her. “My dear husband died very young,” she told them, “and I had to be both parents to her.” The ladies loved the stories.

Arnold Franklin spent the early part of the spring evening at McGinty's on Second Avenue. Painted shamrocks lined the mirror over the bar and the convivial customers seemed to know each other. Arnold did not join in the joking, but listened and had a satisfying number of scotches and lemon, relishing his feeling of virtue at not eating dinner.

He walked home through the cool streets. He was not in the least sleepy. The smell of washed gutters and bus exhaust was as pleasant as McGinty's sawdust and beery air. He enjoyed the feel of the polished knob at his front door as he opened it, went in, and then bolted and locked it behind him.

He put on a lounging robe and stood at an open window, taking deep breaths of the acrid, beloved New York air. Ready at last to work, he sat at his desk, took a pad of yellow paper from the drawer, filled his fountain pen, and settled his velvet high-backed chair closer to the flat surface of the polished desk. At ease, comfortable, alone, he began to write:

He: deluded, drowning, barely able to make his escape.…

She: beautiful, lost.…

It was eleven in the morning. Mary Maguire had cleaned her desk and was about to start work on a new book. Putting off the difficult moment of the first sentence, she picked up the last sheets of old manuscript she was about to drop into her trash basket and read:

I remember seeing those shiny ads in magazines with the whole family in them, the boy in a white shirt and a home-knitted woolly sweater ready for school with his Mickey Mouse lunchbox and the girl with a bow in her hair and a white middy blouse and the mother in a gingham robe and her face full of healthy-looking make-up and a short neat brunette haircut and the father, like God the father, shaved and smiling and full of life insurance and his hair just cut ten minutes ago and his eyes shiny from a great night's sleep on a new firm mattress. You look at this family on shiny magazine paper sitting in their shiny yellow kitchen and out of the window in the background you can see a shiny green swing set for the little children and a plastic blue pool and they're all inside eating breakfast things like orange juice for the teeth and cream and eggs and strawberries or some such damn thing and this family looks
holy
and then you know they're the same family you see in other ads about praying in church on Sunday and you feel … out of it, like, out of the world, out of the race of people really because they must be the real ones. They're in all the magazines and a million people must recognize themselves in them.

How do I get into those pictures? Is real life like that?

Mary Maguire had not been able to use all this in
The Fabulous Franny Fuller
. Crumbling the page, she sat thinking of the Golden Girl who had put those foolish questions to her, wondering where she was now, how she was. She thought about others like her whose rise to stardom she had reported on, who were now somewhere beyond the limelight. Some had resisted aging until it was too late to grow old gracefully. Some had retired rich, grateful for their privacy and their unlimited acreage in Nevada. Some had traveled down into inevitable obscurity. She tried to recall all the descending trails, but she found herself coming back to the girl on the page in her hand.