Westlake, Donald E - Novel 50 (18 page)

 
          
"That
was when I started hitting the bottle pretty heavy."

           
O'Connor looks at me, as though not
sure whether to believe what I'm saying. "You mean," he asks,
"you weren't a drinker before your second marriage broke up?"

 
          
"I
was a social drinker," I tell him, and shrug. "Like anybody
else." (Hey, I just shrugged there and didn't fall over! I'm getting
better, health is returning, I can feel it. Once again, I survive the
Temple
of
Doom
.) "But after
Lorraine
left," I continue, "I wasn't a
social drinker, I was a
drinker.
And
it was beginning to affect my work."

 
          
The
antiques-store set was wide but shallow with an old glass-paned door leading to
a minimal sidewalk set at the right end, and smaller, darker wooden door
leading out of the left end to nowhere but the rest of the soundstage. The
effect in the film would be of a deep narrow dark shop, crammed with all sorts
of curios.

 
          
Facing
this set broadside were the usual crew and equipment. The director, a florid
stocky bald man in a bush jacket, sat on a tall canvas-backed stool beside the
camera. "Quiet," he said, quietly.

 
          
"Quiet!"
called an AD.

 
          
“Quiet!”
called a further-off AD.

 
          
"Rolling,"
murmured the director.

 
          
"Rolling!" called the first AD.

 
          
"Rolling!"
screamed the further-off AD.

 
          
Nothing
happened.

 
          
The
director looked sardonic and long-suffering. Shifting position on his stool, he
raised his voice a bit and called, "We're rolling, Jack. That's your
cue."

 
          
Still
nothing happened.

 
          
The
director looked as sardonic, but even more long- suffering. Speaking generally,
to ADs, grips, best boys, gaffers, script girls, whoever might know anything of
use, he said, “Jack? Is he back there?”

 
          
No
one spoke. A general awful embarrassment rose from the assembled company like
shimmering heat waves. The director, masterfully combining deference with
irritation in his voice, called, “Jack? We are rolling now, Jack.”

 
          
The
front door of the antiques shop burst open, slamming back against the set wall.
Jack reeled in, off balance, the door having weighed less than it looked so
that he'd given it a little too much push when he'd opened it, and then he'd
tried to overcompensate in the other direction, and now all he was trying to do
was stay on his feet.

 
          
His
waving arms sent a candelabra flying toward the camera, bouncing on the floor
at the director's feet. Next, a stuffed owl was knocked the other way off a
crowded shelf, taking a kerosene lantern along with a crash and a clatter.

 
          
The
sudden noise startled Jack just as he was getting his equilibrium back, and he
staggered sideways into a row of porcelain beer steins, sending them into and
through a display of old doll furniture. Lunging away from all that, Jack
became entangled with an old wooden rocking chair, fought manfully to free
himself
from the thing, and only succeeded by reducing the
rocking chair to kindling, some of which swept nearby shelves clean of
apothecary bottles, tea sets, samovars, and stereopticons.

 
          
Each
move Jack made caused a separate and distinct crash, smash, thunk, tinkle,
thud, bang, crumple, snap, jingle, gong, crack, and/or pit-a-pat, and every
noise made Jack try again to correct his course by making another move. Thus,
by an irregular series of tattoos, detonations, and dying falls, he crossed the
set from right to left. Never quite toppling over, never quite getting his
balance, never quite managing to just stand still, Jack swept like the angel of
death across the antiques shop set, leaving hurricane news footage in his wake.

 
          
At
the far end of the set, he brought up against the interior door, which was not
in fact a working door at all, so that he didn't pass through it but merely
brought up hard against it, with force enough to make the whole set tremble.
Recoiling from this encounter, he reeled back through his previous carnage to
the middle of the set, where at last he managed to come to something like a
stop; though he trembled all over, like a race horse after the meet.

 
          
And
he wasn't quite finished yet. Turning to say something to the director, raising
one expressive hand, index finger upthrust, he lost his balance yet again. This
time, he tottered backward, feet fumbling and stumbling with the shards and
shreds of his previous passage, until he reached the wall of the set. Here he
flung his arms out to the sides as though crucified and leaned back against the
wall, which gave way, the whole canvas rear wall of the set slowly falling
over, Jack riding it down backward, arms outspread, an expression of harried
but mild surprise on his face as he and the wall went completely over and
landed with a mighty
whoosh
and great
puffs of dust.

 
          
No
one said a word. A final
clink
was
heard from somewhere. The dust slowly settled. And then the director spoke.
"Cut," he said.

 
          
“But
I didn't care, not then, as I was drunk, I just thought life was one big
party.”
 

 
          
A
nother transformation had come to the
living room of the house in
Malibu
. The books and bookcases were gone, as though they had never been. The
furniture, pushed back against the walls, was scruffier, showing signs of hard
wear. Five television sets in various parts of the room were all switched on,
but the sounds they might have been making were impossible to hear because the
room was
jammed
with partygoers: a
young and hedonistic crowd, laughing and shouting, scoffing down the bottomless
supply of liquor and the endlessly refilled side table of finger foods. Jack
reeled among his guests, a glazed look in his eyes and a glazed smile on his
face. He held a quart bottle of Jack Daniel's Black Label by the neck and
paused from time to time to knock back a slug.

 
          
Buddy
moved toward Jack through the partygoers. He was sober, neatly dressed in pale
sports jacket and opennecked shirt, and in his eyes was a faint expression of
disapproval of the scene swirling around him. That expression disappeared when
he reached the sozzled Jack, to be replaced by his usual look of aggressive and
selfconfident comradeship. Never had the familial similarity between these two
been less noticeable
;.
Buddy was trim and neat, clearly
in good physical shape, while Jack was getting jowly, his body sagging within
his rumpled clothing. The parallels between them had become obscured by their
very different ways of caring for themselves.

 
          
“Hey,
Buddy!" Jack called, seeing
his oldest friend, turning to stagger toward him.
“Hey,
my Buddy!"

 
          
"Listen,
Dad," Buddy said, low and confidential, "could I have the car?"

 
          
“Sure,
Buddy." Jack frisked himself
with uncertain gestures, switching the bottle from hand to hand, until he found
a set of car keys, which he handed over.

 
          
Buddy
nodded, pocketing the keys, but said, "No, Dad, I meant could I have the
car
."

 
          
"Whuzza?"

 
          
Buddy
brought out of his inside jacket pocket automotive sale documents and a pen.
Leading Jack to a nearby table, spreading the papers on it, handing Jack the
pen, he said, "Just sign here, Dad. You see, I got a little something to
take care of south of the border."

 
          
"Oh,
sure, Buddy," Jack said. An amiable drunk, he put the bottle down,
scrawled his name with a flourish, dropped the pen, picked the bottle up, and
drank.

 
          
Buddy
retrieved documents and pen. "Thanks, Dad," he said, patted Jack on
the shoulder, and left.

 
          
A
girl who'd been sitting on the sofa beside the table grinned up at Jack and
said, "Hey, baby. You got a car for me?

 
          
"That's
my oldest friend in
all the
world," Jack told
her.

 
          
"Yeah?"
the girl said. "He doesn't look that old."

 
          
Jack
thought about that, nodding, smiling in a distracted way, and then he got it,
and it
broke him up.
His eyes came to
life! His smile beamed like the sun! His arms shot up! He slopped
Tennessee
sour mash whiskey all over the place! He
yelled, "Oh, wow! Holy—oh, gee!"

 
          
"It
wasn't
that
good," the girl
said, beginning to get worried.

 
          
“Wasn't—Comere!
Comere!”

 
          
Jack
dragged the girl up off the sofa and threw his arm around her shoulders. While
she held her head drawn as far as possible away from him, looking sideways at
his manic profile with only semicomic revulsion and alarm, he dragged her
toward the hot center of the party, crying, “Hey, come here! Hey, listen to
this!
Wit?
Holy shit!"

 
          
 
“But it all came to a head the night I won my
Academy Award.”

 
          
 
“And
now, to present the award for Best Actor,
Dori Lunsford!”

 
          
The
band played. The audience applauded. The billions watching on television all
around the world watched Dori Lunsford approach the lectern. A big-boned,
good-looking blonde, Dori Lunsford was the sex symbol of the moment, a big girl
whose stock in trade was giggly little-girl movements, as though she didn't
know she was voluptuous. Tonight she wore an extremely low-cut white gown, the
hot television lights gleaming on the upper hemispheres of her breasts.

 
          
At
the lectern, she bowed slightly, presenting those breasts to the world, or at
least the half of the world watching her on television. The plain forgettable
man from Price Waterhouse—rather like Michael O'Connor he was, in fact—came out
and handed Dori Lunsford the envelope and went away again, immediately
forgotten.

 
          
"Oh,
I'm so excited!" Dori told the billions, and jiggled a little. (She was
having her period, which always made her breasts swell.) Tearing
open
the envelope with a
 
pleasing clumsiness, she said, “And the
winner isssss ..." She pulled the card most of the way from the envelope,
and
squealed
.
“EEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
Jack Pinel”

 
          
In
the audience, as it burst into applause, competing with the band's breaking
into the theme music of the film for which Jack was getting his award, Buddy
poked at Jack, who was sound asleep in the aisle seat beside him. Knowing he
was on television, Buddy did his poking with a good-natured grin on his lips,
as though congratulating his pal rather than waking him, but his knuckles were
hard and sharp, digging into Jack's ribs, yanking him unpleasurably up from
alcoholic stupor.

 
          
Jack
roused himself, hearing the confused noises, seeing the lights, feeling Buddy's
sharp fists prod him up out of the seat and into the aisle.
“Go
on, Dad!"
Buddy yelled, through the music and applause. “Go get
it!"

 
          
Befuddled
but moving, Jack made his way down the aisle. Like a rat in a maze, he was
constricted to this route by the applauding hands and beaming faces on both
sides. Sensing the urgency all around him, he broke into a shambling trot,
found himself abruptly in front of steps, and ran up them only because the
alternative would have been to sprawl across them in a painful heap.

 
          
At
the top of the stairs, Jack hesitated for just a second, unsure what he was
supposed to do next, having not the slightest idea what was going on. Several
tuxedoed and gowned people behind a curtain, within his line of sight but out
of camera range, stopped applauding to wave at him frantically to hang a left
and get
going.
He hung a left. He got
going.

 
          
And
here was Dori Lunsford. And here was some sort of elbow-height piece of
furniture to lean on. Feeling an intense need to lean on something, Jack
approached that piece of furniture, but before he could get his body on it Dori
Lunsford smiled like the sun in
Bangkok
and handed him something. Jack grasped at
it, whatever it was, and Dori kissed his cheek, pressing her great globes
against his arm and chest.

 
          
Jack
weaved slightly, not leaning against anything. He looked at the shiny thing in
his hands and recognized it, but didn't quite yet dope out its meaning or
implications. With a piteous look at Dori, begging for enlightenment, he said,
"This is for me?”

 
          
The
microphone on the lectern picked up the question, of course. The audience,
which had quieted enough to hear what Jack might say, naturally thought it was
meant to be a joke, and responded with good-natured laughter and more applause.
Jack looked out toward the great hall, saw it full of people, and began to
catch on. He looked back at Dori. He had it together now, and his trouper's
spirit took over.

 
          
The
famous Jack Pine smile flashed. The famous Jack Pine voice spoke: "Well,
thank you, Dori.”

 
          
At
which point, Dori was supposed to leave, backing smiling away from the lectern
to give the recipient of the award his opportunity to thank everybody on God's
green earth for having made this moment possible. Preparatory to this rearward
departure, Dori did smile her farewell smile, but then something went wrong.
Jack reached out his right hand—the left hand still clutching Oscar about the
head, as though he were a bottle of Jack Daniel's— dipped the hand into the
open top of Dori's dress, and grasped her right, or downstage, breast.

 
          
Dori
gasped. The whole audience gasped, but Dori gasped on television. Dori started
to pull away, to make her scheduled departure anyway, but then she realized— as
her expression told the half of the world's population watching—that she'd
better not.

 
          
With
his left hand clutching Oscar and his right hand clutching Dori's breast, Jack
turned toward an audience suddenly grown deathly still. "And thank all of
you,” he said. "I mean it, honest to God I do.”

 
          
Dori
stood frozen, a terrified smile on her face. She had no choice but to remain
there throughout Jack's acceptance speech, and in her panic she had clearly
come to the conclusion that the best thing to do was look as happy and bubbly
as possible, just as though nothing had gone terribly wrong, just as though her
breast was not now in the tight and unrelenting grip of a madman.

 
          
Jack
went on, addressing the audience, saying, "I really thank you all for
this, uh, Tony, Emmy, what the hell is it?" He held up the statuette,
studied it closely. "Oscar," he decided. Lowering the statuette
again, but still holding on to Dori, he looked out at the oil painting of an
audience and said, "I thank you. And I want to thank everybody who made
this moment possible. I want to thank every ass I ever had to kiss. I want to
thank every prick who ever turned me down for a rotten picture so I was forced
to do the good ones. I want to thank Marty Friedman, my director, that traffic
cop, for staying the hell away from me and letting me get the job done. And I
want to thank my co-star, Sandra Shaw, for doing such a tight-ass, piss-poor,
lamebrain job of it that I
had
to
look good in comparison. You notice
she
didn't get a nomination. But mostly, I want to thank all those little people
out there, all those little people out there, those little people,
all
those goddamn little people.
There's
more of them around all the time, you know? I think they live in the
plumbing."

 
          
Finished,
befuddled again, his mind full of lurking, crawling, slithering little people,
Jack turned and walked off stage, leaving a stunned silence behind, but taking
Dori Lunsford along by the breast.