Lone star

Tansi glanced quickly at me, then at Mercy: “Did he bother you about that thing?”

Mercy was quiet.

I raised my eyebrows and craned back my neck, deliberately letting Tansi see. That thing? “Tansi, my dear, you seem to be doing a lot of talking about a subject you’re trying to avoid letting me in on.”

“I’m sorry.” She glanced at the heap of hibiscus she’d deposited at my elbow. One gaudy blossom had broken free and toppled to the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “It’s just that I get so protective of Jimmy. You’ve seen the dailies, Edna. My God, Warner has a goldmine in him.”

“But what’s going on?”

Mercy smiled. “Edna, all of us here are a little gaga over Jimmy, I must tell you. Not only those gangly, teenaged girls out there seeing East of Eden for the twentieth time, but middle-aged women and-well, all women. There’s something about the boy. And Tansi here, she’s his guardian angel on the back lot.”

Tansi grinned. “I don’t exactly swoon, Mercy.”

“Admit it, Tansi, come on. It feels good to confess infatuation.”

Tansi shook her head. “I’m forty-five years old.”

I interrupted. “And I’m nearly seventy. And I still couldn’t find the words to talk to him.”

Tansi pulled up a chair, as though ready to share sophomoric James Dean stories. But Mercy cleared her throat and whispered, “Tansi, Jimmy just told us he got another letter.”

Tansi jumped, as though stung. “From Carisa?”

“I assume so. He left without saying.”

“Could someone please tell me what’s going on?” I begged, helpless.

Tansi got serious. “We’re on orders from Jake Geyser, supposedly via Jack Warner, to keep the news from you, Edna. Jake’s as adamant as Warner is skittish. No one’s talking so far, and Jake’s hinting that the release of the film might be in jeopardy.” She shook her head. “It’s all crazy, really.”

Mercy leaned over the table and covered one of my hands with one of hers. Yet she was looking at Tansi. “I think Edna has a right to know what’s going on.”

Tansi fumed. “No, please, Edna, stay away from this. Mr. Warner warned us.”

Mercy looked at her. “Tansi, last night Jimmy stopped by my apartment and asked me to talk to Carisa, because, as you know, I was friendly with her a while back and…”

Tansi’s voice rose. “Impossible. This has gotten to the point of sheer madness, really. Carisa Krausse is a two-bit washed-up actress who got fired for laziness and…and…Jimmy never did what she said…and…”

Mercy held up her hand. “I told him no, Tansi. I’m not talking to Carisa. I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to get in the middle of studio business. Warner can handle this.”

Tansi flicked her head back, nervous. “I can’t believe he asked you to visit her.”

“He thinks he can charm me into doing his business,” Mercy said, shrugging her shoulders.

“And can he?” I asked.

A trace of a smile. “Probably.” Mercy glanced at her watch. “Lord, I’m late.” She stood up. “Edna, dinner tonight?”

I nodded.

“I’ll invite Jimmy.”

I noticed Tansi staring into Mercy’s face.

“Will you join us, Tansi?”

Tansi was nodding.

I looked at my watch. Jimmy was late. Tansi was late. I wasn’t happy. Idly, I munched on a breadstick that tasted like sesame-studded cardboard.

“Jimmy is something new,” Mercy was saying, “the teenager as hero-all those aching children in the darkened theaters relating to him.”

We were sitting at the Villa Capri, a place Jimmy suggested for our eight o’clock dinner. He was already a half hour late. I made a gulping sound. “Sounds like another Sorrows of Werther spectacle. All angst and no depth.”

“Well, Edna, angst is the new attitude.”

“We’ll see.” I was old enough to have witnessed countless generations of young folks who maintained they owned the world, but somehow lost it in a late-night crap shoot with younger pretenders to the dubious throne. James Dean-well, I meant it. We’d see.

Mercy ran her fingers through her hair. “Somehow Jimmy seems different, which is why everyone at the studio is nervous. He has to be guarded.”

“Guarded from what?” I asked.

“Jimmy likes to lead a sort of mysterious life, a little on the edge,” Mercy said, cryptically.

Driving me to the restaurant, Mercy had discussed the growing panic at the studio: some fired actress was insisting Jimmy had gotten her pregnant. “I don’t believe it,” she confided. “Jimmy’s foolish, but not that foolish. His career comes first.” Mercy’s fingers drummed on the steering wheel. She glanced at me. “Let’s see what you think, Edna. After you talk to him.”

I looked around, impatient, unhappy. Overdressed in a shimmering silk dress, with fitted bodice and generous full skirt, a creamy shawl over my shoulders, and wearing my best rope of pearls, I felt grand duchess, intimidating, imperious: the woman of means who means what she says. But the place didn’t suit me, and I’d groaned as Mercy turned into the tiny parking lot, just off Hollywood Boulevard. The drab adobe-style restaurant seemed attached to a seedy, rundown hotel, obviously for transients and miscreants-those drifters who flocked to Hollywood and lost their way. The restaurant itself seemed a mere step up from a highway hash house. Once inside, the owner, Patsy D’Amore, seated us with a flourish, having got a call from Jimmy himself, who, I gathered, was the darling of the eatery.

“Jimmy. He come here before he’s famous,” the man announced, so loud that other diners looked at us. “He come here all the time now.”

“It’s his hangout,” Mercy added. She smiled, her voice deepening on the word as though she were pointing out an opium den.

Mercy, I noted, had dressed more casually, fittingly: a wrinkled gray circle skirt, a wrinkled muslin blouse, a charcoal-gray sweater buttoned at the neck. She looked like she’d just stepped off a bus.

I didn’t like the place, but I hadn’t expected to. Frankly, this wasn’t the Upper East Side, and the cluttered tables, the dripping red candles stuck into Chianti bottles, the obligatory red-and-white checkered tablecloths (stained-at least ours was), and the sentimental Blue Grotto art work dotting the walls like panels from a stereopticon, all suggested one more cheap Hollywood backdrop for a second-rate Anna Magnani movie. I’d have a lettuce salad, perhaps. Maybe a glass of red wine. No, a martini. No vagrant vermin could survive in that alcoholic concoction.

“He’s late,” I said again, checking my watch. I was ready to leave.

Mercy buttered a breadstick. “Of course. It’s part of the new young-actor mystique, really. How to out-Brando Brando. But he’ll come, Edna. I know he wants you to hear his side of the story. You have to, he told me. He knows I told you about Carisa.”

“Me?” I exclaimed, too loudly. “Everyone is trying to keep me from learning this shocking and sordid tale, and he wants me part of it?”

“He tells people things all the time. Some people.”

“Who?”

“People he trusts.” She munched on the breadstick. “He wants you on his side against Warner and Stevens- the studio.”

“Me? A woman he’s never met?”

“He knows exactly who you are: a writer from New York. That means something to him. He’s a little bit of a poseur, trying to be a Bohemian intellectual out here in this sterile land, walking around with a Zen Buddhist paperback in his back pocket, sitting in the commissary with War and Peace. That sort of