Lone star

Not a subject I was comfortable with, truly. I winced. Birds and bees may indeed do it, but not on my watch. I’m almost seventy, and I stare like a deer in the headlights at the mention of that monumental and ferocious three-letter word.

“I’m not following you.” And I wasn’t.

“Forget it.” He stood up and walked to the window, looking down into the street. “You got some good view of an empty city here.” He pointed. “Somewhere over there is Chinatown. The street of the Golden Palace. You can get your fortune told there.” He looked back at me. “You know, L.A. has a real different energy than New York. New York is pulsating and real nervous-like. It’s jumpy and feverish. It’s all throb and burst. That’s where artists can grow. You know that. You live there. L.A. is emptiness. So much room to wait things out, to dream and not to do. People, you know, float from one exhibitionist outpost to another, grasping for ideas that are best left untouched.” Most of what he’d just said was mumbled, and he seemed to laugh at the end of each line, as though embarrassed by the sentiment.

“What are you talking about?”

“I want you to talk to Mercy. That’s why I’m here. Convince her to talk to Carisa. Mercy was the only person Carisa liked. She told me that. She said Mercy reminded her of an older sister who died of some disease or something. And that fool Jake Geyser called me again tonight, and asked me if I had any idea how to shut Carisa up. This is all beyond him, though he won’t admit it. He’s panicking. Unwed mothers, Jimmy Dean’s love child, forbidden passion, God know what other lies. They’re pressuring me. What am I supposed to do?”

I nodded. And then kept nodding. Even after he left, backing his way out like a servant in some costume drama, bowing and shuffling, I sat there nodding. Then I got angry with myself. I felt, suddenly, that he’d charmed me, wooed me, reeled me in like an available (and not very challenging) fish. I glanced at the clock. After eleven. I didn’t care. I dialed Mercy’s number, knowing she’d be up. I apologized, but Mercy was delighted to hear my voice. I filled her in on Jimmy’s visit, even the earlier encounter at Googie’s, and Mercy chortled. “Did he tell you about his mother?”

“No.”

“He’s saving that story for you. It starts out, ‘I was nine when my mother died.’” She stopped, and seemed sorry she was making light of his story. “But it’s real. His pain is worn like a coat he can’t take off. But let me guess. He wants you as intercessor with me.”

“Yes, he wants you to talk to Carisa.”

“I’ve already told him no.”

“Why not, Mercy? I don’t understand.”

“I don’t know, really. Like Tansi, I just assumed it would go away. I don’t believe Carisa is pregnant. She’s just a melodramatic and misguided girl…”

I closed my eyes. “I promised him I’d convince you otherwise.”

Mercy laughed. “I knew it.” Then I heard her sigh. “You know, after that last letter to Warner, I’ve been thinking maybe I should step in.” A pause. “If I go there, you have to go with me.”

“I don’t think…”

“I’m not giving you a choice. Good night, Edna.”

That night I dreamed of towering, pitch-black oil rigs, a line of them punctuating the parched yellow land, strung out like telephone poles. Rhythmic drilling in the arid Texas landscape, monotonous and steady and thunderous. All night long the clamorous cacophony of cold steel and taut wire and oily rod against caked, clay- packed dirt-pounding, pounding, pounding. I woke with a headache.

Chapter 6

Los Angeles lay, at midafternoon, under a heavy sun, like a blister erupting on the skin. A film of dry heat covered the sidewalks and buildings, and everything struck me as sere or lemon yellow; dried skin, flaking, dissolving into dust. I’d spent late morning and early afternoon in meetings with studio execs. Stevens, rushing in from shooting for five minutes of comment, made an off-hand remark about Jimmy’s annoying tardiness, but then qualified it-after all, he was talking to the money men-remarking that Jimmy’s performance was nothing short of glorious. I nodded. I’d seen an hour of dailies that morning and was pleased. When the meeting finally broke, I went for a walk. But not very far. Under a nickel-gray sky with that lazy sun behind wispy clouds, the heat exhausted me. And besides, people in L.A. didn’t walk. They only moved on wheels. My beloved Manhattan pastime was taboo here. An old lady tottering along hot sidewalks in expensive shoes, I fully expected a benevolent passerby to offer smelling salts or a free ride to a mental ward.

Back at the hotel, I napped, a brief uncomfortable sleep, fraught with Gothic visions of screaming children impaled on wrought-iron fences. It startled me awake, that ugly nightmare. Children? Fences? Impalement? I lay there, a bead of sweat on my brow, and suddenly remembered last night’s equally disturbing dream-all those oil rigs on endless Texas plains, pounding, pounding. L.A., I told myself, sitting up and preparing to put a cold compress on my forehead, was a place conducive to jolting nightmare. Only in murderous and serendipitous New York City could a soul find comfort-so long as you were fifteen floors above the city, tucked into an Upper East Side doorman building, away from the slapdash West Side and cacophonous Lower Manhattan. Frontier lands, both places, wild west shows, noisy and grimy.

Promptly at five I left my suite, headed downstairs to the Cocoanut Grove, where Warner was hosting a cocktail party. The one formal-attire event of my visit. Posh, posh. Men in rented tuxedos and women in ostrich plumes, doubtless. I was guest of honor, the invitation said, but so was producer Henry Ginsburg and director George Stevens. So, I joked, were Liz and Rock and Jimmy. And Chill Wills and Jane Withers. Maybe even Lydia Plummer with her two-word moment. Oh well. Five to seven. Two hours of stilted chatter, indigestible food, and expensive but warm champagne. I’d dressed appropriately, as indicated by the invitation. The creamy off-white silk flared dress with swirls of silver piping around the clinched belted waist, a lace bodice (a nod to my Victorian birth, I told myself), the rope of cultured pearls I felt naked without, and the black patent-leather clutch containing nothing but a hairbrush, faint red lipstick, perfume, and a mirror. This was as regal as I’d ever look: the novelist dowager, the first lady of American literature, taking on Hollywood.

Closing the door behind me, I paused, and remembered the elbow-length white gloves I’d specifically bought, obligatory at such formal occasions. A woman without gloves is a social misfit, I knew, recalling my forgetting to wear gloves to the Hoover White House and the looks I’d garnered, my escort into the room taking my bare forearm as though touching poison ivy.

I met Mercy in the hallway outside the Cocoanut Grove and apologized for last night’s telephone call. She shrugged it off. “Actually, you got me to agree to something I was trying to convince myself to do anyway. I was able to sleep well.”

And I dreamed of grimy oil wells and disemboweled, impaled children.

Mercy was in a shimmering blue cocktail dress with a band of rainbow-tinted sequins accenting the scalloped neckline, very nice, indeed. And a single gold heart around her neck. Simple, but elegant. A rhinestone clip in her hair, almost lost in the curls. I suddenly thought myself dowdy, drab, the old prune with the pearls.

She nudged me, pointing. “Sal Mineo.”

I turned to see a slight, dark boy passing by, looking straight ahead, dressed in a grownup tuxedo. “He looks like he’s twelve.”

Mercy leaned in. “He’s part of Jimmy’s fan club. Ever since Rebel. By the way, did they screen the movie for you? You have to see that red jacket you’ve come to love. Anyway, Sal’s been emulating Jimmy, the preening walk, the insolent glare, the clothing, even the haircut. In Marfa, he stared at Jimmy all the time.”

Tansi joined us. “My, my, Tansi,” I said. “You really do go all out for cocktail hour.”

For a second Tansi looked unsure of herself, but she noticed I was smiling, my eyes appreciative. “I try.”

“Very…fetching.” And, I told myself, it was, this metamorphosis in Tansi. The awkward angular figure with the unruly hair was transformed by a pencil-shaped velvet dress, teal blue, with black satin stripes running down