Lone star

I unfolded the paper and found myself staring at a small, amorphous piece of clay, an embryonic torso, clay twisted into arms and legs and a narrow, long protuberance that, perhaps, would become a head. An incomplete body, some surrealistic object, a figure suspended between creation and fruition. I held it, wondering what to say.

“I made it for you,” he said, finally. “You like it?”

“Yes. I didn’t know you sculpted.”

“I do a lot of things.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s, like, anonymous man. You got to do the rest of the work yourself-create a life for it in your head. Like I imagine you do when you write characters like Jett Rink.”

“Is that why it has no face?”

“You’re missing the point,” he said. “Faces get in the way of things. Look at me. Everybody keeps telling me I’m…I’m gorgeous. You don’t know how sick that makes me feel.”

“It’s a gift.”

“Or a curse.”

“It’s your point of view, Jimmy.”

A broken smile. “Exactly, I guess. That’s the point of my statue there. See? Point of view.” He withdrew a folded piece of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to me. I unfolded it and found myself staring at a remarkable likeness of my own head, ancient and large, with a mane of teased white locks, and fiery, hard-as-nails eyes.

I gasped. “My Lord. Me?”

He grinned. “You.”

“This is very good. I mean, I don’t like any pictures of myself-never have. But this is startlingly true.”

“You have a great head on that tiny body. It dominates. It’s there, like a monument.”

“The missing figure from Mount Rushmore.”

“It’s a sketch I’m doing for a sculpture I’m working on-of you.”

“Thank you.” I waited. “Jimmy, where do you find the time?”

“I never sleep. I feel like I gotta keep moving. I feel like there’s a wall out there and I keep nearing it. It’ll stop me.”

“Are you talking about fate?”

“Yeah, fate. Maybe.” He banged his head, as though rattling his brain. “I read a lot about the Aztecs. I’m a bad reader and I go slow. Like a page a day. But they had this cool sense of doom, you know, from what I’ve read. Like they tried to make the most of whatever time they had on earth. The Aztecs, well-I want to live my life like they did. Hard driving, filled up.”

“You’ve made a good start. You’re young and famous. At what? Twenty-four?”

“It means nothing. I’m not famous inside. Movies lie. You ever see Sunset Boulevard, when it came out a few years back?” I nodded. “Well, I’ve seen it over and over. I watch Gloria Swanson, old, you know, and there she is, walking down that final staircase and she says that I’m-ready-for-my-close-up line. Well, I’ve already had my close-up scene. At twenty-four.” I started to say something, but he held up his hand. “No, let me finish. But the line that always gets me is when she says: ‘I’m still big, it’s the pictures that got small.’ Whenever I hear that, I think, wow. That’s not me, can never be me.” He breathed in, closed his eyes. “So now I’m on the big screen, and I’m big, big, big. So big, you know. But I think, I’m still small, even though my pictures got big.” Then, as if jolting himself from a reverie, he sat up. “Enough.”

“Jimmy, there’s nothing wrong with fame.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s what I hungered for. How can there be anything wrong with it?” His voice was ironic and slurring. He stood. “I gotta get out of here. I gotta make the scene with Ursula Andress for some photographer.”

“I understand she’s beautiful.”

“Sure is. A hell-fire, too. Studio set us up, originally, one of those phony lovey-dovey things. But we hit it off, strangely, and now we’re really dating,” he stressed the word, “as opposed to being seen together.”

“Hell-fire?”

“We do battle, her and me. She’s got a temper, like me. I’m learning German so we can fight in her own language.”

I waited a second, then said, “You don’t hit her, do you?”

Jimmy squinted, interlocked his fingers and stretched out his arms. “People been telling tales about me, Miss Edna?”

“I heard…”

He sucked in his breath, breathed out, making a bubbly sound. “Sometimes things get a little heated, and, like something rises in me, so red-hot I’m about to burst, and I lash out.”

“You should never hit a woman.”

“They hit me, too, you know.”

“Still, a man has an obligation.”

“Pier Angeli used to slap my face. I’d slap her back. Lord, Natalie Wood slapped Sal Mineo one afternoon. That surprised the hell out of him.”

“Why?”

“He was, I don’t know, being a pest and she was having a bad day.”

Jimmy got quiet. I watched him wither, sink back into a seat, pull his knees up and wrap his arms around them. I waited. He was staring at his knees.

The phone rang, and I jumped. It had rung a few minutes before Jimmy arrived and I’d ignored it. Now, flummoxed, I went into the bedroom to answer it. It was Tansi, eager to talk. “I’ll call you back,” I told her. “Jimmy’s here.”

“There?” Tansi exclaimed. “Why?”

“I’ll call you back.”

But when I returned to the living room, Jimmy was gone. As I sat down, I glanced at the table where I had laid Jimmy’s gift, the statue without a face. It was gone. He’d taken it back.

Tansi, when I reached her-her line was busy, and I got irritated-wanted to know what Jimmy was doing, but I dismissed her curiosity. “He dropped off a drawing he’d made.”

“Of what?’

“No matter, Tansi.”

“Stevens was looking for him. Everyone made excuses.” She waited for me to answer, but I kept quiet. “Edna, I just have to tell you about a lunch I just had. With Nell and Lydia.”

“I thought Nell moved in with you, and Lydia was angry, hurt.”

“That’s it exactly. You see, Nell is a sweetie, a little too young and naive maybe. So after she moved out and Lydia had that nasty tantrum, Nell started feeling funny about it. She doesn’t like to hurt people’s feelings, of course. So she asked me to help, and I said-how? I didn’t know what to do…”

“Tansi, get on with it, please.” I was impatient, looking at the spot where the odd statue had rested. He’d even taken the newspaper he’d used to wrap it in.

“So we three had lunch at this jazz club on the Strip. Chatting, clearing the air, Nell apologizing and saying she had to get on with her life. She wanted no hard feelings.”

“And how did Lydia take it?”

“Well, that was odd, really. At first she was cold, distant. She even made a crack about how chubby Nell is, how she could never be an actress looking like that. Imagine! Then she seemed to just relax. She said it didn’t matter any more. You know what she said? ‘We were really never friends, just roommates.’ That was a little hard, I thought, but Nell just nodded, happy to be forgiven.”

None of this was earth-shattering revelation or headline news. Lydia and Nell talk, bold face print. L.A. Times. “So they really didn’t iron out differences?” I said, bored. “Just quietly walked away from each other.”

“I suppose so.” I could tell Tansi didn’t like my facile summary.