In the two years after his Guild award and Academy Award nomination he wrote and delivered one complete script, a quite mediocre television movie, for which he’d been commissioned. After that he wrote nothing at all. The mortgage on the house was salvaged by Maddy’s father, who was less interested in the property investment than in the contemplation of his daughter’s unseemly pending reemployment with the Pasadena museum. Your father’s absolutely prehistoric, Llewellyn snarled at his wife, to which she answered, God, are you so beyond gratitude? Gratitude! he cried.
Then he got a call one day from Eileen Rader, who offered him a job. He would be writing the sequel of a very successful picture of the previous summer, with a cowriter; this meant he’d do a treatment and first draft which someone else would then rewrite. It was the studio’s way of protecting itself from any possible idiosyncrasies on Llewellyn’s part. “Listen to me,” Eileen said, “this assignment isn’t art, Lee, we both know that, this is you getting back into action, this is you becoming a working writer again,” and he read between all the lines right there on the phone: Eileen had pulled strings to get him this gig, she had swung weight. Accept it with good humor and a sigh of relief. So he did, with no enthusiasm. Among those around him there was enthusiasm enough: Maddy, his father-in-law, and his friends, including Richard, who was out from New York for the third time in five years, living at the Ambassador, a fifty-something-year old actor who couldn’t get so much as a commercial. “Write me a part,” Richard said when he heard, and didn’t even have the pride to laugh as though he were joking.
Now, in the last years of his fourth decade, Llewellyn had found himself thinking about his life and everything it meant in the manner of a man who’s at the end of that life. When I was a young man, he told himself one day, I fell in love with women who made my heart stop. When I became older, I fell in love with women who made my heart melt. That pivotal transition came with Maddy, whom he’d known at least a year before he loved, and it came one lunch when she pushed her caustic cynicism too far in his direction (now he couldn’t even remember what it was she said) and he withered her with a look. The blood ran from her face. She was like a child, stricken by the way his gaze turned cold; and in that moment, having hurt her, his heart melted for her and he loved her.
On the day he saw the new housekeeper in the kitchen he heard the actual stop of his heart, a thump as though it had fallen from his chest onto the floor. He wrenched his eyes from her so that his heart might begin again; by the time he was in the other room he was suffocating. He ran into Maddy. “Going to the studio?” she asked, and he just answered, “We can’t afford her.” At the door he said it again, and got in the car and drove up Sixth Street to La Cienega, north on La Cienega to Burton Way, and out Burton Way into Beverly Hills, where he crossed Little Santa Monica Boulevard to Big Santa Monica and turned west. Not the beach, I can’t take the beach today, he said to himself half a mile from the beach. He turned around. He paid three dollars to park in a lot in Westwood where he just sat in the car. On the street adjacent to where he sat beautiful women passed him by, dressed and toned and carnivorous. You’re nothing, he whispered to them: don’t you know what I’ve seen? He had red visions of The Beast mounting The Earth and fertilizing it, the soil splitting open and the housekeeper emerging, her hair a hollow black and her mouth the drooling purple of carnage. He sat five hours trying to remember the faces of his wife and child.
After that he went out each day, driving aimlessly. Maddy kept telling herself he was going to the studio. Are you going to the studio? she would ask him on his way out. Yeah, he’d say, the studio. When his friends like Richard
