"That's OK, Stan. What matters is where we go from here."
"Right," he said.
I put the incident out of my mind. What money remained was being handled by Stan, and by people he knew and trusted, people we paid well for their services. Would people like that let all these complicated money-things drop, a bag
of springs off the roof? Of course they wouldn't, especially not now with so much going wrong. Reverses come to all, but my managers are swift of mind, I thought, and will find solutions many and soon.
fourteen
"GET ONE Five Five X-ray," I said, holding
the microphone button down, "is out of flight-level three five zero for two seven zero, requesting lower:"
I looked down over my oxygen mask seven miles to the afternoon desert of southern California, checking the sky clear below with a long slow-roll.
Technically, I was flying west to give a daylong talk at a Los Angeles university. I was glad, though, to be a few days early.
"Roger Five Five X," came back Los Angeles Center. "Cleared to two five zero, lower shortly."
Going down 400 miles per hour wasn't fast enough. I wanted to get this thing on the ground and see Leslie swifter than any airplane could fly.
"And Five Five X, you're cleared to one six thousand."
700
I acknowledged that, trimmed the nose of the airplane lower still, and faster. The altimeter needle spun downward.
"Jet Five Five X-ray is through flight-level one eight zero," I said, "and canceling Item Fox."
"Roger, Five X-ray, you are canceled at zero five. Squawk VFR, good day."
The lines from the oxygen mask were still on my face when I knocked on the door of her house at the edge of Beverly Hills. A symphony orchestra boomed on the sound-system inside; the heavy door trembled. I rang the doorbell, the music went quiet. And there she was, eyes of sea and sunshine, sparkling hello. No touch, not even a handshake, and neither of us thought it strange.
"I have a surprise for you," she said, smiling to herself at the thought of it.
"Leslie, I hate^surprises. Sorry I never told you this, but I totally and completely hate surprises, despise presents. Anything I want, I buy for myself. If I don't have it, I don't want it. So by definition," I said, tying it up neatly and finally for her, "when you give me a present you are giving me something that I do not want. It's no problem, is it, to return it?"
She walked into the kitchen, her hair splashing lights across her shoulders, down her back. Ambling to intercept came her old cat, convinced it was suppertime. "Not yet," she told it softly. "No dinner yet for the fluffalorium."
"I'm surprised you haven't bought one for yourself," she said over her shoulder, with a smile to show that I hadn't hurt her feelings. "You certainly should have one, but if you don't want it, you can throw it away. Here."
The present was not wrapped. It was a large plain bowl from a dime-store, from a cheap dime-store, and there was a painting of a hog on the inside.
"Leslie! Had I seen this I would have bought it! This is stunning! What is this nice . . . thing?"
"I knew you'd like it! It's a hoggie-bowl. And ... a hoggie-spoon!" And there was a spoon in my hand, an eighty-eight-cent steel spoon with the likeness of some anonymous pig stamped upon the handle. "And if you look in the refrigerator . . ."
I swung the thick door open and there stood a two-gallon drum of ice cream and a quart container labeled FUDGE FOR HOT, each with red ribbon and bow. Cold mist gently wafted from frost on the drum, falling silent slow-motion to the floor.
"Leslie!"
"Yes, Hoggie?"
"You ... I ... Do you think . . ."
She laughed, as much at herself for the mad caprice of what she had done as for the sounds my mind made while its wheels spun on ice.
It was not the present that stumbled my words but the unpredictability, that she who ate only seeds and a sparing salad would order wild extravagant sweets into her freezer just to watch me trip and numb over them.
I wrestled the tub of stuif from the refrigerator to the kitchen counter, pulled off the top. Full to the edges. Chocolate-chip ice cream. "I hope you got a spoon for you," I said severely, pushing my hog-spoon into the creamy snow. "You have done an unthinkable act, but now it is done and there is nothing for us to do but get rid of the evidence. Come. Eat."
She picked a miniature spoon from a drawer in the kitchen. "Don't you want your hot fudge? Don't you like hot fudge anymore?"
"Crazy about it. But after today, neither you nor I will ever want to see the letters 'hot fudge' so long as we might live."
No one does anything uncharacteristic of who they are, I thought, spooning the mass of fudge into a pan to heat. Could it be that she is characteristically unpredictable? How foolish of me to begin to think that I knew her!
I turned and she was looking at me, spoon in hand, smiling. "Can you really walk on water?" she said. "The way you did in the book with Donald Shimoda?"
"Of course. So can you. I haven't done it yet on my own, in this spacetime. In this my present belief of spacetime. You see, it gets complicated. But I'm working on it."
I stirred the fudge, stuck to the spoon in a half-pound lump. "Have you ever been out of your body?"
She didn't blink at the question or ask me to explain. "Twice. Once in Mexico. Once in Death Valley, on a hilltop at night under the stars. I leaned back to look and I fell up into the stars. ..." There were sudden tears in her eyes.
I spoke quietly. "Do you remember, when you were in the stars, how easy it was, how natural, simple, right, real-as-coming-home it was, to be free of your body?"
"Yes."
"Walking on the water is the same. It's a power that's ours . . . it's a by-product of a power that's ours. Easy, natural. We have to study hard and remember not to use that power, or else the limitations of earth-life get all jangly and undependable, and we're distracted from our lessons. The trouble is that we get so good at telling ourselves we
won't use our real powers that after a while we think we can't Out there with Shimoda, there were no questions asked. When he wasn't around anymore, I stopped practicing. Little taste of that goes a long way, I guess."
"Like hot fudge."
I looked at her sharply. Was she mocking me?
The chocolate was beginning to bubble in the pan. "No. Hot fudge goes a lot longer than remembering basic spiritual realities. Hot fudge is HERE! Hot fudge does not threaten our comfortable worldview. Hot fudge is NOW! You about ready for some hot fudge?"
"Just a little teeny bit," she said.
By the time we had finished our dessert, we were late, and had to stand in a line two blocks long to buy our movie-tickets.
The wind was from the sea, cooling the night, and not wishing her to feel a chill, I put my arm around her. "Thank you," she said. "I didn't think we'd be outside so long. Are you cold?"
"Not at all," I said, "not cold at all."
We talked about the film we waited to see; mostly she talked and I listened; what to look for, how to notice where money is wasted in a film, and where it's saved. She hated wasting money. In the line we began to talk of other things, too.
"What's it like to be an actress, Leslie? I've never known, always wondered."
"Ah, Mary Moviestar," she said, laughing at herself. "Are you really interested?"
"Yes. It's a mystery to me, what sort of life it is."
"Depends, It's wonderful, sometimes, with a good script, good people who really want to do something worthwhile.
That's rare. The rest is just work. Most of it doesn't make much contribution to the human race, I'm afraid." She looked a question at me. "Don't you know what it's like? Haven't you ever been on a set?"
"Only outdoors, on location. Never on a sound-stage."
"Next time I'm shooting, would you like to come and see?"
"I would! Thank you!"
How much there is to know from her, I thought. What has she learned from celebrityhood
. . . has it changed her, hurt her, made her build walls, too? There was about her a certain confident, positive grasp of life that was magnetic, deliciously attractive. She's stood on mountaintops I've only sighted from far off; she's seen lights, she knows secrets I've never found.
"But you didn't answer," I said. "Aside from making films-what's the life like, how does it feel, to be Mary Moviestar?"
She looked up at me, guarded for a moment, then trusting.
"It's exciting, at first. You think at first that you're different, that you have something special to offer, and that can even be true. Then you remember you're the same person you've always been; the only change is that suddenly your picture is everywhere and columns are being written about who you are and what you've said and where you're going next and people are stopping to look at you. And you're a celebrity. More accurately, you're a curiosity. And you say to yourself, / don't deserve all this attention!"
She thought carefully. "It isn't you that matters to people when they turn you into a celebrity. It's something else. It's what you stand for, to them."
There's a ripple of excitement when a conversation turns valuable to us, the feel of new powers growing fast. Listen carefully, Richard, she's right!
"Other people think they know what you are: glamour, sex, money, power, love. It may be a press agent's dream which has nothing to do with you, maybe it's something you don't even like, but that's what they think you are. People rush at you from all sides, they think they're going to get these things if they touch you. It's scary, so you build walls around yourself, thick glass walls while you're trying to think, trying to catch your breath. You know who you are inside, but people outside see something different. You can choose to become the image, and let go of who you are, or continue as you are and feel phony when you play the image.
"Or you can quit. I thought if being a moviestar is so wonderful, why are there so many drunks and addicts and divorces and suicides in Celebrityville?" She looked at me, unguarded, unprotected. "I decided it wasn't worth it. I've mostly quit."
I wanted to pick her up and hug her for being so honest with me.
"You're the Famous Author," she said. "Does it feel that way to you; does this make sense to you?"
"A lot of sense. There's so much I need to know about this stuff. In the newspapers, have they done this to you? Print things you've never said?"
She laughed. "Things you've not only never said, but never thought, never believed, wouldn't think of doing. A story published about you, with quotes, word for word, made-up. Fiction. You've never seen the reporter . . . not even a phone call, and there you are in print! You pray
readers won't believe what they see in some of those papers."
"I'm new at this, but I have a theory."
"What's your theory?" she said.
I told her about celebrities being examples that the rest of us watch while the world puts tests to them. It didn't sound as clear as what she had said.
She tilted her head up to me and smiled. When the sun went down, I noticed, her eyes changed color, to sea-and-moonlight.
"That's a nice theory, examples," she said. "But everybody's an example, aren't they? Isn't everybody a picture of what they think, of all the decisions they've made so far?"
"True. I don't know everybody, though; they don't matter to me unless I've met them in person or read about them or seen them on some screen. There was a thing on television a while ago, a scientist researching what it is that makes a violin sound the way it does. I thought what does the world need with that? Millions of people starving, who needs violin research?
"Then I thought no. The world needs models, people living interesting lives, learning things, changing the music of our time. What do people do with their lives who are not struck down with poverty, crime, war? We need to know people who have made choices that we can make, too, to turn us into human beings. Otherwise, we can have all the food in the world, and so what? Models! We love 'em! Don't you think?"
"I suppose," she said. "But I don't like that word, model."
"Why not?" I said, and knew the answer at once. "Were you a model?"
"In New York," she said, as though it were a shameful secret.
"What's wrong with that? A model is a public example of special beauty!"
"That's what's wrong with it. It's hard to live up to. It frightens Mary Moviestar."
"Why? What's she afraid of?"
"Mary got to be an actress because the studio thought she was so pretty, and she's been afraid ever since that the world is going to find out she isn't that pretty and she never was. Being a model was bad enough. When you call her a public example of being beautiful, it makes it worse for her."
"But Leslie, you are beautiful!" I blushed. "I mean, there's certainly no question that you're . . . that you're . . . extremely appealing. . . ."
"Thank you, but it doesn't matter what you say. No matter what you tell her, Mary thinks beauty is an image someone else created for her. And she's a prisoner of the image. Even when she goes to the grocery store, she should be all done up, just so. If not, somebody is sure to recognize her and they'll say to their friends, 'You ought to see her in person! She's not half as pretty as she's supposed to be!' and Mary's disappointed them." She smiled again, a little sad. "Every actress in Hollywood, every beautiful woman I know is pretending to be beautiful, she's afraid the world will find out the truth about her sooner or later. Me, too."
I shook my head. "Crazy. You're all crazy."
"The world's crazy, when it comes to beauty."
"I think you're beautiful."
"I think you're crazy."
We laughed, but she wasn't kidding.
"Is it true," I asked her, "that beautiful women lead
tragic lives?" It was what I had concluded from my Perfect Woman, with her many bodies. Perhaps not quite tragic, but difficult. Unenviable. Painful.
She considered that. "If they think their beauty is them," she said, "they're asking for an empty life. When everything depends on looks, you get lost gazing in mirrors and you never find yourself."
"You seem to have found yourself."
"Whatever I've found, it's not by being beautiful."
"Tell me."
She did, and I listened, startled turning astonished. The Leslie she found hadn't been on film, but in the peace movement, in the speakers' bureau she formed and ran. The real Leslie Parrish made speeches, fought political campaigns, struggled against an American government bent on war in Viet Nam.
While I flew Air Force fighter-planes, she was coordinating West Coast peace-marches.
For daring to oppose the institution of war, she was tear-gassed by the law, attacked by right-wing gangs. She went on afterwards, organizing ever-larger rallies, producing massive fund-raisers.
She had helped elect congresspeople, senators and the new mayor of Los Angeles. She had been a delegate to presidential conventions.
Cofounder of KVST-TV, a Los Angeles television station with special powers built in for the downtrodden minorities of the city, she had taken over as president when the station was in trouble, deep in debt and not a day's patience left among the creditors. Station bills she paid sometimes with money from her film work, and the station survived, it began to prosper. People watched, wrote reviews nationwide
about the noble experiment. With success came the power struggle. She was called a racist rich-person; she was fired by the downtrodden. KVST went off the air the day she left, and it never went on again. To this day, she told me, she couldn't see the blank screen on Channel 68 without pain.
Mary Moviestar paid the way for Leslie Parrish. Devout righter-of-wrongs and changer-of-worlds, Leslie had walked alone into late-night political meetings in parts of the city that I didn't have the courage to fly over at noon. She stood in picket lines for the farm workers, marched for them, raised money for them. She had thrown herself, a nonviolent resister, into some of the most violent battles of modern America.
&nbs
p; Yet she refused to play nude-scenes in motion pictures. "I wouldn't sit around my living room naked with my friends on a Sunday afternoon. Why should I do it with a bunch of strangers on a movie set? For me, doing something so unnatural for pay would have been prostitution."
When every role in films had its nude-scene, she sank her movie career, switched to television.
I listened to her as though the innocent fawn I touched on a meadow had grown up in the firestorms of hell.
"There was a march, one time, in Torrance, a peace march," she said. "The planning was done, we had our permits. A few days before, we were warned that the right-wing crazies were going to shoot one of our leaders if we dared to march there. It was too late to cancel. ..."
"It's not too late to cancel!" I said. "Don't do it!"
"Too many people already coming, too short notice. We couldn't reach them all at the last minute. If just a few showed up alone against crazies, that would be murder, wouldn't it? So we called the newspapers and the television
networks, we said come on out and watch us get killed in Torrance! Then we marched; we linked arms with the man they said they'd shoot; we surrounded him and marched. They'd have had to kill everybody, to get him."
"You ... did they shoot?"
"No. Killing us on-camera wasn't part of their plan, I guess." She sighed, remembering. "Those were the bad old days, weren't they?"
I couldn't think what to say. That moment, standing in the movie-line, I had my arm around a rare person in my life: a human being whom I totally admired.
I the retreater was struck dumb with the contrast between us. If others wish to fight and die in wars or in protesting wars, I had decided, that's their freedom. The only world that matters to me is the world of the individual, the world each of us creates to be our own. Sooner I'd try to change history than turn political, than try convincing others to write letters or to vote or to march or to do something they didn't already feel like doing.
She's so different from me, why this awe-full respect for her?