“I won’t go, Jeremy!”
“Then stay home. But don’t go to this damned rock thing. I don’t want you going. I don’t want you seeing the street kids, because if somebody is looking for you—”
“Jeremy, you’re acting crazy. I’m going!” Bedroom door slammed.
I stomped downstairs. Sticky scent of hair spray in the air, clatter of junk jewelry as she went back and forth between her room and the bathroom.
“I don’t want you taking the car to this thing alone,” I called up to her. “I can take a cab,” she said with maddening politeness. “I’ll drive you.”
“That’s dumb. Go have dinner with your friend and forget about me.”
“Ridiculous!”
She came to the bottom of the stairs wearing black jeans, flaming silk blouse, rhinestone heels, leather jacket. Hair a torrent of red and gold spikes, eyes black holes in space, mouth like a war wound. “Where’s my leopard coat, you seen it?”
“Good God,” I said. “Not that coat.”
“Jeremy, come on!” Flash of sweetness. She threw her arms around my neck. Musky perfume, rattle of beads. Unbearable softness of breasts under silk. Bra or no bra? Her hair felt like a century plant. Her mouth smelled like bubble gum.
“Suppose somebody’s out there looking for you?”
“Who?” she asked. She went rummaging in the hall closet. “Here it is. God, you had it cleaned. You are the strangest person, .Jeremy.”
“Suppose there’s some detective out there hired to find you.” I could c,e~[ tb, e bdtr ~,;~sit,,g oct tk› 6~ck of my creek, Wa~ I_ th_reate__ning he_r wit_h its or just warning her? She did have a right to know, didn’t she? “There just might be somebody looking for you.”
Flash of her glittering eye. False eyelashes? Probably just sticky gunk. She put on the coat, adjusted the collar, looked at herself in the mirror.
High heels and jeans: kiddie tramp. I swallowed, took a deep breath.
“A rock concert is a place he might look,” I said. “If you were my kid, I’d have somebody looking for you.”
“Jer, he would never recognize me under all this, now would he?”
WE were halfway to the auditorium before I said anything more. She was humming some little song to herself, tapping the dash with one hand.
“Would you be smart in there? Don’t smoke any grass. Don’t try to buy a beer. Don’t do anything to get busted.” Laughter.
Slumped against the door, facing me, one knee up, arch of foot over impossible high heel shoe. Toenails polished bright red peeping through the lace stocking. Bracelets like armor on her wrists.
“I don’t want them to find you, you know, whoever they are.”
Did she sigh? Did she murmur something?
She moved forward with a new gust of perfume and put her arms around my neck.
“I’ve done all that—grass, acid, ecstasy, coke, you name it. All that’s past.”
I winced. Why weren’t these clothes the past?
“Don’t do anything to attract attention,” I said.
In the flash of passing headlights she seemed to be burning up beside me. She popped her gum loudly when I glanced at her. “I’11 just fade into the woodwork,” she said.
She caught me in another soft silky clinch, then she was out of the car while it was still moving. Click of heels on the asphalt, throwing a kiss back over her shoulder. I watched her all the way through the crowd to the doors.
And what if we went some place where we could get legally married? Some southern state where she was old enough? And I could just say to everyone in the whole world—?
And it would be over right then and there, wouldn’t it? CHILDREN’S AUTHOR TAKES TEENAGE BRIDE. You wouldn’t even have to show the paintings. And her family, what would they do when they finally put it all together: kidnapping, coercion. Could they have it annulled and take her away to some private asylum where rich people stash their family troublemakers? Goddamn it all!
Alex had a head start with the wine when I got there. He had been up in the Napa Valley all day shooting a champagne commercial. And we were dining alone, in his suite, which was just fine with me. The place was jammed with flowers, big showy red carnations in glass vases. And he had on one of those glamorous full4ength satin-lapelled robes I always associate with English gentlemen or black-and-white forties pictures. Even a white silk scarf tucked inside at the neck.
“You know, Jer,” he said, as I took my place across from him, “we could have shot this whole champagne thing in my backyard down south. But if they want to fly me to San Francisco and take me on a tour of the wine country and put me up in a nice little old-fashioned suite at the Clift, who am I to object?”
The waiters had just set out the caviar and the lemon. Alex went to work with the crackers at once.
“So what’s happening?” I said. “You’re locked in on ‘Champagne Flight’ or what?”
Try not to think of her in that mead hall full of barbarians. Why wouldn’t she come with me?
“No, they wrote me out of the plot. Bonnie takes a young lover, some punk, the masochistic angle you know, and I go off into the sunset accepting it philosophically. That way they can always bring me back. And they might. But so what? This champagne commercial’s just one of the fringe benefits. We’re shooting eight spots, and the figures are perfectly ridiculous. There’ll be magazine ads too. And there’s talk of some automobile commercial. I tell you it’s madness, the whole thing.”
“Good for you,” I said. “Take them for everything they’re worth and you’re worth.”
“You got it. Here, have some of this champagne, Ws not ~x~ ~t CxYx~otgxx~’ ~t ~x~. K ~ ~xtet ~’~ ~et~ c~eavin~ to the wx~ suaaen~ sprang to l~{e and ~led m~ saucer g~xss.
“And by the way, what’s the big secret you’ve been keeping from me?”
“What are you talking about?” I said. I think my face went red.
“Well, first off you’re wearing a very expensive shaving lotion, which is just the kind of thing you never bother with, and this is the first time in my entire life that I’ve seen you in a decent suit. So who’s the mystery girl?”
“Oh, yeah, well, I wish there was some big secret I could tell you.” (And she did buy the suit and the shaving lotion.) “Fact is, all I want to tell you is I’m right about what I said last time I saw you—about the truth.”
“What? Truth? We had a conversation about truth?”
“Come on, Alex, you weren’t that drunk.”
“You were. Did you ever read my book?”
“I’m telling you, the truth is the big pie in the sky. And it’s time I used all the lies I’ve told as the platform for it.”
“You crazy kid. This kind of inanity is exactly what I come here for. Nobody down south talks like you. You mean, you’re going to stop doing little kids in nightgowns?”
“Yes, I’ve kissed them good-bye, Alex. I’ve kissed them all good-bye. If I make it now, it will be strictly as a painter.”
“So long as you’ve got the royalties coming in,” he said. “But if it’s all those horrible things, those roaches and rats you used to paint—”
“In a beautiful way,” I said. “It’s worse than that. My life’s been taken over by something, Alex. And I’m glad the revelation happened now and not twenty years down the road when I’m—”
“As old as I am.”
Yes, I’d been going to say that when I caught myself. But it was them suddenly that awful thought, what if I were lying there dying and all I saw when I looked back was Charlotte, Bertina, Angelica?
He gave me a big generous smile, even white teeth positively glistening. “Jet, shut up about art, will you? You taste this champagne? I just said to a potential seventy-five million viewers that it was superb. What’s it taste like to you?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. Get me some Scotch, will you? And hey, there’s something I want to know. Susan Jeremiah. Movie director. Does that name mean anything to you?”
r /> —,,
“Yeah, up-and-coming if United Theatricals doesn’t ruin her life with television movies. You can’t learn anything in television. The standards are too low. These people are crazy. They go out to shoot so many pages a day and they do, no matter what happens.”
“Any dish on Jeremiah that nobody else would know?”
He shook his head. “That thing she did at Cannes, Final Score, whatever it was, was full of lesbian scenes, real steamy. But now that’s all hush-hush. You know, your bit about truth versus what the public wants? Well, nobody straightened out faster than Jeremiah did for a contract at United Theatricals. Right out of the art house class into prime time. Why are you asking me about her?”
“I don’t know, just thinking about her. Saw her picture in a magazine somewhere.”
“Oh, the press loves her. It’s the hat and the cowboy boots and she really wears them. Quite a swagger, too.”
“And they love you right now, don’t they?”
He nodded. “In a real way, Jet, things were never better. Now let’s really get down on this subject of truth for a second. My book’s right up there in the fifth slot, you know that? And after this champagne commercial, two teleplays in the works, one a three-hour Sunday night special. I play a priest who’s lost his faith and gets it back when his sister dies of leukemia. Now can you look me in the eye and tell me I should have told all in my book? What would it have done for me?” I thought about it for a minute.
“Alex,” I said, “if you had told all, I mean all, maybe they’d be feature films and not teleplays.”
“You upstart kid!”
“And they’d want you for a French champagne instead of an American one that tastes like soda pop.”
“You never give up.”
The caviar was being removed now, and the main course was being served from those heavy silver dishes that the old hotels still use. Roasted chicken, Alex’s favorite. It would do fine, but I wasn’t really hungry. I kept thinking of her in that punk garb, rushing through the doors of the auditorium.
Sense of foreboding. I realized I was looking at us in the mirror. In the cream-colored satin robe Alex looked wonderfully decadent. No salt-and-pepper gray at his temples. He had never looked more like a wax museum monument to himself.
“Hey, Jer, come back,” he said. Unobtrusive little snap of the fingers. “You look like somebody walked on your grave.”
“No, just thinking. It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference whether or not the truth sells. The truth just is the truth, that’s all, even if it brings you right down to the bottom.”
He laughed and laughed. “You’re a scream,” he said. “Yeah, the truth, and God and the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus.”
“Alex, tell me, do you know any of the top execs at United Theatricals?”
I mean, almost any teenager in America would want to meet Alex Clementine. And she wouldn’t even hear of it, wouldn’t even ... something about the expression on her face when I said his name.
“What the hell has that got to do with truth, Jeremy?”
“Do you?”
“Know all of them. Assholes. They come out of TV. I am telling you, TV stinks, Jer. That Moreschi, the producer of ‘Champagne Flight,’ that kid might have really been something in life if it hadn’t been for TV.”
“Any dish on anybody ... family problems, kids missing, runaways, that kind of thing.”
He stared at me. “Jer, what is this about?”
“Seriously, Alex. Have you heard anything? You know, any stories about teenage kids vanishing, that kind of thing?”
He shook his head. “Ash Levine’s got three boys, all good kids, as far as I ever heard. Sidney Templeton doesn’t have any kids. He’s got a stepson he plays golf with. Why?”
“What about Moreschi?”
Shook his head. “Just his stepdaughter, Bonnie’s kid, she’s socked away somewhere in a Swiss school. I heard about that enough from Susan Jeremiah.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, Susan used that kid in a movie at Cannes. She was pretty crazy about her, wanted her for a new TV thing, but the kid’s bricked up in a Swiss convent, nobody can get to her. Jeremiah threw a fit.”
I leaned forward. An alarm bell had just gone off inside my head.
“This is the kid you told me about, the one with the hairdresser father-”
“Yeah, beautiful little girl. Blond hair and baby face, like her daddy, George Gallagher—now you talk about somebody irresistible, that’s George Gallagher. Hmmmmm. Can’t stand it. Eat something, Jer, your food’s getting cold.”
“How old is she?”
“Who?”
“The kid! What’s her name.”
“Teenager, fifteen, sixteen, something like that. I don’t think I ever heard her name.”
“Are you sure she’s in a Swiss school?”
“Yeah, everybody’s been wanting that kid since Cannes, and the name and address is top secret. Marty even threw Jeremiah out of his office for bugging him about it. But he didn’t fire her, and I can tell you that means the lady is hot.”
I could feel my heart racing. I tried to keep my voice normal.
“You didn’t see the movie at Cannes?”
“Nah, I can take a little Fellini or Bergman if I’m drunk enough, but ... what’s the matter with you, Jet? You look positively sick.”
“Do you know anyone who does know the kid’s name, somebody you could call right now, somebody—” ‘
“Well, I could call Marty or Bonnie, of course, but that wouldn’t be cool. I mean, with agents bugging them about that kid—”
“What about Gallagher or Jeremiah?”
“Hmm, I could maybe do it tomorrow. Let’s see, Gallagher’s in New York somewhere, living with some Broadway director, Ollie Boon, I believe it is, yeah, Ollie—”
New York. My oldest buddy ... It’s raining in New York City.
“Jeremiah’s in Paris, could probably find out where. Hey, Jer, snap out of it, this is Alex, remember?”
“I have to make a phone call,” I said. I almost upset the table as I stood up.
Alex shrugged and gestured towards the bedroom. “Help yourself. And if it’s your girlfriend you’re calling, give her my thanks for getting you to a decent barber. I never could.”
I rang the Beverly Wilshire. Dan was out but would be back at nine. “Give him this message,” I told the operator. “‘Champagne Flight’ Bonnie—check out her daughter’s name, age, pic, and whereabouts right away. Sign it J.”
I hung up. My heart was skipping. I stood in the doorway for a moment just trying to get straight. It wasn’t Belinda—of course, it wasn’t. The Swiss school, I mean this little girl whoever she is ... why were my legs shaking like this? What the hell damn difference did it make?
“Do me a favor, son,” Alex was saying to one of the waiters, a very cute one of the waiters, “go into the refrigerator there and take out all those bottles of champagne. Keep’m, give’m away, I don’t care what you do with them, but get me a nice cold bottle of Dom Perignon right away, OK? That stuff’s trash.”
I’LL leave if you mention my parents again ... it’s the easiest way to get rid of me. No hard feelings. I will just go.
I chained the front door after me and went straight up to her room. Same posters, mags, empty purses, old suitcase. Susan Jeremiah squinting under the brim of her cowboy hat. Susan Jeremiah standing with one foot inside her mile-long Cadillac, same hat, same boots, same squint, beautiful smile.
Tapes under the sweaters. One of you has got to be Final Score!
I gathered them all up, though my hands were shaking (I mean, these are her things, buddy!) went downstairs to my office and locked myself in.
The television on my desk was small but new, and the video tape player there was as good as any of the others in the house.
I hated this, hated it, but there was no turning back now. I had to know the answer, no matter what I did or did not ever say to
her. I had to know for myself.
I slipped the first tape into the machine, then sat back with the remote control in hand.
Old movie. Half the credits were gone, and the quality was dreadful. Almost certainly a pirate or a film recorded off television.
Director Leonardo Gallo. Ancient Roman streets, full of half-clad muscle men and cheesecake beauties. Melodramatic music. Most certainly this was one of those ugly badly dubbed Franco-Italian productions.
I touched the scanner and started to move through rapidly. Claudia Scartino, OK, I recognized her, and a Swedish starlet whose name I couldn’t remember. And Bonnie, yes, there was Bonnie, of course!
I felt a tightening in my chest. It was true, I knew it was true, no matter what Alex had said about the Swiss school, and suspecting was one thing, knowing was another. Bonnie right there. And why else would Belinda own this piece of trash? I took it out, tried the next one.
Another mess. LconaMo Gallo. Claudia Scartino again, two old Hollywood stars, the Swedish cutie—whose name was Eve Eckling—and Bonnie again. But what else did these tapes mean to her? Did she care that much about her mother’s old films?
Scan a little. OK. Lots of international breasts. Good lesbian scene between Bonnie and Claudia in a Roman bed. Some other time I’d have a hard-on.
Scan again.
Barbarians overrun the villa. Square-jawed American actor in animal skins and horned helmet grabs tender upper arm of Claudia Scartino, fresh from bath, clad only in towel. Slaves scatter, scream. Vase bounces on the floor. Clearly made of rubber. Little girl in flimsy Roman gown drops stick doll and puts hands to her head. Arm comes down around her waist, lifts her out of the picture.
Little girl. Little girl/I backed it up until she was there again, more, close-up, freeze-frame. No, not—yes, Belinda.
I sent it back another frame, then another, bigger close-up, froze it again. Belinda at s{x, maybe seven. Hair parted in the middle as now. Oh, yes, the eyebrows, the poochy little mouth, definitely Belinda.
For a moment I was too stunned to do anything but look at the blurred grainy image on the screen.
If there had been the slightest doubt, it was gone now.