“No wonder they wanted it all covered up.”
“Oh, yeah, real prime-time laundry job on Mama. But I shouldn’t have played ball for a lousy five-minute interview with the zombie. She could have been reading her answers off cue cards. I got screwed.”
“When did the kid go back to Switzerland?”
“No idea. What’s this bio you want me to do? Who is your client?”
“Oh, yeah, right. Frankie Davis, an animal trainer from the silent film era, dying to tell his story, just a real sweet nostalgic story. He’s willing to go five hundred dollars up front and one percent royalties—”
“You gotta be kidding. Catch you later.” She hung up.
This lying was easier than I had figured.
I put a call in at once to William Morris in Los Angeles and demanded to know did anybody there represent Belinda, Bonnie’s daughter? Call Creative Artists Agency, they represent Bonnie. I did. I wanted Belinda for a big picture in New York, I said, all European money, this was important. The assistant to Bonnie’s agent told me to forget it. Belinda was in school in Europe.
“But I spoke to Belinda at Cannes about this!” I said. “When did she decide to go back to school?”
“Last November. We’re sorry, she has no plans to resume her career.”
“But I have to reach her—”
“I’m sorry.” Click.
I FLIPPED open the biography. Bonnie had shot Marty on November 5 of last year. There had to be a connection. Two events like that at the same time—the shooting and her dropping out of sight—just couldn’t be unrelated.
I tried Dan again. No luck.
I rang Alex Clementine at the Clift. His line was busy. I left a message.
Then I ate a little breakfast, though I didn’t much want it, tried Alex again, who was still busy, then I checked out.
IN the lobby the shops were just opening. Sunshine glared on the roofs of the cars lined up beyond the front doors. I went back to the newsstands, spotted a couple more pieces on Bonnie. Same old trash, and nothing about Belinda.
I WENT out and walked around Union Square.
Gorgeous white cocktail dress in the window of Saks—floor-length white silk trimmed in silver, sheer sleeves to the wrists, clinging skirt.
It was the kind of dress a girl could wear at Cannes, I imagined. Seemed to go with the atmosphere of the Carlton, champagne in glistening silver buckets, crystal glasses, suites crowded with pink and yellow roses, all that.
I felt empty and rotten. Everything was ruined. No matter that I could not fully understand why. It was all shot.
Intellectually I could remind myself that she had never lied to me. But what difference did that make now? It was too enormous what she had kept secret. So it was hers, and I had no right to be angry. It just did not work.
Yet I went into Saks, like somebody sleepwalking, and I bought the white gown for her, as if I could somehow recapture everything.
It was like wrapping up bright light when they smothered it in tissue and closed the box.
It was only eleven thirty when I left the store. And the Clift was less than five blocks away. I hailed a cab and went up there and took the elevator up to Alex’s room.
He was all dressed up, even to an old-fashioned gray fedora, and a Burberry raincoat over his shoulders, when he answered the door.
“There you are, you rascal,” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach you all morning. Just missed you at the Saint Francis. What in hell were you doing down there?”
Two bellhops were packing his clothes for him in the bedroom. And one of the handsomest young men I’d ever seen was sprawled on the couch in a pair of silk pajamas reading a magazine with Sylvester Stallone on the front.
“Look, I know you’re mad at me for being so mysterious last night,” I said. (The handsome kid didn’t even look up.) “But is there some place we can talk?”
“You weren’t exactly a barrel of laughs either,” Alex said. “But come on downstairs with me, we’ll have a little lunch, I want to talk to you, too.” He shut the door and guided me towards the elevators.
“Alex, I have to know something and you’ve got to keep it secret that I even asked.”
“My God, more Raymond Chandler,” he said. (The elevator was empty.) “OK, what?”
“Belinda,” I said, “that’s the name of Bonnie’s daughter—”
“I know, I know. I got a hold of George Gallagher this morning in New York, but he’s not the one who told me.”
He took my arm as the elevator doors opened and ushered me across the lobby. I could feel people looking at him, feel them recognizing him. Or maybe it was just the romantic fedora and the pink cashmere scarf around his neck or the way he seemed to fill up the whole place with every step. Every passing bellhop or desk clerk nodded to him or gave him a quick respecting smile.
The Redwood Room was shadowy and inviting as always, with its dark wooden pillars and the small scattered tables each with its own muted light.
Alex’s table was ready for him, and the coffee was poured into china cups at once. Alex seemed to glow in the dark as he looked at me. As soon as the waiter left us, I asked:
“What did George Gallagher say to you about her? Tell me every word.”
“Nothing much. But I’ll tell you something very strange, Jeremy, I mean, stranger than stranger, unless the little boy is psychic.”
“Which is what?”
He took a gulp of his coffee, then went on:
“Well, you know, I was telling him that a friend of mine and I were having dinner and we were trying to remember his daughter’s name, you know, playing Trivia on the beautiful people and all that, yak yak, would he take a load off my mind by just giving me the kid’s name, you know, and G.G. asks, Who’s the friend. I say it’s an author, old old friend of mine, children’s author, matter-of-fact, and he asks, Jeremy Walker? just like that.”
Speechless.
“You still with me, kid?”
“Yeah. I want a drink, OK?” He signaled the waiter.
“Bloody Mary,” I said. “Go on.”
“Well, I say, How did you ever guess Jeremy Walker, and he says, That’s the only kid’s author he’s ever heard of who lives in San Francisco, but—guess what, Jeremy?—I never told him I was calling from San Francisco. I know I didn’t.” Speechless.
“I know I just said, This is Clementine here, because I was trying to sound casual and all, you know. I’ve had a crush on G.G. for years. Anyway he says his little girl’s name is Rumpdstiltskin, and he starts laughing. You gotta know G.G. to understand. G.G. is one of those little boys who will never grow up. He’s Ollie Boon’s lover, you know, the Broadway director, and he and Boon, well, they’re like angels or something—I mean, both of them are sort of gentle goodhearted flakes. They’re people who have actually made a bundle off being goodhearted. There’s nothing bitchy or mean about them at all. So when he laughs, it’s just sort of sweet. I say, Come on G.G., come straight with me. And then he says suddenly he’s gotta go, he’s really sorry, he loves me, loved my last bit on ‘Champagne Flight,’ give Bonnie hell and all! And he hangs up.”
Speechless.
The Bloody Mary came and I drank it. And suddenly my eyes were watering.
“I mean this is weirder than weird, son. So I was sort of pissed. I mean, I wanna know her name! So I call my agent down at CAA and I ask him, which I should have done the first time round.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, CAA handles Bonnie, you know. And he says Belinda. Her name’s Belinda. He knows it right off. And the Swiss school thing is absolutely true by the way, she’s been gone since November. Bonnie and Marty hustled her out of the limelight for her own good, he says. But what do you make of all that with G.G. in New York?”
“Can I have another drink?”
“Of course, you can!” He glanced towards the bar, pointed to my glass. “Now what do you make of it, that’s what I want to know.”
“Alex, my
friend,” I said. “Tell me anything else you know about this girl, anything at all. I mean, this is important, you can’t know how much.”
“But why, Jeremy? Now I mean it, why!”
“Alex, it’s everything to me. I’m begging you—any dirt, anything—did you see her in LA? Did you hear anything about her? Even the craziest gossip. I know you’re holding back. I knew you were the night of the dinner party when you were telling all the book people the stories, you were holding back something about Bonnie and Marty, we all knew it, something about that shooting, there had to be more to it, you know something, Alex, and you’ve got to tell me.”
“Pipe down, will you? You’re only talking about my boss.”
The waiter set down the fresh drink.
“Alex, this is strictly confidential. I swear it.”
“OK,” he said, “this is the big one, the big one that could cost me a bankroll in Hollywood. Get me blackballed from every studio in town. Now can you keep your mouth shut? I mean, you never tell anyone where you got this! I mean, this is my career we’re talking here, and I’m not going up against Moreschi for—”
“[ swear.”
“OK. The scuttlebutt down there—and I mean secret scuttlebutt—is that Marty Moreschi molested that kid. That’s what happened. And Bonnie caught him and bang, bang, bang.” Silence.
“Next day they packed her off to Switzerland, poor baby. Bonnie was sedated, Marty was in intensive care. Bonnie’s brother from Texas flew in, took the little girl to the airport, got her safely away from the whole circus.”
“And Bonnie made up with Marty.”
“She had to, son.”
“You’re putting me on.”
“Jeremy, don’t be too quick to judge these two. Take it from me. I’ve known this lady for years. She’s one of these beautiful women who’s just a nobody and a nothing, and when they make it big, they always fall apart. Money can’t do anything for them. Fame only makes things worse. You might say Bonnie’s been legally dead since the sixties. She believed all that Nouvelle Vague stuff in Paris; she really did go around carrying books by Jean-Paul Sartre under her arm. Flambeaux and those artistic types, they made her feel she was somebody, something was happening, taught her things a woman like that should probably never learn. Then ten years of making spaghetti Westerns and gladiator epics killed that girl. I mean, she is a perfectly ordinary person who is just beautiful enough to have been a doctor’s wife living in a five-bedroom ranch-style suburban house.
“Now Moreschi pumps enough embalming fluid in her to keep her from rotting right on the spot. If she blows ‘Champagne Flight,’ she’s finished. Pills, booze, a bullet, what difference does it make? Besides, she’s burned her bridges. Even her old friends hate her now. Blair Sackwell, you know, Midnight Mink, he made her famous, and the actresses she knew in Europe, they can’t even get her on the phone these days. So they sit around in the Polo Lounge crucifying her. The lady’s on borrowed time.”
“And what about Moreschi?”
“If you really want it straight, he’s not so bad. He’s network TV and he sucks and he doesn’t know it, but he’s not basically a vicious guy. In a real way he’s better than just about everyone around him. That’s why he’s top of the heap at thirty-five years old. Story of his life most likely. He’s done more with what he’s got than anybody he knows. These people are not like you and me, Jeremy.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You’ve got your paintings, son. You’ve got this private universe of yours, these values you’re always talking about. There’s somebody looking back at me when I look into your eyes. And me, I’m happy. I’m always happy. I know how to be happy. Faye taught me that, and even after Faye died, I bounced back. But these people have never felt like you and me, not even for one moment of their entire lives.”
“I know what you’re talking about, but you don’t understand what it is that you are asking.”
I drank the fresh Bloody Mary, and it made my eyes water again. The Redwood Room seemed eerily quiet around us. Alex smiled sadly under the shadow of the fedora. When he lifted his cigarette, two waiters moved to light it.
“What I’m saying about Marty is this,” he went on, “maybe it was like five minutes of kissy-face with the little Belinda, and when she realizes, hey, this is a man, not some kid in the backseat of a car, and she can’t turn him off that easily, so she screams for Mam~.~ ~k~4~, ~:, a man can wind up l~(tX~ ~%~. %t)met~mg like that all his life.”
“Him or somebody else,” I said.
“Jer, I don’t want to be stalled anymore. What has this got to do with you? I want to know now.”
“Alex, you don’t know how grateful I am for what you just told me,” I said. “You’ve given me exactly what I need.”
“Need for what? Jeremy, I’m talking to you. Answer me.”
“Alex, I promise you, I’ll tell you everything, but you have to give me a little time. And you wouldn’t want to know right now, either, Alex, take my word for it. If anybody ever questions you about it, you have to be able to say you didn’t know.”
“What the hell—” I stood up.
“Sit down, Walker,” he said. “Sit down now.”
I did.
“Now you listen to me. We’ve been friends for years, and you are dearer to me than just about anybody I know.”
“Alex—”
“But there was one special time in my life, right after Faye died, when I needed you and you came through. For that alone, son, I’d do almost anything for you that I could.”
“Alex, you never owed me anything for that,” I said. It was true. After Faye’s funeral one of Alex’s lovers, a young actor, had moved in on him, slipped Libriums into everything he was eating or drinking and sold off half his furniture and memorabilia before Alex caught on. In robe and pajamas Alex had walked to a neighbor’s to call me, because all the phones in the house were locked up. I’d flown down at once, let myself in with my own set of keys, and gotten rid of the kid with a couple of threats.
Ir was nothing as hard as Alex had imagined. The kid was a schemer and a bully, but he was also a coward. And I was damned honored that I had been the one Alex called. But the incident hurt Alex, really hurt him. We’d gone to Europe immediately after that and stayed in his house near Portofino until he felt he was OK again and could go back to work.
“Alex, I enjoyed playing hero that time, if you must know, and in Portofino afterwards you treated me to the time of my life.”
“You’re in trouble, Walker, I know you are.”
“No, I’m not, not at all.”
“Then you tell me who the young lady was,” he insisted, “the sweet young lady who answered the phone at your place this morning when I called.”
I didn’t answer.
“It couldn’t be the kid, could it? The one everybody thinks is away at the Swiss school?”
“Yes, it was Belinda. And I promise you, one day I’ll explain everything. But for now don’t tell anyone about this. I promise, I’ll call you soon.”
I GOT a cab in front of the hotel.
All I wanted in the world right now was to be with her, to hold her, and to tell her I loved her. I was praying that George Gallagher hadn’t called her and hadn’t alarmed her, that she’d be there when I got home.
I’d confess the spying. I’d confess everything and then I’d tell her I’d made the decision, no more questions ever and this time I meant it. We were going to leave San Francisco and head south tonight.
If she could only understand the prying enough to let it go, we’d be all right.
Lovely to think about it suddenly, the van loaded, the long drive across the country together through desert and mountains and finally emerging in the sultry New Orleans heat.
Wouldn’t matter, all the old memories associated with the house, Mother, the novels, all that. We’d make our memories in it, she and I, and we’d go far away from all of it. Nobody would ever find us down there.
As the cab moved up Market Street towards the Castro, I opened the Bonnie biography again and looked at the photograph of Marty Moreschi—the dark eyes shining behind the thick glasses, the thatch of black hair.
“Thank you, asshole,” I said out loud. “You’ve given her back to me, you’ve made it OK for me to be with her, you’re worse than me.”
He seemed to be staring right back at me off the pulp page. And for an odd second I didn’t hate him so much as I acknowledged we were brothers. We both found her irresistible, didn’t we? Both took a risk for her.
How he might have sneered at me. Well, fuck him.
I was too elated and too relieved right now to care about him.
I thought about the things the biographer had said, about the suicide attempts and the car nearly going off the cliff on Saint Esprit.
Yes, it all made sense, it explained so much about her, the odd precocity, the strange almost-proletarian hardness, and the elegance and the sophistication, too.
She must have had a bellyful of it all before she even got to LA, and then they exile her to Switzerland, she takes the fall after he molests her so “Champagne Flight” can stay in the air. Damn them. And thank God for them and their madness.
Because we have our madness, don’t we, she and I.
Just be there, darling, when I get there, just don’t have run off on me, because of anything George Gallagher might have told you. Just give me a chance.
She wasn’t there when I got home. I went upstairs and into her room.
All her luggage was stacked on the bed—the new brown leather suitcases I had bought her and also the old battered case she had brought with her from the Haight.
One glance into the closet told me she had packed everything. Nothing left but the fancy satin hangers and the smell of jasmine sachet.
But the luggage was still here! Even the overnight case was still here. And everything was locked.
What a strangely affecting sight it was.
Made me think of another sight years and years ago—the bare mattress on my mother’s bed the afternoon of her death.