“How are your folks?” I asked.
“Fine. Pretty much the same.”
“Any other…people in your life?”
He grinned like an errant schoolboy. “Am I married, you mean?”
“Whatever.”
He held up a ringless hand. “See.”
I smiled at him. “It doesn’t have to be official.”
He shrugged. “A few girlfriends.”
“A few?”
He laughed.
“Here?”
“What?”
“The girlfriends.”
“No. Back there.”
“Maine?”
“Yeah.”
“That can’t be any fun.”
He shrugged again. “I haven’t been here that long. How is your mother?”
I took note of this abrupt change of subject, then told him my mother died three years ago.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a graceful way to bring a Griffith Park pickup into this conversation, so I asked him what he’d done since he’d been here.
“Not much,” he said ruefully. “A lot of lunches.”
I nodded knowingly, as if I, too, had borne—and borne recently—the terrible burden of being overlunched. I could see Callum making the rounds again: at the Hollywood Canteen, say, springing that fresh, yet oddly familiar, young face on some aging baby mogul who hasn’t seen it for a decade. What a potent impression it would make! And what a hook for the media: this kid who conquered Hollywood at ten and gave it up for the simple joys of teendom in New England returns to the big screen as a grown-up heartthrob. If the movie’s any good at all, he could be a huge star again before the year is out.
“Are you reachable?” I asked.
“Sure. I’m at the Chateau Marmont.”
“Oh. OK.”
“The switchboard will put you through.”
“Great.”
He smiled like a cat in the sun. “Remember when Ray used to live there?” He meant Ray Crawford, the cranky old geezer who played Callum’s grandfather in Mr. Woods.
“Sure do,” I said. I had never been invited by, but I knew that Ray had a suite at the Marmont. If you remember him in the movie, he looked pretty much the same as that, except that he wore ascots under short-sleeved shirts, instead of cardigans. He died about five years ago without much fanfare. There was a brief mention of it on Entertainment Tonight.
“I have the balcony next to his,” Callum said.
“Is this progress?” I joked, since nobody much liked old Ray.
He laughed. “I like it there, though.”
I could see Renee heading toward us, so I made a quick excavation in my purse and handed him one of my cards. “This is me,” I said.
He studied it for a moment. It says Cadence Roth Acts for a Living and gives both my number and Leonard’s office number. “That’s clever,” he said, and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “I forgot Leonard is your agent too.”
“So does he.”
He chuckled, but sort of uncomfortably.
“When you see him, say hi for me,” I said.
“I will.”
Then Renee came up and Callum made a move to introduce himself. I stopped him with a yank at his sleeve. “Promise me you won’t scream,” I said to Renee.
“Huh?”
Callum looked at me and grinned.
“Promise me, Renee.”
She shrugged. “I promise.”
“This is Callum Duff.”
As Renee homed in on him, her mouth slackened noticeably and her eyes began to narrow. It’s the look she gets when she’s trying to think of a phone number, or painting snowy peaks with that guy on TV.
“Thank you,” I said, when a scream failed to materialize. “Callum, this is Renee Blalock, my housemate.”
Callum sprang to his feet and stuck out his hand. “Hi.”
Renee echoed him meekly.
“Renee is a big fan of yours.”
“Do you totally swear?” Renee asked Callum.
Since he looked completely baffled, I said: “She doesn’t think it’s you.”
“Oh…well…”
“Don’t make him swear, Renee. It’s him.” I got up and brushed off the seat of my T-shirt, making signs of leaving. Callum had begun to look restless, and I’d seen quite enough of humanity’s march for one day. I was ready to go home and veg out completely, sit under the sprinkler, maybe, with nothing but a Walkman on. Renee was just getting warmed up, of course.
“You were so great as Jeremy,” she told him. “I wanted to be you so bad.”
“Thanks.”
“I really, truly, mean it.”
“I can tell,” said Callum. “Thanks.”
Renee bounced a little in her excitement, never taking her eyes off the poor kid.
“OK,” I said. “Time to move on.”
“Oh. OK.” Renee got all sheepish in front of Callum. “I hope I wasn’t…”
“You were very nice,” said Callum. “I like the movie too.”
Renee shot me an excited glance. “You know what would be neat?”
I gave her a wary look on Callum’s behalf. “What?”
“If I could get a picture of you two.”
I reminded her nicely that no one here had a camera.
“Back there they do.” She pointed down the chaste postmodern midway to an exhibit sponsored by Fuji Film, a sort of high-tech playroom for grownups. “They take your picture in front of any backdrop you want.”
Callum didn’t hesitate. “You could be in it too, then.”
“Oh, could I?”
“Why not?”
“Oh, gah, that’s so great.”
“Don’t you have to be somewhere?” I asked Callum.
“Not for a while.” He gave me an earnest, just-between-us-grownups look. “I really don’t mind. I’d like a souvenir myself.”
“There’s no line,” Renee said.
“Well…whatever.”
It had dawned on me finally that we’d each get a picture, and that mine would come in very handy indeed. I was already imagining the way I would tease Jeff with it.
We ended up choosing a rear projection of plain blue sky and clouds. Renee argued pitiably for the Mr. Woods backdrop, but Callum seemed a little uncomfortable about it, so I stood firm with her. Callum sat in a chair, while I posed in his lap, and Renee stood behind, one hand resting delicately on Callum’s shoulder. We attracted a small but fascinated crowd with this curiously Victorian tableau.
“You’re a good sport,” I told Callum as he set me down again.
“Hey.”
“Where’s your appointment?”
“Over there,” he answered, gesturing with his eyes. “The other side.” He meant the real side—the working side—of Icon Studios, the place where we’d once made a movie together, so many years ago.
I nodded knowingly and left it at that, not wanting to come off as nosy.
Callum insisted on paying for the photos, and told Renee, who was already in seventh heaven, to order a poster-sized one for herself. The shot turned out much better than I’d expected. Renee looked placidly lovely, her hair a sort of three-strip yellow against the phony blue sky. I had cheekbones for once, and my eyes, or so Renee assured me, were at their sultry best. Callum looked far more like the child I had once known than he did in real life. Something sweetly uncomplicated and true had surfaced in his eyes in time to meet the camera halfway. It was downright eerie.
“Do people recognize you?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Not usually. Almost never.”
“Me either.”
He laughed. “We’re even, then.”
Sensing his restlessness, I told him how glad I was we’d bumped into each other, and to call me whenever he felt like it. He thanked me nicely but didn’t commit himself, which came as no surprise, since we had never been all that close. Renee thanked him prof
usely for posing with us and, pushing the limits even further, gave him an awkward peck on the cheek.
We left him roughly where he had found me, then headed up the giant escalator toward the parking lot.
When we got home, I called Jeff first thing. After six rings and the usual annoying musical interlude from k.d. lang, I was informed that the gay Saroyan was at a motel in Palm Springs and would not be back until Monday morning. I felt hideously let down, so I left him a cruelly cryptic message to call me anytime for information regarding “the latest Jeremy sighting.” I wasn’t about to waste this one on a tape, and I knew from experience that Jeff would appreciate the story more if I wrapped it festively in a little intrigue.
I haven’t heard a peep out of him all evening. This is puzzling, frankly, since he’s usually good about checking his machine, no matter where he is. The phone hasn’t rung at all, in fact, since Renee and I sat down—or stood up, in her case—to our respective creative endeavors.
Renee’s painting is coming along nicely. She’s doing a waterfall now, the next step after snowy peaks. She says “Oh, poo!” out loud so often that I want to throttle her, but she shows a real knack for this technique. And I see what she means about the instructor; he does have a way about him. As I lie here on my pillow, his low, reassuring voice floods over me like warm honey, or some kindly old uncle murmuring nursery tales over a crib. I wonder if he has a cult or something, if other people tune in just for his voice.
I’m almost to the end of this notebook. Another twenty pages or so and I’ll have to find a new one, something a little classier this time, that doesn’t have Mr. Woods’ ugly face on the cover. That was it for me today, I’ve decided, my last sayonara to the little dick-head. Every time I relent and reimmerse myself in that bankrupt mythology, I come away feeling drained and discarded, a relic before my time.
Life is too short for looking back.
Especially mine.
It’s past midnight, and Jeff still hasn’t called. Renee turned in half an hour ago, after donning a new nightie and slicking her face drastically with Vaseline.
I picture Jeff in a room by a pool, with a sleazy desert moon hanging low in the palm trees. He has just had spectacular sex (sorry, I can’t quite see the face) and is on the verge of springing the next chapter on his unsuspecting victim. In which case, he could well be planning to check his machine before he calls it a day.
The hell with it. I need my beauty sleep.
9
I WOKE UP THIS MORNING AND FOUND A MOUSE IN A TRAP RENEE had laid in the kitchen. This might have been manageable had it been a regular trap, but it wasn’t; it was a rectangle of white plastic, covered in a sort of yellow goo, to which the poor thing was stuck, very much alive, twitching horrifically. Even the side of her face was caught in the nasty stuff. In her frantic struggle to escape, she was straining every muscle under her command, but so far all she’d managed to do was shit. I hate to think how long she might have been there.
Renee is the official exterminator at our house, just as Mom once was, but she was out on a morning mall crawl and unlikely to return for hours. I opened the cabinet under the sink and made a frantic search for the mousetrap box, in the dim hope it would tell me what to do next. When I couldn’t find it there, I flung open the cupboard and spotted a likely candidate on the top shelf: a red-and-yellow box with the name E-Z Catch printed on the end. I swatted at it with a broom handle until it tumbled toward me in a pungent avalanche of cleaning rags.
There were instructions, all right, printed in Spanish and English: Eche raton con trampa. Discard mouse with trap. There was also a charming illustration of a mouse caught in the sinister goo, rendered so playfully as to be almost a cartoon, complete with vivid little beads of mouse sweat (or were they tears?) popping from her head. No Springs, No Snaps, No Hurt Fingers, Disposable, Sanitary, Ready to Use.
What to do? If I hurled this living creature, ever so conveniently, into the garbage can, as advised, it would lie there for hours in the dark, panic-stricken and exhausted, until its life ebbed away and the ants came to eat it alive. There was no way I could be a party to that, so I filled my low-level kitchen sink with several inches of lukewarm water (thinking that might make it more pleasant) and drowned the little bandit.
It took her the longest time to stop moving; I held her down for a while after that, just to make sure. When I finally raised the tiny, dripping corpse, checking anxiously for signs of life, I flashed perversely on Glenn Close bursting out of the bathwater in Fatal Attraction. The mouse was perfectly still, though, so I took the trap outside and dumped it into the sunken garbage can by the street. Then I hurried back to the house, shuddering a little, and took a long, hot shower with a loofah.
I am not, as they say, a born killer. I was wasted for the rest of the morning. You’d think Renee would be the prissy one in this respect, but she’s not at all; she’s held her own mousy My Lai’s before, racking up deaths by the dozen, and it doesn’t faze her one bit. She can be downright cheery about it, in fact, when she’s checking her traps in the morning.
I’m writing this on the beach at Santa Monica. Renee has three more days of vacation left and plans to make the most of them. We’re encamped under a new floral-pattern beach umbrella she bought at K mart yesterday. I’m wearing my latest creation: a pink gingham bathing suit, heavily ruffled, that makes me look like a huge Victorian baby. Renee is in a royal-blue bikini, poring over the latest People for the juicy details of Annette Bening’s pregnancy by Warren Beatty. There’s a soft, lulling breeze off the water, and the sky is remarkably clear and blue. Though my housemate doesn’t seem to have noticed, a Chicano guy two blankets over has been giving her the eye for ages, with a nice boner in his Speedos to prove it. I guess I should tell her—sooner or later.
To catch up:
Jeff called the morning after I left that message on his machine. “OK, Cadence, what is it?”
Since he sounded edgy, I decided not to be coy. “Callum Duff is in town,” I said. “He’s been here for several months.”
He was silent for so long that I wondered if he was mad at me, though I couldn’t think of a reason he should be.
“You’re entitled to gloat,” I added.
“How do you know this?”
“I saw him. We talked.”
“But you don’t know it’s the same person.”
“No, but I’ve got a great way to find out.”
Another pause, and then, furtively: “He’s not there, is he?”
I chuckled. “No, Jeff. I’ve got a photograph. Taken yesterday.”
“Oh.”
“What’s the matter?” I said. “I thought you’d be overjoyed.”
“You didn’t tell him that I…?”
“I didn’t tell him a thing. Your name never came up.”
“Good.”
“The next move is strictly yours.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Well…whatever.” I let my tinder-dry tone convey the message that it was no big deal to me, since I was beginning to feel vaguely pimpish about the whole affair. He could find his own boyfriends, for all I cared.
“He had my number, you know, and he never called back.”
“So?”
“Well, I can’t just call him now, out of the blue like that. He never even told me where he lived.”
“Oh, I see.”
“There’s such a thing as pride.”
“Mmm.”
“Where does he live?”
“Does it matter?”
“Cadence…”
“The Chateau Marmont.”
He made a little murmur, or maybe a grunt, of recognition.
“That’s where you pictured him, wasn’t it? In a castle?”
“Very funny.”
“He’s a dreamboat, Jeff. I see what you mean.”
“Yeah, well, a fucked-up dreamboat.”
“Why? Because he didn’t call you back?”
No answer.
“Do you wanna see the picture or not?”
He emitted a protracted groan that meant yes, so I told him he knew where he could find me. He said he’d be on his way as soon as he finished his sit-ups. I hung up and went into the living room to fluff the pillows, feeling the glow I always feel when I lure someone I really like into the soul-sucking reaches of Yellow Ribbon Land.
He showed up an hour later, bearing wilted carnations he’d bought from “a Hispanic person at a stoplight.” He tried to stay cool about it, but his muffin-round, sandpapery face wore expectation like rouge. After kneeling briefly to bestow a ritual peck on my cheek, he went straight for the photograph.
“Where was this taken?”
I told him.
“I thought you hated it there.”
“I do. Renee made me go. Is it him, Jeff?”
He nodded.
“Are you surprised?”
“No. Are you?”
I shook my head and gave him a crooked, apologetic smile.
“Did he say anything that made you think he was gay?”
I told him about the girlfriends back in Maine.
“Oh, great.”
“Maybe he was just covering,” I suggested.
“That’s what I mean. He sounds fucked up. And if there really is a girlfriend, forget it.”
“I think he’s just young, Jeff.”
He sighed and dropped into the armchair. “Too young. I don’t feel like being a tutor. If he’s still in the closet, I haven’t got time to wait for him.”
His jaded world-weariness was beginning to annoy me. I settled into my pillow and pointed out that Callum was only ten years his junior.
“Well, yeah,” he said, “but look what happened in those ten years.”
I couldn’t argue with that. A decade of living with death and dying can certainly change the way you look at things. Given Callum’s cloistered New England upbringing and Jeff’s growing militancy, it was entirely possible that the two men weren’t on the same wavelength at all. I just thought they’d look cute together. Jeff thought so too, I know damn well, though he’d done his best to convince me otherwise.