“Dorothy—Tarah,” Max interrupted her, “I doubt that a copy even exists.”
“What?”
“An eight–millimeter film, all grainy and worn?”
“Gone? Destroyed!” Tarah was surprised to hear herself gasp.
“Maybe someone from the past treasures it, keeps an obsolete projector on which he can view it once more before he dies.”
Tarah refused to face that this complicated matter had turned so easy, so banal—so, really filthy. “If—when!—that dirty film surfaces, I will overcome the scandal.”
“No one would care today,” Max interrupted her.
She ignored his words. “Monroe survived those photos, and so will I! I don’t care what I have to do to get the role of Helen Lawson! Whatever it takes!”
Max said with a crooked smile, “Whatever it takes?” He applauded, slowly, one hand on the other, then again. “So you’ve become like the rest of us. Welcome to the valley of vultures, Dorothy—Tarah Worth! You’ll do whatever it takes to get what you want, and damn anyone else. Right?”
“Yes!”
She stood up, turned to leave—and recovered quickly when she stumbled on a box that turned over, spilling dildoes.
2
A type of meanness exemplified.
There is a kind of cruelty that exists purely for its own sake, with no purpose other than making the wounded squirm, like ants captive under a child’s sun-magnifying glass. Max Renquist leaned back in his chair and smiled, pleased, very pleased, that he had produced a similar effect on Tarah Worth.
“What did that woman want? I ran into her in the elevator,” Wilma Renquist, her hair freshly darkened, walked into her husband’s office.
“That pretentious bitch, that … that … ‘Tarah Worth,’”—he gave the name a nasty sound. “So fuckin’ high and mighty now. I lowered her a few pegs, quite a fucking few. I didn’t tell her that the fuck flick she made years ago never even got developed.”
“The one you bungled,” Mrs. Renquist remembered, sniffing her perfumed handkerchief to disguise the stench of crassness.
“That one. I let her believe it was just obsolete. Like her.”
“Good,” Mrs. Renquist approved.
“Fuckin’ good, eh?” Mr. Renquist revised.
Mrs. Renquist crushed the scented handkerchief in her anguished hands. “Always? Always? Must you—?”
3
A plan is put into motion.
Outside, Tarah fished in her purse for the address the detective had given her, where the Mystery Cowboy lived. She would use his notoriety for her ends. So what? She’d been used, abused. She’d learned! No, she had been taught by masters.
In the cab, she was still trembling with indignation, not the indignation she had brought with her into Max’s office. She was shaking with a greater indignation, Max’s intimation that any performance of hers would be forgotten.
4
The next step.
VARIETY
Show Biz Down & Close
A knowledgeable source alerted this column that actress Tarah Worth is profoundly concerned about a possible stalker who has made menacing overtures toward her. Police officers cannot move against anyone until an actual crime has been committed, or is clearly about to be committed. The actress is a strong contender for the role of Helen Lawson in Return to the Valley of the Dolls, the sequel to the late Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.
They had used it! Tarah stopped on her way from Max’s office to pick up the new issue of Variety. Her long-time friend had printed the item she had given him.
Now she would cast the horny Mystery Cowboy in her real-life drama.
5
The state of Lyle’s troubled heart.
In the very center of his heart, Lyle was sad, deeply, deeply sad. Life was full of problems and complications! That was his thought as he wandered along Hollywood Boulevard, which at night turned into a shattered electric kaleidoscope, shards of blazing colors. He walked past newly arrived squads of people, a new invasion preparing for the ritual of the Academy Awards.
Just as in Rio Escondido he had gone to think and ponder matters in the vacant lot, he now went to the foyer of the grand Egyptian Theater to sort things out. Its outdoor court—with its gurgling fountain and glazed mosaics of sunbursts and Egyptian monarchs—was flanked by palm trees, eight on each side, lit invisibly from their base and enclosed by oval concrete benches. At times the palm trees seemed to hover over him with understanding. At other times, when a breeze created a flurry along the Boulevard, they turned away, ignoring him. A few people usually milled about the court and moved on when there was no event in the theater. Today, the palm trees were as pensive as he was.
“I wish—” he said aloud. There was so much to wish for. That Sylvia would be happy, that … “I wish—” He investigated wishing. How odd that the heart—or, Sister Matilda might say, the soul—could yearn for anything, anything in the world, the most impossible things—like being able to fly, say—but the world wasn’t made to grant those wishes. Was that where hope filled in—being able to hope? He hummed and strummed on his guitar:
Why is the heart allowed to hope
for what the goddamned world
cannot—cannot—give?
6
The matter of fate.
Tarah stared into the mirror because her new look fascinated her. Determination? Yes! Finally. Cruelty?—life was cruel, wasn’t it?—cruelty? Yes!
“Sit down,” she commanded when Rusty Blake arrived in response to her latest summons.
“Y’know, Tarah, I don’t like the way you, like, just call up and, like, demand that I be here.”
She ignored him. She was going to secure for him the chance of his lifetime. “We have to rehearse it all, very carefully,” she said.
“Uh, like what—?”
“The kidnapping.”
“Hey, I, like, thought you were, like, making that up. I still don’t get it. … Listen, I’m not putting myself in danger. No way, man. L. Ron says stay away from danger—”
“The only danger you’re in, if you don’t cooperate, is of losing the role of a lifetime.” That thrilling coldness in her voice! “I’ve enlisted others, a detective, a chauffeur. All you have to do is save me.”
“I think I get it, man. Like in the script, right? … Uh, like save you from who, what?”
The new Tarah ignored him. “Do you believe in fate?”
“Sure, who doesn’t?—like when—in Rebel Without a Cause Dean—Like what?”
She hadn’t even heard him. She said: “You have to push fate along in the direction you want it to go. When it reaches a certain point, you shove it! Then it becomes fate!”
“Uh, yeah, like—”
7
Back in Rio Escondido—
Clarita kept a close eye on Sylvia that whole day, following her when she seemed to be heading for the liquor cabinet, even standing outside her bathroom door where she kept a pharmacy of pills, stood there, glaring, until Sylvia would retreat from the bathroom or stop pouring “just another nip.” So she was sober—well, as sober as she ever was now—when the time came to leave for the wedding of Maria to the politician and gambler Enrique Fielding. (The cabrón called himself a politician although he had never been elected to anything—and “Enrique” wasn’t his real name; he had chosen it in order to appeal to “Hispanic constituents,” whoever they were.)
Clarita was always amazed by how well Sylvia could hold several drinks, and then, on the next one, would collapse. Today she was determined to keep her from that one fatal drink. She also marveled at how beautiful Sylvia could still become—when she cared—beautiful.
Today, she was beautiful, and she herself—Clarita admitted—didn’t look half bad, in a dress she had recently bought at a discount that Sylvia managed for her, a very chic dress, she knew—and she was wearing a hat, the way one should for a wedding. Alas, she had forgotten to buy gloves!
“You look l
ike a movie star,” Clarita told Sylvia.
“I do? Not Miss America?”
“Even prettier.”
Maria was marrying Mr. Fielding in the Catholic church where Armando had bared his oblique muscles to Sylvia in a rivalry with Jesus Christ’s buffed body. There was no question in either Sylvia’s mind nor in Clarita’s that Maria was marrying the man because he was powerful and very rich. But so what? thought Sylvia; that was a much better reason than falling in love with a no-good son of a bitch.
Sylvia had become very happy when she learned of the impending wedding. That girl Maria was impetuous. She had disappeared in search of Lyle—and returned with Mr. Fielding. That was that between her and Lyle.
In the ornate Catholic church—arches, stained-glass windows, glittering gold and silver everywhere—Sylvia sat and Clarita knelt in a pew reserved “for close friends of the family”; Clarita intended to kneel throughout the whole ceremony. “That will show you, God, my devotion to you, even though I haven’t been to Mass in a year. You’ll take this into consideration, especially because of my bad knees,” she explained, begging Jesus to nurture Lyle the Second’s heart if he still loved the fickle girl. But her knees hurt too much and she sat as comfortably as church pews allow.
Sylvia looked around at the glamorous saints. Once, they had reassured her that she would win the title she longed for, change her terrible life. Now they seemed indifferent. She thought, They always were, I just didn’t see that then.
The church was crowded, of course—“with as many Anglos as there are Mexicans,” Clarita tartly observed, “and many are protestantes,” she sniffed.
“He’s homely,” Sylvia said as Mr. Fielding appeared at the railing of the altar, to await the bride. He was flanked by the best man and three ushers, his Anglo friends from wherever they came, staid, pale, uncomfortable men who had arrived accompanied by staid, pale, uncomfortable wives. “I’m glad he’s homely,” Sylvia whispered to Clarita. “She deserves a homely man.”
That might be so, but he certainly must have deserved a beautiful wife, because Maria looked gorgeous, in white, the veil not quite able to disguise the dark lush hair. She was accompanied by her father, Armando in a tuxedo, looking entirely middle-aged and prosperous. Difficult to remember that he had actually once been “the sexy Chicano.” Sylvia winced to remember that at a desperate time she had even allowed him to think that he had fathered Lyle. She never really regretted it; who knows what would have happened between Lyle and this unstable girl, given the direction they were moving at the time?
Now there was something to approve of, Clarita interrupted her prayers to observe—the bridesmaids, in pale blue chiffon, lovely girls, probably Maria’s friends, if she had any. They looked like budding flowers. “To the hills!” Clarita blurted uncontrollably, in the clasp of past memories. She quickly hushed herself, her hand over her mouth.
There was the swell of organ music. A wedding was always so lovely, wasn’t it? Clarita was about to observe aloud when she remembered that Sylvia hadn’t had one.
The slow procession of flowery bridesmaids and the white apparition in satin and veils made its way toward the altar. The groom and ushers waited, looking stuffed.
As she passed with Armando, arms linked, Maria stopped next to Sylvia.
Actually paused as if about to speak to her! Please, God, no! Clarita begged. If she had been able to, she would have pressed her hands against Sylvia’s and Maria’s lips because no telling what might be exchanged.
Maria glided past like a pretty sailboat.
That moment. What did it augur? Clarita fretted. Something. Some unresolved animosity lingering from those earlier times, surely. Sylvia was capable of anything, and that Maria had spirit, too.
In a pew ahead, Maria’s mother looked stern even as she smiled, the smile becoming icier when Armando passed by like a stuffed penguin.
The priest in bright garb. Vows exchanged. Tears shed.
The ceremony was over.
Music surged, the procession out of the church began.
Flowery girls fluttered about, like a floating tide of colored water lilies. The stiff men beside them shuffled awkwardly. Mr. Fielding, smiling and nodding, became even more rotund and satisfied in his expensive tuxedo.
“A moment, please!”
What? Everyone froze, including the priest and the altar boys.
It was Maria, at the exact center of the altar, who had halted the procession. She tossed off her veil, which floated to her feet, creating a cloud on which she stood in a glorious prism of light that filtered through a color-paned window and cast on her face an angelic glow.
It was coming, whatever had passed between her and Sylvia, it was coming! Clarita held Sylvia’s hand, preparing to restrain her from whatever would happen now.
“Although—” Maria held the word there for moments. “Although I have made my nuptial vows and will in the eyes of Heaven honor them—”
Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. Oh! Ay!
Clarita’s hand locked on Sylvia’s arm.
“Still, I must be true myself, and so”—she paused—“I declare that I shall always love Lyle Clemens!”
Ah! Oh! Ay! What? What? Qué?
Was Sylvia about to get up? Confront her? She had thrust Clarita’s hand away and was standing up, facing the girl at the altar.
Silence. Deep, deep stunned silence as the two women stood, just stood facing each other, one at the altar, the other in the pews.
Then Sylvia Love laughed aloud, a throaty, sustained laughter.
Stunned murmurs rippled through the church.
Then laughter erupted from the altar—Maria’s laughter. Sylvia’s laughter rose even louder and Maria’s matched it.
Ay, Dios, Clarita prayed, her apprehension having not conceived of this. Please make them stop laughing. “Hail Mary, full of grace—” she whispered holy words.
For the first time—or had there been another moment, when she had first met her?—Sylvia was fond of Maria, for her daring, her spirit, the mutual defiance that had been acknowledged between them just now; the joined current of laughter asserted that, as if they were involved in a rampant opera. But more than anything else, Sylvia Love was laughing at the absurdity of romance, of trust, of love.
Clarita’s voice pierced the laughter: “—the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women. … “Please make them stop this laughing, please. “Blessed is—”
Now a man’s laughter rose, louder, still louder, raucous. It was Mr. Fielding, adding his own howls of laughter, a trio now, convulsed—he, Maria, and Sylvia Love.
“—the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” Please, Jesus, stop this horror in your church. “Holy Mary, Mother of God—”
The priest at the altar turned away from the congregation, facing the crucified figure. His body quivered, as he burst into chuckles, then laughter, now joined in by titters skittering among the congregation. More gasps, more outbursts of laughter here and there, and, soon, the whole church rocked with wild laughter.
“—pray for us sinners,” Clarita persevered, “pray—pray—pray … Ah-harrr! Harrr! Harrrr!” All her restraint broke, and her own laughter soared even above the growing tide.
A prim altar boy pushed his way to the railing of the altar.
“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! This is the Lord’s House!” he protested. “Stop—” But his next words were drowned by his own gales of laughter.
Then Clarita noticed this: Sylvia’s laughter had turned into sobs. And her own laughter stopped.
8
An ill-timed development?
Los Angeles Times
Liz Smith is on vacation.
When Tarah Worth read that—a mere item for so cataclysmic an event!—she fell into a depression of speculation. She figured quickly on her fingers and asserted that the great columnist would be back on the job by the time of the Academy Awards. But how strange to take a vacation as it all heated up toward the monumental night.
What if
she was really dead?—they often maneuvered to withhold big news about big people, until adjustments could be made. She was relying on her to break the news of her triumph at the Academy Awards, Lenora ready to relay the story the moment it began to unfold, thus handing her a great exclusive.
In her home, staring at the cloudy pool which would soon be filled with clear water—or would it also turn murky, like the prospect of the day?—Tarah realized the one thing she hadn’t counted on was Liz Smith’s mysterious absence.
9
Growing concern about the truth of the fabulous columnist’s absence.
Two weeks had elapsed. No one took more than two weeks for a vacation. Tarah Worth tossed aside the irrelevant pages of the Los Angeles Times, in search of Liz Smith’s column. There it was again!
Liz Smith is on vacation.
It hadn’t been two weeks, of course not. Only a couple of days—maybe even yesterday. It had seemed like two weeks. Still, her readers would be thirsting for her by now.
Was it possible that the malicious astrological chart might yield some encouragement today, just today? She opened the drawer casually, shifting papers, and peeking. Today’s entry: “Severe loss of a potential ally—” She shoved the drawer shut.
Vile! Vile! Was it possible to sue an astrologer? In the meantime, she’d turn to someone much more reliable. She dialed.
“Riva!”
“Tarah!”
She waited the required long psychic moments that would send the question undulating to her superb psychic in her arboretum.
“Riva!”
“Tarah!” Another moment of psychic affirmation. “Yes!” the voice of Riva answered the unstated question.