T.R.’s attention had wandered. She looked tired, but also restless.
“Muddy’s right,” I said. “I’m weird. I think it’s mainly what blocked me from coming to see you. I convinced myself you were leading a happy, normal life in a nice town with nice friends. When you were little I had no friends and I had failed at everything, plus I knew I was weird. I wasn’t really afraid of your mother or your grandparents—I was afraid of what you’d think if I suddenly showed up in your nice, normal life. You might have thought I was gross or yukky or something.”
I paused. She wasn’t looking at me, but she was listening.
“Maybe you think that anyway, now that you’ve seen my house, and the way I live,” I said.
“It ain’t the way you live, it’s the way you don’t live,” T.R. said. “Shoot, I like to get out and buzz around. What do you and L.J. do out here all day? I know L.J. likes to get high, but what do you do all day?”
“Well, I’m writing a book,” I said. “I can’t run around much when I’m writing.”
“I want to read it,” T.R. said. “There’s so many books in this house, I don’t know where to start when it comes to reading. I’ll just start with your book. When can I read it?”
I was flattered that she’d be interested, but painfully aware that I really had nothing to show. Even the first sentence of my new book was in doubt; since meeting T.R. I’d had no time even to muse about the various first sentences I’d once contemplated. Life had thrust art aside, but of course I didn’t want to admit that to T.R.
“You can read it when I get a little farther along,” I said. “I did publish a book about the time you were born. You could start with that one, if you like.”
She was looking around my bedroom, which essentially consisted of three walls of floor-to-ceiling book-cases, all crammed, and a final south wall of glass, a kind of cinema screen for the brilliant sunlight to project itself on. In front of some of the books were pictures of the five or six women who had been most important to me. Jeanie was there, a lovely snapshot of her at her most winning, taken by a street photographer in Paris. Jeanie was so stern about her pictures, she might well have censored this one right out of my bedroom if she had ever come to visit and noticed that I had it. “I prefer just to be lodged in your mind,” she had once said gravely when the subject of pictures had come up.
There were Marella Miracola and Antonella Napthi, the most dazzling and most constant of my various Italian loves. I also had a few pictures of women who had never been girlfriends, but who nonetheless loomed large in my memories of Europe—Pier Angeli, Françoise Dorléac, Romy Schneider; they flashed in my imagination whenever I thought of Paris or Rome. I didn’t treasure them as I treasured Jeanie Vertus, a lifelong love, but they had all been glorious young women and were vivid threads in the tapestry of my past. I kept their pictures, and now T.R., my daughter, was looking them over; it seemed to me there was a kind of jealousy in her look.
How could she, a girl from a little oil town in the west, compete with these great world beauties? That was what I read in her look.
“Are you fucking any of these women?” she asked in the flat tone into which she seemed to mix both anger and resignation.
“Nope,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“I just want to know if some movie star is going to show up down here and move in with you and start ordering me around,” she said.
“It won’t happen,” I said. “I just moved in the only woman I’m likely to move in.”
“I ain’t no star,” T.R. said. “I ain’t much of nothing.”
She seemed to be sliding into the yawning pit of unconfidence that looms beneath most, if not all women—even monoliths of female arrogance, of which I’ve known several, slide into that pit from time to time.
“T.R., this is a trite thing that parents are always saying to their children, but I’m going to say it to you anyway, since this is my first chance,” I said. “You’re just starting out in adult life. You’re twenty-two and healthy. You can be as beautiful as any of these women, or as well-educated, or as famous, if fame interests you. You aren’t nothing, and you can make yourself into whatever you want to be. You can go to college, you can study acting, or anything you want to study, we can travel for a year or two and see some of the world. I don’t really have a thing I need to do except make up as best I can for all that time I lost with you.”
T.R. ignored my pitch—she was studying the pictures.
“Who’s that?” she asked, pointing to a severe little photograph of Jill Peel. Jill was sitting alone in a gondola in Venice—her son had snapped the picture not long before he killed himself. I had taken them to Venice to cheer them up. We had a pretty good trip and it did cheer them up. Jill was looking up at the camera, at her son and me, with the sort of chaste composure some people perhaps can muster when facing a firing squad. Hers was the face of a woman who was playing the endgame and accepted the fact and was glad nonetheless to be in Venice. In a way I hated the picture—I often resolved to take it off my bookcase. And yet Jill had given it to me. To have put it away would have confirmed the cowardice of which she had so often accused me. So there it was, in front of my set of The Golden Bough, haunting me as Jill always had, whenever my eye chanced to fall on it.
“Her name was Jill Peel,” I said. “She’s dead. Her story’s a sad story.”
“Every time I hear about dead I wonder where Earl Dee is,” T.R. said, moving closer to me.
“T.R., stop worrying,” I said. “We’ll go to Europe for a few months. He’ll probably be back in jail before we return. Or he’ll have forgotten he said he’d kill you.”
“Earl Dee won’t forget,” she said. “Earl Dee keeps his promises. That’s one thing I’ll say for him.”
“I’ll hire more security guards then,” I said, “just until we get our passports. I’ll put one over at the highway with a walkie-talkie twenty-four hours a day. Earl Dee’s not going to kill you. You need to stop worrying.”
“Tell me about that woman,” T.R. said.
“Well, it’s not necessarily the best story to tell you while you’re in this mood,” I said, wishing I had put the picture away long ago.
“I want to know about her,” T.R. said. “She looks like I feel, so let’s try the hair of the dog.”
“Well, okay,” I said, as she snuggled close to me.
8
Jill Peel and I went back a long way, to my very first visit to Hollywood, just after my one novel was published. The novel had been optioned by a movie producer, and I had gone to Hollywood to discuss writing the script. I met Jill in the corridor of the old Columbia Studios on Gower Street; a departing boyfriend had just slapped her and she was standing in the corridor, crying.
I lived in San Francisco then. Sally, just pregnant with T.R., had left me and gone home to Texas. Jill and I fell in love and she came to San Francisco with me, but the love soon faltered. She was an animator then, and rather famous, having just won an Oscar for an animated short called Mr. Molecule. Her taste in all things—art, food, clothes, the design of rooms, furniture, directors, even daylight—was so much better than mine that I’ve often wondered since if I would even have managed to become an educated person if Jill Peel hadn’t seen fit to take a few months out of her successful life to get me started.
“If she was so perfect, why didn’t it work out?” T.R. asked, once I had explained that much.
“I didn’t say she was perfect,” I said. “She was far from perfect. For one thing, she had a terribly conflicted relationship with her son. But she did have impeccable taste.”
“Vomit,” T.R. said angrily.
“Pardon me?”
“I said vomit!” T.R. said. “Impeccable taste makes me want to throw up. Who gives a fuck, other than rich people? I hate impeccable taste. I guess I was just born tacky.”
“If you’re going to hate her because of things I tell you about her, why should I tell you about her?” I asked. ??
?You don’t have to compete with her, you know. She’s dead.”
“I guess I’m the one who knows who I have to compete with,” T.R. said. “I don’t think you know anything other than how to have sick headaches.”
It was hard not to perceive that my daughter was mad at me; her body, which she had scooted next to mine, was stiff as a board. Decades of exposure to female anger had not made me indifferent to it, either. I have as much respect for it as white hunters are said to have for wounded lionesses. (I owned a large collection of white-hunter memoirs. I studied them in depth for a movie that never got made; the one thing I remember about those hunters is their respect for wounded lionesses.)
I stopped talking—I was watching the bushes, as it were. This tactic only made T.R. angrier.
“Are we just going to lay here?” she asked. “What happened after you two broke up?”
“I disappeared for a few years,” I said. “I came to Texas to see if your mother would take me back, but she wouldn’t.”
“I don’t blame her,” T.R. said. “Why would she take you back if you’d been off fucking someone with impeccable taste?”
“Oh, boy, are you mad at me!” I said. “You’re extremely mad at me.”
The comment amused her. I saw a trace of softening, even a smile.
“If you think this is extremely mad, you’re gonna be surprised when you see me get extremely mad,” she said. “I don’t have to like that woman just because she had good taste.”
“No, you don’t,” I admitted. “You just have to decide if you want to hear the rest of the story.”
She gave a noncommittal shrug. “I guess,” she said. “I want to find out if she got what she had coming to her.”
I told her about the movie Jill directed: Womanly Ways, it was called, a low-budget, well-acted, beautifully directed film made in the sixties. It happened to catch the rising tide of feminist sentiment and did rather well. Jill won her second Oscar, this time for directing; for the next several months she was the hottest ticket in Hollywood. Her future seemed all opportunity; the film did well in Europe too, so, for a time, Jill was a member of the international A-list, right up there with Truffaut and Bertolucci.
Never lucky in her choice of lovers, she dissipated a certain amount of momentum in love affairs with a number of men, at best boring and at worst terrible, who had nothing in common except the fact that they were all jealous of her status. Then the years began to pass, and whatever remained of her momentum began to trickle away, as momentum will, in Hollywood. Development deal followed development deal, but somehow the pictures never got made. Jill had her standards and was not loath to defend them—she had those two Oscars, after all. She was seldom subtle, and never inclined to back down. Soon she had quarreled with every studio head in town. Most of those studio heads soon fell by the wayside, but Jill promptly quarreled with their replacements. Then it was no longer studio heads she was quarreling with: Womanly Ways was seven or eight years back, a geological era in Hollywood terms. The executives Jill could get meetings with were younger and younger, farther and farther from the seats of power.
Finally she got nothing made, and she was broke. She was offered deals to write scripts, deals to coproduce, jobs in production, but she turned them all down. Everyone who mentioned her mentioned her only to complain; she was difficult, she was impossible, she was finished.
During the years of her fame I carefully hid from Jill. Los Angeles is a big town; one can hide without confining oneself too closely. While she was running around with Bernardo and François, I was the humblest mole at Hanna-Barbera. I had no intention of embarrassing her by leaning over her table at Ma Maison to remind her of old times. In any case, I could not have got into Ma Maison, or afforded it even if I could have. I lived in the Valley. People in Beverly Hills speak of the Valley as if you have to have a passport to go to it. From my two-room apartment in the Toluca Cabana I could see the Hollywood hills, where Jill lived. I knew the road she lived on, but I never drove on it. I avoided her house, the hills, all of it. I lived in the Valley and read about Hollywood in the trades.
The years passed and I read less and less about Jill; for one thing, I couldn’t always afford the trades. Once or twice a year I might pretend I was still going somewhere and splurge on a breakfast at the Sportsmen’s Lounge, complete with the trades, but by that time I was drifting down the Valley; down the Valley and then out of the Valley and down the state, headed for my eventual exile in Blythe. Not until the pilot for “Al and Sal” was in preproduction, and fame but a tick away, did I return to Greater Los Angeles. I was in the Warner’s commissary one day, having a bowl of chili, when I noticed a woman at the next table. The woman was Jill Peel. She was not actually crying, but she looked as if she’d feel better if she went on and cried.
“What’s a commissary?” T.R. asked.
“Just a lunchroom,” I said. “It’s where the studios feed their slaves.”
“What happened to her impeccable taste?” T.R. asked.
I ignored the question and went on with my story. Of course, the minute I noticed Jill, I began to pretend that I hadn’t noticed her. I felt physically weak at the thought of trying to be part of Jill’s life again. There was no reason to suppose she wanted me to be part of her life again, of course; but the thought that she might was enough to take away my appetite for the renowned Warner Brothers chili.
What I was suffering from was the sheepman’s syndrome. As the sheepherder feels inferior to the cowboy, the television writer feels his peonage in comparison with a movie maker. Jill might not have been working much for the last decade, but she was still a movie maker; I was just a television writer.
But when the waitress brought Jill her check and she signed it, I panicked. I might be scared of her, but I couldn’t bear to let her just walk away either. She had once been my dearest friend.
I almost knocked my table down, getting up so I could rush over to her.
“Howdy,” I said.
“Congratulations,” Jill said. “I thought for a while you weren’t going to work up your nerve.”
“I’m surprised I did,” I admitted.
“Me, too, let’s have dessert.”
“Why do you look that way?” I asked. It was probably the most direct thing I’d asked a woman since she and I broke up. In my dealings with the female sex, what few there were, I had become as elaborately circumlocutional as Henry James. In general, I didn’t want anyone, women particularly, to figure out what I meant too quickly, if indeed I meant anything.
Such tactics wouldn’t cut it with Jill, though, any more than they would have with T.R. Every now and then, despite my caution, I seemed to end up with a blunt woman in my life.
“I look this way because Joe Percy died,” Jill said.
“Oh, dear,” I said. “When?”
“A month ago,” Jill said. “I was the one who found him.”
Joe Percy had been her oldest friend. Like myself he was a peon, a television writer. I had met him only once or twice, but I knew that he worshiped Jill, adored her, loved her deeply. Probably that’s ill-put: he loved the woman, but worshiped the talent. You’ll see that a lot in Hollywood: people with no talent or at best a half-talent in love with someone who possesses the real thing. Joe Percy had stood by Jill for as long as I could remember. In the years when all I saw of her was her picture in the trades, at various awards dinners and fetes, Joe Percy, a portly man, was usually her escort. Their relationship, from what I gathered, had never quite risen to passion, but it had produced a rare devotion. It was hard to imagine Jill without Joe Percy’s devotion, yet there she sat, alone.
“He died sitting in his chair,” Jill said. “I got back from Europe the night before and was too tired to go see him. Now I wish I had.”
Only the day before, someone in the studio had told me they thought Jill had just directed a movie in Europe—the first inkling I had that she was working again.
“Did you make a picture?” I as
ked.
“I made a mess,” she said.
We ordered some pie and stared at one another warily while we poked at it. I guess we were both wondering if the embers of our interesting friendship still had enough glow to be worth working on. The ashes of a decade and a half were piled on top of them, and neither of us had that easy a touch with friendship.
“If it didn’t work out the first time, why would it work out the second time?” T.R. asked.
Before I could answer, Jesse and Bo arrived at the door and looked in. They stared for a moment, picked up negative vibes from T.R., and went away.
“The first time, we were trying to be in love,” I reminded my daughter. “This time we’d have both settled for someone to have a meal and a chat with now and then.”
“I think you still wanted to fuck her,” T.R. said. “Who wants to just sit around eating pie?”
“I wish you weren’t so mad at me,” I said.
“I don’t think you ever tell the truth,” she said. “Everything you say sounds wrong, so no wonder I’m mad. I guess it’s your business if you want to spend your life eatin’ pie with horrible women, but it makes me fuckin’ mad.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Just does,” T.R. said, shrugging. “I ain’t got impeccable taste, like all your girlfriends. I ain’t got an impeccable brain, either. I ain’t never even had a good job.”
I gave up. I felt as if I were being squashed between the pains, the pain of thinking about Jill and the pain of T.R.’s bitter anger. Probably I deserved both pains, but it didn’t make it any more pleasant to feel squashed.
“Oh, go on,” T.R. said. “I give up.”
“Give up?” I said. “Give up what? I’m just telling you about what happened to an old friend. Why do you need to give up?”
She shrugged again. “All you do is talk to women,” she said. “You ought to understand why I give up.”