“Yes,” she said, sounding absurdly eager, “that’d be nice.”
“I’ll go up and get a bottle,” he said. His voice wavered as he said it, like an adolescent’s.
Lu Anne did not feel particularly like drinking liquor but it seemed important that there be something to take.
“Oh great, Skip,” she said. “Now, you remember the car we came in, huh? Well, you just go back to that car and get him to take you up the hill and you can get us a jug. Only carry it in something, will you, because I don’t want people to think we’re a couple of old drunks.”
“Right,” Lowndes said. “I’ll brown-bag it.”
“And when you’re up there,” she said as he started for the car, “you ask them if a Mr. Walker has arrived, O.K.?”
“Mr. Walker,” Lowndes repeated. “And a plain brown wrapper.”
Across the clearing, Lu Anne saw Jack Glenn, the actor playing Robert Lebrun, in conversation with Joe Ricutti. She went over to them. A few years before, she had heard an agent describe Glenn — a natural who could fence, juggle, swing from vines and play comedy — as too small to be big. Whenever she repeated the story she got her laugh and people said it was a voice from Vanished Hollywood. But the agent had not vanished and Jack Glenn, at five feet nine inches, worked irregularly. Someone had told her it was because he was fair-skinned; a fair-skinned actor had to be taller. It was a matter of semiotics, the person had said.
He turned to her approach. “Ah,” he said with his hand over his heart, “Les Douleurs d’amour.” He kissed her hand, correctly, with the appearance of a kiss. Glenn was nice-looking and bisexual but for whatever reason she had never been attracted to him. Perhaps because he was fair and short.
“I don’t suppose,” Lu Anne said, “that since we talked you’ve come into any … you know, into possession of …”
“What a coincidence that you should ask.”
“You have!” she exclaimed joyfully.
“No,” Jack Glenn said. “But I was just thinking about it myself. I was thinking of asking that guy.”
He pointed to a middle-aged Mexican in a safari jacket who was holding one of the trolley horses with a twitch, examining its leg. As he worked, he was humming “The Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St. Louis.
“Who is he?” she asked.
“The vet,” Glenn said.
“What?” she said.
“The vet,” Joe Ricutti told her. “For the horses. So they shouldn’t get sick.”
Lu Anne turned to watch him work.
“I never thought of Mexican locations as having vets.”
“I always thought they shot the horses,” Jack Glenn said archly. “Don’t they?”
“This is No Help City,” Lu Anne said. “I mean, it’s a very bad situation.”
“This unit doctor,” Glenn said, “you tell him you can’t sleep, he tells you how many gringos are locked up in Baja Norte. ‘One hundred twenty U.S. citizens in jail.’ That’s the only English sentence he knows. So I was just thinking, like hmm — there’s the vet. Maybe he has something nice for us.”
“Oh God,” Lu Anne cried in exasperation, “like horse tranques? How about an STP trip? Or some angel dust?”
“Get him to give you a shot,” Joe Ricutti said. “You’ll go off on the rail at Caliente and finish first at Del Mar.”
“Well,” Lu Anne said, “we’ll have to tough it out, won’t we? Everything will have a clear black line around it, like a death notice.”
Jack Glenn laughed. “You’re so weird, Lu Anne.”
“That’s why we’re all here,” she told him. “You included.”
“I don’t know how people can joke about drugs,” Glenn said in mock sadness. In fact, as Lu Anne well knew, Glenn was mainly indifferent to drugs. He was only trying to amuse. “We should get someone to score for us in L.A.,” he said. “Bring shit down with the dailies.”
“Maybe Joy got hold of some,” Lu Anne suggested.
Glenn shook his head.
“Well,” she said, “I’m going to lie down and die again.”
She went back across the field to her trailer and there was Lowndes, sitting on the three little metal steps with a brown bag beside him. He stood up and presented the bag.
“Got any ice?”
But of course she did not want Lowndes, only the liquor. Or something. She opened the trailer door, trying to think how she might get rid of him. He followed her into the trailer and closed the door behind them.
She had some weeks-old ice in the trailer. She smashed the tray repeatedly against the miniature sink to get the cubes free, brushing aside Lowndes’s gestures of assistance. There were two plastic glasses on her makeup table; she filled them with ice and whiskey and passed one to Lowndes.
“We’ll have to make this a quick one, Skip, O.K.? Because I’m not really through working, you see.” She could not keep her words from running together, so intensely did she want the drink and Lowndes out. “I just wanted something … you know, when I get out of the water to dry me out. Well,” she said, “I guess dry’s the wrong word, isn’t it? I just wanted something to keep me wet between takes, aha.”
He was a magazine writer, she reminded herself, an important one, and he was there to write about the picture. With fascinated horror, she watched his upper lip draw back to expose a line of unhealthy red gum. “Not,” she laughed gaily, “that I’m planning to play the scene loaded, because that’s not how I work. Hell no, why …” She broke off. The man in front of her seemed to grow more and more grotesque and she was no longer confident about the reality of what she was seeing. There was something familiar about him, familiar in a most unpleasant way. It might be that he reminded her of someone. Or it might be worse.
“It’s been a very long time since I had a drink,” Lowndes told her.
“Is that right?” she asked. “Well, here’s how.”
When they drank, Lowndes’s features puckered with distaste. His eyes watered.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said to Dongan Lowndes, “when I’m through this evening we’ll have a proper drink. We’ll set around and drink and talk. How’s that?”
“I thought it would be all gnomes and agents and flacks,” Lowndes said. “I’d love to see you later.” He finished what was in his glass in a swallow and turned pale. “Shall we have dinner?”
“Yes, yes,” Lu Anne said, standing up. “Dinner it is.”
She gave him the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree smile. He was a starfucker, she thought, a cheap starfucker who wanted to get her in bed and then brag to all his colleagues about it and then, without fear or favor, humiliate her before all of with-it, literate America. Not, she thought, that it hadn’t been done before.
“Yeah, that’s great,” Lu Anne told him. “After work.” She put a hand on his arm to shove him toward the door. Then she realized that she must not shove, so the hand on his arm was transformed into something like an affectionate gesture. She plucked an imaginary thread from his shirt. After work — it was just like waiting tables again, only they knew where you lived.
“Are you working late?”
“Sundown. After six.”
“Well,” Lowndes said, “I’ll be in the bar around seven-thirty. I’ll see you there.”
“Is he here?”
“Who?”
“Gordon. Gordon Walker.”
“Gosh, I’m sorry. I forgot to ask. He’s the screenwriter, isn’t he? Is he a friend of yours?”
“Yes. Yes, an old friend. Hey, thanks for the scotch,” she called as he went out. “Skip.”
He had brought a full bottle of Dewar’s. The only problem was that it was whiskey and it would smell up her breath and the trailer, so she would have to rinse her mouth and spray evil-smelling deodorants around.