“I said to him—‘Mr. Drogue, I’m shocked. It’s my turn to be shocked now,’ I said.”
“It’s probably for the best. He can help you. I think you probably did the right thing. Careerwise.”
“I’m not talking about it,” Joy said. “I’m going to forget it ever happened.”
“I will too,” Walker said. “I mean, I’ll forget everything you told me.”
“What have I told you?” Joy demanded. “I haven’t told you anything.”
“Right.”
“Old Ryder,” she said, “he’s your pal, isn’t he?” Ryder was the photographer, Joy’s husband.
“I don’t see him much anymore.”
“We split up, you know. Love lost its luster for us.”
“I’m sorry,” Walker said.
“Boring, like.”
“That’s life, isn’t it?” Walker said. “I mean,” he said, “when it’s there it’s there. And when it’s not it’s not.”
“Oh yeah,” Joy said. “Well, we tried getting the old moonlight and roses back. No way.” She shook her head. “He used to get me into trouble like tonight,” she told Walker. “I mean, he put me forward like that. It must be second nature to me now.”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“Well, I’m not,” she told Walker. “I’m blaming him. He’s the one had me out doing that sleazy phornpone,” she said.
“Right,” Walker said.
He recalled that Ryder had coerced Joy into accepting a position as a lewd telephonist for a pack of Melrose Avenue fatsos who rejoiced in her cultured British accent. She had stayed with the job until the owner of the shop was murdered.
“Waste of time, that was,” Joy said.
“A waste of something.”
“See, we took a holiday up in Mendocino, Ryder and me did. Bloody rained. He was piss paranoid. Didn’t bloody speak. The television set was screwed. I spent the whole bloody time walking in the bloody rain.”
“It can be so pretty up there,” Walker said. “Are you sure you’re O.K.?”
“Yeah.” Joy shook her head, took a deep breath and looked at Walker once more as though she had discovered him that moment before her. “One thing,” she told him, “I saw two animals there. Two animals fighting on the beach.”
Walker brightened. “That must have been exciting,” he said. “What sort of animals?”
Joy sighed deeply. “I think they were winkles.”
“The choreographer at the Sands is dead!” Jack Best shrieked. One of the cooks had come out of the kitchen and was crossing herself. Axelrod and a waiter were struggling to get Best out the inner door. At the table where he had been sitting, Walker saw Lu Anne seated next to Dongan Lowndes.
“Well,” Joy said. “Another bloody night, eh, sport?”
“Right,” Walker said.
He walked into the bar, his heart beating faster. Once she seemed to look his way but her eyes never settled on him. He took the chair that Best had been sitting in.
“Hello, Gordon,” she said calmly.
Her casual greeting stung him like a blow.
“Hello, Lu Anne.”
“We’re having a wonderful time filming your script.”
“That’s great,” he said.
“We have quite a famous author down here to write a piece on us, Gordon. Mr. Dongan Lowndes. From New York Arts. Have you all met?”
“Yes,” Walker said. “We’ve met.”
“You know, Mr. Lowndes,” Lu Anne said, “there are whole passages from Naming of Parts that I can remember just by heart.”
“Lu Anne used to be the president of the Good Old Girls’ Good Old Book Club,” Walker told Lowndes.
He watched Lowndes’s slack mouth tighten. Walker’s hands were trembling and he kept them out of sight.
“You know,” Lowndes said, “a lot of times when Hollywood people tell you they like a book it turns out they’re referring to the studio synopsis.” He laughed rather loudly at his own observation.
“That’s not true of Lu Anne,” Walker assured him. “She’s a great reader.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Miss Verger. It’s just something I began to run into.”
“Was your book ever optioned?” Walker asked.
“Yes,” Lowndes said. “There was something up. I don’t know what became of it.”
“It would have been difficult to film,” Walker said.
“In those days I suppose I would have been thrilled to have it made. Now I realize that the world can get on quite well without a film version of that book.”
From where he sat it seemed to Walker that Lowndes had moved his chair very close to Lu Anne’s, that their bodies must be touching at some point and Lu Anne had made no move to draw away. She seemed to hang on his words.
“If we get into what the world can do without,” Walker said to Lowndes, “God knows where we’ll end.”
Lowndes smiled. His left hand was below the table; Walker could not escape the thought that he was fondling Lu Anne. Yet, he thought, it might all be pure paranoia. As for her, he had imagined every reaction to his arrival except the smiley indifference he was experiencing. He ordered another round of drinks.
“So,” he asked Lowndes when the drinks arrived, “how long have you been down?”
“Just a day,” Lowndes said. “I think.”
Lu Anne nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. A day.”
“Let me tell you a little about what I want to accomplish down here,” Lowndes told Walker. “You may find it interesting.”
Walker saw Lu Anne and Lowndes join hands behind their chairs.
“Why not?” he said to Dongan Lowndes. “Why not do that?”
“I really don’t think anyone’s ever written a good piece on the making of a film until after the fact.” Lowndes disengaged his hand from Lu Anne’s and went into his pocket for cigarillos. Walker declined; Lowndes lighted one for himself. “My thinking is — if I hang around here, see a little of it all going on — I can get an insight into the process. So I did a little boning up on who everybody was. Now I can watch them do their thing. Then I can analyze the final product in terms of what I’ve seen.”
Walker looked at Lu Anne to see if what the man was saying made sense to her. So far as he could tell it did and she seemed profoundly interested.
“I don’t really understand,” he told Lowndes. “That sounds very complicated and ambitious.” He tried to imitate their smug amiable demeanor. “It’s a nice place to spend a couple of weeks. I’m sure it’ll turn out fine.”
“You decline to take me seriously, Mr. Walker,” Lowndes said.
“I don’t get it, that’s all. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove.”
“I have all your scripts,” Lowndes told him. “Every one you ever wrote.”
Jon Axelrod, red and sweating, returned to the table and sat down wearily. “Holy shit,” he said. “Sorry.”
Walker stared across the table at Lowndes. The idea of this soft-spoken, pockmarked man poring over the hundreds and hundreds of scenes that he had written made him feel violated and ashamed. All those scripts, he thought — the record of petty arguments lost or won, half-assed stratagems and desperate compromises. A graph of meaningless motion like the tube-worm trails in a prehistoric seabed. Here and there some shining secret as withered and barren as a stone pearl in a fossil oyster.
He thought of the things written that he ought not to have written. They were like the things done that should not have been done. The things not written were worse.
“How’d you like them?”
Lowndes smiled.
“They’re really very good.”
“Gordo’s very good,” Axelrod said. “Ask anybody.” Axelrod was in the process of discovering an unwholesome stain on his sleeve. He touched his finger to the stain, brought it away, looked at his finger and excused himself again.
“Some things about your writing make me wonder,” Lowndes said.