“You should have made provision,” she told him. “You should have lived like other people.”
“I always thought I could deliver. You know. Eventually.”
“When we do our Lear,” she told him, “and I’m your Fool, you’ll deliver.”
“I wasn’t bad, you know,” Walker said. “I was all right.”
She took his hands in hers. He gently disengaged and kissed her again.
“If I’m the Fool,” she told him when they caught their breath, “I’ve got to be Cordelia. They’re the same.”
“Yes,” Walker said.
“But I’m too old.”
“You aren’t,” Walker told her. “Anyway, I think it’s as much a question of weight.”
“That is what they say. Isn’t it, Gordon?”
“Yes, it is. Absolutely true.”
She let him pick her up, clasping her hands around his neck. She was not at all hard to lift, thinner than he had ever seen her and as quick.
“That’s the way they do it at the ice show,” she told him. “Did I tell you, Gordon, about when I was with the ice show?”
“Of course,” Walker said. “Of course you did.” He walked toward the bed carrying her.
“Howl!” she half cried. Clinging, she looked up at him. “Howl,” she whispered. “Howl.”
He swung her gently around once.
“See,” she said. “I can be a light Cordelia. And I can be a shy Cordelia. Warlike, on-the-march Cordelia.” She let go her grip on the back of his neck and sank down across his outstretched arms with a sigh. “And I can be a dead Cordelia.”
He placed her on the bed and sat down beside her. When they were both naked he rolled over to face her and found himself beside dead Cordelia.
“Hey,” he said. “Come back.”
They made love over a daylight hour or so. Once she told him that she had joy in his arrival; her words, while their spell lasted, swept away his weariness and fear and anger. Later they slept awhile.
When he awoke the sun was low in the sky. A blade of sunlight was edging across the bed where they had been, threatening the shadows in which Lu Anne lay sleeping.
That she had taken joy in his arrival, he thought, that she had spoken those words to him should be all that mattered. He wanted more than anything to stay in a time where her words and his love were all that mattered. When it began to slip away, he had a drink of mezcal and quietly went to his stash for more cocaine. He brought the drug and his works into the bathroom.
As he was chopping the crystalline powder, he happened to glance in the cabinet mirror. He saw the bathroom doorknob slowly turn. It was too late to hide anything; he steadied the stuff on the ledge in front of him so as not to spill it. In the next moment, as he expected, the door flew open and she was standing in the bathroom doorway, laughing.
“Aha,” she cried. “Gotcha.”
In a pink palazzo at the top of the hill, the Drogues and their womenfolk were whiling away the afternoon watching films in which people walked into the sea and disappeared forever. They had watched Bruce Dern in Coming Home, Joan Crawford in Humoresque, James Mason in the second A Star Is Born and Lee Verger in The Awakening. Now Fredric March and Janet Gaynor were on the out-sized screen before them. March stood clad in his bathrobe in the character of Norman Mayne.
“Hey,” he called to Janet Gaynor. “Mind if I take just one more look?”
Old Drogue picked up the remote-control panel and stopped the frame. His eyes were filled with tears.
“Listen to me,” he told the others, “this guy was the greatest screen actor of all time. That line — the emotion under it — controlled — played exactly to movie scale. There was never anyone greater.”
Joy McIntyre lay on some heaped cushions beside him, weeping unashamedly.
“Wellman was good,” the younger Drogue said.
“The vulnerability,” old Drogue said, “the gentleness, the class of the man. Never again a Fredric March. What a guy!” He let the film proceed and settled back with head on Joy’s bare belly. “You see what I mean, sweetheart?” the old man asked his young friend. But Joy was too overcome to reply.
“Look at the nostrils on Gaynor,” young Drogue said. “She acted with her nose.”
“Do I have to remind you that she started before sound?”
“I love it,” Patty Drogue said. “Before sound.”
“She was ultra-feminine,” old Drogue said.
The younger Drogue studied the images on the screen.
“Her face suggests a cunt,” he said.
The old man sighed.
“I don’t know why it does,” young Drogue said. “It just does.”
“You’re a guttersnipe,” Drogue senior said.
“Something about the woman’s face, Dad. It makes a crude but obvious reference to her genitals.”
“Some people are brought up in poverty,” the old man said, “and they become cultivated people. Others grow up spoiled rotten with luxury and become guttersnipes.”
“You look at her face,” young Drogue declared, “and you think of her pussy.” His brows were knotted in concentration. “Can that be the primal element in female sexual attraction? Can it explain Janet Gaynor?”
“People are surprised,” Drogue senior said quietly, “when they find out you can get sex education lectures at the morgue. They’re not in touch with the modern sensibility.”
Joy was glaring sullenly at young Drogue. The old man shifted his position, the better to fondle her.
“What does he mean,” Patty Drogue asked her husband, “sex education lectures at the morgue?”
“In San Francisco,” young Drogue said absently. “The coroner explains about bondage. Pops got fixated on this.”
On the screen, Fredric March’s body double was wading toward the setting sun. This time it was Drogue junior who stopped the frame.
“This one was the best,” his father said smugly. “Of all the walk-into-the-ocean movies this one was it.”
“In the Mason and Judy Garland,” his son told him, “the Cukor version, the scene’s exactly the same. Frame for frame.”
“The scene is conditioned by what’s around it. The other one is a Judy Garland film. Entirely different thing.”
Young Drogue went pensive.
“Well,” he said, “with Judy Garland now, see, she …”
“Stop,” his father said sternly. “I don’t want to hear it. Whatever idiotic obscenities you were about to utter — keep them to yourself. I don’t want to hear your sexual theories about Judy Garland. I want to go to my grave without hearing them.”
“Some of us want to remember Judy the way she was,” Joy McIntyre said primly.
“Who the fuck asked you?” young Drogue inquired.
Old Drogue kissed Joy on the thigh to soothe her.
“Ours is the best,” the young director declared. “We took a great risk to honor the author’s intentions. We had to reinvent a virtual chestnut because it was in the book.”
“You’re lucky you had a strong script,” his father told him.
They watched Norman Mayne’s funeral and the end of the film.
“There was another Cukor version, right?” young Drogue asked. “Before Wellman’s. It had a walk to the water, didn’t it?”
“There was What Price Hollywood? by Cukor. It’s a similar plot but it doesn’t have anyone in the water.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely certain,” the old man said.
The chimes of the main door sounded. Patty rose to her feet and lifted the drawn shutters to peer out.
“Tell them to fuck off,” said Drogue minor.