“I give up. Who am I?”
“It so happens I own a nice little piece of Take Five Productions, sweetie. And some of their nice letterhead. We do daytime game shows. So let’s go to the darling secretary’s office and compose a letter.”
Mr. Peter Kesner
President, Major Productions On location
Rosedale Station, Iowa
Dear Peter,
This will introduce Travis McGee, one of the consultants on our new and exciting project for prime-time television, tentatively titled THE REAL STUFF.
As you may or may not know, I have an ownership interest in Take Five Productions, and I have had the privilege of being in on the planning phase of this new program scheduled for next fall on ABC.
It is our intent-and I know you will keep this confidential-to go behind the scenes of the entertainment industry, not only in America but around the world:
From backstage ballet to the back lot of the carnival, to big band rehearsals, to animal training, to moviemaking. We will go for action and pictorial values, and we have no intention of skimping on the budget. Some very excited sponsors are waiting in the wings to see what we come up with as a pilot for the show.
In discussions here, it occurred to us that the picture you are making, about hot-air balloons and the people who fly in them, out there in the lovely springtime in the heartland of America, might make a very vivid episode in our projected series THE REAL STUFF.
I hope I am not imposing in asking you to give Mr. McGee the run of the sets and to answer his questions. I am certain he will be considerate. Should we want to use clips from your rushes, I can assure you the compensation will not disappoint you.
I wish you all manner of luck with your picture. And please say hi to darling Josie for me.
Affectionately,
Lysa Dean
She read through it again and signed Lee with a flourish, a swooping curlicue thing that went back under her name and crossed itself in a figure eight stretched out on its side.
“Such utter crap!” she said. “But you know, it is just ridiculous enough to appeal to that freak. Especially the hint about money. Can you carry it off, do you think?”
“Provided you tell me the kind of questions I should be asking.”
She did not hear me. She was staring into the middle distance. Finally she said, “You know, it really might make a program. I’m going to take it up with Sam.”
Thirteen
I GOT into Des Moines late on Monday night, stayed over in a motel near the airport, and drove to Rosedale Station on Tuesday morning, the twentyeighth of April. I drove through soft gray rain, the wipers thudding back and forth in slow steady rhythm. The flat fields and the hedgerows and the ditches beyond the shoulder of the highway were green, the bright new green of springtime.
My road atlas said that Rosedale Station had 2,812 people. It had a railroad track, grain elevators, a central school, a dozen churches, a dozen gas stations, a new downtown shopping mall, a couple of fast food outlets, a lot of white houses and big trees, and a very few traffic lights.
I drove around in the rain until I came upon a brick and frame structure called THE ROSEDALE LODGE. FINE FOOD. It had its own gravel parking area to the right of the entrance. I pulled the rental Buick into a slot and trotted under the dripping trees, up onto the veranda, and into the front entrance hall.
There was a tall thin old lady behind the oak registration desk. I asked her if there was a vacancy. “You with that movie bunch?”
“I’m not with them. But I have some business to transact with them.”
“Then you’re with them, the way I see it. I’ve got a single. It’s fifty dollars a night. In advance. Food is extra.”
“Is Mr. Kesner staying here?”
“Yes.”
“Is he in now?”
“I wouldn’t know and I won’t ask.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong with the people around here. Do you want the room or don’t you?”
“I’ll take it for one night. Why are you being so rude?”
“Let’s say it’s catching.”
She slapped my key down: Room 39. I paid and signed in, using the Burbank address of Take Five Productions.
“Third floor, all the way to the back on the left,” she said.
“Would it be against your house rules to tell me Kesner’s room number?”
“Twenty-five and -six,” she said, and turned away.
“Pretty good room rate,” I said.
“When you people go back where you belong, it will come on back down to normal.”
“Welcome to Rosedale Station. Nice little town.”
“Used to be,” she said, and went into the switchboard alcove, pulled an old-fashioned plug, and let it snap down into its recess.
I took my duffelbag on up to 39. There was a big tree outside my single small window. Through the leaves I could see a neighboring lumberyard. My wallpaper was a design of crossed ropes and little old sailing ships, in brown, gray, and blue. My single bed was hammocked in the middle. The toilet and shower shared a three-by-six closet. The sink was in the bedroom, beside the shower-room door. There was an oval mirror over it. I had to stoop to look at myself. The backing was coming off, so that my image was fragmented. The spit-colored eyes looked back at me with more calm than I felt. I did not look like your ordinary consultant-type person. I looked more as if I worked with a sledge out in the sunshine, turning big rocks into little rocks. I took my shirt off and scratched my chest and thought about the tragicomic inconsistencies of the emotional life of McGee. A repressed libertine. A puritanical wastrel. A lot of names rolled around in my skull. Old ones: Puss and Glory and Pidge and Heidi and Skeeter and Cindy and Cathy. New ones: Gretel and Annie and Lysa.
Ah, the eternal compulsion to leap into a marvelous stew of boobs and butt, hungry lips and melting eyes, rolling hips and tangled hair. But I had to pause before the leap, like some kind of shy farm girl interrogating the traveling salesman after they have dug their nest in the side of a haystack: Wait, Walter! Is this for real?
Lysa was the peach which had hung long on the tree, gone from green to ripe to overripe, bursting with the juices that had that winelike tang of early fermentation. She had made all the moves she knew, and she knew a lot of moves. But I had bicycled around the ring, keeping her off with a long cautious left jab, avoiding the corners, slipping, rolling, tying her up. I had wanted her so badly I had felt as if I was carrying paving blocks around in the bottom of my belly. But of course it wasn’t for real, and it wasn’t forever. I had the sap’s record of spurning her once before, and apparently I was out to win the world title for sapistry.
And here I was on a rainy day in a sorry little room in a country hotel, a long long way from that lady of Sunday evening, that queen of the game shows who had wanted merely a jolly cluster of bangs in the night, topped off with steaks and a swim and a farewell bang for luck. But I had left her to the tireless throb of her Prelude 3 System and the technicolor stimulation of her blue movies.
Maybe what I was saying to myself by sidestepping a quantum bang was that I wanted but one lady at a time. Regardless of what Annie’s reaction would have been, it would not have been anything I would have wanted to tell her. That did not improve my image. I wanted the free ride and I wanted to be paid in my own coin-meaningfulness or sacrament, or some kind of spiritual dedication-something that would give Hefner the hiccups. What gave me pause was the thought that for a fellow of my hesitations, I had sure cut myself a wide swath through a wall of female flesh, dragging my canoe behind me. Cheap apologist is the phrase that comes to mind.
I put on a fresh shirt and went down the stairs and found rooms 25 and 26. I could hear murmurous voices in there, which stopped when I knocked. A tall, strong, dark-haired young girl with a glassy look in her wide eyes opened the door and said, “Yeh?” She was wearing a very faded purple T-shirt with a drawing of Miss Piggy on the front of it and, as near as I could judge, nothing else.