"Everybody loves you, Tom," she said. "Don't they?"
How sad and lonely that made me feel. Out of selfishness and need I grieved for myself. It passed.
"Yes, I'm sure everyone does. It's great."
"Do I count?" she asked.
Yes and no. But of course I didn't say that. In the twisted light I saw her out there sauntering toward a brass horizon and I wanted to follow after. But I was not so foolish nor had I the generosity of spirit. I was running out of heart.
"You more than anyone, Lucy," I said. "Only you, really."
That's how I remember it. As we drove on Lucy began to complain about a letter she said I'd written.
"You used these exquisite phrases. Avoiding the nitty-gritty. All fancy dancing."
"I don't do that. I don't know what letter you mean. Come on—'exquisite phrases'?" I laughed at her.
A couple of miles later she informed me she had written the letter to herself. "In your style," she said.
"So," I asked her, "what were the phrases you liked?"
"I don't remember. I wanted to get it down. The way you are."
"Lucy, please don't write letters from me to yourself. I can do it."
"You never wrote me," she said, which I guess was partly the point. "Anyone can jump out of a phone."
Suddenly, but without apparent spite, she declared, "John's going to expand my part." She was talking about the now revived horror movie in which John had hired a live British actor to strangle her. However, on consideration she thought he might transform her into a surviving heroine. I said it was great but that it probably wouldn't be as much fun.
"You know," she said, "you don't get credit for being scared and dying. It doesn't count as acting. Anyway, I can live without fun."
"If you say so."
"John," she said, "wants to marry me." For some reason, at that point she put her hand on my knee and turned her face to me. "Seriously."
I wondered about that in the weeks following. Once she showed me a postcard of the Empire State Building he had sent her from New York. He had adorned it with embarrassing jokey scribbles about his erection. One day I took John to Musso's for lunch but he said not a word to me about her. Over our pasta I asked him if it was true that he was sparing Lucy's character in the thing forthcoming.
"Oh," he said, as though it were something that had slipped his mind. "Absolutely. Lucy's time has come."
I suspected that the lead would be the kind of supposed-to-be-feisty female lately appearing as part of the serious and adult wave. I knew Lucy would deliver that one all the way from Avenida Revolución.
"She can give a character some inner aspects," I told him.
"You're so right."
"Good actress," I suggested. "Great kid."
John went radiant, but he didn't look like a bridegroom to me. "You know it, Tom. Tops."
He didn't marry Lucy. Instead, when the funeral-baked meats had cooled he married Brion Pritchard's widow, Maerwyn. He didn't even promote Lucy to insipid ingénue. Halfway through the horror movie her character died like a trouper. In spite of my infatuation, I had to admit there were many great things one could do with Lucy, but marrying her was probably not one of them.
We went out a few times. She began to seem to me — for lack of a better word — unreal. I kept trying to get close to her again. At the time I was selling neither scripts nor story ideas. There were no calls. I might have tried for an acting gig; I was owed a few favors. I had no illusions about my talent, but I was cheap and willing, well spoken enough for walk-ons as a mad monk or warmongering general. I offered a Brooklyn Heights accent, which sounds not at all the way you think. But I had grown self-conscious and all the yoga in the world wasn't going to bring back my chops or my youthful arrogance. That was what I'd need in front of a camera. My main drawback as an actor had always been a tendency to perform from the neck up. I might have thrived in the great days of radio.
Eventually I got a job with a newspaper chain working as their "West Coast editor." It took up a lot of my time, and part of my work was resisting being transformed into a gossip columnist. I almost got fired for doing a piece for the New York Times Arts and Leisure section. The news chain paid a lot less than writing for the movies, but it paid regularly. I had plans to engineer a spread for Lucy, but nothing came along to hang it on.
Out of what seemed like nowhere, she took up with a friend of mine named Asa Maclure, pronounced Maclure, whom people called Ace. Ace was an actor and occasional writer (mostly of blaxploitation flix during the seventies) with whom I had liked to go out drinking and drugging and what we insensitively called wenching. Ace was a wild man. What inclined me to forgive him all was a telegram he had once sent to a director in Washington for whom he was going to act Othello: CANT WAIT TO GET MY HANDS AROUND THAT WHITE WOMANS THROAT.
Ace had just arrived back in L.A. from Africa, where he had portrayed a loyal askari who saved a blond white child from swart Moorish bandits in the Sahara. The child, supposed to be French, was from eastern Europe somewhere. Ace was unclear as to which country. She had gone on location with her mother along as chaperone. The mom was, as Ace put it, a babe. Ace was suave and beautiful, the kind of guy they would cast as Othello. In no time at all his romance, as they say, with Mrs. Vraniuk was the talk of every location poker game. Restless under the desert sky, Ace decided to shift his attention to young Miss Vraniuk. Consummation followed, producing some uneasiness since the kid was not yet twenty-one. Nor was she eighteen. Nor, it seemed, perhaps, was she fifteen. But it was in another country, another century, a different world. At the time, in the circumstances, it represented no more than a merry tale.
"This child was ageless, man," Ace told us. "She had the wiles of Eve."
If any images or other evidence of desert passion existed, no one worried much about it. Talk was cheap. And most American tabloids then did not even buy pictures.
Ace and Lucy became a prominent item, appearing in the very papers that now employed me. The stories were fueled by Ace's sudden trajectory toward stardom. Though she was blooming, grew more beautiful as she aged, Lucy was noticed only as Ace's companion.
It happened that one week the papers dispatched me with a photographer to do a story on kids in South Central who rode high-stakes bike races. The races ran on barrio streets, inviting the wagers of high-rolling meth barons and senior gangbangers. Lucy decided to come with me, and when I went down a second time she came along again. Both times she seemed a little hammered and could not be discouraged from flirting with a few speed-addled pistoleros. A local actually approached me with a warning that she was behaving unwisely. Driving back to Silver Lake, she said: "You and I are sleepwalking."
"How do you mean?" I asked her.
"We're unconscious. Living parallel lives. We never see each other."
I said I thought she was involved with Ace.
"I mean really see each other, Tommy. The way people can see each other."
"You're the one who's sleepwalking, Lucy."
"Oh," she said, "don't say that about me." She sounded as if she had been caught out, trapped in something like a lie. "That's frightening."
"That's what you said about both of us. I thought you were on to something."
Maybe she was confounded by her own inconsistency. More likely she never got there. She sat silent for a while. Then she said: "Don't you understand, Tommy? It's always you with me. Ever since Grauman's."