“Is your security gate supposed to work that way?” Tony asked, approaching the couches. He then noticed, buried in one of them, a smallish woman with a sharp chin, a long thin nose, and small clever eyes accented by arching sarcastic eyebrows, smoking a long thin cigar.
“It’s there to encourage burglars and discourage guests,” the stranger said.
Maureen laughed. “You’re too clever,” she answered the woman. “It’s broken, darling,” she said to Tony, draping an arm over the back of the couch, reaching for his hand. He took it and she pulled him toward her. He almost flipped over the couch. She kissed him (her breath smelled of wine; there was an open bottle on the glass coffee table) on the lips. “You look marvelous.”
“Malibu tan,” said the small lady, putting her cigar gently onto an ashtray.
“This is my dear friend Andrea Warren.” Maureen squeezed Tony’s face. “My beautiful brilliant boy.”
“Hello,” Andrea said in a deep voice. Everything she said seemed sly and sarcastic.
“Hi,” Tony said. He hated all his mother’s friends on sight. Experience had taught him they were invariably flatterers.
“Do you remember Andrea?” Maureen asked.
“Of course he doesn’t,” she said. He looked at her closely. Her pageboy haircut and smooth skin had fooled him: though at first glance she looked ten years younger, the graying streaks and crow’s-feet betrayed that she was his mother’s age. “He was a baby.”
“We lived through the dark ages together out here before you were born and—”
“He couldn’t have been more than two or three,” Andrea said to Maureen.
“My dear, that whole decade is a fog to me.” She drank from her glass. “Everything is a fog. When I glance at the news and see Ronald Reagan, part of me thinks: ‘Is he still working?’ ”
“No!” Andrea snapped. “He’s just renting the White House to take naps.”
“I bet it is a good place to nap,” Maureen said. She patted the couch. “Jump in.”
Tony smiled. “I practically have to.”
“Kyoto!” Maureen yelled. “Bring a glass for my son!”
They sat while the sun went down, drinking and talking. Tony felt drunk after only a few glasses, but soon that passed, and it seemed no amount of alcohol could influence the languid sense that time was passing very slowly, if at all, in the mountainous couches. Food was never mentioned, although he had been invited to dinner. With the second bottle of wine, cheese and crackers appeared, but only Tony partook. Maureen and Andrea seemed content to merely drink and smoke. They had him talk about living and working with Garth — he made the obvious jokes about a star’s egomania. “Oh, we actors are terrible!” his mother would comment periodically, more, Tony thought, to imply that she wasn’t that way than to acknowledge that she was. Andrea, he found out, had been the wife of a blacklisted writer who died in the sixties from a heart attack (“from a condition Joe McCarthy gave him,” Maureen said; “from booze and red meat,” Andrea answered), and had turned to producing herself. “She’s a great success,” Maureen commented. “She did The Last Dinosaurs.” Namely a TV movie about nuclear war ending all human life. “We sit and talk,” Maureen went on. “Talk and sit. About the old days. Right?”
Andrea raised her glass, her mouth twisted in a smile of celebration and a frown of regret.
“Before we knew the world was full of bastards,” Maureen concluded. There was a heavy pause. The moment of silence for all the wounded of the blacklist. Tony had long ago named it for himself. She looked at him coldly. “Like your father,” she said.
“Maureen,” Andrea said sadly, the way one might react to a hopelessly spoiled child: scolding having given way to a perfunctory acknowledgment.
“Don’t count on him to help you out.” Maureen went on. “If you agreed to go back to work on this script because you assume Daddy, being the big cheese at International, will give it a go, you’re sadly mistaken.”
“I don’t count on him,” Tony said, looking away from her: everything else seemed to blur, however, until he returned to focus on her face. I’m very drunk, he realized.
“Bullshit, you don’t. You should have stuck to writing plays. Not let them get their filthy hands on your art.”
“Now, now,” Andrea interrupted. “The only people who haven’t sold out are the ones who haven’t been asked.”
“That’s not true! You didn’t sell out,” Maureen said.
“I had nothing to sell out,” Andrea answered.
“What about you, Mom?” Tony said, unable to restrain his anger. “What the hell are you doing in I Love Lucy II?”
“That’s not selling out, honey,” Maureen answered, saying “honey” as though it was an obscene word. “That’s staying employed.”
“Well, that goes for me too, Mom. I haven’t turned down Broadway — they turned me down.”
“You didn’t try very hard,” she answered, looking lofty, though her consonants had become soft from drink. “You quit after three plays at the age of thirty.”
“Let’s go out for dinner,” Andrea said casually.
“And now,” Maureen concluded, closing her case, “you’re counting on Daddy to hand success to you like a Christmas present.”
Tony held his breath: he teetered on the edge of his rage, frightened by its limitless horizon.
“I’m sorry, darling,” Maureen added, implying not apology but pride. “I can’t stop myself from telling the truth. I have no tact. It’s my curse. And my blessing.”
“Fuck you, Mom,” Tony answered. The sentence was complete, said with plenty of clarity and gusto, unhurried by fear, enunciated with conviction. “I’m sorry there’s no McCarthy for me to blame my failures on. He’s a convenient partner for you — I wish I had one.” He felt quite triumphant with this construction of his retaliation. Glancing at Andrea to measure her shock, he saw instead a sympathetic face utterly unlike her look up till then.
Maureen blinked at him. The liquor seemed to have just hit her. She put both hands down, steadying herself on the couch. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“You know damn well what it means.” Tony thrust the words at her. She had hurt him all her life: he meant to give it back. But Andrea’s sorrowful eyes worried him.
“I see,” Maureen concluded. She tried to stand, but lost her balance halfway up and sagged back. “You think my career wouldn’t have been any different.”
“If you were so goddamn committed to your art, what the hell were you doing here in the first place? You came out here before the McCarthy—”
“I came out here because of your father!” Her great voice lost its resonance. She was squawking from her throat, like an ordinary person in pain, and her face was squeezed from repressed tears, unlike the graceful slow flow that she could release on cue for the final close-up.
“Oh come on,” Andrea said, trying to be light, but almost yelling. “We all came out here for the weather — let’s admit it.”
“Even then he thought nothing of sacrificing anything for his career! You should have seen him, wooing me to do it!” She laughed — a mad stage laugh that almost dissolved into tears. “Said it would help me. Guaranteed stardom!” She had been speaking to the past, faces and voices long gone but still alive for her. She returned to Tony: “And now he’s fooled you with the same lies. Maybe you’re right, Tony. Maybe I would have cracked up anyway.” She brushed her graying hair off one ear, a trademark maneuver from her TV show. “Lord knows I was always fragile. And maybe you’re really my son: vain, facile, and in the end, weak. Too goddamned weak to ever really be anything but a mass of regrets.” She struck him with her eyes, glittering with clever anger. “Yes. Maybe this is just the town for you. Probably you didn’t give anything up. You never had it.”