But Liz had a kindness about her, a bittersweet gentility. I sensed a decent human being here. She smiled wistfully, her salutation. Two men and a woman-their faces dull as cardboard-rushed in, as though they’d misplaced a precious jewel and now had found it, and immediately closed in on her, but never touching, whispering about appointments and obligations. She stared at them, her chin set, then moved seamlessly out of the room. Her perfume lingered.
I shook my head. “I’m thinking about Liz Taylor.”
Mercy nodded. “A beautiful woman.”
“There are always too many people around her. She’s never alone.”
Mercy tapped the ladle against the steaming pot. “Alone she might be forced to face the glossy eight-by-ten photograph they’ve turned her into.”
“You know,” I said, “one afternoon I was passing by the commissary, and I saw Rock Hudson sitting by himself, alone at a table, hunched over some papers.”
“So?”
“He just sat there, this-this presence. All these people walked in, crew people, secretaries, best boys, worst boys, I don’t know. And no one approached him.”
“People don’t dare.”
“But why?” My voice was rising. “Over and over he looked up as folks neared, passed by, as though he were expecting someone. He’s one more Jimmy Dean, hungry for attention and recognition, but scared of it. Because…maybe because…he doesn’t quite know the rules he now has to play by. He looked so…so isolated there. He’d planted himself in the middle of the room, as conspicuous as a noonday sun, and he waited. He looked like a shy schoolboy waiting to be picked for sandlot baseball, but only if they made him the star player.” I paused. “You know, Mercy, they’re all up there on the screen and everyone embraces them, that frozen image, but then they sit in a cafeteria and begin to fall apart.”
Mercy laughed. “Good God, Edna.”
“This movie, my romantic story of Texas opulence and penury, has allowed them to avoid looking at themselves. One more chapter in avoiding the awful mirror. Here, in paradise, Jack Warner tells us that we shouldn’t remember Carisa or Lydia. And even dear Tansi.”
Mercy was silent a long time. “It’s just Hollywood.” Flat out. Final.
I nodded. “I was planning to convince Tansi to return to New York. Back there she was spirited, witty. The years in Hollywood made her high-strung, brittle, kowtowing to an ego-mad man like Jack Warner, who wields power like a fist in your face, or Jake Geyser, a toady who mimics his superiors. She lost her bearings here.”
Mercy sighed. “So you really think she did all those things to serve the company? She really believed she was saving Jimmy’s future?”
I shook my head. “No, not really. She told herself that. She did it out of some peculiar loneliness-some aloneness, maybe-that comes from living here among the cannibals. Mercy, she did it for her idea of love.”
“What will happen to her?”
“Well, I’ve had one very angry phone call from her mother. She’s quite the battalion of a woman, that one. She blames me. She’s already lined up an army of high-priced New York and L.A. lawyers-funded by her ex-husband, Tansi’s dipsomaniac father. His millions will save her. I can’t imagine she’ll ever do prison time. There’s so much money there, and power. Probation, perhaps. Petrified Tansi need have no fear. She’s already made bail, of course, and is nowhere to be found.”
“I thought it peculiar that the newspaper talked of Detective Cotton solving the crime, ‘following leads that culminated in the arrest,’ and so forth. That struck me as duplicitous, a cavalier dismissal of your work.”
“Septuagenarian spinsters, albeit with spunk and gumption, and a tiny withered Jewish lady at that, are not supposed to step into his bang-bang-you’re-dead world. But Detective Cotton did assume control when I called him that afternoon, with Tansi sitting with you just ten feet away. In tears. Both of you.”
“I go to sleep thinking of it. It haunts me, her shriveled, empty face.”
“You know, Detective Cotton sent a dozen roses to my hotel. That was a surprise. Of course, each night they droop a little more, shedding perfumed petals. When I fly out tomorrow, I expect the carpet will be covered with browning petals.”
“You’re really anxious to get back home?”
“I am and I’m not. Alaska looms before me like a desolate wasteland. I’ll be flying there again, stuck in snow drifts when it’s a teeth-chattering one-hundred degrees below zero.” I sighed. “L.A. will seem a paradise.”
“Come back to visit.”
“Of course. But I have to do Ice Palace.” I bit my lip. “I suppose it will be my last novel.”
Mercy looked at me sideways. “Edna, you probably said that back in the twenties when you finished Show Boat.”
I grinned. For a moment I imagined myself back in Alaska, my vision colored by these last days in California. I knew my heart beat differently now.
Mercy pointed to a stack of books on a side table, all wearing glossy dust jackets, a tower of neatly stacked volumes. “Thank you,” she said. Earlier I’d arrived with copies of my novels, and, a little sheepishly, had inscribed them to Mercy, each one with a different inscription. In Giant I’d written, “You did not fail him.” That’s all I wrote, and Mercy smiled.
“Did you hear from Jimmy?”
“No,” I said. “They’re shooting every day now-the last scene. He couldn’t…”
“Still, he could have called you.”
“There was a small drawing left in my hotel mailbox. It’s a picture of a boy’s face, and it looks, I suppose, as he did as a young boy: bony, intelligent face, the eyes, the lips-embryonic idol, that one. A boy in what looks like a confirmation suit, with slightly mischievous eyes. He signed it ‘Jim (Brando Clift) Dean.’ It’s beautifully innocent and simple. I’m happy to have it.” I thought of Rock and Liz. “What will happen to these young, beautiful people?” I said, suddenly. I looked into Mercy’s face. “And you? Out here, among the cannibals.”
“Me, I hide away, look at it all cynically, and probably will dissolve into booze and multiple marriages.”
“Don’t say that,” I warned.
“We pay a price. We’re a patchwork quilt of publicity shoots. Actors have a short shelf life.”
“A lot of this scares me to death. You know, my novels have romantic characters, Mercy. Beautiful, willful women and gorgeous, though horribly flawed, men. But they’re…creations. Here, they use real people who seem unaware that, well…the inevitable arc of rise-and-fall is built into this dreadful illusion.”
“What’s going to happen to him?” Mercy asked. “Could he end up lounging with other stars at the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool, waiting to be recognized?”
“I don’t want to think about that. It scares me even worse.”
“I’ll never understand him.”
I stood up, walked to the window. The rain was stopping. I saw a pale blue sky; the eucalyptus and lemon trees gleamed and shimmered in the yard’s sudden light. “He’s all that we think he is. Nothing more.”
“Nothing more?”
I turned and faced her: “But that’s enough.”
Epilogue
I wake with a start, glance at the clock on the nightstand. Is it really five in the morning? An absurd hour to be startled awake, neither late night nor hazy morning; a limbo hour, the hour of desperate souls caught between lives. It’s the new draperies, I decide, hung poorly, perhaps, so that watery early morning light, creeping over the Manhattan skyline, filters into the dim room.