“Can I drive it?” Jimmy asked.
Tansi balked. “But you speed, Jimmy.”
He turned away, bored now. He lit a cigarette, blew smoke across the table, and Tansi reached into her purse for a cigarette. I watched the two of them smoking, and was momentarily enthralled: Jimmy’s careful, deliberate playing with the cigarette, the long Chesterfields moving and sliding as he inhaled, or said a few words. Tansi, however, worked at the cigarette, as though it required calculation. The thin shaft was unnecessary and a little irksome, but part of a picture she was setting up in the eyes of someone watching. One was total seamlessness; the other artifice; one, syncopated rhythm, the other, a pesky protuberance.
Jimmy offered me a cigarette. I debated taking one but finally shook my head. “Now and then, with a cocktail. At the end of a day’s work.”
“When I wake in the morning,” Jimmy said, “I usually find I already have one in my mouth.”
“I find it relaxes me,” Tansi volunteered, and Mercy and I both started to laugh.
Mercy tapped her on the wrist. “Tansi, it actually seems to make you a bundle of nerves.”
But Tansi was in a good mood now. “You know, I learned to smoke from Bette Davis movies. You know how she leans in to light cigarettes, bringing the cigarette to the match?”
“Is that what you were doing?” I asked, smiling. “I thought you were trying to set yourself on fire.”
Jimmy drank wine spritzers, finished the first one in a couple of gulps, and immediately signaled for another. I sipped my martini, very acceptable-and picked at an antipasto. Suddenly Jimmy stood up, stopping the conversation. Then he slumped back down, dug into the pocket of his jeans and extracted a piece of paper, which he tossed, carelessly, onto the table. It lay there, crumpled, like a wasted napkin; but, I noted, it held all of our eyes; some unearthed runic tablet, magical now, and powerful.
“The new letter,” Jimmy said.
I reached for it, but Jimmy put his hand on it. My fingers collided with his. “What Jack Warner didn’t want you to know, Miss Edna, is that a girl I dated while we were on location in hellish Marfa, Texas, has sent me this letter and one before it, claiming I’m the daddy of her unborn bastard baby.” He waited, watching me. Tansi made a gargling sound, throaty and harsh. But Jimmy never looked at her.
I stared. “And, I gather, you’re not?”
Jimmy howled, stretched out his arms and threw back his head. “You’re something else, Miss Edna.”
I was frowning. “I’m serious.”
“No, it ain’t true. I swear. And she’s crazy.”
“Just what does she want?”
Mercy spoke up. “It’s hard to say. In the first letter she said she wants marriage, that Jimmy be a real husband and father, as he’s supposed to, but she ends by saying she wants money so she can go away. Two different messages.”
“And in this new one she hints she’ll tell the world my dark secrets to that rag Confidential and ruin my career.”
Tansi was rattled. “Good God. That’s what Mr. Warner is afraid of.”
Mercy turned to me. “Jimmy gave Warner the first letter…”
“My mistake! I never learn.”
“You had to. You had to,” Tansi said.
Jimmy ignored her. “Carisa’s just plain crazy.”
“Warner is afraid any negative publicity will hurt the movie,” Mercy noted. “Maybe even sink it. America in these blacklist Commie days is not too forgiving of Hollywood and its sins. Careers lost, lives ruined.”
Jimmy stretched out his arms again. “I’m innocent,” he said, staring at the ceiling, looking bored.
I grunted. “So are those sad souls condemned by Senator McCarthy, now begging for jobs from friends who turn their backs on them.”
Mercy spoke softly, “I really thought it would go away, Edna. A stupid, desperate girl who’s misguided. Talked to by the studio. But now,” she turned to Jimmy, “a second letter.”
“This one is plain crazy, folks. My deep dark secrets. ‘You think you’re a big movie star now.’ That sort of thing. ‘I’ll take care of that. Marry me. You promised.’”
Tansi was surprisingly blunt. “Well, did you promise her?”
Jimmy shook his head. “I never promise women things.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He finished his drink, smacked his lips, and signaled the waiter for another. I didn’t like this. I’d been sipping my cocktail slowly.
I waited a moment. “Tell me, do you have dark secrets she can tell the world, Jimmy?”
Jimmy closed his eyes for a second. “We all have dark secrets we don’t want the world to have.”
I pontificated. “I don’t.”
Jimmy narrowed his eyes. “You’re a downright fibber, Miss Edna.”
I drew in my breath. I didn’t like this. This young man was hard to read. Talented, maybe-probably. But foolish, impetuous, foolhardy. Like most young men, a blunderer, if not a downright bounder.
He seemed to read my mind. “I’m not a cad.”
“Just what happened in Marfa?” I asked. Giant was my goldmine. Visions of studio hesitation, delayed openings, audience boycotts, a callow but censorious press, nasty accusation, deadly scandal. My mind reeled.
Mercy began, “There was nothing to do in Marfa. For six long, long weeks. Nothing. Except for stars like Jimmy and Rock and Liz, who lived in houses, we stayed in the one hotel, the Presidio, three or four to a room, while Jimmy shot jackrabbits at night, riding in a Jeep out over the white buffalo grass.”
Jimmy didn’t seem to be listening. He spoke over her words. “Mercy came down with sun poisoning.”
“Jimmy was the ringleader of a bunch of young people, like his friend Tommy and some other bit players, including Carisa. They hung out at the Old Borunda Cafe on San Antonio Street and drank Lone Star beer…”
“And died from the heat,” Tansi added.
Mercy kept going. “But Jimmy started seeing Carisa Krausse who, despite her name, played a Mexican girl in the film. I was surprised to see her there because, well, I’d worked with her before in All the King’s Men, and no one liked her. Something was wrong with her. She’d become peculiar, quirky, talked too much, accused.”
“And no one warned me,” Jimmy said.
“Anyway, her behavior became so erratic and unprofessional, a malingerer, that Stevens fired her, shipped her back to L.A., and when we all got back here, she wrote that first letter.”
“And now a second,” Jimmy said, shaking his head.
“And this is the news Jack Warner wants me shielded from?”
Jimmy grinned. “Everybody, well…ah…is scared of you.”
“So what’s the answer?”
I noticed, sadly, that Jimmy was tipsy, though it was easy to miss, given his slurred, inarticulate speech, half-spoken sentences, grunting, and his slouching. I caught Mercy’s eye, and then turned to Tansi, who looked bothered, casting sidelong glances at Jimmy, watching. Eyes half shut, lips drawn into a drunkard’s bemused smirk, Jimmy seemed ready to fall asleep. Good Lord, I thought, this is like a rehearsal for the final scene of Giant, with Jett Rink collapsing onto the banquet table in a drunken stupor. The inevitable final act of a story that began when a lonely boy fell in love with another man’s wife.
My question hung in the air.
“Madama can help.” He raised his glass to her.
But Mercy shook her head. “Just because I met Carisa at an earlier shoot-we actually rehearsed together one day-Jimmy thinks I can talk sense to her, make her see how…” She trailed off, shrugged her shoulders, punctuating the moment with her deep sigh. “You can’t talk to an irrational woman, Jimmy. She has problems…”
He cocked his head to the side. “Come on, Madama. You can talk some sense into her. People like you.”