“Ask her what she’s wearing.”
I was pretty sure she could hear what Alan was “whispering.”
“Ask her if she’s getting hot and bothered.”
“Hot and bothered?” I asked Betty if she liked the water.
She smiled, said something about the water’s buoyancy, and floated up a little higher, her foot rising up into the bubbles between us.
“Just say, ‘You turn me on.’ ”
“You turn him on,” I told her.
“Not me,” he said.
“Not him.”
“You.”
“You’re turning on everyone,” I said to her. And that’s when Alan told me to keep talking. “Keep going,” he said, and he closed his eyes. I looked at Betty, who seemed to be enjoying herself, and Alan was enjoying himself, and I’m not saying I was even attracted to Betty, but the idea of doing something that wasn’t like me, what was so bad about that? What was so great about authenticity? I’d come to Los Angeles to be something different, and whatever failures and defeats, whatever unfulfilled expectations I was leaving back in New York, that was one thing, and this was an opportunity. To take a step forward. Whatever I would say to her, I knew she wasn’t going to mind, and I expected something to come out of my mouth.
Bubbling water was the only sound I heard.
And you could say I was stuck or paralyzed, or that I was in a knot. That’s what it seemed like at the time, and what I thought of as a way to get out of the knot was Steve Martin. He would be able to say something. He was just a guy, I told myself, not that different from me, but that difference, when I started to think about it, seemed huge, like a canyon, and I was standing on the precipice of that canyon, and I thought I was ready to jump. I was telling myself, Now. Speak, trying to will myself or trick myself into speaking, scanning my body for a desire to speak, for Steve’s desire or any desire, and there comes a point in the progression of desire when, if it’s not acted on, it disappears.
“Fuck it,” I said.
And I don’t know whether I said it like Steve or not, but that’s when Betty smiled again. She smiled, and I smiled at her, and Alan started whispering in my ear again. And so I said things. I knew she didn’t believe I was actually thinking the thoughts coming out of my mouth, but she seemed to pretend. And we talked, or rather Alan talked, through me, and she smiled, and that was how the conversation worked. In my ear and out my mouth until it became too obvious that whatever I might have been saying, Alan was the one who was thinking it. And feeling it. And since Betty didn’t move and I didn’t move, Alan couldn’t help himself. He floated back to where he had been sitting, next to Betty, his lips mumbling some palaver into her seemingly disinterested ear until, after a while, disinterest turned to interest, and that’s when I got up, got dressed, and drove back to my hotel.
There was no chair in my room at the Metropole, so I took off my shoes, sat on the bed, and read my book about the 1947 production of Galileo. According to the book, Laughton spent three years working with Brecht on the script, letting the seed of Galileo incubate in him and expand in him, and as opening night drew near, he was feeling the pressure of that expansion. Acting, for him, was a way to release that pressure, and he imbued the characters he played with life partly because it was his life he was portraying, and because it was usually an aspect of his life that was hidden from him, it often came out with a strange kind of intensity. Once, when asked why he acted, Laughton said, “Because people don’t know what they’re like and I think I can show them.” And although he was sometimes accused of overacting, if you knew him you trusted him, and trusted that the place he was taking you, no matter how strange, was probably recognizable.
The Buddhists have a concept called anatta, which translates roughly as no self, and as I understand it, after sitting on a cushion for a while — a long while — thoughts and feelings begin to have a clarity. They might come, but they also go, and since they’re the things that make us who we are, when they’re gone, it’s easier to change who we are. And it took a while, but at some point Laughton discovered that he could change who he was into Galileo by putting his hand in his pocket. It seemed strange, even to him, but actors need a trick, and during rehearsals, and even during breaks in rehearsals, he would walk around, his hand buried in his pocket. It didn’t matter about authenticity because he was an actor, and being an actor he was happy to empty himself and exchange his own thoughts and feelings for the thoughts and feelings of Charles Laughton. Someone described what he did as an “unconcealed fumbling with his scrotum.” And maybe he was playing with himself, or maybe he was playing Galileo, imagining Galileo’s surrender to the inquisition, imagining the self-loathing that followed. And maybe because he was playing with himself he was able to become someone else and see that yes, here was a great man, and the great man was probably scared.
I was getting to know Jane and to know we liked each other, and it was getting to be the time, if I had desire, to show it. We met that morning, in the parking lot of the La Brea Tar Pits. We arrived together, parked next to each other, and kissed when we stepped out into the air. We wandered over the wet grass to the largest of the black pits, sat on a bench, and drank hot chocolate from a thermos top. Jane was sitting there, looking into the black pond, and at the edge of it we could both see the tusks of animals raised in a sculptural reenactment of prehistoric struggling.
“They’re huge,” one of us said.
“They’re mammoth.”
“They’re woolly.”
“They’re made of cement.”
“Now. But at one time they were woolly mammoths.”
That was us, talking.
Because the sun was shining, we were happy to be walking from pit to pit, and we found ourselves leaning against a fence near another pit when a workman appeared. I asked him a general question about the composition of tar, and by way of an answer he invited us into an enclosure. It seemed almost illegal, with all the fences and equipment, but he’d probably worked the La Brea beat for a long time, and he led us through a chain-link gate to a large pit in the middle of some excavation. He pointed out the makeshift cement stairway that led down to the ooze where they’d actually been digging up fossilized remains. He left us alone, and we descended the seven or so steps, and it was warm down there, and oily, and the smell was sweet, like the odor of a railroad track.
We squatted on a large stone, looked into the black pool, and there was something that looked like a skeleton fragment stretching up through the dark viscosity in front of us.
“Is that a bone?” she said.
“It’s an animal bone.” And then, trying to say it more like Steve would say it, I said, “A dead animal bone.”
We’d read that the tar pits were discovered when Los Angeles was still farmland, and she said something about a tar pit catching a moment in the middle of life being lived. And preserving it. “Thousands of years ago,” she said, “animals were hunting and mating on this exact spot.”
I thought about the wife of King Minos of Crete, and while I was thinking it she stood up.
We walked back up the steps, and we were standing on the grass, breathing the regular air when she said, “Next time we should have a picnic.”
“What would you bring?” I said.
“A friend,” and she looked at me. That’s nice, I thought, and she laughed. And in the expansiveness of her laughter I felt included and encouraged, and I wanted to take whatever distance existed between us and make it disappear.