She asked me if I had a business card, and I did, an old one from New York. I borrowed a pen from the sales counter, crossed out my New York information, wrote in Jack, and circled my cell phone number.
“You might not feel like calling,” I said, and she asked for a second card, and she wrote her phone number on the back of that and handed it to me.
“I already have your number,” I said.
“Now,” she said, “we both have no excuses.”
“So,” I said, “I guess that’s it,” meaning “I guess our conversation is over.” Although I didn’t want it to be over, I didn’t feel I could keep up the façade I’d put in place. I was afraid that who I was would eventually appear and that I’d say something or do something to ruin the rapport we’d started to establish.
So I shook her hand. And I noticed, when I did, that she had a good solid grip. When she walked away, I was still feeling the sensation of that grip. I pretended to be looking for a book, but I turned around in time to see her walking past the glass windows of the store.
And then I drove back to the Metropole.
I parked on the street, walked into the lobby, and to the right of the registration desk people were sitting around the television set, watching a movie. It was Sunset Boulevard. I stood by the wall, watching one of the old familiar scenes, and then I got my key and went up to my room. I turned on my radio, lay back on my thin mattress, and pulled out the card she’d given me. I was listening to the news about the current war, looking at the way she’d written her name on the card, reading the name on the card, over and over.
Before the actual outbreak of the Second World War a number of people in Europe had felt the erosion of freedom, and the threat of that erosion. A number of them came to Los Angeles, including Billy Wilder, who, in 1950, made Sunset Boulevard. In the story, William Holden plays a scriptwriter living in Los Angeles. In an early scene he’s sitting on his bed, typing on an old Underwood typewriter, and because his scripts haven’t been selling, when he hears his doorbell ring, he knows what’s happening. The lending company, in the form of two central-casting tough guys, has come to take his car, and as he says, losing a car in Los Angeles is like getting your legs cut off. So he sneaks out of his apartment, down to a shoeshine parking lot where he gets in his old convertible. As he drives along Sunset Boulevard the henchmen, in their black sedan, chase him through parts of Los Angeles that, like a kind of memento mori, are still topographically recognizable. At a certain point, he feels his tire blow, and he makes a sharp turn into a driveway that leads to an old, seemingly abandoned mansion. We see the black sedan drive past the entrance, and the soundtrack, which was frantic before, now changes to something more adagio. William Holden can relax now, and when he does he notices an empty swimming pool. He’s standing near this pool when a voice calls out to him to come upstairs. The voice is the voice of Gloria Swanson, a silent-era movie star, who at that moment is conducting an elegant funeral for a pet monkey. She thinks William Holden is the monkey undertaker, and somehow, the way Holden plays it, it doesn’t seem that strange. His character is average and weak, but still morally responsible. He happens to be down on his luck, and by down on his luck I don’t mean that the henchmen were going to kill him; his situation is only partially about the threat. Mainly it’s about the seduction proffered to remedy that threat. Holden finds, in that faded mansion, a kind of utopia. It’s handy because he needs a place to stay, and so he stays a few days, and a few days turn into a few weeks, and after a while he and Gloria Swanson begin to play the parts of people being in love.
Jane and I weren’t in love exactly, but I could imagine the possibility. That’s why I went to Scott’s office, in what he called the Old Bank of America Building on Ivar. He was going to become Steve Martin and I was going to see how he did it.
He’d warned me the office was small, and it was, a corner room on the ninth floor with windows that looked out over Hollywood Boulevard and the flat expanse of city beyond it. Against one wall there was a metal clothes rack, and against the other wall was a long folding table. A small mirror was facing the single chair, and tucked into the frame of the mirror was a photograph of Steve Martin taken at some award ceremony.
“I would’ve thought you’d have more pictures,” I said.
He was sitting at the desk, looking at me in the mirror.
“To inspire you.”
“I like to keep it simple,” he said, adding that his Steve was more a sketch than a painting.
He was preparing for an appearance at an Orange County car dealership, and I was watching his transformation. I watched him trim his white hair with a small pair of scissors. I watched him apply foundation makeup to cover the rough patches on his skin. He used the bathroom down the hall to brush his teeth. And because Steve Martin was nothing if not a sharp dresser, Scott had several suits hanging on his rack. He chose a gray one, then slipped out of his pants, and when he got the suit on, and got the tie tied, it seemed as if the person inside the suit was someone who was happy.
“It doesn’t seem that hard,” I said, and he grinned his grin.
When I asked him why he didn’t change his clothes in his house, he said that he didn’t want to confuse who he was with who he was trying to become. And when he said the word become, although I noticed the change in his voice and the change in his posture, he was talking about more than physical resemblance.
“The job is to make people happy,” he said, and again he used the term being Steve. “When I’m being Steve,” he said, “I have to forget about myself.”
I thought I knew what he meant because every so often I forget about who I am. Usually, when I do, I like it, and as I watched Scott, or Steve, whoever it was, as I saw the transformation in him, I wanted to learn a little bit about how that transformation happens. With Jane, at the bookstore, I felt something, and I asked him about his posture.
He tilted his hips slightly. “Can you do that?”
I tried moving my hips.
“Pretend you have a tail,” he said, “and you’re trying to get the tail between your legs.”
I tried to do what he was showing me, and he must’ve seen my interest because he suggested I try on one of his suitcoats. He picked one out and handed it to me. And when I got it on, I thought maybe he would want to put some whitening agent in my hair, but he didn’t bother with hair color or makeup. He started to show me what to do. He said the important thing was the walk. He showed me an easy, beginner-level version of the Steve Martin walk.
At first I swung my arms in a goofily exaggerated way, and he told me not to try so hard. He told me I already had some Steve in me and. . “There,” he said. “You’re beginning to get it.”
And it was strange. Although I knew I looked nothing like Steve Martin, as I paced back and forth, I couldn’t help smiling, and it felt like the smile Steve Martin would smile. With the suitcoat and the walk and the role model in front of me, I was beginning to feel, slightly, like dancing.
“See what I mean?” he said.
He had a Steve Martin twinkle in his eyes, and I think there was probably a twinkle in my eyes too, and looking into his eyes, I would have to say I liked him. And I did see what he meant.