She stuck her hands in her blazer pockets, and I wondered when she had stopped wearing the halter dress and the pink satin gloves.
“The secretary stands by him,” Heada said. “She picks up after him and gives him advice. She even helps him out with his romances, because she knows at the end of the movie he’ll finally notice her, he’ll realize he can’t get along without her, he’ll figure out Katharine Hepburn’s all wrong for him and the secretary’s the one he’s been in love with all along.” She looked up at me. “But this isn’t the movies, is it?” she said bleakly.
Her hair wasn’t platinum blonde anymore. It was light brown with highlights in it. “Heada,” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I already figured that out. It’s what comes of taking too much klieg.” She smiled. “In real life, Liz would have to get over Jimmy Stewart, settle for being friends. Audition for a new part. Joan Crawford maybe?”
I shook my head. “Rosalind Russell.”
“Well, Melanie Griffith anyway,” she said. “So, anyway, I leave this afternoon, and I just wanted to say good-bye and have you wish me luck.”
“You’ll be great,” I said. “You’ll own ILMGM in six months.” I kissed her on the cheek. “You know everything.”
“Yeah.”
She started out the door. “ ‘Here’s lookin’ at you, kid,’ ” she said.
I watched her down the hall, and then went back in the room, looking at the list Heada’d given me. There were more than thirty movies here. Closer to fifty. The ones near the bottom had notes after them: “Frame 14-1968, bottle on table,” and “Frame 102-166, reference to ale.”
I should feed the first twelve in, send them to Mayer to calm him down, but I didn’t. I sat on the bed, staring at the list. Next to Casablanca, she had written, “Hopeless.”
“Hi,” Heada said from the door. “It’s Tess Trueheart again,” and then stood there, looking uncomfortable.
“What is it?” I said, standing up. “Is Mayer back?”
“She’s not in 1950,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “She’s down on Sunset Boulevard. I saw her.”
“On Sunset Boulevard?”
“No. On the skids.”
Not in a parallel timefeed. Or some never-never-land where people walked through the screen into the movies. Here. On the skids. “Did you talk to her?”
She shook her head. “It was morning rush hour. I was coming back from Mayer’s, and I just caught a glimpse of her. You know how rush hour is. I tried to get through the crowd to her, but by the time I made it, she’d gotten off.”
“Why would she get off at Sunset Boulevard? Did you see her get off?”
“I told you, I just got a glimpse of her through the crowd. She was lugging all this equipment. But she had to have gotten off at Sunset Boulevard. It was the only station we passed.”
“You said she was carrying equipment. What kind of equipment?”
“I don’t know. Equipment. I told you, I—”
“Just got a glimpse of her. And you’re sure it was her?”
She nodded. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but Betsy Booth’s a tough role to shake. And it’s hard to hate Alis, after everything she’s done.” She gestured at her reflections in the array. “Look at me. Chooch free, klieg free.” She turned and looked at me. “I always wanted to be in the movies and now I am.”
She started down the hall again.
“Heada, wait,” I said, and then was sorry, afraid her face would be full of hope when she turned around, that there would be tears in her eyes.
But this was Heada, who knows everything.
“What’s your name?” I said. “All I have is your access, and I’ve never called you anything but Heada.”
She smiled at me knowingly, ruefully. Emma Thompson in Remains of the Day. “I like Heada,” she said.
Camera whip-pans to medium-shot: LAIT station sign. Diamond screen, “Los Angeles Instransit” in hot pink caps, “Sunset Boulevard” in yellow.
I took the opdisk of Alis’s routines and went down to the skids. There was nobody on them except a huddle of tourates in mouse ears, a very splatted Marilyn, and Elizabeth Taylor, Sidney Poitier, Mary Pickford, Harrison Ford, emerging one by one from ILMGM’s golden fog. I watched the signs, waiting for Sunset Boulevard and wondering what Alis was doing there. There was nothing down there but the old freeway.
The Marilyn wove unsteadily over to me. Her white halter dress was stained and splotched, and there was a red smear of lipstick by her ear.
“Want a pop?” she said, looking not at me but at Harrison Ford behind me on the screen.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Okay,” she said docilely. “How about you?” She didn’t wait for me, or Harrison, to answer. She wandered off and then came back. “Are you a studio exec?” she asked.
“No, sorry,” I said.
“I want to be in the movies,” she said, and wandered off again.
I kept my eyes fixed on the screen. It went silver for a second between promos, and I caught sight of myself looking clean and responsible and sober. Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. No wonder she’d thought I was a studio exec.
The station sign for Sunset Boulevard came up and I got off. The area hadn’t changed. There was still nothing down here, not even lights. The abandoned freeway loomed darkly in the starlight, and I could see a fire a long way off under one of the cloverleafs.
There was no way Alis was here. She must have spotted Heada and gotten off here to keep her from finding out where she was really going. Which was where?
There was another light now, a thin white beam wobbling this way. Ravers, probably, looking for victims. I got back on the skids.
The Marilyn was still there, sitting in the middle of the floor, her legs splayed out, fishing through an open palm full of pills for chooch, illy, klieg. The only equipment a freelancer needs, I thought, which at least means whatever Alis is doing it’s not freelancing, and realized I’d been relieved ever since Heada told me about seeing Alis with all that equipment, even though I didn’t know where she was. At least she hadn’t turned into a freelancer.
It was half past two. Heada had seen Alis at rush hour, which was still four hours away. If Alis went the same place every day. If she hadn’t been moving someplace, carrying her luggage. But Heada hadn’t said luggage, she’d said equipment. And it couldn’t be a comp and monitor because Heada would have recognized those, and anyway, they were light. Heada had said “lugging.” What then? A time machine?
The Marilyn had stood up, spilling capsules everywhere, and was heading over the yellow warning strip for the far wall, which was still extolling ILMGM’s cavalcade of stars.
“Don’t!” I said, and grabbed for her, a foot from the wall.
She looked up at me, her eyes completely dilated. “This is my stop. I have to get off.”
“Wrong way, Corrigan,” I said, turning her around to face the front. The sign read Beverly Hills, which didn’t seem very likely. “Where did you want to get off?”
She shrugged off my arm, and turned back to the screen.
“The way out’s that way,” I said, pointing to the front.
She shook her head and pointed at Fred Astaire emerging out of the fog. “Through there,” she said, and sank down to sitting, her white skirt in a circle. The screen went silver, reflecting her sitting there, fishing through her empty palm, and then to golden fog. The lead-in to the ILMGM promo.
I stared at the wall, which didn’t look like a wall, or a mirror. It looked like what it was, a fog of electrons, a veil over emptiness, and for a minute it all seemed possible. For a minute I thought, Alis didn’t get off at Sunset Boulevard. She didn’t get off the skids at all. She stepped through the screen, like Mia Farrow, like Buster Keaton, and into the past.