In the two years after his Guild award and Academy Award nomination he wrote and delivered one complete script, a quite mediocre television movie, for which he’d been commissioned. After that he wrote nothing at all. The mortgage on the house was salvaged by Maddy’s father, who was less interested in the property investment than in the contemplation of his daughter’s unseemly pending reemployment with the Pasadena museum. Your father’s absolutely prehistoric, Llewellyn snarled at his wife, to which she answered, God, are you so beyond gratitude? Gratitude! he cried.
Then he got a call one day from Eileen Rader, who offered him a job. He would be writing the sequel of a very successful picture of the previous summer, with a cowriter; this meant he’d do a treatment and first draft which someone else would then rewrite. It was the studio’s way of protecting itself from any possible idiosyncrasies on Llewellyn’s part. “Listen to me,” Eileen said, “this assignment isn’t art, Lee, we both know that, this is you getting back into action, this is you becoming a working writer again,” and he read between all the lines right there on the phone: Eileen had pulled strings to get him this gig, she had swung weight. Accept it with good humor and a sigh of relief. So he did, with no enthusiasm. Among those around him there was enthusiasm enough: Maddy, his father-in-law, and his friends, including Richard, who was out from New York for the third time in five years, living at the Ambassador, a fifty-something-year old actor who couldn’t get so much as a commercial. “Write me a part,” Richard said when he heard, and didn’t even have the pride to laugh as though he were joking.
Now, in the last years of his fourth decade, Llewellyn had found himself thinking about his life and everything it meant in the manner of a man who’s at the end of that life. When I was a young man, he told himself one day, I fell in love with women who made my heart stop. When I became older, I fell in love with women who made my heart melt. That pivotal transition came with Maddy, whom he’d known at least a year before he loved, and it came one lunch when she pushed her caustic cynicism too far in his direction (now he couldn’t even remember what it was she said) and he withered her with a look. The blood ran from her face. She was like a child, stricken by the way his gaze turned cold; and in that moment, having hurt her, his heart melted for her and he loved her.
On the day he saw the new housekeeper in the kitchen he heard the actual stop of his heart, a thump as though it had fallen from his chest onto the floor. He wrenched his eyes from her so that his heart might begin again; by the time he was in the other room he was suffocating. He ran into Maddy. “Going to the studio?” she asked, and he just answered, “We can’t afford her.” At the door he said it again, and got in the car and drove up Sixth Street to La Cienega, north on La Cienega to Burton Way, and out Burton Way into Beverly Hills, where he crossed Little Santa Monica Boulevard to Big Santa Monica and turned west. Not the beach, I can’t take the beach today, he said to himself half a mile from the beach. He turned around. He paid three dollars to park in a lot in Westwood where he just sat in the car. On the street adjacent to where he sat beautiful women passed him by, dressed and toned and carnivorous. You’re nothing, he whispered to them: don’t you know what I’ve seen? He had red visions of The Beast mounting The Earth and fertilizing it, the soil splitting open and the housekeeper emerging, her hair a hollow black and her mouth the drooling purple of carnage. He sat five hours trying to remember the faces of his wife and child.
After that he went out each day, driving aimlessly. Maddy kept telling herself he was going to the studio. Are you going to the studio? she would ask him on his way out. Yeah, he’d say, the studio. When his friends like Richard called, she said, He’s at the studio. Richard said, Yeah but is he working? One day the studio called looking for him. He’s in the study working, she told them.
On the day Catherine broke the mirror in the Edgars’ living room Llewellyn was sitting in his car parked on Canon Drive. A New Jersey photographer he knew named Larry Crow was walking up the sidewalk, and Llewellyn sank down into his seat so Crow wouldn’t see him. He closed his eyes and the next thing he heard was the car door on the passenger side opening and closing; he could feel the weight and heat of someone sitting next to him. Crow, he said, his eyes still closed. Crow was a man of such odious self-assurance that no amount of hostility or indifference could discourage him. He’d been in Los Angeles eighteen months pushing very hard; unfortunately he was a very good photographer, and he was good at persuading the magazines and agencies for whom he worked what it was they really wanted and believed. He understood that he lived in a world where the arbiters of taste and trend and image had no idea what they wanted or believed; they were in a race to discover what their competitors wanted and believed before their competitors discovered it for themselves. Crow had been introduced to Llewellyn by Eileen Rader six months before at a party. The acquaintance of the two men had gone through three stages. The first was the stage in which Crow learned Llewellyn was the writer of Toward Caliente and had received an Academy Award nomination for it. The second was the stage in which Crow learned Llewellyn hadn’t worked in two years. The third was the stage in which Crow learned Llewellyn had just gotten the Nightshade Part II assignment. The first and third stages found Crow very interested in Llewellyn, and the second stage found him not the least interested. If Nightshade II is a disaster, Lew thought hopefully, I won’t have to put up with this asshole sitting in my car anymore.
Llewellyn opened his eyes. He was always disconcerted to find Crow a more pleasant-looking man than he appeared in Llewellyn’s mind. Crow had a large envelope with him filled with photographs; they were all pictures of women. Crow had found working in Los Angeles exactly the same as working in New York except that there were more beautiful women in Los Angeles and the venality of the city was closer to the surface; in Los Angeles, Crow could identify more readily what he was dealing with. All the women Crow showed Llewellyn in the car were predictably gorgeous, in all hues and variations of gorgeousness. “Check this one out,” Crow said. “This one here.” He moved through the photographs. “This one. This one.”
He looked at Llewellyn. Llewellyn looked back at him with something resembling superior benignity. “They’re nothing,” he said to him.
“Shit,” said Crow in disbelief.
“I know a face that will crack your lens like a diamond.”
“All right,” said Crow, “let’s see her.”
Lew was disgusted with both of them. “I gotta go.” He motioned to the door.
“Maybe another time,” said Crow, out of the car and leaning in the window.
“I gotta go.” Llewellyn pulled from the curb and headed up Wilshire.
I think you’re right we can’t afford her, Maddy said in a rush before he’d gotten in the door; her voice expanded and tottered. He saw the mirror. What happened? he asked calmly. She broke the mirror with her hands there’s blood on the carpet: our good mirror, said Maddy. Forget the carpet and the mirror, Llewellyn said, what about the girl? Is that all you care about, Maddy cried; she could hear the sound of Catherine’s blood in her voice. I think she’s disturbed, Maddy said.