“I can, Buddy,” Jack said, a crazed and holy smile forming on his lips. “I can, and I do, and I will, and you can’t stop me. I forgive you!”
“Jack! Jack!”
“I forgive you, Buddy Pal! I forgive you!”
“Oh, Jack! Jack!”
Jack pulled Buddy into his arms. Tightly they embraced, eyes squeezed shut, faces buried in each other’s shoulders. A collective sigh rose from the semicircle of assembled spectators. Strong men were seen to wipe away a tear. Women were seen thoughtfully to lick a lip. The guitar music flowed its mournful message. Then the applause started, slight at first, but growing, mingling with the guitar.
Jack and Buddy reared back so they could see each other, but still held tightly to each other’s arms. Both men were crying for happiness. The applause continued, and beneath it Buddy said, his voice throbbing with sincerity, “But the most important person to forgive, Jack Pine, is your little Marcia.”
Weeping, tears and makeup commingling on his face, Jack shook his head. “Buddy, Buddy,” he said, “you don’t know what you’re asking.”
“She needs you, Jack Pine,” Buddy told him. “Your little Marcia needs you.”
“Oh, no, she doesn’t,” Jack said, his voice hardening.
“Oh, yes, she does,” Buddy said. “She’s going to have your baby.”
I wipe away a tear. Then I taste it. It tastes like the sea. I think I like the sea better than I like swimming pools. I think I don’t like swimming pools the way I used to. I smile sadly — I feel myself doing it, smiling sadly — I smile sadly at the interviewer and I say, “That was the last time Buddy and I ever fought about anything.”
He seems surprised. As though challenging me, he says, “The last time?”
But it’s the truth, the simple truth. All truth is simple. “The last time,” I say.
“And Marcia Callahan was pregnant with your first child at that time?”
Less simple. “The blood test was inconclusive,” I say. “But when Buddy brought me the news, what could I do? I went back to the nasty bitch. And you know the first thing I said to her?”
“What was that?”
Flashback 13
The shades were drawn against the California sun. In the rose-colored light in the same bedroom in which Jack found that awful scene, Jack and Marcia lay in bed, half-covered by wrinkled sheets, both warm, perspiring, Marcia in a glow of reconciliation, Jack puffing on a cigarette as he lay half-propped against the soft headboard, Marcia’s head against his shoulder. He turned her face toward his, and she gazed up at him with melting eyes. His free hand smoothed her hair as he looked deep into those eyes. Gently, he said, “He better look a lot like me.”
“And did he?”
I shrug; a dangerous gesture. Perhaps a simple and dignified nod in future. But now I shrugged, and recovered, and I say, “She was a girl. Took after her mother, in fact, in more ways than one.”
“Let’s see,” the interviewer says, annoyingly tapping his pencil against his notebook as he gazes out over my head and over the swimming pool behind me and into the middle distance. “That would be your daughter Rosalia, wouldn’t it?”
“That’s right.” I grin the grin I used when I played Satan that time. “I named her after a lady in Mexico that helped me during the movie down there.”
The interviewer nods and reels in his glance to look again at me, saying, “How old would she be now?”
“Well, she would be about thirty-five,” I say, “but the fact is she’s nineteen. Last I heard, she’s living in Colombia with some big dope dealer down there.” I feel a crooked and half-proud grin coming to my lips. I say, “Smart for a kid of mine, huh? Cuts out the middleman.”
“You and Marcia Callahan had three children together, didn’t you?”
This time I remember not to shrug. I perform a simple and dignified nod. I say, “She had three kids while we were married. I suppose I had something to do with it. But the marriage, you know, never really did survive that first big shock.”
“Even after Buddy Pal came to Mexico to try to make things up with you?”
“Didn’t matter,” I say. “It’s a funny thing, but I really did forgive Buddy. We got to be best friends again just as though nothing had ever happened. But I never in my heart forgave Marcia. I guess in her heart she must have known that. She was never stupid, the bitch.”
“And all,” the interviewer says, “because of one simple mistake.”
“Well, at least one. But also, there was our careers. The movie of Tupelo didn’t do business, and you know what that means out here. They blame everybody but the producer, and Marcia got her share of the debit. After that, her career just sort of stuttered along for a while, so-so roles in nothing pictures, no build-up, just the gradual realization on everybody’s part that the industry could get along just as well without her.”
“Tough on her, I guess.”
“You bet. Particularly because, for me, it went just the other way. I hit with the biker, consolidated with the pathological killer, and got my first Oscar nomination with the patient picture.”
“Slip of the Knife,” the interviewer says, nodding yet again at the brilliance of his own research.
“Yeah, that’s right. That’s the picture where I first really got it together, my own talent and the technology of film. Where the camera and I blended into one creature, one omnivorous animal that could eat anything and not die. Slip of the Knife; that’s when I hit my stride, got a bridle and bit on my powers, became the superstar. After Slip of the Knife, I was one of those very few stars that could do anything at all and the people still come, they pay the money, they sit down, they watch. I could read the phone book and they’d come. I could read the Valley phone book and they’d come.”
“I guess that’s true,” he says, thoughtfully, as though it hadn’t occurred to him before why he should be interviewing me.
“It is,” I assure him. I stretch my arms and legs, bend from the waist. My entire skeleton aches. What have I been doing with this body, this instrument of my talent? Fucking it over, man.
And worse. I suspect, I suspect worse.
No no no, there are things I must not know.
Do not look toward the swimming pool.
Patiently my interviewer sits, awaiting the dropping of further pearls from these lips, and so I oblige him. “After Slip of the Knife,” I tell him, “just like Irwin said, I could do anything I wanted, the industry was mine. I had to hire a girl just to read the scripts they sent me. As for Marcia, well, around town, more and more she was getting to be known as Mrs. Jack Pine, with fewer and fewer parts coming her way. She couldn’t stand that. So, one day, when Rosalia was four and Indira was two and Little Buddy was five months...”
Flashback 14
This living room, large and airy, expensively and artfully furnished in shades of gray and blond and white, with owned original oil paintings on the walls, was up in the hills of Beverly Hills. The view out the large but well-curtained windows was of green hillsides tastefully decorated with mansions. Jack, in cashmere pullover and flannel slacks, barefoot, strolled up and down the thick pile shag rug, studying a movie script, silently mouthing his lines. In his other hand was a bottle of Tuborg beer from which he occasionally sipped.
Marcia entered from deeper in the house, wearing a well-tailored gray suit and a small hat with a veil. She looked elegant and handsome, but older. She was pulling on suede gloves. She stood a moment watching Jack, but he remained absorbed in his script, pacing back and forth, lips moving, expressions flowing and changing on his face.