At last Marcia moved over directly in his path and watched without expression as he paced away from her, swiveled, and came pacing back. Even then he might have simply angled around her if she hadn’t, in a low and cold and emotionless voice, said “Jack?”
He stopped in front of her. He looked up inquiringly from his script. Marcia reared back and gave him an open-handed walloping roundhouse gloved right across the face. The script went flying. The Tuborg bottle went flying. Jack himself went flying, backward and over the nearest low white suede sofa.
Marcia waited, adjusting her right glove, face still expressionless, until Jack righted himself on the floor over there and his bewildered face appeared above the sofa back. Then she nodded. “Good-bye,” she said.
Open-mouthed, Jack watched her stride across the living room and out the front door. His slack jaw, the left side of it reddening, rested on the cool suede of the sofa back.
I lean forward. Elbow resting on my interviewer’s gray-clad, bony, silently protesting knee, I reminiscently rub my jaw, where the ghost of Marcia’s departing hand still shimmers and burns. With two fingers and thumb, I check the working of my jaw hinge. All aches are psychosomatic, aren’t they?
I can tell my interviewer is feeling sympathetic at this moment because, though his face remains frozen in that blank look of reception, he is not pushing my elbow off his person. He is restraining his prissiness. Even to the extent of letting sympathy seep into his voice as he says, “She left you just like that, huh? No warning, no discussion, just up and walked out, just like that.”
“Just like that,” I agree. “She took the kids. Boy, the books they’ll write some day.”
“And they’re all still in their teens.”
“The Sargasso Sea of the teens,” I say. “In their teens. The penal colony of the teens. I remember my tee— No, I don’t! Memory begone!”
“There’s something back there, isn’t there?” my interviewer asks me. “Something that explains everything that followed. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”
This knee is too bony, too gray-clad, too prissy. I withdraw my friendly elbow, I turn away — not toward the pool! — I turn back, I find my place on the teleprompter of my eyelids, I say, “Marcia.”
“Yes?”
“She left.”
“Yes.”
“I gave her the house, three pints of blood, and Ventnor Avenue, and after that Buddy and I moved into a place out on the beach.”
“Buddy again? Just the two of you?”
“Heck, no,” I say, smiling at the memory. Well, the beginning of the memory, anyway. “I got to fulfill an old dream. I brought my mom and dad out to live with me.”
Flashback 15
The bedroom was small and square, with off-white walls and blond wood floor and very prominent electric outlets, prominent because the room was not yet furnished. The only objects in it were two white wooden kitchen chairs without arms, facing each other. On one stood a portable TV set, its black wire reaching back to a cable outlet low on the wall. To one side, plate-glass doors showed a broad gray wood deck in blinding sunlight, with the broad gray Pacific heaving like chicken soup beyond.
The room’s interior door — flush, painted white — opened and Jack entered, smiling, sweating, awkward, trying to please, ushering in his mom and dad. Mom was short and buxom, round-faced, jolly; she wore an old print dress and a gray cardigan. Her hands were full of snapshots. Dad, short and skinny and dry, wore white shirt and black pants and shoes, all too big for him. His face had a collapsed look around the mouth.
“And this is your room!” Jack exclaimed, pumping up his enthusiasm, giving one of the very few poor performances of his acting career. Gesturing madly at the bare walls, the white chairs, the ocean outside, he said, “Furniture’s going to be delivered by noon! All brand new!”
Mom had been waiting impatiently for Jack to shut up or at least pause for a breath. When he finally did so, she shuffled toward him, holding up snapshots, saying, “Here’s cousin Rosie with the twins. And here’s the twins with Blair’s dog. And this is the Flynns’ new car.”
“TV,” Dad said.
As Jack smiled and nodded and stared glaze-eyed at Mom’s photographs, Buddy entered, smiling, hands clasped in front of him, nodding like the co-host he was, and Dad crossed the room to switch on the television set and seat himself expectantly on the edge of the other chair.
“Great reception here, Dad,” Jack told him.
The picture blossomed on the screen. Dad leaned forward to start switching channels.
Mom held up more snapshots. “Here’s the laurel tree out behind Margaret’s house. Look how it’s grown! Can you see, Jack?”
Jack tore his eyes away from the back of Dad’s head. As Dad went on switching among the channels, Jack looked at the picture of the laurel tree out behind Margaret’s house. “Yeah, gosh,” he said. “Sure has grown.”
“You look, too, Buddy,” Mom said.
“Okay, Mom Pine.” Buddy obediently leaned forward, gazing with pleased interest at the picture of the laurel tree out behind Margaret’s house.
Dad, his voice testy, his manner testy, even his shoulder blades testy, said, “Where’s the sports?”
Grinning spastically, like a lion tamer who’s just heard a low growl from behind him, Jack said, “There might not be any sports right now, Dad.”
Dad stopped switching channels, sat back with an air of triumph, and pointed at the set. “Wrong again, Sonny. Tennis.”
“That’s nice,” Jack said.
“There, now,” Mom said, “just leave your father to his sports. We’ll all go sit on the sofa and look at pictures.”
“Okay, Mom Pine,” Buddy said.
Jack flashed a dozen smiles toward his father’s impervious profile. “See you later, Dad.”
Dad ignored him. Mom hustled the two younger men out of the room and firmly shut the door. Sunshine bleached the world beyond the glass doors. Dad watched tennis.
Sunshine bleaches the world. I sit beneath it, the white light making haloes and auras and ghosts and spirits in my vision. “I introduced Mom and Dad to all my industry friends,” I tell my interviewer, “and they fit right in.”
Flashback 15A
The concept of the living room in the Malibu house was casual living with plenty of room to entertain friends. In an open central fireplace built on a platform of white brick, a cozy fire crackled. Comfortable furniture of canvas and wood, easily maintained and quite weatherproof, stood back out of the way so that the forty people at the party could flow around the fireplace and in and out of the broad doorways leading to the sunstruck deck. A good third of the partygoers wore famous names and famous faces, and most of the rest were their associates: wives, agents, boyfriends, attorneys. Uniformed staff passed discreetly through the crowd with canapés and drinks.
To one side of it all stood Jack, viewing the scene with sweaty pride. He watched his mom, in the same print dress and gray cardigan as before, move around the room, buttonholing people, clutching their elbows, showing them photograph after photograph, her victims all being distracted but polite. He watched his dad, in a far corner, seated with his back to the crowd, watching “Bowling for Dollars” on a large, elaborate console TV. He watched Buddy perched on the back of a sofa, drink in hand, easy and aggressive smile on face, chatting up a pretty girl in a summer dress.