"To tell you the truth Toni, sometimes I wonder. Business has been good but it's a lot of work holding it together. I've got a good reputation and I'm in tight with the local authorities which makes it, I must admit, a hell of a lot easier but it keeps me jumping. I don't spend all my time hanging around my pool."
Lisa had to look after some bookkeeping for half an hour and Toni walked back to the house, made herself a drink and took it out onto the patio where she hung her feet over the edge of the pool and looked up at the blue glazed, snow capped enormity of Mt. Driscoll, The only sound was of crickets and birds and her own feet moving through water.
Lisa Williams grew up an only, but not unhappy, child in a large comfortable house in Cos Cob, Connecticut. She had everything she wanted and was given more on top of that by her adoring parents. By the age of twelve it was obvious that Lisa was going to be a great beauty; by sixteen there wasn't a doubt about it. From as far back as she could remember Lisa was always the most noticed girl wherever she went; the most sought after, the most desired.
This created problems as well as resolving others. Lisa acquired an extremely elevated opinion of herself that she didn't shake until she was well into her late twenties-after she had seen more of the world than just Cos Cob, Connecticut and found out that she was not the only pea on the pod; that around most corners there was another beauty lurking-younger and capable of many of the same tricks she thought she held an exclusive copyright on. The fact that her parents told her she could have anything she wanted in the world and from the world did nothing to dispel this lofty self image.
To a large extent they were right of course. Lisa's towering, blonde beauty opened many doors for her. She had her pick of the "boys and was forever being told that she was it; that no one could hold a candle to her. She managed to crank herself through high school without ever having a thought of what she was going to do after her father had bought her into college, which she didn't really want to attend. Her
mother couldn't have cared less if her daughter went to college because it was her plan that Lisa should marry a doctor or a lawyer and settle down to raising children and joining the local country club and the easy, sheltered life to which she had become accustomed. That was part of her birthright.
During the last week of her senior year in high school she decided that she wasn't going to go to that college in Vermont come September. "Well what are you going to do?" her father asked when she announced this fact to him.
"Go to California. Hollywood."
"Hollywood!?! And do what? You don't know any people there."
"I'm going with Jeanette and I'll meet people. I'll get a job or something."
"What do you mean, 'or something'?"
"Well how do I know! I'm not there yet am I?"
"And how are you going to get there and what are you going to live on until you get a job?"
Lisa's eyes swung out to the oval driveway with the brand new, powder blue Thunderbird gleaming like some exotic bird of paradise in the afternoon sun; her graduation present from her parents.
"We're driving and I've got a few hundred dollars in my savings account that should hold me over until something comes along."
"But you're only eighteen!" her father protested, the strain of the conversation ripping deep into his face.
"Well, daddy it's about time I started doing something isn't it? After all you're the one who always told me life is too short to waste. Who knows, maybe I'll become an actress."
"An actress!" he barked.
"Yes what's the matter with that? Lots of girls go to Hollywood and do it."
"And lots of girls end up very disappointed with nothing to show for any of it too."
"You don't know until you try do you?"
"Look Lisa," her father was using everything he had to master the panic that was bubbling up from his stomach, "don't you think we should sit down with your mother and talk this over. After all you have been accepted to college, and a very good college at that. Somehow it would be a shame to just toss it aside like that because you've got some half cocked notion about going to Hollywood to become an actress. Sure, OK go to California for a month with Jeanette, she's a very nice girl and your mother and I have always liked her, no objections there. We'd hoped that you'd be spending the summer with us, but since you've decided that that's what you want to do I can't see any harm in it. You're a big girl now and the drive across country would be worthwhile I think but please, I beg you, don't just blot out the idea of going to college altogether."
"But daddy I have thought about this and sure I'll tell mother and we can talk about it but I know what she's going to say and I know that I'm not about to change my mind. College just isn't for me and mother has always said that I needed college like I need to grow another six inches."
"You know very well that that has been a bone of contention with your mother and myself for a good long time now. She thinks that just because you're such a beautiful girl that that's all you need and all there is to it. Well let me tell you something young lady, she's wrong and you are going to find that out. It takes more than a nice figure and a pretty face to get on in this world and you're not going to find the answer to life in Hollywood. That is the absolute truth. You're kidding yourself."
"Maybe I am, but that's what I want to do and you and mother are not going to talk me out of it."
"I'm not trying to talk you out of anything I'm just trying to give you some direction"
This conversation was resumed on and off like a marathon ping pong game; the final score was Lisa and her high school friend Jeanette driving off in her Thunderbird the day after graduation with Lisa's parents standing at the door of their suddenly empty home shaking their heads and waving feebly. "I hope she's going to be all right," her mother sobbed.
"She will, she will, dear," her husband comforted her, "I know my own daughter."
After an uneventful cross country drive that brought them only one flat tire somewhere in Wyoming, Lisa and Jeanette arrived one dusky Friday evening in Hollywood. They checked into a Sunset Strip motel and after a short nap and a shower they went out to eat. At the Hamburg Hamlet they spotted a few well known television and movie personalities, one of whom spotted Lisa and chatted the two girls up; whisking them and their check away when the last coke had been drunk.
In the parking lot the actor said to Lisa, "That's some dusty looking car you've got there," his eye balls tearing at her clinging white shirt and short skirt.
"I told you we just drove across the United States." As they followed behind him in the Thunderbird bursting with excitement, his sleek sports-car wove in and out of the Canyons. Jeanette 'turned to Lisa and said, "It's you he's really interested in so maybe I should take the car back to the motel and you can call me when you want to get back if he doesn't drive you."
Lisa was choked with embarrassment at her friend's candor. Her mind fished frantically for something to say that wouldn't sound foolish but she couldn't manage much beyond, "Oh, come on now you know that's not true and besides I don't want to be up there with him all alone." Jeanette shrugged and they drove the rest of the way in silence.
His house was all palm fronds and pillows on the floor and a big, bouncing English sheep dog that answered to the name of Morris. The lights went out, the candles flickered on and from a hidden speaker soft music creeped forth. "Scotch?" he asked his teeth flashing artificially in the half light.
"Just coke is fine," they said in unison.
When he went into the kitchen for the cokes they looked at each other and started to snicker. Inexperienced perhaps but dumb? No, not Lisa and Jeanette. The cliched situation they found themselves in made them laugh. The way that Blaze Scott ('What a bullshit name', they agreed) was coming on to them was right out of Hollywood B movies, B for bad. When he came back into the room he was dressed in nothing but a pair of swimming trunks.