As far as they were concerned, I was a part of the machine. It irritated me, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I kept trying to figure out their relationship. Sometimes they would have savage arguments. She would turn around and kneel on the seat. They acted as if I were stone-deaf. Those two would say anything to each other. Some of the arguments were about money. I’d wondered how they were fixed. They weren’t hurting as much as I had thought. He’d owned a piece of a couple of profitable movies, and he owned a piece of the producer’s end of a television show that had been running for three years and looked as if it would run forever. And he had stashed some into an annuity back in his fat days. I estimated they had thirty thousand a year coming in. But that was a tenth of the income he used to make, and so they felt impoverished. And they wouldn’t cut any corners. They schemed to live in borrowed houses, but in a motel he’d give the boy who brought the ice a five-dollar bill. Some of those kids looked like they’d been hit on the head. There was a flossy gift shop connected with one motel where we stayed. She bought two skirts of handwoven fabric, sixty bucks each.
The biggest money fight was about whether he should sell his piece of the television show and reinvest it in the Mexican movie venture. Every time they argued about it, they switched sides. And they would say things to each other I wouldn’t say to a weasel. She, in particular, had the foulest mouth I’ve ever heard on a woman. She said things to him worth killing her for, and fifteen minutes later they’d both be napping.
Sometimes they fought about how talented they were. He told her once that if she had fifty times the acting ability, he wouldn’t use her in a mob scene. She told him if he had a chance to direct the rape of the Sabine women, he’d turn it into a box-office dog. He told her the mares in Westerns had more talent. She told him he was the joke of the industry. Twenty minutes later they’d be telling each other how great they were. She had more than Hayes and he had more than Huston.
But the worst scraps were about cheating. Then the language was so choice I wondered why I didn’t run the car off the road. He’d tell her she made any honest tramp look like Joan of Arc, that if she’d kept score, her diary would look like a phone book. She’d tell him that he’d spent forty years proving he had no discrimination. If it was warm and wore a skirt, that was all he needed. Then they would start throwing names, dates and places at each other, but what it always came down to was that neither of them had any real proof. He’d call her an ice-cold scrawny, ridiculous bitch. She’d call him a fat, impotent old man. Once, when they were going it so hot and heavy I thought he was coming over the seat after her, a spark from her cigarette stung her wrist. From the way she carried on, you would have sworn she had just lost the arm. He cooed at her and petted her, and she whimpered and yowled until I located a drugstore. He hurried in and came out with four different kinds of burn remedies, and fixed her up with a bandage big enough for a fractured wrist.
It was a weird marriage.
A strange thing happened at a motel just west of Montgomery, Alabama. It was unseasonably warm. The pool was drained, but there were chairs around it. I sat out in the warm dusk, thinking about going and getting something to eat. She came up behind me, touched me on the shoulder in a friendly way, and sat in the chair next to mine. She said John was taking a nap. She called me Kirby for the first time. She turned on so much warmth and charm, it was like standing in a hot-chocolate shower. We sat there for at least two hours. She drew me out. She made me feel like the most interesting man in the world. I gave her the full report on Kirby Palmer Stassen, from high chair to office boy.
“What do you want, Kirby? Where are you heading?”
“I don’t know, Kathy. There’s all the pressure to conform. I’m not ready to play on the team.”
“Kicks? Is that what you want?”
“That’s a word for it, maybe. I want to... do everything there is to do. I don’t want to go down a tunnel.”
Like a damn fool I thought we’d gotten onto a new basis. But the next day I was Stassen, part of the Chrysler. It gave me the feeling she’d used me for some kind of practice session, like a hell of a wing shot getting his eye ready for the season by trap shooting.
We went down 79 and 81 and crossed at Laredo. We stayed at Laredo one night and a half a day. Something happened to them there. Something private and significant and deadly. I don’t know what it was, what they did to each other. But it was the end of something between them. You could sense that. I didn’t see how it could be anything they said to each other. Nothing could have been more unforgivable than all the things they’d already said.
The change was abrupt. All of a sudden they were painfully polite to each other. They made comments on the road and the weather. No more battles. Something started to end right there at Laredo. And I was in at the finish. Some unknown incident gutted the relationship, and suddenly they had begun to be strangers.
I am treating my relationship with John and Kathryn Pinelli in such great detail because I suspect that it bears a significant relationship to all that came later. I know that on the basis of timing it was significant, because if I hadn’t gone to Mexico with them, I’d never have met Sandy, Nan and Shack at that beer joint on the outskirts of Del Rio. On another level, if it hadn’t been for the Pinellis and what happened, I wouldn’t have been ready to meet Golden, Koslov and Hernandez. I wouldn’t have had that special attitude which helped the four of us fit together like the fingers on a glove.
Once you have destroyed somebody, and there’s no way to put the pieces together, and you know you’re going to live with a funny kind of remorse the rest of your life anyway, you can maybe dilute remorse through more destruction.
So maybe what happened to me is suicide.
I wish that Kathy could have a chance to read this. I wouldn’t expect her to understand it, or make any attempt to try. If I could write it as a play, and if she could be given the chance to read it, then she would come alive, frowning in pretty concentration, fitting her mouth silently around her lines. But I know what would happen to this kind of a journal. She would riffle it, see there was no art work, and drop it out the car window and go to work on her nails, or pick a fight with John, or curl into a tiny and fragrant cat nap.
Four
Riker Deems Owen devoted one whole memorandum to a rather rambling analysis of the Stassen boy:
On what now appears to be superficial reasoning, I felt in the beginning that Kirby Stassen would be the one I could communicate with most readily. Now I realize I was misled by the similarity of our backgrounds. We are from the same approximate social and financial level. He has poise and good manners, and treats me with a respect only infrequently marred by a strange attitude of derision.