“I don’t know anything about...”
“Just read the lines, old boy.”
I started to read the first speech, feeling like a damn fool, trying to sound the way I thought Wilson should sound from what little clue I had.
Sonninger broke in. “You!” he said.
“Yes?”
“This is not talent scouts,” he said in his slight Mittel European accent. “It is not Actors’ Studio. Just read, please. Nothing more.”
I shrugged and read my lines as if I were reading a market report. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they got. Kathy had the corner on emotion. Frank Race and I read our lines woodenly. She emoted. I thought she did fine. But I thought the script was horrible stuff, full of pretentiously poetic expression. It went on until three in the morning. They would quarrel viciously, yell at each other, and then mark up the copies of the script. Sonninger was boss. I couldn’t see how they were improving it in any way. If this was going to be the first release by Sierra Productions, it looked like a poor place to stick your money.
The only other time I wasn’t totally ignored was on Monday morning at about eleven. I had swum and I was baking on the platform above the beach. Frank Race came gingerly down the steps, his pallid, narrow body gleaming with oil. He carried a beach towel and a script.
After a casual greeting, he stretched out and worked on the script for about a half hour. When he put it aside, I said, “Is that thing really as bad as I think it is?”
He looked at me, slightly startled, and then smiled. “They can read bad, old boy, and play well. We’re all happy with it. And, forgive me, we have the benefit of professional judgment.The people who will release it are happy with it too. And they’re quite shrewd about these things.”
“There seems to be a hell of a lot of talk in it.”
“We’re taking a little out, here and there.”
“Kathy will play the lead?”
“That’s the idea. The old dear is a little long in the tooth for the part. But that’s a camera and lighting problem. It’s worth that gamble to have John.”
“John or his money?”
He looked at me intently. “You are a very brash young man. You seem to like to talk about things you know nothing about.”
“I’m just asking questions. People haven’t been falling over themselves to hire him. So all of a sudden he’s wonderful?”
“I’ll tell you a little more than you need to know, old boy. John Pinelli is a director of the first grade, sensitive, creative. A director must have one additional talent. He must be able to control his stars, keep them from acting like petulant children, keep them from blurring him. John used to have that. When he lost some of his confidence, he lost that first. The rest is intact. Sonninger will produce. I will be unit manager. We will work closely with John, and we’ll control the talent. He can do the rest. Once we wrap this one up, and it’s good, then all the confidence will be back. And he’ll be an enormous asset to us on the other pictures we’ve scheduled. I expect him to make me rich, old boy. The feds cleaned me last year. I miss the money.”
“So this first one has to be tops?”
“It will be.”
“I hope it is,” I said. I didn’t see how it could be. The story seemed silly to me. But maybe they knew what they were doing. Then I thought of all the brilliant, confident people who use up a whole year out of their lives to bring something to Broadway which lasts three performances. It seems like a mutual hypnosis deal. They all tell each other the material is great until they finally believe it.
Anyway, I took them to the airport on Tuesday, and Kathy and I were left alone in the house with the three servants. Nadina, the maid, was a round, brown girl with broad, bare feet. When you addressed her directly, she would put one of her black braids in her mouth, bite down upon it, try to turn her head all the way around on her shoulders, and giggle. When working, she sang softly to herself in a clear, true voice.
There was a sense of isolation about that house. It was as if the concrete steps were a rope ladder, and when you were up there, they were pulled up and you were alone.
I saw more of Kathy than I expected. We ate together. This seemed to please Rosalinda. There were always fresh flowers on the table. Kathy was casual and remote. She spent a lot of time on the beach and on the sun platform. And she spent a lot of time grooming herself, exercising. I did not mention my plans. At the time I made an accounting and gave her the balance from the two thousand pesos, she gave me the hundred dollars I had been promised. But she did not ask me what I would do. It seemed agreeable to her for me to stay on. She gave me errands to do. I drove her to and from town when she wanted to shop. It annoyed me that she preferred to sit in the back.
Things changed between us on the following weekend, late on Sunday afternoon. We were down on the sun platform. Rosalinda called her to the phone. She had been expecting John, and had been growing more irritated when there was no word from him. When she came back down, her face was pale under the new copper-gold of her tan, and she was so furious her hand shook visibly.
“Was that John?” I asked.
“Be still!” She stretched out with her back toward me. Her hip in gay nylon was mounded high. The nape of her neck looked tender and touching and defenseless, like the neck of a child. The strap of the halter top bit into the slender softness of her back.
She rolled up onto her knees abruptly, turning to face me. “Come on,” she said, a whisper almost lost in the sound of the ocean. It had come up under the platform. She looked at me over a gun sight. She got to her feet. “Come on,” she said. It was a command that needed no explanation. She went quickly and lightly up the steps without looking back. I followed her.
We went to the master bedroom. She adjusted the heavy wooden shutters so that narrow strands of the late sun lay against the far wall, filling the room with a luminous golden light. As she fixed the shutters I could hear the shallow quickness of her breathing and the whispery sound of her bare feet on the blue-green tiles. She turned, tiny and imperative, and held her arms out toward me, and it was as if reality had merged with my own erotic imaginings, making the present moment dreamlike.
I believe it would be ridiculous for me to waste any of this imprisoned tag end of my life in description of the mechanics of copulation, in the more intimate devices of this particular pair of adulterers. Go to any loan library. Select a novel with a reputation for naughtiness. Open it to the section where the pages are most smudged. Substitute Kathy and Kirby for the names in the text. Our novelists seem to write of physical love as though they were under some obligation either to acquaint a herd of Martians with the fleshy facts, or to compose a handbook for the inexperienced.
Now that I am so far away from it, I can coldly chart the short history of our physical affair. In the beginning, as is always the case, pleasure was handicapped by the awkwardnesses of new lovers. As we learned each other, on the physical level, in the way the tricks of performance of a new sailboat or sports car must be learned through use, pleasure was heightened. As with all lovers since the origins of mankind, as pleasure was heightened, we indulged ourselves more often. Such intensity invariably creates a hypnotic aura which dims all the other aspects of existence.
And now I must account for the change in Kathy, a change which astonished her. She tried to explain it to me many times. When John had phoned her from Mexico City he had taunted her with an account of Sonninger’s continual pressure to sign a younger actress for the lead in their first production, and he had tried to make her feel insecure by telling her he might back down and let Sonninger have his way. Kathy, furious at John, had sought the handiest weapon of revenge, to take a boy who meant nothing to her into the bed of her husband. It was to have been a meaningless and destructive act, a service she would require of me which would lead to no emotional involvement.