Andre! He came in just now, all a flurry of breathless, manly purpose, surprising me on the balcony. White Shirt had just gone inside his house.
"Let's have a drink," Andre announced.
"I'm ahead of you," I said, walking inside, drink in hand. I turned on the news, trying to mask the flutter in my stomach— a signal of any number of reactions to this unscheduled arrival of the director for a drink with his wife. Did he have time off the set during a complicated lighting shift . . . or was something wrong that he could leave, or had he said he'd have an early night and I'd forgotten?
It was a hurried drink. A drink should never be hurried. "How you grace me with your presence!" I spoke to his back as the door closed. He left with the bottle. He'd come for the bottle, the drink a nickel's worth of his time bestowed. Was his leading lady thirsty?
They are shooting close by, close enough for me to drop in, which he said I should do. But I won't. I would be treated on set like the general's wife. There would be curious stares and fawning over his onetime lead, the actress who took best prize at Cannes under his direction. The unanswered question always hovering: Why did she retire early, still in her prime, when the full blossoming of her breasts tantalizes most and she begins to understand her craft and to take bigger risks— why? Were the producers already casting about for less ripe, more malleable girls with dreams of stardom; was that it? Andre insists the lead is in me yet. Ha! I walked away of my own free will. Why would I walk back into that insecure cesspool of chattering facades called acting?
Andre doesn't like that word, insecure. He says it's overused, a catchall excuse for lack of discipline.
"Wobbly, then," I said back. "People are wobbly in who they are. You might try to be more sympathetic."
"Rubbish." It could almost have been Joe talking. But Joe would have qualified the retort by saying that the system of civi lization discourages personal strengths, the better to control a populace.
I stopped myself from throwing my drink at the door behind Andre. Wasted! I am wasted on peasants. If I came at you, dear audience, full force, you couldn't withstand me, yet Andre can crush me with a glance, like a rose petal under heavy boots.
Between Joe and Andre there were others. Once Joe and I bled dry, were wrung out, twisting in the winds of our failure, others entered the void. I was all alone in L.A. We didn't want to split up a pair of sisters, so Joe kept the cats, old by then but missed terribly, and I would not replace them. Harry kept me busy. He bent over backward to make the physical part of my move painless. It wasn't. He secured invitations to the important parties. That was hell. It was all I could do to keep from finding the broom closet until enough time passed to head for the door, get into my car, and drive home. I'd bought a brand- new compact to spirit me across the vastness of Los Angeles. I sublet a furnished bungalow on Gardiner Street, up in the hills— not too far from where I am now— and hunkered down among the chintz upholstery, shades drawn. I napped a lot, like a three- year- old, or I paced the small, secluded garden draped with intoxicating jasmine, surrounded by tall eucalyptus trees. I went for walks and absorbed the stares of the locals for doing the unthinkable, using my feet on the pavement. I detested L.A. at that point with all the strength my newly single sorry soul had available.
Dottie was my one solid friend. We were an odd mix. She was much older and very overt. Singers are a different sort of showman than actors. She started out doing radio jingles in Wichita, then went east, played the Rainbow Room, other high- end New York nightspots. Dottie was auditory color; she'd made a brief splash in a tough town. She told me she was born with perfect pitch. "That was God's gift," she declared. "I had not a thing to do with it." It was her Plains modesty talking; Dottie's no- nonsense values didn't always fit with her bright outfits and flamboyant theatrics. We had in common a shyness hidden by what we did for a living. With Dottie it was Kansas proper— no one out in all that open likes a show- off, she'd say— though she could ham it up pretty good at the piano. I was shy at the bone. If you scratched Dottie, you scratched dirt, where corn or soy or wheat comes from: solid earth, simple and clean and probably conservative in ways I might not tolerate if Dottie wasn't a chanteuse. Scratch my surface and you get blood, guts, darkness, and dumb hope.
She sang Noël Coward ballads and old show tunes with flare but not a whole lot of depth— the material didn't encourage it. She worked sporadically. A well- off husband died, leaving her comfortably placed. About Joe she said, sensibly, "Ard, honey, the boy who'll follow a girl around the world hasn't been invented yet. They'll calve before that happens. You had no choice. Or yes, you did: It was you for yourself or him." Why'd I have to choose at all? Joe hadn't given me an ultimatum, and I hadn't given him one. I was wracked with doubt. Should I have moved out west, put my career ahead of Joe? Was Dottie right: Woman follows man? Was I doomed to die alone?
I hit bottom, started turning down jobs, refusing phone calls. Harry was ready to work me over with a whip. He called to tell me Andre Lucerne was looking to direct another feature; he wouldn't cast me in the lead this time but was offering a strong supporting role that was mine for the taking. I said no, thanks.
"You're turning down Andre Lucerne?" Harry said. "Help me here, Ardennes."
"I'm not turning down Lucerne. I'm turning down the location. Stockholm in winter, Harry? It's too far away. I'm just not ready." Harry snorted his disbelief. "Okay, I don't like the part either."
"You're wrong; that part is a perfect vehicle for you. And Stockholm is glorious in winter. Lucerne himself called." This time I snorted a so- what. " Never mind." Harry said all calm business. "I'm giving you one month to finish suffering and then I'm dropping you."
"Harry . . ."
Dottie said what did I expect; Harry wasn't my uncle. She didn't let on how worried she was about me hanging around the house all day with a bad case of the guilty blues. She'd take me shopping or come over and make us cocktails, sing ditties until I'd smile, which was about all I could manage, and that was mostly polite. "Dear girl, that sea is loaded with fish, you just have to dive in and pull. And for heaven's sake climb out of those tired old pj's and get outside. Go back to work!"
I wasn't sure if Harry was bluffing or if he'd really drop me. I also genuinely did not know if I'd ever stand in front of a camera again. I wanted so badly to call Joe, tell him that I'd made a terrible mistake, that I wanted to come home; I'd go back to stage acting and our life together, forget all about Hollywood. But he didn't call either and I think that was what hurt the most, that he could just do without me. He'd had a lot of practice, Dottie pointed out, all those absences, me out here working among the fleshpots of Southern California. But Joe didn't doubt me in that way; he was the surest guy I ever met. In the end I think he just didn't want to be married to a movie actress.
Dottie said it was not what she had in mind when I started going around with a friend of hers, a steadily employed character actor in big movies. We met at one of Dottie's rare singing dates. For a couple of weeks she was the closing act at a club that specialized in after- hours drinkers, well- off layabouts, a crowd that ate up her songs, was never loaded to the point of clamor, and by closing time would be singing along, adoring Dottie and their carefree lives.
Like me, Fits (that's all anyone ever called him except in movie credits, where "Matthew Fitzgerald" scrolled across the screen) didn't fit the cabaret scene. He didn't know the lyrics to Dottie's numbers and flat- out hated show tunes. We were there for her, and maybe the generous drinks. Fits was not my type. He was heavyset with sandy, graying hair scattered like buckshot over his head, and a good number of years