Fade to Black (9 page)

“I’m working for an advertising agency now,” he said, casting the bait “I told them I even had some new faces lined up for models.”

Marilyn set down the skates she was tightening.

“Oh, did you now?”

CHAPTER •
11

It took Eric some doing, but a feverish search through his closets turned up a matching outfit that not only fit, but also complemented itself colorwise. Pressed pants and polished shoes, dress shirt and thin matching tie, topped off by a snappy gray blazer with padded shoulders. It was an outfit possibly worn by a leading man in the M-G-M stable of stars back in the forties. Some of the clothes were even back in style now, discounting the smell of mothballs that clung to him like a cheap cologne.

As he looked in the mirror, admiring his metamorphosis, Eric glanced out of the corner of his eye at the photo of Cary Grant taped up on the bathroom wall. He mimicked Grant’s smile and basked in euphoria.

Marilyn Marilyn Marilyn, he thought to himself.

Even the sound of Aunt Stella coming up the elevator and whirring into the room couldn’t dampen his spirits.

“You look trés elegant,” she cracked, marveling at Eric.

Eric looked at her reflection in the mirror, still Cary Grant. “Thanks, my dear,” he said sprightly.

“You even cleaned up your room,” Aunt Stella went on. “Are you sure you feel all right?”

“Certainly, my dear,” Eric said, swinging away from the mirror and striding like a peacock up to Aunt Stella. “I have a most important date with a most important young lady.”

“I’m Greta Garbo if you’re Cary Grant,” Aunt Stella said coldly.

Eric adjusted his tie as he accosted his aunt, refusing to give up the act, even enjoying the aggravation it gave Aunt Stella. “You’re absolutely correct, my dear. Absolutely correct.”

Aunt Stella was more than aggravated. Her fingers tightened around the armrests of her wheelchair. Her whole body was trembling subtly beneath her bathrobe.

“Who is this . . . young lady?” Aunt Stella asked, her voice strained and menacing.

“Ms. Marilyn Monroe,” Eric announced suavely.

Aunt Stella laughed spitefully.

Eric bent over his aunt.

“Sorry, darling,” he announced, whisking a finger delicately along Aunt Stella’s upper lip. “Must dash.”

He turned and started out the door, taking two steps before he remembered something and stopped. By the time he turned back to face his aunt, Cary Grant was gone, leaving Eric to beg, his voice flat, “Oh, ah, Aunt Stella. May I have a small loan at the usual rate of interest?”

It was her turn to smile. An eerie gleam came to her eyes as Eric came back to her. She had him, back the way she wanted him.

“Please,” Eric finished.

“On one condition,” she said, setting out her terms slowly, enunciating each word as if it were a separate lashing, “That you come straight home, right after the movie.” She rolled her eyes upward, driving her gaze into Eric. “I want my back rubbed.”

Eric didn’t reply. There was no need to. While Aunt Stella reached into her robe and pulled out a ten-dollar bill, Eric loomed uncertainly over her, the joy drained from his features, replaced with an uneasy dread.

Marilyn sat across from Joey Madonna at a patio table outside the West Beach Café. They sipped burgundies and traded small talk as they waited for a table inside. Waiters and other patrons drifted in and out of view in the nearby doorway.

She was still waiting for him to go into more detail about his photography job and where she could fit into it.

Joey kept putting her off with some banter about spoiling a surprise.

There was no one sitting at the nearby tables, leaving them quite alone. They sat in view of the ocean, which drank down the last colors of the sunset. The atmosphere called for romance, but Marilyn’s heart wasn’t in it. She was getting impatient with Joey.

He leaned forward, looking her in the eyes. “They tell me that dreams reveal a lot about a person’s inner secrets.”

“Oh, no,” Marilyn said sarcastically. “I have these horrible nightmares about losing my makeup. What does that mean?”

She took out a small hand mirror and looked into it, adding a fresh gloss to her crimson lips.

“I had a dream I photographed Marilyn Monroe last night.” Joey let his hand slide across the table and make a play for Marilyn’s. Her fingers retreated at his touch.

“How’d it go?” she asked blandly.

“I don’t know.” Joey said dramatically. “The proofs haven’t been developed yet.”

Marilyn looked back at the restaurant.

“I’m starved,” she said, thinking, two can play this game.

Westwood was a magical world all its own. Bordered to the north by UCLA, it presented itself as a retail wonderland for the affluent collegiate set and also boasted one of the highest concentrations of movie theatres per capita and square foot in the world. It was difficult to look in any direction without seeing a theatre marquee jutting out over the sidewalk, advertising a new release in a blaze of pulsing neon.

Ship’s Westwood was a coffee shop on the order of a posh Denny’s, dwarfed by a forest of high-rise buildings crowded near the intersection of Westwood and Wilshire Boulevards. Eric paced nervously in front of the restaurant, framed, in neon as he stared out at the street, waiting for Marilyn to show up. She was late.

“Excuse me,” he said to a man coming out of the coffee shop, “what time is it, please?”

“It’s about nine o’clock,” the man answered.

“Thank you,” Eric said, deflated. He readjusted his Hopalong Cassidy watch and wound it again. “Where is she, Hoppy?”

He ran the day back over in his mind, concentrating on his scene with Marilyn after he had dropped her off. He could swear he had said Ship’s Westwood at eight o’clock. He was almost positive. Of course, maybe she had misunderstood. Most of the films started at a little after nine. Maybe she thought he’d said nine, then, and just wasn’t familiar with the long lines in Westwood.

Damn, he thought. He’d been right there at the shop. All he would have had to do was stick his head in the door and say something charming. “Date at eight, don’t be late.

Just a reminder.

“Stupid,” he told himself. “I should have come with her.”

Once she decided that Joey was playing her for a fool, Marilyn went all out to give him his comeuppance. She played not only hard, but expensive to get. Even though she had eaten only a few hours before, she ordered escargot and a Caesar salad to precede her main meal of filet mignon. She just picked at all three dishes, leading Joey on with her responses to his trite advances.

“Would you change your name if you became famous?” he asked her.

“If?”

“When . . .”

“Change it to what?”

“I don’t know. It just seems like you’d want to establish your own identity instead of having people call you Marilyn the Second or something like that.”

“You know, you have a good point there. What name should I use when I become your model, hmmmm?”

“Maybe it’s time we talked about that,” Joey prompted. “What do you say we go over to my studio? It’s just around the corner.”

Marilyn smiled. “Do you mind if we have some dessert?”

Joey struggled to keep the smile on his face. “No,” he said gallantly, “You can have anything you want.”

He summoned over their waiter to go through the dessert menu, all the while trying to remember how much money he had on him. This was going to clean him out, but he hadn’t come along this far to be turned back from scoring on Marilyn over a few dollars. He’d just have to raid the till at the photo store tomorrow when he was lifting more film for the “photo session.”

Clinging to his last straw hope that Marilyn didn’t know where Ship’s was located, Eric finally abandoned his post outside the coffee shop and strode hastily down Wilshire to Westwood Boulevard and stopped at the corner, trying to decide which way to go.

He crossed the street, going south toward Santa Monica Boulevard. There were still a few long lines trailing around the theatres like human belts.

Eric made a frantic pass along the lines, bobbing up and down as he scanned the ranks of theatregoers for a trace of Marilyn. Several times he waded into the swarm to pursue a blonde whose back was turned to him, only to turn the girl around and find himself apologizing to a stranger.

He finally swam through one of the lines to the ticket booth, throwing himself up against the window and pleading into the vent, “Excuse me, but did you see a blonde girl, about my height, looking for somebody . . . she has big red lips and real blonde hair.”

The girl inside looked at him, amused. “Well,” she said, “you’ve narrowed it down to half the population of Westwood and Hollywood. Keep trying.”

“Well,” Eric offered, hopes rising, “she looks just like Marilyn Monroe.”

“Don’t they all, though,” the ticket girl said. “Look, I can’t help you, friend, unless maybe you were looking to buy a ticket. They aren’t blonde, but they have a lot of personality.”

The couple behind Eric laughed, and he pulled himself away from the kiosk and elbowed his way back out to the sidewalk.

One of the fraternities on campus at UCLA was sponsoring a hayride, and a truck passed Eric by, with a few dozen people bouncing happily on the bales in the back bed. They leaned forward and waved at Eric. A few blew party favors that shot out at him like frogs tongues. Others showered him with confetti.

Close to tears, Eric turned away from the truck and went back to the corner, crossing with the light and heading toward the Village proper.

Halfway up the street, it struck him. That creep at the skate shop. Maybe she was with him. Yeah, the big hot shot with his spiffy clothes and all the right moves. She probably figured he’d show her a better time and forgot about their date. Or maybe she’d never planned on showing up in the first place. Just a cocktease. Something to tell her diary. “Hey, you should have seen the way I strung this jerk along today. What a fool! Mr. Gullible himself.”

“Binford, you’re a fuck-up!” he told himself angrily, imitating Mr. Berger. Maybe they were all right. Aunt Stella, Mr. Berger, Richie, Horace, all of them. Of course they were right. It only made sense. He was always saving his best material, his best lines, just getting by on clichés and rough draft dialogue, waiting for that time when he’d come into his own and claim the fame due him. What a life. Always waiting for tomorrow. Always stuck with today.

There was an empty soda can lying by the edge of the sidewalk. He kicked at it angrily, sending it into the street, missing a passing Citroën by inches. The car screeched on its breaks and backed up. The driver leaned over the front seat and waved a fist out the window at Eric.

“What you tryin’ to pull, Jack?” the driver shouted. “I ought to come out there and beat your fucking head in.”

“I didn’t hit you,” Eric told the driver. “Leave me alone.”

The driver burned more rubber racing off into the Village. Afraid he might be just driving around the block and coming back for him, Eric turned down a side street and disappeared into the shadows.

Marilyn was halfway through her cherries jubilee when she remembered. She shrieked and jumped back in her seat, taking Joey by surprise.

“I forgot,” she exclaimed. “I was supposed to meet this guy in Westwood hours ago.”

“Oh, come on,” Joey groaned, dumbfounded. No one walked out on Joey Madonna.

“Look, I’ve got to go,” Marilyn said, getting up from the table and unslinging her purse off the back of her chair.

“What’s the matter?” Joey asked snidely, “don’t you like men?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Marilyn told him on her way out the door.

Eric tapped a cigarette against the brick facing of a storefront, then lit it. He blew smoke and walked off, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

Stood up.

He couldn’t believe it. He’d had it all planned out. They would have been able to spend a few minutes together after the movie, just walking around the Village and talking some more before he had to go home. Just talking, just being together. It would have been so perfect. There was something about her that brought him out into the open, made him feel free. He thought back on his impersonation of the Creature of the Black Lagoon. Sensational. But he would never have thought himself capable of giving that imitation in public. She drew it out of him, like a great director able to coax the best performance out of his actors.

Damn her, why didn’t she come?

They would have arranged for another date, probably for the weekend, when he had money from his paycheck. He would have had time to have planned out something special, something so extraordinary she would have never gotten over it. A day walk through Hollywood. The things he knew, the things he could tell her. If she only would have come . . .

Marilyn wouldn’t have let me down, he thought. Not the real Marilyn. His Marilyn. She would have been there early, like he was, anxious for their date to begin.

It was past ten-thirty. The theatres were filled, but there were no more lines. The last shows were halfway over. The streets were relatively empty.