Long Shot (10 page)

He went in among the lemon trees, as far as the crest of the hill. He could hear the crowd on the boulevard below, though the hillside growth hid everything from sight. He felt the sense of violation more than ever: The people a man didn't know did not belong at his funeral. All afternoon, as he poked about—expecting any moment to be caught and shown the door—he was seized with a sense of trespass, every time he heard a wave of rumbling from below. He'd have liked to clear out all outsiders, not including him.

He watched the groom brush down the horses. He watched the gardener hose the driveway. He stood for a while in the little pool house, rifling through a drawer full of bathing suits. By midafternoon, he knew all the cracks in the tennis court, and he could have told you where they piled the trash. He was happy to sit on the low stone walls and take the mountain air. For it turned out Sid was right, that nobody paid him the slightest notice.

He didn't feel any different, though, when it came to splitting the man and the myth. Jasper Cokes was nothing to him. His star was artificial. All his pictures junk. At some quite visceral level, Greg reviewed his old resentments: If Jasper had made it, why didn't he? About once an hour, he took a break with a page or two of
Walden
. Just like a monk with his breviary—or a kid with big ideas, reading books in snatches on the bus. What his old friends used to call moody, in the days when he lived at a typewriter. Sid and Edna, not so subtle, called it weird.

When Vivien got up, she took a bath she didn't need, put on a robe, and went from room to room as if to oversee the plans. From the deck that led off the canyon room, she watched a workman dig the grave on the naked brow of the hill. She stood at the kitchen door a while. The cook was dicing lobster for a salad. In the study, Carl was up to his neck in telephone calls. Artie was on the roof with the minicam unit, setting up for the main event. It was all going swimmingly. From what she could gather, nothing was out of line except her life.

It was getting time for her and Greg to meet. They wandered away, between them, the whole of the afternoon, just waiting to catch sight of each other. She didn't think to venture outside. He didn't dare go in. Nobody talked to her because they didn't know what to say. Nobody talked to him because they didn't know who he was. They were still in different stories, really. Both unnerved by all the waiting, though he didn't get quite as bored as she did. Given the fact that boredom was the very thing she hid, however, they were more alike than not by four o'clock. Completely out of it, that is.

It looked as if they were made for each other. But it may have been that fate had put it off too long. Neither had ever known anyone else whose moods were in such constant swing. So as not to seem quite mad, they'd each perfected something close to reticence. They only revealed to others every third or fourth reversal. Their moods appeared to change a couple of times a day, from afternoon to evening wear. In fact, they had sometimes got it down to twice an hour—from black despair to trills of drunken laughter. With it all locked up inside like that, perhaps they no longer had it in their power to show how much alike they were. They were all disguised in moderation.

At 4:45, she left the house through the Spanish cloister. Artie and Carl were at either side. The dress she'd bought at Giorgio's was the palest lilac—sadder than black, in her view. Now they made their way through knots of English roses, between two hedges ten feet high. She came right out with it. “Hey,” she whispered, “thanks for the book.” She was staring straight ahead of her, peripheral vision finely tuned to catch the barest nod of recognition. But Artie and Carl kept walking as if she hadn't said a thing. It was either some mistake or one of them was lying.

Either way, she didn't care. She had no plans to read it. She avoided doing anything on recommendation, out of a dread of disagreeing. She already had a
Walden
of her own, should she ever be so inclined. It was bound in calfskin, stamped in gold, and sat on its proper shelf with several others of its kind. One of these days, she thought as they crossed from the garden onto the hill, she would have to go pick out a classic and read it cover to cover. The change of pace would do her good. But she had to do it on her own, with a book nobody bothered with.
Walden
was simply not her style.

They walked single file on the upper trail. The rose and yellow rockets of the setting sun were on the wane, bathing the whole of the canyon Arctic purple. Up ahead, a half-dozen men were clustered on the hilltop. They looked a bit like a scouting party. Most were only undertaker's men, but, seeing twice as many as she planned on, Vivien stopped to wonder what the union rules were. How many did you need to dig a simple grave? To put to rest one modest urn of ashes, she would have thought a single man with a shovel was enough. Somehow, this many meant trouble.

As the three from Steepside came along the ridge, the party at the grave cast their eyes down, glancing at the ground as if embarrassed. All but the perky minister, who pattered up to Vivien and took her by the hand. Closely followed by Maxim Brearley, red-eyed and just finished drinking, who clasped her other hand in both of his, as if he planned to play the devil's advocate. Together, they led her forward. They murmured a string of platitudes till she thought she was going to scream. They brought her up to the brink of the pit before they let her go.

She stared down in. It looked like someone planned to sink a fence post. Then she turned her eyes on all these strangers. For an instant, she thought she would turn and run, but Artie came up close behind and squeezed her by the shoulders. She let out her breath and relaxed a bit. As the minister started to speak, she focused across at Max, who stood on the opposite edge. She couldn't remember inviting him, but decided to let it pass. Since Jasper had no blood relations, Max could act the long-lost cousin. Besides, he'd directed Jasper first and last. If he hadn't had the brains to put his star in khaki pants, they never would have gotten past the werewolf stage. His presence here today was more or less inevitable.

But who the hell did the rector think he was? Did he think they were having auditions? Given as he was to a phony British clip, he was clearly schooled in a God that wore a coat and tie. And he gave it extra resonance today, since the death at hand was sorely lacking in decorum. He'd picked the wrong crowd to try it on. The more he gave it like a speech, the more did Vivien, Artie, and Carl look off and shift their feet. They probably couldn't have pooled among them a whole hour spent on their knees in the last ten years. By the time he asked them all to join him—“Brethren, let us pray”—he didn't stand a chance.

The violent gold and broken glow of the sky was dwindling down. All along the crater of the canyon, the brush and grasses deepened into gray, as if the source of the night was shadows rising out of the ground. One by one, as Vivien watched, the listeners looked away to the landscape. Two lines into the Lord's Prayer, the minister must have known he was fated to go it alone. Abruptly, the high-toned manner and Richard Burton rhythm dropped. His voice got very thin. The mourners and workers had banded together. They gazed in all directions, sweeping the hills in the falling twilight, a deaf ear turned to the pieties. It was better than hymns and the ringing of bells.

She was free at last. She could be as bored and tearless as she wished. Nobody here was out to pin her down. The class of officials who'd overrun her life, massed all week like cops at a car wreck, had no power now to make her take it hard. The busy crew from ABC, shooting it all from the roof, reduced her to three or four inches high and could not read her mood. The Cinemascope dimensions of the scene were on her side. Then too, she was the only woman. The others all had to act like men and keep their feelings private. And they didn't lock eyes with a woman like her, in any case—for fear of triggering coolness that would ice their very hearts.

She had come to say goodbye and nothing else, and so she said it. She didn't tart it up with proper feeling. She had managed, eight years running, not to care what Jasper did in bed, or wonder who he made it with. They were none of each other's business, Jasper Cokes and Vivien. And they owed it to the boundaries they'd fought for, somehow to keep things in their places. One goodbye was all the moment needed. That and a windy hillside.

Vivien looked up. At first, she thought she must have spoken it aloud. Though the rector droned along entirely unaware, a look of confusion had passed like a chill among the men around Jasper's grave. Everyone stared straight at her. They saw she was a renegade. Then, suddenly, Carl and Artie, standing beside her left and right, broke from the circle and ran. She realized what they'd all been looking at was going on behind her back. She spun around, thinking:
Let it be something grand
.

But it was nothing, really. There was someone there in the path, about twenty yards down the hill. A couple of Steepside guards had closed around him. Though they made a wall like a football huddle, she saw they were roughing him up a bit. It was all that pent-up guardsmanship. All week they'd been deprived of criminal trespass. None of the fans had climbed the fence, and the burglar class instinctively stayed clear of so much raw activity. Thus, this overcurious man, whoever he was, was the very first live one they'd tracked down.

Vivien ran to catch up with Carl and Artie. The cameras on the roof had pulled away from the crest of the hill, to train themselves on this new scene. All at once she understood—seeing the way it would be from here on in—that now, with Jasper dead, it was she alone being trespassed on. The show of force was in her name. As she came up level with the incident, she felt strangely helpless. Carl and Artie had joined the ring around the man inside. She couldn't see a thing. Luckily, she was only skin and bones. She saw a space and ducked between two fullbacks, worming in before they knew what hit them.

She came up into the midst of pushing and angry questions. A finger poked her in the side. She had to catch at the intruder, just to keep her balance. He was hunched in his charcoal suit, shielding his gonads, but he put out a hand and caught her. Suddenly, they were arm in arm. The oafish guards, a beat behind in reflex, watched it happen and shrank away, as if to make them room. After all, it was the boss who'd just popped in.

“Are you a friend of Jasper's?” Vivien asked. Dispensing with preliminary matters—how he got in and what he was after. He had the look of a loner.

“No,” said Greg. “Harry Dawes.”

“Oh,” she replied, a trifle faintly. She hoped it sounded something like an apology.

“What do you want?” demanded Artie, grabbing him up by both lapels.

“I don't know,” he answered truthfully. His plans had somehow slipped away. He told the truth for the hell of it. “I figured this was the only place where the whole thing might make sense.” He fixed her with a penetrating look. “You know what I mean?”

“Artie, let him go.”

She saw him struggle to give a name to something odd about her eyes. In fact, she hadn't a clue what he meant. For his part, he felt as if he'd been misinformed by the flat of a thousand photographs. He went on talking a moment more, but made no attempt to appease the men who threatened him. He let all present danger slip his mind, so drawn was he to the mischief playing in her glance. Could a person be that self-contained? Even at a time like this?

He said: “It's just two people dying, right? The same as anyone else.” He tried not to put any pressure on her arm. He figured she'd been squeezed till she was black and blue. “All I'm trying to do is see it plain. Without the bullshit.”

“You'll have to go,” said Artie coldly.

The guards closed in a second time, still eager to do it by force. But Carl had had a chance to mull the implications over. He was ready as ever to turn the screw. “It's not that simple,” he put in dryly, overruling Artie. “If we don't press charges now, this sort of thing will never end.”

“Later,” she said dismissively. “Now that he's here, he might as well wish Jasper luck.”

And she led him away like an honored guest. She didn't agree at all that it was just two people dying, but she liked a man to generalize. This candor and right-mindedness were just the thing they needed here, to stand against the rain of hollow pieties. For the rest, she meant what she said about “later.” He would have to talk his way out of it himself, once she left him again to his own devices. She had no room for someone new. Besides, she figured he must have an alibi, or friends who owed him a favor. A person took care of himself. That was her number one rule.

“You aren't, by any chance, the other widow, are you?”

She ventured this as gently as she could, but it must have come out pretty hard. She felt a sudden spasm twitching in his arm. It seemed he wouldn't answer. She had plainly over reached. It was only that she wanted someone feeling just as she was—nothing—and here she thought she'd found her man at last. A case of misreading the moody glint in his eye as a mirror image. For all she knew, he was something a good deal simpler—Harry's brother, or his agent even. Full of tears, if you scratched the surface. Not the same as her at all. And yet she wasn't sorry that she'd taken up his case. As they walked uphill to the grave again, the Steepside forces neutralized and trailing in their wake, she saw that the minister was most put out by the interruption. All around him, the funeral crew was visibly buoyed by the outcome of the scuffle. So at least she could console herself with this: She'd turned the mood of the moment on its head.

“Not exactly,” Greg said slowly—at a loss to know why he was lying. “We were friends,” he said. “Isn't that enough?”

“Of course,” she said. They were only a few feet off from the grave. The minister lifted his prayer book and took a deep breath. Vivien let go of Greg's arm, but she leaned up close and whispered one last thing. “By the way,” she said, “thanks for the book.”