Still, he thought, gathering up his screenplay and sliding it carefully into his Reel Thing tote bag, nobody ever got anywhere in Hollywood by sitting at home and wishing.
He took one last look at the mirror before he left. It reflected nothing but the sitting room and himself and the morning sunlight. He was beginning to think that he must have hallucinated that ball. Maybe he would go talk to his friend Marion Gidley about it. She was into self-hypnosis and self-induced hallucinations and all that kind of stuff.
As he closed the door of his apartment behind him, he came across Emilio playing on the landing with a Transformer robot. ‘How’re you doing, Emilio?’ he asked him.
Emilio looked up with big Hershey-colored eyes. ‘Hi, Martin. Doing good.’
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’
‘Datson 280 sports car, turns into an evil robot, look.’
With a complicated fury of clicking and elbow twisting, Emilio turned the sports car into a robot with a pin head and spindly legs. Martin hunkered down and inspected it. ‘Pretty radical, hunh? I wish my car would turn into a robot.’
‘Your car’s junk.’
‘Who said that?’
‘My grandpa, he said your car’s junk, and he wishes you wouldn’t park it right outside the house, people are gonna think it belongs to him.’
‘My car’s better than that hearse that
he
drives.’
‘My grandpa’s car turns into a robot.’
‘Oh, yeah?’
‘It does, too, turn into a robot. He told me.’
Martin affectionately scruffed Emilio’s hair, which Emilio hated, and got up to leave. He was halfway down the next flight of stairs, however, when he thought of something. ‘You don’t happen to own a ball, do you?’ he asked Emilio through the banister rails.
‘Grandpa gave me a baseball.’
‘No, no – I mean one of those bouncing plastic balls, blue and white.’
Emilio wrinkled up his nose and shook his head, as if the idea that he would own a bouncing blue and white ball was utterly contemptible. ‘No way, José.’
Martin reached through the banister and tried to scruff his hair again, but Emilio ducked away. ‘Don’t keep
doing
that!’ he protested. ‘What do you think I am, some kind of gerbil?’
Martin laughed, and went off to keep his appointment at Fox.
June Lassiter was very calm and together and California-friendly; a woman’s woman with frizzed-up black hair and pale, immaculate, hypo-allergenic makeup that had been created without causing any pain to animals. She wore a flowing white suit and a scarf around her neck that had been handprinted on raw silk by Hopi Indians. She took Martin to the Fox commissary and bought him a huge spinach salad and a carafe of domestic Chablis that was almost too cold to drink.
‘You’re raising ghosts, that’s the trouble,’ she drawled. Martin had a large mouthful of spinach, and all he could do was look at her thin wrist lying on the table with its faded tan and its huge loose gold bangle, and munch, and nod.
June said, ‘Boofuls is one of those code words in Hollywood that immediately make people’s brains go blank; you know, like Charles Manson.’
‘People have tackled difficult Hollywood topics before. Look at
Mommie Dearest
.’
‘Oh, sure,’ June agreed. ‘But in
Mommie Dearest
, Joan Crawford eventually redeemed herself, and all the terrible things that she was supposed to have done to her children were rationalized and forgiven. She was a drunken carping bitch but she was a star, and in Hollywood that excuses everything. How can you do that with Boofuls? The boy was chopped up by his crazed grandmother and that was the end of the story. No redemption, no explanation, just an abrupt and brutal ending – even if you
don’t
depict it on the screen.’
Martin wiped his mouth with his napkin. ‘So what’s the verdict?’
‘Well, Martin, I haven’t read your screenplay yet and it may be brilliant. I mean I’ve heard Morris talking about you and he’s
very
complimentary about your work. But I have to tell you that Boofuls is the kiss of death. The only person who might conceivably touch it is Ken Russell; and you know what kind of a reputation
he’s
got;
enfant terrible
, even at his age. Even if he’d agree to do it, you’d still have the devil’s own job raising the money for it.’
Martin sat back. ‘I don’t know. It seems like such a natural. The music, the dancing, and if you could find the right kid to play Boofuls …’
June shook her head. ‘My advice to you is to file it and forget it. Maybe one day you’ll be wealthy enough and influential enough to develop it yourself.’
They spent the rest of their lunch talking gossip: who was making which picture, and who was making whom. When they were leaving, June stood in the empty parking space marked G Wilder and said, ‘Get your name painted here first, Martin. Then make your musical.’
Martin gave her what he hoped was a laconic wave and walked back to his car, with his screenplay under his arm. As he went, he whistled ‘Heartstrings’.
You play … such sweet music
How can … I resist
Every song … from your heartstrings
Makes me feel I’ve … just been kissed
But he drove back along Santa Monica Boulevard with the wind whirring in the pages of the screenplay as it lay on the seat beside him, and he felt like tossing it out of the car. He was beginning to believe that Morris was right, that he was carrying this screenplay around like a sackful of stinking meat.
Hollywood’s golden boy of the 1930s had died more than one kind of death.
He returned to his apartment shortly before three o’clock. Emilio was playing in the sunshine on the front steps. Emilio had obviously finished his lunch, because his T-shirt was stained with catsup. The steps were proving an almost insurmountable obstacle to a deadpan plastic Rambo; and the afternoon was thick with the sound of machine-gun fire.
‘Full-scale war, hey?’ asked Martin. Emilio didn’t look up. Martin sat down on the steps and watched him for a while. ‘It beats me, you know, how
Rambo
can gross seventy-five million dollars, with all its shooting and killing and phony philosophy … and here,
here
’ – slapping his screenplay in the palm of his hand – ‘is the most entertaining and enchanting musical ever made, and everybody sniffs at me as if I’ve trodden in something.’
Emilio continued his war; this time with heavy shelling, which involved extra saliva.
‘You should come up and watch some of my Boofuls movies,’ Martin told him. ‘Then you’d believe, you little Philistine.’
Emilio shaded his eyes with his grubby hand and looked at him. ‘Who’s Boofuls? Is he a cartoon?’
‘Is he a cartoon? My God, doesn’t that grandfather of yours teach you anything? Boofuls was a boy, just like you, except that he could sing and dance and make people happy. In other words he didn’t sit in the dirt all day with some grotesque reproduction of Sylvester Stallone, pretending to zap Asiatics. Who’s Boofuls, for God’s sake.’
Emilio picked up a green plastic helicopter and waved it around for a while. ‘That boy in your room can dance,’ he remarked.
‘Well, that’s Boofuls,’ said Martin. ‘The boy in the poster, just above my bed.’
‘No,’ Emilio contradicted, shaking his head. ‘The boy in your other room. The real boy.’
Martin frowned; and then reached out and took hold of Emilio’s wrist, so that the helicopter was stopped in midattack. ‘What real boy? What are you talking about?’
Emilio pouted and wouldn’t answer.
‘You went into my room?’ Martin asked him. ‘Today, when I was out, you went into my room?’
Emilio refused to do anything but pout.
‘Listen, Emilio, if you went into my room I won’t be mad at you. Come on, it’s your grandfather’s house, you can go where you want.’
Emilio slowly and sulkily twisted his wrist away.
Martin glanced up toward his sitting room window. It was blank, as usual, with the sky reflecting off the glass.
‘You won’t talk?’ he said to Emilio. ‘In that case, I’d better go see for myself.’
He got up from the steps and bounded quickly upstairs, three steps at a time, until he reached the landing just outside his front door. There was a small plastic name tag on it saying
M Williams
. Underneath,
J Berrywell
had been scratched out. Even when they were living together, Jane had insisted on keeping her maiden name.
He hesitated.
A real boy
. For some irrational reason, he felt a prickle of genuine alarm. There were no boys in his apartment, of course, real or unreal. Emilio had simply invented an imaginary playmate. He was just the age for it, after all, and he had no friends of his own age, not on this block. But all the same, Martin found the idea of it unexpectedly unsettling, as if his apartment had been intruded upon by something he didn’t understand.
He opened the front door. He hardly ever locked it, because there was nothing worth stealing, except for his typewriter, and he had been hoping for years that somebody would take that, so that he could buy a new one with the insurance money.
The apartment was silent. The midafternoon sunlight fell across the wood-block floor in a dazzling diagonal. From the bedroom, the pale face of Boofuls watched him as he trod softly along the corridor to the sitting room door.
He paused. He called, ‘Hello?’ But there was no reply.
What did you expect
? he asked himself.
A whole chorus of Walt Disney ghosts to come charging out of the closets chorusing ‘Fooled you, Martin!
’?
He eased the sitting room door wide open. Then he peered around it. In the mirror, his own face peered back. There was nobody else in the room. No boy; not even a
sign
of a boy, like an abandoned blue and white ball.
‘Kids,’ he said under his breath, meaning Emilio in particular.
It took him only a couple of moments to look around the rest of the apartment. There were no boys hiding in the closets among his clothes; there were no boys crouching under the bed. But as he went through to the kitchen to find himself a fresh bottle of wine, he was sure for an instant he could hear somebody giggling.
He hesitated and listened, but there was nothing. He stepped out of the kitchen into the hallway, holding the bottle of wine in his hand, and there was Emilio with his hands in the pockets of his shorts. Martin looked at him without saying anything.
‘Can I play with him?’ asked Emilio.
‘Can you play with whom, Emilio?’ Martin replied, deliberately pedantic.
Emilio swung one shoulder toward the sitting room. ‘The boy, of course.’
Martin said, ‘Emilio, my little lunatic, there is no boy.’
‘There is, too, a boy.’
‘Well, that’s right, and your grandfather’s car turns into a robot.’
‘I’ve seen it! He showed me!’
‘All right,’ cooed Martin. ‘All right, don’t lose your cool. Let’s just say that I’m one of these real skeptical adults you see on children’s television – you know the kind of adult I mean. The kind of adult who can’t understand what the hell Flipper is trying to say to him, and takes a swipe at Lassie when she’s trying to drag him off to the abandoned mine by the trouser leg.’
Emilio didn’t understand a word of what Martin was saying; but it made Martin feel better, and it stopped Emilio’s fretting.
‘If there really is a boy,’ said Martin gently, ‘all you have to do is introduce him to me. Let me shake the boy by the hand, and say good afternoon, boy. Then I’ll believe you.’
‘You can’t shake his hand,’ Emilio retorted.
‘I know I can’t, Emilio, because he’s imaginary.’ He tapped Emilio’s forehead with his fingertip quite hard. ‘He exists only in there.’
‘No,’ Emilio protested. ‘He’s real. But you can’t shake his hand because he’s in the mirror.’
Martin straightened himself up. Emilio was looking up at him, his grubby little face serious, his eyes wide, his fists clenched.
‘Emilio,’ he said, ‘has it occurred to that one-byte brain of yours that the real boy in the mirror might be you? A reflection of you? Or was your face so filthy that you didn’t recognize yourself? Maybe you thought it was Paul Robeson.’
Emilio was getting cross again. ‘He’s real! He’s real! But he’s only in the mirror! I’m in the mirror, and he’s in the mirror. But I’m in the room, and he’s not in the room!’
Martin thought of the blue and white ball, and how it had come bouncing into the mirror. He thought of how he had gone back to look at it again and found that it had vanished.
It’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond
.
A slow cold feeling crawled down his back, like a snail making its way down a frozen drainpipe.
‘This boy … did he look anything like you?’ he asked Emilio.
Emilio wiped his hand over his face as if he were attempting to erase his own features and come up with some other face: placid, blank, with eyes like Little Orphan Annie.