Once Upon a Day (11 page)

“How dare you!” Lucy’s voice was louder than she expected, and she realized she was furious. “This is about a lousy spoon?”

The big eye was staring at her, and she could feel herself becoming awkward in her own body. “My mother told me you were up here waiting for me.”

“Well, I’m not going to do it,” Lucy said, quieter now, but with a firmness that surprised herself. “I’d rather go to jail than . . . than . . .”

“What?” He took a long look at her. She felt her cheeks get warm. He sounded annoyed. “I only came up here to talk to you.”

“But you took off your shoes. You’re on the bed!”

“I have blisters on the bottoms of my feet. An accident I had on the last day of shooting, when I was supposed to be showing one of my actors the right way to walk across hot coals.” He inhaled. “I’m on the bed because the room isn’t finished. It’s the only place to sit. I assume that’s why you’re sitting here too.”

She’d already breathed a sigh of relief when he said, “Let me make sure I understand. Were you telling me that you’d rather go to jail than have sex with me?”

She sat up straighter. “Yes, yes, I was.”

“And you know who I am?”

“Of course. You’re Charles Keenan, the great director.” Her voice grew defiant. “But do you know who
I
am?”

“Your name is Lucy.”

“That’s all you know? Because I’m—”

“I know you tried to steal from me. Solid silver, worth . . .” He rubbed his forehead. “I have no idea.”

“Big deal. You have enough already, don’t you think? My entire
place isn’t as big as this guest room. The spread you have on your table would feed me and my roommate for a year.”

“So you think you had a right to do this?”

“Of course not! I’ve never done anything like this before in my life. What do you think I am, a criminal?” Her top lip was quivering a little, but she flipped her hair and forced a smirk. “Look, just tell me what you’re going to do and get it over with. Call the police. Blacklist me all over town. I don’t care.”

He was staring at her with both eyes now. “As long as you don’t have to have sex with me.”

“Sex is for love. I don’t care how insane that sounds to someone like you. It’s the way I’m going to live. Even if you offered me a starring role in your next movie and half this house, I still wouldn’t sleep with you.”

He didn’t say anything as he reached for his shoes, but he groaned a little when he put them on. Maybe it was true about the blisters.

When he stood up, she was struck again by how tall he was. Tall and intimidating. She stood up too, but it didn’t help.

“Let’s go.” He waved his hand in the direction of the door.

“Where?”

“Back to the party.”

“Both of us?”

He was already opening the door, and then they were in the hall, crowded with guests. His mother, Margaret, was taking them to the screening room in the west wing of the house. It was time to watch
A Silver Dollar and a Gun.

“Would you sit with me?” he said to Lucy.

She was very surprised, but she said okay. At least she’d have a good seat, she thought, though it didn’t turn out to be true. Charles always sat in the back so he could watch everyone’s reactions. He said these closed preview screenings were a farce—no one ever said what they really thought—but he could tell whether the scenes were working by the way the audience breathed and moved in their seats. Too much sighing or squirming was obviously bad, but none
was bad too. “If the hero is in danger,” he told Lucy, “everyone
should
be uncomfortable.”

Lucy was uncomfortable, no problem there. Before the movie started, at least half the room turned around to catch a glimpse of her. Later, she would discover that Charles had never had a woman sit with him during a screening. He said he’d never trusted any woman he’d been with not to distract him with false praise.

After the movie was over, he asked if she’d stay at his side while he suffered through the applause and backslapping. When her roommate, Janice, came up to ask what was going on, Lucy shrugged, but Charles said the explanation was simple.

“Lucy is not corrupt.”

Janice’s eyes were on her. Several other people had gathered in a circle around Charles, and they were looking at her too. One of them was the actress Belinda Holmes, who had been the female lead in several of Keenan’s movies.

Lucy wondered if he’d been drinking, but then she realized she’d been with him for more than two hours. Even if he had, it would have worn off by now.

“This girl has moral values,” he said, emphasizing his point with one hand slicing the air. His tone became loud, as if he were giving a speech. Which he was. The crowd around them was growing with his every word. “Too many people in this business don’t even know what that means anymore. Immoral behavior has become so commonplace that they don’t even call it that, they call it ‘looking out for your career. Doing what you have to do.’ There’s no such thing as bad or good, only the next big score.”

The longer Charles talked, the more Lucy thought he sounded like one of the monologues that were considered the “signatures” of his movies. Unlike old-fashioned Westerns, Keenan’s films always contained at least one direct address to the audience, usually by the sheriff. Movie critics loved to talk about the meaning of these monologues, claiming they were really about Watergate, the Vietnam War, feminism, race relations, all the issues of the day. Lucy
never really caught any of that. To her, the sheriff sounded like her grandpa, spinning a tale of the old days when good was good and bad was bad and people had faith in each other and the world.

Charles himself had moved back to the topic of Lucy and was spinning a dream of the little town she must have come from. Her accent gave her away, he said. It was Southern, wholesome, without a hint of sarcasm.

She winced a little at the word “wholesome.” Smitty had called her “wholesome looking”—while he was laughing and pinching her butt.

She’d let herself drift into a daydream by the time Belinda Holmes suddenly said, “Tell us, Lucy, are you really such a good person?”

“You don’t have to answer that,” he said irritably.

“Why not let her answer?” Belinda said, tossing her head back. When she turned to Lucy, her voice was a challenge. “Unless for some reason you don’t want to.”

Lucy’s eyes darted around the room, but she didn’t see one person crack a smile. Even the group of actors who were rumored to be twenty-four-hour speed freaks looked as serious as if they were in church.

The church of Charles Keenan, she thought. She figured he was waiting for her to say yes, so his speech would make sense, but she was so nervous, she blurted out the truth. “No,” she said. She looked down at the beautiful wood floor, each plank gleaming, not a speck of dust in sight. “I want to be a good person, but I don’t think I am.”

She looked up when Charles started clapping. A slow, steady clap, each one loud enough that she wondered it didn’t hurt his hands. Soon the rest of the crowd had joined him and she realized she’d never been more confused in her life. But she wasn’t angry. Maybe she really was meant to be an actress, she thought, since she liked even this bizarre applause.

Over the next hour or so, two agents slipped her their cards. One said, “You are incredible,” and the other simply told her to call
him tomorrow. It felt exciting, even though she knew it was only because of Charles Keenan’s interest that they were interested in her. And that won’t last, she thought later, sitting next to him on a white couch that had to be eighteen feet long, eating slices of the most delicious strawberries and mangoes she’d ever tasted in her life. Now that she wasn’t angry, she couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him. Even when he asked what she thought of his movie, she said, “Great.” It was her true reaction, but how boring.

By the time the guests started leaving, she was mainly just relieved. She was dying to be back with Janice in Janice’s old VW, smoking a joint and laughing, rehashing all the strange details of this very strange night.

She did manage to tell him she was going. When he asked her to come into the dining room for a moment first, she nodded and let him lead her into the deserted room.

The chandeliers were dark, but the room wasn’t, thanks to the shadows of the giant floodlights outside playing on the wall. She could see a tennis court and swimming pool in back of the house, and she remembered again that this man was a millionaire many times over.

“Before you leave, I’d like to kiss you,” he said. “Is that all right?”

He must have taken her silence as a sign that she didn’t mind because he leaned down and put his lips on hers, surprisingly lightly and gently, as if he were kissing a newborn baby. It was so different from the way Mr. Smitty had kissed her that she felt tears spring to her eyes.

“Is something wrong?” he said. His voice had become so kind, and she felt foolish but even sadder.

“No,” she whispered.

“May I kiss you again then?”

May I? she thought. Like something from one of his movies. Next thing you knew, he’d be calling her “ma’am,” and she’d be wearing gingham and calico.

At that moment, the idea struck her as incredibly romantic.

She said yes, and he did kiss her, over and over until she was dizzy. But then he walked her to the front hallway and let her leave with nothing but a good-bye.

Back in the VW with Janice, riding down Wilshire Boulevard, she realized she’d lost interest in smoking a joint. She wasn’t in the mood to talk about the party and she definitely didn’t want to listen to Janice going on and on about Charles. Especially in her silly pirate voice, which Lucy never liked much anyway.

“Aye, matey, it was his eye, I tell you. That wicked eye. Aargh, the eye made me do it.”

“Very funny.”

“Aargh. Better a weird-ass eye than missin’ a leg though. That’s what I always say since—”

“Cut it out.”

“I lost me middle leg back in ’fifty-seven. Aargh. Wonder if that big eye means a big di—”

“Shut up already, will you?”

“What’s your problem?” Janice was frowning, but then she glanced at Lucy. “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? Did he promise you something? Is that what this is about? Oh, you lucky dog!” She reached over and punched Lucy lightly on the arm. “Here I am out here for a year and a half with nothing but walk-ons and already you have a part in—”

“He didn’t promise me anything.”

“But he said he’d give you a role, didn’t he? And you know what? I bet he meant it. Everybody says he’s such an honest man, the most ethical person in Hollywood, the only guy in the industry with old-fashioned values, blah, blah, blah.” She honked the horn and yelled out the open window. “My friend is going to have a part in a Charles Keenan movie. Dammit! You lucky, lucky dog.”

“He never said anything about a part, Janice.”

“Then what?” Janice said, confused. When Lucy didn’t answer, she burst out, “Oh my God, don’t tell me you like him? That can’t be it. You like that weirdo?”

“He’s not that weird.”

“Come on, Lucy, he’s as weird as they come, and they come pretty damn weird in this city. He lives with his mother, for Pete’s sake. He’s
always
lived with his mother.”

“But he’s had girlfriends,” Lucy said, racking her brain to remember the name of the latest one, the one she read about in some tabloid. “He dated that model, Delia Beck.”

“ ‘Dated’ is the word. He’s never lived with anyone, never been married. Of course girls want him. Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, as they say. But nobody is good enough for the fabulous Charles, that’s the problem.”

Lucy was trying to think of a way to change the topic without admitting it bothered her, when the radio saved her. Janice’s favorite song came on and before long both girls were sticking their arms out the window, screaming along at the top of their lungs. “‘Welcome to the Hotel California, such a lovely place . . .’”

By the time the song was over, Janice was ready to talk about all the cool people she herself had met at the party. Lucy listened, though each person Janice mentioned was interesting to her primarily because they were at his house. Were they his friends? Did they work with him? Had he ever said one of them was “not corrupt”?

If Lucy had had a real social life or something beyond her job as a waitress on the breakfast shift of the Venice Café, she might have been able to put him out of her mind. If either of the agents she’d tried had panned out, she might have already been on the way to being a success in her own right. Lucy would turn out to be a natural as an actress, but she didn’t discover that until Charles Keenan gave her her first role. The role of a lifetime, the critics would say later. The role that defined every part she would be offered for the rest of her career, even after Charles had disappeared.

Everyone said she retired early because of what happened to her family. That was part of it, but the other part was she could no
longer stand the role of saint/savior that Charles had written for her and taught her how to play.

It was almost four months after the party before she saw him again. During that time, while she was scouring for news of him in
The Hollywood Reporter
and
Variety
(there was so little news! Didn’t the man ever leave his house?), he was writing the script for what would turn out to be his last Western,
The Brave Horseman of El Dorado.
The cast numbered in the hundreds, as in all Keenan’s films, but the star, the horse
man,
was actually a girl. It was a fascinating idea: to retell the Joan of Arc story as a Western. And the girl, the new Joan, had long red hair, according to the script. She was small, at most five-three, no more than ninety-five pounds. She had hazel eyes and tiny hands and very white skin and the lightest sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks and nose.

In other words, Lucy herself.

“What if I hadn’t wanted to do this?” she asked, attempting to be playful, though she was so nervous her voice shook. He’d called out of the blue and asked where to pick her up. She’d phoned her waitress job, pretending to be sick, but they’d fired her. So what? Now she was riding with Charles Keenan in his black sports car out to a movie studio. She was flipping through a real movie script.