The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (9 page)

“Why don’t you put your feet up?”

“They are up.”

“Oh. Then why don’t you take off your shoes again? Here, I’ll help you. Would you like another drink?”

“No.” He felt himself slipping away. “I guess I am tired. All this waiting.”

“I know.”

How could she? She couldn’t know what it was like. He didn’t know what to do with her. To throw her out so soon would be rude. “Pour yourself one, if you like.”

“I like your voice,” she said. “And your face. It’s gentle. Not like the other men who come here.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you very successful?”

“Sure,” he said. “I will be. You’ll see. You’ll all see.”

She came around and perched on the edge of the bed.

“You haven’t read your newspaper yet,” she said, as if acting out some women’s magazine version of an idealized domestic scene. Why bother? Go home, he thought, to the small town you came from, marry some guy with a polyester suit and a regular income. You won’t have any surprises, but you won’t have any disappointments, either. Meanwhile practice on someone who can fill the bill. She could find someone else, couldn’t she?

He was aware of her inching closer. He felt smothered, immobilized. What did she want from him? Somehow things had taken a turn toward the surreal. He didn’t understand it. For now he felt too weary, too ineffectual to resist. That would have to change, of course. In another minute. As soon as she eased off. Then it would be time to call again.

She unfolded the newspaper and laid it across his lap.

He opened his eyes. “You’re very kind,” he began, “but you really don’t have to—”

He saw the headline.

FILM GREAT FOUND DEAD

He snatched up the paper.

HOLLYWOOD (UPI) Joe Gillis, one of the screen’s most durable leading men for more than four decades, was found dead in his West Los Angeles condominium today, the apparent victim of a massive stroke.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, “did you see this?”

“No.”

He read on numbly.

A security guard discovered the body early this morning, using a passkey after the actor’s agent and friends became alarmed. Preliminary reports indicate that the star of such film classics as
Man Afire
,
La Carcel
and
Hole in the Wall
had been dead for at least several days. Police say the corpse, sprawled on the floor near an empty whiskey bottle and with the telephone only inches from his hand, had already begun to decompose. . . .

Wintner’s eyes followed the story to the bottom of the page, then returned blearily to the three-column photo at the top and began again. He read the words over but they did not make any sense. It was some kind of sick, twisted joke.

He grabbed the phone, dialed 393-9058.

The receiver clicked.

“Hi,”
said a reassuring voice.

“Hi, Joe,” said Wintner, remembering to breathe again. “Listen, is this April Fool’s Day or something? What’s all that crap in the
Examiner
about . . . ?”

“This is Joe Gillis. I’m sorry but I’m not in right now. If you’d care to leave a message, wait for the beep and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. And thanks for calling. . . .”

“Hello?” said Wintner. The receiver began to shake in his hand. His fingers went cold, as though they were dying. The blood drained from the left side of his body and pounded in his ears. He could not hear whether or not anyone had picked up the other end. “Hello? Is anybody . . . ?”

She placed the glass in his right hand and poured.

The electronic beep sounded and, when he could not speak, clicked off into a dial tone.

She hung up the phone for him.

Dazed, he said, “I’m sorry, but something terrible’s happened. I’ll have to ask you to—”

“Is it so terrible?”

“
What?
Do you realize what this means?”

“Yes. I didn’t think you knew.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“That’s partly why I came here.”

“You did read it, then.”

“No.”

“Then how could you know?”

“I know he’s dead.” A maddening tranquility passed over her features. “I went to the room to get my towel, and when I got back he was—gone. He waited for such a long time. We all did.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“My father. I believe you met him. Mother said you did. She’s very strict with me, by the way. That’s why I told you I wasn’t sure when you asked me if I could—”

“Who? You mean the man by the pool? You mean that he’s dead, too?”

He spilled the drink as he drained the glass dry. It went down like sweet fire but this time he could hardly taste it. She wiped the drops from his shirt, then poured herself a small one and sat sipping, watching him patiently.

It was too much. His head tilted back. His muscles were rubber. He felt his body, his legs, the bed and the floor dissolving and falling through while his mind continued to function, like the elusive Joe Gillis whose answering tape had stayed on as his stand-in even after he had gone, like the man in the cabana whose body, what was left of it, remained in place even as his mouth opened in a final wrenching paroxysm of terror.

“We all have to let go,” she said, moving over him.

What would become of the actor after his tape was turned off? His number would be given to someone new, his furniture moved out and someone else’s moved in. And then? Wintner was at sea, cast adrift.

“What happens now?” he said groggily, as the liquor anesthetized him.

“Now we’re free,” she whispered. He smelled the alcohol on her breath, close and sickeningly medicinal.

He saw the note in his mind, as if in a dream. It fluttered up on a dark wind. Was
he
the one, then? Wintner saw the man crawling like a living torso toward the opening and the light, struggling to speak, to scrawl one last plea before falling across the threshold to another country. help me, PLEASE HELP ME . . .

“What did he want?” Wintner choked, as her hot breath filled the shrinking space around him.
“What?”

“The same as anybody,” she said. “The trouble was, Mother’s too old to take care of him now. I couldn’t help. She wouldn’t let me. She says I’ve got myself to worry about. No one else could do it for her. It was her job, you see. You do see, don’t you? Don’t you . . . ?

“It’s going to be easy from now on,” she said, climbing higher, settling in. “You’ll see. It’s simple, so simple, I promise. . . .”

The morning sun was a burning penny in the sky. It blasted the canvas until the sides blazed with louvers of hot orange light.

She took down the top of her black bathing suit and lay prone on the bleached white towel, her elbows out and her small hands locked under her chin. When he glanced down it appeared at first that her arms were abnormally shortened, the bones already eaten away close to the body. But then she flipped her head to the other side and used one hand to touch a spot on the back of her neck.

“Here,” she said, “between my shoulders. Can you get it, honey? It’s starting to bother me.”

So soon, he thought. He paused to peel off his T-shirt, then sat over her, kneading the hyaline flesh. He worked up slowly to a regular rhythm, soothing and mindless.

“Mmm,” she moaned. “Feels so good. I love you to take care of me like this.”

“Do you?” He didn’t mind. It was easy, after all. So much easier. It gave him something to do now besides waiting.

A gust shook the tent. It was strong today, the first intimation of a full-blown wind, possibly even a rainstorm, what passed for winter here. The flap blew open. The sudden coolness raised bumps on his arms.

“Can you see my mother?”

He leaned back and peered through the gash of the opening. “She’s at the end of the pool, by the diving board. It doesn’t look like she’s ready to go in yet.”

“It’s been too long,” said the young woman wistfully. “It’s like she has to learn all over again.”

The woman was standing like an overgrown child, afraid to get her feet wet. There was no one else out yet; that, he thought, might make it easier for her.

“She’s finally going to have some fun,” he said.

“Oh, is she? I hope so! She deserves it. She waited so long. . . .”

“Shall we join her?”

“Not today. I’m not feeling well at all.”

Of course, he thought. He heard the distant chime of glasses being stacked. “Maybe she’s going to have a drink first.”

“Mmm. That would be nice.”

He stopped moving his hands and sat back to take a breather while the cabana grew brighter, the sides vibrating with an unearthly intensity, the threads of the canvas shimmering in bas-relief like the venation of a translucent membrane, like the projection of his own retinas on the screen of his eyelids when the light became too harsh and he had to close his eyes.

She took the opportunity to raise to her elbows and crawl forward a few inches. She put on his dark glasses and lifted the flap.

“Hey,” she called, “can you do me a favor?”

Her mother turned from the bar and looked back blankly.

“Can you bring me something to drink?”

The mother nodded and said something to the attendant.

“I could use one, too,” said Wintner.

“What?”

“I don’t care,” he said. “But tell her to make it a double.”

She did. Then she crawled back into position so that he could continue taking care of her.

He did.

It went on like that.

IT STARTED IN MILO'S right foot. He awoke in the dark of his bedroom with a pins-and-needles sensation from the lower part of his calf to the tips of his toes. He sat up, massaged it, walked around the bedroom. Nothing helped. Finally, he took a Darvocet and went back to bed. He managed to get to sleep but was awake again by dawn, this time with both feet tingling. In the wan light, he inspected his lower legs.

A thin, faintly red line around each leg about three inches up from the ankle. Milo snapped on the night table light for a closer look. He touched the line. It was more than a line—an indentation, actually, like something left after wearing a pair of socks too tight at the top. But it felt as if the constricting band were still there.

He got up and walked around. It felt a little funny to stand on partially numb feet but he couldn’t worry about it now. In just a couple of hours he was doing a power breakfast at the Polo with Regenstein from TriStar, and he had to be sharp. He padded into the kitchen to put on the coffee.

As he wove through L.A.’s morning commuter traffic, Milo envied the drivers with their tops down. He would have loved to have his 380SL opened up to the bright early morning sun. Truthfully, he would have been glad for an open window. But for the sake of his hair he stayed bottled up with the AC on. He couldn’t afford to let the breeze blow his toupee around. It had been especially stubborn about blending in with his natural hair this morning, and he didn’t have any more time to fuss with it. And this was his good piece. His backup had been stolen during a robbery of his house last week, an occurrence that still baffled the hell out of him. He wished he didn’t have to worry about wearing a rug. He had heard about a new experimental lotion that was supposed to start hair growing again. If that ever panned out, he’d be first on line to—

His right hand started tingling. He removed it from the wheel and fluttered it in the air. Still it tingled. The sleeve of his sports coat slipped back, and he saw a faint indentation running around his forearm, just above the wrist. For a few heartbeats he studied it in horrid fascination.

What’s happening to me?

Then he glanced up and saw the looming rear of a truck rushing toward his windshield. He slammed on the brakes and slewed to a screeching stop inches from the tailgate. Gasping and sweating, Milo slumped in the seat and tried to get a grip. Bad enough he was developing mysterious little constricting bands on his legs and now his arm, he had almost wrecked the new Mercedes. This sucker cost more than his first house back in the seventies.

When traffic started up again, he drove cautiously, keeping his eyes on the road and working the fingers of his right hand. He had some weird-shit disease, he just knew it, but he couldn’t let anything get between him and this breakfast with Regenstein.

“Look, Milo,” Howard Regenstein said through the smoke from his third cigarette in the last twenty minutes. “You know that if it was up to me the picture would be all yours. You know that, man.”

Milo nodded, not knowing that at all. He had used that same line himself a million times—maybe
two
million times. If it was up to me. . . .

Yeah, right. The great cop-out: I’m a nice guy and I have all the faith in the world in you, but those money guys, those faithless, faceless Philistines who hold the purse-strings won’t let guys with vision like you and me get together and make a great film.

“Well, what’s the problem, Howie? I mean, give it to me straight.”

“All right,” Howie said, showing his chicklet caps between his thin lips. He was deeply tanned, wore thick horn-rimmed glasses; his close-cropped curly hair was sandy-colored and lightly bleached. “Despite my strong—and, Milo, I do mean
strong
—recommendation, the money boys looked at the grosses for
The Hut
and got scared away.”

Well. That explained a lot of things, especially this crummy table half hidden in an inside corner. The real power players, the ones who wanted everybody else in the place to see who they were doing breakfast with, were out in the middle or along the windows. Regenstein probably had three breakfasts scheduled for this morning. Milo was wondering which tables had been reserved for the others when a sharp pain stabbed his right leg. He winced and reached down.

“Something wrong?” Regenstein said.

“No. Just a muscle cramp.”

He lifted his trouser leg and saw that the indentation above his ankle was deeper. It was actually a cut now. Blood oozed slowly, seeping into his sock. He straightened up and forced a smile at Regenstein.

“
The Hut
, Howie? Is
that
all?” Milo said with a laugh. “Don’t they know that project was a loser from the start? The book was a bad property, a piece of clichéd garbage. Don’t they know that?”

Howie smiled, too. “Afraid not, Milo. You know their kind. They look at the bottom line and see that Universal’s going to be twenty mill in the hole on
The Hut
, and in their world that means something. And maybe they remember those PR pieces you did a month or so before it opened. You never even mentioned that the film was based on a book. Had me convinced the story was all yours, whole cloth.”

Milo clenched his teeth. That had been when he had thought the movie was going to be a smash.

“I had a
concept
, Howie, one that cut through the bounds and limitations of the novel. I wanted to raise the level of the material, but the producers stymied me at every turn.”

Actually, he had been pretty much on his own down there in Haiti. He had changed the book a lot, made loads of cuts and condensations. He had made it “A Milo Gherl Film.”

But somewhere along the way, he had lost it. Unanimously hostile one-star reviews with leads like, “Shut
The Hut
” and “New Gherl Pix the Pits” hadn’t helped. Twentieth had been pushing an offer in its television division and he had been holding them off—who wanted to do TV when you could do theatricals? But as the bad reviews piled up and the daily grosses plummeted, he grabbed the TV offer. It was good money, had plenty of prestige, but it was still television.

Milo wanted to do films and very badly wanted in on the new package Regenstein was putting together for TriStar. Howie had Jack Nicholson, Bobby De Niro, and Kathy Turner firm and was looking for a director. More than anything else in his career, Milo wanted to be that director. But he wasn’t going to be. He knew that now.

Well, at least he could use the job to pay the bills and keep his name before the public until
The Hut
was forgotten. That wouldn’t be long. A year or two at most and he’d be back directing another theatrical. Not a package like Regenstein’s, but something with a decent budget where he could do the screenplay and direct. That was the way he liked it—full control on paper and on film.

He shrugged at Regenstein and put on his best good-natured smile. “What can I say, Howie? The world wasn’t ready for
The Hut
. Someday, they’ll appreciate it.”

Yeah, right, he thought as Regenstein nodded noncommittally. At least Howie was letting him down easy, letting him keep his dignity here. That was important. All he had to do now was—

Milo screamed as pain tore into his left eye like a bolt of lightning. He lurched to his feet, upsetting the table as he clamped his hands over his eye in a vain attempt to stop the agony.

Pain!
Oh Christ, pain as he had never known it was shooting from his eye straight into his brain. This had to be a stroke! What else could hurt like this?

Through his good eye, he had a whirling glimpse of everybody in the dining room standing and staring at him as he staggered around. He pulled one hand away from his eye and reached out to steady himself. He saw a smear of blood on his fingers. He took the other hand away. His left eye was blind, but with his right he saw the dripping red on his palm. A woman screamed.

“My God, Milo!” Regenstein said, his chalky face swimming into view. “Your eye! What did you do to your eye?” He turned to a gaping waiter. “Get a doctor! Get a fucking ambulance!”

Milo was groggy from the Demerol they had given him. In the blur of hours since breakfast, he’d been wheeled in and out of the emergency room so many times, poked with so many needles, examined by so many doctors, x-rayed so many times, his head was spinning.

At least the pain had eased off.

“I’m admitting you onto the vascular surgery service, Mr. Gherl,” said the bearded doctor as he pushed back one of the white curtains that shielded Milo’s gurney from the rest of the emergency room. His badge said, EDWARD JANSEN, M.D., and he looked tired and irritable.

Milo struggled up through the Demerol downgrade. “Vascular surgery? But my eye—!”

“As Dr. Burch told you, Mr. Gherl, your eye can’t be saved. It’s ruined beyond repair. But maybe we can save your feet and your hand if it’s not too late already.

“
Save
them?”

“If we’re lucky. I don’t know what kind of games you’ve been into, but getting yourself tied up with piano wire is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

Milo was growing more alert by the second now. Over Dr. Jansen’s shoulder, he saw the bustle of the emergency room personnel, saw an old black mopping the floor in slow, rhythmic strokes. But he was only seeing it with his right eye. He reached up to the bandage over his left.
Ruined?
He wanted to cry, but Dr. Jansen’s piano-wire remark suddenly filtered through to his consciousness.

“Piano wire? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play dumb. Look at your feet.” Dr. Edwards pulled the sheet free from the far end of the gurney.

Milo looked. The nail beds were white and the skin below the indentations was a dusky blue. And the indentations had all become clean, straight, bloody cuts right through the skin and into the meat below. His right hand was the same.

“See that color?” Jansen was saying. “That means the tissues below the wire cuts aren’t getting enough blood. You’re going to have gangrene for sure if we don’t restore circulation soon.”

Gangrene!
Milo levered up on the gurney and felt his toes with his good hand.
Cold!
“No! That’s impossible!”

“I’d almost agree with you,” Dr. Jansen said, his voice softening for a moment as he seemed to be talking to himself. Behind him, Milo noticed the old black moving closer with his mop. “When we did x-rays, I thought we’d see the wire embedded in the flesh there, but there was nothing. Tried Xero soft-tissue technique in case you had used fishing line or something, but that came up negative, too. Even probed the cuts myself, but there’s nothing in there. Yet the arteriograms clearly show that the arteries in your lower legs and right forearm are compressed to the point where very little blood is getting through. The tissues are starving. The vascular boys may have to do bypasses.”

“I’m getting out of here!” Milo said. “I’ll see my own doctor!”

“I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”

“You can’t stop me! I can walk out of here anytime I want!”

“I can keep you seventy-two hours for purposes of emergency psychiatric intervention.”

“Psychiatric!”

“Yeah. Self-mutilation. Your mind worries me almost as much as your arteries, Mr. Gherl. I’d like to make sure you don’t poke out your other eye before you get treatment.”

“But I didn’t—!”

“Please, Mr. Gherl. There were witnesses. Your breakfast companion said he had just finished giving you some disappointing news when you screamed and rammed something into your eye.”

Milo touched the bandage over his eye again. How could they think he had done this to himself?

“My God, I swear I didn’t do this!”

“That kind of trauma doesn’t happen spontaneously, Mr. Gherl, and according to your companion, no one was within reach of you. So one way or the other, you’re staying. Make it easy on both of us and do it voluntarily.”

Milo didn’t see that he had a choice. “I’ll stay,” he said. “Just answer me one thing: You ever seen anything like this before?”

Jansen shook his head. “Never. Never heard of anything like it either.” He took a sudden deep breath and smiled through his beard with what Milo guessed was supposed to be doctorly reassurance. “But, hey. I’m only an ER doc. The vascular boys will know what to do.”