“Is there anything I could do?”
“Not really. Talk to him. Show sympathy, but not too much. You'll have to figure it out. See if he wants to be with you.”
It was too confusing. How was I supposed to know what he needed? He hadn't come to see me. But Trilby had.
So there was one uncomplicated thing in my life right then, one thing I could do where I wouldn't have to think. I rolled over and got on top of Trilby and started to kiss her. She responded with a lazy eroticism I found irresistible. She
did
know some tricks I'd never heard of.
Â
“How was that?” I said, much later.
That smile again. I got the feeling that I constantly amused her, and somehow I didn't mind it. Maybe it was the fact that she made no bones about her being the adult and me being the child. That was the way it would be with us. I would have to grow up to her; she would not go back and imitate me.
“Are you looking for a grade?” she asked. “Like the twentieth century?” She got to her feet and stretched.
“All right. I'll be honest. You get an A for effort, but any thirteen-year-old would. You can't help it. In technique, maybe a low C. Not that I expected any more, for the same reason.”
“So you want to teach me to do better? That's your job?”
“Only if you hire me. And sex is such a small part of it. Listen, Argus. I'm not going to be your mother. Darcy does that okay. I won't be your playmate, either, like Cathay was. I won't be teaching you moral lessons. You're getting tired of that, anyway.”
It was true. Cathay had never really been my contemporary, though he tried his best to look it and act it. But the illusion had started to wear thin, and I guess it had to. I was no longer able to ignore the contradictions, I was too sophisticated and cynical for him to hide his lessons in everyday activities.
It bothered me in the same way the CC did. The CC could befriend me one minute and sentence me to death the next. I wanted more than that, and Trilby seemed to be offering it.
“I won't be teaching you science or skills, either,” she was saying. “You'll have tutors for that, when you decide just what you want to do.”
“Just what
is
it you do, then?”
“You know, I've never been able to find a good way of describing that. I won't be around all the time, like Cathay was. You'll come to me when you want to, maybe when you have a problem. I'll be sympathetic and do what I can, but mostly I'll just point out that you have to make all the hard choices. If you've been stupid I'll tell you so, but I won't be surprised or disappointed if you go on being stupid in the same way. You can use me as a role model if you want to, but I don't insist on it. But I promise I'll always tell you things straight, as I see them. I won't try to slip things in painlessly. It's time for pain. Think of Cathay as a professional child. I'm not putting him down. He turned you into a civilized being, and when he got you you were hardly that. It's because of him that you're capable of caring about his situation now, that you have loyalties to feel divided about. And he's good enough at it to know how you'll choose.”
“Choose? What do you mean?”
“I can't tell you that.” She spread her hands, and grinned. “See how helpful I can be?”
She was confusing me again. Why can't things be simpler?
“Then if Cathay's a professional child, you're a professional adult?”
“You could think of it like that. It's not really analogous.”
“I guess I still don't know what Darcy would be paying you for.”
“We'll make love a lot. How's that? Simple enough for you?” She brushed dirt from her back and frowned at the ground. “But not on dirt anymore. I don't care for dirt.”
I looked around, too. The place
was
messy. Not pretty at all. I wondered how I could have liked it so much. Suddenly I wanted to get out, to go to a clean, dry place.
“Come on,” I said, getting up. “I want to try some of those things again.”
“Does this mean I have a job?”
“Yeah. I guess it does.”
Â
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Cathay was sitting on the porch of the Sugar Shack, a line of brown beer bottles perched along the edge. He smiled at us as we approached him. He was stinking drunk.
It's strange. We'd been drunk many times together, the four of us. It's great fun. But when only one person is drunk, it's a little disgusting. Not that I blamed him. But when you're drinking together all the jokes make sense. When you drink alone, you just make a sloppy nuisance of yourself.
Trilby and I sat on either side of him. He wanted to sing. He pressed bottles on both of us, and I sipped mine and tried to get into the spirit of it. But pretty soon he was crying, and I felt awful. And I admit that it wasn't entirely in sympathy. I felt helpless because there was so little I could do, and a bit resentful of some of the promises he had me make. I would have come to see him anyway. He didn't have to blubber on my shoulder and beg me not to abandon him.
So he cried on me, and on Trilby, then just sat between us looking glum. I tried to console him.
“Cathay, it's not the end of the world. Trilby says you'll still be able to teach older kids. My age and up. The TA just said you couldn't handle younger ones.”
He mumbled something.
“It shouldn't be that different,” I said, not knowing when to shut up.
“Maybe you're right,” he said.
“Sure I am.” I was unconsciously falling into that false heartiness people use to cheer up drunks. He heard it immediately.
“What the hell do you know about it? You think you . . . Damn it, what do you know? You know what kind of person it takes to do my job? A little bit of a misfit, that's what. Somebody who doesn't want to grow up any more than you do. We're
both
cowards, Argus. You don't know it, but
I
do.
I
do. So what the hell am I going to do? Huh? Why don't you go away? You got what you wanted, didn't you?”
“Take it easy, Cathay,” Trilby soothed, hugging him close to her. “Take it easy.”
He was immediately contrite, and began to cry quietly. He said how sorry he was, over and over, and he was sincere. He said, he hadn't meant it, it just came out, it was cruel.
And so forth.
I was cold all over.
We put him to bed in the shack, then started down the road.
“We'll have to watch him the next few days,” Trilby said. “He'll get over this, but it'll be rough.”
“Right,” I said.
I took a look at the shack before we went around the false bend in the road. For one moment I saw Beatnik Bayou as a perfect illusion, a window through time. Then we went around the tree and it all fell apart. It had never mattered before.
But it was such a sloppy place. I'd never realized how ugly the Sugar Shack was.
I never saw it again. Cathay came to live with us for a few months, tried his hand at art. Darcy told me privately that he was hopeless. He moved out, and I saw him frequently after that, always saying hello.
But he was depressing to be around, and he knew it. Besides, he admitted that I represented things he was trying to forget. So we never really talked much.
Sometimes I play golf in the old bayou. It's only two holes, but there's talk of expanding it.
They did a good job on the renovation.
INTRODUCTION TO
“Air Raid”
What can I say about the next story? Well, actually, I could say so much that I'd be in danger of having the introduction run longer than the story itself.
It all began one rather warm afternoon in Damon and Kate's living room, at the Milford Conference, as I tried not to doze off while somebody's story was being efficiently deconstructed. It might even have been one of my stories. Suddenly this idea appeared in my head, full-blown. Five minutes later it was more or less completely written, all I had to do was go home and sit at the typewriter for a while. I did it that night, finishing just as the sun was coming up.
Ten years later I found myself standing with Kris Kristofferson on a steep hillside on the outskirts of Toronto at 3 A.M., so cold I couldn't feel my feet. The hillside was smoking, there were small fires everywhere, and the twisted wreckage of an old 707 which had been trucked in from an airliner graveyard in Mexico was artfully scattered over several blackened acres, along with thousands of crushed suitcases, carefully scorched clothing, and all manner of other junk. There was a line of big trucks along the dirt road behind me: gaffers' and grips' vans, craft services dispensing sandwiches and bottles of Evian water to the five hundred people standing around, honey-wagons, Winnebagos, mobile makeup and hairdressers' studios. There were thirty cars made up to look like police cruisers from various jurisdictions in Minnesota, right down to fake license plates. There were a dozen real fire trucks ready to spray water over the scene. There were four large camera booms, miles and miles of cables, hundreds of massive lights, and three camera helicopters zooming overhead. The scene was so convincing that two real airline pilots on approach to the Toronto airport a few miles away called the tower to report that a big jet had gone down.
Kris swept his arm to indicate the scene and grinned at me. “John, you wrote all this,” he said. A few minutes later somebody shouted
“Action!”
But I'm getting ahead of myself. . . .
I sold the story, “Air Raid,” to
Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
a new publication which had first been announced while I was attending Milford. It was to appear in the very first issue, but I had already sold them another story. The editor, George Scithers, suggested I might want to use a pseudonym. Back in the forties there were guys who wrote entire
issues
of SF magazines, under eight different names. Asimov said he thought it was a silly custom, but I was tickled by the idea, and used the name “Herb Boehm.” Herbert is my middle name and the one I used until I decided to become a writer (John Varley just looked better to me), and Boehm (pronounced “Beam”) is my mother's maiden name. It is the only time I've ever used a pseudonym.
The story was collected in several anthologies. One of them was read by Dennis Lasker, an assistant to John Foreman, a man who had produced many of Paul Newman's films, most notably
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
“Air Raid” is about people from the future who are taking people off airplanes that are about to crash. They aren't gentle about it. It is without a doubt the most action-packed story I've ever done. Dennis was on a plane when he read it, and later told me he kept looking over his shoulder, worried about being kidnapped.
Soon I was on an airplane myself, winging down to Los Angeles. I was taken to the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel for a lunch meeting. Dustin Hoffman was sitting at the next table. At my table were John Foreman; Douglas Trumbull, the special effects wizard behind
2001: A Space Odyssey,
who would be directing the proposed movie; Freddie Fields, who used to be Judy Garland's agent; and David Begelman. Begelman's name was familiar. That very morning in the hotel his name had been in the headline of the
Los Angeles Times,
plea bargaining his way into “community service” because he forged Cliff Robertson's name on $80,000 worth of checks to cover gambling debts. Many years later, David killed himself in a five-star hotel in Beverly Hills. I don't think it had anything to do with the movie we discussed that day, which would come to be called
Millennium,
but I wouldn't swear to it. It almost drove
me
to suicide.
If any movie ever had a checkered history, it was
Millennium.
I was hired to write a forty-page treatment turning what could have been a very exciting episode of
The Twilight Zone
into a feature-length movie. I was also hired to write a novelization, which struck me as putting the cart before the horse, but since I was assured I'd have a totally free hand and wouldn't have to adhere slavishly to whatever script was eventually turned in, I accepted the assignment. A good thing, too. The man they hired to write the script eventually produced something that bore only a passing relationship to “Air Raid.” I hated it. Luckily, so did everybody else. I showed John the script I had written in four feverish days adapted from my story “The Phantom of Kansas.” He liked it. I allowed as how I'd like a shot at
Millennium.
Amazingly, he thought that was a good idea. Even more amazingly, so did Doug, David, and Freddie. I was in the screenwriting business.
We discussed the project with Paul Newman. John suggested Jane Fonda for the
female lead. Pretty heady stuff. I turned in the first draft, which was read and endlessly rehashed, as is standard practice in Hollywood. I began on the second draft. Then one night Natalie Wood went swimming, drowned, and
Millennium
was dead. In hindsight, I know it probably should have stayed dead, but it soon became
The Development Project That Wouldn't Die!
Good science fiction title, that.
Why did Natalie Wood's death drive the first stake into the undying heart of
Millennium?
Simple. Doug Trumbull was directing
Brainstorm
at the time, and Natalie Wood was starring in it. MGM took a look at the insurance on the project and found, to the surprise and delight of the studio bean counters, that they could make a tidy profit by just closing the picture down. Doug Trumbull thought he could finish it, shoot around her few remaining scenes, and if necessary perform some of his special effects hoodoo and morph Wood's face onto a double. Create a Natalie golem, sort of like Gollum. MGM thought this was in bad taste, and besides, “We've got a
guaranteed profit!
” Doug thought it would be a good memorial to Natalie, and besides, he wanted to finish the picture. He took them to court. Within a week Doug was about as welcome on the MGM lot as Michael Cimino after
Heaven's Gate.