"Fine, I'm fine," Nat Ross said, and then in a way that was clearly designed to indicate that he was also a nice boy who takes care of his family, he said, "You know, I always mean to ask about your uncle Bobo. I was such a fan of his and your father's. How's he doing?"
"Bobo is Bobo. He's nearly eighty-five, with diabetes, cataracts, an ulcer, kidney problems, and phlebitis," Rick answered. "But," he added, "at least he has his health." His stomach suddenly felt crampy as he wondered what this call was going to be about. He had four projects in development under his deal with Nat Ross's studio. Only one of them was even close to being
ready to go. A political thriller involving a glamorous Jackie Kennedy type of First Lady.
"Ricky." Nat Ross, who hadn't heard anything Rick just said, went on to his own agenda. "I'm calling to tell you I know how you feel about Kate Sullivan, but I wish you wouldn't reject the idea out of hand of her playing the First Lady." There was silence so Nat Ross went on. "Listen, believe me, I hate her politics, too."
"Yeah?" Rick said. "So?"
"So, she's more right for the part than anyone else either of us know."
"Meryl Streep," Rick said.
"Unavailable," Nat answered.
"I haven't asked her yet," Rick told him.
"I have."
"Nat," Rick said, trying to keep his voice even, "when I made the deal with you, you promised me hands off. Don't let's change that policy or it won't work. Because I'll give you back all your nice money and go down the street if you try to tell me who to cast. And you know that."
"I'm suggesting, Richard. Only suggesting."
"Suggest elsewhere."
"I apologize."
"I forgive you."
Rick put the phone down, said the word "putz" out loud, certain that Nat Ross had just done the same thing on his end, and signaled to get off the freeway at Pass Avenue.
Kate Sullivan to play the First Lady. No way in hell. Everyone who knew him knew he hated that phony self-aggrandizing bimbo. Couldn't abide all of her grandstanding political horseshit. Half the time she didn't have any idea what she was talking about anyway. Was just a mouthpiece for her brother the senator. Besides,
Sullivan hated Rick too. Had for years. Since that fund-raiser for NOW or one of those feminist groups a million years ago, where she'd made some precious speech about the feminizing of the English language. And afterward, when she'd asked if anyone had any questions, Rick had raised his hand and asked her didn't she think it was a waste of everyone's time to focus on small issues like
herstory
versus
history
when there were so many crucial larger issues at stake for women, like day care and equal pay.
Even from where he'd sat that night in the far reaches of Norman Lear's garden, Rick could see Kate Sullivan's green eyes narrow angrily, and then she snapped something inappropriately personal back about how everyone knew "Mr. Reisman's position on women." Then she somehow managed to sidestep answering his question. Afterward one of the men a few rows up handed him a note that read
I guess the answer to your question will continue to remain a Mstery
. No. He would not cast Kate Sullivan in this or any other picture of his.
In his office the spindle that held his telephone messages had fallen on its side from the weight of all the slips. "I'm afraid to look," Rick said, then righted the spindle and pulled all the messages off at once with an upward tug.
His secretary, Andrea, didn't hear him come in. She was facing the other way, typing and wearing the headphones from her Walkman, which was blasting music into her ears at such pumped-up volume Rick could hear the bass line from where he stood. When she looked up and saw him she jumped to her feet. "Oh my God." She ripped the earphones out of her tangled nest of blond hair and burst into tears.
Another boyfriend walked out on her, he thought.
"I'm sorry," she said, "I didn't want to be the one
to tell you. I mean I know how you feel about him and . . . " She put her hands with the too-long red fingernails on his arms and squeezed.
Bobo, he thought, my God, he's gone.
"Charlie Fall is dead," Andrea said, her face streaked with tracks of runny eye makeup.
The unexpected shock struck Rick suddenly in a place deep inside his chest and spread into his limbs and his face. Charlie. Impossible.
"I'm sorry," Andrea said. "Mr. Fall's secretary called a few minutes ago and said it was a heart attack.''
"No."
"She said she tried you at home, but I told her you were probably on your way in. He was running very early this morning at the UCLA track. It was still dark and he was the only one there. By the time one of the other runners found him and they got him over to emergency he was gone. Mrs. Fall asked that you be called."
Rick turned and walked into his own office, not bothering to close the door behind him, dazed with the terrible news. Charlie. Good God. Andrea, sniffling into a Kleenex, followed him in.
"Where is she? Where's Patty?"
"At home."
"I'll go there," he said. "Right now." But he was too paralyzed to move.
"The funeral's the day after tomorrow," Andrea told him, then tiptoed out and closed the door behind her.
Outside, from the reception area, Rick could hear the phones ringing again and again. He looked down at the telephone on his coffee table watching the lights on the various lines that would blink then stop as Andrea answered. Calls that were probably for him, which Andrea was holding so he could have some time to collect his thoughts.
Charlie. His best friend for almost forty years. Rick had been preparing himself to lose Bobo. In fact any time the phone awakened him at night he sat up and said the old uncle's name out loud. But not Charlie. Just two weeks ago in a screening room at Fox they sat together at Charlie's dailies, the viewing of which was always guarded carefully and secretly from everyone in the industry but Rick. But this time it had been obvious that Charlie was nervous having Rick there.
Even from the out-of-sequence pieces of raw work, Rick had seen the genius that Charlie's earlier films had only prophesied. It probably was envy, unadulterated envy, that brought the tears to Rick's eyes that afternoon when the lights went up and Charlie, stoked with elation, had looked him square in the eye and said, "Eat your heart out."
"Oh, I am," Rick said, unable to lie to Charlie, who knew him so well. "Believe me, I'm eating plenty here. It's fucking genius."
Charlie had sighed and smiled a big smile that showed the space between his two front teeth and said, "It's about time I heard you saying that to me, because it's how I feel every time I see
your
work."
"But this is better than all that. Better than anything either of us has done before now. It's extraordinary. I swear to you." The two men had embraced and walked out of the theater into the bright day. Charlie Fall was gone. A heart attack. And Patty. What in the hell would she do without him? Rick's eyes moved around his office at all of the photographs of Charlie he now realized he had scattered everywhere. He and Charlie together in black tie at the Oscars. The year Rick had won, and then another from the year Charlie won. That one with Charlie, shirtless and tan, wearing that big Charlie grin at the Santa Monica Pier, arms around each of his boys, who held fishing rods. The boys.
Rick's eyes ached. He could picture Charlie's boys now, sitting with Patty on the deck at the beach house, holding on to one another in their shared pain. He dialed the number at the Falls' Malibu house. The line had a too-fast busy signal, making it sound as if the phone on the other end was off the hook. He put the receiver down and walked over to his desk. It was a mess. Piled with papers. Memos from the executives upstairs, a letter from a film festival in the Midwest where they wanted to do a Richard Reisman retrospective. He remembered cringing when he opened it, thinking,
Retrospective
? The fucking word makes me feel like I'm dead. Dead.
There was a pile of script notes he wanted to look over one more time. An invitation to an AFI dinner, and a brochure that he hadn't had a chance to look at when it arrived. For a long time he sat in his desk chair and read every word of it, then he dialed the number printed on the bottom. When the woman at the other end answered, he couldn't say a word to her, because he was crying. A woeful cry of loss, the forgotten telephone receiver now lying on the desk.
"Hello?" the woman on the phone said. "Are you calling the Pritikin Health and Fitness Institute? Hello?"
Rick put the phone back in the cradle.
11
J
UST THE WAY Charlie had requested it in his will, the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band sat on the stage of the chapel at Forest Lawn playing all of his favorite songs. They were swinging into the first few bars of "Blue Skies" when Rick drove up. Patty and the boys waved to him, smiling. Music and merriment, the way Charlie had asked for it to be. As the parade of mourners arrived they could hear the happy music through the outdoor speakers, and after their initial surprise, they understood, which was exactly what Charlie had hoped. Rick stood with Patty and the boys. Patty's hand held his tightly as people who knew how close he and Charlie had been spoke consoling words to him as well as to the family.
A man in his early twenties walked up to Rick and took his hand as if to shake it, then put his other hand around it.
"I'm a film student," he said to Rick, "and I just
wanted to tell you I was a big fan of Mr. Fall's and continue to be a big fan of yours. I think most of the young directors out there could take a few pointers from you old veterans."
Maybe it was the words "old veterans" (Charlie would have screamed with laughter over that one), or the fact that the band was playing "Fascinatin' Rhythm" and Rick was remembering one drunken night when he and Charlie walked down the beach sharing a champagne bottle as they rewrote the lyrics to that tune, calling it "San Diego Freeway." Whatever the reason, he couldn't control a huge bubble of inappropriate laughter that went right into the astonished film student's face.
Tonight he left the office late and drove over the hill to Westwood. He'd agreed last season to come in and speak to an evening class on directing at UCLA. In fact he and Charlie had been scheduled to do this one together. The classroom was so full of milling, chatting people that Rick had to edge his way toward the front, where Charles Champlin, who was going to be moderator, sat alone at a long table, glancing at some notes.
Rick liked Chuck Champlin. The critic was always kind to his films, even the ones every other critic destroyed. Champlin's sweet round face filled with concern when he looked up and saw Rick. The group of students were chattering so loudly he had to lean in toward Rick to be heard. "You know, after Charlie's death, I thought seriously about calling you and telling you we could easily have postponed this. I know how close you two were and . . . "
Rick tried a smile. "That's very sensitive of you, but I'm okay," he said.
"I screened
Quarter to Nine
for this group last week, and of course Charlie's
Sea Front
, and everyone is so eager to . . . "
Rick turned to look at the noisy laughing crowd, and when he did, his face got hot and he felt the panic of claustrophobia.
"Are you all right?" Champlin asked, noticing. "Because, Rick, honest to God, I'd sooner send these folks home than—"
"I'm fine, Chuck," Rick said, willing the panic to slide away. Once he was seated the students took that as a signal to stop talking to one another, and all of them sat so the class could begin. Champlin made opening remarks about Rick's history. He told them about Rick's father, the late Jacob Reisman, and his uncle, William "Bobo" Reisman, and how they had directed and produced dozens of films in the thirties and forties, and how Rick had grown up on studio back lots.
The shuffling around in chairs and the pages turning in notebooks all stopped when Champlin spoke about Charlie Fall and Rick's friendship. He said he'd been at the funeral, though Rick didn't remember seeing him there, and that Rick in his eulogy had said that he and Charlie always joked that "we were so close, if I ate Chinese food, an hour later,
Charlie
was hungry."
The class laughed, a kind of uncomfortable laugh, and remembering that he'd said something that inane in a eulogy made Rick cringe. Champlin went on to say more about
Quarter to Nine
and Rick looked out at the jumble of people whose faces blurred together, the color of their clothes blending each into the next, and he wanted to stand and say, "I can't do this," but now hands were up. Dozens of hands.
"Yes?" Rick asked, pointing to one of the people, and the evening was launched, while he sat there feeling flushed and hoping his mind would stay far enough ahead of his mouth to answer the questions. Not wander to Charlie, or to his own loneliness, or the frightening inability to sleep that had been infecting him for the last
few days. But after a while, the knot in his abdomen melted away when he realized the questions were going to be the same ones he'd answered a million times before, and that he didn't need to worry, since the answers, the self-deprecating jokes and the put-downs of the industry he'd used for years, still worked in the same places, and after a while he was able to breathe easily. This was safe ground. Nothing too complicated or demanding. This he could deal with.
Before long, it was over, and Champlin was summarizing, and all Rick could think of was getting out of there and going home. Everything that had happened in his life these last few days played itself out against the fears and anxieties that sat lodged inextricably in his brain. Thank God, he thought, that my age-old system runs so smoothly that it's actually running without me. Because I'm not there. I'm lost someplace in my own fear. Heart-racing, nauseating fear. That I'll die. Or worse yet, that I won't die and that soon I'll be known as that decaying director who never had a life outside of his work.
In a flutter of notebooks closing and keys being searched for, the class stood and mixed and chattered, and finally all but one of them disappeared out the door. Champlin was talking to a tall bald man about Truffaut when a pretty blond woman who had left the classroom reentered and walked toward Rick. As she got closer, he noticed how beautiful her face was. Fresh. Young. And she had a great long, lean body.