"Excuse me," she said. "I'm Erik Blake's daughter Diane."
Erik Blake was the cinematographer on two of Rick's early films. "I told my father you were speaking tonight, and he sends you his regards."
Beautiful, he thought. Hands thrust into the pockets of her jeans. A blue work shirt, the color of her eyes.
"You were wonderful tonight," she said. "Even though I know you're probably not in the best of spirits."
He shrugged, not knowing how to answer. He wanted to say, True, so maybe you could cheer me up.
"I'm sure you're probably rushing home, and if you are, I'd understand, but how would you feel about going out for a cup of coffee?" she asked. Hah!
"Love it," he said at once. Great body. Maybe she'd like to make it with a depressed fat man.
"I'm parked in the lot next door, so why don't we meet over at Ships?" she said.
"Ships." He agreed and then watched her toss the blond hair as she headed for the door. Chuck Champlin's pat on the back and thank you made Rick turn and offer perfunctory apologies for being less than fascinating, after which he found his way across the UCLA campus to the parking lot. The girl was a knockout, but Ships, he thought. Why didn't I say, "How about my place?" Or some dimly lit bar instead of a big ugly coffee shop? But when he pushed the glass door of Ships open he was glad he hadn't said that because Erik Blake's daughter was not alone. Had never intended to meet him alone.
She was sitting in a back booth next to a man, and even from the door, Rick could see that the two of them wore matching wedding bands. For a long disappointed moment he considered turning to go, but she noticed him and stood and waved to let him know where they were seated.
"This is such a thrill," the husband said, standing to greet him. "I'm Harvey Feldman."
He was tall and athletic with an open boyish face, and Rick recognized him as a member of the sea of people at the lecture. He looked young. Not as young as the girl, but maybe thirty. Decaf, Rick said to him
self. One decaf and you're out of here, asshole. You thought you were in hot pursuit of pussy, and here you are about to have a postmortem on your seminar with the husband of the pussy. When are you going to learn to stop listening to your cock?
"I know your uncle Bobo," the husband said, and gestured to a passing waitress. "My grandmother Essie Baylis was a Busby Berkeley girl. She lives down the hall from him in the lodge. She calls it the geriatric coed dorm."
Rick laughed.
"Diane and I go out to the home on Friday nights. We play cards with her and frequently Bobo is our fourth for bridge. He's a good counter. And at eighty-two, that's unbelievable."
"Eighty-five his next birthday. In a few weeks," Rick corrected him.
"Isn't that funny," Diane Blake Feldman said. "I could have sworn he told
me
he was eighty-two."
"Was he making a pass at you at the time?" Rick asked her. They all laughed.
"Well, isn't it a small world?" Rick said, using what Charlie used to refer to as his warm-nice-guy voice. "Bobo is a colorful guy," he said. The Feldmans were already drinking coffee, so when the waitress arrived she looked directly at Rick.
"One decaf," he told her, "shaken not stirred."
The Feldmans laughed at that.
"You know," Harvey Feldman said, "last time we played cards with Bobo, which was about two or three weeks ago, he said that he thought you and I ought to get together because I'm in a business that's filled with so many dramatic stories. He says there's a movie in nearly every one of my cases."
Great, Rick thought. My uncle Bobo is agenting for me, and I'm hoisted with my own prick. This
shmeckel
used his wife for bait and now he's going to try and sell me stories. Well sorry, pal. One decaf and out. Even if we're at the best part of the story when I'm finished. And even if you are nice enough to play cards with my uncle.
"And what is it you do that's fodder for such great stories?" Rick asked, hoping the kid would give him a nice three-or four-word answer.
"I specialize in open adoptions in which the birth parents and the adopting parents of a child get to meet and know one another."
"Now why would they want to do that?" Rick asked politely, hoping the answer wasn't complicated, but Harvey didn't get to answer.
"Ricky?" a voice asked, and Rick looked up. There were two girls. Both hot little numbers, both vaguely familiar, but no names came to mind.
"Blair Phillips and Sandy Kaye," one of them offered. Nothing. No bells. Christ Almighty. He didn't have a clue who they were.
"Of course, Blair," Rick said, grinning at one of them, hoping she was the one who was Blair. "Nice to see you. How's everything?"
"Great," she said. "We haven't seen you since the night we were all on Henry's boat," the other girl said. Bimbos. They were bimbos he'd partied with on someone's boat. Who was Henry?
"Well, thanks for stopping by, girls," he said.
"Yeah, a real pleasure to see you too, hon," one of them said, and they twitched off across the room to a table. The waitress put the decaf in front of Rick. He put cream in it from the little aluminum pitcher, then opened a Sweet 'N Low package and poured the powdery white sweetener into the cup and stirred. He felt embarrassed to look at the Feldmans after what had just happened with those girls, and not sure why. That kind
of thing happened to him a lot. Maybe it felt so awkward now because these people knew Bobo.
"The reason people want to do that," Diane answered for her husband, continuing the conversation, "is because for every healthy baby, there are forty couples in Los Angeles who want to adopt it, and six or seven single people. So a birth mother immediately has forty-seven choices. By creating a situation that allows a young girl who gets pregnant and doesn't want to have an abortion to choose the parent or parents she thinks are best for that baby, you give people who the state wouldn't consider eligible an opportunity to be chosen. Older couples, gay couples, single people. In that way, it becomes a competition for people to convince the mother that choosing them is in the best interests of the baby."
"Stories," Harvey Feldman said to Rick. "I've got enough stories for
ten
movies. Because the adopting parents can and have been anyone and everyone. Not just the people who have the qualifications per the state agencies."
The hustle. The kid was putting the major hustle on him pretty good. And why not? Wasn't that, after all, what life was all about? Had things been otherwise, he himself would have been hustling the tall blond Diane into his bed. But the "my life is a movie" rap. That was the one he had to sidestep regularly. Everyone in the world who thought his or her life was screen worthy, which meant everyone, would corner him at some point and try to sell it to him.
Well, not tonight, kids, he thought. And then he slid out of the booth, quickly stood, and to avoid the possibility of their thinking they might convince him to stay for even another minute, announced, "I'm really sorry to do this, but I'm not much for socializing these days and . . . "
"We understand," Harvey Feldman said, and both he and his beautiful blond wife stood.
"Thanks for joining us" is what Rick thought he heard them say, when without even thanking them for inviting him to Ships, buying him a decaf, or offering to sell him what were surely profound stories about something he had already forgotten, he was in Ships' parking lot hurrying to his car.
12
O
NE OF THE FEATURES that had been pointed out to Rick as a high-line perk was the wet bar in his office that the studio stocked with liquor and wine and soft drinks. No one who came there to meet with him during the workday ever asked for alcohol. So the liquor bottles which sat on the Lucite shelves were the same ones that had been delivered on the first day he moved in.
Today, as Andrea was washing the coffee cups in the sink, she noticed that the bottle of scotch was half empty. Rick had been drinking during the day. Poor baby, she thought. She had watched him these last few weeks walk out in the middle of a meeting, step into an empty office, close the door behind him, and, she was sure, stand in the unlit room crying. Crying it out, because he was still so filled with the pain of losing Charlie that the slightest reminder could set him off. And finally, once he'd composed himself, he would
pass her desk again and with a last sniffle go back into his office and continue the meeting.
Tonight he was at a late story conference upstairs with Nat Ross and some writers, talking about a new project he wanted to develop. He told Andrea at five-forty-five, when he left, that if he wasn't back by seven, she could go home. It was nearly seven, and when she finished washing all the coffee cups, she wiped off the Formica counter and placed a square of paper towel on it. Then she turned each cup upside down on the towel to drip, dried her hands on her jeans, turned out the light in Rick's office, and left.
By the time Rick stopped back to get his jacket it was nine-thirty and a blue-black Los Angeles night had fallen, but he didn't bother to turn the light on in his office. He saw in the spilled light from the fluorescent ceiling bulbs in the reception area that his jacket was hanging on the back of his desk chair. When he picked the jacket up, his keys fell jangling from the pocket to the floor. As he stooped to pick them up, he realized there was someone else in the room. Sitting cross-legged on the sofa watching him.
"Don't get scared. It's me."
Kate Sullivan. Jesus Christ.
"I've got to play that part," she said. He saw the orange glow of the cigarette she was smoking. "You realize, of course, that I could just ask the studio to take that project away from you and give it to me and they would," she said.
"Then why don't you?" he asked. His tongue felt thick. Maybe he should pour himself a scotch. That would probably make this bizarre intrusion a little easier to handle.
"Because now that Charlie Fall is dead, you're the only person who can direct me in it."
He walked to the bar and poured some scotch into a glass. Without bothering to add any ice, he drank most of it.
"I was with Charlie a lot before he died," she said quietly. "He was helping me organize the fund-raisers for the battered-wives' shelters."
Rick emitted an involuntary grunt. Charlie. In the middle of the biggest project of his career he took time out to work for battered women. The guy was a fuckin' saint.
"After the meetings we would talk, sometimes for hours," Kate said. "He told me he was certain that no matter how hard he worked he'd never be able to zero in on the essence of behavior the way you did. It was why his last three pictures were on such a grand scale. Burton Holmes travelogues, he called them. India, Russia. Pieces where the characters were incidental to the grandeur."
The scotch fired Rick's mouth and throat, and he drained his glass and poured another. She was quite right. Her own box-office success was far superior to his and she could easily commandeer his project with just a nod.
"He talked about your pictures, in astonishing detail. The way Pacino put his fork down in one of them, or the look on Jack Nicholson's face in another, and the hysterical contagious laughter of a bad actress who looks not just good but brilliant after you've improvised with her and shot the scene while she was still in the palm of your hand."
In the half darkness he could see she was wearing jeans and knee-high boots and a turtleneck sweater, and he remembered reading the article in
Vanity Fair
about her a few months ago, and how while he did he'd thought that the picture that accompanied it must have been touched up. No woman her age could possibly look that young. But she did. And as if to prove it, she
stood now and walked over to Rick's desk and switched on the desk lamp. After another sip, the second glass of scotch would be empty.
"So I screened them. Every last one. And he was right. Everything Charlie said about your work was right."
Rick felt weak and tired. "Kate, I'm glad to hear that Charlie loved me. But I already knew that. It's why losing him has made me feel destitute for the last many weeks. However, your coming here to tell me that isn't going to change my mind about you."
She was perched on his desk now, and as he poured himself another scotch, just a taste this time, he realized that Kate Sullivan was going to try to seduce him. She was prepared to flatter him, fuck him, whatever it took to get not just the part she wanted, because that would be easy, but him directing her in it as well. He finished the third scotch and poured himself just half a glass this time, which he finished in two gulps, then he sat on the sofa, holding the empty scotch bottle in one hand and the empty glass in the other. The dull buzz in his head was the only sound he heard for a long time.
"It's going to be tough for you without Charlie, isn't it?" she asked him. Her tone was familiar. It was the same one his mother had used when he was a little boy trying to be strong and she would ask, "What is it, my baby?" And all of his resolve to be a big boy would fall away, which was what happened now.
The tears rushed into his eyes, and he put the glass and the bottle down so he could hide his face with both hands, and then he really lost it, crying uncontrollably. Not just about Charlie, but about his own life, his whole meaningless, unrelated, narcissistic, valueless, lonely fucking life. Maybe it was because he feared that it was Charlie, a man whose life was so filled with meaning, so completely unselfish, who should have lived, and that
he
was the one who should have died. He was trying to contain his sad
ness and cope with a quantity of scotch he was unequipped to consume when he felt Kate Sullivan's arms around him. Smelted her perfume, felt her lips on his hands, then on his wet face, and her hands on his body.
"It's okay," Kate was saying, and her coolness felt welcome against the heat the scotch provoked inside him. Or maybe it wasn't the scotch that was making him blurry and confused and aching with feeling but her nearness and her scent of perfume and shampoo and cigarettes, and the undeniable truth, which was how much he wanted to fuck her. To pull that sweater over her head and feel her tits against his chest and then to fuck her eyes out.