But Lily or no, Faun was always interested in my comings and goings. Sometimes when I came home the phone would ring and there she’d be, calling on some silly pretext or other, wanting to know where I’d been, with whom, but it was only feigned interest. She was lonely, I knew, but not good enough company for me to do something about, and while I tried to be agreeable I really didn’t try too hard. Besides, she had Bobby Spurting—whom I’d come to think of as Bobby the Goon.
One Saturday morning late in June—I had a lousy cold and my ass was really dragging—I drove down to the drugstore to buy some cold medicine and when I came back and got out of my car I heard the phone. It was Maude. Belinda was having a bad morning; could I leave work and come up to the house and talk to her?
“I’m truly sorry to interrupt you,” Maude said, “but perhaps you won’t mind. You said—”
“It’s all right, don’t worry, the world can wait another day for this piece of Euripides.”
Laying a towel over my work to discourage investigation from any stray trolls, I went up to the main house and found Belinda. She’d had yet another row with Faun—over Bobby Spurting, naturally—she’d lost her temper again and told Faun to get him out of her life.
“Hey,” I said, “I thought we agreed, no harsh words.”
She gave me a helpless look. “I know what we agreed, only—damn it, Chazz—you don’t know what it’s like—she gets so wickedly nasty, just plain down-home corn-row mean, I want to hit her, I really do. They were sniffing coke, right here in this studio. What if Maude had walked in? I’d be so ashamed. And—do you know what she said, that little—?”
“No, I don’t,” I broke in quickly. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“She said, ‘Well, I guess this will all make another interesting chapter in my little opus.’ And, damn it, she means it. Don’t you see—it’s blackmail, pure and simple. The minute I take exception to anything, she threatens to get me with whatever’s in that goddamn book. She’s forever holding it over my head. Charlie, I’m getting scared.”
“What are you afraid of?” I asked her.
“You know what I’m afraid of.” She sounded desperate. “I’m afraid she’ll get me so riled up that I’ll take a drink. Just one—but that’ll be all I’ll need. That was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life—I’d never be able to do it again, never! You know it’s true! I wouldn’t…”
She began to sob and I took her hands in mine, pressing them hard.
“Look,” I began, “in the first place nobody’s going to drive you to any drink, certainly not Faun. If you take a drink it’ll be because you let yourself, because you wanted to have it. But you’re not going to take a drink. No matter what, you’re just not going to do it, so stop thinking that way. And in the second place you’re going to be able to handle this situation. You know it’s just threats. You know she’s only doing it to get your goat. She’s never going to publish that thing, so put it out of your mind, just ignore it, or laugh at it. But whatever you do, don’t let her see you’re scared. Catch?”
“Yeah, catch,” she said ruefully, and blew her nose. Then she began softly weeping and I held her close, her head against my shoulder, stroking her hair. I was digging for my handkerchief when I saw two figures pass the doors—Faun and her Goon.
“Oh Jesus, get a load of that,” I heard her say to Bobby as they passed by, “not him too?”
She shot me a look of contempt and rage, as if I’d somehow betrayed her. Then, grabbing Bobby’s arm, she dragged him along, whispering in his ear. The shrill sound of her laughter drifted to us as they disappeared down the stairs toward the tennis court. “Have fun-n-n, Mumm-eee,” we heard her call as they dropped out of sight.
Belinda shook her head wearily and pushed her hair back. As usual, she tried to take the blame on herself. “I know it’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, but I wish someone would tell me, where did I go wrong? Is it that I’m just not cut out to be a mother? Like——?” (She named a famous Metro star who would never get the Mother of the Year award.)
I argued that the man or woman didn’t live who could answer a question like that, not even the most skilled psychiatrist. Faun herself had been to see enough of them, hadn’t she?
I put off my morning’s work and stayed close by, talking on and on, trying somehow to get Belinda’s mind off darling Faun. Maude wasn’t having a good day, either; she sent Ling out with her apologies—she’d lunch in her room but hoped to speak with me later. I swam and sunned with Belinda for the rest of the forenoon, got her laughing again, and we had lunch sitting at the bar in the studio. Afterward we walked around the gardens, talking about Frank, who’d gone to New York and Europe on business and whose return was now overdue.
“I spoke to the office,” Belinda confided. “Minnie said, ‘Expect him definitely on Monday but don’t count on it altogether but look for him absolutely on any other day but Tuesday through Saturday—maybe.’ Whatever you’re able to make of that—Charlie, are you listening?”
“Hm? Oh yes, sure.”
I’d paused at the top of the stairs and was peering down through the trees to the Cottage, finding the scene exceedingly strange. I could see directly onto the gravel drive; my front door was ajar, the gates were flung wide—and my Mercedes was gone.
I glanced at Belinda, hoping she hadn’t noticed. As usual, I’d left my keys in the ignition. Obviously this negligence had been discovered, and Faun and her boyfriend had taken the car for a joyride. Well, what the hell, I wasn’t going to need it until four, when I had my A.A. meeting, and when she brought the car back I’d just have to exercise cool judgment in the way I dealt with her.
But by four, when the car still wasn’t back, I had to miss my meeting. I could have borrowed Belinda’s car, but I didn’t want her to find out what had happened. When Faun and the Goon finally showed, it was way past ten and all my “cool judgment” went flying out the window; I was really pissed off. To make things worse, the left front fender had a dent. When I asked for an explanation, I got glazed looks and foolishness. I put my damaged car away and locked up. When I switched off the outdoor lights, they were still silly-giggling as they made their way across the gravel toward the garden steps. As they mounted in the dark, I heard a laugh float down from on high, derisive, contemptuous, inane: Bobby’s.
I had the dent taken care of on my insurance (one hundred dollars deductible), and said nothing to anyone. It only encouraged her. One afternoon not long after this, when I came down from my swim Bones began growling as we approached the door: someone was in the Cottage, and it wasn’t Suzi-Q. I crept up to the window and sneaked a look. At the writing table, in my chair, sat Miss Trouble herself, and in the window seat lounged the Lizard of All He Surveyed. Faun was bending over my typewriter, reading aloud from my typescript, while Bobby lay on his spine, his sneakered feet crossed on the plaster wall above him, his head lolling off the seat, his long hair hanging straight down. I banged open the door and Bones bounded in, scaring the hell out of them.
“Christ! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” roared the terrified Bobby.
I called Bones to heel and said, “Maybe you’ll tell me just what the hell you’re doing in here.”
“We just stopped by.” As if that were totally normal.
“You just stopped by—for what? To trespass? To walk into my house uninvited? To help yourself to my bar, to read my pages? Just who the hell do you think you are, anyway?”
Bobby rolled out of the window seat and swaggered over to me. “Hey, look, man,” he said, doing his Brando act. “That’s no way to act. We weren’t doing nothing.”
“You’re in my home, uninvited. And since I don’t want you as a guest here, I’d appreciate it if you’d get the hell out.”
Faun had been taking in this dialogue with apparent amusement. “I think your play is really kind of funny,” she said. “But only in spots. It needs lots of work.”
“I’m real happy you think
so. Now, if you’d please get out I’d like to do some work.”
“Okay okay—we weren’t going to stay, anyway. Come on, Bobby.” She nudged him and they moved together to the door, giving Bones a wide berth. On the threshold she whispered something; Bobby sauntered off across the gravel toward the stairs, while she turned back to me.
“Yes?”
“I was just wondering,” she began. “I really need to talk to you. It’s important.” I gave her a hard look, then told her to wait in the arbor. I changed into a pair of cut-offs and went out to join her.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I apologized, “I don’t like to play Billy Goat Gruff around here, but you’ve got to understand you can’t just go barging into people’s houses. This isn’t your place, you know, it’s mine while I’m renting it from your grandmother. So after this let me know when you’re coming, okay?”
She nodded in her most endearing way and I determined to put the incident behind me. “Now, what did you want to see me about?”
Her writing, she said.
“Yes? What about it?”
“I’ve really been thinking and I feel I could finish my book if I had the right kind of help on it. Some really professional help. And I was thinking, well—I was just wondering if maybe you couldn’t sort of steer me right on some things.”
Boy, could I ever!
“Doing an autobiography’s not the easiest thing, you know,” she said, affording me some amazing tidings. “It’s so personal, you know? You really have to have the right way of expressing yourself. Don’t you think that’s true?”
“Yes,” I said, “it calls for a certain style. You call this work an autobiography. Why?”
“Well, because it’s about me and my life.”
“I see. What makes you think people—that is, the book-buying public—are going to be interested in your twenty-four-year-old life?”
She gave me a nervous little laugh. “Well, I don’t know, I mean—well, I am Faun Antrim, aren’t I? I mean, I’m famous, sort of, aren’t I? Why wouldn’t people be interested in what I have to say?”
“Okay, let’s assume they are. Let’s say everybody’s panting to read what you have to say—though most people wait to write their autobiographies until they’ve done something important in their lives. What have you done that’s really notable or of interest to a reader?”
“Well—people are always asking me what it’s like to be the daughter of a famous star. What it’s like to live in Hollywood, have the upbringing I did. And they always want to know about that whole business—”
Here it came. “Which whole business, Faun?”
“You know. About Bucky Eaton, the fire, all that. Raping me the way he did.”
“Yes, I see; yes, of course you’d want to include that, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, of course! That’s the whole point. I want to give the real slant on that.”
“Yes, well, I suppose to a certain type of reader there’s a definite interest in lurid events like those, but—”
“But what?”
“Well, since they’re bound to be so upsetting to your mother, your grandmother as well, it seems to me that you’d do better not to rake over the coals, so to speak. Some things are better off left alone, don’t you think?”
Her face took on that expression I hated so, that small-mouthed, mean look. I thought, I don’t give a rat’s ass how pleasant she can be sometimes, I don’t like her and I never will. “What do you say we just put our cards on the table, hm? I’ll tell you what I think and you tell me what you think, okay? Good. I think this book you’re presumably writing—”
“What do you mean, presumably? I am writing!”
“Good. Okay. Fine—you’re writing. But why not be honest and say you’re writing it just to get back at your mother? That you’re doing it as a sort of blackmail to frighten her with. She’s still in the public eye, you know.”
“I know, but that’s not why I’m doing it.”
“Why, then?”
“Well, as a sort of ca—ca—what’s that word?”
“I suppose you mean ‘catharsis.’”
“That’s it—catharsis. You’ll see. One of these days you’ll all see. You think I’m just Miss Stupid fucking around with a pencil and paper. But you’ll see. One day…”
Yes, one day her prince would come, or maybe Tuesday would be her good-news day. Faun lived for “one day” and hadn’t learned yet what a mistake that was for man, woman, dog, or cat. But what was the point of explaining anything to Faun? When I reminded her that Bucky Eaton hadn’t raped her, she fuzzed that little episode over, then declared sanctimoniously that she hoped her book would make Belinda “see the light” and force her to admit she’d been a bad mother. When I suggested it might be in bad taste to chastise publicly someone who loved her, she said it was for Mummy’s own good and in the end she’d be a better person for it. Catharsis, shit. No, there was no talking to our Faun.
But in the days that followed I noticed a slight shift in her view of Frank, or maybe in her relation to Frank. Since his return she hadn’t acted so obviously contemptuous and scornful. Instead of sniping at him the way she used to do, she fell into affected silences (though I also noticed that she seldom took her eyes off him).
When she was wearing her shades, I wondered what feelings hid behind those Lolita lenses, but it didn’t take much imagination. Her libido was doing its little dance of the seven veils, her genes were giving battle. There was one afternoon—Maude and I had been painting side by side in the studio, and I was attempting a view of the pool as seen from inside the studio. The picture was bright, very California, David Hockney-ish: the aqua-tinted water in the pool, the scattering of pool furniture, the fountain, the tubbed petunias and geraniums, the sloping hill view beyond the wall. Frank had driven up to be with Belinda (it was a Saturday), and they lay paired side by side in two of the chaises, sipping eleven o’clocks from tall frosted glasses. They made a handsome couple, their two heads cocked toward each other, dark and light together, speaking quietly and holding hands.
Then—this was creepy—a shadow fell across them and I saw Faun appear around the three tall cypresses that formed a clump there. I say “creepy” because there was something actually sinister in the way she hovered over them, casting this shadow that fell across the chaises. They didn’t know she was there, Frankie was leaning forward and touching Belinda, and I grabbed up Maude’s birdwatching glasses and trained them on Faun. In close focus I could see her look of—what?—disgust, contempt, loathing, ridicule? All were there, and more. I studied this display for several moments; then, setting down the glasses, I strode from the studio and called out, “Hey, you guys—” and then, pretending to have just noticed Faun, I waved—“jump in, the water’s fine.”
By then Frank and Belinda had both sat up and were talking to Faun, who eyed them a second longer, then slouched to the far end of the pool, where she spread out her things and began sunning.
What was there in Faun’s furtive appearance that had made me uneasy? As if she were plotting some further mischief? There was no reason, yet I had been alarmed—a little, anyway. I didn’t know exactly what Maude might have seen; she said nothing, I said nothing, and the incident was soon forgotten.
Frank and Belinda went on being together every chance they got, and occasionally invited Faun to join them, once to dinner, another time for a Bowl concert—Pinchas Zuckerman was playing. “I just ha-a-a-ate fiddle players,” she complained the next morning. “Why did you go, then?” Maude asked. “Because Mummy made me,” was the reply, in which there was not a word of truth. How do you force a twenty-four-year-old to go to a concert? Besides, Mummy never made Baby do anything; Baby did as she wanted. That was the trouble.
She seemed to think she lived some sort of super-enchanted existence by virtue of her name. This was odd, because half the time she complained about it, saying it embarrassed her and people were always asking her about her grandfather Crispin, who??
?d died when she was still a young child. But whenever Maude talked about Crispin, Faun would frown and express vast indifference, even boredom. If Maude noticed, she never said anything.
I recall one evening in the Snuggery when Maude had just come down, and Faun made some remark about all the framed photographs of Crispin and why so many? Maude smiled, saying there could never be too many for her, she never tired of looking at his handsome face. “Your grandfather was the kindest, dearest man in the world. I was a lucky woman to get him.”
“And he never tried getting it on with other women?”
“Good heavens, whatever made you ask a thing like that?”
Faun’s look was arch, her tone insinuating. “Just wondering. He must have been quite something if he stayed faithful all that time. He made those movies with Babe Austrian, didn’t he? I bet he had a tough time keeping his hands off her.”
“Babe Austrian had her admirers, but she was hardly your grandfather’s type. And I believe, if you were to dig into your grandfather’s past, you’d discover that so far as the opposite sex are concerned, his hands are lily white.”
“That’s because he had you.” Faun got up and went to give her a kiss. I wondered what she was planning to ask for this time.
It came out at the dinner table: she had a friend in town, they were going to a party, and to impress the friend she wanted Nana to ask Ling to get out the Rolls and chauffeur them. I was pleased when Maude declined on Ling’s behalf. I always liked it when people said no to Faun; I thought it was good for her character. It probably wasn’t, though.