FINALLY I started the drive back with Alex, and we were arguing almost at once over the wind in the open car about why he hadn’t put the little true stories in his autobiography.
“But what about the juicy ones that wouldn’t hurt anybody?” I kept insisting. “Forget Bonnie and George Hairdresser What’s-his-name, you know all kinds of things—”
“Too risky,” he said, shaking his head. “Besides, people don’t want the truth, you know they don’t.”
“Alex, you’re behind the times,” I said. “People are as hooked on the truth these days as they used to be on lies in the fifties. And you can’t kill a career anymore—anybody’s career—with a little scandal.”
“The hell you can’t,” he said. “They may put up with some of the dirt they didn’t want yesterday. But it’s got to be the right dirt in the right measure. It’s just a new set of illusions, Jeremy.”
“I don’t believe that, Alex. I think that’s not just cynical, it’s a bad observation. I tell you, things are different now. The sixties and seventies changed everybody, even people in small towns who never heard of the sexual revolution. The ideas of those times raised the level of popular art.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Walker? Have you watched any TV lately? ‘Champagne Flight,’ you can take it from me is garbage. It’s the step-kid of the fifties ‘Peyton Place.’ Only the hairstyles have been changed.”
I smiled. Only an hour ago he’d been defending it.
“OK, maybe so,” I said. “But any TV show today can handle incest, prostitution—taboo subjects they wouldn’t even touch twenty years ago. People aren’t scared to death of sex these days. They know that lots of the big stars are gay.”
“Yeah, and they forgave Rock Hudson for it because he died of cancer, same way they forgave Marilyn Monroe for being a sex queen because she went into the big sleep. Sex, yes, as long as death and suffering comes with it, gives them the moral overtone they’ve still got to have. Take a look at the docudramas and the cop shows. I tell you, it’s sex and death, just like it always was.”
“Alex, they know the stars drink. They know they have kids like Bonnie did out of wedlock. It’s a long way from the years when they drove Ingrid Bergman out of town for having a baby by an Italian director she wasn’t married to.”
“No. Maybe for a little while it was really open, when the flower children were big, but now the wheel’s turning again, if it ever turned at all. Yeah, we’ve got a gay guy on ‘Champagne Flight’ because ‘Dynasty’ did it first, but guess who plays him, a straight actor, and it’s all minor stuff and you can smell the Lysol they sanitized it with a mile off. Just the right dirt in the right measure, I’m telling you. You’ve got to be as careful with the proportions as you were in the past.”
“No, you could have packed your book with the truth and they’d still love you and everybody you wrote about. Besides, it’s your life, Alex, it’s what you’ve seen, it’s you going on record.”
“No, it’s not, Jeremy,” he said. “It’s another part, called movie-star writer.”
“That’s too cold, Alex.”
“No. It’s a fact. And I gave them what they wanted, as I always have. Read it. It’s a damn good performance.”
“Bull shit,” I said. I was getting angry. We had glided off the bridge and down the freeway past the ghostly Palace of Fine Arts and into town, and I didn’t have to shout so loud now. “And even if you’re right, the stories you know are good. They’re good entertainment, Alex. The truth is always strong. The best art is always based on the truth. It has to be.”
“Look, Jeremy, you make these kid’s books. They’re sweet, they’re wholesome, they’re beautiful—”
“You’re making me sick. But those books happen to be exactly what I want to do, Alex. They are the truth for me. Sometimes I wish they weren’t. It’s not like there’s something else better that I’m hiding or passing up.”
“Isn’t there? Jeremy, I’ve known you for years. You could paint anything you want, but what do you do? Little girls in haunted houses. The fact is you do them because they sell—”
“That’s not true, Clementine, and you know it.”
“You do them because you’ve got an audience and you want them to love you. Don’t talk to me about truth, Jeremy. Truth’s got nothing to do with it.”
“Not so. I’m telling you that people love us more for the truth,” I said, really working up a head of steam. “That’s my whole point. The stars dish the dirt about their love affairs in books now, and the public devours it because it’s authentic.”
“No, son, no,” he said. “They dish the dirt about certain affairs, and you know what I’m talking about.”
Dead silence for a moment. Then he laughed again, his hand lightly squeezing my shoulder. I knew we should lighten up. “Come on, Walker—”
But I couldn’t let it go. It tormented me too much, him blazing away at dinner with all those stories and none of them in the book. And me, what the hell, had I said to that reporter two nights ago at the promotion dinner? That I wrote Looking for Bettina because the audience wanted it? Did I mean that? That little slip was bound to come back to haunt me, and maybe I deserved it, too.
There was some real important issue here, something that was damned near critical to my life. But I was maybe a little too drunk and a little too tired to really grasp it.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. I don’t know,” I said. “But I tell you, if you’d put everything you knew in that book, they’d have loved it more, they’d have made a movie out of it.”
“They’ll make a movie out of it the way it is, Jer,” he said with the loudest laugh yet. “We’ve got two firm offers.”
“OK, OK,” I said. “Money, the bottom line, all that crap. Don’t I know it! I’m going to paint some pictures of money!”
“And you’ll sell your little Angelica What’s-her-name to the movies, too, won’t you? But listen, son, they’re calling you a genius for this Looking for Bettina book. Saw a window of it downtown. Downtown. Not in some kiddie bookstore. Genius, Jeremy. Got to admit it. Saw it in Time.”
“Fuck it. Something’s wrong, Alex. It’s wrong with me and that’s why I’m fighting with you. It’s really wrong.”
“Ah, come on, Jeremy, you and me, we’re both fine,” he drawled. “We’ve always been fine. You’ve got it made with those kids, and if and when you write your life, you’ll lie for them and you know it.”
“It’s not my fault my books are wholesome and sweet. It’s the card I drew, for Chrissakes. You don’t pick your obsessions when you’re an artist, damn it!”
“OK, OK, OK!” he said. “But wait a minute, smarty pants. Let me give you a damn good example of why I can’t tell the true stories. You want me to tell everybody that when your mother was dying, it was you who wrote her last two novels for her?”
I didn’t answer. I felt as if he had hit me in the head.
We had stopped at the light at Van Ness and California and the empty intersection was absolutely quiet. I knew I was glowering at the street in front of me, positively glowering, but I could not look at him.
“You didn’t know I knew that story, did you?” he asked. “That you actually wrote every word of Saint Charles Avenue and Crimson Mardi Gras?”
I shoved the car into first and made an illegal left turn onto California. Alex was probably my closest friend in the world, and no, I had not known that he shared that old secret.
“Did the publishers tell you all that?” I asked. They had been my mother’s publishers too—twenty-five years ago. But all those editors were now gone.
“I’ve never heard you talk about that,” Alex went on, ignoring my question. “Not ever. But you wrote both those last two books ‘cause she was too sick and in too much pain to do it. And the critics said they were her best works. And you’ve never told anyone.”
“They were her outlines, her characters,” I said.
“Like hel
l,” he said.
“I read her the chapters every day. She supervised everything.”
“Oh yeah, sure, and she was worried about leaving you all those medical bills.”
“It took her mind off the pain,” I said. “It was what she wanted.”
“Did you want it? To write two books under her name?”
“You’re making a big issue of something that really doesn’t matter now, Alex. She’s been dead for twenty-five years. And besides, I loved her. I did it for her.”
“And those books are still in every library in this country,” he said. “And Crimson Mardi Gras plays on late-night television somewhere out there probably once each week.”
“Oh, come on, Alex. What’s that got to do with—”
“No, it’s right to the point, Jeremy, and you know it. You’ll never tell for her sake. That biography of her—what was it?—I read that thing years ago, and not a word in there about it.”
“Popular junk.”
“Sure. And I’ll tell you the real tragedy in it, Jeremy. It’s about the best story that anybody ever tells about your mother. It may be the only story about her entire life worth telling.”
“Well, that’s my point now, isn’t it?” I said. I turned and glared at him. “That’s what I’m trying to say, Alex. The truth is where it’s at, goddamn it!”
“You’re a scream, you know it? Watch the road.”
“Yeah, but that’s my goddamn point,” I said again. I yelled it: “The truth’s commercial.”
We were pulling into the driveway of the Stanford Court and I was relieved that this was almost over. I felt scared and depressed. I wanted to be home now. Or go looking for Belinda. Or get dangerously drunk with Alex in the bar.
I stopped the car. Alex just sat there. Then he pushed in the dash lighter and took out a cigarette.
“I love you, you know,” he said.
“The hell. Besides, who cares about that story? Tell it.”
But I felt a little stab inside when I said that. Mother’s secret. Mother’s goddamned secret.
“Those kids keep you young, innocent.”
“Oh, what crap,” I said. I laughed, but it was awful. I thought of Belinda, of reaching under Charlotte’s nightgown and feeling this hot, succulent little thigh that was Belinda’s. Picture of Belinda naked. Was that the truth? Was that commercial? I felt like a fool. I felt exhausted.
Go home, wait for her to call or come, then take her clothes off. Lay her down on the crumpled flannel nightgown in the four-poster bed and pull of her tight pan ties and push into her gently, gently ... like a brand-new little glove—
“It was your mother, you know, who told me about your writing the books,” Alex said, his voice rising easily to its dinnertime volume. Lights, action, camera. I could feel him relaxing in the seat. “And she never told me I had to keep it secret either.”
“She knew a gentleman when she saw one,” I said under my breath as I looked at him.
He smiled as he let out the smoke. He looked immensely attractive even now in his late sixties. His white hair was still full, sculpted in a flawless Cary Grant style. And he carried what little extra weight he’d gained over the years with authority, as if other people were just a little too light. Perfect teeth, perfect tan.
“It was right after the premiere of Crimson Mardi Gras,” he said, eyes narrowing, his hand on my shoulder. “You remember we had wanted to fly her out to California and she couldn’t come, it was impossible the way she was then, but you came, and then later I flew down to New Orleans to call on her.”
“Never forget.”
“Jeremy, you don’t know how Gothic it all was, that trip south.”
“You have my sympathy.”
“My car pulls up to this gigantic old rose-colored house on Saint Charles Avenue with all the dark olive green shutters bolted, and the picket fence just holding back the oleanders so they don’t fall right down on the front pavements. It took two of us just to push in that front gate.”
“No place like home,” I said.
‘“And then I enter this dark cold hallway with the grim bronze pirate’s head on the yule post, and a big shadowy oil painting of what was it, Robert E. Lee—?”
“Lafayette,” I said.
“—Those ceilings must have been fifteen feet high, Jeremy, and those old cypress floorboards, enormous. I went up and up that Scarlet O’Hara staircase. The old gas light fixtures were still in the walls!”
“They didn’t work.”
“—And just a tiny little chandelier dangling in the upstairs corridor—”
“It was murder changing the light bulbs.”
“—And there she was, the Cynthia Walker, in that cavern of a front bedroom. That wallpaper, Jeremy, that old gold-leaf wallpaper! A set designer would have given anything to get his hands on that old paper. Yet even so, it was like being in a tree house when you stood there and looked through the open slats of all those blinds. Nothing but the oak branches and the green leaves. If you peeped out the front, you could barely see the traffic moving down there, just little specks of color and that old wooden streetcar rocking past. It gave off a roar, like the sound m a sea shell.”
“Write another book, Alex, a ghost story.”
“And there she was in her big old-fashioned bed with the oxygen tanks beside it, the oxygen tanks right in the middle of all this gold wallpaper and mahogany furniture. Big highboy—wasn’t it?—with the curly Queen Anne legs, and one of those old French armoires with the mirrored doors ?”
“Full of moth balls.”
“You can’t imagine how it looked to me, that room. And the book jackets and photographs and the mementos everywhere, and those tinkling wind chimes, those dreary brass wind chimes—”
“They were glass, actually—”
“—And this tiny little woman, this mite of a woman, sitting up against all these embroidered pillows.”
“Silk.”
“Yeah, silk. And she was wearing a lavender silk negligee, Jeremy, beautiful thing, and cameos. She had cameos on her neck and on her fingers, and on her bracelets. I never forgot those cameos. Said they came from Italy.”
“Naples.”
“And a wig, a gray wig—I thought she had a lot of class to have a wig like that made, natural gray and with a long braid of hair, nothing modern or false for her. And she was so gaunt, I mean, there was nothing left of her.”
“Eighty pounds.”
“Yet she was so lively, Jeremy, so sharp, and you know she was still pretty!”
“Yes, still pretty.”
“She had me sit down and drink a glass of champagne with her. She had the silver ice bucket right there. And she told me how on Mardi Gras days the king of the Rex parade would stop at every house along Saint Charles Avenue in which a former king lived, and the former king would climb up a ladder to the new king’s throne on the float, and they would drink a glass of champagne together while the entire parade waited.”
“Yeah, they did that.”
“Well, she said that it was like having the king of the Rex parade come to drink champagne with her to have me come to New Orleans to see her. And, of course, I told her what a great writer she was, and what a privilege it had been to play Christopher Prescott in Crimson Mardi Gras and how well the premiere had gone and all. She laughed and she said right out that you’d written every word of it. She didn’t even know who Christopher Prescott was! Oh, how she laughed. She said she hoped he was a gentleman, this Christopher Prescott, and that he drank champagne with the king of Rex during the Crimson Mardi Gras. She said you’d done the last two books under her name and you’d be doing others, lots of others. Cynthia Walker was alive and well in your hands. Cynthia Walker would never die. She was even leaving you her name in her will. You’d be doing Cynthia Walker books forever, saying you’d found the manuscripts in her files and her bank vaults, after her death.”
“Well, I didn’t do them,” I said.
He sighed and c
rushed out the cigarette. Blessed silence. No sound but the roar of the Saint Charles car in my ears. Two thousand miles away, but I could hear it. Smell of that room.
“I got the call in New York when she died,” he said. “That must have been—what?—two months later? We toasted her that night at the Stork Club. Real genuine article she was.”
“Undoubtedly. Now get out of my car, you drunken bum,” I said. “And next time you write a book, put the story in it.”
“I’d like to see you do that,” he said.
I thought for a moment.
“And what if I did?” I asked. “Somebody would come along and make a TV movie of just that story. And sales of all her books would go up—”
“But yoga wouldn’t tell it.”
“—And so would the sales of my books, and all because people got a little truth. Truth makes art and people know it. Now go on in, you bum, some of us have to work for a living.”
He looked at me for a long moment, gave me one of his easy, wide screen smiles. So well kept he looked as if somebody had gone over him with a magnifying glass to remove every blemish, every line, every unwanted hair.
I wondered if he was thinking about the other part of the story, if he even remembered it.
On his way out of the house that afternoon, he’d come by my back porch painting room, and I had invited him in, and he had shut the door and casually slipped the bolt. When he sat down on the cot, he gestured for me to sit beside him. We had made 1ovc—I guess you could call it that, he had called it that for fifteen minutes, more or less, before the big limousine had taken him away.
He had been the leading man then in all his glory, graceful of build with curly jet black hair. I remember he had on a white linen suit with a pink carnation in the buttonhole and a white raincoat over his shoulders which faintly suggested the capes he always wore in his costume roles on the screen. Effortlessly charming. That part had not changed at all.
“You stay with me when you come out west,” he’d said. He’d written his private number inside a matchbook for me.
I had called that number three months later when I decided to leave the house.