WAS (37 page)

"So charming to have lunch with you," he said in Mortimer's voice. "Are you often on the menu?"

"Uh-oh," said Karl, in something not unlike real fear.

"Joke," cooed Mortimer and batted his eyelashes. "People do say my humor slays them."

Mort was a pastiche of different acting styles. Mostly he spoke like a slightly camped-up Boris Karloff.

"Yup, really kills me," said Karl, wincing with anticipation.

"Is that an invitation?" said Mort.

"Ew!" said Karl in delicious discomfort. "Ew! He's doing it! He's doing it!"

The fans didn't know Jonathan's face, but they recognized the voice. They looked up from the tables. They put down their trays and began to gather around.

Jonathan played with Karl's hair. Karl stood, eyes closed, bearing up like a child determined to resist a tickling.

"My little baby," said Mortimer in a greasy, singsong voice. "He's rigid with embarrassment. You might say Mort'ified. Shall we play a nice little game?"

"Eeek," said Karl in a tiny voice. There was an appreciative murmur of laughter. Laugh at me, will you? Mortimer thought. Laugh? Then listen to this.

And Mortimer threw himself from side to side in the chair, possessed by laughter, shrieking with it, loud and piercing as a knife.

"Ooooooooo!" breathed out the audience in fear. It was the laugh of the Wicked Witch of the West.

Later that night, Karl came and drank whisky in Jonathan's room, and slept with him, even though, as far as Jonathan could determine, he was heterosexual. Karl's last name was Rodriguez. Karl Rodriguez. Jonathan kept saying the name. Could you fancy someone for their teeth? Karl had a huge grin full of large bright teeth. Karl's parents had come to the north from Mexico.

The next day, Jonathan was interviewed in front of five hundred people. He sat behind a folding table, next to a scholarly looking woman with plain, pulled-back hair and glasses.

"What's your worst nightmare?" she asked.

"Waking up to find I'm in
Child Minder Fifteen
." There was laughter. The laughter was uneasy.

"Do you sometimes find the violence hard to take?" the interviewer asked.

"Oh no. I can't see all that meat and blood," said Jonathan. "I can't see red. I'm color-blind."

And he thought: I've got, I've got to find something else to do.

There was to be a charity performance of
The Wizard of Oz
in the Hollywood Bowl. Dorothy was going to be played by Cher. Nick Nolte was the Tin Man. Sam Shepard was going to play the Scarecrow, but had to pull out.

For the first time in his life, Jonathan hustled. Ambition alone could not have made him do it. Only an overwhelming urge to play the part could have driven him.

He went straight from reading
Variety
to Aaron Spelling's office. Aaron was producing; Jonathan had appeared in "Dynasty," another one of his tormented character roles, a priest in love with Joan Collins. The character had not been popular with audiences and was speedily dropped-but Spelling still had some time for Jonathan.

Jonathan simply told him the truth. He was the only man in L.A. who could still play the Scarecrow. To prove it, he sang "If I Only Had a Brain" right in the office. He ran full speed at the wall and did a backward somersault from it. Jonathan shook his head like a salt-shaker and knew that he was sprinkling from it something he could only name but not describe. The something was Ozziness, the quality of Oz.

Spelling chuckled and shook his head. "Okay, okay, you sold me." Maybe he needed to fill the part quickly, maybe it didn't matter with all the star names on the bill. There were a lot of maybes.

But word soon went around town that some horror-movie star was playing the Scarecrow. The buzz was that the horror-movie star was wonderful.

"Well, he's always been a brilliant actor," said those who cared to remember the little theaters, his TV psychos, his TV academics.

Jonathan found himself having lunch with Cher. She seemed to take a kind of rueful, maternal interest in him. He told her about his researches into Baum, into Kansas, into Oz. He told her about his visit to Lancaster, California. She changed the subject.

"This show could do you a lot of good," she said. "This show could really break you."

Jonathan was dazzled. Something alive seemed to stir in him, made out of joy. With a kind of twist and a flip of his hands, he folded, out of the corner of the tablecloth, a dog's head. It had little knots for ears, a snout, and a punched-in, toothless mouth.

"We're not in Kansas anymore," said Jonathan, stroking the dog's head. The dog turned around and looked at Cher and cocked its head with curiosity. Its ears rose up, attentive. The dog was alive.

"That's terrific," said Cher.

"I only wish I would stop losing all this weight," Jonathan said to Toto.

A week or two later, he went in for tests.

Ira didn't show up. Jonathan hated driving now, but he drove to Bill's house by himself anyway, alone in the dark, and got horribly lost. He missed the exchange onto the freeway, and he missed the turn off the freeway, and then he wandered aimlessly up and down Topanga Canyon. The roads on the map wriggled under his eyes like worms.

He arrived in a panic, sick at being lost and alone, horrified at how fragile his illness had made him.

"I drove round and round for hours! I couldn't find where I was!" He was sobbing. He had to sit down.

"Muffy, get a whisky, could you?" asked Bill.

Bill took Jonathan in his arms. It was a great comfort to be held. But it was an enfeebling comfort. Jonathan had been reduced to needing to be hugged after a simple drive in the car. Jonathan wiped his cheeks and tried to pull away, patting Bill on his great bare arms.

"There you go, buddy," said Bill, and let him go.

And Bill's wife Muffy was there, holding out a glass of whisky. A glass of whisky in Waterford crystal. Jonathan was terrified he might drop it.

"You must think I'm a real wimp," he said.

"I think you're scared," said Muffy. "It's not pleasant, being alone and lost."

It was alarming how people were the only island of safety he had against terror. As soon as he was around people, the fear went. Most of the time in L.A., he was alone.

"I couldn't read the map," he said, gulping whisky and snot.

"Let me show you around the house," said Bill.

The house was a museum. It was a great old farmhouse from the days when L.A. was a Western settlement of farmers and fruit trees. There were huge wooden spoons on the wall that had been used for stirring vats of lye soap. There were old homemade candles. There were shoes people had made themselves out of hides. There were family Bibles, with names of parents and grandparents.

"Look at this! Look at this!" Jonathan exclaimed. "I didn't know you were into all of this!"

How can you cover so many bases? Jonathan thought, looking at Bill Davison's face. You can talk shop to a ball player, history to a historian. With a face like yours, you ought to be some Reaganite businessman in favor of defense budgets. With money like you make, you ought to be slick and sharp and spouting horrible, phony relation-speak.

"All these things," said Bill Davison. "They're from Kansas. I kind of collect them."

"I only take photographs," said Jonathan.

Muffy walked with them, commenting quietly on the implements. "That object there is for firing pills down horses' throats." There was something European about her. She was plump and pale, with undyed hair, no makeup, and yet there was something forcefully sensual about her. Even Jonathan felt it. Her breasts hung loose, her hips wobbled under the peasant dress. Jonathan found that he was glad for Bill, glad that he had a wife who was his match.

Muffy had gone with Bill on his expeditions to Kansas. She talked about the samplers on the walls. She knew about the people who had made them. One of them had been singed in the fire at Lawrence. Made by Millie Branscomb, aged eight.

"This is the strangest thing," Muffy said. "When we researched this, we found out it was done by the mother of someone Bill knew."

"The mother of a patient of mine. My first patient, you might say," said Bill. "It's all very strange. I got to know a woman about eighty-something. She was living in a Home. She thought she was Dorothy Gale."

It took a moment. "From Oz," said Jonathan.

"Turned out," said Bill, "that she was. She knew Frank Baum."

There was that icy vapor again, from the snow, from the cold. It rose up from the floorboards. Jonathan saw it at his feet.

Later, when Muffy was in the kitchen, they sat at the table and Jonathan said, "I'm having visions, Bill."

"What?"

"I'm seeing things. I'm hallucinating. You're a psychiatrist. You tell me what that means."

Bill went very silent. In front of him was a rush place mat. He traced its spiral pattern with the blade of a knife. "It all depends," said Bill Davison, "on whether the visions are true or not."

Jonathan thought a minute and then said, "I think they are."

Muffy had cooked a Turkish meal. The main course was made of eggplants and onions. They waited awhile before dessert, hoping that Ira would come. Drinking whisky had been a mistake. Jonathan felt himself go quiet and slightly confused. He listened.

Bill talked about the history of Kansas. The Old West, he said, had stringent gun-control laws. You checked your firearms before you came into town. Wichita, Kansas, was the town of Wyatt Earp, of Bat Masterson, the town of all those TV shows along with Dodge City, also in Kansas. For the whole decade of the 1870s, when Wichita was one of the wildest cowtowns, the total number of people murdered in it was four. Four people killed in ten years. In Los Angeles, it was four a day.

"It was the cities Back East that made up the Wild West," said Bill. "The penny-dreadful magazines, and the movies after them."

"What about Billy the Kid? He was real."

"Looks as if he may have been born in New York City."

Jonathan began to hear cattle lowing, somewhere up the canyon perhaps.

"Tell me more about Dorothy," he said.

"She was from a farming community called Zeandale, near a place called Manhattan, Kansas. Its other claim to fame is that Damon Runyon was born there."

"What was she like?"

"Well," said Bill, looking into his wineglass. "It was as if she lived in Oz all the time. She lived in a world of her own. Maybe that was what Baum saw in her, maybe not. I wrote to the Baum Estate to find out more about it. All they could tell me was that Baum had been a substitute teacher there for a short while. They thought it more likely that the character in the book was named after Baum's niece."

He told Jonathan the story, as much as he knew. He told him how Dorothy had died. The room seemed to fill with the low smoky light that comes on winter afternoons, sun through silver mist.

"One day," said Bill, "I might just go to Manhattan and see what else I can find out about her. Speaking of which, how are you and Oz getting on?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Oz. Remember our contract?"

Jonathan had forgotten.

Ira finally arrived in his own car. He was gray with fatigue, and he stared coldly at Jonathan.

"I rang and rang. Where were you?" he asked, as he sat down.

Jonathan's eyes were round, unblinking, feverish. He didn't answer.

Ira turned to Bill. "I'm really sorry, Bill. I wanted to call and say I was going to be late, but I didn't have your home number."

Bill explained. "That's okay. Jonathan told me he was locked out of your house. He couldn't answer the phone."

"I've lost my house keys, Ira," said Jonathan. The room glimmered, as sunlight sprinkles snow with stars. Someone was trying to walk toward Jonathan through the mist. All Jonathan could see was a dark shape, lumpy, in dark clothes. Light came in rays from all around it, cutting through the mist, casting shadows.

"I'll need sunglasses," said Jonathan and grinned and grinned.

Muffy came in, carrying the dessert. To Jonathan, the dessert looked like a chocolate pudding.

"I made this specially for you," Muffy said to Jonathan.

Jonathan imagined how smooth the chocolate pudding would be. He picked up the serving spoon and plunged it into the dish, and then, confused, pushed it into his own mouth.

"Jonathan!" exclaimed Ira and thumped both hands on the table. The pudding seemed to turn into dust in Jonathan's mouth. It was chestnut pudding, bland and with a kind of powdery texture underneath.

"It's okay," said Muffy. "I'll get another serving spoon."

As she left for the kitchen, Jonathan thought: She made it for me, and I don't like it and that will hurt her feelings. I know. I'll eat without chewing it, so I won't have to taste it. There was silence at the table as he gulped it. He took another serving spoonful and swallowed again. He made a noise like a frog.

Muffy came back out. One more mouthful for her. He stuck the spoon in and swallowed it whole, raw.

"Very. Good," he said.

Then he stood up and shambled into the kitchen and threw it up, into the sink, over the draining board.

"Oh God! Jonathan!" shouted Ira.

There was a kitchen chair. Jonathan slumped helpless onto it, otherwise he might have fallen.

Ira was in the kitchen first. He picked up a towel. It was a good dishtowel, too good to use.

"Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus," he said and flung the towel against the wall in rage. Muffy came in.

"I'm so sorry," said Ira to her.

"That's okay. I can clean it up," said Muffy. She did not sound cheerful, but managed to be reasonably businesslike.

"No. You will not. That is one thing you mustn't do," said Ira. There were wispy trails of blood in the pudding.

Jonathan had begun to realize exactly what he had done. He wished he was dead. Then he remembered that he would be soon enough. "I'm sorry," he said, in a voice perhaps too low for the others to hear. Jonathan tried to get up and found that he couldn't. "I'll clean it up," he said. Again, no one seemed to hear.

Muffy flashed rubber gloves. Ira took them from her. "Really," he said. "I'd rather you let me do it."