Destiny (66 page)

Standing in the Via Condotti, Lewis blushed for a miscalculation sixteen years old. The panic grew worse. A book? No, books were too impersonal. Flowers? He wanted to give her more than that. Perfume? He thought Helen never wore it; perhaps she disliked it.

In the end, compromising, and reminding himself that if Helen did agree to go away with him, this gift would at least be useful, he went into Gucci. There, after further agonizing, he selected a weekend bag. It was extremely expensive, shaped like a Gladstone bag, and made of maroon crocodile skin. It was flamboyant; Lewis was sure his mother wouldn't like it. But he wasn't buying it for his mother, he reminded himself. He was buying it for Helen.

Growing excited, he asked if they could monogram it. They could—^but it would take a few hours. Lewis hesitated once more, and then decided to go ahead. The initials were H. C, he told them; he arranged for the bag to be delivered later that day to the Principessa's.

At the mention of that name and that address the stiff assistant unbent considerably; her manner began to approach charm. Lewis left the shop

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feeling extremely happy. On the way out, he half-collided with a man going in. Lewis looked up at him in annoyance: a tall dark man, wearing a black suit. Someone important, presumably, because two assistants were already bowing and scraping at the door. He brushed past Lewis with a curt apology in Itahan; Lewis glanced back, then passed out into the street, and instantly forgot him.

He took another cab across the river to Trastevere, and was stuck for what seemed hours in the hooting, yelling mayhem of a Roman traffic jam. By the time he reached the house where Thad was filming, it was past noon, and Lewis—knowing Thad usually broke for an hour then—was looking forward to joining Thad and Helen for lunch. He let the cab go in the Piazza di Santa Maria, and strolled cheerfully down the narrow side streets, whistling. When he reached the entrance to the house, and went into the hall, he found his way barred. The assistant director, Fabian, a tall languid Frenchman, was lounging at the bottom of the stairs.

Lewis looked up then, past the snaking cables, to a closed door.

"Salut. " Fabian gave him a lazy grin, and didn't move.

"Excuse me . . ." Lewis took a purposeful step forward.

"Sorry. It's closed. Thad doesn't want anyone up there."

"That doesn't mean me."

Fabian grinned amiably. "It means everyone. Sorry, Lewis."

Lewis hesitated. He glanced at his watch, then back at Fabian. He felt a sudden nervous dart of alarm. Thad had discouraged him from attending shootings before, but never barred him.

"Aren't they going to break? What the hell's he doing up there?"

Fabian shrugged. "He's on the final sequence. Thad's there—and Victor, and Helen. C'est tout. It shouldn't take much longer—then it's a wrap."

Lewis frowned. He knew how this film began—in close-up on Helen's face. He knew how it ended—the same way. It was the bits in between where his knowledge was sketchy. He knew enough, though, to remember that the final sequence took place after the murder, and featured Helen alone; in bed.

He listened carefully. Through the panels of the door above he could just hear the drone of Thad's voice. He pushed Fabian aside and ran up the stairs. The door was locked, and Thad stopped talking the moment he heard Lewis's footsteps. Lewis rattled the door handle furiously. From inside came the familiar high-pitched rasping giggle, then the sound of Thad's footsteps.

"Lewis?" he said through the door. "Fuck off."

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Lewis glowered at the door. He considered for a second whether to smash it into matchsticks by barging it with his football player's shoulders, or simply to kick in its panels with his foot. On reflection, he decided either course lacked dignity. Answering Thad lacked dignity. He retreated down the stairs again without another word.

Fabian gave him a fatalistic glance and a very Gallic shrug.

"You would like me to give Thad a message when he comes out?"

"Sure. Tell him I'm going out to get drunk."

"Bien stir. " Fabian yawned.

"And tell him I'm coming back here in an hour."

At this Fabian looked doubtful. "An hour? I think an hour may not be long enough."

"Why not, for chrissake?" Lewis rounded on him belligerently. "The way he described it to me, it's one tiny sequence. One set-up. How long can something like that take?"

"Who knows?" Fabian smiled resignedly.

"Is she naked up there—is that it? Has he got her undressed?"

Fabian slowly lowered one eyelid. "Lewis, mon ami, I swear to you, I have no idea. But if he has—he is a lucky man, yes?"

Lewis turned away without another word. He was trembling with an emotion he could not identify. He walked down the street to the edge of the piazza, and went into the first bar he found.

The first Strega made him feel better; the second, better still. The third was a mistake, and the fourth was a disaster.

It was a small bar, patronized by local workmen. Lewis sat and stared at the bare wooden table, and listened to the clicks of the machine as they played pinball. A television set was on in back somewhere, and dimly he could hear the screams of an Italian football commentator. On another world, another planet, someone, somewhere, was playing Real Madrid.

His head sagged forward. He traced the mark of his wet glass on the tabletop. He wondered, in a fumbling fashion, his brain refusing to work very clearly, whether the feelings he was experiencing were the result of thwarted lust, or jealousy, or betrayal, or love. And who, exactly, had aroused those feelings?

It could have been Helen. It should have been Helen. He was almost certain it was Helen.

On the other hand, it could have been Thad.

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He had met Thad by accident; it was an accident that changed his hfe. Sometimes, Lewis felt as if he'd been looking for Thad all his life. He had been in a bad way at the time; the immediate pre-Thad era of his hfe was one Lewis preferred to forget. He had left Harvard behind, he had escaped from Boston, he had been having a good time—and all at once, he had started to worry. He couldn't remember quite why now—perhaps it was just that he noticed the faces at the parties he attended were getting younger, and he himself older. He wasn't sure.

All he knew was that it suddenly seemed urgent that he should stop drifting, and make a success of his life. In his worst moments, Lewis had always doubted his ability to do that, but at other times he felt a euphoric certainty that somehow, somewhere, he would make the grade. He saw himself, the prodigal son, returning to Boston: a success—but as what precisely?

His mother had always favored politics. She had hinted at her hopes wistfully. She noted the meteoric rise of John F. Kennedy, and hinted more openly. To Emily Sinclair, the Kennedys were Irish-Catholic upstarts. If John Kennedy could achieve so much, what might Lewis, that tall handsome scion of the Sinclairs, do? Lewis's father was more direct. Lewis would go into the family bank, and his refusal to do so immediately after leaving Harvard was wayward and inexplicable.

Lewis meant to have nothing to do with poUtics, nothing to do with the bank. But when he tried to decide on a profession which would bring him the success he craved, he vacillated. One of the new careers, he felt that instinctively—the kind of thing he read about in newspapers, the kind of thing no Sinclair ever did. Advertising. The music industry. Journalism. Show business. The new make-it-fast professions, where what mattered were your wits and your stamina, not the fact that your parents adorned the Social Register and you had a father to pull strings.

Lewis dabbled with these ideas, pursuing none of them with great vigor, and then, on a whim and a casual invitation from an actress he'd been seeing in New York, he went out to the West Coast. There, quite suddenly, he felt he had found his metier. Not to act—he couldn't act. Not to direct —Lewis was aware of his own limitations. But to produce movies, now that attracted him. He liked the fact that it was fluid and unpredictable. It was a little shady, you had to hustle, and he hked that too. The wheehng and dealing, the hype, the gab: he hked all those—he also liked the parties and the girls.

He met a number of young producers while he was out there, and

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watched them, fascinated. It took quite a while for the obvious to sink in: they were all different from him; they were all Jewish. He confided his ambition to the actress one night, when he was drunk and incautious. She nearly fell out of bed laughing.

Reluctantly, Lewis decided she was right. He grew tired of the actress, tired of Hollywood, tired of the fantasy. He bought a ticket back to the East Coast. It was actually in the back pocket of the jeans he had adopted as California camouflage, when—late one afternoon—the actress announced they were going to a party. His last night in California. Lewis shrugged and agreed.

The party was at a beach house in Venice. It was at that party he felt his life really started, because it was at that party he met Thad.

The actress had introduced him, with a wave of the hand, as "the Toad." She moved quickly away to some guy who was rumored to have a line into MGM casting.

Lewis, hemmed in and unable to escape, learned the Toad's name was Thaddeus Angelini. He was second-generation Italian-American, bom and raised in L.A. The Toad provided this brief information, and then lapsed into silence. Lewis squirmed. He still had some residue of Boston manners. He had yet to perfect the Hollywood art of cutting stone-dead someone who had neither reputation, nor influence, nor money, nor hope. So, when his fund of conversation had dried up, and the fat sweating man was still silent, Lewis, growing desperate, asked him what he did.

"I make movies."

The fat man blinked up at him behind shaded glasses.

Lewis, who was naive, looked at him with marginally more interest. In Hollywood he had met a lot of people with projects, no one with anything under his belt.

"I—er—would I have seen them?"

"It's unlikely. None of them have been made yet."

The fat man giggled—that was the nearest word Lewis could think of to describe the nervous high-pitched rasping sound he made. Lewis swayed on his feet. He thought: Jesus, just my luck; a nut case.

"They're in my head. For the present. At this moment in time." He giggled again, and Lewis decided that he was either nuts, or drunk, or high, or possibly all three. Then he noticed that the man was drinking tea, and didn't seem to smoke. He peered at him more closely through the haze, at which point the fat man gave him a singularly sweet smile, marred only by irregular yellowing teeth.

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"Fuck off if you want," he said, in an obliging tone. "I won't mind. Most people do."

It wasn't intended as a challenge, but Lewis interpreted it as such. He had always been contra-suggestible; now, glorying in that, as well as in the cheap white California wine, he pushed past a shrieking group of Venice fairies and sat down next to the fat man on a cushion on the floor. The fat man regarded him equably.

"So stay," he said. "Tell me what you're looking for in hfe."

To his own everlasting surprise, Lewis did.

They talked for an hour—Lewis talked, with occasional interjections. Then they went back to the fat man's fourth floor walkup downtown, and talked some more. At dawn, Lewis bedded down on the floor, and when the hangover wore off the next day, they began talking again. That evening, they went to a Bergman film. The Seventh Seal, at a movie theater near the UCLA campus. Lewis had seen part of it once, at Harvard. The fat man had seen it thirty-five times. They returned to his apartment, and this time Thad talked. He talked for four hours without drawing breath. He talked about that film, and Bergman's other films.

Lewis understood about fifty percent of what he said, and that fifty percent seemed to him pure genius. Thad made him see meaning behind meaning, the way movies related to life; he showed him how it was possible, technically, to make these meanings mesh, to disguise them in the form of a story. Lewis listened; art made sense; life made sense.

The next day he couldn't remember the details as clearly as he had the night before, but he was still impressed—more than that, he was hooked. He and Thad became friends. He supposed that was the word, though he had never experienced friendship like this before.

For a period of two months, the two were rarely apart. They lived on junk food from takeouts; Lewis continued to sleep on Thad's floor. They spent most of each day watching movies, and most of each night talking about them. Thad's benevolent obsession made Lewis relax. For the first time in his hfe he felt totally unpressured. Thad expected nothing from him: if he wanted to come to the movie, he was welcome; if he didn't, Thad shrugged, and went alone. He was uninterested in Lewis's background, and never questioned him about it, but when Lewis felt the need to talk, Thad would listen, like a fat, wise father confessor. He never passed judgment; he never apportioned blame; indeed, he seemed to Lewis curiously above all moral questions: for Thad, such concepts as duty, honor, and truth—the code of the Boston Brahmin—did not exist. Except in movies.

Lewis, sitting cross-legged on the floor, forking up Chinese takeout, halfway through a bottle of wine, suddenly realized that he felt free, and because he felt free, he felt great. By the time he had finished the bottle of

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wine, his concept of freedom had grown still wider. The problem with his parents, he saw it now, was that they were old. Most of his Harvard contemporaries were old—they were bom that way. Like his family, they belonged to the past, Lewis explained, to the gray postwar Eisenhower world. He and Thad were different. They didn't give a shit about conventions and codes. They didn't need things the way Lewis's family did— houses and cars and college degrees and—Lewis cast about wildly—and money.

He collapsed exhausted at the end of this emotional speech, and Thad sat quietly nodding. Finally, he spoke.