Mitla Pass (14 page)

We were at poolside. Val was fixing drinks. She had on high heels and a bikini. Still a dynamite-looking woman.

“Cheers,” she said with a kiss. “So, tomorrow’s the big day. Why don’t we go to New York or Vegas for a long weekend and shoot out the lights?”

My expression must have been grim. She reacted with apprehensive curiosity. “You certainly don’t look like the man who has just snared the brass ring.”

“Val, I’ve decided to write the screenplay away from the house.”

“If you want to work at the studio, that’s okay with me. I’m going to miss having you around.”

“I mean I want to go off and write it.”

“Holy mackerel, Amos, this is a little sudden.”

“For you, not for me. I’ve been stewing over it for weeks.”

“Good Lord, Gideon, you can’t do a thing for yourself. You’re helpless.”

“I know. A lot of things have piled up. The closet needs a cleaning out.”

She was getting my drift that I wasn’t going to change my mind. She shrugged and loosened my leash a bit, but still held firmly. “So, write in Malibu. I can spend most nights with you and we can have the girls on the weekend. Say, it might be fun, after all.”

“Val, I’m going to the Caribbean. Alone.”

I don’t think she ever expected to hear me say anything like that. Val always had the trump card, my fear of loneliness. When backed into a corner, she never hesitated to use it. It had never failed to work.

“I realize we all need space but being a writer doesn’t give you license to abandon your family and home. God, you make me feel I’ve driven you out. It’s that damned book,
The Tenderloin.
”

“It’s not you, not the girls, not the studios, not Los Angeles. It’s me. Gideon Zadok is treading water. I thought we had given up so much to do the first book, the rest of the way would be covered with rose petals.”

“That bastard Murphy put you up to this.”

“Nobody put me up to anything. I cried for mercy. I’m lost, Val. Murphy understood. Becoming a true novelist means that I’ve got to be prepared to give up much more than I’ve given up till now. I have to do what is necessary to become a writer again who can look at his face in the mirror without cringing. As for now, Val, I’m going wherever my work takes me. If you and the girls can come, wonderful. If I have to go it alone, that’s what I’m going to do.”

She must have been numbed. I could hardly believe these words were coming from my mouth.

“I may fall flat on my face. I may not have the stuff. But I’m not going out without protest. I’m going to write another book, baby, and I’m going to give it everything I’ve got.”

We were consumed by deadly, black silence.

“You’re cruel! You’re rotten! You selfish son of a bitch.”

She hadn’t heard a bloody word! She felt nothing I was pleading for! Val flung her glass. It skidded over the patio. Glad it was plastic. She stood over me heaving her chest and locking her teeth.

“Why don’t you enroll in art school?” I said with all the meanness I could muster.

“What about me!” she cried. “What about me?” I asked.

A
LPACA SWEATERS
with muttonchop sleeves were the costume of the moment. Schlosberg wore a tan alpaca, Sal a blaring red, and I had on a white one to indicate chastity, modesty, and virtue.

Schlosberg lit a cigar that seemed half his size and he hung on my every word. We seemed to be of a single mind as to where we were taking the story but something was annoying him. I smelled that he had not totally made up his mind. “Up front?” he asked when I had finished.

Oh God, here it comes, the goodbye kiss.

“Of course,” I said.

“I like some of your work, Zadok. I like most of what you said here today. Now, I’ve always treated my writers as adults, until they prove otherwise. I was the first producer in Hollywood to permit writers to work at home. If home be Santa Barbara or New York. I’ve even let a couple of the Englishmen work in London. As long as we can stay in communication. But Sal tells me you want to write this in ... uh ...”

“St. Barthélemy.”

“Why?”

“Up front? The house of Zadok is tottering. But mainly, I believe it’s going to make the script better.”

“Are you fucking me over, Zadok? Why is it going to make the script better?”

“I want to create an atmosphere where I can achieve total, absolute concentration. This is going to be a great script.”

“Nine out of ten scripts bomb. Who do you think you are?”

We had worked out a flat deal. I would write a screenplay for fifty thousand dollars and I would be paid—good, bad, or mediocre. Okay,
bubele,
this is your big moment, I thought to myself.

“Give me a month to see if I’m doing the story right, or if I’m whacking off on the beach. If you don’t get my pages on time or if you don’t like them, the deal is off. You don’t owe me a dime.”

I thought Sal would swallow his cigar.

“You’re serious, aren’t you, Zadok? Why are you putting yourself through this?”

“Hard for me to put it into words.”

“I haven’t noticed any overpowering shyness from you.”

I shook my head. “You’ve heard too much shit in this office from too many shit merchants.”

“Why, Zadok?”

“When I die, I want one word on my tombstone beside my name: author. I’m not as gifted as a lot of novelists. But I’m not picking soft spots for myself. I’m in a fight to find out if I have the balls and the discipline.”

“Well, I hope you win because if you don’t, it’s going to kill you.”

“At least I’ll die with a shit-eating grin on my face.”

“Good luck, Gideon, I mean that.”

I stopped in the outer office to phone Val.

“Hello.”

“Hi, baby, we’re in screenplay,” I said.

She hung up on me.

I
MONKEYED AROUND
town most of the day, dreading another brawl at home. It was evening when I turned into the driveway. I sensed something was very wrong. Usually our golden retriever hung out by the main gate waiting for me. No Grover Vandover. I opened the front door and called in. No Val, no maid, no girls. I was startled! What’s going on here? Thoughts of a robbery or that maybe one of the girls had been hurt ran through my mind.

“Val! Penny! Roxy!”

I heard Grover whimper and made for Roxanne’s room. Her dresser drawers were open and half cleaned out as though she had been evacuated in a hurry. Penny’s room was the same. Jesus! What’s going on! No note on the kitchen board. Knock off this shit, Val!

I saw Val’s car in the carport. Did an ambulance come? What the hell? Wait a minute. Val might still be here. I flung open our bedroom door. There it was!

Pinned onto the pillow with a rose lying across it. My special little address book. It must have had fifty to a hundred names of girlfriends, hookers, escorts. There were even phone numbers for some of Val’s best girlfriends, the divorced ones. I drew the line at other men’s wives. I must have gotten sloppy careless and left it out.

I went outside and looked around. My office, maybe. I opened the door. It was an awful sight. Val had gone through it with a club or knives. Everything was smashed. My bookcases were overturned and the books all ripped up ... my typewriter bashed to smithereens, the telephone jerked from the wall, my record collection scratched to uselessness, all the windows broken. The stuffing from my couch and armchair had been cut out with a knife ... all my photographs knocked down and trampled, the curtains slashed.

That’s it. The safe was opened. Val had found the combination and gotten the address book out of it. Manuscript papers were shredded and hurled all over the room. The pistol was gone! Wait! My chair filled with bullet holes, the empty gun on the floor.

Valerie stood in the doorway to the kitchenette. She tossed a big-bladed kitchen knife and a baseball bat to the ground and stood, frightfully calm.

My first reaction was one of relief that she hadn’t hurt herself.

“Where are the girls?”

She didn’t answer.

“Are they with your mother?”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Get out. You can have one of your buddies come over and get your stuff.”

“Okay.”

Oh Lord, that woman was hurt. “Okay,” I repeated.

“I had a long talk with some of your lady friends,” she said with a twisted smile on her lips. “They said they’d put me down as an extra girl. If there’s a big party I can go out and do a few tricks with them. Fifty bucks a pop, three hundred for an all-night party. You don’t have any objections, do you?”

“I’ve been very unhappy, Val. But no matter what happened, you didn’t deserve this.”

“Does Phil Delaney know you’re balling Joany? Did you fuck her in our bed? And sweet little Mary Allen. Prettiest little math teacher I ever did see. Fucking wholesale meat operation!”

“Val.”

“Get out!”

“Okay, but there’s one thing I want to know. You’ve known about this for a long, long time, Val. Why didn’t you stop me?”

She put her hands in her face and sank to the floor. “Whores,” she wept, “whores, whores, whores.”

St. Barths, 1956

O
KAY, BUSTER,
you fought for it, you won it. You now have the absolute right to go bust your ass on another novel. So, go get it. St. Barthélemy? I didn’t know the place existed or where it existed. The ultimate romance of the novelist, self-imposed exile. Real Somerset Maugham stuff.

My knowledge of the Caribbean was formed by Hollywood studios when I was a kid. So many of our conceptions of life and places were made on sound stages. Yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum. Steamy jungles, miserable black slaves sweating in the sugarcane fields, voodoo rites. Devil’s Island where no man escapes, except in a wooden box. Maureen O’Hara, so magnificent, so voluptuous. Bruce Cabot—now there was a villain for you. I’d duel my way, Errol Flynn style, through ten Basil Rathbones to free my beloved from those driveling, one-eyed, hook-handed scums.

A blissful haze enveloped me after I boarded the plane in L.A. I usually became maudlin after a few drinks at eighteen thousand feet. Val, I’ve hurt you so badly. I can’t even comprehend the visions that must have run through your mind on the hundred and one nights when I was away from home.

Maybe I was predestined to go to St. Barthélemy to salvage something, to pay penance. Christ in the wilderness. Val ...Val ... I bit my lip hard to hold back tears for the want of another chance to stroke Penny’s hair and read to her, or the kicks I got watching Roxanne taking jumps on her pony.

“This is for you, Daddy. I made it in art class.”

Remorse was punctuated by the white-knuckle aspects of flying in the Caribbean in 1955. The trip wasn’t for sissies. After Miami, I changed from one baling-wire airline to another, from Cuba down to Jamaica and then up to Haiti and over to Puerto Rico to my first destination, St. Thomas.

I was met by Tex Richie, one of Junkyard Murphy’s pilots. Generally speaking, old, fat-bellied pilots gave me a feeling of security. They had survived. Tex Richie was old, fat, and spoke with a whiskey-flavored Southwestern drawl. He didn’t exactly fill me with confidence. The plane gave me even less. It was an odd, dumpy configuration made in Holland with a push-pull engine in the rear. Tex called it a STOL, acronym for Short Take Off and Landing.

When he put on a thick pair of glasses to read the map, I almost called the whole thing off.

“There’s the little mother” he said, holding a magnifying glass.

“Where?”

“There.”

SHIT!

“Where’s the runway?”

“Oh, it’s there all right. All thirteen hundred feet of it.”

“Thirteen hundred feet!”

“Hell, ain’t no worse than landing on the deck of a carrier. They keep the grass low by using it as a grazing plot for the island’s sheep. When it gets down low enough, they sweep the sheep shit off it and use it as a soccer field. Junkyard told me to take real good care of you. They’re mowing the field for our arrival.”

Reinforced by that bit of intelligence, we took off. The flight was short and choppy. We came to a confluence of islands. Tex pointed out a speck.

“St. Barths.”

Good Lord, was he kidding? He flew over it once to see if any emergency panels had been laid out and to check the wind sock.

“God dammit,” he grumbled.

“What’s wrong?”

“We got a twenty-five-knot tail wind. It’s gonna be a good one.”

He went out to sea, circled back, and lowered the plane until we were but a few hundred feet over the water, then he banked her almost ninety degrees. At this terrifying angle we were being kicked from behind by the wind. He slowed her till I thought she had to stall and drop us into the sea. Tex held this attitude and the stall warning beeped.

“Motherfucker,” he garbled under his breath.

The runway went from the water’s edge and then took off uphill into a dead end of boulder-filled hillocks. If we touched down too far up the runway it seemed there was little chance of getting her up in the air again quickly enough.

“Used to have an awful lot of pileups,” he said to comfort me.

At the last instant, with the stall button blaring, Tex leveled her out and let her glide. She hit the runway twenty feet in from the water’s edge and started an uphill run coming to a halt with—oh hell, a good ten or twelve feet to spare. Piece of cake.

And then I lightened up. At the side of the runway by the shack a pleasant-looking couple stood beside a battered jeep and waved us in. Denise and Pierre Dumont, Junkyard’s caretakers. They fussed over me as though I were visiting royalty. Who knows? I might have been the first Jew ever to have set foot on the place.

I really didn’t know what I was expecting—a thatched hut, a cave dwelling, a spear-carrying native chief. Junkyard had digs on a half-dozen islands. This one turned out to be a petite but nicely built villa. It obviously belonged to a skilled trader, for it was supplied to the gunwales with everything from bug spray to bourbon. All I would need was one pair of shoes, one pair of shorts, and my typewriter.

The location was primo. Villa Murphy was on a small hillside above a magnificent curve of beach, a bay called St. Jean. It was a three-minute walk from the front door to the strand.