Passing Through the Flame (19 page)

“I’m getting tired of this party,” Paul said. “Why don’t we give up and go home?”

Velva Leecock leaned against the balcony railing, not really listening, looking out over the splendor of the city nightscape, inhaling the warm perfume of the Santa Ana, feeling pleasantly woozy from four—or was it five?—martinis. This is the way to live, she thought, way up on a mountain top looking down on everything. When we finish the picture and I’m a star, I’ll get a place like this way up in the hills, and I won’t go down into the flats except to go to restaurants and clubs and make movies. I’ll have the dressmakers come up to my house and the hair-stylists, too. They can even take the publicity pictures in my house, why not? I’ve spent too much time in downtown Hollywood and the crummy old San Fernando Valley.... Of course Beverly Hills has more class, and Bel Air might be the right place to build, and you can get hilltop sites with fabulous views, Wilt Chamberlain built that palace of his up there looking down on just
everything....

“Are you okay, Velva? You look a little green around the edges.” Paul was leaning over her faking concern, but really being bored and trying to hustle her out of the party. She wasn’t
that
stupid.

“I feel fine,” she said. “I feel wonderful. And I certainly have no intention of leaving until we talk to Jango Beck again. You heard what he said. At this very moment, he’s probably putting together the financing on his film. On
our
film, the film that’s going to make you an important director and me a star. How can you
even think of
leaving?”

Really, he’s being impossible! All he ever does is bitch and moan about how awful it is to be stuck making pornies, and what a hotshot filmmaker he is, and how impossible it is to get that first break in Hollywood, and when someone hands it to him on a silver platter, he refuses to believe it.

“Velva, Velva, the creep was putting us on. Why would anyone want to make a film with an unknown writer-director and a star with no credits?”

“Because Jango Beck has an instinct for talent and star quality, you heard what he said.”

“Shit,” Paul said, and he turned away from her, stared down the overgrown shoulders of the hills at the city below.

Velva touched him gently on the bare back of his neck. “You’ve got to believe in yourself, Paul,” she said. “I believe in you. Jango Beck believes in you. Why don’t you believe in yourself? Without that, you’ve got nothing.”

“I just don’t believe that Beck is anything but a put-on artist. That movie idea of his couldn’t be serious, no one would back a thing like that, and as for hiring me as writer-director and you as female lead—” He shrugged, sighed. “What’s the use? You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.”

Velva looked out over the lights of the golden city, imagining them rearranged into a gigantic theater marquee bearing the name “Velva Leecock” in brilliant letters a hundred feet high. “I’m listening,” she said. “I’m listening to you, and it’s making me sad. If only you’d believe in yourself, believe that something good is bound to happen to you because you’re a star inside and you deserve it, then you wouldn’t be grousing like this on the most wonderful night of your life.”

“If this is the most wonderful night of my life,” Paul said sarcastically, “then maybe I ought to just stand up on this railing and jump. With a little luck, I might make the
Hollywood Reporter.
‘Despondent Hopeful Finally Makes Impact on Sunset Strip’—”

“Ah,
here
you are! I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Velva turned and found herself looking into the dark sexy eyes of Jango Beck, a Jango Beck who actually looked thrilled to see her. Paul turned around more slowly, with a sour look on his face.

“Hello, Mr. Beck,” he said. “Got your movie deal together yet?”

“Rome wasn’t burned in a day, Paul,” Jango Beck said. “I’ve got the basics lined up, but obviously no one is going to put anything on paper until they’ve met with you. That’s why I was looking for you. Can you be in my office at Dark Star Records next Wednesday, about two thirty?”

Velva had to swallow her giggles at the sight of Paul just standing there, staring at Jango and breathing air like a beached fish. He really looked ridiculous, like a cross between Don Knotts and Jim Nabors, a startled hick.

“Look, if you can’t make it Wednesday, I could push the meeting back to Friday,” Beck said. “If it conflicts with a shooting schedule or something. But I
would
like to get this nailed down as soon as possible. You know how things tend to slip through your fingers in this town if you sit on them without contracts for too long.”

“Ah... no, no, I can make it on Wednesday,” Paul managed to say.

“Good. I’ll see you then.” Jango Beck turned back toward the crowded center of the balcony, and a wave of fear and nausea washed over Velva.

“What about
me
?” she said.

Jango Beck paused, turned around again, his big bush of black hair billowing like a thundercloud, little lightnings flashing in his eyes. He’s about the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen, Velva thought. When a thin smile appeared on those sensual lips, she felt the juices flowing between her legs.

“Oh, you too, of course,” Jango said. “I see you as the next great star of the silver screen. Jane Russell to my Howard Hughes. Susan Schiller to my Bill Horvath.”

He leaned over, kissed her lightly on the lips, sending electric shocks down her body to the base of her spine. Then he nodded, turned again, and moved off into the crowd of his guests.

Velva stood there watching Jango Beck saunter off, waving his arms, talking with important people—actors, actresses, producers, directors, columnists—overwhelmed by the knowledge that
she
, and of course Paul, were really the two most important guests at this party. The next important writer-director... and... and the next great star of the silver screen! Jango Beck had said so himself!

She hugged Paul wildly. “I made it! I made it!” she cried. “I’m going to be a star!”

Paul just stood there passively in her arms. “This isn’t happening...”he muttered. “I can’t believe this is happening....”

“Let’s get out of here,” Susan Schiller whispered in Bill’s ear. “The vibes are getting to me.” It was a cold room, all flat-surfaced modern furniture in aggressively synthetic primary colors lit by neutral colorless light; an airport waiting room. When they had first entered it, it had been a relief.

The last room they had been in, with its warm synthetic firelight, low couches, and funky atmosphere, had drawn the people in it toward each other, and they had swarmed all over her. An enormous fat man with his own picture on his T shirt suggesting with an arrogant self-importance that his column in the
Flash
was important to her career, while sending out vibrations of loneliness, selfloathing, and despair. A gay dude all perfumed and exaggeratedly feminine pretending that he gloried in being a pussy, while he exuded a lust for her that was so twisted and distorted by layers within layers of self-deception that he could only perceive it as unfocused pain. A TV writer or something in fancy Beverly Hills clothes, who had made a big play for her, boasting with his posture and the overtones of his words of what a great lay he was, while his sexual terror washed over her. She had felt herself dissolving in a sea of pain and need, her own sense of self eroding, becoming nothing more than the focus of that need, becoming Star inside.

This cold plastic room, with its isolated groupings of two or three slick hard chairs, had been a bracing relief, like stepping from a wallow in hot wet mud into a cold shower. When she and Bill had walked into it, they were noticed only with sidelong glances.

A good-looking older woman in a cocktail dress was trying to pick up a spaced-out red freak, to feed on his youth, not realizing that he was a million years old inside. There were three other couples in various stages of picking each other up, and three slickly dressed men in their forties yearning hopelessly after every young girl that walked through and making sniggering jokes about it to each other. The red freak and the three horny men kept stealing looks at her as she and Bill sat alone, but there was something about the furniture placement, the lighting, and the flat shiny surfaces that made everyone keep his physical and psychic distance, an airport waiting room indeed.

At first it had been relaxing, just sitting there alone, being Bill and Susan, not talking, and not having to talk. But gradually, she could feel a tension mounting, a crystallization of the psychic forces in the room about their focal points: the three middle-aged men lusting for young flesh, the red freak longing to break away from the woman who wanted what he didn’t have to give and bury himself in what he imagined Star could give
him
, and her own persona as Star, the center of crystallization. They all seemed frozen in their isolation, as if the lines of psychic force connecting them were rigid girders holding them in place, a crystal frozen into its immutable geometry, a moment of longing and pain caught in the balance of its own dynamics, unable to either resolve or shatter. Finally, there was no possibility of relaxation, only the feeling of being trapped in a rigid spider web of brittle razor-sharp glass.

Bill nodded, took her hand, and they rose together. As they walked across the room, she felt the psychic crystal shattering, felt herself moving through the falling shards of despair, thwarted longings, imagined opportunities not taken, a million mirrors shattered by her own selfishness, ten thousand years of bad karma falling in fragments from the casual touch of her hand. But she also felt as if she were rampaging through the cells of a glass prison, smashing her way to freedom through fragile walls of her own making.

And then Susan caught herself thinking such thoughts, and popped back into another, saner reality, thinking, am I flipping out? Am I going to find myself in there someday and not come out again?

Tuned to her wavelength, Bill said, “Are you okay, babes?”

“Bad flash just then, but it’s all right now.” She felt the touch of his hand, the sure presence of his love. What a love it was, his sharing of her pain, her sharing of the pain her pain gave him, their mutual knowledge that their mutual pain was their mutual karma and that millions of people experienced it as love. And it was love, a love that somehow still survived and transcended all.

“Love you,” she whispered as they stepped through an archway and into the next room. How many levels there were in those two words, how much pain, how much joy.

This room had a soothing, organic decor—all wood paneling and rich leather-covered furniture—and it was quite crowded. Every seat was taken, and perhaps a dozen people were standing around holding drinks or joints, everyone rapping with each other while a quiet, Muzaky instrumental medley of middle-period Beatles mumbled to itself in the background. Mike Taub sat between Teddy Jones and some graying dude in a charcoal suit who looked like a booking agent or a club owner. Over in a corner, Peter Fonda was talking to two chicks. People from various groups were scattered around the room, and a few nameless faces familiar from television. Obvious talent agents were running their hustles.

Susan felt herself relaxing; there was something soothing, strangely homey, about this scene. It was as phony as a smack dealer’s concern for his customers, but it was a
business
scene, show business, their business, and therefore emotionally neutral Safe.

“—gotta give us some more bread if we record an album, Jake, think of the publicity value—”

“—may be some advantages to a big outfit like GAC, but try and get your personal agent on the phone—”

“—don’t knock commercials, I’ve been living on residuals from that damned thing for six months—”

“—Ferraris are gassy to drive all right, but the thing has to be tuned so often most of my driving is to the mechanic and back—” Taub waved to them, and they both waved back falsely, but it was all right, it was beautifully ordinary.

Orrie Lewis wandered over, ripped out of his tree, hugged her then Bill.

“When are we gonna see a new Cloud album, Bill? The universe waits with bated breath.”

Susan could feel Bill wince inside, but he smiled easily and muttered, “When the muse comes knockin’ at my bedroom door.”

“Is that a line from a new song? If not, it should be.” Orrie giggled and melted back into the general blur.

“I feel good in here, Bill,” Susan said. “Better than I’ve felt since we came to this party.”

“Yeah, well that number Jango ran was a king-sized bummer. I
can
make you perform, but I
won’t
make you perform until your head is together, but you can squirm a little in the meantime.”

“But you know, that thing he said about ‘soon you’ll be where the music takes you,’ maybe—”

“You know where the music’s been taking you, babes,” Bill said. “Away from yourself. Away from me.”

“We could change our act, you could write a whole new album that doesn’t have anything to do with... with....”

“A little late for that.”

It used to be such a joy, Susan thought. To sing beautiful words that Bill wrote for me about me, to sing his love songs to me to the world, to feel the love filling the world, to feel them wanting the love, needing the love, demanding the love, slavering after the love, trying to suck it out of my flesh, feeling the pain, becoming the thing that keeps the pain away—

Charges of static electricity seemed to nibble at the periphery of Susan’s sensorium; the room seemed to vibrate, she began to feel lightheaded, and sounds flattened out.

And she was aware of the hideous old man standing a few feet away, looking at her. His hair was long, white, and stringy; it was secured with a beaded headband. Red velvet pants and a ghastly paisley dashiki hung grotesquely on his emaciated frame. His thin, sallow face was eroded into complex canyon systems of wrinkles. His nose was a beak, his mouth an ugly twisted scar, and his huge rheumy eyes were filled with a terrible dread, a loathsome pain. He was a monstrous caricature of a senile hippie, a mocking specter from some ghastly future. But he was also a human being in overwhelming pain.