The Hollywood Trilogy (82 page)

“Where are you going?” he begged her.

“Back to the house. You'd better come and say goodnight.” He could not believe it.

Impossible.

But it happened. And zap! he was driving down the Coast Highway, alone, trying to accept that she had only been playing with him.

The Tennysons had nailed him, all right. The old one-two.

Wrecked his project and kicked him in the balls for good measure.

What kind of people
were
they?

His testicles ached throbbingly, as if in reply.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ALEXANDER SAT quietly listening to Dr. Fieldstone talk about how he had bruised his nipples painfully while body-surfing at Malibu and now wore a tank top to the beach. The good doctor, a man in his middle thirties and a general practitioner in the heart of Beverly Hills, made a fortune by calling on his practice in their homes or offices and by making himself available at any time of the day or night. He seemed very full of himself to Alexander, handsome, tanned, muscular, casually dropping famous names into his conversation without ever actually giving away any professional secrets. And he was good at his job, which he likened to that of a mechanic administering high-level pit stop repairs to his clientele so that they could get back out there on the track without a moment lost.

“I understand the Hollywood game,” he said modestly, “because I'm the same myself. I work hard, play hard, sleep hard, and I give as good as I get.”

Alexander sat quietly. If there was one thing he knew how to do, it was sit still and listen, his own emotions tucked away.

“To continue with the mechanical model,” Dr. Fieldstone said abruptly, “think of what you put into yourself as fuel, and your innards as engine parts. Think of refined sugar products and alcohol as fast fuels.” On he went, explaining the problems of aging and blood sugar in homely metaphors while Alexander half-listened and half-daydreamed about Teresa. It was because he was having trouble suppressing his rages, blind, sky-blackening rages, that he had summoned Dr. Fieldstone. The other night they had been making love out by the pool and in a moment of great passion he had grabbed her tiny neck in his hands and felt a delicious rush of pleasure at the thought of clamping down, crushing her throat, driving the life out of her squirming body just at the moment of orgasm.

She must have felt the power of his emotion.

“Do it!” she croaked, and her body writhed like a snake.

It was only a lifelong discipline over his emotions that kept him from sweet murder. And to murder Teresa di Veccio, even if he got away with it, would be to deprive himself of the only woman, apparently, who could
inspire him to lovemaking. She was at once the sentence and the reprieve, and it was driving him crazy.

Now Dr. Fieldstone was telling him to quit drinking sugared soft drinks and to stop eating foods that contained refined sugar.

“Eat lots of protein, some fats, and get your carbohydrates from natural foods like orange juice. Go back to exercising every day, but don't try to break any records. And avoid caffeine.”

“No medicine?” Alexander asked. What he had hoped for was some pill he could take, as Charlie Devereaux took his Inderal every day and seemed to be in great shape. “These emotional outbursts . .”

Dr. Fieldstone laughed lightly. “No medicine, unless you want to go around half-zizzed all day long. Just take care of your machine a little better. You're not hypoglycemic yet, my God, you should hear some of the things I hear . . .”

Alexander had not, of course, told him about the near-murder of Teresa.

“One director friend of mine, patient, really, lives on codeine while he's making a picture, gets 'em from Canada, calls 'em Royal Canadians, eats six or eight a day, has a couple of drinks, five or six cups of coffee and heads out for the set feeling pretty good. But then the picture's over and the pressure's off, and he starts to panic about possible addiction and comes to me for an easy way down the ladder. Well, there
ain't no easy way down the ladder,
as you must know, so he goes through a couple weeks of hell, drinking orange juice and dosing himself with gram after gram of Vitamin C. Then he's okay and can go into the cutting room, maintaining on beer. But one of these days, he's not going to make it off the codeine, and he's gonna come to me and ask my advice. Do you know what I'm gonna tell him?”

“No,” said Alexander. He wanted very badly to tell Dr. Fieldstone to leave, please. But didn't. There must be a point to this story.

“I'm gonna tell him to move to Canada,” Dr. Fieldstone said with a grin. He stood up and shook Alexander's hand. “I guess the moral of this tale is, this is no time to slacken up on your good habits. The more pressure you put on yourself the less you should rely on drugs or candy or booze, see what I mean?”

And then he was gone, and with a depressed sensation Alexander faced his afternoon's telephone calls. He had been neglecting business so badly he hadn't spent an afternoon in the screening room for a week, and he knew he was slipping behind, losing currency.

The trouble was, he couldn't just drop Teresa. He had gotten through the crisis of
that afternoon
strictly on automatic pilot, to use one of Dr. Fieldstone's metaphors, but for days he had been shaken, not by what he had seen, he was not that naive, and not even by the implications—that Teresa made a habit of this sort of thing—he could even handle that. He still loved her. Perhaps he loved her more, and she had been so sweet and so apologetic, blaming herself for it all and confessing to a hopeless nymphomania and swearing never to embarrass Alexander again—no, he could handle
that.

It was something inside
himself
that really ate away at him, filled him with unpredictable rages and depressions and made him, for almost the first time in his life, wonder what kind of human being he was. The only words he could find for it were
moral outrage.
The three of them lying there wet and stinking. Not even embarrassed, just surprised. If he had had a sword he would have put them to death on the spot.

Who the hell did he think he was?

Slowly, filled with dread, he pulled himself up out of his personal life (such as it was) and back to business.

“Willi, bring me my calls and get Richard Heidelberg if you can.”

He stared at the list of callers, which had grown by fifteen calls just since the arrival of Dr. Fieldstone, not counting, of course, the ones Willi hadn't bothered to log. These people wanted to butter him up, get him to solve their problems, help them with their power games. Only a couple, from men in the same position as himself, could be said to be friendly calls. Ted Ashley. Sidney Beckerman.

He called Sidney and had a good schmooze, laughing at Sidney's description of a cocktail party, and then Rick was on line 2.

“Gotta go, Sidney,” he said abruptly and hung up without saying goodbye. “Hello, young man, I've been waiting to hear from you.”

“Been busy,” Rick's voice said.

“You don't sound happy,” Alexander said.

“No Dael Tennyson,” came Rick's reply.

Alexander had known that for a couple of days, but said nothing.

“Do you want to come over here and have a talk?” he said. Rick agreed to come by in a few minutes, and Alexander buzzed Willi. “Get me a nice Coca-Cola, huh?”

“Okay,” she said with only a hint of reproval in her voice. “Donald Marrow on five.”

“I'm in a meeting,” Alexander said, and felt a guilty schoolboy pang. Willi came in and poured the cola into a glass of ice, and Alexander listened to the ice cracking and watched the bubbles subside with great impatience. Then, as an ironic gesture aimed at himself, raised the glass, “Here's to you, Doctor Fieldstone!” and drained his glass. Ah! Delicious!

It was too soon to talk to Marrow, anyway. He sat waiting for Rick, not knowing how he would respond to the young man's troubles. One part of him, of course, wanted to crush, humiliate and destroy him. Another part, perhaps the stronger, felt a fatherlike feeling for Rick; no, more brotherlike; no, he just plain
liked
him. And not for his phony charm, either. Rick really was, deep down inside, charming and nice, a good boy. With the morals of a cat. That's all.

My God, if you judged people by their behavior in this business, who would there be left to work with?

For some reason this made him think of the President of the United States, and he laughed, the first really good belly laugh he had had in a long time. On the tail end of it, in came Richard Heidelberg.

“Oh, excuse me,” Alexander chuckled, and blew his nose. “I wasn't laughing at you.”

“It's all right,” Rick said, and sat.

“Willi, bring us a couple of Cokes, okay?”

“I'll have to send out for them,” came her voice over the intercom. Had she been listening when Dr. Fieldstone had been talking to him? Maybe it was better not to know. “That's fine,” he said, and turned once again to the young man trying to relax across the desk from him.

“So no Dael Tennyson,” he said. “Travolta is still a possibility. And there are others.”

Rick looked him right in the eye and said, “I've come to the conclusion that this project is fucked. The idea's weak and the script is boring. Let's not waste any more time on it.”

Alexander's stomach sweetened and his mood rose sharply. This young man had guts!

ALEXANDER LISTENED quietly as Rick outlined his proposal to remake
The Lady in the Lake
and offer the part of Philip Marlowe to Peter Wellman. The thing was to be done period, World War II, and no expense would be spared developing the fun of period. Rick stressed the importance of the new tragic romance element and pointed out the popularity of
Witness for the Prosecution,
with its series of lurching volte-faces. That was to be the structure of
Lady,
too, with the additional shattering effect of having Marlowe confronted at once by the woman he has allowed himself to fall in love with because she is dead (with all that
that
implied) and the white knight ethic that makes him turn her in.

Alexander nodded gravely from time to time, but when Rick was finished with his pitch, he only said, “Let me sleep on it. Who owns the rights?”

“Endless Unicorn Company,” Rick said. “We closed the deal with M-G-M yesterday.”

“You can't shop this around town, you know,” Alexander said. “You owe us a picture.”

“I'm hip,” Rick said.

“Well, I'll sleep on it.”

Rick stood up. Alexander did not feel like standing up. He stared at the young man. The proposal was a candy store, of course, anybody who liked making movies would have a fine time with it. But whether it would make a profit Alexander could not foresee, and the little tickle of intuition he depended on in such matters tickled him not.

“I don't have to sleep on it,” he said abruptly.
Let's see how tough this kid really is.
“I pass.”

“You mean, no?”

Rick was actually goggling at him.

“I mean no,” said Alexander. Now he was sure of himself. “And you can take it anywhere you want. I release you from your commitment.”

Rick continued to goggle, and then he drew himself together. He looked tough now, like a street kid about to get into a knife fight. “You mean you're kicking me off the lot?”

Alexander laughed easily. “Oh, hell no, Rick. I'm just turning down your proposal, that's all. You aren't very much used to the word
no,
are you?”

Alexander stood up, just as Willi came in with the two Coca-Colas on a tray, with two glasses of ice.

“Make us a couple of drinks, will you, Willi?” he said. “What'll it be, Rick? Bourbon over ice?”

“I don't have to take this shit,” Rick said, and started out the door, but Alexander's hand snaked out and grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around. Alexander was smiling his deadliest smile, and his fingers gripped Rick's shoulder hard enough to really hurt. Rick did not flinch. The two men glared at each other, Alexander showing his teeth and Rick with his mouth a tight white line.

Willi made the drinks unobtrusively and got the hell out of there, closing the door behind her.

Alexander said, “Now I slap your face, and you say
‘Thanks, I needed that.'”
He let go of the shoulder, picked up his drink and tossed about half of it down his throat. It burned sweetly. He walked over to the couch and plopped himself down. “Come on, kid, relax. It's not the end of the world. You just think it is.”

Rick was making a visible effort to get control of himself.

Alexander finished his drink and watched him. Finally Rick sat and sipped his drink like a man.

“That's better,” Alexander said. “We don't want to lose you, Rick, you're a good filmmaker and you're going to be a better one. Hell, someday you might have my job, you've got the makings of an executive, or whatever the hell it is I'm supposed to be. Did you know I was a tank commander in World War Two? Nineteen years old, breaking my ass for Georgie Patton?”