Timebends (66 page)

The motel owner woke me one night to tell me I was wanted on
the phone. It was after eleven, well past Marilyn's bedtime while filming. The truck bumped along the sandy path to the phone booth, lit inside only by the greenish glow of the moon. Every star seemed to crowd the sky across the great Western vault. The air seeping in under the door of the booth was cold on my bare ankles.

Her voice, always light and breathy, was barely audible. “I can't do it, I can't work this way. Oh, Papa, I can't do it…” Jokingly at first, then as a habit, she had been calling me this, but there was no joking here; she was desperate and near weeping. She sounded strangely private, almost as though she were talking to herself, not even bothering with pronouns. “Says I did the scene with vulgarity. What is it, a registered nurse? Can't stand women, none of them can, they're afraid of women, the whole gang of them. Vulgar! Supposed to rip off my tail, this thing I have sticking out of my costume in the back, but angrily so it makes a mockery of me so I can
react,
instead of like just lifting it away I didn't even know he'd done it. So I said rip it off, be angry with me so I can make it real when I react, but they're afraid to act nasty because the audience might not approve, you see what I mean? I'm no trained actor, I can't pretend I'm doing something if I'm not. All I know is real! I can't do it if it's not real! And calls me vulgar because I said that! Hates me! Hates me!

“Supposed to run out into the rodeo and my shoe came off and I could see him start to call cut, but then he saw the crowd laughing and so happy so he let me run back and get my shoe and go on with the scene, but he was ready to cut if I hadn't of gone on! Because I knew the minute it happened it would be good, and it was, but he doesn't know!”

But all this was overlay, a swollen sea of grief heaved under it, and now she began to sound high and inspired. “I don't want this, I want to live quietly, I hate it, I don't want it anymore, I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me. I can't fight for myself anymore . . .”

I asked if her partner, Milton Greene, couldn't help, and her voice went deeper into secrecy; he was there in the room with some other people. But he was afraid to stand up to Logan for her.

As such, her complaints about Logan—which smacked a bit of frantic actor talk—mattered less to me than a new terror I was hearing, an abandoned voice crying out to a deaf sky, and the dead miles between us choked me with frustration; whatever the truth about Logan, her sincerity was unquestionable, for she was dancing on the edge and the drop down was forever. This was the first time
she had sounded so unguardedly terrified, and I felt the rush of her trust in me. She had concealed her dependency before, and I saw suddenly that I was all she had. I recalled her telling me months ago that she was putting off signing a contract that Greene and his lawyer had been pressing on her to set up her new company; it gave Greene fifty-one-percent control against her forty-nine. In return for his share he would bring in new recording and film projects that would not require her participation, but so far the new company's assets consisted only of her and her salary. She had not wanted to dwell on this, had tried to turn from the implicit betrayal, and even now as she reported her disappointment in Greene's failure to protect her from Logan, she seemed to shy from any open anger with him. For myself, I wished she could trust him; I had had only the minimum necessary interest even in my own business affairs, leaving most of the decisions to lawyers and accountants to keep myself free to work. I hardly knew Greene; it was faith itself I instinctively did not want to see her lose.

I kept trying to reassure her, but she seemed to be sinking where I could not reach, her voice growing fainter. I was losing her, she was slipping away out there, and with partner and friends so close by. “Oh, Papa, I can't make it, I can't make it!” Her suicide leaped up before me, an act I had never connected with her before. I tried to think of someone I knew in Hollywood who could go and see her, but there was no one, and suddenly I realized I was out of breath, a dizziness screwing into my head, my knees unlocking, and I felt myself sliding to the floor of the booth, the receiver slipping out of my hands. I came to in what was probably a few seconds, her voice still whispering out of the receiver over my head. After a moment I got up and talked her down to earth, and it was over; she would try not to let it get to her tomorrow, just do the job and get on with it. Lights were still revolving behind my eyes. We would marry and start a new and real life once this picture was done. “I don't want this anymore, Papa, I can't fight them alone, I want to live with you in the country and be a good wife, and if somebody wants me for a wonderful picture …” Yes and yes and yes and it was over, and the healing silence of the desert swept back and covered it all.

I left the highway behind me and walked toward the two cottages and the low moon. I had never fainted before. A weight had fallen and my lungs felt scored, as if I had been weeping for a long time. I felt healed, as though I had crossed over a division within me and onto a plane of peace where the parts of myself had joined. I loved her as though I had loved her all my life; her pain was mine.
My blood seemed to have spoken. The low lunar mountains outside my window, the overarching silence of this terrain of waste and immanence, the gloomy lake and its unchanging prehistoric fish swimming longingly toward India forever—I felt my happiness like a live glow in all this dead, unmoving space. I tried to recall a play about people who suffer but do not fail and saw suddenly the inexpressible happiness that tragedy reveals. Suddenly the hidden order, life's grin of continuity; as I had felt it tonight, as though her being had been maturing in me since my own birth. The anguish of this past year, the guilty parting with children and the wrenching up of roots, seemed now the necessary price for what might truly be waiting just ahead, a creative life with undivided soul. For the first time in months or maybe years, a fierce condensing power of mind moved in me, the signal to write, but only something as simple and as true as tonight. To be one thing, sexuality and mind, appetite and justice, one. All our theatre—my own of course included, but that of the masters too—seemed so paltry now beside the immensity of human possibilities. It had all been written by unhappy men—Ibsen, a paranoid with a lust for young women he could not dare acknowledge; Chekhov, fatally ill and all but abandoned by an unfaithful wife; Strindberg, in terror of castration. Where was the broad marble brow of the Greek vision, the sunlit wholeness of a healthy and generous confrontation with catastrophe? She, in her fogged, blundering search, was an unaware exemplar. She had accepted the role of outcast years ago, even flaunted it, first as a casualty of puritanical rejection but then with victorious disorder; from her refusal to wear bras to her laughing acknowledgment of the calendar photos, her bracing candor—so un-American especially now in the new empire preparing to lead the war-crippled West—was health, the strength of one who has abandoned the illusions of a properly ordered life for herself. With all her concealed pain, she was becoming enviable, the astonishing signal of liberation and its joys. Out of the muck, the flower. And soon, an amazing life . . .

Nevada was easy to define, hard to grasp. On the left of the highway to Reno a black tar-paper box about twenty feet square stood on stilts with a roughly made ladder descending from the middle of the floor and disappearing into a hole in the ground. A Cadillac, dusty but new, was parked nearby. The owner was a small man dressed in boots and jeans and a sweaty broad-brimmed hat, cheerful
and friendly. When he needed a little cash he would descend the ladder from his living room and go down the hole into his silver mine. It was simple but hard to absorb, somehow. Especially when I learned that he kept a grand piano in his stilt house and played only chopsticks on it. None of this thought particularly noteworthy among Nevadans.

After a week or so out on the desert with two rodeo men whom I had met in Reno, hunters of wild mustangs in their off times, we came on an abandoned shack in the middle of nowhere, a shelter put up by some long-gone rancher and used now for a lie-down by anybody who happened by. The lone window had lost its panes, the door hung open on one hinge. Several hundred magazines lay strewn about. They were of two types,
Playboy
and its clones, and Western stories. In the corners the piles were a foot thick, indicating that hundreds of cowboys must have come by with their magazines over many years, to rest and read and dream. My two friends couldn't understand why I thought it strange that men who had lived on horseback for years looked to the movies for their models and could imagine no finer fate than to be picked up for a film role. The movie cowboy was the real one, they the imitations. The final triumph of art, at least this kind of art, was to make a man feel less reality in himself than in an image.

Four years later, one of these men showed up on location when we were shooting
The Misfits,
and after a good reminiscing talk, he watched from beside the camera as Clark Gable happened to be telling Marilyn some details of his character's past, which I had drawn from this cowboy's life. When the scene was finished he turned to me shaking his head, excited and pleased: “Sounds real as hell.” But he clearly showed no sign of recognizing his own biography as the source, or even the possibility of such a metamorphosis. Nevada thus became a mirror to me, but one in which nothing was reflected but a vast sky.

Out on the desert, far from any vehicle track, there were sometimes signs of life underground: in the midst of sage and sand a pair of shorts hung on a stick to dry in the sun, or a T-shirt. My friends never ventured close, although they claimed to know some of these residents of holes in the ground. They were men wanted by the law, for murder more often than not. The state police knew they were out there, and nobody inquired why they were never picked up, but payoffs were inevitably suspected.

In Reno on our weekly shopping and laundry expeditions we saw the town differently than tourists do looking for fun; after a few weeks the tawdriness of the gambling enterprise grew depressing. Next to the supermarket checkout counter, women carrying babies would drop their change into waiting slot machines, but from the indifferent blankness of their faces they had no anticipation of winning. It was as joyless a routine gesture as discarding a Kleenex out a window, tired and blind and thoughtless. Just a lot of women in jeans and worn sneakers giving away money.

Toward dusk one night in a tiny town of some eight or ten houses on a single dogleg street, the two cowboys and I bought stringy steaks from a little grocery store at the edge of the desert. The grocer simply reached up to a side of beef hanging over his cash register and started cutting. We also bought a long spongy white bread and some salt, and went outside and built a fire of dried sagebrush and roasted the meat on sticks. The juices, spiked with sage, drenched the bread. Each of us must have eaten several pounds of beef, and it was one of the best meals I have ever had. The moon rose while we were digesting beside the fire, and the two men admired its appearance as though it were a woman, with those faint smiles that show a man is imagining something.

There was an occasional week when they did the rounds, servicing two or three women waiting in various beds in the area, but they almost always referred to them with respect. There was always a nice trickle of would-be divorcees flowing in from all the states, and the variety of their personalities fascinated my friends. Being divorced themselves, they sympathized with the difficulties of staying married. Under all that sky and amid those eternal mountains they understood weather and animals and each other, but the women were forever the mystery. The older of the two, Will Bingham, a rodeo roper in his early forties, had left a wife and a six-year-old daughter whom he occasionally stopped by to visit in a small town in the north of the state. He led a lone, self-sufficient life that he seemed to think inevitable if not ideal, but the guilt of having left his child was always with him. The sensitivity of some of these brawny Western men was somehow reassuring, something I did not recall reading about, except for hints of it in Frank Norris's forgotten masterpiece,
McTeague.
I ran out of a few staples one day, and rather than make the long trip to Reno, I decided to try to locate the Indian store a few miles inside the reservation. I found it hidden in a valley several miles from the lake, a general store in front of a cluster of tilting cabins surrounded by rusting debris, the busted bikes, washing machines, and automobile shards of the other civilization. Beside the dirt road stood a lone gas pump. Inside the barren store a middle-aged Indian woman was just laying out a display of homemade moccasins in the food case next to the cheese, butter, and milk. I asked if I could buy some milk and bread and butter, and she was setting out my purchases with her dark peasant's hands when a heavy-bellied middle-aged Indian with a worn Stetson tilted back on his head came out of the back room and asked if I was being taken care of. As soon as I answered, his eyebrows went up. “What part of Brooklyn you from?” he asked with a happy grin. He had lived for twenty years on Atlantic Avenue, worked on the George Washington and other New York bridges as a high-altitude painter, saved his money, and come back to buy this store. But he felt strangely out of place now and was restless. “These people are very discouraged. They gave up trying to improve themselves,” he confided disappointedly once we were outside and I was getting back into the car.

I asked him his name as we were saying goodbye.

“Moe.”

“That's not an Indian name, is it?”

“No, but nobody can pronounce my Indian name, so everybody in Brooklyn start calling me Moe, so now this is Moe's Store. I'm going to put up a sign.”

I saw through the rearview mirror as I slowly drove away that the woman had come out of the store and he was pointing down the dirt track at me, another man from Brooklyn. He looked animated but probably went back inside regretting having left the excitements of Atlantic Avenue. There was a kind of universal homelessness in Nevada that was somehow beautiful, maybe because it tended to impart an air of inquisitive longing to the people, rather than the smugness usually found in quiet places. I wished I could write about it.