The bathroom door opened suddenly and Lysa Dean came out. She was not smaller than I had expected because I was prepared for a woman smaller than she had looked to me on the VistaVision Screen, in living color, in close-up, each slanty gray-green eye as large as a Volkswagen sedan. She came across the bedroom elevation and down the three steps toward me. She made the absolute most of those three steps. She wore flat sandals with gold straps. She wore faun-colored pants in a fine weave. They fitted as tightly as pants, or paint, or a tattoo, could fit. She wore a strange furry blouse, with a big scooped neck and three-quarter sleeves. It looked as if Skeeter’s Quimby and a couple of hundred of his relatives had contributed their pale belly-fur to this creation. Around her slender throat was knotted a narrow loose kerchief of green silk precisely matching the single jewel she wore, an emerald as big as a sugar cube on the little finger of her left hand.
She came swiftly toward me, hand outstretched, her smile full of the warm delight of a woman welcoming the returning lover. “So good of you to come!” she said in her light, breathy, personal voice. As I took her hand she turned slightly so as to face the bright and shadowed daylight. It is the most cruel light a woman can accept. Her hand was small and dry and warm, a trusting little animal as intimate as her voice.
They have the distinctive occupational tricks. A lot of expressive business with mouth and eyebrows, animation with gestures.
I could remember, quite vividly, a long conversation with a stunt man named Fedder. Arthritis had forced him out of the business.
“Don’t let anybody tell you they’re not worth the effort,” he had said. “A lot of them aren’t. You got to look close to see which type. They all have to be damned good-looking and well-built. So suppose you get a chance at one who’s a pretty good little actress. Let it go. The thing there, they sublimate. That’s a word I learned once. They take all that steam and they shove it into their work and there isn’t enough left over for bed. Now suppose you got one
thinks
she’s a hell of an actress, but she’s a ham. You skip her too. She’ll take all that ham to bed with you and be so damn busy watching herself her heart won’t be in it. The ones to wait for, and go a long way out of your way to get, they’re the ones that plain started off with such damn good glands they don’t have to do any acting. The camera picks up how good they’d be. Man, they can’t rest from tracking it down and trying it out. The next one is always going to be the biggest and best yet. They’ve got what you call a real strong interest.”
I had the feeling Fedder would approve of this one. I had not
expected her to have such a genuine flavor of youthfulness. By every way I could measure it, she had to be about thirty-three. Yet she was a young girl, and not in any forced way. She had the slimness, the clear-eyed look of enormous vitality, the fine-grained and flawless skin, the heavy swing of burnished hair. Her impact, so carefully measured it seemed unaffected, was of a kind of innocence aware. A gamin sparkle, hinting at a delicious capacity for naughtiness.
But I had known enough of them to know that this was but one role. The enticing woman who is not in the industry will have five or six faces to wear. One like this would have dozens, and this was the one she had momentarily selected for me.
She had the showbiz trick of close-range conversation. Normal people keep their faces a yard apart. Eight inches is the focal distance on the Coast. Eight inches keeps you aware of the girl-breath heat against your chin, and the up-thrust breast-bud an inch and a half from your chest.
“Any friend of Walt’s …” I said inanely.
“I treasure that man.” She backed away a quarter step to give me a cock of the head and an urchin appraisal. “He said you were big, but he didn’t say how huge, Travis. Trav? He called you Trav, I think. I’m Lee to my friends. Dear Trav, he told me you were big and rough-looking and sour and sometimes dangerous, but he did not tell me you are so terribly attractive.”
“A veritable doll,” I said.
“It’s so wonderful of you to agree to help me.”
“I haven’t.”
She was quite motionless for a thoughtful second, her smile in place. The capped teeth gleamed, between moistness. Green of iris speckled amber near the pupil. Delicate geometry of the
hairs of red-gold brows. Fantasy length of the darker lashes. Faintest of fuzz on her upper lip. It was an unusual and grotesquely familiar face, the features slightly sharp, extremely sensuous, unmistakable. With her head slightly bowed, looking up at me through her lashes, the gold-red weight of hair at the right side of her face had swung slightly forward. Suddenly I knew what she reminded me of. A vixen. A quick red fox. I had seen one in heat long ago on an Adirondack morning in spring, pacing along well in front of the dog fox with a very alert and springy movement, tail curled high, turning to see if he still followed, tongue lolling from between her doggy grin.
She turned abruptly away, walking toward the elevated part of the room where the chairs and fireplace were. “But you will help me,” she said in a small voice.
I followed her. She sat on a small couch and pulled her legs up. She took a cigarette from a table box. I held the light for her. She huffed smoke from the delicate oval nostrils of the slightly pointed nose, and as I sat in a big chair half facing the couch she smiled across at me. “You are refreshing, Trav McGee.”
“How am I managing that, Lee?”
Her shrug and laugh were self-deprecatory. “You don’t say what I always hear. I loved you in this. I adored you in that. I see every picture you make. You look better off the screen than on, actually. You know what I mean.”
“I’ll go through all that when I ask for the autograph.”
“You know, you are sour, aren’t you? Or are you afraid of seeming to be impressed. Or don’t you give a damn? It’s a little unsettling, dear.”
“Your Miss Holtzer unsettled me the same way.”
“Dana is a gem. When she reacts, she lets you know it.”
I shrugged. “I loved you in this. I adored you in that. You look just fine in person.”
Again she was motionless. It was an odd feeling to be so close to her. It made me aware of the uncounted millions of men all over the world who had stared at her image, coveted her, lusted after her, mentally stripped her and plundered those silky little loins. I wondered how many secret, solitary orgasms had been engineered with her in mind. The unmeasurable scope and intensity of all that vast and anonymous wanting gave her a curious physical impact. True, she had spent years being starved, pummelled, flexed, rubbed, plucked, burnished, perfumed and trained into the absolute peak of lovely physical condition. Without a chromium ego and a savage will she could not have endured it so long. But one could also believe that, as sex symbol, she also carried sex to an ultimate otherwise unknown—providing ecstasies unimaginable, greater heats, deeper spasms, longer agonies than mortal woman could know. And this, of course, was the nonsense a man must guard himself against. Her physical confidence, approaching arrogance, would lead the unwary to believe it.
“Excuse me, please,” she said politely, and hurried the length of the room, toward the dressing room. A girlish graceful haste, forever eighteen. She came back with a large manila envelope and put it on the table beside the cigarette box.
“That big chest down there is a bar. If you want to fix yourself anything, I would like some of the sherry. Just half a glass, please.”
As I walked to the bar, she raised her voice and said, “It is so terribly difficult to know where to start, dear. You don’t seem to make it any easier for me.”
“Just tell me the problem. You told Walt, didn’t you?”
“Just some of it. But I would guess you want to … know all of it.”
“If I’m to help you.”
As I carried the drinks toward her, she said, “Celebrity! If all the ones who’d like to be one only could know what it means. You become such a target, actually. Slimy schemes to fasten themselves onto you for the free ride. You cannot make a single careless move.”
This was the new pose. She sipped her wine. I sat down. The suffering celebrity. Public responsibility.
She gave me a sad smile. “It isn’t worth it, you know. But you have to get into it as far as I am to realize it isn’t worth it. And then it’s too late. You can’t get out. They still follow Garbo. How long since she made a picture? A thousand years, at least. Oh, there have been some satisfactions, of course. But the things I really treasure—contentment, friendships, peace of mind, marriage—none of those things could survive all the rest of it. There is a terrible loneliness, Trav. Like being on top of a mountain, alone.”
“They pay you for it.”
“And they pay very well indeed. I’ve had good advice. I have quite a lot of money. Of course, it is invested in a lot of things, but if I should take it all out, it would be quite a large sum. That’s why I did try to … buy my way out of trouble.”
“Blackmail?”
She put her glass aside and got up quickly, pacing about in an agitated way. “Can you see how valuable it is to me … how
essential
to have a little time when I can be myself? Like here with you now. We can talk like two people. I don’t have to pose with you. I have to forget sometimes that I am Lysa Dean, and just be plain Lee Schontz from Dayton, Ohio, the fireman’s
daughter. Sixteen-ten Madison Street.” She whirled and stopped with a leg-warmth against my knee. “You can understand that basic human need, can’t you?”
“You can’t live up to the public image at all times.”
“
Thank
you for understanding!”
This was another role. I guessed it was a speech out of an old movie, edited to fit the present need.
“And when I do … forget, that’s when I’m most vulnerable.”
“Sure.”
“I
so
want you to try to understand me. I’m not really very complex, Trav. I am the same as everyone. I have times when I feel desperate and self-destructive. I have times when I do foolish things. There are times when I do not give a damn what happens to me.”
“Sure.”
She reached and drew her fingertips across my cheek and whirled away and sat on the couch again. “I know you’re not a prude. I can sense that. This has to be as if I’m talking to my doctor or my lawyer. But I do feel so terribly shy about this.”
“What happened?”
She sighed and made a rueful face. “A man happened to me. Of course. He was a very exciting chap. Exciting to me, at least. It happened a year ago last July, over eighteen months ago. We’d just finished shooting
Jack and the Game
. I was literally exhausted, but I went off with Carl. Carl Abelle. He had a ski school. We’d never had a chance to really be alone. He found a place for us. An absolutely fantastic little house. Do you know California? It was just below Point Sur, and clinging to the rock by its fingernails. Friends of his named Chipmann own it. They were in Switzerland. They have another house there. It was just the two of us …”
Her voice trailed off into uncertainty.
“Yes?”
“Trav, I am under the most terrible disciplines most of the time. I do work very hard.”
“So when you let go, you let go?”
“More than most, I guess. Just a little time of not watching every ounce and every quarter inch, every blemish and drink and calorie and bruise … God damn it, to be a woman for a change. Fry eggs, let my hair go, get stoned, have a ball. I’m naturally a very passionate woman. But I keep it all under control. Until a time like that a year and a half ago. With Carl. That’s what I try to do. Get away like that, with a certain kind of man. Then everything that’s been saved up …”
“Birds and bees. I didn’t think you went into a convent when you had time off, Miss Dean. I don’t follow this routine.”
“It’s just to explain how things happened. It was such a very
private
place. Carl would drive off to buy food and liquor. There were steps cut into the stone, down to a little beach way way down that you couldn’t use at high tide. There was a terrace on the ocean side, twenty feet square, about. It was a little offset so you could get morning sun too. A low broad wall around it. And a great stack of weatherproofed sun mattresses and pillows in all kinds of colors. We’d arranged it so we could have three weeks alone. Maybe that was too long. I guess it was. We were marvelously right for each other, in a purely physical way. We knew that before we went there, of course. Except on a ski slope or in bed, Carl isn’t very stimulating. It was very intense for about a week, I guess. Day and night all mixed up. Eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re sleepy. When the edge was gone, we both started drinking more. And we spent more and more time on the terrace in the sun. I knew I was getting too
brown, but I was too lazy and relaxed to give a damn. I was drinking a lot of vodka. Hot sun and vodka kept me in a sort of permanent daze. We’d make love there in the sun, all slow and sweaty and, I don’t know, remote somehow. I had a tube pregnancy when I was just a kid and damned near died and I don’t have to worry about taking care of anything. The thing is, we felt so
private
. You’d see a boat way out, or an airplane far away, or hear a truck sometimes on the highway. The phone was cut off. I had a little radio. You have to understand that nothing seemed important, absolutely nothing at all. Do you understand that, Trav?”
“I’ve been there.”
“Anyway, it must have been just about at the end of two weeks, we needed things and Carl drove to town to get them. He left in the early afternoon sometime. And he was gone so long I began to get damned annoyed at him. I belted the vodka pretty good, so by the time he did come back, I was getting kind of sloppy and confused. He came skidding back into the driveway with two cars following him, and the whole drunken bunch came marching into the house bellowing some goddam German skiing song. Five fellows and three girls. He’d known one of the girls up at the Valley. He ran into them in town, and had drinks with them, and decided we should have a house party. They damned near fell over when they saw who his girl was. They’d brought tons of food and beer and liquor and cigarettes from town. I was sore at him, but I thought that as soon as they had recognized me the damage was done, if any, and the hell with it. I guess I was getting bored with Carl and I lost any sense of caution. They were swingers, every one. The girls were darling. The fellows were fun. I guess there’s no good way to
avoid telling you all, dear. It was a very scrambled evening, all things considered, and by late afternoon the next day the last holdout, the girl they called Whippy, she got tight enough to let Sonny peel her out of her swim suit and get her into the fun and games on the terrace. It just seemed to be a crazy time for everybody, and nobody seemed to care much, and you saw everything and did everything through a kind of sleepy crazy haze so that in my memory it’s all jumbled up. It was the first and last time I was ever in a situation like that. It’s sort of standard practice on the Riviera, with those car-light signals and horn signals to get recruits and all. It didn’t offend me. In some ways it was very exciting. But it was just too dangerous for anybody in my position. And I hadn’t
wanted
it to happen. Carl brought them back to the house and it just went on from there, and lasted, oh, four days I guess. When I got back to Brentwood it took me
weeks
to get back in shape. It all seemed like a dream. Then one day toward the end of August I got a big envelope in the mail. There were twelve photographs in it. Eight by ten glossies. There is a great deal of difference between remembering something and seeing it … like that. Seeing yourself … God! I flipped my lunch.”