Authors: Clive Barker
He turned and looked back toward the house. It was still more impressive from this side than it had been from the front, its four floors rising like the tiers of a wedding cake, its walls lush with ivy in places, and in others CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 138
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naked. Beyond it, further up the hill, Todd could just see a glimpse of one of the guest-houses that Maxine had mentioned. Altogether, it really was an impressive parcel of land, with or without the buildings. Had Jerry shown it to him as part of the grand tour Todd might well have been tempted to invest. The fact that Jerry hadn’t done so probably meant that it had not belonged to anyone of significance, though that seemed odd.
This wasn’t just any Hollywood show-place: it was the crème de la crème, a glorious confection of a residence designed to show off all the wealth, power and taste of a great star.
By the time he’d made his way back inside, Marco had turned up from Greenblatt’s with a car-load of supplies. He welcomed his boss with his usual crooked smile and a generous glass of bourbon.
“So what do you think of the Old Dark House?”
“You know . . . in a weird way I like it here.”
“Really?” said Maxine. “It’s nothing like your taste.” She was plainly still mildly irritated by their earlier exchange, though for Todd it was past history, soothed away by his wanderings in the wilderness.
“I never really felt comfortable in Bel Air,” he said. “That house has always been more like a hotel to me than a home.”
“I wouldn’t say this place was exactly
cozy
,” Maxine remarked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Todd said. He sipped on his bourbon, smiling into his glass. “Dempsey would have liked it,” he said.
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On Thursday, the 18th of March, Maxine got a call that she knew was coming. The caller was a woman named Tammy Lauper, who ran the International Todd Pickett Appreciation Society, which despite its high-falutin title had its headquarters, Maxine knew, in the Laupers’ house in Sacramento. Tammy was calling to ask a very simple question, one that she said she was “passing on” to Maxine from millions of Todd’s fans worldwide:
Where was Todd?
Maxine had dealt with Tammy on many occasions in the past, though if she possibly could she ducked the calls and let Sawyer deal with them.
The trouble was that Tammy Lauper was an obsessive, and though in the eight years she’d been running the Appreciation Society—(she’d once said to Maxine she hated to hear it called a
fan club
. “I’m not a hysterical teenager,” she’d said. This was true: Tammy Lauper was married, child-less, and, when last spotted, an overweight woman in her middle thirties)—though in that time she’d done a great deal to support Todd’s movies, and could on occasion be a useful disseminator of deliberately erroneous information, she was not somebody Maxine had much time for. The woman annoyed her, with her perpetual questions about trivia, and her unspoken assumption that somehow Todd belonged to her.
When she
was
obliged to speak to the Lauper woman—because there was some delicate matter in the air, and she needed to carefully modulate the flow of news—she always aimed to keep the exchanges brief. As courteous as possible—Tammy could be prickly if she didn’t feel as though she was being given her due—but brief.
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Today, however, Tammy wasn’t about to be quickly satisfied; she was like a terrier with a rat. Every time Maxine thought she’d satisfied the woman’s curiosity, back she’d come with another inquiry.
“Something’s wrong,” she kept saying. “Todd’s not been seen by
anyone
. Usually when he goes away, members of the Society spot him, and they report to me. But I haven’t heard
one word
. Something’s wrong.
Because I
always
hear.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“So what’s going on? You’ve got to tell me.”
“Why should anything be going on?” Maxine said, doing her best to maintain her equilibrium. “Todd’s tired and he needs a break, so he went away for a few weeks.”
“Out of state?”
“Yes. Out of state.”
“Out of the country?”
“I’m afraid he asked me not to say.”
“Because we’ve got members all over the world.”
“I realize that, but—”
“When he went on his honeymoon to Morocco,” Tammy went on, “I had six reports of sightings.” (This was a reference to the event which had caused Maxine more publicity problems than any other in Todd’s life: his short-lived marriage to the exquisitely emaciated model Avril Fox, which had been strewn with potentially image-besmirching scenes: adulteries, a ménage-à-trois involving Avril’s sister, Lucy, and a spot of domestic violence.)
“Sometimes,” Maxine said, a trace of condescension creeping into her voice now, “Todd likes to be out in public. Sometimes he doesn’t.”
“And right now?”
“He doesn’t.”
“But
why
would he mind being seen?” Tammy went on. “If there’s nothing wrong with him . . .”
Maxine hesitated, wondering how best to calm the suspicions she was clearly arousing. She couldn’t just drum up an excuse and jump off the CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 141
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phone; that would make the Lauper woman even more curious than she already was. She had to maneuver the conversation away from this dangerous area as carefully as possible.
“I’ll tell you why,” she said, dropping her voice a little, as though she were about to share something of real significance with Tammy. “He’s got a secret project in the works.”
“Oh?” Tammy said. She didn’t sound persuaded. “This isn’t
Warrior
, is it? I read that script, and—”
“No, it isn’t
Warrior
. It’s a very personal piece, which Todd is writing himself.”
“He’s writing it? Todd is writing something? He said in an interview with
People
last July he hated writing. It was too much like hard work.”
“Well, I lied a little,” Maxine said. “He’s not doing the actual writing.
He’s working with somebody on the project. A very well-respected screenwriter, actually. But he’s pouring out his heart, so it’ll be a very personal project.” There was a silence. Maxine waited. Had Tammy taken the bait or not?
“So this is autobiographical, this movie?”
“I didn’t say it was a movie,” Maxine said, taking some petty pleasure in catching Tammy out. “It may end up on the screen, but right now he’s just working hard to get his feelings down. He and the writer, that is.”
“Who is the writer?”
“I can’t say.”
“You know it would make all this very much more
believable
if you gave me some more details,” Tammy said.
That was it. Maxine lost her composure. How dare this little bitch suggest her lies weren’t believable?
“You know I’ve really said more than I should already, Tammy,” she snapped. “And I’ve got six calls waiting. So if you’ll excuse me—”
“Wait—what am I going to tell the members?”
“What I just told you.”
“You
swear
Todd’s fine?”
“Good God, how many times?
Yes
. Todd is perfectly fine. In fact, he’s CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 142
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never been better.” She drew a deep breath, and attempted to calm herself a little before she ended up saying something she would regret. “Look, Tammy, I really wish I could tell you more. But this is a matter of Todd’s privacy, as I’m sure you understand. He needs a little time away from the pressure of being a celebrity, so he can work on this project, and when he’s finished I’m sure you’ll be one of the first to hear about it. Now really, I’ve got to go.”
“One more question,” Tammy said.
“Yes.”
“What’s it called?”
“What’s what called?” Maxine replied, playing for time.
“The script. Or the book. Or whatever it’s going to be. What’s it called?”
Oh shit, Maxine thought. Now she was in deep. Well, why the hell not give the damn woman a title? She’d lied herself into a hole as it was, one more shovelful wouldn’t hurt. She pictured Todd in an image now indelibly inscribed in her mind’s eye, sitting waiting for Burrows to start cutting away the bandages. And the title came:
“
The Blind Leading the Blind
,” she said.
“I don’t like that,” Tammy said, already proprietorial.
“Neither do I,” Maxine replied, thinking not just of the title, but of this whole, sprawling, exhausting mess. “Trust me, Tammy. Neither do I.”
Tammy Jayne Lauper lived on Elverta Road in Rio Linda, Sacramento, in a one-story ranch-style house fifteen minutes from the Sacramento International Airport, where her husband had worked for eight years as a baggage handler. They had no kids, nor any hope of having any, this side of a miracle of Biblical proportions. Arnie had a zero sperm count.
Tammy didn’t mind much. Just because God had given her breasts the size of watermelons didn’t mean she was born for motherhood. And of course the absence of children left plenty of space in the house for all the files relating to what Arnie sneeringly called “Tammy’s little fan club.”
“It isn’t a fan club,” Tammy had pointed out countless times, “it’s an CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 143
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Appreciation Society
.” Arnie said Tammy wasn’t no appreciator, she was a fan, plain and simple, and he knew every time they’d used to sleep together and she closed her eyes it was that dickhead Pickett she’d been imagining on top of her fat ass, and that was the whole unvarnished truth of it. When Arnie got to talking like that, Tammy would just tune him out. He’d stop eventually, when he knew she wasn’t listening; go back to sitting in front of the TV with a beer.
The main center of the Todd Pickett Appreciation Society’s operations was the front bedroom. The room she and Arnie slept in was considerably smaller, but as she’d pointed out to him, it didn’t really matter since all they did was sleep in it. They still had a double bed, though God knows why; he never touched her; and a couple of years back she’d stopped wanting him to. The third bedroom (and all the closets) were used for storage: files of clippings, issues of the fanzine (quarterly for the first year, then monthly, now quarterly again), photographs and biographies to be distributed to new members, copies of press kits from every film Todd had ever made, in twenty-six languages. Downstairs, in what would have been the family room, she kept the Collection. This was made up of items related to Todd and his career, all of them relatively rare, some one-of-a-kind items. Hanging in zipped-up plastic laundry bags were articles of clothing made for the cast and crew of his pictures. On the mantelpiece, still sealed in their boxes, were six Todd Pickett dolls that had been the hot thing to own during his teen-idol period, the boxes signed by Todd.
Preserved in a vacuum pack were several unused latex makeup pieces for his Oscar-nominated performance as the maimed firefighter in
The
Burning Year
. She didn’t ever look at those. She’d been warned that they deteriorated when they were exposed to sunlight.
The collection also contained a comprehensive library of scripts for his movies, with all their addenda, including one marked up in Todd’s handwriting, along with a complete set of novelizations of the movies, leather-bound with gilt lettering. There were also credit-listings on all the crews who worked with him, costume sketches and call-sheets, and of course, posters of every size and nationality. If the Smithsonian ever wanted to CC[001-347] 9/10/01 2:26 PM Page 144
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open a wing dedicated to the life and career of Todd Pickett, Tammy had once boasted, they need look no further than her front room. Once, she’d attempted to enumerate the items she owned. It was something in the region of seventeen thousand three hundred, not including those pieces of which she had more than one copy.
It was to this shrine that Tammy had come after her frustrating exchange with Maxine Frizelle. She closed and locked the door (though Arnie would not be back from work and his after-hours carousing for several hours), and sat down to think. After a few minutes, turning over the conversation she’d just had, she went to the very back of the room, and took from its place among the treasure-trove a box of photographs. These were her special pride and joy: pictures of Todd (fourteen of them in all) which she’d managed to buy from somebody who’d known the still photographer on Todd’s fourth picture,
Life Lessons
. This was Todd’s coming-of-age picture: the one in which he’d changed from being a Boy to being a Man. Of course, his smile would always be a boy’s smile, that was part of its magic, but after
Life Lessons
he went on to play tougher roles: a home-coming soldier, a firefighter, a man wrongfully accused of his own wife’s murder. Here then, caught in the moment before his cinematic adult-hood, was the boy-man of Tammy’s dreams. She had even purchased the negatives from which the series of pictures had been printed, and along with them the assurance from the person she’d got them from that they had been “lost” in the production offices before they were ever seen by the director, the producer or by Todd himself. In short, she had the only copies.
Their rarity wasn’t the reason she valued them so highly, however.
What made them her special treasure—the quality that made her return to them over and over, when Arnie was out at work, and she knew she had time for reverie—was the fact that the photographer had caught his subject unawares. Well, shirtless and unawares. Todd was sleek and pale, his body not heavy at all, not all muscle and veins popping out, just a nice, ordinary body; the body of the boy next door if the boy next door happened to be perfect. She had never seen a body she thought so beautiful.
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Then there was his face. Oh that face! She’d seen literally thousands of photographs of Todd in the last eleven years—and to her adoring eyes he was handsome in every single one of them—but in these particular pictures he was something more than handsome. There was a certain lost look in his eyes that allowed her to indulge the belief that if she’d been there at that moment—if he’d seen her and looked at her with the same forsaken feeling in his heart as was in his eyes—everything in her life would have been different; and maybe, just maybe, everything in his.