Authors: Larry McMurtry
There was silence as the tape ran on.
“Now that I’ve described it I think I’ll just leave matters to you, Danny,” she said. “If you think I ought to do it give me a call right away. I have to let them know Monday.”
The next message was also from Jeanie.
“You know, you don’t have to help me with that one, Danny,” she said. “I’m sorry I bothered you—you’ve got your child to consider now—at least I hope you do. The only thing that really worries me is that it’s Nebraska—I’m not sure I can be that rural. My hope would be that the writer can think of a troubled bird that lives a little closer to the city. If not, I guess I better just say no, I like her obsession and all but I’m just too worried about Nebraska. All things considered I think I better pass on this one, Danny.”
There was a lengthy pause; I could almost hear Jeanie’s spirits sinking.
“It’s nice to get hired, though, you know,” she said. “They came up with the bucks, that means they want to hire me. In this business you can just get forgotten—they hire you for a while and then pretty soon they just forget you’re there and hire someone else. I’ve seen that happen. One of these days it’s gonna happen to me.”
She sighed; there was a final pause. “Maybe I could manage Nebraska,” she said, her tone brightening a little. “I could pretend it was just the park, only bigger. I think I’m gonna go over to the park right now and see if I get any vibes that feel like Nebraska. That’s it. That’s what I’m gonna do. Thanks for listening.”
I decided not to get the rest of my messages. I read a little more in my Peru book. It was still a few hours before dawn, though, and my headache was not really gone. It had subsided, but only as a retreating surf subsides. Any minute the surf might come crashing back.
To take my mind off this possibility I called the machine once more, and once more, as I had expected, got Jeanie.
“I took that picture about the woman in Nebraska,” she said in a tone of rich unhappiness. “I figure, at my age, if they still wanta hire me, I better let them—maybe Nebraska will get
changed, the writer kind of sounded surprised when I asked about it, but he didn’t entirely rule it out. So that’s what happened, Danny, the decision got made. Call me sometime and tell me what your daughter’s like.”
Jeanie Vertus was forty-one, which meant that each role she got offered was an invitation to walk along the knife blade that separates stars who are still bankable and sought after from aging actresses who will never be bankable or sought after for star roles again. Over the years I had watched a number of talented, spirited women walk that knife blade. The most brilliant among them, with the broadest skills, the best instinctive choice-making apparatus, the most photogeniety, and some enduring energy and sexual radiance, might make it to forty-six, even forty-eight or fifty before making a fatal slip—and with aging actresses, two flops in a row generally constitute a fatal slip.
Others slipped at once and were reduced to playing small roles in PG comedies, or larger but more embarrassing roles in cheap European films, where often they would have to show a flash of tit but would at least keep their billing a year or two longer before slipping forever from the list of those stars producers automatically think of when they’re casting their leads.
Jeanie, Nema, Marella were all dancing on that knife blade now, and Viveca Strindberg had already slipped fatally; it had been seven or eight years since she’d been in a film in which she got to keep her clothes on.
I hung up again, depressed, and spent most of the rest of the night trying to decide if Jeanie could keep herself upright on that thinnest of edges—a star career—by playing a Nebraskan version of Jenny Sondstrom, with sandhill cranes instead of buzzards.
I decided she couldn’t and resolved to call her the first thing in the morning and tell her to try to back out of the deal. In my view the quickest way to get severed from stardom was to start taking jobs just because someone was still willing to offer them
to you; for the most part those were roles that had already been rejected by the hot actresses of the day, and rejected for good reasons. Taking them on for no better reason than that they had been offered was no way to advance along the sword’s edge.
I decided to call my machine once more, though so far it had not been contributing to the sort of calm mood that helps one get over a migraine.
“I’ve been reading this book,” Nema said. “My masseuse gave it to me. It’s called
Oral Sex
. It describes a couple of things I don’t think I’ve ever done, but maybe I have done them, maybe I’m just confused by this writer’s terminology. I wish you’d call so I could discuss some of these terms with you. It’s kind of frustrating not to know whether you’ve done a particular sex act or not. You know me, always willing to give things a try, particularly new sex acts. It’s kind of exciting to think there might be some new ones, at my age—I could get some nice fantasies out of it, even if it didn’t turn out to be so great in practice, or even if I couldn’t get A.B. to do it. He’s pretty vanilla in his way of proceeding with sex, but he can be coaxed, and I could probably coax him.”
There was a pause—I heard her turn a page of her book on oragenitalism.
“Hum,” she said. “Irrumation. It doesn’t sound familiar but I may have done it with Joe. Joe certainly wasn’t vanilla to the extent that A.B. is. It’s making me horny just to read about it—I wish I were doing it right now.”
There was another pause. I assumed Nema’s imaginative temperature was rising, as it often did when her mind was alertly exploring the possibility of new sex acts, or old sex acts with new partners. But this time I was wrong; for once reality seemed to be winning the constant battle it fought with fantasy for the control of Nema’s spirit.
“There’s this young guy I’m gettin’ interested in,” she said. “He’s younger—I see him around the lot once in a while. He’s a driver, but not for me. Unbelievably cute, Danny, but not too good a brain, from what I can judge. He’d do this irrumation with me in a minute, or anything else, either. Every time I run
into him I have fantasies about him for two or three days. But I don’t know—suppose I grab him? It’s not going to be as good as the fantasies, no way. Either he’ll get scared and I’ll have to chase him or he’ll fall in love and I’ll have trouble gettin’ rid of him when things cool down.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I used to just grab these cute young guys and deal with the mess when the mess came along, but I guess I’m losing my nerve or something. More and more I don’t grab them. I remind myself that the fantasies would undoubtedly be better than the realities, and I stop with the fantasies.
“I don’t know,” she said again in a discouraged tone. “I guess I don’t respect my new approach. I’d really just like to grab that kid and fuck him and sort things out later. That would seem more brave—besides, I bet it’d be fun.”
She sighed. “But I don’t know if I will,” she said. “This one might stay a total fantasy. Do you think it’s because I’m older?
“If you’ve got that business with your daughter straightened out I wish you’d call,” she said. “There’s irrumation and a few other terms I want to discuss with you. Bye.”
The final two calls on the machine were both from Marella Miracola and were made from a car phone somewhere outside New York—she was there promoting a new film. Unfortunately my message machine didn’t handle car phone calls very well—it interpreted little cellular signals as hang-up signals, and it hung up, only allowing Marella about five seconds each time.
“Hello, it’s Marella, I’m driving around,” she said; then the beep cut her off.
The second call was no less brief, but its few seconds were packed with Latin indignation.
“It cut me off, I hate your machine!” Marella yelled. “I hate it, it’s giving me dread!” She got the word “dread” out just in front of the beep, after which no more was heard from her. It was too bad, but I’d told her a million times the machine was erratic with car phones.
After that I backed the tape up and played another snatch or two of Gladys’s argument with Godwin, to see if it had gotten serious or had merely remained rhetorical. Fortunately the latter
seemed to be the case; the two would probably not come to blows for at least a day or two, so all I had to remember was to call Jeanie and advise her to get out of the bird-woman movie, then call Nema and encourage her to fuck the cute young driver. Probably she would never get around to it, but the encouragement alone would be a tonic. It seemed to me that Nema was a little too young to allow her sense of adventurousness to fade into the light of common caution.
Outside, the sky was lightening, finally. I went out on my little balcony and sniffed the misty, slightly fetid Houston dawn—the smell awakened old memories, not merely of the several years I had spent in earlier life, smelling the city’s dawns; but memories even older, cellular memories, perhaps, of life in the primordial swamp, which Houston in some ways resembles.
Across town, toward the ship channel and the faint promise of sun, T.R. and my grandchildren were sleeping—in my mind’s eye their sleep was Edenic, shadowed with good dreams; soon they would be awakening to the first day of their new life with me.
At the thought that I would meet the three of them soon, I suddenly felt flooded with energy—a thing once common but now rare. I never supposed I had a first-rate mind or a first-rate talent, but I
had
, for some years, been in possession of first-rate energies; no one who lacks them will go as far as I went in episodic TV, where you need both the speed of the sprinter and the endurance of the marathoner if you’re to live and function through the forty-two weeks that comprise a season.
Once I had trusted my energies completely; they were as natural as sunlight and seemed sufficient to carry me through any task; but then, for no reason medical science could determine, they began to leave me, and their departure was as swift as a winter sunset.
Success, which had once energized me, began to enervate me instead. For months at a stretch I awoke lethargic, paralyzed by the knowledge that there was no longer any need to rise. There was no likelihood that I would be doing anything very interesting or very useful if I did rise, so often I just didn’t
bother. Gladys could usually be badgered into bringing me orange juice or hot chocolate; often I just slipped another
policier
flick into the VCR and watched Franco Nero or his equivalent chase sleazy Mediterranean dope dealers around Genoa, Naples, or Palermo.
Godwin and Gladys hated it when I stayed in bed all morning watching
policier
movies. They took it as a sign of moral collapse, a point I didn’t argue.
“The only difference between you and King Farouk is that he was fatter,” Godwin would announce, standing nervously in my bedroom door.
“Well, I may get just as fat before I’m through,” I said. I always replied cheerfully to accusations of moral collapse.
“Your whole problem is that you never had to do no regular work,” Gladys informed me. “It’s important to move around and get the blood circulating.”
“I believe it circulates whether one moves or not,” I said, with scientific dispassion.
“Pecking on a typewriter gets it moving in your fingers, I guess,” Gladys said, intent on the theme of moving blood, “but I wouldn’t call pecking on a typewriter regular work. You got five fireplaces in this house, why don’t you pop out of bed in the morning and chop a few pieces of wood? That might do the trick.”
“It might do the trick of me cutting my foot off. Is that what you want?” I asked her. I had never chopped wood in my life.
“It’d be better than wasting your whole life watching movies,” Gladys replied stubbornly. She didn’t easily give up her visions, and she returned to the theme of woodchopping many times in the next few months, inspired, no doubt, by President Reagan’s example; Gladys was deeply devoted to President Reagan, though cool to the First Lady.
“Them movies you watch ain’t even in English,” she said. “I wouldn’t see no point in watching a movie in one of them old languages.”
This morning, though, my energy seemed to have returned from its long absence. I felt like doing something, and, considering
the hour, walking seemed my best option. As the sun colored the thinning mists, I dressed and walked along South Main to Rice, among whose dreaming groves I had spent so many absorbed hours as a graduate student in my mid- and late twenties. Then, I wanted to learn all there was to know about literature, and I felt sure I could: I meant to read everything in English literature, from the first runic fragments to Iris Murdoch, before going on, like a grazing ruminant, to digest the literatures of the continent, the steppes, South America, Asia. I would read it all, and meanwhile I would write.
Standing once again amid the great trees of Rice, I felt the kind of bittersweet feelings that seemed to me entirely appropriate for a man of my age and station; I had traveled a long road, circling the decades and the continents not of literature but of emotion, to reach those groves once again; I had written a poor first novel (I burned every copy of it I could find), married and lost one woman, loved and lost many others, while keeping the affection, I hoped, of a few women of brilliance. I had produced one hundred and ninety-eight episodes of a sitcom, a life’s work squeezed into nine years, though it had taken nearly forty years to get to it.
Though no life could have been much less like Rilke’s than mine, I thought of him as I walked through the Moorish colonnades of the old Administration Building. He had taken all his life to get ready to write those
Elegies
, had written them in two great bursts, and, not too long after, died.
Well aware that a sitcom producer should not be comparing himself to a great European poet, nonetheless I was conscious of certain parallels in our careers—Rilke dealt with women largely through letters, but no doubt he would have used message machines had they been available in his day; that was one parallel. Women who were rarely actually with him nonetheless sustained him; that was two. And I had stewed and fidgeted forty years before spewing out “Al and Sal,” after which, if I could have managed it, I would have serenely died. For at least three of its nine years “Al and Sal” was really good, too—the sitcom
equivalent of the
Duino Elegies
, the only thing I ever did or would ever do that got close to being art.