Fun With Problems

High Wire

I FIRST MET LUCY AT a movie premiere at Grauman's about midway between the death of Elvis Presley and the rise of Bill Clinton. Attending was a gesture of support for the director, who happened to be a friend of mine. The film's distributors had made a halfhearted lurch toward an old-style Grauman's opening, breaking out a hastily dyed red carpet. A couple of searchlights swept the murky night sky over downtown Hollywood. By then these occasions were exhausted flickers of the past, so there were none of the much-parodied rituals some of us watched in black-and-white newsreels at the corner Bijou. No more flashbulbs or narrators with society lockjaw telling us what the talent was wearing. Neither simpering interviewers nor doomed starlets walking the walk. The camera flashes and the demented fans crowding the velvet rope were all memories. Hollywood Boulevard was even rattier then than it is now. The only people around the marquee that night were frightenedlooking Japanese tourists and bright-eyed street freaks with slack smiles.

The picture was no good. It was the forced sequel to a 1960s hit with a plot cribbed from a John Ford movie of the fifties. It featured two very old actors, revered figures from the time of legend, and the point of it was the old dears' opportunity to recycle their best beloved shtick. The withered couple and their more agile doubles shuffled through outdoor adventures and a heartwarming geriatric romance stapled to some bits of fossil western. Attempts had been made to make it all contemporary with winks and nods and brain-dead ironizing.

The audience consisted mainly of people who were there on assignment, out of politeness, or from fear. There were also members of the moviegoing public, admitted by coupons available through the homes-of-celebrities tours and at the cashier counters of cheap restaurants. Raven-haired Lucy, with her throaty voice and dark-eyed Armenian fire, was in the picture briefly, as an Apache maid. I later learned she was not in the theater to take pleasure in the picture or even in her own performance. She had come in the service of romance, her own, involving an alcoholic, Heathcliffish British actor, the movie's villain.

Heathcliff had made Lucy crazy that night by escorting his handsome and chic wife, suddenly reunited with her husband and relocated from London. It seemed that the sight of them had stricken Lucy physically; when I saw her sitting alone a few seats down from me she was cringing tearfully in the darks and lights from the screen.

My first impulse was to leave her alone in her distress. I was certainly not impelled to a hypocritical display of concern. But it was one of those bells; I was unattached, still single, due to leave town in a week. Maybe I'd had a drink or smoked a joint before the appalling show. Anyway, I moved one seat toward her.

"Nice scenery," I said.

She looked at me in a flash of the Big Sky Country's exterior daylight, removing her stylish glasses to dab at her tears and sitting upright in her seat.

"Oh, thanks."

Her tone was predictably one of annoyed sarcasm, but I chose not to interpret it as the blowing off she intended. Sometimes you can parse a hasty word in the semidark and I decided not to be discouraged, at least not so quickly. I realized then that she had some connection with the picture on the screen. An actress, a production girl?

In those days, I was confident to the point of arrogance. I assumed I was growing more confident with time. How could I know that the more you knew the more troubled and cautious you became, that introspection cut your speed and endurance? We watched for a while and she shifted in her seat and touched her hair. I interpreted these as favorable portents and moved over to a place one seat away from her. At that distance I recognized her among the film's cast. Scarcely a minute later onscreen, Brion Pritchard, her real-life deceiver, callously gunned down her character, the Apache soubrette. I watched her witness the tearjerky frames of her own death scene. She appeared unmoved, stoical and grim.

"Good job," I said.

Lucy fidgeted, turned to me and spoke in a stage whisper that must have been audible three rows away.

"She sucked!" Lucy declared, distancing herself from the performance and turning such scorn on the hapless young indigen that I winced.

"So let's go," I suggested.

Lucy was reluctant to go, afraid of being spotted by our mutual friend the director, who had also produced the film. She expected to look to him for employment before long. However, she seemed to find being hit on a consolation. It was the first glimpse I had of her exhausting impulsiveness.

We sneaked out in a crouch like two stealthy movie Indians, under cover of a darkness dimly lighted by a day-for-night sequence. The two stars onscreen told each other their sad backstories by a campfire. Their characters had the leisure to chat because Apaches never attacked at night.

Across the street, appropriately, a country-and-western hat band from Kyoto was crooning rural melodies. The two of us jaywalked across Hollywood and into the lobby of the faded hotel where the band was performing. A man in a stained tuxedo — an unwelcoming figure — directed us to a table against one wall. I ordered a Pacifico; Lucy had Pellegrino and a Valium.

"It's Canada," Lucy told me.

"What is?"

"The scenery. In the thing over there."

"The thing? You don't remember what the picture's called?"

"I like repressed it," she said, and gritted her teeth. "Sure I know what it's called. It had different titles postproduction."

"Such as?"

"Unbound. Unleashed. Uncooked."

We introduced ourselves and claimed we had heard of each other. For a while we watched the hat act sing and swing. The lads looked formidable under their tilted sombreros. Their lead singer sang lyrics phonetically, rendering interpretations of "I Can't Stop Loving You," "Walking the Floor Over You" and other favorites. Their audience was scant and boozy. There were a few other bold escapees from the premiere across the street.

"You were a great Apache."

She only shook her head. Plainly, even qualified professional regard would take us nowhere. For some reason I persisted.

"Come on, I was moved. You dying. Featured role."

"Dying is easy," she said. "Ever hear that one?"

I had. It was an old actor's joke about the supposed last words of Boris Thomashevsky, an immortal of the Yiddish stage. Surrounded by weeping admirers seeking to comfort him, he gave them a farewell message. "Dying is easy," said the old man. "Comedy is hard."

"They shot different endings," Lucy explained. "One sad, one happy."

"Really?" It was hard to believe they would perpetrate a sad ending with the two beloveds, which would only have made a fatuous movie even worse. When riding a turkey, I believe, cleave to the saddle horn of tradition. But sad endings were a new thing in those years — the era of the worst movies ever made. Industry supremos who hadn't been on the street unaccompanied for forty years were still trying to locate the next generation of dimwits. So they tried sad endings and dirty words and nude body doubles. There was no more production code; movies were supposed to get serious and adult. Sad endings were as close as most of them could reach.

"So I hear. I wasn't there. I didn't read the endings. Like I had other things on my mind. I didn't see it, did I? We're over here."

"Okay."

"I bet they went with the happy, though." She sneaked a quick look around and bit a half of her second ten-milligram Valium. I told her the happy seemed likely.

"Oh," she said, and she smiled for the first time in our acquaintance. "Tom Loving. You're a writer." She either guessed or had somehow heard of me. Her smile was appropriately sympathetic.

She told me they had reshot a lot during the filming, different versions of different scenes.

"I die in all of them," she said.

Eventually we drove our separate cars to an anchored trailer she was living in on the beach in Malibu. As I remember, she was tooling around in a big Jaguar XJ6. We sat under her wind-tattered awning on the trailer's oceanfront deck and a west wind peeled wisps of cold briny fog off the water. It was refreshing after the sickly perfume of the theater and the haze of booze and smoke in the lounge.

"I'm not happy," Lucy told me. "I'm sure you could tell, right?"

"I saw you were crying. I thought it was over the movie."

"If we'd stayed," she said, "you would have cried too."

"Was it that bad?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes! It was deeply bad. And on top of it that bastard Pritchard whom I've always loved." She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. "You know?"

"I do," I said. "We've all been there."

She looked away and laughed bitterly, as though her lofty grief must be beyond the limits of my imagination. I was annoyed, since I had hoped to divert her from pining. On the other hand, it was entertaining to watch her doing unrequited love with restraint and a touch of self-scorning irony.

"This man is deliberately trying to make me crazy," she said. "And to kill himself."

"It's a type," I explained.

"Oh yeah?" She gave me another pitying glance. "You think so?"

She had crushed my helpful routine. I put it aside. "Was that the wife?" I asked. "The blonde?"

"Yes," Lucy said. "Think she's attractive?"

"Well," I said, "on a scale of yes or no…"

"All right, all right," she said. "All right."

"Met her?"

"I have met her," said Lucy. "When I did, I thought, Hey, she's not a bad kid. But she's a fucking bitch, it turns out."

I kept my advice to myself, and little by little Lucy detached herself from her regrets. Later I came to know how suddenly her moods could change. It was of course an affliction, in her case untreatable. She kept her ghosts close at hand and always on call. They were present as a glimmer of surprise behind her eyes that never disappeared.

After a while I got her to walk with me; we shed our shoes and went across the moonlit beach. Brion seemed to be off her mind.

The sand at the water's edge had a steep dropoff to the surf. We clambered down to the wet sand where the waves broke. The sea's withdrawing force was nearly enough to pull us off our feet. Lucy lost her balance and I had to put an arm around her waist to preserve her.

"It could take you away," Lucy said.

We climbed the four feet or so to the looser sand, which left us out of breath. As we walked back, Lucy told a story from her earliest days in town. She had fallen in with some fast-lane hipsters. Many of them came from industry families. One night she and a friend found themselves on the beach with the daughter of a world-famous entertainment figure. The daughter passed out, so when Lucy and her friend saw somebody coming they ran off into the nearby shadows. Two men arrived, equally world-famous. They encountered the daughter sprawled on the sand and tried to rouse her. The adolescent responded with dazed, rude mutterings. One man told the other whose daughter she was. Lucy always remembered his Viennese accent.

"Ja," the man said to his friend. "Kid's a valking disaster."

Lucy and her friend giggled in the dark. Who could walk?

"I don't drink anymore," Lucy told me.

In spite of her solemn reflections, when we got back to the trailer she produced some Quaaludes and cocaine for me. I did a sopor and a couple of lines on her beautiful goatskin table. We drank champagne with it, which I feared would be a mistake. We were ready to get it on, both of us, but I wondered briefly if she might not suffer a morning-after-the-fact change of heart. She was a woman on the rebound; I was a stranger and afraid there might be recriminations. That was not Lucy, but I didn't know it then. She seemed so mercurial. I think we watched a little of Carson that night and found it uproariously funny in the wrong places. It was true that she smoked incessantly and smelled of tobacco. Otherwise she was a Levantine angel, one of the celestial damsels awarded to the devout and to me. In the sack she told me about her early life in Fresno.

"Know what people called Armenians?" she asked.

"What, baby?" We had gone to bed to Otis Redding, "Dock of the Bay," and there beside me Lucy addressed her après cigarette with such intensity and style that, after three years clean, I wanted one too. "Tell what they called the poor Armenians."

"They called us the Fresno Indians. Not so much people in Fresno. But in other towns. Modesto."

"How appropriate in your case."

She daintily set her smoke down, turned around and poked me in the ribs, hard, forcing me back into focus. She was wild-eyed. "Don't fucking say 'poor Armenians'! You're disrespecting my parents."

She was not really angry, although she had me fooled for a moment. She ran her fingers down my bones like a harpist and we slept the sleep of the whacked until drizzly dawn. Getting up, it struck me that I was due in New York in less than a week and what fun Lucy was. She would be on location in Mendocino until I left. This saddened our morning. We swore to keep in touch, the contemporary West Coast vow of enduring passion.

The gig in New York was the rewrite of a script that had been worked by two different writers unaware of each other's efforts. The dawning era of serious adult movies (a term that did not then altogether carry the meaning it has today) had inspired them to attempts at revolutionizing the film idiom. They both seemed to think that some ideal director would be guided by their novel scene settings and subtle dialogue. The thing had to be done in New York because the indispensable star lived in Bucks County and hated the coast. Naturally the synthesis was a turgid rat's nest and the job shameful and distressing. It was a project only God could have saved; I failed. I didn't like failing but I got paid, and thanks to Him the thing never got made. If it had, you can be sure I would have eaten the rap for it all by myself.

Then a doctoring job on a picture in production in England came my way. The project was an Englishing of a French movie for which the producers had actually paid money, and the translation of it by a British writer with a good command of French was not at all bad. But the setting had been transferred to Queens, and the producers thought his draft both too faithful to the original and too un-American. This was one to grab, though, a worthwhile credit. I went over to London, got hired and started looking for an apartment. Meanwhile the producers put me up in a crummy room at Brown's. The weather was sleety so I read my way through Olivia Manning's trilogies, Balkan and Levant. At this time Britain had little daytime television, lest weak-minded people play hooky from their dark satanic mills. For the same reason, nighttime television went off around eleven, to the national anthem.

One night I turned on the tube to see that ITV was running a soap Lucy had done two years before. The moment I recognized her I felt a rush, a fond longing. I wasn't inclined to explore the feeling. Without prejudice — I think without prejudice — I was struck by how good she was in it. She looked altogether youthful and lovely, and she had a substance in the role that was worlds away from the poor Pocahontas routine my pal John had thrust on her. Days later I watched another episode. She played a villainous character — slim sexy brunettes were usually villainesses then — who did a lot of lying. She managed to render deceit without sideward glances or eye rolling. Her character had heart and mystery. Also intelligence. Vanished were the trace elements of Valley Girl adolescence that I had become rather fond of. But I preferred Lucy the pro because in those days I loved watching real artists deliver.

Now I wonder whether it wasn't about then — that early in the game — that I started doubting myself, distrusting the quality of the silence in which I worked. Anyway, in Lucy's performance on that soap I thought I recognized the effort of one who lived for doing the voices, the way good writers did. Equipped with a sheath of fictional identity, she turned incandescent.

In the morning, I phoned her across eight time zones and tried to tell her what I had seen her do. She tried to tell me how she'd done it. Neither of us in that sudden conversation quite succeeded.

So I asked her: "How's life?"

She said: "Oh, man, don't ask me. I don't know, you know? Sometimes bearable. At others fucked."

"The pains of love or what?"

"I miss you," she said all at once, and I told her, from the heart, that I missed her too. I hadn't been asking her about us, but I can tell you she put me in the moment.

The next day I got a call from John, the perpetrator of Unbound Unleashed Uncooked. During my conversation with Lucy I had mentioned that I was house hunting. Now John told me that none other than Heathcliff, Brion Pritchard, had a place in St. John's Wood I could borrow for a moderate fee. I was so enthused, and tired of hearing landlords either hang up or purr with greed at the sound of an American voice, that I went for it at once. The studio that had green-lighted us paid. Distracted, I failed to focus on the distaste-fulness of this arrangement. Anyway, prowling and prying about the place when I should have been writing, I discovered many amusing and scandalous things about Mr. and Mrs. Heathcliff that sort of endeared them to me.

Then a strange and wonderful thing happened. One evening at the interval of a play at the Royal Court I saw a girl — she was so lovely and gamine that I could not think of that creature as anything but a girl — who was speaking American English to a female friend she had come with. I noticed that she was wearing Capezios. Catching her alone for a moment, I made my move. My predations at that time often had a theatrical background.

"You're a dancer," I told her.

She was in fact a dancer. I asked her if she cared for dinner or coffee or a drink after the play, but she didn't want to leave her friend alone. Today I would have given her my phone number, but not then, so I asked for hers and she gave it to me. On our first date we went to an Italian place in Hampstead. Jennifer had spent two years with the Frankfurt Ballet, and when we met she was in England pondering options. European cities were losing their state art subsidies, and there was no shortage of young dancers from Britain and the States. I took her home, not pressing it. Our second meeting was on Highgate Hill, and as we walked to Ken Wood we told each other the story of our lives. This was the wonder-of-me stage of our courtship and it was genuinely sweet.

It turned out that Jennifer, notwithstanding her adorable long-toothed smile and freckled nose, had been around the block, a runaway child and an exotic dancer — a teenage stripper — in New Orleans. Her nice parents in Oak Lawn had reclaimed her and sent her back to ballet school, first in Dallas, finally in New York. As a student she had gotten into cocaine and danced a Nutcracker in Princeton, where the falling-snow effects, she said, made her sneeze. We were so easy with each other, at the same time so intoxicated. It was lovely.

In London, although there was plenty of blow about, she abstained, and in that hard-drinking city she stayed sober. She put up with my boozing, but sweetly let me know she did not want to see the other. I thought often about moving her into the place in St. John's Wood. Since the Pritchards showed no sign of returning, I had stayed in it after the script was done and kept it on my own for months afterward, working on originals. For some reason we never got to the point of moving in together that year. Then I got a call — like all your Hollywood Calling calls, it came in the middle of the night — asking me if I would come out and talk about another deathless number. I decided to go, and when I told Jennifer, she cried.

"I thought we were long-term."

It just about broke my heart. "We are long-term," I hastened to say. I wondered if she would ask to come with me. I probably would have taken her. At the same time, I wanted to see Lucy.

Back in L.A., it was a dry, sunny winter inland with a mellow marine layer at the beach each morning. The place I liked that I could have was a condo in Laguna. Laguna was prettier then, but for some reason I had not known about the traffic and had not realized what was happening to Orange County. The apartment overlooked the sea and had sunsets.

I had batted out three original scripts in London. Mysteriously, the first two drew from my then agent — Mike? Marty? — more apparent sympathy than admiration. Out in the movie world, two of the three were promptly skunked. I was still used to being the boy wonder, and a midlife bout of rejection was unappealing. I didn't much like rejection. Maybe I had tried too hard, attempting to scale the new peaks of serious and adult, naively imagining for myself an autonomy that neither I nor anyone in the industry possessed. The third one, anyway, was optioned, went into turnaround and years later actually got made. But my deathless number expired.

Frustrated and depressed, I postponed calling Lucy. During my third week back I finally invited her down for another walk on the beach.

Climbing out of her dusty Jag, she looked nothing but fine. She wore turquoise and a deerskin jacket, my Fresno Indian. With her smooth tan, her skin was the color of coffee ice cream and her eyes were bright. Ever since watching her perform in the soap I had begun to think of her as beautiful.

As we set out down the beach, beside the Pacific again, she put on a baseball cap that said "Hussong's Cantina," promoting the joint in Ensenada. It was a sunny day even at the shore, and you might have called the sea sparkling. A pod of dolphins patrolled outside the point break, gliding on air, making everything in life look easy. Lucy told me she had tested for a part in our friend John's next movie, a horror picture. She was still worried about whether he had spotted the two of us walking out of Grauman's. The horror flick sounded like another bomb at best. This time Lucy had read the shooting script and knew what there was to know of the plot.

"She's a best friend. Supposed to be cute and funny. She dies."

I said that in my opinion she, Lucy, was ready for comedy.

"Tom, everyone pretty much dies horribly except the leads. It's a horror flick."

We had a nice day and night.

A week later I went up to Silver Lake, where Lucy had moved after selling her trailer in Malibu. Her bungalow had some plants out front with an orangy spotlight playing on them, and in its beam I saw that the glass panels on her front door were smashed and the shards scattered across her doorway. Among them were pieces of what looked like a dun-colored Mexican pot. This was all alarming, since her door would now admit all that lived, crawled and trawled in greater L.A. Moreover, there was blood. When she let me in I asked her about it but got no answer. She brought us drinks and I lit a joint I had brought and she began to cry. Suddenly she gave me a sly smile that in the half darkness of the patio reminded me of the weeping Indian maid I had rescued on the next seat at Grauman's.

"I'm in difficulty," she said.

I said I could see that. It turned out to be all about bloody Heathcliff, Brion Pritchard, still on the scene and newly cast in the horror movie. Third-rate art was staggering toward real life again: Brion was the man who got to stab her repeatedly in the forthcoming vehicle.

"How can they do that?" I asked her. "Another of John's movies and Pritchard gets to kill you again. Isn't that like stupid?"

"He's relentless," she said. "Tommy, don't ask! What do I know?"

I suppose it was I who should have known. Brion was in serious decline, succumbing to occupational ailments in a tradition that went back to the time of nickelodeons. He drank. A man of robust appetites, he also smoked and snorted and stuffed and swallowed. On top of it all, he had started lifting weights and pioneering steroids. He boozed all day and through the night, drove drunk, punched some of the wrong people. Along the Rialto, all this was being noted and remarked upon. He was a violent working-class guy, one of A. E. Houseman's beautiful doomed ploughboys, who but for talent and fortune would have drunk himself into Penrhyndeudraeth churchyard long before. Predictably, he had identified Lucy as the font of his troubles.

Shortly after dawn on the morning before my visit, Brion had come banging on Lucy's door, haranguing her in elegant English and low Welsh. Impatient to enter and mess with her, he had taken her ornamental pot and shoved in the door, cutting himself in the process, badly enough to sober him slightly and slow him down. This bought time for Lucy to call 911. She told me that when the cops came Brion gave them the old Royal Shakespeare, which by then in Hollywoodland impressed no on e. They all but begged her to press charges, although he had succeeded in hitting her only once, hard. Naturally she denied it heroically — I could well picture her playing that one — and sent them away. At least she hadn't raced to his side at the hospital.

That evening it was plain we were not going to have much of a party. I asked Lucy to come down to Laguna with me. She dawdled and I hung around until she turned me out. I was angry; moreover, I was feeling too much like what you might call a confidant. In the end I made her swear to get the door fixed or replaced, and I said I'd do it if she wouldn't. I told her to call the cops and me if the loutish Welshman accosted her again. I have to admit that if it came to action, I wanted the cops on my side.

Driving back that night I was unhappy. I had expected to stay with her. I should mention that in this period there occurred the last brief gas panic — odd- and even-numbered days and so on. In my opinion the fuel shortages of those years played their part in the vagaries of romance. People often went to bed with each other because their gas tanks were low.

I picked up work at that point with HBO, which had then started showing its own productions. The project involved several interviews around the country in the subjects' hometowns. It was a Vietnam War story, echoing the anger of the recent past. This took me out of town for the next three weeks. In a hotel in Minneapolis I picked up a USA Today with a back-page story announcing that Brion Pritchard was dead. It was shocking, of course, but in fact with the advent of AIDS a sense of mortality increasingly pervaded. We could not know it, but death was coming big-time. In that innocent age no one had imagined that anything more serious would happen to Brion than his dropping a barbell on his foot. I felt nothing at first, no relief, no regret. He was no friend of mine. On the way back to L.A., though, I became drunk and depressed, as if a fellow circus performer had fallen from a high wire. All of us worked without a net.

I had some doubts about calling Lucy too soon, mainly because I no longer fancied the role of consoler. Eventually I realized that if I wanted to see her again, I would have to endure it. When I called she sounded more confused than stricken. At first I couldn't be sure I had the right person on the line. My thought was: She doesn't know how she feels. This is a role thrust on her, and her feelings are down in some dark inaccessible region much overlaid. With what? Childish hungers, history, drama school? Capped by unacknowledged work and guilty ambition. A little undeserved notoriety of the tabloid sort. By then I thought I knew a few things about actors. I had been one myself years before.

When I saw Lucy next she gave a display of what I now recognized as false cheer. In this dangerous state she could appear downright joyous. When I expressed sympathy over Brion she gave me an utterly blank look. Being the pro she was, Lucy was almost always aware of how she looked, but the expression she showed me was unpremeditated, unintentionally conveying to me that Pritchard's death was literally none of my business, that neither I nor anyone else shared enough common ground with her and the late Heath-cliff, ensemble, for even polite condolences. But somehow, a couple of weeks later we found ourselves on the road to Ensenada. Ensenada and Tijuana could still be raggedy fun in those days. We managed to borrow a warped convertible from an actor pal and took off down the coast road. I hope we told him we were crossing the border.

The drive was an idyll, precisely defined, I was unsurprised to learn, as a happy episode, typically an idealized or unsustainable one. Down south that April afternoon there were still a few blossoming orange groves to mix memory and desire on the ocean breeze. Over the emerald cliffs people were hang-gliding, boys and alpha girls swooping like buzzards on the updrafts. In the sea below surfers were bobbing, pawing ahead of the rollers to catch the curl. And on the right, a gorgeous gilded — no, golden — dome displayed a sign that read, as I recall, SELF-REALIZATION GOLDEN WORLD FELLOWSHIP. It was the place the surfer kids called Yogi Beach, and there we overcame Lucy's peculiar grief and spent the happiest half day of our lives.

In Tijuana, which was as far as we got, we put the convertible in Caesar's protected parking and ate the good steak and the famous salad. We did not talk about Brion. For a while we traded recollections of Brooklyn College drama school, where, strangely, both of us had put in time.

It seemed, as the day lengthened, that the elations of our trip stirred a mutual yearning. Not about the night, because of course the night would be ours. I thought we might find our way through the dazzle of our confusions to something beyond. In my memory of that day — or in my fond dream of a memory — I was about to guide us there. In this waking dream I'm suspended at the edge of a gesture or the right words. All at once a glimmer of caution flickers, goes out, flashes again. Who was she, after all? An actor, above all. I was wary of how she brought out the performer in me. I mean the performer at the core, ready to follow her out on the wire where she lived her life. At that age I thought I might walk it too.

I could have been a moment short of giving her the sign she wanted, whatever it was. These days I sometimes imagine that with the right words, a touch, a look, I might have snatched her out of disaster's path, away from the oncoming life that was gathering ahead of her. I held back. Surely that was wise. The moment passed and then Lucy simply got distracted.

I let us drift down the colonnades of the farmacia tour at the busy end of Revolución, chasing green crosses and phosphorescence. I wanted a party too. Joy's hand, they say, is always at his lips bidding adieu. That melancholy truth drove us.

We crossed back to Yanquilandia without incident. On the drive up the freeway we talked about ourselves.

"You and me," Lucy asked. "What is that?"

I didn't know. I said it was a good thing.

"Where would it go?"

Not into the sunset, I thought. I said exactly that. Lucy was ripped. She chattered.

"Everything goes there," she told me.

I ought not to have been driving. I was stoned myself.

As Lucy talked on I kept changing the subject, or at least tweaking it.

"I have a kind of plan for my life," she said. "Part of it is career shit." She had picked up the contemporary habit of referring to people's film and stage work that way, including her own. As in "I want to get my shit up there." Or "I saw you in whatever it was and I loved your shit." It was thought to be unpretentious and hip, one social deviant to another. I particularly hated it, perhaps for pertinent but at the time unconscious reasons. "Actually," she went on with an embarrassed laugh, "artistic ambitions."

"Why not?"

Her fancies involved going east, to off-Broadway. Or working in Europe. Or doing something in one of the independent productions that were beginning to find distribution. Besides the artistic ambitions she entertained some secular schemes for earning lots of money in pictures. In retrospect, these were unrealistic. We found ourselves back on the subject of us.

"Don't you love me?" she asked.

"You know I do."

"I hope so. You're the only one who ever knew I was real."

I politely denied that, but I thought about it frequently thereafter.

"What about Brion?"

"Poor Brion was a phantom himself," she said.

"Really? He threw a pretty solid punch for a phantom."

"I wasn't there that time either," she said. "I hardly felt it."

As we passed the refinery lights of Long Beach, she shook her head as though she were trying to clear it of whispers.

"You know," she said, "as far as shadows and ghosts go, I fear my own."

"I understand," I said. Hearing her say it chilled me, but for some reason I did understand, thoroughly. I was coming to know her as well as was possible.

"Why do you always treat me with tea-party manners, Tom?"

"I don't. I don't even know what you mean."

"You're always trying to be funny."

I said that didn't mean I didn't love her. "It's all I know," I said.

We were driving along the margins of a tank farm that stood beside the freeway. Its barbed chain-link fence was lined with harsh prison-yard arc lights that lit our car interior as we passed and framed us in successive bursts of white glare. In my delusion, the light put me in mind of overbright motel corridors with stained walls tunneling through gnomish darkness. My head hurt. In the spattered white flashes I caught her watching me. I thought I could see the reflected arc lights in her eyes and the enlarged pupils almost covering their irises, black on black.

"Everybody loves you, Tom," she said. "Don't they?"

How sad and lonely that made me feel. Out of selfishness and need I grieved for myself. It passed.

"Yes, I'm sure everyone does. It's great."

"Do I count?" she asked.

Yes and no. But of course I didn't say that. In the twisted light I saw her out there sauntering toward a brass horizon and I wanted to follow after. But I was not so foolish nor had I the generosity of spirit. I was running out of heart.

"You more than anyone, Lucy," I said. "Only you, really."

That's how I remember it. As we drove on Lucy began to complain about a letter she said I'd written.

"You used these exquisite phrases. Avoiding the nitty-gritty. All fancy dancing."

"I don't do that. I don't know what letter you mean. Come on—'exquisite phrases'?" I laughed at her.

A couple of miles later she informed me she had written the letter to herself. "In your style," she said.

"So," I asked her, "what were the phrases you liked?"

"I don't remember. I wanted to get it down. The way you are."

"Lucy, please don't write letters from me to yourself. I can do it."

"You never wrote me," she said, which I guess was partly the point. "Anyone can jump out of a phone."

Suddenly, but without apparent spite, she declared, "John's going to expand my part." She was talking about the now revived horror movie in which John had hired a live British actor to strangle her. However, on consideration she thought he might transform her into a surviving heroine. I said it was great but that it probably wouldn't be as much fun.

"You know," she said, "you don't get credit for being scared and dying. It doesn't count as acting. Anyway, I can live without fun."

"If you say so."

"John," she said, "wants to marry me." For some reason, at that point she put her hand on my knee and turned her face to me. "Seriously."

I wondered about that in the weeks following. Once she showed me a postcard of the Empire State Building he had sent her from New York. He had adorned it with embarrassing jokey scribbles about his erection. One day I took John to Musso's for lunch but he said not a word to me about her. Over our pasta I asked him if it was true that he was sparing Lucy's character in the thing forthcoming.

"Oh," he said, as though it were something that had slipped his mind. "Absolutely. Lucy's time has come."

I suspected that the lead would be the kind of supposed-to-be-feisty female lately appearing as part of the serious and adult wave. I knew Lucy would deliver that one all the way from Avenida Revolución.

"She can give a character some inner aspects," I told him.

"You're so right."

"Good actress," I suggested. "Great kid."

John went radiant, but he didn't look like a bridegroom to me. "You know it, Tom. Tops."

He didn't marry Lucy. Instead, when the funeral-baked meats had cooled he married Brion Pritchard's widow, Maerwyn. He didn't even promote Lucy to insipid ingénue. Halfway through the horror movie her character died like a trouper. In spite of my infatuation, I had to admit there were many great things one could do with Lucy, but marrying her was probably not one of them.

We went out a few times. She began to seem to me — for lack of a better word — unreal. I kept trying to get close to her again. At the time I was selling neither scripts nor story ideas. There were no calls. I might have tried for an acting gig; I was owed a few favors. I had no illusions about my talent, but I was cheap and willing, well spoken enough for walk-ons as a mad monk or warmongering general. I offered a Brooklyn Heights accent, which sounds not at all the way you think. But I had grown self-conscious and all the yoga in the world wasn't going to bring back my chops or my youthful arrogance. That was what I'd need in front of a camera. My main drawback as an actor had always been a tendency to perform from the neck up. I might have thrived in the great days of radio.

Eventually I got a job with a newspaper chain working as their "West Coast editor." It took up a lot of my time, and part of my work was resisting being transformed into a gossip columnist. I almost got fired for doing a piece for the New York Times Arts and Leisure section. The news chain paid a lot less than writing for the movies, but it paid regularly. I had plans to engineer a spread for Lucy, but nothing came along to hang it on.

Out of what seemed like nowhere, she took up with a friend of mine named Asa Maclure, pronounced Maclure, whom people called Ace. Ace was an actor and occasional writer (mostly of blaxploitation flix during the seventies) with whom I had liked to go out drinking and drugging and what we insensitively called wenching. Ace was a wild man. What inclined me to forgive him all was a telegram he had once sent to a director in Washington for whom he was going to act Othello: CANT WAIT TO GET MY HANDS AROUND THAT WHITE WOMANS THROAT.

Ace had just arrived back in L.A. from Africa, where he had portrayed a loyal askari who saved a blond white child from swart Moorish bandits in the Sahara. The child, supposed to be French, was from eastern Europe somewhere. Ace was unclear as to which country. She had gone on location with her mother along as chaperone. The mom was, as Ace put it, a babe. Ace was suave and beautiful, the kind of guy they would cast as Othello. In no time at all his romance, as they say, with Mrs. Vraniuk was the talk of every location poker game. Restless under the desert sky, Ace decided to shift his attention to young Miss Vraniuk. Consummation followed, producing some uneasiness since the kid was not yet twenty-one. Nor was she eighteen. Nor, it seemed, perhaps, was she fifteen. But it was in another country, another century, a different world. At the time, in the circumstances, it represented no more than a merry tale.

"This child was ageless, man," Ace told us. "She had the wiles of Eve."

If any images or other evidence of desert passion existed, no one worried much about it. Talk was cheap. And most American tabloids then did not even buy pictures.

Ace and Lucy became a prominent item, appearing in the very papers that now employed me. The stories were fueled by Ace's sudden trajectory toward stardom. Though she was blooming, grew more beautiful as she aged, Lucy was noticed only as Ace's companion.

It happened that one week the papers dispatched me with a photographer to do a story on kids in South Central who rode high-stakes bike races. The races ran on barrio streets, inviting the wagers of high-rolling meth barons and senior gangbangers. Lucy decided to come with me, and when I went down a second time she came along again. Both times she seemed a little hammered and could not be discouraged from flirting with a few speed-addled pistoleros. A local actually approached me with a warning that she was behaving unwisely. Driving back to Silver Lake, she said: "You and I are sleepwalking."

"How do you mean?" I asked her.

"We're unconscious. Living parallel lives. We never see each other."

I said I thought she was involved with Ace.

"I mean really see each other, Tommy. The way people can see each other."

"You're the one who's sleepwalking, Lucy."

"Oh," she said, "don't say that about me." She sounded as if she had been caught out, trapped in something like a lie. "That's frightening."

"That's what you said about both of us. I thought you were on to something."

Maybe she was confounded by her own inconsistency. More likely she never got there. She sat silent for a while. Then she said: "Don't you understand, Tommy? It's always you with me. Ever since Grauman's."

It was not a joke. I don't think she meant to hurt or deceive me with the things she said. For some reason, though, she could leave me feeling abandoned and without hope. Not only about us but about everything. She was concerned with being there. And with whom to be. It occurred to me that perhaps she was going through life without, in a sense, knowing what she was doing. Or that she was not doing anything but forever being done. Waiting for a cue, a line, a vehicle, marks, blocking. Somewhere to stand and be whoever she might decide she was, even for a moment.

"That can't be true, Lucy."

"Oh, yes," she said, urgently, deeply disturbed. "Oh, yes, baby, it is true."

There was no point in arguing. A couple of miles along, she put her hand on my driving arm, holding it hard, and I suspected she might force the wheel.

"I have such strength," she said. "I don't know how to use it. Or when. I accommodate. That's the trouble."

One strange afternoon, Asa Maclure, Lucy and I decided to go bungee jumping. Seriously. It might have represented the zenith of our tattered glory days. The place we chose to jump from was a mountainside high above the desert, reachable by tram from Palm Springs. There, over a rock face that rose a sheer few hundred feet from the valley floor, two actual Australians, a boy and a girl, had the jump concession.

I might say that I can't imagine how we came to plan this, but in fact I know how. Ace was well aware of the fraught status between Lucy and me. I'm sure she talked about me to him, maybe a lot. He would tease me, or both of us, when we were together.

"You all are pathetic," he declared once. "A gruesome twosome. Tommy, she sighs and pines over you. I believe you do the same. I don't mind."

I was provoked. He was saying that our strange affair notwithstanding, he — Mister Mens Sana in Corpore Sano — was the one she turned to for good loving. It was a taunt. So I decided I'd play some soul poker with him for Lucy and win and take her away. Thereafter he tried to see that she avoided me. When we were all together Ace and I would watch each other for cracks in which to place a wedge. Though I liked to believe I was smarter than Ace, he was verbally quite agile.

The bungee incident began as a bad joke and started overheating, the way one kid's playful punch of another will gradually lead to an angry fistfight. In fact it was completely childish, nothing less than a dare. It was I who made the mistake of talking bungee-jump; I'd seen the Australians referred to in the Times's weekend supplement and it occurred to me I might get my employers to pay for us. Ace was famous, Lucy semifamous, beginning to get noticed, frequently called in to test, and cast at times to help lesser actors look good. There were also reruns of her several soaps.

I felt I had to do this. I had made a jocular reference to this scheme in the presence of Ace, and Lucy and Ace called me on it. While I was trying to prod the powers above to spring and assign a photographer, the two of them went and did it. Would Lucy descend into the ponderosa-scented void after her paramour? A thing never in question. It was an eminence she'd sought lifelong, a Fuji-disposable Lover's Leap. They survived.

All my life I have regretted not being there. For one thing, regarding Maclure, I held my manhood cheap. He had foxed me and bonded with her in a way that I, who had made something of a career out of witnessing Lucy's beau gestes, would never experience. She hurt me bad.

Suffering is illuminating, as they say, and in my pain I almost learned something about myself. I repressed the insight. I was not ready, then, to yield to it.

"I wanted it to be you," Lucy said, like a deflowered prom queen apologizing to the high school athlete whose lettered jersey she had worn and dishonored.

"I wanted it to be me too," I said. "Why did you go and do it?"

"I was afraid I wouldn't do it if we waited."

I shouted at her, something I very rarely did.

"You'd have done it with me! You goddamn well would have!"

Of course this exchange was as juvenile as the rest of the incident, but it stirred the unconsidered home truth I had been resisting. This kind of juvenility goes deep, and you can also approach self-awareness after acting childishly.

Still, I wasn't up to facing it. For days and days I went to sleep stoned, half drunk, whispering: What was it like, Lucy? I meant the leap. I very nearly went bungee jumping by myself, but it seemed a sterile exercise.

I was bitter. I had excuses to avoid her and I used them all. She called me at the office and in Laguna, but I was tired of it. The next thing I knew I had quit my job and gone over to England to find Jennifer.

Jen had got a Green Book and was teaching dance with some friends in Chester. When we saw each other I knew it was on again. I had to peel her loose from some painter from over the border. Another fucking Welsh boyfriend!

I took her home to Dallas and met the high-toned folks and married her in the high-toned Episcopal equivalent of a nuptial Mass, dressed up like a character out of Oscar Wilde. She conscientiously wore red, though I pointed out that neither of us had been married before. We moved to Laguna and, lovely and smart as she was, Jen got herself a tenure-track job in dance at UC San Diego. I watched her work, and she was peppy and the good-cop bad-cop kind of teacher, and you never saw a prettier backside in a leotard. We moved to Encinitas.

My bride all but supported me while I worked on a few scripts. She had loans from her parents and the UC salary. I don't know exactly what had changed in the movie business; I hadn't noticed anything good. However, I optioned two scripts right away.

One day I was coming out of the HBO offices on Olympic when I ran into Asa Maclure. The sight of him froze my heart. In those years you knew what the way he looked meant. He was altogether too thin for his big frame; his cool drape sagged around him. The worst of it was his voice, always rich, Shakespearean, his preacher father's voice. It had become a rasp. He sounded old and he looked sad and wise, a demeanor that he used to assume in jest. I hoped he wouldn't mention the bungee jump, but he did. Plainly it meant a lot to him. From a different perspective, it did to me too. We traded a few marginally insincere laughs about how absurd the whole thing had been. He looked so doomed I couldn't begrudge him the high they must have had. I didn't ask him how he was.

A couple of weeks later I got a call from Lucy, and she wanted to see me. She was still in Silver Lake. I lied to Jennifer when I drove up to visit Lucy. Jen had not asked where I was going, but I volunteered false information. I felt profoundly unfaithful, though I realized that there was not much likelihood of my sleeping with Lucy. No possibility at all, from my point of view. So I felt unfaithful to her too.

Lucy, in Silver Lake, seemed at once agitated and exhausted.

"Ace said he saw you," she told me when we were seated on the patio dead Heathcliff had demolished.

Passing through her living room I noticed that the house was in a squalid state. The floors were littered with plastic flowers and charred metal cylinders. There were roaches on the floor and in the ashtrays, along with beer cans and other post-party knickknacks. Lucy had been running with a new set of friends. I imagined these people as a kind of simian troop, although I never got it clear who exactly they were and how Lucy had been impressed into being their hostess. I did know that it had somehow to do with supply and demand.

I had been out of town and was not familiar with freebasing. I can't be sure that Asa turned her on to it. Basing was the rage then in extremist circles like his. She talked about it with a rapturous smile. I had been around long enough to remember when street drugs hit the industry big-time, and I remembered that smile from the days when each new advance in narcosis had been acclaimed as somebody's personal Fourth of July. A life-changing event. To cool the rock's edges Lucy had taken to easing down behind a few upscale pharmaceuticals: 'ludes, opiate pills. Unfortunately for all of us, genuine Quaaludes were disappearing, even south of the border. This left the opiates, which were still dispensed with relative liberality. While I watched, Lucy cooked up the brew in her kitchen as she had been instructed. She told me she had always liked to cook, though this was a side of her I'd never seen.

Cooking base, we ancients of art will recall, involved a number of tools. 7-Elevens then sold single artificial flowers in test-tube-like containers, so that crack scenes were sometimes adorned with sad, false blossoms. Lucy mixed quite a few gram baggies with baking soda and heated them in a cunning little Oriental pot. The devil of details was in the mix, which Lucy approached with brisk confidence. Alarmingly, the coke turned into viscous liquid. People who have put in time in really crappy motels may recall finding burned pieces of coat hanger on the floor of the closets or wardrobes. Lucy had one, and she used it to fish the brew out so it could cool and congeal. It was then that the stem came into play, and a plastic baby bottle, and a burned wad of Chore Boy. On the business end of the stem, appropriately enough, was the bottle's nipple, which the adept lipped like a grouper on brain coral.

We did it and at first it reminded me of how, when I was a child, my mother would have me inhale pine needle oil to cure a chest cold. The effect of freebasing was different, although if someone had told me it cured colds I wouldn't have argued. It was quite blissful for a time and we were impelled toward animated chatter. I commenced to instruct Lucy on the joys of marriage, for which I was then an enthusiast. She soared with me; her eyes flashed. In this state she was always something to see.

"I'm so happy for you. No, I'm really not. Yes I am."

We smoked for an hour or more. As she plied the hanger end to scrape residue from the filter and stem, she told me about her career prospects, which seemed stellar. She had been cast for what seemed a good part in a film by a notoriously eccentric but gifted director who had assembled a kind of repertory company for his pictures. Some of these made money, some tanked, but all of them got some respect. For Lucy, this job was a good thing. And not only was there the film part. As schedules permitted, she was going to do Elena in Uncle Vanya at a prestigious neighborhood playhouse. I rejoiced for her. As I was leaving, supremely confident and looking forward to the drive, I kissed her. Her response seemed less sensual than emotional. I was hurt, although I had no intention of suggesting anything beyond our embrace. Sometimes you just don't know what you want.

Around Westminster, I began to feel the dive. Its sensation was accompanied by a sudden suspicion that Lucy's reversal of fortune might be a little too good to be true. When I got home I took two pain pills and believed her again.

Not long after this we read that Asa Maclure was dead. He had AIDS all right, but it wasn't the disease that killed him. The proximate cause of his death was an accident occasioned by his unsteady attempt to cook some base. He set himself on fire, ran as fast as he could manage out of his San Vicente apartment and took off down the unpeopled sidewalks of the boulevard. He ran toward the ocean. Hundreds of cars passed him as he ran burning. According to one alleged witness, even a fire truck went by, but that may have been someone's stroke of cruel wit.

Asa Maclure was a wonderful man. He was, as they say, a damn good actor. He was also enormous fun. In the end, he was a good friend too, although obviously a difficult one. Suffice it to say I mourned him.

Jennifer and I went to his funeral. It was held at a freshly painted but rickety-looking black church in what had once been a small southern town not thirty miles from where her parents lived in Oak Lawn. Asa's father presided, his master in declamation. Asa had resembled his father, and the man was strong and prevailed over his grief. There were a few people from the industry, mostly African American, all male. Praise God, Lucy did not appear.

Back in Dallas at my in-laws' stately home, we had a few bourbons.

"Your friend has the kiss of death," Jennifer said. She delivered this observation without inflection, but it remained to hover on the magnolia-scented air of that cool, exquisitely tasteful room.

Both of my optioned scripts were being green-lighted.

From what I read in the papers it seemed Lucy had been replaced in the mad genius's picture. The neighborhood production of Vanya opened with no mention of her. I presumed she had read for it. Maybe she had assumed the part was hers. Once I met her for a sandwich in a Beverly Hills deli and we talked about Ace's death. Lucy spoke slowly, with great precision, and was obviously high. I was worried about her and also concerned to discover where Ace's death had left her.

"I've compartmentalized my life," she declared. She had brought with her a huge paperback book with dog-eared pages and she showed it to me. It was a collection of drawings by Giovanni Piranesi that featured his series called Imaginary Prisons, in which tiers of prison cells are ranked along Gothic stone staircases and upon the battlements of vast dungeons that ascend and descend over spaces that appear infinite. For reasons that many art lovers will immediately comprehend on seeing some of his drawings, Piranesi is a great favorite among cultivated junkies. His prisons are like their world.

On the blank pages in the book Lucy had written what she called plans. These were listed in columns, each laid out in variously colored inks and displaying Lucy's runic but attractive handwriting. When she handed the book to me for comment I could only utter a few appreciative sounds. Every word in every paragraph of every column was unreadable. I still have no idea what she had written there. Finally I could not, for my life, keep myself from saying something meant to be friendly and comforting about Asa. I got the same cold suffering look I had seen when Brion Pritchard died.

In the weeks after that, in a craven fashion, I kept my distance from her because I was afraid of what I might see and hear. She didn't call. Also the trip to Texas had left Jen and me closer somehow — at least for a while.

A few months later Lucy left a message on our machine, absurdly pretending to be someone else. Suddenly I thought I wanted to see her again. The desire, the impulse, came over me all at once in the middle of a working afternoon. On reexamination, I think the urge was partly romantic, partly Pavlovian. I was concerned. I wanted to help her. I wanted to get seriously high with her because Jen didn't use. So my trip back to Silver Lake was speeded by a blend of high-mindedness and base self-indulgence. It's a fallen world, is it not? We carry love in earthen vessels.

Lucy's house was not as dirty and disorderly as it had been on my previous visit, but everything still looked rather dingy. She did not garden or wash windows; she no longer employed her help. And she no longer cooked, since crack, the industrialized version of base, had obviated that necessity. It was safer too and far less messy than basing. The rocks went straight from the baggie into the stem. For me the hit was even better. She had Percocet and Xanax for coming down, a lot of them. She was still very attractive, and I later learned she had a thing going with a druggy doc in Beverly Hills who must have been something of an adventurer.

"I'm going to Jerusalem!" she said. She said it so joyously that for a second I thought she had got herself saved by some goof.

"Yes?" I approved wholeheartedly. Seconds after the pipe, I approved of nearly everything that way. "How great!"

"Listen to this!" she said. "I'm going there to live in the Armenian quarter. In a monastery. Or, like, a convent."

"Terrific! As a nun?"

She laughed, and I did too. We laughed loud and long. When we were finished laughing she slapped me on the shoulder.

"No, ridiculous one! As research. Because I'm going to do a script about the massacres. I'm going to sneak into Anatolia and see the Euphrates."

She had an uncle who was a high-ranking priest at the see of the Jerusalem patriarch. He would arrange for her stay, and she could interview survivors of the slaughter.

"I want to do this for my parents. For my background. I won't say 'heritage' because that's so pretentious."

"I think it's a great idea."

I was about, in my boisterous good humor, to call her project a pipe dream. Fortunately I thought better of it.

She saw the thing as eminently possible. The Russians had unraveled and she might film in Armenia. There were prominent Armenian Americans in the movie business, in town and in the former USSR. She had me about a quarter convinced, though I wondered about the writing. She had the answer to that.

"This is yours, Tommy! Will you do it? Will you go with me? Will you think about it? Please? Because if you wrote it I'm sure I could direct. Because you know how it is. You and me."

Naturally the urgency was intense. "It's a sweet idea," I said.

"You could bring your wife, you know. I forget her name."

I told her. She had somehow deduced that Jennifer was younger than she.

"They're all named Jennifer," she said.

As if to bind me to the plan, she pressed huge handfuls of Percocet on me. Starting to drive home, I realized that I was too rattled to make it all the way to Encinitas. I checked into a motel that was an island of downscale on the Westwood — Santa Monica border and called Jen, home from her classes. I explained how I had come up to inquire into something or other and suddenly felt too ill to make it back that evening.

"Don't drive then," Jen said. I could see trouble shimmering on the blacktop ahead.

Next Lucy disappeared. Her phone was suddenly out of service. The next time I was up in town I went to her house and found it unoccupied. The front garden was ochre rubble and the house itself enclosed in scaffolding. It was lunchtime, and a work crew of Mesoamericans in faded flannel shirts were eating In-N-Out burgers on the roof.

Once I got a message in which she claimed to be in New York. It was rambling and unsound. She said some indiscreetly affectionate things but neglected to leave a number or address. I did my best to tape over the message, to stay out of trouble. I had only partial success.

A little serendipity followed. I heard from a friend in New York, a documentary filmmaker, whom I hadn't seen in many years. He had gone into a boutique on Madison and met the gorgeous salesperson. She seemed glamorous and mysterious and dressed enticingly from the store, so he asked her out. He thought she might go for a Stoppard play, so he took her to the play and to the Russian Tea Room and then to Nell's. People recognized her. It turned out she was an actor, a smart actor, and could talk Stoppard with insight. She was a wild but inspired dancer and had nearly nailed a part in a Broadway play. She knew me, was in fact a friend of mine.

"Oh," I said. "Lucy."

He was disappointed she hadn't asked him home that night. Casual couplings were not completely out of fashion by then, though white balloons were beginning to ascend over West Eleventh Street. My friend thought he liked her very much, but when he'd called one evening she sounded strange. It sounded, too, as if she lived in a hotel.

I thought I knew the story, and I was right. She could hardly have asked him home because home then was an SRO on 123rd and Broadway and he would not have enjoyed the milieu. All her salary and commissions, as I later learned, were going for crack and for scag to mellow it out. Pain pills were not doing it any longer. I quoted him the maxim made famous by Nelson Algren: "Never go to bed with someone who has more problems than you do." He understood. I didn't think I had deprived anyone of their bliss.

There was something more to my friendly cautioning. It wasn't exactly jealousy. It was that somehow I thought I was the only one who could handle Lucy. That she was my parish.

When she showed up in California again it was in San Francisco. I got a call from her up there, and this time I didn't bother to erase it. Jennifer and I were in trouble. I had a bit of a drug problem. I was drinking a lot. I suspected her of having an affair with some washed-up Bosnian ballet dancer she had hired down at UCSD. The fellow was supposed to be gay, but I was suspicious. Jennifer was a well-bred, well-spoken East Texas hardass a couple of generations past sharecropping. Amazingly, the more I drank and used, the more she lost respect for me. At the same time I was selling scripts like crazy, rewriting them, sometimes going out on location to work them through. Jennifer was largely unimpressed. Everything was stressful.

I was full of anger and junkie righteousness and I went up to see Lucy, hardly bothering to cover my tracks. She had rented an apartment there that belonged to her stockbroker sister, not a bad place at all despite its being in the dreary Haight. I guess I had wanted a look at who Lucy's latest friends were.

Her live-in friend was Scott, and she introduced us. I had expected a repellent creep. Scott surpassed my grisliest expectations. He had watery eyes, of a blue so pale that his irises seemed at the point of turning white. He had very thin, trembly red lips that crawled up his teeth at one corner to form a tentative sneer. He had what my mother would have called a weak chin, which she believed was characteristic of non-Anglo-Saxons. There were no other features I recall.

Scott was under the impression that he could play the guitar. He plinked on one for us as we watched and waited. Lucy avoided eye contact with me. As Scott played, his face assumed a fanatical spirituality and he rolled his strange eyes. Watching him do it induced in the beholder something like motion sickness. In his transport he suggested the kind of Jehovah's Witness who would kill you with a hammer for rejecting his Watchtower.

When he had finished, Lucy exclaimed, "Oh, wow." By force of will I prevented us from applauding.

Scott's poison was methamphetamine. I was not yet familiar with the drug's attraction, and this youth served as an exemplar. Having shot some, his expression shifted from visionary to scornful to paranoid and back. I had seen many druggy people over the years — I knew I was one myself — but Scott was a caution to cats. To compare his state with a mad Witness missionary was demeaning to believers. His transcendent expression, his transport, ecstasy, whatever, was centered on neurological sensation like a laboratory rat's. The mandala at the core of his universe was his own asshole. It was outrageous. However, there we were, beautiful Lucy, cultivated me, livers of the examined life, in more or less the same maze. What did it make us?

When Scott had exhausted conversation by confusing himself beyond explication, he picked up a pair of sunglasses from the floor beside him, put them on and moved them up on his forehead.

"I invented this," he told us, "this pushing-shades-up-on-your-head thing."

Weeks later, Scott was removed from her apartment with the aid of police officers, screaming about insects and imitating one. It was history repeating itself as farce, a particularly unfunny one. Lucy lost the place and the stockbroker sister was forced out. The upside was losing Scott as well.

Back home it was cold, and Jennifer grew suspicious and discontent. When she was angry her mild, educated Anglosouthern tones could tighten and faintly echo the speech of her ancestors in the Dust Bowl. Sometimes her vowels would twist themselves into the sorrowful whine of pious stump farmers abandoned by Jesus in the bottomland. You had to listen closely to detect it. I had never heard the word "honey" sound so leaden until Jennifer smacked me in the mouth with it. She could do the same thing with "dear." Dust bowl, I thought, was by then a useful metaphor for our married state.

I started going to bars. I listened to production assistants' stories about the new-style dating services. I did not pursue these routes because I was no longer so young and beautiful and because I was bitter and depressed. I did have a few one-or two-nighters on location. The best, carnally speaking, was with a stuntwoman with a body like a Mexican comicbook heroine who, it was said, had once beaten an Arizona policeman half to death. Of course bodies like hers were not rare in movieland. Straight stuntwomen were more fun, at least for me, than actresses. What they might lack in psychological dimension they made up for in contoured heft and feel and originality. They were sometimes otherwise limited, unless you counted insanity as psychological dimension. Once I had a weeklong liaison with an unhappily married Las Vegas mounted policewoman who wanted to break into movies. As for the young women once characterized as starlets — they all knew the joke about the Polish ingénue, the one who slept with the writer.

I was not so obtuse that I failed to observe certain patterns in my own behavior — not simply the greedy self-indulgence but all the actions that were coming to define me. At the time this seemed a misfortune because I didn't reflect on them with any satisfaction. There they were, however, beginning to seem like a summary, coming due like old bar bills. As for root causes, I couldn't have cared less. There were limits even to my self-absorption. Also I worried about getting ever deeper into drugs.

I saw Lucy every few months. Jennifer and I finally had it out around that one. She accused me of infidelity, and I told her plainly that yes, I was sleeping around. Safe sex, of course, I said, though I don't know how much that would have mattered, since Jennifer and I had not made love for months. However, I told her truthfully that I had not been to bed with Lucy for years, and not at all since we had married. I also challenged her own virtue.

"What about your supposed-to-be-faggot colleague down there at school? Fucking Boris." The high-bounding lover was called Ivan Ivanic, and I had hated him since the day Jennifer corrected my pronunciation of his name, which was I-van-ich. "He's not getting in your pants?"

She was furious, naturally. You can't use that kind of malicious language about gays to most dancers. But I saw something else in her reaction. She was shocked. She cried. I resisted the impulse to believe her.

I began to visit Lucy more frequently. One thing I went up for was dope. She had moved into a fairly respectable hotel just uphill from the Tenderloin, and by then she was scoring regularly in the Mission. After numerous misadventures, ripoffs and a near rape she had learned how to comport herself around the market. She had the added protection of being a reliable customer. Lucy was not yet penniless. Her television work was still in syndication, and her residuals from SAG continued. But she was spending her money fast.

By the time I arrived from the airport — this was still in the days of fifty-dollar flights — Lucy would have done her marketing on Dolores and picked up her exchange spike at the Haight Free Clinic. My contribution to the picnic was the coke I had bought down south. Lucy kept her small room very neat. We would embrace. Sometimes we would hold each other, as chaste as Hansel and Gretel, to show we cared. We hoped we cared. Both of us were beginning to stop caring about much.

I would snort coke and Lucy's smack. I never shot it.

Sometimes it made me sick. Often it provoked brief hilarity. I would watch her fix — the spoon, the lighter, the works, as they say — with something like reverence. Listen, I had grown up to Chet Baker, to Coltrane, to Lady Day. To me, junkies, no matter how forlorn, were holy. Of course at a certain point if you've seen one, you've seen them all, and this was as true of us as of anyone. Much of the time we looked into each other's eyes without sentiment. This was better than staring at your toe. In each other's dilating pupils we could reflect calmly on the uneasy past. The lambent moments expanded infinitely. All was resolved for a while. Once she began to dream aloud about going to Jerusalem to do research for the script that I would write, and about kicking the jones in the holy places.

We chose silence sometimes. It wasn't that we never spoke. In a certain way you might say we were weary of each other. Not bored, or fed up, or anything of that sort. Worn out after the lives we'd tried to make intersect, and conducting a joint meditation on the subject. There were times I'll admit I cried. She never did, but then she was always higher.

Every once in a while Lucy would try to persuade me to fix the way she did. We never went through with it, and I felt guilty. I was, after all, the guy who had not gone bungee jumping. Lucy never pressed it.

"If you died, I would feel like I killed Shakespeare," she said.

I was never sure whether we thought this would be good or bad.

Mortality intruded itself regularly into our afternoons because it seemed that half the people we knew were dead. I supposed that down in sunny Encinitas my Jennifer was expecting to hear that I had succumbed to the kiss. During one of my later visits — one of the last — Lucy told me about a conversation she'd had at the UC hospital emergency room. A doctor there had said to her: "You're rather old to be an addict." She laughed about it and did a self-important, falsely mellow doctorish voice repeating it.

To me, Lucy was still beautiful. I don't know how she looked to other people. She was my heroine. I did notice that lately she always wore long sleeves, to hide the abscesses that marked the tracks where her veins had been. Her eyes didn't die. Once she looked out the small clear window that looked up Nob Hill and made a declaration:

"The rest of my life is going to last about eleven minutes."

The line was hardly lyrical, but her delivery was smashing. She looked great saying it, and I saw that at long last she had located the role of her lifetime. Everything before had been provisional, but she had made this woman her own. It seemed that this was finally whom she had become, and she could do almost anything with it. Found her moment, to be inhabited completely, but of course briefly.

I went home then, the way I always had, and saved almost everything. I saw that Lucy and I, together, had at last found the true path and that this time we were walking hand in hand, the whole distance. Again I refused the jump. She was more than half a ghost by then, and it would be pretty to think her interceding spirit saved me.

One of us had to walk away and it was not going to be Lucy. She was the actor, I thought, not me.