Innocent Blood

Fourteen

Two hours after the Disney bomb went off, Frank’s producer, Peter Brodsky, called him.

‘Now they’ve bombed Disney? Jesus.’

‘They’re not going to stop, Peter. They’re not going to stop until there’s no Hollywood left.’

They shared a moment’s silence, but then Peter said, ‘I thought you’d better be the first to know. Pigs has been canceled until further notice.’

‘Well, I can’t say that we haven’t been expecting it.’

‘You know that it’s absolutely no reflection on you or the show. We have to think about the safety of everybody involved in it, that’s all. Just as soon as they’ve caught these goddamned terrorists—’

‘Peter, I totally understand.’

‘You’re OK, are you, Frank? Marcia was wondering if you’d like to come over for brunch on Sunday morning.’

‘Well, that’s very thoughtful of her, please say thanks. The thing is, though, I’m going down to Rancho Santa Fe to spend the weekend with some friends.’

‘Good, good. So long as you’re not alone.’

He called Nevile again, but he was still away. He left a message on his voicemail asking him to call back as soon as he could.

‘I’m feeling spooked . . . I don’t exactly know why. This bomb at Disney hasn’t made me feel any better, either.’

Mayor Joseph Lindsay was being interviewed outside the archway of Disney Studios. Behind him, Alameda Avenue was still crowded with fire trucks and ambulances, their red lights flashing. The mayor was saying, ‘I think I speak for everybody in the city of Los Angeles when I say that Disney cartoons were a precious part of my growing-up. When somebody attacks the Disney studio, they’re attacking not only my freedom of speech as an adult, they’re attacking my childhood, too. They’re attacking my memories and my values. They’re attacking my cultural heritage.’

Part bored, part edgy, Frank drove round to see Mo, who lived in a split-level house on Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica. Mo was obviously hosting a party because there were cars parked all the way along the street and colored lights in the trees outside. Mo came to the door in a voluminous gold kaftan, drunk, with a large glass of whiskey in his hand.

‘Frank! In the nick of time! Look here, everybody! The ship may be sinking fast but the captain’s on the bridge!’

‘Sorry, Mo. If I’d known you had guests . . .’

Mo flung his arm around him. ‘Baloney. It’s the end of the world as we know it, Frank. It’s Armageddon. Everybody’s welcome.’

The hallway and the living room were crowded with people, most of them shouting and arguing, while almost unheard, a gingery-headed man who looked like an overweight Art Garfunkel, played Irving Berlin favorites on the piano. Mo’s wife, Naomi, was in the kitchen serving up tuna knishes and challah sticks and barbecued chicken legs, assisted by seven or eight of her friends who all knew more about serving up food than she did.

‘You should never serve barbecue chicken on a paper napkin,’ he heard one say. ‘It sticks – you want your guests spitting out bits of tissue?’

Mo found Frank a very cold Coors out of the fridge. ‘This is my mother’s seventy-ninth birthday party. I guess I should have invited you, but then I thought, no, I like Frank too much to have him meet my family. Look at them. The Cohens. I’ve seen hyenas with Alzheimer’s behaving better than this.’

Frank was introduced to the birthday girl, a withered woman in a red silk gown, with a mahogany suntan and diamond-encrusted claws. ‘Mo’s told me so much about you. I imagined you taller.’

‘Well, I expect you were sitting down at the time.’

Mo breathed whiskey in Frank’s ear. ‘She doesn’t understand humor. Only discomfiture. The last thing that made her laugh was Naomi’s kugels.’

Frank was introduced to several other Cohens, one of whom owned a local Oldsmobile dealership, another who played cello for the Santa Monica Symphonia, another who was big in tomatoes. Each of them paused for long enough in their arguments to say to Frank, ‘You lost your boy, didn’t you? What can I say?’

He and Mo ended up on the veranda, by the light of a guttering torch. ‘Strange times, you know, Frank,’ said Mo. ‘One day you think you know exactly what the world is all about; you think you got all of your parameters fixed. You got steady work, you live in a nice place, you got your family all around you. Then God comes along and says, “Excuse me, may I remind you that you’re stuck by your feet by an invisible force to a ball of unstable rock which is hurtling around in a total vacuum, and that you’re obliged to share this ball of unstable rock with millions of demented people, many of whom don’t use deodorant, and some of whom would like nothing better than to pocket all of your possessions, torture your pets and blow your head off. Not only that, everything that makes this situation bearable, like cheeseburgers and whiskey and reasonably priced cigars, is going to shorten your life, and in any case you’re going to die anyhow, half-blind, half-deaf, in wet pajamas, in Pasadena.”’

Frank swallowed beer and wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘I guess that’s one way of looking at it.’

He told Mo about the séance. Mo was beginning to sober up now, and he listened and nodded and occasionally patted his sweaty face with a balled-up tissue.

‘You’re sure this wasn’t your imagination working overtime? After all – what – it’s only been ten days now since Danny died. Don’t kid me that you’re not traumatized, too.’

‘I saw him, Mo. Or whatever spirit it is that’s pretending to be him. I just don’t understand what it’s all about.’

‘Not everything in this life has to have a logical explanation, Frank. Look at my family. Quod erat demonstrandum.’

‘I never hit Danny, though, Mo. I never bruised him, I never made him bleed.’

‘Of course you didn’t. But look at it this way. Maybe this spirit is using Danny to get your attention.’

‘What?’

‘Your folks never had much money, right, and when you were a kid you didn’t have any confidence, and you kept doing things like the time when you were trying to impress that girl and you sneezed that huge green booger on to the back of her hand. But if you personally went on television and whined about your miserable childhood – you, Frank Bell – who would want to know?’

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘Poor old hard-done-by Frank Bell! Nobody would want to know, would they? But in Pigs you’ve invented Dusty and Henry, and when Dusty and Henry get embarrassed, or upset, or make idiots of themselves, people can identify with them, right? The audience feel empathy. “Gee, that was exactly the way I felt, when I was a kid.” That’s why the show’s so goddamned popular.’

‘You’ve lost me, Mo. Maybe you need another drink.’

‘No, no, listen! Maybe this spirit is doing the same thing. If he appeared to you like he really is – some dead guy that you’ve never even met – you wouldn’t be interested in his childhood, would you, no matter how much he was knocked around? But he’s pretending to be Danny, because you care what happens to Danny, like your audience cares what happens to Dusty and Henry. In spite of yourself, when you see Danny, even though you know that it’s not really him, you can’t stop yourself from feeling protective.’

Frank thought about that, and then shrugged. ‘I guess that’s as good a theory as any. But that still doesn’t tell me why.’

Mo raised his glass. ‘“Ah, what is man! Wherefore does he why? Whence did he whence? Whither is he withering?” Do you know who said that? Dan Leno. Do you know who Dan Leno was? And don’t say Jay Leno’s kid brother.’

‘I was right. You do need another drink.’

They went back into the living room. The arguing was even louder. The pianist was playing ‘Isn’t it a Lovely Day?’ and Mo’s mother was singing along in a high, breathless screech.

‘My mother,’ said Mo proudly. ‘She could empty Carnegie Hall in three minutes flat.’

He was woken up at six twenty-five the next morning by the telephone ringing. He picked it up and said, ‘Astrid?’

‘Mr Walker? This is your six thirty alarm call.’

‘You have the wrong room. This is Frank Bell in 105.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir! You have a nice day now.’

‘You too,’ said Frank. He turned over and tried to get back to sleep but the room was already filled with sunlight and outside the gardener was noisily hosing down the pool. He had only drunk three or four beers at Mo’s party but he still felt blurry-headed, as if he had a hangover.

He kept thinking about what Mo had said. He could very well be right about this spirit that was masquerading as Danny. But that still didn’t answer the question of why, or what it was that the spirit was trying to tell him.

At six fifty-one he got out of bed and spooned some dark roast coffee into the percolator. Then he took a shower, although he turned the water off three or four times and listened, because he thought he heard the phone ringing. This was ridiculous. Here he was, a grown man, a well-known TV writer, a husband and a father, waiting for some girl to call him and tell him how he was going to spending his weekend.

He sat on his balcony drinking coffee and eating a toasted muffin with apricot jelly. He felt unsettled – not only because Astrid hadn’t called, and he still couldn’t get in touch with Nevile – but because he didn’t have any writing to do. This was the first weekend in three years when he hadn’t been pushed to finish a new episode of Pigs. He had already blocked out a new storyline in which Dusty had at last won the heart of the classroom beauty, Libby Polaski. Ever since episode three, Dusty had harbored fantasies about sitting on the banks of the Thick Silty River with Libby, picking the scabs off her knees and eating them. ‘At the age of twelve, that’s about as close as you’re going to get to oral sex.’ But now there was no point in writing any more.

Maybe he could work on a series about a man whose son was killed, and the son’s spirit comes back to help him sort out his tangled love life. Half tragedy, half bittersweet comedy.

Maybe Astrid would call.

By noon, nobody had knocked on the door and the phone had remained silent, so he decided to drive to the ocean. It was a warm day but a strong wind was blowing from the west, and the clouds were tumbling over each other in their hurry to get to the mountains.

Frank didn’t know if he had expected the old man to be there or not, but he had been sitting on the beach for less than ten minutes when he appeared, in his duck-billed baseball cap and purple T-shirt, dragging a moth-eaten gray mongrel behind him on a length of string. The old man stopped about twenty feet away and took off his cap and scratched his scalp.

‘All on your own?’ he said, his eyes narrowed against the wind.

‘I was, until now.’

‘Well, Frank, we can’t always expect other people to do what we want them to do. Sometimes we have to realize that we’re not the sun, and that other people, they’re not our planets.’

‘I took your advice.’

‘Oh, yes? And what advice was that?’

‘I kept on putting one foot in front of the other, but I still don’t know where the hell it’s taking me.’

The old man chuckled and sniffed. ‘Have patience, Frank. You’ll find out where you’re going, sooner than you think.’

He was sitting on the edge of the bed on Sunday evening, taking off his socks, when there was a frantic knocking at his door.

‘OK, OK! I’m coming!’

He opened the door to find Astrid standing there. Her hair was messed up and she had two crimson bruises under her eyes. She was hugging a dark-blue sweatshirt around herself as if she were cold.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said Frank. She limped into the room and immediately sat down on the couch. He saw that she was wearing no shoes, and that her left foot was bleeding. He closed the door and sat down beside her, trying to take hold of her hands. ‘For Christ’s sake, Astrid, what the hell’s happened?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I got into some trouble, is all.’

‘Trouble? What kind of trouble? Look at you – you look like you just went the full distance with Mike Tyson!’

‘It doesn’t matter. Could I have a drink, please?’

He went through to the kitchen and brought her back a glass of Diet Coke.

‘A drink, Frank. A proper drink.’

‘You think you ought to? Look at the state of you.’

‘Frank, you’re not my mother.’

He poured her a Jack Daniel’s, straight up. She tipped it back in one, coughed, and held out her glass for another.

‘So . . . are you going to tell me what happened? I thought we were going to Rancho Santa Fe.’

‘I’m sorry about that, Frank. I had to go see somebody.’

‘And that somebody beat up on you? Are you going to tell me who it was?’

She took another swallow of whiskey. ‘I told you, it doesn’t matter. I deserved it.’

‘Look,’ he said, sitting down beside her again, ‘I don’t have any right to stick my nose in your private business, but you and I are a little more than friends, aren’t we? And when you come back here all covered in bruises, I think I deserve an explanation.’

‘I’m sorry about Rancho Santa Fe. I should have called you.’

‘What happened? Where did you go?’

She looked at him and he thought that he had never seen anybody looking so sad. ‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.

They sat for a long time in silence. Astrid sipped her whiskey and kept her eyes on the television, even though the sound was turned down. Frank kept his eyes on Astrid. A television reporter was standing amongst the shattered remains of Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy and Bashful. The caption read ‘Disney Death Toll Reaches 113.’