Sacred Monster

Flashback 9A

On her way home from the studio, Marcia picked up her and Jack’s dry cleaning, then continued on up and over Beverly Glen Boulevard out of the Valley and into Westwood to the furnished rental she now shared with her husband. She thumbed the garage-opener button as she made the turn into her driveway, and the broad blank door folded up and back, accepting its daily diet of Porsche.

Marcia collected the plastic dry-cleaner bag, which had been draped over the back of the passenger seat, then climbed from the car, and went through the connecting door and through the kitchen and the corner of the living room and down the hall, the dry-cleaner bag held over her shoulder like Frank Sinatra’s jacket. Walking down the hall, Marcia glanced leftward and saw, in profile, Jack.

Still there. In the same old cowboy hat and fringed jacket and high decorated boots, he sat in his favorite canvas chair at the deep end of the pool, seated well down and back so his head and knees were at the same height, cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes to shade them from the afternoon sun, booted legs stretched far out in front of him over the redwood deck with ankles crossed, hands folded casually in lap. From a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, a slender pale tendril of smoke wavered upward past his ear and the brim of his hat.

Marcia did not break stride. Her eyes narrowed slightly, she gazed steadily at that self-absorbed profile out there, and she kept walking, on down to the end of the hall, where she faced front again at last, moving through the doorway into the master bedroom.

Clean laundry stood in neat folded piles on the bed. Nodding as though to say her expectations had been fulfilled, she walked around the bed to the wall of closets and hung the dry-cleaning bag on the rod. Then she turned, looked again at the laundry on the bed, took a long, slow breath, and glanced across the room at her reflection in the dresser mirror there. No expression showed in the face looking back at her.

Marcia stepped through the sliding glass door to the outside, slid it shut behind her, and stood at the shallow end of the pool, looking down across the water at Jack, who hadn’t moved. An almost inaudible sigh parted her lips, which then pressed shut again. Deliberately she strode around the pool; he finally — as she was halfway to him — lifted his head and lifted his hand to lift his cowboy hat away from his eyes to watch her. Nothing else on him moved.

Marcia stopped in front of him. They looked at each other for a long silent moment, and then, with a kind of grim fatalism, she said, “Get off your dead ass.”

“Hi, honey,” he said mildly, a happy smile playing at the corners of his lips. “How’d things go today at the studio?”

She shook her head, pushing that aside, saying, “What did you do today?”

He considered. “Well,” he said, “the laundry.”

“Jack,” she said, “you’ve got to get out of this house, you’ve got to get moving, you’ve got to get your life going again. Do you want to spend the rest of your life as a kept man?”

He considered that question, giving it careful thought, and then a sunny smile glowed all over his face and he looked up at her and said, “Yes!”

“No!” she told him, and pointed a rigid finger at his nose. “You,” she said, “are going to get a job.”

Mildly, the smile still faintly lighting his features, he gazed up at her, blinking.

So Marcia got me an appointment with her agent, Irwin Sandstone, a man who had guided lots of fellas just like me to movie stardom.