Sacred Monster

Flashback 13

The shades were drawn against the California sun. In the rose-colored light in the same bedroom in which Jack found that awful scene, Jack and Marcia lay in bed, half-covered by wrinkled sheets, both warm, perspiring, Marcia in a glow of reconciliation, Jack puffing on a cigarette as he lay half-propped against the soft headboard, Marcia’s head against his shoulder. He turned her face toward his, and she gazed up at him with melting eyes. His free hand smoothed her hair as he looked deep into those eyes. Gently, he said, “He better look a lot like me.”

“And did he?”

I shrug; a dangerous gesture. Perhaps a simple and dignified nod in future. But now I shrugged, and recovered, and I say, “She was a girl. Took after her mother, in fact, in more ways than one.”

“Let’s see,” the interviewer says, annoyingly tapping his pencil against his notebook as he gazes out over my head and over the swimming pool behind me and into the middle distance. “That would be your daughter Rosalia, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s right.” I grin the grin I used when I played Satan that time. “I named her after a lady in Mexico that helped me during the movie down there.”

The interviewer nods and reels in his glance to look again at me, saying, “How old would she be now?”

“Well, she would be about thirty-five,” I say, “but the fact is she’s nineteen. Last I heard, she’s living in Colombia with some big dope dealer down there.” I feel a crooked and half-proud grin coming to my lips. I say, “Smart for a kid of mine, huh? Cuts out the middleman.”

“You and Marcia Callahan had three children together, didn’t you?”

This time I remember not to shrug. I perform a simple and dignified nod. I say, “She had three kids while we were married. I suppose I had something to do with it. But the marriage, you know, never really did survive that first big shock.”

“Even after Buddy Pal came to Mexico to try to make things up with you?”

“Didn’t matter,” I say. “It’s a funny thing, but I really did forgive Buddy. We got to be best friends again just as though nothing had ever happened. But I never in my heart forgave Marcia. I guess in her heart she must have known that. She was never stupid, the bitch.”

“And all,” the interviewer says, “because of one simple mistake.”

“Well, at least one. But also, there was our careers. The movie of Tupelo didn’t do business, and you know what that means out here. They blame everybody but the producer, and Marcia got her share of the debit. After that, her career just sort of stuttered along for a while, so-so roles in nothing pictures, no build-up, just the gradual realization on everybody’s part that the industry could get along just as well without her.”

“Tough on her, I guess.”

“You bet. Particularly because, for me, it went just the other way. I hit with the biker, consolidated with the pathological killer, and got my first Oscar nomination with the patient picture.”

“Slip of the Knife,” the interviewer says, nodding yet again at the brilliance of his own research.

“Yeah, that’s right. That’s the picture where I first really got it together, my own talent and the technology of film. Where the camera and I blended into one creature, one omnivorous animal that could eat anything and not die. Slip of the Knife; that’s when I hit my stride, got a bridle and bit on my powers, became the superstar. After Slip of the Knife, I was one of those very few stars that could do anything at all and the people still come, they pay the money, they sit down, they watch. I could read the phone book and they’d come. I could read the Valley phone book and they’d come.”

“I guess that’s true,” he says, thoughtfully, as though it hadn’t occurred to him before why he should be interviewing me.

“It is,” I assure him. I stretch my arms and legs, bend from the waist. My entire skeleton aches. What have I been doing with this body, this instrument of my talent? Fucking it over, man.

And worse. I suspect, I suspect worse.

No no no, there are things I must not know.

Do not look toward the swimming pool.

Patiently my interviewer sits, awaiting the dropping of further pearls from these lips, and so I oblige him. “After Slip of the Knife,” I tell him, “just like Irwin said, I could do anything I wanted, the industry was mine. I had to hire a girl just to read the scripts they sent me. As for Marcia, well, around town, more and more she was getting to be known as Mrs. Jack Pine, with fewer and fewer parts coming her way. She couldn’t stand that. So, one day, when Rosalia was four and Indira was two and Little Buddy was five months...”