Robert Stone - Fun With Problems

"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.