Paul Murray - An Evening of Long Goodbyes

‘Out?’ I said.

‘Mexico,’ they said. In the New Year they were taking their equipment and moving out to join some crowd who had set up their own state in the jungle of the Chiapas Mountains. The leader wore a black balaclava that he never took off. ‘He says it’s a mirror,’ the builders told me, ‘for the faces of the dispossessed.’

‘Must get awfully stuffy, though,’ I said. ‘You know, it being the jungle and everything.’

‘Someone’s got to do it,’ they said, climbing into their bulldozers. ‘So long, Mr H! Vive la révolution! ’

I never thought of Bonetown as anything more than a temporary solution. Yet the longer I stayed, the more the idea of living away from Frank came to trouble me. It wasn’t that he said anything, nor indeed that he did anything; it was more the basic fact of him that was reassuring. He seemed to prop things up, somehow: he was like a buttress, holding up a very important wall.

It seemed to make a kind of sense, moreover, being back amid the junk, the discarded pieces of failed lives. So I brought over the piano from home in his van, and squeezed it into the living room, and in the evenings after work — as Droyd, to whom Frank was teaching the rudiments of Panel Beating, hammered away at the kennel he was making for An Evening of Long Goodbyes, and Laura hung pictures of flowers in wooden frames from Habitat, or combed the day’s salvage for treasures that might fit the colour scheme she was devising for the apartment, and beneath the window the pushers pushed and the addicts grovelld, and Frank snored gently, patriarchally in front of the muted television news — I tinkered with fragments of melodies that had come to me, or that perhaps I had heard somewhere before: on Bel’s record player, maybe, the Dylan fellow, or the woman with the grace notes who sang the song about the dishwasher and the coffee percolator. And one day I stopped at the front door and, with the lipstick I had never given back to her, added to the graffiti a bright-red C.

‘Charm the Homeless,’ read a reedy voice behind me. I turned to see a scruffy boy in a sweater. It took me a moment to recognize him without his trolley and his accomplice: and before I could ask him where they had gone, he had scurried away.

I had taken that job, in Frank’s friend’s warehouse: I worked the late shift, from two o’clock till half past ten, readying everything for pick-up the next day. The warehouse was the distribution centre for a company that manufactured uniforms. They made them in Africa then shipped them here to be delivered to various points about the country. My job was to separate them into individual orders: with my billhook plucking each item from rails that went all the way up to the ceiling, packing the goods into boxes I had assembled earlier, checking off names and addresses against triplicate order forms. The only other worker was a deaf-mute called Rosco who generally left me alone. It was peaceful there, among the aisles of empty pants and jackets — like a museum, I thought, a museum of the present. Usually by nine o’clock or so, everything was done; and when I had swept the floor and assembled a few dozen boxes for tomorrow, I would retire to a chair and a rickety writing desk I had stowed away at the end of the nurses’ aisle; and hidden by their crisp white hospital skirts and tunics, begin to write.

On Christmas Eve 1958, the day before she was to return to Hollywood after her four-year absence, Gene Tierney suffered her most total breakdown yet. She had been fine: she had convalesced with her mother in Connecticut; Life and Time had written articles about her to the tune of ‘Reborn Star’ and ‘Welcome Home for Troubled Beauty’. But the night before the flight, quite without warning, she dissolved utterly; and instead of California, she woke — like Dorothy returning from Oz — and found herself in Kansas. This was the Menninger Clinic, her third and last institution. The doctor who ran the clinic didn’t believe in ECT. Instead, Gene was encouraged to do what she wanted: and what she wanted to do, it turned out, was knit. She knitted rugs and pillows. She knitted throws and shawls and full-length dresses. She knitted and knitted for months on end and, gradually, she was restored to herself.

When she finally made it back to Hollywood in 1962, the studio system that created her was long gone, and because of her history, the insurance companies wouldn’t cover her to work. It was Otto Preminger — who’d directed her in two of her best films, Laura and Whirlpool — who bailed her out, threatening his producers that he would quit the picture if she wasn’t given a part, insurance or no insurance. She was given the part: her cameo in Advise and Consent allowed her to complete her contract with Fox. After that she retired to Houston and married a millionaire and never set foot in an institution again.

The doctors speculated that her problems might never have surfaced if she hadn’t chosen to act. She had grown up a society girl and to society she returned: it was only when she stepped before the camera that everything went haywire. It seemed to me, though, that this was missing the point.

There were her men, for one thing. ‘For a beautiful intelligent girl,’ Dana Andrews tells her in Laura , ‘you’ve certainly surrounded yourself with a remarkable collection of dopes.’ She’d always had a weakness for aristocratic types — the disinherited Russian count, the presidential candidate, the billionaire gadabout, others — Howard Hughes for instance, before he crashed his plane in a street in Beverly Hills. They wanted her for the same reason as the studios: her stellar beauty; and just as she did for the studios, she morphed and mutated and recomposed this beauty into the precise form of their desires, until there was nothing of her left.

These relationships, however, were merely variations on a theme that had been set long before with her father, Howard Tierney Sr. Growing up, Gene had worshipped him. He was without doubt a compelling figure: the stern moralist, who brought her to church every Sunday; the financial wizard who had built his family two houses, enlisted them in the best country club in Connecticut, endowed them with servants, horse, boat, sent his daughter to a Swiss boarding school with the daughter of Marlene Dietrich and the future wife of a maharajah.

She worshipped him and through the thirties she watched him dwindle to a man so crippled by debt and the Depression that he took to carrying a gun in his pocket so that if the worst came to the worst and they had nothing left he could kill himself and the family could claim on the insurance. When Gene first decided to act — after that fairy-tale discovery on the Warners’ lot, on the holiday across America with Pat and Howard Jr and Mother — it was with the intention of helping the family, helping him, restoring him to what he had once been.

And so he brokered her first deal, while warning her against the meretriciousness of the movie business; when her mother moved out to Hollywood to chaperone her, he stayed in New York and set up the Belle-Tier Corporation to manage her earnings. She lived within the parameters he set — she drove a small car, made her own clothes — and everything was dandy, until she eloped with Cassini and her mother flew home in disgust to New York and found that her husband had been having an affair with her best friend, whom she had charged with ‘taking care of him’ while she was away. The best friend was the daughter of a railway tycoon and had a fortune of her own: in her, Howard Tierney Sr saw at last a way out of his debts. In fact, this relationship had been going on for some time; in fact, the reason he’d sent his young family on that fated holiday across America in the first place was so that he could spend the summer alone in New York with her; and now, fresh from denouncing his daughter to the press, he announced he was divorcing Gene’s mother and marrying her best friend.