Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) (30 page)

“And go where?”

“To a much better place where they’ll give you medicine – the kind of medicine you need, so you won’t have these terrible dreams any more. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea? And I’ve brought your clothes; we can leave right away if you want to.”

He was silent for a long time. Then “Okay,” he said, and she
could feel the happy smiles of Dr. Chadwick and Randolph on her back.

“All you have to do,” she said, “is sign this. Here, I’ve even got a pen.”

“No. Forget it. I’m not signing any more contracts with you and Carl Munchin and Chester Pratt. Make your own half-assed movies; I don’t want any part of ’em. Is that clear?”

“Oh, John, you’re just fooling. I
know
you know better than that. This doesn’t have anything to do with movies. It’s just a piece of paper to make you well.”

And it took twenty minutes or more, but at last there was a scrawl that looked something like “John C. Wilder” on the proper line of the printed form.

“Wonderful,” she said. “Now we’ll get you dressed.”

“I’ll go make a phone call,” Dr. Chadwick said. “Tell them we’re on our way.”

“He ought to have a bath,” Randolph said, “but the last time we tried that it took three men to hold him in the tub. He thought we were trying to drown him. I never heard such yelling and screaming; had complaints from all over the building.”

When he was dressed and standing up he looked better; he looked almost normal, except that it was clear from the fit and hang of his clothes that someone else had put them on for him. Pamela took one arm and Randolph the other, and they guided him carefully out of the room. Chadwick was waiting in the hall.

Randolph went along on the drive to UCLA: he rode in the back seat with Wilder, holding his arm. Chadwick sat in front with Pamela, who drove.

“We going to the airport?” Wilder inquired.

“No, John; I told you. We’re going to a place where you’ll get medicine to make you well.”

“Why we taking Randolph?”

“Because he cares about you. We all care about you, John.”

“In a pig’s ass.”

“That’s no way to talk to a lady,” Randolph said.

She thought she would never find her way through Westwood to the university campus, and then she thought she would never find the building, but Dr. Chadwick was a steadying influence: he guided her into the right parking lot and put the right amount of change in the meter. Then they were all four in the elevator, and then they were in Neuropsychiatrie.

“Rose,” Wilder said. “What the hell’s Rose doing here?”

“If you’ll just come this way,” Dr. Rose said, “I’ll show him to his room.” But he looked nervous as he ushered them through the open part of the ward, where a woman wearing her hair in curlers played Chinese checkers with a young boy who must have weighed four hundred pounds. When they were all in the room that had been prepared for Wilder a nurse appeared with a hypodermic syringe.

“All right, Mr. Wilder,” Rose said, “if you’ll just take off your coat and roll up your—”

“Fuck you, Rose. Go eat your chocolate mints. You’re not
big
enough to shoot me out, and you’re not smart enough either. And fuck
you
, Chadwick, you simpering nigger bastard. Wipe that shit-eating grin off your face and tell your friend to get his black hands off my arm. Motherfuckers! Motherfuckers! And you know what
you
are?” He turned his wild eyes and wet mouth on Pamela. “You’re a
cunt
. You’re a
cunt
. You’re a
cunt
…”

In the end Randolph had to wrestle him to the floor. The nurse brought a straitjacket; Randolph and Chadwick stuffed his arms into the sleeves of the thing, rolled him over and tied them behind him. When the straitjacket was secure they all retreated into the hall and Rose shut the door, which locked with an efficient click.

“He’ll quiet down now,” Chadwick said.

“Not necessarily, doctor,” Randolph said. “Not if
I
know him. He’s liable to go on like this for days.”

“In any case,” Rose said, straightening his coat with trembling hands, “I doubt if we can keep him here.”

It was hard to tell, from the thumping and shuddering of the locked door, whether Wilder was hitting it with his shoulder or his head.

Through friends – and it often surprised him how many friends he had left – Chester Pratt had found a nice little house in the hills. It overlooked a foggy canyon, with the tops of palm trees rustling just below its porch, and it suited him perfectly: a good place to work, a good place to sleep, a good place to sit with a lemon Coke in his hand and watch the sun go down.

All the poison was out of his system now. He was working well, if you could call writing a movie script “working,” and as soon as this job was over he would get back to his second novel. He would have to throw away a lot of what he’d done in New York and almost everything he’d done in Washington – bad work; bad work – but if he was lucky and careful he might finish the book in a year. And it would be good; maybe even better than
Burn All Your Cities
.

Sometimes, bored with Munchin’s screenplay, he would get an idea for the book and drop everything until he’d written it out in the form of a note and stowed it away, face down, on the little pile of other notes that lay under a paperweight on one corner of his desk. And he took a miser’s pleasure in the accumulation of those papers: he liked to pick them up and test their thickness with his thumb. He was doing that when the phone rang.

“Hi, baby,” he said. “… Hell, that’s okay; take your time. I
won’t expect you till I see you…. Okay.”

And he’d scarcely gotten settled at his desk when it rang again. “… Oh, hi, Bill,” he said. “… Tonight? Well, of
course
we’d like to; it’s just that I don’t know what time Pam’ll get back here. She just called and said she’ll be late. Well, look, let’s leave it this way: if you haven’t heard from me by six, that means we can make it. The Beverly Brown Derby at seven thirty…. Okay, Bill, thanks for calling. We’ll look forward to it…. Right. Okay, Bill….”

Finally he was free of the phone and back at the manual labor of Munchin’s screenplay. How did a nice middle-class advertising man go crazy? Simple: he did it in a hundred and twenty-five pages of script, the first third of which were an easy rewrite of Jerry Porter’s turgid little Bellevue piece.

At first he had planned to live in Hollywood only until he’d made enough money to go back East, but recently he’d changed his mind. He would stay here. This was, after all, the place where his luck had changed: the gentle climate, the good house, the lucrative job with Munchin, and best of all the marvelous coincidence of finding his little New Frontier girl again and getting her back. He didn’t quite trust her – she had left him before and might leave him again; and even though it had worked to his advantage he didn’t much like the way she’d treated this poor bastard Wilder – but it was fine to have her for the time being. She was like the glass of cold milk he drank at eleven o’clock each morning: she made him feel young and strong and full of good health. The future would take care of itself. He had learned in AA to take things a day at a time.

He worked without interruption for two or three hours; then he heard her car pulling up to a stop outside and got up from the desk.

“
God
, what an afternoon,” she said. “I don’t know if I can tell you about it or not.”

“Sure you can tell me,” he said, “after you’ve had a drink.”

He fixed the drinks – bourbon on the rocks for her and a lemon Coke for himself – while she arranged herself in one of the canvas chairs on the porch.

“Oh, lovely,” she said after her first sip. “God, I needed that.” And then she told him everything: Chadwick, El Dorado, UCLA, and Rose’s saying “I doubt if we can keep him here.”

“So where will they take him?”

“I don’t know.” She closed her eyes and held the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger. “Oh, Chet, I don’t know, and I know it’s awful of me but I don’t much care. They’re doctors; they’ll work something out. At least he’s in good hands.”

“Yeah,” Chester Pratt said. And he guessed she was right – there probably wasn’t anything she could have done – but he had to study her face for a second before deciding he still liked her.

“… And I can’t help feeling this enormous sense of relief,” she was saying. “His problems are just – beyond me, that’s all; too much for me. He needs professional help, and that’s what he’ll get.”

The sun was low. The light on the porch was the color of dry vermouth, and it flattered her face. How could anyone dislike a girl with cheekbones and eyelashes like that?

“Are we eating in or out tonight?” she asked.

“Out. We’re meeting Bill Costello at seven thirty.”

“The awful little television man, you mean? The ‘Let’s Ask Daddy’ man?”

“Come on, Pam, that’s not fair. He’s a good friend. God only knows where I’d be if he hadn’t been my sponsor, first in New York and then here. He’s done more for me than I can ever—”

“Oh, that’s nonsense. You did it yourself.”

“I never could have done it without his help. Besides, he’s getting older and he’s lonely. The least we can do is—”

“All right. If you’re in one of your sentimental moods there’s nothing I can do about it. Do I have time for a shower?”

“Sure.”

“What’ll I wear?”

“Doesn’t matter. You always look good.”

But nothing prepared him for the way she looked when she came out of the bedroom wearing a short, backless dinner dress: she looked stunning. He wanted to tear the dress off, pick her up and carry her back to the bed; instead he settled for a courtly little kiss on the neck.

“Oh, Chet,” she said, stretching up on tiptoe to receive the kiss. “You’re so nice and tall.”

Janice Borg agreed with her husband that Southern California was much less interesting, much less stimulating than the northern part of the state. In San Francisco they had stayed in the Fairmont Tower; they had ridden the cable cars and visited North Beach, where they’d browsed in the City Lights Bookstore and sipped espresso in an Italian café that featured old Caruso recordings. Then, in keeping with the leisurely pace of this long and happy summer vacation, they had taken their time driving down the coast. Janice pronounced Big Sur the most utterly beautiful place she had ever seen, and Paul made her laugh by saying she had better look hard and remember it well, because there would be nothing but plastic and palm-lined squalor when they got to L.A.

What neither of them mentioned, because they had discussed it thoroughly before leaving New York, was that she would want time alone in Los Angeles to go and visit her former husband.

It was 1970, a troubled year in many ways but one in which Janice Borg could count her blessings. The unspeakable war in Vietnam was still going on, but she thanked God for Tommy’s student deferment. Richard Nixon had become President – a thing that could almost certainly never have happened if Robert Kennedy had lived – but Paul said he might grow in the job.

Paul had been silent for many miles when they turned off the coast highway onto Sunset Boulevard, and his profile looked a trifle grim, but Janice knew better than to interrupt his silences. They often meant he was thinking about Natalie, and that was understandable: there were times, less often, when she was quiet because she was thinking of John. They never lasted long, though, these little breakdowns in communication; that was one of the many wonderful things about their marriage.

“Which sounds better?” he said at last. “The Beverly Wilshire or the Beverly Hilton?”

“You decide. You always know best about hotels.”

He always knew best about everything. She didn’t say that aloud for fear of sounding silly, but it was true. She had never known anyone whose judgment was so totally reliable.

“Oh, I think this is charming,” she said as the palm trees swept past their car, and when they pulled up to the Hilton she said it was “lovely.”

Their room was lovely too, and so was their dinner; everything was lovely until the following afternoon, when the time came for her to leave Paul and make the drive alone out to Camarillo.

“I won’t go if you don’t want me to,” she said. “He’ll never know we were here.”

“No,” Paul told her. “You’d better go. It’s the right thing to do.”

It wasn’t that she dreaded seeing him as she negotiated the Freeways and then the dreary local roads, it was simply that she didn’t know what to expect. That was what made sweat break out in her scalp and under her arms.

The state hospital looked pleasant enough from a distance, but up close you could tell what it was. Patients dressed in grey or green twill work clothes idled in the sunshine around the main
door of John’s building, and on the lawn near the parking lot a couple of heavy, slow-moving parents were bathing their grown son. They had removed his twill shirt to wash the upper portions of him, using a soaped washcloth and a plastic bucket of steaming water; then, after his father had turned him to face the building, his mother dropped his pants and carefully swabbed between his legs.

“Hey lady, gimme a dime for a cuppa coffee?” a toothless old man asked her in the doorway, and before she got to the elevator another old man plucked at her sleeve.

“Hey lady, gimme a dime for a piece a cake?”

The linoleum of the waiting room outside John’s ward was being mopped, and the angry-looking black man who mopped it talked steadily to himself as he worked. There were only three or four other visitors sitting at chrome-and-plastic tables around the room. A short, grey-haired man in green came out, and she didn’t recognize him until he drew a chair out from her table.

“Hello, Janice,” he said.

It wasn’t only that he’d turned grey; his face had gone slack and his eyes bland. He looked like a middle-aged man to whom nothing had ever happened.

“It’s good to see you, John,” she said. “You’re looking very well.”

“You too. What’re you doing in California?”

“Just a vacation.” There was a pause. “Tom said to give you his love. And wait – look.” It was a relief to busy herself with her handbag. “Here, I’ve brought you some pictures of him.” She laid three snapshots on the table. “I took these at Harvard. Isn’t he a fine-looking young man? I know his hair looks a little strange, but that’s the way they’re all wearing it now.”