Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (42 page)

Junior nodded. He looked so much like Irving, hair so dark brown it looked black in the low light, eyes hooded and deep. “That sounds good, Mom.”

Laura missed her husband. She rested her palm against Junior’s cheek. He had a few days’ worth of stubble, but still looked handsome to her, always handsome. There were home movies from when Junior was a baby, movies that Irving had had the studio make, and she wondered where they were. Boxed up in the film archives along with everything else. Laura wanted to show her son the way they had all looked as a family, how happy they had been. She could never adequately
describe the look Irving had had when Junior was born, the look he’d had when Junior took his first jerking steps. Laura wanted all of it back, every moment, so that she could live it all over again. She let her hand rest against her son’s face until he felt embarrassed and pulled away.

I
t was never good news when the phone rang in the middle of the night. No one ever called in the middle of the night to tell you that they loved you—it couldn’t have been Junior; he was at home. Something must be wrong with her mother, or Josephine, or one of Clara’s children. Laura rolled over and grabbed blindly for the receiver.

“Hello?” Laura cleared her throat. Her heart was beating so quickly that she could hardly believe she’d been asleep just a few moments earlier. Hearts shouldn’t speed up that quickly, she thought. That was how people got killed. “Hello?”

“Ms. Lamont?” The voice on the other end of the line was tinny and measured, a professional person. There was no hurry there.

“Yes?”

“Ms. Lamont, this is the Los Angeles Police Department. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. We’ve just picked someone up, and we need you to identify the body.”

“The body?” Laura could suddenly make out everything in the
room—the paperweight, the ashtray, the chair legs, the open closet, the door to the bathroom. Her body hummed with adrenaline.

“I’m afraid it’s your husband, Ms. Lamont.”

“Irving? What happened to Irving?” Laura sucked in sharply, as if she’d been struck. When she was woken in the middle of the night, there was only one person who’d ever truly held that title. Once her breath returned, Laura felt her midsection wobble in and out, like a dog panting in the sun, an involuntary movement her body was making in order to regulate her temperature. She needed to know what had happened.

“Uh, no, ma’am. The person in question is Mr. Pitts? Mr. Gordon Pitts? I’m sorry, ma’am, but you were listed here as his wife.”

Laura let out a loud, involuntary noise that started somewhere around her gut and made its way out her throat.

“Ma’am?”

“I’m sorry,” Laura said. She exhaled, a nervous sound that she knew made her sound like a harpy. “Yes, I was married to Gordon Pitts. What’s happened to him?”

The detective coughed. Laura could picture him: a young man sitting awake all through the night, having to make these kinds of calls. She felt sick to her stomach for her reaction.

“It seems to have been an accidental overdose, ma’am. Are you able to come into the station to identify the body? We’re at the Central Community police station on East Sixth Street.”

“Of course,” Laura said. “I’ll be there in an hour.” She hung up the phone, but didn’t move for several minutes. Laura kept her hand on the phone, as though holding it down would take back everything she’d felt in the few moments that she’d thought that Irving was still alive, somehow brought to life by the phone in the middle of the night. She stayed as still as possible, waiting for her breathing to
return to normal, and then Laura stood up and slowly got dressed. She slipped out quietly, careful not to wake Junior in the next room.

Gordon had been found on a bus stop bench. The women who found him, two housekeepers at a nearby hotel, had at first thought that he was sleeping and kept their distance. One of the women had finally noticed that Gordon wasn’t moving, and spoke to him. When he didn’t speak back, she spoke louder, and when the woman approached Gordon and gingerly put her hand on his hand, she found his flesh cold and hard. The women ran to the nearest pay phone and called 911. The police relayed the information to Laura without any extra sugarcoating—the gentlemen understood that she was not distraught, and so just gave her the facts straight. Gordon had overdosed on heroin. He had been dead on the bench for at least a few hours, and all evidence seemed to indicate that he had been sleeping outside for much longer than that.

It was necessary for her to visually identify the body before the conversation progressed. Laura felt as if she were on a field trip in school. There were many parts of the police station she had never imagined—secret hallways, bright overhead lights despite the late hour, cold metallic surfaces. When the officer led Laura into the room with Gordon’s body prone on a table, she held her breath, both for fear of the smell (there wasn’t any) and for fear of what she might see. The officer unzipped the body bag far enough to show Laura Gordon’s head and shoulders. There was no doubt that the person before her was Gordon Pitts, and yet Laura felt so distant from him, and from her life with him, that she could not be sure that he was he and she was she and that they were not perfect strangers. His cheeks were caved in, and Laura was sure there wasn’t a tooth left in his mouth. Not only did Gordon not look like Florence anymore, he didn’t even look like himself.

“I see,” Laura said. “And what happens to the body?”

“Well,” the officer said, suddenly looking down at his shoes, “I’m afraid that’s your responsibility. Mr. Pitts had you listed as his wife. It took us a while to find you. That was until…Well, my mother is a great fan of yours, and that’s how we were able to locate your whereabouts.” The policeman was Florence’s age, or younger. He seemed nervous. Laura was sure that no one ever got used to doing this kind of thing. She put her hand on his arm and steadied them both.

“Oh,” Laura said. She forgot how affecting celebrity could be, forgot that her own face could matter to strangers. Her life as an actress felt like it had happened to someone else, someone young and lucky, Elsa Emerson’s ghost. “I see.” The officer zipped Gordon’s face back up, away from view, and led Laura out of the room.

There were several options: Laura could pay for Gordon’s burial herself; she could send him to a pauper’s grave; she could cremate him and scatter the ashes somewhere meaningful, as if such a place existed. Then she could tell the children, or she could pick one option and never tell anyone. In the end, Laura decided it would be best to pay for a grave somewhere nearby, in the same cemetery as Irving. That way the children could visit if they wanted to. She made the arrangements by telephone from the police station, and then drove herself home in the early morning light. As Laura turned back off Sunset Boulevard, the smells of car exhaust and freshly mowed lawns coming through the car’s open windows, she felt herself begin to hiccup. She wasn’t crying for Gordon, not exactly. She was crying for the children, and because even if she hadn’t loved him the way she loved Irving, Gordon was the reason she was in Los Angeles. Without him, she—
Elsa
—might never have left Door County. She might have gone to Chicago, or New York, or Paris. Laura pulled the car over to the side of the road. Only the gardeners were out this early, and the pink dawn light was just starting to cling to the roofs of her neighbors’
houses. Laura rested her elbows on the steering wheel and leaned forward, until her forehead rested against the wheel too. She stayed there until cars began to drive by with more frequency, which meant that Junior would be awake soon, wondering where she was.

I
t was Harriet who saw the notice in the paper. Laura had given up reading the trades and the glossies and watching the local news—it was better to be in the dark.

“Laura, did you know about this?” Harriet said, holding up a section. She’d come over for Sunday brunch prepared by the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the two women sat at a table in the coffee shop. Laura had to put on her glasses to read it, but the large photo was instantly recognizable—Gardner Brothers Studio. The black-and-white photo showed the tall main gate, the studio’s name in large letters looming overhead.

“What is it?” Laura asked. It must be Louis, the old man himself finally gone, she thought. What else would make the papers?

It wasn’t Louis Gardner, but it was a death. The whole studio had been bought by an outfit called the TransMedia Corporation, and there was going to be an auction right there on stage twenty-seven in Hollywood. There were twenty thousand items being auctioned off during the month of May, everything that wasn’t bolted to the ground. Even though Laura hadn’t been under contract at the studio for more than twenty years, she could still see every piece of that lot in her mind, feel the chumminess of the canteen, the whole lot like an office building without any walls, with girls tap-dancing down the fake streets. From where she sat, Hollywood was a happy hallucination, old-fashioned as a dinosaur. It would be easier to think she’d made it all up. Laura thought about all those things up for sale—the dresses
she’d worn, the umbrellas she’d twirled, a pair of Irving’s glasses, a pile of scripts she might well have tossed into the wastebasket—and wished them luck out there in the universe, with no one like Louis or Irving to look out for them. It was as if all of them—the actors, the directors, the grips and best boys—as if
they
were up for auction too, just waiting for someone to make a bid, to say, “You know, I bet that old bird’s still got life in her yet.” The proceeds would go to a brand-new TransMedia hotel in Las Vegas, a shining tower in the middle of the desert, with enough rooms for everyone who was a member of the Screen Actors Guild.

Laura put the newspaper down and asked the waitress to hand her the telephone. She dialed Ginger’s number with one finger.

Ginger & Bill’s Hoedown Happy Hour
was still in reruns every day, despite the fact that they hadn’t filmed a new episode in ten years. Suddenly it was quaint to have a television show in black-and-white, and children younger than Clara’s, who were no longer children, after all, watched it daily after school. When Ginger’s housekeeper answered the telephone, the dogs were yapping in the background, all four of Ginger’s white toy poodles. After a moment, Ginger came to the phone.

“It’s over. Did you see?” Laura knew she wouldn’t have to explain.

“Are you going to buy anything?”

“What, like a souvenir?”

“I almost want to go buy all my old lipsticks. Ha! As if there’s any left. No one can say I wasn’t thrifty.” Ginger’s full-throated laugh made Laura feel like she’d just drunk a giant mug of hot chocolate.

“I wouldn’t want to be seen there,” Laura said. “After everything.”

“Sweetie, let me tell you something. Hollywood loves a comeback.”

Now it was Laura’s turn to laugh. “Do you know how old I am?”

“In fact, I do. Here’s what I want you to do, Laura Lamont. You
probably saw every play known to man when you were a kid, right? With your parents? I bet you knew all the parts, right? I want you to write down all your favorite parts for old ladies, even ladies you think you’re too young to play, and then you find somewhere to play them.” A dog yapped. “The puppies agree.”