Skyscape (32 page)

Loretta Lee was keeping secrets.

35

“Someone with
Good Morning America
was on the line,” said Loretta Lee, “wanting to get footage of Margaret and Curtis hugging and kissing when she shows up. I chewed them out so bad they actually apologized.”

“I'll get his ass fired, whoever it was,” said Patterson, in a bored tone.

“It was a her.”

“You faxed everybody and God that statement already, right?” said Patterson. “The one about Margaret joining her husband for a nice long visit, the need for the continuing therapeutic solitude.…”

“And the continuing quiet essential and curative. Sure. And everybody figures that you owe Margaret reassurance, and she'll get it and maybe have like a second honeymoon out here, with you helping them with the rough parts.”

“Sounds kind of fun, doesn't it?”

“I don't see why you have to bring her all the way out here, Red, not really.” She did have the sense to hesitate, unsure whether she should pursue the subject.

He did not encourage her.

She kept talking. “At least, her visit could be short. She could just fly in the way Bruno Kraft did, take a look, and leave, right?”

They were outside in the night, sitting beside the pool, sipping spearmint tea. The pool lights were pretty, Patterson thought, the ripples illuminated from within. You had to give those early Southern California designers credit. They had a good idea of how moguls and starlets ought to live. A person who could afford it could live in a California that was just as glamorous as it was supposed to be.

The surface of the pool was blemished by a small upwelling where the water from the filter surfaced. It was hours after Bruno's call from Margaret's apartment. Kraft's cultivated delivery, like the voice-over in an ad for expensive cars, had described Margaret's threats as though they were of mere interest. The press were already aware that by this time tomorrow night Margaret would be listening to the purling waters of Owl Springs.

“You didn't like Margaret?” said Patterson, examining his fingernails in the shivering light from the pool.

“I look forward to seeing her again,” said Loretta Lee. She sounded okay, but something bothered her.

Maybe she hadn't been such a good actress after all, thought Patterson. “There's no reason,” he said, “for you to feel threatened by Margaret.”

“Of course there isn't.”

“And there's no reason to feel threatened by me.”

“Of course not, Red. I wouldn't feel threatened by you under any circumstance. What a thing to say. I just wonder why you're letting her visit.”

“Kindness,” said Patterson.

Loretta Lee said nothing.

But having used the word “threat” and “Margaret” in the same brief span of time exposed Patterson's anxieties, if only to himself.

“We'll take good care of Margaret,” said Patterson. “She's a charming woman. We'll make her feel that she's a part of this place. She'll never want to leave.”

“I'll be glad,” said Loretta Lee, “when we can go back to the way things used to be.”

“I thought you wanted me to rest.”

“I don't call this rest.”

Patterson guessed that it was three hours before dawn. He looked up at the stars, and there, timing it just right, was a meteor. Just a quick flash—you didn't see it and you saw it, all at once.

“I'm starting to have trouble again,” she said. “Like in the old days.” She was wearing very little in the way of clothing, something see-through and held with a bow at the neck. “I stop in the middle of doing something and wonder.”

Bishop's bedroom light had been out a long time. The man kept a pilot's habits, brutality sublimated into the care he took with airplanes. A creature of some sort whispered through the air, a soft sound, a stocking tossed across a floor. Bats, thought Patterson, or one of the owls.

“You remember,” said Patterson, “that stockbroker I had on the show last year, the man who never slept.”

“What a dull man. Jesus. The only interesting thing about him was that he never put his head on a pillow.”

“He said he didn't miss it.”

“But you got him to admit that he did miss it. You got him to admit that he really did sleep, but while he was in the middle of doing other things, little tiny naps, and what he really wanted was to lie down in a big bed under a quilt with the rain on the roof.”

“People never tell the truth,” said Patterson. “At best, they tell a lie that resembles the truth, like an insect that looks like a twig.”

“You've always underrated my intelligence, Red.”

Sometimes he thought Loretta Lee would never shut up. “You're joking.”

“At the same time you plugged it in and used it, like some sort of kitchen appliance.”

He had known for a long time that some day Loretta Lee was going to be more trouble than she was worth, although if you ran a spreadsheet on her she still looked attractive enough.

When Patterson made no remark, she added, “Is Margaret going to help Curtis—help him paint the picture?”

“I am taking Mrs. Newns under my wing.” He thought that image would be the sort of thing Loretta Lee would understand, obvious and simplistic. A big rooster protecting the little hen.

“But it will help Curtis, too, right?”

“I think you really should be going to bed, Loretta Lee. Your voice has that scratchy sound it gets when you're tired.”

“Sometimes you talk to me in that fatherly way and it thrills me,” she said. “Other times it just pisses me off.”

“It's the adolescent in you, full of feeling, empty of understanding.”

“Tell me what's happening here, Red. I trust you.”

He could always just drown her here in the pool, he thought. Unthinkable, of course. Besides, she was as strong as a young moose. He kept his voice gentle. “Those two statements don't go together.”

“Let me be a part of your plans.”

“Are you really ready for that, do you think?”

“You know I only want to help you.”

“But that was always your problem wasn't it?” he said. “You could have relaxed and made a little cigarette money, and retired by now married to—”

“To what? What was I going to do with my life?”

“You thought I was the answer. ‘I know what I'll do. I can't manage my own life, but I sure can handle Red Patterson's.'”

“Do I really sound like that? One of those accents? I worked hard to get rid of it.”

“Nothing wrong with a little twang.”

She must have mistaken his tone. Or maybe she sensed that this was her last stand. Patterson knew that Loretta Lee would never have marched into the Little Bighorn with anything less than a machine gun. She put an arm around him.

She whispered, “Make me feel better.”

They went inside. They tiptoed, as though afraid to wake a crowded household.

She led him by the hand into her bedroom, and he was surprised to see new prints on the wall, cinnamon-red prints of Cézanne hillsides. Patterson smiled. Loretta Lee was trying to learn something about art.

When they first met, her pubic hair had been shaved, in preparation for a starring role, under the name Beverly Pasadena, in a movie with a good deal of action but featuring one character after another with remarkably simplistic motivation.

Patterson had rescued her from so much sleaze, and here she was, naked, slipping into the satin sheets, perhaps a little disappointed when the only act of affection Patterson was prepared to offer was a glass of water from the spring and four beet-dark Seconals, the old, bad drug, the purple bombers that had taken so many movie careers into the permanent sweet night.

But she was like a picture, a pinup on the men's room wall, pink and brunette. Well, a little carnal play wouldn't do any harm. It might relieve a little tension in both of them.

“I've been good for you, haven't I, Red?” she whispered into his ear.

He did have a lingering fondness for Loretta Lee, thought Patterson, as he eased himself into her, letting himself take his time, waiting for her to ask him to
hurry, hurry, please hurry up
, just like she used to.

After all, Patterson thought, what was the act of love but the power to give pleasure, and to forestall it. Loretta Lee must realize this, and fear it: the difficulty was that love was not enough.

He knew how to work her body so it gave them both pleasure. Later, after he had made her gasp
please please
until it was nearly a scream, he lay there next to her in the dark. He could feel her stirring against the weight of the barbituate, working back up to him. “You'll tell me what you're going to do, won't you, Red?”

“Of course I will,” he said.

Paul Angevin had warned him years ago. A psychiatrist sees himself as magic, but he tempers this sense of power with respect for his patients and knowledge of his own shortcomings.

Paul Angevin had gone to various medical experts, and collared network executives, trying to stir up opinion against the show. Paul had told everyone it was a bad idea, a sick plan, talk-show glitz coupled with the needs of real people to be healed. Paul had been a troubled man himself, a heavy smoker, a man afflicted with psychosomatic tics, rashes, illnesses. But Paul had been earnest, and people had listened to him.

A televised psychiatrist, Paul had written in his last memo, “cut off from the council of colleagues by their inevitable envy and his own vanity, trapped in the rich-oxygen of adulation, will fatten into a power he can use but not control.” The show had begun by then, and Patterson had already experienced the confidence the show pumped into him.

She was asleep. Patterson was out of bed, back into his clothes. He listened to her slow breathing. He didn't have to search very hard. He opened the nightstand drawer. The light was not good, but he could see a box of suntan-shade panty hose, an electric razor. And several microcassettes, the kind Loretta Lee used in her tape recorder.

Patterson hurried quietly through the corridors. In his own bedroom Patterson popped a cassette into his little black Sony and sat listening.

Loretta Lee was saying it was so hot out by the pool that the lizards ran high up off the ground, as far as their legs would stretch. She went on to describe a dream about the lizards. “Someone's in this big house,” Loretta Lee was saying. “And I know they're going to find me, so I try to hide, but all these lizards are in the way, all over the floor—”

Patterson worked the fast-forward. Loretta Lee's voice became a high-pitched scramble. He switched it back to normal speed, and Loretta Lee was saying that sometimes she felt afraid. “Red doesn't look so good,” she was saying. “He looks tired and tense and—”

Patterson worked the fast-forward again, whisking through what he gathered were more unflattering descriptions of himself, and more unremarkable dreams. Dreams, Patterson reflected, were considerably overemphasized as a source of psychological insight. There was a description of the house, how empty it felt. Loretta Lee talked about the locked silence of the studio.

“I've never seen Red like this,” Loretta Lee's recorded voice said. “I look at him and I think—he needs help. I think maybe if things get worse here I might have to do something.” There was a click. She had shut off the tape. When the tape was recording again she wasn't talking. “If things get worse,” she said at last, “I might have to call in someone who can help.” There was the sound of Loretta breathing. “Some kind of doctor. Some kind of authority—”

Patterson switched off the recorder.

He had hoped he would find out how innocent she was. Well, that was another pet illusion he wouldn't bother feeding any more. Loretta Lee had kept a diary off and on for a long time. He should have cured her of the habit.

Maybe she had been contacted by one of those tabloids. He could imagine the conversation.
Just keep a daily record of what goes on down there and sign right here at the bottom of this page
. Maybe someone from another television network took her out for a drink a few weeks ago, bought her dinner and showed her his checkbook.

It didn't matter who had bought her. Patterson had a lot to do.

He found his way to the studio, unlocked the door and when he was inside the big room he felt the wonder of the place, the presence of the painting. He switched on the light.

He locked the door behind him. He stepped toward the painting. It was draped with muslin, shrouded. Bruno Kraft had stood right here. Right here—and he had seen the truth.

Paul had been wrong, ultimately. Television was life. Bring all the people who have lost themselves back to the harbor. Back to life. It was not that difficult.

I have come to show you all how to leave the past. I will show you how to take one step after another upon the supple uneven surface, the sea. And you will walk
. He had heard himself saying those very words on his first show, stimulated by the presence of the cameras, unsteady before a half-empty audience, most of whom were shills, there on free tickets pressed on them by the publicity department. Television had taught Patterson that anything was possible.

Patterson whisked away the sheet. The painting changed the light in the room. Television was life—but art was something more, something that out-lasted hope and doubt.

The painting was far from finished. There was so much emptiness here, so much left to be filled out, or captured, as if a painting was like one of Michelangelo's sculptures, already in existence and waiting to be freed.

And yet, Patterson was a doctor, a pilot, a man who knew the value of being. It would be a good idea to drive out into the desert and just make sure that everything was okay.

He replaced the shroud and left the studio, testing the lock. He paused before a door down the hall, stood before it, and actually had the key in the lock.