“Marlon Brando,” I said, “replaced Montgomery Clift in Reflections in a Golden Eye.”
Marthe nodded, breathing deeply, and not in the yoga way. Then she blinked, very slowly, asking me to go on.
“Robert Mitchum replaced Burt Lancaster in Maria’s Lovers.”
Her breath came quicker. Marthe took down one strap of the leotard, then the other. She slowly pulled the garment to her waist. She’d been naked with the ocelot, too, and younger, but she’d never been more beautiful.
For the first time in my life, trivia was someone else’s aphrodisiac. She didn’t meet so much, as she’d said, the nerd.
“Go on,” she said.
“And …”
I racked my brain. The only problem was: I couldn’t remember a single other fact.
It didn’t matter. Marthe had laid down on the mat and pulled me to her.
“Just watch out for my legs,” she said. “They’re killing me.”
I promised to be careful. I hadn’t been with anyone since my Ambersons adventure. Marthe didn’t need to know that, though I sensed she would have understood. What she was doing was partly from opportunism—she wanted the movie, after all—but it was partly from desire, too. Thor could hardly raise his racket now.
No matter what I’d intended when I came in, I wasn’t going anywhere, not anymore. If that made me a schmuck, I had been called worse things.
“My film greek,” she murmured.
“Geek,” I whispered back.
She took the information in.
“Geek,” she repeated, unless I closed her mouth gently with my own.
Soon I didn’t care about the noises coming from upstairs.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU’RE STAYING?” DENA ASKED, THE NEXT DAY.
I found myself stammering, trying to sound resolute. “Just for a while. I think I can … you know, use things here to my advantage.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. A morning shower had failed to remove Marthe’s scent from me, and I closed my eyes, inhaling it.
“Well, okay,” Dena said, unsurely, “if you think it’s safe.”
It was, of course, unsafe. Especially considering what I now held in my hands: the Federal Express package. I was lucky it had arrived before any of my dissolute friends had gotten up.
“I’m too jazzed to even open it,” I said.
“I know how you feel.” It seemed Dena was being infected by the Clown disease, too. “Just be careful with it.”
“Believe me, I will.”
There was a longer pause. Then Dena’s tone changed once again to the unpleasantly maternal. “I sent it to you, Roy, because you’re the most knowledgeable—and trustworthy—person about this subject that I know. But if there’s something else going on in L.A. now … I wish you’d tell me.”
I sighed. I could have just fled with the tape back to New York, to familiar sources and surroundings. But I had lied to myself that there was no harm in remaining. And then I lied to Dena.
“There’s no harm in remaining,” I said.
All I could think about was the way Marthe had kicked away her leotard, sending it upon the bed we hadn’t used. I could still see vague fissures from the yoga mat on my legs, arms, and back. It was a minute before I remembered that I might have The Day the Clown Cried. And that surprised even me.
—
Of course, who knew whether I had it? The ragged, banged-up tape, once I opened the bag and saw it, could have been anything. It was as much a relic as my Hollywood friends, and about as poorly preserved.
I e-mailed Abner that I might have Clown. Then, after leaving an elliptical note for Marthe, I walked up to the nearest thoroughfare—Olive Avenue, it turned out—and called a cab from a pay phone in a mini-mall.
When the driver heard where I was headed—“Santa Monica, please”—he smiled, bemused. Taking a rube on a lengthy trip in bumper-to-bumper traffic would pad his pocket nicely. But I didn’t feel safe watching it in Troy’s house. I clutched the tape as tightly as I would my child, as I made my way to check it out.
—
The promenade in Santa Monica was home to any number of overpriced restaurants and gift shops. I moved uneasily among the tubby tourists and emaciated homeless who mingled on the mall like two competing occupying armies.
I was trying to find an independent video store that catered to the college crowd. I intended to consult a trivial man I heard worked as a clerk there, having just been thrown out of UCLA. A trivial boy, I should say: Kent Moreno was only thirteen. He had lied about his age to get the job.
I found him atop a ladder in The Video Hole, rearranging gift DVDs of Buster Keaton silents. The mailbag with the tape was jammed into my armpit like a block of gold.
“What you got there, Roy?” said a voice with a faint Puerto Rican accent.
I wasn’t aware Kent was even looking down at me. But he, despite his age—and string-bean shape, which made him look even younger—always seemed to know everything. That accounted for his early college admission and, it appeared, his early dismissal.
“I’ll let you know in a minute,” I said.
