in Fritz popped. Not hot but cold air rushed out of his body. His bad eye developed a tic that grew outsize.
“Grace,” he cried into the telephone, “don’t listen to that idiot who just called. Cancel New York. Get me Laguna! What? Down the coast, dimwit. A house facing the Pacific so I can wade in like Norman Maine at sunset, should Doom itself knock down the door. What? To hide. What good is Paris; the maniacs here would know. But they’d never expect a stupid Unterseeboot Kapitän who hates sunlight to wind up in Sol City, South Laguna, with all those mindless naked bums. Get a limo here now! I expect you to have a house waiting when I reach Victor Hugo’s restaurant at nine. Go!” Fritz slammed down the phone to glare at Maggie. “You coming?”
Maggie Botwin was a nice dish of nonmelting vanilla ice cream. “Dear Fritz,” she said. “I was born in Glendale in 1900. I could go back there and die of boredom or I could hide in Laguna, but all those ‘bums,’ as you call them, make my girdle creep. Anyway, Fritz, and you, my dear young man, I was here every night at three A.M. that year, pedaling my Singer sewing machine, sewing up nightmares to make them look like halfway not so disreputable dreams, wiping the smirk off dirty little girls’ mouths and dropping it in the trash bins behind the badly dented cots in the men’s gym. I have never liked parties, either Sunday-afternoon cocktails or Saturday-night sumo wrestling. Whatever happened that Halloween night, I was waiting for someone, anyone, to deliver me film. It never came. If a car crash happened beyond the wall I never heard. If there was one or a thousand funerals the next week I refused all invitations and cut the stale flowers, here. I didn’t go downstairs to see Arbuthnot when he lived, why should I go see him dead? He used to climb up and stand outside the screen door. I’d look out at him, tall in the sunlight, and say, You need a little editing! And he’d laugh and never come in, just tell the dressmaker tailor lady how he wanted so-and-so’s face, near or far, in or out, and leave. How did I get away with being alone at the studio? It was a new business and there was only one tailor in town, me. The rest were pants pressers, job seekers, gypsies, fortunetelling screenwriters who couldn’t read tea leaves. One Christmas Arby sent up to me a spinning wheel with a sharp spindle and a brass plate on the treadle: “GUARD THIS SO SLEEPING BEAUTY PRICKS NO FINGERS AND GETS NO SLEEP,” it said. I wish I had known him, but he was just another shadow outside my screen door and I already had a sufficiency of shadows in. I saw only the mobs at his memorial trip out of here and around the block to cold comfort farm. Like everything else in life, including this sermon, it needed cutting.” She looked down at her bosom, to hold some invisible beads, hung there for her restless fingers.
After a long silence, Fritz said, “Maggie Botwin will be quiet now for a year!”
“No.” Maggie Botwin fixed me with her gaze. “You got any last notes on the rushes we’ve seen the last few days? You never know, tomorrow we may all be rehired at one-third the salary.”
“No,” I said lamely.
“To hell with that,” said Fritz. “I’m packing!”
My taxi still waited, ticking off astronomical sums. Fritz stared at it with contempt. “Why don’t you learn to drive, idiot?”
“And massacre people in the streets, Fritz Wong style? Is this goodbye, Rommel?”
“Only till the Allies take Normandy.”
I got into the cab, then probed my coat pocket. “What about this monocle?”
“Flash it at the next Academy Awards. It’ll get you a seat in the balcony. What’re you waiting for, a hug? There!” He wrestled me, angrily. “Outen zee ass!”
As I drove away, Fritz yelled: “I keep forgetting to tell you how much I hate you!”
“Liar,” I called.
“Yes,” Fritz nodded and lifted his hand in a slow, tired salute, “—I lie.”
66
“I’ve been thinking about Hollyhock House,” said Crumley, “and your friend Emily Sloane.”
“Not my friend, but go on.”
“Insane people give me hope.”
“What!!!!” I almost dropped my beer.
“The insane have decided to stay on,” Crumley said. “They love life so much that, rather than destroy it, they go behind a self-made wall to hide. Pretend not to hear, but they do hear. Pretend not to see, but see. Insanity says: I hate living but love life. Hate the rules but do like me. So, rather than drop in graves, I hide out. Not in liquor, nor in bed under sheets, nor in a needle’s prick or snuffs of white powder, but in madness. On my own shelf, in my own rafters, under my own silent roof. So, yeah, insane people give me hope. Courage to go on being sane and alive, always with the cure at hand, should I ever tire and need it: madness.”
“Give me that beer!” I grabbed it. “How many of these you had?”
“Only eight.”
“Christ.” I shoved it back at him. “Is all this going to be part of your novel when it comes out?”
“Could be.” Crumley gave a nice, easy, self-satisfied burp and went on. “If you got to choose between a billion years of darkness, no sun ever again, wouldn’t you choose catatonia? You could still enjoy green grass and air that smells like cut watermelons. Still touch your knee, when no one was looking. And all the while you pretend not to care. But you care so much you build a crystal coffin and seal it on yourself.”
“My God! Go on!”
“I ask, why choose madness? So as not to die, I say. Love is the answer. All of our senses are loves. We love life but fear what it does to us. So? Why not give madness a try?”
After a long silence, I said: “Where the hell is all this talk leading us?”
“To the madhouse,” Crumley said.
“To talk to a catatonic?”