Hollywood Gothic Read Free Page B

publication broke. He had won his Oscar a couple of years before for a film Aaron Roth had personally produced. When he tore himself away from his typewriter on the Fourth of July, he was working on an adaptation of Kipling’s The Light That Failed, for which Aaron and Maximus were paying him $250,000. It was never produced but he got into Goldie’s pants that first night, a turn of events which reinforced his basic belief that life is composed of a little of this and a little of that.
    In addition to her natural sense of the absurd and a wonderfully dirty mouth, there was something else very good about Goldie—the way she looked. Challis was reminiscent in those days of a charming character from a George Axelrod comedy, vaguely mid-thirtyish, polished loafers and baggy cashmere sweaters, a tendency to drink too much and to be rather funny when he did; Goldie was in the full flush of her yellow-and-brown California-girl look then, and it hadn’t begun to go stale and come apart like aging hollandaise, the way that particularly delectable look so frequently, so horribly did. Seeing her for the first time, coming off the tennis court with her legs and arms and hair all honey-colored and her mouth jutting in a pout that was going to become awfully familiar, he was a dead duck. It was her manner, too: childish, spoiled, capricious, given an attractive texture by extremes of enthusiasm, high spirits, and anger. You didn’t fall in love with a creature like Goldie Roth. You wanted her as a trophy. There was one immutable truth about the prototype; it was the key to their allure, the cause of their undoing, and it never seemed to change: they liked being trophies. What they wanted was a man feeling lucky and proud to have somehow reached the pinnacle and gotten one of these rare and wonderful and doomed birds of passage for himself. But when the trophy developed a patch of tarnish here and some wine-and-cigarette breath there, when every six months or so brought a deposit of cellulite or some goddamn thing that required hugely expensive treatments by the latest European seer, when suddenly the trophy sat awhile on the shelf … why, then they wondered what it was about them that had become so unlovable. They forgot that they had defined the rules. The process never seemed to change. Challis had seen it happen a hundred times among people he knew. But watching this particular girl, with all the unimaginable tarnish and rust and nastiness just out of sight over the Beverly Hills, all Challis knew was that this blond, tan, tennis-playing trophy was exactly the trophy he’d been looking for.
    Later, when they had been married awhile, he looked up from his typewriter and saw her lying naked in the sun on the deck of their beach house. She had white plastic globes where her eyes should have been and her belly kept tensing, then relaxing, tensing, relaxing. She was doing vaginal isometrics, which were all the rage that year, or so she informed him, and that was when it was getting on toward the bad part. Staying a child was becoming very hard work and the returns were diminishing. It wasn’t enough for her that she looked fine, tawny, lean: she knew by then that being a child of nature and impulse was wearisome, for Challis, for herself, for anybody who knew her. Yet she was lost looking for what role she was going to play next, now that she was over thirty.
    Challis sipped his gin and tonic, listened to the crashing surf, squinted at the sunshine hitting the Malibu stretch of ocean and glaring nervously off a million waves and eddies. You could go blind watching the sunlight on the water, reflecting like an infinity of mirrors. Somebody famous ran past on the beach and waved at him, a sheepdog floundering happily behind, getting his feet wet in the surf. Goldie was listening to a rock radio station, her naked stomach and fingers jerking to the beat. At one time, a time he could barely remember, he’d have gone crazy at the sight of