“Go on.”
“I think I prefer it when I’m not in shock, and the waves are just battering me. I feel better about myself when I’m really, really overwhelmed by the loss. When it’s physical. When it’s uncomfortable. When I want to tear at my clothes.”
“You shouldn’t ever feel bad about yourself, Carmen.”
“I just suppose I’d be a better person if I were inconsolable. If I were hysterical.”
“Someday you’ll play a grieving widow, and you’ll use all of this. Besides…”
“Besides what?”
“Your body and mind are too focused on trying to survive right now to mourn. Grief? It’s a luxury.”
She knew he had more experience with death than anyone she had ever met. She wasn’t sure if he was correct about her specifically, but she knew she would nevertheless use his logic through the long night ahead to help rationalize her behavior.
* * *
.?.?.
There was a mini-golf course on Sepulveda with the usual sorts of obstacles: a waterfall, a windmill, and a hippo. But it also had a model of the Eiffel Tower on one hole and a twelve-foot-high fantasy castle anchoring another: pink bricks, yellow flags, and petunias lining the twenty-foot fairway to the palace entrance.
And that hole had a moat, and it was the moat that mattered if you were playing. The fairway narrowed like an hourglass, and the trick was to putt perfectly straight through the center. If you missed, your ball ricocheted back to the tee; if you tapped it too hard, you’d wind up in the drink.
But it was the castle that mattered to the movie magazine’s art director. His vision? Shirley MacLaine and Carmen Tedesco popping out of the small turret with the nearby hole’s Eiffel Tower right behind them. “It’s perfect,” he said. “The new movie is set in Paris, you two play a couple of chippies, and the Eiffel Tower looks like a giant phallus behind you.” He said this as he stood in the awning of the snack bar, while Shirley and Carmen were seated on the snack bar stools and a pair of women applied their makeup. The young publicist from Reggie’s firm, Jean Cummings, had just brought them each a bottle of Coca-Cola.
The art director was wearing a blue blazer with a Beach Boys T-shirt underneath it. He was probably fifty and had been doing this since the end of the war. Carmen watched how Shirley responded to being called a chippie, but she didn’t seem perturbed. And so Carmen dialed down her own vexation at the word. The truth was, they were playing hookers in the movie, and so chippies was, arguably, a step up.
The photographer, a guy about the same age as the art director, was out by the castle, checking the light. He was wearing khaki pants with more pockets than Carmen had ever seen on a pair of trousers. He looked back at the snack bar and called to them. He asked if Miss MacLaine and her stylist could join him, and so Carmen was left alone with the art director, Jean Cummings, and the woman working on her face.
“Think you’ll ever be in a pic your father-in-law is directing?” the art director asked her now.
Carmen didn’t have to answer right away because the makeup artist, her breath a little sour with coffee, was finishing her eyeliner. It gave Carmen a moment to formulate her response.
“I’d be honored,” she told him after the woman had stepped back to appraise her work. “I’d be honored to be in one of my husband’s movies, too.”
“You ever see the story we did on Rex?” he asked, referring to Felix’s lion of an old man.
“I did,” she answered. She had hoped to steer the conversation back to her husband and decided to try a second time.
But Jean was a step ahead of her. The other woman began, “I think Felix—”
“You remember the photos that went with it?” the art director asked Carmen, cutting off the publicist.
“I do,” Carmen answered. “They were up at the Griffith Observatory. There was one of Rex near a telescope.”
“A massive telescope. Now that was a phallus.” He nodded, pleased that she had remembered it and proud of the image. “Yeah, those pics really worked. It was for that pseudo-science-fiction movie he did. But these ones of you and Shirley we’re getting today? They’ll be even better.”
“They’ll be fantastic,” said Jean. The publicist was wearing a sleeveless black blouse and a skirt with a pattern that looked like it belonged in a Las Vegas casino lobby. Lots of teal and pink and orange blocks bouncing like dice against a white background.
“Why?” Carmen asked. “Why will these be even better?”