Rhode Island Blues. Fay Weldon

The tabloids had discovered Leo Fox, our handsome young lead, was gay: Olivia, his fictional girlfriend, had declared mid-interview in one of the broadsheets that she was a lesbian. Harry was good enough to remark that in the circumstances I had done a good job with the sex scenes. I refrained from retorting that had he supplied me with twenty per cent more footage I could have made a better job of it still: Clive failed to refrain from remarking that perhaps the casting director and the PR people should be sacked: the dotty woman from wardrobe insisted on being present though obviously there was absolutely nothing she could do about anything at this stage. Harry’s stubbly chin brushed against my bare shoulder rather frequently. The shoulder was not meant to be enticing: the air conditioning had broken down, naturally, and the temperature was way above normal. I was down to my camisole, and wore no bra. I don’t have breasts of any great weight or size.

      

      ‘You’ve got beautiful skin,’ he said, at one juncture, while we were rewinding. I could feel the idiot lady from wardrobe bristle. Sexual harassment! But it wasn’t like that. He had just noticed I had beautiful skin—I do: very pale, like Angel’s—and remarked upon it: it was a statement of fact, not a come-on. I simply do not rate in the love lives of these people: they are married to women to die for, in the 99.9 percentile when it comes to brains, beauty and style, and for their lovers they have the most beautiful creatures in the world to choose from. That the girl—or boyfriends are very often pains in the butt, shaped by cosmetic surgery, drug-addicted or compulsive kleptomaniacs, or solipsistic to a degree, or could hardly string two words together or work the microwave—forget an editing deck—is neither here nor there. Hollywood lovers have legs long enough to wrap around the likes of Harry’s neck: brains are the opposite of what is required, which is rough trade of any gender, though with the edges smoothed over, to serve as a trophy to success. The brave deserve the fair. I might have a good skin and Harry might notice it but I was still just part of the production team talent.

      

      The trouble is that if you mix with people like this, share space with them and common purpose, the men you meet in the club or the pub or in the lending library just don’t seem up to much. Even Clive, coming into a room, slight and gay and bad-tempered-looking as he is, and the boring end of the business, seems to suck all the vitality out of the space and take it for himself, leaving everyone else feeling and looking vapid.

      

      If I went home alone from parties it was from lack of interest in any man present—there was a whole new race about of slender, shaven-headed, just-about-non-gay men in dark clothing, all laying tentative hands upon one’s arm, with liquid, suggestive, cocainedriven eyes—but who cared? They were as likely to be as interested in a free breakfast as in free sex: a dildo would be as provocative, and less given to complaint.

      

      The day proceeded: there was no lunch break: at one stage Harry threw coffee across the room, complaining about its quality. Clive was in danger of rubbing Danish pastry into the sound deck, and I pointed it out to him, and from his expression got the feeling I would never be employed again by him—not that I cared, I hated the film by this stage, a load of pretentious rubbish, and anything he ever made would have the same loathsome quality, so why should I ever want any job he had to offer? Harry laughed when I said as much: I tossed my head and my hair (red and crinkly) fell out of its tough restraining ponytail and Harry said ‘Wow!’; the scriptwriter banged upon the door and was refused entry, the wardrobe woman pointed out that she had spent $100,000 dollars unnecessarily, since I had abandoned the entire Versace sequence, and I asked her to leave, since obviously she had only been hanging around using up our valuable oxygen in order to make this stupid point—in a $30,000,000 film what was $100,000 dollars—and she slammed out.

      

      The credits and titles people became hysterical and complained we had left them no time, which we hadn’t: while we were mid-provisional-dub the composer—they always take things literally—who was rumoured to have OD’d turned up and wept at what he heard, so we wished openly he had been left to die.

      

      The PR debacle was at least turned around: young Leo announced to the media mid-morning that he was bisexual—people are always reassured by classifications—and Olivia mid-afternoon that her lesbianism wasn’t a permanent state: she’d just once been seduced by her English teacher at school, and everyone who watched the sex scenes would see for themselves just how much she truly, erotically, madly fancied Leo. A crisis about a double booking in the preview theatre was narrowly averted, and by midnight Clive admitted the fine cut was ninety-five per cent right and no-one would notice the missing five per cent except he himself, the only one with any taste, and declared the picture locked.

      

      I emerged gasping into the fetid Soho air with Harry, who asked if I had a bed he could sleep upon. He did not want to face the glitter of his hotel. I thought this was a feeble reason but said okay. He trailed after me to my peculiar residence, climbed my many flights of stairs with a kind of dazed, dogged persistence, looked around my place, said, ‘Very central,’ demanded whisky which I refused him, put his head upon my unshaken pillow, pulled my matted duvet over him and fell sound asleep. The phone rang. It was Felicity. She said she had tripped and sprained her ankle and it would be her hip next. I said I would come over on the next available flight. I lay on the sofa and slept. I did not attempt to join Harry in the bed. There would be no end of trouble if I did. Women should not venture out of their league or their hearts get broken. And I was just production team talent who happened to have a bed which the director didn’t need a taxi to get to. And Clive was too mean to provide a limo.

       3

      Not far from Mystic, not far from Wakefield, well protected from any traffic noise by woods and hills, just out of Connecticut and into Rhode Island, stood the Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement. Rhode Island is a small dotted oblong on a map, one of the six states that compose New England, the smallest, prettiest, most crowded and (they say) most corrupt state of them all, though who’s to judge a thing like that? It is the indigenous home of a breed of russet feathered hens, the Rhode Island Red, now much appreciated by fanciers the world over. It is crowded in upon, squashed, by Connecticut, Massachusetts and the Atlantic Ocean; it is lush with foliage: birches, poplars and ginkos that turn gold in autumn, and mountain maples and ash, and hickories that turn orange, and red oak and red maple, sassafras and dogwood that turn scarlet. It is sprinkled with wild flowers in spring: ornithological rarities and their watchers spend their summers here. It has sheltered beaches and rocky coves, faded grandeurs, and a brooding, violent history of which an agreeable present makes light. It is the home of the brave, the better dead than red state. In November, of course, it is much like anywhere else, dripping and damp and anonymous. Better to turn the attention inward, not out. So thought Nurse Dawn, executive nursing officer of the Golden Bowl Complex.

      The Golden Bowl is constructed much in the fashion of the former Getty Museum outside Los Angeles; that is to say it is an inspired version of a Roman villa, pillared and pooled, lilied and creepered, long and low, and faced with a brilliant white stone which in California looks just fine but under soft Rhode Island skies can startle. The young and unkind might say it glared rather than glowed: the elderly however valued its brightness, and marvelled at the splendour in which they could finish their days, and for this reason the local heritage groups had bitten back protest and allowed its existence.

      

      Even as Sophia travelled to Boston on her sadly delayed visit to her grandmother, Nurse Dawn, together with Dr Joseph Grepalli, specialist in the medical arts and Director of the Golden Bowl, contemplated a bed rendered empty by the sudden death of its previous occupant, Dr Geoffrey Rosebloom. The windows were open, for the decorators were already at work; new white paint was being applied throughout the suite—Dr Rosebloom had been a secret smoker, and the ceilings were uncomfortably yellowed—and an agreeable classic pink-striped wallpaper pasted up over the former mauve and cream flowers. So long as wallpapers are pale they can be put up fresh layer upon old layer, without ever having to strip off the