Innocents and Others Read Online Free PDF Page A

attention, and you can do something with that. Believe me, the attention can hurt, so you must make sure you get something out of it.”
    I start to cry. He stops talking and places his hand on my head.
    â€œCan you shut up? Please?” I say. He sighs and I help him to his bed.
    You can guess the rest. What happened to him was on the news.
    The housekeeper comes into my room and wakes me up. Her face is sweaty, and she seems to tremble as she speaks. She tells me she has called 911, and that the ambulance is about to take him away. I scramble out of bed and stop at the doorway, unsure what to do. I watch them take him out on a gurney. He is white and nonresponsive, his massive body already collapsing into itself, looking passed and dead to me. The housekeeper says, “I am calling his family.” And she disappears into his room, closing the door behind her. Soon—within an hour—people will go to the hospital. Then they will descend onthis place: a relative, an agent, the press. I pull on my jeans. I had slept in an oversized Mercury Theatre jersey, which I now use as a tunic shirt. I need, it seems to me, to get out of there fast. I pull a suitcase from the closet, the very same one I had brought over after a few days of living with him.
    I look around my room. Here is what I take: my clothes, my videotapes, my notebooks, and a few little souvenirs he gave me (some lacquered balls for juggling, a deck of cards, a lobby card for the last of his great films, an annotated copy of King Lear with his small neat notes in the margins along with the King Lear screenplay he wrote but never shot, a long Nubian dress, and a vintage Mark IV viewfinder on a lanyard). I also take the wicker box filled with his love letters. Of course I do. I make the bed. I close the closet door. There is no sign of me in the bedroom or anywhere in the house. I walk to the back door in case someone is arriving. I hesitate as I pass his room. I push open the door. The bed is a mess; as they pulled him onto the gurney they must have dragged all the bedclothes off. I look at his dresser where he left his watch and his pocket notebook. His vest and scarf hang from a chair back, just as he left them last night. I pick up the scarf and hold it to my face. I can smell his hair oil and aftershave. I drape it gently across the dresser. I ought to leave. A tumbler of liquor on the end table by the bed. He couldn’t sleep so he drank and read. Next to the book are some scribbled notes and his sturdy fountain pen. I pick up the pen—it is green resin, fat and substantial in my hand. Just one small thing of his. I put it in my pocket. I slip out the sliding back door to the patio. I open the garage, throw my suitcase into the backseat of my Rabbit, and go.
    I drive to Brentwood Village and call my parents on a pay phone. “Everything is fine,” I say. “I just wanted to say hello.” The radio in my car is already reporting that my boyfriend was pronounced deadat UCLA Medical Center. I stare out the window and listen to the valedictory obituary, something carefully constructed long ago and updated each year until it would finally be read on the air. Nobody had really wanted to see him lumber onto TV sets to talk. They had been waiting to pronounce him dead, to bring to a proper close his long American story.
    I head straight to the camera supply store with my father’s wad of cash and pick out some gear. Then onto Route 15 and then 40, by myself, driving to New York. I drive until I reach a motel just over the New Mexico border. It isn’t until I collapse on the motel bed and switch on the TV that I feel it. I watch the special report, and I see him young and beautiful. Close to my age, in fact. And out of that young man comes my boyfriend’s voice. I cry and hold the motel pillow against my face. I see his face as he lay on the gurney, and it is that image that makes me feel how lost he is to me. How much I will