Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [467]
NICOLE (little laugh; long pause) Well, okay, it was because Barrett had me convinced I wasn't any good and so the, the only thing I could do was . . . go with somebody that didn't know what good was.
SCHILLER You're saying that Barrett had you convinced you were a lousy lay?
NICOLE Yeah.
When it came to interviewing, Schiller knew he had met his match. Maybe there wasn't a disclosure he had gotten in his twenty years of media that hadn't been built on some part of Bullshit Mountain, but with Nicole he got along. He didn't have to use tricks that often and it moved him profoundly. He took a vow that when and if his turn came to be interviewed on Gilmore, he would also tell the truth and not protect himself.
Now Schiller was certainly back with Stephie. He was in love. He was going to marry his princess. He saw it as belonging to the best vein of his luck. But he couldn't believe the other side of his luck. It was that he was friends with a girl for the first time in his life.
Something like affection for himself began to come into Schiller when he realized that the monumental gamble he had taken that Nicole would not commit suicide was probably going to win out. One of the reasons he could trust her not to take her life for too little over the weeks and months and years to come, was because of her friendship for him. She wouldn't do it to him for too little. So he went on with the interviews and at times was ready to cry in his sleep that he was a writer without hands.
Chapter 44
SEASONS
April joined the Baker family out on Malibu after a hard time in the hospital. The patients and staff, she announced, had really laid it on her, and banged her head on the wall. Books and newspapers kept coming in. It was horrible. She kept reading all about Gary.
Now, at Malibu, she was still panicky. Out of her sleep she would cry, "Mama, are you all right? Are you sure you're all right?" The night would go on.
In the daytime, April and Nicole would squabble. They had never gotten along. Things might get better, things might get worse, but certain things Kathryne could count on. One of them was that April and Nicole would spit like cats before the day was out.
Later that winter, Noall Wootton was having martinis with a couple of attorneys in the Sheriff's Office of Salt Lake County, and one remarked, "These fellows still want me to prosecute Nicole for smuggling pills in to Gilmore." Noall Wootton said, "Bill, for hell's sake, what's that going to accomplish? Forget it."
"Well," said Bill, "I already have. I told them I declined it. I am not interested." Under it all, Wootton would have loved to question Nicole to find out how she did get the pills in.
Sam Smith called Vern one day and wanted to know how they smuggled the liquor into the prison.
"You must be dreaming," Vern told him. "I don't know how." Sam called again. Tried to get him to open up. For some reason, it remained a mystery to Vern.
After the month in Malibu, Nicole decided she liked living in Los Angeles, with her kids, and so she took a house out in the San Fernando Valley that didn't cost too much. Just a shabby little ranch bungalow, five blocks from the very end of town. She could almost have been in Spanish Fork. The desert began down the street, and the mountain rose not a mile away. Nicole tried to keep the kids in day school, hold a job, and go to school herself, but it was a dull stretch. There was no man. There was nothing in her life.
She bought a camper with some of the money Gary had left her, and got a driving license, and went out to Utah and came back.
She had not had sex since that night in October with the Sundowner in the middle of Gary's trial, but late in April, returning from Utah, she picked up a hitchhiker. It had been a long, difficult stretch with all kinds of guys trying to make out, and Nicole had been wondering if she could go for the rest of her life without it. Being faithful left her feeling choked up and