Sunset Park

confrontation with the hero, whose wife has been running around with Cochran on the sly, but that finally isn’t what interested him either, Cochran’s performance is a matter of complete indifference to him, what counts is the story his mother once told him about having known Cochran during the war, yes, his mother, Anita Michaelson, née Cannobio, who died four years ago at the age of eighty. His mother was an elusive woman, not given to opening up about the past, but when Cochran died at forty-eight in 1965, just after Renzo had turned nineteen, she must have been thrown sufficiently off guard to feel a need to unburden herself, and so she told him about her brief infatuation with the theater in the early forties, a girl of fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and how she crossed paths with Cochran in some New York theater group and fell for him. He was such a handsome man, she said, one of those rugged black-Irish heart-throbs, but what falling meant was never quite clear to Renzo. Did his mother lose her virginity to Steve Cochran in 1942 when she was seventeen years old? Did they have an actual fling—or was it only a thing, an adolescent crush on an up-and-coming twenty-five-year-old actor? Impossible to say, but what his mother did report was that Cochran wanted her to go to California with him, and she was prepared to go, but when her parents got wind of what wasbrewing, they put an immediate stop to it. No daughter of theirs, no scandals in this family, forget it, Anita. So Cochran left, his mother stayed and married his father, and that was how he came to be born—because his mother hadn’t run off with Steve Cochran. That is the idea he is toying with, Renzo says, to write an essay about the things that don’t happen, the lives not lived, the wars not fought, the shadow worlds that run parallel to the world we take to be the real world, the not-said and the not-done, the not-remembered. Chancy territory, perhaps, but it could be worth exploring.
    After he came home, Renzo says, he felt curious enough to do a little digging into Cochran’s life and career. Gangster roles for the most part, a couple of plays on Broadway with Mae West, of all people, White Heat with James Cagney, the lead in Antonioni’s Il Grido, and appearances on various televison shows in the fifties: Bonanza, The Untouchables, Route 66, The Twilight Zone. He formed his own production company, which produced little or nothing (information is scant, and although Renzo is curious, he is not curious enough to explore this point further), but Cochran seems to have acquired a reputation as one of the most active skirt chasers of his time. This probably explains why his mother fell for him, Renzo continues, sadly contemplating how easy it must have been for a practiced seducer to soften the heart of an inexperienced seventeen-year-old girl. How could she have resisted the man who later went on to have affairs with Joan Crawford,Merle Oberon, Kay Kendall, Ida Lupino, and Jayne Mansfield? There was also Mamie Van Doren, who apparently wrote at great length about her sex life with Cochran in an autobiography published twenty years ago, but Renzo has no plans to read the book. In the end, what fascinates him most is how thoroughly he suppressed the facts about Cochran’s death, which he must have heard about when he was nineteen, but even after the conversation with his mother (which theoretically should have made the story impossible to forget), he forgot everything. In 1965, hoping to rejuvenate his moribund production company, Cochran developed a project for a film to be set in Central or South America. With three young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, supposedly hired as assistants, he set out for Costa Rica on his forty-foot yacht to begin scouting locations. Some weeks later, the boat washed ashore along the coast of Guatemala. Cochran had died on board from a severe lung infection, and the three panic-stricken young women, who knew nothing about sailing, nothing about navigating forty-foot yachts, had been drifting through the ocean for the past ten days, alone with Cochran’s putrefying corpse. Renzo says he cannot efface the image from his mind. The three frightened women lost at sea with the decomposing body of the dead movie star below deck, convinced they will never touch land again.
    So much, he says, for the best years of our lives.

2
    He has been invited to four New Year’s Eve parties in four different parts