West of Paradise Read online

  “Any further outbursts,” the judge said, “and I’ll hold you in contempt.”

  Sarah sat back down.

  “She made it read as though I had driven him to it,” Jessup said. “I wanted to be invisible. She agreed I would be. Instead she held me up to ridicule…”

  “Do you deny you boasted to Sarah Nash there wasn’t a man you couldn’t have?”

  “Your honor.” William Arnold half stood.

  “It wasn’t a boast,” Norman said.

  There were seven women on the jury and five men. It was, unusually, a highly educated jury, the defense team having gone for as much intelligence as possible, since the issues of breach of contract and fraud were complex. Jessup had crowed of his accomplishments and standing in the community sufficiently through the trial that the jury’s patience appeared to be wearing thin. Everyone was tired. Even the court watchers, those retirees who spent their days at the courthouse in Santa Monica rather than watch soap operas, seemed relieved when Jessup was excused from the stand, and the judge called a recess. These were in the months before the televised Simpson affair, which turned a trial, even more than baseball, into a national pastime.

  It had not been Crowley’s intention to finish with him quite yet. But the words “It wasn’t a boast” seemed to hang on the air, suspended, underlining the vanity of the man. And after all, it was Santa Monica, where in spite of AIDS benefits, supposed progress, and political correctness, a rose by any other name was still a pansy. It felt to the lawyer like a good place to end it.

  “There’s just Sarah Nash’s final cross left,” said a reporter into one of the three adjoining pay phones in the marbled corridor outside the courtroom. The case involved celebrity and so was of interest to the whole country. So there were two other reporters from the area, another from Chicago, one from The New York Times, one from The Washington Post. In addition, there were several magazine writers. There was no one from the publishing house that had printed Sarah’s book. Arnold had left them out of the suit, since there was no way they could be said to have breached a personal contract. The publisher considered it circumspect not to have any representatives at the trial itself, as they were holding back a great reserve of Sarah Nash’s voluminous royalties in case anyone else should decide to sue and include them. But a few of the young men in the courtroom were whispered to be part of the publisher’s legal staff, quietly observing the proceedings.

  “Then the closing arguments,” said the reporter into the phone. “The instructions to the jury, and, depending on how long they take to get to their verdict, maybe we can get it into the Sunday edition.”

  “No real courtroom theatrics,” said the reporter on the next phone. “Everybody’s pretty worn down.”

  * * *

  Sarah Nash had dressed differently for this last day of the trial. Throughout the proceedings, her clothing, like her demeanor, had been restrained, businesslike, rather drab, with only the occasional hint of courtroom flair, a scarf of some softness or color at her throat. That swanlike arch of neck was all that seemed assailable, naked as it was, revealing her alabaster skin. Everything else was lightly powdered over or obscured, from the steel blue of her wide-set eyes, shielded by the bought-for-the-occasion glasses, to her sizeable breasts, boxed into conventional career clothes, Brooks Brothers for women. It was a persona her attorney had worked very hard with her to present, the jury needing to put aside any prejudice it might have against an admitted cocaine and alcohol abuser, who had found restraint, self-esteem, and everything but God in the cleansing act of writing her book. Her shoulders were so broad as to seem androgynous, an image that would have been fortified were it not for the slenderness of her waist. Her hair, at the time still lustrous and dark, hung in a page boy just below her resolute, one might have said stubborn, jaw. Her nails were blunt and buffed. As characterized as her writing was by sharp wit, only the dimple that appeared occasionally to the side of her tight-held mouth indicated any humor. Throughout the trial she had appeared very much the serious author, just incidentally a Recovering Everything, and woman.

  Today though, as she entered the last phase of her cross-examination by Jessup’s attorney, she wore a light-blue coatdress, with a buttoned self-belt at the waist. Her breasts, which had seemed almost bound during the trial, looked opulent, the full fall in between made discreetly indistinct by the fashionable scarf tucked into her décolletage. It was finally clear that a woman sat there. Her generous mouth, loosed from its tense moorings, relaxed into an unaccustomed smile, as William Arnold asked her if it was not true that she deeply disliked Norman Jessup.

  “Absolutely not. I really loved Normie.” Her glasses were perched atop her hair now, in Jackie Kennedy fashion, so she seemed less the driven career woman she had been depicted as in various publications, than a fortyish female who’d probed unexpected depths to become a writer.

  “Was it not your intention to vilify him? To break your contract?”

  “There was no contract,” she said. “And as for … allegedly vilifying him, I left out a lot he said that was more offensive than anything I used.”

  “Did you not give him your word … an oath?”

  “Lacks foundation, your honor,” said Crowley. “There is no evidence that—”

  “Withdrawn. If you ‘loved’ him, why would you invade his privacy?”

  “Privacy?” Sarah said. “He was more public about his leanings than anyone since Oscar Wilde. Didn’t you ever have lunch with him?”

  “Why would you make him sound so callous?”

  “They were his own words.” She did not quite look at Jessup. All through the trial they had avoided each other’s eyes. (“I thought she was my friend,” he had keened, over and over during his testimony. “I spoke to her as my friend. She betrayed me.”) “All of them his own words.”

  “Did you include what Jessup might really have wanted to say?”

  “There isn’t room in a book for everything Normie might want to say. There isn’t room in a whole library.”

  One of the jurors tittered. Sarah’s attorney, his shoulder angled so the judge could not see the gesture, raised his hand in warning, almost imperceptibly shook his head. No sarcasm, he had cautioned her at breakfast. Everyone was already aware of how clever she was. They had all read the book. And no real display of wit. Jurors didn’t like uppity women. Remember Jean Harris, he’d counseled her. Juries didn’t favor bright women, as prejudiced as they still might be against gays. Juries liked deviant men more than women who thought they were smarter than anybody, especially if they were.

  “And yet you say you liked him.”

  “I did like him.”

  “Wasn’t your ending his chapter as you did, with the suicide, a deliberate and malicious attempt to defame—”

  “Objection.” Crowley was on his feet. “This is not a libel trial.”

  “Will counsel please step forward,” the judge said. “I have warned you both for the last time,” he said very softly, as they stood before him.

  Arnold tightened his tie, stepped back, and readdressed the witness. “Miss Nash, why did you end the chapter with that revelation?”

  “There wasn’t anything Normie hadn’t told me about himself, from his sex life to his educational background to his much-too-early potty training at the punishing hands of the mother he’s now so concerned about. He never stopped talking. The only thing he kept silent about was the boy who hanged himself. I found that out on my own. It seemed to make a point.”

  * * *

  “My colleague will tell you that Sarah Nash damaged this man’s career and hurt his health, ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Oliver Crowley said in his closing argument. His gray suit was quite rumpled now, a hard-working contrast to his adversary’s impeccable tailoring, as his emotional style was to the older man’s reticence. “I will have no further chance to rebut him. So I ask you to listen very carefully and hold in mind what I’m telling you now.

  “Norman Jessup
has lost none of his power. He is simply a man who has lost some weight. A man who could not control his other appetites, even with a young boy who was obviously unbalanced. His cravings are exceeded only by his hunger for publicity, his yearning for self-promotion. He brought this suit for the same reason he talked to Sarah Nash, soliciting more celebrity.

  “He says Sarah Nash and he had a contract. That she invaded his privacy. You’ve heard him. I believe you see without any help from her how little privacy he chooses to have. He is, by his own proud admission, publicly, a philanderer. And not exactly as we’re used to them. Should such a person receive damages? They say that virtue is its own reward, ladies and gentlemen. Let it be the same with corruption.”

  * * *

  There was a quietly impassioned closing plea from William Arnold, about a man’s home being his castle, sanctified, with those who are invited in as friends honoring that autonomy. “Now he has no place to hide,” Arnold said. “Sarah Nash has pillaged his sanctuary, taken from him an altar where he could speak as a penitent to a priest, the privileged relationship, the trust that is implicit between friends. He trusted her.

  “Like one of the Indians who don’t want you to take their picture because it will rob them of their souls, he has had his soul violated. Secrets he wanted to share only with his intimates, published without his permission and with her assurance that he would be protected. She has taken his most precious goods, his privacy, his very identity, and put them out in public. A betrayal all the more shocking because she masqueraded as his friend. But this was how she planned it from the beginning. And for his humiliation, his hurt feelings, this fraud, he should be compensated, though no amount of money can ever restore what she has taken away.

  “There was between these two people an implicit contract, a solemn oath. Sarah Nash was not simply Norman Jessup’s friend, she was his supposed ally. And she betrayed him. A similar case, MacDonald versus McGinnis, was tried before a jury here in Los Angeles. A journalist betrayed a convicted murderer, promising he would take his part if given access to personal material. Instead, he turned against him. The lie, the betrayal, was reprehensible, even though people condemned what that murderer might have done.

  “I tell you this because no matter how liberal or enlightened you may be, there is still a tendency to discriminate against a homosexual. But surely no matter what his style of life, or acts, they cannot match those of a convicted murderer. And yet this murderer had been betrayed. He had an understanding, an implicit contract, and he was betrayed. As Norman Jessup was betrayed.

  “There are no moral judgments in play here. There is simply a question of one’s word. When a witness touches that Bible and swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, if he lies it is perjury. When a trusted friend swears she will honor and respect … well, I have but one word to describe it.” Arnold teetered on the brink of speaking, and then fell onto the word, almost gasping it. “Judas.”

  He was silent for a long moment. “I ask you to award my client ten million dollars.”

  * * *

  The judge gave his instructions. The jury returned with its verdict.

  “We find for the defendant,” the foreman said. They awarded Norman Jessup nothing.

  * * *

  Afterwards in the almost deserted courtroom, as Arnold packed up his exhibits, sorrowfully drawing strings around mounted blowups of documents, Jessup sat ashen-faced in the corner of the first row. “I can’t believe it,” he said, his voice grating. “I just can’t believe it. She ruined my life, and it costs her nothing.”

  “It cost her her lawyer’s fees,” Arnold said. Remarkably, his hair was not yet white, and the pomade he used to slick it back and down made it seem as dark as it had been in his long-ago youth, when he’d gone into law because he thought it meant justice.

  “I could have strangled her, calling me Normie like that on the stand. By a nickname. Like she really had affection for me.”

  “It’s over. Let it go.”

  “I should have won.”

  “No question about that. It was as good a closing argument as I’ve ever given. I have something at stake in this, too. I don’t like to lose. But in the long run the jury believed she didn’t damage you. Homosexuality is openly accepted in the civilized world.”

  “Ha!” Jessup said.

  “I’m telling you as a friend as much as your lawyer, in the long run you haven’t been damaged. You must see that. If you don’t now, you will. You are still a powerful and productive man. Let it go.”

  “I can’t. I can’t let her get away with looking me in the face and then betraying me. Crucifying me.”

  “This has already taken up years of your life, not to mention the money.” Arnold said. “You have to move on.”

  “Oh, I intend to.” Jessup got to his feet, color coming back into his cheeks, the light returning to his eyes. “Indeed, I will move on. But perhaps not exactly in the way she expects.”

  * * *

  One of the few who’d remained unobtrustive in the courtroom had been a representative of Sarah’s publisher. He’d reported to her that last exchange. So ever since the trial she’d been looking over her shoulder, expecting that Norman might be after her. Some time had passed, and she’d finally worked up the courage to come back to Los Angeles. There was no question she was a snowflake in Hell. But a snowflake without the drugs she’d genuinely tried to get off of, and without booze to anesthetize her loneliness. There was nothing to blur the fact that she was, in her way, a woman without a country. She’d grown weary of gypsying. There was nowhere else she really belonged.

  Not that she belonged here, even with a secret hideaway. Even with the place on Topanga Canyon so secluded and gated and riddled with alarm systems that nothing could get to her but the next earthquake, the next mudslide, or any of the natural disasters that courted those who stubbornly clung to this apocalyptic place. No one knew where she lived except for a small cadre of her remaining friends, a few new friends from the publishing world who admired her audacity, her writing style, and even more the number of books she’d sold. And, of course, the realtor who’d sold her the property, under oath. A stronger oath than the one Sarah had allegedly given to Norman Jessup. This one stated in writing, drafted by her lawyer, that if ever the realtor revealed the whereabouts of Sarah’s gated home, the realtor herself would have to pay what remained of the mortgage and return the down payment. So Sarah knew she could count on the realtor’s loyalty, anyway.

  And still, she had the feeling, as she drove up the twisting, inhospitable road, that someone she didn’t want to know where she was might know where she was. “Just because you’re paranoid,” her dentist had said to her, years before she had reason to be, “doesn’t mean someone isn’t after you.”

  She drove behind the barrier of hedges, tree-high, that she’d had installed so no one could see her house from the road. She closed the electric gate, operable only from inside her car or inside the house, and stopped for a moment. A little Volvo went by, a young man at the wheel.

  She didn’t recognize him. No one she’d made an enemy of could possibly drive a Volvo. She gave a deep sigh of relief, and realized she hadn’t been breathing. She pulled into her high-security garage, put in her private code, unlocked three locks, and went inside the house.

  She bolted the door behind her and rubbed behind her right ear, one of the nervous habits she’d developed since the suit started. Her finger felt sticky. She looked at it. Fucking guacamole. The bastard had made her green behind the ears.

  Well, she wouldn’t stay that way long. She hadn’t been that innocent even when she was an innocent, and now that she was far from innocent—though they’d failed to find her guilty—there were no lengths she wouldn’t go to to get even with Jessup. There had to be more she could find out about him. If he’d kept one secret, there were others to be uncovered. Maybe even more sinister than the suicide. Old lovers never mentioned, strangely out of his life
. The dancer he’d lived with for years. What had become of him? What was his name? Paulo. Paulo something-exotic.

  She went to the phone and called her researcher in New York and told him to get on it.

  * * *

  The young man at the wheel of the Volvo that had passed by Sarah’s house was breathtakingly beautiful even in profile, sitting down. That was how he’d first been seen when Norman Jessup found him, meditating on the beach in front of Jessup’s Malibu home. He’d had his eyes closed and his large, graceful hands placed on his kneecaps, exposed through the fabric of his deliberately worn-out jeans. He’d looked very much like a golden-lashed angel, maybe one carved out by Michelangelo, complete with radiant curls that circled his head like a white-yellow halo. When Jessup greeted him and he’d stood up to his full height, it was no longer one of the artist’s cherubs he resembled, but his statue of David. He was six foot three, an inch taller than Jessup himself, with a chest that seemed about to burst his shirt. Norman wished it would.

  “I’m so sorry,” the young man said. “I didn’t realize this was private property. I didn’t mean to trespass.”

  “I forgive you your trespasses,” Norman said. “What’s your name?”

  “Tyler Hayden.”

  “Norman Jessup,” he said, extending his hand, waiting for the name to register on the kid. It seemed not to. He felt mildly annoyed. “You’re an actor, of course.”

  “No,” Tyler said.

  “What do you do?”

  “Still trying to work that out,” Tyler said.

  “Would you like to come up to the house for a little lunch? I’ve invited some interesting people.”

  The interesting people were all men. They had seen the boy on the beach and sent Norman down to corral him. All of them thought they knew all the beauties in town, even from behind, or especially from behind, but none had seen this particular broad, tanned, muscular back before. Their numbers included Bunyan Reis, by his own appraisal the most interesting painter-writer since William Blake, but a better conversationalist. Gil Besoin was also in attendance. The producer of television comedies, he was considered funnier than anything he’d managed to get on the air. There was a gay black actor from New York, Hoover Coolidge Gray, long past his prime. But Norman liked to show he did not practice ageism any more than racism. There were also a few young numbers who didn’t have much to say, but that wasn’t why they were there. And into their midst came Tyler Hayden.