West of Paradise Page 8

  Lila sipped her coffee, holding the cup with two hands. “What did Larry do, besides the movies, and the bad stuff they’ve already written, that makes him worth writing a book about?”

  “That’s what I’d like to find out,” Kate said. “Socrates said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’”

  “No shit. Socrates, huh?” Lila lifted her coffee to her lips, with shaking hands, and took a swallow. “Well, maybe it wasn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Worth living. Look how he threw himself away on those people, on those drugs. Like he didn’t really care about himself.”

  “But you did.”

  Lila smiled. “I was crazy about him. Always. Even when he took the money my father gave him to start his own furniture business and ran away to Hollywood. Even when he changed his name. Even when he married those other women.”

  “You weren’t upset he divorced you?”

  “He never divorced me,” Lila said, and drank some more coffee.

  “And you never said anything?” Kate said, after a stunned moment.

  “Being a bigamist could get him in trouble. He made enough trouble for himself. I knew he’d come back. And he always did. Whenever they died, he’d come home to me, and I’d make him tuna fish sandwiches. He always said nobody made tuna fish sandwiches like mine.

  “He’d come in his limousine, and it would wait outside. And we’d talk, and hug, and cry a little, and I’d pack him a few sandwiches for the plane. Even when he had a private plane, or the studio plane, he never left without a little paper bag, with my tuna salad in it.”

  “So you forgave him.”

  “I was never angry. Disappointed, sure. Hurt. Jealous of the women. But I was the one he loved, I always knew that. Those other women were for the guy he was trying to be. They were like the custom shirts he took to wearing, the ones with the pointy collars. They looked pretty snappy, but they didn’t launder well. Anyway, they all died. Not that I wished it on them, but I admit I never shed a tear.”

  “And you didn’t mind that he never moved you out of Queens?”

  “I like Queens,” Lila said. “It was Larry who needed to live like a king.”

  “Will you tell me the whole story?” Kate asked.

  “Maybe one day,” Lila said. “Right now, I’m hungover, and that always makes me reserved.”

  * * *

  In the far corner of the restaurant, in the last beige Naugahyde booth, a man sat hunched down, back to the room, elbows on the hard surface of the table, fists clenched against his cheeks so what little of his face peeked from beneath his porkpie hat and from behind his heavy sunglasses was obscured. He had known this hotel in the fifties, shortly after the death of James Dean, when Marlon Brando was thin and heartbreakingly handsome, and Natalie Wood was a reckless teenager no one ever considered would come to a tragic end. Vince Edwards had stayed here before he’d had a hope of a television series. Nick Adams, having flogged himself to the press as Jimmy Dean’s best friend, thereby earning the eternal enmity of Linus Archer, who thought the title his, had set up residence here just before committing suicide. The act garnered him more press than he’d ever received from holding himself out as Jimmy’s buddy. Even the then very young and appealing Tony Perkins commented that if Nick had known how much publicity his suicide would get him, he would have done it a lot sooner. Tony at the time of the comment was being groomed to be the romantic idol who would replace Jimmy Stewart, before Psycho typecast him as the weirdo he was to play for the rest of his life. He had made that remark to a very young writer secreted in the hotel by the man who was sitting now, back to the room, in the very last booth, with another very young writer he was keeping there for exactly the same reason.

  Forty years had passed, and Rodney Sameth, though his technique as a director had changed—some said blossomed, some said diminished, some said disappeared—was exactly the same in this one respect at least: he had engaged an unknown, worshipful would-be screenwriter to write his next movie and promise not to tell anybody. For that reason, he was putting the writer up at this hotel, where nobody had ever bumped into anybody, since nobody came there unless they were very hard up, which nobody Rodney Sameth knew was, except the young writer.

  The reclusive director, who lived in fortified seclusion on the Isle of Wight behind electrified fences and a frontline of attack dogs, had met the young writer at a party in Sameth’s honor. The party marked the only event Sameth would have come back to America for: an honorary PhD from Stanford. The one area in which he felt incomplete, in spite of his constantly acknowledged genius, was education. Admittedly he had done more and better than anyone who had received a real PhD. But Rodney was at the time of his life when he realized, in spite of the fact that Billy Wilder had referred to him always as “Twenty-nine-year-old Rodney Sameth,” that he was no longer twenty-nine-year-old Rodney Sameth. And there were still some things he wanted, that he wouldn’t have time to do, like get a PhD.

  He had taken a ship and a cross-country train to get to the ceremony, since he didn’t fly. On the Isle of Wight he wore safety belts when his driver, who was allowed to go no faster than thirty-five kilometers an hour, took him anywhere, which he rarely did. There was nowhere, really, that Rodney wanted to go. He sent second units out to locations to get exteriors for his films, used doctored process shots, invented ingenious special effects in his private lab, and filmed all interiors, as well as many pseudoexteriors, on a huge soundstage he had built inside his compound. If the tropical trees in his movies looked like plastic, which they were, the critics seemed to overlook it, so glad were they to get another film from him. Such was his stature that the world, what little he wanted of it, came to him. This included studio chieftains and his lawyer, who had emphysema and now had to travel with an oxygen tank. The man was frail and eager to retire, except that Rodney insisted he stay his lawyer. There was no one else he could trust.

  He had never trusted Larry Drayco, but admired the Phi Beta Kappa key he’d gotten from Yale. So as long as Rodney had to be in California, he’d gone to the funeral. It was the first time in decades he’d been back in Hollywood, the only real reason being to have meetings with this boy, who would not return to England to hide out with him, as he was close to completing his doctoral thesis. He was bright enough to do that at the same time he was working on the screenplay for Rodney’s movie.

  “I just don’t understand what all the secrecy is about,” said Morgan, the young writer. “Everybody knows you bought the Novotny novel.”

  “Lower your voice,” Rodney said, in a controlling whisper. “If they hear the name Novotny, they’ll guess you’re talking to me. If they find out you’re a writer, they’ll think you’re writing the screenplay.”

  “But I am.”

  “Shhh.” Rodney hunched down further in the booth. “You agreed to do it on the quiet because you want to work with me.”

  “I do, Mr. Sameth. You’re the finest director of your generation.”

  “Call me Rodney. And I want to work with you. When I read your screenplay, I thought, ‘This kid writes the best dialogue of any writer in America.’”

  “Thank you.” The young man tried not to beam, but it was difficult. Praise was new to him. The academic world wasn’t particularly comfortable with graduate students who might be able to succeed in the world outside. His teachers had been close-vested with their accolades, saving their compliments for his work on Keats, which would not get him jobs except at other universities. That he aspired to writing movies threatened most of them. Some suggested he should consider transferring to UCLA. Most had declined to read his screenplay, and the ones who had had taken forever and then said they didn’t know enough about screenplays to comment. So the fact that arguably the most original director of his lifetime had read it the same night it was given to him, and immediately asked Morgan to come to Los Angeles—all expenses paid—to start writing Sameth’s next film, was intoxicating. He had agreed to Sameth’s stipula
tion he not tell anybody where he was going or why.

  “You’re saving my life, Morgan. Josip Novotny can’t write dialogue to save his own.”

  “Then why do you need to say he’s writing the screenplay?”

  “Janet Maslin is only going to give me a good review in The New York Times because I’ve bought the work of an acknowledged literary genius. I’m not sure he even wrote his own sex scenes, or was really a Holocaust survivor. But it’s not up to me to bust anyone’s balloon. The world admires him. I can’t say some graduate student is writing the screenplay because the genius can’t. What do you mean, of my generation?”

  It took a beat for Morgan to realize Sameth was back a few thoughts, still hanging on the rating of his talent. “Well, for those who are into Spielberg and Scorsese…”

  “Never mind, never mind,” Sameth said, whisking it away with a thick-fingered hand. “I’ll take care of whatever it costs to keep you here till you finish, and some pocket money. Maybe even enough to buy a used car. That way you won’t have to walk to Schwab’s.”

  “There is no more Schwab’s,” Morgan said. “I asked. They tore it down twenty years ago.”

  “This town,” Rodney said, and shook his head. “No respect for history. Not enough they leveled the Garden of Allah, where Dorothy Parker stayed, and Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. They have to take away the drugstore where Sidney Skolsky found Lana Turner’s tits. It’s all just real estate.”

  “So why do I have to stay at this hotel?”

  “Because if you’re anyplace else, somebody might see you, and then they’ll know what you’re doing.”

  “But I hate it here. The only thing missing is Norman Bates.”

  “You work fast. Look at all the pages you’ve written already. You’ll be done in no time, and out of here. And when it’s a hit…”

  “You’ll reveal it was me?”

  “I can’t do that. The Writer’s Guild would have my scrotum. But I promise to give you full credit and Guild minimum on my next movie.”

  The young man, whose skin was pale by nature, made more so by spending most of his time in libraries and at the computer, blanched. “You only do one picture every five years.”

  “What do you care? You’re young.”

  * * *

  Because Rodney Sameth sat hunched down with his back to the room so no one could see him, even obscured as he was by the hat and glasses that served as a disguise, he couldn’t see if there was anyone else in the coffee shop. Morgan was so engrossed in his own exhilaration-cum-disappointment, so hypnotized by his reverence for Sameth and the man’s indisputable, if dark, charisma that he noticed no one else in the room.

  It was an odd hour. The transients who slept late had finished their breakfasts. The monthly residents of the apartment-hotel, some of them elderly, some of them prostitutes, had finished their lunches. Three freshly-arrived-from-Iowa waitresses, overly made up, just a bleach job away from becoming Tori Spelling, they were sure, studied a map of Beverly Hills, trying to determine where 90210 was. Unable to locate it, they set out for Melrose Place. So except for two women in a booth near the cashier and the old cashier herself, who had played opposite Turhan Bey and been deeply in love with him until he lost all his hair, the place was virtually empty. The only sound besides Rodney’s heavy breathing and the subdued conversation coming from the two women was the clatter of plates being cleared by the busboy.

  “Enough socializing,” Rodney said, and put a twenty-dollar bill on the green, pencil-marked check. “I’m keeping you from your work.”

  The two men got up and headed for the door. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning for the new pages.”

  They passed the two women, the younger of them with her back to the booth where they’d sat. She looked up. “Morgan!” she cried excitedly, and leapt out of the booth, throwing her arms around him. “What are you doing in L.A.?”

  “Nothing!” Morgan said. “Not a thing!” The man with him headed straight for the door, head down, hand covering his face, the back of his neck crimson.

  “But I can’t believe this!” She turned to Lila. “This is Morgan Craig. He’s a friend of mine from graduate school! Lila Darshowitz.”

  “Enchanted,” Lila said.

  “This is like a miracle! I’ve been so lonely. Are you staying here?”

  “No. I’m not staying anywhere. I’m not even really in town.” He backed towards the door, sneakers squeaking on the linoleum.

  “Hey, I’ll never tell them you’re playing hooky.” She smiled at him, very white and wide, real connection animating her face and making her look fresher, younger, brighter. “Did you finish your thesis?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Then how come…” Kate frowned suddenly, feeling his discomfort, putting his evasiveness together with the man who had hurried out of the coffee shop. She looked out the window, into the glaring sunlight. He was nowhere to be seen. “I’m sorry,” she said softly and sat back down.

  “It’s okay,” Morgan said, phumphering. “Really. Not to worry.”

  “I’m listed. Will you call me?”

  “Sure. Sure. If I’m ever in town.” He ran out of the restaurant.

  “I guess you caught him with his boyfriend,” Lila said.

  “But he isn’t gay.” Kate looked genuinely flustered.

  “Maybe he wasn’t,” Lila said, and drank the rest of her coffee. “But this is L.A.”

  * * *

  “Shit!” Rodney said, when Morgan found him, huddled in the parking lot behind the building. “Fuck! I might as well have put you at the Beverly Hills Hotel!”

  “I would have liked that,” said Morgan. He saw that Sameth wasn’t smiling. “Don’t worry. I didn’t tell her anything.”

  “The same fucking English department,” Rodney fumed. “Two literate people in the whole of Los Angeles, and Fate puts them in the same place.”

  “Fate has very little to do with it. I would have put me at the Chateau Marmont.”

  “Don’t be a wiseguy. If you’re saying it’s my fault, I agree. I should have stashed you at my lawyer’s. Maybe I should move you there.”

  “I thought he was in an oxygen tent.”

  “Exactly. He won’t even know.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.”

  “What if she saw me? What if she guesses?”

  “Nobody even knows what you look like.”

  “Of course they do.” Rodney took his hat off, his hair glued to his skull from perspiration. He fanned himself. “I’m an icon.”

  * * *

  When Tyler Hayden got back to the house in Malibu, there was a cold lunch waiting for him in the guest house refrigerator. A salad with sprouts, laid out appetizingly in the style of nouvelle cuisine, strips of red pepper making it into a happy face, sided with a plate of turkey breast, thickly sliced. There was a large bottle of Evian out on the table, since Norman knew he didn’t like it chilled. Tyler took the two plates in one hand, as he’d learned to do during a brief stint as a waiter, a miniloaf of olive bread from The Godmother still in its bag and the Evian in the other, and pushed the screen to the deck open with his hip, letting it slam shut behind him. A wooden picnic table was set with a bamboo place mat, silverware, a plastic goblet that looked like crystal, a twin decanter of oil and balsamic vinegar, and a small vase filled with delicate flowers, miniature purple and yellow calla lilies, their slender necks drooping. He sat down and cut the crusty dark bread down the center, drizzled some olive oil on it, and started to eat. It was crunchy and flavorful, and felt good in his mouth, in spite of what was going on in his belly.

  “So did you find where she lives?” Norman said, coming up the wooden steps from the back deck of his house.

  “I found where she lives,” Tyler answered in a monotone. “She’s in Topanga Canyon. There isn’t a number, but it’s behind a really high hedge, about three-quarters of a mile in.” He put his feet up on the bench in front of the railing. “I wouldn’t mind living in Topan
ga Canyon.”

  “Then one day you will,” said Norman, sitting down on the bench beside Tyler’s sandaled feet. “Thank you.”

  “This whole thing makes me sick,” Tyler said.

  “You don’t like turkey?”

  “You know what I mean. The situation is sick, and you’re sick, and being part of it is making me sick. You’re not going to heal until you forget about her and let the whole thing go.”

  Norman leaned his red head back on the railing so his neck was against it and he could see the sky. “When I was a little boy, and I would drop a piece of food on the floor, my mother would tell me to kiss it up to God, and then it wouldn’t be dirty anymore.”

  “You want to kiss Sarah Nash up to God?”

  “I wish I could.” He brought his head up sharply. “I don’t want you to concern yourself with this anymore.”

  “Good,” Tyler said firmly. That he was accepting what passed for Grace in Malibu, someplace really nice to stay, did not bother him. He genuinely liked Norman Jessup, and in spite of his power, Tyler could feel his pain, which served to reinforce his conviction that what most people considered power had no real force. But it did bother him that he might be part of some dark purpose here with Norman, especially since his reason for being on the planet was to bring light. He’d read that in his own chart. He had seven planets in his mid-Heaven, so his job was to illuminate. He just didn’t know where the employment agency was that told you where to apply for that one.

  “Carina wants very much for you to come into town to dinner with us.”

  He also liked Carina. He had been genuinely surprised by her serenity, the gracefulness with which she moved, the tender way she dealt with Norman. Tyler liked to think he was without judgment, but his mother had been extremely judgmental, and you couldn’t help picking some of that up, no matter how spiritually independent you were. So it had close to astonished him that this flagrant homosexual had actually been drawn to such a feminine woman. It actually had astonished him, and once he integrated it totally into his consciousness, it thrilled him. Because it reinforced the truth that there was God even for gays, and so much for Jerry Falwell.