West of Paradise Page 9

  “You have anything to wear?” Norman asked.

  Norman’s mother and probably his father as well had been totally into judgment, and appearances. Tyler knew that. “What you see is what you get,” said Tyler.

  “We’re about the same size. I’ve got a closet full of jeans with no holes in the knees.”

  “It took me a long time to get these holes exactly right. A lot of Dead concerts at the Oakland Coliseum. What if the spirit of Jerry Garcia came to look for me? How would he know me if I wasn’t in these jeans?”

  “Jerry’s manager threw his ashes in the Ganges,” Norman said. “He won’t be coming to Beverly Hills.”

  “He was an ascended Master,” Tyler said. “Alive, he could be in two places at once. God knows what he can do now.”

  “God knows. About the pants…”

  “You either love me as I am—”

  “I do,” said Norman. “But I’d like you to do it for Carina. She’s from another hemisphere, you know. A more formal one. If you don’t want to wear something of mine, go to Fred Segal’s.” He took a couple of crisp hundreds from his pocket, with the new Ben Franklin imprinted slightly off center, and younger, without the glasses, as though America didn’t even like to think of the founders as growing old.

  “I don’t want any money from you,” Tyler said. “Room and board is generous enough.”

  “You could come work for me,” Norman said. “You’re sharper and more imaginative than any of the kids in my company. You could shimmy up the ladder in no time.”

  “I don’t like what’s at the top of that ladder,” Tyler said, meaning it. He hadn’t been exactly sure what brought him to L.A. Everybody said he was good-looking enough to be a movie star, and in an objective way, he knew that to be true. This was not vanity. He simply saw what was in the mirror and knew how women reacted to him, following him down the street sometimes, trying to think of a way to start a conversation. He could feel them behind him. Occasionally he would stop and turn and smile and let them get it off their minds. Sometimes he would even engage with them, take them for a cappuccino, and think, when they were smart enough, and physically appealing enough, that something might come of it. But usually they stopped short of the place where it could fly. Where they could fly together, because they understood where he was coming from. Nobody had ever really come from the same place except Diana, and she’d been sexually abused, something that never really got healed, so it was too hard to have fun, to be completely spontaneous. He’d had no choice but to end it, as work that had no joy in the process was anathema to him.

  Still, knowing how attractive he was, reading the inane interviews of his contemporaries who had made it as stars, he had come to think from time to time that what society could really use was someone to admire who had more on their mind than slurpees. He thought what it would be like to date Uma Thurman, who seemed to have depth, and came from parents with enlightened credentials. He pictured his own indisputable sparkle at an opening with Gwyneth Paltrow, and then realized he was getting caught. He could not fulfill what he’d come to the planet to do unless he was free. Even Premiere magazine, which he read standing up at the open magazine rack in the Santa Monica mall, admitted Hollywood was a trap.

  So he’d abandoned his impulse to give it a shot as an actor, even though there was no one in movies six three, golden-haired, straight-shouldered, barrel-chested, but slim-hipped enough so as not to look beefy, with eyes that were Orientally slanted and very pale blue, heavily lashed, able to see through just about anybody. And since he didn’t want to get into a power structure where people were afraid, where mad queens could declare “Off with their heads” for no visible reason, he passed on Norman’s offer of a job. A real one, in an office, not just shadowing some enemy.

  “What’s at the top that’s so odious to you?” Norman asked.

  “I’m not sure. But I know that people in your business are afraid. Fear can blow big holes in the imagination. And that would be worse than the ones in my jeans. Fear not, doubt not, rejoice always. You should make that into a placard and put it on the wall of your office.”

  “What do you want, Tyler?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to work it out. What I’d really like to do is inspire people.”

  “So you’ve said. In what way?”

  “To be the best they can be. To see themselves as a little piece of God. Like they really are. Like you are, if you’d forget about Sarah Nash.”

  “Look. You don’t lean on me, I won’t lean on you.” He got up from the bench. “You can wear those jeans to dinner.”

  “It wouldn’t be respectful to Carina,” Tyler said. “I’ll borrow a pair of yours.”

  * * *

  In the end, he also borrowed a really nice shirt, brand new, that Norman had bought for him, but not offered, knowing that Tyler wouldn’t accept it. But the kid had good taste, and found it in the closet where the jeans were hanging. Because they were going to Morton’s, Norman had suggested offhandedly, Tyler might also want to borrow a shirt.

  “What’s Morton’s?” Tyler was looking through Norman’s jeans, and found the shirt hanging there.

  In spite of how much he loved Carina, Norman hadn’t been able to help thinking that the shirt was just the right shade of radiant light blue to go with Tyler’s eyes. Old habits died hard, and none of them were really fashioned for fidelity. “It’s where to go on Monday nights.”

  “You’re such a victim,” Tyler said. “So easily manipulated, in spite of your so-called power.”

  “So-called?”

  “Letting people tell you what’s the right place to go on a Monday.”

  “It was I who set that standard, decided it,” Norman said imperiously. “People go there on Monday because there’s a chance of running into me.”

  “Can I borrow this shirt?”

  “If you like,” said Norman, trying to sound casual, covering his exhilaration that still someone else had fallen into a snare of his devising, no matter how small or benign a snare it was. “It would probably look good on you.”

  Tyler tried it on, smiled at his reflection. “I like it. It’s my color.”

  Actually, now that Norman examined his own feelings deeply, he felt, besides the feather-flicks of desire, fatherly. “From now on,” he said, “they’ll go there on Mondays because there’s a chance of running into you.”

  * * *

  Helen Manning had not really intended to sing at Larry’s funeral. She felt genuinely bad that he had died, as she felt genuinely bad when anybody died. She was without rancor, or the wish for revenge, which made her almost as unique in her community as did her phoenix eyes, so labeled by Bunyan Reis, with whom she was dining at Morton’s. She had sung because the song had reminded her of Larry Drayco on what was probably one of his best days. She’d been present for part of the scoring of his picture and seen how happy he looked that the song was genuinely wonderful. Remarked to her that it was really a world-class ballad. She’d heard in that instant that he would have liked to be, himself, world class. For all his affectations of breeding, his Phi Beta Kappa key, and the latest wife he’d married in a ceremony that had to have cost him a million with the rooms he’d redone in Vegas, the private jets to take everyone there, the orchids flown in to make a carpet for the bride to walk down, suites for all those invited with gift baskets in each one that included not just champagne and fruit and sweets but his and hers Tag Heuer watches that gave time and date all over the world, with a card that said “So you’ll remember our perfect day,” a day which had lasted just a little over a year—for all of that, Helen had known he wasn’t that sure of himself. Even if he hadn’t been caught embezzling.

  Her intuition went deeper than anyone imagined, especially about insecurity. There had never been a room she was in where any man present looked at anyone else, and she still had to check the mirror to make sure she was really beautiful. So she knew in her heart, which was quite open and surprisingly good, in sp
ite of the disappointments she’d suffered, that Drayco didn’t have even the confidence she was supposed to. While they scored the song, she’d pressed his hand in an unaccustomedly affectionate gesture as he clutched his armrest. She felt the cold sweat, experienced a moment of genuine, deep affinity, perceiving how vulnerable he was. She understood that he would have liked nothing better than to be as unmistakably fine, even for a moment, as that song.

  When she’d heard the song at the funeral, all that he’d been that he couldn’t show, all that he’d wanted that he couldn’t achieve, bubbled up in her, like sorrow. Longing for the things that eluded most people, that they pursued: prosperity, peace, the perfect love. The last still applied in her case, and it was that lack, that place of continuing emptiness and yearning she’d been moved by, as well as what she’d felt for Larry, when she’d heard the song. So she’d involuntarily started singing.

  Her eyes were still a little red around the edges this Monday evening at Morton’s. But the redness didn’t diminish their golden-amber glow. They felt a little tired from the force of the emotion and the tears she’d shed. So she wasn’t sure if the boy with Norman Jessup and Carina was as beautiful as he seemed.

  She tried not to appear too interested or excited as he passed her table, igniting in her a palpable electricity, making the small hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She hoped that Bunyan wouldn’t pick up on it and say something bitchy. But he wasn’t paying attention to her, chatting to the man on the other side of his banquette.

  “His name is Tyler Hayden,” Bunyan was saying. “True sparkle. Inside as well as out.”

  “You’ve been?” asked Wilton Spenser.

  “I’ve engaged. Verbally and metaphysically. He’s very into that. Tellement New Age-y.”

  “I’ll be dead soon enough,” whimpered Lester Rolph, the seventyish man on the other side of Wilton, to the thirtyish man opposite. “And you’ll get everything, and then you can give it to him. Can’t you just pretend you love me?”

  “I do love you,” said the younger man, not looking at Lester.

  “And Carina doesn’t mind that he’s living there?” Wilton asked Bunyan.

  “Then why do you have to see him? I’ll be dead soon enough.”

  “He’s straight as an arrow, so Carina doesn’t mind,” Bunyan said. “Did you see his eyes? Luminous. Like the children in Village of the Damned.”

  “I asked Elizabeth once,” Wilton said, “if she’d seen Village of the Damned, and she said ‘No, but I read the book!’” He chortled. “She’s such a hoot!”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” said the maître d’ to Arthur Finster, checking the reservations book. “But we have no table for you.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Arthur said, twirling one of his dreadlocks nervously. Morton’s was the center of his universe on Monday nights, the capital of the need to see and be seen, to eat and not be eaten. “My secretary confirmed last Friday, and again this afternoon.”

  “Who did she confirm with?”

  “Laurence.” He gave it the French pronunciation.

  “I’m so sorry,” said the maître d’. “Laurence no longer works here.”

  “That’ll teach him to book a table for you,” Charley Best said, as he headed into the dining room, the buoyant Brandy on his arm, in a see-through dress with sequins strategically placed.

  “I’ll buy this fucking restaurant!” Arthur said. “By Hook or by Crook is going straight to number one.”

  “Funny,” said Charley. “It smelled to me more like number two.” Smiling, he followed the maître d’ to his table.

  “You’re in particularly good company this evening,” Wilton said to Bunyan, looking at Helen a little wistfully.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Bunyan said. “Do you know each other?”

  “I don’t think so,” Helen said.

  “That’s right, you waited in the car.” He held out his hand. “Wilton Spenser. A privilege.”

  “Car?” She shook his hand.

  “Larry Drayco brought you by my place once, made a quick stop.”

  “I never went out with Larry Drayco,” Helen said.

  “Well, maybe he only said you were in the car so I’d give him a better grade,” Wilton said. “But it’s great to meet you. I really enjoyed your singing today. I didn’t know you sang.”

  “Neither did I.” She looked away from him. “Bunyan, that young man with Norman and Carina…?”

  “That way lies madness, my darling. You’re old enough to be his mother.”

  “I’m thirty-eight,” she said, angrily.

  “Forty. I’ve seen your passport. He’s twenty-five.”

  “No one has children when they’re fifteen.”

  “Joan of Arc saved France at that age.”

  “Maybe she had no sex drive.”

  “I’ve seen you pursued by sultans,” Bunyan said. “I won’t watch you make a fool of yourself.”

  “Then look the other way,” Helen said, and signaling the waiter, asked for a piece of paper. She wrote a short note and asked the waiter to give it to the young man with the Jessup party.

  At the next table Lester Rolph was weeping. “You can’t wait for me to die.”

  “You’re boring me,” the younger man said.

  “What about me?” asked Wilton. “I only invited you because I thought you’d tell us tales about old Hollywood. Why can’t you dwell on the past, like other people your age?”

  Helen ordered a second coffee, lingering over dessert, making a visible effort not to seem to be waiting. Carina and Norman Jessup stopped by the table to say hello on their way out of the restaurant.

  “I really loved your singing,” Norman said.

  She seemed not to hear him, her eyes on the young man, who did not look at her, but just kept walking. “I’ll be outside getting the car,” he said to Norman.

  “Isn’t he clever,” she said, devastated, after they were gone. “He’s playing hard to get.”

  “I’m afraid he isn’t playing,” said Bunyan.

  Rats

  There were rats in Beverly Hills. It was not metaphor, or something Kate could regard as symbolically Kafka-esque, although she did. It was the reality.

  The brush that burst into flames in the surrounding hills in the dry ovens of summer, the ivy that trailed around the best manicured streets in the flats, choking the stately palms, sucking life from the soft violet-blossomed jacarandas, housed rodent hordes. Unsightly trucks from exterminator companies proliferated on the choicest streets, more visible than the resident Mercedes. Even the best exterminators refused to guarantee that the rats would not come back.

  Kate knew there were rats in the guest cottage she rented on Burton Way. She could hear them rustling in the night. She was aware they were nocturnal, as ghosts were supposed to be nocturnal. Still she wished there was such a thing as ghosts, so she could open one of her latticed windows, reach out, and only be touched by an icy hand. Sometimes she would turn on the light by the side of her bed, and catch a flash of tail, a rush of fur on the wooden rafters of her cathedral ceiling. She wondered if they followed the habit patterns of the populace and would seize her by the throat while sleeping.

  She asked her landlord to get rid of them. At first he denied they were there. Then he said she could always move. He knew he had her, like the rats might, by the throat. It was a Beverly Hills address, cheap for the neighborhood, an exquisitely wrought little cottage with a winding staircase leading up to a bedroom loft, every inch of it unique and beautifully crafted, carved, inlaid with antique paneling, designed by one of England’s leading decorators as a gift to her lover before leaving him. It had been in Architectural Digest. A copy of the magazine lay on the red-and-white inlaid game table. The landlord told her the noises were in her imagination.

  But of course being a writer, her imagination was very vivid, and she could hear them all the time. The night of Larry Drayco’s funeral, she heard what might have been a thunder sheet in an ama
teur production of Lear, so persistent was the noise, so full of rustling and crackling. She switched on the lamp, picked up the baseball bat she kept beneath her bed in the event of an intruder, the flashlight beside it in the event of an earthquake, and followed the sound down the winding staircase, to the kitchen. There was a walk-in pantry built cleverly into what would have ordinarily been a broom closet, and in it Kate kept the essentials that got her through her up-to-now uneventful life. She beamed the flashlight around. There was a case of bottled water—not Evian yet, because she wasn’t in that category—a case of soft drinks and mixers in the event of the party she hadn’t yet thrown, pasta, rice, crackers, and a large box of Raisin Bran.

  The box was shaking. The rustle was more than a rustle now, a swishing, an audible chomping, as though something were biting through wax paper, participating fully in the whole-grain value of the contents. She looked at the baseball bat in her hand, the box on the shelf, and wondered how, exactly, she would do it. The shelf was a little high. What if she only antagonized what was in the box, didn’t even succeed in stunning it? The entire box seemed to be doing a kind of dance now, some ritualistic dark Disney thing. What if it fell to the floor and whatever was in it ran out at her?

  Dropping the baseball bat, she seized the box and ran with it to the refrigerator, opened the freezer portion on the top, shoved the box inside, and slammed the door. Then she ran back upstairs, switched off the lamp, and tried to go back to sleep, lulled into quiescence finally by the decelerating pounding of her own heart.

  In the morning she did not even brush her teeth or go to the bathroom, but went immediately to the freezer and warily opened the door. The cereal box was overturned. The rat stood frozen on its hind legs, frosted eyes fixed on the door, front legs up in a scrunched position, as though someone held a gun on him, and he was surrendering.