Based on a True Story (7 page)

eleven

Mr. Romance leaned over a low white wall on the crest of Mount Hollywood. A thousand feet below, the lights of Los Angeles glowed like circuits on a computer board.

I should really try to conjure a more tender image
, he thought.
How about this: at night, seen from above, the city looked like the cover of a greatest hits album by a country rock band
.
Like fireflies pinned in a case, slowly dying. Like the spark of hope snuffed out in a thousand silent rooms . . .

He would have to work a bit harder.

“It’s so beautiful up here,” said the young woman beside him, who was nestled in the crook of her boyfriend’s arm. “I can’t believe I’ve lived in this city all my life and I’ve never been to the observatory.” She clutched her boyfriend’s hand, brought it up to her cheek in an old-fashioned gesture. “Did you know about it, Asad?”

“Yes, moron,” Asad said, playfully. “Some of us look up when we’re driving.” Taking her shoulders, Asad turned her toward the domed white building to their left, luminous against the purple sky. “I can’t believe you’ve never seen
Rebel Without a Cause
, Tay. I know what we’re watching next movie night.”

“Anything’s better than
Hostel Part 15
,” the girl said, but she was smiling. “Or whatever you made us watch last time.” Taylor slid closer to her fiancé, pressed her face to his shoulder.

Kenneth Deller felt an unaccustomed lurch: he hoped they would make it. He’d been working with them for two weeks, and the bafflement he felt when they first contacted him hadn’t diminished a bit. They’d chosen one of his mid-price packages, From Friend to Forever, which usually attracted a lesser class of lover. Taylor and Asad seemed as plump with good fortune as any two people he’d ever met, blemish-free from skin to soul. She was studying to be a doctor, while he, on the same campus, trained as a pharmacist. They seldom interrupted each other, and their glances were filled with affection as well as hunger. They were already luckier in love than he had ever been.

Even these two, however, were not immune to the American desire to quantify self-improvement. What had drawn them to From Friend to Forever was its promise: “Five steps to long-lasting love, tailored to suit your particular relationship, based on the romantic history we’ll discover at some of the city’s most iconic landmarks.” He loathed the word iconic, but this was a small price to pay in the quest for clients.

Deller beckoned them across the lawn where a few couples strolled, post-dinner and pre-coital.

“Here,” he said, “is Colonel Griffith J. Griffith’s monument to his sorrow.”

“Isn’t it an observatory?” Asad asked.

“It is, or it was once. But it’s also a temple to one man’s folly, his failure to grasp the ineffable power of love.”

He worried for a moment that he’d over-egged the pudding, but Taylor said dreamily, “The ineffable power of love. You know, Ken, I do love your accent.”

He hid a smile. The Manchester in his voice had lured scores of posh London girls to his bed, and horrified an equal number of their parents. But it carried no subtle class codes here. He was merely English, and thus a sophisticate.

Taylor stared at the building, which was lit as carefully as a movie star, its three darkened copper domes shadowy against the sky, its name picked out in Art Deco type above the front doors: Griffith Observatory.

“Griffith J. Griffith was a scoundrel, a pint-sized chancer from the Welsh Valleys,” Deller continued. He walked toward the path that separated the building from the mountain’s edge, and they followed. “He was no more a soldier than I am. But he climbed Los Angeles society as if it were a ladder, and on the way up, he — a good Episcopalian — found himself a beautiful Catholic wife.”

They’d walked around the corner of the observatory, and a wide, white plaza stretched before them, its ramp curving around the hill like the train of a bridal gown.

“Oh,” said Taylor softly.

The smell of scorched chapparal drifted up from the slope below, a reminder of the previous month’s wildfires. Ken stopped by the low white wall and continued: “They were happy for a while, the phony colonel and his papist bride. Slowly, though, a worm of paranoia burrowed in his brain, and he became convinced that his lovely wife was conspiring with the Pope to steal his riches and siphon them off to Rome.” He lowered his voice: “A paranoia that culminated in the bloody events of 1903.”

“What bloody events?” whispered Taylor. Asad took the opportunity to clutch his fiancée tighter.

Ken let his voice drop. “On holiday with his wife by the seaside, Griffith J. Griffith snatched up a pistol and —” his voice cracked through the air “— shot her in the head!”

Taylor gasped and drew back against her boyfriend.

“Fortunately,” said Ken, “she didn’t die. And when Griffith got out of San Quentin, he was a changed man. Full of sorrow for what he’d done. Desperate to atone. He convinced the city to take his money, and this —” he swept a hand toward the observatory “ — is what they built with it.”

He paused and leaned back against the wall, quite pleased with himself. Then he noticed that the posture made his belly stick out, and stood up straight.

Taylor and Asad were looking at him as if they expected more. Finally, Taylor shot a glance at her boyfriend and said, slowly, “I think I see why you brought us here, Ken. Yes, I’m sure of it. You’re warning us about the dangers of interfaith marriage, right?”

People who study science
, he thought sourly,
have a restricted sense of wonder
. “It wasn’t necessarily what I was getting at, Taylor, no. Obviously, that is something that you and Asad have already discussed, and I understand both your families are quite supportive.”

“’Course that’s not it, baby,” Asad said with a patronizing smile. “He’s warning us about money issues. He’s saying there should be a prenup. Is that it, then? That’s the lesson: we should have a prenup.”

Why did he even bother taking them on these magical journeys? It was like reading poetry to sponges. He began walking back to the road, and they followed at his heels.

“Was that it?” Asad asked, trotting behind. “Because my dad thinks we should have a prenup, too.”

“What?” Taylor gasped. “Your father thinks so? Oh, that is rich . . .”

He stepped between them, put an arm around each of their shoulders. They’d stopped in front of the white obelisk of the Astronomers Monument. Johannes Kepler gazed into the night with pitiless stone eyes.

“Look up,” Ken said. As usual, no stars were visible; there was a price to be paid for the glow of the lights below. The last few couples wandered back to their cars through the soft darkness. “I was trying to tell you . . . about forgiveness. About compassion.”

It’s about biting your tongue
, he wanted to add,
about keeping the live wire in your hand rather than shocking the person in front of you
. He watched their bright, hopeful, blank faces and sighed. They could figure it out for themselves.

Driving down the winding road that led from Mount Hollywood through the dark valleys of the park, Kenneth turned on the radio, pleasantly surprised to hear the Hollies singing about bus stops and wet days. He wasn’t the first lad to flee the steel-grey skies of Manchester for California. Best not to think in terms of portents, though, not when he was this tired and already seeing ghosts.

As he approached Los Feliz, he knew he should move over to the right-hand lane to make the turn, but instead, after a shamefully brief mental tussle, continued to drive down Vermont.

His eye caught a movement inside a parked car, two shadows shifting, merging into one solid lump. Maybe, somewhere, Taylor and Asad were making the beast with two gym-sculpted backs. More likely they were drinking decaf Nespresso, poring over the bridal registry at Barneys.

He would post their wedding pictures on his web site; it would be good for business. Maybe he’d include a bit about them in his book — the anxieties that bubbled beneath their flawless façade. He shuddered at the thought of the manuscript sitting unfinished on his computer. If he didn’t hand it in soon, he’d have to pay back his advance. The emails from the office of Middle Way Books were growing less Zen by the day.

The mere thought made him weary, and there was only one cure for his malaise. A right turn took him into a parking lot under a neon sign that read
HOUSE OF PIES
. Truly he did not need House of Pies when he already had a stomach full of pies, but logic held no sway at the end of a very long day.

He slid into one of the vinyl booths, smiling at the waitress as she came over.

“Peach pie, two scoops of vanilla, and black coffee, please,” he said, not bothering to look at the menu.

He watched the couples at nearby tables, fascinated, as always, by their behaviour. Busman’s holiday. The younger women nursed whimsically flavoured teas, staring with famished eyes at their boyfriends’ desserts, making occasional darting sorties with their forks. The older couples sat in companionable silence, a single plate between them.

It must be nearly thirty years since that afternoon when he and Augusta sat in the Little Chef on the A46 near Binley, sodden with Southern Comfort. Or was it brandy and ginger? He had been reading
The Loved One
to her, the little paperback spread open between a bottle of HP Sauce and a full ashtray. He wished the novel were longer. She roared with laughter at Evelyn Waugh’s satire about failed Englishmen in California. He loved her laughter, the rolling-barrel sound of it. When she laughed he could see into the pink cave of her mouth, the sharp little teeth, the talented tongue. The sight made him giddy with hunger.

He read to Augusta as she ate, pausing for her laughter. Under a flowered, floppy hat she bent her head to her plate and worked through a jacket potato with beans and sweetcorn — “It looks like vomit on a pillow, but it’s quite delicious” — a piece of gammon, and apple crumble to finish. The memory of happiness lingered, a flavour barely remembered.

In those days, he’d thought nothing about her drinking. Everyone he knew drank too much. The drink made Augusta wanton — it made her want him. It was only after the boy came and she retreated to her bedroom, meanly clutching clinking bags, or disappeared for days on end, that he began to despair. Even then — and this was something he tried not to admit to himself, though it was the truth — he would have said nothing, so long as she would have him around.

A line of doggerel from the Waugh novel drifted into his thoughts: “I wept as I remembered how often you and I / Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ’tis here you’ll lie . . .” Well, here he lay, in a bed of his own making. And a cold bed it was.

“Peach, two scoops.” The waitress had arrived silently on thick rubber soles and placed the plate in front of him, warm and redolent of summer. The fruits of August. He laughed out loud at the idiot machinery of his own subconscious.

twelve

“Meet the new boss,” said Stanley Pfeffer, aiming his cigarette at a man in evening dress leaving the back seat of a Range Rover. “Same as the old boss.”

“Fresh from Tbilisi,” said Sue. “Oil money to burn, and he decides to buy our little rag.” She took a long haul of red wine. “Probably should have just set fire to his roubles and saved himself some time.”

“Not roubles,” said Frances. “Georgians use lari.”

Stanley looked at her and shook his head in wonder. “The nooks and crannies of your mind never fail to astonish me, Frances.”

It was silly to take pleasure from a tiny compliment, but her larder of praise was not particularly well stocked these days. Frances felt heat rise to her face. They stood, shoulders almost touching, and watched the Georgian join the stream of tuxedoed guests arriving at the hotel for the Well Done London Awards. At the newspaper he had just bought, where his real name was considered unpronounceable, he had been dubbed Oli Gark.

A tall blonde, equal parts sinew and diamond, towered over the
Advance
’s new proprietor. Solicitously, he held a hand over her perfect bottom and steered her through the hotel’s doors. Frances had seen the shoes she was wearing in the window of Selfridges. They did not carry a price tag.

“His daughter’s pretty,” she said.

Stanley gave a tubercular laugh. “He doesn’t have any daughters.”

Frances stole a sideways glance. Stanley was already half in his cups, grey hair wild against the sea of black.
Men should always wear tuxedos
, she thought. Even the bottom-heavy had their geometry corrected by the stiff weight of jacket and trousers.

She tore her eyes away and scanned the crowd: Augusta Price was meant to be receiving an award tonight. Frances had seen her name near the bottom of the press release, where the Survivor of the Year prize was listed. She had no desire to run into Augusta again. For a week, she’d debated whether to accept Stanley’s invitation, and the threat of Augusta’s presence had almost been enough to keep her at home. One morning, though, she realized she hadn’t spoken to another human being in four days. Spurred by panic, she stumbled from bed to write Stanley a note:
I’ll be there.
Loneliness was a stronger goad than fear.

The Georgian turned to glare at Stanley through the glass doors, then disappeared into the crowd. “I think he loathes me,” Stanley said. “He saw me in my office this morning and didn’t say a word, just cleared his throat. I thought he was going to spit on the floor.”

“Maybe,” said Sue, “that’s a sign of affection in Georgia.” She ground out her cigarette. “If we win an award tonight, you’ll be golden, Stan.” Draining the last of her wine, she attempted a wink at Frances that convulsed half her face. “I’ll see you both inside. Eventually.”

“Order us something crippling,” Stanley called after her.

A silence hung between them as they watched tawny-orange soap stars and firefighters, awkward in formal wear, arrive for the dinner. Neither of them made a move to go inside. They watched as three-quarters of London’s journalists and all of its B-list celebrities walked a carpet that had once been red and was now the colour of Mateus.

He looked down at her and smiled. Frances caught her breath, acutely aware that the dress she’d chosen, bought for half-price in the Christmas sale, offered a rich landscape of cleavage. Stanley had noticed too. They both looked away at the same moment.

“The scene of our greatest triumph,” he said finally. “This ridiculous hotel.”

She looked up at him in disbelief. “Our greatest triumph? You nearly got me killed.”

He reached into his pocket for a second cigarette, which she recognized as a rare luxury.
Or maybe the luxury is standing here talking to me
, Frances thought. He snapped his lighter open and blew smoke up into the sky.

“Don’t be an idiot. It was a great story. You did a cracking job with it.”

The spy. The poor, dead spy. A year before, a Russian spy had swallowed a cocktail spiked with Polonium 210 in the hotel bar. The next day, Stanley had dispatched her to the bar, armed with a Geiger counter, to write a story about the cancerous hazards that lay in wait for London’s business tycoons, oligarchs, Gulf State princes, and their unsuspecting paid company.

On the day her story ran in the
Advance
, the spy had died — alone, suffering, friendless — in a sealed-off hospital ward. Frances had to remind herself not to look for parallels in everything she wrote.

She’d woken every morning for a month feeling under her arms for swollen glands, searching for blood in her urine. Stanley had found her hunched over her screen Googling “symptoms of radiation poisoning.” An hour later, when she’d come back from lunch, there was a bottle of vitamin C on her desk and a note that read, “Don’t say I never give you anything.”

A raucous group of partygoers passed by and Stanley bent closer so he could speak in her ear. “I’ve been worried about you, Frances. You probably think I’ve been ignoring you, but I’ve been putting out calls. Seeing what’s available. It’s a crime that you’re not writing.”

She thought about all the time they’d spent at the pub, or in his office, dreaming up ideas: Why don’t you take a white cane down the Tube and see how bad it is for the blind? God, she missed that feeling: the thrill of the chase, the pleasure Stanley took in her stories. It was only rarely that he’d actually risked her life.

“Do you miss me?” she asked. “Or do you miss having a willing slave?”

He looked down at her, blew a plume of smoke over her head. “Is that what you were? My slave? I wish I’d taken time to enjoy that a bit more.”

Their eyes locked and for a moment Frances felt she’d shed something weighty, cumbersome. The relationship that had tied them was gone, and she was just a woman standing with a man whose company she enjoyed.

“Frances,” he said, and stopped. He appeared to be fishing for sober wisdom from deep within. She noticed that he’d missed a patch of stubble under his chin, dark grey against the paler grey of his skin
. I could reach up and kiss him right now
, she thought, dizzy,
and he wouldn’t stop me . . .

“Frances,” he started again. “There is something I wanted to say. About the day you left.” She caught her breath, expectant, and he leaned down: “You left an awful pile of crap behind.”

Or I could stab him with the nail file in my bag. One thrust, right through the eye.
He was still looming over her, expectant, like he hadn’t just thrown a glass of cold water in her face.

“I . . . I need a drink, Stanley.” Shaking her head, she turned and walked away, leaving him standing by the driveway, hands open, as if waiting for something to fall into his grasp.

Frances stormed into the ballroom and snatched a glass of wine from a waiter’s tray with such haste that it swayed in his hands. He glared at her, but she didn’t notice. She’d spotted something alarming at the bar: a small figure perched on ludicrous heels, cinched into a low-cut black dress, crowned with an abundance of red hair.

Her first and only instinct told her to run in the other direction. But it was too late: Augusta had seen her, and began making her way over, parting the crowd like a vindictive and half-dressed Moses.

When Augusta reached her, Frances blurted, “I’m sorry.”

“Most people are, at one time or other,” Augusta said. “It means nothing, in the end.”

She stood watching Frances coolly, as if she’d been expecting this exact conversation. Strangely, of all the people at the party, she seemed the most sober.

“I’m sorry about that story. It didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped it would.”

“The headline,” Augusta said, “was ‘Washed-Up Tales from a Soap Flake.’”

Frances laughed, a slightly maniacal bleat. “Yes, well, that’s the sub-editor. Most of the time I don’t think they actually read the stories. The picture of you was good, didn’t you think?”

“The caption said, ‘Augusta Price was once famous for drug addiction and being killed off for ratings.’”

“They’re not big on nuance, it’s true.”

“And they spelled ‘addiction’ wrong. You might want to let them know.”

For the first time, the girl smiled, but it was the kind of smile that preceded tears. “I would, but I don’t work there anymore. They sacked me.”

“Because you called me an old bag?”

“I did not, and no, that’s not why. Look, can I buy you a drink? A peace offering.” Frances cocked her head, a mute plea for Augusta to follow, and apologized her way through the crowd. Augusta squeezed in next to her at the bar, elbowing aside an elderly quiz-show presenter.

“As it happens, I’m not drinking.”

Frances couldn’t keep the shock from her voice: “Forever?”

Augusta threw back her head to laugh, and the barman stopped, mid-pour, to take in an eyeful of décolletage.

“We’re not supposed to talk about forever. Only today. And today I choose not to drink. To add to my woes, I must attend a funeral tomorrow. Being hungover at a funeral just reminds you how close you are to the grave.” She reached for the bowl of cashews on the bar. “You cannot imagine how boring it is. To be sober among these dullards.”

“It’s pretty bad being drunk among the drunks,” Frances said. She gathered her courage. “Look, I am truly sorry about the article.” She took a business card from her bag; she’d scratched out “
London Advance
” and written “freelance journalist,” beside her mobile number. “I’ve struck out on my own,” she said.

“Because you struck out.”

Frances felt the ominous tremble in her lower lip. “I suppose that’s one way of putting it.”

Augusta looked at her through mascara-crusted eyes. She waved at the barman, who poured a glass of wine. With one purple-tipped finger, she slid the glass over to Frances.

“Here,” she said. “This is what you take for disappointment.”

As she raised the glass, Frances felt a warm finger tapping the curve where her neck and shoulder met and, cursing herself, turned around. Stanley stood, bleary-eyed, thrusting a glass of wine in her direction.

“I already have a drink, thank you.”

He bent to whisper in her ear: “Yes, but you should always have an extra, for emergencies.” He reached over her to offer his hand to Augusta.

“Stanley Pfeffer,” he said. “I understand you’re getting a gong. Congratulations.”

“Yes,” she said. “The ‘I’m Still Alive’ award for beating the bookies’ odds. They thought I’d be at the bottom of a swimming pool by now.”

Stanley’s laugh cut across the crowd, and Frances saw the
Advance
’s new owner glaring at them from the other side of the bar, brows stitched together in an angry furrow. She tugged on Stanley’s arm.

“I think we’d better take our seats.” She smiled at Augusta, as sweetly as she could. They found their table, at the back of the room, and Stanley pulled out her chair. The
Advance
’s new owner presided over a much better table near the front. He sat and stared at his new employees with fish-hook eyes.

An hour later, between an award given to two firefighters for rescuing a child from a smoky basement and one to a dog that had detected its owner’s cancerous tumour, Augusta received her honour. She came to the stage, thanked Keith Richards for making her look good by comparison, and left with a wave.

Stan pushed away his dessert and leaned heavily toward Frances. “There’s a reason I never called you, Frances. Everything I say comes out wrong. I was trying to tell you that the things you left behind made me realize . . . what I was missing, I suppose.” Shoving himself away from the table, he gestured to the waiter again. His arm, in Frances’s increasingly blurry vision, seemed about a mile away.

“Another bottle, Stan?” Sue said. “Look, I’m not complaining, but you saw the memo we got last week about cutting costs. We’re not even supposed to be expensing muffins and coffee, never mind cases of pinot.”

“Who cares?” slurred Stan. “Who cares? We might never all be together again, like this.” He raised his glass at the Georgian. Frances suddenly knew what it meant to be alone in a foxhole, surrounded by enemies.

“Where were we?” Stanley turned back to Frances, aimed his arm for the back of her chair, missed. “Ah, yes. The future.”

She’d already poured out a stream of misery as he listened intently. She held nothing back, not even the humiliation of her aborted stint at
Under the Skin
. “I even thought of going home,” she whispered. “Phoning my parents and getting them to send me a ticket. Admitting failure. What’s worse? Going home a loser, or staying here where nobody cares if I live or die, like that poor Russian spy?”

Stan leaned in closer, beckoned her to do the same. Frances bent toward him. When they were only inches apart he whispered, “Can you keep a secret? It’s kind of what I thought you might do. After I had to let you go.”

She yanked herself away from him, and said in a small, deadly voice: “What?”

Stan hesitated, as if trying to gauge where the landmines lay in his path. “For God’s sake, Frances. I thought I was doing you a favour.”

“A favour?”

“So you could go back home. And you wouldn’t have to work for me anymore.” His voice rose to a shout. “I mean, who leaves California to come work in a complete shithole, anyway?”

“Are you calling my newspaper shithole?”

The
Advance
’s new owner stood behind Stanley’s chair, wearing an interrogator’s smile. Frances shivered. The blonde companion slouched beside him, bored, smoothing the skirt of her white dress.

“Ah, Nikolaz,” said Stan. “No, of course not. I would never call the
Advance
a shithole.” He ran a napkin across his forehead. “I might call it a toilet on some days, but only with great affection.”

The Georgian smiled without using many muscles. Frances wondered if he really had once been
KGB
, and if so, how many prisoners had soiled their drawers at the appearance of that smile.

“Is very funny, Mr. Pfeffer. Is English funny, I think.” He bowed his head slightly. “I see you at office.”