Immaculate Reception (8 page)

We walked past the crowds on a Hollywood contact high. Donald approached the young uniformed geek at the door. After a few words back and forth the very nice geek motioned to us to come on in.

Donald dimpled at us. “It's cool. The guy said we could just hang out in the lobby and watch from the back of the theater.” We entered ahead of the pack.

“We need Milk Duds,” Holly announced. “For luck.”

Just then, the line that had been waiting outside to see
Gasp!
was let in. As the crowd of people rushed into the theater, they began to swarm the concession counter. Holly and I jumped in line quickly while Wesley and Donald went on toward the theater.

“Where's Arlo?” Holly asked me.

“Working.” Arlo always worked. For the past three years we'd both had outrageous schedules with demanding jobs. Since I'd semiretired, I had noticed that we had become somewhat off-balance, timewise.

“Isn't Donald cute?” Holly asked.

Lucky Donald. It was not possible to strike out, chickwise, on a night when your very own
movie
was opening very, very big. I hoped Donald appreciated his unique position.

“Adorable,” I agreed, happy to see Holly so happy. Her luck with men had been, up until this one, dismal.

My phone rang. Out from my deep dark shoulder bag I retrieved my cell phone and punched “start” just in time.

As our line moved up, bringing us closer to the glassed-in jujubes, I mashed a hand against my free ear in an attempt to block out the noise.

“Oh, hi. What's up? Is anything wrong?”

Holly had moved up to the counter and was ordering her lucky Milk Duds. She turned and asked if I wanted anything.

“It's Xavier and I can barely hear him,” I told her quickly, and then added, “Can you get me a Diet Coke, please?” as I moved away from the noisy crowd.

“Can you hear me now, Madeline?” Xavier asked me again on the other end of the cell phone.

“It's a little better.”

“I just wanted to talk to someone.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I mean, I wanted to talk to you.”

“Would you like to meet us?” I offered. “We're kind of driving around, checking out lines.”

“I can't. I just wanted to find out how things went this morning with the monsignor.”

“Fine. I didn't learn that much. But it seems like our Ugo wasn't as old as we'd thought.”

“Really?” Xavier asked, interested. “You know, it's funny. I'd wanted to reread the confession, but I couldn't find it. Did I leave my copy at your place?”

“I don't think so. We made two copies, right? You took the original and I took one for me and one for the monsignor.”

“That's what I thought, too. Huh. I guess I'm getting confused with all the paperwork that's been going across my desk now that the pope is about to arrive. And then, I heard some news from the police.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“They've arrested someone. It turns out it was a gang member who killed Brother Frank del Valle.”

I could hear Xavier sigh.

“That's horrible. Are they sure?”

“The young man confessed, I believe. But this has to be just between you and me. We have to keep this whole incident very quiet.”

“I may have to tell Wesley. And Arlo. Is that okay?”

“I trust your judgement, Madeline. It's a relief, in a way. Now that they've made an arrest, I hope everything will begin to settle down. Anyhow, I thought you'd feel better to know that the man responsible for Brother Frank's death has been arrested.”

“Do they know why he did it?”

“Did you ask why? It's a tragedy that boys feel they need to belong to gangs in the first place. That is what Brother Frank thought. That's why he had wanted to help. I believe his cousins are still involved in gang life, which had been a deep concern of his.”

“It's so sad, Xavier.”

“Yes. But at least with this swift arrest we can all begin to heal. And, now, of course our plans can move forward.”

“You mean about the pope's visit?”

“He arrives tomorrow night.”

Holly walked up to me, her face beaming, handed over
an enormous cup of Diet Coke, and whispered loudly, “The movie's about to begin.”

I got off the line with Xavier and we rushed to the theater, which was now seriously packed. Donald and Wes were standing at the back, with Donald pacing a nervous dance.

“Milk Duds, honeybear,” Holly sang as she waved the box in front of Donald's face.

“I couldn't eat anything, Holly,” he said, “Thanks, but…”

“
Lucky
Milk Duds,” Holly continued singing, with an excited smile, as she manically raised and lowered her colorless eyebrows beneath her white-blonde bangs.

Finally, she broke through Donald's trance. As the last coming attraction trailer faded to black, Donald lunged for a lucky
anything
as his first movie began to play.

2
424 PICO is a trendy restaurant that's slightly off the beaten path. Tonight it was jam-packed with hip young things making the scene. It goes without saying everyone was wearing black. For several years now the fashion people have been telling us that brown is the new black. But don't let them fool you; black is the new black.

We were starving. After catching about ten minutes of
Gasp!
in three different Westside cinemas, we had to eat. Holly and Donald picked the restaurant. The food here is ambitious, and the service is sometimes independent, but the crowd is fabulous, a mix of lovely young Brits looking to be discovered and the I'm-not-famous-yet-but-wait-until-next-year types.

We brought our glow of success with us. Holly headed straight for the ladies room as Donald met up with some of his pals at the bar. Pretty soon the room started receiving free drinks. Even though many groups had been waiting an hour or longer for their reservations, the atmosphere in the place got remarkably cheerful. Does any town love a winner more than ours?

I pulled Wesley over to a quiet corner and told him about my conversation with Xavier, or “Bro” as Wes had begun calling him.

“The police have arrested some gangbanger,” I reported. I nursed my drink, full of thoughts. The world has recently rediscovered martinis but I've always had a thing for them.
I tasted the hot vodka of the moment, Belvedere. Sipping, I pondered the meaning of this sudden end to the silent investigation of Brother Frank's death.

“Does Bro believe the police have the right man?” Wes asked.

A sudden pang caught me unawares, almost bringing tears. I would always be confused about what Xavier thought. I had known him, once. I had. But now I doubted.

Look at our past. Like, one day he's going to marry a person and the next day he's taking vows of celibacy—how strange was that? Wes waited patiently, watching me.

“Wes,” I said carefully, “do you think Xavier is gay?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not,” I said.

The way in which Wes could handle the zigs and zags of my typical conversation rivaled Unser at Indy, with not so much as a squeal of his mental wheels.

“How could he leave you?” Wes said, switching to this new subject. “That's the big question, isn't it?”

“The truth is, I could never understand his kind of faith,” I said, quietly. “That's why I'll never understand how he could have left. There's never been anything wrong with Xavier. I'm the one who's missing something. I mean, what a relief to put everything into God's hands.”

“Men are bastards, eh?”

I gave him a fond look and went back to my drink.

Wes patted my hand and, with the detour into Mad Bean's self-pity over, zigzagged back to our previous topic. “This notion that a gang member did it—somehow broke onto a very secure studio lot, entered the dressing room of a T.V. star, tracked down a monk, picked up a statuette, and committed murder—that incongruity isn't alarming anyone but you and me. So maybe we should just leave it alone for tonight.”

“Agreed.” I finished my drink.

Holly returned from her visit to the restroom, full of news.

“Parker Posey was in the bathroom with me!” she announced, gushing. “I peed in the stall next to Parker Posey!”

“My, what exciting lives we lead,” Wes said, deadpan.

Holly turned to me and added, “She's so cool. So where's my Donald?” She swiveled toward the bar and spotted him. “There he is!”

“Wesley,” I said after she'd fluttered off in Donald's direction, “lighten up. Give Hol a break. This is her first real boyfriend in a long time.”

“And I believe this is the first one who has ever been able to pay his own Visa bill,” Wes said.

“Even better,” I agreed.

“Didn't Marlo Thomas used to call her boyfriend ‘my Donald'? You know, on ‘That Girl'?”

“I thought that was Ivana Trump?” I teased him.

“That was ‘
the
Donald,'” Wes corrected, and then belatedly got that I was having a bit of fun with him.

“Okay.” Wes grinned. “A moratorium,” he offered, holding his tonic water on the rocks in the air.

“I will drink to that,” I said, although my martini glass was low on actual drink.

“Me, too,” added Holly, now back with us and raising a banana daiquiri up over her head.

“Lake, party of four,” called out the hostess.

“Can that be us?” Holly asked, checking her watch. “We've only just been here ten minutes.”

“Donald's a star,” Wes reminded her.

“
My
Donald?” Holly squealed.

Trying not to laugh, I grabbed Wes by the arm and followed the pretty hostess as she slinked her way to the back of the room, showing us to a pleasant table. Donald left his admirers at the bar and joined us. I was pleased to see the waitress who followed him was carrying a tray with fresh drinks.

“Who was that girl you were just talking to?” Holly asked as we were getting seated.

“Claire Danes,” Donald said. “She was congratulating
me. Can you believe that? I can't figure out how all these people already know that
Gasp!
is a hit. It's only ten o'clock. Weird.”

“In the old days they had tom-toms, my boy,” Wes said. “But nowadays we've got something better.”

“Buzz,” Holly explained to her darling Donald.

How can there be secrets? Hollywood is the ultimate beehive.
Everything
that happens is confided to a nutritionist, faxed to a studio accountant, bragged by competitive nannies in another language, sweated over with a personal trainer, name-dropped in preschool parking lots, ranted bitterly to a therapist, confessed to the dentist between the gargle and spit, chuckled over by valet parkers, approved by the pet groomer, blurted out during a shrill custody battle outside Toys 'R Us, and leaked to the tabloids. So, of course, everyone knows everything before everyone else. Buzz.

Donald beamed at us. “So tell me what's been going on. Holly says you guys are going to do a big party for the pope. That's huge.”

“Donald, you're so new at this Hollywood thing it hurts,” Wes chided. “You are never supposed to talk about anyone other than yourself. It's the law here.”

“The teasing ban,” I reminded Wes.

“He can't help himself,” Holly explained, and then turned to her Donald. “Ignore him, sweetkins.”

“Man, I think it's incredible that the pope is coming to Los Angeles. This town is in need of serious redemption,” Donald said.

“Madeline's making His Holiness some of her famous homemade granola, just to fortify him to face L.A. That should handle it,” Holly joked.

Seeing as Donald and I were almost smashed, we decided to let Wesley be our designated menu handler, as well as driver, and he told the waitperson what we were all to have. He, or she, had a partially shaved head and multiple piercings. I was struck by the realization that Holly's fashion adventures, bare feet now shod in thick-soled Doc Martens
in a bow to restaurant health codes, were rather tame.

The waiter took our menus back, but not before he asked for Donald's autograph. Yes, we were enjoying ourselves, basking in the heat reflected from Holly's Donald. In the land of dreams, almost everyone is an aspiring something. If it's not actor, it's director; if not director, it's stand-up comic. Take someone for drinks in L.A. and by the third Amstel Light they're telling you about this script they wrote and if their cousin's hairstylist gets it to Loni Andersen they might get it optioned. There are literally thousands of Subaru salesmen and English teachers, not to mention yoga instructors and airport shuttle drivers, who have a script or two in their drawers that could be the next
Titanic
if someone would give it a shot.

This enormous yearning to be discovered is almost palpable. Of all the fairy tales Hollywood itself believes in, the frog who is really a prince must be our favorite. That made Donald's victory the sweetest kind. He was the proverbial unknown talent, a guy who came from nowhere, who had no relatives or friends in high places, a goddamned lucky son-of-a-frog who had been kissed by fate.

Talent is important here. Connections are important. Hard work and perseverance and paying dues are important. But nothing is as venerated here as much as luck because anyone could get lucky, right? This is a town that worships that kind of luck.

I, myself, yearned for luck at times, but I was also very interested in the work and so I was kind of frustrated that we hadn't actually seen any of Donald's film.

“I'd like to know more about your script,” I said to Donald as things began to settle down at our table. “What inspired you to write
Gasp!
?”

“I found these great old true stories and I got hooked,” Donald answered, happy to be talking about his work. “I wrote the entire script in my old Valley Village apartment. I was doing some research for my masters and I found these old European diaries. I was struck by how different the world seemed then. It was only fifty-five years ago, but
it could have been centuries. Real low-tech, you know? But with all the crap that was going down during World War Two, there were also fantastic acts of personal bravery.

“Think of it—people being dispossessed, flung from their normal lives, facing enormous threats—it moved men to acts of passion and compassion. Not everyone was a sinner; not everyone was a saint. But almost everyone was tested, see? And some of the stories were naturally cinematic. I started getting excited about writing a screenplay that captured what I was feeling. I mean, what do you do? Do you risk everything to help, or do you close your eyes and become part of hell?

“I started with the Nazis rounding up Jews. Then I added a young couple on the run. Once I got to work writing, it took me less than a month to finish the script.”

“You are so deep,” Holly said, hooking her leg around Donald's under the table.

“So where did the alien motherships come in?” asked Wes, tentatively.

“Later.”

We waited while another round of drinks was delivered compliments of a table of agents this time.

“Yeah. I got the script out there but nobody wanted to do a picture about Nazis.” Donald looked at us like, can you believe that? “Nuts, huh? But then they said they could see it as a sci-fi epic if I changed a few things and that seemed pretty funny to me. So I holed up for an entire weekend and rewrote it. Just to crack up my roommate, you know? Only it was good. It really worked.”

“So it's a Nazi story played in outer space,” I said.

“It's about this man who's trying to get out of Europe before the Nazis catch up with him and throw him in a concentration camp. He's on the run and he hides out in Italy using some false papers. While he's in hiding, he meets a woman with a young son and they, you know, fall in love hard. This part was a true story, by the way. I'm
not making up anything. But then, the borders start closing up tight. You remember at the start of
Casablanca
, how there were some people who bought travel visas on the black market and got phony passports? They had to get out of Europe, somehow, and they were desperate. And that sneaky bastard who had the stolen documents was planning to sell them to the highest bidder if the Nazis didn't catch him first. Remember ‘
Reeky, you must hide these letters of transit! Please, Reeky
!'”

I watched Donald as he did his Peter Lorre impression and laughed and talked about his story. Perhaps he would hang onto his natural enthusiasm. Unfortunately, it was not always so. The ride Donald was on too often took a detour through the dream grinder. But not always.

“Anyway, there's all this suspense and then they escape and then they get caught,” Donald continued.

“Don't tell me the end,” I said.

“I won't. But there's the basic moral issue of who betrayed whom? Of what is moral in an unspeakably immoral time in history? Of how far would you go to save yourself or someone you loved?”

“But played out on Alpha Centuri,” Holly added.

Donald laughed. “I know I'll be criticized. So what? I don't have a problem with popular culture. Maybe the story loses some of its resonance, taking it out of Europe. What can I say? It's only a movie.”

“I can't wait to see it,” I said.

“I think the producer left in a lot of the good stuff, so I have no complaints. And, you know? It actually works to have this story placed in the future. It says that we can't get comfortable thinking this is a horror story from the past and nothing like this could ever happen again. It's a clarion warning that we must guard against this future or pay an unspeakable price.”

Where had Holly found this guy? He
was
deep.

The food was brought to our table. Although the descriptions in the menu had been so darn
California
it had given
Holly and me the giggles, there was nothing wrong with the presentation. Wes had ordered me the lobster ravioli, which was prepared with spinach greens and a coconut milk and saffron sauce. My kind of thing. For Holly, he selected Chilean sea bass with mango salsa and dried fig sauce. She appeared to be happy with it, although Holly was always happy with food, no matter what. Wes ordered himself the honey-pomegranate-glazed game hen with apricot-and pistachio-studded cous cous, and for Donald he chose the tenderloin of beef with garlic mashed potatoes and a Cabernet sauce. It all looked amazing and we dove in.

As I surveyed the restaurant I noticed the hostess taking a telephone call, jotting down a note, and then delivering it to a silver-haired man at a nearby table. His had to be the only gray hair in the establishment, I thought, and then, as I watched him look at the note and pass it along to the young man seated next to him, suddenly I remembered something.