The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 1 (41 page)

“My word, Z. I'll bet your sweet nothings have unzipped a lot of dresses. But I'm afraid you've much to learn about Hollywood. Truth and reality are intertwined in these here hills. I am what they say I am—and there is nothing I can say about it.”

“Such a knot of words.” I gestured at the settee. “Please let me assist in the disentanglement. Mind the antlers.”

“Sit? In this dress?”

A long, luscious leg that had no business being attached to a woman in her mid-thirties stretched outward to display the gown to best advantage—a snug velvet encasement with metallic leaves embroidered about the collar and down the steep neckline. The dress had no back to speak of, and I longed to warm my cold palm upon the kiln of accessible skin.

“This is my standing dress,” lectured she. “There is another version for sitting.”

“Your sense of humor goes vastly under-reported.”

“I'm quite serious. Ask Mary. She recommended the designer.”

Mary Pickford? I'd forgotten the swarm of buzzing dignitaries! Now I inhaled their stratospheric air and felt no correlating queasiness. What volumes of confidence could be won from the most casual of attachments to a woman like Bridey Valentine.

“I should like to meet Miss Pickford,” said I. “And Mr. Fairbanks, as it was he who extended my invite. Swell people, I should think—the swellest!”

“I think they'll like you, provided you keep your enthusiasm to a low boil. Just don't ask Mary about her next picture because there
is
no next picture. She's through with acting thanks to that horrible facelift. She can't even smile anymore, poor dear.”

“Facelift?”

“Oh, Z. You're a charmer. Yes, you shall meet them. And George Bernard Shaw, if you can find him beneath his beard. And Dietrich too, although don't get too excited about it; she is, as you will see, a raging lesbian. It's all here for you, so go, go, take advantage of it—it's the Hollywood way. I do suggest staying clear from
that
one. The fat fellow staring daggers.”

“Fatty Arbuckle! The hefty humorist! Is he still making films?”

“He's mounting a comeback.” But she said it through bared teeth. “You recall the rape trial? How he squashed that starlet to death?”

“Oh.” This did damper the mood. “Yes.”

“They say that the poor girl's girl parts were in a box on their way to the incineration room when the coroner rushed in and stopped it, and that's when they discovered that her bladder had been ruptured by the weight. He almost got away with it.”

“But he did get away with it.”

Bridey shrugged.

“Fans don't forgive as easily as juries.”

“So why invite him? If he is as hated as you say?”

She reached out, stroked the hair above my ears, and spoke softly.

“There are many reasons one might be invited to Pickfair. Some of them admirable. Some of them not. Fatty Arbuckle—oh, how
do I say it with any class? He is a star burning out before our very eyes. We have to watch it up close if we are to understand our own demises, which will come, and quickly, because time out here moves double-speed. Make sense?”

No number of printed puff pieces could have prepared me for this introspection. Nor could Bridey have guessed the effect her words would have upon me. As the world's bearer of
la silenziosità
, I knew how one could dangle the secrets of death before any man or woman, and how, regardless of the danger, they would snatch at it.

Her hand slid from my hair (was this a fantasy picture?), down my cheek (hellcat, pray continue!), and to my chin, where it drew to a teasing pinch. She let go; my dead skin took its time expanding. Her lashes fluttered and she blew me the smallest of kisses.

“Be careful out there and you might live to see me again.”

And then, Reader, Bridey Valentine took her leave, the shush of her hemline across carpet ten times more effective than Mae West's honking. Everyone turned to kiss-kiss her cheeks. I became jealous, of course I did, for I'd been the hunter to capture her as she'd prowled the greenery. But it struck me that she might be teaching me a lesson: not all women could be captured.

Halfway through a sigh worthy of a silver-screen romance, my allotment of daylight was blotted out by a figure sidling up next to me. There was a yellow suit, acres of it, and squirting from its collar was a perspiring, ham-pink face split by an alligator grin and buttoned with blue eyes that blinked, blinked, blinked like a bird.

“Watch out for Valentine,” giggled Fatty Arbuckle. “She'll screw your prick off.”

III.

W
HAT IS ONE MONTH IN
Southern California? Or two, or four, or six? The sun shined until it became a stupor, a daydream of life undelineated by the usual indicators of rain or snow. Los Angelenos lived as if in constant emergence from a dark theater, convinced of their mastery over the smaller, dimmer worlds played out across the rest of the country.

For a time I was their best barnacle. My debut at Pickfair earned me a string of auxiliary invites, from home banquets complete with ice sculptures and balalaika quartets, to lunch parties aboard houseboats and schooners, to private rooms behind velvet ropes in happening clubs like Hawaiian Paradise and the Famous Door. No one in the flea-ridden flophouse where I resided received such summonses, and from that I drew an energy both prideful and, after a time, pitiful.

It took talent to make a splash and I was but a gimmick, sat ever nearer the washed-up end of the table and called upon once per evening to entertain.

“Why, you're that young magician Doug was so keen on,” one would remark.

“You
do
look ghoulish,” a second would say. “Is that make-up? Max Factor is doing fabulous things these days.”

“Do your bit!” a third would add. “Jolly good fun—Madge, wait until you see.”

And thus my night would rise to a climax befitting the Pageant of Health, with me borrowing a pin from an adjacent lady and, after a halfhearted spiel, jabbing it into the back of my hand and displaying it as if it were a ring. The sophisticates gasped and clapped, and, oh, how I slurped it up in my thirst to belong to their society, if only for a minute. The flavor was always bittersweet; each time I would spy a starlet so put off by my demonstration that she could not eat.

Bridey had warned me.

There are many reasons one might be invited. Some of them admirable. Some of them not.

My trick became tired. Invites petered and I was friendless. Poorer than I'd been in New York, I hustled work as a movie extra. My bony, ashen face made me an ideal “Mad Villager” or “Freak Number Four” on a half-dozen Universal Studios horror pictures, and I mailed almost everything I earned to Church's Chinatown address. There came no reply, though, and chasing fake monsters like Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff off soundstage cliffs did nothing for my self-esteem. I was the monster, the real one, and I waited for the other mad villagers, or freaks, to realize and redirect their pitchforks.

I was studying up on active volcanoes into which I might hurl myself when I saw a note being slid beneath my door. In it, the harried handwriting of the proprietor relayed a telephoned invitation to a last-second shindig celebrating the fresh repeal of Prohibition thirteen years after its harebrained ratification. For most, this was cause for a celebration of the guzzlingest kind. I, however, pressed the heels of my hands to my sockets, hoping to suppress the images of John Quincy, Mother Mash, and the alcoholic mud foaming beneath their dangling feet.

I'd half-crumpled the note before noticing the party's location:
the San Simeon home of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. Shared with his almost-wife, actress Marion Davies, it was rumored to be nothing short of a medieval hilltop acropolis. Only the hasty organization of the event explained my invite. I set the note upon my lap and smoothed the wrinkles. Yes, I'd attend one last bash as a toast to John Quincy, who never lived to see the liquor laws fall.

Perched high above a portentous fog, Hearst Castle was a thing to behold, one hundred and sixty-five rooms situated upon acres of craggy bluffs that looked as if shipped over from Scottish moorland—and given Hearst's fortune, it was possible. I passed beneath the hand-carved eaves and cathedral arches as did everyone else, hushed by the semblant fairy tale and waiting for the royal wedding (or underbridge trolls) to conclude it.

A butler scowled at my weathered suit and in a self-righteous huff I stormed the so-called Assembly Room, a hall of etched ceilings, ancient tapestries, marble nudes, bronze busts, and a thirty-foot Christmas tree. Sixty-some people mingled in the caramel light, drinking suddenly legal liquors by the steinful. Ignoramuses to a man! Not a one of these ales or lagers could possibly rival the love-punch of Dog Bowl Debbie.

Renaissance-era choir stalls were built into the walls and I claimed a corner one in order to embark upon what I hoped to be a sulk of legend, crossing my arms so that my naked, bony elbows peeked from matching holes. I was the bum in the alley, these people were the big bad wolves, and it was with their grand successes that I wiped my vile filth:
Tra la la la la.

Mr. Hearst appeared via a hidden door to great applause and he pointed us toward the Refectory, a dining hall in the style of a middle-ages monastery, with tall windows, colorful Sienese banners,
and a long table fit for sixty-four fools. Placecards directed me to the ass-end, some forty or fifty miles from our hosts. Painstaking place settings were old hat to me, but this was farcical: three china plates, three glasses, four forks, three spoons, two knives, and a selection of other instruments of dubious utility.

“And paper napkins!” exclaimed the drunkard to my left.

“And ketchup and mustard bottles!” exclaimed the drunkard to my right.

“That Hearst,” said the first, “is one of a kind.”

I buried the urge to kill. Onward came the soup, caviar, bison tenderloin, potatoes and gravy, string beans, apricot tartlets, and enough alcohol to honor its resurgence. People englutted and imbibed and cackled, and not one of them paid me any mind. My empty veins itched with the maggots of antipathy until I could take no more.

I bolted upright to leave but the cockamamie handkerchief tucked into my collar had found its way beneath my untouched plate. Plate bumped glass and glass overturned, spilling my wine across the tablecloth. Drunkard I and Drunkard II at last noticed me and raised a hearty hurrah at my faux pas while servants rushed to blot and wipe. I sat to dislodge myself and Drunkard I grabbed my shoulder.

“I know this mug! This is that young fella who sticks forks in his arm. It's a riot!”

“Forks, you say?” chuckled Drunkard II. “Like some kind of savage? Maybe Fay Wray discovered this guy on Skull Island! Whaddya say, kid? How's King Kong smell in person?”

The bastards howled until a tray of crab flakes distracted Drunkard II. Drunkard I, though, was undeterred, mussing my hair with every insult until the ladies around us began to laugh as well. Had I really traded companionship with Church for this debasement from
self-righteous jackals? My emotions coalesced into a cold fury that burned through the rancid cancers of my torpid organs, and I turned toward the heckling dipsomaniac, flaming with the ice of
la silenziosità.

Hearst Castle smudged down to a Neanderthal's cave of stone and fire. Time swallowed me down its hot throat. There!—Death!—waiting as always to tease me with vulture claws. This time the pain was worth bearing in order to watch the drunkard's plumped roseate cheeks flatten and whiten and the boozed exuberance of his eyes deplete with horror.

I am the savage, you fat fuck?

Indeed I am, and unto you this I savage.

Adrift in obliteration, I did not hear the cheery voices die out nor see the grins fall, but when at last I surfaced, it was not two or three diners staring at me with their open mouths crowded with cud, but our entire half of the table, twenty or thirty people rudely awakened from their everlasting privilege to the realization of their ugly, encroaching deaths. The drunkard himself was a blubbering wreck, his fountain of tears melting through a flume of snot and beer.

I stood, this time unmindful of my handkerchief, and charged toward the nearest door.
La silenziosità
, dependably as ever, had left me weak, and servants were amassing to warn me that this was not an exit. I shoved past the busybodies, anything to escape from all those film-camera eyes, and if I became lost in the castle? All the better. Castles had dungeons; perhaps down there I might be shackled.

The door fed into a sitting room that looked like a mouth—a long tongue of purple rug, the biting teeth of chandeliers. Past stone sphinxes stood two golden doors, but they were locked, and so I took up a three-foot candlestick and swung it at my pursuers.

So weaponed, I dashed to the right, through a chamber dominated by snooker tables and a Flemish tapestry, then beneath an Arabian doorway. Servants cornered me in a small Art Deco movie theater, but I climbed over four rows of padded seats and candlesticked my way out of a side exit and into a blue evening of tall palms and long shadows.

I expect a night watchman would have shot me down like a coyote had I not happened upon a door that brought me back to the Assembly Room. There I encountered a serving boy ignorant of my escapades. I asked him to fetch a taxi, and make haste, make haste! I bashed through the vestibule and onto the front esplanade, and would have sprinted down to the road to intercept the cab had I not received an abrupt question.

“Still disturbing the locals, Z?”

Behind a veil of smoke stood Bridey in a red dress, tapping ashes into an ornamental urn. Her repose suggested nonchalance, but the bosom heaving within the bodice betrayed that she had hurried to catch me.

“How do you do,” said I. “Had I seen you at dinner I might have—”

“Delayed your jailbreak? That would have been a shame. It was the highlight.”

Behind rattling doors, a squad of irate servants shouted to one another their scheme to nab me. I needed to vacate, and yet so complimented was I by Bridey's attention that I lingered.

“The truth is, Miss Valentine, that I have had a streak of rough luck. It has made me mindful that I do not belong here, not with people of your stature. The jailbreak, as you say, has only begun. I believe I shall hop a train tonight, or steal a car. Whatever it takes to make myself scarce.”

“A pity.” She fluttered her bobcat lashes at my groin. “And here I thought you were excited to see me.”

I looked down and saw that I still wielded the three-foot candlestick. Such clever ribaldry! I laughed aloud; it surprised the both of us into grins.

“You know what?” posed she. “You're exactly right. You don't belong here. Which is why, in my opinion, it is such good fortune that you
are
here. I trust you got a good gander at those quacks crammed in there like a Busby Berkeley number? They make a lot of money changing—by the role, by the trends, by the minute if necessary. But you? You're as strange as ever.”

“You praise me for this?”

“I don't know what it was you did in there, but you might as well have pissed directly onto Hearst's plate. In other words, yes. I am praising you, dear, most highly.”

My luck could not last forever. The doors burst open and spit out a butler whose last filament of hair stood straight up in the breeze. He expected a lengthy sprint before catching me and was taken aback by my presence. He glared, pet down his cranial poof, and bowed at Bridey.

“Madam, I must ask you inside. This young man is an infiltrator and crook.”

“An infiltrator?” Bridey looked amused. “Why, this is Mister . . .”

She extended a braceleted arm in my direction.

“Finch,” said I.

“Madam, he has purloined a valuable candlestick.”

“Pish-posh. He's stolen nothing.”

The butler winced as servants do when tasked with correcting their uppers. He gestured at the antique that I held at my side.

“It is one of a quartet of gilt-brass sticks set with four moonstones. Unmistakable, I'm afraid. The police are on their way.”

“Oh,
that
,” said Bridey. “I asked Mr. Finch to carry it for me so that I might have a set of my own designed. Did I forget to ask permission from Miss Davies? Blame it on the feminine mind! So flighty, you know. Now be good and call off the police, lest we create a headline about Bridey Valentine's Hearst Castle incarceration.”

The butler knew he was being gamed but, well trained, he bowed grimly, returned inside, and began snapping fingers to call off his tuxedoed hounds. Bridey waited until the doors were closed before giving me a most devious curtsy.

“Acting,” said she.

“Brava,” said I. “But I think I should return the candlestick.”

“Out of the question. It's our cover story. In fact, I'll have to get an entire set made just to cover my tracks.”

“I am sorry about that.”

“Sorry? It can't cost more than one or two thousand, tops.”

“Still. If there is anything I can do to repay you.”

Bridey dropped her cigarette into the urn and arched her back so as to push herself from the column. She advanced with a serpent's slowness, the diamondback crepe of her dress rasping across the underfoot marble. Inches before me she halted, hands low upon her cocked hips, elbows back, chest forward, and face tilted so that I could see my pale reflection in her lipstick's luster. The lips parted, wet. Behind them, white teeth, pink tongue, nibbling movements, a throaty hum.

“Repayment,” mused she. “Yes, I can think of something.”