The Diamond Lane (54 page)

“Ivan is all for black and white as the colors? He's all for prime rib and baby carrots at the reception dinner?”

“Everything. He's being a prince.”

“You gave me a scare, honey. I went to six different shoe places to find the right shade of taupe for my shoes.”

THE DAY OF
the shower, the Big House was busier than Heathrow over the holidays. The carpet cleaner. The window washer. For some undisclosed reason, the plumber. The house had a merciless western exposure, no air conditioning. After about one o'clock it was ten degrees hotter inside than out. Forget frying an egg on the sidewalk; an egg fresh from the fridge would be hard-boiled by the time you cracked it on the edge of the counter.

Nevertheless, the parade of service people marched on. Rental tables and chairs were delivered. A sheet cake arrived. Phone calls from the florist, the caterers, the assistant to Mr. Futake, the corn syrup sculptor, inquiring as to the number of burners on the stove.

Tony felt like the bleeding butler, letting people in, answering the phone. He felt put upon, abused, a forgotten stick of suddenly very important humanity there at the top of the frying
city, for at 12:27, between a phone call from a guest needing directions and one from the window washer asking should he bring an extension for his ladder, V.J. Parchman called with good news. Solid good news, unlike the normal spongy Hollywood variety rife with contingencies and suppositions.

Allyn Meyer wanted to buy
Love Among Elephants
.

Allyn Meyer wanted to buy his script!
They'd turned in the new draft (really the original first draft with new covers) only the week before. It was the
Romeo and Juliet
in Kenya version, wherein he and Mouse exchanged vows in the Rwandan mountains in the fog, among the gorillas. Tony hadn't expected an answer this quickly.

“Get yourself a lawyer if you don't already have one,” said V.J. “She's only offering Writers Guild Minimum, which is hardly enough to qualify as money, but there it is.”

“This is bloody fantastic!”

“There's another thing – I suppose you should have your lawyer get with her about this – she wants you to waive your option to do the first rewrite.”

“So she really went for the love story. Did she say anything? Did she like it? Obviously, she must have liked it.”

“She's getting the idea off the street, is what's happening here.”

“Have you rung up Ralph, yet? He'll go berserk.”

“I don't think she has any intention of following through with it once I'm gone.”

“Once you're – you're not headed back to Nairobi, are you?”

“Nairobi? You gotta be kidding. I'm going over to head Michael Brass's new production company. I'd love to take this project with me. We couldn't offer you anything up front, of course, but there'd be a lot on the back end, including a guarantee that we won't hire any other writers. You'll see it through to the final print.”

“I've got to speak with Ralph. We've got to speak with Allyn, What is Writers Guild Mininium anyway?”

V.J. told him. It sounded like a hefty sum until he figured what it would be after he split it with Ralph, then paid taxes and a lawyer to negotiate a contract. Then it sounded like just enough to buy a next-up-from-the-bottom-of-the-line Toyota.

Tony reiterated that he needed to speak with Ralph and rang off.
Allyn Meyer wanted to buy his script
.

Ralph wasn't at the office, nor was he at home. Tony left messages at both places. He tried to call Mimi. She was at lunch. He even tried to call Darryl and Sather at the editing rooms, despite the fact he was furious with them for still allowing Mimi and Lisa to use the house for the wedding shower when the wedding no longer included him. It was positively inhumane. What was he supposed to do? Hang about like a good old sport, wish Mouse and that creep his best? Propose a toast?

“You don't have to be there,” Darryl had said before they left that morning. “I'll come home, give you the car, you can take off.” Then Sather called and said they had to have a reel on the dubbing stage at seven the next morning, and probably wouldn't be home until after midnight.

“You promised you'd lend me your bloody car!” Tony had shouted.

“What am I supposed to do?”

Now, now that he was a working screenwriter –
Eow! Allyn Meyer wants to buy me bloody script!
– he really had to get out of there. No working Hollywood screenwriter would be caught dead lurking about the shadows of the wedding shower for the woman he was at one time engaged to marry, but who was now marrying someone else. No working screenwriter was obligated to be a good sport.

He stood on the deck in the full rage of the sun, toasting the view with a fresh bottle of gin. “I sold a script!” he called to the smog. “I am a screenwriter!” he sang to the limp forest of prickly pear stretching down the hill beneath the deck. The strong urge to call Mouse with the news was a knife in his heart.

Lisa arrived, a little after six, struggling through the house
with a deck chair from her own patio, the backs of her wet legs imprinted with the pattern of the upholstery on her bucket seats. She'd been dropped off by Carole, who was already headed back down the hill to pick up some of Mimi's potted plants.

“Potted plants!” Tony followed her out onto the deck. “What do you need potted bloody plants for? It's a wedding shower, for God's sake, not a meeting of the frigging ladies' auxiliary. I desperately need to borrow your car.”

“You guys live like cavemen is why we need the plants.”

“We sold our script.”

“Who? You and Ralph?”

“We haven't sold it. The money isn't in the bank, but we got the call. I got the call. Anyway, Mouse and Ivan are liable to be here any minute, and I –”

“– the nervous groom,” said Lisa, arranging the chair by the railing, stopping to admire the persimmon sun sinking behind sheets of smog in the western sky. “People always say it's the bride. How much are they offering for the script?”

“Don't tell me no one's told you!”

“What, is it on the front page of
Variety
or something?”

“About the blasted wedding!” Tony had already suffered a consolatory phone call from his parents, whom Mouse rang up two seconds after she'd given him the boot. He'd also received a letter from Gabrielle and Wim in Nairobi telling him how terribly sorry they were to hear about the split. He presumed if those people knew, everyone did.

“Is there a way we can pull the speakers out here?” She mopped her forehead with her arm. “Jesus, at least if there was a breeze. What were you saying about the wedding?”

Before Tony could construct a phrase which communicated the gist of the situation without rendering him ripe for pity, there was a knock on the door. At the same time, the answering machine launched into its series of chirps and clicks which announced someone was ringing in. “Good God,” he moaned. He had a pounding headache from the gin, from the onslaught
of service people, from the prospect of being trapped here while the loathsome Mouse and Ivan were celebrated by all of his and Mouse's friends, from the frustration – good God! He hadn't felt this pent-up since his boarding school days, passing the lingerie catalogue around the dormitory at midnight – of not being able to share his good news.

“Hang in there,” said Lisa. She grabbed the phone in the kitchen. “Get the door, would you?”

“No,” said Tony, “absolutely not.”

After a good fifteen seconds of insistent rapping, the door opened. A foreign-sounding tenor called out: “Anybody is there?”

“This is insufferable,” said Tony, striding through the house to the entryway.

At the door was a tall Japanese, almost as tall as Tony, with a swingy Beatle haircut and an underbite. He wore a ruffled evening shirt with a red bow tie, and showed no signs of suffering from the heat. “Mr. Futake,” he said, pumping Tony's hand and bowing slightly. “You Tony Cheatham, groom?”

“No, but come in.” Past Mr. Futake, in the driveway, Tony saw another Japanese in a tux unloading aluminum pots, tins of corn syrup, ten-pound bags of sugar, and a small brown case from the back of a four-door, charcoal-gray import still bearing its dealer tags. A car. A car that would be parked here in the drive, presumably all night. The assistant, with the girth and lightheartedness of a Sumo wrestler, plowed past Tony, immediately commandeering the kitchen. Lisa had finished on the phone. Tony saw her out on the deck struggling with a speaker the size of an icebox, a loose wire trailing dangerously between her legs.

“Mr. Futake, I'd like to have a word with you, if I may.”

“I do groom.” He mimed a few sculpting gestures.

“Wonderful. But I'm not, I used to be the groom, but I'm not any longer.”

“Sure,” said Mr. Futake amiably.

Soon, the close air of the kitchen was heavy with the smell
of melted sugar. It made Tony's teeth hurt just to inhale. Mr. Futake and his assistant peered into the vat of hot corn syrup and argued in Japanese. Tony stood behind them wringing his hands.

“Mr. Futake,” he tried again. “I have a bit of a favor to ask. If you'll indulge me. You see, I used to be the groom, but there's been, we've had, anyway, the point I'm trying to make is, my ex-fiancée is marrying someone else. You can imagine how embarrassing that is for me. I've also just sold a screenplay, so it would be doubly embarrassing for me to be …”

“Sure,” said Mr. Futake, his black Beatle hair swinging as he nodded his head. He snapped open the brown case on the counter, took out a red cloth utility belt, tied it around his waist, then extracted a half dozen gleaming silver instruments that would look at home in the hand of a dentist.

“… in any event, I won't stand on ceremony with you. What I was wondering, could I perhaps borrow your car? Just for a few hours. I'm fully insured and have an excellent driving record.”

“Car? Sure.”

“Splendid.” Tony exhaled with relief.

Mr. Futake took a long, thin, tongue depressor-like stick from the case, dipped it in one of the vats on the stove, pulled out a golden viscous glob of hot corn syrup.

“I'll just wait till you're done there,” said Tony, checking his watch. Perhaps he'd drive out to Santa Monica, see if Ralph had turned up … or no, didn't he have that writing class tonight? Perhaps he'd drive out to Valley College.

With a few turns of the wrist, a few confident swipes of one of the more cruel-looking pieces of pseudo dental equipment, Mr. Futake sculpted a small Porsche, which he presented to Tony with a bow. “Car.”

“Car. That's bloody clever of you, isn't it? Now, if I could, presuming it's all right with you, of course, if I could just have the keys to your car. The keys? To your car?”

“Key? Sure.”

Mr. Futake sculpted Tony a skeleton key.

“Good Christ,” said Tony, “you haven't understand a word I've said, have you?”

Mr. Futake sculpted Tony a small sad hippie hanging from a cross. “Christ,” he said.

Tony thanked Mr. Futake and went to his room. What was he going to do? In the city with the most cars on the planet he could not lay his hands on one. Here he was a
screenwriter
, and never had he felt so stuck. He had broken into
Hollywood
, and he was feeling the way people did in life rafts, dying of dehydration while floating in the middle of the ocean

He stumbled over his ridiculous cowboy boots in the dark, shot-put them to the back of his closet,
thunk-thunk
, threw on a pair of threadbare gym shorts, hiking boots, and a T-shirt. He hadn't worn these clothes since Nairobi.

He would just have to walk. The café at the bottom of the hill closed at nine; after that he would read magazines in the store until it closed, then ride the bus around until midnight or so. He would keep trying to ring Ralph. It was pathetic, but there was nothing for it.

He got no farther than the front door. He opened it to find a gaggle of people with video cameras and clipboards, wearing the deeply insincere smiles of television journalists, crowded on the front porch. Coming up behind them were Mouse and Ivan followed by someone else hauling
their
equipment. One of the television journalists, a young woman with a gargantuan mouth framed in purple lipstick, rustled through the papers on her clipboard. “We're from
L.A. Today
. You must be the groom.”

He slammed the door in her face. Christ! Was the
news
here? Without thinking, he galloped back through the house to his bedroom. His head boomed. Sweat flooded his eyes. He would just have to wait in his room. It was really not on, a screenwriter of his stature stuck playing the role of the jilted lover. He'd close the door, not make a peep until the party really got swinging, then climb out the window. He sat for a very long time. In his shorts, in the dark, on the edge of his bed, he sat. He
heard the front door open, then slam, muffled chattering, yips of delight. Who in God's name was out there? Mouse didn't know that many people. They must all be friends of Mimi's. The broken window, which had caused him to see his breath on a number of recent cold nights, admitted not a wisp of a breeze. He dared not turn on the light for fear someone on the carpeted highway to the bathroom at the end of the hall might see it. A diamond mine could be no hotter or stuffier than this loathsome room in this loathsome house in this loathsome city, he thought. He blotted the sweat from his face with his T-shirt. This was not the life of a famous screenwriter, or even a struggling screenwriter. Even Mimi's doddering mutt had it better than this.