The Five Acts of Diego Leon (38 page)

He was dressed in costume—frayed cotton trousers, a heavy
wool jacket adorned with embroidered galloons, boots, a large sombrero, and a fake mustache—when he arrived. He grabbed a pistol and placed it in his leather holster. The set designers had arranged several props—a fiberglass horse, a whiskey barrel, a pitaya cactus—and they would be shooting a series of movie stills, he was told, by a group of fidgety photographers, then some headshots.

“The studio hired a new photographer,” one of the casting assistants told Diego while they watched the set designers arrange the props. A piece of the wooden barrel had been chipped, a large hunk of wood missing from one side when it was dropped while it was being moved, and they had to call in a carpenter.

The casting assistant told Diego, “Why don’t you go inside the trailer.” She pointed to a white Airstream parked behind the stage. “Mister Apple can take your headshots, and when he’s done we should be ready out here.”

“Very well,” he said, and walked to the camper.

He opened the door and stepped inside. A chair was positioned in front of a black velvet curtain. In front of the chair was a camera on a tripod, the wooden stilts gleaming new and smooth. A large lamp sat atop a stack of crates, the light pointing directly at the chair.

“Hello?” he said. “Anyone here?”

“Coming,” said a voice from behind a narrow door. Soon it opened and the photographer stepped from behind the trailer’s kitchenette that seemed to double as the dark room. He wore a white apron and thick, black glasses.

“Why, hello!”

The man’s voice was familiar, but from where? “Hello,” Diego said, feeling uneasy.

The photographer came closer and removed his glasses. “Don’t you recognize me?”

Diego continued to stare. It was none other than Charlie Applebaum. “Charlie?” he asked, stunned.

“It’s me,” he said, laughing, slapping his knee. “What a surprise. I knew you worked here. But I didn’t know you were on this picture.” He laughed and gave Diego a quick pat on the back. “Why, it’s been a while since I saw you. Thought you were sore at me.”

“Sore? Why would I be sore, Charlie?” Diego smiled.

He placed his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “I dunno. After I was evicted from the Ruby Rose, I never saw you around the diner.”

“I got busy. My life,” he stammered, “became a little occupied.” He looked around, said, “Wow. You’re a photographer now?”

“Can you believe it?” Charlie said. “Been enjoying my work. Better than I could have ever imagined.” Charlie walked over and handed Diego a book. Inside, the pages were filled with headshots of faces he recognized—Lester Frank, Ada Daniels, Margaret Dillon, Clark Gable, Greta Garbo—each personally autographed by the actors themselves to Charlie.

“You took all of these?” Diego asked, thumbing through the book. The pages went on and on. “Every single actor in Hollywood must be here.”

“They are,” he said. Charlie said it took him spending a few weeks thinking about his life, about the choices he’d made, about his career in pictures. He was taken in by a preacher, he said, right after he left the Ruby Rose. This preacher was a great man named Brother Earl. He preached the word of God with his daughter, Rebecca. They made me see, Charlie said, that a career in pictures wasn’t for me. So, he said, he started attending services more and more, grew closer to Brother Earl and Rebecca.

“They made me see the error of my ways. Now, I’m much happier. Changed my name. I’m Charlie Apple. I attend services regularly, and I just bought a studio. I’m still getting settled, but I already got customers flocking there. Girls wanting their headshots, guys like you, like I once was, needing their photos to pass around at the studios.” He folded his arms and leaned up against a chair.

“That’s great,” said Diego. There was an awkward pause, and they stood there, quietly, Charlie playing with his glasses and Diego jiggling his hands in his pockets. “Well,” Diego said. “Where shall I sit?”

“Here,” he said, pointing to a chair.

“Very well.” Diego sat.

Charlie positioned himself behind the camera, fiddled with different glass plates, adjusting the lens and the lamp. He covered his head under the camera’s cloth and held the flashbulb up. “Good,” he
said, his voice muffled. “Stay there. Just like that. Don’t move. Stay quiet and still.”

He snapped several pictures, the flashbulbs exploding, the black smoke dissolving into the hot air. Charlie said nothing for a while then spoke again. “I know what you did. I know it was you who took my spot.”

“What are you talking about?” Diego asked. He felt Charlie’s eye on him, magnified, behind the large glass plate of the camera. “Spot? What spot?”

“When the studio called that morning. It was you. You intercepted the message.”

“What are you talking about? I … that’s absurd.” The lamp’s light glared in his face. He squinted and began to sweat.

“I had a friend who worked on that picture. I ran into her a few days after I was evicted. She told me a guy showed up claiming to be me. Only it wasn’t me. She recognized you from a photo in the paper.”

“Charlie, look—”

“The thing is that I’m not sore,” he said. “I really and truly am not sore at you. Because if you hadn’t done that, who knows where I’d be right now, who I’d be. The whole show business stuff. Why, I never had the chops for it.”

“Hey,” Diego said. “Look, I’m sorry. I needed a break. I needed to make it here. I was desperate.”

“I was too,” Charlie explained. He stopped now, removed the cloth, and stood straight. “I too was once lost, but now I’m found.” He approached and placed his hand on Diego’s shoulder. He looked into his eyes, and Charlie’s gaze was penetrating, sharp and frigid as ice. “I know you. The real you. What you’re capable of. Why you do what you do. What you’re running from. I know who you truly are.”

“You don’t,” Diego said, standing now. “You don’t know
anything
about me.”

He turned toward the door, trying to erase Charlie’s words from his memory, trying to erase his own guilt that felt heavier now more than ever before.

He didn’t need prayers from the likes of Charlie Applebaum, or Apple, to help him gain clarity. What he needed were the things he had depended on that got him this far: determination, opportunities, luck, and talent. Yes, sir, he told himself. I’ll be fine and dandy. Something will give. It’s not the end of me. A minor setback. A small wrinkle in an otherwise smooth plan. Diego had read a few days before an article about Thomas Edison and how many times he had to redesign, redraft, and reimagine all of his inventions before getting them just right. He admired the man’s tenacity and told himself he would go forth from that day forward and try to emulate it. Diego would allow himself to think only successful thoughts. He would forget the past. He would work harder. He would eventually triumph.

Diego was feeling chipper for the first time in weeks. Though apprehensive about his next move once work on the picture was over, he walked around that day—the sun shining brightly, a cool breeze blowing in from the coast—at Frontier and reminded himself that, though he would miss it, there were other games in town. Another studio will pick him up. He walked with a slight skip in his step, whistling, as he strolled around the studio, killing time between takes, when he ran into Georgie Wexler. She was coming out of the studio diner with a group of girls, all of them seamstresses in the costume department.

“Well, look at you!” she said, running up to give him a hug.

“Georgie?” He hugged her back and said, “What a surprise. How’s tricks?”

She waved good-bye to her friends. “It’s good to see another familiar face. I was just having coffee with the girls. How I miss them.”

“Are you visiting?”

“For a few days,” she said, leaning up against the diner’s wall.

Georgie unbuttoned her coat, and he looked down and saw her belly.

“You’re pregnant?” he asked.

“Four months,” she said, out of breath, fanning herself with her hand. “My, but the little bugger tuckers me out.”

“What have you and Nick been up to these last few years?”

She told him how, after their honeymoon, they moved to Connecticut
where Nick attended law school at Yale, how he finished up the year before and was now working in Manhattan for a friend of his father’s. They bought a house in the suburbs and Nick commutes into the city.

“Just like we planned it,” she said, smiling and pointing to her belly. “Now, all we have to do is wait for the little one to pop out, and we’ll be complete. I’ve seen your movies,” she told Diego now. “My, how you’ve changed.”

“Yes, well,” he said. “It’s show business.”

She looked at her wristwatch now and buttoned her jacket up. “I have to meet my mother for tea,” she said. “Dear, look at the time.” Georgie leaned in and kissed Diego. “Did you know Fiona’s back? Living in Pasadena.”

He was surprised. Fiona. He hadn’t thought of her for so long. “Really?”

“Yes,” Georgie said. “She has a son. Cutest little thing.”

“Where does she live?” Diego asked. “I must go see her!”

The houses on Serenata Street were modest bungalows with small yards and large porches. The car crept along, and he counted the numbers until he came to 156. He had picked up the telephone book, thumbed through it, and there she was. She would remember him as he
was
. That notion made something inside of him tremble. Something inside of him said he should start the engine and turn around, to forget about this. But he stepped forward, walked up the paved path lined on either side with blooming yellow poppies, climbed the wooden steps to the porch, and stood there, by the door, peering through the screen at the inside of a small living room furnished with a sofa and coffee table and bookshelves, all of them modest pieces, nothing fancy or expensive-looking at all. They were arrogant in their simplicity, in their imperfection, and this put him at ease. So he took a deep breath and knocked until he heard a set of footsteps approach. The screen was dirty, and all he could make out was the silhouette of a figure, a featureless face, ambivalent and unclear.

“Yes?” she said.

He took his glasses off and removed his hat. “It’s me,” he said. “Fi, it’s me.”

The screen door opened, and she stood there at the threshold, in a pair of loose-fitting trousers with mud caked on the knees, a white blouse, and a checkered scarf tied around her head. She wore no makeup, sweat glistening in the crease above her lip, and yet she looked just as adorable as ever. She put her hand on her hip and said in a voice that was loud and direct, “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch!” And she laughed and threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheeks.

She was a different person, a whole other woman. He regarded her still beautiful bright blond hair, the traces of freckles on her face, and the voice and the smile and the unmistakable flicker in her eyes.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

She smirked, patted him on the shoulder. “Motherhood happened, doll.”

“Yes, but—”

“It makes you practical. Makes you respond to the world differently. No more revealing dresses.” She stopped, batted her eyes in an exaggerated way, cocked her head to one side, coyly, and then there she was, the Fiona he remembered, and then she vanished. “No need for wild parties and bathtub gin and running with film stars. I have a son to look out for. Got to take care of him on my own. I’m all he’s got.”

“Where is he now?”

“Inside. Napping.”

She grew vegetables out back. They were in low boxes throughout the yard, their leaves green and healthy and robust. Still some weren’t doing so well. Snails, she said, leading him out. She was having so many problems with snails.

“They crawl up and devour my tomatoes.” Fiona bent down, broke a stem off, and showed it to him. She pointed to the tiny holes on the leaves, and they looked like the burns from a lit cigarette when pressed against a sheet of paper. “Would you look at that?”

After showing him the garden, she led him around and up to the front, and they sat on the swing in the porch that let out a series of low creaks as they rocked back and forth.

“Been meaning to take some oil to that,” she said. “So?” She turned to him now, smiling. “A real-life movie star. That’s exciting.”

“Why, it sure is,” he said. “Who would have thought, huh?”

“I would have. You were a natural. Driven.”

“And you? Tell me about you.” Diego didn’t want to talk about Frontier. He wasn’t ready to tell Fiona the truth.

She folded her arms, and they were flecked with mud, her fingernails coated with dirt and grit. “Where to begin?” She shook her head. “Where to begin?”

She said Europe was fun, and working on the set of that picture had been the best experience of her life. The cast was amazing, the director a real sweetheart, and the location was to die for. She rented an apartment in a building owned by an old woman with a blind cat.

“Things went sour when work on the movie was done, but the eventual project was shelved along with the other ones I was told I’d be on. I gave up after that.”

Out of a job and pregnant, it was hard finding work, and she lived hand to mouth, barely able to pay for her apartment. When the baby came, the old woman kicked her out, said the boy wasn’t letting the other tenants sleep with his incessant crying. So she left, had a string of low-end jobs—waitress, newsstand worker, clerk—most with flexible hours. She left the boy with various people she knew and trusted, sometimes women she worked with, with a lady she befriended who looked after other kids, other times even taking him with her to work. Eventually, she came back to the States and borrowed money from her parents, who also helped her find a place to live in Pasadena.