The Master of Happy Endings (23 page)

Nothing looked familiar. Or rather, everything looked familiar—another “stage” the size of a warehouse, another row of identical white trailers, another truck attached by thick black cables to something beyond an open door. His bag of books was still in Travis's trailer. Would Travis think to bring it with him later?

A small delivery van pulled up and stopped, and the driver stepped out—a dark-skinned young man in a brown uniform. He turned a slow full circle with lowered brow before approaching Thorstad. “You know Building 46?”

Thorstad turned, himself, to look at the nearest buildings, all of them beaming sunlight off white stucco. There were numbers on some, in no discernible order, but not a 46. “I don't know where I am myself.”

The driver bounced the parcel in both hands. “I been all over this place looking for Building 46. Nobody knows where it is.”

“And I'm looking for the building where they're shooting
Forgotten River
.”

The delivery man grinned. “A fine pair, us. Should turn ourselves in to Lost and Found.” He came closer, a deep crease dividing his forehead in half down the middle. “You somebody's missing grandpa?”

“I turned a wrong corner somewhere is all. It makes me think I might be getting old!”

The delivery man threw back his head and closed his eyes for a silent laugh. “The mirror got news you're gonna hate.” The eyes opened again; the laugh abruptly stopped. “But, man, you are
tall!
Old men supposed to shrink!”

A long-legged blonde towered above them on the wall of the nearest building, her red high-heeled shoe larger than a person's head. “I remember passing by that shoe—coming, I think, from over there somewhere. Maybe I'm closer than I thought.”

But he wasn't closer than he'd thought. When he got to the other end of this alley nothing looked familiar: a deserted city street of brick walls and large storefront windows, some of them papered over on the inside. These appeared as substantial as the sound stages and office buildings, though they were clearly no deeper than their front walls. All of this was waiting, he supposed, to become Main Street in a small town, or a back street in a city. At the moment it appeared as though its population had fled a spate of killings, or a plague. You expected to hear wind howling, a scrap of paper travelling erratically over the pavement. He probably
had
seen it, at some time, from his seat in a movie theatre.

Yet, when he'd moved beyond the first bend, a bar and grill appeared in full colour in the midst of all this drab neglect. Where a long wall of windows slanted off to a side street, the bricks and windows had been scrubbed clean and a neon sign lighted overhead. Behind the glass, workers pushed furniture into place—a long bar with stools, booths beneath the windows, shelves and mirrors across the back wall.

If he hadn't looked up at the neon sign—
“Casey's All-Nite”
— he might have overlooked the tall brick building next door: a storefront window and DELI sign, three rows of uniform windows above—it could become an office building, he supposed, or a tenement, but at the moment it was only a wall with a fire escape attached outside the three upper rows of windows, each window topped with a solid brow. He could be looking at the wall his father had scaled before leaping to his death.

But of course every movie and television studio must have a row of false fronts like these—solid facades of concrete or brick that could be used repeatedly for any number of cities or towns in almost any country on earth, as insubstantial and illusory as the surviving walls of a bombed wartime street—though he was certain, now, that there was not a DELI sign in the fatal chase sequence of his father's film.

And here was the delivery man again, this time on foot with the parcel in the crook of his arm. “Building 46?” His voice betrayed disappointment-in-advance. When he recognized Thorstad he briefly mimed an exaggerated state of shock. “You still Lost, or are you Found?”

“That actress with the high-heeled shoe misled me.”

“That is her way. Probably didn't invite you home for dinner neither.” The world was determined to disappoint them both. “Me, I'm making the rounds by foot this time. Maybe my truck can't fit where they hidden Number 46.” He turned away as though to leave, but turned back again. “You come across it down some alley, now, you find me let me know.”

12

If Evans was displeased about having Travis's tutor at the studio, he must surely be unhappy about having him in his home. The man had more or less suggested to Thorstad that he get lost, speaking with the patient restraint of someone addressing a confused
senior-senior
who'd strayed beyond his care-home walls to intrude upon other people's turf.

But the arrangements had been made by Travis's parents— another testament to Mrs. Montana's powers of persuasion, though the drama-teacher friend may have had something to do with it, or the executive producer's wife. This tanned, athletic-looking young woman met them at her door with a welcoming smile and introduced herself to Thorstad as “Camilla.” She insisted they join her guests for dinner as soon as they'd settled in. “Very informal. Just a few old friends. Arriving in an hour.”

Thorstad had not been to a dinner party in a decade and had no interest in attending one now. “I'm sure your friends would rather have you to themselves.”

She laughed, “They'll be relieved to meet someone new,” and sent them off to the guest house. Another guest house! To get to this one Travis led them through a garden of fragrant herbs and the sort of mysterious succulents you saw in photographs of deserts, and past the shallow end of a swimming pool whose water reflected the unclouded evening sky.

Inside, Thorstad could see it all at once—a large room with a fridge and small electric stove, and two sleeping alcoves behind curtains, with a bathroom door in between. A few books had been laid out on a large table in the centre of the room. The cover photo of
A House on the Water
was of a building spread wide beneath a swooping roof, its veranda posts blurrily reflected in the dark water below. At the centre of the table, a tall blue vase was crammed with a spray of eucalyptus twigs, perhaps from the tree outside the door.

They were above the Pacific Coast Highway and looking out upon the ocean from high on a hill so steep as to be almost a cliff face. The Evanses' sprawling white house was a comfortable distance from other homes with their own terraces and towering palm trees and walls of glass, each perched on a narrow shelf of earth shored up with retaining walls of concrete and shaded by clusters of feathery eucalyptus trees. Like the private boxes in an opera house, they looked out from various levels in the one direction, as though waiting for a drama to unfold on that apparently endless sea. There was nothing operatic out there now—only a barely moving tanker and its spreading wake. Perhaps when these people came home from running corporations or directing movies or capping the teeth of celebrities, they preferred to look out on an empty world and the blur of an indefinite horizon.

“All of this”—Travis spread his arms to indicate both direc-tions—“all this twenty-seven miles of coastline used to be owned by a married couple who kept the world out with chained gates and, like, armed guards on horseback.” Since he hadn't confessed to tour guide ambitions, he must be practising for the day he welcomed visitors to his own Malibu home. “After the old guy died, the widow sold a row of lots to celebrities who built their homes along the beach, shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the road. From down on the highway you can't see the water—just blank walls and doors.”

“And a few parked Audis.” Thorstad could see five immediately below.

“You see that house with a tower?” Travis pointed to the right along the slope. “Sold for twenty-eight million last year. My mother nearly peed her pants when she calculated the commission!” It was impossible to know whether he intended to mock his mother or was impressed with the sum himself.

“How would your mother know what people pay for their houses?”

“They tell you. It's in their papers. They can tell you how much Richard Gere paid for his estate, they know how much it cost Cher to build her fenced-in compound up the coast, they can even tell you how much she paid for the, you know, palm trees she imported from Europe or somewhere.” He stood back from the railing and turned to Thorstad with a mischievous smile. “Guess how far their teachers drive to get to their jobs. They have to cross the mountain range every day, like the maids who clean these houses.”

Thorstad would prefer to avoid a dinner party with people whose maids and teachers were restricted to the back side of the mountains, but some things could not be avoided. Once they had showered and shaved and changed out of their travel clothes— Thorstad wearing his new dress pants for the first time, and a pale green shirt—they crossed the garden to the house where Camilla Evans again met them at the door, wearing gold earrings and a dress of cornflower blue. She led them through to a flagstone terrace off the dining room and introduced them to two guests who had arrived, she said, only moments before. The slender bespectacled man with ginger hair was a cosmetic surgeon named “Larry” whose patients were “high profile and highly confidential.” She explained that Larry had given a certain actress “now starring in
The Brigadier's Lady
” the upper lip that had made her famous, and now was swamped with demands from others wanting the same. “Larry tends to size you up, imagining how he'd alter your appearance if you'd let him.”

“I'll keep my distance then,” Thorstad said, shaking a hand that was undoubtedly insured for millions. “A face as old as mine could be a temptation.”

The surgeon's thin smile appeared to cause him pain. No doubt he'd heard such things before.

His diminutive wife Louise had piled her dark hair on the top of her head—perhaps to acquire a little more height, something her husband's profession was not equipped to do. She wore a bright red shawl around her shoulders and a patterned skirt that fell to just above the painted toenails in her spike-heeled shoes. “Louise is an interior decorator,” Camilla said. “She recommended the realtor who found us this house—which explains why I adore her.”

The adored one's glasses were too large for her small round head. Surely a husband accustomed to studying faces must have informed her of this.

“That will be Harold's car we hear,” Camilla Evans said, offering a platter of mushrooms—stuffed, she said, with crab. To Thorstad, who watched the red Ford sedan zigzag its way up the hill, she explained that Harold had written a long-running series back in the eighties but was living in Texas now. “He's in town to pitch a couple of story ideas. Also, I imagine, to show off his new friend.”

The new friend, introduced as “Lyle,” was only a little older than Travis and possibly thirty years younger than white-haired leathery Harold. He wore a cobalt shirt with tight denim jeans and electric-blue runners, and stood with arms crossed and hands clamped to his own shoulders while old friends greeted one another. He may have felt as foreign here as Axel Thorstad.

“A Norwegian name?” he said, when they'd been introduced. He ran his glance down Thorstad's length and answered himself. “Well, of course! Ten feet tall and brooding forehead! Legs for striding over mountains. You make movies where everyone commits suicide in the dark of winter. Am I right?”

He was disappointed to learn that Thorstad was not in the business.

Harold wanted to know where their host was hiding. “Not called to the studio, I hope.”

“We may wish he was,” Camilla said. “He's just had a call from Morrison. The network's moving
Forgotten River
to Fridays.”

“On no!” Lyle said. “Isn't Friday night supposed to be certain death?”

“Except for those who survive it,” Camilla said. “Don't bring it up unless he does. I expect he'll join us once he's simmered down.”

Harold seemed determined to outline the route they had taken to get here—a dizzying list of street names and sharp turns and shortcuts through unfamiliar territory—while one hand explored his considerable paunch. “We outsmarted ourselves and had to come over the ridge from behind, risking our lives on those hairpin downhill bends.”

Elliot Evans had come out onto the terrace while Harold was taking them through the back roads of Greater Los Angeles. “God bless the PCH,” he said, slipping his cellphone into a pocket. “Life would be impossible here without it.” No longer in the faded jeans he'd worn at work, he was dressed in wide-legged cotton slacks and a blue shirt with a pattern of silver diamonds.

To Thorstad, Camilla said, “In L.A. it's always ‘How did you get here?' before anything else—in case someone has found a route without traffic jams or streets blocked off by film crews. I'm told that where you're from all party conversations begin with the weather.”

Harold would not agree to Louise's suggestion that he practise pitching his story proposals to the present company, but he was interested in hearing how
Forgotten River
was doing at the end of its third season. “Still no temper tantrums from Dolores?”

Evans made a show of gritting his teeth. “Until today, the biggest problem I've had is the studio's newest series. This guy waltzes in with nothing behind him but two mildly successful procedurals and they give him his own show and my best writer! I'm still fighting to get her back.”

“I heard your biggest problem was Tom Morrison,” Harold said. Apparently he believed that Camilla's warning had not been meant for him.

Evans's face coloured up. “The bastard says he's convinced we can handle Friday but I bet he hopes we die!”

“He's an idiot,” Harold said. “It probably means his days are numbered and he wants to do as much damage as possible while he can. Did he give you a reason?”