Wake Up and Dream (7 page)

“So do I.”

“We all do,” April Lamotte added as she slipped her arm around Clark’s. “Dan’s had his ups and downs lately—some very difficult times, to be honest, haven’t you darling?—but we’re hoping we can put the past behind us and move on.”

Clark nodded, gave her ass a squeeze, and said
sure
, although he was puzzled as to why she was raking up his problematic mental history at this of all moments.

“That’s… terrific.” Amdahl cleared his throat. “And maybe, seeing as we’re close to the cocktail hour… ?” He gestured towards a glass-fronted cabinet.

“Well, I—” Clark began.

“That’s real nice of you.” April Lamotte gave a burgundy smile. “But Dan and I are planning a small celebration. We’ve booked a table at Chateau Bansar.”

“Chateau Ban
sar
… ?” Amdahl looked impressed.

N
O CHALLENGES. NO AMBUSHES.
And no sudden surprises—unless you counted the brief issue of his possible Jewishness. He felt a sense of anticlimax as they stepped out from the cool offices of York and Bunce, back into the city’s noise and heat. As roles went, dressing in someone else’s clothes and mimicking their signature was hardly up there with playing Shakespeare. But who needed all the hassle and rejection when you could get paid a thousand bucks for doing this instead?

“So—where’s this Chateau place?” he asked as April Lamotte did something complicated with the Delahaye’s keys to get the engine throbbing.

“Up past Silver Lake.” She looked at him and smiled before pulling swiftly out into the rush-hour traffic. “Well done, by the way. I think we did it, didn’t we?”

“I think we did.”

Traffic was slow at first as she drove back along Sunset and then Hollywood. It always was at this time of day. Beyond the hanging veils of smog, the Santa Monica Mountains seemed scarcely there. So, as they shimmered in the heat pouring off the blacktop and the lanes of queuing cars, did the people on the sidewalks and the nearby buildings.

He lit himself a Lucky Strike using that clever lighter, and lit April one of her pastel cigarettes. She touched his hand with her burgundy-nailed fingertips for longer than seemed entirely necessary as he passed it to her. In pauses in the traffic, she demonstrated a few of the Delahaye’s other tricks. A top of the range Motorola. Windows which powered themselves up and down from the press of an electric button. Electric locks, too. Adjustable vents that blew out what passed in this city for fresh air.

Traffic began to clear as they passed Barnsdall Park and turned north on Cahuenga. The Delahaye’s motor began to roar.

Chateau Bansar was up a drive which wasn’t even signposted, and which wound on for so long, and through gardens so spectacular, that Clark found himself wondering when their designer’s invention would run out.

There were lakes and Chinese pagodas. There were Grecian temples and a huge and genuine-looking waterfall cascading over genuine-looking rocks. A stag deer regarded them from an outcrop. He’d just decided that it was a thing of painted plaster when it raised its head and bolted off.

The chateau itself was all fairyland turrets and balconies, floating in a haze of spotlights against the setting sun. A car valet liveried like a medieval page took the Delahaye and drove it off down an underground ramp so as not to spoil the scene. They wandered beneath arbors and around fountains. Peacocks were preening and cawing. There were swans on a moat.

“Is this what you and Dan do regularly?”

“No.” They were arm in arm.

“So there’s no chance of anyone recognizing us?”

“Absolutely nil. Why do you think I chose it? But don’t forget, you are still Dan tonight.” He felt her shrug. “I just felt we both deserved a treat.”

Wrought-iron candelabra, real fires and sweeping wooden floors. Minstrels playing something minstrel-like from a minstrel gallery. A green-lit carp-filled pool. The woman who checked their reservation and led them around the mosaic pillars to their table was wearing a wimple.

The other diners were dim figures—each alcove was shrouded in ivy and lit by genuine flames—but if you peered hard enough you could make them out. This was a gossip columnist’s paradise, and Clark didn’t doubt that all these handsome faces murmuring to each other over expensive wine belonged to people he should have heard of. Trudy Rester and Saffron Knowles and James H. Pack, maybe, and all those other billboard names he’d given up noticing these last few years. But that would
have
to be Monumenta Loolie. No one else in the world had breasts like hers, and even he knew about those.

He wondered about the old names—those briefly immortal faces he’d glimpsed along the corridors of York and Bunce. Mary Pickford. William Desmond Taylor. Colleen Moore. A few still lived in this city, or so he’d heard. They’d enough money to keep hold of some fragment of the dream even if no one now remembered or cared about who they’d been. Then there were those other names. People who were just starting to get used to the limousines and the easy fucks and the swish hotels before it all disappeared. People like himself.

The menus were huge and handwritten and had no prices. He was vaguely worried that April Lamotte might decide to deduct his half of the bill off the thousand bucks she was paying him, but for one night he was happy to play along. After all, they had pulled off something pretty impressive together, hadn’t they?

The Champagne was poured. They clinked glasses. “Cheers.”

“Cheers.” He took a slug of the Champagne, then slid the bottle out of the ice bucket and poured them both some more. “When do you think Dan… uh…
I’ll
be back in good enough order to get back to work?”

Her gaze hardened fractionally. “I don’t know.”

He considered the bubbles in his Champagne. Someone as sharp as she was, he was surprised she wasn’t ahead of him. “What I mean is, April, the contract’s just step number one. The studio will want all the usual stuff once the project goes into development. You know—meetings, revisions. More meetings, more revisions. Table top readings and re-writes for some star who thinks they know about how to make a script work. All the crap that writers have to go through.”

“I guess so.” She was twisting her wedding ring, although she stopped as soon as she noticed him watching.

“And if Dan’s not… If
I’m
not—Hell, April, no one here’s listening… What I’m trying to say is that I could help you and Dan some more.
I
could go to the meetings, do the pitches, suck up to the executives. Whatever. And not just for this feelie. Not if the stuff’s as good as
Wake Up and Dream
is. The Dan who does the writing could keep himself as far out of the way as he wanted from all the shit that rains down in this town. And, if they ever
did
find out that there were two Dans, the studios wouldn’t care anyway. Not, and pardon my French, the tiniest fuck. Not if the writing’s successful. I mean, who the hell’s losing out? More likely, they’d want to make a new feelie out of the whole scam.”

“You’re not quite the hard-bitten cynic you like to think you are. You’re worse. You’re just an outright romantic, aren’t you?”

“You got me there.” He grinned back at her and raised his glass. “So? What do you think?”

“I think we should order. You’re hungry, aren’t you? I sure am.”

Clark, who liked his food plain even at a joint like this, settled for steak and fries with a brandy sauce. She ordered some kind of fish that still had its head on when it arrived. Once the waiter had gone away, he tried probing some more.

“You know what I still don’t understand? How you found me. Sure, I advertise, but it’s mostly word of mouth. The normal business I do, anyway. Then you said something about hiring some kind of private dick to find me. I know a lot of those guys. And the way that letter arrived, and all the stuff you somehow found out about me. It requires certain skills. So I was wondering…”

“You’re right. I did hire someone. But the whole deal was that they’re discreet.”

“You’re not going to say?”

“Would you want me to go around talking to everyone about what
you’ve
been up to?” “No, but—”

“Exactly. But I did find out some things about you, as you say. Cuttings, mainly. Nothing but a name, and a face. But still, I’m curious. I mean, I don’t remember any of the silents and talkies you were in, and doubt if many people do. But you really were close, weren’t you? You nearly made it. So—what was it? What happened? You can’t just tell me it was just those teeth and the ears. If they bothered you that much, you’d have had them fixed.”

Now
she
was probing, and in directions he didn’t want to go—especially not after seeing Peg in that feelie and all the memories that had been raked up since. So he ordered some more Champagne and told April Lamotte instead about what had got him into acting in the first place, and about what it was like to grow up in a down-at-heel boomtown like Hopedale, Pennsylvania (might as well put hope in the name, the locals said, because you wouldn’t find it anywhere else). Times when he was plain old Billy Gable, and the best he could have hoped for out of life was to follow his dad into the oil wildcatting trade or pull the molds off tires for the Firestone Rubber Company over in Akron. But he’d always felt there was something else out there, even though he didn’t know what it was or how the hell he was supposed to get to it. The closest he’d come as a kid was when his stepmom Jenny read him
Great Classics of the World
with that fine voice she had before the TB took hold. Most important of all, though, was seeing
Bird of Paradise
performed by the Akron Players at the music hall on Exchange Street. What hit Clark most was the way the stage made a doorway into a different world. For all that you could tell the princess wasn’t really Hawaiian and the stage boards creaked and the volcano in the background didn’t look much like a volcano, he was there with them. This was magic.

He went to see the same play the next night, and again the night after. Then he waited outside in the back alley for the actors to emerge. Luana the Hawaiian princess now looked more like the sort of woman you’d find behind the counter of the local grocery store, but he already knew that there was something these people had that he wanted. When, sitting drinking with them around the corner in a bar, he asked if there might be any kind of work going, and they agreed that he might be of some help shifting scenes, he was already hooked.

By now the main dishes had come and gone. So had the second bottle of Champagne, and April Lamotte had ordered a third before he could wonder whether it was a good idea. She seemed to have mellowed as she leaned across the table, working her hands around her neck and then up into the roots of her hair, even though she’d been filling up his glass more often than hers.

“
Everyone
in this city is hooked. The people here…” She gestured, and leaned forward some more. “Or the bus station whores. Me. I mean, I wouldn’t be here, would I—not one of us would—if it wasn’t for the dream. Or nightmare. I sometimes wonder. I mean, even today… What the hell’s it all for?”

He watched her blink away the glitter that had formed at the edges of her eyes.
What the hell’s it all for?
In this business, in this city, nothing ever changed. By this time in the evening, the same question would be asked at many of Chateau Bansar’s other lit tables, and in thousands of cheap lodging houses, and down at the bus station by the whores.

“Not that Dan can help the way he is. He’s sweet. He’s brilliant. But, God, he’s
hard work
. No one knows what it’s like to live with a writer—I mean, it never gets into the stuff they write, does it? Or even the biographies… What about Mrs Shakespeare, eh? What about Mrs fucking Dickens? They sat at home, they took the shit, they peeled the potatoes and made the bed and put the meals on the table and told the kids playing out front to shut up because their genius husband’s writing. Or trying to write. Or quite possibly not writing at all…”

The glitter came again. It spilled from her eye and soaked into the powder on her cheek. She rubbed it away. “This was supposed to be a celebration. I’m sorry.”

He took her hand. “No. It’s okay.” She gave a louder sob. Her elbow knocked her glass, and Champagne glittered across the table.

Looking up, he saw that a waiter was already hovering at the edge of their alcove, looking dumbly concerned. Taking April a little closer in his arms, he told him to get them some fresh napkins, and the bill.

I
T WAS FULLY NIGHT NOW,
and the waiting Delahaye’s engine was already running, and the inky blue sky shone in rivulets along its long cream flanks. Clark took off the tortoiseshell glasses and gave them a wipe with his DL monogrammed handkerchief as if to get rid of some kind of blurriness. But what he felt was clear-headed. Anyone would, having glimpsed the size of that bill.

“Why don’t you drive?” Less tearful now, April Lamotte let go of his arm. “Like I said, Dan, it’s your car.”

The pull of the engine. The way the suspension rode. He was doing fifty just on the curving driveway out of Chateau Bansar.

“Which way?”

“No hurry. Your car’s down by Los Felice isn’t it, so why not try Mulholland? We can drive up through the mountains and cut down through Ventura.” She laid her hand over his on the gearstick as they waited at the turn. “It’s the kind of night for a drive.”

The smog had blown away in a light wind from off the ocean. The city spilled below them like a box of glittering jewels.

He’d forgotten. He really had. He’d been living and working in this city—at least, the fringes of it—for all these years, and he’d been like someone asleep. Fairyland didn’t stop with those last views in the rearview of Chateau Bansar’s turrets. Up here, driving a car like this above Hollywood, you felt you were traveling pretty much as high and as far as it was possible to get in this world.

He re-found Cahuenga and lost most of the traffic by turning east along the wide detour of Mulholland Drive. The dials twitched. His hands turned easy on the wheel. The Delahaye took the switchtails like a salmon taking the rapids on its way to spawn.