West of Paradise (11 page)

“You'll reveal it was me?”

“I can't do that. The Writer's Guild would have my scrotum. But I promise to give you full credit and Guild minimum on my next movie.”

The young man, whose skin was pale by nature, made more so by spending most of his time in libraries and at the computer, blanched. “You only do one picture every five years.”

“What do you care? You're young.”

*   *   *

Because Rodney Sameth sat hunched down with his back to the room so no one could see him, even obscured as he was by the hat and glasses that served as a disguise, he couldn't see if there was anyone else in the coffee shop. Morgan was so engrossed in his own exhilaration-cum-disappointment, so hypnotized by his reverence for Sameth and the man's indisputable, if dark, charisma that he noticed no one else in the room.

It was an odd hour. The transients who slept late had finished their breakfasts. The monthly residents of the apartment-hotel, some of them elderly, some of them prostitutes, had finished their lunches. Three freshly-arrived-from-Iowa waitresses, overly made up, just a bleach job away from becoming Tori Spelling, they were sure, studied a map of Beverly Hills, trying to determine where 90210 was. Unable to locate it, they set out for Melrose Place. So except for two women in a booth near the cashier and the old cashier herself, who had played opposite Turhan Bey and been deeply in love with him until he lost all his hair, the place was virtually empty. The only sound besides Rodney's heavy breathing and the subdued conversation coming from the two women was the clatter of plates being cleared by the busboy.

“Enough socializing,” Rodney said, and put a twenty-dollar bill on the green, pencil-marked check. “I'm keeping you from your work.”

The two men got up and headed for the door. “I'll be back tomorrow morning for the new pages.”

They passed the two women, the younger of them with her back to the booth where they'd sat. She looked up.
“Morgan!”
she cried excitedly, and leapt out of the booth, throwing her arms around him. “What are you doing in L.A.?”

“Nothing!” Morgan said. “Not a thing!” The man with him headed straight for the door, head down, hand covering his face, the back of his neck crimson.

“But I can't believe this!” She turned to Lila. “This is Morgan Craig. He's a friend of mine from graduate school! Lila Darshowitz.”

“Enchanted,” Lila said.

“This is like a miracle! I've been so lonely. Are you staying here?”

“No. I'm not staying anywhere. I'm not even really in town.” He backed towards the door, sneakers squeaking on the linoleum.

“Hey, I'll never tell them you're playing hooky.” She smiled at him, very white and wide, real connection animating her face and making her look fresher, younger, brighter. “Did you finish your thesis?”

“Not quite.”

“Then how come…” Kate frowned suddenly, feeling his discomfort, putting his evasiveness together with the man who had hurried out of the coffee shop. She looked out the window, into the glaring sunlight. He was nowhere to be seen. “I'm sorry,” she said softly and sat back down.

“It's okay,” Morgan said, phumphering. “Really. Not to worry.”

“I'm listed. Will you call me?”

“Sure. Sure. If I'm ever in town.” He ran out of the restaurant.

“I guess you caught him with his boyfriend,” Lila said.

“But he isn't gay.” Kate looked genuinely flustered.

“Maybe he
wasn't,
” Lila said, and drank the rest of her coffee. “But this
is
L.A.”

*   *   *

“Shit!” Rodney said, when Morgan found him, huddled in the parking lot behind the building. “Fuck! I might as well have put you at the Beverly Hills Hotel!”

“I would have liked that,” said Morgan. He saw that Sameth wasn't smiling. “Don't worry. I didn't tell her anything.”

“The same fucking English department,” Rodney fumed. “Two literate people in the whole of Los Angeles, and Fate puts them in the same place.”

“Fate has very little to do with it. I would have put me at the Chateau Marmont.”

“Don't be a wiseguy. If you're saying it's my fault, I agree. I should have stashed you at my lawyer's. Maybe I should move you there.”

“I thought he was in an oxygen tent.”

“Exactly. He won't even know.”

“Nothing's going to happen.”

“What if she saw me? What if she guesses?”

“Nobody even knows what you look like.”

“Of course they do.” Rodney took his hat off, his hair glued to his skull from perspiration. He fanned himself. “I'm an icon.”

*   *   *

When Tyler Hayden got back to the house in Malibu, there was a cold lunch waiting for him in the guest house refrigerator. A salad with sprouts, laid out appetizingly in the style of nouvelle cuisine, strips of red pepper making it into a happy face, sided with a plate of turkey breast, thickly sliced. There was a large bottle of Evian out on the table, since Norman knew he didn't like it chilled. Tyler took the two plates in one hand, as he'd learned to do during a brief stint as a waiter, a miniloaf of olive bread from The Godmother still in its bag and the Evian in the other, and pushed the screen to the deck open with his hip, letting it slam shut behind him. A wooden picnic table was set with a bamboo place mat, silverware, a plastic goblet that looked like crystal, a twin decanter of oil and balsamic vinegar, and a small vase filled with delicate flowers, miniature purple and yellow calla lilies, their slender necks drooping. He sat down and cut the crusty dark bread down the center, drizzled some olive oil on it, and started to eat. It was crunchy and flavorful, and felt good in his mouth, in spite of what was going on in his belly.

“So did you find where she lives?” Norman said, coming up the wooden steps from the back deck of his house.

“I found where she lives,” Tyler answered in a monotone. “She's in Topanga Canyon. There isn't a number, but it's behind a really high hedge, about three-quarters of a mile in.” He put his feet up on the bench in front of the railing. “I wouldn't mind living in Topanga Canyon.”

“Then one day you will,” said Norman, sitting down on the bench beside Tyler's sandaled feet. “Thank you.”

“This whole thing makes me sick,” Tyler said.

“You don't like turkey?”

“You know what I mean. The situation is sick, and you're sick, and being part of it is making me sick. You're not going to heal until you forget about her and let the whole thing go.”

Norman leaned his red head back on the railing so his neck was against it and he could see the sky. “When I was a little boy, and I would drop a piece of food on the floor, my mother would tell me to kiss it up to God, and then it wouldn't be dirty anymore.”

“You want to kiss Sarah Nash up to God?”

“I wish I could.” He brought his head up sharply. “I don't want you to concern yourself with this anymore.”

“Good,” Tyler said firmly. That he was accepting what passed for Grace in Malibu, someplace really nice to stay, did not bother him. He genuinely liked Norman Jessup, and in spite of his power, Tyler could feel his pain, which served to reinforce his conviction that what most people considered power had no real force. But it did bother him that he might be part of some dark purpose here with Norman, especially since his reason for being on the planet was to bring light. He'd read that in his own chart. He had seven planets in his mid-Heaven, so his job was to illuminate. He just didn't know where the employment agency was that told you where to apply for that one.

“Carina wants very much for you to come into town to dinner with us.”

He also liked Carina. He had been genuinely surprised by her serenity, the gracefulness with which she moved, the tender way she dealt with Norman. Tyler liked to think he was without judgment, but his mother had been extremely judgmental, and you couldn't help picking some of that up, no matter how spiritually independent you were. So it had close to astonished him that this flagrant homosexual had actually been drawn to such a feminine woman. It actually
had
astonished him, and once he integrated it totally into his consciousness, it thrilled him. Because it reinforced the truth that there was God even for gays, and so much for Jerry Falwell.

“You have anything to wear?” Norman asked.

Norman's mother and probably his father as well had been totally into judgment, and appearances. Tyler knew that. “What you see is what you get,” said Tyler.

“We're about the same size. I've got a closet full of jeans with no holes in the knees.”

“It took me a long time to get these holes exactly right. A lot of Dead concerts at the Oakland Coliseum. What if the spirit of Jerry Garcia came to look for me? How would he know me if I wasn't in these jeans?”

“Jerry's manager threw his ashes in the Ganges,” Norman said. “He won't be coming to Beverly Hills.”

“He was an ascended Master,” Tyler said. “Alive, he could be in two places at once. God knows what he can do now.”

“God knows. About the pants…”

“You either love me as I am—”

“I do,” said Norman. “But I'd like you to do it for Carina. She's from another hemisphere, you know. A more formal one. If you don't want to wear something of mine, go to Fred Segal's.” He took a couple of crisp hundreds from his pocket, with the new Ben Franklin imprinted slightly off center, and younger, without the glasses, as though America didn't even like to think of the founders as growing old.

“I don't want any money from you,” Tyler said. “Room and board is generous enough.”

“You could come work for me,” Norman said. “You're sharper and more imaginative than any of the kids in my company. You could shimmy up the ladder in no time.”

“I don't like what's at the top of that ladder,” Tyler said, meaning it. He hadn't been exactly sure what brought him to L.A. Everybody said he was good-looking enough to be a movie star, and in an objective way, he knew that to be true. This was not vanity. He simply saw what was in the mirror and knew how women reacted to him, following him down the street sometimes, trying to think of a way to start a conversation. He could feel them behind him. Occasionally he would stop and turn and smile and let them get it off their minds. Sometimes he would even engage with them, take them for a cappuccino, and think, when they were smart enough, and physically appealing enough, that something might come of it. But usually they stopped short of the place where it could fly. Where they could fly together, because they understood where he was coming from. Nobody had ever really come from the same place except Diana, and she'd been sexually abused, something that never really got healed, so it was too hard to have fun, to be completely spontaneous. He'd had no choice but to end it, as work that had no joy in the process was anathema to him.

Still, knowing how attractive he was, reading the inane interviews of his contemporaries who had made it as stars, he had come to think from time to time that what society could really use was someone to admire who had more on their mind than slurpees. He thought what it would be like to date Uma Thurman, who seemed to have depth, and came from parents with enlightened credentials. He pictured his own indisputable sparkle at an opening with Gwyneth Paltrow, and then realized he was getting caught. He could not fulfill what he'd come to the planet to do unless he was free. Even
Premiere
magazine, which he read standing up at the open magazine rack in the Santa Monica mall, admitted Hollywood was a trap.

So he'd abandoned his impulse to give it a shot as an actor, even though there was no one in movies six three, golden-haired, straight-shouldered, barrel-chested, but slim-hipped enough so as not to look beefy, with eyes that were Orientally slanted and very pale blue, heavily lashed, able to see through just about anybody. And since he didn't want to get into a power structure where people were afraid, where mad queens could declare “Off with their heads” for no visible reason, he passed on Norman's offer of a job. A real one, in an office, not just shadowing some enemy.

“What's at the top that's so odious to you?” Norman asked.

“I'm not sure. But I know that people in your business are afraid. Fear can blow big holes in the imagination. And that would be worse than the ones in my jeans. Fear not, doubt not, rejoice always. You should make that into a placard and put it on the wall of your office.”

“What do you want, Tyler?”

“I don't know. I'm trying to work it out. What I'd really like to do is inspire people.”

“So you've said. In what way?”

“To be the best they can be. To see themselves as a little piece of God. Like they really are. Like you are, if you'd forget about Sarah Nash.”

“Look. You don't lean on me, I won't lean on you.” He got up from the bench. “You can wear those jeans to dinner.”

“It wouldn't be respectful to Carina,” Tyler said. “I'll borrow a pair of yours.”

*   *   *

In the end, he also borrowed a really nice shirt, brand new, that Norman had bought for him, but not offered, knowing that Tyler wouldn't accept it. But the kid had good taste, and found it in the closet where the jeans were hanging. Because they were going to Morton's, Norman had suggested offhandedly, Tyler might also want to borrow a shirt.

“What's Morton's?” Tyler was looking through Norman's jeans, and found the shirt hanging there.

In spite of how much he loved Carina, Norman hadn't been able to help thinking that the shirt was just the right shade of radiant light blue to go with Tyler's eyes. Old habits died hard, and none of them were really fashioned for fidelity. “It's where to go on Monday nights.”