West of Paradise (20 page)

“Jake wasn't even in the final draft,” Arthur said.

“But you circulated the manuscript before he was cut out of it, and circulation constitutes publication. Apparently what was said about him—”

“You should talk to Delight, the hooker who—”

“No graphic details, please.”

“—who performed her specialty on him. Because of personal circumstances, she was not available for the polygraph test, so we cut that chapter out. But she will be willing to testify at a trial, should it come to that.”

“She's in rehab?”

“Either that, or a convent,” Arthur said, and chortled.

“You really have no guilt about this garbage?”

“I have no reason to feel guilty about anything,” Arthur said, clearing his mind of his mother. “These women were desperate. They'd lost all sense of themselves, descended into drug dependency, had nothing to trade on but their rapidly failing looks. They were unfeelingly used in the lowest possible way by these men, who thought they were entitled to do whatever they wanted, because they were celebrities. Power players high in the Hollywood echelons. This book is an important social document.”

“And the greatest gift of all,” Ralph said, inhaling deeply, “is self-delusion.” He turned to the camera, facing it directly.

“We have to go now, people. The book is called
By Hook or by Crook,
by five
former,
and I stress former, ladies of the evening. Our guest was Arthur Finster, the publisher, editor in chief, and C.E.O. of Harbinger Press.”

The lights went down. “Sorry if I was rough on you,” Ralph said. “But my viewers wouldn't like it if I seemed to approve.”

“Hey,” Arthur said, and trying to run his hand through his dreadlocks, stopped by the knots in them, leaned over and shook them out. “You showed the book. You said the title. I appreciate it.”

“So this Natalia, the one who did Drayco, she's into S&M?”

“Not always,” said Arthur. “Her real specialty is fellatio. But with her breasts. She has these gigantic jugs, and she presses them on the outside of the guy's cock and rubs, while her tongue—”

“I get the picture,” Ralph said. “I thought it was Delight who did that.”

“They're all versatile,” said Arthur. “And of course they're fabulous with phone sex.”

“Maybe you should leave me their numbers,” Ralph said, “in case there're any ramifications from the show. I should have that for my lawyers.”

“Certainly,” said Arthur, and taking out his pocket computer, called the numbers up, and started writing.

*   *   *

The treadmills at the Star-Crossed Health Club in Brentwood were all in a line, by a floor-to-ceiling mirrored wall. Those who walked them had the option of facing themselves or the TVs, a special engineer having outfitted them to roll in either direction. During the heavily trafficked hours of the day all the treadmills were in use, as were the StairMasters opposite. But now it was the dinner hour, and most members had completed their workouts, the lucky or manipulative among them having found someone to spend the evening with.

Only two treadmills were now in use, on the far side of the room. On one Victor Lippton marched at an accelerated speed, next to the treadmill trod by a striking, white-skinned redhead who had sweated through her designer workout clothes at curiously provocative places, one stain outlining her crotch, the stain beneath her armpits having spread to underscore her magnificent breasts. It was almost as though she had deliberately splashed herself in those places, which Victor Lippton now suspected she had.

“Don't tell me it was a coincidence, Alexa,” he little more than whispered, looking around uneasily to see if they were being watched. Almost all the high-end places in town had unobtrusive security systems: the Hotel Bel-Air with its barely perceptible TV eye on the pool to make sure nobody drowned, the restaurants with cameras on their parking lots, some of the pricier supermarkets following suit. “You couldn't have just
chanced
on the identical outfit.”

“Why not?”

“They didn't even come as an ensemble. You had to have watched her pick them out.”

“Did not.”

“Don't deny it. And don't speak like a child. It couldn't have just happened. You did it deliberately. There's no way it was coincidence.”

“Why not? We have the exact same taste in men.”

“I hate it when you get smart,” Victor said, not really hating it, enjoying it really, because he liked to think she was as clever as she was passionate. It was one of the things he dared not discuss with the therapist who was counseling him and Chen on their sex life, or lack of it. He didn't really trust the therapist, because the therapist had read them some of the fan mail he received from the people he counseled on the radio. And also the therapist was screwing one of his patients. Victor knew that because he paid a private investigator to watch him, so he would have something on him in the event he ever violated Victor's confidence.

The patient he was screwing was the wife of another psychiatrist who was probably paying him less than the $150 an hour that Victor paid. Professional courtesy, they labeled it to each other. But he was paying him something, giving him a stipend while the bastard was fucking his wife. The detective Victor had on him had followed the woman to a cheap little apartment in Toluca Lake, one of those ramshackle compounds built around a pool where she met her shrink lover three times a week, to put horns on her husband. How he could have been stupid enough not to know when she didn't come home three nights a week until after eleven was more than Victor could comprehend. Medical degrees. Internships. Their own analysis, years of practice and a mandatory amount of insight, and the jerk still didn't know he was paying for his wife to get screwed.

Or maybe he did. Maybe it took the pressure off him, and he wasn't attracted to his wife anymore, like Victor wasn't attracted to Chen. Maybe it got him off to be paying the other guy professional courtesy rates for fucking his wife. What did Victor know, except that they were all crazy.

“You're deliberately trying to provoke a confrontation,” Victor said to Alexa. “You're going out of your way to make yourself conspicuous so she'll notice you, and get what's going on between us.”

“What exactly is going on,” Alexa said. “A love affair? Or am I just your strumpet?”

“I wish you'd stop watching those old movies,” Victor said.

“What else am I supposed to do, those cold lonely nights?”

“You could read,” he said.

“I read.”

“Something besides
W,
” he said.

“You got me the subscription.”

“Because I honor what is special in you.”

“The surface,” she said. “You want me to look as good as your wife, and then when I look as good as your wife, you accuse me of trying to make trouble.”

“Aren't you?”

She turned down the speed of her treadmill, and slowly came to a stop. “I love you, Victor. The last thing in the world I want is to cause you pain.”

“Maybe the next-to-last thing,” he said. “When I give in to you and let you come to one of those evenings I know better than to let you come to, and then, instead of making it easy and pleasant you almost cause a scene—”

“I didn't even speak,” Alexa said.

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” Victor said, sweating profusely now, his words coming almost in a pant, rushed, breathless from his exercise. “And an outfit that is the same as the one a man's wife is wearing speaks volumes. Photo albums.”

He was very red in the face. The hairs that poked from above the scoop of his T-shirt had little dots of pink around them, as though the pores on his chest were blushing.

“Are you all right?” Alexa said anxiously. It was true what he had said, that it was the next-to-last thing she wanted to cause him pain. The last thing she wanted was for him to die. Oh, God, what would happen to her if he died? She would have to work this treadmill forever, like some kind of mechanized Flying Dutchman, till someone else showed up on the treadmill next to her, and, captured by the bob of her breasts, released her, ready to treadmill in her place.

“I'm in my prime,” he said, winded, as he slowed to a stroll. “I have everything in the world I want, a great company, great company in you…”

“But not all the time.”

“I told you when it started that it could only be so much, that I was married to Chen for life. Even if I didn't love her, which I do, her father is one of the most powerful men on the planet. And I'm not talking the kind of power they honor in this town, or even in this country. I'm talking Asia. Americans have no concept of how things operate there, no interest, not enough foresight or widesight or whatever kind of sight it is that gets people out of their own belly buttons, or their own backyards. I'm talking about the ability to put whole countries out of business, whole businesses out of countries, shutting down newspapers if the man in charge doesn't like something that was written without even mentioning his name. Have you ever been to Singapore?”

“I'd love to go,” she said, flirting, thinking it an invitation, his mind going much too fast for her. Their discussions, such as they were, never involved anything of a sociological nature except Donald Trump, and what had happened with Marla, which Alexa had prayed for at night, until that shuttle mission, too, had been aborted.

“Say something that ruffles the feathers of the senior minister of Singapore, and you're finished.”

“They even cane you in church?” she asked, having absorbed one news item about a boy who did graffiti.

“Not that kind of minister,” Victor said. “A political minister. When the plane descends into Singapore they remind you that having drugs is a capital offense. They could also remind you that having an opinion that is not shared by the head of state could result in your being driven out of the country.
If
they were being merciful.

“Well, that's who Chen's father is,” he tried to explain.

“I thought he was a Chinaman.”

“I was speaking metaphorically,” he said. “That means it's a symbol. And we don't say Chinaman, we say Chinese.”

“Even in Singapore?” She saw the expression on his face, and knew she was being thick. The only way to fix it was to make him even thicker. She jumped onto his treadmill and stuck her hand down the front of his shorts.

“Not here,” he said. “Are you crazy?” But even as he denounced her with his words he blossomed in her hand.

And not letting him go even for the moment it took them to cross the floor like a vaudeville team, she led him, at point, to the ladies' room, and blew him in the toilet. Locking the door, of course, and covering his mouth with the hand that was free when he climaxed and started screaming, as she imagined him doing in Singapore, when they caned him for throwing his wife out the window, strict as the laws were about littering.

*   *   *

“Can we have lunch tomorrow?” Sarah Nash asked Bunyan Reis. She had become a fairly accomplished shadower of those who did not want to be shadowed; bearding him outside his Sutton Place lair had been no problem at all. Bunyan was forever giving interviews in which he pronounced his writing and his painting extremely accessible. He would then add himself to the package, saying he continued to have his number listed, and his place of residence well known, in spite of what had happened to John Lennon. Of course his popularity in no way touched on that of the gunned-down icon, and his building had a much better security system than the Dakota. But she had waited outside till the moment she knew from his memoirs he went out to dinner, though no longer at the restaurants he loved, because almost all of them had closed.

Once she might have waited for him outside Lutèce or La Côte Basque, when both he and the restaurants he counted as his own had been in favor with his women friends, before he had betrayed them in print. But now they were shuttered, as the women were, coffined up, most of them. Living well was the best revenge, according to the maxim and the Murphys. But Bunyan had gone them one better. Living was the best revenge, especially after those who had dropped you had died.

The night was lightly misted, no sign of stars except in the sidewalk, those illusory little glistens in the asphalt that caught the lights from streetlamps. Sarah was literally cloaked in darkness, a soft black felt serape flung around her shoulders, her pale face unrouged, the only color visible the scarlet of the dinosaur back that spiked the top and center of her hair.

“Are you mad?” he asked Sarah. “Lunch with you?”

“You could bring your food taster.”

“But your poison doesn't come in food, my nonadorable. It's much more insidious.”

“I've never harmed you.”

“That's only because you had nothing to gain, and didn't know me that well.”

“We don't have to speak of anything you don't want to. And, in addition to the food, I have a little tidbit for you that will put you back in the gossip mainstream.”

He was suddenly alert, helmeted, with a life jacket on, ready to ride the rapids of the rivers of scandal he had been so abruptly excluded from because he had blown a few hundred confidences, as Sarah had. In fact they were not unalike, except that he always dressed in muted tones, grays and silvers to match his eyes, and now his beard, and she was so frighteningly flamboyant, crown-wise. But they both had the same kinds of tastes, in calumny and young boys. “Tell, tell,” he urged.

“At lunch, at lunch,” said Sarah. “Where shall we have it?”

“Nowhere anyone can see us,” said Bunyan, already excited. Positively Shakespearean it was, meeting in the antechambers, plotting the downfall of the liege. Not that he intended to harm anyone he cared for, though it might have been construed that way had anyone seen them together and then reported back to Norman that Bunyan was consorting with the enemy. Important to choose the place craftily.