West of Paradise (3 page)

“They had a lot of names for that big guy,” the woman delivering the eulogy was saying, in the style of vanished sportscasters, her full-lipped mouth twisting in a wry smile. “And some were pretty dirty. But I tell you no one ever had a better friend.”

“That's because she's an actress,” said Wilton. “Even she doesn't know what she's really feeling.”

“You're an actor,” Kate said.

“Only sometimes.”

“What else do you do?”

He did not respond. He looked uneasily at Sarah Nash.

“Why so shy about yourself, Wilton?” Sarah muttered.

“Why don't you tell her? Or do we have to wait for your next memoir, where you hang the rest of the town by the balls?”

“There's nobody left after what Arthur Finster just published.”

“Maybe you could expose Arthur.”

“Maybe,” Sarah said. A look of mischief softened her too-thin face, making it seem fleetingly girlish. “I'll check with my lawyer.”

“And now,” said the minister, looking at the list of speakers. “We will hear from Larry Drayco's longtime associate and co-producer.”

A pallid, gray-haired man with thyroid eyes moved to the platform. In a halting voice, he began to speak, reading from a piece of paper a prose reworking of Gray's
Elegy in a Country Graveyard.
He paused, swallowed, his enormous Adam's apple bobbing visibly. “God rest you, pallie,” he said, rapping his knuckles gently on the coffin.

“Knock, knock, who's there?” cried an enormously fat woman in a pew across the aisle, getting to her feet. “Nobody!” She took an audible breath, loud as she was, as if the mere act of standing, with that heft, had taken all the air out of her. “You're a bunch of empty phonies. Where were you when his stock got low and he needed real friends?” She had Pillsbury Doughboy skin, pasty, with puffed cheeks, great sacks of flesh atop her eyes, bags below them. She looked to Kate to be the only older woman at the funeral who hadn't had plastic surgery. Her ankles were conspicuously swollen above worn leather shoes. “Talking about him like you cared about him. Most of you didn't even know his real name.”

“Darshowitz,” Wilton whispered. “That's probably his mother, Lila. The one person on the planet he was truly afraid of.”

One of the ushers went over to calm the woman. “Get your hands off me, you fairy,” Lila said.

“From Queens, you know,” murmured Wilton. “They haven't heard yet there's a new vocabulary.”

“The interment will be private,” the minister said quickly, and raced from the microphone.

*   *   *

“Nothing in his life so became him as the leaving of it.” Wilton pinned onto his lapel a little sprig of violets twisted around a green-wrapped pipe cleaner that a woman handed him as he exited the chapel. “As Kenneth Branagh might have said.”

“Where's your car?” Kate had parked her Saab by the Sanctuary of Peace, a white-marbled crypt wall-to-wall with slotted, cremated tenants.

“I came by cab. One never knows when one might bump into one's Destiny, and ought to be without a way of getting home.” He pulled the stem of his violets, arranged it so the tiny nosegay sat more neatly on his olive drab corduroy jacket. “I think they got this idea from Elizabeth. Now
there
was a woman who knew how to bury people. I remember when Laurence Harvey left us, and she arranged a ceremony where grown men wept not on cue.”

“Would you like me to drop you someplace?” Kate asked.

“Aren't you coming to the lunch?”

“I don't really know any of these people.”

“Nobody knows them but Gore Vidal and he's got too much taste to examine them.”

“Hey, Wilton!” Linus Archer sprang from behind the open gate to the Sanctuary of Tranquility. His hair was close-cropped and silver, the grin on his angular, sharp-nosed face still boyish and cocky, as though he were smugly pleased he could continue to surprise people with sudden entrances and the ability to spring. He was close to sixty now, Kate guessed. His career spanned over four decades, only the early films less than memorable, while he was still trying to portray likeable people. “The mantel of Jimmy Dean,” a Hollywood historian had written, “has fallen on Linus Archer like a Boy Scout tent.” It had taken him a lot of years to untangle himself, emerging as the villain he had been born to play. Perhaps, from the talk, not just in the movies. “What do you think really killed Larry?”

“I heard it was an aneurism.”

“Well, sure, that's the official line. But let us not forget his own M.D. OD'd. And there
is
the book.”

“Book?” asked Kate.

“You're pretty cute. Have I ever been married to you?” asked Linus. His heavy, still-thick eyebrows pulled together, forming one straight line over his nose, as though he were really trying to remember. His hazel eyes, small-pupiled, were at once searching and blank.

“She's new in town,” Wilton said.

“I just moved here from—”

“Then you don't know about me,” Linus interrupted. Origins seemed no longer of interest to him, since he had overcome his own.

“No, I don't,” Kate lied, setting aside her usual honesty. Judging from this morning, a little duplicity worked wonders. Though she had no firsthand knowledge of these people, she intuited the enormity of their egos. Like cats, they were more likely to try and cozy up to what they saw as indifference.

“You didn't catch my interview on A & E? You didn't see the cover of
GQ?
”

“Linus likes to talk in initials,” Wilton said. “It makes him think he's in Washington.”

“Hey, those guys like to think they're in Hollywood.”

“Aren't they?” Kate asked.

“Not just another pretty face,” said Linus. “You sure we haven't been married?”

“She isn't your type,” said Wilton. “She thinks.”

“I've been with women who think.”

“Not the ones who wrote the book,” said Wilton.

“What book?” asked Kate again.

“We're instituting a class action libel suit against Harbinger Press and Arthur Finster,” Linus said. “Fletcher McCallum is handling it for us. Can you believe Arthur publishing that book, the creep?”

“I heard he has notarized affidavits from the hookers and the madam. Lie detector tests.”

“They're going to find him with his cock in his mouth,” said Linus.

“Strapped in black leather?” Wilton said.

“I'm not into bondage,” said Linus, fuming. “That's a fucking lie!”

“Affidavits,” Wilton said archly. “Lie detector tests.”

“Finster should be strung up just for killing the trees to print that shit. Can you believe the writing? ‘He put his hot hand on my tight buns.'”

“I don't think it's being bought for the prose.”

“Nancy Drew and the Hidden Screw,”
Linus said contemptuously. “I wish Larry was still alive so he could join in the suit.”

“Talk is he was reading it when he died. They found him naked on the toilet, with the book open on his lap to the chapter about him.”

“Maybe we could add wrongful death to the lawsuit. The stuntman's widow on my last picture got five mil. But we'd have a hard time proving he wasn't drugging. Everyone thinks he OD'd.”

“A bubble burst in his brain.”

“You weren't supplying him?”

“He wasn't using anymore.”

“Right. And O.J. never did crystal meth.”

“I don't think we should be talking about this here,” said Wilton, looking around at the crowds coming out of the chapel.

“We should have a wake at Larry's house. I know where he kept his stash.”

“He no longer did coke.”

“A pop in the brain from what he was reading?”

“Only because he couldn't get to the kitchen to put a knife through his heart.”

*   *   *

“So is that what you do?” Kate said, as she drove her car onto Wilshire Boulevard. “You're a drug dealer?”

“Only for friends,” Wilton said. “It started during the Screen Actor's strike. So many actors were losing their houses, I knew I needed a second career.”

She adjusted her rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of herself. She looked a little too wide-eyed for someone twenty-seven, her chestnut curl–capped face with its faint, barely detectable lines starting at the corners of her chocolate eyes slightly too eager, as though she were still taking creative writing courses at Stanford. “Aren't you afraid of getting caught?”

“I'm afraid of being poor. And my friends are afraid of being bored and empty. It's a charity I perform, really.”

“What if they overdose?”

“I don't deal anything low grade. No crack. And nothing really hard.”

“You don't think cocaine is hard?”

“Not in this town. Cocaine is easy. If they didn't get it from me, they'd get it from someone who didn't care about them, and that could be fatal.”

His smile was guileless, his expression amused, tolerant. Now that she looked at him carefully, Kate realized he was older than her first impression. His haircut, flat-topped, military, made him look youthful, athletic, as his trim, long-legged body did. His hands were graceful, a musician's hands they looked to be, only the high, blue veins on the backs of them indicating age. He was tanned a George Hamilton brown, as if not being good-looking were more to be feared than skin cancer.

“So now you know about me,” Wilton said. “What about you? What do you do besides give lifts to the slightly stoned?”

“You're on cocaine?”

“I never do cocaine. Do I look stupid? I just took a little hit on a joint to take the edge off the morning. The sting out of funerals. Tell, tell.”

“I'm a writer.”

“Low man on the town totem pole,” said Wilton. “Writers don't count for shit here, unless they eviscerate people like Sarah Nash did and make themselves into bigger celebs than the people they destroy.”

“What about this book that Linus was talking about, that Larry was reading?”

“It isn't anything you have to
read.
It's just something you move your lips to while the girls go down on you. Writers are beneath contempt here, and contempt is the janitor. Did you hear the joke about the Polish actress who wanted to be a movie star, so she slept with the screenwriter?”

“I don't write screenplays. I'm trying to write a book.”

“Why would you move here to write books?” A black Jeep Cherokee cut in front of them. Wilton opened his window. “How very four-wheel and macho!” he shouted at the driver.

The man raised his middle finger. “
Soooo
articulate.” Wilton closed his window. “Why L.A.? You could live anywhere.”

Dark green fronds, like cheerleaders' pom-poms urging the team to victory, waved from the tops of tall, gray-barked palm trees lining the wide boulevard. The fanlike stirring surges of color softened the white and gray stone of the high-rises on either side, their windows a cool, jewellike mint green. In the distance the white peaks of the San Bernardino Mountains sparkled with perfect clarity, snowcapped after the recent heavy rains. It was one of those rare, crystal days in Los Angeles that swept doubt away along with the smog, rid the mind of earthquake, fire and flood, made people wonder why they considered living anywhere else. It would have been truthful for Kate to say she really liked the place, hungered for what it could offer if she succeeded.

But there had been her PhD thesis and the oral report before the committee. The words were still stored in her, easily remembered, and Wilton was obviously bright. “As a young romantic,” she tried not to seem to recite, “a would-be writer, I fell in love with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Not just his writing. His life.

“I always imagined if I had been his love instead of Zelda, I could have saved him. Saved him from drink, saved him from his lack of belief in himself. Talked him out of his conviction that there were no second acts in American lives. Given him a second act. Here, in the place where his life ended. The last frontier of the American dream, where things still happen Overnight.” She capitalized the word with her inflection. “Instant love, instant recognition, instant table from the headwaiter. Where he wrote his last book, but only a fragment.
The Last Tycoon.
”

“You going to finish it for him?”

“I wouldn't presume to try. But the fascination he had with the prototype of the Hollywood producer, the character of Monroe Stahr…”

“He had Irving Thalberg for a model. A genius. A visionary. An infant industry that had magic. And you've got this prick.”

“How do you know there wasn't some aspect of Larry Drayco's life that was memorable? ‘Action is character,' Fitzgerald said. Maybe Drayco once did something … meaningful. An act that ennobled his life.”

“You're not a romantic. You're delusional.”

“Maybe I could find it. What made him matter.”

“Like redeeming social significance in pornography?”

“It's worth a try.”

“And I thought I was the one who was stoned,” said Wilton. “Turn left at the next intersection.”

A Party at Wolfgang Puck's

The parking attendants at Wolfgang Puck's were as good-looking as some movie actors. Some movie actors were as good-looking as parking attendants. And for good reason: they had once been them. Harrison Ford had been a carpenter, so a raft of carpenters still had the dream. Demi Moore had come from a trailer park. Anything was possible.

The parking attendant who opened the door for Samantha Chatsworth, West Coast editor of
East,
was a cast-off lover of Norman Jessup, the town's most powerful producer. Norman had never promised him anything, as he never promised any of them anything. Still, it was a little humiliating for the parking attendant to open the door for a woman he had sat on the right of at a black-tie dinner party when he was in favor. But since he was now in a different kind of uniform, she didn't recognize him, so he didn't have to worry.