West of Paradise (7 page)

“Besides,” Kate said, as the good-looking parking attendant opened the door of her car, and the two waiters loaded Lila onto the seat, “she's my source material.”

*   *   *

In the shadows of the restaurant, Norman Jessup watched a tidied-up Sarah Nash head for the front door, her makeup washed off with the guacamole, so she looked almost fresh-faced, if you didn't know better. He moved into a palmy alcove, empty of people, and took out his cellular phone. Dialed. “She's leaving now,” he said softly, into the slat of a receiver. “Follow her.”

A Snowflake in Hell

Driving west into the sun in its afternoon blaze, down Sunset to Pacific Coast Highway, Sarah Nash had the disconcerting feeling there was someone after her. Paranoia had been one of the side effects of publishing the book. Writing had been an incredible high for her, finding out she had the talent to survive independent of the people she vilified. Taking them on, she had known full well she was closing doors. But she'd had nothing to lose: the doors had already been slammed shut. That she'd had to turn on Norman, in addition to everybody else, when she still really liked him, was something she didn't allow herself to think about.

She'd had to hide out, quite literally, for a time after she'd become a bestseller. A lot of people would gladly have given her the same chance as her title:
A Snowflake in Hell.
She had lived in secluded five star hotels in Europe, Australia, Asia, registered under aliases, bathed in luxury, but drying off with eczema on her skin, little pimples of anxiety. Fear that someone might find her.

The process server did. The suit from Norman Jessup, though she had expected it in a way, still came as a terrible shock. She had thought his shame would be greater than her guilt, that he wouldn't want to draw more attention to
Snowflake,
already a sensation. She imagined his attorney would tell him not to press the issue of libel, since all she had to do to win was prove his homosexuality. She'd been right about that. He didn't sue for libel. He sued her for breach of contract and fraud.

They had been close friends. Or at least as close friends as a woman could be with a faggot, which she uncharitably considered him now. He had told her everything about everybody, including who was into bestiality. Some of the information truly blew her away, as jaded as she thought she was. From her wildest forays into pornography, usually whipped through while mellow with freebased cocaine, she had known about women who smeared their vaginas with beef extract and then let their lap dogs at it, shepherds with their sheep, Catherine the Great purportedly dying when the horse she was fucking fell on her. But never had she imagined men having animals up their asses. And the poet thought custom could not stale the infinite variety of Cleopatra!

All of it Norman told her with the express understanding she would shield him as the source, and reveal nothing about Jessup himself. But her publisher insisted the book needed jazzing up, that she had to come up with one or two even bigger names than the hundreds she'd already dropped and ground into earth. So she went back on her word,
allegedly
(her lawyer had drilled the word into her) betraying Norman, giving him up as Judas
allegedly
had, making her
allegedly
Faustian bargain.

He took her to court. He had gotten the best trial lawyer in Hollywood through Fletcher McCallum. She found one in Santa Monica, where, in spite of the proximity to the motion picture industry, reality still abounded. Hers had used various legal ploys that put the trial on delay. The court calendars were full. After some stomach-churning years, where she'd broken into a sweat at the sound of her doorbell for fear it was another subpoena, they went to court. She remembered it all too clearly.

By the time the verdict came in, even those who had little or no interest in the law or that star-spangled phrase “freedom of the press,” were riveted. The case had everything: sex, scandal, a powerful protagonist, a patently brilliant woman (she had proved it to the bastards, and
in print
), as well as drama's most captivating elements, fury and revenge.
Jessup v. Nash
seemed less a breach of contract suit than breach of promise. He was like a lover scorned.

“She betrayed me,” Norman Jessup said, not for the first time, even as Sarah's lawyer rolled his eyes heavenward so the jury could see he was about as fed up with the refrain as they had to be.

Oliver Crowley, the defense attorney, was a tall, fair-skinned man with wheat-colored hair and eyes so light it was surprising the darkness they could give off when they flashed with contempt, as they did now. But he was careful to make sure his back was to the judge. “Please answer the question.”

“I don't remember what it was,” said Jessup.

“I don't wonder,” murmured Crowley, so low that the judge might not hear his disdain.

“Objection,” said William Arnold, the plaintiff's lawyer, older by decades than his adversary, but no less energetic.

“Well, if your client would stop making speeches—”

“Mr. Crowley, I must warn you,” the judge said.

“I'm sorry, your honor. But I'm sure all our patience is wearing a little thin.”

“I'll determine how forbearing we must be. Would the clerk read the question?” Usually the judge dozed through civil cases, but this one had kept even him awake.

“How soon after Miss Nash's book appeared did you become ill?” Part of the damages Jessup had sued for were based on his claim that he had been thrown into a crippling depression, suffered physical ailments, and become incapacitated because of what she had written.

The expression on Jessup's freckled face was absent the jauntiness that had characterized his opening testimony, nearly four weeks before. There were sunken pockets below his high-boned cheeks. “Before it was even published. Someone at one of the book clubs slips us early looks at manuscripts … like … advance men in armies.”

“Telling you where the battles are going to be waged?”

“In a way. Alerting you to books you might have to fight over.”

“Well, you certainly picked up your cue,” said Crowley.

“Objection!” Arnold said, at the very moment the judge made his admonition.

“Mr. Crowley…”

“I apologize. Please continue,” he said to Jessup, with a veneer of politeness.

“She swore to me I would be no part of the book. That she would leave me out of it. That was the only reason I consented to give her a lot of the information.”

“Information?”

“The insider stuff that nobody knew.”

“And you were willing to spread that gossip?”

“Your honor,” Arnold said.

“Don't make me warn you again, Mr. Crowley.”

“What would account for that generosity?” Crowley said.

“She was on her ass. Nobody would make a picture with her, because she spelled trouble. I tried to make her a part of some of my deals, because that's the kind of friend
I
was. But nobody would come near anything I had if she was attached. Her only hope was that book. She gave me her solemn promise…” His hands started to shake. “When I read the galleys, I had to be hospitalized. They thought it was a heart attack.”

“A heart attack?” The hospital records had been submitted during the discovery preceding the trial and showed Jessup had been treated for gastroenteritis.

“Well, I got diarrhea, too.” He furrowed his brow.

“What else besides diarrhea?” Crowley said it a little scornfully, like the television commercials that ask “Do you mind if I say a few words about … diarrhea?” and a viewer wants only to throw a shoe at the set and scream “Yes!”

“I couldn't sleep. I still can't. I've lost more than twenty pounds. She betrayed me. She made me think if she said anything about me, it would be sympathetic.”

“You were not trying to promote yourself personally? You are not a publicity seeker?”

“Objection!” William Arnold was dressed in a well-cut, pinstriped blue suit, a typical Grand Old Man attorney, with just a touch of color in his lucky tie, the one he always wore the day before the case would go to the jury. He usually won.

“Sustained.”

“I want to answer anyway,” Jessup said, ignoring the hand signals from his lawyer, who angled himself so neither the judge nor jury would see. “I don't need any publicity.”

“And yet you have a publicist, a whole department of them on staff.”

“That's to promote my pictures.”

“You have no wish for self-promotion?”

“I don't need it.”

“Aren't there little gates outside the complex you have at the studio, with some kind of brand above them, with what you claim is your family seal?”

“That's decor,” said Jessup. “Decor is a very important part of Hollywood history. David O. Selznick had his name hanging in the breeze, like a shingle. I got shingles from her, too. All around my waist. I couldn't breathe. Her book nearly strangled me.”

“Can we get him to stop making speeches, your honor?”

“Just answer the question,” said the judge.

“Yes. There are gates.”

“And what purports to be a family seal?”

“I come from a very good family,” said Jessup contentiously. “My mother also had to be hospitalized.”

“In response to your young companion's hanging himself?”

“He was unstable,” Jessup said. “Actors in this town commit suicide all the time. There's a lot of pressure. Competition.”

“Not because you threw him out?”

“That was months before. Sarah made it seem in her book as though it had been the same day, as if I had killed him. She ended the chapter on me on that terrible note. She betrayed me. She let me believe nothing of my life would be between the covers. And then she made it read like I killed him!”

“I didn't even know about that kid when I started the book.” Sarah was on her feet. At the time she had an ordinary haircut, subdued on the outside, as she tried to be on the inside. But the press, focusing on the two combatants as much as the trial itself, had labeled her surprisingly colorless, the less interesting of the two, with Jessup the one with the passion. So her lawyer had agreed that if she wanted to show emotion at some point, it might be a good idea. Just not to overdo it.

“Any further outbursts,” the judge said, “and I'll hold you in contempt.”

Sarah sat back down.

“She made it read as though I had driven him to it,” Jessup said. “I wanted to be invisible. She agreed I would be. Instead she held me up to ridicule…”

“Do you deny you boasted to Sarah Nash there wasn't a man you couldn't have?”

“Your honor.” William Arnold half stood.

“It wasn't a boast,” Norman said.

There were seven women on the jury and five men. It was, unusually, a highly educated jury, the defense team having gone for as much intelligence as possible, since the issues of breach of contract and fraud were complex. Jessup had crowed of his accomplishments and standing in the community sufficiently through the trial that the jury's patience appeared to be wearing thin. Everyone was tired. Even the court watchers, those retirees who spent their days at the courthouse in Santa Monica rather than watch soap operas, seemed relieved when Jessup was excused from the stand, and the judge called a recess. These were in the months before the televised Simpson affair, which turned a trial, even more than baseball, into a national pastime.

It had not been Crowley's intention to finish with him quite yet. But the words “It wasn't a boast” seemed to hang on the air, suspended, underlining the vanity of the man. And after all, it was Santa Monica, where in spite of AIDS benefits, supposed progress, and political correctness, a rose by any other name was still a pansy. It felt to the lawyer like a good place to end it.

“There's just Sarah Nash's final cross left,” said a reporter into one of the three adjoining pay phones in the marbled corridor outside the courtroom. The case involved celebrity and so was of interest to the whole country. So there were two other reporters from the area, another from Chicago, one from
The New York Times,
one from
The Washington Post.
In addition, there were several magazine writers. There was no one from the publishing house that had printed Sarah's book. Arnold had left them out of the suit, since there was no way they could be said to have breached a personal contract. The publisher considered it circumspect not to have any representatives at the trial itself, as they were holding back a great reserve of Sarah Nash's voluminous royalties in case anyone else should decide to sue and include them. But a few of the young men in the courtroom were whispered to be part of the publisher's legal staff, quietly observing the proceedings.

“Then the closing arguments,” said the reporter into the phone. “The instructions to the jury, and, depending on how long they take to get to their verdict, maybe we can get it into the Sunday edition.”

“No real courtroom theatrics,” said the reporter on the next phone. “Everybody's pretty worn down.”

*   *   *

Sarah Nash had dressed differently for this last day of the trial. Throughout the proceedings, her clothing, like her demeanor, had been restrained, businesslike, rather drab, with only the occasional hint of courtroom flair, a scarf of some softness or color at her throat. That swanlike arch of neck was all that seemed assailable, naked as it was, revealing her alabaster skin. Everything else was lightly powdered over or obscured, from the steel blue of her wide-set eyes, shielded by the bought-for-the-occasion glasses, to her sizeable breasts, boxed into conventional career clothes, Brooks Brothers for women. It was a persona her attorney had worked very hard with her to present, the jury needing to put aside any prejudice it might have against an admitted cocaine and alcohol abuser, who had found restraint, self-esteem, and everything but God in the cleansing act of writing her book. Her shoulders were so broad as to seem androgynous, an image that would have been fortified were it not for the slenderness of her waist. Her hair, at the time still lustrous and dark, hung in a page boy just below her resolute, one might have said stubborn, jaw. Her nails were blunt and buffed. As characterized as her writing was by sharp wit, only the dimple that appeared occasionally to the side of her tight-held mouth indicated any humor. Throughout the trial she had appeared very much the serious author, just incidentally a Recovering Everything, and woman.