Land of Dreams: A Novel (14 page)

Actually, it was great fun. I could feel his excitement and joy and that made me happy.

Freddie asked me if I would like to come along to the studio to see Leo being filmed. I told him I would love to go, but Leo quickly said, “I’d rather you didn’t—it would make me too nervous.”

It hurt to feel that I was an embarrassing hindrance to my teenage son, but it was an inevitable price of motherhood. It only saddened me that my years with Leo had been so short—and I longed for him to like me enough to allow me to extend them by sharing his life with me. This was another step back, but at least I was here.

Freddie seemed slightly relieved also when I bowed out, and I imagined that was because they had both lied about his age, and a mother in tow would give the game away. This would surely be Leo’s one and only shot at stardom and so, confident that there would not be a next time, I let it go.

On the day of the filming a car came to collect Leo and Freddie. It was the first day I’d had to myself since leaving Fire Island. The first day, in any case, when I was free from worrying about other people and able to take some time to think about my work. I took my sketchbook down to the pool, although I had learned from doing so beforehand that I would probably not get a chance to use it. The pool was rarely quiet enough for me to work in peace, and there was too much distraction in watching the other guests at the Chateau come and go.

The permanent guests here (of whom I was now counted as one) were a strange and mixed bunch, and all of them had that affected way of carrying themselves that revealed they were in the film business. Speculating on their comings and goings was every bit as entertaining as watching a movie! The middle-aged man and his younger male friend—they always entered their chalet a few moments apart, even though it was obvious they were together. An improbably glamorous woman whose age was impossible to discern lay on a thick, purple towel on a chaise by the pool; always in dark glasses, her thick red hair cascaded down her shoulders in perfect glossy waves, and when she smiled at the waiter her teeth were so white that one feared if they caught the sun they might blind you. I saw the same woman with a scarf around her bald head, scuttling back to her room after some assignation at reception (probably getting her wig cleaned). Her face, devoid of makeup, seemed strangely drawn—and I remembered my Polish traveling companion and his comments about Hollywood actors and their false teeth.

There were a couple of movie veterans living in the main building, being cared for by the staff. Nobody terribly famous that I could gather, but rather respected casualties of the talking pictures—silent actors whose glory had diminished overnight. Not wealthy enough to be living in mansions with servants, yet with enough of their heyday left to pay for room and board at this strangest of exclusive boardinghouses. One very much got the impression that if the money did run out, some mysterious movie mogul would come along and foot the bill. On the one hand, this place seemed to have gone somewhat to seed. A palatial facade of a building, which had failed to live up to the grand expectations of a French chateau, and now ran as a motel for Hollywood has-beens and kids like Freddie, getting their feet on the first rung of the ladder. On the other hand, the Chateau Marmont ran like a private house for the best of the racy film-industry set.

Studio heads came to relax and drink beer by the pool; in the few days that I had been there I had already seen several people I recognized as movie stars just milling about, sitting in the lounge smoking. Freddie knew them all. “There’s Bogie,” he said, walking through the lobby one evening and signaling to the famous star, who raised a somewhat automatic eyebrow back. “We’re all friends here,” the young scout told me in a conspiratorial tone. “Bogie, Turner—I know them all; we look out for each other.”

Leo remained resolutely quiet, although I could feel his eyes boring a hole in me, desperate for a reaction.

“Very impressive,” I said, just to keep my son happy, although really I was wondering how much longer poor, broke Freddie was going to be able to wheedle himself a room here.

The pool area was empty now, and the chalets all around it were quiet. I remembered there had been a party the night before, so it was unlikely there was going to be much activity about the place before noon. Good. I would have it to myself and a few hours of solitude, to drink in the surroundings and seek inspiration.

I lay back on a lounger and looked up and around me. The sky was a perfect crisp blue, the grand turrets of the Chateau set against it in shimmering white; a couple of palm trees bent themselves symmetrically at the edges of my view. This place was really . . . I looked for the words to describe it. Beautiful? Idyllic? Paradise? And extraordinary. For the visitor I was, it was all of those things, but to the artist in me, who was hoping for something fresh and new to paint, it felt curiously bland. The colors were too perfect, the architecture too tidy, and there seemed to be no center to this reclaimed desert region. I felt it was a hollow landscape that, while exotic and beautiful, held no particular meaning for me. Perhaps it was my rural Irish upbringing in the rough fields and hedgerows, the black, leathery forests, the purple, heathery bogs; but my passion for landscape was about being able to imagine beyond it. I could sit and look at the same sea, on the same day, in Fire Island, and see a dozen different pictures, conjure up a world of nuance and meaning. Here, every aesthetic seemed set out for me. There was nothing beyond the pretty facade.
That is not to say it isn’t there,
I thought,
it’s just that I cannot see it.

However, once this idea became fixed in my head, I knew I would not work that day. I put my notebook aside and picked up an Agatha Christie novel that I had found in the library of the hotel. Although my republican Irish roots discerned that I ought to dislike the quintessentially English style of this crime novelist, it was her very descriptions of quaint villages and people taking afternoon tea (while vicars were being bludgeoned to death in the rectory!) that made me feel strangely as if I were home in Ireland. The English and the Irish, despite our ancient animosity, had lived in close proximity to each other for so long that our cultures were intertwined. My middle-class parents had aspired to be English in their manners and refinements and, despite myself, some of that had rubbed off on me. In any case, there was very little in the way of popular Irish books available to me, so I had to make do with stories set in England. I still, after all these years, thought of Ireland as “home.” It was a secret failing, and one that I contradicted openly at every opportunity, claiming myself to be a true American.

I had not finished the first page when I heard the by now irritatingly familiar clip-clop of Crystal’s high-heeled mules on the steps up from their chalet. She hadn’t gone with Leo and Freddie.

“We’ve been abandoned,” she said dramatically, taking off her cardigan and lying down on the striped sun-lounger cushion, before pulling her sunglasses down over her nose, then addressing me again. “Have you ordered coffee yet? I’m sure the kitchen is open by now.”

Where on earth did this spoiled, stupid girl come from? She really did seem to expect everybody to go around waiting on her hand and foot!

I swung my feet over my lounger and gave the end of hers a good kick.

“Oi,” she said, jumping and removing her glasses. “What was that for?”

“For being such a lazy girl,” I said. “Get yourself down to your chalet and make some coffee yourself.”

“I don’t know how,” she said, pulling her sunglasses back down over her eyes. “I am an actress”—she waved her hand around vaguely—“not a coffeemaker or whatever.”

“How can you
not
know how to make coffee?” I asked.

She let out a sigh, sat up, pulled her cardigan over her shoulders, then turned around to face me, pulling her glasses off and placing the arm of one side coquettishly between her teeth, while she thought about how to explain it to me.

Then she drew her tiny frame up to her full height, her set blonde curls twitching as she straightened herself. “It is like this, Eileen,” and she jabbed the air with her sunglasses, “I am an actress—a star in the making, if you will. I am not a
fool
—I know how to make coffee, and if I
was
a complete fool I would be making coffee and mixing drinks and preparing sandwiches for every damned scout and producer in this town, possibly in this very establishment. Instead I am sitting around the pool at the Chateau just being . . .” She trailed off, her heavily mascaraed eyes flitting about as she searched for the perfect word to round off her profound statement.

“You?” I said.

“Yes,” she said, delighted with herself. “Just being me!”

“So you’re not going to go and get us both some coffee?”

“Nope,” she said, lying back down on her lounger, “I am not.”

I did not know what to make of this young woman. She was certainly incorrigible, spoiled—but not unattractively so. There was warmth and a charm to her certainly, but really—could any human being be that shallow? That deluded? Surely nobody beyond the age of a child, like Leo, could possibly be so egocentric and vain?

Deciding that there must be more to this young woman than met the eye, I reached for my sketch pad to draw her. Answers—even to the most casual of questions—could usually be found on the page.

“Oh! Are you drawing me?” Crystal bounced up again, instantly aware of my interested eyes on her. “How thrilling! How would you like me to pose?” She began to twist this way and that in exaggerated poses, until she made me half shout, half laugh, “Sit any way you please, you silly girl. Just keep reasonably still!”

I took out my pencils and found a soft brown one, then began mapping out the young woman’s features.

“I have a perfect chin, you know—a
top
makeup artist said that to me once,” she blathered on. “ ‘Miss Moody’—(that’s my real name)—he said, ‘never wear your hair too long, or people will be denied the benefit of your perfect chin.’ I do think it’s important to make the best of yourself, don’t you? I mean, I know being pretty isn’t
important
as such, but all the same if you
are
pretty, I do think it’s important to do your bit. I mean, the world can be such an ugly place . . .”

I zoned out on what she was saying as my eye scanned from her face to the page, until my hand and eye were moving in the automatic unison that made me who I was: an artist. Seeking out truth—sometimes finding it and sometimes not, but with the eye looking and the pencil moving—I knew I was at least on the right road.

Then, suddenly, there it was.

“I mean, I never really thought of myself as having the perfect chin. Or the perfect anything. I mean, I know I’m pretty, but . . . you don’t want to be
too
perfect, do you?”

Crystal stopped talking for a moment, and while she was drawing breath between the senseless shallow wanderings where her mind and her mouth met, I caught a glimpse of something behind her eyes: a shrewdness. Crystal, I saw, was a good deal more intelligent than she let on, but her canny game did not make her unattractive to me. In fact, the opposite was true. How vulnerable a person must be to want fame, to need to be adored that much, by everyone, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Yet surely the desire for fame was not so different from the desire to be loved, and everyone in the world wants to be loved. The desire for fame and love is born from a deep human need to be seen, and I felt as if I could really see this young woman now, beyond the mules and the dye and her ridiculous ideas and affectations. So I started to draw her.

My intensity must have rubbed off on my subject because, as the first page began to fill, I noticed that Crystal had stopped talking and was sitting, quite peacefully and thoughtfully, and very, very still like a proper artist’s model.

A dozen drawings and perhaps an hour later, we had gathered a small audience.

“I’m being drawn,” Crystal said, quite unnecessarily to the older homosexual actor.

“Excellent,” he said in a marked English accent, looking over my shoulder, “these really are
very
good.” And his young partner stood behind and watched, politely turning his head to exhale his cigarette smoke.

As they were admiring my work, the glamorous lady with the red wig set herself up on another lounger and pretended to ignore us.

“How much do you charge?” the older man asked.

I bristled, but this was, after all, Hollywood.

“Don’t be so cheap, Bertie,” Crystal suddenly piped up, clear and loud. “This is Eileen Hogan, the famous New York painter—not some sketch artist for hire.”

The girl was smart.

The two men sat and chatted and invited me to a party in their chalet the following evening. “
Everyone
will be there.” People kept saying that.

“The Queen of England?” I asked playfully.

“Certainly,” said Bertie, “several of them.”

I laughed and said I would “try,” which, I thought, made me sound very enigmatic and important.

When they had gone I could sense the other actress taking surreptitious glances over at us.

“She’s jealous,” Crystal whispered, nervous that my attention was waning. “She’s ancient—you know that’s a wig?”

I put down my pencil and said, “That’s enough, Crystal. Now, what about that coffee you promised me?”

By the time the boys got back that evening they found us still sitting by the pool, surrounded by the debris of a day’s eating and drinking and sketches of almost every resident in the Chateau, including Bertie, and Gloria in her magnificent red wig.

The lights around the pool were on and there was a holiday atmosphere. We had argued about what time Cocktail Hour was—Crystal had said four, but Bertie had made us wait until five, then provided us with a staggering array of drinks: gin fizzes, Gibsons and whiskey sours.

I was quite tipsy when Leo and Freddie appeared, like a couple of angels in their white suits, at the steps to the pool.