Land of Dreams: A Novel (20 page)

I was pleased to see him happy, but was starting to find his incessant acting both obsessional and wearing.

Bridie, on the other hand, was a bottomless pit of admiration. “You’ll end up in the lead role yet!”

“I have a speaking part—you know? None of the other boys in my group have a speaking part.”

“That’s because you’re a special boy,” Bridie said, “you were born to it. Read me that bit again . . .”

“I don’t know why you’re indulging him,” I chided her when Leo was out of the room. “We’ll never get back to New York at this rate.”

“Sure, what does it matter where we are, as long as they’re happy,” she said, nodding over to Tom, who was sitting on a stool in the garden doing his schoolwork. “He wouldn’t be doing that in January in New York, and sure, look at him there—sure, he loves being outside—he’s in heaven!”

Los Angeles had caused a notable transformation in Bridie. She had not complained once of her usual aches and pains and, while her sharp tongue would never be curbed, she was generally in a better humor than I had ever seen in her before.

The same could not be said for me. Leo was out of the house filming most days, with Freddie and the studio ferrying him back and forth. I had enrolled Tom in the local school, where he had quickly made friends with all the neighbors’ children and—charming scallywag that he was—with most of their parents too, which meant that he was freely wandering in and out of gardens all along our street. Tom was thriving so much in his new environment that I felt guilty for the time I had deprived him of the company of other children by taking him to Fire Island.

This meant that I now had the time and the freedom to paint—but none of the impetus, which was making me cranky and dissatisfied. I looked for distraction around the house, washing windows and polishing floors, and insisting to myself that Bridie was too old to be doing heavy housework (which she was). All the same, I knew I was just making work for myself to keep me from facing the fear that I might never find it in me to paint again. I feared that my time as a serious artist had just been some brief and interesting excursion. I had become wrapped up in the idea that I was an “artist” and had attached significance to it; it seemed important that I express myself in that way and, in creating my work, I felt as if I were contributing something to the world. I was afraid that this lull in motivation meant that the artist in me had fled; that all the death and family drama had been too much of a diversion, and she had retreated back to whatever place she had inhabited before I started painting.

Perhaps Ellie-the-artist had been a visiting muse and was now gone forever, like the Polish girl I had briefly rented a room from in New York; sharing everything from clothes and food to the intimate joys and heartaches of our young lives, vowing to be friends forever, then losing touch within months of moving out, never to see each other again. Perhaps now I would return to being the muted, ordinary version of myself, the person I was before I had discovered—or rather before Hilla had told me—that I was “an artist.” The desire to create had been like a little stream running through me, trickling away all the time, whether I was working or not—and when I got the paintbrush in my hand and the canvas in front of me, it could turn into a fast-moving, sometimes raging river. As I built my colors and shapes on the canvas I became utterly lost in my own world; nothing existed but the work in front of me and my desire to keep creating it. If days went by without painting, it felt as if someone had blocked my way with stones and then, when I got my chance in front of the canvas, I’d move the rocks away and let the waters of my imagination free again.

There had been no moment when I had realized that the stream had dried up—I just believed that it had. There was nothing I wanted to paint; that was the only sign that things were awry, except that I would not test myself by unpacking my brushes and paints, setting up my easel, stretching linen across a wooden frame and then allowing myself the terror of the blank canvas. I would have to find something that I wanted to paint. I needed to find a way back in.

Stan had telephoned me to arrange to meet, but he had been so busy working to complete a film score that we had not been able to see each other since that day in the studio.

“The producer I am working for is impossible. A lunatic! I spent three months writing him a ‘love theme’ for some stupid film. ‘Go for it, Stan,’ he said, ‘I want something big, something magnificent, something
epic
. . .’ So I write a big piece, a strong piece—full orchestra and a chorus of one hundred—and do you know what he asks me to do in our last meeting? He asks me to whistle him the tune. Whistle—like a delivery boy. The humiliation!”

I so enjoyed listening to Stan on the telephone.

“What did you say?” I asked, spellbound.

“I told him, ‘David—this is so embarrassing. I wish I was a better musician for you—I wish I was a world-class composer, but alas, I can’t whistle.’ He told me I should learn, but in the meantime he had to endure the strain of listening to one hundred world-class musicians play my masterpiece for him. He stopped them, of course, after six bars, and went for lunch, or to screw some starlet—who knows. The important thing is that I have been paid, and when we musicians get paid (and sometimes when we don’t) we have a party.”

“In the studio?” I asked.

“Oh, my goodness,
no
,” he said, “no more film studios for a while, if I can help it. It will be somewhere—in a friend’s house, my house, who knows where it will be? In any case, this Saturday we will sing and drink, and play and drink, and drink and drink . . .”

I laughed.

“Will you come?”

“How could I refuse?” I said.

This was my first social engagement in Hollywood. I did not know what I would be expected to wear, so I wore the simple navy dress I always wore to openings. It flattered my curves and fell to my calves—it was elegant without being showy. I tied my hair back with a pearl barrette that I had grown fond of over the years and wore simple pearl clip-on earrings. I applied powder and rouge and lipstick, but did not go overboard, reminding myself that I was going to a musicians’ party in the house of an older man, and not an Oscar ceremony.

I checked myself in the hall mirror and realized that I was not as glamorous as I might have been, had I been the kind of woman who made more of an effort with her appearance.

At the age of forty-two, I had long since decided that I was just fine as I was. I was neither too fat nor too thin. My face had lost the plumpness of youth, but I had good bones, and the blue of my eyes was still striking enough to draw the warm attention of admirers when needed, but also to chill the hearts of bigots when I wanted them to. Nobody expected a woman of my age to be overly embellished, and to do so just made one look foolish and desperate. Even in Hollywood—or, as I had decided since I got here,
especially
in Hollywood. Back in my mid-thirties, as I had felt I’d hit middle age, I had stopped chasing fashion and glamour. I worked with what God had given me; what he had taken away in the freshness of my youth he had given me back in the wisdom of my rich life experience. At least that was what I told myself when the mirror showed me, as it often did, the furrowed brow of a woman with the world on her shoulders. Although I was not in the full cup of my youth, on the inside I nonetheless felt a good deal younger and happier than I looked. My answer was to look at my reflection as seldom as I could!

When Stan’s driver arrived at eight I gave myself a cursory once-over in the hall mirror. I looked plain. There was no denying it, but I put aside the moment of insecurity and decided that it wasn’t so important and that I would just have to do.

The driver took us up above the city into the richest part of the Hollywood Hills. There was a peculiarly remote atmosphere. Narrow, winding roads with beautiful houses in all different shapes and sizes jutting up out of the vertiginous land. No two houses were the same—a black-and-white Tudor-style mansion; a miniature Scottish castle; a round white building with windows reminiscent of a cruise ship—yet each smacked of the two themes around which I had come to believe people here lived their lives: wealth and fantasy.

The car stopped outside a low building that looked like a modest cottage, certainly by the standards here. Stan was waiting for me.

He held out his arms, wide and dramatic.

“Ah, Ellie—you look beautiful.”

He was smiling so broadly that I could see the gold in his teeth at the back of his mouth and, as he held me in his embrace, he was swaying slightly. The party had obviously started early.

“Come in, come in. This is my house, my home—come, come and meet everyone . . .”

He pulled me through the dense foliage of the narrow cottage garden and as soon as we stepped inside I saw that the modest frontage was deceptive. Inside, the building was vast. The front door led us onto a walkway that looked directly across to a huge glass window with a view of what seemed like the whole of Los Angeles. Below the balcony was an open living area (a feature of houses here were these large, airy living spaces—there were no walls!), at the center of which was a grand piano, which at the moment we walked in was being played wildly and badly by a man who looked awfully like the curly-haired lunatic comedy actor Harpo Marx. Beside him was a smart-looking man with a thin mustache playing the violin with great gusto.

Stan saw me looking at him and said, “Ben Hecht—he wrote
Gone With the Wind
.”

“The score?” I asked.

Stan laughed. “God, no—the screenplay. He’s not a real musician, although he likes to think he is. Actually started his own little orchestra, the Ben Hecht Symphonietta—diabolical, of course, but we professionals indulge them. The best you can call him is a talented amateur, if there is such a thing, like that other fool with him.”

It
was
Harpo Marx—his brother Groucho was standing in front of the screenwriter pretending to conduct him, waving his arms around like a bat.

“Are they . . . ?”

“Yes,” Stan said. “Chico is the one who can play the piano—a little—but he isn’t here tonight. The other two are part of Hecht’s wretched Symphonietta. We can only hope the idiot actors have left their instruments at home, although by the looks of them I don’t think we will be that lucky tonight. Harpo plays the harp—but only in A minor; and as for the other fellow and his mandolin . . . !”

There must have been a hundred people in the room, wandering in and out of the doors that let onto a wide balconied garden area to the front, but while the building was buzzing with a party in full swing, it was not uncomfortably packed. The house was large enough to accommodate twice as many people as were there, but while it was grandly proportioned, it was not ostentatious. The furniture was modern and simple; the art, I was gratified to note, was well chosen—I recognized a large Paul Klee immediately—but you could tell by the slightly austere decor that this was a house where a man lived alone.

I recognized some of the faces, but no other big stars. Most of the guests were male and, by their casual costumes and the number of instruments lying in corners and on tables, were clearly musicians, orchestra members and perhaps composers like Stan. I spotted half a dozen starlets. They looked out of place, these young women dressed to the nines with glossy hair and pristine makeup; yet after only a few weeks here I had already realized that it was impossible to move in Hollywood without encountering their ambition and their youthful dreams.

“Let me get you a drink,” said Stan, “there should be some food coming. I ordered it—or I think I did! Perhaps I forgot . . . in any case, come, come . . .”

There was something very attractive to me about this man, but I could barely work out what it was. My instincts for love had become tempered by the harsh experience of losing two husbands. This man, I sensed, might perhaps fall in love with me, and the very last thing I needed in my life was a lover. I knew that common sense must prevail, although I decided that Stan seemed a strong enough character to withstand a little light flirting on my part, without losing his head. I never wanted to hold another man’s heart in my hands. I had no desire for the power or the responsibility. If there was one thing marriage had taught me, it was that men, for all their pomp, would always remain in the greatest part of them like young boys, and I already had two sons to rear.

Stan led me down the stairs into the fray. From the four corners of the room the discordant cacophony of musicians practicing and plucking and tuning met in the middle, in a terrible clash of sounds. I must have grimaced, because Stan put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I know, it must be terrible—we are used to the noise.”

“I thought musicians made sweet music,” I shouted at him.

“Sometimes we do,” he shouted back, “and sometimes we just make trouble!”

We walked into the kitchen, where every surface was covered with bottles of alcohol.

Stan looked around for a glass for me and, unable to find one, snatched one from the hands of a fiddle player who was so inebriated that the glass was about to fall from his limp hand to the floor (although the arch of his instrument was tucked safely between his legs).

He rinsed it under the tap, handed it to me and, seeming to sober up and remember himself, he said, “We musicians like to party, and we are somewhat Slavic in our excesses. Are you shocked?”

“Horrified,” I said, “as you know, we Irish are very reserved in our tastes. Would there be a drop of whiskey left in this den of iniquity?”

“If you’re quick,” he said, handing me a bottle.

I don’t know what came over me, asking for whiskey. I rarely drank alcohol and certainly never spirits. I wanted to show off to my new friend my artistic propensity to party, or perhaps I just wanted to get drunk and forget myself for a few hours. In any case I achieved both.

I had never experienced such a night. Early in the evening Stan gathered the most interesting people he could find in a group around me in the kitchen. He was trying to impress me by being the perfect host, but I also felt he was trying to show me something that I might become a part of. Everyone there seemed to be a musician or a writer or an artist and, as the new girl in town and a friend of Stan, they entertained me with their stories: the rugged, thrice-published New York novelist who had been lured by a huge contract to write screenplays and now found himself wallowing in the sex and the money, and unable to write seriously; the painter who had studied in the school of the famous Russian landscape artist Ivan Aivazovsky and then, escaping the communists, had arrived a penniless immigrant in America. He had got some casual work painting backdrops, and was so talented that he found himself being promoted to set designer for one of the big studios. These were all serious artists with great ambitions, riding the Hollywood gravy train—some were happy with their lot, others disillusioned, but all of them were fascinating.