West of Paradise (12 page)

“You're such a victim,” Tyler said. “So easily manipulated, in spite of your so-called power.”

“So-called?”

“Letting people tell you what's the right place to go on a Monday.”

“It was I who set that standard, decided it,” Norman said imperiously. “People go there on Monday because there's a chance of running into me.”

“Can I borrow this shirt?”

“If you like,” said Norman, trying to sound casual, covering his exhilaration that still someone else had fallen into a snare of his devising, no matter how small or benign a snare it was. “It would probably look good on you.”

Tyler tried it on, smiled at his reflection. “I like it. It's my color.”

Actually, now that Norman examined his own feelings deeply, he felt, besides the feather-flicks of desire, fatherly. “From now on,” he said, “they'll go there on Mondays because there's a chance of running into you.”

*   *   *

Helen Manning had not really intended to sing at Larry's funeral. She felt genuinely bad that he had died, as she felt genuinely bad when anybody died. She was without rancor, or the wish for revenge, which made her almost as unique in her community as did her phoenix eyes, so labeled by Bunyan Reis, with whom she was dining at Morton's. She had sung because the song had reminded her of Larry Drayco on what was probably one of his best days. She'd been present for part of the scoring of his picture and seen how happy he looked that the song was genuinely wonderful. Remarked to her that it was really a world-class ballad. She'd heard in that instant that he would have liked to be, himself, world class. For all his affectations of breeding, his Phi Beta Kappa key, and the latest wife he'd married in a ceremony that had to have cost him a million with the rooms he'd redone in Vegas, the private jets to take everyone there, the orchids flown in to make a carpet for the bride to walk down, suites for all those invited with gift baskets in each one that included not just champagne and fruit and sweets but his and hers Tag Heuer watches that gave time and date all over the world, with a card that said “So you'll remember our perfect day,” a day which had lasted just a little over a year—for all of that, Helen had known he wasn't that sure of himself. Even if he hadn't been caught embezzling.

Her intuition went deeper than anyone imagined, especially about insecurity. There had never been a room she was in where any man present looked at anyone else, and she still had to check the mirror to make sure she was really beautiful. So she knew in her heart, which was quite open and surprisingly good, in spite of the disappointments she'd suffered, that Drayco didn't have even the confidence she was supposed to. While they scored the song, she'd pressed his hand in an unaccustomedly affectionate gesture as he clutched his armrest. She felt the cold sweat, experienced a moment of genuine, deep affinity, perceiving how vulnerable he was. She understood that he would have liked nothing better than to be as unmistakably fine, even for a moment, as that song.

When she'd heard the song at the funeral, all that he'd been that he couldn't show, all that he'd wanted that he couldn't achieve, bubbled up in her, like sorrow. Longing for the things that eluded most people, that they pursued: prosperity, peace, the perfect love. The last still applied in her case, and it was that lack, that place of continuing emptiness and yearning she'd been moved by, as well as what she'd felt for Larry, when she'd heard the song. So she'd involuntarily started singing.

Her eyes were still a little red around the edges this Monday evening at Morton's. But the redness didn't diminish their golden-amber glow. They felt a little tired from the force of the emotion and the tears she'd shed. So she wasn't sure if the boy with Norman Jessup and Carina was as beautiful as he seemed.

She tried not to appear too interested or excited as he passed her table, igniting in her a palpable electricity, making the small hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She hoped that Bunyan wouldn't pick up on it and say something bitchy. But he wasn't paying attention to her, chatting to the man on the other side of his banquette.

“His name is Tyler Hayden,” Bunyan was saying. “True
sparkle.
Inside as well as out.”

“You've been?” asked Wilton Spenser.

“I've engaged. Verbally and metaphysically. He's very into that.
Tellement
New Age-y.”

“I'll be dead soon enough,” whimpered Lester Rolph, the seventyish man on the other side of Wilton, to the thirtyish man opposite. “And you'll get everything, and then you can give it to him. Can't you just pretend you love me?”

“I do love you,” said the younger man, not looking at Lester.

“And Carina doesn't mind that he's living there?” Wilton asked Bunyan.

“Then why do you have to see him? I'll be dead soon enough.”

“He's straight as an arrow, so Carina doesn't mind,” Bunyan said. “Did you see his eyes? Luminous. Like the children in
Village of the Damned.
”

“I asked Elizabeth once,” Wilton said, “if she'd seen
Village of the Damned,
and she said ‘No, but I read the book!'” He chortled. “She's such a hoot!”

“I'm terribly sorry,” said the maître d' to Arthur Finster, checking the reservations book. “But we have no table for you.”

“That's bullshit,” Arthur said, twirling one of his dreadlocks nervously. Morton's was the center of his universe on Monday nights, the capital of the need to see and be seen, to eat and not be eaten. “My secretary confirmed last Friday, and again this afternoon.”

“Who did she confirm with?”

“Laurence.” He gave it the French pronunciation.

“I'm so sorry,” said the maître d'. “Laurence no longer works here.”

“That'll teach him to book a table for you,” Charley Best said, as he headed into the dining room, the buoyant Brandy on his arm, in a see-through dress with sequins strategically placed.

“I'll buy this fucking restaurant!” Arthur said. “
By Hook or by Crook
is going straight to number one.”

“Funny,” said Charley. “It smelled to me more like number two.” Smiling, he followed the maître d' to his table.

“You're in particularly good company this evening,” Wilton said to Bunyan, looking at Helen a little wistfully.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” Bunyan said. “Do you know each other?”

“I don't think so,” Helen said.

“That's right, you waited in the car.” He held out his hand. “Wilton Spenser. A privilege.”

“Car?” She shook his hand.

“Larry Drayco brought you by my place once, made a quick stop.”

“I never went out with Larry Drayco,” Helen said.

“Well, maybe he only said you were in the car so I'd give him a better grade,” Wilton said. “But it's great to meet you. I really enjoyed your singing today. I didn't know you sang.”

“Neither did I.” She looked away from him. “Bunyan, that young man with Norman and Carina…?”

“That way lies madness, my darling. You're old enough to be his mother.”

“I'm thirty-eight,” she said, angrily.

“Forty. I've seen your passport. He's twenty-five.”

“No one has children when they're fifteen.”

“Joan of Arc saved France at that age.”

“Maybe she had no sex drive.”

“I've seen you pursued by sultans,” Bunyan said. “I won't watch you make a fool of yourself.”

“Then look the other way,” Helen said, and signaling the waiter, asked for a piece of paper. She wrote a short note and asked the waiter to give it to the young man with the Jessup party.

At the next table Lester Rolph was weeping. “You can't wait for me to die.”

“You're boring me,” the younger man said.

“What about me?” asked Wilton. “I only invited you because I thought you'd tell us tales about old Hollywood. Why can't you dwell on the past, like other people your age?”

Helen ordered a second coffee, lingering over dessert, making a visible effort not to seem to be waiting. Carina and Norman Jessup stopped by the table to say hello on their way out of the restaurant.

“I really loved your singing,” Norman said.

She seemed not to hear him, her eyes on the young man, who did not look at her, but just kept walking. “I'll be outside getting the car,” he said to Norman.

“Isn't he clever,” she said, devastated, after they were gone. “He's playing hard to get.”

“I'm afraid he isn't playing,” said Bunyan.

Rats

There were rats in Beverly Hills. It was not metaphor, or something Kate could regard as symbolically Kafka-esque, although she did. It was the reality.

The brush that burst into flames in the surrounding hills in the dry ovens of summer, the ivy that trailed around the best manicured streets in the flats, choking the stately palms, sucking life from the soft violet-blossomed jacarandas, housed rodent hordes. Unsightly trucks from exterminator companies proliferated on the choicest streets, more visible than the resident Mercedes. Even the best exterminators refused to guarantee that the rats would not come back.

Kate knew there were rats in the guest cottage she rented on Burton Way. She could hear them rustling in the night. She was aware they were nocturnal, as ghosts were supposed to be nocturnal. Still she wished there was such a thing as ghosts, so she could open one of her latticed windows, reach out, and only be touched by an icy hand. Sometimes she would turn on the light by the side of her bed, and catch a flash of tail, a rush of fur on the wooden rafters of her cathedral ceiling. She wondered if they followed the habit patterns of the populace and would seize her by the throat while sleeping.

She asked her landlord to get rid of them. At first he denied they were there. Then he said she could always move. He knew he had her, like the rats might, by the throat. It was a Beverly Hills address, cheap for the neighborhood, an exquisitely wrought little cottage with a winding staircase leading up to a bedroom loft, every inch of it unique and beautifully crafted, carved, inlaid with antique paneling, designed by one of England's leading decorators as a gift to her lover before leaving him. It had been in
Architectural Digest.
A copy of the magazine lay on the red-and-white inlaid game table. The landlord told her the noises were in her imagination.

But of course being a writer, her imagination was very vivid, and she could hear them all the time. The night of Larry Drayco's funeral, she heard what might have been a thunder sheet in an amateur production of
Lear,
so persistent was the noise, so full of rustling and crackling. She switched on the lamp, picked up the baseball bat she kept beneath her bed in the event of an intruder, the flashlight beside it in the event of an earthquake, and followed the sound down the winding staircase, to the kitchen. There was a walk-in pantry built cleverly into what would have ordinarily been a broom closet, and in it Kate kept the essentials that got her through her up-to-now uneventful life. She beamed the flashlight around. There was a case of bottled water—not Evian yet, because she wasn't in that category—a case of soft drinks and mixers in the event of the party she hadn't yet thrown, pasta, rice, crackers, and a large box of Raisin Bran.

The box was shaking. The rustle was more than a rustle now, a swishing, an audible chomping, as though something were biting through wax paper, participating fully in the whole-grain value of the contents. She looked at the baseball bat in her hand, the box on the shelf, and wondered how, exactly, she would do it. The shelf was a little high. What if she only antagonized what was in the box, didn't even succeed in stunning it? The entire box seemed to be doing a kind of dance now, some ritualistic dark Disney thing. What if it fell to the floor and whatever was in it ran out at her?

Dropping the baseball bat, she seized the box and ran with it to the refrigerator, opened the freezer portion on the top, shoved the box inside, and slammed the door. Then she ran back upstairs, switched off the lamp, and tried to go back to sleep, lulled into quiescence finally by the decelerating pounding of her own heart.

In the morning she did not even brush her teeth or go to the bathroom, but went immediately to the freezer and warily opened the door. The cereal box was overturned. The rat stood frozen on its hind legs, frosted eyes fixed on the door, front legs up in a scrunched position, as though someone held a gun on him, and he was surrendering.

The phone rang. “Baby!” It was her agent's voice. Mel had never called her
baby
before. In fact, he had never called her, only occasionally accepting her calls, one of them the one she had made to him in terror because there were rats in her house, at which time he had put her on hold. “Why didn't you tell me?” Mel was saying now.

“Tell you what?”

“About Grandpa. And the manuscript.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Haven't you seen the trades?” he said.

“I'll call you back,” said Kate.

“You better,” he said. “Don't forget who was in your corner when you were nobody.”

She ran to the mat outside her front door, where the trade papers were delivered, along with the
Times,
and took them with her to the bathroom. It was in the middle of the party column in the
Reporter,
along with photos of celebrities who'd been at Drayco's funeral. Her name was in bold print, with Perry Zemmis's, and her “grandfather,” F. Scott Fitzgerald's, and underlined and in bold,
The Last Tycoon.
Perry Zemmis had bought the “sequin,” it said in quotes, like he had been being clever. Like he'd been making a witty joke. But they'd spelled her name right, which, according to Tallulah Bankhead, and the theatrical histories she'd read that she remembered, was all that mattered. A little quiver went through Kate at the sight of her name in print, along with all the celebrity names. Bold. She experienced something greater than relief, as she felt the release of her urine.