West of Paradise (24 page)

He seemed not to register what she was saying. “Where's the original of the tape?” he asked.

“That's it.”

“I suppose you made copies.”

“I suppose you'd suppose that.”

“So you picked up the finer traits of blackmail from your late husband.”

“He was never a blackmailer,” she said darkly.

“Then what is this?” He indicated the tape on the recorder.

“He wanted to leave me a legacy.”

“What exactly do you want?”

“I'll have to think about it.” She shifted in her wheelchair as best she could. “He suggested a three-picture deal, or a place on your board. But I don't know if that's my style.”

“Cash?” he asked, his dark eyes narrowing underneath the leonine head of wheat-colored hair. “How much?”

“This town shit all over my husband,” she said sullenly.

“I understand it was reciprocal.”

“He was a decent kid when he came here. It was the place…”

“People like to blame the environment they live in when they can't take responsibility…”

“Don't give me that sophisticated crap. I'm a very simple woman.”

“So what do you want?”

She was silent for a moment. “A monument to him.”

“You're putting me on. We're supposed to erect a goddamned statue to a man who broke every rule, violated every ethic—”

“I didn't say a statue,” she interrupted. “And I wouldn't talk about ethics if I was you. Or maybe we should play the tape again. Adultery. And you're not even in the military.”

“I'm talking business ethics,” he said, reddening.

“I got a flash for you, Mr. Lippton. Life isn't just about business. Maybe it seems to be that way here…”

“Hollywood is a microcosm of America,” he said.

“I don't know what that means.”

“A microcosm…” He assumed the stance he took when he addressed his board of directors with the annual report, inhaling air as though it were tobacco through slightly pursed lips. He exhaled the explanation. “A miniature of the big picture, a little model of what it's all about.”

“You think America is about movies?”

“People want to be entertained. Forget their troubles, even if they're not interesting enough to have any. America is a company town. Sometimes the company is Eastman Kodak. Sometimes it's government. Here it's about pictures, so it's got a greater hold on the public. But every company has the same bottom line, and the bottom line is success. That's what this country is about.”

“That's really pathetic,” said Lila.

For a moment Victor was taken aback, as though it were his explanation she found unacceptable. “I'm sorry you find my theory offensive.”

“I'm not offended,” she said. “Nothing this town does can offend me. Not anymore. My only interest in Hollywood is already underground. And I want him … what's that word, when you want to make sure somebody is remembered?”

“Oh, he'll be remembered,” Victor said.

“I mean
good
remembered.”

“Commemorated,” Lippton said.

“Yeah. That's it. Commemorated.”

“How do you suggest we do that?”

“I'll have to think about it,” Lila said, and smiled.

Last Lunches

Algernon Reddy awoke from a dream of death. It took him a moment to remember that it was life that was the illusion. Because he had full confidence in that precept, he had chosen to return to New York as his semifinal resting place, electing to die in an environment where man was assaulted with reality. Mugged, you might say.

Even cosseted as he was with the comforts his confreres had provided, safe in a very soft bed, with the hum of
Oms
from the meditation room downstairs in his ears, he could still hear the rumble of traffic, the slam of lids on garbage cans, the sirens. “I have chosen not to die in California,” he'd said, on leaving, “because how could I tell?”

The pronouncement had been made a few days after Larry Drayco's funeral. As that man's death had been unexpected, and his own was imminent and predictable, he'd decided to make tracks. Attached as he was to the weather in L.A., to the outer peace that seemed at times to match his inner one, to the profusion of flowers outside the guest house that the last in a long line of heiresses had made available to him, he understood, as Carl Sandburg had said, that life was “a series of relinquishments.” So he knew he had to let go of what made him, even in his pain, sensually comfortable, for the final relinquishment that lay ahead.

Friends who ran the meditation center in New York had been sadly delighted to welcome him. All had the same view of mortality, that it was but part of an infinite journey. Still, they hated to see him go. He had brought wild colors to the philosophy, as vibrant as those he had seen on his psychedelic trips, and his gift of words had made them almost visible, even to the spiritually blind.

Now he lay, or sometimes sat, dying, his last public appearance walking unaided having been at Drayco's funeral. The man had befriended him, as much as a man like Larry Drayco could befriend anyone who could do him no measurable good. They had shared a few quiet dinners in a vegetarian restaurant, as the producer made a perceptible effort to seem like he didn't wish he were at Matteo's. As though following Algernon's urgings that he open himself to his own spirituality, Drayco had actually made a trip to India and spent several days at Sayed Baba's ashram, where he watched him perform some of his miracles, and had come back a little calmer. Algernon had found himself feeling fondness for the fellow, a sentiment that did not diminish even when he found out that Drayco's real reason for the trek was the presence at the ashram of an Indian billionaire who was thinking of putting money in movies. Whatever got you there, Algernon had thought at the time, looking back at his own metaphysical beginnings, when, still known as “Ever” Reddy, he'd dropped acid because he thought it might enhance his fucking.

There was a table beside the bed that had on it medicines doctors had given him to dull the pain, or put him out of his head so he couldn't measure how excruciating it was; liquid cocaine friends had smuggled in from England where it was legitimate and freely administered to the mortally ill; plus a variety of psychedelics to make the passage easier and more interesting. The least of these was marijuana, which so attenuated time that Algernon had the illusion that he was living forever. Which, as he knew from heavier tripping, he was destined to do.

Because the house where he was staying had an official, tax-deductible spiritual label, it was filled with seekers, some of them residents, some transients, some there for the day just to chant or be still. All of them wanted interviews and audiences with Algernon. But his strength was measurably ebbing, and, as Self vanished, he became more selfish. The sense of playfulness had disappeared from his journey: he had sent away the young filmmakers who had been in attendance to record his departure. Of all those who wanted to be with him, the only one he wanted was the young boy—he could not help thinking of him as that even though he was a man—who sat beside his bed now.

The boy was golden-haired, golden-lashed, and golden-skinned, a remnant of his California bronze, as beautiful a creature, man, woman, or beast, as Algernon had ever laid eyes on. They had first met when Algernon gave a reading of his poems at the Viper, the Los Angeles nightclub where River Phoenix had OD'd.

“You are my final gift,” Algernon said in a voice that was still surprisingly strong. “On this side, anyway. I am grateful to Destiny for bringing you to the Viper to see me.”

“I didn't come to see you,” Tyler Hayden said.

“Why, then?”

“I was looking for my peers.”

“You don't have any,” Algernon said. “It's you and everybody else.”

He wished Reddy hadn't said that. Tyler suffered from pride and disliked it in himself, wanting very much to shed what seemed to him often to be arrogance, since he, too, knew how beautiful he was, and how smart. At the same time he could feel himself flush with pleasure, because that was the conviction he himself had had, that he was one of a kind. To have it confirmed by someone as brilliant and perceptive as Algernon came as a great relief, even as it burdened him with how lonely he would be.

“I'm fading,” Algernon said.

“Can you see God yet?” asked Tyler.

“I see Him all the time,” said Algernon. “I see Him in you. I hear Him in music. I taste Him in food. I feel Him in sex.”

“Pretty irreverent,” said Tyler.

“That's why I came,” said Algernon. “If God didn't mean us to be irreverent, He wouldn't have created me. Or Jonathan Swift, making him a clergyman. It's the pompous and the pious who are an insult to Him.”

“I wish you had been my father,” said Tyler. “I wish it had been you who raised me.”

“But I did,” he said. “In the little piece of time we have known each other, this life, anyway, I have seen you grow like a spiritual fungus.”

“Not a pretty picture,” Tyler said.

“It is to me. But then, I've known some really great fungi.”

They both laughed. Algernon winced suddenly.

“Are you in a lot of pain?” Tyler asked softly.

“I can't really tell. Maybe agony itself is a hallucination. A convincing one, I grant you. But passing, as everything is passing.”

“I can't believe how lucid you are, with everything you're on.”

“Well, drugs are mother's milk to me,” said Reddy. “On the other hand, maybe I haven't taken everything I seem to have taken. Maybe I want the full experience as it is. Maybe I've only told my friends I'm ingesting all this shit to make
them
more comfortable.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

Algernon closed his eyes, and thought for a moment. “Don't compromise,” he said, at last.

“Have you?” Tyler asked. “Have you ever?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, in my youth, when I was a fabled swordsman, I from time to time shtupped a woman or twelve I felt nothing for, including lust.”

“Why?”

“Ego. To reaffirm I was the best. To raise money for my foundation. You'd be surprised how many women there are who have too much money and feel guilty about it, and are desperate to go deeper, give their life significance, get laid. Fucking for me was no more than a smile is to most people. A way of manipulating.”

“And you regret it?”

“I regret nothing. See that you do the same. Regret is a cancer, and I already have that covered.”

“How about…” Tyler hesitated. “How about if you were drawn to a woman that you knew was a ditz, empty?”

“Why, I should fill her up,” Algernon said. “Besides, an enlightened man doesn't judge.”

“I don't have to judge. It's evident.”

“That's very superior of you.”

“I thought you said I was superior.”

“I only said you were apart. Apart shouldn't put you on a perch, looking down. Is she beautiful?”

“Like nobody else,” Tyler said.

“Then go for it.”

It had been Tyler's hope that Reddy would discourage him. The taste of Helen's mouth, the expert softness of her lips, collapsing under his even while she ate them, had nearly made him stumble off his road. He had actually considered for a moment trying to do something commercially acceptable, like being a movie star. Or taking her up on her offer to give him entree to everybody. But he knew in his heart, which was as good as his brain, that people would consider him her Toy Boy. Whatever of inspiration he had to deliver to the unaware could not be passed on from such a position.

So he desperately wanted someone to dissuade him. His own father was not around anymore to talk sense to him, and even when alive had been easily intimidated, especially by people he deemed successful, which he was not. Tyler's mother was self-absorbed, never even noting how exceptional her son was, except when it reflected on her. His beauty was nearly lost on her, so caught was she in the most superficial of externals, like his failing to wear a tie. So to take on another narcissistic female after his struggle to escape the one he'd issued from seemed to him self-destructive and stupid. Especially as Helen Manning had undoubtedly had every man she'd ever wanted. Unique as Tyler held himself to be, and Algernon Reddy had just confirmed, perhaps all that made him really different for Helen, as simplistic as her thinking seemed, was the fact that he withheld himself.

Besides, he was scared. “I don't want to end up a man who's led around by his thing,” Tyler said.

“Thing?”
said Algernon, energized enough by outrage to raise himself on his elbow. “Am I to leave my spiritual estate to a man who can't say penis?”

Tyler grinned. “Why do you suppose they gave genitals such ugly names? Penis. Vagina.”

“As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, ugliness is in the mind of the listener. There's nothing wrong with those words, unless you live in Orange County.”

“You don't think lewdness diminishes our connection with God?”

“It only makes it stronger,” said Algernon, and took Tyler's hand, his own fingers frail against the firm, healthy flesh. “If God didn't mean us to be sexual beings, he wouldn't have given us dicks.”

*   *   *

Sometime late that evening, he died, still clutching Tyler's hand. They both knew that what Algernon was, what everybody was, was indestructible consciousness. He had talked of the bubble of his spirit becoming a part of the infinite ocean. It all sounded so correct that when the moment came, and the terrible gurgle issued from his throat, an actual rattle, and the man was gone, fled, gray-faced, nobody home, Tyler had a hard time with how final it seemed. Somehow he had not expected death to be what it was when looked straight in the face. He had not been present when his father died: his body was gone when Tyler came home from school. Death. That was really the right word for it, no matter how convinced you were it was part of a passage.