Stages (34 page)

“This is a surprise,” said the man. “How long’s it been? Three years, four?”

“Four years,” Rebecca replied. “And three months.”

Johnny took a thin cigar from a pack by the bed and lit it.

“That long, huh?” he said through a blue haze. “I forget…that women always remember.”

“I’ve missed you,” Rebecca said. She fought an urge to hurl herself onto his bed.

“We had a real thing going, didn’t we? I remember that. So what’re you doing now?”

“I’ve been with the same guy for almost two years. He’s an agent. And he’s really making the big bucks. We live in Bel Air—”

“’Scuse
me
,”
s
aid Johnny grandly.

“But basically he’s a creep,” Rebecca said.

“Most Johns are.”

“I’d walk out on him tomorrow—but I wouldn’t want to walk away empty-handed, you know?”

“Marry him, then walk.”

“He’s talked about us getting married. If we did, and I dumped him, I’d get half. But I think there’s a way to get more than half.”

“Yeah? How?”

“By making a movie.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Look, he’s starting his own production company. He’ll be able to get
backers.
Suppose he’s making a movie with a twenty-million-dollar budget. Suppose
I’m
the producer, and suppose the director is working for me. Then I’ve got him in my pocket. You realize how much could be raked off?”

“Tell me more,” Johnny said. “This is starting to sound interesting.”

“You remember Matt Martignetti?”

“The one from Chicago who likes black pussy?”

“He also likes to gamble. He owes money all over the place. But he directs commercials, and he’s good. He won a couple of those advertising awards.”

“I think I get the idea.”

“I thought you would.”

“How do I fit into this?”

“This
is
a studio, isn’t it? You are a filmmaker, aren’t you? How many people can you clean up enough to get on my payroll?”

Johnny smiled. “Quite a few,” he said.

“You want to be my special assistant?” Rebecca said.

“That sounds like a pretty good offer,” Johnny replied.

“I think we can really pull this off, Johnny,” Rebecca said. “He won’t check you out, or anything. He’s high three quarters of the time. He thinks he’s Superman.”

“Why are you bringing me into this?”

“I told you.”

“Not really.” He was looking at her as though he had caught her at something. “You still have a thing for me, don’t you?” he said.

Rebecca swallowed hard.

“C’mere,” Johnny said.

Rebecca stared at the rising in his milky-blue briefs.

57

Kathy had always pictured L.A. as a flat place, featureless except for the palm trees and the homes of the stars. She had never dreamed that it had hills as awe-inspiring as those of San Francisco, so it was an eye-opening experience for her to be shown houses in the Hollywood Hills. The house she finally settled on was near the top of one of those hills. It was a small, boxy, three-bedroom ranch with a deck off the living room. At first, being in the house had almost made Kathy dizzy. Standing on her deck, she had thought of the little balsa wood airplanes that the boys in her neighborhood used to fly. That was exactly how the deck made her feel, as if she was swirling in the air and could nosedive at any moment all the way down to Santa Monica Boulevard. She thought Alison would like the view. She was planning, by way of encouragement, to say to her, “It’s just like being up in a plane, isn’t it?”

Unfortunately the day of Alison’s arrival dawned badly. Smog lay over the city below like atmospheric lint. Kathy woke up with a sore throat, and her eyes were watering. She assumed that Alison, traveling alone, in the custody of the stewardesses, would be spoiled all the way out, so she’d no doubt arrive tired but in a good mood on account of having been the center of attention. With any luck, she’d sleep right through her first night in her new house, and perhaps by morning the smog would have lifted.

As she drove to the airport, Kathy prayed that everything would go okay. In just two days she’d be starting her new job, and poor little Alison would have to be making an adjustment not only to a new house but to a day worker named Angel Albino (at least with Angel around, Kathy could be confident that her daughter would be bilingual by the time she entered first grade). Her eyes were bothering her so much that Kathy had to roll up the car’s windows and put on the air conditioning. This atmospheric inversion made the Jersey meadows seem like a fresh-air camp. Kathy hoped that it wouldn’t affect Alison too much.

The plane was right on time. Kathy had been nervous about Alison flying too; she was relieved to see her daughter walk into the baggage claim area, holding the hand of a stewardess. This was what life was turning into—breathing easier after a trip was over because you and your loved ones had made it. What must it have been like in the fifties just to get on a train and not think twice about whether or not you were actually going to get where you were going?

Kathy rushed up to her little daughter, who started yelling “Mommy, Mommy” as soon as she spotted her. As Kathy swept her up in her arms, she began to spill out everything that had happened to her, all excited because she had a story to tell Mommy for once. The tale began somewhere in the middle with, “Mommy, I had
two
desserts.”

“She was a
very
good girl,” said the beaming stewardess. As they waited for her luggage, Alison said to her mother, “Mommy, can I be on an airplane again sometime?”

“Of course,” Kathy replied. “We’ll fly back east to see Grandma and Grandpa, and sometimes you’ll go to see Daddy on your own, and your other grandma and grandpa.”

“Can we go to Disneyland first?” Alison replied.

“We’ll go to Disneyland next weekend,” Kathy said. “We’ll spend a whole day there.”

“Really? A whole day?”

“Really,” Kathy assured her.

“Are these people going to Disneyland?” Alison asked when they were on the freeway, with cars on all sides.

“Just some of them,” Kathy replied. “You’re in California, now. And here people drive even if they’re not going to Disneyland.”

“Why?”

“Because they want to.”

“I won’t drive—except to Disneyland. Where is it?”

“A little bit south of here,” Kathy replied.

“North is up and south is down, isn’t it? Grandma told me that in California the ocean’s on the wrong side.”

“It’s on the right side for the West Coast,” Kathy said, wondering what else her mother had told Alison about California. Parents. Anything that wasn’t right next door to them was either where those awful murders had taken place or a “hell hole”—Kathy’s father’s phrase that he’d used when she said she’d be living in Hollywood.

As they drove along Sunset Boulevard, Kathy said, “Did you ever see so many great big houses?”

“They look like nobody’s home,” Alison said. “Do we have a big house?”

“No, we have a little house. But it’s way up high.”

“Does it have a big backyard?”

“No, but it has a nice big deck.”

“Like on a boat.”

“Mm-hm.”

“I told Grandma I wished I’d been on Noah’s ark, with all the animals. She said cruises are better.”

“When you get to be an old lady like Grandma, you’ll want to go on cruises too.”

“Only if they have animals. I
might
go on a cruise if they had lions that ate up the old ladies.”

“I might too.”

“Why aren’t we there yet?”

“We’re almost there,” Kathy said.

“This is like a roller coaster,” Alison said as Kathy slowly climbed their hill,

“Isn’t it fun?” Kathy replied.

“I don’t know,” said Alison.

Please God, just let her like the house,
Kathy prayed.

“Is this it?” Alison asked as her mother pulled into the car port.

“This is it,” Kathy replied.

“Where are the windows?”

“They’re mostly on the back, so people can’t look in from the street.”

“Oh.”
Oh
was also the standard reaction to gifts of jigsaw puzzles.

Carrying her little green imitation alligator suitcase full of dolls, Alison followed her mother into the house.

“Isn’t this
nice
?”
said Kathy, coaching.

“It’s
little,
” Alison said.

“It’s just the right size for us,” her mother told her. Taking her hand, she led Alison over to the sliders and out onto the deck.

“Isn’t this something?” she said. “Isn’t this like the plane you were just on?”

“It’s scary,” said Alison. “Where did that big cloud fall down from? Why is it yellow?”

“That’s not a cloud. That’s from the cars…from all the people…
going to Disneyland.
”

Alison stood there gaping.

“Do you have to go to the bathroom?” her mother asked.

“No. That cloud looks like somebody peed. I don’t like it here.”

“How do you know that when you’ve only been here a few minutes?” Kathy said a little desperately. Then she saw, on a neighbor’s deck, a girl right around Alison’s age. Her heart skipped a beat. This was a real gift.

“Look,” she said. “Over there. There’s somebody who can be your new friend.”

The little girl across the way was just getting up. She’d been lying on a beach towel. Kathy saw that she wasn’t so little. She was fat, actually, and she got up off the towel behind her, like a cat stretching. The big little gill was wearing a two-piece bathing suit, Kathy saw and she was also wearing
lipstick.
She had a bored expression on her face that didn’t seem to take in anything but the path to the kitchen.

Alison’s grip on her mother’s hand was tightening.

She stared at the fat girl.

She stared at L.A., far below, with sulfur spreading over it like pancake batter on a grill.

Alison swallowed.

Then her cheeks ballooned, and she threw up all over the deck.

58

“It’s kind of crazy, isn’t it?” said Janet King. A few crumbled bits of paté that Veronica had thought looked a little too much like dog food were on a cracker poised on Janet’s fingertips to enter her mouth—neatly, Veronica hoped, for the front of Janet’s blouse had already been splashed with cocktail sauce from the shrimp. Apparently Janet had not noticed that she’d slopped all over herself. Veronica thought, though, that the smear contrasted amusingly with the woman’s studied manner, the voice that sounded like William F. Buckley’s except that it was slightly less suggestive and somewhat more masculine.

Janet, who was a producer over at Paramount, was talking about a young screenwriter named Richard Martin. She had just pointed him out to Veronica.

“There’s something about a person being so successful so early on that doesn’t seem right,” Janet was saying. “I think he’s, like,
twenty-six,
barely out of film school, and his very first screenplay not only gets made but turns out to be big box office. Now I ask you, is that justice? Writers aren’t supposed to have it that easy. They’re supposed to have to struggle.”

“More or less than actors?” Veronica inquired.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Are writers supposed to struggle more or less than actors?” Veronica said.

“Well, I think writers
need
to struggle,” Janet replied. “So their work will have some character. Actors don’t have to develop character. They just have to become personalities.”

“Or they have to have a talent for being famous,” Veronica replied. “That is a talent, you know, unto itself. It’s all the more fascinating to me because it’s invisible. It’s as if these people have an act, but when they’re performing they’re not actually
doing
anything.”

“Mmm, I know,” said Janet. “Like Jackie O. I will admit I liked this Martin kid’s screenplay, though. That movie had an intensity, a grittiness. It was like a vision of New York as hell.”

“The city of the damned,” Veronica reflected. “That’s one of the things that’s wrong with L.A. Instead of being damned, which can be character building, people out here seem to exist in a kind of limbo, doing ‘Happy Days’ or a ‘Love Boat’ episode.”

“My goodness,” said Janet, swallowing the rest of her paté with an uncomfortable gulp. “You sound about as intense as young Mr. Martin. I should introduce the two of you. You’d probably get along.”

“Why don’t you?” Veronica said. “I am a little curious to meet him.”

Taking Veronica by the hand, Janet led her across the room to where Richard Martin was standing, looking bemused, with a glass of white wine in his hand.

“
Richard,
”
Janet said, “how are you? Janet King, from Paramount,” she added immediately, in what Veronica recognized as the panic of anyone minor in show business that they will not be remembered by someone major.