by Adam Braver
He walked outside and sat down on a green wooden bench, uncertain of what to do next. Wind was blowing off the whitecaps and slapping his face with a mother’s scolding. The bottom line was that he still needed to file the story. Graham Scott would be twiddling his fingers, bouncing the erasers off the desk, and yelling out to Barb every thirty minutes to find out if there was any word on Baker’s article.
At that moment Vince Baker could have walked away. Not just from the story, but from the whole career altogether. It’s not that any of those sonsabitches had ever held a grip on him. Doheny. Harrington. Huntington. Johnson. He had the one thing that all their money combined could not buy—a voice. They did their level best to seduce him, offering glimpses into their lives and letting him have a slight touch. They made certain that the maître d’s knew him by name and treated him as though he were one of the tribe. They offered to put him on their payrolls for businesses three times removed, but he never acquiesced. His distance and comparative poverty were his strength. His upper hand. But here he was, standing alone and waiting. A good reporter doesn’t usually even have a half second to turn around and adjust his Johnson. A reporter’s eyes roam. They catalog. They conclude. They remember. But here in the land of Abbot Kinney, between the theater and the hotel, he suddenly understood the true deference he had with all his subjects. No matter how much you think you are smoking them out, the truth is that you are always still chasing after them. You can strut and posture as much as you like, but in the end you are ultimately left waiting for the invitation. Not much of a life to lead.
But he would have still liked to get her take on the boycott. True, the bishop and his army had relaxed, but initially they still had intended to extend the boycott into Venice. They had hounded Baker daily, led by their little messenger, Dorothy O’Brien, who was on his back both goddamned day and night to hear her plans. She left messages at the Herald to say that the story was not over. A certifiable nut. Living in her solitary bungalow where the paint never peels, where for two years she’s walked at least one mile every day to go to the Cathedral of our Lady of Angels, where she sometimes works as an assistant to Bishop Conaty, but more often than not is a caretaker for the church, sweeping the steps, polishing the pews, and dusting the cobwebs that are spun to the Savior’s nailed feet. She goddamn told him everything. Never just said her piece and went. Finally he managed to get her off his back by telling her that if he reopened the story it would not be about the success of extricating Bernhardt, rather it would investigate how the bishop was funding the new cathedral. Apparently the threat worked, because the League of Decency had turned quickly silent. (And Baker was lucky that it stopped there, because if word had reached Scott that Baker had tossed out threats to the religious community during the cleanup of the Vienna Buffet, Baker would have been knelt down in the Herald’s guillotine right then and there.) Dorothy O’Brien left one last message to invite him to a small victory celebration for their most trusted parishioners and the press. That’s how they are, those zealots. They come frumped up in their salt-and-pepper wool overcoats, shuffling along like they are too lonely to walk, looking helpless and slightly off, and then the next thing you know they are given a little attention and they hang on you night and day, the lunacy confirmed. Baker had elected not to go. Reporters don’t celebrate the outcomes of their stories with the people involved. His regret was that he probably could have made Bernhardt’s story into something. Now he would likely hack some junk out, trying to make celebrity machinations into a newsworthy piece.
Baker decided that he would hike a nonstop trip to Willie’s, and throw back a stiff one that cleansed, sanitized, and burned the Bernhardt humiliation right out of his system. He stood up and paced with the same thoughtful walk of his father, taking slow languid strides as though calculating the weight of the world, when in fact there was nothing much going on inside except the quest for solitude.
He patted his breast pocket for a smoke. Left his butts at the goddamn house. He thought about his sister Leslie still back in Phoenix and her daughter Jessie. He used to bounce Jessie on his knee. They called him Uncle Vince. He had always thought he was too young to be called Uncle. Jessie must be huge now. It would be okay if she called him Uncle Vince. He wouldn’t mind now, he thought, considering the idea that he now was old enough to be called Uncle.
He was about to leave when the sound of a woman’s laugh caused him to turn around. In the distance, heading over to the theater, he swore he saw Bernhardt with her escort (must be Mr. Klein). Her body swayed while she walked. Her footsteps hard and proud. A strange glow shone through the edges of her hair. If it was Bernhardt, she hardly looked the infirm that the desk clerk had made her out to be.
Baker charged back into the hotel to find that goddamn wiry Dolph and find out what was really going on. Everybody knows that you don’t stand up reporters in this town with bullshit excuses.
“Mr. Baker,” Dolph said. “You are back.”
“I want you to go up to her room again. I want to know when she thinks she will be feeling better.”
Dolph shook his head. “I just don’t…” And the way he hung indecisively on the empty phrase convinced Baker that his suspicions had been confirmed—he had been duped. She had kept him here for close to two hours, only to feign illness in order not to talk with him. Insult upon insult. Treated him like a child by employing such novice charades. Fuck this. He was walking from this story. Walking from giving her a fair shake. He could call on Dorothy O’Brien or Thomas Conaty, and then walk away with enough quotes to spill across the page like blood. And when Bernhardt woke up and saw the story in the morning edition, she would be horrified, and again stupidly wonder what she had done to deserve this wrath. And he wasn’t walking away without telling her. He asked Dolph for some paper to write down what she should expect and why. Bullshitters like her always thought they were untouchable.
Baker’s hand shook while he prepared to write the letter. He thought of about ten different openings, each time dropping the lead to the paper but pulling it up quickly in dissatisfaction. His self-esteem had weighted down his judgment, and his rage began to grow in place of reason and eloquence. Finally he let the pencil write:
DEAR MADAME BERNHARDT:
I assume that you are feeling better. I came prepared for our meeting at one o’clock, but had been informed that you had taken ill and would not be receiving guests. Mr. Klein has apparently fared better, as, at the time of this writing, you seemed to have found his company along the pier.
Please forgive the attention I have given to your side of the story, in hopes of writing a balanced account of your recent controversy here. Know that I will no longer try to take your time. Instead I will concentrate my efforts back on the bishop and his agenda.
Au revoir, Madame Bernhardt. And one suggestion: You might consider a regular suppository if you are often as sick as you are today.
Cordially,
VINCE BAKER, The Los Angeles Herald
He should not have hastened to send the note. Read it over once or twice, and then scratched out the impertinence. Instead he folded it four times and handed it to Dolph. “Please have this sent immediately.”
“Would you like me to wait for a reply?”
Baker shook his head no. And he turned around and left. With his first pure sense of direction of the day.
SARAH WAS BY NO MEANS HAPPY, even though she had been laughing while she walked toward the theater with Max. She had been imagining Alexandre’s expression when Max told him to change the set. Max had done a pretty good job describing the way Alexandre’s shoulders seem to puff with steam while his eyes looked as if they would leak a pair of oceans.
“You really should write for the stage,” she told Max.
“I bet you say that to all the boys.”
“Only those who have seen me at my worst but can still make me beautiful.”
She took his arm as they ascended the steps toward the arched wooden doors. The dusk fe
lt fresh. It settled on their cheeks.
Max pulled the door open with a certain hesitancy, cracking just enough space for them to have slipped through, but then he closed it before they entered. Perhaps he sensed the reaction that she would have when faced with the theater. That the proclamation of changing plays and the newfound life that had reinvigorated her would quickly be diminished by the realities of the production. The charming image of Alexandre’s angst would easily give way to her frustration with his insolence. Or Ibé frantically combing out the new wigs while loudly complaining that a man of his reputation should not have to endure such utter unprofessionalism. It would all get to her, and the enthusiasm would reveal itself as temporary, and she would storm out of the theater, looking for some solution that would inevitably consider the positive results of a hit of opium.
But for the moment all was well. She was still smiling while picturing her lead carpenter’s face.
“At least you managed to curry Kinney’s support,” Max said. “It could have been much worse. Especially as he does not trust us.”
“He still does not trust us. But he does trust his patrons’ reactions.”
“Nevertheless, you did handle that well.”
“I didn’t handle anything, Molly. He is not so terrible.” While she was not necessarily any more partial to Kinney than the usual producer, she did concede a soft spot for him by the end of the brunch. Maybe it was due to a newfound understanding of him. Much in the way you can always literally see the perceptions change in the eyes of the audience as an unsympathetic character is made compassionate merely by the gathering of a few secret details or select thoughts revealed. During the small talk, Kinney was quite charming, and almost entirely forthright about his ambition to make, keep, and protect his money. He was not filled by wild theories or the rich man’s justifications, nor did he feel ashamed about his success and his drive to it. He had worked hard in the tobacco business, seen it peak and then watched it fall dangerously close to the point of shattering, which he said as a father and husband nearly scared him to death. If he were young and single he might not have cared—he had spent so much of his youth traipsing around Europe with a modest sum that seemed like a bounty—but when he looked into the fearless eyes of his children he knew that he would do anything in his power to keep them that way. In some respects, that’s what Venice of America was, a mixing of the dreams of his youth with a capital venture. He told her he was not that complicated, and she thought he was right. But she did not find him to be a particularly simple character either. The mark of the successfully ambitious.
“Are you ready to go in now?” Max asked.
“You are the one who closed the door.”
Sarah slipped in behind Max. They stood at the back of the hall. Below them the last remnants of 9, rue d’Antin’s interior were being hauled off to the right, while stage left saw Alexandre directing his crew in preparation to raise the walls of the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle. The actors sat in pairs with their faces buried in tattered scripts reminding themselves of the lines. They had changed roles quickly before. Perhaps a bit unexpected, but not particularly surprising. And in spite of their initial reactions (which Max described as filled with sighs and eye rolling), they all had returned easily to the business at hand. They were of course professionals dedicated to the craft. They studied and worshipped it. And unlike Sarah, most were hungry with ambition to stay alive in the industry. They must have equally worshipped and despised her position. To have made it. To not have to audition and hope and pray that you are given parts. To not lay awake nights and think of the shitty jobs that you will have to do in order to keep acting. To not walk into rehearsals questioning your talents and wondering if today will be the last. Sarah must have been the living embodiment of every single dream that her company of actors shared. And to them, she would have simply answered that she worshipped their passion for theater—one that extended beyond business. Their pure love for the heartbreak of art.
“I am not ready now,” she said to Max.
“Sarah, they are waiting for you. They want to start reviewing La Tosca for tomorrow.”
“They don’t need me right now.”
“At least for a line run-through.”
“Molly, please just take me back to my room. I am telling you that I cannot do this right now.” She spoke in a forceful whisper. “I have neither the enthusiasm nor the energy that the company will require of me at this time. They are better off temporarily to go at it alone.”
“Sarah…”
“Molly, please.”
“Do you prefer your railcar or the hotel room?”
“Whichever is closest.”
VINCE BAKER REALLY WANTED A CIGARETTE.
Back downtown, he walked to Pershing Square and rode the Angels Flight funicular railway up to Broadway, and north to Temple Street, where he briskly trekked over toward Olive. Once on Olive, Baker stopped and looked upward at a towering edifice that he had strangely never noticed before, like the long silhouette that stretches to announce you, but you forget that it is there. The unfamiliar building loomed over him. Its two columns split by the steps to the entrance and capped in sultans’ hats blocking out the pinkly fading sky. Stained glass windows whose colors were muted by gray were lost with the setting sun. By design it was a simple structure. Generous curvatures and delicacies touched by the sculptor’s hand cast its elegance.
He was caught in the building’s shadow, as though a trespasser under the watchful eye of a stingy neighbor. Baker felt the light begin to evaporate, leaving a strange misty illumination that erased any sense of time. This is how prisoners must feel. Stripped of time. Where days and nights invert, wrapped around each other until they become indistinguishable. You need something to ground you, like the smell of a flame burning paper, and the soothing smoke that fills your mouth after a long drag. He had interviewed a crook named Skip Nelson once in the bowels of the L.A. county jail. Nelson had been picked up on orders of Mayor McAleer. Nelson had been kind of a loudmouth, with a history of larceny and unproven assaults. He had screamed out threats at Mayor McAleer once at a rally and then a week later made some impure suggestions about the mayor’s wife, thus making him property of the city of Los Angeles. The fact that Theodore Roosevelt was stumping through the basin only extended Nelson’s stay. So while most of the reporters were joining Roosevelt, McAleer, and all the other dignitaries over California oyster cocktails, Montalvo potato croquettes, and filet of Arizona beef at the Westminster Hotel, Baker sat in a cell, trying to get Nelson to talk about anything other than being railroaded by a man who believed his authority superseded the Constitution of the United States. It was an interview that yielded nothing, except enough crazy ramblings to build the mayor’s case. But what he remembered most was Nelson bumming a smoke off him when he first sat down; and Nelson’s eyes had been dark and hollow like the fluid had been sucked from them. Deep rings below the sockets that were in the accelerated process of molding to the skull. But he lit that butt. Under the orange ember his eyes yielded some life. Nelson didn’t say another word until he finished the cigarette. Then asked for another. His only connection to normalcy. One thing to keep him alive. Until he died of mysteriously natural causes alone in a cell, with no reason for a postmortem despite the holster in his head perfectly tailored for a billy club.
Baker shouldn’t be such a pansy about it. He should walk down to Second, bum a smoke from the first passerby, and march right up to the cathedral, tell the bishop that he is ready to talk, and could Conaty kindly share that bottle of booze that he surely keeps hidden, probably a three-quarter-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s, square and weighted by its black label, a fluted neck confident yet lonely. And beside it would be two shot glasses that looked unused for some time, but still were noticeably free of dust. “Help yourself. Please,” the bishop would say. His charm would be so real it would feel disingenuous. “We have much to discuss.” And they could sit there together, killing the bottle an
d wondering how one barely significant person could compromise their professional dignities. Then they could figure how to finally do her in, so that they could return to their respective higher callings.
And in the midst of the mutual confession, Baker would never mention to Conaty about having written the letter at the hotel. Or at least not in the fashion that he did. He had come off sounding childish and impudent, driven by the strains of a jealous lover below the balcony. It made him embarrassed just to think about it. Baker had made this assignment personal in a way they he didn’t fully understand—quickly the story that he didn’t want became the object of his desires. He could have analyzed it with a simple psychology, that he craved all the things he could never touch, but the basic-ness of that was insulting. Instead what he needed to negotiate was in understanding what he cared most about. He had convinced himself all along that he was the maverick who had ridden out from the wildest of the west into Los Angeles to expose the high rollers who gambled away everybody’s future in an effort to line their own pockets. That he was the badass around town who kept the place honest. But perhaps he had forgotten his own honesty. There are those rare times when the mirrored walls that you put around yourself to imprison and protect your self-image become chipped and worn. Then suddenly you are looking through glass. You see the whole world out in front of you. And it is large. Goddamn it is big. And it expands all around you, and the sky arches up as an infinite hood, and there are faces and bodies so much larger and more meaningful than yours running in circles just to get around you. In other words, you realize how small you are. Everybody has been there. Huntington. Johnson. Doheny. Conaty. They had all looked through that window at one point. The fuel for their desperation to be larger. The chase for immortality, where the larger the letters for their names on the building are, the larger their memories live on, ensuring that they will always dwarf guys like Baker for all eternity. And something had made them see it, their own personal bush burning that gave them the nasty vision. And at that point it is all a matter of what you do with it. You can inflate yourself larger than life. Or you can wilt. Or be like most, and do whatever you can do to curtain the window and convert it back to a mirror where you continue your life in the safety to which you are accustomed.