The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  A young woman appeared suddenly and hurried in to the set where she sat on the couch Travis had just vacated, brought her legs up under her, and lifted a magazine from the coffee table. “Oh hell,” said Paolo, and hurried back in, steering his lithe body around a passing crew member and in through the entrance to the set—all with the elasticity of an eel. Thorstad could see their images engaged in a conversation he could not hear. A man with a brush smoothed the woman’s hair into place, tucking strands behind the ear nearer the camera, himself made bright and more vitally alive by the intensity of light.

  Thorstad might not have realized who this young woman was if the camera hadn’t zoomed in on her face as she gave the retreating hairdresser the same almost-contemptuous look she’d given Thorstad outside the trailer. Makeup had given the transparent skin a healthy glow, and the hacked-off hair had disappeared beneath a carefully shaped blonde wig. As the camera moved back, he saw that the smart tight-waisted dress had been designed to give the impression of a womanly figure inside.

  Once Paolo had returned to his seat behind the monitor and examined the image in his screen—the young woman glancing through a magazine, an open door beyond her, a glimpse of leafy conservatory beyond the door—a stocky young man passed by shouting “All right. Here we go! Positions please! Quiet now! Quiet!” Then someone else, unseen, shouted, “Background!” Another: “Rolling!” Then Paolo: “Aaaand action!” After a moment in which the young woman turned pages, Travis appeared in the open doorway, obviously nervous and uncertain. She looked up, apparently alarmed, but he quickly explained: “The maid let me in. She said she’d get Mrs. Bradshaw but didn’t come back.” His voice, coming to Thorstad from the headphones, was distant and thin.

  “Ella’s not a maid, she’s a nurse. And she’s probably calling the police.” She got to her feet. “If you’ve come to bully my grandmother, I can tell you she won’t be threatened.”

  Travis did not retreat. For a moment the two looked at one another as though neither knew what to say next. Had someone forgotten the next line?

  “I didn’t know,” Travis eventually said, though what he didn’t know remained unspoken. “Your surname . . .”

  “She’s my mother’s mother,” the girl said. “Are you going to threaten me? You probably told your folks you were off to make something of yourself. Wouldn’t they love to see where your plans have brought you? At least I have a roof over my head.”

  Travis did not move, his character evidently uncertain how to react to this. Then, after a few seconds, he turned away without speaking and disappeared into the shadowed leaves of the conservatory. “Okay,” the director shouted. “Cut!”

  Again, Paolo left his seat at the monitor and navigated his way around others and into the set. The camera people had not come out. The man with the tool belt perched on a stack of wooden blocks and took up his book. Of course Thorstad should have known that once would not be enough. As the first-time director of a stage play he’d needed six weeks of rehearsals before deciding it was “ready.” For a television director, perhaps there was always a possibility something might be salvaged from even the worst of the takes.

  Once the scene had been shot three more times and Paolo had reminded everyone that they’d be shooting Scene 13 in an hour, Travis walked with Thorstad back along the cables to the exit. Before going up the three metal steps to the trailer door, he stopped, and asked to be left alone for a while. Already a Greta Garbo. “This is a tough scene. I’ve got to get it right!”

  Thorstad could not recall having a door shut in his face before. Still, he’d learned long ago not to be insulted by the words or gestures of a preoccupied adolescent. He’d known better than to imagine himself the centre of his students’ world.

  “A word?” Elliot Evans was at Thorstad’s side, indicating with a tilt to his head that they step around behind the trailer to have their “word” in private.

  “I have the impression you expect to come onto the lot every day.”

  Because he recognized the impatience in this man’s voice, Thorstad determined to be calm and reasonable and, if possible, unimpressed. He’d had plenty of practice at this. “He expects me to be here. His parents expect me to be here so we can take advantage of the times he isn’t working.”

  Evans’s fleshy face was surrounded by a halo of wild and nearly colourless curls. Brown eyes blinked behind dark-rimmed rectangular glasses. “Look. In case you’ve been misled, I’d rather you weren’t here. We need the boy’s undivided attention.”

  “I understand.” Despite an immediate flush of alarm, Thorstad made sure he sounded unperturbed by the hostility of someone with so much power. “But his parents would be here if I weren’t.”

  “His parents would not expect to be on the lot every day.”

  “I’m sure they would when there are exams on the horizon.” Alarm had become indignation. This man had decided to be an obstruction.

  Because Evans had begun to walk, Thorstad had little choice but to walk with him if he was to state his case. “It is important to them, and to him, that he graduate. It is up to me to make sure he studies every available minute, on the lot or off.” He had raised his voice a little, and paused to take a deep breath.

  “I understand.” Evans stopped again and turned to confront his pursuer. “But I’m telling you that in expanding his role we’ve made it more difficult.” They were face to face now, standing amongst the pedestrians—people with clipboards, briefcases, and folders. A white electric cart whizzed by, its tires hissing on pavement. “If he doesn’t measure up, there won’t be more. Just so you know.”

  Just so you know that Travis’s future was at stake and Axel Thorstad was the one who could ruin it.

  Thorstad had little doubt this young man in faded jeans and dirty tennis shoes regarded him as a nuisance, an inconvenient old man who ought to be resting in an easy chair somewhere, reading the newspaper and drinking mugs of tea. He was probably one of those short men who resented having to look up while speaking to someone tall. Right now he’d like to cut Thorstad off at the knees. To poke him in the chest at least. “I know this,” Axel Thorstad said. “He’s a minor, and expected to finish his schooling. I have the impression the parents would prefer he not be down here at all.”

  Evans’s smile suggested pity for the misinformed. “Don’t kid yourself. If you think they’ll be furious if he doesn’t pass his exams, just wait till you see how they react if he’s written out of the show. There are others I could replace him with if I have to.” He turned away to leave, then turned back, his eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses. “Look. I get it. You want to cram in a bit of study whenever he’s got the time. But you need to understand he won’t have much.” He looked to either side, as though hoping for someone to support him in this. “I intend to put the pressure on, to make sure he doesn’t take anything for granted. If I decide you’re in the way you won’t get past the gate.” His voice had gradually grown louder, his tone more impatient. “I don’t have the time to argue! There’s an actor waiting in my office who’s about to hear that I won’t renew his contract if he doesn’t get his shit together soon. Then I have to meet with a bloody network Suit with both the power and the will to chop my budget.”

  He started off again but again turned back. “Every day eats up another three hundred thousand bucks. Understand?” Then he strode off again, the back of his neck a dangerous red. Perhaps he resented being forced to admit that it all came down to money.

  Travis hadn’t wanted a tutor—he’d made that clear the day they met. But then, in the days that followed, he seemed to have decided he could handle this one. Perhaps he’d simply assumed that Old Man Thorstad would be powerless once he came up against the strong-willed Elliot Evans.

  He had been left in an alley between glaring white buildings where he recognized nothing. There were no street signs—the “streets” were not named, were not even strictly speaking streets but simply paved gaps between buildings, some of them wi
de enough for vehicles to pass by, and for trucks and trailers to park, while others were barely wide enough for a person to walk. This “lot” appeared to be a collection of buildings in the way Alvin White’s field was a collection of wrecked cars, arranged in rows but with a lack of uniformity in size or shape that made it impossible for the rows to look ordered.

  Couples strolled past, deep in conversations. Individuals rushed from one building to another, though one woman paused long enough to tell him she’d enjoyed his performance during last week’s episode. She did not say which show he’d been in. A cyclist in white shirt and tie tilted a head in a sort of friendly nod, and wished him a good afternoon. A man in overalls was down on hands and knees yanking weeds from beneath the animal-shaped bushes against a white wall. Outside a portable snack canteen two men, dressed in jeans and short-sleeved shirts and runners, interrupted their conversation to watch him pass. Perhaps it was clear, even to them, that he didn’t know where he was.

  Nothing looked familiar. Or rather, everything looked familiar—another “stage” the size of a warehouse, another row of identical white trailers, another truck attached by thick black cables to something beyond an open door. His bag of books was still in Travis’s trailer. Would Travis think to bring it with him later?

  A small delivery van pulled up and stopped, and the driver stepped out—a dark-skinned young man in a brown uniform. He turned a slow full circle with lowered brow before approaching Thorstad. “You know Building 46?”

  Thorstad turned, himself, to look at the nearest buildings, all of them beaming sunlight off white stucco. There were numbers on some, in no discernible order, but not a 46. “I don’t know where I am myself.”

  The driver bounced the parcel in both hands. “I been all over this place looking for Building 46. Nobody knows where it is.”

  “And I’m looking for the building where they’re shooting Forgotten River.”

  The delivery man grinned. “A fine pair, us. Should turn ourselves in to Lost and Found.” He came closer, a deep crease dividing his forehead in half down the middle. “You somebody’s missing grandpa?”

  “I turned a wrong corner somewhere is all. It makes me think I might be getting old!”

  The delivery man threw back his head and closed his eyes for a silent laugh. “The mirror got news you’re gonna hate.” The eyes opened again; the laugh abruptly stopped. “But, man, you are tall! Old men supposed to shrink!”

  A long-legged blonde towered above them on the wall of the nearest building, her red high-heeled shoe larger than a person’s head. “I remember passing by that shoe—coming, I think, from over there somewhere. Maybe I’m closer than I thought.”

  But he wasn’t closer than he’d thought. When he got to the other end of this alley nothing looked familiar: a deserted city street of brick walls and large storefront windows, some of them papered over on the inside. These appeared as substantial as the sound stages and office buildings, though they were clearly no deeper than their front walls. All of this was waiting, he supposed, to become Main Street in a small town, or a back street in a city. At the moment it appeared as though its population had fled a spate of killings, or a plague. You expected to hear wind howling, a scrap of paper travelling erratically over the pavement. He probably had seen it, at some time, from his seat in a movie theatre.

  Yet, when he’d moved beyond the first bend, a bar and grill appeared in full colour in the midst of all this drab neglect. Where a long wall of windows slanted off to a side street, the bricks and windows had been scrubbed clean and a neon sign lighted overhead. Behind the glass, workers pushed furniture into place—a long bar with stools, booths beneath the windows, shelves and mirrors across the back wall.

  If he hadn’t looked up at the neon sign—“Casey’s All-Nite”— he might have overlooked the tall brick building next door: a storefront window and DELI sign, three rows of uniform windows above—it could become an office building, he supposed, or a tenement, but at the moment it was only a wall with a fire escape attached outside the three upper rows of windows, each window topped with a solid brow. He could be looking at the wall his father had scaled before leaping to his death.

  But of course every movie and television studio must have a row of false fronts like these—solid facades of concrete or brick that could be used repeatedly for any number of cities or towns in almost any country on earth, as insubstantial and illusory as the surviving walls of a bombed wartime street—though he was certain, now, that there was not a DELI sign in the fatal chase sequence of his father’s film.

  And here was the delivery man again, this time on foot with the parcel in the crook of his arm. “Building 46?” His voice betrayed disappointment-in-advance. When he recognized Thorstad he briefly mimed an exaggerated state of shock. “You still Lost, or are you Found?”

  “That actress with the high-heeled shoe misled me.”

  “That is her way. Probably didn’t invite you home for dinner neither.” The world was determined to disappoint them both. “Me, I’m making the rounds by foot this time. Maybe my truck can’t fit where they hidden Number 46.” He turned away as though to leave, but turned back again. “You come across it down some alley, now, you find me let me know.”

  12

  If Evans was displeased about having Travis’s tutor at the studio, he must surely be unhappy about having him in his home. The man had more or less suggested to Thorstad that he get lost, speaking with the patient restraint of someone addressing a confused senior-senior who’d strayed beyond his care-home walls to intrude upon other people’s turf.

  But the arrangements had been made by Travis’s parents— another testament to Mrs. Montana’s powers of persuasion, though the drama-teacher friend may have had something to do with it, or the executive producer’s wife. This tanned, athletic-looking young woman met them at her door with a welcoming smile and introduced herself to Thorstad as “Camilla.” She insisted they join her guests for dinner as soon as they’d settled in. “Very informal. Just a few old friends. Arriving in an hour.”

  Thorstad had not been to a dinner party in a decade and had no interest in attending one now. “I’m sure your friends would rather have you to themselves.”

  She laughed, “They’ll be relieved to meet someone new,” and sent them off to the guest house. Another guest house! To get to this one Travis led them through a garden of fragrant herbs and the sort of mysterious succulents you saw in photographs of deserts, and past the shallow end of a swimming pool whose water reflected the unclouded evening sky.

  Inside, Thorstad could see it all at once—a large room with a fridge and small electric stove, and two sleeping alcoves behind curtains, with a bathroom door in between. A few books had been laid out on a large table in the centre of the room. The cover photo of A House on the Water was of a building spread wide beneath a swooping roof, its veranda posts blurrily reflected in the dark water below. At the centre of the table, a tall blue vase was crammed with a spray of eucalyptus twigs, perhaps from the tree outside the door.

  They were above the Pacific Coast Highway and looking out upon the ocean from high on a hill so steep as to be almost a cliff face. The Evanses’ sprawling white house was a comfortable distance from other homes with their own terraces and towering palm trees and walls of glass, each perched on a narrow shelf of earth shored up with retaining walls of concrete and shaded by clusters of feathery eucalyptus trees. Like the private boxes in an opera house, they looked out from various levels in the one direction, as though waiting for a drama to unfold on that apparently endless sea. There was nothing operatic out there now—only a barely moving tanker and its spreading wake. Perhaps when these people came home from running corporations or directing movies or capping the teeth of celebrities, they preferred to look out on an empty world and the blur of an indefinite horizon.

  “All of this”—Travis spread his arms to indicate both direc-tions—“all this twenty-seven miles of coastline used to be owned by a married c
ouple who kept the world out with chained gates and, like, armed guards on horseback.” Since he hadn’t confessed to tour guide ambitions, he must be practising for the day he welcomed visitors to his own Malibu home. “After the old guy died, the widow sold a row of lots to celebrities who built their homes along the beach, shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the road. From down on the highway you can’t see the water—just blank walls and doors.”

  “And a few parked Audis.” Thorstad could see five immediately below.

  “You see that house with a tower?” Travis pointed to the right along the slope. “Sold for twenty-eight million last year. My mother nearly peed her pants when she calculated the commission!” It was impossible to know whether he intended to mock his mother or was impressed with the sum himself.

  “How would your mother know what people pay for their houses?”

  “They tell you. It’s in their papers. They can tell you how much Richard Gere paid for his estate, they know how much it cost Cher to build her fenced-in compound up the coast, they can even tell you how much she paid for the, you know, palm trees she imported from Europe or somewhere.” He stood back from the railing and turned to Thorstad with a mischievous smile. “Guess how far their teachers drive to get to their jobs. They have to cross the mountain range every day, like the maids who clean these houses.”

  Thorstad would prefer to avoid a dinner party with people whose maids and teachers were restricted to the back side of the mountains, but some things could not be avoided. Once they had showered and shaved and changed out of their travel clothes— Thorstad wearing his new dress pants for the first time, and a pale green shirt—they crossed the garden to the house where Camilla Evans again met them at the door, wearing gold earrings and a dress of cornflower blue. She led them through to a flagstone terrace off the dining room and introduced them to two guests who had arrived, she said, only moments before. The slender bespectacled man with ginger hair was a cosmetic surgeon named “Larry” whose patients were “high profile and highly confidential.” She explained that Larry had given a certain actress “now starring in The Brigadier’s Lady” the upper lip that had made her famous, and now was swamped with demands from others wanting the same. “Larry tends to size you up, imagining how he’d alter your appearance if you’d let him.”