The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  “What about your Building 46?”

  The courier scratched rigorously at a bushy sideburn. “It don’t exist!” His eyes bulged. “I walked into one of their offices and said, You tell me where you hid Building 46 or I leave this parcel on your desk! They said there aint no 46! Number 46 was retarred. So I took the parcel back where it came from and tol’ them Try again!” He sat on the bench beside Thorstad and draped his forearms over his long thighs. “No one’s gonna shoot me if I rest a minute.”

  “You’re not from here? Your accent—”

  “Nobody’s from here. I’m from N’Orleans, me. You heard of it? I’m one of Katrina’s orphans, scattered farther than most.”

  “Your home was wrecked in the storm?”

  “Busloads of black people hauled out of there fast—sent as far as they could send us. Hoping they send us far enough we won’t come back. I heard some ended up in Utah! Lord! My bus come all the way to California before it let me off in desert. They’re not getting me to stay in no desert.” He looked this way and that, as though to reassure himself that he wasn’t in desert now. “So I put out my thumb and kept moving till I got to here. My Momma’s cousin works for this courier company, gave me a job when somebody quit. Studios only! How you like that? Messages to beautiful actresses. Parcels to famous directors. The gossip I hear, oh my!”

  Noticing the bag at Thorstad’s feet, he reached down and pulled out a book—Travis’s modern poetry anthology. “What y’all do with these?” He laid the textbook on his lap and opened it carefully, like someone nervous of what he might find inside. “You goin’ to old-folks school or what?”

  “I’m supposed to be a teacher for a busy actor.”

  The courier bent forward to peer hard at the open page and sounded out the words at the top. “Lucinda . . . Matlock. Hmmm. Who she?”

  “A woman speaking from her grave. She raised twelve children, lost eight, enjoyed her marriage, died at ninety-six. No complaints.” Thorstad took the book and ran a finger down the page. “Listen—her last few lines:

  “What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,

  Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?

  Degenerate sons and daughters,

  Life is too strong for you—

  It takes life to love Life.”

  “She sound fierce, that one. Dead and still speaks her mind?”

  “There’s a whole graveyard full of people speaking their minds in the book she came from. Most complain, but not her.”

  “Somebody ought to tell us what Katrina victims say from their graves—Whooo! My granny’s tongue would blister the sonbitch she decide to blame.” He reached into the bag again. “These other books got poems?”

  “Geography. Composition. History. The boy has exams to write.”

  “Exams!” The courier abandoned the books and stood up to flee exams. “I missed as many them things I could. ’Course, I am one damn ignorant fool.”

  Thorstad also stood, once he’d returned the poetry book to his bag. He would go up and see whether he could interest Travis in the twentieth century’s list of horrors and the abundance of best-answer questions they might spawn. Assuming, of course, that he was free of the journalist and not acting before the cameras.

  The delivery man returned to his truck and concentrated on his clipboard. Thorstad had got ten or fifteen metres past him up the paved slope before the little truck caught up—enough time to be struck with the thought that this was one person who might know the whereabouts of people in this business. He held out an arm. “Hold it, please?”

  “No room for passengers. Anyway, it’s ’gainst the rules.”

  “You ever deliver something to Another Life?”

  “What studio’s that?”

  “I don’t know. An old friend sometimes appears on that show. Oonagh Farrell?”

  The courier closed his eyes and thought.

  “Plays an elderly Swedish princess,” Thorstad said, to help him think.

  “Lady with a big laugh?” The courier’s grin was wide. “I seen her name on a door, yes sir. Heard big laughing behind it, then it opened and out she come to read something on the paper in her hand. She had the whole place roarin’ in a minute.”

  “Next time you see her, maybe you could tell her an old friend from her teaching days says hello.”

  “Put yourself in a box and I’ll take you to her. You can tell her hello to her face.”

  “I directed her in her first stage role. She’ll remember that.”

  “You a director?” He slapped a knee. “Hell, I thought you was a granddaddy brought to work because your caregiver sick!” Thorstad hoped this was meant as a joke. “You want to say hello on paper I’ll put it in my pocket and remember it next time I hear that laugh.”

  That imagined piece of paper was suddenly dangerous. What did he think he was doing? He felt, suddenly, as though he’d come too close to slipping off a cliff. “I think you should forget I mentioned her.”

  “Fine with me.” The delivery man put his truck in motion. “That woman just gone off to Nowhere with Building 46. Now I got my job to do. You do yours but don’t get lost! Ha, ha! ”

  His job? His job was to drag Travis back into the bloodshed of the twentieth century and his obligations now in the twenty-first as soon as the journalist, the publicist, and the director had all had their share of him.

  When he’d crossed most of the distance to Stage 5, the writer in pink pyjamas was suddenly beside him, his beaded moccasins silent on the pavement. “I hope you left a few good ideas in my office, man. I’m about run out of my own!”

  Thorstad saw no signs of distress in the man’s face, though there were beads of sweat on his shiny scalp. “You survived your meeting?”

  “What do I care what they think?” He flung his arms wide, as though to throw off what he’d heard from his fellow writers. “They think we’re a team. They think they’re auditioning for The Closer or something. Hell, I don’t care what they think. I won’t be back next season anyway.”

  “You know this?”

  “I’ve decided this. My brother-in-law’s working on a movie script for Brad Pitt and needs me.” Before going in through the door to the sound stage he said, “Apparently Paolo wants to talk with me now—something about my stupid script.” He tilted back his head and shouted fiercely to sky. “Probably wants to tell me how brilliant it is!” Then, chuckling, he quickened his pace and left Thorstad behind.

  Apparently a scene had just been completed. The powerful lamps had been extinguished and crew members were securing or shifting equipment amongst the temporary walls and stacks of unpainted plywood in the grey depleted light. The excitable Charlie, rushing off to an emergency elsewhere, informed him that Travis had already left the building. “Only one little line, but he’ll be back for his big scene later!”

  It appeared the actress who played the wealthy matriarch was still in the building. At least Thorstad assumed this woman surrounded by a group of admirers was the actress. She was familiar from the episode he’d seen in the Montanas’ viewing room, though he could not at the moment recall her name—once a glamorous star in the era of Jean Simmons and Susan Hayward, now something of an elderly matron in a moss-green sweater set and tweed skirt. She appeared to be holding court, with several of the crew clustered around to overhear what was being said between her and the director. Evidently she was hearing only compliments from Paolo and Paolo was hearing only compliments in return, while her eyes checked the faces of her admirers. She seemed pleased with whatever it was she saw.

  Dolores Williams. You could see traces of the lovely Dolores Williams despite the added girth. Tiberius’s bloodthirsty mistress. As a young man he had seen her swooning in the arms of Gregory Peck. And, if he remembered correctly, shooting the hat off Gary Cooper’s head. There was a time he might have asked for her autograph, but now he could only wonder why it was disappointing to see that certain people had allowed themselves to get old.

  When
Paolo led the writer off for a private conversation, the clipboard woman stepped up to the actress. “Always a pleasure to watch you work, Miss Williams.”

  “Thank you, sweetie. And gracias for not blowing the whistle on me.” She glanced to either side but did not lower her voice. “I buggered up that one line pretty bad, but everyone was too polite to stop me so I kept on going. There are some advantages to being older than everyone else on the planet.”

  “This is Travis’s friend,” the clipboard woman said. Perhaps Thorstad had been gawking.

  The actress put out a small round hand for Thorstad to shake. He assumed she did not expect him to raise it to his lips. “You thought this old dame had died off years ago—admit it. A few close calls but I’m still here!” Her laughter was low and warm. “You could probably say the same yourself.” She patted his hand, perhaps with sympathy, then wiggled goodbye fingers and set off towards the outer door where a young man hurried forward to take her arm.

  Her perfume remained in the air. He was surprised to discover himself confused and embarrassed. For a moment he’d been his seventeen-year-old self thrilled to be meeting the famous Dolores Williams and at the same time he was his seventy-seven-year-old self shocked to discover that the movie star, down off the screen, looked older than his remembered grandmother. Apparently sixty years, once behind you, were little more than an instant.

  “You might want to check on Travis,” the clipboard woman said. “Paolo was pretty hard on him.”

  Inside his trailer, Travis pounded a fist into the padded arm of his couch. He had removed the wig, but hadn’t changed out of his clothes or removed his makeup. “As soon as he sees what we got he’ll make Paolo do it again. They had to take me through my single line six or seven times before he used the cameras and still I sounded like a high school drama dork with stage fright! Wrecked the scene for everyone.”

  “Well, you didn’t ask them to expand your role.”

  “They’re giving me a chance to show what I can do!” His tone suggested that Thorstad was a fool not to have known this. “One of the other guys was dropped and they picked me to replace him.” He ran a hand back over his hair, once and then again. “There’s others waiting for me to fail.”

  “You know this?”

  “Rosie told me. A guy named Reynolds Green is waiting for me to screw up so they’ll, you know, give him a chance.”

  “Well.” Thorstad lowered himself onto a chair and laced his hands together and looked for a few minutes at his feet. “I suppose,” he said as gently as he knew how, “this is not the time to consider the causes of the Spanish Civil War.” If this were his son he would move to sit beside him on the cot and offer sympathy, but this was the son of Carl and Audrey Montana who were far away, fixing teeth and buying up farms for townhouses.

  “I’m sorry.” Travis closed his eyes. “Everything’s, like, crowding me. That journalist kept reminding me how important it is to get in his stupid magazine. Sticking his camera in my face. No wonder I screwed up, with him watching!”

  “But you’re done with him now?”

  “No such luck.” Travis unbuttoned his fire-damaged shirt, shrugged out of it, and tossed it onto a wall hook. “Elliot told him he could meet us tomorrow at breakfast.” He removed his Seattle airport shirt from a hanger, put it on, and began to button it up. “How much more of me does he fucking need?”

  14

  Before going on to a meeting farther up the coast, Camilla Evans dropped them off at the restaurant in Paradise Cove with instructions to order a hearty breakfast and put in some serious study before she returned. “I don’t want to be blamed if you fail at your job.”

  He was already failing at his job. What else could you call it but failure when so little had been accomplished? Last night he’d telephoned Carl to explain what he was up against, but Carl had only suggested he employ his teacher-ingenuity to deal with the situation. “Remember how you outsmarted that music teacher who tried to borrow Selena Thompson whenever her pianist was sick?”

  But that young music teacher hadn’t possessed Elliot Evans’s advantages.

  Even the choice of this restaurant may have been a deliberate act of sabotage, when you considered the distractions. The walls were crowded with black-and-white photos of old-time movie stars. Cary Grant. Judy Garland. James Dean. Too many of the customers looked, to Travis, like contemporary movie stars he couldn’t quite name. And there was the wide beach beyond the glass—golden sand traversed by scantily clad strollers. The long white pier extended well out over the water on picturesquely spindly legs, its nearer railing a roost for resting gulls.

  Travis knew too much about this place. Apparently Barbra Streisand lived nearby. A movie named Gidget had been filmed here, a series called Baywatch as well. He could not believe that Thorstad had never heard of Baywatch.

  Ignoring this apparently serious gap in his cultural background, Thorstad pushed his coffee mug aside and opened the textbook next to his seafood omelette. “We agreed we would talk about Shakespeare’s tragedies this morning.”

  “And that other series was shot here too,” Travis said. “A private investigator—had a sidekick named Angel. What was it called? Used to be my dad’s favourite show.” He opened his cell-phone and pointed it at Thorstad. “Axel Thorstad amongst the stars.” He frowned for a few moments at the little screen, then folded the gadget shut. “James Garner was the PI.”

  Thorstad did not know the series but he did know that if Travis was not familiar with Shakespearean tragedy both of them would be in trouble. Literature, History, and Geography were the courses most at risk. The Montanas would throw Thorstad’s belongings out on the road for the senior-seniors who passed in their daily walks. Whatever was left would be shipped to the homeless shelter. Angus Walker would be wearing his socks.

  “According to the course outline, your teacher could have chosen The Tempest, Hamlet, or King Lear. But yours chose Hamlet?”

  Travis flopped back in his chair as though dealt a blow by Shakespeare himself. “Hamlet boring Hamlet!”

  Thorstad had heard this quick dismissal too often. “Most of the world’s great actors have played Hamlet. Half the actors in this room have probably tried it, even those with roles in Baywatch. What is it about the Danish prince that makes him tempting to every actor in the world but Travis Montana?”

  “There isn’t room in my brain for this.” Travis closed his eyes as though to make Thorstad disappear. “I should be going over my lines.”

  “I’ll help you with your lines as soon as we’ve dealt with the Danish prince. Look, we’ll come at it another way.” Thorstad drew a sheet of loose-leaf paper from his bag and sketched an isosceles triangle, then divided it with vertical slashes into five parts. “Look at the shape of his tragedies. Five acts. For half the play things go right, more or less.” Here was something he’d always loved. If there were a chalkboard nearby he would be up on his feet drawing diagrams and explaining things to strangers, famous actors included. The geometry of literature! Eyes were supposed to widen now, the lights were supposed to go on. “For the second half, beyond this peak in the middle, they go steadily downhill, usually because of the hero’s actions in the first half. Or inaction in this case.” A pause for the beauty of it all to sink in. “What is it about Hamlet that causes his own destruction in the end?”

  Before Travis had time to come up with an answer, the journalist from Teen TeeVee slipped into the booth beside Thorstad. “Morning!” he cried, loud enough to turn heads. A knapsack was placed on the seat between them. “I have a volleyball in my car,” he said. “And a photographer. I want you out on the sand. Didn’t Evans tell you to wear a swimsuit?”

  “He didn’t,” Travis said.

  “We’ll have you take off your shirt, then. And roll up your pants. Let’s go! The photographer’s waiting outside.”

  The publicist was outside as well, frowning at the expanse of sand as though doubting its value as a backdrop. After convincing their wa
iter that he would return immediately, Thorstad followed Travis in order to register his protest. The journalist would be impervious but a grey-haired woman might understand—might hope to see her own children pass exams.

  But when she turned to confront Thorstad he saw in her eyes that she made no sentimental distinction between an old man and an inconvenient post. “Lewis is on a tight schedule. We had no choice. We shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

  Travis had already started out across the sand, but turned suddenly and jogged back. “Hey, look. I’m sorry. Be patient, eh? I don’t have any choice here!” He started walking backwards now, away from Thorstad again. “Hamlet!” He raised his arm and pointed a finger. “We’ll talk about Hamlet later. To be or not to be— in Teen TeeVee. Maybe this is the end.” He turned again, and ran to catch up with his masters.

  To Thorstad it was obvious that, for this only child, pleasing some adults was more important than pleasing others. His tutor had been demoted to some inessential post-adult state. Travis had made a choice, which was not to say he wouldn’t suffer for it. Some only children of Thorstad’s experience would make nervous wrecks of themselves if trying to please one adult meant displeasing another.

  Of course he’d been an only child himself, and suffered from it still. If he was not more patient with this situation, it was at least partly because he wanted to avoid disappointing Carl Montana. And what were his chances of pleasing anyone? How could his desire to teach compete with Travis’s drive to act, or Elliot Evans’s determination to complete his episode within budget? Or, for that matter, the journalist’s need to get a good story for his magazine? As though to drive home the point, by the time he had paid for their unfinished breakfasts and gone out to the small sandstrewn terrace, Rosie had also appeared. Was he to compete with her as well?

  She was not alone. A dark-haired youth in knee-length shorts and red muscle shirt stood frowning beside her—impatient perhaps, or painfully self-conscious, or so intensely aware of his own good looks that he believed others were compelled to admire him. Apparently, to be this handsome was a serious burden.