West of Paradise

by Gwen Davis

  “You’ve got brass balls talking to me,” Norman raged. Carina pulled at his elbow.

  “Better brass than none at all.”

  “Let’s go,” Carina said, softly.

  “She’s not chasing me out of anyplace,” he said proudly. “She’s the one who had to leave the country. She’s the one who had to hide. Who still has to hide from all the people who despise her.”

  “But you’re the one who lost the lawsuit.”

  He drew himself up to his full, Lincolnesque height. “In the long run you failed to damage me,” he proclaimed, as his lawyer had tried to tell him ever since the trial. “Homosexuality is openly accepted in the civilized world—”

  “And its own little Mafia in Hollywood,” Sarah said.

  “I wonder if a woman can be found with her cunt in her mouth,” murmured Linus from the sidelines.

  Norman inhaled deeply, as his meditation teacher had taught him. “All of that is beside the point now.” He put his arm possessively around Carina. “I have fallen deeply in love with this exceptional woman, and she is soon to be my bride. You’ll understand if you’re not invited.”

  “Oh, I understand all of it,” Sarah said. “Really I do. I’ve been studying Kraft-Ebbing, which still sets a good standard for sexual deviation.”

  “Deviant only to you, who has to hire beach boys to make love to you.”

  “Like you’ve never paid anybody.”

  “Not ever in my life. Anyone who was with me was with me because they wanted to be, and never got a cent from me.”

  “Which is why some of them are now parking attendants.”

  Darcy Linette came forward, looking as soft as her job was hard, tall and honey-haired, with the same long hairdo that had served her since college, when she learned that appearing girlish made a bright woman less threatening to men. “Please, people. This is a solemn occasion. Don’t turn it into a brawl.”

  “Why don’t they just step outside,” goaded Linus. “Gunfight at the Wolfgang Puck Corral!”

  “In the long run you have failed to damage me,” Norman recited again to Sarah. “My life is fuller than yours will ever be.” He hugged Carina close. “I have turned myself around through therapy.”

  “Well, I wish you every happiness,” Sarah said icily. “But I think it’s Carina who’ll have to turn herself around, so you can pretend she’s a boy.”

  He reached over with his long-fingered, freckled hand, took Sarah by the back of her neck, and shoved her, facedown, into the guacamole. “All right!” cried Linus, right fist shooting into the air, a victory salute.

  Sarah came up sputtering. Waiters ran over with napkins. She wiped the bilious clumps from her face, pulled them from her spikey hair.

  “That color is really becoming,” Norman drawled. “Now you look like you do on the inside.”

  “You won’t get away with this,” Sarah muttered. “I’ll get even with you, you pervert creep.”

  “Miss Nash,” Carina said very softly. “You’ve already done your worst to Norman. There’s nothing more you can do.”

  “That’s what you think,” Sarah said, and headed for the ladies’ room.

  * * *

  On the pink satin chaise near the makeup console, Lila Darshowitz lay on her back, a wet towel against her mouth. “Are you all right?” Kate asked, bringing another towel.

  “Why should you care?” Lila said.

  “I just do.” Not the moment for the genuine reason to this woman either, sick as she was, still half retching, Kate assured herself. Compassion was in her act, and as Fitzgerald had said, action was character, so if the act was compassionate, so was she. She wasn’t just being self-serving, she was positive.

  “I’m sick,” Lila said, and turning on her side, retched again, this time into the towel.

  “Do you have a way of getting home?”

  The reddened, heavily lidded brown eyes tried to take Kate in, as they filled with tears. “I don’t have a way of getting anywhere.” She shook with self-pity, her great, obese body heaving with sobs. “Oh, Larry. Larry. Why’d you ever come to this shitty place?”

  “You want me to call you a cab?”

  “Okay, I’m a cab.” Lila tried to laugh. “That was one of his jokes.”

  “I’m really very sorry for your loss,” Kate said, wondering what some of his other jokes were. Maybe that had been Drayco’s saving grace, humor. Maybe he had once done something really funny, something healing. Laughter was the best medicine, went the old homily, and it was true. Kate wasn’t just a fan of Fitzgerald’s, but of movies as well. She loved Preston Sturges’s work, got the message he’d proclaimed quite clearly in Sullivan’s Travels, that comedy was man’s salvation. Larry Drayco hadn’t made any comedies as far as Kate knew. But maybe he’d done something genuinely loving once, making someone laugh.

  She knew she was reaching. Nobody at the funeral seemed to feel a sense of genuine loss, except this poor jellyfish of a woman.

  Sarah Nash burst through the doors, talking to herself, murmuring obscenities, uttering future programs of revenge, carom-shooting threats. She put her head under the faucet, started to wash the guacamole away, filling the sink with shades of putrescent green.

  “Did I do that to you?” Lila asked, embarrassed, half sitting.

  “What happened?” Kate said.

  “That queen has messed with me for the last time,” Sarah said.

  * * *

  “I hate it when these occasions turn ugly,” said a columnist from The Hollywood Reporter. “Though it does make for better copy.”

  “Well, I have something positive you can put in your column,” Perry Zemmis announced. “I’ve just bought the sequin to The Last Tycoon.”

  * * *

  “Where did you disappear to?” Jake Alonzo asked Kate, when she came back.

  “I was with Larry Drayco’s mother. I’m taking her home.”

  “But I wanted to take you home.” He looked genuinely disappointed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go get my car.”

  “Can I take you to dinner?”

  “Not tonight. She really needs somebody.” It was a good excuse, a selfless one, while calming her fears of his discovering her deception. Or her discovering … what? Was she so shallow that some physical deficiency of his would impact her? Wasn’t she more moved by him because his face was no longer too beautiful?

  “May I call you?”

  “Of course,” she said, and gave him her number. Wherever it was going could wait for another time.

  “Are you nuts?” Wilton followed her out to the parking lot. “You blow off Jake Alonzo for that blowsy drunk?”

  “We don’t know that she’s a drunk. She’s upset. Understandably. And Jake said he’d call.”

  “These people have a short attention span,” Wilton said. “You have to strike while his iron is hot.”

  “It’s the black Saab,” Kate said to the parking attendant, handing him her ticket, not looking at Wilton, not looking into herself, really. Not allowing herself to feel what was actually there. She was in no hurry to find out about Jake. In spite of the dangers of the era, this wasn’t high school, or an age when you said “Not yet.” Not to a movie star. Not to Jake Alonzo.

  “He likes me for something that isn’t true,” she said to Wilton, not needing to share with him that there was something less than genuine in her. Not needing to share it with herself, really, trying to sidestep it even in her own mind.

  “What does it matter, as long as he likes you?”

  “I like him, too. Too much to play off a lie.” That much of the admission was completely sincere. She did like him. What was the word he had used about her? Substance. Yes. That was it. He had unexpected substance. But what if it turned out he didn’t have it where a woman expected it? What if the truth about him was as disappointing as the lie about her?

  Two attendants were helping Lila out of the restaurant. She hung between them, a multicolored disaster
area, her swollen ankles draping over the edge of her tight-fitting shoes, feet not quite maneuvering the concrete.

  “Besides,” Kate said, as the good-looking parking attendant opened the door of her car, and the two waiters loaded Lila onto the seat, “she’s my source material.”

  * * *

  In the shadows of the restaurant, Norman Jessup watched a tidied-up Sarah Nash head for the front door, her makeup washed off with the guacamole, so she looked almost fresh-faced, if you didn’t know better. He moved into a palmy alcove, empty of people, and took out his cellular phone. Dialed. “She’s leaving now,” he said softly, into the slat of a receiver. “Follow her.”

  A Snowflake in Hell

  Driving west into the sun in its afternoon blaze, down Sunset to Pacific Coast Highway, Sarah Nash had the disconcerting feeling there was someone after her. Paranoia had been one of the side effects of publishing the book. Writing had been an incredible high for her, finding out she had the talent to survive independent of the people she vilified. Taking them on, she had known full well she was closing doors. But she’d had nothing to lose: the doors had already been slammed shut. That she’d had to turn on Norman, in addition to everybody else, when she still really liked him, was something she didn’t allow herself to think about.

  She’d had to hide out, quite literally, for a time after she’d become a bestseller. A lot of people would gladly have given her the same chance as her title: A Snowflake in Hell. She had lived in secluded five star hotels in Europe, Australia, Asia, registered under aliases, bathed in luxury, but drying off with eczema on her skin, little pimples of anxiety. Fear that someone might find her.

  The process server did. The suit from Norman Jessup, though she had expected it in a way, still came as a terrible shock. She had thought his shame would be greater than her guilt, that he wouldn’t want to draw more attention to Snowflake, already a sensation. She imagined his attorney would tell him not to press the issue of libel, since all she had to do to win was prove his homosexuality. She’d been right about that. He didn’t sue for libel. He sued her for breach of contract and fraud.

  They had been close friends. Or at least as close friends as a woman could be with a faggot, which she uncharitably considered him now. He had told her everything about everybody, including who was into bestiality. Some of the information truly blew her away, as jaded as she thought she was. From her wildest forays into pornography, usually whipped through while mellow with freebased cocaine, she had known about women who smeared their vaginas with beef extract and then let their lap dogs at it, shepherds with their sheep, Catherine the Great purportedly dying when the horse she was fucking fell on her. But never had she imagined men having animals up their asses. And the poet thought custom could not stale the infinite variety of Cleopatra!

  All of it Norman told her with the express understanding she would shield him as the source, and reveal nothing about Jessup himself. But her publisher insisted the book needed jazzing up, that she had to come up with one or two even bigger names than the hundreds she’d already dropped and ground into earth. So she went back on her word, allegedly (her lawyer had drilled the word into her) betraying Norman, giving him up as Judas allegedly had, making her allegedly Faustian bargain.

  He took her to court. He had gotten the best trial lawyer in Hollywood through Fletcher McCallum. She found one in Santa Monica, where, in spite of the proximity to the motion picture industry, reality still abounded. Hers had used various legal ploys that put the trial on delay. The court calendars were full. After some stomach-churning years, where she’d broken into a sweat at the sound of her doorbell for fear it was another subpoena, they went to court. She remembered it all too clearly.

  By the time the verdict came in, even those who had little or no interest in the law or that star-spangled phrase “freedom of the press,” were riveted. The case had everything: sex, scandal, a powerful protagonist, a patently brilliant woman (she had proved it to the bastards, and in print), as well as drama’s most captivating elements, fury and revenge. Jessup v. Nash seemed less a breach of contract suit than breach of promise. He was like a lover scorned.

  “She betrayed me,” Norman Jessup said, not for the first time, even as Sarah’s lawyer rolled his eyes heavenward so the jury could see he was about as fed up with the refrain as they had to be.

  Oliver Crowley, the defense attorney, was a tall, fair-skinned man with wheat-colored hair and eyes so light it was surprising the darkness they could give off when they flashed with contempt, as they did now. But he was careful to make sure his back was to the judge. “Please answer the question.”

  “I don’t remember what it was,” said Jessup.

  “I don’t wonder,” murmured Crowley, so low that the judge might not hear his disdain.

  “Objection,” said William Arnold, the plaintiff’s lawyer, older by decades than his adversary, but no less energetic.

  “Well, if your client would stop making speeches—”

  “Mr. Crowley, I must warn you,” the judge said.

  “I’m sorry, your honor. But I’m sure all our patience is wearing a little thin.”

  “I’ll determine how forbearing we must be. Would the clerk read the question?” Usually the judge dozed through civil cases, but this one had kept even him awake.

  “How soon after Miss Nash’s book appeared did you become ill?” Part of the damages Jessup had sued for were based on his claim that he had been thrown into a crippling depression, suffered physical ailments, and become incapacitated because of what she had written.

  The expression on Jessup’s freckled face was absent the jauntiness that had characterized his opening testimony, nearly four weeks before. There were sunken pockets below his high-boned cheeks. “Before it was even published. Someone at one of the book clubs slips us early looks at manuscripts … like … advance men in armies.”

  “Telling you where the battles are going to be waged?”

  “In a way. Alerting you to books you might have to fight over.”

  “Well, you certainly picked up your cue,” said Crowley.

  “Objection!” Arnold said, at the very moment the judge made his admonition.

  “Mr. Crowley…”

  “I apologize. Please continue,” he said to Jessup, with a veneer of politeness.

  “She swore to me I would be no part of the book. That she would leave me out of it. That was the only reason I consented to give her a lot of the information.”

  “Information?”

  “The insider stuff that nobody knew.”

  “And you were willing to spread that gossip?”

  “Your honor,” Arnold said.

  “Don’t make me warn you again, Mr. Crowley.”

  “What would account for that generosity?” Crowley said.

  “She was on her ass. Nobody would make a picture with her, because she spelled trouble. I tried to make her a part of some of my deals, because that’s the kind of friend I was. But nobody would come near anything I had if she was attached. Her only hope was that book. She gave me her solemn promise…” His hands started to shake. “When I read the galleys, I had to be hospitalized. They thought it was a heart attack.”

  “A heart attack?” The hospital records had been submitted during the discovery preceding the trial and showed Jessup had been treated for gastroenteritis.

  “Well, I got diarrhea, too.” He furrowed his brow.

  “What else besides diarrhea?” Crowley said it a little scornfully, like the television commercials that ask “Do you mind if I say a few words about … diarrhea?” and a viewer wants only to throw a shoe at the set and scream “Yes!”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I still can’t. I’ve lost more than twenty pounds. She betrayed me. She made me think if she said anything about me, it would be sympathetic.”

  “You were not trying to promote yourself personally? You are not a publicity seeker?”

  “Objection!” William Arnold was dressed in a well-cut, p
instriped blue suit, a typical Grand Old Man attorney, with just a touch of color in his lucky tie, the one he always wore the day before the case would go to the jury. He usually won.

  “Sustained.”

  “I want to answer anyway,” Jessup said, ignoring the hand signals from his lawyer, who angled himself so neither the judge nor jury would see. “I don’t need any publicity.”

  “And yet you have a publicist, a whole department of them on staff.”

  “That’s to promote my pictures.”

  “You have no wish for self-promotion?”

  “I don’t need it.”

  “Aren’t there little gates outside the complex you have at the studio, with some kind of brand above them, with what you claim is your family seal?”

  “That’s decor,” said Jessup. “Decor is a very important part of Hollywood history. David O. Selznick had his name hanging in the breeze, like a shingle. I got shingles from her, too. All around my waist. I couldn’t breathe. Her book nearly strangled me.”

  “Can we get him to stop making speeches, your honor?”

  “Just answer the question,” said the judge.

  “Yes. There are gates.”

  “And what purports to be a family seal?”

  “I come from a very good family,” said Jessup contentiously. “My mother also had to be hospitalized.”

  “In response to your young companion’s hanging himself?”

  “He was unstable,” Jessup said. “Actors in this town commit suicide all the time. There’s a lot of pressure. Competition.”

  “Not because you threw him out?”

  “That was months before. Sarah made it seem in her book as though it had been the same day, as if I had killed him. She ended the chapter on me on that terrible note. She betrayed me. She let me believe nothing of my life would be between the covers. And then she made it read like I killed him!”

  “I didn’t even know about that kid when I started the book.” Sarah was on her feet. At the time she had an ordinary haircut, subdued on the outside, as she tried to be on the inside. But the press, focusing on the two combatants as much as the trial itself, had labeled her surprisingly colorless, the less interesting of the two, with Jessup the one with the passion. So her lawyer had agreed that if she wanted to show emotion at some point, it might be a good idea. Just not to overdo it.