West of Paradise

by Gwen Davis

  “My God,” Bunyan exclaimed, when he saw him. “Aphrodite rising from the sea. Penis on the half shell.”

  “I don’t think I can stay,” Tyler said.

  “Control yourself, Bunyan,” said Norman. “I apologize for Mr. Reis.”

  “Apologize for yourself,” Bunyan said. “It was not I who was publicly disgraced, and in Santa Monica. They might at least have held the trial in Santa Barbara, where we could have gone horseback riding afterwards.”

  “Are you the writer Bunyan Reis?” Tyler said.

  “And the painter,” said Bunyan.

  “I’ve read everything you’ve written.”

  “Well then, you’re one up on me,” said Bunyan. “I just write it and let other people read it. Have to save the eyes, you know.” He had thinning white-silver hair, the same color as the beard he had recently grown in the event of a transplant, and silver eyes he coordinated with all his clothes. “I would like to paint you.” He narrowed his eyelids. “In oils.”

  “I thought you had given up painting,” Norman said.

  “I didn’t mean on canvas,” said Bunyan.

  “You’ve got a lot of yellow,” Tyler told him. “I’m surprised. I thought you’d be all violet.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your aura,” Tyler said. “Violets are the most creative. The people who have come here to be the full expression of themselves and inspire others.”

  “Well, you’ve got that right,” said Bunyan, dazzled. “What’s yellow?”

  “The eternal child.”

  “Oh, my. You must have been speaking to Mum. She’s on the other side. Can you do that?”

  “Everybody can,” said Tyler, his blue eyes luminous, laughing at them, at the same time reassuring.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” asked Norman.

  “You have bottled water?”

  “Is there any other kind?”

  “I’ll just have some bottled water.”

  “Bring him a case!” Bunyan shouted to the houseboy. “More, more, you exquisite creature. What other colors do you see?”

  “That’s it. You’re strictly a yellow-violet.”

  “And what am I?” asked Gil Besoin, sucking in his enormous belly, which hung over his running shorts.

  “Fat,” Bunyan said.

  “Don’t be bitchy. You’ll frighten him away,” Norman said.

  “I can handle it.” Tyler looked at Gil. “You’re yellow and violet too, but with a lot of green.”

  “What’s green?” Gil asked.

  “Money. Mental. You really like using your mentality to make money.”

  “Otherwise you’d never have gone into television,” Hoover said.

  “One must survive. Not all of us have Jesse Jackson in our corner,” said Gil. “Are you married, beautiful boy?”

  “No.”

  “Will you marry me? We can do it at the Bel-Air and preempt Norman and Carina.”

  “I’m dying to see her. Absolutely perched on the edge,” Bunyan said. “When’s she coming out?”

  “In a couple of weeks,” Norman said.

  “I don’t mean to be charitable,” said Bunyan, “but I do wish you nothing but well, after that awful ordeal.”

  “Thank you,” said Norman.

  “How that vile Sarah could say that on the stand, comparing you to Oscar Wilde.” Bunyan snorted. “If anyone is to be compared to Oscar Wilde, it is I. ‘I have put only my talent into my work,’” he quoted. “‘My genius I have put into my life.’ I have put my genius into both, but unfortunately I have only a mild case of genius. My talent is virulent.”

  “That was your choice,” said Tyler, taking the bottle of Evian the Filipino houseboy brought him, waving away the glass.

  “Expand that thought,” Bunyan said.

  “Genius carries with it too much responsibility.” He opened the bottle, took a swig from it. All the men watched, riveted. He took the bottle from his lips, wiped his mouth with the back of his long-fingered hand. “Your yellow just wants to play.”

  “Isn’t he fascinating,” Bunyan said. “Can my yellow play with yours?”

  “Sure,” Tyler said, and smiled.

  “What color am I?” asked Hoover.

  “Blue-violet. Very maternal. A drama queen.”

  “He’s seen you act,” Gil said.

  “Not in the judgmental or pejorative sense,” Tyler was quick to say. “Emotional. Someone who really loves getting carried away.”

  “It’s been so long,” Hoover said. “I’d almost forgotten.”

  “Look at his eyes,” Bunyan remarked. “They’re opalescent. Luminous. Translucent. Like the children’s eyes in Village of the Damned. I do believe he can see through us.”

  “What color am I?” Norman asked.

  “Violet and green, with a red overlay.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Rage,” said Tyler.

  “Well, if you’d just been through what he’s been through,” Bunyan said, “you’d have a red overlay, too.”

  “Can I get rid of it?” Norman asked.

  “If you want to. But it involves forgiveness. First you have to forgive yourself, then you have to forgive whoever it is…”

  “You ask too much,” said Norman. “How come we’ve never seen you around?”

  “I just got into town.”

  “Where are you living?”

  “I don’t know that yet.”

  “You could come live with me,” said Gil. “We wouldn’t have to get married, unless you’re old-fashioned, or really mad about the Bel-Air.”

  “How many are you having to the wedding, Norman?” Bunyan asked.

  “A hundred and fifty is all they can hold.”

  “Are you inviting Sarah?”

  “I doubt that Miss Nash will be with us by autumn.”

  “Is she leaving the country again?” asked Bunyan. “We must warn Australia.”

  “I doubt she will be on the planet,” said Norman.

  “Yes, I heard she’s been seeing Dr. Arnie, and it isn’t for collagen,” said Bunyan. “Apparently she’s got some kind of nervous skin disorder.”

  “I think … she’s been acting suicidal,” said Norman.

  “Oh, dear,” said Roscoe. “Have we issued a fatwa?”

  “She issued her own fatwa,” Norman said. “By her actions she put a price on her own head. In the Arab countries they do it for the glory of Allah. This is Hollywood. Power inspires the zealotry of a Muslim fundamentalist. Making it here is as good as being with Allah.”

  “Maybe better,” said Gil. “Allah is so strict.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Bunyan said. “Have her offed?”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Norman said. He was in the company of strangers, potential blackmailers. Not the boy, though. For some reason Norman knew he could trust him, knew that this was a young man with no evil in him, like an innocent in a Williams play, had Tennessee ever written one without sinister twists. Or, more aptly, like the boy in Narcissus and Goldmund, a property Norman was familiar with: he’d had coverage done on it as a potential vehicle for Brad Pitt. A Herman Hesse character, plucked like a starfish from the sand, here on the beach of Malibu. And just as he knew he could trust him, he also knew that the statement he’d unfortunately made to Sarah, that there wasn’t a man he couldn’t have, was no longer operable. But that was just as well, since Carina would be coming soon, and he was finally ready for commitment.

  “So if you’re not going to get a hit man, how can you be sure she’ll be gone by your wedding?” Bunyan asked.

  “I have every conviction that Sour Mash will take care of herself. Anyway, I could’t find her if I wanted to. She’s done a better job of hiding out than Salman Rushdie. Is anyone hungry?”

  “I am,” said Gil.

  “I mean anyone who isn’t always hungry.”

  “I could eat,” said Tyler.

  “I bet you could,” said Gil.

  “
So if you’re not an actor,” Norman said hurriedly, “what do you do?”

  “I have a master’s in psychology, but I don’t really want to practice. You only get to work with disturbed people.”

  Gil laughed. “I think I’m seriously in love with you.”

  * * *

  So were most of the people at lunch. But they all left him alone. Including Norman, who offered him the guest house at the back of his property, along with the promise that he’d never try to make a move on him. All Tyler had to do in return was run a few errands for Norman. Nothing demeaning. Just your general odd job, Norman said. In a town where a man could hire people to do his reading for him, there was no reason a rich, influential man couldn’t get someone else to do his stalking.

  By Hook or by Crook

  Besides her love for Fitzgerald and a belief in the sanctity of the written word, Kate understood that writing was a kind of trust. Anne Frank had written in her diary that she wanted to go on living after her death, “and therefore I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing all that is in me.” Kate wasn’t sure where she stood on God, but she did know that being able to put words together well was a gift, one she thought she had. One she hoped she had.

  So to squander a gift on something superficial and meaningless might be a sin, depending on where you stood on God. But, as Lincoln (or perhaps it was Will Rogers?) might have said: The good Lord must have loved the superficial man, or he wouldn’t have made so many of them.

  Still, as she got Lila Darshowitz out of her rancid dress, eased her voluminous flesh out of its confining undergarments, and helped her into the bath she’d filled for her at her hotel, Kate wondered if she wasn’t wasting her time. Act of kindness aside, she wanted desperately to establish herself, to be somebody. Maybe some of her longings went a little higher; maybe she wanted, like the dead, practically sainted Anne, to express all that was in her. But she knew it was unlikely she could do that with Larry Drayco, no matter what she uncovered. So maybe the whole idea was a mistake.

  She hadn’t even started yet, and she was already having concerns about her conceit. Not conceit in its literary sense. Not in the sense they’d flung around the quad: an ingenious or witty expression, an extended metaphor, but conceit, as most people understood it: vanity. Maybe she had too high an opinion of her own abilities, imagining that she could give weight where there was only air. Find truth where there was only duplicity. Nobility where there was most likely just villainy.

  “Let me know if you have to throw up again,” she said to Lila now, moving the cheap plastic wastebasket closer to the tub.

  “You’re being so good to me,” Lila said weakly, rippling some water over her voluminous breasts, sinking down into the bath just up to her chin, washing away the dried vomit. “Why are you being so good to me?”

  “There are things I’d like to know from you,” Kate said, straightforward again, finally. She knew there was nothing at stake with this woman, nothing she really had to lose, especially as she was already starting to sour on the project.

  “Things?”

  “About Larry.”

  “You from the Enquirer?”

  “I’m not a reporter.”

  “What are you?”

  “I write books. Or at least, I want to.”

  Lila sunk further down, the water just below her nostrils, her bloodshot, heavily lidded eyes so clouded over that their color was indeterminate. She studied Kate suspiciously, before coming up to speak. “You mean like that whore book?”

  “I’m a serious writer. I mean, I hope I am.”

  “Some fucking epitaph that publisher left him. Did you read that piece of shit?”

  “I only heard about it. I don’t even know what it’s called.”

  “By Hook or by Crook,” Lila said contemptuously. “I guess Larry was supposed to be one of the crooks they meant, who run Hollywood.”

  “Wasn’t he?”

  “Not to me,” Lila said. “Never to me.”

  “He was good to his mother,” Kate said kindly. “Well, that’s something.”

  “He wasn’t really that close to her.”

  “Her?”

  “Esther. She was very possessive. One of those mothers that couldn’t let go, so he stayed away from her.”

  “You aren’t … you weren’t…?”

  “What?” She sat up in the tub.

  “I thought you were his mother.”

  Lila sank down into the water, all the way under, so for a moment Kate was afraid she might be drowning. But she came up laughing, raucously, uproariously. “Honey…” Her gray-white hair, mottled with vestiges of a really bad yellow rinse that hadn’t completely washed out, clung to her skull. “I’m his wife.”

  * * *

  Kate waited in the other room while Lila finished bathing, trying to pull her thoughts together, sort out her confusion. The obituary had placed Larry’s age at fifty-eight. The woman in the tub had to be in her seventies. Did men do that, too, manipulate the numbers, so people would think they were younger? She had seen photos of him, recent ones, released to the papers with the announcement of his death. He had looked good, vital, almost youthful.

  “Maybe you better help me out of here,” Lila said over the sound of sloshing from the bathroom. “I don’t want to break my neck and give them that to write about.”

  Kate collected what towels there were. The quarters were furnished with minimal amenities, a cheap, slatted chest of drawers, two beds in the main room, catercornered singles that slid under wooden bookshelves. Made up and covered they could double as couches, so it could serve as a sitting room, someplace to entertain. As if anyone would genuinely be able to entertain in such a place, except for one of those quickie humps that could be heard through the thin walls, not unlike the one her neighbor was having right now. Maybe a professional, judging from the mechanical “Yes, yes!” that came at the end of the joyless thudding, accompanied by grunts.

  The towels were the skimpy variety of cheap hotels, no absorbency to them, too small to go around Lila’s massive frame. Kate helped her out of the tub, struggling not to be repelled by the rolls of flesh, the broken veins on the enormous thighs. “Are you up to dressing yourself?” she asked Lila.

  “What do I need to get dressed for?”

  “Does this place have room service?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You could probably use some coffee.”

  “Yeah, okay. Sure.”

  * * *

  The Park Sunrise was one of those low-priced, high-gloss motels on the Sunset Strip that called themselves hotels. There was a coffee shop with bright brass bad-taste modern chandeliers shaped like spikey solar systems with too-high-watt candlebulbs that made Lila look even older than her seventy-some years. “How old are you exactly?” Kate ventured. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “Once you stop caring if you get laid you don’t mind if people know,” Lila said. “I’m seventy-two.”

  “How old was Larry?”

  “The same.”

  “How old were you when you got married?”

  “Eighteen.” Her eyes got almost pretty for a moment, with vestiges of their probably once-bright blue, as she seemed to remember.

  Maybe she’d looked really cute, Kate considered. Maybe underneath the flab and the years was the really snappy kid who had managed to capture him. Everyone seemed to agree, no matter how little they thought of his other qualities, that Larry had been sharp. Maybe Lila had been sharp, too. Sassy in an appealing way, different from the combative style she’d shown at the funeral, when there was nothing more left to lose.

  “My parents had a furniture business,” Lila said, as if it hadn’t been her looks alone she’d had to offer him. Dowries, in the guise of a line you had to offer someone, not quite the law firm he could partner into on a higher level, but the proud credentials of the lower middle class. “It was a pretty big busin
ess. Booming. End of the war.” She poured a couple of packets of sugar into her coffee. “Ended just in time, so he wouldn’t have to dodge the draft or have his eardrum punctured like he talked about doing.”

  She stirred her coffee, looking into it like tea leaves containing the past, smiling as though she considered that aspect of him cute, original, early indications of the guy who was to learn to worm his way out of anything. “It was not part of his program to die in somebody else’s fight.”

  “What was his program?”

  “To conquer the world. I guess in his way he did. If you think Hollywood is the world, and a lot of people do. You really want to write a book about him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not an expose?” Lila left off the last syllable, not adding the final a sound, as though she had never really heard the word, only read it.

  “That’s not my style,” Kate said, not quite sure yet what her style really was, but knowing it would have to hold her own redemption in it, as well as Larry Drayco’s. There was so much she wanted from life. There were so many little shadows of ambition and desire in herself she avoided looking at. Instead, she did what most people did when they started out: she ennobled her path before setting out on it.

  Even when she spoke of her infatuation with Fitzgerald, she left out the part of his history she really coveted, besides loving him, cherishing his talent, saving him from Zelda. And that was the conscienceless enjoyment of life, selfish, with no other purpose than having a fine time. She would have happily encouraged him to run through Paris. Paris or the south of France. Isadora Duncan at the next table. The Murphys under brightly colored parasols on the beach. What an adventure they would have had together! And though she was sincere in her wish to have taught him that there were second acts in American lives, she would have liked to have been assured of a first act of her own. All it had been so far for her was a curtain raiser.