by Gwen Davis
A single set of lovers strolled arm in arm on the darkening sands. For a moment Lila saw in their slender forms, heads nodded inward, crowns meeting, arms entwined, who she had once been, how she had once walked with Larry. And she reached for them, as though she could touch them across the distance, and touching them, would be able to feel her vanished self, contact the flesh of Larry. And so stretching, she lost what balance she had, and fell.
* * *
When the phone rang, Kate was halfway through the script Victor Lippton had sent over, hopeful she would want to do it and rope in Jake Alonzo. Jake Alonzo himself had shown some signs of wanting to be roped, sending a single rose, wrapped with red ribbon around an answering machine. It was all too much for Kate, being courted for who she wasn’t, what it was assumed she could do because of genes that weren’t really hers. She’d written Jake a note to thank him, afraid to call him, but didn’t know where to send the note. Still, she didn’t imagine formal good manners were the mode in this town any more than honesty was. So she didn’t worry about seeming rude to Jake, since she’d already seen that a show of indifference worked better than a beating heart would.
Besides, the script was terrible. She had called Mel by page fifteen and told him it was really god-awful. He’d said, “Good.” The worse it was, he’d explained, the more impressively she could harangue the powers at Cosmos with what needed to be done. The fact that the writer could not write a sentence of believable dialogue, that the characters had no character, that the lead, a hired assassin, had no charm in addition to no psychic core were all, Mel insisted, plusses.
But it was like wading through quicksand for her to read that level of—could she even call it prose? So when the phone sounded, it was a reprieve. She was already grateful to whomever was on the other end, receptive, friendly. It took her a minute to absorb the fact that it was the fire department.
“Lady broke her leg, and maybe her hip,” the man said. “She’s still up in X ray.”
“What lady?”
“Lila Darshovitz,” he said, slowly, as though he were reading it.
“Witz,” said Kate. “How come you’re calling me?”
“Well, she’s pretty … out of it. Drunk. Besides being in shock. We asked her who we should call, and she couldn’t tell us. Just kept crying. We went through her purse and found your number.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Kate said, imposed upon, instantly hearing how selfish she sounded.
“Well, we thought you might be a friend, or a relative. Do you know where we could find a relative?”
“Her husband is in the Westwood Mortuary,” Kate said. Maybe Lila had been right about her. Maybe she wasn’t as sweet as she pretended. How fast did that happen? Not even a full twenty-four hours on the fast track, and she sounded tough. Maybe the humanity didn’t ooze out of you in this setting, it just imploded. “Will she be alright?”
“Yes. But she’s going to need help. They’ve got her in emergency now. But she doesn’t seem to have any coverage for hospitalization, or insurance for nursing care…”
“Can she travel?” Kate said, mentally putting her on the plane.
“Not for a while, I don’t guess,” the fireman said.
“Where is she?” Grudgingly.
The fireman gave Kate the address. As she was going out the door, the phone rang, and she let her new machine pick it up. It was Jake Alonzo, asking what she thought of the script.
* * *
“You hate me,” Lila said from the back of the car, where the ambulance crew had positioned her, the broken leg in its splint raised to the back of the passenger seat. Fortunately her hip had turned out not to be broken. “You wish I had died.”
“No I don’t,” Kate said.
“Well, I wish I had died. I went there to throw myself off the end of the pier, but the fuckers put a fence up. I was trying to get down to the ocean to drown, when I fell.”
“Maybe you could sue them,” Kate suggested.
“That’s what they’re afraid of. That’s why they fixed me for nothing,” she said. “Larry would have liked that, my beating the city. Except I’d rather be dead.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Kate, not knowing what else to say.
“What reason do I have to be alive?”
She couldn’t think of any. “There’s the book,” Kate said, remembering how only a few days before she’d had mercy in her.
“You’re going to write it?” Lila asked.
“I’m going to try.”
“Well, good,” Lila said, a great whoosh of air coming out of her with the words, like a bellows. “I remembered some other stories.”
“What’s momser mean?” asked Kate.
“It means a person who doesn’t deserve what they get,” Lila said. “A bastard if you want to be literal. Usually it’s a man, but I suspected you were one of those feminist people. So I gave you equal status. But if you like, I could call you a courvah.”
“What’s that?”
“A whore.”
“Let’s leave that for the ones who wrote the other book,” Kate said.
* * *
The broadcast studio for the Ralph Robertson show was rented from a local New York station on East Seventy-first Street. Arthur Finster hired a limousine service to take him there. He made sure that the stretch had a phone in it, so he could call his office as he already had countless times that day, just in case he remembered anyone else who ought to be alerted he was on the show.
“And you’ll call the producers at Larry King to watch?” he asked and ordered into the phone.
“They’ve already passed,” the PR woman said.
“And Oprah?”
“We’ve called everybody,” she said.
“And don’t forget my mother.”
“We called her.”
“But you didn’t tell her I was in New York?” Even as he said it, he slumped down deep into the seat, a counterspy, just in case anyone who knew her should see the limo. The windows were darkened, shaded, opalescent, giving him the protection of a rock star. But she could see through walls and bathroom doors, so her friends would only have to notice a limousine passing to know that Arthur was inside and hadn’t been to visit her.
“Well, she knew where the show was broadcast from, so I had to talk very fast. I told her they were linking you up by satellite.”
“You get a raise as soon as the book hits number one,” Arthur said.
“It’s number one in the L.A. Times next Sunday.”
“Nationwide,” he said. He hung up the phone.
* * *
“But what about the accusations of blood money?” Ralph Robertson was asking him. He was blond, with elegant posture and the clipped accent of Johannesburg, where he had lived until moving to the States and becoming, as he often said, smiling, on the lecture circuit, an African American. “What about the people who are calling you a vampire?”
“What about them? There will always be jealousy. The publishing business is notoriously stodgy, slow-moving. They can’t help resenting how fast it’s happened for me. How much money I’ve made.”
“But these are people many of whom are a great deal richer than you. And they call you a blight on the industry.”
“Free country.” Arthur shrugged. “First Amendment. They can say anything they like, and I can publish anything I like. And readers like.”
“Readers?” Robertson gave his famous chuckle, the only well-known laugh on the air that seemed to have a British accent. “This has been called a nonbook, by nonwriters, in what many are calling non-English.”
“These girls have been through terrible ordeals,” said Arthur. “They speak from the heart.”
“Is that what they call it?”
Ignoring the barb, Arthur plowed on. “The writing of this book has been a cleansing for them, a kind of therapy, where they have learned the foolishness of their ways, and now will lead a life of spiritual values.”
“Sort of
like the Confessions of St. Augustine?” Robertson said.
“You could say that.”
“But I won’t,” said Ralph. “I don’t need mail from the Vatican. How do you feel about the death of Larry Drayco?”
“I feel bad when anyone dies.”
“Especially reading about himself in your book.”
“That is an unconfirmed rumor. Natalia, that’s the former call girl who hung out with Larry, Natalia has already apportioned part of her royalties to a headstone.”
“Really. I heard your authors don’t get royalties. That you have them sign away all rights in exchange for protection.”
“From what? They haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Then why is there a class action libel suit against you and the … what did you call them? Former call girls? Filed on behalf of some of the biggest names in Hollywood by Fletcher McCallum, the most respected attorney in entertainment law? The suit alleges, besides libel, invasion of privacy, and malice, that you have deliberately vilified celebrities in order to promote the sale of By Hook or by Crook. Linus Archer, Rick Flinders, Jake Alonzo—”
“Jake wasn’t even in the final draft,” Arthur said.
“But you circulated the manuscript before he was cut out of it, and circulation constitutes publication. Apparently what was said about him—”
“You should talk to Delight, the hooker who—”
“No graphic details, please.”
“—who performed her specialty on him. Because of personal circumstances, she was not available for the polygraph test, so we cut that chapter out. But she will be willing to testify at a trial, should it come to that.”
“She’s in rehab?”
“Either that, or a convent,” Arthur said, and chortled.
“You really have no guilt about this garbage?”
“I have no reason to feel guilty about anything,” Arthur said, clearing his mind of his mother. “These women were desperate. They’d lost all sense of themselves, descended into drug dependency, had nothing to trade on but their rapidly failing looks. They were unfeelingly used in the lowest possible way by these men, who thought they were entitled to do whatever they wanted, because they were celebrities. Power players high in the Hollywood echelons. This book is an important social document.”
“And the greatest gift of all,” Ralph said, inhaling deeply, “is self-delusion.” He turned to the camera, facing it directly.
“We have to go now, people. The book is called By Hook or by Crook, by five former, and I stress former, ladies of the evening. Our guest was Arthur Finster, the publisher, editor in chief, and C.E.O. of Harbinger Press.”
The lights went down. “Sorry if I was rough on you,” Ralph said. “But my viewers wouldn’t like it if I seemed to approve.”
“Hey,” Arthur said, and trying to run his hand through his dreadlocks, stopped by the knots in them, leaned over and shook them out. “You showed the book. You said the title. I appreciate it.”
“So this Natalia, the one who did Drayco, she’s into S&M?”
“Not always,” said Arthur. “Her real specialty is fellatio. But with her breasts. She has these gigantic jugs, and she presses them on the outside of the guy’s cock and rubs, while her tongue—”
“I get the picture,” Ralph said. “I thought it was Delight who did that.”
“They’re all versatile,” said Arthur. “And of course they’re fabulous with phone sex.”
“Maybe you should leave me their numbers,” Ralph said, “in case there’re any ramifications from the show. I should have that for my lawyers.”
“Certainly,” said Arthur, and taking out his pocket computer, called the numbers up, and started writing.
* * *
The treadmills at the Star-Crossed Health Club in Brentwood were all in a line, by a floor-to-ceiling mirrored wall. Those who walked them had the option of facing themselves or the TVs, a special engineer having outfitted them to roll in either direction. During the heavily trafficked hours of the day all the treadmills were in use, as were the StairMasters opposite. But now it was the dinner hour, and most members had completed their workouts, the lucky or manipulative among them having found someone to spend the evening with.
Only two treadmills were now in use, on the far side of the room. On one Victor Lippton marched at an accelerated speed, next to the treadmill trod by a striking, white-skinned redhead who had sweated through her designer workout clothes at curiously provocative places, one stain outlining her crotch, the stain beneath her armpits having spread to underscore her magnificent breasts. It was almost as though she had deliberately splashed herself in those places, which Victor Lippton now suspected she had.
“Don’t tell me it was a coincidence, Alexa,” he little more than whispered, looking around uneasily to see if they were being watched. Almost all the high-end places in town had unobtrusive security systems: the Hotel Bel-Air with its barely perceptible TV eye on the pool to make sure nobody drowned, the restaurants with cameras on their parking lots, some of the pricier supermarkets following suit. “You couldn’t have just chanced on the identical outfit.”
“Why not?”
“They didn’t even come as an ensemble. You had to have watched her pick them out.”
“Did not.”
“Don’t deny it. And don’t speak like a child. It couldn’t have just happened. You did it deliberately. There’s no way it was coincidence.”
“Why not? We have the exact same taste in men.”
“I hate it when you get smart,” Victor said, not really hating it, enjoying it really, because he liked to think she was as clever as she was passionate. It was one of the things he dared not discuss with the therapist who was counseling him and Chen on their sex life, or lack of it. He didn’t really trust the therapist, because the therapist had read them some of the fan mail he received from the people he counseled on the radio. And also the therapist was screwing one of his patients. Victor knew that because he paid a private investigator to watch him, so he would have something on him in the event he ever violated Victor’s confidence.
The patient he was screwing was the wife of another psychiatrist who was probably paying him less than the $150 an hour that Victor paid. Professional courtesy, they labeled it to each other. But he was paying him something, giving him a stipend while the bastard was fucking his wife. The detective Victor had on him had followed the woman to a cheap little apartment in Toluca Lake, one of those ramshackle compounds built around a pool where she met her shrink lover three times a week, to put horns on her husband. How he could have been stupid enough not to know when she didn’t come home three nights a week until after eleven was more than Victor could comprehend. Medical degrees. Internships. Their own analysis, years of practice and a mandatory amount of insight, and the jerk still didn’t know he was paying for his wife to get screwed.
Or maybe he did. Maybe it took the pressure off him, and he wasn’t attracted to his wife anymore, like Victor wasn’t attracted to Chen. Maybe it got him off to be paying the other guy professional courtesy rates for fucking his wife. What did Victor know, except that they were all crazy.
“You’re deliberately trying to provoke a confrontation,” Victor said to Alexa. “You’re going out of your way to make yourself conspicuous so she’ll notice you, and get what’s going on between us.”
“What exactly is going on,” Alexa said. “A love affair? Or am I just your strumpet?”
“I wish you’d stop watching those old movies,” Victor said.
“What else am I supposed to do, those cold lonely nights?”
“You could read,” he said.
“I read.”
“Something besides W,” he said.
“You got me the subscription.”
“Because I honor what is special in you.”
“The surface,” she said. “You want me to look as good as your wife, and then when I look as good as your wife, you accuse me of trying to make tro
uble.”
“Aren’t you?”
She turned down the speed of her treadmill, and slowly came to a stop. “I love you, Victor. The last thing in the world I want is to cause you pain.”
“Maybe the next-to-last thing,” he said. “When I give in to you and let you come to one of those evenings I know better than to let you come to, and then, instead of making it easy and pleasant you almost cause a scene—”
“I didn’t even speak,” Alexa said.
“One picture is worth a thousand words,” Victor said, sweating profusely now, his words coming almost in a pant, rushed, breathless from his exercise. “And an outfit that is the same as the one a man’s wife is wearing speaks volumes. Photo albums.”
He was very red in the face. The hairs that poked from above the scoop of his T-shirt had little dots of pink around them, as though the pores on his chest were blushing.
“Are you all right?” Alexa said anxiously. It was true what he had said, that it was the next-to-last thing she wanted to cause him pain. The last thing she wanted was for him to die. Oh, God, what would happen to her if he died? She would have to work this treadmill forever, like some kind of mechanized Flying Dutchman, till someone else showed up on the treadmill next to her, and, captured by the bob of her breasts, released her, ready to treadmill in her place.
“I’m in my prime,” he said, winded, as he slowed to a stroll. “I have everything in the world I want, a great company, great company in you…”
“But not all the time.”
“I told you when it started that it could only be so much, that I was married to Chen for life. Even if I didn’t love her, which I do, her father is one of the most powerful men on the planet. And I’m not talking the kind of power they honor in this town, or even in this country. I’m talking Asia. Americans have no concept of how things operate there, no interest, not enough foresight or widesight or whatever kind of sight it is that gets people out of their own belly buttons, or their own backyards. I’m talking about the ability to put whole countries out of business, whole businesses out of countries, shutting down newspapers if the man in charge doesn’t like something that was written without even mentioning his name. Have you ever been to Singapore?”