by Gwen Davis
“It is,” said Anita, setting her briefcase on the console.
“Yeah, I remember when he went to New Haven,” said Lila. “He got involved in some musical, trying out out of town. He found that key thing in a pawn shop.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Anita.
“You don’t have to apologize to me because he fooled you,” Lila said, grinning. “‘Every man is a hero to his fool of an attorney’; that was his favorite saying.”
“I believe the saying is ‘No man is a hero to his valet,’ or ‘Only a fool has himself for a lawyer,’” Anita said coolly.
“Well it’s good you can straighten me out,” said Lila.
The young woman opened the briefcase. “Do you have a VCR?” she asked.
“We can get one from the desk,” said Lila. “It’s ten extra dollars a day.”
“I suspect you’ll be able to afford it,” said Anita, and pulled out a sealed envelope. “His instructions were to give this to you and that I be present while it was played.”
* * *
“Do you want me to leave?” Kate asked, once the VCR was installed and the tape was about to go on. As curious as she was about its contents, she would not have minded Lila’s excusing her, letting her off the hook. Already she was feeling somewhat relieved, the burden of Lila Darshowitz shifting in her mind onto this blue-suited, gently officious young woman, paid to carry the load.
“Can she stay?” Lila asked Anita.
“It’s up to you.”
“Stay,” Lila said.
There was a sadness in the way she said “Stay,” it seemed to Kate, as though everything else had deserted her. Her youth, her lover, seasons, perhaps, that she had wished she could cling to, spring that had changed too quickly to summer, summer that blazed into fall. “Stay,” she might have whispered out her window to the turning leaves on the trees. But they’d fallen all the same, plunging her into winter.
“Then we’ll proceed,” Anita said, and turned the tape on.
* * *
The lighting was a little harsh. But on the screen there was a surprising softness about Larry Drayco, an unexpected sweetness. His hair was very light, cut short, so the eyes in the still-babyish face, round cheeks, tanned skin, looked large and very clear. His voice as he spoke was gentle, little more than a whisper, not as in the famous, uncontrollable rages he was noted for.
“I suppose you’re wondering why I called you here today,” he said, and then laughed. “No, I guess not.” He looked straight at the camera. “Lila, I’m sorry. I hope I didn’t go in any way that made things tougher for you than I already have.
“I’m leaving you whatever I have in the bank, my house and all its contents. But I don’t have to tell you there are people waiting in line with claims against me. Some gonifs I beat fair and square who still took me to court, and won because I made the mistake of telling the judges to go fuck themselves. You know me, with people who think they’re in charge.
“Plus there’s the IRS. And the lawyers who are bringing this to you now. I owe them for the time in court—plus the other guys’ attorneys’ fees. Without me there to put up a fight, I guess they’ll take pretty much everything.
“Herb and I do have a new picture coming out, and if it’s a winner maybe the studio can be leaned on to give you some share. Darcy Linette is a decent woman, very active in charities, so maybe she’ll realize that you deserve something. But I wouldn’t hold my breath because she’s got that whole fucking corporate bureaucracy to work through, and charity ain’t their game.
“I wouldn’t hold my breath.” He repeated the words, and gave a gentle chuckle. His smile, like his voice, was curiously gentle, lighting up his face. “I guess that’s really just an expression now.
“But I am able to leave you a little something that could put you in the catbird seat. This town, as you probably figured out by now, is all about power. I have something on a truly major player. The other item in this packet is an audiotape that should give you a three-picture deal, or a place on the board of his studio, which comes with a pretty steep stipend, as they say when they’ve been to Hahvahd.” He pronounced it in the Bostonian manner, slyly, slightly contemptuously, as if he had, indeed, gone to Yale, and had traditional reason to look down or at least askance at Cambridge. “I don’t know if you want to get involved in this shitty business, but if you do, this is your passport. Don’t be intimidated by the fact that you don’t know anything about making movies. They got clothes designers who connect with the right star, get them to feel dependent, and make themselves producers. Hairdressers who hoist themselves up by their clients’ tresses like they was Rapunzel, climbing to the towers of power. So don’t be shy. And don’t take crap from anybody. You’re worth all of them.
“Listen to the tape alone. As Benjamin Franklin said, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. As far as I know, since you’re playing this tape, I’m the only one who qualifies.
“I wish I could give you something more concrete. You’ve been the only one in my life I could always count on—”
At this point Lila burst into sobs. Convulsive they were, wracked, as though she were vomiting tears.
“I’m sorry you couldn’t say the same about me. But I really loved you, probably still do. I mean, even now, when I’m not there anymore. If I’m anywhere, I bet included in my package is how I feel about you. I hope that counts for something.”
By now, Lila was wailing uncontrollably. The phone rang. Anita hit the remote control and stopped the tape while Kate picked the receiver up. It was the desk clerk, saying someone had heard screams, asking should he call 911.
“No, it’s okay,” Kate said. “We’ve been to a funeral.” She hung up the phone, and the video resumed.
“Well, I’m outta here,” Larry was saying. “Probably by now I’ll be doing lunch with Orson Welles in that big Chasen’s in the sky. I’ve got a lot I’d like to ask him. I really would’ve loved to be a great filmmaker. But what can you do? You do what you can. I even would’ve loved to have left you with Rosebud. You know, some big mystery about what was really important to me. The thing I missed out on, grieved over losing. But I don’t think even I know what that was.
“So all I have to leave you is the tape. May it serve you well. Au revoir, I sincerely hope.”
The screen went dark.
* * *
After they were gone, after she had pulled herself together, and Kate had put a box of Kleenex where she had easy access to it, Lila played the audiotape. Anita had loaned her a small cassette player, and called an agency for her for home nursing care, which she was sure Larry’s health insurance could cover, since Lila was still officially his wife. Otherwise, she said, the firm would be glad to sue the city of Santa Monica, on contingency. It seemed to Lila as close as that young goy lawyer could get to being warmhearted.
There was music on the tape. Larry with his sense of theatrics, his love of song, producing, staging, putting a curtain around whatever it was he was going to show. It wasn’t until a little further in that Lila realized the music was actually happening wherever the scene was playing out, part of whatever was going on, the squeaks that she’d thought were bad violins the springs of a mattress going up and down.
“Oh, God, I love these,” the man was saying.
“And I love that you talk in bed,” said the woman, throatily. “Most men…” there were moist pauses “… don’t like to talk when they’re making love.”
“Why?” he said, with difficulty.
“Because talking requires an answer,” she whispered. “And you’d rather my mouth was doing this.”
A pause. He groaned.
“Oh, Larry,” Lila said. “You really going to make me listen to this?”
When it was over, Larry’s voice came on the recording. “Honey,” he said. “That was Victor Lippton, tobacco zillionaire, and new head of Cosmos, with his mistress, Alexa de Carville. Not exactly a poor person either. Her father invented
a utility software that writes all kinds of letters for you, sold it to a giant corporation for a bundle.
“Richest of all is Victor’s wife, daughter of a Hong Kong businessman whose enemies often turn up in Victoria Harbor. If the weights fall off and they turn up at all. So this is nothing he would like her to find out. Or take a chance on her finding out.
“Call him at Cosmos—it’s in Culver City, the number changes all the time as the owners do, so call information. Ask for Victor Lippton. Tell his secretary you’re Larry Drayco’s widow, and I left him something.”
* * *
“How did he get it?” Victor Lippton asked, white-faced. They were alone in his office, which he had shown her with the automatic pride of very rich men who knew they didn’t have to impress anyone, and so impressed everybody. Four interior designers had banded together to make it an instant understated showplace, erecting it like a tent over a society wedding in less than two days. Carpenters and electricians from the studio had done the construction work, seamlessly, flawlessly, with unbelievable speed. That is to say, it would have been unbelievable, Victor had said, smiling benignly at the start of their meeting, had their futures, like the suite, not hung in the balance.
The offices jutted out like a ship’s prow over the garden below, the corner of the main room at an improbable angle, finished with floor-to-ceiling glass. To be in that place, even in the wheelchair they’d brought her in, had given Lila a slight attack of vertigo, a condition that seemed to be shared by Victor once he heard the tape.
“I don’t know exactly,” Lila said. “Somebody he knew at the National Enquirer, probably. They were always doing exposes on him.” She said it as she always did, without any kind of A sound, so it rhymed with noses, only having read the word. “After a while he started trading information, and you know Larry. He had a knack for making friends.”
Victor Lippton guffawed. It was a nasty sound, artificial in its merriment.
“What I would ask myself,” Lila said, “before I sent any more hate and mistrust to Larry, is how did they get under her mattress?”
He seemed not to register what she was saying. “Where’s the original of the tape?” he asked.
“That’s it.”
“I suppose you made copies.”
“I suppose you’d suppose that.”
“So you picked up the finer traits of blackmail from your late husband.”
“He was never a blackmailer,” she said darkly.
“Then what is this?” He indicated the tape on the recorder.
“He wanted to leave me a legacy.”
“What exactly do you want?”
“I’ll have to think about it.” She shifted in her wheelchair as best she could. “He suggested a three-picture deal, or a place on your board. But I don’t know if that’s my style.”
“Cash?” he asked, his dark eyes narrowing underneath the leonine head of wheat-colored hair. “How much?”
“This town shit all over my husband,” she said sullenly.
“I understand it was reciprocal.”
“He was a decent kid when he came here. It was the place…”
“People like to blame the environment they live in when they can’t take responsibility…”
“Don’t give me that sophisticated crap. I’m a very simple woman.”
“So what do you want?”
She was silent for a moment. “A monument to him.”
“You’re putting me on. We’re supposed to erect a goddamned statue to a man who broke every rule, violated every ethic—”
“I didn’t say a statue,” she interrupted. “And I wouldn’t talk about ethics if I was you. Or maybe we should play the tape again. Adultery. And you’re not even in the military.”
“I’m talking business ethics,” he said, reddening.
“I got a flash for you, Mr. Lippton. Life isn’t just about business. Maybe it seems to be that way here…”
“Hollywood is a microcosm of America,” he said.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“A microcosm…” He assumed the stance he took when he addressed his board of directors with the annual report, inhaling air as though it were tobacco through slightly pursed lips. He exhaled the explanation. “A miniature of the big picture, a little model of what it’s all about.”
“You think America is about movies?”
“People want to be entertained. Forget their troubles, even if they’re not interesting enough to have any. America is a company town. Sometimes the company is Eastman Kodak. Sometimes it’s government. Here it’s about pictures, so it’s got a greater hold on the public. But every company has the same bottom line, and the bottom line is success. That’s what this country is about.”
“That’s really pathetic,” said Lila.
For a moment Victor was taken aback, as though it were his explanation she found unacceptable. “I’m sorry you find my theory offensive.”
“I’m not offended,” she said. “Nothing this town does can offend me. Not anymore. My only interest in Hollywood is already underground. And I want him … what’s that word, when you want to make sure somebody is remembered?”
“Oh, he’ll be remembered,” Victor said.
“I mean good remembered.”
“Commemorated,” Lippton said.
“Yeah. That’s it. Commemorated.”
“How do you suggest we do that?”
“I’ll have to think about it,” Lila said, and smiled.
Last Lunches
Algernon Reddy awoke from a dream of death. It took him a moment to remember that it was life that was the illusion. Because he had full confidence in that precept, he had chosen to return to New York as his semifinal resting place, electing to die in an environment where man was assaulted with reality. Mugged, you might say.
Even cosseted as he was with the comforts his confreres had provided, safe in a very soft bed, with the hum of Oms from the meditation room downstairs in his ears, he could still hear the rumble of traffic, the slam of lids on garbage cans, the sirens. “I have chosen not to die in California,” he’d said, on leaving, “because how could I tell?”
The pronouncement had been made a few days after Larry Drayco’s funeral. As that man’s death had been unexpected, and his own was imminent and predictable, he’d decided to make tracks. Attached as he was to the weather in L.A., to the outer peace that seemed at times to match his inner one, to the profusion of flowers outside the guest house that the last in a long line of heiresses had made available to him, he understood, as Carl Sandburg had said, that life was “a series of relinquishments.” So he knew he had to let go of what made him, even in his pain, sensually comfortable, for the final relinquishment that lay ahead.
Friends who ran the meditation center in New York had been sadly delighted to welcome him. All had the same view of mortality, that it was but part of an infinite journey. Still, they hated to see him go. He had brought wild colors to the philosophy, as vibrant as those he had seen on his psychedelic trips, and his gift of words had made them almost visible, even to the spiritually blind.
Now he lay, or sometimes sat, dying, his last public appearance walking unaided having been at Drayco’s funeral. The man had befriended him, as much as a man like Larry Drayco could befriend anyone who could do him no measurable good. They had shared a few quiet dinners in a vegetarian restaurant, as the producer made a perceptible effort to seem like he didn’t wish he were at Matteo’s. As though following Algernon’s urgings that he open himself to his own spirituality, Drayco had actually made a trip to India and spent several days at Sayed Baba’s ashram, where he watched him perform some of his miracles, and had come back a little calmer. Algernon had found himself feeling fondness for the fellow, a sentiment that did not diminish even when he found out that Drayco’s real reason for the trek was the presence at the ashram of an Indian billionaire who was thinking of putting money in movies. Whatever got you there, Algernon had thought at the
time, looking back at his own metaphysical beginnings, when, still known as “Ever” Reddy, he’d dropped acid because he thought it might enhance his fucking.
There was a table beside the bed that had on it medicines doctors had given him to dull the pain, or put him out of his head so he couldn’t measure how excruciating it was; liquid cocaine friends had smuggled in from England where it was legitimate and freely administered to the mortally ill; plus a variety of psychedelics to make the passage easier and more interesting. The least of these was marijuana, which so attenuated time that Algernon had the illusion that he was living forever. Which, as he knew from heavier tripping, he was destined to do.
Because the house where he was staying had an official, tax-deductible spiritual label, it was filled with seekers, some of them residents, some transients, some there for the day just to chant or be still. All of them wanted interviews and audiences with Algernon. But his strength was measurably ebbing, and, as Self vanished, he became more selfish. The sense of playfulness had disappeared from his journey: he had sent away the young filmmakers who had been in attendance to record his departure. Of all those who wanted to be with him, the only one he wanted was the young boy—he could not help thinking of him as that even though he was a man—who sat beside his bed now.
The boy was golden-haired, golden-lashed, and golden-skinned, a remnant of his California bronze, as beautiful a creature, man, woman, or beast, as Algernon had ever laid eyes on. They had first met when Algernon gave a reading of his poems at the Viper, the Los Angeles nightclub where River Phoenix had OD’d.
“You are my final gift,” Algernon said in a voice that was still surprisingly strong. “On this side, anyway. I am grateful to Destiny for bringing you to the Viper to see me.”
“I didn’t come to see you,” Tyler Hayden said.
“Why, then?”
“I was looking for my peers.”
“You don’t have any,” Algernon said. “It’s you and everybody else.”
He wished Reddy hadn’t said that. Tyler suffered from pride and disliked it in himself, wanting very much to shed what seemed to him often to be arrogance, since he, too, knew how beautiful he was, and how smart. At the same time he could feel himself flush with pleasure, because that was the conviction he himself had had, that he was one of a kind. To have it confirmed by someone as brilliant and perceptive as Algernon came as a great relief, even as it burdened him with how lonely he would be.