West of Paradise

by Gwen Davis

  “I’m fading,” Algernon said.

  “Can you see God yet?” asked Tyler.

  “I see Him all the time,” said Algernon. “I see Him in you. I hear Him in music. I taste Him in food. I feel Him in sex.”

  “Pretty irreverent,” said Tyler.

  “That’s why I came,” said Algernon. “If God didn’t mean us to be irreverent, He wouldn’t have created me. Or Jonathan Swift, making him a clergyman. It’s the pompous and the pious who are an insult to Him.”

  “I wish you had been my father,” said Tyler. “I wish it had been you who raised me.”

  “But I did,” he said. “In the little piece of time we have known each other, this life, anyway, I have seen you grow like a spiritual fungus.”

  “Not a pretty picture,” Tyler said.

  “It is to me. But then, I’ve known some really great fungi.”

  They both laughed. Algernon winced suddenly.

  “Are you in a lot of pain?” Tyler asked softly.

  “I can’t really tell. Maybe agony itself is a hallucination. A convincing one, I grant you. But passing, as everything is passing.”

  “I can’t believe how lucid you are, with everything you’re on.”

  “Well, drugs are mother’s milk to me,” said Reddy. “On the other hand, maybe I haven’t taken everything I seem to have taken. Maybe I want the full experience as it is. Maybe I’ve only told my friends I’m ingesting all this shit to make them more comfortable.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Algernon closed his eyes, and thought for a moment. “Don’t compromise,” he said, at last.

  “Have you?” Tyler asked. “Have you ever?”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, in my youth, when I was a fabled swordsman, I from time to time shtupped a woman or twelve I felt nothing for, including lust.”

  “Why?”

  “Ego. To reaffirm I was the best. To raise money for my foundation. You’d be surprised how many women there are who have too much money and feel guilty about it, and are desperate to go deeper, give their life significance, get laid. Fucking for me was no more than a smile is to most people. A way of manipulating.”

  “And you regret it?”

  “I regret nothing. See that you do the same. Regret is a cancer, and I already have that covered.”

  “How about…” Tyler hesitated. “How about if you were drawn to a woman that you knew was a ditz, empty?”

  “Why, I should fill her up,” Algernon said. “Besides, an enlightened man doesn’t judge.”

  “I don’t have to judge. It’s evident.”

  “That’s very superior of you.”

  “I thought you said I was superior.”

  “I only said you were apart. Apart shouldn’t put you on a perch, looking down. Is she beautiful?”

  “Like nobody else,” Tyler said.

  “Then go for it.”

  It had been Tyler’s hope that Reddy would discourage him. The taste of Helen’s mouth, the expert softness of her lips, collapsing under his even while she ate them, had nearly made him stumble off his road. He had actually considered for a moment trying to do something commercially acceptable, like being a movie star. Or taking her up on her offer to give him entree to everybody. But he knew in his heart, which was as good as his brain, that people would consider him her Toy Boy. Whatever of inspiration he had to deliver to the unaware could not be passed on from such a position.

  So he desperately wanted someone to dissuade him. His own father was not around anymore to talk sense to him, and even when alive had been easily intimidated, especially by people he deemed successful, which he was not. Tyler’s mother was self-absorbed, never even noting how exceptional her son was, except when it reflected on her. His beauty was nearly lost on her, so caught was she in the most superficial of externals, like his failing to wear a tie. So to take on another narcissistic female after his struggle to escape the one he’d issued from seemed to him self-destructive and stupid. Especially as Helen Manning had undoubtedly had every man she’d ever wanted. Unique as Tyler held himself to be, and Algernon Reddy had just confirmed, perhaps all that made him really different for Helen, as simplistic as her thinking seemed, was the fact that he withheld himself.

  Besides, he was scared. “I don’t want to end up a man who’s led around by his thing,” Tyler said.

  “Thing?” said Algernon, energized enough by outrage to raise himself on his elbow. “Am I to leave my spiritual estate to a man who can’t say penis?”

  Tyler grinned. “Why do you suppose they gave genitals such ugly names? Penis. Vagina.”

  “As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, ugliness is in the mind of the listener. There’s nothing wrong with those words, unless you live in Orange County.”

  “You don’t think lewdness diminishes our connection with God?”

  “It only makes it stronger,” said Algernon, and took Tyler’s hand, his own fingers frail against the firm, healthy flesh. “If God didn’t mean us to be sexual beings, he wouldn’t have given us dicks.”

  * * *

  Sometime late that evening, he died, still clutching Tyler’s hand. They both knew that what Algernon was, what everybody was, was indestructible consciousness. He had talked of the bubble of his spirit becoming a part of the infinite ocean. It all sounded so correct that when the moment came, and the terrible gurgle issued from his throat, an actual rattle, and the man was gone, fled, gray-faced, nobody home, Tyler had a hard time with how final it seemed. Somehow he had not expected death to be what it was when looked straight in the face. He had not been present when his father died: his body was gone when Tyler came home from school. Death. That was really the right word for it, no matter how convinced you were it was part of a passage.

  They had spoken, in part, about the afterlife, Reddy telling Tyler how it would be, what paths he would have to tread, what transitions he would go through, even the hospital wards on the other side he might be wayfared into for a while, to recuperate from his fleshly agonies. Tyler already knew all that Algernon told him, having read the same books and eaten the same kinds of mushrooms. But as he loved the man, and was struggling to learn complete compassion, he kept silent. He understood it was Reddy’s greatest joy to teach.

  He had wept at the last, as Algernon wept, the two holding each other, pooling tears, not because they believed he was dying in the true sense, but because their dialogue was temporarily coming to an end. Tyler never told him that the woman he was talking about was Helen Manning. He was afraid that, much as Algernon cared for him, he might call him a fool for even hesitating. A fucking fool, most likely.

  * * *

  Still, when he came away from the cremation, when they gave Tyler a share of the ashes Reddy had bequeathed him, along with the aviso to sprinkle them somewhere transcendent, and enough carfare to take him there, Tyler did not even think of Los Angeles. That is to say, he thought of it. He thought of Topanga Canyon, with its green arroyos; Leo Carrillo Beach sparkling mica gold; Point Dume, where towering, tufted cliffs overlooked a flawless stretch of unoiled azure ocean and the air was so crystal you couldn’t tell a few miles away was smog. And he thought of the Self-Realization Center with its devotee-tended radiant purple flowers lining the hills, its Mark Twain–like white steamboat anchored on a still, silver green pond, with only the detached meandering of swans lightly riffling the surface. And he thought of the Hollywood Bowl on a Beethoven night. He thought of the fountains outside the Ahmanson. All places where Algernon might have felt comfortable, lifted, exalted.

  But in Tyler’s belly was still a little knot of fear. Because as one-dimensional as Helen Manning might have been, he suspected she was still more woman than he had ever had. Than anyone had ever had, probably, aside from the forty or fifty or maybe hundreds of men she had known.

  * * *

  Whenever Jake Alonzo looked in the mirror now, he was pleased with what he saw. All his very young life it had sort of dismayed him t
hat he was so flawlessly handsome. As the afflicted cried why me?, Jake wondered why he’d been chosen, what there was special about him that God, or Nature, or some positive freaking of genes had given him a face that made people stop and stare. He had been aware since early childhood that his older brother was retarded, that his parents were simple and ugly and cruel and often violent, that it was just him and his baby brother who, for some invisible reason, had been given a generous portion of beauty. When they walked through their dingy part of the Bronx, off Shakespeare Avenue, shopkeepers would offer them candy, soda, all the things you weren’t supposed to take from strangers even when you knew them. The two boys were so exquisite, their dark tousled curls so shiny, their smiles so winning, they seemed princes in a neighborhood of thugs, and behaved accordingly. Jake was the older royal, the one whose kingdom it was destined to be, with the second in line, his little brother Max, trailing after.

  Not quite as clever as he was good-looking, Jake at a very early age still had sufficient curiosity to find out who Shakespeare was that he got his own avenue, just as he’d learned why James Monroe deserved a high school. Impressed, and a reader, he’d started to study the Bard and, sponsored by his high school English teacher, found his way to an acting school run by one of the last great divas. She was a member of the Actor’s Studio, a spiritual descendent of Stella Adler, and although in her fifties, still incredibly randy. She did not ask him to move in with her till he turned nineteen.

  His parents had no idea where he was living, not that they would have cared. But his mentor was afraid they might make trouble. So he went back home from time to time to take his little brother for a soda. Adored as he was by the diva, and everyone in his acting class, and even casting people who were starting to fall all over him, there was nothing like a worshiping sibling. And Max would trail after him as he had all through their childhood.

  “I gotta go back downtown,” Jake told him, one autumn afternoon, when a tree that grew through the cracks in the sidewalk had amber leaves, all that the neighborhood offered of nature. The first time Jake had had a girl he’d been ten, and they did it on the concrete of the schoolyard at night, there being no parks in the vicinity.

  “How come you don’t let me visit you?” Max asked.

  “They don’t allow kids in my building.” It was as good an excuse as any, and probably true. The building where the diva lived was a rent-controlled high-rise on Eighth Avenue. It was inhabited exclusively by theater people who signed up years in advance and waited so long for a vacancy that by the time they were ensconced they were too old to breed. Max was only twelve.

  From the corner of his eyes, Jake caught a glimpse of an old school friend, now a banker for the Mafia, collecting money for numbers. The mob recruited from the graduating class of James Monroe as law firms did from Harvard and Yale.

  “Yo, Red!” Jake called out, anxious to have his friend see how far he had come, or gone, actually. He wanted Red to take note of his clothes, which were well cut now, as custom-tended as his diction. “See you,” he said to his little brother.

  “But we didn’t get a chance to really talk…” Max pleaded, as his brother cut across the street.

  “You’re twelve,” Jake said, his back to him. “What makes you think you’ve got that much to say?”

  “But…” Max started after him. Jake was on the far corner when he heard the screech of the brakes, and the impact.

  * * *

  In class, they worked on guilt, how to incorporate it nonverbally into the subtext of a scene. He didn’t have any problem using that. He would look in the mirror while shaving, and wonder why he was clock-stopping handsome, why he was the one left alive, why he was the one with a brain that functioned. What made the chips fall the way they did?

  They found him for Hollywood. His press agent sent out releases about charisma. Several leading ladies who became his lovers threatened suicide, and the diva who’d launched him died.

  Cocaine and booze were easier to come by than absolution. He was twenty-eight when he crashed into the tree.

  * * *

  Now when he shaved and saw what was in the mirror, he was satisfied. He looked as flawed as he felt. Humpty-Dumpty. All the king’s plastic surgeons. As good a job as they’d done, his face was slightly asymmetrical, the unrestorable nerve in his eyelid causing a slight droop over his right eye. The rosebud mouth, once so lushly feminine, was pulled at the corners. But along with the not quite perfect reconstruction had come acting bonanzas. He could now play the obsessed, the psychopaths, and that seemed somehow appropriate. If a woman loved him onscreen it was because she was needy, so her judgment was off.

  It was not like that in real life, of course. Or real life as it was in Hollywood. Ingenues and the seemingly well were among the women waiting in line.

  * * *

  Right now the woman across from him was Samantha Chatsworth, the West Coast editor of East magazine. The lunch they were having at an open-air cafe near the ocean in Santa Monica had been set under the pretext of an interview she was thinking of doing. So far she had taken not a single note. Since she was English, Jake understood it would take her a while to get to the point, dancing around her true agenda as the Happy Breed usually did.

  “I was wondering,” she said eventually, leaning back so her tightly coiled auburn hair touched the fringe of the white umbrella shading their table, “who you were planning on taking to the Oscars?” She was dressed in her New York chic: a sleeveless black sheath, pearl choker at her throat. It was totally inappropriate for the setting, where even the local lawyers taking their lunch breaks had their jackets off and only the waitresses wore ties.

  “I haven’t been nominated this year,” Jake said. “I’m not sure I’ll be going.”

  “But certainly you’ll go to the parties and the Governor’s Ball.”

  She was working her breadstick like a baton, twirling it subtly through the air as she spoke, conducting herself, quite literally, Jake noted, like a lady. What she really wanted was still a puzzle to him. She would certainly have her own invitations to the awards, people in power in Hollywood being intimidated by the press, especially when headquartered in New York.

  But he waited, understanding the protocol. The British rarely asked anything even as straightforward as “How are you feeling?” for fear you might answer the truth, say something open, show a piece of heart that had blood in it, and then the questioner would have to cope. He knew from the gossip, and the vibes she sent out, that Samantha was not particularly interested in men. So she certainly wasn’t trying to wangle his escorting her.

  “I’m not much for parties,” he said.

  “But the Oscars aren’t a party. They’re a worldwide celebration. A billion people around the planet watching, riveted.”

  “What does that say about the planet?” Jake asked.

  “Let me tell you about the specials,” their waitress said. She was long-legged and brilliantly red-haired, her thick Scottish tresses snared unsuccessfully into a ponytail.

  “I’m just going to have the chopped Cobb,” said Samantha, dismissing her with a wave of her breadstick.

  “Go ahead,” Jake said, smiling at the big-breasted girl. “You can tell me.”

  “For appetizers there’s a carpaccio of gravlax and scallops, very nice, on a bed of watercress or pepper-seared tuna with papaya relish and eggplant. For entree: halibut with a raspberry coulis, and the pasta special is penne with sundried tomatoes, roasted yellow peppers, and garlic.”

  “Who’s your acting teacher?” Jake asked.

  “How did you know I was an actress?”

  “You’re waiting tables in L.A., aren’t you?” Jake said, and smiled.

  She said the name of a once almost-star.

  “She’s good,” Jake said. “I did a movie with her. Give her my love.”

  “And you are…?” the waitress asked him.

  “Very funny,” said Samantha, coldly. “I’ll have the chopped Cobb.”


  She didn’t come to the point until they were having coffee, a cappuccino for Jake, an espresso for Samantha. “Have you met our adorable Wendy?” she finally said.

  “The duchess?”

  “We’re not supposed to call her that anymore. Of course she’s more royal than practically anyone who’s left, but don’t quote me.”

  “Who to?” he said. “It’s not my kind of conversation. Nothing that captures my attention.”

  “What does interest you?” Samantha asked.

  “Aspiration,” said Jake. “Longing for what can never be achieved.”

  “How frustrating.”

  “Not really. It’s the struggle to be more that keeps us from being less.”

  “Very thoughtful,” Samantha said, writing it down. “We must do a piece on you. I wouldn’t have expected that.”

  “What would you have expected?”

  “An interest in politics. Sports. Most men like to talk about sports.”

  “That’s so they can go on for hours without revealing anything about themselves, who they really are, what they feel.”

  She seemed uncomfortable, actually looking away. “What a sensitive man you are,” she said, although the revelation seemed to irritate her, apparently being more than she cared to know.

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like to take Wendy to the Oscars?” There it was.

  “Not particularly,” Jake said.

  She looked surprised, literally caught her breath. “But you’re not attached to anyone, are you?”

  “Only to myself,” he said. “And she’s not exactly my cup of tea, as you might say.”

  “You don’t even know her. She’s an absolute darling.”

  “I’m sure. But darling doesn’t do it for me. Not at this point in my life.”