West of Paradise

by Gwen Davis

  “What do you want?” asked Samantha, not meaning to be curious, but unable to stop herself. She could hardly believe it. This man, this actor, turning down the duchess. Even though he’d topped the short list of eligible, impressive locals who might escort her, he was still as common as clay. Talented clay, to be sure, but who did he think he was? “She’s one of the most sought-after women in the world.”

  “Not by me,” he said. “I’m flattered that you’d think of me, but—”

  “Answer my question,” said Samantha imperiously. “What do you want?”

  Jake thought for a moment. “The part of a lifetime. A woman who loves me. To make amends for the wrongs I’ve done. To be all that I can be.”

  “You should join the army,” said Samantha, furious, and, getting up, left him with the check.

  * * *

  The horror was that now Wendy might go with someone inappropriate. The whole world was inappropriate, in Samantha’s opinion, and the young woman was headstrong. Even in her wounded state, she was fiercely determined. It was all Samantha could do to shepherd her properly, an assignment she had given herself.

  The first public event Wendy would attend since Larry Drayco’s funeral, which didn’t count, especially as Samantha had unsuccessfully attempted to dissuade her from going, was the Oscars. Who she went with would determine how the world would now perceive her. The only name on Samantha’s list Wendy had responded to with interest was Jake Alonzo. And the man had had the nerve, the actual hubris, to turn her down.

  “He’s made other plans,” Samantha told her now. She herself was unable to bear the truth. How could she tell it to Wendy?

  They were in the ex-duchess’s apartment on Wilshire, a low floor of a high-rise in case of earthquake. Unreality came with the territory, built in, like the assurance the building had sway, and if the big one came you’d be just as safe in a high-rise. Still, they had contracted for a lower floor, putting aside any thought that the apartments on top could just as easily collapse on you as not.

  The room they were in had fabric-covered walls, a flowery chintz that gave the feeling of country. Wendy didn’t want to feel confined when she rode her stationary bicycle as she was doing now.

  “That’s fine,” Wendy said, a little short of breath. “I only said alright to him because I like his acting. I have no idea what he’s like as a person.”

  “Surly and full of himself,” said Samantha, still livid.

  “Maybe I’ll ask Morty,” said Wendy.

  “Are you mad?” She saw little dots of light in the air around her, swirling, the kind that preceded a migraine.

  “Why? He’s sweet. And you’re the one who brought us together.”

  “So he could make your line of clothes,” Samantha said. “Not your evening. For God’s sake, Wendy. Think how it would look. The two of you together.”

  “He’s taller than the duke.”

  “He’s a Jew.”

  “You’re not serious,” Wendy said.

  “You didn’t know he was a Jew? Mortimer Schein?”

  “Of course I knew that,” Wendy said, and stopped bicycling, got down from the seat. “What I didn’t know was that you were an anti-Semite.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Samantha said impatiently.

  “Exactly,” said Wendy, and wiped the perspiration from her brow with a royal blue washcloth. “And let’s not leave out His Son.”

  “Now, don’t you go all unctuous on me,” Samantha said, defensive anger being more powerful in her than her wish to maintain an important connection. “Some of my best friends are anti-Semites.”

  “I have no doubt.” Wendy wiped the back of her neck. She had sweated through her workout clothes, a sample Mortimer had sent her of the model he was considering for marketing under their banner. It was pale blue Lycra and fleece, the color of her eyes. “The colour of your eyes,” he had written in his accompanying note to her. “You see, I can spell in English.” She could not help considering him a little adorable.

  “Some of the most intelligent people in history…” Samantha went on, unable to contain herself. “T.S. Eliot. The founding father of literary modernism. There’s a book by the Princess of Wales’s own solicitor, proving that very point.”

  “That doesn’t make it an endorsement. I never even particularly liked Eliot. ‘I am old. I am old. I will wear my stockings rolled.’ It gives one an aversion to age.”

  “You should have that anyway,” said Samantha.

  “Then I shall have to die young,” Wendy said.

  “Don’t be so tragic.”

  “I was simply stating the truth. That’s the only way to avoid getting older.”

  “I have a line to every important plastic surgeon on four continents. There’s no reason you ever have to change.”

  “Yes, there is,” Wendy said, and opened the door to show her out. “I don’t want to be like you.”

  “You’re making a great mistake,” said Samantha, stepping into the hall. “There’s no one you can really trust besides me.”

  “Then I’m in worse trouble than I thought,” said Wendy.

  * * *

  When she got back to her office, Samantha patched a call through her switchboard in New York to the United Kingdom. “You’d better do something,” she said. “It’s more appalling than the equerry or the art collector.”

  * * *

  There was a gay underground in New York, just as there was in Los Angeles. There were those who gossiped and knew unrevealed truths about each other, even though one could presumably do no more harm now that everybody was out of the closet. Almost everybody, that was. Still there were advertising executives playing out their two-and-a-half-children charades in Greenwich. Politicians who kept silent because it could be used against them at the polls. But in the theater everyone knew, and everybody acknowledged. The red ribbons they’d worn for AIDS awareness were now matched by pink ribbons for breast cancer awareness, and pale gray for prostate cancer awareness, as if life-threatening illness had become less disease than fashion statement.

  So Sarah Nash had little trouble turning up people who were willing to feed her information about Norman Jessup and the vanished Paulo and their tumultuous love affair in the days before homosexuality had been politically correct. “Yes, Norman was friends with Stephen Ryder,” the young gay man her publisher had put her in touch with told her over lunch at Fiorello’s, a noisy restaurant across from Lincoln Center. “Stephen of course was the first movie star to ‘out’ himself after he was married, and before it was politically correct. That’s what makes him such an interesting subject for a biography.”

  “How’s it coming?” Sarah asked, not really interested. But writers seemed to demand that one be curious about what they were working on.

  “I’m becoming just a tad obsessed with him,” Eliott, the young man, said with Woody Allen mannerisms. The glasses he wore were owlish, in further veneration.

  “Well, you’d have to be if you’re writing his biography.”

  “I mean, really obsessed. It’s harder to get to know him, since he’s dead…”

  “I’d imagine.”

  “… so I’ve started dreaming about him. Mostly he comes to me in red satin briefs.”

  “How is he hung?” Sarah asked.

  “Fabulously,” Eliott said, twirling his spaghetti. “I never realized he was such a hunk.”

  “And he was friends with Paulo and Norman?” she said, getting him back on track.

  “They all lived in the same neighborhood when they were in New York.”

  “Where?”

  “Turtle Bay. Stephen told friends he felt very special in New York because he lived near Katharine Hepburn. And he had a bill among his papers from a liquor store addressed to Cole Porter, that was marked ‘Third Notice,’ with these big red letters ‘OVERDUE.’ Apparently it blew over his fence when he was very young and doing a play, and he kept it because he found it so droll. Cole lived in Turtle Bay.”
r />   “You knew him?” She did not quite sneer at the use of the songwriter’s first name.

  “God, I wish. But he lived eons before I was born. Still, I know all his lyrics by heart. I don’t know why they make such a fuss over Stephen.”

  “Sondheim?”

  “Equal wit, maybe, but none of the humor, basically mean-spirited, except for Forum. And, of course, ‘Send in the Clowns.’” He started to hum it.

  “And Norman and Paulo lived in that neighborhood?” she asked, trying not to show her impatience. The theater interested her hardly at all, nor did twenty-five-year-old gays who spoke like insiders when they weren’t and had contracted to write about movie stars they hadn’t even known just to be able to interview people with whom the stars had been friendly. Her take on Eliott was sharp and accurate, backed up by information from a junior editor who’d been disgusted by the deal Eliott had gotten because he lived downstairs from a successful author with a powerful agent. There was just as much corruption in publishing as in the movie business, Sarah knew. But somehow it wasn’t as fascinating to the public, so Sarah had no intention of exposing it. Besides, she’d have to get a publisher who wasn’t in publishing.

  “All you would have had to do is check the real estate records,” Eliott said, picking up the brusqueness in her tone.

  “I find you a lot livelier.” She did not add that she hated doing regular research. That was what she had Chuck for. She was annoyed with him for not thinking of simply checking the residential house sales, sparing her this lunch.

  “Well, thanks,” Eliott said. “I was a little intimidated at the prospect of meeting you, but I did love your book. How come you didn’t write about Stephen Ryder in it?”

  “He was already ill.”

  “That was merciful,” Eliott said.

  “And people weren’t that interested in him anymore.”

  Eliott paled. “Really?”

  “Have you ever written anything before?” she asked, trying not to let the scorn she felt become audible in her tone.

  “A piece for the Voice,” he said.

  “The Village Voice?”

  “Yes.” He was starting to sense how little she wanted to be with him. He looked chagrined.

  “And you didn’t know Stephen?”

  “He died when I was still in college,” he said.

  “Oh, you went to college.”

  “You know,” Eliott set his fork down, “I heard you were a bitch. But I had no idea.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. You don’t seem to have many ideas of your own.”

  “What did I do to antagonize you?” he asked, shaken.

  “Maybe I just don’t like people who call themselves writers when they haven’t written. Who get writing deals because of who they live near, not because of what they write. Maybe I don’t like people who exploit the dead.”

  “As opposed to the living?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Or maybe you just don’t like gays,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she agreed. “Would you like coffee?”

  * * *

  When lunch was over, as it had been the moment it began and she saw how little he would be able to tell her, Sarah went across the street to the Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. One of the few things in the world, alive or inanimate, that Sarah felt affection for was libraries. They had been the havens of her childhood, the place where she went for silence so she didn’t have to hear her family argue. She avoided them now as she avoided peace, because they might put her in touch with herself. She was afraid she wasn’t as bright as everyone thought because she was bitchy. To confront her own limitations was nothing she wanted to do at this point in her life. And so she left the research to Chuck.

  But she also kept away from libraries because it broke what heart she had that they were going out of business. Computer nerds and technology boosters were becoming billionaires, while those who loved books had to deal with limited hours, days when the quiet sanctuaries didn’t open at all, what with staff cutbacks and lack of funding. Some of the branches in the cities where she’d been on her book tour were closed altogether, never to reopen. She took it personally that the structures that had been her refuge and become her advocates in the career she had moved to when the movies closed her out were themselves now in danger of closing.

  A kind of piety came over her as she ascended the steps, a sense of wonder that all that knowledge could be so enshrined, and yet in peril. She floated towards the stillness. The library edged just behind the Metropolitan Opera, a flat, square, three-story building. It was the only one in the fountain-centered complex that was less than architecturally interesting, as if music and theater and dance were more deserving than words.

  There were signs all around telling people to watch their wallets. At the checkout desk, with its metal portal magnetically guarding against book theft, were caveats advising those with pacemakers that they might set off the alarm.

  The inside of the vast, sterile building was well, if flatly, lit. Around her rose several stories of books, magazines, newspapers. Even from the ground floor she could see donated collections. And the sad, inevitable signs advising they’d be closed certain days, that the hours on the days they were open were limited.

  “Could you tell me where the material is on dance?” she asked the not-so-young but still pretty woman by the card catalogue.

  “Second floor,” she said.

  Sarah climbed the stairs. There was a bright-eyed brunette behind the second-floor desk, alert and cheerful. She had probably gone into library science for her graduate degree, imagining that libraries, and she, still had a healthy future.

  “Where would I find material on dance companies from Brazil?” Sarah asked her.

  “Back table,” the woman said, pointing. “There’s a catalogue. Listed alphabetically.”

  Sarah made her way to the giant book, and opened it to B. But it fell open first to A. At the bottom of the paged index was “AIDS, obituaries.” She turned it quickly.

  BRAZIL. The heading directed her back to the main desk.

  “It says I get the newspapers from you,” Sarah said.

  “I’ll need your ID.”

  She gave the librarian her passport, which she carried with her now like Kleenex in the event she was moved to flee. No place was a safe haven for her anymore, nothing felt like home. Be it ever so humble, there was no place like a departure lounge.

  The woman handed her folders filled with newspaper clippings. Some of them were current; most of them yellowing and old. It was a while before Sarah found what she was looking for, from 1980: a review of the Capoeiras de Bahia, a dance company that starred the fourteen-year-old Paulo Nerys.

  There was a picture of him, grainy and unsatisfactory. But it was possible to see how muscularly slender his young body was, the grace he had in flight. His legs were spread in a leap worthy of Baryshnikov.

  On the third floor, among the closed stacks, she found the glossy photographs of balletic figures captured in interesting close-up by Martha Swope. There was a study of the young Paulo Nerys. A sudden surprising sadness came over Sarah, as when she had seen the pristine fields that were once Beverly Hills, commemorated in the pizza parlor that sat on them now. The beautiful boy in the picture existed no more, even if Jessup hadn’t had him killed. Had he? How could someone have so completely vanished, unless that was the explanation? Had he contracted AIDS and, like so many of the dying, hidden away, adding shame and guilt to his ordeal? Whatever the explanation was—and there had to be one—the boy in the picture was vanished. If he was alive, which Sarah doubted, he wasn’t that boy anymore.

  Thick black hair flowed around his face, but not so freely that it obscured the high cheekbones, the wide imposing nose, the V of his chin. It was easy to see why Winsett had been smitten with him, why Norman Jessup had been struck. Especially with that look, not really a look. His eyes seemed loathe to look at the camera. So indirect
, and so curiously guileless. A step back from guileless, really. Blank. A spiritual tabula rasa, as though one could write anything on that psyche that one wanted, so empty were those eyes.

  Empty eyes. Sarah’s mind meandered. Where had she seen eyes that were that strangely empty? Where had she encountered, close up, those vacant eyes?

  Building Bridges

  As accustomed as he was to having a full staff to do legwork of any fashion for him, including stalking, it momentarily irritated Norman Jessup to have to hire a private detective. Especially as the man was going to be paid to find the man who had only just stopped doing Norman’s stalking. But as there was nothing sinister involved, Norman figured the detective could do him no harm in the way of extortion or wanting a job in the movie business, the risk you always ran when you were Norman. He could not even address a ladies’ luncheon, which he did only for his public image, without someone in a hat asking him to interview her nephew.

  The detective he decided on was recommended by one of the security people at the Carlyle, a breed Norman trusted to be reliable as much as he did the manager and Bobby Short, who was currently doing a stint on piano in the Cafe. They sat in the darkened room where the entertainer played, and the detective murmured his credentials, but not so loud that it interfered with the music.

  “It’s okay, you come highly recommended,” Jessup said, raising his hand to stop the recounting of runaway teenagers found, renegade fraudulent financiers stopped at the airport, and wives caught in flagrante. Only when the singer finished his first show and the lights went up did Norman tell the man what he wanted.

  The detective looked slightly seedy, which put Norman at his ease, as the only private eyes he’d seen were those in films. Apparently this man had been to the same movies. His face was scratchily Humphrey Bogart, his overlarge head Bruce Willis, shaved, bridging the generations in a single overweight bound. Even though he’d been assured he had Norman’s confidence, he still held out his ID and his license to carry a gun. Both had his name, Hallowell Vincent, and a thumbprint.

  “Hallowell,” Jessup said. “That’s some moniker.” He felt an actual lift in his heart as he used that word.