by Amor Towles
Litsky rang off.
Because here’s the thing: Fred and Edna loved to see the girl next door, all right—sitting on the tippity top of the silvery screen. But the only thing they loved more than that was seeing her tumble back down. That didn’t mean Fred and Edna were bad people. There wasn’t a mean-spirited bone in their bodies. They just couldn’t help themselves. The scientists call it human nature; which is just a fancy term for the God-given flaws we have no intention of giving back.
Litsky put the scrap in his hat and his hat on his head. Then he put another nickel in the phone. He didn’t need to look up this number. He knew every crummy digit by heart. After sixteen rings, Humpty got around to hefting the receiver.
—It’s me, Litsky—Yeah, I know what time it is. Everybody knows what time it is—What’s so important? I quit, that’s what—Wait a second. Can you say that slower? So I can write it down? It’s one for the history books—Yeah. Same to you.
Litsky hung up and exited the booth. When he got back to his stool, his drink was waiting for him.
And so was the ravaged blonde.
She was sitting alone at the opposite end of the bar.
He couldn’t believe it. She must have seen him saluting the boys from Shepherd Avenue and ordered the kid to follow in hot pursuit. And now here she was, giving him the nod of a solid citizen who’s just happened to happen into a bar.
When she ordered a Scotch and soda, Litsky told O’Malley to put it on his tab. She gave a neighborly smile of thanks, then she walked her drink down the bar.
—Hi, she said. I’m Katey. Katey Kontent.
—Jeremiah Litsky.
She gestured to a table for two in the middle of the room.
—Would you like to join me, Mr. Litsky?
—Sure, said Mr. Litsky.
As he was reaching for his bag, she picked up his drink and carried it to the table on his behalf. It was only when they’d both taken their seats that he could see what a knockout she’d been. All blonde and blue with a spunky little hourglass figure to boot. She wasn’t Litsky’s type, but without the scar and the limp she would have been everybody else’s.
Tough break, he thought to himself, feeling a tremor of something that might have been mistaken for sympathy.
She raised her glass and they drank without taking their eyes off each other.
Or maybe he had it all wrong . . .
Maybe in this town the scar was just the ticket. In Hollywood, when a good looker gets off the bus, every dame for twenty miles grits her teeth. And when the boys in the business meet a pretty face, they’ve got good reason to be wary—because they’ll never really know what she’s after until she’s after it. But with that scar, there weren’t going to be any screen tests for the likes of Katey Kontent.
Which made you sort of wonder what she was doing here in the first place.
As Litsky was thinking this through, she was sitting with her legs crossed, sipping at her drink and flipping her shoe off her heel—letting it hang on the tip of her toe for a beat before flipping it back on.
—So what do you do, Mr. Litsky?
He stirred his Scotch with a finger.
—I’m a member of the fourth estate.
—A journalist? she said taking out a cigarette. Well, that must be fascinating in a town like this. Tell me all about it.
She sat there with the unlit cigarette between her fingers waiting for Litsky to strike a match. He took a drink of his whiskey instead.
—You can cut the sugar, Blondie. I know exactly who you are.
—And who pray tell is that?
—You’re the one who comes in through the lobby and goes out through the kitchen door.
Pleased by his own poetry, Litsky smiled for the first time in a year.
—Ooh, she replied. What big teeth you have, Grandma.
Litsky raised his glass in the affirmative and emptied it in her honor.
—You want to know what this town is like? he said. I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like a waiting room. It’s the largest waiting room in the world. We’re all sitting on wooden benches reading yesterday’s papers, eating yesterday’s lunch. But every now and then, the door to the platform opens and the conductor lets one of us through for a ride on the Millionaire Express. Sometimes, it’s some kid in a mailroom whose story’s found its way to a big oak desk. Sometimes, it’s a dainty damsel who gets plucked off the farm like your friend. But sometimes, it’s for a little guy like me.
He patted the bag that was sitting on the table.
—And when that door opens . . . , he added.
—You’d better go through it, because it may not open again.
—Bingo, Blondie.
She put her chin on her hand and looked at him all dreamy.
—That’s a nice little mustache you’ve got there, Mr. Litsky. How do you do that? How do you leave just that little bit behind?
—I’ve got a light touch.
—I’ll bet you have. Now I’ve got a story for you, she said—finally taking the time to light her own cigarette, to shake the flame from the match and toss it over her shoulder.
The story was about a fat, little Italian who happened to make it good. This guinea designed scenery for the opera houses in Milan and New York before making his way out west. Well, once he’d poked his finger through a Hollywood set, he sent for all the boys back home—you know, the carpenters and painters and masons who’d built the Sistine Chapel, but who were fresh off the boat and willing to ply their trades for a nickel a day. Pretty soon, all the studios wanted to hire this guy. He’s building Dodge Cities, and African jungles, and rooms in Versailles, making half a million bucks a year. So, naturally, he tears down his little shack on Doheny and has his boys build him a mansion with all the fixings. He moves back in on August first, 1935, and the following morning, they find him floating in his pool.
Litsky well remembered the heat wave of ’35. In fact, as he was sitting in O’Malley’s listening to this yarn, he could practically feel the swelter; he could practically hear the water lapping at the edge of the pool as the cruisers pull into the drive.
Quick as a wink, the cops see that this was no ordinary accident. There was no bump on his head, no booze in his blood. So they start wondering: Did one of those vendettas get carried over from the old country? Did one of his paisanos finally get tired of working for nickels? Or, was the competition getting antsy?
Blondie leaned back and shot some smoke at the ceiling.
—But in the end, Mr. Litsky, do you know what it was that killed him?
—No, said Litsky, wiping his brow. What?
—The metric system.
Litsky shook his head.
—The metric system . . . ?
—You see, our little entrepreneur didn’t know how to swim. So when the pool was being built, he told his mason to make it a yard and a half deep—that way, he could wade in it safely with his head above water. But the mason, having just arrived in America, didn’t know what a yard was. And when he asked, one of his countrymen told him it was just like a meter. But, as you know Mr. Litsky, a meter is a little longer than a yard. So that’s what this man’s ticket on the Millionaire Express bought him: Five extra inches of water.
Litsky stood to go. But the room moved a little to the left.
—That’s a helluva story, Blondie.
He reached for his bag. He knew there was something important in it. Something like his future. Or maybe it was his past. He couldn’t remember. But either way, it was heavy as hell.
—Here, said a motherly voice. Let me help you with that.
Freed of its burden, Litsky’s body floated a foot off the ground. It hovered for a second, and then settled back in its chair.
On the shelf behind the bar a tiny orchestra was playing that trumpety little number f
or the seventeenth time. Litsky put a hand on the table and tried to stand again, but he couldn’t budge. He shook the inner workings of his head, and for a moment he could clearly see the features of this blonde who’d come out of nowhere. She was studying him the way that she had studied the band—with her narrowed eyes and her that’s-more-like-it sort of smile.
She leaned over him so closely that he could smell her perfume.
—Where did you come from? he heard himself asking.
—From a hurricane, she said.
Then the warm circumference of her beauty began to recede, diffuse, and finally disappear.
On the periphery of his awareness, someone a lot like Litsky knocked over a chair. Its clatter echoed through the hallowed halls of Hollywood, mimicking the geometric pattern of the tin ceiling overhead. A door closed, an orchestra abandoned its search for the twentieth measure, and a string of gently swinging Christmas lights went out one by one, leaving Litsky in the ebon embrace of the eternities.
Marcus
ON THE FIRST OF March, Marcus Benton parted the louvers of his window shade with two fingers and looked out onto the lot, thinking he still wasn’t used to the weather. Without a bleak winter hour or sweltering summer night, February hadn’t felt like February anymore than July would feel like July. In Southern California, it was as if a glimpse of spring were repeated week after week, month after month, year after year.
Central Casting must have been listening to his thoughts, because a barefooted boy wearing a floppy straw hat suddenly appeared from around Building Four with a makeshift rod on his shoulder.
As a boy, Marcus could have assembled a better one with his eyes closed. He could have stripped a sapling, bent and threaded a needle, tied a double hinge. Having slipped out the back of the schoolhouse, he could have skirted the town hall to avoid the feed store and circled back to Keeper’s Hollow, where Whistling Billy McGuire would have already dropped his line. But here in Culver City, the boy with the floppy hat was stopped by a young blonde in a bright blue blouse. She asked him a question and he pointed toward Marcus’s office.
Marcus let the louvers fall.
He resumed his place behind his desk and took up the small green dossier. A glance at the photograph inside confirmed that the blonde in blue was the one he was waiting for. He leafed through the file, reacquainting himself with what little they knew: that she had been raised in New York, attended a finishing school in Europe, worked for a year at a literary press; and that she had fled the gossip mill of Manhattan when her engagement to a blue-blooded banker had been abruptly called off.
He wished, of course, that he knew more (one always did). But what he had in hand would suffice. For it was a simple matter, really—a matter of making the young woman feel a part of a grander endeavor.
Marcus had learned this in his early days as a litigator in Arkansas. In the jury box of the Pulaski County Courthouse (in any jury box in the country, for that matter), one could expect to find a sample of the human condition: a patchwork of intellects and experiences, personalities and prejudices. To convince these twelve disparate souls of an argument’s merits, an attorney could not rely on logic, or science, or even justice. After all, Socrates couldn’t convince the elders of Athens of his innocence, anymore than Galileo could convince the pope, or Jesus Christ the people of Jerusalem. To convince the men of a jury, one must instead draw them into the course of events.
One must show that they have not been called to the courthouse to fulfill some civic obligation—to observe and assess. Rather, they have been called to participate. Each juror is a principal who must play his part in the trial as one plays his part at a family gathering, or at the supper table of a friend, or in the pew of a church—those places where consciously or unconsciously we know the frailties and strengths of our neighbors to be inseparable from our own.
That is how Marcus extricated David from his little problem back in Arkansas. Thanks to the papers, weeks before the trial the good people of Little Rock already knew that Selznick was a Hollywood mogul. They knew he was a millionaire, a city slicker, a Jew. And this was the essence of opposing counsel’s case. Thus, acknowledging that all of this was true, Marcus (his suit a little rumpled, his hair a little unkempt) took the jury back to the beginning. Calling David to the stand, Marcus inquired about his youth in a blue-collar corner of Pittsburgh; he inquired how David at the age of twenty-one had helped his family make ends meet when his father fell on hard times; overcoming objections of relevancy, Marcus inquired how David had fallen in love with the cinema at the age of ten—tucked among his fellow citizens in a crowded theater, thrilling to the sound of the upright piano and the flicker of celluloid, imagining a day when the Lone Ranger would call Hi ho, Silver aloud . . .
Six months later, Marcus found himself pursuing a similar line of questioning in Los Angeles County Court.
When David had called, Marcus demurred. But David had been characteristically persuasive: It would only take a few weeks, he said; he would make it worth Marcus’s while; and there was no one else in the whole country he could rely upon. As an added enticement, David sent a plane. With Marcus seated by himself in the passenger cabin (a glass of his favorite bourbon in hand), the plane inscribed its dotted line from Little Rock across the dustbowl, over the Grand Canyon and Death Valley, to the airstrip in Culver City where David waited at the side of his Rolls Royce. And when they arrived at Selznick International and walked into Building Two, David opened an oaken door with an elaborate flourish to reveal . . . Marcus’s office in Little Rock.
With a bit of help from the property department, the Selznick International set designers had engineered a facsimile—right down to the louvered shades, the antiquated map of eastern Arkansas, and the Roman bust on the book shelf (albeit a papier-mâché Caesar standing in for a marble Cicero.)
That was four years ago.
Marcus surveyed the top of his desk. Neatly arranged along its edge were seven stacks of paper, one of which stood a foot tall. These weren’t from the prop department. They were an essential component of the industriousness of his client—a man for whom no slight was too offhand, no promise too in passing, no penny too thin to wage a battle on its behalf. Selznick versus a Studio. Selznick versus a Star. Selznick v. Temperature, Time, and Tide.
—Mr. Benton, sounded an electronic voice. A Miss Evelyn Ross here to see you.
Marcus put the dossier in the drawer and pushed the button on the intercom.
—Please, show her in.
As was his habit, Marcus came around the desk ready to greet his guest and make her feel at ease; but he was taken aback when through the door came the blonde in blue with the barefooted boy’s fishing rod on her shoulder and his floppy straw hat on her head.
She barely gave him a chance to introduce himself.
—Did you know that a few hundred yards from here is a stretch of the Mississippi River? And not only does it have a rickety dock and a riverboat, it has been stocked with actual fish!
Marcus laughed.
—We do strive for verisimilitude, Miss Ross.
—I’ll remember that.
She gestured with the rod toward the bookcase.
—May I?
—Of course.
She leaned the rod upright and placed the hat on the shelf next to Caesar’s head. Then she took a seat, crossed her legs, and lightly bounced her foot.
Inwardly, Marcus smiled. Because in the course of sixty seconds, he had learned more about Evelyn Ross than the studio’s investigators had learned in three weeks. The young lady sitting before him was no native of New York. The ease of manner, the disarming smile, the glimmer in the eye were all indigenous to that tribe of women who dwell from the shores of the Great Lakes to the port of New Orleans. Over the course of two hundred years, these farm-bred charms had evolved to provide the rest of us some consolation when losing the upper hand in horse-tra
ding, card-play, and courtship.
If an engagement had been broken back in New York, Marcus thought to himself, then Evelyn Ross was the one who had done the breaking.
She pointed to the seven stacks of paper.
—Do you buy that stuff by the pound?
—You jest, Miss Ross. But my father ran a feed store in Arkansas. I spent my summers selling all manner of things by the pound; not to mention by the bushel and the peck.
—That must have made you quite hardy.
—It made me very good at estimating weights.
—Really, she said with a playful squint. Then how heavy am I?
—That’s not the sort of question a gentleman should answer.
—I’m not the type to take offense.
He tilted his head.
—105 pounds . . . ?
—Not bad! You’re only off by two.
—Was I heavy or light?
—Now, that’s going a step too far.
Oh, Marcus could see why a young banker in Manhattan might have made a rushed proposal; and he could see why it wouldn’t stick. He even felt a touch of pity for the poor bastard. But it did make one wonder: If the young man was the jilted party, then why had Miss Ross left New York?
She swung her foot up and down, waiting for him to speak.
—I appreciate your coming on such short notice, he began. I hope it wasn’t too much of an inconvenience.
—Not at all.
—I’m glad to hear it. The reason we asked you to stop by is very straightforward. In essence, we want to thank you. We know that you and Miss de Havilland have become good friends; but it has also been brought to our attention that back in January you helped her out of quite a fix . . .
—What are friends for, she said.
—Precisely, Miss Ross. What are friends for? Miss de Havilland is a wonderful young woman with a bright future. But as you’ve seen firsthand, there are those who would seek to profit from her slightest misstep. So, we would deem it a terrific favor if you would continue to keep an eye out for her.