by Edward Riche
“That was absolutely THE BEST wine you ever tasted?” said Robin, who Elliot now saw was drunk.
“Well, no . . . what’s ‘best’? The best wines anyone ever tastes are Burgundy Grand Cru, Musigny, or Les Clos. You don’t compare every play to Hamlet . . . that’s not the . . .” Finally Elliot thought he had it. “The most beautiful lover you ever had isn’t necessarily the one you think about all the time.”
This appeared to give Robin pause. Either that or she was becoming dizzy.
“What did you say it was called again, Château something something?” Veronica’s pen was poised above a notepad on which she had yet to write a word.
“Châteauneuf-du-Pape. It was an old bottle — a 1961 Isabelle d’Orange. It should have been long finished when I drank it, too old, but no.”
“Orange County?” wondered Veronica.
“Why didn’t you bring some of that ‘intriguing’ wine along, instead of two wines you say are failures?” asked Eva.
“The one I drank was the only bottle I have ever seen. Nineteen sixty-one was the last year the vineyard existed. They never made much. And the family was always at odds with the syndicate. I’ve tried tracking any down that might have been lying around but . . . to no avail.” Elliot heard himself starting to sound precious.
“Why was it such a memorable lover?” Veronica asked.
Good question.
“Oh, I’m not sure.” Elliot had worried for a time that it wasn’t the wine at all but the context, the confidence and contentment he’d felt drinking it with Lucy on that perfect day in the South of France. Then, hearing one day, about a not very good movie, that “everything is context,” he realized that everything wasn’t. Some part of anything was context, some other part was substance. “It was a spectacular vintage for the entire appellation, and the blend of grapes at that particular vineyard was not typical; there was more of this and less of that than was usual. Isabelle d’Orange actually used fourteen different grape varieties, the extra grape being an obscure one, the Matou de Gethsemane. That’s one of the reasons they were having trouble with . . . Regardless, it’s not germane to this discussion.”
“But you will bring some good wines the next time?” asked Veronica.
“I promise.”
OUTSIDE, THE GLARE punched. The stone of Jerry’s vast sloping drive was the texture and colour of Rolaids. In the sun it was infernal. Elliot felt his pockets for sunglasses. The daytime highs in Southern California were approaching record levels; it was Al Gorey. Elliot dreaded calling Walt and getting a report out of the vineyard — no doubt another day over a hundred degrees and the newly formed grapes would be beginning to show signs of heat stress. The oldest Zinfandel vines seemed even to like it and the Mourvèdre could handle it, but every other grape variety he grew would be shutting down, the fruit cooking before it could mature phenolically.
He looked back at the house. It was a rectilinear thing, planes of tooth enamel and shimmering glass — Richard Meier school. There was a smog warning, and the sky, white as the centre of a spark in every direction, seemed to suspend something dusty and grey as cigarette ash. The palms in the rear garden that rose beyond the structure looked to Elliot as if they were about to ignite, like that tree line at the beginning of Apocalypse Now. “This is the end.”
Worse, it was the middle.
Eva emerged from the house, her blue hair and bituminous sweater on the white stone in the midday sun some kind of experiment in the limits of ultraviolet tolerance in New Yorkers.
“That was interesting,” Eva said, not bothering to sound convincing. “It’s weird terrain, aesthetically. I mean, are there greater rewards for the viewer or listener or drinker if the work is more difficult?”
Elliot made like he wasn’t sure whether it was he to whom Eva was talking, as though she was mistaking him for someone else standing nearby who might understand, or care, what she was saying. “‘Aesthetically?’ I’m a screenwriter, you know . . . here,” he jabbed his finger down toward the scorching concrete drive, “in Los Angeles.”
“You’re being flip, right? It’s hard to tell in California,” said Eva.
“Sorry. I don’t hear many interesting questions. If you’d asked me if the lead could be younger and more sympathetic or if the ending could be more uplifting, I might have better understood how to dodge the question.”
Eva smiled for the first since they’d met. And she was right, it was weird and interesting stuff. He was being a prick. Elliot was about to say so, but Robin was upon them.
She came out the house like a shot and staggered, tipping forward on account of her heels, gravity sending her careering toward the street. By the time she reached Eva she had to put a hand out to arrest her momentum.
“Elliot,” she said, “you live in Beverly Hills . . . didn’t you say?”
“No. I didn’t. I’m in the Los Feliz Hills, by Griffith Park. Beverly Hills,” he sighed, “can be on the way.”
“Awesome. You can drive me home, it’s not far, 1085 Summit.”
Given what little they had consumed — and that over a couple of hours — it seemed incredible that Robin could be impaired, but as she came unmoored from Eva her course to Elliot was as irregular as a torn kite. Elliot looked back to Eva as Robin dragged him forward. “Aesthetically,” imagine.
On the drive to the Silvermans’ house Robin explained how it was that she had become so intoxicated: Thursdays were “not-eating” days for her. On Mondays and Thursdays she would take no solid food, though she allowed herself fluids — that they might be alcoholic was no matter. Elliot didn’t bother offering that booze, in any variety, was not particularly slimming.
So little did Robin care about getting smashed during her fasts that she invited Elliot in for a drink.
“I would love to,” he said, on the off chance that Lucky Silverman was at home and that Elliot might finally shake his hand, give Lucky a face to remember. Everything went through six or seven page-one rewrites, minimum, these days; having your name rattling around the consciousness of a producer as busy as Silverman increased your chances of joining the queue of eligible hacks. Elliot had been on a conference call with Silverman once but knew that Lucky would never remember it. Even he couldn’t recall what that one had been about. That Lucky would’ve known that the scribbler on the phone also had something to do with a winery of which he owned a piece was unlikely. Lucky Silverman had bigger fish to fry. Men in such a hurry only learned the dimensions of their holdings when the courts were seizing them.
Elliot pulled up to an iron gate at the bottom of a long, steep drive. Robin stuck her head out the window, waving to an invisible camera, and the security barrier opened. Parking was under a twelve-car pergola.
The interior of Casa Silverman was decorated in an Asian tropical theme. There was a preponderance of coffee-coloured wooden furnishings, the grain and heft of which said endangered and illegally logged. Indosamnesian? Javanuatan?
Once onto the rattan matting of the living area, Robin gave a kick of each leg, launching her high heels toward the far end of the room, a punt for the help to return.
“Do you only drink wine?” she asked, making for a credenza the length of a Cadillac.
“No. I’ll —”
“How about a vodka?”
“Sure,” Elliot said, though he didn’t really care for vodka. “You know, I’ve been meaning to come by. I guess you know that Mr. Silverman is one of a number of investors in my —”
“Lucky’s overseas. Toronto, I think.” She turned around with an offering of four ounces of clear spirit on ice for her guest.
“That’s a shame.” Out of habit Elliot swirled the liquid in the glass and sniffed its contents. Next to nothing. Maybe vague grassiness.
“Shame. Shame on me? Sorry? Nooo . . . I’m sooo high. I should sit. Sit with me.” Robin took a place on a couch, one of three distributed seemingly willy-nilly throughout the place. She patted a space next to her as if beckoning a puppy
. Elliot sat. He gave the place another once-over to avoid eye contact. It looked not like a home but like a furniture showroom. Over a concert Steinway hung a Warhol of his hostess. Elliot did the math. The painting, if genuine, would have to have been executed in the early ’80s at the latest, when, judging from appearances, Robin would have been only in her teens. Unless she was mainlining formaldehyde . . .
“Nice Warhol,” he said, fishing.
“Yeah, looks like me, hey?”
“Very much.”
“It’s Lucky’s second wife, Melinda. It was in storage. I thought, she looks just like me, what the hell. It’s a Warhol, right? And where, like, Warhol’s dead, this is the closest I’m going to come to getting him to do me.”
Thinking she was correct in her assessment of the situation, “It’s a great place you have here” was all Elliot could think to say.
“Used to belong to some old Hollywood director. You know, the communist. Pissed everybody off.”
“There have been a few.”
“I heard the story so many times that I’ve forgotten,” Robin said. She was grasping her vodka in one hand and, with the other, absent-mindedly brushing a nipple already hardened by wintry gusts of conditioned air. Perhaps she had been making a pass back at Jerry’s place after all.
“It’s a storied town,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It . . . it has a lot of stories . . . in it. You know, a history.” Elliot hadn’t been laid in many months, and the last few exchanges, fraught with the tension of a terminal relationship, had not been rewarding. Robin was presenting. The prospect here was of sudden and meaningless gratification. There was a vascular manifestation.
“I thought, when I came out here, years ago, from Wisconsin, that it would be much more exciting.”
“I’m from Canada originally. When I came down I thought the same thing.”
“Hardly anybody drinks anymore . . . everyone goes to bed early. Lucky and I go to parties, everybody leaves around ten o’clock.”
“Their bankers’ hours are in New York, so . . .”
“There’s nothing they can do until the overnights come in.” The comment betrayed Robin’s age. “Why not relax, enjoy yourself? Lying in bed at home worrying is not going to make people watch your stupid TV show or go to your stupid movie.”
There was definitely something going on, for now Robin was working the nipple, pinching and rolling it between her fingers. Her long, pale coral nails were, if real, flawlessly manicured.
“There has always been a puritan streak . . .”
“Elliot.” She put her hand up to stop him speaking. A thought seemed to have come to her, something she had to say before its sense was lost. “Can I . . . Well, listen, how would you like to fuck?” She placed her tumbler on the coffee table and turned around to face him, coming so close that he could feel her boozy fever. “I would love to fuck.”
How many people had made such a request of Elliot? Few. None so directly. Maybe good-looking lifeguards or firemen heard it occasionally. Movie stars, even the B’s, heard it. You got it on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, in “Silicone Valley” (“Let’s take it again, from ‘Fuck me, fuck me’”), but that was lazy writing.
Elliot was faced with one of the most intractable of choices: that between fucking and eating, between screwing some thriving producer’s wife and the faint hope of working for the man. Elliot thought of a starving, horny rat sent into a maze, the path to one side leading to a mate, the other to a ration of feed. Today, facing, as he did, escalating debts and a diminishing professional reputation, he first considered the pellets of meal.
“I always like to fuck, but . . .”
“I had some work done down there” — she looked into her lap — “cosmetic, and this is the first day I’m allowed to test drive it.”
“Unfortunately —”
“And like you said, even if you weren’t the most beautiful lover I ever had, I might think about you from time to time.”
“I’d love to be in your thoughts, Robin . . . and elsewhere, but —”
“Sex is tremendous for my self-esteem.”
“Mine too, but I have an appointment, with my agent, that I cannot break.” This was almost true. He did have an appointment with Mike Vargas, his agent, though, given what Mike usually had for him these days, breaking it probably wouldn’t matter.
Robin snatched her vodka back off the table. “See! This town is a total bore!”
“I really appreciate the thought, Robin. Thanks for the drink.”
Two
VARIOUS CUTS OF what might have happened with Robin screened in Elliot’s head all the way to Mike Vargas’s office in Century City. No matter how gratifying or, as now, frustrating the experience, Elliot was left wanting more. He was closing in on fifty and desperately awaiting some diminution in his drive. The infrequent act wasn’t such a problem, but the social theatre surrounding it wasted so much time — to say nothing of the thousands of hours spent thinking about it. Elliot was a creator, a man who made his living making things up; now valuable imaginative resources would be blown on the what-might-have-beens with Robin.
He was dealt a red at the intersection of South Beverly Glen and Wilshire. A long, tall white guy, a stork in a Speedo and a muscle shirt, crossed the street, glassy eyes glowering at Elliot through the windshield as he passed in front of the car. He mouthed something carefully, and with deliberate menace. Was it “chaff”? Elliot saw, as the man stepped up onto the curb on the other side, that he was wearing, for shoes, hollowed-out loaves of bread. Dude was one of those . . . what did they call themselves? “Farinists.” Elliot knew of them. They were holed up in a compound in the hills west of Paso, near the site of the old Enredo Mission, not far from his vines. They were rumoured to be armed to the teeth. The latest in a line of apocalypse-hankering wackos, waving the Bible or the Constitution, neither ever read, under your nose.
“Hi, my name is Stereo Mike,” Elliot sang to himself. The Bran Van number. “Hell Hey! L.A.! Hell Hell A! L.A.!” Indeed, the city was visiting more mockery and humiliation on Elliot daily.
How degrading to be so hard up for work that you wouldn’t put it in some producer’s wife. This was a low point. He needed a break, needed to get the fuck out of the industry town for a time, get his head together. Maybe France, among like minds.
As he pulled into the parking lot he saw Priscilla Smith emerging shoulder to shoulder with the director Dutch Waggoner. Waggoner was nodding enthusiastically at something Smith was saying. Waggoner was hot, Smith was hot, Mike represented both talented youths, something was probably happening. Bastards.
Elliot resolved to ask why it was that he was never part of some package deal.
“Feelin’ kinda groovy, working on a movie! . . . Yeah, right.”
“Because no one ever asks to work with you,” said Mike. “There is no one to ‘package’ you with.”
“Really?”
“You have to communicate your ideas to producers and directors if you want them to become interested in your script.”
“Directors,” said Elliot with disgust. He looked around. Mike’s agency had recently expanded into the adjoining set of offices. Where formerly was a wall, shared with a dental surgeon (vibe retained), there was now floor-to-ceiling glass, through which one could observe Mike’s ever-expanding staff of go-getters making their daily flatteries into headsets. “You fixed up Dutch Waggoner with Priscilla Smith.”
“See them in the parking lot?”
“I’ve still got a few teeth in my head and a few friends downtown.”
“Is that from Citizen Kane?”
“John Huston in Chinatown, but I don’t think I got it exactly right. Yeah, saw them in the parking lot. ”
“Dutch and Priscilla, they came to me with the idea. They took the initiative.”
“They’re young, they don’t know any better.”
Mike, while the same vintage as Elliot, didn’t
look it. He was as spry as his buff new clients. Perhaps he was drinking their blood to stave off aging.
“And it’s not a film or show that would interest you anyway.”
“What is it?”
“It’s not storytelling, okay, Elliot? It’s high concept.”
Elliot started to speak but Mike cut him off.
“Yeah, yeah, high concepts are for the lower orders, you’ve said it a million times. Basically, Priscilla’s thing, it’s competitive rehab for celebrities. But it’s interactive. The audience can vote and reward competitors with like a therapy session or methadone, or put hazards in their way, like booze in the kitchen cupboards or a kite of blow on a night table. It’s interacploitation.”
“So . . . what? They’re filmed in their homes?”
“They live in a compound with surveillance cameras everywhere. Same old same old. What is entertainment these days, Elliot? Degradation and celebrity adoration. This has got both, in spades. It’s a market-savvy pitch.”
“How do you get away with . . . ?”
“It’s shot offshore, on a tropical island . . . what’s the place called? Primitive, corrupt government . . . no American jurisdiction, no unions, and a tax credit to die for.”
Washed-up celebrities battling it out, their cringe-inducing meltdowns, the audience transference and schadenfreude . . . it had a chance. Elliot recalled the delight the press took in reporting his son Mark’s arrest on drug charges. A former child actor brought low, what sport that was.
“People are afraid of fiction these days,” continued Mike. “I mean, if it works, they identify with the character, they say ‘Hey, that could be me’ — and that scares them. The thing that makes reality programming so much more comfortable to watch is the fact that you know that it’s somebody else’s reality you’re watching. Reality is for people who can’t handle fiction — and that is mostly everybody.”