by Paul Monette
chapter 2
DESERT-GREEN, SNAKE-PROWLED, POWDER-DRY, they rise up here like the last of the West. In fact, as mountains go, the Santa Monicas play the wilderness part to the hilt. They front the coastal plain of the L.A. basin with something like the pride of ranges fully twice their size. And not because they can’t be climbed, since that is all some people ever do. But they aren’t pristine in the Tibetan way, removed forever from man’s estate. One cannot get properly lost in them, or avalanched or height-sick. Still, there are stretches not yet built on that are empty as a dream. Money claims title and trees these slopes wherever it can, from Brentwood east to the steeps of Hollywood. Yet for miles at a stretch the stubborn ground persists, from crest to empty canyon. In a city where most of the people have scarcely a three-foot square to stand on, the scrub-covered ridge of the Santa Monicas is the closest L.A. ever gets to a thing like Central Park.
In the winter of 1919, Abner Willis was able to say that he bought Stone Canyon for a song. Nineteen hundred acres at eight cents a throw, to be precise. At the time it was so much dead-end dust, boxed in by mountains too steep to pitch a tent on, and not a cup of water as far as the eye could see. Though it lay between Bel-Air and Beverly Hills, those heavily gardened districts turned their backs on nature in the raw, as if it were faintly embarrassing. But an old deed-trader like Abner knew a good deal more about land than how to turn it into the south of France. Long after everyone else had subdivided madly, he kept all his bottom land in orange trees and beehives, biding his time for twenty years, and never so much as breaking even on a crop. He put off deciding where to build his house, preferring to ride up all alone and living out of a sleeping sack.
In 1935, he convinced the county water district to use his canyon for the west-side dam and reservoir. He sold it back to the public at better than half a dollar’s profit on the acre—a six-hundred-percent return over twenty years. Considering that he had a thousand back for every dollar he sank in Orange County, the canyon deal was next to philanthropic. Besides, if he’d charged the county any less, they would have been suspicious—maybe his canyon leaked, or it sat on a hairline fault. He couldn’t have been more accommodating, frankly. All he was after was the view out over the water, with a bowl of hills around it. A wilderness all his own within the L.A. city limits.
He used to say he’d got a little corner of Wyoming. Doubtless no one from Wyoming would have seen it quite that way, but more and more, this was how Steepside came to see itself—wild as the last frontier. Abner Willis stood on his empty hilltop, pointing down the canyon toward the dam, and said to Mr. Wright, his architect: “Pretend this canyon’s the middle of nowhere, and build me a house on top of it. Make sure it’s open all over, so the Willises never forget it’s the West down there.”
Abner knew full well where the Mediterranean lower third of the state was headed. The people were pouring in so fast you couldn’t count them. It wasn’t going to end till every vacant lot was taken up. In twenty more years, Los Angeles wouldn’t remember how far west it used to be. By then, as Abner saw it—turning to point the other way, east along the ridge of the Santa Monicas, high above the endless city—by then, the people here would all be living in the future. And barring some catastrophe—say an earthquake seven-five or better, which Abner knew was an old wives’ tale—who was going to protest the future’s being here? The rest of the world, as far as Abner Willis could ascertain, preferred to stick to the past.
On Tuesday the fourth, when Vivien Cokes, the last of the Willis line, came back to the hilltop she called home, she had to do the final leg in a company helicopter. She could have sworn the seats were upholstered to match the jet. But she had no choice. A crowd of upwards of a thousand was jammed so tight at the Steepside gate, it would have taken a car a good twenty minutes to inch its way through. If the widow herself had turned out to be in a given car, they probably would have flattened it. Just to get a close-up of her, red-eyed and bereft.
The helicopter whirled up over the dam and into the canyon, crossed close to the water, and then rose up the side of the hill, touching down on the west lawn. Vivien jumped out first. She ignored the half-circle of downcast types who waited to tell her how sorry they were. She threw her arms around Artie and tugged him away to the house. But he wasn’t any help at all. He couldn’t stop sobbing and asking her why—the very thing she’d counted on him knowing. As to where the blame should fall, he didn’t leave an opening big enough for anyone but him. It was all his fault, he told her over and over. The mortal flesh of Jasper Cokes had been given into Artie’s care. In the bodyguard line of work, a man made only one mistake.
Meanwhile, four sympathetic suicides—all of them thin young women—were laid to the Jasper Cokes affair in the course of the first day. It wasn’t clear whether they died because they agreed the world was awful, or whether the knowledge that their particular star was gay had sent them over the edge. When at last the police came lumbering down the hall to Harry Dawes’s apartment, they found it wall to wall with neighbors, all of whom swore the door was broken open when they got there. Nobody really cared. There was nothing to steal.
At Universal, a couple of jumpy executives scrambled around in the editing rooms and scooped up every scrap of The Broken Trail. This they locked in a vault, with an armed guard dressed like a chocolate soldier. The film’s director, Maxim Brearley, announced to the press (before he went into seclusion) that all of Jasper’s tortured final days were there to see in the picture.
Of course, you could hardly find an out-of-work actor who didn’t have a story to peddle as to the kinks of Jasper Cokes. But most of the dirt was going to have to wait. In the followup work, they’d prove how his whole life reeked of death and the drift into moral corrosion. At present, the media had all it could do to bury him. Or, as it turned out, to burn him up.
It seemed he’d remarked to Vivien once that he wanted his ashes buried high in the hills at Steepside. Just like Abner Willis, who’d always had a horror of ending up another stone in a graveyard. At the time, Vivien simply laughed it off as one of Jasper’s ironies. They were eating a mound of crab in the Cecil Beaton suite at the St. Regis, looking out of a big round window down the length of Fifth. Jasper had always been uncommitted, to place above all else. He didn’t seem to require a permanent home. He preferred hotels. So when he spoke that night of a bare and windy grave site, she thought he was saying the opposite. Why would he care about afterwards? He’d had all his candy on this side.
But when they got together to iron out details, they found he’d made the same remark to Carl and Artie, too, years ago in a low-life bar miles from the nearest cemetery. They saw now that he must have meant exactly what he said. Ashes in the hills was the order of the day. It was only then, when Vivien gave the nod to release these plans to the press, that she first began to see herself as one of three around Jasper Cokes. She’d always thought of them before as three against Carl and his bloodless deals, though here it was she who usually stood and fought. Jasper and Artie tended to be amenable. Furthermore, she always supposed that if anyone split the group, it would be she. But now it appeared the mathematics were over her head.
They settled on a sunset service for Thursday the sixth, and decided to keep the mourners down to five, forestalling the overland invasion of the press by inviting the lady dean of the anchormen to film it from a hundred feet away. This was not enough for the swollen crowd at the bottom of the hill. By Wednesday noon, the police had pegged it at forty-five hundred. The boulevard up through Beverly Glen from Sunset to Mulholland Drive was all but impassable. Most had come expecting to file by an open coffin, thus to wail at the frailty of life. At the very least, they expected to watch a fleet of limos pass in and out. An urn let into the earth with only five in attendance seemed to them a lousy piece of theater. As the numbers grew on the boulevard, they put on a show of their own.
The downhill gate was abandoned, except for security traffic and the delivery of goods. In add
ition, Vivien dismissed the helicopter within hours of her arrival, as being too noisy and disorienting. So whenever she and Carl and Artie left the estate, they were forced to go on horseback. Down the steep and narrow trail on the canyon side, where there wasn’t any road, then around the north end of the reservoir. It was about an hour’s ride. When they reached Stone Canyon Road, a driver picked them up in the powder-blue Rolls and whisked them away through Bel-Air. The crowd at the gate was never the wiser. Vivien made the trek twice, to get out to dinner on Wednesday the fifth, and Thursday morning to shop for black.
It was just gone midnight Wednesday when she led the way uphill on Jasper’s buff-and-spotted horse. Carl and Artie were fifty yards behind her, arguing what would have happened if. An hour ago, she’d sat with them in the Hamburger Hamlet in Beverly Hills. Rough and sweaty in her riding clothes and wearing mirror glasses, she listened while they blamed it all on Harry Dawes. The worst they could summon up to pin on Jasper was keeping Harry secret. Vivien wasn’t buying their scenario, though she hadn’t said a thing at dinner. If they were going to be strictly accurate, she thought, Jasper was more to blame for the boy than the boy was for Jasper.
She looked off across the ghostly outline of the bowl of hills that cupped the canyon. It looked like a mountain lake tonight, with the desert vegetation high and green around it. The sage was heavy in the April air, and something white beside the trail had broken into bloom. By the time she reached the top, she was far ahead of the others. She did not linger to watch the night. She ducked and clung to the horse’s neck so they could shortcut, coming in through the moon gate and along the length of the Japanese garden. She called out Jasper’s groom from the stables, gave over the horse impatiently, and fled inside. It was simpler to be alone.
Harry Dawes was not what he ought to have been, and Carl and Artie knew it. They made a show of his being a zero. They wanted him half whore, half messianic crazy, so they could put the whole thing down to Jasper under pressure. Vivien had seen the type herself, wandering openmouthed on the upper terrace by the pool, the morning after. She had no idea where Jasper ran across them. They seemed to understand they’d be wise to get a good look while they could. Sometimes, she’d almost wanted to give them coffee. Then Artie would come and tap them on the arm and drive them off, while Jasper slept in until midafternoon. Ideally, Harry Dawes should have been that sort.
Vivien wasn’t sure what she wanted him to be. From what she read, he was the Huck Finn of a small Wisconsin town that had lowered all its flags to half-staff and now stood waiting at the depot while the Willis Company shipped the body home, free of charge. The way it was being pitched in the tabloids, he’d announced to his widowed dad that he planned to spend his twenties finding out why the world didn’t work. It was hard to see through shit like this, but Vivien had a built-in periscope from lifelong study of the pitch on her. He seemed quite nice, quite likable and real, this Harry Dawes of Turner’s Falls, Wisconsin, son of a heavy-equipment man.
He only came to L.A., it seemed, to get to the harbor at Long Beach. He’d been on the road two years, and he thought it was time to sign on a freighter bound for the islands. But he got to L.A. and fell for the climate and the rootlessness, which matched his own exactly. He decided to give it a year—about seven months gone when he died.
Vivien didn’t see how she could go along with the Steep-side line, which made him sound like a sullen drifter. The kid loved animals. He lived on books. She decided he would have been good for Jasper Cokes. As the week rolled on, as she paced her bedroom and took no calls, she brooded more and more about the boy from Turner’s Falls. It was as if Harry Dawes could have told her why. Could have told her who to blame.
Artie rode sidekick Thursday morning. They left the house just after seven and resumed the downhill trail as if they’d stopped the night at an inn. It had rained for an hour before dawn, and the bushes on either side of the trail swagged against their legs and wet them to the skin. The pewter sky was bruised in the east with white, where the sun was coming through. Artie had packed sweet rolls and a Thermos in his saddlebags. He pointed down to the grassy spot by the water’s edge where they would stop for breakfast. He must have thought she needed cheering up, because he kept on reassuring her. He seemed to have gotten the tears out of his system.
In fact, she was holding up all right. Not feeling much of anything. A suicide got what he wanted, after all. Her anger had somehow disappeared, like jet lag. Maybe, now that she saw what a fine man Harry Dawes turned out to be, the rage had no place else to go but Jasper. And she didn’t want to take it out on him. So she played it numb and glassy-eyed, and waited out the run of other people’s tears. This feeling next to nothing was almost second nature. It was part of her breeding, like the love of high prices.
“Artie,” she said, because she had to say something, “was Jasper scared of getting old?”
He was riding on the switchbacks just in front of her—burrheaded, musclebound, guileless, shy. He leaned forward and whispered into his horse’s ear, and she thought at first he hadn’t heard her. Then, when he straightened up and pranced ahead, she thought perhaps he didn’t consider the question worth an answer. She decided she agreed. But then he turned around in his saddle and for a moment looked at her piercingly. It was just the way he used to look at Jasper on the set, as if to check out whether he had a part down pat.
“It was being old he would have hated,” Artie said. “But he wasn’t the type to feel it yet.”
“That’s not what Max is saying.”
“He never even had a hangover. Not once in sixteen years I knew him. Jasper liked the way he felt.”
“It’s a funny way to kill yourself,” she said.
They stopped by tacit consent on either side of a hairpin angle, so they faced away onto different hills. She was a couple of feet above him, and she saw him backed by the canyon and the wide and leaden water. In his black shirt yoked with yellow thread, he was surely the only substantial cowboy for miles around. The frontier verities clung about his person, glinting like a sheriff’s badge. Vivien made do very nicely drawing a blank with everyone else, but Artie seemed to require that she be present and accounted for. It was mildness a person couldn’t ignore.
“Max makes out like he saw it coming, does he?” His own directness made his voice a trifle halting. “Like it’s there in Jasper’s face. Like some disease. That’s bullshit, Viv.”
“But Artie, it happened.”
The spotted horse beneath her shivered with impatience, as if to say this wasn’t the right approach at all. She knew that if she’d looked at Jasper’s face herself, she wouldn’t have seen a thing. But she wondered if it didn’t expose some fundamental failure in her vision. Some loss of nerve in the face of love.
“I mean, it didn’t come out of nowhere, right? A thing like this takes years.”
“It’s this way,” Artie said. “He finally got too stoned.” Sounding, all of a sudden, as if it ought to be self-evident. Just two days since, he was choked and panicked to find out why. “I think they both got ripped and played it out like a fantasy. They probably thought they’d wake up after and be as good as new.”
As if it was only a movie.
The horses seemed to sense a sudden impasse here. They started forward, all on their own, as if to resolve it in physical motion. They sashayed down an incline. From the sandy ditch on the uphill side of the trail, a canyon hen and her chicks went scurrying under a bush. Vivien hadn’t ridden here in years, and she was shocked to see how little it had changed. Nothing was ruined. Nothing gone.
When Jasper was in a picture—that is, when he wasn’t on camera—he segued from one to another of the recreational drugs. It was as if he had to work up a state of reverie over the story he was starring in. An air of distraction went with him wherever he went, like a background instrumental. So you never knew, late at night when he talked nonstop and went out slumming, if he was playing some kind of game or only lost in the role o
f Jasper Cokes. Vivien saw what Artie meant. For a man wrapped up in a starring role, there was no telling where a game might lead when the night began to fight it out with the morning. You might get carried over it like a falls.
“When you went away, Viv, did you know you were coming back?”
“Of course,” she said—dismissing it even before she took it in, imagining they had turned to lighter matters. They plodded ahead. If Artie was right, it was only an accident. Jasper hadn’t planned a thing. She wondered if this made her feel any less betrayed.
“Because I missed you, Viv,” he said. From the hunch of his overmuscled shoulders, she saw how it shied him to say it out straight. “See, I never would have stayed this long. Not for Jasper’s sake. It got so he made me very sad. He didn’t mean to, but like I told him, what’s the point of protecting a man on the outside, if all the risks he takes are in his head?”
From the first, there were birds around them, lighting in the sagebrush whenever they stopped, and betting they’d break out the sweet rolls early. A few kept pace—a scatter of sparrows and a pair of jays—but now they bristled and squawked. They had to turn back. They were hilltop birds, and they had no range in the canyon.
“Did Jasper think I was gone for good?”
“It’s the first time you ever left when he was shooting.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
“I know. You’re not answering mine.”
Somehow, she’d never gone out of her way to see what it was between Jasper and Artie. She supposed they must have been lovers once, long ago in college in Vermont. At the time, they must have been equally matched. But as Jasper’s name got brighter, till they knew him in every town on earth that had electric lights, Artie’s scope got narrower and narrower. He was chief valet and dialogue coach, as well as the unofficial final word on Jasper’s look in a given scene. At night, with his stash of whites and blues, he was Jasper’s last connection.