Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  "Yes you are."

  He turned to look at her, finally. The blood had rushed to the surface of his half-mended face. It was grotesquely red.

  "You think I'm finished, so you're leaving me to be crucified by every piece of shit journalist in the fucking country."

  Maxine ignored the outburst, and picked up what she was saying. "I'll find somebody to take over, who'll protect you better than I can. Because I'm just as tired as you are, Todd. Then I'm going to have one last party down at the beach-house, and get the hell out of this city before it kills me."

  "Well I'm not going to let you go."

  "Oh, now don't start threatening—"

  "I'm not starting anything. I'm just reminding you. We've got a contract. I'm not going to allow you to make a fortune out of me and then just walk away when things get difficult. You owe me."

  "I what?"

  "Whatever's on the contract. Another two years."

  "I can't do it. I won't do it."

  "Then I'll sue your ass, for every fucking cent you earned off me."

  "You can try."

  "And I'll win."

  "Like I said, you can try. If you want all our dirty washing dragged out for everyone to see, then do it. I guarantee you'll come out looking worse than I will. I've covered for you so many times, Todd."

  "And you signed a confidentiality agreement. If you break it, I'll sue you for breaking that, too."

  "Who cares? Nobody gives a rat's ass about me. I'm just a professional parasite. You're the movie star. You're the all-American boy. The one with the reputation to lose." She paused. Then murmured, almost ruminatively: "The tales I could tell . . ."

  "I can tell just as many."

  "There's nothing anyone can call me that I haven't been called a hundred times. I know everyone says I'm a cunt. That's what they say, right? 'How can you work with that fucking cunt?' If I have to hear it in a courtroom one more time, I can take that, as long as when it's all over I don't have to hear your whining and complaining anymore."

  "Okay," Todd said. "If that's the way you want to play it."

  Maxine headed for the door. "For your information," she said, "I could go down to LAX right now, and I could fill a limo with kids who have ten times your talent. They're all coming here, looking to be the next Tom Cruise, the next Leonardo DiCaprio, the next Todd Pickett. Pretty boys with tight asses and nice abs who'll end up, most of 'em, selling their tight asses on Santa Monica Boulevard. The lucky ones'll end up waiters.

  "If I wanted to, I could make any one of them a movie star. Maybe not a star like you. But then again maybe bigger. Right face, right time, right movie. Some of it's luck, some of it's salesmanship. The point is, I sold you, Todd. I told people you were going to be huge, and I said it so often that it became the truth. And you were so sweet back then. So . . . natural.

  You were the boy next door, and yes—for your information—I was a little in love with you, like everyone else. But it didn't last long. You changed. I changed. We both got rich. We both got greedy." She put her hand to her mouth, and gently passed her fingers over her lips. "But you know what, Todd? Neither of us was ever happy. Am I right? You were never happy, even when you had everything you'd ever dreamed of wanting."

  "What's your point?"

  "I don't know what the point is," she said softly. "I guess that's the problem in a nutshell, isn't it? I don't know what the point is." She stared into the middle distance for a while. "You'll be fine, Todd," she said finally. "Things will work out better without me, you'll see. I'll find someone to take care of you, Eppstadt'll find a movie for you, and you'll be back in front of the cameras in a few months, looking perfect. If that's what you want."

  "Why wouldn't I want that?" he said to her.

  She looked at him wearily. "Maybe because none of it's worth a damn."

  He knew he had a riposte for that; he just couldn't figure out what it was at that particular moment. And while he was trying to figure it out, Maxine turned her back on him and walked out.

  He let her go. What was the use of a feud? That was for the lawyers. Besides, he had more urgent business than trading insults with her. He had to find Katya.

  The afternoon sun was not just warm, it was hot, and the foliage was busy with hungry hummingbirds and the Canyon was quiet and perfect. He threaded his way through the overgrown bushes, past the tennis courts and the antique sundial, up toward the guest-house. The gradient became quite steep after a time, the narrow steps decayed by time and neglect, so that in some spots they'd collapsed completely. After a while, he realized the path had divided at some earlier point, and that he'd taken the wrong turning. The mistake took him on a picturesque tour of the garden's hidden places, bringing him first to a small grove of walnut trees, in the middle of which stood a large gazebo in an advanced state of disrepair, and then into a garden within a garden, bounded by an unkempt privet hedge. Here there were roses, or rather the remains of last year's blooms, the bushes fighting for space, and strangling each other in the process. There was no way through the thorny tangle to pick up the path on the other side, so he was obliged to try to get around the garden from the outside, staying close to the hedge. It was difficult to do. Though the plants he was striding through didn't have thorns, they were still unruly and wild; twigs and dead flowers scraped at his face, his shirt was quickly soiled, his sneakers filled with stony dirt. By the time he got to the other side of the garden, and took to the path again, he was short of breath and patience; and had two dozen little nicks and scratches to call his own.

  His wanderings had brought him to a spot that offered a spectacular view. He could see the big house below him surrounded by palms and Birds of Paradise; he could see the baroque weathervane on the top of the gazebo he'd passed on his way here, and the orchid house, which he had come upon during one of his earlier trips around the garden. All this, bathed in clear warm California light; the crystalline light which had brought filmmakers here almost a century before. Not for the first time since coming to the house he had a pleasurable sense of history; and a measure of curiosity as to the people who might once have walked here, talked here. What ambitions had they plotted, as they ambled through these gardens? Had they been sophisticates, or simpletons? What little he knew about Old Hollywood he'd heard from Jerry Brahms, which meant he'd only ever really been half-listening. But he knew enough to be certain those times had been good, at least for a man like himself. Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, the Barrymore clan and all the rest had been like royalty, lording it over their new dominion in the West. A bean-counting prick like Eppstadt—with his demographics and his endless corporate maneuvering—would have had no power in the world this Canyon still preserved.

  Having caught his breath, he now continued his ascent. The shrubbery became denser the closer he got to the guest-house. He would have needed a machete to hack through it efficiently; but, lacking one, had to do with a branch he picked up on his way. The flowers gave up their perfume as he beat his way through them, and he recognized their scent. It was her scent. The scent on Katya's skin. Did she walk naked among them, he wondered, pressing the flowers against her body? Now that would be a sight to see.

  The thought of this had stirred him up; he actually had a hard-on. Not an everyday order of hard-on either, but the kind that was so strong it actually hurt. It was a long time since he'd had a woodie so fierce, and it added immeasurably to his sense of well-being. With the guest-house now in view he pressed toward his goal, feeling curiously, happily, adolescent. So what the hell if Maxine was deserting him? What the hell if he'd never be a Golden Boy again? He was still alive and kicking, still had a stick in his hand, and a woodie in his pants, and the thought of Katya's flower bath in his mind's eye.

  The thicket had finally thinned, and he was at last delivered onto a small unkempt lawn. The house before him was a two-story affair, built in the same style as the main house, simply on a much more modest scale. Above the door, set into the st
ucco, was a single tile, with a man on a horse painted upon it. He glanced up at it for only a moment. Then he pressed his flattened hand down the front of his jeans to push his erection into a less obvious position on the clock, and knocked on the madwoman's door.

  THREE

  There was no reply from within, nor any sound of movement in response to his knocking. He knocked a second time, and then—after a short pause—a third. Still there was no response, so he tried the latch. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open, and stepped out of the sunlight into the cool interior of the house.

  At first glance he assumed that he'd misunderstood what Katya had told him, and the house was not occupied after all; merely used as a storage space of some kind. The room before him, which was large and high-ceilinged, was little more than a junk-room, filled with furniture and bric-a-brac. But as his eyes became more accustomed to the murky light, after the blaze of sun outside, he began to make sense of what he was seeing. Yes, the place was over-filled, but the contents of the room were far from junk. On the wall to the left hung an enormous tapestry depicting a scene of medieval revelry; on the wall opposite was a series of white marble bas-reliefs that looked to have been filched from a Roman temple. In the far corner, close to a great oak door, were more slabs of stone, these carved with hieroglyphics. There was an elegant chaise longue in front of the massive fireplace; and a table, its legs elaborately carved with baroque grotesqueries, stood in the middle of the room. All of this had presumably been removed from the big house at some point, but that hardly explained the strange confusion of periods and styles.

  Moving deeper into the room, Todd called out again to announce his presence. Again, there was no reply. He didn't linger now to study the furniture or the antiquities, but crossed the room to the large oak door. Here again he knocked, but receiving no reply, he turned the carved handle, and pushed the door open. Given its size, he'd expected it to be heavy, but it wasn't. On the other side was a wide hallway, the walls of which were hung with white masks. No, not masks, life-casts; white plaster faces, all caught with that expression of eerie, enforced repose that such masks always wore. He'd had similar things made of his own face, by special effects men. Once for the face wound in Gunner, once for a bullet wound. It was an eerie experience, to look at the finished work. This is what I'll look like when I'm dead, he'd thought when he'd been shown the final results.

  There were thirty or forty masks displayed on the wall; mostly of men. He thought that he vaguely recognized some of the faces, but he couldn't have put names to any of them. They were all handsome; some of them almost beautiful. He remembered Katya's crazy talk about the parties she'd had in the house. How she'd seduced Valentino. Was this collection the inspiration for that fantasy? Had she dreamed of fucking the famous because she had plaster copies of their faces up on her wall?

  The door at the other end of the wall of life-masks was, like the last, deceptively light. This time he paused to puzzle out why, and examining it a little more closely, had his answer. It was fake. The large rusted nails weren't iron at all, but carved and stippled wood; the patina of antiquity had been achieved by a skilled painter. It was a door from a movie-set; all illusion. And if the doors had been made that way, what about the tapestry and the bas-reliefs and table carved with grotesqueries? They were all most likely fakes. Stolen off a back-lot, or bought from a studio fire-sale. None of it was real.

  He pushed the door open, and came into a second room, this one much smaller than the first, but just as cluttered. On the wall opposite him hung a large mirror, its gilt frame elaborately carved with naked figures, men and women knotted together in configurations which looked both sensual and tormented. He seldom let a mirror go by without putting it to use, and even now—knowing he wouldn't like what he saw—he paused and assessed his reflection. He was a sad sight, his clothes in disarray from his trip through the shrubbery, his face like an inept copy of its finer self. He wondered if perhaps he shouldn't turn back; he was in no condition to present himself to Katya. Even as he was thinking about this the door to the left of the mirror creaked a little, and—caught by the wind—opened a couple of inches. Forsaking his sorry reflection, he went to the door and peered into the room beyond.

  The sight before him put all thought of retreat from his mind. Inside was an enormous four-poster bed, its columns decorated in the same lushly erotic style as the gilded frame of the mirror. A swath of dark purple velvet hung in ripe folds like a half-raised curtain. The red pillows heaped on the bed were just as excessive, creamy silk fringed with lace. The sheet, which was also silk, was pulled back, so that the sleeper was left uncovered.

  It was Katya, of course.

  There she lay, face down; her hair unloosed, her body naked.

  He stood at the door, enraptured. The pillow she lay on was so soft and deep that her face was almost concealed, but he could still see the high curve of her cheek, the tender pink of her ear. Was she awake behind her pale lids, he wondered, her nakedness a deliberate provocation? He suspected not. There was something too artless about the way her legs were splayed, too childlike about the way her hands were tucked up against her breasts. And the final proof? She was snoring. If this was indeed a performance then that was a touch of genius. The perfectly human thing which made all the rest so believable.

  His eyes went to the cleft of her buttocks; to the gloss of the hair that showed between her legs. He was suddenly stupid with lust.

  He took a step toward the bed. The floor creaked under his weight, but thankfully the noise wasn't loud enough to stir her. He continued his approach, his gaze fixed upon her face, looking for the merest flutter of a lash. But there was none. She was deeply asleep; and dreaming. He was close enough now to see that her eyes were in motion behind her lids, watching something happening in another place.

  At the bedside, he dropped down onto his haunches, his left knee popping loudly. There was a faint dusting of gooseflesh on her limbs, he saw.

  He couldn't resist the temptation to reach out and touch her skin, as though he might smooth the gooseflesh away with his fingertips. Surely she would wake now, he thought. But no, she slept on. The only sign that she might be surfacing from sleep was the slowing of the motion of her pupils. The dream was leaving her; or she was departing from the dream.

  He was suddenly alarmed. What would she think if she woke to find him this close to the bed, his intent so unquestionably voyeuristic? Perhaps he should go; quickly, before she woke. But he couldn't bring himself to move an inch. All he could do was kneel there, like a suppliant, his heart beating furiously, his face a furnace.

  Then, in her sleep, she murmured something. He held his breath, trying to catch the words. It wasn't English she was speaking, it was an Eastern European language; probably her native Romanian. He could make no sense of what she was saying, of course, but there was a softness to the syllables; a neediness, which suggested they were supplications. She turned her face up from the pillow, and he saw that her expression was troubled. Her brow was furrowed, and there were tears welling beneath her lids. The sight of her distress bothered him. It brought back memories of his mother's tears, which he'd watched her shed so often as a child. Tears shed by a woman left to raise her sons alone. Tears of frustrated rage, sometimes; but more often tears of loneliness.

  "Don't . . ." he said to her softly.

  She heard him speaking, it seemed. Her entreaties grew quieter. Then she said: "Willem?"

  "No . . ."

  The frown nicking her brow deepened and her lids began to flutter. She was waking up now, no doubt of that. He got to his feet, and began to retreat to the door, keeping his eyes fixed on her face. Only when he reached the door did he finally, regretfully, relinquish sight of her and turn away.

  As he slipped through the door he heard her speak. "Wait," she said.

  He was sorely tempted to exit rather than turn and face her, but he resisted his cowardice and looked back toward the bed.

  She had pulled the sh
eet a little way up, to partially cover her nakedness. Her eyes were open, and the tears her dreams had induced were now running down her cheeks. Despite them, she was smiling.

  "I'm sorry," Todd said.

  "For what?"

  "Coming in here uninvited."

  "No," she said sweetly. "I wanted you to come."

  "Still, I shouldn't have stayed . . . watching you. It's just that you were talking in your sleep."

  "Well it's nice to have somebody listening," she said. "It's a long time since anyone was with me when I slept." She wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  "Are you all right?" he asked her.

  "Yes, I'm fine."

  "Were you having a bad dream?"

  "I can't remember," she said, glancing away from him. He knew from his acting coach what such glances indicated: a lie. She knew exactly what she'd been dreaming about; she just didn't want to tell him. Well, that was her business. God knows everybody was allowed their share of secrets.

  "What time is it?" she said.

  He glanced at his watch. 'Almost four-thirty."

  "You want to go for a walk before it gets too dark?" she said.

  "Sure."

  She threw off her sheet, and got up out of bed, glancing up at Todd as she did so, as though to assure herself of his scrutiny.

  "I'm going to bathe first," she said. "Would you do me a little favor in the meantime?"

  "Sure."

  "Go back to the Gaming Room, where we met last night, and—"

  "Don't tell me. Fetch your whip."

  She smiled. "You read my mind."

  "As long as you promise not to be beating me with it."

  "Nothing could be further from my mind," she said.

  "Okay. I'll get it. .. but no beating."

  "Take your time. There's still plenty of light in the sky."

  He left her feeling oddly light-footed, pleased to have an errand from her. What did that say about their relationship? he wondered as he ran. That he was naturally subservient? Ready to do her will at the snap of her fingers? Well, if so, so.