“You know,” I said, after a pause, “people do lose phone numbers.”
He brooded a moment longer. “So if I called him, what would I say?”
I shrugged. “That you’d bumped into me, and that I’d told you about seeing him at Icon, and that had made you realize who he was.”
“At which point he hangs up on me.”
“Maybe not.”
“You don’t mind if I mention you?”
“Of course not.”
“That would at least be a conversation point. What a coincidence it was, and all that.”
“Sure.” I thought about this for a while. “If he told you his name was Bob, will he be freaked out that you know his real name?”
“Probably,” he said.
“Oh, well. Can’t hurt to say hello. You wanna borrow the phone? There’s one in Renee’s room, if you want privacy.”
“She’s not here?”
“Nope.”
He heaved another sigh. “This is going to be irretrievably humiliating.”
“Then don’t do it,” I said. “Or do it, anyway, and write a chapter about it.”
He gave me a sardonic, brotherly smile, then went into Renee’s room and closed the door.
I was making tea for us when Jeff returned to announce that Callum wasn’t in his room at the Chateau Marmont. He said he hadn’t left a message, since as far as Callum was concerned, he, Jeff, was just a one-night stand of several weeks back. How he’d come to discover Callum’s whereabouts, not to mention his true identity, wasn’t the sort of thing to be entrusted to a desk clerk. Even a desk clerk at the Chateau Marmont.
Jeff waved toward the teapot in my hand. “That isn’t for me, is it?”
“Both of us. Yeah.”
“I have to run, Cadence.”
“You dick.”
“I know. I’ll make it up to you.”
I set the teapot down. “Go on. Desert me. Leave me out here with all the wives.”
He laughed. “I’m meeting with an editor. Otherwise…”
“That’s OK. You’ll be sorry. When my video is all the rage on MTV, I’ll remember this.”
“What video?”
“Never mind. You’re in a hurry.”
“You’ve got a video?”
“I’ll tell you about it later. You want the picture of Callum?”
He hesitated for a moment. “To keep, you mean?”
“I’ve got two of ’em.”
“Oh…thanks, then.” He went into the living room and picked up the photo, giving it a once-over. “It’ll be nice to have. Mostly because you’re in it.”
“Right. Kiss my butt, now that you’re leaving.”
He smiled. “How’s Renee, by the way?”
I told him Renee was fine, that she was on vacation this week, that she was just out for a few hours. I didn’t put much into it, because I knew he didn’t really care. Jeff has always thought of Renee as a hopeless mess; especially since Easter, I think, when he caught a glimpse of her here in high Protestant drag, complete with handbag and corsage, on her way to church. They’re not enemies or anything; they’re just not exactly two peas in a pod. Most of my friends are that way; I’m all they have in common.
“Do me a favor,” I said.
“Sure.”
“Find out about his movie.”
“What movie?”
“The one he’s making. What he’s come here for.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t say I asked or anything. Just let it come up. I’m sure it will.”
“OK.” He thought for a moment before giving me a snaky look. “So that’s your stake in this.”
“I have no ‘stake in this,’” I said firmly. “This is just a favor you can do for me.” For a moment it sounded like something Rumpelstiltskin might say, a wicked dwarf’s decree, so I laughed self-mockingly to convince him of my innocence and offered my cheek to be kissed.
“I’ll call you soon,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “About a movie.”
“Oh.” He meant seeing one, I realized. “OK.”
“Did you read about Pee-wee, by the way?” (For a while, Jeff and I used to watch Pee-wee’s Playhouse together on Saturday mornings. We’re also serious fans of the movie—the first one, not that embarrassing sequel where they tried so hard to make him look straight.)
“What about him?” I asked.
“He was arrested in Florida for wagging wienie in a porn theater.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “With another man?”
“No. Alone.”
“Can they arrest you for that?”
Jeff was already out the door, heading for his car. “In Florida they can.”
I waved goodbye from the front door, watching until his rusty Civic had rounded the corner, out of sight. Back in the kitchen, as I searched for a vase for his carnations, I wondered if he really had a lunch date with an editor or was on his way to the Chateau Marmont for an all-day stakeout of the lobby. He wasn’t above that sort of thing, and I had noticed a certain gleam in his eye.
The following day, in an empty greenhouse on La Brea, we began shooting the video. It was the second time Neil and I had met with Janet Glidden, his American Film Institute friend. She was a tall, skinny white girl with enormous teeth and a slab of straight black hair, shimmering like spun acrylic, that she continually swatted from her eyes. Her manic, fidgety manner, which hindered her work at every turn, might easily have been mistaken by some for cocaine abuse or plain old tenderfoot jitters, but I knew better.
The greenhouse belonged to a friend of Janet’s, who had lent us the place for two days only. That would be pushing it, to say the least, even for a simple lip-syncing job, so I did my best to keep things moving along. This meant standing still, for the most part, resplendent in pink sequins on a tiny, thrown-together stage, while Janet from Another Planet skittered around the room in a terminal tizzy, endlessly apologizing. Her fingers were long and ivory-colored and trembled visibly as she adjusted and readjusted the various sources of light.
The lighting was all natural, she said, and she was very proud of it. She had a drop cloth on one slope of the roof, arranged in such a way as to send melodramatic little God-rays streaming down across the stage. From time to time, she would scurry up a ladder outside the greenhouse and poke at the cloth with a bamboo pole. She was building a set with light, she told me, just as Orson Welles had done in Citizen Kane; it was the only way to achieve “grandeur” on a limited budget.
Neil watched the grandeur from a distance, leaning against a potting table at the far end of the greenhouse. He was in slacks that day, dark-brown gabardine, and a white cotton sweater that hugged him like skin. While he didn’t talk much, he would catch my eye and wink from time to time, as if in acknowledgment of Janet’s loopy, befuddled nature. I think he’d realized, as early as I had, that she just didn’t have it in her to deliver the goods.
When she excused herself and flapped out of the building in search of a missing lens, Neil ambled down to the stage and took a seat next to me on the wobbly plywood.
“Is this safe?” he asked.
It took me a while to realize he meant the stage. “Is anything?” I replied.
He laughed. “You got that right.”
I asked him how it had looked.
“Well…it’s hard to tell, of course, without the music behind it.”
I grunted. “Yeah, well…I’m not holding my breath for MTV.”
He smiled.
“Or public access, for that matter.”
“You wanna bail out?”
I told him I was OK about it. There was only one more day, I said, and Janet’s poignant little film, whatever its quality, would work as a résumé I could show to producers. I was a good sport about it for Neil’s sake, since he’d had such high hopes for the project and seemed even more let down by Janet than I was. I also wanted him to see me as a nice person, someone far too magnanimous to pull a prima donna number, however ju
stified, on some ditzy film student. I cared what he thought about me, I guess. Care. Present tense.
“She’s not usually this way,” he said.
I asked him where he’d met her.
“She was a friend of my ex-wife’s.”
I nodded soberly. “And you got her in the divorce.”
He smiled. “Not exactly. I ran into her on the street, and she told me what she was doing at AFI. She sounded so together about it.”
“Oh, well,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe we should fix her up with Tread.”
He laughed. “He could use some of her energy.”
I told him not to mistake panic for energy.
“Panic?” Hieroglyphics formed on his forehead. “About the shoot, you mean?”
“About me.”
This seemed to rattle him. “I dunno, Cady. She’s pretty cool.”
“She may be,” I told him pleasantly. “But she’s also in the throes of dwarf panic.”
“But she was fine when we saw her before.”
“Sure,” I said. “And then she had a week to think about it. I’ve seen the pattern, Neil. I’ve known too many women like her.”
“You really think so?”
“Yeah, I do.”
He asked if it was always women.
“Women empathize,” I said. “Some of them do it too much. ‘There, but for the grace of God…’ and all that. Janet looks at me and sees herself and can’t take it. She has to get away from it as fast as she can.” I smiled at him. “You must’ve noticed. She’s been running her little buns off all morning.”
Neil didn’t respond, just nodded blankly for a moment, then smiled at something in the distance. Turning, I saw that Janet had returned.
“Find what you need?” Neil asked.
“Oh, yes. I’m sorry, people. I was sure I’d brought it.”
“No problem.” Neil and I actually said this together, like a couple of cats who’d just shared a canary. I hoped Janet hadn’t heard my quickie analysis of her behavior, since it would only heighten her guilt, and she had way too much already. I found her exasperating, of course, but I knew she was doing her best, so there was no point in getting mean about it.
When you’re my size and not being tormented by elevator buttons, water fountains, and ATMs, you spend your life accommodating the sensibilities of “normal” people. You learn to bury your own feelings and honor theirs in the hope that they’ll meet you halfway. It becomes your job, and yours alone, to explain, to ignore, to forgive—over and over again. There’s no way you can get around this. You do it if you want to have a life and not spend it being corroded by your own anger. You do it if you want to belong to the human race.
“How are you?” Janet’s voice was just a tad too loud to be natural. “You must be tired.”
I told her I was fine.
“I can run out for coffee or something…”
“I think we should just finish up,” I said.
“Oh…OK.”
Neil bounded to his feet, making the little stage wobble a bit. “I’ll get out of the way.”
“I like what you did there,” I said. “Those slanting beams.”
“Oh…me?” Janet was so cranked up that the compliment had flown right past her. She wheeled around like a confused crane and examined the delicate play of light and shadow on the wall behind us. “Really? You think so?”
I told her it reminded me of those long shadows on the buildings in The Third Man.
“Well…” She allowed herself a quick shutter-flash of a smile and blushed violently. “That’s really nice, but I’m not sure it’s…Did you notice the latticework up at the top?”
I told her that I had, and that it must look wonderful in black and white.
“Oh, it does,” she said. “I mean, I hope. Would you like to see?” I’m sure she hadn’t considered the logistics of this exercise before making the offer, because she suddenly looked flustered again. “Unless…”
“Neil can give me a boost,” I assured her.
“Oh, well, then…if you’d really like…”
So Neil helped me down off the stage and held me in his arms long enough for me to look through the lens at Janet’s handiwork. Janet served as my stand-in, sitting cross-legged where I had stood, so I could see how the light would fall on my face. It was quite an effect, all right—starkly dramatic and spare—yet not nearly as memorable as the warm mahogany of Neil’s flesh through the nubby roughness of that white cotton sweater.
“Do they teach you that at AFI?” I asked Janet, after Neil had set me down.
“What?”
“Lighting. You seem to have a knack for it.”
“Oh…no. Well, yeah…some.”
“It’s amazing that you can do that with natural light.”
Janet looked at it again for a while, then back at me, a little calmer now that I had shifted the focus onto her work. In some ways, I think she was seeing me for the first time. “I’m so glad you like it,” she said.
Neil and I held a postmortem on the way back to the Valley.
“She might surprise us,” he said.
I agreed that she might and left it at that.
“I hope you aren’t pissed,” he said.
“About what?”
“That I roped you into this.”
I gave him a stern, half-lidded look and told him I was never roped into anything.
“Still,” he said.
I asked if his ex-wife was like Janet.
“No.” He turned and looked at me. “Why?”
“Well, you said they were friends, so I just wondered how much they have in common.”
“Not much,” he said. “Linda was organized. Is organized. That must be why Janet appealed to her. Another messy life to tidy up.”
“Did she tidy up yours?”
“As much as she could.”
“Is that why you broke up?”
“Not entirely.”
“What else?”
He seemed to resist for a moment, then said: “Are you scouting for Oprah or something?”
“No, but pretend I am.”
“She wasn’t much on romance,” he offered.
“Didn’t bring you roses?”
He shook his head. “Or expect them to be brought.”
“Ooh,” I said. “That is a problem.”
“It got to be.”
My teasing had begun to unsettle him, so I veered away from the tender spot. “Was she in show business?”
He shook his head. “Hospital administration.”
Immediately I pictured this chilly bitch with a clipboard; make that chilly stupid bitch with a clipboard, since she’d let Neil get away. I asked him how he’d met her.
“At Tahoe. When I played piano in a show lounge.”
“And she was a tourist?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you in love with her?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“For a while, yeah, I was.”
“You don’t sound that much alike.”
“We aren’t.”
I would have felt much better if he’d said “We weren’t,” but I didn’t remark on it. It was getting clearer all the time that Linda still weighed heavily on Neil’s mind, for whatever reason. “What did you love about her?” I asked.
He thought about that for a moment and then shrugged. “She made me feel talented.”
“You are talented.”
He smiled sleepily. “Not that talented.”
“She liked the way you played piano?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“No,” he said. “Unless it’s all there is.”
“Well…yeah.”
“There was more to it than that,” he said. “I’m making it simpler than it is. I was young then. I needed somebody to believe in me. My family wasn’t great at it.”
I asked
him how long he’d been divorced.
“Almost two years.”
“Why don’t you see other women, then?”
Boy, did that rattle him. “Why are you so sure I don’t?”
“Do you?”
“Some. When I can. The job doesn’t make it very easy. And I spend a lot of time with my little boy.”
“Oh, right.”
“I will. I mean, I will more.”
“Will more what?”
“Date more.”
I nodded.
“Do you always pump people this way?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because people always answer me.”
He laughed. “They do?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Wanna see where I live?”
For a moment, I thought he was just being snide, underscoring my nosiness. “Look, I didn’t mean to…”
“No,” he said, “I mean it. Come by for a while.”
“Well…OK. Sometime.”
“What’s wrong with now?”
I couldn’t think of a thing.
He lived on the second floor of a motel-style apartment house in North Hollywood. It was a clean, serviceable place built of rough white bricks and ornamental iron, with a plastic NOW RENTING banner flapping noisily in the breeze. The front doors were painted either orange or cobalt blue. On the patch of lawn out front, a small child with red braids sat perfectly still on a yellow plastic trike. As we approached, I noticed the eerie fish-scale sheen of the lawn and realized it was plastic too.
There was an elevator, thank God, so I arrived at his apartment in a state of manageable breathlessness. He lifted me into an armchair in the living room, a pleasant, sunny space that had almost certainly been furnished on a single Saturday morning at Pier One Imports. There was lots of wicker stuff in plums and greens, matchstick shades, a preposterous trio of giant Italian wine jugs. The beige carpet smelled marvelously new. Beyond the sliding glass doors, the railed ledges overlooking the parking lot had been converted into twin ecosystems, rife with jungly potted things. Neil’s seven-year-old son, Danny, who was staying with his mom for the summer, was more than amply commemorated by a photo shrine on top of the TV set. Neil handed me one of the larger pictures to examine: the fruit of his loins seated at an upright piano, grinning infectiously.