As I sat there sunk in pseudo anthropology, the dreary images chased across the tube: FULL SHOT, CLOSEUP, MEDIUM SHOT, CLOSEUP. Only the closeups seemed to register: Lee - Lee - Lee - Her face serenely strange under its carrot cloud; soft green gemstone eyes focused at infinity. Intercut with the other shots, her meditative face rebuked her wagging, spastic body.
I froze a closeup by chance as she glanced at the camera. The great green eyes watched me patiently; the face asked: why are you looking?
Because you’ve got me hooked.
Nonsense: she’s just a girl in a sleazy film. The right freeze-frame makes anyone look eerie.
No, not “eerie”; something more. There was an odd transparency that gave the illusion of looking below the skin, beneath the skull, into a singular, sexless, inner beauty. She was beautiful, but she wasn’t, but she was - and even frozen on the grainy little screen, she oscillated back and forth, compellingly. I stared for half a minute, as still as she was, then shook her image out of my head.
I jabbed the pause button and the ritual coupling resumed.
Hm: a truck shot; that meant a dolly. Four, maybe five lights - and up high too. No ceiling. Looked like a set. A studio.
Denise’s studio? Well, it was a place to start. Maybe I could find Lee - I mean find the film.
In and out, in and out. Awful stuff. Ugh; enough. Profoundly depressed, I ejected the tape, returned the tawdry office to darkness, then pointed the Rabbit home to Laurel Canyon.
East Hollywood was snoozing in the late orange light: bungalows and stucco flats and unmarked warehouses hiding obscure goods. A frail grandma was pushing home a giant supermarket cart bearing two tiny parcels full of supper.
The Angelus.
* * * *
I was still evading Lee’s green-eyed gaze when I got home to find my young landlady on her knees in the flowers beside the drive. Plants: in pots, plots, boxes, beds, and barrels, L.A. plants obsessively.
“Hi, Sally.”
She sat up and grinned, displaying a T-shirt emblazoned GOOD AND PLENTY!” The candy box depicted was contorted into a topologist’s erotic dream.
“Aren’t you uncomfortable without your undies?”
She pushed at her damp, Viking hair. “Nope, I took the Cosmopolitan test.”
“The what?”
“They ran an article on how to tell if you could go braless.” She stood up, dusting her hands on filthy shorts. “See, you take a pencil and push it up under your boob.”
“Ow!”
“Horizontally, dimbulb. If you can’t hold the pencil, you stick out enough to do without a bra. If the pencil stays there, you’re too droopy.”
“And what was your result?”
“Do you realize how male this whole discussion is? Listen: I made lasagna.”
“Do you realize how female that transition was?”
Sally ignored this feeble face saving. “What do you say? I’ve got a ton of it.”
“I don’t know, Sally....”
“Well, see how you feel later. I’m going to go shower. I’m all stuck together.” She tugged at her damp T-shirt and the candy box approached its normal shape.
Sally was built to special order for Wagner or Renoir, whose taste I most certainly share; and our dinners often lead to other things that are fun too.
Oh hell. To be honest, I love Sally, obsessively, foolishly - and without encouragement. She chortles at my smart remarks and pats my arm in passing as we cook rich suppers in her warm kitchen. She shows me the sardonic wit she can’t reveal at work. And when we wander off to bed, she wraps me in an embrace so comprehensive it engulfs me, soul and body.
But in the morning she rises cheerfully to resume a life as disconnected from mine as if we’d simply shared a bus seat.
Drives me nuts.
Sally ambled toward the house, still cleaning her hands on her khaki behind. She’d got the hillside cottage in a divorce settlement and rented me the downstairs flat to help pay the mortgage. Considering my income, her choice was ill-advised.
I descended eight steps to my front door, dreading the evening routine. Today’s mail: three final notice bills and an offer to sell me desert property: YES! S. Wimpston , you are a WINNER!!!
I unlocked the flimsy door and trudged into my dank, empty cave: cinder block bookcases on the left wall, floor to ceiling and corner to corner. Back wall mostly hidden by my photographs in snap-together frames. Living room paved with dirty clothes. I waded through them to the TV set to check the guide: zilch. Over to the kitchen on the right-hand side to consult the fridge: ditto. Dispensing the last can of beer. “Adding today’s wardrobe to the bedroom floor and into the bathroom, which was redolent of mildew. Its only virtue is a walk-in shower.
The apartment shows the misplaced enterprise of Sally’s former husband. He’d fixed it up to rent for several hundred a month. But since it’s half buried in the hillside, the back rooms are almost windowless and the seeping winter rains paint Rorschachs on the walls. I got it cheap.
I wet the rigid washcloth: hm, a trifle ripe, as usual. Better soap it extra hard. Clanking pipes - another drawback - revealed Sally in her own shower overhead, lathering her abundance as promised. I turned on my own shower.
“SONOFABITCH!” came through the ceiling.
Oops. The sudden water pressure drop guaranteed that Sally’s abundance was now slightly scalded. Under my own water, meditating on the scene above: Sally scrubbing, snorting in the spray. Slippery trickles snaking down her back. Corn silk hair plastered to her brown neck. Singing “When I’m Sixty Four” in a brazen, female baritone.
Maybe I should reassess that dinner invitation.
Sure, to eat her food and share her day and listen to some Mozart in the dusk; to bloody my head against her wall of independence.
Standing in the musty stall, I watched the runoff eddy around my big flat feet.
Still, after a day of Harry Hummel, Denise Tolman, and passive, puzzled Lee, I needed to be around a grown-up.
And Sally was eminently qualified.
Chapter 2
Santa Ana light the next morning on the way back to Pasadena, as desert winds drove out the smog and sucked the air dry. Hillside houses snapped into phony 3D Technicolor and the sky was a perfect cyclorama. The view was breathtaking but subtly unconvincing - an elaborate model shot. Eighty degrees at nine A.M. and the hard glare promised twenty more by noon.
I pursued a favorite pastime as I drove: conversing with imaginary passengers. Today my spectral guest was Woody Allen.
He regarded the surreal landscape balefully through his horn rims: “L. A. Wonderful; my favorite place. Who built those houses, Mattel?”
“You get used to them.”
“Sartre was wrong, believe me. Hell is Southern California.”
“For some people.”
“Look what it did to you. You used to be English, like Matthew Arnold or Virginia Woolf. But now, who could tell?”
“It’s just my tan.”
“If a tan is so important, take a cruise.” Woody leveled large, sad eyes: “You know you’re doomed? First your legs atrophy, then you start telling everyone to ‘have a good one.’ Before you know it, you’re breathing through your mouth. Jesus, watch it!” He clutched his armrest spastically as the Rabbit hurtled around a Buick piloted by a serene grandma too short to see over her steering wheel. The armrest came off in his hand.
“At least there’s freedom here.”
“Freedom for what: to dry your brain like a raisin? Where’re we going?”
“Pasadena.”
He groaned, his worst suspicions confirmed: “California hell. And with my luck, I’ll spend eternity watching the Rose Parade. Listen, just being here is unbelievably stressful. Why are you putting me through this?”
“I need advice. If you had to investigate something, how would you do it?”
“Like Nero Wolfe: I’d stay in New York - indoors. Look, that’s not really the problem, so what do you
say we get right to it.”
“It’s the girl in the film.”
“Better; much better. What about her?”
“She’s reaching me.”
“How?”
“She looks so ethereal. How could she make a film like that?”
Woody nodded until his specs bounced on his nose. “Okay. Right. Suddenly it’s clear: you have this fantastic landlady - “
“How did Sally get in this?”
“A fantastic person - I mean we are talking borderline implausible: smart, together, with a body some teenage boy dreamed up in the dark.”
“Look...”
“She feeds you, talks to you, sleeps with you; she even likes you. But you want more and she won’t give it. So you get back at her: you develop an obsession with this movie chick who is spiritual on top but carnal on the bottom and adjacent parts. This obsession is irrational, maybe neurotic; so to rationalize it, you ask me, the Fellini of flaky females.”
“The Allen of alliteration.”
“Don’t evade the issue, which is, you have a problem: you’re determined to be hooked on a girl you never met; you can’t reconcile what she looks like with what she’s doing in that film; and you can’t admit the combination pressurizes your pants.”
“Hey!”
“Come on: the whorehouse Madonna, the slime angel - I have to tell you these oxymorons are old hat. On top of which, you’re leching at her mother too.”
“Stepmother.”
“So technically it’s not incest. Technically.” He shook his head with weary sympathy. “My friend, you live a highly developed fantasy life, and so what, who doesn’t? But you’re in very great danger of confusing it with reality. Listen: I gotta split; this air is killing my sinuses.”
“Thanks for the advice - I guess.”
His spindly form was growing transparent. “I’ll give you one more piece: be totally careful, Winston. This is not a game.”
Woody vanished.
* * * *
Denise Tolman stood at the maple table in her bright yellow breakfast room, snipping food coupons out of the newspaper. A button-down shirt in a tablecloth check this morning, plus tight jeans whose pocket stitching presumably sent status messages to those who could decode them. I couldn’t.
She didn’t look at me as I spoke: “Denise, I’ve decided to take the job.”
Her contour-handled scissors snickered out a coffee coupon, which she added to a growing pile.
I tried again: “Since Lee is in that tape, she has to know who shot it. So the obvious plan is to find her.”
The scissors hesitated, then stalked an orange juice discount.
“You have no idea where she went?”
Denise scanned the paper for more prey.
“The tape was probably shot in a studio.”
The scissors darted after new quarry.
“Maybe your studio. It’s a place to start looking.”
Her face tightened. “Don’t go there.”
“I’ll just say you asked me to find her. I don’t have to mention the tape.”
“Please don’t go.” She sifted coupons, counting the day’s haul.
“Look Denise: you’re paying me for two weeks. Now I can relax at the beach and phone in fairy tales or I can get that tape back. Which is it to be?”
“Maybe I’ll try the market up on Linda Vista.”
“Denise!”
She looked at me as if she’d walked into a store and then forgotten what she’d come for.
“Denise, what is the matter?”
She picked up a shoulder bag covered with pockets; unzipped a pocket; zipped the pocket; unzipped another; folded her cuttings; stored them deliberately; zipped the pocket. “I thought I had a Cheerios coupon.”
Perhaps this arid light had driven her round the bend. They say Santa Ana winds unglue people. Circling the table, I grasped her arms gently, just below her shoulders.
“Anybody home?”
A six-second freeze-frame, then her left eye extruded one fat teardrop, which struggled through an eyelash, plopped into the faint depression at the bottom of her eye socket, then made a stately progress down her plump cheek. It seemed to take an hour. Even in the air conditioning, she exuded a certain warm femaleness, mixed with breakfast smells.
“What’s wrong, Denise?”
She scraped at the tear track with an index finger, then made an interminable job of refolding the newspaper. Finally: “I’m sorry I got upset.”
“Why don’t you want me to go to your studio?”
“The church group’s shooting there today.”
“I won’t talk to them. But it’s logical to start at the studio. Did Lee ever go there?”
“Yes - well, not often. I don’t know.”
“Hm. Tell me about the extortion.”
“Someone called and said I’d be getting a tape in the mail. For my own good, I’d better play it. I don’t have a recorder, so when the tape came, I took it to Harry.”
“Why Hummel?”
“Harry and I are friends.” The dropped eyelashes suggested more than friendship. “I was shocked by the tape, of course. I mean, I never even saw a hard-core movie. “And when I recognized Lee....”
“What happened next?”
“She called back and said she wanted fifty thousand dollars or Isaiah Hammond would see the tape.”
“She?”
“It was a woman. Remember how I said Hammond gives me half my business? Well it’s more than just half - it’s really most of it. That’s why I’m so worried.”
“But you didn’t want to pay.”
“Fifty thousand dollars?” Her eyes and voice filled up again. “That’s three months’ gross. And with the overhead, there’s nothing left. Thank God Roy had mortgage life insurance on this house or I’d be out on the street with my furniture.”
“Did the caller sound like Lee, by any chance?”
Denise looked surprised. “Maybe.”
“Did you recognize her voice?”
“No. Why do you think it was Lee?”
My turn to play with the newspaper, while phrasing a diplomatic reply. “Yesterday, you hinted that you and your stepdaughter didn’t get along. Could Lee be getting back at you for something?”
She clenched her lips to stop their trembling. Then: “I hope not. I really tried so hard with her.”
I didn’t push it. “Okay, Denise, call your studio manager and say I’m coming. I think we can sort this out.”
Moving close to me, Denise stared hard at my face, switching her gaze back and forth as if to verify that my two eyes matched. “I hope so, Stoney. I don’t have to tell you what this means to me.”
* * * *
I swung the Rabbit off the freeway at Santa Monica Boulevard and rattled past the sex shops and porno movies around Western Avenue, toward Denise’s tiny studio, a block off Santa Monica. The dusty brown sound stage wall proclaimed “Tolman Studios” in faded paint. “Studios” was stretching it for a tired stucco hangar equipped with a dwarf lobby, a rental bay full of lights and grip equipment, and a few mangy cubicles for editing and offices. The sound stage itself was barely big enough for shooting commercials and the entire lot wasn’t a fifth the size of Finart Studios six blocks west, where Hummel rents his office.
I zipped into the front parking lot, which was unguarded by a gate, and penned the Rabbit in a space lettered “21st Century Enterprises” - a commercial production house that expired four years back.
A relief to exchange the surreal sunshine outside for the silent gloom within. I padded down a dingy corridor lit by egg crate fluorescents, heaved open the massive, padded door, and stepped into the tiny sound stage.
The usual tableau: foreground confusion of lights, chairs, and lounging technicians silhouetted by the lit set behind them: a tent contrived from draperies and dressed with potted palms. An imposing gent in Sunday School pageant costume being patted by a squatty makeup man. An Isaiah Hammond show, no doubt.
The fat, weary director was fighting with the camera man: “Whaddya got?”
“Too high. I can see the floor.”
“Oh hell, you gotta boom down for this shot.”
“What can I say? The floor is in the frame.”
“Well tilt up; I mean, Jesus.”
“I’ll lose him.”
“Hell. Satch!” The key grip uncoiled from a chair and ambled up.
“Get him a half-apple.”
The key grip produced a blue wooden box. Old Testament Grandpa climbed aboard.
“How’s that?”
“Now he’s out of his key.”
“Hell. Enders!” Now the gaffer headed toward the key light with all deliberate speed. He began adjusting it as I retreated to the hall and climbed the musty stairs to the second floor offices.
Pepe Delgado was a very busy manager. He signed three letters (first shaking back a gold wrist chain), banged a ledger shut, and dropped a stack of papers in his OUT basket, displacing a puff of dust.
“Pepe...”
“One moment.” He keyed the antique intercom: “Hold my calls!”
“Nobody’s out there.”
“No? Ah. Perhaps the girl went to lunch.” He shot his cuffs, clasped his hands, and smiled. “Now: my undivided attention.”
“Denise Tolman asked me to find her daughter.”
“She is a nice lady, that one.”
“How about her daughter Lee?”
Pepe mimed “remembering,” eyes beseeching Heaven, pursed lips lifting his little mustache horizontal, painful cogitation.
Finally: “I don’t recall her.”
“You’ve never met her?”
Pepe was about as Mexican as a plastic taco, but he saw himself as Ricardo Montalban. He hunched thin, velour-coated shoulders in a Latin shrug: “That is what I said, my friend.”
“And you’re certain she never came to this studio?”
“I am sorry, my friend; I am too busy to keep track of visitors.”
I was already tired of being Pepe’s friend. “Denise said you had the address of Roy Tolman’s first wife.”
“I guess I got it someplace, but it is three years old.”
“I’ll take it anyway.”
“It might be in my files.”
“Would you get it for me please?”
“My pleasure.” He pronounced it to rhyme with pressure.
He didn’t move. Neither did I. We waited.
Finally, with another shrug and a windy sigh, Pepe went to a filing cabinet and, striking a reflective pose, depicted “remembering” again. Then, with a eureka! flourish, he pulled the top drawer, rose on dainty tiptoes to augment his five feet-four, and scanned the folders. He yanked one out.