That revelation occurred at twenty-nine thousand feet over Ohio. By Missouri, the sun had set out his left hand window, and they’d gotten tipsy on the free martinis and had managed to wolf down three orders between them of the not-bad Tournedos Rossini. At Kansas City, the lights dimmed for nappies, but they kept drinking and were each given second plates of dessert—New York cheesecake with a blackberry center. By then they were on a first name basis, and she was telling him in gross detail (which he encouraged) about her first two fiancées. The first was the heir to an international hotel fortune with a propensity for mutual anal shenanigans and a substantial “tool kit” for said fetish custom manufactured in Finland. The second had been a Dallas Cowboys linebacker who “screwed like a quarter horse” but whom she later discovered had made identical outfits to her own, which he then wore while masturbating privately in front of a mirror.
But if all that weren’t great enough to begin a Hollywood flight with, a world famous comedienne had been in the row in back of them, all by herself, having bought both seats so she could spread out, and she had whined and demanded so much, that approximately somewhere over Denver in the flight the First Class steward, “a well-put-together queen of a certain age” as Vic’s pal Gilbert would describe him, had had just about enough of her, and had loudly replied to her umpteenth-hundred demand, “You’re not the only passenger on board, you know, Mizz _____. Maybe these passengers,” pointing to him and the famous guy’s wife, “would like some extra service too.” The steward had then turned around and done what Gilbert would have agreed was “flouncing off in a huff.” He’d later reappeared and very loudly offered them more martinis and a third plate of cheesecake.
Tipsy, already cake-stuffed, and very surprised, they had accepted and then giggled and giggled like naughty children until they’d landed.
They kissed each other’s cheeks in the VIP lounge upstairs at LAX as their luggage was being gathered by various uniformed people, making promises Victor was sure they’d never fulfill to see each other soon. Meanwhile, her husband—looking shorter, more muscular, and a lot more butch than he’d ever seemed on the tube—and Vic’s newly arrived and self-announced chauffeur—tall, dark-haired, uncute and rather distressed facially—had looked on without comment.
And now here he was, all by himself, in the spacious backseat of the powder blue Fleetwood six-door, zipping along Sepulveda Boulevard, headed north toward the hotel. The night was cool and balmy, utterly blissful after a Manhattan winter that seemingly refused to end. When he’d left, there had still been six foot high ridges of filthy frozen and refrozen snow banks hard as steel all around the airport and defining the runways. Here, it was like being on another planet—or at least another hemisphere. He could smell night-blooming jasmine and orange blossoms, and was that frangipane too? It was Highway Heaven and if he weren’t so intent on looking around, he would have settled back into the deep tufted leather seat with his eyes closed and just listened to the perfectly reproduced sounds of Tchaikovsky’s Mozartiana from the three built-into-the-sky-blue-satin-ceiling speakers and simply inhaled the night.
Of course arriving so late—11:45 at night—there would be no one but the night staff in the hotel lobby. But Vic checked in easily, attempting not to gape at the immense, celebrated lobby. The very stiff-backed and somewhat puckered-mouth fellow who presided behind the desk at this hour explained extremely carefully to Victor’s driver, as if English were his second language, where he might park every day. He then produced a plastic-like placard for the driver to place at a very particular spot in the front right area of the Caddy’s windshield (not an inch to the left or right, he warned) whenever he parked outside or was awaiting Victor.
That was when Vic discovered that the driver would not be there at all hours and times but would instead come for him for any meetings. He needn’t call for the driver for anything having to do with the production company, although Vic could also prearrange the driver for other trips, day or night. Oh, and the guy had one night a week off.
The driver took Vic aside as he was leaving, “All the staff here will look at you like they expect a tip. Don’t do it. Only tip the bellman and the waiters. And not too much!”
“What about you?” Vic asked. “Do I tip you?
“Only if I do something special.” He laughed insinuatingly, making his face even uglier. Then he added, “I’ll tell you when.”
The fireplace was huge and in full flame despite it being more than sixty-five degrees outside, but the Cyclopean armchairs and sofas facing it in upholstered versions of the famous Bird of Paradise wallpaper were bereft. The thin bellman scrambled directly up the long staircase to his room and Vic followed. But once settled in the two large rooms with their own version of the famous wallpaper, he immediately decided he was far too excited and came back downstairs to look around.
He heard laughter from a doorway that turned out to lead into the Polo Lounge, but he was too timid to enter, although there were groups of twos and threes at tables and at the bar.
Another hotel person, shorter, more ethnically raven-haired, passed by, and seeing his bewilderment said, “Kitchen’s closed for food, sir. But if you want a bite, try the Coffee Shoppe,” and he led him circuitously around to it.
As they passed an older couple, he distinctly heard her say, “No. I don’t know him. Do you know him? Maybe he’s in music. They’re all young in music these days!”
The Coffee Shoppe was closed too, and wouldn’t reopen till six a.m. but the hotel guy went into a doorway and found a chef there who did room-service and he came out, very friendly, also ethnic looking, and took Vic’s order for a nighttime snack. “If you like grilled cheese, sir, I can make you one. Or, you might want to try our version of it. It’s called a kay-sa-dee-ya.” Okay, Vic would have that, he said. And beer.
He signed something, then walked out to the pool, deserted this late but with voices filtering out from the Polo Lounge, and it all seemed so strangely different: the palm trees high above, the soft slurring of flowering bushes with wind, and the stars beyond the encircling mist.
By the time Vic returned to his suite, there was the food, all laid out in covered salvers with vanilla napery, smelling great. He’d just begun to eat when the hotel phone rang.
Surely not the people from Silver Screen Films? They weren’t watching him this closely, were they? And it couldn’t possibly be Marcie?
“Hel-lo! Beverly Hills Hotel, Suite Thirteen! I have always wanted to answer the phone like that.”
“Tell me you are absolutely quivering with room service, and that you have a champagne flute in one hand and jam sauce dribbling down your chin from a Charlotte Russe in the other
Gilbert Onager, his closest friend in Manhattan.
“Gilbert, snookuns! No gentiles ever eat desserts with French names anymore.”
“Not even Peche Melba?”
“Nope. What ungodly time must it be there? Like sunrise?”
“Close. I put the alarm on to wake me, so that I could get all the dish, the impressions, the feelings, the thoughts, momento por momento, as it is happening to luckly little toi!”
“Dearest Gilberto. Dearest, utterly demented, Gilberto. No one in their right mind would ever drea . . . Well, if I must. The napkins here could swaddle a grown man as a diaper with room to spare and are softer than cashmere. Ironed with creases, they stand up by themselves.“
“Ooooh!” Gilbert cried.
“The grilled cheese sandwich whipped up especiallymente pour moi by the overnight room service chef, Manuel, is actually some Spanish concoction and is just runny with three cheeses, the name of only one of which I actually recognized, placed atop dots of jalapeños—hot little green peppers to you—and perfectly barbecued chicken breast strips, between two white cornmeal tortillas that would swathe even your enormous ass.”
“He’s there nine minutes and he’s already speaking the lingo! My ass is a lovely size. Or so Jeffrey says.”
“Jeffre
y is blind as a bat. On the tray alongside it,” Victor continued, “is carefully placed half of a perfectly ripened avocado, sliced finger wide, and two Valencia oranges also sliced. Several springs of curled parsley and a scattering of a black bean, toe-mah-toe, and corn salad grace the side of the enormous plate. A Pentel-thin wavey line of tomatillo salsa verde encircles it all, for a visual effect.”
“Stop, I beg you.”
“The beer, ice cold, is imported from Mexico, natch. A brand I’ve never heard of. Tres somethings or others. And has a slice of lime squashed into the top, past which one pours it into a glass.”
“I die. I die.”
“Shall I stop?”
A very offended, “Of course not!”
“Some elderly people in the lobby thought I was a rock star. I did not disabuse them. She was wearing a gold lame top of such vintage I suspect it was possibly the first one ever fashioned by man.”
“Be still my heart.”
“The car I have for the week met me at the airport and is the largest Caddy made in Detroit, painted that same shade as your sainted grandmother’s hair, with burled wood inside the doors and surrounding a small bar. My driver’s name is Anthony Cecil Meade and he is plug-ugly and six feet six with a bizarre scar from above one eye along the sideburn line and around the lower part of the ear. Doubtless picked up in Alcatraz when he was doing a dime on manslaughter because, Gilbert, he resembles nothing so much as an underpaid, and definitely under-utilized, but nevertheless quite trigger-happy assassin.”
“Gasperooni. Basket size? And do not say you didn’t notice.”
“Sizable.” Victor admitted. “Could be tube socks.”
“Or tube steak!”
Gilbert was by his own admission “on the modest side, genitally speaking”—seldom a fault in a bottom with a perfect bubble butt—and from what Vic had seen of Jeff, getting blown in the Everhard Baths, he was nothing special either. Yet both of them were constantly pretending to be size queens.
“As for the flight here. Hold on to your oversized Fellini picture hat with too many ribbons, Gilbert. This one was for the books.”
“You met someone famous?”
“Try, I sat next to _____ _____’s wife the entire way.”
“You must stop now, Victor. I’m close to cardiac arrest.”
“And in the row behind us,” Victor continued unfazed, “Was _____.”
“And now I’m experiencing a complete panic attack. She’s my all time fave—”
“Who turned out to be a to-tal, de-mand-ing, ut-ter bitch on wheels!”
“No! I’ve just passed out,” Gilbert announced. “The next sound you shall hear is my death-from-too-much-dish rattle.”
“Are you sitting down? Are you in the big living room chair obliquely looking down into Needle Park?”
“How did you guess?”
Then Vic told him everything that had happened.
As he spoke, finishing off the beer and spitting out the lime wedge, twirling avocado and orange slices at the end of his fork in salsa verde, then nibbling on them, he could so precisely picture his closest friend that it was as though he were looking through a wall-mounted camera.
Gilbert would be clad in his Barney the Dinosaur grape-juice-purple flannel pajamas with the double cloth sole-stockinged feet and button-up front and back flaps. The largest size available in Macy’s Boys Department, because while Gilbert was petite, he was also a man of thirty-two. The pre-war ten foot ceilinged West Side apartment would be heatless and thus ice-box cold this early in the day, so he’d also be wrapped in the eiderdown federbed Jeff had bought for them in Dusseldorf last year and seldom used himself because he was one of those heat-manufacturing sleepers. Gilbert’s green-as-a-Coke-bottle eyes would still have a slight film on them, since it physiologically required a minimum of two hours for him to fully awaken, and for much of that time he resembled a four month old infant: glistening pupils, dewy cheeks, bruised-looking lips, squonched earlobes. His unfashionably short, Gund-bear-brown hair, with its natural cedar highlights and hint of a widows peak would manage to look rumpled until it met one pass of a flexible comb, at which point it lay down as though painted on. His upturned nose and long vulnerable looking nostrils made him look years younger. (“Don’t you drown in the rain?” had been nine-year-old Victor’s introductory question to him when they’d first bumped into each other and gotten Anorak arms and pinned-on gloves tangled up in a fourth grade wardrobe.)
Utterly unathletic Gilbert, whose closest approach to a sport had been “jazz dancing” in his early teens, had, like most guys Vic considered to be “homunculi” (that is, under five-feet-two) a near-flawless body, as perfectly proportioned as a Da Vinci drawing, and featuring those gorgeous and dynamic buttocks. This commanding evidence of apparent masculinity was almost always promptly overshadowed by Gilbert’s nearly unstoppable femminess of attitude and gesture. Over the years, Vic had himself become far more macho, indeed downright butch, had worked out and exercised way past the norm, because of the need to constantly and usually instantly rescue Gilbert from one form of unjustified assault or another. These had ranged from the not unexpected school yard bullies and always volatile street ball toughs to otherwise colorless college profs with a yen for nude spanking, and normally sane boyfriends who just couldn’t resist slapping him around a little during sex.
Gilbert possessed a solid sense of self esteem and a pleasant, not unmanly tenor voice. Under Vic’s careful and iterated tutelage over the decades, Gilbert had come to understand that in any new or even marginally dubious situation, he must deeply tamp down his inner Lorelei Lee until the last possible moment, when it would invariably erupt, complete with silver balloons, champagne bubbles, and platinum curls.
When Vic was done talking, Gilbert audibly sighed. “I’m bouche baie from a surfeit of glamor, even at second hand. The sun is up. Nothing better could possibly happen to me today than this wondrous phone call, so I’m calling in sick and staying home.”
“Mister Mitch will have a heart attack, if you do.”
A reference to Gilbert’s employer, a just-off Park Avenue florist. “Em-Em,” as Gilbert usually called him, despite his unruly toupee, too obvious maquillage, and High Society pretensions, had a client list and delivery address book that The Heart Association would commit mayhem for.
“He’ll probably also develop hives by noon. Uggh. That’s an unattractive picture! Well then! It’ll be the morning off! Who cares? After all, it’s your very first night in Aitch-Wood!”
Pleased that someone else was sharing it all, Victor hung up, brushed his teeth, changed into his new sapphire-blue silk boxers and fell asleep reading John Fowles’ latest, most impenetrable yet book that he’d begun on the plane, then forgotten because the TV guy’s wife had been so much fun.
Just before he dozed off, Victor thought, Welcome to El Lay. Welcome to the Ho-tel Ca-lee-for-nya!
CHAPTER THREE
Jim was speaking into the phone now, at one end of the huge conference room, gesticulating at no one in particular as he spoke facing the floor-high glass windows that gave a sweeping view down, down, deeply down off this plateau of Sunset Boulevard into a vast bowl of Los Angeles—or West Hollywood, or South Hollywood, Victor couldn’t be sure, though he’d looked over a map at the hotel earlier in the day. Because the weather was unnaturally crystal clear—where was the famous smog everyone talked about?—just beyond the bowl of unending two and three story buildings, and a single, lonely, horizontal line of skyscrapers, he could make out a ridge of hard brown hills, and beyond those to the left what looked like downtown, backed by picturesque gray mountains with snow on them. A cluster of skyscrapers, and, to the right, another sharply angled cluster of much less altitudinous structures—apartments? hotels?—fronting the glittering-in-the-early-afternoon-sun Pacific Ocean. He already knew that was Santa Monica.
“Ellen,” said Stan, the not uncute heavy-set guy in the tan shirt and sharply creased brown trousers, identi
fying the caller. Thinking he’d been addressed, Vic turned to say something in response only to see Sam, the youngest of them all, standing at the side table fixing himself a mug of half coffee, half hot chocolate. Sam had been addressed, not Vic. Whiplash thin, his frame accentuated by his black slacks and deep blue shirt, Sam now turned and asked, “His wife? You know her, Stan? Do you believe it?”
“I met her a half dozen times,” Stan clarified, out of the side of his mouth, so that Victor faced aside again, feeling he was intruding, and he even edged slightly away from them although he clearly would be in hearing distance unless he left the room altogether, not a real option. “And, I don’t know if she is.” Adding, “He thinks she is.”
“What’s he going to do about it anyway? . . . If she is. She’s got the trust fund, right?”
“I say let her. You know, keep her out his hair a bit.”
“Yeah,” Sam sniggered. “They are a little bit too close, if you know what I mean.” He uttered a little snort of a laugh. “It’s not natural.”
“Wives!” Stan concluded, dismissively, as though he’d never even consider one.
Jim was now saying into the phone: “No. I don’t know exactly when. After this. Well, but I’ve changed my mind and I’ll be home early. No, I don’t know exactly when! After this meeting! When this meeting is over! I’m at a meeting, you know.”
There was one more exchange too quiet for Vic or any of them to hear since Jim faced away, his forehead against the window. Then he hung up, or rather stopped talking, still holding the phone, with its forty foot long cord, still staring out the window.
Stan and Sam sat down at the opposite side of the big pale green glass and matte metal German conference table that filled yet failed to dominate the oversized room. Taking that as a cue, Victor sat opposite them.
Stan had a much-thumbed looking copy of the paperback of Justify My Sins which he was tapping with two fingers as he sipped his coffee. Vic had spotted another half dozen fresh copies of the book outside on the receptionist’s desk, and three more piled next to the Danish and croissants on the matching glass and matte metal German side table. Vic wondered if he ought to take one and pretend to read it. He wished he’d brought his Sony Personal CD player to the meeting.
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