“With a track record like that—“ Victor began to say, and never quite completed his sentence which would have ended, “it will never be made into a movie.” Instead he said, “It is clearly jinxed in some way.”
“Come on, you don’t believe that.”
“I have twelve other books. Option one of those. They’re just as good. Many of them are better.”
“Don’t fight it, Victor. Sam wants it because he couldn’t make it with Frank. I want it because I couldn’t be part of your great team back then. He’s optioning the book. I’m handling the paperwork. It’s a done deal. You’ve got no say in the matter. You sign the papers and you take the money. Ahhh! Here’s the Prime Rib. Dig in.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-five
“My friend Lindsay says this producer sees absolutely no one!” Dmitrios assured Victor. “He only involves himself in a very few special projects every year, and each one is a gem.”
They were attempting to get past the 405 freeway traffic jam, which evidently happened at all hours of the day at Wilshire Boulevard
Dmitrios went on to mention three movies that Gaspar Gustavsson had put his very rare imprimatur upon, although it wasn’t at all clear to Victor in what capacity he’d done so. Had he been producer, co-producer, executive producer, or what? The films themselves were solid middle of the road products—no Adam Sandler comedies, thankfully. Was Lindsay the good looking black guy Dmitrios had been with when they first met?
“So, this Gustavsson is seeing us because of Lindsay? Or because he’s gay and looking for a gay project? Or why?”
“From what Lindsay said—and he was whispering into his cell during a meeting in his office at the time so I couldn’t really make it out clearly—Gustavsson needs a new project. He’s been busy with some other matters and hasn’t really presented any new product to any of the bigger places, and it’s getting to be time to do so.”
Victor guessed he could live with being the purveyor of “product.”
“So he’s quirky, but like genius-quality,” Dmitrios offhandedly assured him.
“Quirky” would adequately describe the three pics he’d mentioned; “genius” wouldn’t.
They’d finally cleared the mess and were moving again, making a semi-circle around the V.A. Hospital’s extensive grounds, and suddenly were back in the midst of tall buildings.
Victor had been dubious until the very moment that Dmitrios pulled the CLK-320 into the parking garage of one of these newer skyscrapers
On the lower level where they located “Guest Parking” there was a glassed-in elevator shaft. Chic.
It was glassed-in on the fifteen floor too when they arrived. Very chic.
The office was easily accessible from the high-ceilinged lobby; not off in some side corridor. Tres chic!
A not-too-attractive gay man in his late twenties let them in, sat them down in real chairs at a real coffee table with manicured plants, and popped in to the other door to announce they’d arrived. He popped back out again, said, “A minute or two,” then sat down at his desk and began pecking away at a computer keyboard.
Given the previous two meetings, it all seemed to Victor refreshingly professional.
However, a lot more than a minute or two elapsed while they flipped through recent copies of The Hollywood Reporter and tried not to be too bored.
At last something buzzed at the assistant’s desk. He looked up and smiled. They stood up and walked in.
This office was tall and narrow. A desk filled the far end. Three tall windows behind it gave a view down Wilshire Blvd toward the ocean.
To say the room was stark would be an understatement. No shelves, no pictures, no plants. Two leather director chairs and the big bare desk with its own leather director chair. The far half-wall below the far windows held a blond wood credenza with one door open enough to see it contained scripts. Lots and lots of scripts. All this was reassuring.
Gustavsson was small with an oddly shaped body and a bald head. His face reminded Victor of those characters who flit in and out of Ingmar Bergman films, where they might be janitors or court jesters, or they might easily be—Death! Come to life! His eyes were red and runny looking, his face gaunt with a hint of a rictus about his pulled-back mouth, his nose bony and large, his ears gargantuan, almost gargoylesque. He wore a black turtle neck, black canvas belt, black levis, black rubber-soled plimsolls. When he greeted them with several large florid gestures inviting them to sit down, the hands he displayed were gaunt, bony, and enormous.
By now, of course, Dmitrios and Victor had honed their spiel to an efficacious, information-rich, twenty minute-long pitch. His manager would “Intro” Victor and his ouevre and then discuss the “social changes in the world” that Victor allegedly represented and wrote about.
Victor would then step in and explain why he’d written the novel Never Can Say Goodbye and what he had hoped to accomplish with it. Dmitrios would rapidly follow up with the novel’s literary reception, its great reviews, its terrific sales, its many readers who were sorry the book ever ended, and the many nominations and awards it had been graced with. Victor would mention the British sales, the German and French translations just coming out, and then he would tell the story.
He was halfway through this last, penultimate portion of what he was increasingly beginning to think of as “Their Act,” in fact just about to begin the wrap-up segment, when Gustavsson held up his huge paw and said, “Wait just one moment! This sounds familiar.”
Before they could slip a word in, he spun around in his chair, facing the window and the credenza.
“Yes. Very familiar. Extremely so.”
He almost fell off the chair and onto his knobby knees so that he could get into the over-filled shelves, rummaging through them, all the while speaking in an unending flow of words: “Now I remember, I was reading this book. No wait, someone sent me a reader’s report on this book, and I swear it was just like what you were talking about, about these two cousins and how they had a love-hate relationship over the decades, but they were still bound inextricably and always came together and could never stay apart, no matter where they went or what happened to each of them. But somehow or other it always ended badly for one of them, while the other one always did well, or at least gained while the other one lost. Who would have thought that two stories would be so alike, but then people will tell you that it happens all the time. Take for example,” and he went on to give them two lame examples, all the while faced away from them, hunting amid his piles of manuscripts and books in the credenza, among the stuff which had by now risen into tottering piles all around him, before shouting, “Only I know that it isn’t happenstance. It’s theft. Intellectual theft. And if you think that I’m going to for a second believe you that it’s a coincidence, you’ve got another thing coming. It’s a good thing for you, there is no actual law against this, or you would be nabbed the minute you left my office for this quackery! This forgery! This theft!” he thundered. “Ah! Here it is!” he screeched at them.
He turned and faced them, demonic in his appearance, accusatory in his stance, one huge hand gripping the desk edge, while the other paw easily held out the book he’d been searching for.
“And before you two miscreants and fakers say another word I must warn you this book, unlike your silly pseudo-production, received a glowing reader’s report!”
He said it with such venom, the words were accompanied by such a spurt of spittle, that Victor, at least, fell back, to avoid the worst of the drool ruining his good shirt.
“Do you see? Do you see now!” he shouted at them so angrily, so bitterly, and so loudly that the walls shook around them.
“But, Mister Gustavsson,” his manager bravely dared to say, after at least a minute, and quaking all the while. “That’s Victor’s book you’re holding.”
Dmitrios pulled out a copy from their packet, and held it alongside the other one, showing him it was the same.
T
he wet, watering, running eyes glanced askew at the two identical book covers side by side, in horror.
The man then slid backward, dropping the books, grasping at the bare top of the desk. He slumped backwards onto the floor where he huddled until he’d spun into a fetal position.
Victor looked at Dmitrios, who looked back and put his index finger between his teeth, and spun it around.
Gustavsson was gibbering on the floor, perhaps headed into some sort of convulsive fit.
They exited, looking for a second at his assistant outside.
Without them having to more than “Ummmm . . . ,” he got the message. He stood up and peeked into the office and then closed the door. He handed them a copy of what he’d been typing and said, “Bye.”
They heard him dialing 911 and saying. “It’s me—again.”
In the elevator down, Dmitrios glanced at the paper, bunched it up, and tossed it.
“What was that, anyway?” Victor asked when they’d gotten back to West Hollywood.
“Whaddya think? His resume.”
Page four hundred and seventy-five of the seven hundred and fifteen page Japanese multi-generational saga appeared to repeat. Sure enough, there was page four hundred and seventy-six some five pages on ahead. Victor decided to check to see if other pages repeated or if that were the only one. His heart had skipped a beat. What if it all repeated, and he’d never reach the end?
After all, he was by now highly invested in time and interest in the Inamori clan with its lower than plebian tide pool-clamming origins in Yokohama, its eventual if by no means assured mercantile successes in old-time Edo, the varied social-climbing missteps of the third generation and those nearly disastrous Imperial court faux pas of the fourth one, not to mention some of the more outré sexual proclivities of this newest, seventh generation of increasingly effete, wealthy, if apparently doomed, young Inamori men coming of age under Hirohito and the super militarism of Tokyo in the 1930’s—when Victor noticed the cat again.
This time it was gingerly tight-walking alongside the inch or two of brick wall and settling itself onto the top pillowed portion of an adjacent chaise longue.
He’d seen the cat a half dozen times before, though it had never come anything like this close, and had always seemed skittish to a fault. Probably a rescued animal, beaten daily by a previous owner.
He knew that it was a ceaseless hunter of the many birds that abounded in the Hollywood Hills. He had come upon evidence of its work before, the headless corpse of a pale gray house-dove among his rhododendrons.
Victor had no idea whose cat it was. Surely not the two guys with the big black dog. And definitely not the household further up the hill from him which seemed to be occupied by ten, maybe a dozen twenty-something dudes living in seven rooms intent on working as little and partying as much as humanly possible. Then again, their pet would likely have to hunt its own food. The old man and his invalid wife down below Don Wright? Possibly? The cat looked well tended, black with white paws and a white bib, sleek, and, at least from twelve feet distant, well cared for.
He was just dipping back into the sordid tale of Genjuri’s latest conquest, a peasant woman in an otherwise empty cable-car half way up a scenic mountain, who had just accepted his money in return for a taste of her dirty left foot, when he heard someone calling, “Ellll-vis. Elll-vis!”
The black cat looked up. It—he thought it was a she—must be Elvis. It smooched its eyes at the sound of its name but was unmoved and continued sitting where it was, Sphyinx-like.
“Ellll-vis! Ellll-vis!”
Victor put down his chunky paperback and quietly stood. Sure enough, down there, on his largest terrace was Done Right (Don Wright) wearing even less than usual—a pair of silvery gym shorts and nothing else—and turning about and calling. “Ellll-vis! Ellll-vis!”
Slowly, Victor gently slid the living room screen door open and gingerly stepped inside. There, among several other cards and slips of paper numbers within his antique ceramic bowl next to the phone was Don’s. He dialed and watched Done Right stop calling, look around and go indoors.
“This is your neighbor up the hill . . . Victor? The writer.”
No response on the other end.
“You came to me about the other neighbor’s dog woofing.”
“Ye-ah?”
“Your cat is Elvis? A black cat with white paws and bib? Well, your cat’s visiting me at this moment. In fact, your cat visits me daily. I would bring Elvis down to you, except Elvis seems really skittish and I’ve never gotten closer than ten feet.”
“I’ll be right there.” Phone hung up.
A half hour later Don still had not arrived. Then he was there on the deck, again arriving quite silently. Maybe it was his shoes, which looked like the kind gymnasts wore at the Olympics. He wore an ink black Guinea Tee and the silver shorts, which up close looked like the kind of material NASA used on the moon.
Elvis sauntered up to him and allowed itself to be picked up and loosely held.
“Any relief with the big dog?” Victor asked.
“They moved it to the other side of their back yard. I still hear it barking. But not as badly.”
“I’m not sure why you thought I’d be of any help.”
Victor’s own phone began ringing. He let the answering machine take the call. He could clearly hear Vlacheslav from the William Morris Agency setting up an appointment for next week.
“I told you they wouldn’t pay attention—” Victor began, and was instantly hushed by Done Right.
“You know Joel Edison!” Don said. It wasn’t a question.
Victor smiled to himself: what an interesting development.
“Sure. We go way back.”
He could see emotion of some sort break out on the trainer’s handsome face. The cat felt it too and pushed itself out of his grip, dropped to the terrace, and sped off into the bushes.
“I . . . really . . . really . . . need . . . to . . . meet . . . him!”
Said with such strain and such a total clenching of his upper torso, neck, and head that Victor couldn’t believe it. He was going to ask why, but he already suspected why. Done Right wanted to do a television show or be a fitness guru in a movie or, hell, be a movie star himself, or something of the sort.
“Real . . . ly . . . need to!” Don repeated.
What’s in it for me? would have been the true Hollywood rejoinder. But the more Victor saw and heard of his neighbor, the more unsure he was of what he wanted to do with him, despite his stellar looks and overpowering emittance of testosterone. And he was almost half Victor’s age.
“We’re just old friends. We’re not doing business together or anything like that,” Victor said, not exactly lying. They had nothing signed, did they?
“Can I leave something with you? Would you give it to him? It would be a really big favor, if you did.”
This could go so many ways, right now, Victor thought. It could be a real future, or it could be a real can of worms. Above all, he thought, be casual. What did Krishnamurti write? Wanting is the root of all evil. Ah, but Krishmamurti hadn’t met nor stood in the testosterone-drenched presence of Done Right, had he?
“Sure. Why not? I’ll be seeing him sometime this coming week, anyway.”
Victor returned to his chaise, sat down and picked up his novel, the very picture of soigne-tude.
When he looked up a minute later, the trainer was gone as soundlessly as he’d arrived.
Two hours later, when Victor went to check his mail in the box along the twisting road, he found in it a twelve by fifteen mailer containing Don Wright’s professional photos, variously clothed and almost naked, as well as a labeled video, and some ten pages of closely printed information. All very professionally done. He didn’t look at any of it beyond a glance, but he had to wonder if everyone but himself in these Hills had such a publicity-packet on hand, ready to be handed out just in case s/he was discovered.
/> When he got back to the house he noticed a yellow Post-it attached to one side of the envelope that read, “You’re a prince.”
“No, “Victor said aloud, “Taboru Inamori is a prince. Or at least the youngest son of the clan is about to be one—just as soon as he marries the Emperor’s niece.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-six
Even from this far away in the Ginger Rogers Memorial suite he could hear their voices.
Victor sat up in bed, lifted the red satin sleepy-eye-patches Tobey had thoughtfully provided against the late March sun, and listened.
Andy Grant and Tobey’s voices rose to some kind of a crescendo, high pitched, each saying one, final, frustratingly indistinguishable word. Then silence.
Maybe he was still asleep. He pinched his lower arm. No. Yet now it was all quiet.
Suddenly he heard the sound of a car revving up and taking off. From the depth of it, it was the Oldsmobile. Tobey had left.
Of course, Victor was half expecting something like this. Ever since he’d arrived back in Palm Springs yesterday mid-afternoon, he’d sensed tension in the house: Tobey skulking about and rather surprisingly being ginger about being in the same room whenever Andy was there. Andy had been gloomier than usual. Curt and unwilling to talk. Stomping about when he did get up to move.
Even the dogs had come to stay with Victor when he’d gone out to the pool with a copy of The Married Man, a big glass of iced tea, and a towel. Cassius and Portia hung around him all afternoon—around him, whom they usually barely tolerated and had certainly never gathered this closely to before!
Dinner last night had been the only bit of relief in the dour atmosphere, and it was a comic relief. Es and El (Esteban and Ellmore) had come over early and had been in rare form. Undistracted by two weeks of fun in the sun in North Africa, their relationship had been reconstituted and its excesses re-infused to its core by fourteen days of Elmore’s unceasing jealousy as Esteban was approached by one Maghrebi cutie after another. “This was no surprise,” Elmore was philosophical if digging, “since Stebie wore virtually nothing all the time we were there and took off whatever he had on at any possible two degree rise in the temperature. Those agog lads have seldom seem so much unsoiled, light tan flesh in their poor, deprived lives.” For his own part, Esteban remained unconcerned, not to mention unabashed by these fanciful recountings of his possible infidelities. Whenever they were alone, he continued his low voiced verbal assault upon Victor with statements such as, “I’ll fill your anus with whipped cream and eat it all out,” and other such alleged titillations, more colorful in the contemplation than in the “it’s-too-#$#@^*-cold!” reality.
Justify My Sins Page 30
