The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

She laughed, grabbed one of the joints and went outside. I finished taking off my other shoe and both socks and went out there barefoot to see if there was any way, any way at all, I could get the magic back.

  SHE SAID, “I wish I’d brought my dog. I didn’t know they let you keep your dog here.”

  “That’s what the hotel is famous for,” I said.

  She was looking down at the little curved street that moved up from Sunset to the entrance of the hotel and around behind. “I can see somebody down there now with their dog,” she said.

  “What kind of dog do you have?” I asked her. “I love dogs.”

  “Oh, just a little rabbit dog, a beagle,” she said. “What’s his name?”

  “Pepper,” she said.

  “I was sitting out on the steps of the hotel one morning waiting for the limo to take me to the lot when this car came squealing out around the hotel and the guy behind the wheel threw a bagful of dog turds at me.”

  She gave me a strange look.

  “Well, I guess he was really throwing the bag at the hotel,” I said, “but I was the one sitting there.”

  “That’s a weird story,” she said, “but I can understand how he might do that, you know, people walking their dogs in front of your house and letting them crap on your lawn.”

  This conversation was careening off the track. “Pepper, huh?” I said. “Sounds like a cute little guy.”

  “He’s the third or fourth Pepper we’ve had. My daddy takes them out rabbit hunting and gets drunk and excited and shoots the dog instead.”

  “Your daddy sounds like an interesting man,” I said.

  “Oh, Daddy loves to hunt rabbits. He says you can learn more hunting rabbits than you can going to college.”

  “Did you go to college?” I asked.

  “No, and I didn’t hunt no rabbits, either. They sent me to the New York City Ballet troupe when I was eleven, and after that drove me crazy I did underwear modeling until I had a nervous breakdown, then I went back to Texas and realized I hat’nt had a nervous breakdown at all, it was just New York. But no matter what, I like it better’n Texas.”

  She started talking about Texas and her daddy and her uncles, nothing big or important, just little conversational items about her family, leaning back with the sun hitting her face, relaxing; and I nodded and said uh-huh and picked at my toenails. Just a quiet day in L.A. My palms were dry again and I felt good. She seemed to have forgotten my stupid remark, in fact, she seemed to have forgotten we were supposed to be heading for the beach and Karl’s house, just relaxed and beautiful.

  “Oh, look,” she said. “A butterfly way up here.” She was pointing at a big yellow and black butterfly who was fooling around the jade plant the hotel had growing out of a big cement pot on the terrace.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” I said.

  She went on to talk about her life as a teenage model in New York and made me laugh a couple of times, not just to get her in the mood, but real laughs, this girl was pretty funny. The mood was coming back, everything was going to be all right.

  Except for that goddamn butterfly, who had managed to get caught in the web of a spider under the overhang of the building right above the French doors, now open, that led to my bedroom. While she talked about life in Manhattan I sat still, praying she wouldn’t turn around to see the spider rush out of his hole and grab the butterfly.

  Maybe it went something like this:

  BUTTERFLY: Oh, help, help!

  SPIDER: I’m coming, I’m coming!

  BUTTERFLY: Oh, help!

  SPIDER: Here, let me give you some medication. There, does that feel better?

  BUTTERFLY: Oh, thank you. I feel sleepy now.

  SPIDER: Here, let me fold those wings of yours, you must be tired.

  BUTTERFLY: Oh, so sleepy . . .

  SPIDER: Let me just drag you here into the shade . . .

  While all this was going on over my head, Sonny talked about herself and never noticed. I alternated between her face and the dinner show overhead. When the spider had finally folded the butterfly into a handy package and hauled it out of sight, I was sitting almost at her feet, listening rapt.

  It was up to her to touch me, she knew what we were there for, and I was plenty close enough to touch, but she didn’t touch me.

  “Your hair,” I heard myself say. I reached out and touched her hair. She turned toward me. There was no expression on her face, her mouth a little open, her eyes looking right into mine, eyes like blue opals, and I pulled her to me and kissed her.

  First kiss.

  Soft little mouth, I put my tongue into it and felt her shiver all over, and then my hand slipped and I fell on my knee beside her loungechair.

  “Ouch, goddamn it!” I said. My knee really hurt. I stood up and she started to laugh and then saw the pain in my face.

  “Oh, you hurt yourself,” she said. “I’ll run get something for it.” She came out in a couple of minutes with a coldsoaked washrag. I was limping around the terrace cursing and crying.

  “Here, sit down,” she said.

  I sat and pulled up my pantleg to where I had skinned my knee, and she pressed the cold washrag against it.

  “Oh,” I said, “that feels good.”

  “Do you have any iodine?” she asked me.

  “I hope not,” I said.

  She was looking at me like I was a wounded Boy Scout and she was the nurse at school. I was not crazy about this, and hopped after her, through the bedroom and into the bathroom. The sun was streaming in the open window over the shower and bouncing off the white towels racked everywhere, making her glow. She had the cabinet over the sink open and was going through my shaving kit.

  “I ain’t got no iodine,” I said.

  “It’s okay,” she said, “I have some down at my place. It’ll only take me a sec to run downstairs and get it. You don’t want an infection.”

  She started past me and I grabbed her by the arm. “What’s all this concern for my health?” I asked, and kissed her on the mouth, hard. This time I could feel her whole body tense up in resistance, and for some reason this pissed me off. The case was closed, we were going to fuck, skinned knee or no skinned knee, and I didn’t care if it was in the bedroom or the bathroom, just as long as we got into it and over it.

  She pulled away a few times but I just grabbed her some more and kept kissing her, and let my body sag so that we were both pulled down to the tile—it was the elevator dream all over again, only real this time, and cold, and angry, I don’t know what got me so angry. While I was kissing I was also grabbing at her body, and she was trying to get me off her, grunting from the effort and talking whenever she could get her mouth free.

  Finally she scraped her fingernail across my knee and made me howl, and then jumped back, into the bathtub.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” she asked me.

  I got up and went after her. She tried to get around me, her eyes wild but not frightened, and I grabbed her and turned her around so that I was pressing up against her ass and that head of hair was crushed against my face. I could smell it, woman-smell, the first womansmell we all go crazy for as kids, clean hair and plenty of it, one arm around her waist and the other on her tits.

  “goddamn you,” she said, “You can’t just up and fuck me . . .”

  “Why not?” I asked her, and pulled her into the bedroom.

  We didn’t get as far as the bed, though. I started unzippering her jeans and had them down around her knees when we toppled over and hit the carpet, but even scraping my bleeding knee on the pile didn’t stop me, I pulled her plaid shirt open, she didn’t have anything on underneath, and her tits just sprung out at me. She was talking in grunts this whole time but I wasn’t listening. I pulled down her underpants, ripping them a little, and then turned her over on her back and held her down with one arm around her while I pulled off my own pants.

  “You can’t . . . do this!”

  “Like hell I can’t,” I sai
d in an amazingly normal voice.

  I stuck my cock deep into her, no hesitation bumps, just one long diving thrust to the bottom.

  She was moist and tight and perfect heaven. She gave a long groan as I went into her, and then not a sound. I had her rammed up against the wall between the bed and the closet door, one leg up over my head and the other, with the jeans and torn underpants still on it, tucked under my arm.

  “Oh, hell, you’re right,” I said, and I pulled out of her and got to my feet.

  I was panting like I’d run up ten flights of stairs. She was still crammed up against the wall, her legs apart, her mouth open, her eyes on me.

  She looked a little disappointed.

  I went into the kitchen and popped open a beer.

  “You want a beer?” I called to her. No answer. I drained off about half and went back into the bedroom. She was in almost the same position. I could hardly pretend not to be interested since my cock was dancing around in front of me, so I just stood there, sipping at my beer, while she got to her feet and pulled up her pants.

  “That wasn’t very nice,” she said at last.

  “I guess you’re right,” I said. I felt okay, and she didn’t seem any the worse for wear. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her finish dressing.

  When she turned around from combing her hair in the mirror I stood up and started to tremble. “Texas bitch,” I said, and we came together, touched and disappeared.

  WE DIDN’T really disappear, it just felt that way. The next thing I knew everything was coming back into focus and I was lying next to the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. I won’t describe the way we made love, there’s only a limited number of choices after all, but what we did glowed and seemed brand-new, our experiment, our invention. Naturally, people have been inventing these sweet pastimes since the beginning and thinking they were unique. Is this love? Who knows?

  But it sure felt good, and I wanted more, lots more. I didn’t know how Sonny felt because I never know how other people feel, but she looked all rosy and clung to me and seemed to radiate hot love for me all the time we were in that room, and I wish we could have stayed there together forever, because nothing is ever the same.

  THE MEADOR estate was on Fourth Street in Santa Monica, high on a cliff overlooking the beach, surrounded by cypress, pine and cedars of Lebanon, an old low rambling vanilla icecream plaster and red tile compound of buildings, tall skinny palm trees with little bursts of foliage at the top looking crazy next to the evergreens. Karl’s little tan Mercedes two-seater was in the drive in front of the closed garage doors, and we pulled in next to it.

  “Have you ever been here before?” I asked Sonny. I walked around the car to hold the door for her, but she was out and looking around by the time I got there.

  “No,” she said. Our arms and legs kept touching as we went around the side, through a little wooden gate and into the pool area.

  “Probably out here swimming,” I said. She touched my arm with her fingers. It was dark and cool beside the house, and I stopped to kiss her, just a couple of slow kisses, and we went on around the big greenhouse and out into the open. The Olympic pool was surrounded by lawn and garden. Here and there on the grass were groupings of furniture, but no Karl or Jim. At the far end of the pool the old man sat in his wheelchair talking to a big woman in white.

  The old man, Max, Karl’s father, with his dark-tanned skin, his sunglasses and the white towel draped around his neck, looked like Gandhi in a wheelchair. He had been knocked over by a heart attack thirty years ago and most people outside the business thought he was dead, the ones who didn’t think he was crazy, but not Max Meador. Karl told me once that his old man made more money the first half-hour of the day than most people will ever see in a lifetime. He would sit out by the pool in the early morning, drinking coffee out of a tiny cup and glancing over the morning L.A. Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, stock reports and whatnot, make a few calls to his broker or his banker, and huge chunks of wealth would be moved around here and there, drawing money like magnets, and then the old man would take a swim, helped in and out of the water by members of his staff.

  “I like to keep busy,” he told me once.

  Sonny and I walked toward him across the lawn. “My God,” Sonny whispered to me, “this grass is like moss, it’s so soft.”

  I told her who she was about to meet and she stopped walking.

  “It’s like meeting the Pope,” she whispered to me, and she was right. If Karl was a prince of Hollywood, then it was sure true that his old man was a king, and not deposed, either, just exiled to his own backyard, if you could call this a backyard, where he manipulated the corporations, conglomerates and supertrusts that in turn ran the movie companies.

  “I have been kicked up,” the old man once said to me. We used to sit and talk a lot, years before, when we were first getting to know each other. “A perfect field goal,” he said, and laughed. Max had a soft guttural laugh with just a hint of the Lower East Side.

  But I dragged her over and we stood a few feet away while the old man and the big woman continued their conversation.

  “What language is that?” Sonny whispered to me.

  “Swedish, I guess,” I said. “Karl told me the old guy learned it just to please his nurse.”

  “Oh,” she said, and I could feel her relax.

  The nurse said hello to us and walked off toward the buildings.

  The old man cocked his head. “I saw your partner a while ago,” he said to me. “They’re in the house.”

  I introduced Sonny, and the old man reached out a brown slim barely wrinkled hand and she shook it. No comment about her name, Max does not embarrass people unless there’s something in it for him.

  I kissed him on the forehead and said, “Another movie.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You sound bitter.”

  Even with his dark glasses on I could see from the way he was looking at us that he knew about this afternoon. On impulse, I took Sonny’s hand.

  “So,” Max said.

  “Karl invited us to go swimming,” I said.

  “I didn’t bring a suit,” Sonny said. “I forgot.”

  I waved at the little pair of buildings just across the lawn. “Plenty of gear,” I said, “but usually we swim naked. At least I do.”

  The old man said, “Don’t mind me,” and laughed.

  “Why don’t you come swimming with us,” I said. “I’ll throw you in the pool if you want.”

  “I guess I better find a suit,” Sonny said.

  I started pulling off my clothes, throwing them on the grass.

  “Have the butler burn those,” I said. The old man laughed again and I could see his teeth, a little stained, but all his.

  “Do you think that stuff will still burn?” he said.

  Sonny headed for the dressing cabanas and I jumped into the pool, nothing like that first shocking delicious crazy explosion into the water, and swam a couple of lengths ending up back by the old man, panting and hanging onto the edge. “Come on,” I said to him.

  “I swam,” he said. “Let’s see you do a hundred laps.”

  But I was distracted and only laughed politely. The truth was I already missed Sonny, and wanted her to come back out and be with me. He knew, too, the old bastard knew everything.

  “She seems nice,” he said.

  SHE CAME out of the cabana wearing a shining blue bathing suit, hugging her arms in front of her and walking slowly barefoot across the grass. Maybe she was scared of Max. I pulled myself up out of the water. I knew Max was paying attention, even though he looked as if he had fallen asleep.

  “Getting chilly?” I asked her.

  She just looked at me shyly and I picked her up, so light, and dropped her in the water. After the splash and yelp, I could hear Max chuckling. I jumped in after her and we swam a couple of lengths together, and then I pulled myself up out of the water again and watched her lapping. She swam long slow strokes, textbook
strokes, and I got the idea that if she decided to swim across the English Channel, she’d probably make it.

  I said to Max, “Let me borrow that towel from around your neck.”

  “No,” he said. “Get a fresh towel from the cabana. Are you afraid to leave her alone with me?”

  There was a hoot from the direction of the house. I saw Jim and Karl coming across the grass, both in bathing suits. I yelled for them to bring over some towels, and Karl veered off for the cabanas and Jim came on toward us, grinning that lopsided shiteating grin that he got when he was really deeply drunk.

  Jim grinned at me for a while, his hands on his hips.

  “Have you been in, yet?” I asked him.

  He fell lifelessly into the water and frogged his way to the other end, as I had done, and then swam a quick chopping lap back toward us, completely exhausting himself so that I had to help him up out of the pool. He didn’t seem to have even noticed Sonny, although this whole swimming party had been his idea. Maybe that was what was making me nervous. Jim, magical Jim, Oh, how wonderful it is to be in love on a day like this Jim, idol of a million squirming females.

  “Oohfff, Jesus God!” was all he could say, though, panting and rolling his eyes. He would never make it if he had to swim for her.

  But of course like an asshole I had forgotten that she was Karl’s girl, or at least Karl might think so. It was the handsome bastard coming this way with an armload of colorful towels that I had to look out for. Jim saw the way I was looking at Karl, and he turned to Sonny, still swimming, and then back to me, and said, “Ah soooo . . .”

  That made everybody in on the big secret except Karl, and possibly Sonny. I guess it was all over my face and no amount of hamming around was going to do any good.

  Jim said sotto voce, “Why not give him a kidney punch while his arms are full?”

  I jumped in the water and swam a couple of furious laps, my eyes shut, not taking breaths, just plowing through the water, and when I finally came up, wiped the hair out of my eyes and looked around, Karl was kneeling by the pool next to Sonny, holding one of her hands and whispering to her. I sucked in a couple of lungfuls and sounded. I could see her legs against the tile sides of the pool, shimmering. I could frog over there and pull her under, or I could let the air out of my lungs and hang on to the filter hole grips at the bottom until I drowned, or I could come up and act like a man.