The Hollywood Trilogy

by Don Carpenter

  “Where?” she whispered urgently.

  “Upstairs!” he said, and they rushed back into the house, up the stairs and, at last, into an unoccupied bedroom. Alexander locked the door. “No sense letting ’em see me naked,” he said, but his throat was contracting with emotion and the words came out fuzzy. He turned and she was almost undressed, her eyes hot on his as she slid down her panties. He went to her.

  Afterward, and only afterward, did he feel he could enjoy the party. Downstairs later, dressed and sated for the moment, Alexander was able to join conversations, have a couple of drinks, eat a few of the delicious ramaki from the trays discreetly offered him by servants, and enjoy his life. Teresa was out of the room, but it no longer bothered him. He felt like scraping his feet on the rug like a rutting dog.

  Then his face froze. Across the crowded room he saw the unmistakable bald shining dome of the little son of a bitch from the East, his boss, the Chairman of the Board. Mr. Donald E. Marrow. What the fuck was Don Marrow doing in California? Not that he didn’t fly to the Coast often, but Alexander was always told of his movements, usually by a phone call from Marrow himself, his dry nasty voice blunt and succinct. “I’m coming out over that Hong Kong turnaround, be there ten hours.” Or, “Meet me at the Fairmont in Frisco, two a.m. Tuesday. Can do?”

  Although many found him charming, Alexander hated Marrow. And there he was, sarcastic grin stuck on his shiny face, dressed right out of the nearest Main Street department store, talking to Kerry and Paul Newman.

  The sudden, unannounced presence of the Big Boss could throw some men into a panic, but Alexander was only irritated. Let the little son of a bitch play his paranoid power game; if he went too far, Alexander would let them have their studio back. Let them try to make it pay. It had been tried before, all over town, these hotshots from the East coming out with their graphs and charts and cheap suits, and either they got thoroughly fucked up over actresses or they went crazy trying to come up with a surefire formula for motion-picture success. In Hollywood, Alexander knew, squeezing a dollar often turned it into a dime. But these boys would look at you with eyes like marbles, making you think they thought you were stealing from the organization right and left. A few months would pass, and they would be carted off to the never-never land of independent production, or the loony bin, whichever seemed appropriate.

  Smiling lightly, and with the memory of her to float on, Alexander made his way toward the little group by the fireplace, the group isolated and magnified by its power. It was a group only an Alexander Hellstrom could walk up to.

  Newman was wearing a beautifully cut tuxedo, and shook hands warmly with Alexander. “How’s tricks?” he said.

  Kerry, red-faced, grinning and drunker than ever, said, “You should have seen him and his girl friend, running out of here with their pants on fire.” They all laughed except Donald Marrow, who smirked.

  “Who’s the new one?” Marrow asked, like a prosecutor in a multiple murder trial.

  Kerry said, “That rich bitch from your end of the country, what the hell’s her name? Teresa di Veccio . . .”

  Newman said, “I have to go to another party, Kerry . . .”

  “Thus the monkey suit,” Kerry said, “I knew you wouldn’t dress up for little me . . .”

  “You’re so right, but I wanted to give you your birthday present,” and he took something out of his pocket that, when he shook it out, turned into one of the worst-looking toupees Alexander had ever seen. Kerry laughed with delight and clapped it on his head. Newman adjusted it, and Kerry posed with his hands on his hips. “Aren’t I cute as a button?” he asked.

  “Just a last-minute thought,” Newman said, with a straight face.

  Alexander thought about the pile of expensive gifts in the library, including his own, a small painting by Larry Rivers that Teresa had picked out. Marrow interrupted his thought by saying, “Teresa di Veccio, huh? You’re showing a little class there, Alex, a little class. Isn’t she supposed to be of royal blood or something?”

  “All those wops are related to some king or another,” Kerry said, “if you go back far enough. Really, Paul, I can’t thank you enough for your gift . . .”

  “It’s nothing,” Newman said modestly.

  Alexander was goddamned if he was going to ask Marrow why he was in town. Hell, maybe it didn’t even have anything to do with business . . . no, everything Marrow did was connected to business, he did not have a private bone in his body.

  “How is Jan?” he inquired.

  “Fine, fine,” Marrow said. Jan was his own rich but somewhat cowlike wife, whom Alexander liked. She was a modest, self-effacing woman who clearly adored her husband. Not for the first time, Alexander wondered what their lovemaking was like, the little dynamo wearing nothing but shoes, socks and digital watch, and Jan shy, tender, frightened of her plainness . . .

  “Well, where is Miss di Veccio?” Marrow asked. “I’d like you to introduce me.”

  “Any time,” Alexander said.

  “Well, well, gentlemen,” said a bright young voice, “what’s this gathering all about? You guys planning a big movie?”

  Alexander turned and saw Richard Heidelberg, grinning, dressed in tight jeans and a tee shirt that said BORN TO LOSE across the chest. Alexander could see the glitter in his eyes. He gave Heidelberg a limp handshake. After all, he wasn’t really welcome and should have known it. These little one-shot geniuses could be a terrible pain in the ass. But Kerry put his arm around Heidelberg’s shoulder and introduced him to Newman and Marrow. Alexander expected Marrow to be cold to him, but he wasn’t, grinned and said, “Hey, I liked The End of the Unicorn, Heidelberg, nice picture . .”

  “Rick the prick,” said Kerry. “Where’s that stunning little bitch of yours?”

  “She’s around somewhere,” Rick said. “The name of the picture was The Endless Unicorn, Mister Marrow. And I hope you saw it in a theater and not in some little screening room. You have to see it with the public to really appreciate it.”

  Alexander had an image of Marrow going into a real theater with real people, and had to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Rick said, his eyes still glittering.

  Newman made his goodbyes, and Alexander excused himself from the group. When he looked back, Heidelberg and Marrow were jabbering away a mile a minute.

  Teresa was dancing with one of the Cajuns. Alexander stood in the doorway to the dining room and watched her comfortably. There were other couples dancing. It was nice to just stand there and watch. She saw him after a while, and smiled sweetly, but kept on dancing. A tray of ramaki appeared and he took a couple and popped them into his mouth. Delicious!

  Then Kerry was dancing with a small beautiful oriental girl and the music was hot, much hotter than before. Everyone else stopped to watch the birthday boy get it on with this slim beauty. For a plump man, Kerry could really move around, but the girl was something else—tigerish, intense, never taking her eyes from Kerry’s. The band caught on and the tempo increased. An odd idea occurred to Alexander. He looked down at Teresa next to him, her eyes bright. Alexander said into her ear, “It looks like that girl’s trying to dance Kerry to death.”

  “What an interesting thought,” she said back up to him, and took his hand.

  But it wasn’t a fancy, it seemed real. Kerry’s face and the top of his head were a fierce shade of red and sweat flew off him as he contorted and stomped and jigged and jumped, always with his eyes on the girl. She went smoothly through her rhythms, pacing a little faster and a little faster, like a coyote encouraging a dog to chase it by running only a little faster than the dog, until at last the dog bursts his heart with effort and dies, while the coyote laughs from the underbrush.

  Teresa was standing in front of him, against him, and he had his arms around her, cuddling, as they watched with complete attention.

  But the oriental girl didn’t kill Kerry, no matter what her intention, he seemed unkillable, and the music finally came to an end, and
they both collapsed to the floor. Kerry’s wife Janie came out and claimed her husband. “Now you have to dance with me, you worm!” she cried, and everyone laughed as Kerry collapsed to the floor again in mock exhaustion.

  The little oriental girl was helped to her feet by Donald Marrow, whose face bore a horrible naked lust, but Heidelberg was there and took her off, so she was Heidelberg’s girl. She was the best-looking woman at the party, next to Teresa, and for some reason this made Alexander like Heidelberg, feel a kind of comradeship.

  Here came Marrow through the crowd, probably bent on meeting Teresa.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Alexander whispered to her and she squeezed his hand in assent. They beat it before Marrow got to them, and running down the driveway Alexander laughed like a schoolboy.

  AND THEN she was gone. Alexander could not believe it. “What do you want to go to Paris for?” he asked weakly. They were sitting up in bed, his place. He never got her to give up her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel, because, she said, she needed an address of her own, and some place to store the things she had been buying, a bewildering mess of antique jewelry, pre-Columbian artifacts and paintings. “I only came out here for a raid,” she told him tenderly, “I didn’t expect to find you . . .”

  “Well, shit,” he said.

  “Why don’t you come with me? My sister would love you.” One of her reasons for going to Paris was to visit her sister, Helene di Veccio.

  “I have to work,” Alexander said grumpily. “I can’t just go flying around the goddamn planet.”

  “Well, I’m working, too,” she said.

  “You mean buying stuff?”

  “And selling it.”

  So that was what she did with her time.

  Once again he begged her to move in with him, for them to declare their companionship. He did not ask her to marry him. He had been married twice, and both episodes had been unfortunate. He was obviously attracted to active intelligent women, but once he married them his own pleasures in work tended to swamp his wives in social function and boredom. So both wives had bitten huge chunks out of his holdings and moved off, one to Chicago and the other to New York, to resume their own lives.

  Teresa, touched but unmoved, said she had a lot of things to do and she would be back before he knew it.

  “Or you could come to New York,” she said, which thoroughly blackened his mood.

  “You don’t love me,” he said bleakly. “You just proved it.”

  “But I do love you. And I know you love me, dear Alexander, come here and we’ll prove it to each other.”

  Instead, he got out of bed and stood looking down at her. For once he did not want sex, sex was in the way. He wanted her not to go.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” he said in a grouchy voice, and wandered off toward the bathroom.

  “Oh, darling,” she said, just a tiny note of exasperation in her voice. He wandered back out of the bathroom, scratching the back of his neck.

  “You could move in with me and still go to Paris,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind that. In fact, it’s a great thing to do, and when I can find a hole in my schedule, I’ll come along.”

  “But I live in New York, all my friends are there . . .”

  “We can have a place in New York and a place here,” he said, but he knew it wouldn’t work even as he said it. “Damn!”

  And so he went to the airport with her, the little Alfa returned to her girl friend, the two of them kissing hungrily in the back of Alexander’s Mercedes 600, Orfeo at the wheel. In front of American Airlines, Alexander helped Orfeo with her luggage. Most of the stuff had been shipped already, so she only had half a dozen suitcases of various ages, all leathery and well traveled. After they got the eye of a greencap and were about to go inside, Orfeo did a strange thing: Alexander had expected him to say goodbye to Teresa and shake hands with her, for he had lent Orfeo to her several times for shopping expeditions, and they got along fine. Instead, however, Orfeo took both her hands in his, said something in soft Spanish, and when Teresa leaned forward, he kissed her lightly on the cheek. Then he went off with the skycap and the luggage.

  “I’m no snob,” Alexander said, “but wasn’t that going a little far?”

  “Oh, Alexander, you are too a snob,” she said. In the terminal she bought a copy of The New Yorker and two packages of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. “I’ll just orgy on these all across the country,” she said. “It’s the only time I allow myself candy.”

  “I never do,” Alexander said stiffly. She smiled at him and squeezed his hand, but his hand did not want to be squeezed. They walked toward the lounge. Some idiot recognized Alexander and started coming toward him, but Alexander glared at the man so fiercely that he was stopped in his tracks, frozen by the blast of icy dislike in Alexander’s eyes.

  “Are we going to the VIP lounge?” she asked him.

  “The hell with that,” he said. They would wait for the airplane with the rest of the suckers, at least that way there might be a few targets of opportunity for his growing rage. Yes, rage. Power. There was never enough. How trite.

  So it was they sat on the little plastic molded seats among the hundreds who were flying to New York, he with his arms tight across his chest, she reading the columns of information in the front of The New Yorker.

  It did seem to him, on the way home in the warm purring back of the limousine, that he had put more into the affair than she had. A good deal more. He glowered at the back of Orfeo’s head. There was no way he could ask about that goodbye kiss. He could fire Orfeo, but why? Exercise of power? All he knew was that for three weeks she had screwed up his life every day, he had been missing appointments, screenings, lunches, even his exercise periods, all for the love of her, and now she was gone, leaving a hole the size of . . . well, he could not think of an appropriately gigantic metaphor, but a huge hole in his heart, as if he had been nailed right through the heart with a 50mm shell, like a bazooka blast through the heart. And left him lying there wounded on the battlefield of love.

  He had to snicker. Wasn’t there just a teeny touch of gladness down there at the bottom? Didn’t he feel just the tiniest bit relieved that she was gone, and he could put his life in order again?

  “Orfeo,” he said. “What the hell was that big kiss about?”

  “Oh, Boss,” he said. “She and I got to be good friends, we talk Spanish while we drive around Beverly Hills. She has good Spanish. I hope you’re not mad.” There was nothing apologetic in his voice. Alex’s heart brightened a bit. He had a pile of work on his desk. He would strip and shower, put on his comfortable old jeans and sweatshirt, some nice thick white cotton socks, and do a little working. That would be just fine! He would be feeling better in just a few minutes. He looked forward to the coziness of it all, and he probably wouldn’t miss her much. Hell, it was just one of those things.

  He was still running the tune through his head when Orfeo opened the back door of the car, and Alex felt the heat billowing in. How in the devil had he forgotten the heat?

  CHAPTER SIX

  SWEAT TRICKLED down Jerry Rexford’s face as he sat hunched in front of his little electric SCM portable. Every window in his apartment was open, and through the screen door drifted the sounds of a radio somebody had on pretty loud out by the pool. Jerry was naked, sitting on a white towel spread over his kitchen chair to keep his ass from sticking to the plastic. Stacks of fresh paper, carbon paper and manuscript were arrayed on the little kitchen table, presenting the only order in the apartment. The sink was full of dirty dishes, the garbage sacks overflowing with aromatic grapefruit rinds and coffee grounds; the bathroom was all damp towels and dust rolls, and everywhere else were magazines, books, clothing—the dirty stuff rumpled in chairs and over the backs of everything, the fresh laundry sitting in ripped-open blue paper packages. Bachelor Hall.

  But Jerry was truly oblivious. He was hacking away at his screenplay, and for once the ideas were coming thick and fast. No more did
he worry about how the script “looked,” whether his notation was correct, whether anyone would know how amateur he was by his clumsiness. The story was happening in his mind now, all by itself, the characters speaking and things moving. It was all he could do to get the stuff down on the page. Then, coming to the end of a scene, he sat up straight, sighed, and realized he was finished for the evening.

  He picked up the stack of manuscript, collated out the carbons and put the pages in order. Good heavens, he had written seventeen pages tonight! That was a lot! He leaned over so he could see the little electric clock in the kitchen. He had been working three hours. And it only felt like a few minutes. He sniffed. He stunk. He sniffed again, and wrinkled his nose. His body smelled fermy and overripe, although he had taken a shower only a few hours ago, after getting home from the day’s work.

  Jerry unplugged the hot little typewriter, patting its side as if it were alive and saying, “Good baby, thanks a lot.” He put the machine aside, leaving a cleared space for the editing process. This was going to be fun, seventeen pages to edit. Jerry loved to edit his own stuff. He sat happily sweating over his work for another hour. By then the radio out by the pool was silent and a bit of cool air was circulating in his apartment, making him shiver slightly.