Ear to the Ground

by David L. Ulin

  “Hey.” Charlie turned around. The boyfriend was staring at him. “That your stuff in the yard?”

  “Uh-huh,” Charlie answered.

  “Building something?”

  “It’s … an experiment.”

  “You a scientist?”

  “A seismologist.”

  “No shit.” The boyfriend grinned. “From Caltech?”

  “CES, actually. We’re a new …”

  “You guys are gonna predict the Big One.” The boyfriend’s face opened in recognition, eyes bright as lasers. “I know you. You’re the guy who predicted Kobe. I read about you in the Reader.”

  “Charlie Richter.”

  “Yeah, that’s you.” The boyfriend stepped forward and put out his hand. “My name’s Ian. You want a cup of coffee?”

  Ian finished brewing the last of Grace’s mocha java and poured Charlie a cup. “Be honest,” he said. “Is it true you guys already know how to predict earthquakes?”

  Charlie laughed. He’d only known this guy five minutes, but already he was acting as if they were old friends.

  “That’s what they said in the Reader,” Ian continued. “Among other things.”

  “Don’t believe everything you read.”

  Charlie sipped his coffee and glanced at a stack of snapshots on the table. A pretty blonde in a bikini stood on Zuma Beach, jutting her hip provocatively and sticking out her tongue. Charlie had a pretty good idea who it was.

  “That’s my girl friend,” Ian said, “Grace.”

  Charlie examined the curve of her thigh, and the way her hair shimmered in the light. “Do you live together?”

  “I have a place in Silver Lake, but Grace works all day. You work at home?”

  “Sometimes. Today I’m buying a car.”

  “Yeah? What kind?”

  “I don’t know. Something simple.” Charlie paused. “A Honda Civic, maybe.”

  “Are you kidding? Get something funky, a convertible, at least. This is L.A.”

  “I don’t know …”

  “Come on. Hondas are boring. You’re not a Honda kind of guy.”

  Charlie looked down at the table, tracing a circle with his finger on the wood.

  “Listen,” Ian said. “I’ll go with you. Just let me get dressed.”

  When he was alone, Charlie reached for the snapshots. In each, Grace stared directly into the lens, as if she knew something he would never know.

  There was one Charlie couldn’t get past, a close-up of her face. She wasn’t smiling, and her eyes flashed with sparks that could have been excitement, or anger, or both. Charlie looked at her for a long time.

  Then he heard the bedroom door open, and, almost as a reflex, he slipped the picture into his pocket. Before he could reconsider, Ian appeared.

  “All right, man,” he said. “Let’s go buy you a car.”

  Grace raced home at lunch to pick up a script she’d forgotten. As usual, Navaro was sitting on the front steps.

  “You’re looking lovely today,” he said as Grace came up the path. She smiled, but made sure not to meet his eyes.

  “Hey. What’s your hurry?”

  “I want to say hello to Ian.”

  Navaro shook his head. “I don’t know what you see in that guy. Hangs around here all day while you work. Doesn’t even own a decent pair of pants.”

  Grace continued to smile.

  “Anyways, he ain’t up there. Took off with Charlie hours ago.”

  “Charlie?”

  “The scientist. Went to buy a car. ‘Course, I’ve been telling him ever since he moved in …”

  But Grace was no longer listening. Charlie? With Ian? Weird. She brushed past the landlord, and went on up the stairs.

  A GOOD BOSS IS HARD TO FIND

  “WHY THE FUCK DID PARAMOUNT BID ON THAT SCRIPT before we did?”

  “I thought we …”

  “Don’t think, please.”

  “But …”

  “This office stays on top of everything! Do you understand?”

  Grace had lost the jump on Paramount. That much was true. But Ethan was such an asshole. He was proud of it, and known for it. His shirts were so starched she hoped one day his collar would slice through the tender skin of his neck. He’d bleed to death, maybe be decapitated, while the office danced around him and sang “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.” Every day he trundled through those hallways, jiggling the change in his pockets, making sure his under-paid-lings did their jobs.

  He’d hired Grace because he was wildly attracted to her. And not just to her sweet smile or her bouncy blonde hair. Grace was tough, and he liked tough. She was dating a screenwriter, he knew, and he’d wondered how long it would take her to bring the guy in for an assignment. It always happened, and Grace’s predecessor—an unfortunate, freckled girl named Jessica—had waited only three weeks to recommend her lay-buddy, some dolt who wouldn’t have known a plot-reversal if it slammed him in the face.

  Everything Ethan had picked up at Harvard he took the wrong way. He became a prick where he might have been an authority, a cutthroat instead of a competitor, snobbish rather than stylish. He’d worked hard and done well, but even his mother didn’t like him. Once she’d brushed the hair from his boyish face and told him she loved him. “What does that mean?” Ethan had queried. “You have to.”

  The first time he masturbated he’d used the image of his eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Templeton. But what appealed to him wasn’t the deep curve of her breast underneath those silky Qiana shirts, nor her long legs, which bloomed into a perfect skirt-clad ass. No, his first orgasm was accompanied by the quiet repetition of what he wanted from the deal: “A’s and recommendations, A’s and recommendations …” He derived no pleasure from the present, and had little respect for the past. After college he’d changed his name from Cohen to Carson, because he preferred how it rolled off the tongue.

  Grace picked up the telephone at her desk and dialed the writer of the screenplay she had lost. She did her best to woo him to Tailspin Pictures, stating the company’s successes, omitting its failures—raising her skirt verbally, so to speak. The conversation lasted only about ten minutes, but before she hung up, she’d managed to wrangle the script away from Paramount. She then called the writer’s agent, a cold man with a lisp. When he found out she’d spoken directly to his client, he gave her a hard time, but Grace persisted. “I’d lay down on train tracks for this script. The fact is we love it. Ethan just got finished reading it and came in here, crying.”

  “Ethan Carson crying? Don’t make me laugh.”

  But the agent came around when Grace went ahead and offered another ten thousand. As she hung up, they were even laughing about the latest O. J. Simpson joke.

  She took a short stroll on the Warner lot. A feature was shooting in the soundstage around the corner, and she peeked inside a makeup trailer where she watched a young woman suddenly grow old. Grace loved movies because, like life, when you added up all the artifice, you ended up with a kind of reality. Ian could rewrite this particular script, she thought, and might not do a bad job of it. If she brought it up to Ethan at the right moment, he’d be sure to listen.

  The worst thing about assholes concerns the vain hope their victims unceasingly maintain, that someday the asshole will smile. In a town of bullshitters and ass-kissers, of fair-weather fans and fly-by-night friends, only the assholes provide a true read. You expect the worst from them because the worst is the standard. And yet, thought Grace, once every blue moon when you do something right, what a reward it is to hear “Good job,” or “Nicely done,” or even “Not bad.”

  Such wasn’t the case, today. When Grace peered into Ethan’s office, and told him about her two telephone calls, her boss said to come in and close the door.

  “Paramount’s bid kicked out,” he hissed. “Nobody wants that stupid script.” Grace couldn’t even muster the energy to blink. That explains why the writer listened so attentively, she thought, and why the agent was cordia
l. She decided not to tell him about the extra ten thousand.

  “But, Ethan, I bought it! We bought it!”

  There was a pause.

  “Well, go back to your office, pick up the phone, and unbuy it.”

  SATURDAY NIGHT

  IAN DIDN’T HAVE AN AGENT EXACTLY, BUT HE DID HAVE a go-getter with a lot of energy and a car phone. Michael Lipman was his name, but sometimes he called himself “CC” (for Chutzpah-Chutzpah), and, though he had few legitimate industry concerns, the air of intrigue seemed to surround him.

  When they met for the first time at his closet on Hollywood Boulevard, Michael attempted, straight away, to reach Quentin Tarantino over the speaker phone. He got as far as a personal assistant, jabbering with the woman about Pulp and how it saved the cinema, and what characters, what situations, what vision. What an idiot, Ian thought. What an exercise in humiliation. Tarantino? You don’t just call Tarantino.

  But then a man’s screechy voice rose from the speaker. “Hiya, Michael,” it said.

  “Quentin. You don’t write. You don’t call.” Then he sang: “You don’t send me faxes anymore …”

  The conversation lasted a couple of minutes, during which time Ian thought how easy it is to misjudge a guy in this town. When Michael hung up, they both smiled.

  Through the wall in an adjacent closet, a young man and woman, aspiring actors both, sat close together at a Salvation Army desk. They laughed heartily when the man hung up the phone, and for a moment it seemed he would kiss her full on the mouth. True, it was only voice work, but they were good mimics, and each time Michael Lipman met with a new client, he provided them with employment. Besides, he paid in cash.

  Ian had sent Michael a first draft of his new screenplay, Ear to the Ground. And though CC hadn’t read it, he did look it over for elements; he liked the earthquake angle, and had begun to work out a wish list of actors, including Sharon Stone and Johnny Depp. The plan was to go wide with it—that is, all over town. Michael was sure this would incite a bidding war. Ian had no problem with that, but he did explain he wanted rewrite work, and that he wasn’t afraid to start at the bottom.

  The following Saturday Michael called Ian at Grace’s, which annoyed her a little. What annoyed her a lot was the agent’s desperate attempt to excite Tailspin Pictures about Ear to the Ground. She looked away from Ian when she passed him the phone. “Get to the Café Med on Sunset, five o’clock,” Michael told him.

  There Ian met a skinny woman with dirty fingernails, around forty-five, who wore black, chain-smoked, and spoke Italian into a cellular phone. When he approached the table she folded up the apparatus, took his hand, and kissed both his cheeks. “I read your screenplay,” she told him. “And I like very much, earthquakes.”

  Penniless, Ian ordered coffee. Who is this lady? Does she have any money? Michael had said she was maybe good for a treatment—a grand, tops. But as the sun set, Ian thought he might charm her into something more. A screenplay, perhaps. Things were pretty tight now; his father had finally cut him off. “Get a job,” he’d said.

  “But I’m a writer.”

  “And I’m a father, but nobody pays me for it.”

  It was hard for the literary artist in the twentieth century, Ian thought. Especially in this town, where screenplays came in waist-high stacks, and bus drivers along Santa Monica Boulevard pitched whole stories between Highland and La Brea. Any night of the week, if you sat at the bar at Chaya or Jones and closed your eyes, you’d hear the word script rolling back and forth across the room, like an auditory lava lamp. Be patient, Ian remembered, always patient. Keep the faith. In Hollywood, anything can happen.

  And happen it did. After a couple of hours, a friend of the woman’s arrived and she was breathtaking—a young Italian actress, quite on fire. She claimed she would have been the star of Fellini’s last film, if Fellini had lived, but Ian didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t have to, though. The waiters hovered and freshened her drinks, offering warm rolls at the flutter of an eyelash. She told a story to the skinny woman in breakneck Italian, and then, full of energy, translated it for Ian.

  “I just had my fortune told by a gypsy lady.”

  “Uh-huh?” Ian was charmed.

  “My palm.” She pronounced it PAL-lem. “Do you know what she telled me?”

  Ian shook his head.

  “Destiny await you.”

  Then she hit the back of her hand against the table, as Italians sometimes do, and made a gap-toothed smile so stupendous that Ian had to fight the urge to grab her by the waist.

  She played the saxophone, she told them, and then pulled one out of a suitcase she had lugged to the table. It was tarnished, but she sat holding it, with a reed in her mouth, smiling into Ian’s eyes. Someone turned down Perry Como, and she stood up.

  Sometime after midnight Ian and the actress ended up in Silver Lake, at his place. Leonetta was her name, and she blew her saxophone through the night while Ian fiddled with his trumpet. Actually, they weren’t bad together. What they lacked in technical skill, they made up for with chemistry. And as they inched toward that morning hour where spending the night becomes a foregone conclusion, Ian noticed the light blinking like crazy on his answering machine, while he played an unpleasant, abstract riff, and considered how to go about suggesting the sleeping arrangements.

  SATURDAY NIGHT, PART TWO

  GRACE WAS PISSED. IAN’S RIDICULOUS AGENT HAD CALLED and harassed her—at home, for Christ’s sake—about Ear to the Ground. What a joker Michael Lipman was. Here it was, Saturday night, and he had set up some kind of meeting. Grace was so angry she hardly even looked up when Ian headed for the door. “I’ll call you,” he told her.

  Three hours later, though, Ian still hadn’t called, and Grace had moved toward the numb realization that she’d been taken for granted again. It was almost summer, and the days were languid, nearly tropical. As twilight settled over the city and fog began to drift across the Hollywood Hills, Grace found herself pacing the rooms of her apartment, imagining a man who wouldn’t leave her hanging on a Saturday, who would maybe buy her flowers once in a while, clean up the kitchen after himself, or at least replace the coffee when he’d used it up.

  She dialed Ian’s number, left a nasty message, and went to get her keys. Fuck him, she thought. She didn’t need Ian. She was an adult. She could take care of herself. There was that new place on Beverly they’d been wanting to try, where she could get a nice piece of fish, lightly grilled, and a glass of wine. And after that … well, she could always read a couple of scripts.

  Navaro was on the building’s front stoop when Grace reached the bottom of the stairs. Please don’t talk to me, she thought, and then: I don’t have to deal with you, I can just go on my way. But he said hello and, of course, she said hi, cursing herself for not having the strength to be rude.

  “All alone tonight?” Navaro asked. In her faded jeans and T-shirt, Grace clearly was not dressed for a date.

  “Ian’s working.”

  “He don’t know the meaning of the word.” Navaro shook his head with a bitter little laugh. “He sits around all day and works on Saturday night? The whole time me and Elise, God forgive her, were together, I’d always be home by six-thirty, every Saturday night.”

  God forgive her? Grace thought. “That’s nice,” she said.

  “Yeah. Elise.” Over Navaro’s shoulder, the last dregs of daylight faded to black. “I ever show you her picture?”

  “No.” Grace’s stomach tightened like a fist.

  “Wanna see?”

  She hesitated, and Navaro took that for a yes. He headed for his front door, leaving her on the steps to wait for him.

  Just then, a Honda Civic pulled up in front of the building, and Charlie climbed out the passenger side. He leaned into the open window and looked at Kenwood, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, hands tight on the wheel.

  “You’re not gonna go home and stare at her picture, are you?” Charlie asked.

  Kenwoo
d shook his head.

  “You want to get some dinner?”

  “Not hungry.”

  “Then do me one favor? Don’t go jumping off any bridges.”

  “What bridge did you have in mind?” Kenwood looked up.

  “Good point.” Charlie smiled, and backed away from the car. “So I’ll see you Monday?”

  Kenwood nodded, and the Civic crawled away from the curb.

  Grace watched the sandy-haired man walk up the path, flickering in and out of patches of lamplight.

  “You must be Charlie,” she said.

  “And you must be Grace.”

  They smiled for a moment that stretched nearly into discomfort. Then Navaro’s door squeaked open, and Grace’s face fell like a stone.

  “Do you know about computers and everything?” She spoke quickly, moving her face toward Charlie’s ear.

  Charlie didn’t understand.

  “I mean, you work with them, don’t you?”

  “Yeah …”

  Before Grace could elaborate, Navaro came up behind them, bearing a photograph of a middle-aged woman in a ratty bouffant. “I see you two met,” he said, wheezing a little, a Pall Mall hanging from his lips.

  “Incorrect path, incorrect path,” Grace said to Charlie. “Every time I try it, I keep getting ‘incorrect path.’” Her eyes sparkled, and a smile crept from the corners of her mouth. “I’m so confused.”

  Briefly, the three of them stood in suspension, and even the crickets in the cool Los Angeles night seemed to grow still.

  “Probably have to defrag the system,” Charlie told her. “Right away.”

  “You guys with your computers,” Navaro laughed, shaking his head. And as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.

  “Thanks,” Grace said to Charlie when they reached the second floor landing.

  “No problem.” He turned slightly toward his door. Something in his way reminded Grace of an old boyfriend who’d never taken the initiative, always waiting for her to make the first move. Charlie would be like that, she figured. But it didn’t matter, she was with Ian, and Ian …