The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  I understood Richie’s childhood devotion to old movies, because I had been as devoted to books, which, just as his movies did for him, helped me escape the loneliness of being different by creating an alternative reality where I was not alone. Richie had once told me the only thing that had kept him alive in the private mental institution to which his parents had committed him when he was fourteen was creeping into the day room at midnight to watch the late show.

  “The last time I was here,” Richie confided over his martini at Musso’s, “Bob Hope came tottering down the aisle. His hair, Henry. Bright orange. And his face looked like it was carved out of tapioca.”

  “What are you going to say about the poetry reading?”

  “Blah, blah, blah. I only need a couple of ’graphs. Did you get a look at that blond by the door? Yummy. Of course, he’s an actor.” Richie smirked. “I think every actor in town ought to wear a sign that says, ‘I am not a real person, I am an actor.’”

  Our waiter came, a fussy ancient whose six dyed strands of hair were carefully plastered across his bald pate. He moued his disapproval over my order of an omelet and a salad, but Richie made up for it, ordering filet mignon in béarnaise sauce, a baked potato, broiled mushrooms, creamed spinach, a Caesar salad and a half-bottle of Bordeaux. I knew from other meals with him that Richie would eat every bite, then demand dessert, and yet he never gained weight. “I’m blessed with a starlet’s metabolism,” he boasted when I pointed this out to him, but a likelier reason was that his father used to scream at him at the dinner table to act like a man until Richie was so terrified his throat closed up.

  “Alex Amerian is an actor,” I said, after the waiter left. “He seemed real enough.”

  Richie raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’re sweet on him.”

  “Could you be serious for a moment?”

  He dropped the supercilious eyebrow. “What’s wrong, Henry?”

  “I think I’m cracking up here.”

  All affectation vanished. “Tell me,” he said quietly.

  I told him everything, about the frantic work and the aimless driving, the incident at Griffith Park, parking in front of Alex’s house, the neighbor who’d run me off, the shame, confusion, grief. I trusted Richie to understand me despite our many differences, because when I lay in bed at night in a small town in California, reading about Achilles and Patroclus, while he sat in front of a TV set in suburban Ohio, watching Joan Crawford in Rain, we had been learning the same lesson about the impossibility of our desire; a lesson that, as grown men, we were still trying to overcome.

  “Ask him out,” Richie said, when I finished.

  “Alex? Just like that?”

  “That’s what people do when they’re interested in someone,” he said, signaling the waiter for another drink.

  “It’s all mixed up with Josh.”

  “Alex isn’t Josh. You’ll see that when you spend some time with him.”

  “What if he says no?”

  Richie said, “He won’t.”

  Dinner arrived and we talked about other things. We were drinking coffee when Richie’s eyes widened at something or someone behind me. A tall, thickly built man in a beautifully tailored suit passed our table, with a thin woman on his arm. He nodded acknowledgment at Richie.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  Richie dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Are you serious? That’s Duke Asuras.”

  “And he is?”

  “The head of Parnassus Pictures, Henry.”

  “Oh, he’s the guy who said Hollywood’s going to take over the world,” I said, telling Richie about the article in the Times.

  “Don’t think he can’t do it,” Richie said.

  “Who was that woman with him? His wife?”

  Richie snorted. “He’s not married. That was Cheryl Cordet.”

  I was trying to place the name. “Isn’t that—”

  Richie stood up, again dabbing his mouth on a napkin. “I’ll be back in five minutes.” He returned in three. “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “Duke asked us to join them for a drink.” He threw some money on the table. “You mind?”

  “No, I’ve never met a movie mogul before.”

  I followed Richie through the restaurant to a remote booth that was further protected by a curtained doorway. He poked his head in, mumbled something, and then pulled the curtain back and said to me, “Hop in.”

  I slid into the booth. Richie followed and drew the curtain shut. The booth was very cold. Asuras and Cordet sat across from us, their backs to the wall. A wall lamp cast a pinkish light. A candle flickered on the table. The remains of a shrimp cocktail lay between them. Asuras was tanned to the color of mahogany. His bright blue eyes were the liveliest feature in a bullet-shaped, bull-necked head. He was bald except for patches of side hair which were shaved to salt-and-pepper stubble. Thick eyebrows, a flat nose and a wide mouth conveyed power and appetite. His shoulders were massive beneath the crepe-like material of his black suit—a weight lifter’s shoulders—but his jowl had begun to sag. He conveyed a combination of strength and self-indulgence, and his heavy, imperious face recalled profiles of a first-century Caesar on an ancient coin.

  Cheryl Cordet was a thin woman, with pale skin and a frizz of graying blond hair. She had a strong, plain face and small, shrewd eyes. Her black sheath dress was made for someone younger and more opulent and it hung on her gracelessly. She radiated nearly as much authority as he did and, despite the intimacy implied by the candlelit booth, the shared food, romance was distinctly not in the air.

  When Richie finished making introductions, Cheryl Cordet said, “You never returned my calls, Henry.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You defended the guy who was accused of killing the gay judge. His boyfriend? You got him off. I had my people call you to discuss selling the rights to his story.”

  I had a vague recollection of talking to someone about the movie rights to the Chandler case. I remembered that the caller’s eagerness to buy the story had been exceeded only by his ignorance of the events.

  “I wasn’t interested.” I said.

  “I remember that case,” Asuras said. “I don’t know, the gay angle would be a problem.”

  “We could change that,” Cordet said. “Soften it. Maybe make the boyfriend a girl? What do you think, Henry?”

  The conversation was so ludicrous, I didn’t know what to say.

  “Speaking of gay,” Asuras rumbled, in a voice so deep I thought he had bronchitis, “I read that piece in your magazine about attacks on homosexuals, Richie. Kind of an unusual piece for you, wasn’t it? You’re not the Advocate.”

  “We cover the news,” Richie said.

  “I guess you checked to make sure what those people in the piece said was true.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Of course. I’m a serious journalist, Duke.”

  Asuras grinned. “Come on, Richie. As a journalist you’re somewhere between Liz Smith and the National Enquirer.”

  “Well, in the interests of accuracy, Duke,” Richie said, “is it true the board of Parnassus Company is still trying to get you fired?”

  Asuras turned a slow, angry gaze on him. “I better not be reading that in your magazine.”

  “Is that a denial?”

  “You ought to know better than to play games with me,” he said.

  Cheryl Cordet glanced at her watch and said, “God, Duke, it’s almost eleven and I’ve got be on the set at five. Mind if we cut this short?”

  Richie and I stood outside, waiting for the valet to bring my car. He was uncharacteristically quiet.

  “Maybe I don’t understand the nuances here,” I said, “but did you just get into a pissing match with that guy because he criticized your gay-bashing piece?”

  “That’s not the piece he’s worried about,” Richie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know anything about Duke Asuras?”

 
; “No,” I said. “Hollywood’s your obsession, not mine.”

  He lit a cigarette. “That’s right,” he said. “I love the movies and I’m not going to let Duke Asuras destroy them.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The car came. The valet opened the passenger door and Richie deflated into the front seat. “Let me give you a crash course in the Industry,” he said. “The first thing you need to understand is that Hollywood isn’t one place, it’s two. LA, where the studios are and the movies get made, and New York, where the companies that own the studios are headquartered. It’s been that way forever, moviemakers versus moneymen, art versus commerce.” He blew a smoke ring. “Movies are risky investments. When they pay big, they pay really big, but when they flop, they can take a company down with them, like Heaven’s Gate killed United Artists. Every year, the cost of making movies climbs higher and higher until now, a medium-sized, medium-budget, no-big-name movie is costing a studio like Parnassus around fifty million to make.”

  “That’s astonishing.”

  “The moneymen try to contain the costs of their investment in case it goes down the toilet. The moviemakers complain that the only thing the penny-pinching accomplishes is to make sure the movies will suck and lose money. It goes back and forth between New York and Hollywood on almost every movie that gets made by the big studios.”

  “Is that why you asked Asuras about his board?”

  “Yeah. Duke runs Parnassus Pictures, but he doesn’t run Parnassus Company in New York. He answers to the president, Allen Raskin, and Raskin answers to the board of directors, and most of them are Wall Street types who know shit about movies. Raskin does. His grandfather was one of the original producers at Parnassus, back in the thirties and forties. His dad was an exec at Parnassus. When he became president, the company was about to go under because of the idiot they had hired to run things before him. He brought Duke back from the dead and made him studio president. That was four years ago. Now Parnassus is the most successful studio in town.”

  “Then why would the board want to fire Asuras?”

  “Because he’s a crook,” Richie replied.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he’s a crook, Henry. He steals.”

  I pulled up in front of Richie’s building. “Steals what?”

  “Money,” Richie said. “Duke started out as an agent representing some big names. He perfected the art of packaging, putting together stars with directors and writers and forcing them all down a studio’s throat while he picked up multiple commissions. One of his clients was Twila Rhodes. You remember her?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Richie said. “She was a second-tier actress with a drug problem. Duke forged her name on twenty thousand dollars in checks.”

  “He couldn’t have borrowed it?”

  “He didn’t need it. The guy was clearing a couple of million a year.”

  “Then why did he do it?”

  “Why does a dog lick its balls?” Richie said. “Because it can.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Look up ‘greedy,’ ‘stupid’ and ‘arrogant’ in the dictionary,” he said, “and you’ll find pictures of studio executives and movie agents. Of course, Duke told a much more complicated story when he was found out. He said he had a nervous breakdown, that it was an act of self-sabotage. You know, the diminished-capacity defense.”

  “Did the jury buy it?”

  “It didn’t get that far,” Richie said. “Twila Rhodes overdosed and there was no one left to prosecute. But the scandal drove Duke out of agenting. He laid low for a while then started up an independent production company that had a couple of big hits before he suddenly quit and left the country to ‘find himself.’”

  “I can hear the quotation marks in your voice.”

  He flicked his cigarette out the window. “The rumor is that his partners caught him embezzling again and gave him the option of resigning or going to jail.”

  “And then Raskin brought him back from the dead?”

  “From Thailand, actually,” Richie said. “In any other business he’d be considered a criminal. In Hollywood, he’s a victim, but not to the Parnassus board.”

  “Moral scruples?”

  “Give me a break,” he scoffed. “With Duke as head of the studio, Parnassus’s stock has never done as well as it should have, given the company’s earnings. The board thinks it’s because Wall Street doesn’t like a crook at the till. They’ve been looking for a reason to get rid of him, but as long as he was making them piles of money, they were stuck. Last year, he lost money, ten million, not much, but it was all the board needed to start screaming for his head. When Raskin refused to fire him, they started threatening him.”

  “What happened?”

  “Raskin and Duke decided to counterattack.”

  “How?”

  “That’s the piece Duke’s afraid of.” He opened the door. “Goodnight, Henry. Remember Mother’s advice. Call Alex.”

  I didn’t give Richie’s account of the nefarious goings on at Parnassus Company any more thought that night, and when I woke up the next morning, the details were already receding. The gist of it seemed to be crooks versus assholes, which more or less summed up Hollywood as far as I could tell. But I did call Alex.

  Chapter 4

  “HELLO, ALEX? IT’S Henry. Rios.”

  “Mr. Rios?” Alarm crept into his voice. “Is there a problem with my case?”

  “No, nothing like that,” I replied, as reassuringly as my own nervousness permitted. “This is a social call, to see how you are.”

  “Everything’s great.”

  In the pause that followed I wandered into the dining room and caught my reflection in the gilt mirror—a gift from Richie—that hung on the wall. There I saw a tall, thin man in khakis and a denim shirt with a long face and prematurely—well, at forty-five maybe not so prematurely anymore—white hair. Dark-skinned, the face unmistakably mestizo and clearly middle-aged. What did Richie say? After thirty-five, gay men aged in dog years.

  I temporized, “That’s good, Alex.” Then, in a rush, “I was wondering if you’d like to have dinner sometime, take in a movie?”

  A pause. “Are you asking me out on a date?”

  My face was on fire. “Something like that.”

  “That would be great. When?”

  I was so invested in rejection, it took me a minute to respond. “What about—are you free on Friday?”

  “Friday’s cool,” he said.

  We made arrangements to meet for dinner at a restaurant on Third Street and then take in a movie at the Beverly Center called Letters. I put the phone down and took another look at myself in the mirror. I had mysteriously become better-looking.

  According to the Times movie critic, Letters was a “postmodern remake of Agatha Christie’s book, The ABC Murders,” a description I couldn’t begin to fathom except that I gathered it was a lot grislier than Dame Agatha’s original, which I vaguely remembered having read as a teenager. It was playing to sold-out houses, so on Friday morning I drove to the Beverly Center as soon as the box office opened and bought two tickets for the nine o’clock show. I spent the morning downtown at the county law library, and the afternoon in Santa Monica with my accountant, trying to figure out how to pay my taxes. Josh had had no health insurance, and his parents, who were retired and lived on a fixed income, could not shoulder the burden. I had picked up the tab for everything Medicare refused to pay, including the twenty-four-hour nursing care that allowed him to die at home instead of a hospital. The bills had pretty much exhausted my savings, and caring for him had played havoc with my practice, leaving me, basically, broke. The IRS was not sympathetic. I resolved the crisis by emptying my last retirement accounts. I promised Marty, my accountant, that I would try to pay myself back as soon as I could, because, as he reminded me, “You’re not getting any younger, Henry. You’re going to need that money.
”

  Back at home, I took a shower then stood at the closet for a long time, water puddling at my feet, looking for something to wear in a wardrobe that seemed to consist either of dark suits or blue jeans and tee shirts. In the recesses of my closet, I found a black motorcycle jacket, the grain of the leather carefully distressed by the manufacturer. I lay it on the bed. A bright green sticker over the right breast proclaimed ACT UP FIGHT AIDS. The coat had belonged to Josh, a souvenir of his days as an AIDS activist, when he was still well enough to sit through hours of Act Up meetings or spend the night in jail after being arrested at demonstrations at the federal building or the county hospital. He had met Steven at one of those demonstrations and left me for him to join the army of lovers battling for a cure for AIDS, trying to save their own lives. I remembered what Richie had said about wondering why he had survived while others had died. I wondered that, too, from time to time. I ran my hands over the jacket; maybe we survived to remember the ones who hadn’t.

  I went back into the closet and found a white, banded-collar shirt I had bought in an attempt to update my clothes and had yet to wear. I paired it with my least-faded Levis, a black belt with a silver buckle and black shoes. For a second I considered wearing Josh’s jacket, but it would’ve looked absurd on me. I threw on a black linen blazer, and studied the result in the gilt mirror. The combination of the collarless white shirt and black blazer made me look like a priest. Not exactly the effect I was after. I tossed the coat aside and headed out.

  I drove to the restaurant with the windows down, a warm breeze blowing through the car. The air was drenched in a cantaloupe-colored light that faded things to the hues of an old, hand-tinted postcard. I had never really been on a date. In high school and college I watched from afar as straight friends performed the dance of courtship while I buried my head in books and ran distance on the track team. When I finally stumbled into a world of men like myself in San Francisco in the sexually liberated seventies, a date was the hour or two you spent drinking before you found someone to go home with. Josh and I had not so much dated as collided in the midst of a murder case in which he was a witness. Dinner and a movie was a first for me.