Stardust

by Joseph Kanon

  She started through the barrier, leaving Ben to follow on his own, moving sideways with the bag through the crowd to keep up. The main hall, streamlined Spanish colonial, was noisy with leave-taking, voices rising over the loudspeaker announcements, so Ben had to speak up.

  “What did she mean about the bottle?”

  “They found one in the room,” she said, slowing a little but not stopping. “They think-you know, for courage. I don’t know who told her. One of her little mice. Maybe the maid. She pays them. Or the night clerk.”

  Or porters on trains, Ben thought. They were passing through a waiting hall with deep chairs and mission-style chandeliers.

  “I don’t understand about the hotel.”

  “It’s an apartment hotel. People live there. But there’s a switchboard and a maid to change the sheets. A service, considering. You rent by the month.”

  “And he used it as an office?”

  “What do you think?” she said, looking at him.

  They reached the high arched entrance, where Ben had to stop, blinded by the sudden glare. She had moved aside to put on her sunglasses and now was rummaging through her bag for cigarettes.

  “I suppose it takes the guesswork out of getting a room. They asked me if I was going to use up the month. Since it was already paid for. They want to move someone else in. Collect twice.” She lit a cigarette, her hand shaking a little, then looked away, embarrassed. “I’m sorry to involve you in this. Such a welcome. But you’ll hear it anyway. So it was like that.”

  He looked over at her, not sure what to say. A marriage he knew nothing about.

  “I didn’t mean to pry,” he said finally. “You didn’t know?”

  She shook her head. “Isn’t that the point? Cinq a sept. Like the French. Just get home in time for dinner.” She drew on the cigarette, her expression lost behind the glasses. “Or maybe he didn’t want to come home. So that’s that.” She lifted her head. “I wonder what she felt when she saw it in the papers. Maybe she left him. Maybe it was that. Well,” she said, the word like a thud, so final that for a moment neither of them spoke. Then she stepped away from the wall. “So come. With any luck we’ll have the house to ourselves. These last few days- Why do people bring food? Salka brought noodle pudding. Noodle pudding in this climate.” She turned to him, still hidden behind the glasses. “Please. Don’t listen to me. All this-business, it’s not your problem. It’s good you’re here.” She dropped the cigarette, grinding it out, and started for the parking lot, lined with spindly palms, then stopped again, staring at the rows of cars, gleaming with reflected sun. “You know what’s the worst? I didn’t know he was unhappy. Isn’t that terrible, not to know that about someone? Maybe the woman was part of all that, I don’t know. So maybe it’s my fault, too.”

  “No. It’s nobody’s fault.”

  “I didn’t even notice,” she said, not hearing him. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. One day, one thing, the next-” She put a hand up to her forehead, covering her glasses. “I’m sorry. I must sound like a crazy woman. Talking like this. You’re here five minutes-”

  “It’s all right. I don’t know how to feel, either.”

  She turned, dropping her hand. “Yes. I forget. It’s not just me, is it?”

  He followed her to a convertible with the canvas roof down, shining with chrome, the metal handle already hot to the touch. She opened the door, then stood still for a second, looking at him.

  “What?”

  “Just then, with the bag, you were like him. Not the looks. You don’t look alike. But the gesture.”

  He got in, flustered, and watched her start the car.

  “I know it’s hard, but-tell me what happened. I want to know. The papers. I mean, dizzy spells.”

  “That was their idea. I said, why not a stroke? Anybody can have a stroke. Even young. But they said a doctor could tell, if he looked. A fall, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Who said?”

  “The studio. They’re superstitious. Bad things. Maybe they stick. They’re not supposed to happen.” She glanced up at the bright sky. “Just sunshine.”

  “But how? Through a window?” he said, still trying to picture it.

  “There was a balcony. Just enough to step on. You know the kind?”

  “A Juliet,” he said automatically.

  “Yes? Like the play? So if you got dizzy, you could fall.”

  “If you got dizzy.”

  She looked at him, then up at the rearview mirror, backing out, physically moving away.

  “Look,” she said, nodding toward the station doors as Polly came out with Carole Landis, arms linked. She waved and moved the car forward in the line to the exit. “Did you really meet Paulette Goddard on the train?” Not wanting to talk about it. “What was she like?”

  “Nice,” he said, forced to go along.

  “Maybe you are.”

  “No, she was.”

  “She won’t be after Polly’s through with her.”

  “What was that about? With Chaplin?”

  “Polly hates Chaplin. So he must be a Communist. Everyone she hates is a Communist. She hated Daniel, too, when he was in the union. She thinks they’re all Communists in the union.”

  “Then why is she doing him a favor? Covering.”

  “It’s for Yates. Daniel was important to him. Partners made money. So he was giving him a big picture to do. You know at Metro you have to wait years for that. That’s why he left there. You know what he’s like. Everything today. A skating picture, but still. A good budget.”

  Not failing, on his way up.

  “Skating. Like Sonja Henie?”

  “Vera Hruba Ralston,” she said, drawing out the name. “You know her? Yates is in love with her. So it was a good job for Daniel. They paid him while they fixed the script.”

  “Hruba?”

  “‘She skated out of Czechoslovakia and into the hearts of America.’“

  Ben did a double take, then smiled. “Really?”

  She nodded. “On the posters,” she said, lighting another cigarette at the stop sign.

  “Who’s Mr. Ralston?”

  “She got it off a cereal box.”

  “You’re making it up.”

  “You don’t have to, not here.” She looked up at the sky again. “The fog’s burning off early. Sometimes it takes all morning. Shall we go to the hospital first?”

  She pulled out of the lot, looking straight ahead. Smoke curled up from the cigarette between her fingers on the steering wheel, then flew back in the breeze as they sped up, mixing with loose wisps of hair. What California was supposed to be like-a girl in a convertible. But not the way he expected.

  Across the street, they drove past a sleepy plaza of tile roofs and Mexican rug stalls, a village for tourists. Behind it, just a block away, the American city began: office buildings, coffee shops, anywhere. Harold Lloyd had dangled from a clock here and the Kops had chased each other through Pershing Square and dodged streetcars (red, it turned out), but all that had happened in some city of the mind. The real streets, used so often as somewhere else, looked like nowhere in particular.

  They drove out on Wilshire, the buildings getting lower, drive-ins and car lots with strings of plastic pennants.

  “The first time, you think how can it be like this,” she said, noticing his expression. “The signs. And then you get used to it. Even my father. He likes it now.”

  “Well, the climate-”

  “Not so much that. He’s hardly ever outside. For him it’s a haven,” she said, her voice so throaty that it came out “heaven.” “All those years, moving. One place. Another place. Then here, finally safe, and other Germans are here, so it’s good. The sun, I don’t think it matters for him. He lives in his study. In his books.”

  “What was Central Station? I never-”

  “ Anhalter before. They changed it. So it wouldn’t sound German. You know it?”

  “ Anhalter Bahnhof. Of course.”

>   “Tell him. He’ll be pleased.”

  She made a right on Vermont, pointing them now toward the hills.

  “Do we pass Continental on the way?” Ben said.

  “We can, if you like.”

  “But if it’s out of our way-”

  “It doesn’t matter. He’s not conscious, you know. We just sit there. Maybe it’s better for him. There’s so much damage, the brain-if he were awake, what would that be like for him? Sometimes I think it would be better if-and then I think, how can you think that?” She bit her lower lip. “But he did. I don’t know why. But that’s what he wanted. Not this.”

  He looked away, across the miles of bungalows.

  “Did he leave a note?” he said finally.

  “No.”

  The crucial prop, the writing of it sometimes a scene in itself, looking up from the paper into a mirror, eyes moist. In the movies. In real life you just did it.

  “Just his ‘effects.’ I had to sign. You know that word? I didn’t know it. Effects.” She looked at him. “They would have said. If they’d found anything.” She turned on Melrose. “That’s Paramount down there, where the water tower is.”

  After a few blocks he could see the roofs of the sound stages, humped like airplane hangars. She slowed near a gate of swirling wrought iron so that he could get a glimpse behind-a tidy factory yard with people in shirt sleeves gliding past, the tall water tower rising above everything, just like its mountaintop logo, ringed with stars. In front of the gate, a thin line of pickets walked back and forth carrying signs.

  “There’s a strike?” Ben said. A prewar image.

  “Daniel said it was jurisdictional,” she said, careful with the word. “One union against the other.” She looked away, no longer interested. “He always wanted to work here. More than any of them. Maybe if- well. That’s RKO, at the end.”

  They turned onto Gower under the model of a radio tower on a globe.

  “Continental’s up there,” she said, pointing. “Across from Columbia.”

  This gate was modern, no more than a break in the walls with streamlined trim. Beyond it, unseen, Lasner’s empire, built from nickels, a private world made invisible by sentries and passes. Outside, the street was empty-no pickets, just a small cluster of people near the gate.

  “Who’s that?” Ben said.

  “They wait here, to see who drives through.”

  “For autographs?”

  “No, just to see them. For a minute.”

  Hans Ostermann was waiting for them in Danny’s room, reading in the corner next to the window. The shades were half-drawn so that even the light seemed hushed, a hospital quiet broken only by the nurses outside and the clank of a meal cart being wheeled down the hall. Ostermann stood when they came in, taking Ben’s hand. He was wearing a suit and tie, as natural to him as his perfect posture and formal nod. Ben wondered, a darting moment, if he wrote dressed this way, erect at his desk in a white collar, keeping German alive.

  Ben approached the bed, his stomach tightening with shock. Not just sick. Danny’s face was beaten in, bruised, one eye swollen shut, jagged laceration marks crossing the rest. What happens when you hit. Ben stared at him for a minute, trying to see something familiar, but all he could see was the fall itself, the smash at the end. Why this way? Danny primping at the mirror for a date, deliberately doing this to himself. Why not sleeping pills, an easier Hollywood exit? Why would he want to look this way?

  Ben stepped closer, taking in the IV drip, the monitor, all the hospital tools to keep him alive, bring him back. But you only had to look at the broken face to see the truth. The teases, the grins, were gone. They were just waiting for the rest of him to go. Ben took his hand, half expecting some response, but nothing moved.

  “Danny,” he said, keeping his voice low, waking someone who’s just dozed off. He turned to the others. “Can he hear anything?”

  “No,” Liesl said.

  “We don’t know that,” Ostermann said. “There’s no way of knowing. Talk if you like.”

  “Nonsense,” Liesl said, moving over to a vase of flowers.

  “No, the doctor said, head injuries-we don’t know. What really happens.” He looked over at Ben, his voice reassuring. “The first two days were the critical ones. So perhaps-”

  “But he’s no better,” Liesl said, bluntly pragmatic, facing it. “Why do people send flowers when he can’t see them.”

  The room, Ben noticed now, was full of them, covering side tables and window sills.

  “It’s a sign of concern,” Ostermann said. “A gesture.”

  “For you,” Liesl said. “They send them for you.”

  “You’re tired,” Ostermann said, as close, Ben saw, as he would come to a reprimand.

  Liesl was reading one of the cards attached to a vase. “From Alma,” she said. “So she’s forgiven you.”

  “For now,” Ostermann said, a weak smile.

  Ben looked at the bruised face. When you’re unconscious, where does the mind go? Functioning somewhere beyond pain, or simply floating in white? Now that he was here, what was there to do? The usual business of a hospital visit seemed beside the point-fetching nurses, chatting idly to keep up spirits, plumping pillows.

  Instead they waited, Ostermann returning to his book, Ben sitting at the bedside gazing at Danny’s damaged face, Liesl pacing, making lists of the flower cards for thank-you notes, glancing over at the bed as if she were still deciding how to feel, wearing herself out with it.

  By lunch, in the cafeteria, she was visibly exhausted.

  “Go home and rest,” Ostermann said. “You were here all night.”

  “How can I leave? What if I’m not here if- What would people say?”

  “That the family was here. Get Ben settled in. I’ll stay.”

  “How can I sleep?” she said, putting things on her tray, standing up.

  Ostermann looked at her fondly. “Then have a swim.” He turned to Ben as she left the table. “It’s no good, being here day and night. Look at her, all nerves. Take her home. He’ll be here later, you know.”

  “What if he isn’t?”

  “I know how you feel. When Anna was dying, in Paris, I never left. Nuns. I didn’t want to leave her with nuns. Leave her alone. But it was for me, not her. When she died, I was there and it didn’t matter. She was alone. I didn’t know it until then. We die alone.” He looked up. “I’ll call if there’s a change.”

  They drove up into the hills, the narrow road twisting upward in a series of blind curves past tall bushes and steep, hidden driveways. With each turn the houses seemed to get bigger, villas and a few white boxes that once must have been daring and modernist, softened now by middle-aged gardens. The trees were bigger, too, mature oaks and tall needle pines, as if the cooler air above the flats made it easier for them to grow. The new cars parked along the side of the road were buffed and shiny, like children after a bath.

  “Here we are.”

  The house, just visible through the driveway shrubs, was Mediterranean, fronted with a row of French windows. They pulled up next to a Dodge coupe.

  “Oh, good, Iris is here. I asked her to come in an extra day.” A maid with a car. In Germany, bicycles were traded for food.

  The house inside was light and open, filled with books and contemporary furniture, a piano covered with framed photographs in the corner. Iris, a wiry, pale woman in a dress, not a uniform, was in the dining room polishing silver.

  “I put the messages by the phone. You better call the caterer again. I told him no ham but he wants to talk to you.”

  Ben looked at Liesl, surprised.

  “I thought I’d better start arranging things,” she said, flushing, “just in case. So we won’t have to at the last minute. Iris, this is Mr. Kohler’s brother, Benjamin.”

  “Reuben. Anyway, Ben,” he said, distracted, noticing her feet in pink bedroom slippers.

  Iris nodded. “I’m sorry about Mr. Kohler,” she said, formal but genuine, then
cocked her head to one side, appraising him. “You don’t look alike.”

  “No, he took after my father.”

  Liesl started toward the hall. “You’re down this way. You’ll have your own bath, so it’s private.”

  Through an open door on their left he could see a big desk and more shelves. Danny’s real workroom, not rented by the month. A club chair in the corner and, next to it, a day bed made up as a couch.

  “I’m here. Daniel’s dressing room opens from the hall, too, so you won’t be bothering me. If you use it. That door.” She pointed, still moving.

  “You better call the caterer,” Iris shouted from the dining room.

  “All right. I don’t see what’s so difficult. I said poached salmon.”

  “Well, he heard ham.”

  She opened a door at the end of the hall. “You’re in here. I’d better phone or she’ll nag me about it. If you’d like a swim, just use those stairs-the pool’s out back. I won’t be long.”

  A swim. Something he hadn’t had in four years. He gestured toward his bag. “I didn’t bring-” Who had bathing suits?

  “Use one of Daniel’s. He’s got a drawer full of them. Just root around and pick what you like.”

  He threw his bag on the bed and went over to the window. The pool was below, blue and rippling, catching the light in quick flashes. It had been set off from the rest of the hill by a private wall of trees, with the far end left open, so that the land seemed suspended in air before falling away to the distant grid of streets. Around the edge were large pots of geraniums, a few lemon trees, and a row of trimmed oleanders, high enough to flower but not block the view. Ben stared at the pool, unsettled, as if a wrong note of music had been hit, jarring the whole piece. He’d thought of Danny as somehow desperate, not lying on a chaise in the sun, picking fruit off trees. How did they fit? An acre of paradise and a room at the Cherokee Arms.