Dreams Are Not Enough

by Jacqueline Briskin

  “Maybe he ran off with a hatcheck girl, old Carmine,” PD said, taking an olive. “Coincidences happen.”

  “And accidents happen to whoever Lang thinks owes him. Never anything provable, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t dead.” Frank, close to tears, tugged his mustache.

  “I’m sure some kind of deal can be worked out with him,” PD said comfortingly.

  Frank sighed. “He has eyes like a crocodile. They never blink. He’s a bad thing for all Italians.” He sat a bit straighter. “PD, you mean what you just said? You could work out a deal?”

  For the first time in his life PD experienced the visceral responsibility that occurs when a parent becomes the dependent.

  “Piece of cake,” he lied.

  • • •

  PD sat in his car several minutes before he turned the ignition key, revolving the problem in his mind. Raising the money seemed as impossible as raising the dead.

  As he drove along Santa Monica Boulevard in the direction of his apartment, he saw the lit façade of Good Shepherd. He hadn’t been inside the twin-towered, Mission-style building since he’d bought Beth’s ring a year ago. He turned left. Parking on Bedford Drive, he told himself that this would be no disloyalty, that he merely needed a quiet place to get his head together.

  He passed between the heavily carved doors and was assailed by the familiarly mingled smells of Lysol and incense. Without conscious volition, he dipped his hand in the cool water, crossing himself and genuflecting.

  A modicum of peace descended on him as he slid into the pew. His mind no longer twitched with the impossible amount of four hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Folding his hands on his lap, he closed his eyes, letting himself float the way he had as a boy, and soon he was in a mental sanctuary where spacious calm prevailed. He found himself murmuring, “Hail Mary full of Grace, blessed art thou among women. . . .”

  Alyssia, he thought suddenly. She was vacationing in Italy with Hap.

  “Alyssia,” he said aloud.

  He accepted the name as the answered prayer for his family’s salvation.

  35

  “Yes?” said the soft masculine voice at the other end of the line.

  “Mr. Lang, this is PD Zaffarano, Frank Zaffarano’s son. There’s some business I need to discuss with you.”

  “You’re talking for your father, then?”

  “Yes, for Dad. When can I see you?”

  “I’m free anytime tonight.”

  It was after eleven. “Tonight?” PD echoed.

  “You’ll have no problem getting a flight. Ask for me at the desk.”

  • • •

  Though all other forms of high living attracted PD, his father’s abiding and unfortunate passion had given him an aversion to the extravagances that surrounded gambling. He never used the Zaffarano box at Santa Anita, he avoided the Friars Club because of its high-stake card games and had availed himself of Bartolomeo Lanzoni’s offers of a gratis run of the Fabulador just that one time ten years ago.

  Since the broiling day of Barry and Alyssia’s elopement, the hotel had tripled in size.

  Though it was long after midnight, a half dozen red-jacketed clerks still busily manned the reception desk. When PD explained he had an appointment with Robert Lang, the clerk’s bored smile changed to respect. With a snap of fingers, he summoned a bellhop. “Show this gentleman to Mr. Lang’s entry.” PD was led past crowded cocktail lounges and clattering slots, through a maze of crimson-carpeted halls, until they came to an elevator door marked PRIVATE. “Here you are, sir.”

  Tipping the boy a five, PD rode up to the elevator’s sole destination.

  When the door slid open he couldn’t prevent his gasp.

  He had been anticipating more of the same garish red decor, but in front of him stretched a softly lit library with obviously old, honey-colored bookcases. The chintz upholstery was faded to soft pastels; the tabletops sagged a bit with age. No interior decorator could have designed such a room, it had been achieved only by several generations of soft living and hard money.

  “Mr. Zaffarano?” said the same soft bass he’d heard on the phone. A man hidden by the back of the sofa rose to his feet. “I’m Robert Lang.”

  He was about thirty, approximately six foot tall, and slight—no, weedy was a better description—with thinning, rumpled brown hair. His v-necked sweater was so well worn that the sleeves were transparent at both elbows, while his equally antiquated, creaseless flannel pants appeared to have been bought decades earlier for attendance at some Eastern prep school.

  There was no way PD could reconcile Robert Lang with Bartolomeo Lanzoni, a very short, ebullient Sicilian who wore loud ties and puffed at smelly cigars. Other mental cogs refused to slip into place. How could this obvious gentleman be threatening the lives of the entire Zaffarano family even unto the third generation?

  “My father spoke of you often,” Lang said.

  “Uncle Bart was my idol. Mom and Dad always said there was no holding me down when Uncle Bart came to the house.” Though PD’s warmth for his father’s dead buddy came naturally enough, the staking of a familial claim by reiterating Uncle Bart was quite deliberate.

  “May I offer you a drink?” Lang gestured at three crystal decanters incarcerated in a silver tantalus.

  PD never touched alcohol during any form of negotiation. “Thanks, but no,” he replied. “This room is amazing, really amazing.”

  “It was moved intact from my mother’s place.”

  All that PD knew of Uncle Bart’s wife was she had died in her early twenties. Could she possibly have been English upper crust? Gatsby, he thought suddenly. At Beth’s insistence he had read the property and fallen in love with Fitzgerald’s blue lawns and the gangster whose every far-out claim turns out to be true.

  Lang poured himself a Scotch. “You’re representing your father, Mr. Zaffarano.”

  PD formed a smile. “That’s my line. I’m an agent, Mr. Lang.” He paused, awaiting the usual suggestion to drop the formality and go onto a first-name basis. His host said nothing. After a couple of beats, PD continued. “I suppose you realize Dad’s flat broke?”

  Lang watched him silently.

  “But if you’ll hold off a few months, we could make five, six times the money he owes you.”

  “We? You mean you and your father?”

  “No, this is strictly between you and me.” PD paused. “I handle major talent, including Alyssia del Mar.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that. I’m a great admirer of her work.”

  “Alyssia’s the definition of the word star. On her next film I can get her to defer salary to you.”

  Lang continued to watch him.

  All at once PD could hear his father’s words: eyes like a crocodile. They never blink.

  “I suppose you’re wondering why she’d do all this for me,” PD said. “The truth is I helped her out once and she owes me. Just like Dad owes you.”

  Lang sipped his Scotch. “As a matter of fact,” he said finally, “I have been considering branching out in Southern California.”

  “Movies?”

  “I’m not positive. Real estate interests me too.”

  “If you’re thinking of Dad’s house, I better warn you that it’s mortgaged to the roof shakes.”

  “Land development is more what I have in mind. An industrial park surrounded by green belts, tracts of variously priced houses. Shopping malls.”

  “Major development,” PD said, wishing he didn’t sound so impressed.

  Another of those long, staring silences.

  PD longed to mop his forehead and upper lip, but all his well-developed instincts warned him to remain both quiet and still. He forced himself to concentrate on the peculiar absence of sound in the library. Fifteen stories below, gamblers reveled and traffic flowed and honked on the Strip, yet PD might have been profoundly deaf for all he heard of the night bustle.

  “Mr. Zaffarano,” Lang said slowly, “one thing you must und
erstand about me. I deal in good faith with others. I expect that same treatment in return.”

  “Dad sincerely felt he could pay his debt.”

  “I don’t wish Miss del Mar to consider I’m forcing her into a difficult position.”

  “It’s me she’d be doing this for,” PD said, while thinking, What makes you so sure she’ll do it? He wasn’t sure, but his gut instinct was that she would help him.

  “Wandering On,” Lang said. “I’ve seen it five times and it’s impressed me each time.”

  “Tremendous at the box office, too. If that’s what you have in mind, no problem. Alyssia would be delighted to do a quality project.”

  “And what about your other cousins? The director, the producer, the writer. The deal would have to include all four of them.”

  PD was dead positive of Barry, who had indicated at their meeting this afternoon—no, yesterday afternoon—that he’d sell his sozzled soul to do a feature. The Wasps, as he and Beth privately called their Episcopalian cousins, were another story entirely. Maxim, who spent most of his time stuck away on his Mexican island, hadn’t done another film after Wandering On, and might easily tell him to fuck off. And as for Hap—if Hap were ignorant of Lang’s Vegas background, his father would set him straight. Hap assuredly would refuse.

  He evaded the question. “Are we talking that you’ll finance?”

  “I’ll put up the money, yes.”

  “Have you considered the sort of percentages you’ll give?”

  “Percentages?”

  “Of the gross. The director gets anywhere up to five, and so does the producer. Even the writer expects something.”

  “I thought you understood, Mr. Zaffarano. The others would get scale.”

  “Scale?” PD cried. “Only beginners work for scale! These are top people!”

  “Then it’s up to you to negotiate with them.”

  “And what about Alyssia? It’s usual for a superstar like her to get someplace close to ten percent of the action.”

  “As you yourself suggested, Miss del Mar will turn her earnings over to me.”

  “I only meant her salary! Am I hearing you right? She stands to make zero on the film.”

  Lang poured himself a Scotch. “You said she was indebted to you.”

  “Mr. Lang, be realistic. You could make millions on an arrangement like this.”

  “You’re acting for your father, aren’t you?” The tone remained soft, gentlemanly.

  “Yes, sure, but—”

  “Then I’ll need to know whether you’ll be paying his debt. Or whether I’ll be financing this film.”

  “We don’t have a property or even a story idea. It takes a long time to get together the crucial elements, and to put it mildly, this deal’s complicated.”

  Lang was thumbing through a hand-tooled leather datebook. “Get back to me by the twenty-eighth,” he said.

  “Of September?”

  “Certainly.”

  “But that only gives me a week. And Alyssia and Hap and Maxim are out of the country!”

  “Possibly your father will have paid his debt by then,” Lang said, and courteously escorted PD to the elevator.

  • • •

  Beth, tying the sash of her pink robe, came to the front door of her apartment. After their official engagement, she had moved out of her parents’ house but still continued to pay the Salvadorian woman she had hired to help Clara.

  “PD, dearest. You look like you haven’t been to bed,” she said in that soothing voice.

  He felt a bit less annihilated. “I haven’t, I’ve been in Vegas. It’s a long story, and right now I could kill for a shower.”

  Showered, wearing his own robe, which was kept discreetly in the back of Beth’s walk-in closet, he sat on the couch and drank cup after cup of fresh brewed black coffee as he told her the story of his father’s debacle with Lang. “You wouldn’t believe this guy. On the outside he’s an English duke or something, but I swear if you took his temperature it’d be below freezing.”

  “He really has people killed?”

  “Nothing crude—it’s always accidents.” PD set down his cup. “Jesus, Bethie, what am I going to do?”

  “There’s no choice, darling. You have to convince Barry, Maxim, Hap and Alyssia.”

  “Barry’s no problem, he’s hot to do a feature—I did say I’m representing him? And I’m pretty positive of Alyssia. But what about the Wasps? How in hell do I convince them? For God’s sake, Hap’s the only truly incorruptible man alive, and you know the spectacular offers Maxim’s refused.”

  “Tell them exactly what you told me.”

  “Beth,” he said hopelessly. “Lang gave me exactly one week. Hap and Alyssia are in Italy; Maxim on that island. I don’t even know how you get to that godforsaken part of Mexico.” PD’s voice cracked, and he had to fight back the urge to weep.

  “My poor sweetie,” Beth said, tenderly stroking back his hair. “You’re exhausted. Things’ll fall into place after you’ve slept.”

  “Sleep? Who has time to sleep?”

  “You can grab an hour while I call my travel agent.”

  In the bedroom he got between flowered sheets that smelled of her, and as she bent to kiss him, his lips clung to hers until she stretched out next to him. “You’re the only person I can count on,” he whispered.

  “I love you even more for doing all this for your father.”

  He untied her robe, pulling up her nightgown, caressing her breasts and what lay beneath the brown triangle, the touch that cherished her above all others. While birds chirped outside the windows, they made love gently and caringly. Some of the girls of PD’s youth had been exquisitely skilled, others adept with accoutrements and drugs, but only with his cousin did he feel unfettered by raging ambitions. With her he was the decent, honestly open man he yearned to be.

  He drowsed to the sound of her serene voice discussing itineraries.

  36

  As the Alitalia plane slowed for its descent into the Milan airport, PD closed his eyes. He was perennially dubious about those laws of aerodynamics which enable a large metal object to dangle semistationary in midair.

  The dangerous part of the trip is over, he assured himself. Successfully over.

  Beth’s travel agent had arranged his journey to Izumel first, a bouncily nerve-racking Aeromex flight to Vera Cruz, and an eternal taxi ride through humid jungle to Puerto Santiago. On the dock passengers, including PD, crossed themselves before boarding an archaic motor launch. The island, a four-mile-long crescent, was defaced at its northern tip by a cluster of shacks. Maxim’s broad-verandaed adobe at the southern end was the only other habitation.

  PD, not having seen Maxim in the three years since the premiere of Wandering On, was frankly shocked by his cousin’s appearance. Maxim was yet thinner. And somehow his deep, reddish tan seemed a cosmetic to hide his pallor—had PD not known better, he would have believed Maxim recovering from a dear one’s death or a mortal love affair.

  They sat on the porch facing a tumbled Mayan pyramid which Maxim gazed at as PD unfolded the Zaffarano family’s peril. When PD asked—no, begged—for help, Maxim got up to open a Dos Equis. Drinking it, he launched into the history of Izumel: in Mayan times the island had been sacred to Ix Shell, goddess of fertility and basket weaving, whose temple the ruin had been.

  PD could bear no more yattering. “Jesus, Maxim! I can see you’re not interested, so why not level with me? Are you permanently through with producing? Or does the Vegas backing turn you off?” He paused, adding in a choked tone, “Or don’t you want to help me out?”

  Maxim opened another beer. “Stop me if I’m wrong, but you don’t have a script?”

  PD shook his head. Barry’s feature ideas, spilled hastily on the drive to LAX, had been unmitigated crapola, giving PD yet another problem: finding a vehicle.

  Maxim, an artist at jerking people around, halted to chugalug his beer. “Then, old buddy, I’ll produce on one condition.”


  “You’re coming in?” PD’s voice broke with excitement.

  “If we make this novel I happen to own.”

  “You’ve optioned a property?”

  “Bought it. Three thousand bucks.”

  PD’s sudden hopes had plummeted. Slumping into his deck chair, he had said, “Nothing producible ever comes that cheap.”

  But, reading the thin book, Transformations, during the flight to Milan, PD had realized price wasn’t an infallible indicator of quality. If ever there was material alive with cinematic possibilities, Transformations was it.

  The plane wheels bounced onto the runway and PD gripped the seat arms. Dizzy with fatigue, he yearned to head for Milan’s top hotel, the Principe e Savoia, where he could shower, dine on veal and fresh porcini mushrooms, then sink into a long sleep.

  But he had exactly fifty hours left.

  He rented a Fiat, following the signs to Lake Como. A warm, drab mist blotted out the view of the Alps and most of the lake. The season was over, so vacationers no longer swarmed in the tiny pastel towns that tumbled precipitously toward the waterfront. On the hairpin curve before the village of Bellagio, PD slowed at a stone gatepost on which was carved VILLA ADRIANA. Swerving across the narrow road, he braked down a steep, cobbled drive. The nineteenth-century house with its peaked roof appeared a smallish bungalow, but from a previous visit, PD knew that five commodious stories descended the hillside.

  • • •

  Hap and Alyssia had leased the Villa Adriana each September of the three years they had lived together. The month was inviolably set apart from the anxieties and pressures of their work. They fell into a drowsy, pleasurable routine—leisurely forays on Bellagio to buy the pungent local salamis and cheeses, or explorations of other villages that surrounded Lake Como. They sat on the terrace, watching the turbulent clouds above the mountain peaks or admiring the panorama—from here they could see all three fingers of Lake Como. They strolled hand in hand around the sculptures and follies in the gardens of Villa Serballone and Villa Melzi. The only shadow on the Septembral happiness was Hap’s seldom mentioned but omnipresent desire to legalize their relationship.