Between the Bridge and the River (24 page)

He got the boys a two-bedroom apartment on Sweetzer Boulevard in West Hollywood, not far from his own place, and set about getting Leon a series of “generals”—meetings with casting directors who could put Leon’s name forward for him to be considered for upcoming projects.

Casting directors in Hollywood are usually gay men or middle-aged women, so Leon shone in these getting-to-know-you meetings.
He flirted and smiled and joked and charmed, but there are lots of extremely good-looking young men who can flirt and charm in Hollywood, it’s one of the things that makes the town so obnoxious, so although he did well, that is to say he was liked, nothing came of any of these meetings.

Saul complained to Cadence that he had Leon go up for acting jobs when he was a singer. Cadence said, bullshit, everyone was an actor and he knew what he was doing. He just wanted enough people to know who Leon was before he had a showcase. He was raising Leon’s profile.

“What’s a showcase?” asked Leon.

“It’s where you get to score your first goal,” said Cadence.

The only other client of any importance that Cadence had was an English screenwriter named David Trundle. Trundle, although a mediocre talent, had managed to wrangle a scholarship for the prestigious UCLA screenwriting course that had been paid for by BAFTA, the British Academy for Film and Television Arts. He got this through his social and family connections in the U.K.

Trundle, a triumph of the English public-school system (which is what the English call their private-school system), was a well-mannered weasel who would succeed far beyond his potential. In another time he would have joined the British Foreign Office.

The screenwriting course itself is prestigious because it has produced a number of students who have written highly lucrative formulaic blockbuster movies for the big studios, movies about evil tornados or evil aliens or evil scientists or evil dinosaurs or serial killers or tough-but-likable maverick cops who don’t play by the rules.

Cadence’s biggest triumph at CAM was when he managed to get a million dollars for a spec script Trundle had written, a ludicrous thriller called
Fingerplay,
the story of identical twins Esau and Luke, who are separated in childhood. Esau becomes a scientist/serial killer and Luke becomes a tough but likable maverick cop who doesn’t play by the rules.

Esau finds a way to forge fingerprints by genetically restructuring his own hands. He steals his brother’s identity and frames him for a
string of murders, and Luke, the good twin/cop, has to clear his name or he will go to the gas chamber and lose his girlfriend.

There is a poignant moment toward the end of the movie when Luke has to kill his bad self.

“Very Jungian,” wrote the fawning and corrupt semiliterate chimp who reviewed films for a Chicago newspaper. The film starred the pompous, pseudo-intellectual, alcoholic movie actor Nicholas Kilmer in the roles of both cop and killer. It made two hundred million dollars at the box office and Kilmer won an Oscar for his work. The critics lauded his performance as breathtaking.

With the success of
Fingerplay,
Trundle became insufferable, he became a genius in his own mind, and he kept on and on at Cadence that he wasn’t getting paid enough for his scripts (he burned through the million for
Fingerplay
very quickly) and demanded that Cadence find him a deal. Cadence was having trouble getting work for the English man because of his reputation for being extremely argumentative and difficult, characteristics that would be tolerated, even encouraged, in an actor or director but were unwise in writers, given that they were so easily replaced. Jesus, anyone can write if they have the time. How hard can it be?

Cadence told Trundle he had a plan for him to make huge dollars by creating a sitcom for television.

Trundle said that no way was he going to make television, he was an artist, but he listened more closely when Cadence told him the amounts involved should they be successful.

Trundle made sure that he was at the showcase early in order to properly suck up to Leon, just in case.

It is difficult for those who have never been actively involved to appreciate the depth of the pathological self-centeredness that infects entertainment executives and artists’ representatives in Los Angeles. These are people who, with one or two exceptions, earn their living and base their self-worth completely on money, gossip, and how much they weigh. This is both a good and bad thing. It is bad for the executives and agents themselves because most of them, as they age, no
matter how successful they have been in financial, career, and dietary terms, begin to realize the awful emptiness of their lives, and this makes them very sad and bitter.

The good thing is it makes them very easy to manipulate. These people are frantic, so the fashion among them is to suck in their guts and effect an attitude that they are slightly bored by everything.

Beneath the surface, little desperate ducks paddling furiously.

Cadence, being one of them, but a smarter-than-average example, understood this, so his plan for Leon’s debut in Hollywood and what would come after was very well thought out, with maximum advantage for him.

He hadn’t figured on Saul but he would only regret that later. Truth is, Cadence did a great job.

When Leon had been to see enough people around town and made a good enough impression, Cadence let slip to one or two other agents, and to his assistant, who was really a spy from another agency (Cadence had long ago guessed this and played the little Mata Hari for all he was worth), that Leon had a development offer on the table from one of the big television networks. A deal that meant the network was developing a sitcom for the charming young Southerner to star in.

When the rumor was established enough, he sent out invitations to hear Leon sing at a dingy little comedy club called the Maestro on Melrose Boulevard in West Hollywood.

Normally, of course, no one would attend an event like this, but Cadence picked a Monday night, when he knew there were no movie premieres or basketball games on, and he picked a club small enough to mean that he could only fit about fifty people into the room.

This meant tickets became scarce and this meant people wanted them. Consequently, there was a decent turnout of middle-range power players in the Maestro when Leon walked to the mike and Rufus, a bucktoothed, red-haired pianist hired for the occasion, hit the opening chords of “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”

The effect of that night on Leon’s standing within the entertainment community in L.A. was dramatic, and before long there actually was a development offer on the table for him.

Cadence packaged Leon with David Trundle as the creators of the sitcom
Oh Leon!
with himself and Saul as executive producers.

The show was about a young lounge singer in Las Vegas, Leon Johnson, played, of course, by Leon (the network thought that Leon’s real surname of Martini sounded too ethnic and alcoholic), who has to raise his cute little brother, Petey, and deal with his wacky fat neighbor, Stan, who is a croupier at one of the big casinos.

After a difficult pilot in which they went through three different kids until they got the right child actor to play little Petey, the network ordered thirteen more episodes.

Leon sang a different song every episode.

The show premiered in the fall.

CLAUDETTE AWOKE JUST AFTER DAWN
, the clean sunlight coloring the city lightly to perfection. She looked at George sleeping peacefully and kissed him on the lips. He smiled but did not awaken. She quietly got out of bed and walked to the bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror, enjoying the little lines of age that were beginning to form around her eyes. French women do not fear aging in the way that their American sisters do. She washed and dressed quietly and wrote a little note for George. She left it on the pillow.

Cher Georges,

If you awake before I return do not think

me callous or rude but I have gone to

the patisserie to fetch breakfast for us.

Thank you for sleeping with me.

Claudette.

X

George kept the note until the day he died. In fact, it was burned with him, in his inside jacket pocket.

She quietly closed the apartment door and headed down the stairs. She didn’t want to be alone in the elevator. She clicked open the little door within the giant green doors of the entrance to the building and stepped out onto the street.

The patisserie at the corner of Rue de Vaugirard and Rue Madam consistently wins awards for its croissants and brioche. In a city of exceptional bakers, it is an exceptional bakery. The counter staff have the usual bleary-eyed grumpiness of all bakers from having to rise in the middle of the night. Like yeast.

Claudette was not too surprised to see a line of construction workers waiting for their take-out breakfasts; there was a lot of renovation being done at the nearby Catholic Institute of Paris.

Rather than wait in a line of amorous laborers, she decided to take a little walk around the park. The Jardin du Luxembourg is closed at night. Municipal workers open the gates at around seven a.m. and early-morning joggers plod around unimpeded by mothers with strollers or tourists who will show up later in the day.

It had been a long time since Claudette had been in the gardens this early and she wondered why. It was at its most beautiful at the beginning or the end of the day.

She strolled toward the boating pond at the park’s center and sat down on one of the green metal chairs thoughtfully laid out by the local council.

She thought of the sex with George. She thought of their meeting and marveled at the intensity of emotion, the depth of feeling that she already had for him. She was a little frightened that he would not feel the same way this morning but she instinctively knew that would not be the case.

She was lost in reverie when she felt the bony old hand tap on her shoulder. She turned around to see a pitifully unpleasant-looking old man. His bloodshot, watery eyes seemed to have the look of a bludgeoned dead squid. White sprigs of hair peeped from under his black beret, sprouted from his ears, and crept from the nostrils of his giant sponge nose like little pallid hedges decorated with a nicotine tint. He had no bottom teeth and suspiciously perfect top ones that looked a
little slack. In fact, they dropped down as he spoke, almost falling from his mouth.

“Do you have a cigarette for an old man, daughter?” he croaked in a voice from a bad character actor’s repertoire.

Claudette smiled and dug a Lucky Strike from the pack in her purse. She lit it for the old man, who shut his eyes and inhaled deeply, drawing the blue smoke down as far as his breath would allow. He held the smoke, then released it in an almost euphoric exhale.

He looked at the label on the cigarette filter. “American?” he said.

She nodded. “They make good cigarettes, then don’t smoke them.”

The old man laughed, phlegm rattling around in his loose, jangly frame.

“I like Americans,” he said. “They are lovers of liberty and civil disobedience and science. They are a great people. Have you been there?”

“Once,” she replied. “I didn’t like it very much.”

He nodded. “I have never been. Perhaps that is why I like it so much.”

She smiled at him. She felt sympathetic toward him, partially because he seemed so pitiful and partly because she had been so well fucked a few hours before. She was still glowing a little.

The old man sat beside her. “I don’t talk to many people. They lose interest in you when you are old. Never grow old.”

“I don’t think I have a say in that,” she said.

“I’ve been here in the park all night, you know. They close the gates but I have my ways. Policemen, hah! They are always locking gates and pushing people around, but not me. Laws were made to be broken, I say.”

“You slept in the park?” she asked, concerned.

“I don’t sleep anymore,” he sighed. “I stay awake all night and listen to stories, or tell stories with the others. Do you want to hear a story?”

She looked at her watch but she wouldn’t have felt right saying no.

“It won’t take long.” The old man grinned. “It’s about a man who made these.” He tapped his filthy mahogany fingernail against the glass of Claudette’s watch face.

A strangely invasive gesture.

ONCE UPON A TIME
there was a clockmaker who believed in the divine right of kings.

His name was Jean Mancona and he came from the country town of Arras in northern France. His father was a clockmaker of no little skill, and nobility from all over the region came to visit his store and please themselves by wasting money on exquisitely crafted time-pieces. It was not as if they had any need of them—who would ever give them trouble for being late?—but they were in fashion.

The king liked them.

Little Jean was a sickly, sensitive child, a pale boy who timidly avoided the roughhousing of the other children in the schoolyard. He was forever the victim of bullies who pressured him to give over any food or toys he may have been carrying with him. He soon learned to carry nothing he valued, but always had a little something to placate his tormentors.

One day in the schoolyard, two of the older boys were picking on him. They had him pinned to the ground and were tweaking his nose and ears, making him squeal like a little runty piglet. Their fun was abruptly ended when Maximilien, a boy his own age, demanded that the bullies leave poor little Jean alone.

Maximilien was a quiet boy, very clever in his studies but aloof from his classmates. The other children said he was sad because his mother and father were dead and he was being raised by his aged grandparents, who were so old and cold they were almost dead too.

The bullies turned on Maximilien and demanded to know who he thought he was. Max stood his ground and when the first and bigger of the two bullies approached him he hit him so hard in the face with a rock he had concealed in his hand that the bully’s nose instantly gushed blood, terrifying him and his cohort.