Dreams Are Not Enough (48 page)

“Everybody,” she repeated.

“What does he say about Lang?”

“He goes into his background. Uncle Bart’s real name, that sort of thing. Nothing libelous—I’m sure lawyers have gone through it with a fine-tooth comb. But he—Lang—does appear star struck in love with showbiz. And, well, naive for letting Hap go so far over the production budget.”

“He comes off a total idiot, you mean?”

“There’s a phrase: ” Las Vegas groupie. ”” “Holy Mother of God!”

PD was in Las Vegas early that evening. While he explained the little he knew about Barry’s magazine sale, he maintained eye contact with Lang, no easy feat against that unfaltering gaze.

“Did Mrs. Gold infer that the material defamed me?”

“Only that you lived in Vegas and owned the Fabulador.” PD forced his white smile.

“Which isn’t against any laws.”

“Does it make me appear ridiculous? Mr. Zaffarano, I warn you, I have no sense of humor whatsoever when it comes to being the butt of humor.”

“I haven’t read the property. I only found out about the subject this morning. Immediately I called Barry’s New York agent to special deliver a copy to Vegas for you and another to my office. After we’ve read it through, we can strategize.”

“When will it arrive?”

“Any time now. I had them take the packages to Kennedy.”

Lang went to his desk, using a hidden intercom.

“Has anything arrived for me from New York?”

A young female voice replied, “About ten minutes ago, Mr. Lang.”

“Send it up, please.”

Almost immediately a short, swarthy man wearing a Fabulador red jacket emerged from the elevator, respectfully handing over an outsize manila envelope.

Lang carried it to his desk, slitting it with an ivory paper knife, putting on half glasses. Paper rustled as he set the pages he had read on the worn, tooled leather of his Jacobean desk. His demeanor gave not the least clue whether or not the material enraged him.

PD attempted not to squirm or stare.

When Lang had finished reading, he sat back in his chair, gazing thoughtfully at his laced fingers. PD would have given a fortune to glance through the stacked sheets, but he knew Lang. He’d have to wait until he saw his own copy. In the meantime he’d be forced to wing it.

The old and valuable-looking pendulum clock loudly ticked away several minutes.

At last Lang looked up.

“Is there any way to squelch this?” he asked in a dry rasp.

“That was the first question I asked Karl Balduff—he’s Barry’s East Coast representative. He said that since there was no libel or slander involved, his advice was to let it stand. If it doesn’t run, a lot of talking heads would be asking questions. About… well, about the hotel and Uncle Bart’s connections. But if you find anything objectionable I’ll try to get The New Yorker to cut it.”

Lang came to stand in front of the unlit fireplace. His expression was normal, but his eyes were strange. The pupils had shrunk to pinpoints as if his outraged brain had secreted some form of drug.

Frightened, PD muttered, “On the upside, the publicity might help Baobab.”

“I hear that Harvard Cordiner’s on his way to Africa.”

“He’s gone? Already?” PD blurted.

“It was just this morning that he mentioned that he would be leaving.”

“I don’t need to tell you how disturbing his excesses on The Baobab Tree have been to me.”

Beth had mentioned that Barry had skewered Lang as an incompetent dilettante for not controlling Hap.

“They went way over budget, sure,” PD soothed.

“Once the box office grosses start rolling in, though, it won’t matter.”

“Then you’ve seen the footage?”

“Hap hasn’t shown it to anyone. That’s how he operates. He’s a star director, with heat, so he has things his way until completion.”

“Exactly. He’s overseen the post-production work on his other films.

And now with Meadstar, he’s simply left. “

“This Hy Kelley is a top film editor,” PD said, openly using his handkerchief on his cheeks and forehead.

“Maxim’s still here.”

“Mr. Zaffarano, Harvard Cordiner is your client. I suggest you tell him to return and finish the job he signed to do for me.”

“I already begged him to stay.” PD shrugged, a helpless gesture.

“He explained he’d gone stale. He’s got problems—he’s splitting up with his wife.”

“His personal life is no concern to Meadstar.”

“Believe me, Mr. Lang, I’ve known the guy forever, and he’s gone haywire. In my opinion we’re lucky he’s off our backs.”

Lang continued to stare at him. Under that strange, pinpoint gaze, PD mopped his face again.

Then Lang looked away.

“I appreciate your alerting me about these matters,” he said in an almost warm tone.

“And I agree with you. It’s best if we leave The New Yorker alone.” He escorted PD to the elevator.

By the time PD was on the plane, he had forgotten how terrified he had been in the Fabulador penthouse while Lang was denouncing Hap. He was congratulating himself on having smoothed over what obviously was a rough situation for his cousin.

Even though it was late when he arrived in Los Angeles, and he was hungry, he went directly to the office.

The large envelope from New York lay neatly on his blotter.

As he scanned Barry’s material, he understood Lang’s fury against Hap.

PD’s own rage was directed at Barry. Never before had PD been in the power of the Cordiner rage. His body was poised for battle, his mind was consumed by a great heat, as if he were in the middle of a forest fire. How dare that writer turd say such things about him, about his family! If Barry were in the office, he would have killed him, and this was no figure of speech. He called Barry, getting his answering machine. PD could never remember what he screamed into the phone.

Then, to prevent himself from some form of violence, he stormed to the small inner office he had fixed up as a gym, pumping iron until he was drenched with sweat and too exhausted to move.

He told nobody that he’d read the article—he couldn’t even think about it without that hot conflagration of murderous urges. He avoided Barry.

Barry, haunted by what he considered Beth’s negative response to his magazine article and horrified by PD’s long, recorded shriek of obscene insults, which he immediately erased from his Ansafone, was in a panic lest Spy also provoke disgust or outrage. The galley proofs were due to arrive from the publisher in the middle of April. In order to go through them carefully and prune away every word that might be objectionable, he needed solitude. Lake Arrowhead being out of season, the mountain area was pretty much deserted and he was able to make a loose reservation for a remote cabin that lacked television and telephone.

The fat, quilted brown envelope containing the proofs arrived on April 14, a few days after Hap had left for Africa. Barry raced between the house and his car, filling the trunk with his manuscript, the galley proofs, a full pack of ballpoints, his portable electric Olympia, his bulky Webster’s Unabridged, Roget’s Thesaurus, two cartons of groceries and a huge chicken casserole prepared by Juanita.

A late storm had dumped several inches of snow on Arrowhead, and at the last minute Alyssia remembered blankets and the heavy hunting jacket that he wore at the chateau. While she went to get them, Barry gunned the engine impatiently.

Watching the car disappear down the steep, winding drive, Alyssia heard a high, thin voice that she didn’t recognize as her own call out, “Barry, don’t go, don’t leave me.”

That evening, Z Channel was showing Scarlet Empress. Alyssia’s legs ached, she felt alone and spiritless, so she decided to indulge herself by eating a dinner of buttery mashed potatoes in bed while taking in the Marlene Dietrich classic. Waiting for the movie, she watched network news. Later, it would seem impossible that she heard in this, the most cliche manner imaginable.

The anchorwoman was a pretty Oriental.

“We have just received a dispatch from Associated Press in Africa. The body of Hollywood director Harvard Cordiner, three-time Oscar nominee, reportedly has been found amid the wreckage of an automobile in a remote area of equatorial Zaire.”

This isn’t real, Alyssia thought wildly. She didn’t realize it, but she was breathing in loud, ragged gasps that resembled an attack, yet came from purely mental torment. / didn’t hear her say that!

“… Cordiner endowed a medical relief center in Zaire, a third world country, and often worked there. He recently completed The Baobab Tree, an as yet unreleased film starring Alyssia del Mar and Cliff Camron. Inhabitants of a nearby village reportedly found the charred automobile upended with Cordiner’s remains inside.”

Charred.

Alyssia shuddered convulsively.

Charred.

Once, she couldn’t have been more than five, May Sue had punished her for interrupting a party-party by holding her hand over the butane stove flame. This’ll learn you to stay out when I tell you to stay out. Now, decades later, Alyssia could feel the incendiary heat searing her palm, smell the charred meat odor. She was again experiencing the awesome pain, her helpless terror.

“We’ll keep you up to date as more reports come in. Now we return to Humphrey Shaw for today’s news of the stock market” -The voice halted abruptly. Alyssia had jammed down on the remote.

Rushing to the set, she gave the heavy piece of furniture a vindictive shove that wrenched at her shoulder and abdominal muscles, then she stumbled into the corridor, her legs weakening so that she would have fallen if she hadn’t leaned against the wall.

“Alice?” Juanita’s frightened voice reverberated as if in a distant echo chamber.

“Is it the baby?”

“Hap….”

Juanita set down the tray on the carpet.

“You’re panting. You’re having one of them bad spells. Here, come back to bed.”

Alyssia let herself be guided into her room. Falling across the bed, she started to weep in soft, animal-like howls.

Juanita sat beside her, draping an arm about the shuddering shoulders.

“Tell Nita what’s wrong,” she soothed.

“Hap….”

“Hap?”

“… television … news … he’s burned in a car.”

“No,” Juanita denied.

“I was watching in the kitchen. I didn’t see” — “Near the relief … center….”

The phone rang. Juanita answered.

“Cordiner residence. No, she can’t talk now. No. She don’t have any information on any accident!” Hanging up, she left the instrument off, letting it buzz.

“I don’t know how they get this number,” she said, tears streaming from beneath her glasses.

Alyssia asked in a choked tone, “So you believe me?”

“He was asking if it was true, so maybe it ain’t.”

Juanita’s remark, intended as mollification, struck hope into Alyssia’s precarious mental workings.

Maybe he’s alive. Yes. He’s alive.

Energy pulsed through her. She jumped to her feet, pacing to the dressing room door, then to the curtained window and back again. The baby, who was active, kicked. She didn’t feel the neural jabs.

“Alice,” Juanita said uneasily, “come lie down again.”

Alyssia paced faster. “

“Reportedly’ means it doesn’t have to be true, right? Besides, she said it was a car crash. And you know what a terrific driver Hap is. He never had a single accident, not even on those hairpin turns around Lake Como with all those crazy Italians going a hundred miles an hour. He told me there’s no traffic in Zaire once you leave Kinshasa—that’s the capital. How could he’ve had an accident? You’re absolutely right.”

“I … I only said it didn’t have to be true,” Juanita sighed.

“But you’re right!”

“Alice, you look awful, I never seen you look this awful.”

“We have to find out.”

“Think of the baby.”

“Maxim’ll know.”

Alyssia’s hands shook, and she could not open the gilt-edged paper of her address book to the C pages. Juanita, blowing her nose and replacing her glasses, did it for her.

Maxim’s line was busy. Alyssia’s urgent, quaking index finger pressed the numbers continuously.

“He probably took it off like we done.”

“Of course!” A febrile intensity glinted behind the blue of Alyssia’s eyes.

“I’ll have to go over.”

Maxim, whiling away his current bachelorhood in the heavily publicized company of a jet-setting oil heiress, had bought a condominium on Spalding Drive opposite Beverly Hills High School. He discouraged all visitors, including family. His address was penciled in her book only because she’d needed to have a signed revision in her Baobab Tree contract messengered over to him.

“We’ll have to wait until morning when Gisele’s here,” Juanita said.

Gisele, who came in daily, did the driving: Alyssia hadn’t taken the wheel since her return from location.

She was already in the dressing room, yanking out purses of every shade and shape, opening each in her search for the car keys. Suddenly she recalled she’d dumped a set in one of her jewelry boxes. Grasping the keys tightly, coat less in her loose, white-silk shorty robe which the pregnancy pulled up in front, she dashed into the chill evening.

Juanita, still protesting, climbed in the Jaguar next to her. At the bottom of the long driveway there were stomach-lurching jolts. The car went off the blacktop, bumping from the ivy to the curb and onto the street.

“Alice, be careful!”

Alyssia continued to ignore her. Juanita gripped the dashboard, begging her to slow down as they sped through red lights and stop signs on the three-mile drive southward. They jerked to a halt at Maxim’s chocolate-brown condominium complex. Double parking, leaving Juanita in the car with the engine running, Alyssia ran between mounded modern landscaping to Maxim’s apartment, pressing the bell, then banging with both fists.

The door was opened by a barefoot, shirtless young man holding a drink. The muscles of his smoothly tanned, hairless chest were well delineated, his teeth capped and even.

She stared at him bewildered. He was completely at home. Could she be at the wrong address? He stared back, and she realized he was seeing a very pregnant woman in a short robe, her feet encased in sheepskin slippers, her glossy black hair falling uncombed over her shoulders.