Best to Laugh: A Novel (23 page)

Ed and I sat quietly for a while, and then nodding toward the mail on my lap, he said, “So that’s it? Just Nepal and Tahiti? Nothing from Outer Mongolia or Barbados?”

38

N
OT
ONLY
DID
C
LAIRE
H
ELLMAN
have lots of ideas, she acted on them. She was her own high-voltage transformer, humming with so much energy that I joked I didn’t dare touch her for fear of getting shocked. Within months of thinking of making a documentary about Francis and the Bel Mondo, she had managed to get a public television contract and funding and had already begun interviewing him.

“He is so excited,” said Frank. “He met with Claire again yesterday at the Chateau Marmont, and he comes home whistling. He’s whistling more than he’s talking!”

We were in a guitar shop on Sunset, viewing the instruments on the wall as if they were pieces of art, which, to Frank, I suppose they were.

“Claire told me she’s getting some great stuff. She says your dad’s a great storyteller.”

Frank’s nostrils flared and he pursed his mouth, moving it from side to side.

“Sorry,” he said, after a moment. “I’m just so happy for him.”

I looped my arm through his. “Me, too.”

“Hey you,” said a greasy-haired sales clerk in a tone that suggested we were riffraff instead of potential customers. “Aren’t you in United States of Despair?”

Frank, as surprised as I was, stared at the clerk.

“Yeah,” he said warily, as if waiting to hear the clerk’s negative review. “Yeah, I am.”

“I thought so,” said the clerk, wagging his head. “I’ve seen you guys at the Masque, and the Whiskey. You’re radical, man.”

“Thanks, man,” said Frank gruffly.

The sales clerk gestured to a guitar on the wall. “You want to try out this Stratocaster? I saw you looking at it.”

“Sure,” said Frank, and despite his tough-guy mien his eyes shone with excitement.

M
AEVE’S
FATHER
WASN’T
THE
subject of a documentary, but she was as proud of him as Frank was of Francis.

“Candy, you can’t believe how his students adore him,” she said, as we sat in dappled shade on the rickety bench facing the Hills’s tennis court. Winter was here and while the temperature was in the midseventies, there was a thinness to the late-afternoon light. “Egon said he’s the best teacher he’s ever had.”

“Who’s Egon?”

Maeve pressed her lips together, but her smile quickly broke the seal.

“This guy I met. At the university.”

Maeve had just come home from a trip to Germany, and we had celebrated her return with a game of tennis. It might have been more of a celebration for me, since it was the first time in our history that I had beaten her. She blamed her defeat on jet lag.

“Uh, think you could spare a few more details?”

“
Jawohl!
” Maeve tucked a section of her lank blonde hair behind her ear. “He’s tall—taller than me, and I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to look
up
to a guy—and his English is flawless. Flawless with the kind of accent you’d expect to hear from someone narrating a fairy tale.”

“Oh, brother,” I said. “You’ve got it bad.”

“Candy, he’s the first guy I’ve ever felt . . . I don’t know, at ease with. Like I don’t have to apologize for anything. Anytime we were together—having coffee or taking a walk—I never felt any of that nervous dating ickiness.”

We laughed, at both the words
nervous dating ickiness
and the shared understanding of what a lousy state to be in nervous dating ickiness was.

“Egon makes me feel like I only have to be myself with him and oh, Candy, he’s so smart. Smart, kind, and he doesn’t think it’s weird that I’m a bodybuilder. In fact, he thinks my body is
schön.
”

“
Schön
’s good,
jah
?”

“
Schön
is
zehr
good.”

Deciding to have dinner together, we wandered down the path, and as we debated whether to go to a Thai place or Musso & Frank a sudden cry stopped us cold in our tracks.

“Did you hear that?” whispered Maeve.

My nod was frantic.

There was a romantic ruin to the Hills—it could have been the estate of Gloria Swanson in the movie
Sunset Boulevard,
years after William Holden’s body was pulled out of the pool. I liked playing tennis
on the dilapidated court (the ghosts of movie moguls arguing whether a lobbed ball was in or out), plus it was nice to escape into its almost jungle-like greenery set in the middle of a city. Still, there was an element of creepiness that made it a place I’d never venture into alone; the guy with the beard and a rucksack most likely was a hiker, but there was a chance he was the Hillside Strangler; the teenaged couple smoking pot by the crumbling chimney was probably skipping school, but they might be a modern-day version of Bonnie and Clyde, trigger fingers itchy.

There was another sob, and a tortured, “God! God damn it!”

Trying to figure out where the noise was coming from, Maeve and I bumped into each other.

“There he is,” I whispered, pointing to a figure sitting amid the gnarled, aboveground roots of a fig tree.

We watched as the man put a bottle to his lips.

“He’s drunk,” said Maeve.

I squinted. “It’s Jaz!”

We looked at each other, asking silent questions with nods and shrugs. The man was obviously in distress: should we approach him? But didn’t the fact that he’d hiked up here convey a certain wish to keep his distress private? Deciding that his misery might be elevated by discovery, we tacitly agreed to leave but hadn’t taken two steps when Jaz’s voice stopped us.

“Hey!” he cried out. “Hey you!”

He struggled to stand among the thick fingers of roots but sank back down, his bottle clunking against the wood.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!”

Now more concerned than wary, Maeve and I raced over to him, asking him if he was all right.

“Do I sound like I’m all right?” Examining the bottle he thanked it for not breaking and took a sloppy swig of its remains. Whiskey dribbled down his chin, and when he wiped at it with the back of his hand his bloodshot eyes filled with tears.

I felt a stir of fear; something was really wrong.

“Jaz, is Aislin okay?”

The handsome, inebriated building manager jerked his head.

“Aislin? Have you heard from Aislin?”

“No. I just thought . . . well, from the way you’re acting, I thought something might have happened to her.”

“I haven’t heard a word from that whore, other than the whore wants a divorce.”

The look Maeve and I shared said it was time to go, and as we turned, Jaz wailed, “Don’t go! Please!”

He sounded so pathetic we had to stop.

“Okay, but if you talk about Aislin like that again, we’re leaving.”

“Yeah,” added Maeve.

“But she left me!” wailed Jaz. “She left me and now I’ve got nothing! No wife and now I’ve lost the best job of my life!”

“You got fired from Peyton Hall?” asked Maeve.

He made an odd noise, like a dog whose tail had been stepped on, followed by a bellowing “Ha!” and then he slumped against the tree trunk, pounding his knee as he laughed.

Maeve and I stood like befuddled scientists, watching our test monkey throw an unanticipated fit.

“Hoo, hoo,” said Jaz, finally, wiping his blue and red eyes. “That’s a good one! Managing Peyton Hall is the best job of my life!” He pulled at his nose as the final vestiges of laughter rumbled out of his chest, sighed, and tried to stand up but was unsuccessful, plopping down, hard. After some dips and weaving, he staggered upward like a boxer who’d been hit too many times.

“But no, Mary,” he said, looking dully at Maeve, “my very best job, or should I say job offer, was playing the role of Errol Flynn.”

“Jaz,” I said, “what happened?”

“They’re not going to make the bloody film! They strung me along all this time, but the green light finally turned red. And I’m out.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

Jaz’s head wobbled and with a great sigh, he took a step, nearly falling on the tree roots.

“Here,” said Maeve, and rushing forward, she put one arm around him. “Candy, get him on the other side.”

F
LANKING
HIM,
we stumbled down the path, through the broken gate, and onto Fuller Avenue, consoling Jaz as he alternately raged and wept.

“What am I supposed to do now?” he asked, his voice high as he overpronounced his syllables. “Go back to Vancouver and play another fucking mountaineer on
Wiley’s Way
? Which, as piss-ant as it was, was the best part I’d had in a year! But all those little piddly piss-ant parts
didn’t matter, because I knew I was going to play
Errol Flynn.
In the biggest movie of the year, of the decade! People were finally going to know who Jaz Delwyn was!”

Instead of walking all the way to Hollywood Boulevard, we cut between two of the apartment buildings facing Fuller—one was Madame Pepper’s—and made our way across the center grounds of Peyton Hall, past the neon sign, and across the lawn to Jaz’s apartment.

“Mr. Delwyn!” said Werner, holding a sprinkler. “Are you all right?”

“I’ve been shot,” said Jaz.

“Wass?” said the Swiss handyman, alarmed.

Both Maeve and I sought to reassure him; I shook my head and Maeve said, “No, he hasn’t.”

Jaz lurched to a stop, and Maeve and I made adjustments to keep him upright while keeping our balance.

“Yes, I most certainly have,” he said to Werner. “Shot through the heart by the assassin Hollywood.”

39

I
N
OLD
MOVIES,
to denote the passage of time, calendar pages shuffle and fly out of frame as if propelled by a good stiff wind. We were in a new decade—had anything ever sounded as modern as 1980?—and it seemed I had barely scribbled notes on a month’s first day when I’d scribble notes for its last. The pages of my own datebook flew as if in a tornado, with the usual notations of business—
3/1/80—Weekend gig up in San Francisco at the Holy City Zoo!
—and pleasure—
6/4/80—Lunch at Barney’s Beanery with Solange; maybe I should have gotten the Classic Chili instead of the Fireman’s . . .

A notation in my September calendaieum of that year combined business and pleasure, but mostly pleasure:
Screening of
The Man Behind the Bel Mondo
!

“
I
TELL
YOU,
this gives me chills,” whispered Melvin Slyke as the limousine pulled up in front of Peyton Hall and the chauffeur hopped out, opening the door for the guest of honor, Francis Flover, and his entourage—Frank, Melvin, and me. “The man is finally getting his due.”

Even in his timeworn suits, Francis had always looked dapper, but in a tux he looked ready for his close-up.

“At one point, I think I had five tuxedos in my closet,” he confided to me. “This is the only one I held on to. I must say I was proud no seams had to be let out!”

A screening room in the old Gower Studios had been rented and among the throng of people that stood outside of it were Claire and her brother, Eric. She waved us over with the ardor of a traffic cop on NoDoz and introduced us to some of the muckety-mucks at the public television company that had bankrolled the production.

“Isn’t this exciting?” said Claire, taking Francis’s arm.

“It is,” said the old man, and taking her other arm, he dipped her, suave and assured. The crowd clapped.

It was not the last time.

As we watched the film—a mixture of old photos, movie clips, and current interviews—there was often applause: when Evie Carlyle, a popular 1950s singer, held Francis’s hand and sang her signature “Old Man/My Baby”; when Dixie Ribedeaux, the movie star, told how Francis kept a stock of crayfish in his freezer, instructing his chef to make something out of it whenever Dixie, a homesick Louisiana native, came into the club; and when Bryce Huntington, an actor hired whenever Rock Hudson wasn’t available, said, “It’s easy to be classy in public, but Francis Flover was classy when no one was watching. I couldn’t get a job for seven straight months, and every day for two-hundred-fifteen days—I counted!—I ate dinner, my only meal of the day, at the Bel Mondo. On the house. And Francis never made me feel like I was taking charity; he always said, ‘What the hell, Bryce! Right now I’m up—you’ll be there in no time!’”

At the end of the film, Francis looked into the camera and said, “And that was the Bel Mondo. Real glamour and not-so-real glitz. Onstage talent that brought you to your feet and offstage drama that sometimes brought you to your knees. It was pure Hollywood, and for a while I was lucky enough to be part of it.”

As his image faded and a photograph of him welcoming fur- and jewel-draped stars into the Bel Mondo came into focus, the credits rolled and the audience erupted into applause, bravos, and shouts of “Speech! Speech!”

Claire, holding up her long skirt in a bunch at her hip, bounded up the steps to the narrow stage, gesturing frantically for Francis to join her.

“Thank you all so much for coming!” she said. “Thanks to my mother, Winnie—” she waved to a woman in the front row—“Hi, Mom!—for telling me and my brother—Hi Eric!—all those wonderful stories of the Bel Mondo when we were growing up, and thanks to Jack Williams and Tricia Bayer of NBS for agreeing to finance Francis’s story. And ladies and gentlemen—” she held out her arm—“Francis Flover!”

Onstage now, the documentary’s star gave a curt yet suave bow and the crowd again went crazy.

When we had all quieted down, he looked out into the audience and said, “Tonight has been a dream.” His voice broke and he took a moment to collect himself. “When I was at the Bel Mondo, I . . . I saw so many dreams come true, and just as many dreams unravel. I am proud to have been part of a community that doesn’t discount dreams but encourages them. Thank you, Claire, thank you, everyone, for encouraging mine one more time.”

It was a beautiful moment, and that Melvin Slyke honked when he blew his nose and Frank practically squeezed my hand into pulp only added to it.

I
T
WAS
ONLY
FITTING
that Francis got a Hollywood ending. Three days after the screening of
The Man Behind the Bel Mondo,
he died in his sleep.

I had just made a turn at the deep end of the pool and was gliding through the water when I became aware of motion, then yelling, and a sudden splash.

“Candy!” cried Frank, flailing his arms in the water as he lunged toward me. “Candy, Pop’s gone!”

He grabbed me, and I grabbed him back; fortunately, we could touch bottom at this point and weren’t in danger of drowning each other.

He wailed as I led him across the shallow end of the pool, and when we got to the short ladder he seemed stumped as to what to do, and I helped him grab the railing so he could pull himself out.

That effort used up all his energy, and he crumpled on the cement, sobbing.

“Pop’s dead,” said Frank, lifting his face off the pavement. “Pop’s gone!”

The few people who were at the pool—Sherri, Robb, and Bastien—had rushed over and helped me get Frank up and lead him to a chair. Robb wrapped a towel around Frank and stood behind him, keeping his hands on his shoulders. I knelt in front of him, taking his hands. Sherri and Bastien stood on both sides of him, their hands on his arms, all of us understanding that what Frank needed now was touch.

He cried so hard I thought he was going to throw up.

“Pop!” he’d holler between sobs, “Pop!”

When his teeth began to chatter, I told him we were going to get him in some warm clothes, and four people in their swimsuits formed a phalanx around the one in soaking wet jeans and T-shirt and escorted him back to my apartment.

Insisting he take a hot shower, I sat on the toilet the whole time, afraid he’d collapse in the stall. When I heard the water turn off, I said, “There’s a towel on the rack and a robe on the door hook. I’ll be waiting in the living room.”

It was there that Frank told me the whole sad story, how’d he woken up early (strange for him; he usually didn’t greet the day until the day was half-spent) and felt an odd quiet in his father’s apartment.

“It was more than quiet,” he said, clutching to his chest the mug of tea I made for him. “It was like a deep quiet. Like something big had been turned off. I went into his room, even though I didn’t want to, and there he was, lying on his bed with a smile on his face.”

“He was smiling?”

Frank nodded and offered a jagged smile of his own.

“I always thought it was a bunch of bullshit when people talked about dead people and said, ‘Oh, he looked so peaceful,’ . . . but he did. He looked peaceful. I’m freakin’ out, though—I don’t want him looking peaceful—I want him looking alive! And I called the ambulance and Melvin heard the sirens and he came over, and he even went with them when they came to pick up Pop. I couldn’t even do that for him!”

“Frank,” I said, pushing the words past the huge lump in my throat, “you didn’t need to do that for him. You’d done everything you should have. You were a great son.”

“He was a great pop,” said Frank, and he collapsed to the floor on his knees, burying his head in my lap. His usual upright spikes of hair were draped against his head like a stringy blue scarf, and I petted them over and over and over.

O
N
THE
DAY
OF
HIS
FATHER’S
FUNERAL,
Frank was a different man. Greeting mourners (Francis would have been thrilled at the turnout of old Hollywood), he was dignified and stately, a comfort to those who needed comfort.

“To tell you the truth,” he told me and Claire at the cake and coffee reception we held poolside, “I was worried about him a long time ago. He was getting so . . . frail. But then you,” he lowered his head, looking at Claire, “you came along and it was like he was young again.”

“I wish he could have lived to see the television broadcast,” said Claire, her voice warbling.

“He didn’t need to,” said Frank. “The night of the screening, when he got all that applause from the Hollywood community—that’s what he called it, ‘the Hollywood community’—well, that’s all he needed.”

“How you doin’, man?” asked Mayhem, carrying a plate loaded with pieces of the three different cakes I had baked.

“Fair to middling. I was just telling them how much Pop dug that documentary.”

Mayhem nodded. “Dug he did, man. I just wish he could be around to see it win an Oscar.”

Claire’s laugh was a one-syllable “Hah.” “It was made for television, Mayhem. It’s not eligible for an Academy Award.”

The skinny rocker skimmed off the cake’s chocolate frosting with his fork. “Then there needs to be a fucking rule change.”