Dreams Are Not Enough (31 page)

“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.

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 semi stationary 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 broadverandaed 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 Flat, 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 gate post 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.

Each time they arrived back at the leased house on Laurel Canyon, Alyssia would phone Barry to set up a date to discuss a divorce.

Invariably he would reply that nothing could please him more. When they were together, though, his willingness always came with a disclaimer—they could start with attorneys as soon as he finished this urgent rewrite, as soon as he moved to his new apartment, the day his mother recovered from her latest illness. If Alyssia remained adamant, he would drink incredible amounts, then turn lachrimose, playing on her guilts, her sense of loyalty, her pity.

PD banged the rococo bronze mermaid door knocker. Though the furnished villa came with three servants, and though Alyssia traveled no place without her bespectacled personal maid, she answered the door herself.

In a gauzy yellow kaftan that showed the outlines of her bikini, without makeup, her glossy black hair sleeked into a ponytail, she looked younger, more beautiful and far softer than her image on the screen.

“PD!”

she cried.

“PD! I don’t believe this! What a mess I must look!

Why didn’t you tell us you were coming? “

“A spur-of-the-moment trip,” he said smoothly.

“We’d have driven to Milan to meet you. God! Won’t you shock Hap! Come on, we’re outside.”

In clear weather the garden had a view that could only be described as magnificent, and even on a hazy, obscured day like today, the pool deck, set into the bougainvillea-covered hillside and graced with ancient Roman pots from which sprang red geraniums, was romantically spectacular.

Hap, wearing faded khaki shorts and zinc oxide on his nose, his feet ad angle in the water, sat reading a script. The ferry was hooting its way into the Bellagio dock, so he didn’t hear them emerge. Alyssia paused to look at him, her eyes bedazzled as if he shone.

Then she called, “Look who’s here!”

Hap jumped to his feet.

In spite of his exclamations and warm welcome, PD detected a lack of surprise, almost a hint of wariness. Hop’s always laid-back, he told himself to calm his nerves.

“Hey PD,” Hap was saying.

“A long flight. You must be beat. So why not bathe and take a nap?”

PD drew a breath.

“Later,” he said.

“First I have a property I need to discuss.”

“So that’s why you dropped in from the sky.” Alyssia smiled.

“Before you start agenting, I’ll get you a drink.”

PD gulped Pellegrino water, then used his considerable skills to pitch the story line of Transformations.

Alyssia’s role, a bawdily outspoken young Detroit assembly line worker, sets off with her crude stud of a boyfriend to New Mexico, where her father is dying. The father turns out to be a billionaire along the lines ofj. Paul Getty, and though the heroine is rebellious and disrespectful to the old bastard, she alone of the assembled, greedy family cares about him. The plot turns on past incest and the willing of the fortune.

When PD finished, Alyssia said enthusiastically, “What a story, and what a role—what a fantastic role.”

“The concept’s brilliant,” Hap said.

“Before we go any further, though—PD, does this project have any connection with a man called Robert Lang?”

PD felt as if somebody had punched the air out of both lungs.

“Then Maxim spoke to you” — “Maxim?” Alyssia interrupted.

“Is he in on this? He’s going to do a movie after all these years?”

“The property belongs to him,” PD said.

“It’s a novel.”

“You haven’t answered me about Lang,” Hap said.

“Uhh….” PD shrugged.

“He’s only on the financial end.”

“Dad called late yesterday. He said you’d probably be contacting us.

Forget it, PD. The answer is no. We are not doing this film. We are not working with Robert Lang. “

“I’m not even going to have a chance to explain the deep hole I’m in?”

“What are you two talking about? Who’s Robert Lang?” Alyssia asked.

“Somebody to avoid,” Hap said.

“PD,”

Alyssia asked, “what did you mean, a deep hole?”

“Let’s sit down,” PD said, mopping his forehead.

He and Alyssia took two of the wrought-iron chairs under the jacaranda tree. Hap remained standing. Brief and unadorned, PD laid out his family’s plight.

“This Lang.” Alyssia leaned forward.

“All he wants is for us to do one film, then he’ll cancel your father’s debt?”

“You’d only get scale,” PD said, deciding not to mention the deferral of her salary until they were away from Hap’s narrowed gray eyes.

“No percentages, either.”

“But he’s agreed to this story?”

“Not yet, but I can’t see him turning thumbs down. He was quite explicit that he wanted an artistically meaningful project—and what else is this?”

Hap’s fists were clenched against his shorts.

“We are out! 0”

U’T!

” Hap almost never lost his temper, but when he did, PD was remembering from boyhood, he was a far more implacable opponent than the terrifying but changeable Desmond Cordiner.

“Hap,” Alyssia said, “sit down. PD’s not asking that much. Why can’t we do a film for only salary?”

“Money’s the last thing I’m talking about.”

“I wouldn’t have hauled ass all over the world,” PD said, “if I had anyplace left to turn.”

“Why shouldn’t you come to us?” Alyssia said.

“You saved my life.”

A muscle moved at Hap’s jaw.

“Can’t you see he’s playing on that? You never change, PD, do you? You’re always that weasel Tony Curtis played in Sweet Smell of Success.”

“Tell me what the fuck I should do. Let my family go down the tubes?”

“Maybe I’m obtuse, but I don’t see any big deal, Hap.” Alyssia’s tone was no longer pleading, but gutsy.

“So Lang owns a hotel and casino”

“He also controls a big hunk of the US heroin trade,” Hap said.

Stunned, PD took off his dark glasses, peering at his cousin. Hap stared back. Near naked, furious, he looked invincibly large.

PD said the first thing that came into his mind.

“There’s an unfounded rumor.”

“Dad quoted considerable evidence to back it up.”

“If Lang’s rough,” Alyssia said, “then all the more reason to help

PD.

“

“Dad’s fought for years to keep slime like this out of the studio.”

“Oh?” Alyssia raised her chin.

“It’s news to me that your father has the same corner on virtue that you do.”

Through the mist came the foghorns and deep throbbing hum of the ferry’s departure.

Hap asked quietly, “Are you telling me I’m a sanctimonious prig?”

“You’re behaving like one!” she snapped.

Hap picked up his script and went into the house. The quiet click as he closed the French doors had more finality than a thunderous slam.

“How could I have said that to him, PD?” Alyssia’s lips were white.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, ashamed of having destroyed the unmitigated happiness he had witnessed earlier.

“He’s so much above me—smarter, more decent, topnotch family, everything.”

PD was perpetually astonished at his top client’s lack of confidence in her true worth.

“Sure,” he said.

“You’re only incredible-looking, talented and famous.”

“I’m terrified one day he’ll come to his senses and leave.”

“He’s mad about you.”

“Not now, not anymore.”

“Crazy talk. Hap’s nothing if not steadfast.” PD sighed and slumped forward in his chair.

“Alyssia, I swear to you it came as a total shock, hearing that Lang dealt in big H.”

She tilted her head at PD, as if finally noting his dejection.

“It’s the world’s most fantastic part,” she said brightly.

“How could I turn it down? And my guess is Barry’ll be delighted to do the screenplay.

Maxim’ll produce. So you have a trio of us. “

“It’s all four.” PD’s voice wavered.

“Four or nothing.”

She bit her lip thoughtfully: the marks showed in the tender flesh when she spoke.

“How long do I have to change his mind?”

PD stared down at his hands.

“The day after tomorrow.”

Hap did not fight the same way the men of her youth had, shouting with hard blows to emphasize a point, nor did he turn petulant, like Barry.

Reserved courtesy was his style. He kept to his own territory in their king-size bed, and beyond the bedroom walls treated her as if she were a fellow houseguest to whom he had just been introduced.

Alyssia was generally the first to extend the olive branch, not because he was in the right, though she conceded that almost without exception he was, but because she was positive a prolonged quarrel might cause an irreparable tear in the fabric of their relationship.

Showing PD to the room he’d occupied before, she was already atremble with the need to surrender. But how could she, when she owed an incalculable debt to her guest? She went slowly down the flight of stairs to the master bedroom, finding Hap in the low-slung easy chair, reading the same script. He hadn’t turned a page in twenty minutes, but she couldn’t know that.

“I’d like to discuss Transformations,” she said. Her voice was level though her hands trembled.