Mumbo Gumbo (10 page)

We were pretty far away from the ladder in the corner or its open trap, but still we kept to stealth mode. Holly gestured like I should try to open the door, while I paused to try to figure out where we were in the building. Were we near
Food Freak
’s front reception area? I knew the receptionist’s desk was located on the first floor, beneath our offices somewhere, but I had the sense that it was off farther, in a leftward direction.

Holly gave me another of her twisting-a-phantom-doorknob gestures, and I looked back at the door. I wondered if it might lead to some interior hallway, or if we’d run into a studio guard and have to explain just what we were doing creeping around. But with Holly getting impatient and me unable to figure out in my
head where we might be, I decided to just go ahead and open the door. It had an old-fashioned dead-bolt lock with a manual switch, and I slowly unbolted the lock.

Instead of landing us in someone’s private office, or in some restricted corridor, the door opened into an alleyway. And only six feet away was Holly’s Volkswagen Beetle, its backseat crammed with mismatched old
Food Freak
scripts, blatantly parked in some gone-for-the-day executive’s prime parking spot.

“Well. Hunh!” Holly looked around, amazed.

“Nifty way to escape without anyone seeing you, eh?”

Holly nodded. “So, should we go back in and tell Greta about all of this?”

“Wait.” I looked over at Holly’s red Bug. “Do you have your car keys with you?”

Holly pulled her key chain from her pants pocket.

I looked down at the
Gourmet
magazine I was still holding, the one I had picked up from under the mattress in the secret bedroom. Its glossy cover featured a tantalizing, steamy copper pot filled with a bubbling Louisiana Cajun gumbo. Affixed to the lower righthand corner was a small white subscription label:
MR. TIM STOCK
, 12226
LEMON GROVE DR.
,
STUDIO CITY
,
CA
91604.

“Holly,” I said, “I have an idea. Let’s go for a drive.”

S
tudio City. Naming a community after a row of soundstages lacks poetry, sure, but it underscores how proud 1920s Los Angeles was that the movie trade was moving to town. Why dream up some sweet and evocative name like “Valley Blossom,” or honor a town founder by naming it “Sennettville”? Studio City said it all. One must only be thankful that other neighboring suburbs didn’t fall in line, or we’d be driving from Studio City into Bank City into Beer City and so on.

In those early days, the movie business was pushing out in all directions from Hollywood proper. Boomtowns sprang up overnight in many of the outlying areas where land was cheap. In 1927, Mack Sennett built a new movie studio on two hundred acres just north of the Cahuenga Pass. Soon his Keystone Kops were knocking into each other and falling down in front of silent film cameras on the lot. Success and employment came to town. Studio City was prepared to welcome all the stars in their shiny cars. The first traffic signal in the San Fernando Valley was placed at Ventura and Lankershim Boulevards.

Holly steered her VW onto the northbound Hollywood
Freeway and headed for this nearby Valley town. As she drove us to Studio City, I considered what I really knew about Tim Stock. I had heard stories—that he had taken off on vacation, that he wasn’t returning calls, that he’d sent Quentin a postcard from Las Vegas—but I could get better information on my own.

You can tell a lot about a person from just observing how they live. Neat or messy? Affluent or broke? One name on the mailbox or two? That sort of thing. And, then, what if Holly and I get to his house and his lights are on? What if his car is in the driveway? Checking his address on the magazine label, I guided Holly to transition to the Ventura Freeway and exit at Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

Holly is a careful driver, despite her freewheeling ways in most other pursuits, and she obeyed the speed limit as she steered us out of Hollywood and into the San Fernando Valley. In the glare from the halogen streetlamps overhead, we cruised along at sixty-five, enjoying the rare 10:00
P.M.
treat of minimal freeway traffic.

This section of Los Angeles has changed a lot since it was cheap land for the studio’s grabbing. For one thing, it was no longer cheap. In the intervening decades, Studio City had been joined by a string of neighborhoods that choked and crowded down Ventura Boulevard. Clearly, no sort of sane zoning had controlled these towns’ hodge-podge development. But, despite its daytime congestion and its propensity to plop a Volvo dealership next to a shrimp restaurant, Studio City was filled with authentic old Hollywood character and charm. The Mack Sennett Studio soundstages were still there, but after several transformations,
they now provided filming space for TV sitcoms. The studio had evolved, in seven short decades, from
The Keystone Kops
two-reelers to
Seinfeld
episodes. Studio City was also home to many small businesses. Yolanda Lee’s Studio City Psychic Predictions is located just a few blocks down from the Euphoria Bridal Salon, which is close to The Hound’s Lounge pet emporium, which is down the block from Art’s Delicatessen, and not far from the address we had discovered for our missing head writer, Timothy Stock.

“I haven’t been around here since Donald and I…,” Holly said.

“Ah, Donald.”

“You’re probably tired of hearing about him, right?”

“What are you talking about? Vent.”

“You’re the best, Mad. I loved that idiot. I don’t now, of course. But I did.”

I had had great hopes for Holly and Donald Lake. He was a likable guy from Indiana or some state like that, a good guy, Wes and I had thought, a young screenwriter with a lot of talent. But Donald had found himself on the Hollywood roller coaster for maybe one long ride too many, and after getting jerked around through all those extreme ups and downs, who wouldn’t be ready to puke?

It’s not that Donald suffered or struggled. The problem was that Donald had a lot of luck. His first script, an intimate betrayal story set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, got a green light almost immediately. Only it was jiggled and rewritten into a spectacular sci-fi epic adventure. But again, Donald had been
lucky. Even twisted inside out, his film became a huge success, which was shocking enough for a first script by a naive young screenwriter. His second script, about a free-spirited woman and the struggling writer she loved, hadn’t fared as well. It had not yet—as it is euphemistically phrased around these parts—found a studio. Such is the sharp way of the world here, and the cotton-wool words we have learned to use to smother the pain.

“I heard Donald bought a house around here,” Holly said, her eyes scanning the hills south of Ventura Boulevard as we turned west onto Studio City’s main drag. “With the money he made from
Gasp!”

In the best part of the Studio City hills, even tiny houses bring over half a million dollars. “He bought a house with what he made writing that one movie?”

“From just what he’ll get off the video rentals.” Life could be hell for a screenwriter, but the royalty payments weren’t so bad.

“Have you called him?” I asked, looking at Holly’s profile as she drove, the passing streetlamps flooding the car interior with pulses of light and dark.

“What’s to say? He’s a creep. End of story.”

“Men,” I said. It was an appropriate final comment for any number of our conversations. Lately, Holly’s and my own male-female entanglements had taken on a puzzling, doomed quality. While we searched for our partners in romantic comedy, we kept accidentally wandering into melodrama. “It’ll get better,” I said, ever the optimist, “we’ve just hit a slump.”

“What I need is to get my tarot cards read,” Holly remarked.

“One-two-two-two-six Lemon Grove,” I read off
the label. Holly turned up a side street, which she declared would eventually intersect with Lemon Grove Drive. It appeared that Tim Stock’s house was, in real estate terms, fashionably south of Ventura Boulevard.

“Are you sure you know where we are?” I asked.

“Let’s check.” Holly pulled over, steering her car up to the curb in front of a tidy California bungalow–style home, dark for the night. She reached under her seat and grabbed the Thomas Bros. guide, a thick book of street maps that require at least a bachelor’s degree in map-reading skills to decipher. Most Angelenos keep this book handy, since it’s virtual insanity to try to navigate in a city that doesn’t get the concept of north-south and east-west streets. With all the hills jutting here and there across the county, there is no hope for a nice easy grid.

It was a quiet night, just a dog barking down the street. From a distance, we heard the faint wail of a siren. I looked over and saw a tear drop onto the page of the map book.

“Hol?”

“You have to admire the art of cartography,” she said softly.

I was certain that the artful maps contained in the Thomas Bros. guide, accurate though they may be, had not moved my friend to tears. “Donald?”

Holly made a circle with her forefinger on the open map page. “Here’s Donald’s new address. One-one-nine-four-nine DeMille Drive. I never even got to see the house, Maddie. He moved in there a few months ago.”

I found the tissue box wedged under the backseat and offered it to Holly. She took three, one-two-three, and wadded them into a pale pink ball and honked.

“I wish I could say I had always known that Donald would turn out to be a jerk,” I said, “but I had liked him. Maybe it is impossible to have a good relationship with a writer.”

Holly began giggling through her tears, sitting beside me in the dark. Parked on this quiet side street, with only the growing sound of more sirens in the background, we found it easy to talk about such a painful subject, so close to Holly’s heart, and to mine. Holly’s laughter was both at herself and at me. I had broken up with a guy not long ago, too, a sitcom writer I’d been with for four years. I ended it, finally, but I should have done it sooner. Despite the long time we had been seeing each other, neither Arlo nor I had wanted to make any kind of permanent commitment. When that’s the case, you should know it has no future. And then I met Honnett. And then…

“Maddie? Um. Would you mind if we drove by Donald’s house?” asked Holly. “Just to see what it looks like? If she’s there, we’ll just keep on driving. What do you think?”

This would really be the worst sort of self-destructive, emotional, soul-destroying journey for Holly. It would be taking a step backward instead of moving forward. Donald had been seeing someone else. He was the last guy in the world you would expect to be unfaithful. He came from a very together home and had gone to a great university. He was funny and modest and even had gee-whiz farm-boy good looks with dimples and everything. But things had begun to look iffy when Holly discovered Donald alone in a locked room with an actress. Still, Holly heard him out. Even though the actress had been stark naked, Holly had believed Donald’s story. Anyone
could believe that a forty-something woman might hit on a great young guy like Donald, even if you didn’t add in her dwindling career options and the fact that he’d written a movie that grossed over $100 million in the first week. Holly chose to be understanding.

It had been much more devastating when Holly had walked in on Donald and a film student he was mentoring at UCLA Extension’s Writers Program. After that discovery, easygoing, in-and-out-of-love Holly had accepted no explanations. She had simply left with her heart broken. In the past six months, she had seen guys on and off but no one had stuck. Lately, she had even given up going out to clubs. I had really not known what to think.

“C’mon,” Holly said, her voice all innocence and persuasion. “We’ll just cruise by. Nothing wrong with that. We’re in the neighborhood, right?” Holly turned her red-rimmed eyes to me. “I looked on the map. It’s only a few blocks from here. Can we go?”

“Oh, sure,” I said. Well, what else could I say? Who hadn’t done a million unhealthy things while pining for a lost love?

“Cool. Thanks. We’ll just drive by. I promise.” Holly looked carefully down the street and then pulled her Beetle out onto the road. I rolled down the passengerside window and noticed that the air was cooler, the heat of the day having lifted, and that the breeze coming into the car had a slightly smoky flavor.

“Here it is,” Holly said, pulling onto a winding uphill road. “DeMille Drive. It should be up on the right somewhere.” Holly drove very slowly as we both tried to catch the address numbers on one of the houses to get our bearings.

“Look,” I said, “11945. It has to be that one, two houses ahead.”

Holly pulled over to the curb and stopped the car. We could see 11949, Donald’s house, clearly. Its front porch light was on. It was a small wood-shingled three-bedroom affair with a sweet little front garden and a white picket fence.

“He has hydrangeas,” Holly said, in a strangled voice. She loved hydrangeas.

The night was still and quiet, except for the sound somewhere of sirens again.

“Do you smell smoke, or is that just me?” I asked.

“You mean coming from the ashes of my burnt dreams?” Holly asked.

I laughed. “Yeah.”

She laughed, too, and then reached for the tissue box, pulling one-two-three more pink tissues and wadding them up. “I would have loved this house,” she said into the ball of tissues. “I would have loved those hydrangeas.”

“Hey, Holly. New car?”

We both looked out Holly’s driver’s-side window. Walking up to the car from behind was Donald Lake.

“What are you doing here?” Holly demanded.

“I’m walking my dog,” Donald said, gesturing to the puppy at the end of the leash he was holding. “I do it several times a day, actually.”

“Oh. You got a dog,” Holly said, stunned. I was stunned, too. We were busted. Caught stalking an ex-boyfriend. It just doesn’t get any lower than that.

“He’s cute,” I said, trying to act like it was a normal thing that Holly and I should just happen to be sitting parked at the curb on a practically deserted dark residential
street deep in the hills of Studio City at ten-thirty at night.

“She,” Donald corrected, cheerfully. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she? Six months old. Part poodle and part something else, we think.”

We. He said “we.” He was probably living with the film student, Danielle, and Holly was in for another colossal bruising. I wondered if the next step might be Donald inviting the two of us in to have coffee with the two of them. That I could not bear.

“What’s your pup’s name?” Holly asked, finding her voice and spirit. She must have missed that fatal “we.”

“Well,” Donald said, “I hope you don’t mind. I named her Holly.”

“You’re kidding?” Holly squeaked, and then hopped out of the car to see her namesake and scratch her darling ear.

Well, say! It didn’t seem all that likely Donald could be living with a new girlfriend if he was hauling off and naming his new puppy after his old one. Hot diggety dog.

“Holly, huh?” she asked, smiling at the puppy, who was quite naturally wagging her tail at the attention.

“I have missed you so much,” Donald said, looking at the human Holly in her silk hip huggers and bare midriff. “I called you and left about a million messages. You never returned any of my calls. I didn’t know what to do…”

“That’s a whole ‘nother conversation,” Holly said, her voice low. “You were horrible to me, Donald. I trusted you and you were horrible.”

I felt like an eavesdropper on a discussion that was getting too intimate, too fast. “Excuse me, Hol,” I
said, calling through the open car window. “But we really need to get going, remember? Got to get over to Tim’s house.”

“Oh.” Holly spun around and bent down to look at me sitting in her car. “Oh, Mad.”

“Can’t you stay a while and talk to me?” Donald said. “Let me show you the house, at least. You, too, Madeline.”

Holly wanted to stay. Of course she did. And as things had gone so far off course anyway, how could I question providence?

“I really need to get to this other guy’s house, actually,” I said. “Maybe another time, Donald. But I could go over there alone, Holly. If you want to stay here for a while…”