The Hollywood Trilogy (13 page)

THE MEADOR estate was on Fourth Street in Santa Monica, high on a cliff overlooking the beach, surrounded by cypress, pine and cedars of Lebanon, an old low rambling vanilla icecream plaster and red tile compound of buildings, tall skinny palm trees with little bursts of foliage at the top looking crazy next to the evergreens. Karl's little tan Mercedes two-seater was in the drive in front of the closed garage doors, and we pulled in next to it.

“Have you ever been here before?” I asked Sonny. I walked around the car to hold the door for her, but she was out and looking around by the time I got there.

“No,” she said. Our arms and legs kept touching as we went around the side, through a little wooden gate and into the pool area.

“Probably out here swimming,” I said. She touched my arm with her fingers. It was dark and cool beside the house, and I stopped to kiss her, just a couple of slow kisses, and we went on around the big greenhouse and out into the open. The Olympic pool was surrounded by lawn and garden. Here and there on the grass were groupings of furniture, but no Karl or Jim. At the far end of the pool the old man sat in his wheelchair talking to a big woman in white.

The old man, Max, Karl's father, with his dark-tanned skin, his sunglasses and the white towel draped around his neck, looked like Gandhi in a wheelchair. He had been knocked over by a heart attack thirty years ago and most people outside the business thought he was dead, the ones who didn't think he was crazy, but not Max Meador. Karl told me once that his old man made more money the first half-hour of the day than most people will ever see in a lifetime. He would sit out by the pool in the early morning, drinking coffee out of a tiny cup and glancing over the morning L.A.
Times
,
New York
Times
,
Wall Street Journal
, stock reports and whatnot, make a few calls to his broker or his banker, and huge chunks of wealth would be moved around here and there, drawing money like magnets, and then the old man would take a swim, helped in and out of the water by members of his staff.

“I like to keep busy,” he told me once.

Sonny and I walked toward him across the lawn. “My God,” Sonny whispered to me, “this grass is like moss, it's so soft.”

I told her who she was about to meet and she stopped walking.

“It's like meeting the Pope,” she whispered to me, and she was right. If Karl was a prince of Hollywood, then it was sure true that his old man was a king, and not deposed, either, just exiled to his own backyard, if you could call this a backyard, where he manipulated the corporations, conglomerates and supertrusts that in turn ran the movie companies.

“I have been kicked up,” the old man once said to me. We used to sit and talk a lot, years before, when we were first getting to know each other. “A perfect field goal,” he said, and laughed. Max had a soft guttural laugh with just a hint of the Lower East Side.

But I dragged her over and we stood a few feet away while the old man and the big woman continued their conversation.

“What language is that?” Sonny whispered to me.

“Swedish, I guess,” I said. “Karl told me the old guy learned it just to please his nurse.”

“Oh,” she said, and I could feel her relax.

The nurse said hello to us and walked off toward the buildings.

The old man cocked his head. “I saw your partner a while ago,” he said to me. “They're in the house.”

I introduced Sonny, and the old man reached out a brown slim barely wrinkled hand and she shook it. No comment about her name, Max does not embarrass people unless there's something in it for him.

I kissed him on the forehead and said, “Another movie.”

“Ah,” he said. “You sound bitter.”

Even with his dark glasses on I could see from the way he was looking at us that he knew about this afternoon. On impulse, I took Sonny's hand.

“So,” Max said.

“Karl invited us to go swimming,” I said.

“I didn't bring a suit,” Sonny said. “I forgot.”

I waved at the little pair of buildings just across the lawn. “Plenty of gear,” I said, “but usually we swim naked. At least I do.”

The old man said, “Don't mind me,” and laughed.

“Why don't you come swimming with us,” I said. “I'll throw you in the pool if you want.”

“I guess I better find a suit,” Sonny said.

I started pulling off my clothes, throwing them on the grass.

“Have the butler burn those,” I said. The old man laughed again and I could see his teeth, a little stained, but all his.

“Do you think that stuff will still burn?” he said.

Sonny headed for the dressing cabanas and I jumped into the pool, nothing like that first shocking delicious crazy explosion into the water, and swam a couple of lengths ending up back by the old man, panting and hanging onto the edge. “Come on,” I said to him.

“I swam,” he said. “Let's see you do a hundred laps.”

But I was distracted and only laughed politely. The truth was I already missed Sonny, and wanted her to come back out and be with me. He knew, too, the old bastard knew everything.

“She seems nice,” he said.

SHE CAME out of the cabana wearing a shining blue bathing suit, hugging her arms in front of her and walking slowly barefoot across the grass. Maybe she was scared of Max. I pulled myself up out of the water. I knew Max was paying attention, even though he looked as if he had fallen asleep.

“Getting chilly?” I asked her.

She just looked at me shyly and I picked her up, so light, and dropped her in the water. After the splash and yelp, I could hear Max chuckling. I jumped in after her and we swam a couple of lengths together, and then I pulled myself up out of the water again and watched her lapping. She swam long slow strokes, textbook strokes, and I got the idea that if she decided to swim across the English Channel, she'd probably make it.

I said to Max, “Let me borrow that towel from around your neck.”

“No,” he said. “Get a fresh towel from the cabana. Are you afraid to leave her alone with me?”

There was a hoot from the direction of the house. I saw Jim and Karl coming across the grass, both in bathing suits. I yelled for them to bring over some towels, and Karl veered off for the cabanas and Jim came on toward us, grinning that lopsided shiteating grin that he got when he was really deeply drunk.

Jim grinned at me for a while, his hands on his hips.

“Have you been in, yet?” I asked him.

He fell lifelessly into the water and frogged his way to the other end, as I had done, and then swam a quick chopping lap back toward us, completely exhausting himself so that I had to help him up out of the pool. He didn't seem to have even noticed Sonny, although this whole swimming party had been his idea. Maybe that was what was making me nervous. Jim, magical Jim, Oh, how wonderful it is to be in love on a day like this Jim, idol of a million squirming females.

“Oohfff, Jesus God!”
was all he could say, though, panting and rolling his eyes. He would never make it if he had to swim for her.

But of course like an asshole I had forgotten that she was Karl's girl, or at least Karl might think so. It was the handsome bastard coming this way with an armload of colorful towels that I had to look out for. Jim saw the way I was looking at Karl, and he turned to Sonny, still swimming, and then back to me, and said,
“Ah soooo . . .”

That made everybody in on the big secret except Karl, and possibly Sonny. I guess it was all over my face and no amount of hamming around was going to do any good.

Jim said
sotto voce
, “Why not give him a kidney punch while his arms are full?”

I jumped in the water and swam a couple of furious laps, my eyes shut, not taking breaths, just plowing through the water, and when I finally came up, wiped the hair out of my eyes and looked around, Karl was kneeling by the pool next to Sonny, holding one of her hands and whispering to her. I sucked in a couple of lungfuls and sounded. I could see her legs against the tile sides of the pool, shimmering. I could frog over there and pull her under, or I could let the air out of my lungs and hang on to the filter hole grips at the bottom until I drowned, or I could come up and act like a man.

Frankly, none of the choices was particularly appealing.

He was helping her out of the pool when I climbed out by the ladder on
the other side, but when I took a towel from the pile and sat down next to Max, Sonny came over and sat on my other side, her hand reaching out and touching mine. We looked at each other.

“Oh, relax,” she said.

Karl came over, ever the gent in front of an audience, and asked her if she wanted anything. Coffee, fruit, a glass of champagne? She looked at me.

“Yeah,” I said, “some champagne would be nice,” and she turned back to Karl and said, “Yes, me, too,” and Karl went over to the house phone by his father and gave the orders. Max and Karl had not exchanged a word, and I wondered if they were in the middle of one of their feuds. On Max's side of it, his son would have had a hard time getting a job in a gas station if it were not for the influence and guidance, however reluctant, of his father. From Karl's viewpoint, his father had never extended him any respect because no matter how good Karl got, no matter how much he learned, changed, advanced in the business, Max was always out there a hundred miles ahead of him and everybody else in the goddamn world. Any proper son of Max's would have had to outreach his father, possibly even destroy him, who knows, in order to get any respect.

But after all these years they still lived in the same house, even though Karl was a millionaire several times over on his own hook (“He doesn't have a hook to call his own!” I could hear Max saying with contempt), and if there was the suspicion that Karl was only the instrument to Max's wisdom, it was a suspicion held by people who had never seen Karl work, or who simply didn't understand the serpentine ways of moviemaking.

“Tell me what you think of the champagne,” Max said to me, after a small man in a white jacket had poured for us and stuck the bottle back into its ice-bucket.

“No fair,” I said, “I can't see the label.”

“You drink a lot of champagne,” he said. “Be a man and taste it.”

I sat and watched the bubbles for a moment. “I had some in San Francisco a couple of days ago that was the best I ever tasted,” I said. “So that's what this stuff is up against.”

I asked Jim if he remembered the champagne, and he looked at me blankly. “From where?”

“The diMorros',” I said, faintly conscious of having dropped a name.

“I was out of my bird,” was all Jim would say. He kept looking at Sonny, but I didn't mind. She was worth looking at. It was only when Karl looked
at her . . . I sipped the champagne, rolled it around in my mouth and spit it into the grass.

“Tastes like shit,” I said to Max. “You own the vineyard?”

Actually it was nice and cold, and champagne, which is enough for me.

“I'm sending you a case,” Max said. “To your house up in the North Woods.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“The oil diMorros?” Karl asked me. “George?”

“God, I'd love to fuck you,” Jim said.

I didn't have to turn around to guess who he was talking to.