Wake Up and Dream (4 page)

THE VIRG N QWEEN

STRRING PE ENTWISTLE

P
URE CHANCE, HE SUPPOSED.

He’d been driving aimlessly around the city, trying to settle his thoughts, when he noticed the letters hanging askew above the columns of some grubby little theater at the edge of Watts. Ignoring the blare of horns and the
hey buddy
curses, he cut in at the nearest space.

“Stalls or balcony?”

He bought his ticket in the dank foyer out of the fifty from his cash advance, and found a seat high, at the back, away from the stink of the restrooms. The lights, which had been pretty dim in the first place, dimmed some more. Then a projector began to clatter, shooting a bright finger through the fug of cigarette smoke toward the curtains, which twitched like something alive, then jerked apart.

That silver screen. The pure anticipation of its emptiness. Yeah, he remembered—the sacred possibility that those wavering shadows would draw you in and wring you out and leave you feeling things you’d forgotten how to feel.

But newsreels first—just plain old sound and picture like in the old days, the Bechmeir field not yet on. Joe DiMaggio’s seemingly endless streak, and the Red Sox and the Dodgers, and Hitler surveying Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower, and German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop arriving at Lakehurst Fields in the
Hindenburg
to give a series of speeches on the theme of
Peace Between Two Continents
despite Roosevelt’s attempts to ban him. All this to a breezy soundtrack and Harry von Zell’s cheery voiceover.

The adverts were something else. Now, with a fizzing humming and their characteristic sea-salt smell of charged plasm, the powered-up generators began to pour their energies across the fine metal grid behind the screen. Even before the field itself was actually visible, the tired air within the theater began to change, and there was an extra glow, an indefinable
presence,
to Jo-Ann Corkish as she rode toward you from across the plains of her prairie ranch. Not that Clark had ever really liked this sensation, or felt comfortable with it, but by the time she’d dismounted, taken out her pack of Luckies from her straining denim breast, lit one up and inhaled, something cool and deep and profound seemed to enter your lungs. When she smiled, you felt a warmth as if the summer sun had suddenly fallen upon your face.

With the feelies, you didn’t just see, or hear. You
felt
—and by the time the last Wrigley’s Doublemint advert had filled Clark’s mouth with useless saliva, he was ready to take the Matson Line to Hawaii wearing Arrow Shirts, drinking Ron Marito rum and smoking several different brands of cigarette. He really
could
do with a new Chevy. And, he thought, as the first swell of the soundtrack of
The Virgin Queen
washed over him, he might even be able to afford one with the money April Lamotte was paying.

The late afternoon daylight felt thin and pale when he re-emerged from the theater.

April Lamotte had been right.
The Virgin Queen
was some feelie. Even the creeps and itches hadn’t been as bad as he’d expected. It was almost enough to convince him that the whole medium wasn’t some twobit trick. Not that Clark—for all he knew about English history, which he could have written on the back of a very small postage stamp—was convinced that the real Queen Elizabeth would have been quite so flirtatious in those scenes with the Spanish monarch, or that a European monarch would ever have gotten as involved in fighting back the Armada as she had on the deck of her ship. But none of that mattered—not even watching some old and scratchy print with a muffled soundtrack and blurry feelie reel which caused washes of out-of-phase plasm to jitter at the edges of the dirty curtains like emerald flames.

Everything had seemed so
real
. The way the color-changing aura of Elizabeth’s joy danced in the gray beam of the projector above as she played in the gardens of the palace in those early scenes. Her rank fear as she crouched in that grimy cell. The sly arrogance that oozed from Hank Gunn’s aura in his brilliant performance as her wily spymaster Walsingham. The execution of Mary Queen of Scots was a masterstroke. The way the music quietened and all the braying voices faded, until all you were left with was the crowd’s horrible need running on the feelie track like some sickness burning in the back of your throat, and the sound of Mary’s footsteps as she climbed the steps toward the block, and the cold squeeze around your heart of her uncomprehending dread… Then the cut to Elizabeth in tears. Clark was crying as well—of course he was; he couldn’t help it. So was the whole audience. It was a brilliant sequence, and he wondered whether it had been written that way in Daniel Lamotte’s script. If it had been, the guy was a genius. If it hadn’t, he was still pretty good.

Then there was Peg Entwistle. To see her face once again, but looming out from a huge screen, bigger and more distant than the moon yet close enough to touch, and equally lovely. Those big gray eyes. The tilt of her head. The curve of her lips. You couldn’t doubt for one moment that this was exactly what the real living, breathing, Elizabeth would have been like. And to think that people used to say that all Peg could play was best-friend supporting roles and kooky comedy. With her classy British accent, with her pale good looks and that hint of sadness and steel, she’d been born to play Elizabeth.

Yes, he’d done a good job of forgetting what it was like to watch a feelie, just as he’d forgotten many things, and the colors of the everyday world seemed pale as he pulled out into the thickening evening traffic and drove west toward Venice, occasionally checking the rearview to see if he was being followed.

V
ENICE WASN’T LA.
Venice didn’t even feel like California. It was one of the many things he liked about the place.

Albert Kinney’s dream—the canals, the palaces, the concrete gondolas—had become a reality back in the 1920s, even if the fancy new center for the arts he’d imagined he was creating had soon become a raucous fairground under the pressures of economic necessity. Most of the more ambitious attractions had long since gone. The canals had silted up. The water rides had run dry. The fake volcano which had once erupted twice nightly in flares of fireworks now lay collapsed behind a rotting fence. Nodding pumpjacks and flaming leftoffs soured the air with the rotteneggs stink of hydrogen sulfide since the discovery of oil just to the south. Still, you got used to it—Clark had worked as a wildcatter—and if all this meant that Venice was a cheaper place to live than it might have been otherwise, well that, too, was fine as far as he was concerned.

The frontage of the Doge’s Apartments still bore a slight resemblance to the Italian original when he’d last consciously looked up at it. Some of the pinkish patterned tiles clung doggedly to the brickwork, and several of the lower windows were shaped into approximately Gothic points. But he had other things on his mind as he pushed through the swing door carrying a cheap cardboard suitcase containing Daniel Lamotte’s things.

He’d checked his mail in the locker—nothing but the same brown bill envelopes he’d tossed back in there yesterday—and was heading for the stairs when a voice called behind him.

“Hey, Mr Gable—I got a message for you…”

Glory Guzman was easing herself out from her cubbyhole. Glory was one of those large people who gave the impression of having reached some final and apotheotic state of fatness. He waited patiently as she mopped her big Aztec face with a handkerchief. As well as supposedly cleaning the apartments—a service noticeable mainly for its absence—Glory kept an ear out for the communal phone in the downstairs hallway and occasionally took messages. But it didn’t do to hurry her.

“… This lady, she asking for you. She say she worry ’bout her husband, how he a good man and professional. She want talk you but no give her name…”

“You got a number?”

“She no even says that to me. She just keep say she worry and she somehows find you name.”

The message wasn’t untypical of a new client. It wasn’t that easy to come right out and admit that you wanted someone to check up on who or what your beloved was screwing. Some of them even remembered his name from back in the day. Talked like they were his biggest fan for half an hour as if all that old filmstock hadn’t long rotted before they got around to saying what they wanted. Some of them—and this was briefly the way he’d thought April Lamotte had been headed—really did just want to put some half-remembered schoolgirl dream to rest and simply fuck him.

“Well, thanks, Glory. If she calls again—or anyone else for that matter—can you stall her? Say I’ve got a case on at the moment, should only take a day or so to sort out. If she turns up or somesuch, try to get a deposit out of her. A ten if she looks up to it. Cash, not check. You know how it works…”

Glory nodded the sort of nod which said she might consider doing something like that, but that he shouldn’t count on it. Glory did grudging and grumpy like few people he’d ever encountered, but he still liked her. She was doing what most people who ended up in Venice were doing, which was trying to escape whatever it was that had driven them out of LA. In her case, it was the fear that her son Julio would end up like his father: dead on some street corner in a zoot suit and cheap French shoes.

From the little that Clark had seen of Julio recently, the signs didn’t look good. With the new State laws about registration and repatriation, things were getting difficult for all Hispanics.

He was about to turn. Then he stopped. “Say—that letter I asked you about. The one that didn’t come with the post. You don’t remember anything more about it, do you? How, who, when it came?”

Glory gave a slow shake of her head.

“And, er… You haven’t noticed anything else, have you Glory? People asking after me, or simply just hanging around?”

Glory shook her head even more slowly.

Up in his apartment, he re-heated that morning’s coffee and fixed some stale bread and corned beef and spread it with what was left in a jar of mustard. He then fixed a roll-up from his wallet of Bull Durham and put his legs up on the bed, occasionally glancing at the unopened suitcase which he’d left by its foot as he smoked.

His own john, his own gas ring, his own shower with his own cockroaches. One comfortable chair, and his very own dirty plates stacked in the tiny sink with its fine view through the window of the flames and the nodding-bird pumps of the oilfield spreading into the distance. All of it suited him just as well as did the whole of Venice.

He liked his work, too. Or much of it. Maids’ affidavits, grainy photos, soiled sheets, used Trojans in the wastebasket, hotel records, stray bits of underclothing, the wrong color pubic hair… Sure, it wasn’t acting, but by his lifetime standards, what with two divorces and God alone knew how many broads and jobs, his venture into unlicensed private matrimonial work had been a model of persistence.

How many years was it now? Six? Seven? No, goddamit, it was nearon ten. Sure, it was messy. Sure, it was unpredictable. But he guessed that those were the things he most liked about it. You never quite knew what was around the corner, and in that sense, and in quite a few others, it wasn’t so different from acting. Even used some of the same contacts. Girls still looking for that big break who were happy to sidle up to some guy in a bar and rub at his resistance and maybe decamp to a nearby hotel room for that all-important photo-opportunity if the money was right. He’d done his own version of that kind of stuff himself when he was working for guys who no longer trusted their wives, despite his ritual show of squeamishness in front of April Lamotte.

But
acting
; that whole stupid business of pretending to be someone you weren’t—the way Peg had done so brilliantly in that feelie—was like some kind of drug that you could kick for ages, yet never really be completely rid of and clean. He sighed, clicked on the bare-bulb light and picked up the case. Flipping it open, he breathed in the faint, gingery smell of another man’s sweat.

A crumpled pale beige summer suit, labeled Janvier—an expensive tailor’s on Washington Boulevard. Keys, a billfold and a grotted linen handkerchief bulked the pockets… These must have been the clothes the guy had been wearing before she had him carted off to the funny farm, which wasn’t a happy thought. The billfold contained a ten and a deuce, which he took as additions to his advance. A driver’s license and a State identity card—
Nordic Caucasian; Disabilities, none
—in the name of Daniel Harold Lamotte. Wingtip burgundy shoes. A white soft collar shirt. A gold Parker pen. Those glasses, which looked and felt to be made out of real tortoiseshell. He checked himself in the mirror with them on. He didn’t look just different; he looked somehow blurred. After holding them up to the light to check that the lenses really were clear, he wound the expensive Longines wristwatch and set it to the right time and put it on his wrist; the strap even fitted at the same notch. What the hell was Lamotte wearing now—a straightjacket? At least there were no underclothes, worn or clean or otherwise, which would have been taking things too far. But the whole case gave off an intimate feeling—part scent, part presence. Almost an aura in itself.

April Lamotte seemed to have thought of everything. Here was another copy of the guy’s signature torn from the bottom of an old contract, in case the one on the driver’s license wasn’t enough. The bulging manila envelope at the bottom of the case contained a copy of the treatment of
Wake Up and Dream
, just like he’d asked.

S
CRIPTS USUALLY WENT THROUGH
a variety of differently colored versions before they were finally printed out for shooting—often, the variations continued even then. This particular badly typed and butterfly-clipped carbon which April Lamotte had given him was white; by the usual protocols, the next draft would be blue. The address it gave on the front sheet wasn’t Erewhon, but a flat at a place called Blixden Avenue, which he assumed was the Downtown bolthole April Lamotte had mentioned. He flicked over the castlist to get to the opening shot.