JULY 18, 1989
EPSTEIN PICTURES
It’s His Birthday
Arlene Epstein & Bruce Hollander Request the Pleasure of Your Company
To Celebrate Craig Epstein on his “27th Year to Heaven”
2____ Briarcrest Drive, Beverly Hills
THE SHADOWS FROM THE LEAVES OF THE OVERHANGING willow trees and California sycamore descended upon the windshield, landing silently on the glass and disappearing at the next curve. The sunlight poured through the driver’s-side window, illuminating Neal Kosoff’s tangerine hair, his freckled scalp, the screw heads on the hinges of his eyeglasses, the bulbous tip of his nose, the crown of his Cartier watch. Somewhere along the way, in Kosoff’s journey from his childhood in Toronto as a sickly boy endlessly at play with his toy soldiers, to university in London, to a lucky entrance into the theater world, to his first film, his first Hollywood film, his first Hollywood hit, and his current position poised near the top of the B-list of directors, he had settled into a public persona almost entirely based on wit—or at least jocularity. Since picking Thaddeus up at the Four Seasons this morning, Kosoff had not stopped smiling—he smiled so much out here in California that the creases near his eyes were fish-belly white.
“I guess you’ve heard this one,” Kosoff said to Thaddeus, stopping at a light on the all but deserted street. “A priest and a rabbi are sitting at a little café on Melrose and a boy walks by. Four years old, right? So the priest says, Ooh, I’d like to fuck that kid. Really? the rabbi says. Out of what?” Kosoff’s hand—pale and spotted like a freshwater fish—reached for the dark mahogany gear-shift nob. The hairs on his fingers bristled in the light, rigid red spears.
“No, haven’t heard that one before,” said Thaddeus.
“It’s not anti-Semitic,” Kosoff said.
“Not particularly.”
“I mean it sort of is, but the priest gets the worst of it. You can’t be anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. Quite a few Nazis managed.”
For the first time this morning, Kosoff allowed his smile to disappear. It was a relief to see it go, like watching the owner finally take charge of his little yappy dog. “Aren’t you in a shit mood today.”
“I’m fine.”
“Jet-lagged.”
“I don’t get jet-lagged going east to west. It’s when I go home that I get sort of fucked up.”
“That’s home for you,” Kosoff said, his smile restored.
Coincidentally, Neal and Thaddeus were dressed similarly, as if they were a team, which, for today’s purposes, they more or less were. In blue blazers and light-colored trousers, and stiffly tasseled loafers, they were on their way to a birthday brunch that Arlene Epstein was having to celebrate her son’s twenty-seventh birthday. Arlene had secured the rights to The Strike, a novel by a young writer called Gary Shaiken about workers occupying the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, in 1937, and for the past few weeks she had been holding court, talking to directors and writers, and by all accounts thoroughly enjoying her position as one who controlled a project whose fervency and good old-fashioned heart-on-the-sleeve progressive politics dozens of Hollywood players gravitated toward, as if the story of young workers risking life and limb to form the United Auto Workers had within it something decent and purifying and all those who participated in the telling would have their former idealism restored. Heretofore, Arlene had only coproduced a handful of cheap, rather broad comedies, and Kosoff barely knew her. Thaddeus had yet to meet Arlene and neither of them had met Craig, her son.
“I get it,” Kosoff said, navigating the car around the sun-blasted curves of Coldwater Canyon Drive. “The connection between The Strike and Hostages. And I think she’s going to bring me on to direct. Gut feeling.”
“Then what the fuck am I doing here?”
“She brings me in, I bring you. But it’ll be easier if she meets you, maybe thinks it’s her idea.”
“Wow, that’s some amazing reverse psychology you’ve got going, Neal.”
“You are really in a mood.”
“I’m too old to be charming.”
“Never! Anyhow, she’s going to like you. Her family is like yours.”
“Oh?”
“Old Commies.”
“My parents weren’t Communists. Trotskyists. Big difference.”
Kosoff laughed merrily. “It’s like Munchkins.”
“Really?”
“Well, yeah, I mean they’re both so famous.”
As they approached Arlene’s house, Thaddeus powered his window down, suddenly desperate to breathe some actual air. The smell of the outdoors was sharp, piney, with something combustible in the weave of it, some stray element, or rogue compound turning the air into fuel for the apocalypse. Everything in L.A. felt unstable. It was a wonder the trees could stay rooted in the parched, sloping ground; one good shake and the whole expensive mess would go sliding down into the Los Angeles basin. The news was full of stories about environmental catastrophe by which the state’s ultimate end could be surmised. Weird objects washed up on the beaches. Just two nights ago a hundred swollen black tuxedos filled with water were spotted near Catalina, looking like the bodies of obese men, bobbing ten feet from the shore—and no one could say where they’d come from. Sudden tidal surges washed away fifty million dollars of real estate in less time than it took to say May I put you on hold? Yes, by all means, put everything on hold. Put that hole in the ozone on hold. Put those geologic squeaks and twitters along the shit-eating grin of the San Andreas fault on hold. Put those wildfires in the hills of Santa Monica on hold—was it there or Malibu that temperatures soared so that horses grazing in the pastures exploded from the heat? And by all means put on hold the sense of impending doom that seized Thaddeus the moment his plane touched the runway at LAX, the sense that here was a place that one day was going to blow up or burn down or be swallowed whole, and when it happened no one in all the world would be terribly surprised—sad, yes, horrified, naturally, but there would not be the slightest element of surprise. The city would become a vast screaming ward of suffering survivors and the great unanswerable question would follow them to their mass grave: What did they expect? How could they have built those multimillion-dollar houses where they could not stand? The city was like a display of Fabergé eggs set up on an escalator! Was it really worth all this for three hundred days of sunshine?
As Neal guided the Benz into the circular driveway on Briarcrest, the sun beat against the long brown hood like a fiery hammer. A ring of vehicles lined the driveway—most of the guests for Arlene’s Sunday brunch had already arrived. There was a sporty red MG, a dune buggy painted Creamsicle orange, a white Rolls, a Vincent Black Shadow, and an old Mustang with a copperish filigree of rust all over the back bumper. Wearing baggy shorts and a sweat-stained maroon tank top, a slightly built Mexican yard worker was cleaning the dead matter out of the yew bushes with a rake in one hand and the nozzle of a leaf blower in the other.
The house itself was modern, simple and white, and looked like a box from an expensive shoe store. Five broad cement steps led to the entrance. A glass double door offered a view straight through the foyer and out the back to the brick veranda and a view of the distant city, which today looked particularly foreboding beneath a motionless ring of pale brown pollution.
Currently, Craig Epstein was living with his mother and her second husband, Bruce Hollander, the owner of a sports memorabilia shop in the Glendale Galleria. Now that Craig had bought (with his mother’s money) a controlling interest in a minor league baseball team out of Concord, New Hampshire, Hollander insisted upon relating to him as if they both were in the “sportsatainment business.” Upon rising that morning in his room at the Four Seasons, Thaddeus had wondered how attending a birthday brunch for Craig Epstein would be of any real use to him. True, transactions in the movie business were often a matter of relationships, but attending a birthday party for Craig Epstein was a bridge too far. And now, milling around Arlene and Hollander’s living room, with its expensive, uncomfortable modernist furniture, its white vases filled with Casablanca lilies, its white carpeting, its white tiles around a white brick hearth in which were stacked three picturesque white birch logs that would never be burned, Thaddeus was certain he should be back in Leyden doing whatever could be done to spackle over the fissures that had destabilized his home. Or reading. Saul Bellow, maybe Seize the Day, one of the short ones. Or poetry! To his great surprise, it turned out Thaddeus was mad for poetry. He ought to have listened to his own internally murmured misgivings and refused Kosoff’s request to come out here and help woo Arlene. Thaddeus’s first thought had been his best thought (as Allen Ginsberg would have it). Allen Ginsberg! Now that would be a way to spend a Sunday, reading “Howl” or “Sunflower Sutra,” not here sipping on a mimosa that promised a splitting headache by midafternoon, and looking at the panoramic view of the ongoing catastrophe below. Where was Ginsberg anyhow? Probably in his walk-up on the Lower East Side. His tea brewing in the old kitchen, stacks of books everywhere like a poetry Stonehenge. His lover staring out the window, his fingers laced around the metal bars of the burglar gates, a square of sunlight on his cowboy shirt. Yes, yes, where was Ginsberg? But more to the point: where was Grace? Thaddeus checked his watch. One o’clock here in L.A., four back home. (Home!)
“I notice you looking at your watch,” a voice said.
Thaddeus looked up and the birthday boy was there in all his Weekend-with-Mom glory. Craig’s thick wavy brown hair was matted, he was unshaven, and he wore maroon-and-white-striped pajamas. He was wandering around while holding a jar of peanut butter in one hand and a spoon in the other. His pajama top had been misbuttoned and curls of his body hair were visible, like insulation in a house under construction, or demolition. Craig’s green eyes were far apart and sleepy, his nose was oily, and he smiled unpleasantly, as if he had heard something compromising about Thaddeus and was deciding whether or not to use it against him.
“Thinking of my wife, figuring out what she might be doing,” Thaddeus said, staring at the peanut butter jar.
“Aw,” Craig said, as if Thaddeus’s statement was an adorable photo of a kitten.
“Well, happy birthday, Craig.”
“Oh, fuck this,” Craig said. “Really. Fuck this with a chainsaw.”
“The big two seven?”
“Everything.” He widened his stance a bit, rotated his hip, trying to rearrange his genitals without actually reaching in.
“Well, you don’t look a day over twenty-six,” Thaddeus said.
The table was being prepared in the dining room and Arlene could be heard scolding one of her maids. The maid fortunate enough not to be in direct contact with Arlene circulated a tray filled with mini-quiches, moving clockwise, while a young Mexican male servant moved counterclockwise, with a pitcher of ice water in one hand and a pitcher of mimosas in the other.
Even with the rights to The Strike to bait the trap, it wasn’t easy for Arlene to attract core Hollywood types to her son’s birthday party. Two of the guests were real estate agents, one was head of marketing for the Lakers and was clearly Hollander’s friend. A couple of lawyers, a couple of studio executives, an abnormally tall man in a Hawaiian shirt who had recently launched a self-help foundation called Yes, Indeed!, and Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin, who lived nearby, and breezed in to wish Craig happy birthday, drop off a present, and depart.
Standing to one side, dressed in a short black leather skirt, her bare legs emerging from lavender cowboy boots, her skin pale and dense as the meat of an apple, was Christine McNally, a fellow screenwriter. When Thaddeus’s gaze passed over her, she pointed at him, a gesture which of late had taken the place of the wave. She looked amused, as if she had caught him at something. She was Stanford educated, and in Hollywood she had assumed the role of resident intellectual, recommending books to actresses, escorting young directors to obscure performance spaces. Christine seemed out of her element in the daylight, and Thaddeus wondered what she was doing at Arlene’s. Perhaps she had come with another director or producer who hoped to get in on The Strike.
“Why, of all the gin joints,” Christine said, sidling up to him. She was free with her hands, flirtatious but remote. Her bangs were cut Lulu style and her lipstick was dark brown. Christine seemed like one of those people born to be alone, self-sufficient, wary, cerebral, distant. Anyone who spent so much as a weekend with her would end up cramping her style.
“Well, look at you,” he said.
“What are you doing here anyhow, Mr. Thaddeus,” Christine said. She was from St. Louis; it was anyone’s guess whether her slight drawl was an affectation.
“Fishing expedition. And thank you.”
“For finding your presence here curious?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t know how any of us got here,” Christine said. “Look at us, a thousand points of blight drinking mimosas on the San Andreas Fault. It’s all very mysterious.”
“That’s funny,” Thaddeus said.
“The thousand points of blight? I’ve been doing that joke since Bush first said it. Most people react the way you just did. They don’t laugh, they just say, That’s funny. Hollywood, right? Ever wonder how we got here?”
“The original Hollywood guys came out here to avoid patent attorneys because they ripped something or other off Thomas Edison.”
“Oh, Thomas Edison was such a pill.”
“Was he?”
“Sprockets,” Christine said.
“Really?”
“That’s what the early moguls pilfered from Edison. The little holes that ran along the edges of the negative? That allow a camera or a projector to advance the film along at an even clip? That was Edison’s and the movie guys stole it from him. Or so the story goes.”
“And now our job,” Thaddeus said, “is to supply content for the sprockets to move along.”
“Our main job is to not get kicked out of the Sun King’s court. To just keep milling around listening to what’s said and what’s not said and who’s up and who’s down, always hoping a little something comes our way. Courtiers, it’s one of my favorite words. It also means flatterer.”
“I leave that to my director,” Thaddeus said.
“Well then.”
“He’s good at it.”
“I think you could be good at it, too,” Christine said. She raised her eyebrows, smiled innocently.
Thaddeus was momentarily stunned, but decided to overlook the insult, if indeed one had been intended. That was the trouble with quips and snappy dialogue. You never really knew what was intended. And it seemed everyone everywhere was just getting funnier and funnier—was it because people were consuming such massive doses of entertainment? One day, you wouldn’t be able to tell what anybody meant. Every conversation would be served with a side of canned laughter.
“Who are you here with?” Thaddeus asked Christine.
“I was supposed to meet Duncan Lee. He wanted to pick me up but I don’t much care for riding with someone else. And now he’s gone and stood me up.” She batted her long, heavily mascaraed eyelashes, the damsel in distress.
The man with the mimosas approached them and they both held their glasses out while he filled them.
“Hello, you two genius writers,” Arlene said, appearing it seemed from out of nowhere. “No fair keeping your brilliance all to yourselves. Circulate!” She had a young body, well-moistened and exercised. Today was for turquoise leggings and a Brooks Brothers white shirt and silver jewelry—she looked as if she might at any moment hoist herself up onto the lid of a baby grand and sing a Stephen Sondheim number.
“I meant to ask you,” she said. “Are you still trying to get that Lady Chatterley thing set up?”
“That’s on a back back burner,” Thaddeus said. “Basically not even in the kitchen.”
Had she heard? The sight of her beloved son saying something to Hollander captured her attention. “Craig,” she called. “Get over here, okay?”
“I’m going to show you something,” Arlene said to Thaddeus and Christine, as they waited for Craig to wind his way across the room. “Craig is a one-man focus group. My baby just knows what’s what.”
“Where’s your peanut butter, Craig?” Thaddeus asked, doing his best to sound good-natured.
“I was talking to your husband,” Craig said, ignoring Thaddeus. “We were talking about baseball and then we were on Bull Durham.”
“Ron Shelton,” Arlene said. “I love Ron. Ron makes me wet.”
The remark, crude and shocking, hung in the air for a moment or two. Until Christine said, “Ron.”
“Ron Shelton?” Craig exclaimed. “Wrong. It’s Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.”
“Ronnie directed, baby, he’s the filmmaker,” Arlene said, with a delighted smile, as if Craig praising a movie without knowing who wrote and directed it was somehow endearing, like an eight-year-old who still cannot pronounce banana.
“Yeah, but people pay to see Costner. And Sarandon,” Craig said.
Arlene laughed and patted Craig’s face. “Look at this. Craig has his finger on the pulse.” She pointed at Thaddeus. “You should write something for Sarandon. A strong woman’s role.”
“With a topless scene,” added Craig. He saw the look of consternation on Thaddeus’s face and said, “I’m kidding.”
“Here’s my question,” Arlene said. She touched the corner of her mouth and Craig, like a base runner who knows the coach’s signals, cleaned the corners of his own mouth with the back of his hand. “What do you make of D. H. Lawrence?”
“The real one or the movie?” Craig asked.
“Either or both.” Her eyes shone with pure pleasure. She clasped her hands and the multitude of bracelets on her wrists tinkled like wind chimes.
Thaddeus felt his nerves tightening, like a watch being wound too tightly. As a graduation present, his parents had given him a Swiss Army watch. It was a sturdy red-and-black thing, with a pleasantly pugnacious little face. It was a wind-up watch—neither of the Kaufmans approved of battery-run watches, believing they were a way of selling you a bunch of batteries. They also abhorred digital watches, feeling that the abandonment of the circular movement and its connection to the earth’s journey around the sun was an implied refutation of Copernicus, a capitulation to the dark churchy forces of reaction. However, the watch was not to be overwound, Sam Kaufman warned. You can’t wind it and wind it and think it’s going to last for the whole week. It needs to be wound moderately once every day. But, sure enough, the next day Thaddeus was caught overwinding the watch and the watch was frozen. What did I say to you when I gave this to you, Sam said, his voice not so much peeved as weary. I think you said congratulations, Thaddeus answered. Sam shook his head. I don’t know what to make of you, he said. That was more like it, the admission filled Thaddeus with a sour post-adolescent pride—until the age of posturing gave way to the age of pondering, and he realized that not understanding was a parental euphemism for not accepting. And not accepting was itself a euphemism for not particularly liking.
“Well, in all honesty I don’t know all that much about the real one,” Craig said. “But the movie was overly long.”
“Are you thinking of Lawrence of Arabia?” Thaddeus asked, suddenly overwhelmed by a furious dislike for the birthday boy. For Mr. Pajama Bottom. For Mr. Peanut Butter Out of the Jar. For Mommy’s Built-In Focus Group. How could Arlene give this boy such power and adoration? Arlene may have been a bit of a barbarian, but she was smart, she was savvy—how did motherhood abscond with her brains? How was this lump in pj’s given such respect for merely existing?
Another man might have been slack-jawed with shame over confusing T. E. and D. H., but Craig took the cultural correction in stride. He merely nodded. “Did I make a boo-boo?” he asked, with a smile.
“You know D. H. Lawrence,” Arlene said to Craig, in her encouraging voice, like someone urging a child to take his first steps. “Narrow face, that little beard.”
“I don’t remember,” Craig said.
“You wrote a terrific paper about D. H. Lawrence for your English Lit class at Dartmouth,” Arlene said. “I kept it. I have it right upstairs if you want to see it.”
“You kept it?” Craig said. He smiled beautifully when he meant it.
“Yes. It’s brilliant. Well organized, right to the point.”
“D. H. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence,” Craig said. He closed his eyes and tilted his head, as if to rearrange its contents.
“Well, there you have it,” said Arlene, with a tinkling flourish of her arm. “Here’s a college-educated moviegoer, one who studied Lawrence at an Ivy League college, and the name means very little to him. Basing a movie on a classic guarantees you bupkis. At this point. All those classic novels—they have their roots in the nineteenth century. Maybe the novel itself does. But look at us. We’re almost in the twenty-first century. The nineteenth century is going to be just for a few nostalgia buffs.”
“What’s 20th Century Fox going to do with its name?” Craig wondered.
Arlene laughed merrily. “Oh, they’ll be fine. The studios always survive.”
“So based on this, you think doing Chatterley is a bad idea?” Thaddeus asked, in a somewhat lawyerly tone.
“It’s a dainty little book anyhow,” said Arlene. “Doesn’t she put flowers on his pubes? I mean, fuck me with a chainsaw. We’re just not there anymore.”
“I’m starting to remember him,” Craig said.
“I’m going to show you what you wrote,” said Arlene. “It’s good. Really good.”
“You and your son are super close,” Thaddeus said. “It’s really amazing.”
Arlene narrowed her eyes.
“I mean that in a good way,” he said.
“I’m sure you do,” Arlene said.
“Freud said that a man secure in the love of his mother can never be a failure,” Thaddeus said, his grin like a piece of shipwreck.
“Well, we’re a team here, Thaddeus. Teamwork is what makes the world run. If you don’t understand that you got bupkis.”
Oh spare me your Hollywood Yiddish. Thaddeus narrowed his eyes, hoping that their being windows to the soul was an empty cliché.
Near the door to the back patio, Kosoff was talking to a middle-aged man who might have been Paul Anka. The man was frowning thoughtfully as Kosoff’s voice rose to deliver his joke’s punch line: “Out of what?”
“I don’t think there’s very much champagne in these mimosas,” Christine said, when they were alone again. “The original recipe from the Ritz calls for half orange juice and half champagne. What we may have here is the infamous Buck’s Fizz, which calls for twice as much juice.”
“I used to be so fucking hungry for all this great food and drink and now everything is starting to make me sick.”
“Stick to the Buck’s Fizz. Vitamin C.”
“I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.”
“No one quits the mob,” she said, in an Edward G. Robinson voice.
“I think Neal is going to be very unhappy he brought me here.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Christine said with a vague gesture.
“I think I really just went one toke over the line with Arlene and the birthday boy.”
“Ah, the birthday boy,” said Christine.
For a moment, his annoyance turned on Christine. Did she ever say what she meant? Her deftness, her deep sense of expediency, her instinct for the neutral all seemed like symptoms of insanity, an incurably subtle madness.
“You want to know what I know, chum?” Christine said. “Eagles can tell how much food is going to be available in their habitat over the next six months and if they see it’s going to be slim pickings they break a couple of their own eggs so there won’t be too many mouths to feed. We’re connected to our environment, too. We’re aware of what’s going on with our species, with our whole world, we can feel it like you can feel a river under a road.”
The server with the mini-quiche and the server with the mimosas converged on Thaddeus and Christine. Food declined, orange juice and champagne accepted. Thaddeus was seized by a sense of urgency. He needed to place himself between Grace and whatever door from which she was aiming to exit. He needed a phone. Up to this very moment, he believed people who carried around portable phones were delusional douche bags, but right now he wished he had one.
Now the question was: how could he approach Arlene and ask if he might use one of her phones? In private. He began to wander the room, aimlessly. He tried to arrange his features into something that might appear purposeful. He knit his brows, pursed his lips, and glanced occasionally at his watch. (Yes, Father, I have a Rolex and it doesn’t need to be wound.)
His second time around the room, Thaddeus was suddenly arm in arm with Kosoff.
“I saw the great lady granted you an extended audience,” Neal said.
Thaddeus saw it all so clearly now: they were all of them in some elevated barnyard, nosing each other front and flank for a better shot at the trough. And the slop in the trough took the form of cars and vacations and extra household help, and tailored suits, education for your children, first-rate medical care, and a comfortable retirement.
“Yes,” Thaddeus said, “and I can’t say it went very well.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, what the fuck? Right? How are we going to have the balls to do justice to the sit-down strikers of Flint if we can’t stand up to the Arlenes of the world?”
“What did you say to her?”
“It’s that birthday boy.”
“Craig? Why in the world would you care about that putz?”
“Listen, Neal, do you have a phone by any chance? I’ve got problems at home. Big problems.”
Kosoff frowned sympathetically, as if compassion had been there just beneath the surface all along. Did this mean Neal was a pretty decent guy after all, or was the compassion a pose? What difference did it make? Thaddeus believed in the Jewish path to morality, believed if you do the right thing and say the right thing, eventually you will come to feel the right thing. Thaddeus’s problem was that he could not sustain the right thing, it came, it went, it floated sometimes just beyond his emotional reach, it filled him with righteousness, but, in the end, he simply could not sustain it. Driven by desire, ambition, and a debilitating attraction to ease and comfort, he was buffeted about, with one thing leading to the next, and with no discernible path. He lived and took what came, his decency and his failings tripping over each other at every turn.
“I’ve got that phone in my car,” Neal was saying. “But you have to start the engine.”
“Would you mind?”
“Of course not. No one’s sick, I hope.”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Anyhow, reception is terrible up here. You should use one of Arlene’s land lines; there’s one in the hall.”
Kosoff led Thaddeus to the phone, with his hand on his shoulder. His kindness was making Thaddeus wonder if he had the look of a doomed man? He felt a shooting pain in his chest. My God, what a terrible place this would be to die. What a terrible place. The phone stood on a tall, narrow green table, with a small cast-iron Buddha on one side of it and a bowl of M&M peanut candies on the other. The phone itself was made of see-through plastic and its circuits and ringer were visible. He picked it up; the dial tone was harsh and unstable, like the buzzing of a large housefly trapped in a lampshade.
Grace answered on the first ring. So: she was waiting for someone to call.
“It’s just me,” Thaddeus said. Neal had returned with a mimosa, which he placed on top of a monogrammed cocktail napkin.
“Hello, Just Me. What time is it out there?” Grace said.
“I don’t know.”
“But you always know what time it is.”
“It’s about one or something.” He was gripping the phone too tightly to look at his watch.
“That’s my boy.”
“Wow. I would have thought it was impossible, but you’ve turned knowing the time into a personal failure.”
“Sorry. So? How’s it going?”
“Grace, I can’t take these personal crises when I’m out here. It’s hard enough.”
“Did room service overcook your eggs Benedict?”
“All right. Just tell me what’s going on. With you.”
“With me? With uneducated, unsuccessful little me?”
“Right.”
“Well, I didn’t kill Muriel. I think that was an accomplishment.”
“Muriel? What can you possibly—”
“She’s a complainer. And I miss my brother.”
He heard the going-down-the-drain glug of wine being liberally poured; it took that for him to realize she was drunk. Drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk.
“Are you alone?” he asked her.
“No, the place is crawling with gallery owners and art dealers and everyone is—”
“Please. Grace. I’m begging you.”
“I caught Emma with a loaf of bread.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You want an obese daughter? You want type B diabetes?”
“It’s type 2, not type B. If you’re going to be a food Nazi at least get your facts straight.”
“Oh my God, you are such an asshole!” Grace said, and with that she hung up the phone.
Thaddeus took a small, steadying sip of his mimosa. Nonsensically, he held on to the phone for a few moments, as if the broken connection might somehow be restored.
He heard a burst of laughter from the next room, as sudden as an explosion. Oh what rich fun! He recalled reading something Evelyn Waugh wrote to a friend back in London while laboring here in L.A., how the worst thing about being in Hollywood was seeing the Jews enjoying themselves. What a prick Waugh was, a funny, brilliant, vexing, petty, sniping sonofabitch. He would have been right at home with the river folk in Leyden, with their smooth chests and cleft chins, their flyaway hair, forever boyish, until one day they woke up looking like Auden. Thaddeus strolled into the party again. He didn’t know what to do with his face so he decided to look . . . curious. His brows were knotted, his head was cocked, as if all these people and their laughter and their lovely Sunday clothes were of considerable anthropological interest, that he was here like that U of Chicago professor who was constantly in the Kaufmans’ bookstore looking for anything about circumcision rituals, not because he was necessarily fixated on his own foreskin but because foreskins were his bread and butter.
The laughter had subsided. Evelyn Waugh would be relieved.
The guests were filing into the dining room. Neal was with Christine, and Thaddeus had the sense they might end up working together—perhaps on The Strike: who knew? Things moved with the swiftness of assassination in this business, assassinations so casual as to be practically whimsical.
“Hey, Mom says your folks fought in Spain.” It was Craig, his hand on Thaddeus’s arm.
“Over what?” Thaddeus asked.
“In the war? The civil war? That’s what Mom said.” His breath was heavy with peanut butter, burnt, sweet, oily, intolerable.
“First of all, no. They did not. And, Craig? Why are we talking about our mommies? Look at you. You don’t even have fucking pants on.”
“It’s my house and it’s my birthday.”
“Grow up, Craig. Act like a human being.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m giving you some unasked-for advice. Don’t go parading around in your goddamn pajamas.”
“How’d you like an unasked-for punch in your mouth?” Craig asked.
“I’d be fine with it, Craig. But first thing, I think you better freshen up.” And with that, Thaddeus Kaufman tossed his mimosa into Craig’s face. Who knew it was so easy? This thing, reality, your life, your future, your reputation, how flimsy it all was, how conditional, how circumstantial, a universe of spun sugar. Nothing was carved in stone. Things were barely scratched in wet sand. Everything could change with a flick of your wrist.
“My eyes!” Craig screamed, stumbling backward, rubbing his hands over his face. “My eyes!”
EXPELLED FROM THE BRUNCH, THADDEUS waited in Arlene’s driveway for the taxi. He had hoped Kosoff would drive him back to the Four Seasons but Neal, who was good enough to call for a cab, let him know that if he were to leave with Thaddeus it would give the appearance of support, and it would be best if he stayed at the brunch and did whatever he could to clean up the mess. Thaddeus, feeling the full force of the mimosas, would have liked to sit down, but the hoods of the cars were scalding, even Arlene’s BMW, parked in the shade beneath a wisteria-laden carport, was too hot to sit on. Waiting for the cab’s arrival, Thaddeus had ample time to consider his options. He needed to empty his bladder, but even in his compromised state he realized that luck was not running in his direction today and the last thing he needed was for Arlene, or Craig, or anyone else in the house to see him taking a leak. He considered letting himself back into the house and using the bathroom, but that seemed tempting fate, and fate had already made it clear that today was not Thaddeus’s day. As he thought about what was preventing him from relieving himself, the urgency to do so increased and before long he was desperate. What did homeless people do when nature called? Every bar and restaurant posted signs warning noncustomers away from their toilets; under the cover of night, the parks and bushes could suffice, but what about the daylight hours? Without the right to relieve yourself you had less status, less comfort, and less safety in the world than an animal. How the homeless must envy the Central Park carriage horses. The dogs. The pigeons. Thaddeus tensed and relaxed his calf muscles, believing that this would somehow lessen the urge to urinate. Was there anywhere near Arlene’s house that he could take a nice long undetected piss? Perhaps he could walk to the end of Arlene’s driveway, find some tree or agave plant to shield him. But the houses here were built close together and for all Thaddeus knew he could end up being seen by a neighbor. Maybe he would be pissing in full view of Benjamin and Prentiss, who lived close enough to walk over to Craig’s birthday. What might their reaction be? They were obviously not huge Craig and Arlene fans, otherwise they would have stayed at the brunch for more than two minutes. Would they somehow see in Thaddeus a kindred spirit?
His thoughts, circular and increasingly frantic, were brought to a sudden stop by the arrival of the taxi, a light blue Chevy Nova. A cloud of dust followed it up the driveway, twisting and turning like a massive caterpillar. The driver was an ascetic-looking man in his forties, with a narrow face, sunken cheeks, watery brown eyes, a bristly mustache. His name was Noori Hasseini.
“Howdy,” Thaddeus said, slamming his door, wanting for some reason the people at the brunch to know he was leaving, that the monster was gone, and they could all go back to their mimosas and quiche and whatever else Arlene had in store. “The Four Seasons?”
The driver nodded, made a three-point turn.
“I don’t suppose the air conditioning is working,” Thaddeus said.
“Not today,” said the driver.
Thaddeus slunk back and released a long sigh. The urge to urinate had subsided; he wondered if that meant toxins had been absorbed into his bloodstream. A slash in the backseat released a ridge of pumpkin-colored foam.
“We are doing this without running the meter,” the driver said. “Forty dollars.”
“Seems fair. God, I am so glad to be out of that place.” Thaddeus closed his eyes for a moment and leaned back. No. That was not relaxing at all. More like being dangled over the side of a high balcony. He straightened up, pressed the heels of his hands against the sides of his head, as if to reshape it. “I hate this life.” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
He saw the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, the quick worried glance. The stress of serving the public. How was this guy supposed to know what kind of lunatic might plop down in his backseat? Thaddeus thought it might be a good idea to put the driver at his ease.
“I see your name,” Thaddeus said. “Are you Iranian by any chance?”
“Yes. I am here with my family for many years.”
“Well, the odd thing is, I’m here—I mean in Los Angeles—mainly because I wrote something that was more or less about your country.”
“This is my country,” the driver said.
“No, Noori, Mr. Hasseini. Am I pronouncing that correctly? I realize this is your country now.” His bladder was once again on high alert. “And what I wrote wasn’t really about Iran.”
“When did you visit?”
“Iran? Well, that’s the thing. Basically never. I mean I was there for an hour. On my honeymoon. The whole thing was made up?”
“You are a journalist?”
“Oh Jesus, no. Screenwriter. Maybe you saw it. Hostages?”
Mr. Hasseini gave no indication.
“I made up a country,” Thaddeus said. “But people took it for Iran. Because of the timing. I didn’t know much about it. I met this woman at a party. But maybe I did, you understand? Maybe we all know about what’s going on, a lot more than we realize. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Because: guess what? I fucked up at the party and now everyone is going to think I’m a maniac.”
Mr. Hasseini had the Sunday papers next to him, and he cautiously patted them, and pushed them farther back on the bench to guard against their flying off should he suddenly apply the brakes. Peeking out from below the papers was the handle of what looked like a billy club.
They were halfway to Sunset Boulevard now, and approaching a cleared lot where a house was under construction. The site was deserted, except for one large bulldozer, ochre and forlorn beneath the blazing sun.
“Can you stop?” Thaddeus cried out. “Please. I have to take a piss like a Tennessee racehorse.” He was sitting forward now and had his hand on the driver’s shoulder, which felt perfectly round and steely.
“You can’t do that here,” Mr. Hasseini said.
“I can do it outside or in the back of your cab.”
They were already past the construction site, but Mr. Hasseini pulled off to the side of the road. He kept one hand on the wheel and the other on top of the newspapers, and stared straight ahead. He didn’t say okay, but he made no further objection, and Thaddeus scrambled out of the taxi, closed the door, and made a quick stiff walk back toward the empty lot. Okay okay okay, he counseled his bladder. Fifty feet to go, twenty-five. And when he was too far from Mr. Hasseini’s cab to catch up to it, the driver ditched him, a full-out, let-me-out-of-here, tire-squealing, dust-raising escape.
“Fine!” Thaddeus shouted. “You fucking idiot!”
He stood there for a few moments, amazed that someone was apparently afraid of him—fearful enough to forgo the fare. A car was approaching and Thaddeus thought about flagging it down and asking for a ride to Beverly Hills, though the act of hitchhiking to a luxury hotel seemed odd. There were a couple of women in their twenties in the car, the driver smoked and the passenger was brushing her hair. Neither gave the slightest indication of noticing Thaddeus’s presence. This is where the hero realizes he is dead, and has been for years. “Thank you for your compassion,” Thaddeus said to the bright red Mustang as it disappeared around the curve. Anyhow, he’d rather pee. He trudged through the building site. The ground had been ravaged, like a battlefield. It was all in huge weedy clumps, difficult to walk over. He stood behind the sad old bulldozer and at last began to relieve himself. At first, nothing came out. Maybe he’d held it in too long. Breathe. Breathe. At last: it came with a sudden hot twist, as if barbed. Okay, okay. Easy does it. He wanted his body to hear soft consoling words. His body had done nothing wrong. All it wanted was to be loved, and to have good food and wine, and a nice place to live, and—all right, there was this—enough on hand to be able to pay others to do the unpleasant work, someone to take the suitcase out of his hands after a long trip. Was that asking too much? Since when did wanting a bit of luxury constitute a fucking crime? Wasn’t that the whole purpose of the goddamned country?
An old patch-eye bulldog was looking at him from across the lot, and as Thaddeus finished up the dog approached him. It seemed possible to Thaddeus that, given the day, he was now going to be bitten by a dog, but the dog stopped several feet away and stood there, its head down, its tail immobile, its ribs showing on the inhale and receding again when the dog breathed out. “You okay there, Spike?” Thaddeus said. The dog lifted its head and looked him over, but got no closer. It was not going to do him any harm, yet Thaddeus was of the distinct impression that the dog was telling him: you don’t belong here.
How many miles to the Four Seasons Hotel? Eight? Ten? The walk would do him good. Even in the pounding sun, the walk might clear his head. And it did. Around mile two he realized that in all likelihood he had ended his career. At mile three he decided that no matter what he would never tell Grace what he had done. Also around mile three he started to feel excited about what might be next for him—maybe journalism, as Mr. Hasseini had suggested, maybe that novel. Maybe something that wasn’t about writing. He wasn’t all that good at writing, it seemed to him, not when he compared what he was capable of to what he had studied in school, or the books his parents bought and sold. And he didn’t really enjoy writing. Well, maybe he enjoyed it, but he didn’t love it. Or maybe he did love it and it just didn’t love him back. Another unrequited love. One thing was certain and that was in the life to come he would be doing a great deal of walking because walking was amazing, walking focused the mind, walking was like meditation, only better, probably. Around mile four he was starting to see more cars on the road and suddenly without entirely meaning to he lifted his arm, whistled, and hailed a taxi to take him the rest of the way.