Land of Dreams: A Novel (17 page)

The day was fine, warm enough for a sweater—maybe a light jacket, as I would be walking some distance and it might rain. I had spent all morning with Tom doing his lessons, and he was now working on his “tunnel”: a shallow hole that he had scooped out of the back lawn, as part of a long-term project to dig himself to Australia. Bridie was at the sink washing potatoes for Irish boxty—which is what Bridie, incapable of sitting down for one minute of the day, did when there was nothing else left to be done. She grated the raw potatoes, mixed them in a bowl with salt, flour, milk and eggs, then fried them in a pan. She and Tom would have made history of the boxty, smothered in butter and honey, by the time I got back with Leo.

My sketch pad and charcoals were in the bedroom that I had allocated as my temporary studio, on the stranger’s dressing table where I had put them the day we moved in. Before I left the house I opened the bedroom door and considered bringing them with me, in case I saw something en route that inspired me. I closed the door quickly again and, in that same action, fearfully imagined that I felt another door inside me close itself off. I would not think about painting today, I decided. I would not look for inspiration. I would just walk for an hour, collect Leo and maybe get a taxi and be back to catch some of Bridie’s boxty.

I walked past the grocery stores, the bank, post office, restaurants and coffee shops of the village and down the empty, wide, dusty sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevard. A few bicycles dashed past me, veering away from the cars that sped up and down the wide roadway. I walked past the bland, low commercial buildings, spread out so that you’d hardly know—or care—what was in them, if not for the gaudy signs “Car Wash” and “Dime Store Bargains.” The air was fresh, but I was going at a good pace and it felt warm enough for me to take off my sweater. It was as if the seasons had stopped. It certainly did not feel like mid-November, and my mind wandered to New York. The air would be crisp and the ground covered in leaves now, children gathering them into huge piles along the sidewalks. I thought further back to Ireland, and how wet and dark it was there at this time of year. I had never minded the bad winter weather, although I suppose I had known no better. John and I would light a big turf fire and sit and watch the flames dance as the light outside faded to . . .
WHACK!

My mind was not on where I was going and I had tripped over the root of a huge carob tree. The wretched things were everywhere, their curling, treacherous roots reaching up from the shallow mud path and all but grabbing at passing ankles. This was certainly
not
a town for pedestrians.

I stood up and put tentative pressure on my foot. No damage had been done. There was nobody around to witness my fall, or help pick me up, or ask after my welfare. The nearest building was half a block away. I was fine, but I told myself I might not have been—and that realization brought up in me a sudden fit of petulance. I
hated
this place with its relentlessly sunny weather, its lack of character and its row after row of palm trees. I had, I told myself, gone for this walk to find some inspiration, something to paint, but instead I had been assaulted by a stupid tree! My petulance turned to fury and, before I knew it, I found myself kicking the carob and hailing a passing taxi to take me to the studio.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

Leo had been going up to the Paramount lot most days for the past three weeks since his contract started. When he was not at the studio I did lessons with him and Tom, and constructed our time as much like a school day as possible. On these days Leo was just on the polite side of surly, still frightened that I might drag him back to New York if he didn’t show some pretense for study. The rest of the time—three, more often four days out of five in the working week—he was at Paramount, being trained in a group of twenty other young actors. Each day they underwent a routine of acting classes, deportment, voice training and grooming. They were also taken around and introduced to the idea of working among the hustle and bustle of cameras and microphones, lighting and “sets,” and all the other terminology that Leo was full of when he came home after his days at the studio.

“Watch my face,” he said one evening when he came in, then simply gazed at me intently for a few moments and then relaxed. “Did you see anything?” he said.

“Well, not really,” I admitted. “You were just sort of—staring?”

His face fell. “It’s a
close-up
, Mam—it’s
really
important. If you can master the close-up, then you’ll be a star. That’s what we learned today.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Show me,” said Bridie, waving me away, “sure, she doesn’t know anything.”

Leo did it again, and this time, with a little more obvious drama, he glared intently at Bridie for a few moments.

She gasped dramatically when he had finished.

“Well, I declare,” she said, “it was like watching Bela Lugosi in
Dracula
, and I am covered in goose bumps—that was very,
very
dramatic altogether. Oh, we have something on our hands here, surely, Ellie. You’d better pick yourself up, lady—your son is going to be a big,
big
star.”

I was somewhat taken aback. I had no idea Bridie knew who Bela Lugosi was, but my sixteen-year-old son gave her a hug that any eighty-year-old would be proud of, and she ruffled Leo’s hair and kissed him repeatedly on the head, until he eventually recoiled with embarrassment, then reemerged as the groomed, sophisticated young man he was becoming.

“I had better go and practice my lines for tomorrow.”

He could memorize pages of complicated text when it was in script form, I noted, but not remember two lines from the Shakespeare sonnet that I had taught him the day before. Bridie raised her eyes to heaven at me, to make it clear she was only humoring him, and when he had left the room she said, “He’ll get over all this nonsense, Ellie—you’ll see.”

The taxi dropped me off at the tall, opulent entrance arch of the Paramount gates.

“Want me to drive you through, lady?” the driver asked, but I said no. What was the point of that? I had legs.

There was a security guard in a small cabin to my left, and he reluctantly put down his paper and came out. He looked at the taxi driving off and seemed a little surprised that I was on foot.

“I am here to meet Leo Irvington,” I said. “He’s a trainee actor with the studio.”

I had never been through the studio gates before, having always collected Leo at the entrance. And I had planned to do the same today, except that I was now an hour early.

“You got a location for him?” he asked. “Location”—another one of Leo’s film terms. What was wrong with “place,” I wondered.

“No,” I said, “I do not have a ‘location.’ Surely there must be someplace where the students all . . .”

“Then he could be anywhere,” the guard said, anxious to get back into his hut and finish his coffee and paper. “Try the back lot—they’re shooting a big crowd scene today, they’ve drafted in loads of extras. If he’s training, he’ll have been sent down there—they need all the bodies they can get. Sorry, lady, this is the first time I’ve sat down all day—he might be there with them.”

“Is there anywhere I can wait?”

He shrugged. “Go on through,” he said, going into his hut and closing the door. “If he’s not on the lot, try Stage 21—down on Second Street, far left; they use it sometimes in the afternoons.”

Street names? In a film studio? I looked ahead and could not even see a left turn, just what looked like warehouses. I walked and walked until the warehouses were distinguishable only by the numbers above their vast, closed doors: “Stage 1,” “Stage 2,” and so on. There was a turn to the right, so I took that, and the numbers on the warehouses increased, then stopped and gave way to flat, boxlike buildings with windows, which I assumed must be offices.
Small wonder,
I thought,
the taxi driver was surprised that I chose to walk through—this place is vast!
People passed me here and there, but nobody stopped to ask who I was or what I was doing. There were men with clipboards, girls carrying trays of coffee through mysterious doors, workmen loading shop signs (or slabs of wood painted to look like shop signs) onto wagons, who wheeled them with determined speed off to some other urgent location.

Among the sprawling office buildings there suddenly appeared a pretty, villagelike area of houses painted in candy colors—pink and primrose doorways, some with sweet little porches on the front. I had been walking for a while now and still had no idea where I was going, but everybody milling about looked so determined, so resolutely in the middle of doing something, that they seemed beyond interruption. I decided just to knock on a door and was naturally drawn toward the cottage-type buildings—silly though it seemed, I assumed their inhabitants would be more amenable to questions. So I stopped and knocked at a small, white two-story cottage with brightly colored bougainvillea creeping up its doorway. There was no reply, so I simply tried the handle and stepped inside. Except that there was no inside—or rather it was not the inside I was expecting, but a dark empty space with no floor and rows of metal rigging instead of a roof.

I stepped back out of the doorway and as I did so I tripped—again—and, trying to catch hold of something to stop me falling, took a handful of the bougainvillea with me, which, as it turned out, was also fake. I was lucky I didn’t take the whole facade with me.

After my fight with the carob tree earlier I was really mad now. Mad with myself for opening the door, and for putting myself through the indignity of a public fall for a second time, but mostly with this bloody stupid place. What kind of insanity was it, putting a building like that there, when it wasn’t a building at all—some kind of stupid trick! I knew it was a set, a stupid film set, but—well, there should have been a sign.

“Are you okay?” a young man with a visor and clipboard leaned over me.

“Yes, I am perfectly all right!” I snapped at him, starting to stand up and grateful that I was wearing trousers, for the smidgeon of decorum that I had left.

The boy backed off, raising his hands in the air. “Okay, okay, lady—just trying to help.” And he hurried off.

“That was some fall.”

A man in a panama hat and a smart beige suit wandered over from the building opposite. He did not rush to help me, but rather sauntered into my company in a way that was, frankly, infuriatingly insouciant. His panama was pulled down, obscuring his face, which I found very rude in itself.

“Thanks for the help,” I said, by way of greeting—not that he deserved a greeting at all. “
You’re
certainly a real gentleman,” I continued.

“I prefer to let the younger generation do the heavy lifting,” he smiled. “I just make myself available for consolation and comfort after the event.”

“Well, you’re doing a lousy job of it,” I said, “and I object to being described as ‘heavy.”

“Object all you like,” he said, “it wasn’t meant to offend. To tell you the truth, I prefer my women with a bit of girth.”

“How dare you—why I have half a mind to . . .” Then behind my blind fury I noticed something familiar.

“Yes, I prefer a nice, real Irish woman like you—not these Hollywood types, with their silly pointy chests, their false teeth, their wigs . . .”

The man pulled back his hat and it was Stan, the composer I had met on the train. My mood lightened immediately. What a pleasure!

“You are a terrible old rogue and a diabolical trickster.”

“And I have finally seen the lady artist’s artistic temperament that I suspected was there.”

“Finally? It didn’t take very long,” I demurred.

“Indeed, and I would have been disappointed if it had. I was not sure it was you. What are you doing here?”

“Looking for my son.”

“Still?”

“No, no—I found him, he’s fine; he’s becoming an actor.”

“And you think that’s fine?”

I was so delighted to meet this virtual stranger, who made me laugh and whose vigorous character stimulated a feeling of intelligence and good humor in me.

“Not exactly—to be honest, I don’t know.”

“Have you time for coffee,” he said, “before you go seeking your actor son?”

“If you can help me find the Back Lot or Stage 21? I have no idea where I’m going—this place is such a maze.”

“You get used to it,” he said, as he lifted his elbow for me to take his arm and we started walking deeper into the lot. “You know, in the first place I
had
to come here to work. I was required by producers, directors—for meetings, rehearsals—and was dragged into this world of pretense and artifice. I thought: ‘This is such a terrible place, so soulless and silly.’ Then one day I realized that I was coming in the gates even when I did not have to! I said that it was good for me to find some corner here, where I could compose with no distractions; the studios would provide me with a good piano and a room with no window, where a writer like me can find solitude to create his masterpiece. But there is something else, another thing that I can find here.” Then he paused and, putting his long, thin fingers over my hand, closed his eyes, smiled and said in a breathless, almost ecstatic tone, “People.”

We had barely walked a hundred yards when suddenly it was as if we were back out on the street. Not a strange, sprawling empty Los Angeles street, but a street in Brooklyn on a busy Saturday afternoon. It was uncannily real. On the corner there was a pizza parlor, with people eating outside under a striped canopy; next to that was a newspaper stand, where a couple of city slickers threw coins at the vendor and got their papers back almost without stopping; a woman rushed to get onto a passing streetcar; a bunch of kids played ringtoss farther along the road; and there was a man getting his shoes shined outside a barber’s shop. It was such a strange and captivating sight to come upon suddenly that I almost didn’t notice the cameramen looming above us on all sides, perched precariously on high rigging. In fact Stan had to hold me back from wandering into the shot and, as he did so, a woman hurtled directly toward us shouting, “Cab!” before stopping suddenly, then dropping her bag and sauntering toward a long cabin with an open front, laid out with tin mugs and trays of sandwiches and cookies.