Land of Dreams: A Novel (32 page)

“I’ll call up to the house,” I said.

“I’ll drive you,” Freddie said, already reaching for his keys.

“Give me half an hour,” I replied.

There was no harm in getting all dressed up and letting Stan have one last look at what he was missing out on. In any case, I was curious about this woman of his; maybe she would be there for me to cast my eye over. I wanted to satisfy myself that I had made the right decision in turning down Stan’s—cheap and insincere—offer of love. As I pulled out a suitably elegant outfit, I reminded myself that I was going to ask him to help my son, and that was the only—the
only
—reason for seeing him.

Freddie was waiting to drive me up, hopping from side to side at the front door, dangling his keys nervously. He was too anxious for my success; his presence would put too much pressure on me.

“Freddie,” I said, “you need to leave this to me now.”

“I’m only driving you up there, Mrs. H.”

“No, Freddie,” I said, putting my foot down, in my best assertive-mammy voice. “I want you to go off about your ordinary work now, and carry on as if none of this is happening. You’ve too much invested in this, and you’re putting us all on edge. Nerves will do none of us any favors. Leave this matter to me. It’s delicate, and I promise I will let you know how I get on, and if—and I do say
if
—Stan can help us.” Freddie opened his mouth to object, but I said, “I am not going anywhere or doing anything while you are standing in front of me looking angsty. Go. To. Work.”

As soon as Freddie left, I called a cab.

I decided that I didn’t want Stan’s girlfriend to see me arrive in the pickup. The journey was short, but as we pulled up outside the house I realized that taking a cab had been a stupid thing to do, because it meant I was stuck there and would not be able to get back.

“Come back in half an hour?” I asked the driver as I was paying.

“Dream on, lady,” he said, taking off.

Stan must have heard the car because he was waiting at the door. He looked sheepish, as if he didn’t want to ask me in. After what Jackson had told me, I assumed he had a woman in the house, and immediately formed a barbed comment in my head. Before I let it out I made myself remember that I was
not
here to make barbed comments, but to help my son get another contract with Paramount.

“I’ve come to ask for your help, Stan,” I said.

“Would you like to come in?” he said, but did not move his body to one side or simply go in and let me follow, as he normally did. There was someone in there.

“No,” I said. Although I was
longing
to get a look, I didn’t want anything to distract me from the business at hand. “I can’t stay—there is just some matter I was hoping you could help me with.”

“Anything, Ellie,” he said, “you know I’ll help you any way I can.”

It was gone: the way a man who loves you pledges himself with every small request. The words were similar, but the meaning was so very, very different: “I would do anything for you” had become “I’ll help you any way I can.”

Words of friendship and patronage, rather than those of love and passion. I took a deep breath, ready to make my case.

“Paramount has not renewed Leo’s contract and . . .”

“. . . you want me to have a word in somebody’s ear?”

I had not thought it would be that easy, or rather I had forgotten that this would be the easy part of seeing Stan again.

“Yes, if you don’t—”

“Sure. No problem,” he said. “I know the head of casting—he’s a good friend. I’ll have a word. Anything else?”

He was dismissing me! Going back inside to his elegant-not-frumpy writer friend, or maybe one of his many young blonde lovers.

“No, thank you, Stan, although . . . ?” I needed a lift back to my house.

“Stanislaw?”

I gasped inwardly. The idea that he had a woman in there, and was possibly making love to a woman when I called at the door, had been an indignant suspicion of mine, more than an actual belief.

“Are you coming back in?” the woman called.

“I have company,” he said apologetically.

“So I see,” I answered, trying to keep the prim, horrified tone out of my voice.

“Well, if there’s nothing else, Ellie?”

“No,” I said, “there’s nothing else,” then added, “Thank you again, Stan. For helping Leo.”

I wanted to spit in his face, scream at him and give him a good, hard kick in the shins. I felt so humiliated, so hurt. He had been playing me all along, pretending to love me when he was sleeping with all these other women. Amusing himself with the respectable Irishwoman until it was time to have his way with the others.

I walked and walked, down the Hollywood Hills, past the vast mansions perched in this cruel, vertiginous landscape. The roads were narrow and so steep that my legs took on a life of their own, staggering down them. How did people even get the trucks with building materials up here? It seemed impossible, but nothing was impossible here. Money could buy you anything, and it had bought my friend Stan love.

Stan said that he was in love with me, yet he was with other women now—so quickly—and probably had been the whole time I knew him. Why did I care? I was not in love with him; I had too many other responsibilities. In any case, I had loved and lost twice (to death, no less) and had neither the time nor the inclination to love again.

Yes, I felt bereft at his rejection of me. Gradually, as I tripped down the narrow hills, my anger turned to hurt. Although I knew there was no logical reason for it, I felt betrayed, and by the time I reached Sunset and called for a cab, a sadness as deep as loss had settled into me.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-O
NE

Bridie’s condition was deteriorating. I took over all of the housekeeping, much of which meant undoing perceived chores that Bridie had done, such as clearing items from every surface in the house and putting them into the trash can, or festooning the bathroom with toilet paper before calling me in to admire the decorations.

It was hard, but Freddie helped me to shield the kids from the full extent of what was happening to their dear nan, and having Susan close by was a godsend.

It was only after Bridie tripped on the back step and cut her hand quite badly that I called in a doctor. He diagnosed her with dementia and said she would only get worse. He recommended that I send her to a home nearby—“a kind of hospital for people in her state” was the way he described it, but, although he assured me it was a very good place “of its type,” there was no way I was sending my Bridie away.

“In Ireland we look after our own,” I told Susan when she gave me the despairing look of a nurse worried that I would not be able to cope. What I didn’t tell her was that my beloved mother-in-law in Ireland, Maidy, had died without me, her only surviving relative. I was assured that the woman who had been more or less a mother to me since childhood had died peacefully, in the care of kind neighbors and friends. Nonetheless I still experienced residual guilt, and had long since vowed that I would never leave anyone belonging to me behind again, to die without me. Bridie had looked after me, one way or another, since I was a young emigrant ingenue from rural Ireland to Jazz Age New York. A dignified old age was her due, and there was no place to die with more dignity than at home with the people who love you. If only I could keep her in the house, and operating within the bounds of human dignity, which, with every passing week, was becoming harder.

It seemed that, for the time being at least, I was resigned to staying in Los Angeles. Conor and Dan had been looking after my cabin on Fire Island and calling regularly, to keep me updated and check on when I planned to return to them.

The last time they had called was late spring, when the season had been just coming into full swing.

“If you like, Ellie, we can find tenants for the cabin for the season?”

The Island was becoming more and more popular with each passing year, and Conor and Dan found their small home crammed with guests every weekend from May to October. They could, I knew, fill my cabin ten times over, with friends from the mainland. I had been reluctant to tell them to go ahead until now. I did not want to close off the option of going back there—even temporarily.

“Sure,” I said, “just until October, right?”

There was no way I could get back before then, but even so it hurt to say it out loud. To admit to myself that my Fire Island days were, for the time being at least, all but over.

“All back to normal—it’ll be ready for you and the boys again this time next year.”

Even as they said it, in some little part of me I knew it wasn’t true. My life of art and solitude seemed a million miles away from the bustling chaos that I now found myself living in.

Crystal’s producer “friend” had kicked her out and she had ended up moving in with us, as well as Freddie—the two of them sharing the studio bedroom, thereby putting a final end to any hopes that I had of painting.

She arrived on my doorstep while Freddie was at work, flinging herself at my chest and all but engulfing me with her sobbing and drama. She insisted that she had left the producer of her own volition because he had “passed me over for so many parts. And, Ellie,” she said, breathless with the injustice of it, “he said I couldn’t
act
. Can you imagine? That he had only taken me in because I had a pretty face!”

I immediately thought,
I doubt it was your face he was interested in,
but then I reprimanded myself.
Don’t be a cynical cow, Ellie, she’s obviously in some kind of trouble—even if it is of her own making. Let her stay for a couple of nights.

So I took Crystal in—for pity’s sake, but mostly for Freddie who, for reasons best known to himself, still adored her.

A few days after she had arrived, the house being as crowded as it was, I walked in on Crystal as she was getting dressed in my bedroom. She was applying makeup to her arms, which seemed a strange thing to do. She didn’t see me and, as I moved closer to the bed, I saw that her forearm was covered in really nasty-looking welts.

“Jesus Christ, Crystal, what happened?”

“Nothing.” She flinched when she noticed me, as if she had been hit, then blushed and looked immediately as if she might cry. “An . . . an insect bit me. It’s nothing.”

“Let me have a look.”

Reluctantly she gave me her arm. Those marks were from no insect, of that I was certain. They were man-made, although I had no idea how such angry-looking contusions could have been caused, and neither did I have any desire to know. Some men were cruel and did strange things, I knew that much just from my time on this Earth. Thankfully, that was as much as I knew; Crystal had not been so lucky.

“Makeup is one of the worst things you can put on that,” I said. “You need to clean up those wounds first, in case they become infected.”

She looked down when I said the word “wound.”

“It’s nothing, don’t fuss,” she said, but I went to the bathroom anyway and got some cotton wool and a small bowl with antiseptic lotion diluted in warm water. “It’s an allergy,” she called out to me.

As I walked back in, I could see her face tightening as she gathered together a new story. As I dabbed at the sickeningly uniform welts, I felt myself balking at the thought of how this might have happened. Crystal’s pride told me this was probably the tip of the iceberg, and it felt wrong even to be forming a thought or speculating on the kind of abhorrent behavior that this was the result of.

“I have
very
sensitive skin, you see,” she said, her voice shaking and high-pitched with the effort of keeping it steady. “The curse of being beautiful, my mother said.”

If her mother had actually known what had happened to her . . . if, indeed, the waif even had a mother, which I doubted. Otherwise, how the hell did Crystal get into this mess?

“Are there any more?” I asked. She shook her head. “Are you sure, Crystal?”

And very quietly, barely audibly, she whispered, “No.” Her eyes were bulging with tears. She’d said that word before I noticed that she was sitting at a strange angle, as if she might be in pain.

As I gently lifted the back of her blouse she did not move away, but released a silent sob of shame. I felt sick. Her back was a mass of the same strange welts and uniform circles. Cigarette burns. I had never seen skin singed with a cigarette burn before—why would I? Yet they were immediately recognizable. Some of them had scabbed; others were weeping and in the early stages of infection.

“Bastard!”

I said it as quietly as her “No,” and with as much reserve as I could muster. My anger and indignation would only add to the poor girl’s pain.

However, I could not help but shake my head and say, “He should be in jail—you should go to the cops.”

Even as I said it, I knew how ridiculous it sounded: a blonde starlet bringing charges against a movie producer in Hollywood? The very idea was ridiculous. Crystal wanted a part in his films, and this abuse was the payoff. She could have gotten lucky and found herself under the wing of a charming lover with simple tastes; as it was, she had hooked up with a vile sadist. Each man would be as influential as the other, and as respectable in the eyes of the outside world. Their differing sexual predilections were a matter for nobody but themselves.

“He said he’d get me a part; he said . . .” Crystal was getting distressed.

“Shhhh,” I said, “no need to explain yourself.”

I put away my antiseptic and reached for some cold cream to soothe the sores, gently smoothing it over her mottled, ruined skin.

“We’ll put this on for a few days, and they’ll be gone in no time and you can forget all about it.”

“You won’t tell Freddie?” she said.

“Of course not, but has he not seen them already?” I asked.

“Not on my back,” she said, “and I told him they were insect bites on my arm, and he believed me.”

Poor dear Freddie
, I thought, although maybe the innocent were those best equipped to survive in this desperate place, after all.