The Cracked Earth (7 page)

Then he came around a corner by the lake and had to stop fast. A dozen horses were spooked and rearing, each held by a wrangler. Beyond them the street was a prairie of some strange angular rubbish, like a beach after a hurricane. People were digging through the rubbish with a sense of urgency, hurling things aside, and most of them were dressed as hussars or grenadiers or something like that. A hussar at the center of the scene shouted and pointed and others congregated with a kind of rapt fury.

He got out and traversed what turned out to be a moraine of lath and canvas and plaster chips toward the busy group. One slab of castellated fortress still stood, and he saw that it had all been a false-front film set. What remained was painted so crudely he was surprised it would even fool a camera. Perhaps it had been a movie about a movie.

“Denny! Get a fucking crane!”

“Sorry, man. We wrapped the crane this morning.”

A man in a devil suit struggled to lift a long two-by-four still attached to a lot of rubble.

“Somebody who isn't a junkie give me a hand here!”

Jack Liffey wedged his shoulder under the two-by-four. A grenadier slipped in beside them, and the plume of a brass helmet waved in Jack Liffey's face, smelling for some reason like beef bouillon.

“Heave. One-two-three,
heave.
”

“Put some emotional investment in it. Lift!”

Something ripped audibly and the plank rose a foot.

“Annie, look for us!”

A stunning-looking redhead with a clipboard hurried up and tucked her head under the canvas.

“Nobody home, dudes.”

“Down on one.”

They released the plank and it crashed with a big billow of dust.

“Who are we looking for?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Bobby Rafferty,” the grenadier said.

“Not only the biggest child star since Macaulay Culkin—” the devil started in.

“But
bankable
.” the grenadier finished for him. “Worth millions. Cute as a button.”

“Nasty little drugged-up aggressive brat.”

“But bankable.”

“Nice little ass on him, too.”

The devil and the grenadier shook hands. “I'm really glad we had this little talk.”

Jack Liffey followed the redhead toward another commotion. Two more grenadiers were prying up another rag of the castle and a man in a business suit was down on his knees talking into the space beneath. The redhead offered a water bottle to one of the grenadiers, who shook his head. Jack Liffey threw his weight into the lift and the flap peeled up all at once to reveal a man in a cardinal's hat lying on his back. He wore white brocade robes that were covered now by dust and clutched a pastoral staff at his side, exactly as if laid out in state.

Sun hit him square in the face and he blinked twice. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” the cardinal intoned. “And if that's not a square deal, I'll kiss your ass.”

They hoisted him out, and Jack Liffey walked away. It was the frame of reference that was missing. He'd made a minor science out of staying in touch with the real, and now he was trying hard to touch something real. It was all unnerving him. The earthquake, the strange frustrating journey, and now the film crew with all their weird confidence and irony. It was a bubble in the world. Little by little the make-believe and the glamour and grace had to blind you, he thought. Everything becomes easy, fun, everything reinforcing your ego. And not far away on Hollywood Boulevard runaway girls with acne and almost no inner resources were turned out as cheap hookers by seventeen-year-old pimps with even worse acne. It was a cinch Lee Borowsky would never leave the bubble and never end up down there.

Of course, it was Lori Bright that he was thinking about.

Two ambulances raced past him as he drove across Los Feliz. As usual for an earthquake, there was a lot more to-do than actual damage. Relatives would be calling from Michigan after the networks culled the worst damage, assuming their nieces' homes had been leveled, but the only serious damage he saw was an old masonry five-story with a wall fallen away to expose several rooms. The beds and closets and toilets were open to the air in that unbearable intimacy of catastrophe.

He stood on the brakes as a huge snake crossed the street in a hurry, hardly believing his eyes. Everything seemed to have shaken loose and the denizens of nightmares had come up for an airing.

P
ART OF A RETAINING WALL HAD GIVEN WAY ON ONE SIDE OF
the steep road, forcing him to go slow and jeep over rubble. The wall was made of flat, broken-up chunks of concrete with ice plant in the niches. He wondered if anyone else made ugly walls like that or if it was just an L.A. phenomenon, because there was so much broken concrete around from tearing everything down once a generation.

Her house at the top end of Bluebird looked unharmed, and he realized he was back for the third time in two days. As he wedged the wheels he heard Lori Bright's voice in his head and was ambushed by emotions he did not want to deal with. Something was making him a bit spacey and confused and in more of a hurry than he had reason to be. He remembered a famous calendar shot of her in net stockings with her knee crooked up in one of those artificial dancer poses. It was as vivid as Sophia Loren in the wet shirt for
Boy on a Dolphin.

A small fountain he hadn't noticed before was a lion's head against the wall spitting softly into a basin. He stopped to let the playing water do what it could for him. Mold grew on the shadowed wall where the water splashed, the lion looked smug and triumphant, and cool seemed to radiate off the surface. He wondered what it was deep in the psyche about splashing water that soothed. If anything, it should suggest the wearing away of everything, oceans that would burnish the earth smooth as a Ping-Pong ball to erase the works of humankind.

The chimes rang deep in the house somewhere and the suspicious-looking maid opened almost immediately and looked disappointed. “Come, please.”

“Expecting Ramon Novarro?”

“He's passed away.”

He realized that she had probably ushered dozens of famous actors in that door, maybe even Ramon Novarro himself, and their names would not be a joke to her. He wondered what it might have been like to blow smoke at Steve McQueen. He was crossing some spooky threshold into another universe, and he could feel his psyche touch gingerly on whatever it was that was disturbing him. No matter how many times you told yourself it didn't matter that she was a movie star, it did. He wondered if he'd been happier in life, maybe it wouldn't be hitting him so hard.

“The señora is meditating.”

That brought up a picture of Lori Bright sitting in a lotus in front of a plaster Buddha. He wasn't sure it was something he wanted to see. The maid led him through the living room, where something made of blue glass had broken on the tile and been swept into a pile, then past an open library door where he saw a lot of books on the floor.

“You got hit pretty hard.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, noncommittally.

“Any structural damage?”

“Do you believe in God?”

He frowned as she glanced back at him magisterially. “Would it change the amount of structural damage?”

“A large fish tank fall over where I was sitting only a few seconds early. Señora Bright call me, but I was lazy and stayed sitting and then God tole me get up. It was just the right time. God saved my life.”

“Good for Him.” That particular drift of argument had always annoyed him. “Too bad He didn't take the time to warn the old guys in the Sylmar Veterans' Home that collapsed last time.”

She scowled and opened a door for him.

“He here, señora.”

It was hard to figure out what sort of room it was. There were a lot of trophy cases, and a tiny desk and a beat-up Swedish walking machine. Lori Bright seemed to be behind a translucent Japanese screen that blocked off one corner.

“Please give me a few moments,” he heard in that husky voice that gave his crotch a shiver. The maid shut the door and he was left with rustlings behind the screen and a faint hum of fluorescents.

He strolled along the trophy case. There was no Oscar, but there were a lot of others, four big garish Golden Globes and lots of plaques. His eye lingered on a Cannes award for best actress, in
Lit à Colonnes,
which he thought meant “The Four-Poster.” There was a photo of her, much younger, beside Jean-Luc Godard and somebody else in huge spectacles. Her eyes were demurely on the ground and Godard was about to speak.

“Best actress at Cannes,” he said aloud. “I didn't remember you'd got that. That's really something.”

“You're looking at my awards.” Her voice sounded gently amused, as if he'd told her he collected matchbook covers as a hobby. “Don't you think getting worked up about awards is a little like worshiping the barometer for the weather? The real satisfaction is in the making.”

“Awards really don't mean anything to you?”

“Every year I'm amazed that the whole world watches film people give each other those things. Can you imagine tuning in to watch a banquet for the best supporting real-estate salesman, in the under two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar category?”

“I wonder why I'm having trouble with sincerity here. Maybe it's all these display cases and, you know, the little lights pointing out the bigger trophies.”

She fell silent and he allowed himself a little grin. He bent down to read a plaque, a humanitarian award from some Methodist society.

“My husband made the cases for me,” she said mildly. Her throaty voice stroked the words, like making love to them. “My husband at the time. It's been so long since anyone's been insolent to me, I forgot how to respond for a minute.”

The grin was still with him and he liked it. It almost got him caught up. “It's kind of a point of honor with me, always insulting what can hurt you.”

“Not a point that's well appreciated in Hollywood. But I like the concept.”

On top of one of the display cases he found a copy of
Peterson's Field Guide to Western Birds,
tented open, and he picked it up to see the color plate for “Buteos or Buzzard Hawks.” Beside the book was a pair of twenty-by-fifty binoculars.

“You're a bird fancier?”

“It's been an enthusiasm.”

He hefted the big binoculars. “These are too powerful. You can't handhold twenty power,” he said. “The military quits at seven.”

“Actors learn stillness. Every year a red-tailed hawk nests in a big Jeffrey pine down the hillside. I started watching her fourteen years ago, though it's probably her daughter or granddaughter by now.”

He rested his elbows on the deep sill and pointed the binoculars out the window, startling himself with the eye-filling profile of a policeman's head. He refocused and saw the embroidered emblem of Rosewood Security on the man's shoulder. He looked about twenty, carried a holstered revolver, and strolled along the edge of the yard, looking out at the view.

“Did you order up the rent-a-cop?”

“Lee's father did.”

“ ‘Stop or I'll shoot… maybe,' ” he joked.

“Actually Lionel wants to talk to you. He's on location about two hundred miles away and he can't tear himself away from his
big epic.
” She gave the last two words a nasty twist. “At least for anything as trivial as his daughter. Could you drive up there and see him? It'll be on expenses.”

“I might have to rent a car. Mine doesn't like to get very far from home.”

“Suit yourself, Jack.”

Jack.
He liked his name in her mouth, and it did something to him deep under his belt.

For an instant he took a step back from himself, saw himself standing there listening to the gravelly voice emanating from behind the screen. It was ridiculous, something a screenwriter would have concocted in the fifties. In the Cary Grant film, it was a bubble bath. In Godard, she'd be reading Horkheimer aloud. In a Peckinpah, she'd be torturing a small animal to death back there. He remembered a Western where she'd unbuttoned a blue work shirt facing William Holden, who was holding a six-gun but looking nonplussed, and she'd turned away at the critical moment to let Holden look but not the camera.
The Johnson County War.
He remembered now that he wanted to ask her what she'd been wearing underneath.

He strode across to the translucent rice-paper screen.

“Enough of this,” he said as he pushed the screen aside.
“Jesus fucking Christ,”
he added.

“I thought you'd never peek.”

She lay on her back on a kind of raised-leather doctor's examination table, with a dozen acupuncture needles sticking out of her nude body, one or two in the tenderer spots. She had wide hips and her large breasts were flattened into pools. With great concentration, she touched a needle that emanated from the large brown aureola of one nipple and made a little cringe of pleasure.

“Vibrate a couple of these, will you?”

“It doesn't hurt?”

“The touch of a needle can be sensuous. You ought to try it.”

“Is this something you do when life gets boring?”

“Oh, don't be
dull.”
She cranked her neck around to look at him. “Are you intimidated?”

“I usually get to be good friends before I twiddle somebody's needles.”

She began plucking out the needles, a little flinch now and then. “I'll make it easier to get to be friends, then.” She raised herself on one arm, a few remaining needles bobbing and swaying under the laws of gravity.

“Mama, send lawyers, guns, and money. I'm in over my head.”

“Warren Zevon,” she said, laughing, and that made him suddenly less nervous. She wrapped a rubber band around the bundle of needles and tossed it onto a wooden sideboard. “Why don't you start by coming a little closer. You're not one of those men who need to woo by candlelight are you?”

“It's a definite plus.” His eye kept going to other things in the room, the coffered wainscoting, a display case of Japanese dolls in kimonos. Somewhere inside he expected a blackmailing photographer in a fedora to leap out and snap a shot with a big Speed Graphic and a real flashbulb.

“A lot of men have wanted this body,” she suggested.

“Oh, including this one, believe me.”

“Then stop standing off with that schoolboy rectitude and let me unzip your pants.”

Something was all wrong, but he let her.

H
E
lay alone in her big tangled bed, trying to touch bottom. The sheets felt silky and he could tell his whole body smelled strongly of her. She had gone off, whistling, to bathe or primp or something, and he should have been elated. She claimed it was some Far Eastern discipline that had taught her to get in touch with her body, so she had come right away, just from his touching her nipples, and then a couple more times as they did other things. It made him feel potent, as if he could point his finger and cause explosions. Of course, she might have been acting. How could you tell?

It was like falling through suddenly into a subterranean province where you didn't belong. Had she slept with Mitchum? Had she been to dinner parties with Dore Schary and Sam Goldwyn? If he moved in with her (imagination works fast), would the old crowd sneer about it? Would everyone think of
Sunset Boulevard
and the doomed William Holden?

Glamour—it was just something the media threw at you to convince you that you were missing out, but if you acted quick, you could hop into the limo and be strong and loved, you could be there, too, posed by the pool with the cocktail if only you bought the Calvin Klein underwear. Futures endlessly and subliminally deferred when they failed, one after another. There was some kind of dissonance now between this silk bedroom and all the rest of his life and he had no idea how to deal with it. Mike Lewis had once done a magazine piece about some street kid elevated to celebrity artist overnight and the epigraph had been: “Don't fuck with fame; it'll bite you on the ass.”

But Lori Bright was real in her own way and she was sure a lot of fun. He couldn't help seeing himself squiring her to an Academy banquet, the surprise escort, arm in arm past the cameras and some latter-day Walter Winchell blathering away about the mystery escort, with Kathy and Maeve goggling in stupefaction at their TV.

He heard her whistling as she approached and he found he was trembling a little. She came in wrapped in a fluffy towel, and it was just too much like a movie to bear. He shut his eyes.

“Feeling okay about this?” she asked.

“Thanks for asking.”

“You feel like you're not attached to the earth. You're watching everything from a great distance.”

He felt the bed shift, then opened his eyes and saw she was brushing out her wet hair. “I'm okay.”

She glanced at him with a faintly skeptical smile. “Please don't reduce it to the ridiculous just because it feels strange to you. I don't like men fucking my image.”

A wave of annoyance swept over him.
“Men.
That puts me back in the cheap seats.”

“I want to see you again.” She took his hand, and the annoyance evaporated all at once. “Jack, I'm only a girl from a small town in Indiana who got too much too fast and never recovered from it. Please just take in life's rich pageant here with me. And if it gets too much for you, get off the merry-go-round in peace.”

It was the best offer he'd had all day.

T
HE
remote on the old answering machine in his office wasn't working, as usual, so he had to schlepp all the way across town to get his messages. He wanted to check on Loco, anyway.

He still carried the strange aura with him as the Concord finally coughed to life in second as he coasted down Bluebird. He'd thought he would just step back across the threshold into the world he knew, but things didn't work that way. What you did changed you, he thought. Nothing was ever provisional. Now he didn't quite know who he was.

There was less earthquake damage when he crossed La Brea, which was pretty much the border between the West-side and Old L.A. A broken plate-glass window, a few chimneys on lawns. A man was up on his roof trying to heave a tall TV antenna upright.