Читать книгу Ear to the Ground - David L. Ulin - Страница 14

SATURDAY NIGHT

IAN DIDN’T HAVE AN AGENT EXACTLY, BUT HE DID HAVE a go-getter with a lot of energy and a car phone. Michael Lipman was his name, but sometimes he called himself “CC” (for Chutzpah-Chutzpah), and, though he had few legitimate industry concerns, the air of intrigue seemed to surround him.

When they met for the first time at his closet on Hollywood Boulevard, Michael attempted, straight away, to reach Quentin Tarantino over the speaker phone. He got as far as a personal assistant, jabbering with the woman about Pulp and how it saved the cinema, and what characters, what situations, what vision. What an idiot, Ian thought. What an exercise in humiliation. Tarantino? You don’t just call Tarantino.

But then a man’s screechy voice rose from the speaker. “Hiya, Michael,” it said.

“Quentin. You don’t write. You don’t call.” Then he sang: “You don’t send me faxes anymore …”

The conversation lasted a couple of minutes, during which time Ian thought how easy it is to misjudge a guy in this town. When Michael hung up, they both smiled.

Through the wall in an adjacent closet, a young man and woman, aspiring actors both, sat close together at a Salvation Army desk. They laughed heartily when the man hung up the phone, and for a moment it seemed he would kiss her full on the mouth. True, it was only voice work, but they were good mimics, and each time Michael Lipman met with a new client, he provided them with employment. Besides, he paid in cash.

Ian had sent Michael a first draft of his new screenplay, Ear to the Ground. And though CC hadn’t read it, he did look it over for elements; he liked the earthquake angle, and had begun to work out a wish list of actors, including Sharon Stone and Johnny Depp. The plan was to go wide with it—that is, all over town. Michael was sure this would incite a bidding war. Ian had no problem with that, but he did explain he wanted rewrite work, and that he wasn’t afraid to start at the bottom.

The following Saturday Michael called Ian at Grace’s, which annoyed her a little. What annoyed her a lot was the agent’s desperate attempt to excite Tailspin Pictures about Ear to the Ground. She looked away from Ian when she passed him the phone. “Get to the Café Med on Sunset, five o’clock,” Michael told him.

There Ian met a skinny woman with dirty fingernails, around forty-five, who wore black, chain-smoked, and spoke Italian into a cellular phone. When he approached the table she folded up the apparatus, took his hand, and kissed both his cheeks. “I read your screenplay,” she told him. “And I like very much, earthquakes.”

Penniless, Ian ordered coffee. Who is this lady? Does she have any money? Michael had said she was maybe good for a treatment—a grand, tops. But as the sun set, Ian thought he might charm her into something more. A screenplay, perhaps. Things were pretty tight now; his father had finally cut him off. “Get a job,” he’d said.

“But I’m a writer.”

“And I’m a father, but nobody pays me for it.”

It was hard for the literary artist in the twentieth century, Ian thought. Especially in this town, where screenplays came in waist-high stacks, and bus drivers along Santa Monica Boulevard pitched whole stories between Highland and La Brea. Any night of the week, if you sat at the bar at Chaya or Jones and closed your eyes, you’d hear the word script rolling back and forth across the room, like an auditory lava lamp. Be patient, Ian remembered, always patient. Keep the faith. In Hollywood, anything can happen.

And happen it did. After a couple of hours, a friend of the woman’s arrived and she was breathtaking—a young Italian actress, quite on fire. She claimed she would have been the star of Fellini’s last film, if Fellini had lived, but Ian didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t have to, though. The waiters hovered and freshened her drinks, offering warm rolls at the flutter of an eyelash. She told a story to the skinny woman in breakneck Italian, and then, full of energy, translated it for Ian.

“I just had my fortune told by a gypsy lady.”

“Uh-huh?” Ian was charmed.

“My palm.” She pronounced it PAL-lem. “Do you know what she telled me?”

Ian shook his head.

“Destiny await you.”

Then she hit the back of her hand against the table, as Italians sometimes do, and made a gap-toothed smile so stupendous that Ian had to fight the urge to grab her by the waist.

She played the saxophone, she told them, and then pulled one out of a suitcase she had lugged to the table. It was tarnished, but she sat holding it, with a reed in her mouth, smiling into Ian’s eyes. Someone turned down Perry Como, and she stood up.

Sometime after midnight Ian and the actress ended up in Silver Lake, at his place. Leonetta was her name, and she blew her saxophone through the night while Ian fiddled with his trumpet. Actually, they weren’t bad together. What they lacked in technical skill, they made up for with chemistry. And as they inched toward that morning hour where spending the night becomes a foregone conclusion, Ian noticed the light blinking like crazy on his answering machine, while he played an unpleasant, abstract riff, and considered how to go about suggesting the sleeping arrangements.