“B.F.,” Brenda cooed into the phone screen, “do you remember the first lesson you taught me about how to get along in this business?”
“No,” he snapped.
“Well I do,” she said. “It’s an old Hollywood motto: ‘Never let that sonofabitch back into this studio… unless we need him.’”
“I will not…”
“B.F., we need him.”
“No!”
“He’s a great idea man.”
“Never!”
“He works cheap.”
“I’d sooner see Titanic sink! And the whole holographic project go down with it! Not Gabriel! Never!”
The image clicked off the screen.
Brenda looked up at Oxnard. “Better cancel the wine,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because we’re driving out to Ron Gabriel’s place. Come on, it’s not far.”
2: THE WRITER
Oxnard and Brenda ran through cold, heavy sheets of rain to her car. Although it was only a few yards from the restaurant door, they were both gasping and drenched as they slid onto the plastic seats and slammed the car doors.
Brenda rubbed at her eyes. “At least it’ll clear away the smog for awhile.”
Sucking in air through his mouth, Oxnard realized that for the first time in weeks there was no perfume smell pervading the environs. And he could breathe without noseplugs.
“Every cloud has a platinum catalytic filter for a lining,” he said.
Brenda laughed as she gunned the car to life. In the dim light from the dashboard, Oxnard could see that her long red hair was glistening and plastered down around her face. It somehow looked incredibly sexy that way.
They roared off through the rain and soon were threading the torturous curves of Mulholland Drive, heading up into Sherman Oaks. The rain and sudden cold made the car’s windshield steam up and it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. The headlights were drowned in gusting walls of rain.
Twice they found themselves on the shoulder of the road, with nothing between them and a sheer drop except a few inches of gravel. Once, on a hairpin curve, Brenda nearly steered into an oncoming set of headlights. Which car had drifted onto the wrong side of the road, it was impossible to tell.
Oxnard was just as drenched when the car finally glided to a. stop as when he had first climbed in. But now he was soaked with clammy nervous sweat. Brenda seemed perfectly at ease, though.
“Here we are,” she said cheerfully.
“Here” was a low-slung modernistic house perched on the shoulder of a hill, in the middle of a long winding street lined by similar houses. Brenda had pulled the car up on the driveway, so that by sliding out on the driver’s side they could splash across one small puddle and dive directly under the protective overhang at the front door.
The door was more ornately carved than Queequeeg’s sarcophagus, a really handsome piece of work. Hanging squarely in, the middle of it, under the knocker, was a tiny hand-lettered sign that said:
TRY THE BELL with a drawing of a hand pointing one finger toward an all-but-invisible button, hidden behind a flowering shrub. Brenda touched the doorbell button and a speaker grill set above the door grated:
“Yeah?”
“Ron, it’s Brenda.”
“Brenda?”
“Brenda Impanema… from Bernard Finger’s office.”
“Oh, Brenda!”
“Can we come in?”
Oxnard was beginning to feel foolish, standing out there with the wind cutting through him, wet and chilled, all the rain in Southern California sluicing down around them, watching a girl he had just met talking to a door.
“Who’s we?” the door asked.
Brenda seemed to be enjoying the fencing match; well, maybe not enjoying it, but at least neither surprised nor dismayed by it.
“Someone you’ll enjoy meeting,” she said. “He invented the… “
“He?” The voice sounded disappointed.
For the first time, Brenda frowned. “Come on, Ron. It’s cold and wet out here.”
“Okay. Okay. Come on in.”
The door clicked. Brenda pushed on it and it swung open. They stepped inside.
Oxnard blinked It was like the first time he had tried sky-diving. One minute you’re safely strapped into the plane and the next you’re out in the empty air, falling, disoriented, watching the blur of Earth spinning up to hit you.
The door slammed behind him. The entryway of the house was ablaze with fights. Oxnard and Brenda stood there dripping and disheveled, gaping at the cameras, people, props, chairs, lights.
“Smile!” a voice shouted. “You’re on candid camera.” “What?”
Ron Gabriel pushed past a tripod-mounted camera directly in front of them, a huge grin on his face.
“Only kidding, buhbula. Don’t panic.”
He was wearing nothing but a bath towel draped around his middle. He was a smallish, compactly built man in his thirties, Oxnard guessed: dark straight hair cut in the latest neo-Victorian mode, blazing dark eyes, hairy chest, the beginnings of a pot belly.
He grabbed Brenda and kissed her mightily. Then turning casually to Oxnard, he asked, “You her husband or something?”
“Or something,” Oxnard replied, feeling testy. “Hey come on, I’m paying overtime already!”
A large, lumpy, bearded man stepped out from behind the cameras. He was swathed in a green and purple dashiki. Some sort of optical viewer hung from a silver cord around his neck.
Gabriel grabbed Brenda and Oxnard by the arms and walked them back behind the cameras.
“What’s going on?” Brenda asked.
“I’m renting my foyer to Roscoe for filming his latest epic.”
“Roscoe?” Oxnard was impressed. “The guy who did the underground film festival at Radio City Music Hall?”
“Who else?” Gabriel answered.
Now it all made sense to Oxnard. Two dozen girls of starlet dimensions stood around languidly, in various styles of undress. A couple of muscular, hairy guys were doing pushups over in a far comer of the foyer. Electricians, lighting women, camera persons of indeterminate gender, and a few other handymen were busily moving cameras and lights around the long, narrow foyer.
“All right already!” Roscoe bellowed in a voice four times too large for Grand Central Station. “Everybody take their places for the grope scene!”
Brenda said, “I’m awfully chilled. Could I borrow a hot shower?”
“Sure,” Gabriel said. “Throw your clothes in the dryer and grab a couple of robes out of my closet. Brenda, you know where everything is. Show him around.”
Oxnard stammered, “Uh… we’re not… not together. I mean, not like that.” Dammit! he raged to himself. Why should I feel embarrassed?
With a grin, Gabriel led him to the guest room and took a terryplastic robe from a drawer.
“Gotta get back to work now,” he said.
“You’re in the movie?”
Gabriel’s grin broadened. “I’m an assistant groper.”
Brenda looked good with a rich brown robe pulled snugly around her, Oxnard decided. One glance in a mirror after his steamshower had convinced him that wearing a robe two sizes too small was better than prancing around nude. But not much. His hairy legs showed to midcalf. He had to be careful how he sat.
Brenda, Gabriel and Ornard were sitting in the living room. It was furnished in old-fashioned Nineteen Sixties style, with authentic green berets and protest posters artfully arranged here and there. The walls were covered with paintings, drawings, sketches—all from stories that Gabriel had written.