‘He’s a paranoid schizophrenic, right?’ She was bored. ‘Lissen, Griffin, I don’t want to, like, pop your bubble, but I’ve had people coming on to me with these psycho ideas for months now — it’s all over town like a goddamn rash.’
I could understand why Bret didn’t want to sit next to anyone in LA. I couldn’t tell if he’d overheard the schizopitch; his face bore an expression of frightening ennui. I began babbling: ‘I’ve been reading your Lunar Park, man; it’s great, truly great — maybe your best yet. I love the way you play with your own identity, create a doppelgänger — but isn’t that what the movies can do now, there’s no disbelief so heavy that it can’t be winched up with fleets of computer-generated helicopters? I mean, it’s also like a psychosis, believing in this stuff even for a second — that’s why they’re putting so much into the new 3-D technology. Shazzam! And you’re in the insect mines of Minroad. Shazzam! again, and you’re in some poor fucker’s liver, kayaking down his bile duct… and, well, this is what we fear, isn’t it? The numbers of people with mental illnesses are increasing exponentially — bipolar, hypomania, OCD, dementia, addiction, schizo-fucking-phrenia — it’s a plague, and these Hollywood movies are expressing that fear! What’s so incredible about the Hulk? I’ll tellya: he’s got BDD, body dysmorphic disorder. He’s a perfectly ordinary guy but he thinks he’s got green skin and this, like, obscenely muscled—’
The waiter was back with a credit card receipt to sign. I scanned it and from the total realized we were going Dutch. Bret was already tucking his Mont Blanc back inside his jacket. I had no idea if he had heard what I’d been saying — or if I’d said it at all.
‘Look.’ He was staring at my retreating figure in the rear-view mirror of his mind. ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy — this script, the rewrites, it’s been grinding me down, besides I gotta drive.’ Bret got up to leave, and when he turned his back I snagged the Powerade from the next table, cracked the lid and drained it in a single heady draft, then I followed his shrinking back.
While we waited under the porte-cochère for Bret’s car, I tried to revive the conversation. Where was he living? Did he get out much — socialize? The more fatuous my questions, the more his face folded in on itself, an origami of mouth tucked under ear, ear poked behind eye. Eventually I resorted to blandishment: ‘Ellen DeGeneres is throwing a little party for me Friday evening at the Bar Marmont.’
‘For you?’
‘It’s a very little party — more of a gathering, really. Anyway, if you show up that would be… nice.’
The parking valet leapt from behind the wheel of a big black Beamerish wagon and held the door open for Bret. I was reminded of the scene in Swann in Love, Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of A la recherche du temps perdu, in which Odette de Crécy (played by Ornella Mutti) is dressed by her maid with a sensuousness all the more compelling for being an expression of the way nineteenth-century labour relations made of one woman’s body a workhorse, and another’s a commodity to be sponged clean, then boxed in its clothes.
The valet clothed Bret in his black BMW, tucking him between its steely folds and binding his breasts with a nylon band. The final touch was to lift his limp legs and insert them into the leatherette hole formed by the seat and the dash before shutting the car door with the sumptuous delicacy of someone smoothing rumpled silk. The window moaned down and I was confronted by two anxious Postlethwaites leering from the lenses of Bret’s Ray-Bans.
‘Y’know,’ he said, ‘you’re not fooling anyone with this, this imposture — least of all me.’ He squirmed and the car juddered into drive. ‘I don’t know the guy well enough to know whether you’re doing a good job, but let me tell you, if you’re a professional actor — and come to think of it I do vaguely recognize you — if people get wind of this you’ll never work in this town again.’
The car purred forward, then moved to the right. I stared at Bret’s face, which remained turned towards me, as, instead of taking the exit, he came back round the circuit to where I stood. The 180-degree revolution of the writer’s head was disturbing enough, but when Bret drew level he said casually, ‘See you tomorrow,’ then accelerated away in a cloud of nitrogen, water vapour, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxide, particulate matter and un-burnt fuel.
Naturally, I understood what Welles had been doing: referencing the revolutionary opening shot of Touch of Evil, a single continuous take over three minutes long that sent the camera tracking down the main street of a dusty border town, then plunging clear through a building in order to follow the progress of a bomb planted in the trunk of a car. If Welles-as-Bret had been the camera, it must have been me who’d swallowed the dynamite.
It certainly felt that way as I ambled poolside: the halibut had reanimated and was threshing about in my belly full of stale asparagus soup. Nothing was helped by the movie star impersonators who were sitting at the circular tables in the Tropicana bar. The pool had been decorated by David Hockney, his clever embellishment consisting of the signature blue curlicues painted on the bottom, which on his own canvases gave the impression of clear water with a rippled surface, but here suggested the blue-varnished toenail clippings of giant starlets.
I assumed the impersonators were there to re-create the first Academy Awards ceremony, held at the Roosevelt in 1929, but there were far too many Charlie Chaplins, Clara Bows, Gloria Swansons and especially Errol Flynns among the guests to make the scene remotely credible. Besides, the twenties were roaring with contemporary chatter as they downed their cocktails: Atkins’s parole hearing, the election campaign, the writers’ strike, Bratton and Baca’s set-to over racial violence, where to buy the longest-lasting garden flares. .
I turned my back on the haunting — I couldn’t stand to look them in their other people’s faces. I walked along the musty dogleg of the cabana corridor and slid my key card into its slot. I hit the lights and a filament squirmed in a goldfish bowl. Christ, what a dump! Hemispherical vinyl bolsters were tacked up the wall above the bed — which was a squared-off mound of clapshot. I sat down on it and put Postlethwaite’s face in my hands. The Powerade was coming up on me, the 1929 Awards were getting louder and louder — sleep would be out of the question, and worse still it was so dark I couldn’t see to read.
There’s a knock on the door and when I open it a solid man-shape stinking of sweat and body paint pushes straight past me.
‘Hey!’ I exclaim.
‘Guest services — mind if I come in?’ A coarse voice sounds from head height in the drear.
‘You are in,’ I snarl; ‘what the fuck d’you want?’
‘Man on the desk says you gotta problem with the lights, can’t see to, uh, read. The dimmer switches in these cabanas are set real low, I can fix that for you.’
‘Why, thank you.’
Is my tone coquettish? I hope not. There’s a clanking as of a toolbox being opened and then the chink and scratch of a screwdriver applied to a switch panel. The light wells up in the cabana and I see the screwdriver twirling in midair. The voice says, ‘Say, you’ve got quite a build on you, you work out, do weights?’
‘We-ell, not exactly.’ Under the warm scrutiny of this void I feel the grotesquely magnified self-consciousness of an adolescent — and with it the lust. ‘But I do a lot of, um, walking.’
‘Walking, huh, you mean walking like this—’ The screwdriver clatters to the rug and it’s upon me, invisible hands pushing up the breathable fabric of my T-shirt, invisible thumbs circling the aureoles of my nipples, invisible fingers flicking the rapidly erecting teats. I moan, and slump back against the door to the patio, my pulse begins doubling its beat as an invisible tongue snails back and forth across my belly.