father and husband nearly scared him to death. If he were young and single he might not have cared—he had spent so much of his youth traipsing around Europe with a modest sum that seemed like a bounty—but when he looked into the fearless eyes of his children he knew that he would do anything in his power to keep them that way. In some respects, that’s what Venice of America was, a mixing of the dreams of his youth with a capital venture. He told her he was not that complicated, and she thought he was right. But she did not find him to be a particularly simple character either. The mark of the successfully ambitious.
“Are you ready to go in now?” Max asked.
“You are the one who closed the door.”
Sarah slipped in behind Max. They stood at the back of the hall. Below them the last remnants of 9, rue d’Antin’s interior were being hauled off to the right, while stage left saw Alexandre directing his crew in preparation to raise the walls of the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle. The actors sat in pairs with their faces buried in tattered scripts reminding themselves of the lines. They had changed roles quickly before. Perhaps a bit unexpected, but not particularly surprising. And in spite of their initial reactions (which Max described as filled with sighs and eye rolling), they all had returned easily to the business at hand. They were of course professionals dedicated to the craft. They studied and worshipped it. And unlike Sarah, most were hungry with ambition to stay alive in the industry. They must have equally worshipped and despised her position. To have made it. To not have to audition and hope and pray that you are given parts. To not lay awake nights and think of the shitty jobs that you will have to do in order to keep acting. To not walk into rehearsals questioning your talents and wondering if today will be the last. Sarah must have been the living embodiment of every single dream that her company of actors shared. And to them, she would have simply answered that she worshipped their passion for theater—one that extended beyond business. Their pure love for the heartbreak of art.
“I am not ready now,” she said to Max.
“Sarah, they are waiting for you. They want to start reviewing
“They don’t need me right now.”
“At least for a line run-through.”
“Molly, please just take me back to my room. I am telling you that I cannot do this right now.” She spoke in a forceful whisper. “I have neither the enthusiasm nor the energy that the company will require of me at this time. They are better off temporarily to go at it alone.”
“Sarah…”
“Molly, please.”
“Do you prefer your railcar or the hotel room?”
“Whichever is closest.”
VINCE BAKER REALLY WANTED A CIGARETTE.
Back downtown, he walked to Pershing Square and rode the Angels Flight funicular railway up to Broadway, and north to Temple Street, where he briskly trekked over toward Olive. Once on Olive, Baker stopped and looked upward at a towering edifice that he had strangely never noticed before, like the long silhouette that stretches to announce you, but you forget that it is there. The unfamiliar building loomed over him. Its two columns split by the steps to the entrance and capped in sultans’ hats blocking out the pinkly fading sky. Stained glass windows whose colors were muted by gray were lost with the setting sun. By design it was a simple structure. Generous curvatures and delicacies touched by the sculptor’s hand cast its elegance.
He was caught in the building’s shadow, as though a trespasser under the watchful eye of a stingy neighbor. Baker felt the light begin to evaporate, leaving a strange misty illumination that erased any sense of time. This is how prisoners must feel. Stripped of time. Where days and nights invert, wrapped around each other until they become indistinguishable. You need something to ground you, like the smell of a flame burning paper, and the soothing smoke that fills your mouth after a long drag. He had interviewed a crook named Skip Nelson once in the bowels of the L.A. county jail. Nelson had been picked up on orders of Mayor McAleer. Nelson had been kind of a loudmouth, with a history of larceny and unproven assaults. He had screamed out threats at Mayor McAleer once at a rally and then a week later made some impure suggestions about the mayor’s wife, thus making him property of the city of Los Angeles. The fact that Theodore Roosevelt was stumping through the basin only extended Nelson’s stay. So while most of the reporters were joining Roosevelt, McAleer, and all the other dignitaries over California oyster cocktails, Montalvo potato croquettes, and filet of Arizona beef at the Westminster Hotel, Baker sat in a cell, trying to get Nelson to talk about anything other than being railroaded by a man who believed his authority superseded the Constitution of the United States. It was an interview that yielded nothing, except enough crazy ramblings to build the mayor’s case. But what he remembered most was Nelson bumming a smoke off him when he first sat down; and Nelson’s eyes had been dark and hollow like the fluid had been sucked from them. Deep rings below the sockets that were in the accelerated process of molding to the skull. But he lit that butt. Under the orange ember his eyes yielded some life. Nelson didn’t say another word until he finished the cigarette. Then asked for another. His only connection to normalcy. One thing to keep him alive. Until he died of mysteriously natural causes alone in a cell, with no reason for a postmortem despite the holster in his head perfectly tailored for a billy club.
Baker shouldn’t be such a pansy about it. He should walk down to Second, bum a smoke from the first passerby, and march right up to the cathedral, tell the bishop that he is ready to talk, and could Conaty kindly share that bottle of booze that he surely keeps hidden, probably a three-quarter-full bottle of Jack Daniel’s, square and weighted by its black label, a fluted neck confident yet lonely. And beside it would be two shot glasses that looked unused for some time, but still were noticeably free of dust. “Help yourself. Please,” the bishop would say. His charm would be so real it would feel disingenuous. “We have much to discuss.” And they could sit there together, killing the bottle and wondering how one barely significant person could compromise their professional dignities. Then they could figure how to finally do her in, so that they could return to their respective higher callings.
And in the midst of the mutual confession, Baker would never mention to Conaty about having written the letter at the hotel. Or at least not in the fashion that he did. He had come off sounding childish and impudent, driven by the strains of a jealous lover below the balcony. It made him embarrassed just to think about it. Baker had made this assignment personal in a way they he didn’t fully understand—quickly the story that he didn’t want became the object of his desires. He could have analyzed it with a simple psychology, that he craved all the things he could never touch, but the basic-ness of that was insulting. Instead what he needed to negotiate was in understanding what he cared most about. He had convinced himself all along that he was the maverick who had ridden out from the wildest of the west into Los Angeles to expose the high rollers who gambled away everybody’s future in an effort to line their own pockets. That he was the badass around town who kept the place honest. But perhaps he had forgotten his own honesty. There are those rare times when the mirrored walls that you put around yourself to imprison and protect your self-image become chipped and worn. Then suddenly you are looking through glass. You see the whole world out in front of you. And it is large. Goddamn it is big. And it expands all around you, and the sky arches up as an infinite hood, and there are faces and bodies so much larger and more meaningful than yours running in circles just to get around you. In other words, you realize how small you are. Everybody has been there. Huntington. Johnson. Doheny. Conaty. They had all looked through that window at one point. The fuel for their desperation to be larger. The chase for immortality, where the larger the letters for their names on the building are, the larger their memories live on, ensuring that they will always dwarf guys like Baker for all eternity. And something had made them see it, their own personal bush burning that gave them the nasty vision. And at that point it is all a matter of what you do with it. You can inflate yourself larger than life. Or you can wilt. Or be like most, and do whatever you can do to curtain the window and convert it back to a mirror where you continue your life in the safety to which you are accustomed.
Baker stood under the shadow of the immense structure, unsure of what to do. His past few days had been spent in the presence of an imposter. One who gives the appearance of ordinariness through her slight build, her coy gestures and ingratiating manner. But in truth Sarah Bernhardt was, and always would be, casting a shadow across him. And the fact that he even thought he could touch the edge of her world now seemed ridiculous. His letter must have looked so stupid to her, or even worse—insignificant.
He knew that he was not going into the Cathedral of our Lady of Angels. He could never willingly support the bishop’s agenda (nor could he imagine sharing a drink with Conaty in some illusion of camaraderie). And as much as he wanted to run back to the King George Hotel to intercept his letter, that scene too had been concluded. He knew he had to fold his hand. He had broken the reporter’s key rule: He had let the minutiae betray the obvious.
