silly as Rodeo Drive? Would Candy elope with Peter Brewster?
It was early afternoon when I got back to Candy’s. I’d done about fifteen miles and I felt better. I spent a long time in Candy’s shower. Then I got dressed and took Candy’s car and went out for a drive. I had read that morning in the L.A. Times that traffic congestion was a leading tourist complaint in L.A. They were obviously not tourists from the East. Compared to Boston and New York, driving in L.A. was like driving in Biddeford, Maine. The freeways were bad, but I never had occasion to use them. I drove east on Hollywood Boulevard, slowly, past Vermont Avenue, where Hollywood fuses with Sunset, and on along Sunset toward downtown L.A. I got off by the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and drove around downtown a little and then headed back on Third Street. I’d been a lot of places and there were usually resemblances. Boston and San Francisco had points of comparison, and they were both not unlike New York, only smaller, and New York was not unlike London, only newer. But L.A. was like nothing I’d ever seen. I didn’t know any place like it for sprawl, for the apparently idiosyncratic mix of homes and businesses and shopping malls. There was no center, no fixed point for taking bearings. It ambled and sprawled and disarrayed all over the peculiar landscape-garish and fascinating and imprecise and silly, smelling richly of bougainvillea and engine emissions, full of trees and grass and flowers and neon and pretense. And off to the northeast, beyond the Hollywood Hills, above the smog, and far from Disneyland were the mountains with snow on their peaks. I wondered if there was a leopard frozen up there anywhere.
The top was down and the wind was warm on my face. I turned down La Brea and parked and walked along Wilshire to the La Brea Tar Pits with their huge plastic statues half sunk in the tar. There was a museum there, and I went in and looked at the relics and the dioramas and the graphics until about four. Then I went back outside. A young man wearing Frye boots and a cowboy hat who had never seen a cow was playing banjo loudly and not well. He had the banjo case open on the ground near him for contributions. It wasn’t very full. In fact what was in there was probably what he’d seeded it with. Some kids hung around while he played “Camptown Races” and then drifted off. The banjo player didn’t seem to mind.
I got back in the MG and drove back to Candy’s apartment feeling friendly toward L.A. It was a big sunny buffoon of a city; corny and ornate and disorganized but kind of fun. The last hallucination, the I dwindled fragment of-what had Fitzgerald called it? -“the last and greatest of all human dreams.” It was where we’d run out of room, where the dream had run up against the ocean, and human voices woke us. Los Angeles was the butt end, where we’d spat it out with our mouths tasting of ashes, but a genial failure of a place for all of that.
I had drunk two beers in Candy’s living room when she called and asked me to pick her up.
“Dress up,” she said. “I’m going to take you to dinner.”
“Tie?” I asked.
“It’s permitted,” she said.
Chapter 23
WE HAD DINNER at Ma Maison, which looks like the cook tent for a Rotary barbecue and is so in that it has an unlisted phone. There were several famous people there and many young good-looking women with older out-of- shape men. The food was admirable.
“You don’t see Rudd Weatherwax in the restaurant, do you?” I said to Candy.
“I never heard of him,” she said.
“Sic transit gloria,” I said. “Is that… ?”
Candy nodded. “Somewhat more of her these days.”
“She shouldn’t swim during whaling season,” I said. Candy smiled. We finished our asparagus vinaigrette. The waiter brought us veal medallions and poured some more of the white Bordeaux we’d ordered.
“Good,” Candy said. “What kind is it?”
“Graves,” I said.
“I’ve got the goods on Peter,” Candy said.
There were pan-fried potatoes with the veal that were the best I’d ever had. I ate one. “The goods?”
Her face was bright. “Yes. I’ve got him, I think. But I need you to help.”
“Glad to,” I said. “It’ll ice my merit badge. What have you got him for?”
“One reason I’ve tried to be with him every night is I wanted to get him won over before you got bored and went home. I knew I’d need you and I had to hurry.”
“Bored? Me? I haven’t even been to Knott’s Berry Farm yet.”
“Well, last night it paid off. He got drunk and started talking about how powerful and important he was. He’s gotten blackout drunk every time I’ve been with him. I think he might have thought he was being sly, and seeing if I would talk about my interest in him. But he kept drinking and he got carried away. Every time it’s the same. We make love. Then he drinks and struts around and conducts a monologue on how important he is. Talked about his connections, with politicians, with mobsters, movie stars. How he could get anything fixed or have someone killed if he wanted to. He bragged about some of the actresses he’d slept with.”
“Mala Powers?” I said.
“No.”
“Phew.”
“But I was in good company,” she said.
“Did he get specific about other things?” I asked.
“Yes. He said, for instance, that he knew where Franco was. He used his full name.”
“Montenegro,” I said.
“Yes. He said he knew how to get Franco Montenegro. He said Franco had made a mistake, and he was going to regret it.”
