There was a very old black man, a hotel employee, who would walk across the courtyard each day with almost painful slowness and water the plants and inspect the fish. He’d grin at me as he went past, and I’d nod at him.
On the third day I got up and walked over to him as he stood by the fish pool, picking out bits of rubbish by hand: a couple of coins and a cigarette packet.
“Hello,” I said.
“Suh,” said the old man.
I thought about asking him not to call me sir, but I couldn’t think of a way to put it that might not cause offense. “Nice fish.”
He nodded and grinned. “Ornamental carp. Brought here all the way from China.”
We watched them swim around the little pool.
“I wonder if they get bored.”
He shook his head. “My grandson, he’s an ichthyologist, you know what that is?”
“Studies fishes.”
“Uh-huh. He says they only got a memory that’s like thirty seconds long. So they swim around the pool, it’s always a surprise to them, going ‘I never been here before.’ They meet another fish they known for a hundred years, they say, ‘Who are you, stranger?’ ”
“Will you ask your grandson something for me?” The old man nodded. “I read once that carp don’t have set life spans. They don’t age like we do. They die if they’re killed by people or predators or disease, but they don’t just get old and die. Theoretically they could live forever.”
He nodded. “I’ll ask him. It sure sounds good. These three—now, this one, I call him Ghost, he’s only four, five years old. But the other two, they came here from China back when I was first here.”
“And when was that?”
“That would have been, in the Year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-four. How old do I look to you?”
I couldn’t tell. He might have been carved from old wood. Over fifty and younger than Methuselah. I told him so.
“I was born in 1906. God’s truth.”
“Were you born here, in L.A.?”
He shook his head. “When I was born, Los Angeles wasn’t nothin’ but an orange grove, a long way from New York.” He sprinkled fish food on the surface of the water. The three fish bobbed up, pale-white silvered ghost carp, staring at us, or seeming to, the O’s of their mouths continually opening and closing, as if they were talking to us in some silent, secret language of their own.
I pointed to the one he had indicated. “So he’s Ghost, yes?”
“He’s Ghost. That’s right. That one under the lily—you can see his tail, there, see?—he’s called Buster, after Buster Keaton. Keaton was staying here when we got the older two. And this one’s our Princess.”
Princess was the most recognizable of the white carp. She was a pale cream color, with a blotch of vivid crimson along her back, setting her apart from the other two.
“She’s lovely.”
“She surely is. She surely is all of that.”
He took a deep breath then and began to cough, a wheezing cough that shook his thin frame. I was able then, for the first time, to see him as a man of ninety.
“Are you all right?”
He nodded. “Fine, fine, fine. Old bones,” he said. “Old bones.”
We shook hands, and I returned to my treatment and the gloom.
I PRINTED OUT the completed treatment, faxed it off to Jacob at the studio.
The next day he came over to the chalet. He looked upset.
“Everything okay? Is there a problem with the treatment?”
“Just shit going down. We made this movie with . . .” and he named a well-known actress who had been in a few successful films a couple of years before. “Can’t lose, huh? Only she is not as young as she was, and she insists on doing her own nude scenes, and that’s not a body anybody wants to see, believe me.
“So the plot is, there’s this photographer who is persuading women to take their clothes off for him. Then he shtups them. Only no one believes he’s doing it. So the chief of police—played by Ms. Lemme Show the World My Naked Butt—realizes that the only way she can arrest him is if she pretends to be one of the women. So she sleeps with him. Now, there’s a twist . . .”
“She falls in love with him?”
“Oh. Yeah. And then she realizes that women will always be imprisoned by male images of women, and to prove her love for him, when the police come to arrest the two of them she sets fire to all the photographs and dies in the fire. Her clothes burn off first. How does that sound to you?”
“Dumb.”
“That was what we thought when we saw it. So we fired the director and recut it and did an extra day’s shoot. Now she’s wearing a wire when they make out. And when she starts to fall in love with him, she finds out that he killed her brother. She has a dream in which her clothes burn off, then she goes out with the SWAT team to try to bring him in. But he gets shot by her little sister, who he’s also been shtupping.”
“Is it any better?”
He shakes his head. “It’s junk. If she’d let us use a stand-in for the nude sequences, maybe we’d be in better shape.
“What did you think of the treatment?”
“What?”
“My treatment? The one I sent you?”
“Sure. That treatment. We loved it. We all loved it. It was great. Really terrific. We’re all really excited.”
“So what’s next?”
“Well, as soon as everyone’s had a chance to look it over, we’ll get together and talk about it.”
He patted me on the back and went away, leaving me with nothing to do in Hollywood.
I decided to write a short story. There was an idea I’d had in England before I’d left. Something about a small theater at the end of a pier. Stage magic as the rain came down. An audience who couldn’t
