Barefoot In The City Of Broken Dreams Part 15

I closed the bedroom door behind me.

Of course, once I was in bed, I immediately had another thought: Maybe I closed that door for a reason. Maybe I didn't want to talk to the ghost because somehow I knew he was trying to tell me something I really didn't want to hear.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

The following Sat.u.r.day night, Kevin and I were invited over to Mr. Brander's house for a dinner party. As we drove over there, I was back to being nervous.

Weirdly, I think I was mostly nervous because Kevin was with me. I never had told him what happened that day at the theater. But now I was worried about how Mr. Brander would act in front of him. Would it be like the first two times I'd met him? Or would it be like the reading when he'd seemed so befuddled, at least at first? Kevin didn't understand how movies were made - the Bulls.h.i.t Factor, the Screenwriter Loophole. He didn't know how crazy everyone could be, that it was sometimes a messy process.

"Just so you know," I said as we drove. "Mr. Brander is kind of strange."

"So you've said. What do you mean?"

What did I mean?

"Well, he's kind of full of himself," I said. "He might be the most confident person I've ever met."

"Yeah?"

"Oh, yeah. You could bounce a quarter off his ego."

This was true, but it wasn't what I'd been trying to tell Kevin.

We drove in silence a bit, and I guess Kevin noticed something was wrong, because he said, "You okay?"

I nodded.

"You'll be fine," he said. "Remember before the first meeting? You were nervous then too, but you ended up being great."

I nodded again, still not telling him what I was really thinking.

Lewis greeted us at the front door. I was glad Kevin and I had decided to wear jackets, because he was dressed up too.

"Kevin, this is Lewis," I said, and the two of them shook hands.

"Nice to meet you," Kevin said.

"So do you actually live here?" I said to Lewis, before I realized it wasn't any of my d.a.m.n business.

But he didn't seem to take offense. "I do," he said.

He led us into the front room where Mr. Brander was waiting for us in his wheelchair. There were hors d'oeuvres on the coffee table: some kind of puff pastry, and crackers and dip. The music on the player was cla.s.sical, relatively upbeat, but I don't know anything about cla.s.sical music, so let's just say it was Mozart.

"Russel, my boy!" he said. He turned to take Kevin in. "And you must be Kevin."

"It's great to meet you," Kevin said, shaking Mr. Brander's hand. "I've heard a lot about you."

"I don't know anything about you, but I feel like I do" - he smiled at me - "from reading Russel's screenplay."

"Yeah, that's the problem with living with a writer," Kevin said. "You never know when something you do or say will end up in one of their scripts."

"Well, if you're anything like Milo, I like you already."

As they talked, I reached for a puffed pastry, not because I wanted an hors d'oeuvre, but so I could step closer to Mr. Brander to see if he still smelled like, well, you know. He didn't, which was a relief, though he did smell a bit menthol-y. I'd also never told Kevin about how Mr. Brander had smelled before.

"Lewis?" the old man said. "Shall we have the drinks now?"

"Sure thing," Lewis said, After he left, Mr. Brander said, "Please! Sit."

Kevin and I sat.

"So Kevin, my boy," Mr. Brander said. "Do you like movies?"

"Oh, sure," Kevin said. "But not as much as Russel does. I just sort of watch them, you know? He drinks them down like cups of coffee."

"Well put!" Mr. Brander said. He sized Kevin up. "Are you a Sean Connery fan?"

"Sure," Kevin said.

"I worked with the man. Right in the middle of the Bond years too. I've always said that smart actors can play dumb, but a truly dumb actor can't play smart. Well, Sean Connery was the one exception."

"Oh, no," Kevin said. "Really?"

Mr. Brander shook his head sadly. "But he looks fantastic in a tux."

I knew what Mr. Brander was doing: he was trying to impress Kevin with stories from his past, name-dropping the celebrity he thought would most impress the person he was talking to. (What did it mean that Kevin got Sean Connery while I'd gotten Bette Davis?!) But the fact is, Kevin did look impressed. Mr. Brander's plan worked. So I was finally starting to relax, thinking that maybe this evening would go okay after all.

"What was the movie you did together?" Kevin asked Mr. Brander, still talking Sean Connery.

I stood up. "Excuse me a sec," I said as if I needed to use the bathroom. But instead, I looked around the house for Lewis.

I found him in the kitchen wrestling with a bottle of champagne. He'd wrapped a towel around the cork and was trying to ease it out.

"Sorry about before," I said to him.

"For what?" he said, even as he kept working on the cork.

"For asking if you live here. That's none of my business."

He smiled. "It's fine. I've worked for Mr. Brander for almost two years now."

The cork slid out with almost no pop and none of the foam that oozes out whenever I open a bottle of champagne. Lewis had a light touch. Food containers littered the countertops, along with plates in a stack: Mr. Brander had had tonight's dinner catered, and presumably Lewis would be the one to a.s.semble it. It smelled fantastic.

Lewis started pouring the champagne into flutes - crystal ones, it looked like, old and expensive.

"Can I help you with anything?" I said.

"Nope," he said. "I've got it."

"Okay..." I turned back toward the front room.

"Russel?" Lewis said.

"Yeah?" I said, turning back toward him.

He stared at me, but didn't say anything.

He wants to tell me something, I thought. That he doesn't just work for Mr. Brander, but that the two of them are some kind of couple. But he thinks I'll judge him.

"What is it?" I said.

He looked away. Then he said, "There's a mountain lion living in Griffith Park."

"Huh?" Griffith Park is this ma.s.sive greenbelt right in the middle of the city - part of the Hollywood Hills, and also where the big "Hollywood" sign is located. But I didn't understand what it had to do with anything.

"I guess it's been living there for years," Lewis went on. "They say it had to cross sixteen lanes of freeway." As he talked, he finished filling the gla.s.ses. He acted like he was totally transfixed on that champagne, getting each gla.s.s filled just right. He seemed nervous. The thing about the mountain lion? That wasn't what he'd been trying to tell me. How could I tell him that I didn't judge other people's living arrangements?

"Yeah, I heard that," I said, meaning the stuff about the lion. "Seriously, do you need me to help carry the drinks?"

"No, it's fine," he said, turning his back on me, looking for something in one of the cupboards, dismissing me.

Oh, well, I thought. Whatever the deal was between the two of them, it wasn't any of my business.

Back in the front room, Kevin and Mr. Brander were laughing. They really had hit it off! The music on the player had segued into something darker, smokier, but just as old-fashioned. A tango?

I joined them and Mr. Brander nodded to the hors d'oeuvres. "Try the eggplant caviar," he said. "Lewis made it."

"Eggplant caviar?" I said.

He chuckled. "Well, I'm not rich enough for the real stuff anymore. But maybe I will be again, once we make this movie."

I tried it on a cracker. I have no idea if it was as good as real caviar, because I've never had it, but this stuff wasn't bad. It had garlic and lemon.

"When does everyone else get here?" I said.

"Everyone else?" Mr. Brander said.

"The other people. For dinner?"

"There are no other people. It's just us tonight."

"Oh." This confused me. On the phone, Lewis had said it was a dinner party, so I'd a.s.sumed others would be there - the whole production team.

Kevin looked at me. Had I told him that I'd thought everyone else was coming too? I couldn't remember, but I smiled like it wasn't any big deal.

Right then, Lewis arrived with the champagne flutes on a tray, which he distributed to Mr. Brander, Kevin, and me. There was a gla.s.s for him too, and I was glad, because I would've felt awkward with the three of us drinking and Lewis watching us.

"To A Cup of Joe!" Mr. Brander said, raising a gla.s.s.

"A Cup of Joe!" Kevin said, drinking.

Champagne? A catered dinner? Even if it was eggplant caviar and not the real thing, Mr. Brander had gone to a lot of trouble for this night, and it was all for me. People were literally toasting my success. Moments like this didn't come very often in life, and I knew I should be flattered.

So why was I still so nervous?

Dinner was better than it deserved to be, given that Lewis had reheated it in the kitchen. It was chicken Marsala with wild mushrooms, roasted potatoes, and a vegetable medley. Mr. Brander may not have been rich now, but he must have been at one point: the china was definitely fine and had what I was pretty sure was real gold trim.

As we all ate, the wine flowed freely, the candlesticks flickered, and Mr. Brander did what he did best: talked.

"There are actually two Hollywoods," he told us. "There's the one that Middle America knows about: the movie stars, and the glamour, and the gossip. That's all most people care about, which is fine. And by all means: actors are pretty to look at, fun to watch. That's an important part of the business model, the public face. But actors have almost nothing to do with the actual making of movies. Of all the princ.i.p.als, the actors spend the least amount of time on a film. They leave the real work, the hard work, to the second Hollywood: the producers, the directors, and" - here he nodded to me - "the writers. We find the ideas, we create them right out of thin air. And we work on them from the very beginning, back when no one else gives a d.a.m.n. But we have faith in each other, and we have trust. And so, like pioneers across the frontier, we follow the project through, across rivers and over mountains, to the end of the trail, hoping against hope that there will be someone waiting for us there, a civilization at the end of the wildness that will understand us - that will welcome our vision."

I looked at Kevin and tried to communicate with my eyes: Remember what I said about Mr. Brander being full of himself? But I couldn't tell what he was thinking.

It was also interesting to hear what Mr. Brander thought of actors, that they were basically a necessary evil. Well, why not? Otto had told me what actors think of writers: that we're mostly hideous beasts with zero social skills.

"It's actually really frustrating for journalists," Kevin said to Mr. Brander.

"That's right, you interview celebrities," Mr. Brander said. "And how does that go?"

"Well, it's true what you're saying," he said. "It's the writer, the director, and the producer who have the interesting things to say about the movie. Sometimes the actor doesn't know anything at all. But no one wants to read an interview with the producer or the writer of a movie. They want to know what the movie star has to say. So you end up with all this great material you can barely use. And then you go through and try to find the one interesting thing the movie star said. Because that's the other thing no one wants to read, and no editor wants to see either: an article about how everyone's favorite movie star is actually a complete idiot."

"Like Sean Connery?" Mr. Brander said.

Kevin smirked. "You said it, not me."

Mr. Brander laughed. "You can take my word for it!" He pointed a fork at Kevin. "But you're so right, my boy. Absolutely right!"

I smiled too, but to myself. Kevin wasn't lying exactly - he'd said stuff like that to me before - but mostly he knew how to work an audience.

He's enjoying this! I thought. The evening is going great.

When we were done with dinner, after Lewis had cleared the dishes and we were having dessert and coffee, Mr. Brander nodded to Lewis, and he brought me a package.

"What's this?" I said.

"Just a little something I wanted you to have," Mr. Brander said.