The Mirror Thief(38)
By the time the Red Chinese finally killed his father, as he’d promised they would, Stanley was living in the apartment like a cockroach, sneaking in whenever he needed food or shelter, creeping out again to forage. He thought this at the time: a cockroach. The idea made him proud. A year after that, when his grandfather died and his mother stopped speaking forever, Stanley quit coming home at all.
The house ahead on his right is entirely overgrown by bougainvillea: only a slumped porch and a pair of dormers still hold off the emerald leaves and vermillion bracts. Stanley’s thrilled to see a building obliterated like this in the midst of a city. Something moves in the vine-snared yard—a cat—and now he can see several, maybe a dozen. One emaciated gray persian watches from the porch, so thin it seems to lack a body, to be nothing but yellow eyes and a snarl of fur.
Stanley walks on. The ocean recedes behind him. He thinks about the cats, and about the anonymous neighborhood houses. About Welles. About Crivano. About black scorpions, and hidden watchers in dense jungles.
He comes to a dead stop on the sidewalk. Barber shop, he thinks.
18
When the bus from Santa Monica pulls up two hours later, Stanley is waiting at the curb, the combat unit from his father’s fieldpack dangling from his fingers. He catches Claudio as he’s stepping from the door, shoves him back inside, and climbs in after him, paying the fare, shrugging into a seat. Stolen sardine cans in the pack scrape together as he settles it in his lap. We’re going to Hollywood, Stanley says.
Claudio stands in the aisle, slackjawed, then puts out a hand to touch Stanley’s fresh buzzcut. Your hair, he says.
Stanley catches him by the wrist, jerks him into the seat. Knock it off, he says. Did you hear what I just told you? Hollywood, chum.
You look like a soldier, Claudio says.
As the bus rolls south to the end of its route and swings north again, Stanley fills Claudio in on what the barber told him. Adrian Welles, it turns out, is now mixed up with the movies: writing, sometimes even directing them. A big production of his just finished filming nearby—right along the boardwalk, in fact—and now he’s in Hollywood editing it. It had a bunch of big stars in it, Stanley says. Even I knew some of the names. This could be your big break, kid.
Claudio’s trying to seem cool and appraising, but Stanley can see the gooseflesh on his forearms. With what studio is he contracted? he asks.
Universal Pictures, I think, is what the guy told me.
I do not believe that the headquarters of Universal-International are in Hollywood, Claudio says. I believe they are outside the city. Do we know how to find this place?
Sure we do, Stanley says. How tough can it be?
They transfer at Santa Monica Boulevard and ride inland, past the boxy white spire of the Mormon Temple, past the Fox Studios and the Country Club, across the Beverly Hills town line. Stanley still can’t figure how anybody can call this place a city. To him, it’s like a real city got cut to pieces and dropped from a plane: tall buildings litter the valley in no real order, and streets and shops and houses stretch between them like a fungus. Every time Stanley thinks they’re downtown, they’re not.
At Wilshire they swap seats. Claudio takes the window to watch for famous faces in passing Rolls-Royces and Corvettes; Stanley slouches and half-listens to Claudio’s commentary while he thinks about what to do next. He should be glad to have a solid lead on Welles, but this feels wrong, and he’s not sure why. It’s not that he doubts what the barber told him—the guy had no percentage in putting him off the trail—it’s just that none of it fits with the image of Welles in his head. That scares him a little. The movies, for crying out loud! Stanley feels betrayed, but can’t justify it. The idea that Welles didn’t so much misrepresent himself in his book as somehow avoid representing himself at all leaves him queasy.
After half an hour of pointless wandering, Claudio gets directions from a Mexican valet at the Sunset Tower—talking to the guy a lot longer than seems necessary—and leads Stanley to a spot where they can catch the Number 22 up Highland into the hills. They stroll the boulevard while they wait. Stanley points out details on the old theaters’ weird fa?ades: thick columns and pharaoh heads on the Egyptian, Moorish battlements on the El Capitan. Claudio listens, nods, but keeps glancing nervously at the white letters on the hillside to the north, as if he expects them to evaporate in the gathering haze.
When they reach Grauman’s Chinese, Claudio gives a start, mutters something in Spanish, and dashes into its patchwork forecourt. Stanley follows at a skeptical distance as Claudio scans the pavement in a half-stoop, like he’s looking for dropped coins. Stanley sees handprints and footprints in the cement, left when it was poured, with names and messages scrawled around them. For a moment he thinks of a sidewalk back home in City Park: G G + V C gouged into its setting surface, alongside the winged imprints of mapleseeds. Then he starts to read the writing at his feet, and he slows to a stop.
Carmen Miranda. Janet Gaynor. Eddie Cantor. Here’s looking at you, Sid. Mary Pickford. Ginger Rogers. Fred Astaire. The parallel furrows of Sonja Henie’s skates. To Sid, Tillykke, Always. Harold Lloyd’s doodled spectacles. Loretta Young. Tyrone Power. To Sid—Following in my father’s footsteps. As Stanley steps over each section of pavement, he imagines the moment it was made: moviestars laughing in a fusillade of flashbulbs, waving their dirty hands. Kids playing in the mud. So this, he thinks, is what it means to be famous.