The Lioness(20)

“I liked your wife’s last movie,” Peter continued, choosing to change the subject and have mercy on Felix.

“Carmen’s amazing,” he agreed, though a part of him had wished that the agent had brought up his own last movie. He was only one of the three writers in the credits, and much of what he had penned had been discarded well before they started shooting, but none of that mattered. His name was on it.

“She is. Very talented girl. How did you two meet?”

“A party. No meet-cute.”

“You’re a writer, you can do better than that.”

Felix poured a little cream into his coffee and looked around the dining room. At the hallucinatory colors of the frangipani and bougainvillea and kaffir boom. At the trophies of different kinds of dead antelope with all manner of horn on the walls. At the two taxidermal giraffes under the dome in the center of the room, overlooking those long white linen-clad tables of fruits and cheeses and biscuits. When he’d walked past one, he’d realized he would have been roughly eye level with the damn thing’s nuts, which, thank God, someone had had the good sense to lop off since they were parking the corpse in the dining room.

“Okay,” Felix agreed, hoping to rise to the challenge. He sat forward in his seat, a plush armchair with butterflies on the upholstery that in his opinion would have been more appropriate in a library in a castle in Scotland than a hotel dining room in East Africa, and began, his voice epitaphic, “Olivia—my kid sister—had just died in a car accident.”

“The one on Mulholland? I had forgotten.”

“Coldwater Canyon, technically. But, yes, within yards of Mulholland.”

He had the agent’s full attention now and decided to bare it all. Milk it for every bit it was worth.

“Her funeral was on a Tuesday, and I was a mess. She was twenty-five, I was thirty. Amsterdam had just bombed—though not because of the script.”

“It’s not a bad script,” Peter agreed, which wasn’t precisely the enthusiasm Felix craved, but he wasn’t going to be deflected from his narrative. It was his second movie, and he thought it was pretty good for a sophomore effort.

“Thank you. It’s really not. Still, I was unprepared for its truly epic failure. And then Olivia died.”

“Was killed.”

“Yes. Was killed,” he repeated. “Obviously, my parents weren’t doing well. My mother was a mess, and my father wasn’t doing much better. And my father has, as you probably know, more ice than blood in his veins. Think of that ball cap he wears when he directs.” Felix was prepared to reveal what was embroidered across the front: nobody moves, nobody gets hurt. But Peter nodded knowingly as he sipped his coffee, and so Felix continued, “None of us handled Olivia’s death very well.”

“How do you ‘handle’ something like that well?” the agent asked, but it was a rhetorical, sympathetic question. “No parent wants to outlive a child. No mother wants to outlive her daughter.”

“No,” Felix agreed. “Anyway, I started drinking at the reception after the funeral. I started at the reception, continued at the bar at the Chateau Marmont with a couple of friends who wanted to console me, and continued alone at my apartment in West Hollywood.”

Peter folded his arms across his chest. “Your sister is killed by some drunk where Mulholland meets Coldwater, and you drove home drunk from a bar?”

“Nope. Left my car there and got a cab.”

“Good for you.”

“I was making nothing but bad choices that week, but none that were going to hurt anyone but me. I mean that. I blew off a meeting with Paramount. I didn’t show up for a lunch with a director—who shall remain nameless, because he was seriously pissed off at me. There’s a pool at my apartment, and I passed out there on the concrete in the middle of the day, the sun dead overhead, and burned the shit out of my back. Wound up in the ER with second-degree burns. I wasn’t answering my phone, I wasn’t opening my mail. I was an absolute mess. I loved Olivia, and the world seemed a really shitty, really heartless place.”

“Oh, it is. Make no mistake, Felix: the universe doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of us.”

The waiter brought him his omelet and called him “bwana.” He’d heard the Swahili word in safari movies and was momentarily taken aback to hear himself called “the man” or “the master” in person. He thanked the waiter and stared at his plate. It was the largest omelet he had ever seen in his life: it looked the size of a pizza cut in half. A small pizza, but a pizza nonetheless. The waiter was watching him, and he realized he was supposed to take a bite. So he did.

“Scrumptious,” he said, though the eggs tasted different here, which made him uneasy. It was also a little chewy. “Hell of an omelet. Thank you.”

The waiter bowed and left them alone.

“When I wasn’t answering my phone, a friend of mine came by to check on me,” he continued. “It was Friday by now, and I hadn’t left the apartment or the pool. Apparently, I answered the door in my underwear, and I had done a real half-assed job of applying Noxzema to my back—except, I gather, to the back of my legs, where I had slathered the goop on like I was painting the side of a house. He cleaned me up and got some coffee and food in me. He looked at my sunburn and dragged me to the ER, where they gave me something a little better than Noxzema for my skin. And then, when I was sober and marginally less disgusting, he convinced me to go to a party, though I didn’t drink anything but club soda when I was there. And that’s where I met Carmen.”