“Sure there is. Lie down and get some rest. We’ll talk about this when we’ve got some sleep.”
He slipped off his shoes and lay down, placing one of the paper-thin pillows beside the other so they’d both have somewhere to lay their heads. “Go on,” he said. “Lie down. I won’t bite.”
“You do know how weird all this is for me, don’t you?”
“Which part: the girl, the house, the Devil’s wife — ”
“No. You and me, together in one bed.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to be making sexual advances — ”
“I know that — ”
” — I’m just suggesting we get some sleep.”
“Yeah. Well. Okay. But it’s still weird. You know, you used to be somebody I idolized.”
“With a heavy emphasis on the used to be,” Todd said, opening one eye and looking at her.
“Don’t be so sensitive.”
“No. I get the message. It was the same when I met Paul Newman, in the flesh,” He closed his eye again. “I always used to think he was the coolest of all the cool guys. He had those ice-blue eyes, and that easy way of … ” his words were getting slower, dreamier ” … walking into a room … and I used to think … when I’m famous … ” The words trailed away.
“Todd?”
He opened his eyes a fraction and looked at her between the lashes. “What was I saying?”
“Never mind,” she said to him, sitting on the bed. “Go to sleep.”
“No, tell me. What was I saying?”
“How much you wanted to be like Paul Newman.”
“Oh yeah. I just used to practice my Newman act for hours on end. The way everything he did was so relaxed. Sometimes he looked so relaxed you couldn’t believe he was acting at all. It looked so … easy … ”
While he talked Tammy took off her own shoes (her feet were filthy, and ached, but she didn’t have the strength to get into a shower), and then lay down beside Todd. He didn’t even seem to realize she was there beside him. His monologue continued, though it became less coherent, as sleep steadily made his tongue more sluggish.
“When I met him … finally met him … he was … so … small … ”
His conclusion reached, he began to snore gently.
Tammy sat up on her elbows and looked at him, lying there, wondering how she would have felt if she’d been told a few days ago that she’d be sharing a bed with Todd Pickett. It would have made her heart jump a beat to even contemplate the possibility. And yet here she was, lying down beside him, and she felt nothing; nothing except a vague irritation that she was not going to get a fair share of the bed with him sprawled out over it. Oh well, she had no choice. She could either sleep on the bed with Mr. Heart-throb, or take the floor.
She closed her eyes.
She was exhausted: sleep came in a matter of moments. There were no dreams.
THREE
While the two mismatched adventurers slept in the subterranean murk of Room 131 in the Wilshire Plaza Hotel, a sleep too deep to be called comfortable; too close to death, in fact — the city of Los Angeles got up and went about its daily business. There was profit to be made. There were movies being shot all over the city. Joyless little pornos being made in ratty motels, witless spectacles with budgets that could have supported small nations made on the soundstages of Culver City and Burbank; penniless independent films about the lives of hustlers, whores and penniless film-makers shot wherever a room could be found and the actors assembled. Some would go onto glory; even the pornos had their nights of prize-giving now, when the lucky lady voted Best Cock-Sucker was called to the podium to humbly thank her agent, her mother and Jesus Christ.
But the fictions, whether sex or science-fiction, were not the only dramas that would be played out today. This was a city that made its profit by selling dreams, not least of itself, and so every day young hopefuls arrived by bus and by plane to try their luck. And every day a few of those dreamers, having been here a few months (sometimes a few years) realized that their place in the food chain of fame was lower than a piece of week-old sushi. It was not going to happen for them: they weren’t going to be the next Meryl Streep, the next Todd Pickett, the next Jim Carrey. They’d have to wait another lifetime for their slice of fame; or the lifetime after that, or the lifetime after that. And for some, it wasn’t news they could bear to take home with them. Better to buy a gun (as Ryan Tyler, real name Norman Miles, did that morning) and go back to your one room apartment and blow out your brains. He’d had two lines in one of the Lethal Weapon movies, which he’d told everyone in Stockholm, Ohio, was the beginning of a great career. But the lines had been cut, and for some reason he’d never caught a director’s eye ever again. Not once in six years, since he’d had those two lines, had he been called back for an audition. The bullet was kinder than the silent phone. His death didn’t make the news.