Four or five times during the trip Jerry had directed the driver to a certain spot, invited Maxine and Todd to get out of the limo in order to show them a certain view, then presented them with a photograph taken on precisely the same spot sixty or seventy years before, when many of the places they visited had been little more than an expanse of cactus and sand. It had been an education for Todd. He hadn’t realized until then how recent Los Angeles was, nor how tenuous its existence was. The greenery was as artificial as the stucco walls and the colonial facades. The city was one enormous back-lot, fake and fragile. If the water ever ceased to pump then this verdant world, with its palaces and its swooning falls of bougainvillea, would pass away.
As it turned out, Todd hadn’t ended up buying any of the properties Jerry had shown them that day, which was probably for the best. He finally decided to stay in his house in Bel Air, but substantially remodel it. It didn’t matter, Jerry had said, apparently reserving his opinion on whether Todd would join the pantheon of guests, nobody legendary had ever lived there.
Once Todd had said yes to the house in the hills, it took a day to get the move to the Hideaway properly organized; a day which left Todd spent sitting at the window of the Malibu House, staring at the pale reflection of his bandaged face in the rain-spattered glass. Technically, the pain-killers Burrows had given him should have left him without any discomfort whatsoever, but for some reason, even when supplemented by some of Bunny’s specials — not a minute of that day passed without his being acutely aware of the pressure of the gauze and the bandages on his face. He morbidly wondered if perhaps he wouldn’t be left with this residue of feeling for the rest of his life; he’d heard of people who’d had certain operations who were made much worse by the surgeon’s knife, and indeed were never the same again. The thought terrified him: that he’d done something completely irreversible. But there was no use in regretting it. All he could do now was hope to God that this unavoidable complication, as Burrow’s insisted it was, would be quickly cured, and he’d have his face back intact. He wasn’t even hoping for improvement at this point. Just the old, familiar Todd Pickett face would do fine; creases, laugh-lines and all.
In the early evening Marco came to pick Todd up, having spent the morning moving some essentials over to the new house. Todd went with him in the sedan, Maxine and Jerry followed on.
“I got lost twice this morning,” Marco said, “going back and forth from the old house to the new one. I don’t know why the hell it happened, but twice I got all turned round and found myself back onto Sunset again.”
“Weird,” Todd said.
“There are no street signs up there.”
“No?”
“There aren’t many houses, either, which is what I like. No neighbours. No tour buses. No fans climbing over the walls.”
“Dempsey used to get them!”
“Oh yes, old Dempsey was great. Remember that German? Huge guy? Climbs over the wall, gets Dempsey’s teeth clamped in his ass and then — ”
“Tries to sue you.”
” — tries to sue me.”
They chuckled at the incident for a moment, then rode in silence for a while.
SIX
“So what exactly did Jerry tell you about this place?”
Todd asked Maxine as they stood outside the Hideaway.
“Not much. I told you he’d played here as a kid? Yes, I did. Well, he said he had wonderful memories of the house. That was about all.”
Maxine hadn’t taken any pictures of the exterior, it had been raining so hard that day. Now, seen clearly for the first time, the house appeared much larger than Todd had anticipated; perfectly deserving of the term ‘dream palace’. He couldn’t get a complete grasp of its size because the vegetation around it had been left to run wild. A large grove of bamboo to the right of the front door had grown fully thirty feet, its tallest stalks standing higher than the chimney-stacks. Bougainvillea grew everywhere in lunatic abundance, purple, red, pink and white; and even the humble ferns, planted in the shade of the perimeter wall, had flourished there, and grown antediluvian. There was room beneath the fronds to stand with your hands raised and still not touch the nubby spores on their underbellies.