Movie Stars Read online

  He smoothed over his keen, professional aggression with jokes. Once there were some end tables no one was bidding on and he said in a mock wheedling tone, “Come on, it’s Bob Hope!” Everybody laughed. But somebody took the bait.

  He laughed too, and openly, at his task of making a Native American–themed golf award sound alluring. “That’s unique: I didn’t know Kachinas golfed.”

  For five chairs with upholstery so remarkably unappealing that the room fell silent in zonked-out awe, he said, “You can have four people over if you’re single.”

  He was playing with their sadness.

  A few lots later, in a searing flash of instantaneous buyer’s remorse and what felt like incipient diarrhea, Chuck gave in and snagged some poorly punctuated linen bar towels (THE HOPE’S BAR, they said) and “two unmarked Far Eastern metal ashtrays.”

  Dizzy and guilty, brooding about what he had done, he had to step out for some air. The bamboo and wicker and rattan, forests of it, had begun to blur together.

  Now he had absolutely no more than seven hundred dollars left to spend on Donny. Still, it was more than enough for the pot. Nobody would want that pot, would they? Why would anyone want that lousy pot? He sat on a low wall in the bleak, paved-over courtyard. People didn’t care about Bob Hope. They were going for the furniture. “A lacquered animal hide console table with Asian style feet.” What was that? It could have belonged to anybody. What were Asian feet? Well, they were something that had people peeling the big bills off their rolls. Memories, on the other hand, were cheap as dirt. Three C-notes for the ashtrays in which Bob Hope had personally stubbed out his cigarettes. And they came with Lucite coasters and glass toothpick holders thrown in. Nobody cared. Who but Chuck would bid on that gross pot from the spidery corner of Bob Hope’s library? It would be a steal. Now Chuck had Bob Hope’s bar towels and that’s all there was to it. What’s done is done, like buying a first-class ticket with no refund.

  He poked his head back in the gallery. His auctioneer was gone. A lanky farm boy with a saucy forelock he kept pushing out of his face had taken his place. He was sepulchral and at the same time his voice would crack like an adolescent’s. Maybe he was an apprentice. The main auctioneer sat nearby, resting and watching thoughtfully. The new guy seemed nice, but the spell was broken.

  Chuck walked around Beverly Hills, killing time until it was late enough to get a cab to Maria’s. At the corner of Beverly and Dayton, a passing guy asked his friend, “This is where that movie star committed suicide?” Or maybe he was saying it, not asking. That’s how people said things, as Chuck had begun to notice. It wasn’t his world anymore. He knew how Bob Hope felt.

  9

  It was somebody’s birthday. Chuck never got a grasp on whose.

  There was an NPR commentator who knew everything about tequila.

  A woman in a scarf worked for a foundation.

  A dignified person with a neatly pressed shirt and cotton-candy swirl of distinguished gray hair buttonholed a former scientist turned filmmaker (who kept calling himself “a former scientist turned filmmaker”).

  An otherwise nicely dressed man from Harvard walked around barefooted as an ape. Well, the guy had respectable feet. They were evenly ruddy, with smooth, glossy nails. They were too small for the guy, his feet were, but that made them even more precious. They were the feet of a faun. It was worse than going around naked. Chuck and Veda had been at a pool party with one casually nude guest and everyone pretended not to notice her coppery tuft glaring at them.

  Chuck was out of his league. His feet were a disaster. He thought they were what kept him from falling in love again.

  Maria gave everyone champagne to toast the elusive birthday. No, not champagne. “Sparkling wine,” as she correctly said.

  Maria lived down a mysterious winding lane that was gravelly and bereft of streetlights and seemed to split and double back on itself as it went along in deadly and unexpected hillocks. The cabbie had a tough time finding her house, which was a towering box of corrugated metal with an orange door. Chuck got out disoriented and stumbled around until he heard Maria calling to him from a balcony. Just feet away, the cabbie had pulled over and whipped it out to pee in the street. It seemed feasible. The dream road was loomed over by fantastic mismatched buildings, and worldly restraint didn’t matter.

  Sparkling wine hit Chuck’s empty stomach. He kept proudly admitting he didn’t know anything. No one was impressed by the saintly depths of Chuck’s ignorance.

  They were waiting for someone else to arrive before they could eat. It was killing Chuck. He was conscious of Maria’s vibe from the other room, where she was slicing up tomatoes and stirring the pot. He wanted go in there and lean against a counter and catch up, maybe pick up something with his fingers and eat it. There was an open box of fried chicken just sitting there from a no-frills Korean place in a strip mall a few miles away. And Maria was tall and gorgeous, born in Vera Cruz. But somehow Chuck was tangled up in this sophisticated living room conversation, where the guy who knew everything about tequila made a speech describing each of the two hundred varieties of agave plant, only one of which could be used to make tequila. It seemed rude to get up and leave. Occasionally someone would squeeze in a word about his or her own fucked-up specialty.

  Somebody said, “Of course, everyone thinks that Al Gore saved the world, but they’re wrong.”

  Chuck guffawed. Guffawed was an accurate description. “Wait!” he said. “Wait! Wait! Everybody thinks Al Gore saved the world?” Then he said something like, “Haw, haw, haw.” Everyone stared at him.

  “Well, some of us lefties do,” the woman in the scarf ventured at last.

  Chuck had stepped in it. He was a lefty! Chuck was a lefty all the way. But he couldn’t say it now.

  The missing person showed up and the table was set.

  Chuck fingered the gold threads in his pleasantly rugged napkin. Real gold, maybe. He had a thimble of the fine tequila the NPR man had brought. He wondered whether “notes of vanilla” would be a correct thing to say about it. He kept his yapper stapled.

  Maria and the man with the wire-rimmed glasses and cotton-candy hair seemed to be in some kind of fancy wine club together—a club of two. Maria brought out a white wine she had been saving for him. It looked kind of brassy when she poured it.

  “It’s a funny color,” said the thoughtful, quiet man, who was across the table from Chuck.

  “It’s old!” Maria said defensively. Chirped defensively.

  The chicken was bleeding but Chuck didn’t care. He sloshed himself a glassful of the rusty wine and started gulping it, only later stopping to think it wasn’t for him. His tongue couldn’t register how special it was.

  Maria had made an incredible salad with raw corn.

  “It was so sweet I didn’t want to do anything to it,” she said.

  Chuck wished he could be like that, to know when not to do anything to some corn, to instinctively know that Christmas lights in different colors were “tacky” for reasons normal humans could never understand.

  Maria sweetly tried to include him in the conversation, asking about the auction.

  “Oh, ha ha, there was this horrible Leroy Neiman painting,” Chuck said.

  The quiet person across the table stopped him. “I happened to be at Leroy Neiman’s ninetieth birthday party,” he mouthed. “He was a sweet guy.”

  Chuck’s soul froze up in horror.

  “He’s fascinating, of course,” lied Chuck.

  “Lee painted some real crap,” said Leroy Neiman’s friend.

  “No, no,” lied Chuck. “No, no.”

  “I was so privileged to be at his ninetieth birthday. You know, most of his birthday parties Lee invited only women.”

  The table chuckled at the venerable rascality of the incorrigible Leroy Neiman.

  10

  Maria had seemed excited about the auction. She had promised to be in Burbank by 9 a.m. sharp to pick up Chuck. He stood there waiting. A Ford F
ocus arrived. Someone stepped out of the driver’s seat and peered. She was long-legged and dark like Maria, but much younger. She wore something fashionable that resembled a bellhop uniform from a 1960s science fiction movie. Chuck took one step in her direction. She examined him inquiringly. He pointed at himself. She raised her perfectly waxed eyebrows over her round black-lensed glasses in response. He crept closer to the car like a deviant.

  “Are you…?” she said.

  Chuck said he was Chuck.

  “I thought so. Get in.”

  Chuck got in. So did she. She turned down the radio and put it in gear.

  “Where’s Maria?” said Chuck.

  “She’s sorry. She couldn’t make it. She sends her apologies.”

  “Are you…?” said Chuck.

  “Oh, I’m…”

  “Are you her daughter?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I am. Angel.” He realized that she wasn’t calling him an angel, she was saying that her name was Angel. “Now, where are we going again?”

  That morning the auction started with a pair of “Venetian Painted Blackamoors.” Chuck apologized. “Bob Hope wasn’t a racist,” he said. “I guess everybody had some Venetian Painted Blackamoors.”

  “No bigs,” said Angel. She was the understanding type.

  “Will there be food?” she had asked him on the way. He had said no, so they stopped and he got her a breakfast burrito to go. But he was wrong. There was a pyramid of bagels and a much larger crowd than yesterday’s attacking them. At the feet of the Ichabod Crane type next to Chuck languished a paper plate scattered with crumbs, a smeared black paper napkin, a plastic cup with a dribble of OJ left in the bottom, a torn cellophane peppermint wrapper.

  Memorabilia seemed to be running higher today, and there was more energy, a wild rumble of nattering that never stopped. A fellow manning the phone table shouted like a revivalist, giving a spine-tingling “YAH!” or “YUP!” whenever an internet customer gained the top bid.

  The Cancel My Reservation pot came and went in a breathtaking shaft of anticlimax, rocketing past him to $1,200. Chuck was astonished and crushed. Angel could see it. “You should have gone for that three-hundred-dollar little table that was really ugly,” she said. “Or his old boot brush. That was a keeper.” She found the whole thing amusing and, apparently, absurd. She was drawn nevertheless to a pair of lush, worn, burnt-orange velvet armchairs, susceptible as anyone to the intimate guile of the bantam auctioneer, though she dropped out quickly, shutting down his seduction with such deftness that Chuck could see the wonder and respect glimmer in his cagey eyes.

  As the auction went on and Chuck made his bereaved and hesitant failures, she kept solemnly tapping the catalog photo of Bob Hope’s grungy boot brush and raising her eyebrows suggestively. It worked every time and he couldn’t help laughing, down as he was in spirit. She smelled like a bubble bath and made the hairs stand up on his arms. He couldn’t think.

  11

  There was a lunch break between the morning and afternoon sessions. Angel and Chuck walked to a Beverly Hills deli with an aged clientele. He had chopped liver and explained things. The hours were running out. The last of the lots were coming up, and only a few remaining items would do for his sick friend. He couldn’t afford a single distraction. His goal required all his concentration. Had she seen how expensive everything was today? It was crazy.

  “I know, you kept saying, ‘That’s crazy!’” she told him.

  “I did? Out loud?”

  “Uh, yeah. Like nine times.”

  “How mortifying,” said Chuck. “But I mean, somebody bought Bob Hope’s Webster’s Dictionary for two hundred dollars. It’s a Webster’s Dictionary. That’s crazy.”

  “Well, you were really going for that shitty box,” she said.

  She meant the small crate of roughly joined planks, stamped all over with DANGER! LIVE INDIA MONGOOSE: THE SNAKE EATER. “When box is opened,” the catalog declared, “a spring mechanism releases a furry tail and loud noise.” It was listed adorably as “BOB HOPE NOVELTY TRICK BOX.” Chuck was sure he had the only legitimate reason to bid on it, and found his deadened capacity for amazement jolted back to life when it swiftly rose in price and, like everything else, out of his range.

  “You’re getting this dude a gag gift, right?” said Angel. “So I think it would have been hilarious if you got him a gag. I mean, a gag gift that’s a real gag? Hi-lare.”

  Chuck was bewildered and hurt. How was something from Bob Hope’s home a gag gift? He hadn’t thought of the box like that. He knew that Donny, lying there on his deathbed, would have gotten a real kick from handling this rare old piece of crude machinery that Bob had used to lay a cornball shock on the jaded partygoers of Palm Springs. Donny would think of some tough guy like Robert Mitchum whipping back his hand in fear and everybody having a snort of hooch and laughing about it around the old acrylic cocktail table. Chuck hoped it wasn’t heart trouble, though Donny would appreciate going out that way, mortally stunned by Bob Hope’s novelty trick box. Chuck had missed out on that frosted glass Christmas tree. It hadn’t seemed worth paying attention to. But it came with a note from Mitchum, which Chuck had noticed too late. That old softie, that big lug, giving Bob a Christmas tree. Who would have expected such tenderness and sentimentality in such a mismatched pair? They were just like Chuck and Donny.

  “A Bob Hope fashion award. That’s a gag gift,” Angel said.

  Chuck couldn’t explain to her why a Bob Hope fashion award, which indeed he had bid on for Donny, wasn’t a gag gift.

  “Do you even know who Bob Hope is?” he asked.

  “Does it matter?” she said. “Hey, look. I have a friend who likes to dress up like a teddy bear and put on a diaper and wet himself.”

  “Okay,” said Chuck.

  “I drew a picture of him with a Hungarian flag as a diaper, and I posted it to my tumblr,” said Angel. “I started getting all these angry comments, like, this is disrespect to Hungary or whatever. And I was like, ‘Whatevs’ or whatever. I was like, ‘My friend is from Hungary and he loves this picture.’ So you see?”

  Chuck didn’t see. He didn’t see at all. She was speaking gibberish. Or he was. He looked across the booth at her and was flooded with feelings. It wasn’t fair that Maria had to get older, replaced by this newer, firmer model, wearing clothes that might have been manufactured before Maria was born. People died and clothes lived forever? Something. Time had gone and got fluid on Chuck. He was one of those movie ghosts who doesn’t realize he’s dead until somebody points it out. His head swam and he must have looked a wretch. Angel reached across the table and touched his ghostly hand.

  “The keychain was cool,” she said, trying to make him feel better.

  He pulled his hand away.

  “The keychain was not cool. Twenty-two hundred for a keychain. I’m starting to feel like there’s something bad in the world.”

  “Any kind of membership card is cool,” she said. “It said on it that all theater managers should extend every courtesy to Bob Hope and his party.”

  Chuck had to laugh, imagining Bob Hope fishing around in his pockets for his keychain so he could get into a movie for free. She really understood nothing about Bob Hope’s place in the world. Soon she and her kind would be the only ones left on earth, a race of long-legged eternally youthful superbeings who smelled invigoratingly of soap.

  “I have to go back alone,” he said, signing the receipt for lunch.

  “Well,” she said, “give me a hug.”

  She stood up. He gave her a hug. He squeezed her too tight. He couldn’t help it.

  He watched her leave, a glimmering alien pharaoh’s daughter parting a sea.

  Chuck went into the deli bathroom, where he saw a stooped nonagenerian in a black suit. Chuck slipped past him into the stall and heard him out there knocking things over in big, chiming crashes. When he came out the old man was funereal as ever, bent over the sink, giving his crooked, lavender hands a slow
and proper bath that never ended. Nothing Chuck could see was out of place.

  12

  The auction house was a riot of cold cuts. Why did Chuck keep missing the free food? He returned to his seat. Things tumbled from the mouth of the man seated just in front and to the left of him: particles of bread; the pale, curled sliver of a sickly tomato; two confetti scraps of lettuce. The sloppy eater turned around to stare, his irises so round and dark he looked like a cartoon character. Eventually, once the auction was underway again, he moved on. A worker in a dark blue uniform jacket cleaned up most of the mess. This place was like a soup kitchen.

  Chuck dozed and had a vision of big ants crawling on a windowpane and a blue jay eating purple dragonflies, only its beak was broken. He woke himself up with a yell and found he was bidding on seventy swirled goblets, yellow and green. He bid some more. He drove up the price with what felt like horror and pulled out just in time to lose.

  He glanced over minutes after losing a crystal ice bucket and saw it in the cabinet at the end of his aisle, so much smaller than he had thought, and wondered if he were really as coarse as he seemed, judging worth by size. In Atlanta in the early ’90s, Veda had taken him to the birthday party of Ronnie Rude, a man with Down’s syndrome who worked carrying ice in a bucket from table to table at the Clermont Lounge.

  The Clermont was a kind of seedy club with weathered strippers who threw glitter and sang “Happy Birthday” to Ronnie Rude, and the glitter fell on the sad cake in the dark.

  As its part of Atlanta had become gentrified, the Clermont had maybe turned ironic, a gag, a novelty trick box, maybe overvalued by nostalgists and underground purists, or maybe its reality was insulted by slumming yuppies from Buckhead. Now they were turning the adjoining flophouse into a boutique hotel. Veda would have been appalled. Supposedly there were plans to keep the Lounge intact—a living historical exhibit, the Colonial Williamsburg of despair. Chuck wondered what people were willing to pay for things, and why. He was fascinated by those who knew which kind of trash was the good kind, like Maria with her cheap but excellent bleeding fried chicken from a grimy storefront, and the authentic pig’s foot he had seen bobbing around when she stirred her red beans and rice. It was a mysterious talent. Veda had always been very big on “authenticity,” but Chuck hadn’t thought about it much since she’d stopped being around.