The Ivy (Apples and Oranges)

The Ivy

In a high-fashion magazine dated 1979, the year of her birth, she read that he often took an early lunch at The Ivy when he was in Los Angeles, so she began going there once and a while, not so much hoping to see him, it had been thirty years, but to indulgently bask in the possibility of seeing him, yet, in all honesty not so much that either. It had more to do with sharing his preference for the place, its sights, smells and tastes, and for a time, to let her mind wander, free from financial panic, the most coveted luxury (in her mind, anyway) of the rich and famous.
Ivy days, carefully worked into the monthly budget, were chosen at random with the help of two darts launched at the kitchen calendar on the first of each month while she sipped cold coffee from her unwieldy futon. Friends were neither informed of, nor invited along on her lunch dates (tenebrously labeled in crayon); the days were hers and hers alone. A rare escape that she afforded herself with much self-congratulation. “It sure beats therapy,” she would tell the mirror in the ladies room while practicing her disinterested face.
Her costume varied, but circled around central themes, classic, simple lines, vintage, sixties inspired, basically anything one of his leading ladies would have worn. Jackie-O sunglasses, silk scarves, pencil skirts, and occasionally a fitted angora/cashmere blend, pale-blue sweater with tiny rhinestone buttons along the dainty cuff. On cool days she featured a raw silk, knee-length, tailored coat with small blue, white and brown flowers, and in the pits of the summer she plucked her wardrobe from an ever-growing garden of simple cotton sundresses that had taken root in her tiny hall closet. Clean, tasteful, she never overdid it. For this was a covert exercise. Garnering attention was not the goal.
Once a young waiter asked after her profession. “I’m a perfectly cast extra in the drama that is Hollywood,” she replied, trying her dandiest to channel Audrey Hepburn, “I do nothing. I am no one.”
This simple comment brought with it a shroud of mystery she could not have paid for even if all the speculations that eventually grew around her were true. She became a haughty regular--her privacy, respected. She was promptly delivered a glass of 2004 Los Camaros, Benziger upon her every arrival. And all the waiters, even the new ones, knew to ask if she would be starting with the Heirloom Baratta salad.
This didn’t happen overnight of course. It took months of silence, generous tipping, and carefully selected reading material--The New Yorker, The Times, and occasionally just a notebook and pen, “So, you’re a writer?” “No, but I will have another glass of Chardonnay.” What fun it was to sojourn amongst the privileged. What a guilty little thrill to up her position in life simply by keeping silent and wrestling with an arrogant forced humbleness. How exhilarating to catch a look from a passing television star wondering behind his Christian Dior sunglasses, just who is she?
But these were merely the perks of investing one-fifth of her income into the Ivy lunches. The meat of the excursions was getting to spend time with him. Oh, sweet obsession, as indulgent as candy covered sex chocolate, she had always preferred ghosts in favor of the living. She had her fill of fleshy disappointments, expectations never met, sour smells and hangovers, dirty sheets and betrayal. The Ivy was the great purger, the eraser on the chalkboard of her soul, a place where all the ugliness in her life was unwelcome. It whimpered away from the hovering archangels of perfume, coffee and lobster bisque. It cowered at the infantry of celebrities, white-coated waiters, and fresh cut flowers. And like a cherry on top, sitting in the corner since 1979, engaging a table full of executives, or sometimes alone with The Times, he sat.
She’d seen every one of his films, three times, at least. Her favorite was a black and white picture from the late 50’s in which he played an artist. He wasn’t the star but he stole the show with ease. She loved his ease. The way he seemed far more comfortable on the screen than any other actor he worked with. How comedy was like breathing for him, drama, like eating a sandwich. He marveled her. His hand movements, his control, and a wry smile so intrinsically his he could have had it copyrighted. How she longed for one thimble full of his brilliance. Not that she wasn’t talented, she was. Albeit unmotivated at times, but that wasn’t her fault. Hollywood, she reasoned, was not a good place for the talented. The talented tended to get lost. To get correlated in giant piles that sat in corners of offices, collecting dust. Or on rare occasion, used to balance a shaky desk. No, there was only room for two kinds of people in Hollywood--the wildly attractive and the genius.
She dressed in front of the oscillating fan, pulling control top pantyhose up over her bony hips while gazing with disdain at her rectangular torso. A pink ribbon she had tied to the protective cage over the blades tickled her belly button, an outie that she vowed to make into an innie as soon as the casting directors who came to her acting class removed their heads from their respective asses and the money started rolling in. She had recently dyed her bobbed hair auburn, but hated the way it looked in the light. It’s purple, she thought. She had specifically asked the stylist not to give her plum tones, that she wanted warm, not cool. It’s just that he was so atrociously Alpha, and people like that easily intimidated her. She chose a green and white cotton dress that accentuated her A-cups, and flats because she was tall for a girl. Most movie stars are tiny, she had been told. Even her paramour was only five-nine, which gave her a three-inch disadvantage, he also tended toward curvier women: blondes in bullet bras, kitten-on-the-head, fountain dancing types with accents. So how did the fantasy play out? How did she win him twice a month, while staring blankly at the air above the corner table, mindlessly wrapping an anchovy around a soggy crouton to save for later? In what reality would he, could he, ever be hers?
Well, there was the “it’s something in your eyes” fantasy, the one where he looked at her and recognized a kindred soul. Then there was the “tear in the fabric of space-time” fantasy, in which she knew his future and was able to offer him advice taken from the pages of his own worn autobiography. Sometimes she would imagine that she had a special talent that captivated him, such as speaking seven languages or playing the mandolin, or that they were in a film together and she was the only one capable of volleying with him during spontaneous moments of improvisation. Or maybe they were friends, close friends, until one night…
Such fantasies (intricate, lengthy and detailed) humiliated her, truth be told. She knew that only immature, stupid people obsess in such a way. That there was very little separating her from a teenage girl salivating over Lindsay Lohan in the latest issue of Tiger Beat. The very definition of “infatuate” is to make a fool of, so she kept it all very close to the chest, intellectualizing it. It was her escape, nothing more. Some people had tennis, hiking, yoga, religion; she had lunch that was all. Until the day he walked into the Ivy.
The last time she had laid eyes on him, the current him, the eighty-two-year-old him, was two weeks earlier on one of those Access Hollywood type shows. She was at a friend’s house, and the friend, knowing her to be a fan, turned up the volume on the television while commenting on how fortunate they were to have stumbled onto the program since he never has the TV on. She sat in the center of the couch with her legs tucked under her body sipping a glass of warm, two-dollar Cabernet, known to a certain set of Angelinos as two-buck Chuck. Horrified by the concept when it was first introduced to her a week or two after her west-coast relocation, it had inspired a sense of pity and repulsion, conjuring images of UCLA frat parties and washed-up, wine guzzling child-stars. But like so many things about Los Angeles that she had once found repellent, she now gulped, mindlessly, refilling her glass from the bottle, leaving rings on the Ikea coffee table.
Poor dear, he looked like a prune. It made her sad. Aging made her sad. His eyes seemed glazed over with a milky-white film. And his smile, oh that smile, it had cut her deep to the loins on so many occasions, and now? Wretchedly ironic, like hearing an out of date commercial jingle decades after the product has ceased to exist. It awoke that familiar twinge of embarrassment and she told her friend to switch it off.
But him in The Ivy: that she couldn’t turn off, that was unacceptable. She was contemplating escape when the waiter brought her wine. They were out of the Benziger, so would she please accept his choice, a glass of the Yulupa free of charge? But she was distracted and he could tell.
The waiter, an Abercrombie and Fitch model named Dylan, who while very kind, made her feel ugly, followed her glare to where the actor and his companion were settling. Not the corner table, but a simple booth, two booths down from hers.
“Oh, he comes in here all the time. Has been since, like, the eighties.”
She wanted to correct him. He had been coming since 1979. But she caught the impulse in her nerd-net, leaving Dylan unaware that he bastardized historical facts.
“Is that so?” she said, trying to seem as though she were pretending to be impressed rather than actually being impressed which, would have made her look weak somehow.
“But I waited on Britney, yesterday, so, ya know…” Dylan gave her that little look so intrinsic to the Hollywood waiter who has seen it all. A bored, quick, half-eye-roll, followed by a cute self-deprecating grin. Dylan was stunning. Too young for her of course, and he probably had some blonde surfy-thing who drank Malibu Rum and pineapple juice following him around. Oh sure, that might get boring, she thought. He might desire the learned arms of the slightly older woman, but she had no future with Dylan. She smiled and accepted the Yalupa, half expecting it to taste like it came from Taco Bell, and when (almost to her surprise) it did not, she drank the whole glass down in under five generous sips.
She couldn’t bring herself to look up. The actor was in her line of sight. She knew that, she could feel it. It was even possible that he had looked at her already. That her mousy image had bounced from his frosted corneas up to his exceptional brain and played there like an image in a slideshow. He might even, by now, be able to pick her out of a lineup. She tried to read, translation, eavesdrop on whatever conversation was happening between him and the younger man who shared his table. But lunchtime was rapidly picking up. It was impossible to hear.
She felt exposed suddenly. Alone. This had never been an issue at The Ivy before. Like a Christian in the throes of the Rapture, a question tortured her mind. Now what? She could have hit him with her desert spoon. There was no escaping this. She couldn’t leave; his gravitational pull was far too strong. The years of emotional energy expended left her ultimately exhausted, her mortification weighing her down, sticking her sweating calves to the banquet and trapping her there. She couldn’t even use her phone to call a sympathetic friend. What if he could read lips, or even worse, was offended by cell phone use in restaurants?
She glanced in his direction. Easy. Okay. He was wearing a jacket, dark, and a shirt, blue. No tie. His head looked like a ball of gray yarn with glasses, but she had only looked quickly. This was a catastrophe. His presence put her life up until that point into such stark perspective that she wouldn’t have been surprised if everyone in the restaurant broke out into rolling waves of laughter directed at her. So she sat and drank, for that was all she could do, and as mid-day turned into afternoon, and two glasses of wine turned into three, she decided that this would be her last trip to The Ivy.
Twenty minutes later, the wine having brought with it a heady sort of devil-may-care confidence, she willed her body towards the bathroom, sailing past his booth without so much as a peek at him. She did however look at the table. He was attempting to coax a particularly stubborn shrimp onto his fork with the aid of a butter knife, while his lunch companion, a younger man whose eyes she did meet (dark, familiar) was becoming increasingly irate.
“Why not?” he said, attempting to maintain control of himself. “I never heard of such a thing. She’s your daughter. You can’t just…”
In the bathroom she’d be quick, but not too quick, to powder her nose. She was hoping to catch a second act to put the scene she witnessed into context, but the ladies room was choked with chattering Barbies who took so long in the stalls you would have thought they were in there giving birth. Five minutes passed. He was probably gone by now. Seven. God!
Finally, the handicapped stall freed up. The seat looked as if it had been left out in a toxic rain and she was glad to have something to hold onto as she hovered drunkenly, pressing down on her abdomen to save time. She practically ran from the bathroom, not bothering with the hand dryer, wiping her hands on her skirt and turning the corner into the dining room just in time for the grand finale, hitting the brakes so hard she almost fell face first into Cesar salad.
The younger man was standing now, gathering his things. He was blocking the way back to her table.
“If that’s how you want it, then fine. You can go to hell. And when you die, she’ll sue us, get everything, and your grandson can go to community college.” He was red in the face. She’d never seen someone so angry in The Ivy before. And since she was, in a way, a captive audience, forced to wait while he finished his rant and stormed out, she felt it wouldn’t be out of line to steal a look at the old man taking the brunt of the rage. He seemed surprisingly emotionless.
“Are you going?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m going. I’m sorry I came.” The young man checked his cell phone and put it in his pocket. Then took out his wallet and threw two bills, a five and a ten, into the remains of his pasta primavera.
“Well, go then. You’re in this young lady’s way.” She inhaled and held it. The younger man left in a huff. And when he was gone, the aging movie star looked at her square in the face and smiled apologetically.
Her heart popped like a glitter filled balloon. Could he see the shimmers cascading down around her like magical silver snow? She smiled back, and gave him the same half-eye roll Dylan had graced her with earlier. And the Yalupa having beefed up her courage, yet without really thinking, she spoke to him.
“He owes you two dollars,” she said, regretting it immediately.
“What?”
“He left you fifteen. I know for a fact that pasta costs seventeen.”
“He owes me more than that,” said the actor, fishing the bills from their bed of penne and sun-dried tomatoes. She grinned politely, straining empathy, and moved off. She could live with that exchange. It was a good story to tell her friends. She had been witty and kind. And at no point did he try to have her thrown out. It was supposed to be over, but his voice stopped her, pulled her back till her hips were resting against her chair, making her aware of inappropriate parts of her body.
“And the hysterical part is that he drove me here. What kind of bastard leaves an old man stranded?” She felt for him, suddenly. Now that they were chatting, now that he had become a real person, it all seemed okay somehow. Her cover had not been blown. She was simply a fellow member of the human race having a casual encounter with an unfortunate soul.
“Let me ask the hostess to call you a car.”
“No, no. I can call my driver.” A withered hand lightly pet the cell phone sitting on the table beside him. He could sense that this embarrassed her. “Do you always eat alone?”
“I come here to get away,” she confessed, inching slowly back to the safety of her table.
“Here? You’re at The Ivy. People come here to see and be seen. Are you an actress?” But she had turned a frightening shade of crimson. She attempted the eye roll again but she could feel how desperate it must have looked.
“I’m trying. I take a class,” she whispered.
“Classes are for morons. Sit.” He gestured with his fingers as if he was conducting a very tiny orchestra. “Let’s have coffee.” And since it didn’t seem like she was being given a choice, she sat.
“My purse,”
“The waiter can get it. So…”
“Ava.”
“Really? You don’t look like an Ava.” And she didn’t, but no one had ever told her to her face before. “Where are you from?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Philadelphia?”
“Altoona.”
“Ah. Ava from Altoona. I was born in Athens.” He said, stressing all the A’s.
“Georgia. I know.” He seemed to ignore this minor revelation and flagged down a confused Dylan with the subtlest of twitches.
“The lady needs her purse and I need two cups of coffee.”
“Of course. Any dessert, sir?” The actor turned to his new lunch date.
“Ava?”
If it were possible to turn any redder, the look Dylan gave her would have likened her face to the chasse of a fire truck. It was as if he silently called her out. Nice going, Anna Nicole, his eyes accused with a smirk. “Oh, oh no. I’m fine. No dessert.”
With the waiter gone, the actor continued his interrogation.
“So, do you have an agent?”
“Not yet. I’ve only been here six months,” she said, trying to sound optimistic.
“How do you pay the rent? Do you have a boyfriend?” He was so still. His eyes so focused. It was impossible to lie to him.
“No. I, I wait tables.” He pondered this as the coffee arrived, delivered by a disinterested Mexican busboy.
“So you probably make about as much money as that bus boy, yet you lunch at The Ivy.”
“I come here to get away,” she repeated.
“So you said.”
“It’s a hard city when you’re just starting out. I can be someone else here. You must think that’s awfully foolish of me.”
“On the contrary, I find it fascinating.”
The remainder of lunch was, for lack of a better word, lovely. As they sipped their coffee the older actor inquired about nearly every facet of her life. And when the busboy came by to refill their cups, and he passed saying that coffee had stopped agreeing with him years ago, he encouraged her to indulge in a second round, commenting with a flick of his fingers that it would be his pleasure just to watch her drink it.
She never took her coffee black, but decided in this case she would. This woman from her acting class liked her coffee black and for some reason this had impressed Ava. That and the way she played her fingers nervously along the edge of the cup while engaging fully with her eyes. She hung on Ava’s every word but seemed fundamentally distracted, a tortured part of her locked away, inaccessible. It was viciously attractive so she mimicked it here for the benefit of her older actor friend while he carried on about the futility of organized acting classes.
“You may as well join a cult. Quit tomorrow. You’re throwing your money away. If you want to act, go out and act. Don’t pay someone to climb into your head and mess with your instincts.”
She defended Arrow, her acting teacher, by saying that he was simply an encouraging force, who helped his students focus on their goals. “We made a vision board last week--it’s a kind of collage--you take little pictures of all the things you want to realize in your life and stick them together on poster board and--”
But right in the middle of her explanation he picked up his cell phone and hit the speed dial.
“Alex, I’m at The Ivy…My ungrateful first born…Fine.” He put the phone down just as Dylan passed with the check. “Add whatever Ava had to this, will you?”
“Thank you,” she ventured. But things had changed between them. He stood and raised his eyebrows at her in a gesture that translated into the most unenthusiastic your welcome she had ever received. Was it disappointment? Has she offended him? Or was her time, simply, up?
Helpless, she watched him leave. Feeling her eyes well up, she pressed her fingernails into the palms of her hands. Vision board, what was she thinking? Of all the lame, pathetic uninteresting things to say, how sheltered, how positively Altoona of her. Maybe he was right, maybe acting classes were pointless and maybe by needing them she was hopeless. After all, by the time he was her age his career had already peeked, twice.
Down trodden and still too drunk to drive, she had the hostess call her a cab and stepped out into the bright afternoon to wait for it. She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, though she seldom smoked during the day, and lit up protecting the flame from the nonexistent breeze with her hand, and then tucked a pin-straight lock of purple hair behind her ear.
“You smoke like Charlotte Rampling,” he said. She turned to see the actor resting against the signature white picket fence. “It’s always a treat to watch a woman move when she thinks no one’s watching.”
Ava put her sunglasses on to hide yet another avalanche of emotion. “Was it something I said?” She took a drag and let it slowly out, the way she guessed Charlotte might.
“No, my dear. I’m an old man. Sometimes I forget myself.” There was an awkward moment of silence, which he kindly broke. “Do you live far?”
“Not very,” she lied. “But I think I’ve had one to many Yalupa’s to risk the drive home. My cab is on its way.” Just as the words were leaving her lips, a black town car pulled up and stopped at the curb in front of them.
“And mine has just arrived. Would you?” He raised his arm ever so slightly and she took it, helping him from his position and towards the town car. The driver, Alex, who seemed only a few years younger then the actor, had made his way around the car and opened the door for them without batting an eye at the tall young woman in the green dress.
“Alex this is Ava. We’re going to be taking her home.”
“Oh, that’s not at all necessary. I really will be fine.” She noticed for the first time that she had been speaking as if she’d just tripped off the pages of an Evelyn Waugh novel. Something about being with him antiquated her speech. God, what a poser. Sometimes she thought herself less of an actress and more of a chameleon. Or what was the other one? A lemming.
The car reminded her immediately of the limousine she rode in on the way to her grandfather’s funeral, stale and depressing. She wondered if death started hanging around the old, waiting, bringing its along aura with it. He opened a hidden compartment in the armrest and took out a medium size pillbox, downing the contents with water from a visibly reused water bottle. She thought she might take this opportunity to tell him how much she loved his films, but she didn’t want to seem gushy in front of Alex, who was no doubt wondering who in the hell she was. She decided to listen and be grateful, playing herself off as possibly the child of an old acquaintance.
“How old are you, Ava,” he asked, without looking up.
“I’m twenty-five.” She had in fact, been twenty-nine for a solid two months.
“Well, you look younger. I have a daughter who’s about your age. I had no idea she existed until three weeks ago and now can you guess what she wants?”
Rhetorical?
“Money. She wants money. They all want money. I have two sons. Sons I raised, sons I afforded every possible luxury, toys, cars, the best schools…” He faded off for a moment only to start up again. “They hate me for it. I ruined them. Now one is married to a man and the other is a folk musician. Don’t ever have children, Ava.”
While she enjoyed how open he was being regarding his personal life, she hadn’t failed to notice that neither the actor, nor his driver, had inquired as to where she lived. It had been her plan to have them drop her at her friend Samantha’s place, for Samantha was in development and could actually afford a home worth looking at. Unlike her ghetto building in the heart of K-town, with its peppering of drug addicts and gang bangers. And though she tried with all her grace to find an opening in his monologue, it wasn’t long before the car hit an all to familiar forty-five-degree up slope probably entitled, Doheny, Larabee, Londonderry, Queens, Kings, or possibly Laurel Canyon, snaking its way up towards Mulholland. She couldn’t be sure exactly because to look out the window and away from him while he was so passionately engrossed would have been rude.
“I have been with some of the most beautiful women in the world, you know. Jane, Kim, Ava, not you of course, Ava Gar--” The car took a sharp turn to the right, the inertia sending his frail shoulder into her bare arm. “Pardon me,” he righted himself with the help of her left leg, “mountain roads,” and met her eyes with a sly grin.
“You know, this is going to seem awfully embarrassing,” she said crossing her legs away from him, “but I think we forgot to drop me off.”
“Did we?” He took a sip of water from the bottle. Some of it dripped down his chin but he didn’t bother to wipe it away.
“Yes. I think we did.”
“Well, he’s not psychic. He’s a driver but he’s not psychic,” the actor grumbled.
“I’m going to Fairfax and-”
“Well, it’s too late now. I have an urgent appointment with W.C. Crapper.”
In a more recent magazine article on his life, it was alluded to that the actor was known to be somewhat difficult in situations that weren’t going primarily in his way. He was also known to be a bit of a cad when it came to women, throwing tantrums, breaking all manner of furniture. Even one or two instances of domestic violence, though never prosecuted, tarnished his record. Ava wondered if it wasn’t a bit of this she sensed coming through now. She recalled a quote made by one of his co-stars, “He (the actor) could be very ornery at times. If something wasn’t living up to his expectations, he would throw a fit and storm off set only to return an hour later eating a chili-dog and going on about some girl he’d picked up.”
Ava hoped his mood would change soon so they could have a pleasant good bye before he had Alex drive her home, but for now she decided to sit quietly as they weaved their way farther up into the Hollywood Hills.
The car dipped through a tasteful gate and finally came to rest on a curvy driveway shaded by lush overgrowth and wild palm trees. She got out when the door was opened for her, but only to let him out. She intended to get right back in, and felt a twinge of nerves when Alex closed the door behind them. The air reeked of eucalyptus, it made her head spin, that, and the reality of where she was. Someone had pointed out the gate to her once on a tour through the hills, but being there was the stuff of fantasy, and dying with every passing moment.
“Charlie! Buster! Harpo!” The actor moved towards his impressively arched front door an opened it. In a tsunami of fur, three small yappy Pomeranians spilled out and danced around their master’s feet like desperate chorus girls. “Whose daddy’s little babies? Whose daddy’s little babies? You’re daddy’s babies. Yes you are. Yes you are…”
The blush returned to Ava’s cheeks as she searched the area frantically for Alex. She saw the driver, who for some odd reason she had assumed to be the saner of the two, kicking a rock mindlessly toward the three-car garage. As the actor continued his one sided dialogue with his dogs, the driver stopped, picked up the rock and tossed it defiantly into some bushes then disappeared around the back of the house and out of sight. Just as Ava was beginning to digest the reality that she might be stranded forever on the space her two feet occupied, the actor called to her.
“Hurry up girl, you’ll catch your death out there. Blizzard’s a comin’. Do you know how to boil a kettle?” He stood stone faced in the doorway.
“Why, yes. Are we having hot coco…?” But her words trailed off as nature willed him inside; her witty retort was lost to the tailored lawn flicked with playful puddles of diffused sunlight. Somewhere she could hear a water fountain. And since peace and tranquility was alien to her, and since she knew she wasn’t being observed, Ava ran towards the doorway, her heart turning over in her chest like a flipped coin. Out of habit she called it—heads—and pushed opened the door.
He had starred in a Technicolor musical, circa 1948. She owned the original soundtrack on vinyl and would listen to it during hazy afternoons while soaking her waitress weary feet in Epsom salts on her crabgrass veranda. There was a waltz in act two, her favorite. With a glass of sugary iced-tea in one hand and a cigarette in the other, she would let her head drop gently back against the stucco wall of her 3’ by 5’ patio and narrow her eyes, blocking out the dirty road and the street signs, so only blue sky and palm trees were visible in her sphere. The grand orchestrations transported her to a place, or more of a feeling really, of sublime perfection. Here, she suspected.
In the middle of the hall, wrapped with a grand staircase that seemed to unfurl like ribbon, stood an antique table adorned with disturbingly vibrant cut lilies. Their waxy heads nodded to the music, encouraging her to enter, reassuring. Nothing can harm you here, they seemed to say, in here everything is a waltz. The ceiling was vaulted and flawlessly framed a tasteful chandelier. A stained glass skylight dripped kaleidoscopic colors onto the curved walls, just kissing the tops of mysterious arched doorways that she imagined lead to parlors and morning rooms. But the real beauty of the house was evident to Ava only after she found the nerve to tiptoe past the lush floral arrangement. A pair of French doors, a jar, opened on a sunken living room and followed an expertly crafted architectural line to a row of three more French doors, the middle leading into the garden and the source of the water she had heard; a fountain worthy of Hearst Castle.
As the waltz in her mind was nearing its end, she had a crude thought about how the chandelier alone could probably pay her rent for two whole years, and stopped all together when one of his dogs found her, barking excitedly, scratching her stockings and finally peeing on her shoes.
“Buster?”
“He’s here. I have him.” Ava slipped out of her soggy flats and tried to encourage the dog away from its offending puddle as the actor came slowly into sight from the living room. “He got excited. Where do you keep the paper towels?”
The actor looked at her strangely as the dog continued his metronomic yap.
“Do I know you, Miss?” Her heart flipped again—tails.
“Ava… From the Ivy,” she ventured slowly.
But he grinned that half mouthed grin of his. “I’ve been waiting eighty-two years to use that joke. Towels are in the kitchen but just leave it, that’s what I pay Alex for.”
“Oh, okay. Thank you.”
He noticed her bare feet. “Did Buster have a piddle on your pumps?” The words piddle and pumps made Ava’s face hot.
“He mistook me for a fire hydrant, yes.”
“I have just the thing. Leave it all here and come with me.”
He led her down through the French Doors and into the living room. The furnishings were Fifties modern, yet not without warmth. Long low couches in what had once been rich navy blue, flanked a polished wood coffee table topped with yet another alien flower bouquet, its blooms ostensibly plucked from the Mesozoic Age. Placed with care all along the walls, were sleek Swedish cabinets below hovering works of modern art. Small black and white photographs dotted their surfaces drawing Ava’s eye. How she would love to pour over them, to see him again as a young man. But the actor didn’t give her the chance. Instead he led her out into the garden.
“Oh, how perfectly—intoxicating,” she gasped. Her hands covered her heart one at a time as she gazed on tens of thousands of white roses.
“There used to be order back here. Now it seems they’ve gotten the better of me.”
“They’re all white,” she whispered.
“My second wife was horrifying cunt, but she had a way with flowers.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“You can wash your feet if you like. The water’s quite warm.” The actor sat on the edge of his three-tiered stone fountain with his hands resting softly in his lap. Ava joined him at a distance, and without meeting his gaze reached up under her skirt and pulled off her torn pantyhose.
“Buster owes me new tights,” she grinned and lifted one long leg and then the other over the stone partition into the emerald green water made so by an ornate mosaic tile composition. He watched her legs, slender and youthful; materialize shyly from under the skirt she wore. Her toenails were painted black but he imagined them red.
“May I ask you a question?” she almost mumbled this.
“Is it personal?”
“No.”
“Too bad.” He didn’t smile for it seemed to send the girl into shivers. He wondered what would happen if he touched her?
“Why did you bring me here?” Her hazel eyes watched the surface of the water and her blush returned.
It was endearing, her innocence. It could have been a game but he doubted it. She seemed a perfect lamb, the kind that comes along once a season, if that. This tall, languid girl, playing dress up with herself, dreaming of this moment, of an escape…“I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?”
It had been so long. And the older he got, the less inclined they were to hang around, even for the money. It dawned on him that he could have this blushing girl for free, he immediately regretted being crude with her earlier. But she was unshakeable and detached, a part of her locked away--viciously attractive. The thought gave him a slight rush. He knew to tread carefully. “You got in my car…” He wanted to touch her suddenly, but maintained his control. This, for him, was the sweetest part of the seduction. Is that what this was? “When you could have said something you didn’t…” Her legs kicked nervously at a floating twig causing a strand of brown hair to come loose and curve down meeting her lower lip. “I didn’t bring you here, Ava. You brought yourself. I’m the one who should be asking why.” In a daring move he lifted the stray strand of hair and brushed it away.
She lifted her head, her lips slightly parted. She looked like a child, a gamine. Nothing at all like the usual Hollywood fare, this girl was charming, skittish as a kitten, breakable.
His closeness scared her so he moved away.
“I don’t know why I came. It all happened so quickly and you, well you…”
If he had been thirty younger here is where he would have kissed her. He would have taken her in his arms and kissed her long and deep while she struggled to keep herself from sliding into the fountain. He would have unzipped her dress and run his hand down her thin white back, waiting until he knew he had her fully in his power. Then he would have whispered to her to stand, the water up to her thighs, her dress ruined, floating on the surface of the water like a lily pad. “Strip for me,” he would say, and once she was naked, he would stand back and study her. She did resemble Charlotte Rampling, and the sadness in her eyes held shadows of Louise Brooks. Some women, standing naked in his fountain (and there had been many), smiled and laughed but Ava, this Ava, would not. She would follow him with her pleading eyes. Demurely covering herself. And when he said the words, the words he always said, she would blush and lower herself into the water. She wouldn’t come up immediately, like some, she would float there, eyes opened, like Ophelia tangled in her lily pad dress. Only when her breath was tapped would she come up. Her eyes once again meeting his, he would kiss her and tell her to wait. The waiting game was his weakness. He would return a call, smoke a cigarette, or occasionally leave altogether for a meeting, or lunch at The Ivy. When he returned, sometimes they’d be gone, but not Ava. She would be there where he left her, fingers having turned to prunes. He would help her from the fountain; dry her, on his knees, kissing her legs and stomach and thighs all the while. Then he would lead her to the bedroom and draw the thick curtains. They would make love in the dark, safe from the omniscient California sun and when it was over, he would send her away forever.
“…It’s just, I love your work.” Ava sat staring at the actor, but he seemed detached. He’d gone off again. His eyes were in the fountain, searching, as if he had lost something. She placed three fingers briefly on his knee.
“Yes. Then you’ll want to see Oscar.”
He walked along the edge of the garden, the house on his left, a sea of roses on his right and down a narrow bridge that led to a wing of the house hanging off the hill, open to a hidden valley. Ava followed, her bare feet skirting the occasional rock or thorn, until they came to another French door, this one covered on the inside with long thick curtains. He held them back for her and she entered, as if hypnotized by roses or another one of his slight of finger tricks.
The bedroom was dark, better to hide her panic, and while she searched for the perfect words, ones that would let him down easily, he moved to a small glass cabinet and flipped the light switch illuminating its glorious contents.
“They send you the plaque in the mail. You have to glue it on yourself. As you can see I let my son do it. He was three at the time.” The little piece of gold plated metal bearing his name, the year, and the words Best Actor, was upside down and crooked. But the statue sat on a mirrored base so that when you looked down at the reflection it was upright.
“It’s amazing, really.” Ava’s feet sunk into the soft carpet, trapping her there like quicksand. “Still… I really should leave.”
“But you’ve come so far, Ava.” The actor took a step back hiding him self among the shadows of the dark room. “I know this isn’t what you want, how you want it. But here in the dark, it isn’t so bad. I want so desperately just to touch you.” From the shadows Ava sensed movement. One of his dogs was dozing in a corner. The room smelled heavy and wet, like dead flowers, mold and body odor. “I want to feel my hands on you, my lips, just for a moment, then you can go.”
“I don’t know if I can.” The actor moved around the perimeter of the room and switched off the Oscar light leaving them in darkness.
“You can. And I offer you nothing in return. I’m an old man, Ava. If I had one wish right now it would be to unbind this cloak of years and let it fall to the floor,” his fingers found her neck and traced her spine down to the zipper on her dress. Neither of them breathed as he lowered it all the way to the small of her back, “but I cannot.”
Ava turned, facing him. In the dark room there was still enough light to make out his silhouette. She lost track of the decade, of herself. “How did I get here?”
“You followed me home.”
“You brought me here.”
“You came here.”
She inhaled.
“You wanted this—me. A part of you did.”
“But not this way.”
“Then how?” In the dark he removed his glasses and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose. “Forgive an old fool,” he whispered.
“For what?”
“My delusions.”
Ava slowly raised her hands to the thin straps of her dress and slid them off her shoulders. The dress collapsed to her waist. She took his hands and placed them on her sides just below the ribs.
“You’re forgiven.”
This is how they used to be, alive for him. Not the plastic wind up dolls Alex brought, but tortured, baptized in his fountain, loving him despite themselves. He had been tired at The Ivy, so tired. He felt tired again now, holding her, this lithe girl, in his hands.
“Put me to bed, Ava.” An unexpected hot breeze parted the heavy curtains and a shaft of light fell across her body, withering at his touch. The waltz began in earnest. Glitter filled balloons popped above them. The heat melted the glue so that Oscar could bend down and fix his plaque.
“I’m tired, Ava. I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.”
He looked younger in the half-light. She had given him thirty years from her rib cage. He held it so softly, his hands not moving. He hadn’t noticed her gift it yet but he would. He would be fifty-two, still young, a prime of sorts. He would nap and when he woke he would know what she had done. His eyes, without their milky film would see her and know.
“Anything else, Miss?”
She would lie with him. Later, his son would find them, or Alex, it changed, but they would keep her secret. They’d have to, and from then on they would all age backwards like Merlin.
This was just another way that it worked out in her mind. Another way she won him. There was the “it’s something in your eyes” fantasy, the “tear in the fabric of space-time” fantasy. Sometimes she would imagine that she had a special talent that captivated him, or that they were in a film together and she was the only one capable of volleying with him during spontaneous moments of improvisation.
“Coffee? Tea? Amaretto?”
Or maybe he came into The Ivy as an old man and she followed him home. Maybe she waded in his fountain and walked among his roses. And maybe, in the dark of his room she placed his hands gently on her sides and gave him thirty years off her life. It all seemed so real, like you could touch it.
“Anything else, Miss?”
“Just the check, Dylan.”
“You’re not gonna tell me your name this time?”
“Just the check, Dylan,” and with a wry half-smile, she thanked him, paid it, and left The Ivy.


Adria Lang
September, 2008