Ear to the Ground. David L. Ulin

aspiring actors both, sat close together at a Salvation Army desk. They laughed heartily when the man hung up the phone, and for a moment it seemed he would kiss her full on the mouth. True, it was only voice work, but they were good mimics, and each time Michael Lipman met with a new client, he provided them with employment. Besides, he paid in cash.

      Ian had sent Michael a first draft of his new screenplay, Ear to the Ground. And though CC hadn’t read it, he did look it over for elements; he liked the earthquake angle, and had begun to work out a wish list of actors, including Sharon Stone and Johnny Depp. The plan was to go wide with it—that is, all over town. Michael was sure this would incite a bidding war. Ian had no problem with that, but he did explain he wanted rewrite work, and that he wasn’t afraid to start at the bottom.

      The following Saturday Michael called Ian at Grace’s, which annoyed her a little. What annoyed her a lot was the agent’s desperate attempt to excite Tailspin Pictures about Ear to the Ground. She looked away from Ian when she passed him the phone. “Get to the Café Med on Sunset, five o’clock,” Michael told him.

      There Ian met a skinny woman with dirty fingernails, around forty-five, who wore black, chain-smoked, and spoke Italian into a cellular phone. When he approached the table she folded up the apparatus, took his hand, and kissed both his cheeks. “I read your screenplay,” she told him. “And I like very much, earthquakes.”

      Penniless, Ian ordered coffee. Who is this lady? Does she have any money? Michael had said she was maybe good for a treatment—a grand, tops. But as the sun set, Ian thought he might charm her into something more. A screenplay, perhaps. Things were pretty tight now; his father had finally cut him off. “Get a job,” he’d said.

      “But I’m a writer.”

      “And I’m a father, but nobody pays me for it.”

      It was hard for the literary artist in the twentieth century, Ian thought. Especially in this town, where screenplays came in waist-high stacks, and bus drivers along Santa Monica Boulevard pitched whole stories between Highland and La Brea. Any night of the week, if you sat at the bar at Chaya or Jones and closed your eyes, you’d hear the word script rolling back and forth across the room, like an auditory lava lamp. Be patient, Ian remembered, always patient. Keep the faith. In Hollywood, anything can happen.

      And happen it did. After a couple of hours, a friend of the woman’s arrived and she was breathtaking—a young Italian actress, quite on fire. She claimed she would have been the star of Fellini’s last film, if Fellini had lived, but Ian didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t have to, though. The waiters hovered and freshened her drinks, offering warm rolls at the flutter of an eyelash. She told a story to the skinny woman in breakneck Italian, and then, full of energy, translated it for Ian.

      “I just had my fortune told by a gypsy lady.”

      “Uh-huh?” Ian was charmed.

      “My palm.” She pronounced it PAL-lem. “Do you know what she telled me?”

      Ian shook his head.

      “Destiny await you.”

      Then she hit the back of her hand against the table, as Italians sometimes do, and made a gap-toothed smile so stupendous that Ian had to fight the urge to grab her by the waist.

      She played the saxophone, she told them, and then pulled one out of a suitcase she had lugged to the table. It was tarnished, but she sat holding it, with a reed in her mouth, smiling into Ian’s eyes. Someone turned down Perry Como, and she stood up.

      Sometime after midnight Ian and the actress ended up in Silver Lake, at his place. Leonetta was her name, and she blew her saxophone through the night while Ian fiddled with his trumpet. Actually, they weren’t bad together. What they lacked in technical skill, they made up for with chemistry. And as they inched toward that morning hour where spending the night becomes a foregone conclusion, Ian noticed the light blinking like crazy on his answering machine, while he played an unpleasant, abstract riff, and considered how to go about suggesting the sleeping arrangements.

       SATURDAY NIGHT, PART TWO

      GRACE WAS PISSED. IAN’S RIDICULOUS AGENT HAD CALLED and harassed her—at home, for Christ’s sake—about Ear to the Ground. What a joker Michael Lipman was. Here it was, Saturday night, and he had set up some kind of meeting. Grace was so angry she hardly even looked up when Ian headed for the door. “I’ll call you,” he told her.

      Three hours later, though, Ian still hadn’t called, and Grace had moved toward the numb realization that she’d been taken for granted again. It was almost summer, and the days were languid, nearly tropical. As twilight settled over the city and fog began to drift across the Hollywood Hills, Grace found herself pacing the rooms of her apartment, imagining a man who wouldn’t leave her hanging on a Saturday, who would maybe buy her flowers once in a while, clean up the kitchen after himself, or at least replace the coffee when he’d used it up.

      She dialed Ian’s number, left a nasty message, and went to get her keys. Fuck him, she thought. She didn’t need Ian. She was an adult. She could take care of herself. There was that new place on Beverly they’d been wanting to try, where she could get a nice piece of fish, lightly grilled, and a glass of wine. And after that … well, she could always read a couple of scripts.

      Navaro was on the building’s front stoop when Grace reached the bottom of the stairs. Please don’t talk to me, she thought, and then: I don’t have to deal with you, I can just go on my way. But he said hello and, of course, she said hi, cursing herself for not having the strength to be rude.

      “All alone tonight?” Navaro asked. In her faded jeans and T-shirt, Grace clearly was not dressed for a date.

      “Ian’s working.”

      “He don’t know the meaning of the word.” Navaro shook his head with a bitter little laugh. “He sits around all day and works on Saturday night? The whole time me and Elise, God forgive her, were together, I’d always be home by six-thirty, every Saturday night.”

      God forgive her? Grace thought. “That’s nice,” she said.

      “Yeah. Elise.” Over Navaro’s shoulder, the last dregs of daylight faded to black. “I ever show you her picture?”

      “No.” Grace’s stomach tightened like a fist.

      “Wanna see?”

      She hesitated, and Navaro took that for a yes. He headed for his front door, leaving her on the steps to wait for him.

      Just then, a Honda Civic pulled up in front of the building, and Charlie climbed out the passenger side. He leaned into the open window and looked at Kenwood, who was sitting in the driver’s seat, hands tight on the wheel.

      “You’re not gonna go home and stare at her picture, are you?” Charlie asked.

      Kenwood shook his head.

      “You want to get some dinner?”

      “Not hungry.”

      “Then do me one favor? Don’t go jumping off any bridges.”

      “What bridge did you have in mind?” Kenwood looked up.

      “Good point.” Charlie smiled, and backed away from the car. “So I’ll see you Monday?”

      Kenwood nodded, and the Civic crawled away from the curb.

      Grace watched the sandy-haired man walk up the path, flickering in and out of patches of lamplight.

      “You must be Charlie,” she said.

      “And you must be Grace.”

      They smiled for a moment that stretched nearly into discomfort. Then Navaro’s door squeaked open, and Grace’s face fell like a stone.

      “Do you know about computers and everything?”