Bride of the Rat God (25 page)

“It’s supposed to look like the real Venice,” Christine had told Norah some weeks earlier, when Venice of America had been mentioned during a break in filming
Sawdust Rose.
“They’ve even shot some costume stuff down there by the bridges and under those arcade things on Windward Avenue, but they have to film at night because of the streetcar tracks.”

It had sounded to Norah like a peculiar idea to begin with, but no description could do justice to the cockeyed charm of the place, even on a mizzly evening with the fog moving in. It was Hollywood’s bright fantasy skewed by earnestness into a truly otherworld absurdity: crenellated pseudo-Italian palaces of ornamental tilework and Moorish arches facing the beachfront boardwalk; winged lions and Celliniesque satyr faces decorating pillared walkways, cheek by jowl with the glaring ballyhoo of a carnival pier whose gateway blazed with lights spelling out
RACE THRU THE CLOUDS
; Oriental towers and Romanesque turrets capping establishments like the Owl Drug Store and assorted tattoo parlors and hot dog stands; streetcars clattering prosaically along the banks of silver canals whose waters reflected aisles of colored lights and the fading winter sky.

Alec’s house was on a sort of island reached by a decorative camelback bridge in a district a little removed from the noise and lights of the piers. Palmetto, eucalyptus, Spanish dagger, and elephant ear grew everywhere; ducks quacked and flapped in the canal that lay within feet of his front door; and a small electric passenger train, nearly empty on this dank evening, rumbled past them as they negotiated a turn up a narrow alley to the back. Chang Ming flung himself out of the car and dashed to the water’s edge, getting his toes wet and barking wildly at the ducks.

“I got the place because it was cheap,” Alec said, carrying magazines of film from the car to the sagging rear porch while Black Jasmine investigated the jungle around the house and Buttercreme huddled disapprovingly in her wicker box. “It’s romantic as hell to have a canal instead of a street in front of your house, but not everybody wants to shlep through the alley and the backyard. Besides, the canal floods at high tide and stinks like a fish market the rest of the time.”

Through the plaster arch that led from the small, hopelessly cluttered front room into the bedroom, Norah glimpsed a single bed half-hidden in the ghostly folds of an old-fashioned mosquito bar. “What’s the neighborhood incidence of malaria?” she asked, and Alec grinned.

“Seven or eight cases per summer—why do you think all the speakeasies under the piers serve gin? It goes with the quinine. Not that the summers are all they’re cracked up to be. We’re in a fog belt here.” He placed the gramophone carefully beneath an old bulb-legged table that was quite clearly its home and unpacked the shellac disks. A much larger electric cabinet phonograph occupied most of one wall, with a path to it cleared through a miscellaneous junk pile of light stands, reflectors, and a small electric generator radiating cables in all directions like an octopus.

“In Los Angeles it’ll be clear and hot, but the fog’ll hang on here until two in the afternoon some days, then retreat out to sea and come sneaking back around six. Drives me nuts when directors try to film down here. Well, hi, Rube,” he added to an enormous golden tomcat that appeared on the back porch. “Long time, no see. Miss Hazel been feeding you decent? Miss Hazel lives next door,” he added, carrying the cat—which must have weighed nineteen or twenty pounds and, as was the way of cats, was loudly proclaiming imminent death from starvation—into the kitchen.

Alec introduced the cat to the dogs, which came rushing in to see and rapidly discovered that cats were not to be played with, then put down food and water—on the floor for the dogs and on the tiled counter for Rhubarb. After that he led the two girls back out through the game trails of the overgrown yard, down the alley, and to a small street that paralleled the canal.

“The problem is, the man who built Venice was a cigar manufacturer, not an engineer. You can’t get enough of a tidal scour to keep the canals fresh, and the breakwater they built to protect the pier plays hell with the currents around the beach. The real Venice is built the way it is for a purpose: to drain a series of low-lying islands. This is a movie set.”

“But you love it anyway,” Norah said quietly, almost subconsciously reaching out and taking his hand.

He looked at her, startled, and their eyes met with perfect understanding. Then he ducked his head, a little embarrassed, as he had been when she’d accused him of superstition at that queer Arabian Nights house in Edendale. “So sue me.”

At the end of the street they turned left, crossed another camelback bridge over glassy dark water (“It’s only about four feet deep,” reported Alec), and found themselves walking along what appeared to be a half-scale railroad track under the shadow of the most enormous roller coaster Norah had ever seen.

“The Race Thru the Clouds,” Alec explained, gesturing to the strings of lights that outlined the scaffolding to their left like illuminated dew. He raised his voice as a roller coaster car rocketed by in a terrifying rattle of wheels, trailing excited screams like banners of triumph in its wake. “And that,” he added with a sweep of his right arm, “is the Venice Lagoon.”

“I think we call such things ponds in England,” Norah said gravely, contemplating the modest expanse of water in whose surface the lights of a small hotel on the far side glinted mistily, like a half-size Avalon. Despite the roller coaster, the scene was oddly pastoral. The point of land opposite them was thick with trees through which gleamed the occasional lights of a cottage window. Norah scrunched her hands more deeply into the pockets of Christine’s hand-me-down fur jacket, which had turned out to be made of vivid petunia silk, paneled with vaguely Egyptian motifs on the back and sleeves and adorned with an enormous collar and cuffs of trailing black monkey fur. She could smell, against the sewery reek of the lagoon, the salt bite of the ocean. The roar of the Race Thru the Clouds behind them was answered by the sweeping bellow of another roller coaster, like unimaginable beasts yearning to mate.

She found herself wanting to rise up suddenly on her toes and dance. Christine was right, she thought, although Conrad Fishbein had actually written the lines. Sometimes one had to pick the rose and not worry about the thorns.

They bypassed Venice Pier and took the red trolley car up Electric Avenue to the much more impressive Pickering/ Lick Pier, which stretched almost a thousand feet into the ocean on pilings and boasted nearly that much street frontage on Ocean Front Walk. The Breakers was situated about halfway along the midway, a plain white wooden building wedged between a billiards and bowling establishment and Finlay’s Museum of Natural Wonders, whose marquees were plastered with posters advertising a special exhibit of monsters of the prehistoric world.

“I’d take you to the Ship down on Venice Pier,” said Alec, “except that’s where all the movie folks go. The reporters would be sure to look for you there. That all right?”

“Oh, absolutely,” said Christine. “I mean, it’s one thing to escape death and get your picture on the front page of every paper in town getting off the train, but
nobody
looks beautiful while they’re chewing. Oh! Red liquorice! That stand over there has red liquorice...!” And she darted off with her borrowed mackintosh flapping and the diamonds on her hat sparkling, leaving Norah to stare around in wonder at the colored lights, the flamboyant posters, the freak shows, custard counters, and chop suey stands, and the crowds that even on a winter evening strolled along the dark and slightly splintery planks of that aisle of noisy glare.

It had been a long time, she thought, since she’d come to a place like this purely for a child’s pleasure in carnival lights and saltwater taffy. Hawkers and shills yelled their dodges to the snap of the shooting galleries and the clank of Test Your Strength. Opposite them, glittering like an illuminated wedding cake in its domed pavilion, the most beautiful carousel Norah had ever seen circled serenely in a glowing lake of music. Behind that towered the scaffolding of something billed as the Blarney Racer Roller Coaster: It Will Scare You to Death.

“It’s not bad,” Alec agreed judiciously as Christine returned with her hands full of rubbery snakes of red candy. “But for my money, give me the Zip over on the other side of the pier.”

Christine let out a squeal of delight; Norah rolled her eyes. For a vampire who lived on the heart’s blood of discarded men, Christine was a sucker for roller coasters, and Norah resigned herself to an evening of comparing the merits of the two and quite possibly those of the Big Dipper and the Some Kick on Venice Pier as well. Her suggestion that supper be postponed until afterward was scornfully rejected as lily-livered, and as the Pacific fog closed in, Norah found herself, with a certain amount of amusement, standing next to the lighted posters advertising prehistoric monsters trapped in the tar pits of death and watching Alec and Christine wait for a chance in the Blarney Racer’s cars.

When she’d first come to California, Norah had wondered how on earth people like Charlie Chaplin managed to go out of their houses without being mobbed, but it was apparently done frequently. And now, having seen Mr. Chaplin in street clothes without his mustache and Douglas Fairbanks in a suit, she understood. So much of being a star, she realized, was
being
a star. A way of walking, of posing, of standing that cried out, “Look at me! I’m Blake Fallon!”

Certainly nobody would associate the disheveled and giggling schoolgirl whom Alec escorted off the Blarney Racer with the She-Devil of Babylon.

“And
were
you indeed,” inquired Norah, nodding toward the sign, “scared to death?”

Christine adjusted her hat with a haughty gesture. “Queen Vashti of Babylon fears
nothing,”
she said in Chrysanda Flamande’s deep, throbbing drawl. “Now let’s try the Zip over on the other side of the pier.”

Norah walked to the edge of the pier and gazed across the water at the lights of the Venice and Sunset piers, which were shining softly through thickening fog.

Like a swirl of brightly-colored petals, the music of the carousel’s pipe organ floated around her, mingling with the delighted screams from the roller coaster and the Captive Aeroplanes on their little pierlet nearby and the
hroosh
of the dark waves among the pilings below. She could smell seaweed, popcorn, and a stray whiff of someone’s cigar smoke. The last time she had been on a pier, she reflected, she hadn’t been old enough to be permitted up this late at night. And with the rowdy laughter, the jangle of bells signaling somebody’s win at something, and the good-natured squeals of brightly clothed girls who weren’t any better than they should be, the place was a far cry from Brighton with Sean and her parents on a hot summer day.

She gathered her incongruous monkey-fur collar around her face and thought,
Sean.

Sean would like this,
she thought, as if her brother had not been brought back from Belgium a mute and twitching automaton with a metal lower jaw who had given no sign of recognizing anyone for the eighteen months he had lived.
Jim would like this.

The thought came to her gently, a passing reflection, without the angry pain of wondering why he wasn’t there to share it with her.
Jim would like California... Jim would love this silly Renaissance on the beach.

And for the first time there was no resentment in her thoughts.

She would always love him, she knew, but something in that love had changed. She had clung to his ghost to get her through the wretchedness of those years in Manchester, years when she had been almost a ghost herself. But almost imperceptibly, as life had stirred back into her—in the desert, in the studio, in the Baroque lobby of the Million Dollar Theater—the ghost had pressed her hand into the hand of a living man.

Had Jim been waiting to find someone he both liked and trusted?

Norah shook her head, impatient at this piece of silliness. It was just, she thought, that enough time had passed. And when enough time had passed, Alec had been there, in this place where she’d never in her wildest dreams expected to be. Possibly, she added, because her dreams had never been sufficiently wild.

No dream seemed too wild for Christine, and maybe, Norah thought, she had a point.

“Wonderful!” Christine gasped, wobbling a little on her diamante heels and hanging on to Alec’s arm. “Just
fabulous,
darling! Now we’ve got to go down to Venice Pier and try Some Kick!”

“Another night,” Alec said, smiling. “I have the suspicion that changes or no changes in the scenario, we’re all going to have to be at Colossus come morning.”

“Oh, pooh!” said Christine. She’d carefully schooled herself never to say
balls
in front of reporters or anyone who might talk to reporters. “Nobody needs sleep!”

“Besides,” Norah added grandly, “you two had your rides, and now it’s my turn. I want to go on the carousel.
And,”
she added as Christine’s face blossomed like a flower with delight at this evidence of her sister-in-law’s sudden descent into crass frivolity, “I want to ride properly on one of the horses that goes up and down and not sit in one of those dull little carts like a grown-up.”

They concluded the evening’s program with a visit to the Dome Theater at the end of the pier, where Christine led them on a quick descent of inconspicuous stairs that debouched into a network of sand-floored passageways and small, smoke-filled rooms. Games of baccarat, roulette, wheel of fortune, and what Norah assumed to be poker and blackjack were all going full swing, and ladies as colorfully dressed and as uninhibitedly behaved as Blake Fallon’s friends from the Montmartre giggled and glittered and adjusted their garters in public. Standing in the doorway of one red-lit
bolgia,
while a black trumpeter coaxed soaring despair from his instrument and Christine flirted with the good-looking bartender who mixed her a cocktail, Norah turned to Alec with a flicker of amusement in her eyes and said, “Whatever else can be said about her, Christine never disappoints me. Of course she’d know the location of every speakeasy in town.”