The Diamond Lane (48 page)

             
Tony's
UNCLE NIGEL
, a bigwig exporter of African
objets d'art
offers Mouse a job while she is recuperating. Through her work, she learns that he is in collusion with
BOAZ
, the most ruthless poacher in the country, exporting tons of tusks to Korea. She tells Tony, and they go to the head of the Kenyan Wildlife Federation,
MR
.
STANLEY
. Stanley tells them Nigel has been under suspicion for some time, but not to worry, it is all under control. Meanwhile, Tony's unit rounds up Boaz and holds him captive in the bush, thereby cutting off Nigel's supply of tusks. Nigel, unaware that it is Tony's patrol who apprehended Boaz, sets his henchmen,
THOMAS
and
STEPHEN
, out to find and kill them. Mouse overhears this one night when Nigel thinks she has already gone home and sets out to warn Tony.

             
Before Mouse can find him, she is captured by Boaz's confederates. They are going to kill her but, at a nearby game reserve lodge, some models from
Vogue
are doing a safari spread. Mouse, using her old
Sports Illustrated
connections, promises to get them into the photo shoot if they will let her go. She runs into Nigel and Mr. Stanley there, cavorting with the models. She confronts Nigel, who realizes his awful mistake. He had no intention of murdering his beloved nephew. Together, Nigel and Mouse set out to find Thomas and Stephen before they can find Tony. They catch up with the two henchmen just as they are arriving in the village where Tony's unit is based. They arrive to find all of Tony's men decapitated, their bodies unrecognizable. Mr. Stanley's henchmen have been there first.

             
That night, Mouse and Ni console each other. They make love. Mouse leaves their bed and goes into the bush to commune with the elephants. She rides one nude through the mist, her AK-47 slung over her shoulder. The elephant takes her to where
Tony is hiding out. Tony says he saw her with Uncle Nigel and is leaving for the States as soon as he can get a flight out.

       
PRODUCTION VALUE
: Good

       
RECOMMENDATION
: Yes____ No____ Maybe
XXX

       
COMMENTS
:

       
Idea is important, topical, potentially interesting, lends itself to a prestige, big-star vehicle. Characters are by and large believable, although it is difficult to believe Mouse would console Nigel (who is still, as far as we know, an exporter of illegal ivory) by sleeping with him. Also, although it's understandable that the world of high fashion modeling would be fascinating to a band of bloodthirsty elephant poachers, I don't believe the promise of watching a
Vogue
photo shoot would be a strong bargaining chip in this situation. Everything else about this script is predictable, confused, and sometimes downright unbelievable. The plotting is feeble at worst, shopworn at best. Despite the exotic arena it's nothing we haven't seen before. The end feels tacked on. With the exception of the abrupt resolution of the relationship between the principals, everything else is left hanging. What happens to Nigel? To Mr. Stanley?

             
If a major star was interested in this it might be worth doing a page-one rewrite, if only because of the subject matter, and its “freely adapted from a true story” appeal. I know you want to write off your upcoming Kenyan honeymoon, Allyn, but if I were you, I'd
PASS
.

       
CAROLE

MOUSE READ THIS
with the same luscious horror with which she'd once read a medical book on African diseases, complete with full-page color photographs of every swollen, withered, rotting piece of human anatomy imaginable; the way she'd read and reread the newspaper accounts of Fitzy's death; the way she read the coroner's report she'd found one day in a file in the bottom drawer of Shirl's desk.

She was not angry. Being angry implied that one day she would cool down. It implied a door was still open, even if only a crack. When she got angry, the door slammed. It locked. Then
the locks were changed. She had been angry like this only once before. Then she had moved to Africa.

Sometime during the script's second act, when “Mouse” is trying to escape her captors, the confederates of the evil Boaz (who, she noticed, bore a striking physical resemblance to a friend in Nairobi who taught film criticism at the University), Carole slipped off to bed.

Sometime later the police helicopter
whopp-whopp-whopped
by overhead. Sniffy slept a few feet away from her, his paw crooked around his black nose, ferreting out dream scents. She lit a cigarette, then forgot about it while it ate itself up in ash, then crumbled onto a pile of slick magazines on the coffee table.

She found some comfort in the fact that
Love Among Elephants
was dreck. Also, perversely, in the fact that underneath Tony's upstanding demeanor lay a sleazy, scheming creep. She always thought he was too good to be true; here was the physical evidence.

It was after four o'clock when she hauled out the futon. She made it up with clean sheets, taking pride in her hospital corners. She slept soundly for the first time since Tony moved out.

22

IT WAS THE BEGINNING OF MARCH WHEN TONY TOOK
over Ralph's old bedroom at the back of the Big House, high up in the Hollywood Hills. It took him several weeks to realize just how high up this was.

His room had cheap dark wood paneling and hundreds of wire hangers jammed into the empty closet, whose sliding door was permanently off its track. The window over the bed was broken. At night it was cold. Tony slept in a sleeping bag and hooded sweatshirt borrowed from Sather. Because the air was also dry, he often awoke with a nosebleed. He gently tucked wads of toilet paper into his nostrils and tried to go back to sleep. The mourning doves roosting in the jacaranda by the side of the house woke him up before it was light.

When he finally pulled himself out of bed, the house was empty, Pop-Tart wrappers strewn across the kitchen counter, a half gallon of milk left on the table, the sports page missing, crumbs everywhere. Sather and Darryl were sound-editing a low-budget feature, which meant working eighty to a hundred hours a week. They left before six and got home after eleven. They thought the post-production supervisor might need someone else the last week of the schedule and promised to try to get Tony on. He tried not to count the days.

Instead, he busied himself watching videotapes of past Lakers games. He read all the magazines in the house, sitting on a kitchen chair on the deck overlooking the smog-engulfed city.
He took his skateboard out once, but the streets were far too narrow and steep. Anyway, he had lost interest. He tried to get his closet door back on track but only succeeded in pulling it off.

Mouse had kept the Toyota. Tony felt it was only fair, since her mother had paid for it. He may be a heel, but a bastard he was not.

Until he got a job and could afford a car, he was on foot or forced to take the bus. The nearest bus stop was three miles away, at the bottom of the hill, next to a little café Tony was convinced was owned by a surgeon specializing in bypass surgery. Even the pancakes glistened with fat.

One day, he hiked down to the café to nurse a cup of coffee over the want ads. Streets rambled all over the hill: dead ends, driveways, apparent wrong turns. To get down, for a short time you had to go up. Darryl had drawn him a map. Tony sat in the little café until the waitress tired of refilling his cup, then walked the three miles back up to the house. The next day his legs were so sore he could barely take a step.

The phone never rang. He tried not to feel anxious. When he ran out of Lakers videotapes he found solace in the all-sports cable station.

V.J. had had the script for over two weeks. He had assured Tony and Ralph that the executives had put it on their weekend reading lists, which meant only that it would not take them three months to get to it. There was the possibility that they'd already read it and hated it: in Hollywood, no news was no news, also bad news. He did pull-ups on a bar installed across the kitchen until his biceps burned.

He tried not to dwell on his wretched performance at the fundraiser. Standing in front of the city's rich and powerful, mouthing off about elephant carvings, when what they'd been interested in was elephant
poaching
. He consoled himself with the fact that he didn't know much about poaching anyway. Nothing that Michael Brass didn't know, in any case, so the mixup was probably for the best. He came off as an endearing
(he hoped) drunk rather than an ill-informed poseur. His host came off looking like a naturalist on par with Richard Leakey. Tony tried to reassure himself that whatever he had done, he hadn't been such an ass as to cause V.J. to lose interest in the script.

Still, Tony heard nothing. Hollywood had the same sense of time as an iceberg, he told himself. Not to worry. Days passed. His biceps grew. Not a peep from anyone.

If he wanted something to eat, and it wasn't in the house, he had to wait for Darryl or Sather to come home so he could borrow a car. One day the only thing around was oatmeal. He wasn't feeling quite so low then and was sufficiently inspired to attempt the cookie recipe on the back of the box. Because the muscles in the backs of his calves forbade another three-mile walk down to the little store next to the little café at the bottom of the hill, he was forced to scrimp on butter.

He spent the rest of the afternoon pitching the suitable-for-trapshooting cookies at the sparrows that alighted on the fat spines of prickly pear that grew by the acre off the deck, trying to find a reason to ring up Mouse. He wished he'd had the foresight to leave something behind at the apartment.

Now that he'd cooled off, he was appalled at the way he'd gone off his bean. He couldn't remember exactly what he'd said, but he distinctly remembered something along the lines of “I don't love you.” He wished he'd been a bit more vague. “Just don't feel ready for marriage, poppet. Me feet are getting a bit of a chill.” After all, he did want to marry her, he just didn't want a bloody movie made about it. Now, even that didn't seem so bad. It was not the movie that was objectionable, he realized, but that pint-sized, bedroom-eyed Oscar-winner. It was Ivan he wanted out of the picture.

“Well, she deserved it!” he said. He tipped the tray off the rail, dumping the rest of the cookies onto the field of dusty green cactus twenty feet below. Here they were entering into holy matrimony and she had deceived him! With her old boyfriend,
no less! He had a right to be furious! He tried to whip himself up into his old rage, but it wouldn't work. He cursed his fuse, which burned quickly and bright. He missed her, damn it.

He found himself waiting up for Sather and Darryl, just to have someone to talk to.

He found himself thinking about asking the waitress at the little café out for lunch.

He found himself mixing up pitchers of martinis, which he drank alone on the deck as a way to pass the long chilly spring evenings. After a few days, he dispensed with the glass. After a few more, the Vermouth and the twist went. He put the bottle of gin in the freezer before the soaps and took it out after
Oprah
.

Finally, nearly a month after his precipitous departure, he broke down. He rang Mouse to see if perhaps he'd left the shirt he was currently wearing at Mimi's. It was either that or start in with the gin before it had even been chilled.

He got the answering machine. There was a new message. It was Mouse's voice, calm and competent. Tony's heart worked as though it was servicing a marathon runner and not a man making a simple phone call.

“Hi, if you'd like to leave a message for either Mimi, Mouse, or Carole, please do so after the beep. If this is Ivan, I picked up the stuff and I'll see you there.”

Tony hung up without leaving a message. He went to the kitchen, pulled the gin from the freezer, rested it against his cheek. Mouse was still seeing Ivan. She was supposed to be a heartbroken wreck. Instead, she had picked up the stuff and was meeting him there! Tony twisted the cap off the gin, put the bottle to his lips right there in the kitchen, the freezer door yawning open, numbing his eyeballs.

No, he thought, no. There was degenerate and there was degenerate. A drink before dinner was one thing, but it was two-thirty in the afternoon. He replaced the gin, pulled out the milk and drank straight from the carton.

On impulse, he strode to the phone, redialed, punched in
Mimi's message code, 22. There might be a message for him. One never knew. Not everyone knew he had moved. V.J. might have gotten confused and called him there. His parents might have called. Noni Bertlestein might have called. He would not be averse to having a drink with her. From the way her owly eyes roamed over him the night of the fundraiser, chances were she'd even come and pick him up. He took a long swig of milk.

There were no messages, save one for Mimi from someone called Eliot. Tony realized that he had half-expected, half-hoped, to hear a message for Mouse from Ivan; something lewd, opportunistic and uninspired, which would confirm Tony's worst opinions of him. Only after Tony hung up did he realize the milk was sour. A few curdled chunks lingered on the back of his tongue. He swallowed, repulsed. Mouse was still seeing Ivan.