Audio: Jonathan Lethem reads.
When Peter Todbaum and I were twenty-five, and three years clear of Yale, I lost track of him for a short while. I had been living in New York City, working as an assistant at F.S.G. and writing short stories that no one wanted to publish, when he got back in touch. He had acquired an agent and was going to Hollywood. He wanted me with him, as co-writer on a stack of ideas he promised me he’d already developed and vetted with his representation, and which needed only my hand. Mine alone! I, Alexander Duplessis, was the writer he needed! Not Robert Towne or Herman J. Mankiewicz! I alone could grok and conjugate Todbaum’s sensibility, and, besides, he had a place picked out for us in Burbank. We’d shack up together and bash out treatments, and it would be a gas, gas, gas, like Yale without all the pointless Yale stuff, and with a great deal more cocaine. Hearing this, I was his, I was there in a heartbeat. I saw two birds in a bush and had not one in my hand.
The place was the Starlet Apartments, a classic thirties two-story complex curled around a pool. Monthly rentals, with a motley assortment of long-term and short-term occupants, and plenty of empty apartments, too. It was right in the shadow of the high-walled Warner Bros. lot, so you’d have to joke that the place was named for its traditional use as a lunchtime casting-couch liaison site, and your joke was surely right. We holed up there, batting out projects poolside or in the paltry ground-floor suite we shared, with the A.C. cranked. In the evening, we drove to West Hollywood bars in Todbaum’s father’s cast-off BMW and pounded Jägermeister shots and tried to pick up women, in many cases women older than us, and never once succeeded, and didn’t care. We were so full of ourselves and our projects—Todbaum’s agent called every few days to see how we were doing; he was champing at the bit to get us into “good offices” as soon as the material was ready—that we worked on the material at all hours, popping out new ideas even at the bars, even while blitzed on German digestif. Sometimes we stayed at the Starlet and worked side by side in deck chairs, while the complex’s young tenants teasingly tried to entice us to join their pool parties.
Blitzed or hung over, we fastened ourselves to the task. We were Wilder and Brackett, or Budd Schulberg and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Todbaum was the bullshitter; I, the hands on the keyboard. He’d circle me in great fugues of self-infatuated improv, doing voices, abruptly changing dialogue or the names of characters, forcing me to hurriedly xxxxxxx out endless lines on the Canon Typestar, a kind of proto word processor that heat-transferred the type on to the page. Then he’d jerk the pages from my hand to scribble further emendations, or ball them up and toss them into the suite’s corners. We hammered out one whole script, a horror movie based on an unpublished story of mine; and four or five long treatments, several of them broad, idiotic comedies pegged for the stars of the day, Carrey or Sandler or Murphy. Our pet, our favorite, was a sci-fi movie we called “Yet Another World,” a tale of alternate nightmare Earths—one a “Mad Max” post-apocalyptic landscape, the other an Orwellian dystopia—that begin to communicate with each other to form a mutual resistance to their twin conditions; in the story, a man from the post-apocalypse (Harrison Ford, probably, or Bruce Willis) falls in love with a lady scientist from the dystopia (Michelle Pfeiffer, so hot in glasses!).
Todbaum and I sold none of what we wrote at the Starlet, though we did run those notions in and out of a great number of meetings. We excelled in near-misses that may not have been near at all, and were, in any event, epic time-wastings, involving follow-up conference calls and weeks of waiting, or requests for further writing on spec which were only occasionally rewarded with anything more nourishing than a free coffee. By the time our run concluded, with Todbaum’s agent’s Rolodex exhausted, two things were apparent: First, that I, the silent partner, the keyboard man, could bang out immense quantities of more or less the thing that was needed in this town, the fuel it all ran on, and that sooner or later I actually might be rewarded for it. Second, that Peter Todbaum had a different gift, for spinning rooms into a kind of visionary frenzy on the pinwheel of his tongue, even if the rooms, for now, quit spinning as soon as he exited. More than one of the development executives we met with joked to him, in so many words, “You should have my job!” Soon, he did.
But that’s getting ahead of the story of the Starlet. In the last of our five months living there, my sister graduated from college. Baginstock, on the coast of Maine, was one of those boutique liberal-arts colleges that younger siblings go to in order to avoid their family’s legacy school. Madeleine was only two years younger than me. The fact that I was the older sibling may still have mattered back when she accepted my invitation to crash with Peter Todbaum and me at the Starlet.
She did so in order to avoid landing back at “home,” on Fishers Island, the place where our parents had elegantly retired, albeit almost penniless, after shoving us both off to, and through, college. In the wake of Baginstock she’d had enough of the Atlantic coast for a spell, perhaps. Certainly, enough of our parents. She’d majored in environmental science and oceanography, and had in her last year moved into a collective off-campus house dedicated to organic farming. That’s to say, she had no special purpose in Los Angeles, let alone in the entertainment industry. But what purpose was needed, beyond curiosity, at twenty-three? And what two insurgent industry horndogs wouldn’t want a tall, attractive sister to accompany them into the West Hollywood night life, to make them appear less loserish?
Maddy had attained her full height. Or—looking more closely, as I did—she’d been encouraged by her righteous communal friends to straighten and not be ashamed of her full height. She was taller than I was, taller than our parents (who’d begun shrinking), and taller than Peter Todbaum, when he rose to greet her. She and Peter hadn’t met in our college years, and when she came through the door of the suite, her only luggage a hiker’s backpack, her air-travel attire a tank top and high-cut jean shorts, I felt his instant excitement at her presence.
“Well, fuck me in the heart,” he said. “Who’s this undifferentiated whisper of womanhood?”
“Peter, Madeleine,” I said, as if at a freshman mixer.
“From what the Sandman here told me, I was picturing a little mud hippie. Some kind of hairy-ankled garden gnome.” Todbaum liked to call me the Sandman—a reworking of my nickname, Sandy, and a joke about how I’d conk out in the middle of parties, or one of his ceaseless sentences. I’d mentioned how Madeleine had cured herself of childhood ailments, including that of preppiness, through her devotion to farming and the outdoors, through a macrobiotic diet and other alternative-health practices. “Maybe there’s a secret Dutch gene lurking in the Frog Family lineage, eh?” He liked to riff on my last name and the suggestion that all my pretensions—reading, jazz, wire-rimmed glasses, and wine—were traces of French ancestry. “Someone must have taken a walk on the Walloon side.”
“Sorry?” said Madeleine, even as she came out of a brief embrace with me to offer her hand to Todbaum. He lifted it to his lips and licked. Then, still holding it up, blotted off the moisture with his left arm’s sleeve. But he didn’t let go.
“You look fresh off the Prinsengracht Canal,” he said. “One of those implacable leggy things the tourists dream of. Where’s your bicycle?”
She caught up to this, a little. “Oh, it folds up small. I’ve got it right here in my pack.”
Todbaum’s manner of acknowledging this was to turn to me. “She walks, she talks, she—whaddayou Frogs call it?—she ripostes.” And then he took her hand to his mouth again and—was I imagining things?—bit, substantially, into the meatiest part of her palm. I wasn’t imagining. Maddy jerked it away, into her pocket, and turned red.
Oh, my sister! Hand-holding toddler, mutual confidante and whisperer, agonizing every-night violin-practicer, and stricken sufferer of childhood psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis! Scratching your bow and scratching your scabby elbows! All those hours you spent smoothing lotion onto your arms and legs and neck, sunning in hope of a solar cure, sweet klutzy embarrassed kid, so unready for your height, teenage prisoner of your flaking and sore knees! Though we’d drifted apart somewhat, in high school, Maddy was lodged in my somatic sense of myself. I felt as though the center of my chest might once have been fused to hers, as though we’d been conjoined twins with one multifarious heart. Now—I mean then—I threw her at the nearest crooked monster available, the first chance I got.
It happened before I knew it. I was too identified with Todbaum to discern the wretchedness of his hungers, or perhaps I was unable to discern how much less ordinarily wretched they were than my own. Maddy must have taken our cohabitation for some ratification of a general O.K.ness—why else would I live with him? Collaborate with him? Take his money and his cocaine? Todbaum and I, in our Starlet phase, were another version of twins, a buddy golem constructed out of a typewriter and a telephone and Todbaum’s entrancing, maniacal all-night filibusters. Maybe Maddy would have been a sitting duck in any event.
Todbaum worked by indirection. By what he called, quoting Howard Hawks’s description of his favorite form of dialogue, “a three-corner shot.” After that initial welcoming flare of his response, he back-burnered Maddy for a day or two, made her watch us work, seemed only grudgingly amused at our sibling familiarities, even slightly impatient to find her on the couch when he emerged for morning coffee. We went out drinking the first two nights, and he half ignored her. The third night, a Friday, when the Starlet broke out in its usual half-assed pool revels, which we usually disdained, Todbaum surprised me by suggesting that we stay in. There were some new faces, he said. A cutie or two. We wouldn’t have to drink and drive for a change, just fall back into our rooms. Only later did I see how every part of this was congruent with his aim. Assuming he’d formed it in advance.
I woke at four or five on a deck chair, my throat raw. Todbaum had poured liquor and pot not into Maddy—well, he’d likely done that, too—but into me. And, from me, conspicuously withheld the cocaine. My hair was stiff and rank with chlorine, though at some point I’d got back into my T-shirt and jeans. I’d either made out with one of the not-terribly-cuties or tried to and only kissed and fumbled. The power Todbaum’s suggestions had over me was awful. I was alone now. I went to the door. The suite was locked, my key inside. I rattled at the handle a little, imagining that Maddy would hear me from the couch, but no. I didn’t ponder this, but instead staggered up North Pass to the Bob’s Big Boy on Riverside, to feed my young, still drunk hangover with hash and eggs.
When I circled back, an hour or so later, I found the suite door unlocked but Todbaum’s bedroom door shut, and no sign of Maddy. Instead I discovered, on the kitchen counter, a note in Todbaum’s hand—Go catch a flick, we could use a few hours—atop two twenties. This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think. I saw “Raising Cain,” a 10:50 a.m. matinée, then ate a bulb-tanned hot dog and sneaked down the corridor, into “Unforgiven.” I wasn’t wakened until the credits rolled.
When I returned to the Starlet, Todbaum’s door was open. I saw no sign, one way or another, of what activities might have taken place there. But Maddy’s backpack was gone; all trace of her seemed to have vanished. And neither she nor Todbaum was to be found, the rest of that day, or into the night. His car was gone, too.
Did I call the police? “Two recent college graduates slipped off in each other’s company. I’m worried the attraction may not be mutual.” I did not. Did I call our parents? “The thing is, Dad, my friend is a—” Well, what was he? I didn’t have to decide. No, I conducted my own search, first on foot, then, humiliatingly, by taxicab. I hit the bars, the widest circuit, the Dresden, the Viper Room, Musso & Frank, places we’d drunk in and others we’d intended to. I invaded the Chateau Marmont. I’d pictured them on a revel, in other words. As though Todbaum had simply nudged me aside and plugged Maddy into my place—maybe they were trying to pick up women together. Although it wasn’t the likeliest picture in the world, it was the best I could conjure.
I had to direct the last cab to a cash machine near the Starlet just to pay off the meter. My account was below five hundred dollars. I walked to Bob’s Big Boy for the second time that day, a day that had turned into my first night in Los Angeles not in the company of Todbaum. I fell into my own sorrow, wondering where I’d ended in my life—as if I’d ended anywhere! At twenty-five! It was a temporary cover for my fear that something had happened to Todbaum and Maddy, or, really, to Maddy. When I walked back, I checked Todbaum’s usual parking spot. The BMW had returned.
I ran up to find them, but no. The suite was still empty, as I’d left it. My sense of helplessness, underscored by hours spent at the mercy of Los Angeles without a vehicle, was now a self-fulfilling thing. There was a name for this. I’d been taught it in college: learned helplessness. Yet this was more surreal, as if I were the victim of some will-destroying parlor trick. Todbaum’s BMW moved of its own accord, the suite doors locked and unlocked themselves, the humans refusing to appear. I stared at the empty rooms in dumb wonder, as if contemplating an M. C. Escher drawing.
When sleep began to overtake me, I stretched out on the couch, where Maddy had camped. This wasn’t in solidarity, exactly. More that to retreat to my room might be to invite further shenanigans at my expense. I wanted to stake out the main space. As I settled in, it occurred to me that I should drag a pillow and a blanket down to the street and sleep across the hood of the BMW, so it couldn’t be started again without my knowledge. That was the onset of crazy thinking, that margin of delirium signalling the body’s merciful shutting down of the mind. No one interrupted my sleep, and I didn’t wake until late the next morning.
The riddle’s answer was sleep’s gift, fully present in my understanding. It wasn’t an M. C. Escher drawing or a Zen koan. It was a plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face thing: the Starlet Apartments had plenty of vacancies. It fit with Todbaum’s languid complacency, his stated preference for using what he called “available materials,” his way of throwing money at any situation. I’d slept in my clothes, had only to tie my sneakers to rush outside. The complex was structured in such a way that from the pool area I’d gain some kind of view into both tiers of apartments. Maybe I could judge, even in daylight, which formerly vacant suite showed signs of new occupancy.
The day’s party was under way. Or the previous night’s had never ended. Party such as it was. A pair of women in midriff-knotted T-shirts and bikini bottoms sat on the kiddie steps, immersed to the waist, smoking American Spirits, with melted ice cubes in a tumbler for a soggy ashtray. One of these was my might-have-been-couldn’t-remember.
“Where’s your suit?”
“Have you seen Peter or Maddy?”
“They’re busy little rabbits.”
“What does that mean?”
“No time for you or me, baby. They’re in the twilight zone.” Then she noticed me casting my eyes along the balcony, reading curtains left to right. “Something wrong?”
“I need to talk to them.”
“Well, go talk to them, then.” Her glance was enough, just.
The door was locked, the curtain drawn. I wasn’t going away. I made a conspicuous noise with the door handle, and tapped at the window, too. When the door cracked open—I heard the chain come off first—Todbaum stuck his head out.
“Just in time,” he said. “We’re out of ice and a few other things—” Though Todbaum wore the same Indonesian silk robe in which he would pace all day around our suite, dictating while I worked the Typestar’s keyboard, his money clip was in his hand. He peeled off a series of twenties and began to stuff them through the gap. “I’ll find you the car keys, if you hold on a minute—”
“I want to talk to Maddy.”
“Not just now, Sandman.”
“I’m serious, Peter.”
“Aww, don’t make me spell it out in plain English, you’re breaking my heart. The reason we’re talking like this is that Maddy asked me to make you go away.”
“Let her tell me that.” A line I’d have scratched from a draft. Would I reach through the door gap and grab Todbaum by the collar now? I didn’t.
He lowered his voice. “We’re all consensual adults around here, Galahad. Don’t infantilize your sibling.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you think we did? Took the edge off, basically. You know what Hamlet said, right? ‘You’ll groan to take my edge off.’ Which, if I’m judging right, is what you’re in need of and didn’t get: your ashes hauled. Am I correct, sir? You find yourself passed over by the poolside?”
“Let me talk to her.”
“No tears were shed, no coltish animals were harmed in the making of this major motion picture.”
We haggled. I don’t recall which of my appeals drew Todbaum’s curliest scorn, only that it got pretty curly. I think he came outside, to stand with me on the balcony; I recall sensing that we’d gained the attention of the women smoking in the pool below. Maybe I’d raised my voice. We were both halted, then, by the click of the lock behind him.
What ensued next was a blundering sequence, one mimicking comedy, but not funny. Todbaum in his robe, locked out, pleading appeal in turn to the closed door, to me, to the dawningly curious onlookers, to the nowhere-to-be-found apartment manager. The pool women involved themselves, displaying a remarkable capacity to seem drunker in a crisis, despite the fact that they weren’t drinking, as if drawing on unseen reserves. Their semi-boyfriends appeared before too long, and ushered Todbaum away to be placated or reasoned with, so that the women could prove to Maddy, with whom they’d begun speaking through the door, that he wasn’t near. Todbaum reappeared and demanded his car keys, and the process of placation had to begin anew. I was given the car keys. Maddy would be smuggled downstairs—she’d refused to speak with me while on the premises, but I’d be allowed to drive her to LAX. I should wait in the car. I suppose I was being placated, too, though I don’t recall any unreasonable behavior on my part, or any reasonable behavior, either—I felt I’d stood dumbly to one side, a helpless observer. Yet there was this sense of my being managed, too. I had no idea whether the absurd strictures were Maddy’s, or conjured up by our loopy intermediaries. Well, soon enough, they’d made good on them: Maddy appeared at the car, fully dressed, bearing the overstuffed hiker’s pack, which she shoved into the back seat. She wore a turtleneck, far too hot for the occasion. Was it this which made her cheeks look so flushed? It reminded me of how she’d dressed as a teen-ager, to conceal the flaky skin of her neck.
“Go.”
I protested. Maddy made it clear that I should drive, if I wanted even a syllable from her. I drove.
“Where to?”
“The airport.”
“Wow,” I said. “You have a ticket?”
“They sell tickets.”
“So, I’m, like, what, your cabdriver? After you vanish for two days?”
“Did I? Vanish? Is that what I did?”
“I don’t know, Maddy. Maybe that’s not the word for it. Are you going to tell me what happened in there?”
I felt her emphatically not looking at me as I slid Todbaum’s car onto the 101. “I am not going to tell you what happened in there.” These words stacked like bricks between us.
“O.K., fine, whatever. So you’re just going to let Peter completely ruin this whole thing for you? I was going to show you L.A.” The car was hot. I cranked the A.C. For once there was no traffic.
“Well, you didn’t show me L.A. You showed me, what is this? Burbank? Toluca Lake? You showed me the Starlet Apartments. But maybe you don’t know the difference.”
“You sound—” I started this despite myself, and finished it that way, too. “You sound like Peter.” A part of me wanted to wreck Todbaum’s car, to wreck the squalid progress of this event.
“That would be natural, since I’ve been listening to nothing else for days.”
Oh, sister. Oh, reader. When is the moment to admit that this story has no good ending? That my unknowns remained forever unknowns, that I carry on trying to describe something I don’t understand? Even then, my college chum had already begun his inflation, through the ranks of the ordinary mortal assholes possessing a desk and a telephone, to assume his rightful place. He transformed himself into one of the sacred monsters of that town, a packager known for wrangling talent and intellectual property into fertile conjunctions, for spooking money out of dim corners of the Pacific Rim and Eastern Europe. He was one of those who defied the usual precept—that, despite all the power talk, the only people who could really make anything happen were the seven or twelve bankable stars. Todbaum made things happen. He made a few stars, too. And my own career.
He began by bringing me in as a kind of triage expert on broken projects. In that way he kept me in the game, but also in a box. I got script-polishing work, hugely remunerative and creatively pointless. My credit wouldn’t ever appear onscreen. Still, I became useful. My name bounced into agents’ offices, as the one who’d salvaged such-and-such. A remora, I fed in Todbaum’s wake. The more he loomed into legend, one reviled for his whims and abuses, for his savage truncations of personal visions, and yet also one whose calls you couldn’t afford not to take, the more my legacy with him—you knew Todbaum at school? Sweet Jesus, what was he like then? Was he already . . . Todbaum?—the more this legacy kept my manager’s phone ringing.
The heat in the car that day was the heat of Maddy’s face, the bottling of unwept tears as she razed the bleached hillside with her eyes. She raised a finger to swab beneath her eye, and it was then that I saw the twin-crescent bite marks on her wrist. At first I pretended I hadn’t seen them.
“You didn’t have to listen for days,” I said. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“No, Sandy, you didn’t ask me.”
I couldn’t compute her sarcasm. “Why didn’t you just walk out of the room? He didn’t restrain you, did he?” I knew, too much, about Todbaum’s fantasy predilections.
“Not in any way you wouldn’t recognize.”
I reached over and tugged at the neck of her sweater. The imprint of Todbaum’s teeth was just below, turned blue. For what it was worth, her skin was otherwise smooth, no sign of psoriasis. She slapped away my hand, though I’d drawn it back already.
“Before you say anything, Sandy—”
“What?” I should have been enraged. I felt baffled.
“That isn’t the problem, it isn’t anything.”
“You like that?”
“I like that.” She was angry now. I would always stand, I saw, at the doorway of those with predilections, those like Todbaum and my sister, and feel a fool for wondering, for not belonging even at the doorway.
“So, what’s the problem?” I said sulkily, unwilling yet to be contrite.
“Maybe you can have a thing you like, but have it in the wrong way.”
“You weren’t his captive? He didn’t stop you from leaving?”
“He did stop me, but not how you think.”
“How?”
“With words.”
“What kind of words?”
“Pull over.”
“What?”
“I’ll find a real cab. Or I’ll hitchhike—that ought to go well. I don’t want to be in this car anymore, Sandy.”
“Maddy, please.” I almost told her what she knew: I was her brother. I wanted it to mean something more than I suppose it did. “Let me drive you where you want to go. To the airport. Do you even know what airline?”
“Domestic whatever.”
“Domestic whatever, right.”
We drove in silence until, soon enough, we sat in silence at the white zone, exposed to the riotous sunshine. LAX was the only airport I could imagine feeling like this, with a six-lane freeway up on top, possibly an entire new city under construction, the second story of the Tower of Babel. Abruptly, Maddy leaped free of Todbaum’s BMW, that decrepit father-poisoned vault of a car, or so it felt now, then opened the rear door and swung her titanic backpack onto the curb, before I could help. I dashed out anyway, and told her I was sorry. I began again to plead. What if I found somewhere else for us to go—would she stay a day or two, at least? We could go to Disneyland. We could look up our cousins in San Diego. Rent a convertible and drive the Pacific Coast Highway. She shook her head.
“It’s O.K., Sandy.”
“Are you going to—are you going to tell Mom and Dad?”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“If there’s nothing—”
“Sandy, listen now. I want you to listen.”
“Tell me. Anything. I’m listening.” We were inspected dispassionately by a curbside check-in attendant. The word “skycap” drifted into mind. That was what they were called. Maybe I could offer one of them the keys to the Beemer and join Maddy in flight.
“Peter didn’t say anything but words.”
Though this was nonsensical on its face, I felt I understood, and I was relieved. And then at last she was crying. And I couldn’t keep myself from asking again, and it was then that she said the last thing she’d ever say to me about what had transpired between her and Todbaum in the Starlet Apartments.
“He didn’t do anything to me that he doesn’t do to you.”
“What’s that?” I cried. “What does he do to me?”
“What he’s doing all the time, you fool, Sandy, oh, don’t you see?”
“What?”
“Practicing.”
“Practicing? For what?” For eating the world, I heard myself think.
But Maddy was done. She allowed me to embrace her, though without unslinging the backpack. A heartbreaking rigid embrace, such brittleness in Maddy’s trapped arms, my hands not quite meeting around the fullness of the pack, fingers locating instead the bulky contour of her hiking boots inside, my eyes briefly finding those of the skycap, who offered me nothing, not even a sneer. He’d seen too much, too often, transacted here. Then she was gone. ♦
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