Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

Maybe, he thought, Jane should find us a place to rent in that section of Hollywood that was actually called Mount Olympus!

The place she found that she thought was absolutely perfect was not on Mount Olympus, but in Topanga Canyon. That seemed awfully far from the studio, about an hour’s drive, but Perry was learning that distances didn’t mean anything to people in Los Angeles anyway. An hour and back to work was thought of as perfectly natural, and to question its convenience simply branded you as an inexperienced newcomer.

The place was quite far up a rural-looking, winding road, and certainly seemed far removed from the studio, in atmosphere as well as distance.

The house itself was quaint, a basic A-frame with wings added on each side, giving the effect of a small chalet. A hideaway. It sat on the top of a grassy hillside. From the edge of the property you could look down into the valley below, a picturesque spot with a stream running through it. The landscape looked oddly familiar—rocky and scrublike, with groves of trees—not the exotic palms of Southern California, but evergreens and oaks.

“Don’t you just love it?” Jane asked, linking her arm in Perry’s.

“It almost looks like New Hampshire,” he observed. “Maybe even Vermont.”

“I know! Isn’t it amazing?” she asked, squeezing his arm.

Perry nodded.

“Amazing,” he said.

Eagerly, like a child who is showing her favorite playmate a newly discovered secret hideout, Jane led him back of the house, to show him what was to be one of its master attractions: the vegetable garden.

“I guess zucchini is everywhere,” Perry mused. “No matter where you go.”

“I can do our summer casseroles.”

“I bet there’s zucchini growing in the goddam arctic. Even under the glaciers. The dinosaurs died out, but nothing could kill the zucchini.”

“The garden’s not even the best thing of all,” Jane said.

“I should hope not.”

She took him by the hand toward a sort of woods that seemed to border the property on one side. Tucked away, almost out of sight in a clump of trees, was a tiny one-room shack. It was formerly a woodshed, converted to a kind of studio.

“I could use it as a darkroom!” Jane exulted. “There’s running water, a sink, everything. Isn’t it perfect?”

Perry shifted from foot to foot.

“Well, that is nice,” he had to admit.

Jane kissed him and took him back to the main house.

“Look, there’s even a fireplace,” she said, leading him into the living room. “And it’s all furnished. They’ll even leave their linen behind. And silverware.”

Perry got out his pipe and packed the bowl.

“So,” Jane asked, “don’t you think it’s like home?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

Perry began to pace, feeling like a trapped animal. He lit up his pipe, sucking and drawing and puffing till great clouds of smoke were spewing forth, surrounding his head.

“Let’s think about it,” he said.

In silence, they went back to the car. In silence, they started driving down the winding road.

“Negotiating this road at night,” said Perry, “with a little wine in the system, could be a little dicey.”

“What’s really bugging you? Why don’t you like it?”

“Look,” Perry said, trying for his most reasonable tone, “as long as we’re out here, in Southern California, don’t you think we might as well live in a place that’s typical of the region, instead of trying to find an imitation of New England?”

“What would be ‘typical of the region’?”

“Well, I suppose a house with a pool.”

“A pool! You have to have your own private swimming pool now?”

“What’s so weird about that? Lots of people out here have pools. It’s no big deal, it’s just part of the life-style.”

“The ‘life-style’! Oh, brother. Shall we stop off and buy our gold chains? Shall we score some coke on the way home?”

“I happen to like to swim. It’s my favorite exercise.”

“Oh, come off it! You’re really into the scene out here. You love the whole thing—admit it!”

“All right, for God sake, I’m guilty! Mea culpa! I even like what I’m doing!”

The house they finally rented for the summer was a compromise. Jane gave up her dream of the New Englandy chalet with the garden and land and countrified atmosphere—even the little studio she could have used as a darkroom. Perry did feel badly about that particular point, but he graciously offered to rent her darkroom space away from home. She said it wasn’t that big a deal, she wasn’t sure she was going to do that much photography work out here anyway. Somehow she couldn’t get herself in the right mood. She planned to do a lot of reading.

Perry in turn surrendered his own fantasy of a house. He had fallen in love with a pink stucco Moorish job with a kidney-shaped purple tile swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills that Jane protested was outlandish in taste as well as in price at $5,000 a month. They settled on a little gray frame bungalow in the unfashionable flats of Hollywood, down from the hills, on a quiet little street below Santa Monica Boulevard, for only $2,700. The house was small but comfortable, and most importantly the little backyard not only had a genuine redwood hot tub for Perry, but also a small patch of scratch soil that Jane got permission to use as a garden. She put in tomato plants and the inevitable zucchini, and planted a border of nasturtiums along one side of the neck-high green picket fence that enclosed the yard.

Give a little, take a little. Fine. The compromise of living quarters was OK with Perry. What mattered was the work.

It was thrilling.

It was show biz.

It was the opposite kind of work Perry had done all his life, that he had grown so bored with, so stale and stultified. Instead of mere contemplation, this was action. Instead of telling others how things had been done in the past, it was doing things now, in the moment, for showing in the future; and the audience, instead of a classroom, was a whole nation!

Instead of the leisurely pace of the academy, the Monday-Wednesday-Fridays of classes at ten, two, and four, with office hours nestled in between and a couple of faculty and committee meetings salted in, this was every day all day into the evening, and every moment meaningful, dedicated, dramatic, devoted to getting every single detail right in order to produce the most magnificent show ever seen on American television!

Perry felt so exalted by it all that he couldn’t even share his deepest emotions with Ned and Kenton for fear of sounding like the star-struck schoolboy he knew in some delicious way he had become. Once, walking across the lot back to his office, passing other shows in production, a group of men dressed as Cherokees, a couple of beautiful women in the full regalia of Old Western dancehall girls, he smiled and waved and felt with a lump in his throat the inspirational lines from Wordsworth: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”

And he was young again. At forty-three, he had rediscovered his youth.

He woke every morning before the alarm and bounced out of bed and into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, drinking it by the window of the living room with the first cool, moist air of morning wafting in, and took a fresh cup and a glass of orange juice to Jane, switching on the TV to “Good Morning, America” and humming along with the theme song.

Jane good-naturedly grumbled, marveling that this was the same, husband who at home she had to wake every morning herself, coaxing him from sleep as she would a drugged derelict coming out of a coma. He told her once way back then in that other life that waking each morning he felt as if he were reenacting the whole history of the human race, rising not just from the sleep of the previous night but from the protozoic slime, pushing upwards through aeons into the dawn of civilization and finally emerging, exhausted from it all, into the bleary new day.