Read Online The Hollywood Trilogy by Don Carpenter - Free Book Online Page B

and we walked down a hall with about fifteen doors, open and shut, on either side. A couple of them were toilets, I could see, but Jim didn’t stop until we came to another little stairway. I followed him up and into an area that was obviously the diMorros’ private suite. Then through another door into a big silken bedroom. Jim’s clothes were all over the floor, and the bed, although made, was wrinkled and the pillows thrown about. Jim sat naked on the edge of the bed, looking mournful and lonesome. I went into the private bathroom and took my piss and came out and he was still sitting like that, so I went to a couch across from the bed and sat down.
    I was about to say, “What’s the matter?” when Jim spoke up, his voice so low I had to strain to hear him.
    â€œIt’s all such shit,” he said. “I get so tired sometimes.” He went on in this vein for a while and I sat and listened to him, not having much to say myself, but nodding now and then to let Jim know I could hear him. Life was painful, life was boring, getting up in the morning was like crawling out from under a pile of rubble, etc&etc., until he suddenly jumped up and said, “I want to show you something,” and he went over to a door that was partway open and opened it and went in. I followed him.
    It was a closet, but not like any closet I had ever seen before, not justrows and rows of clothes on hangers, but rows and rows of rows and rows, and if that wasn’t enough to hold all the dresses and gowns, above the rows of clothing were more, a whole second story of rows of clothes; and on the other side, all in this beautiful unfinished cedar, were these cubbyholes and shelves and cabinets, all full of stacks of sweaters, blouses, underwear of every description, and below that stacks of rows of shoes, so that all Bianca diMorro had to do in the morning was come into the closet and she could find anything she wanted. The one thing that got to me was the cashmere sweaters. I have always liked cashmere sweaters. She had so many of them stacked in their little cedar cubbyholes that they were color-graded, starting out with the whitest of white sweaters and going through the just plain white ones to the first hint of a shade of blue through dark blue, and then pink so soft it seemed almost white, getting pinker and pinker until finally, a couple of cubbyholes away you get at last to the red sweaters, and then the sweaters so dark red they seemed almost black, and so on until you get to a whole cubbyhole of nothing but black sweaters, all in all I would guess she had maybe two hundred and fifty cashmere sweaters.
    Meanwhile, Jim was handling the underwear, which was as plentiful if not more so than the cashmeres, Jim running his hand over silk slips, brassieres, panties, the whole works, sometimes dropping an item of underwear on the floor of the closet, a nice thick beige rug, and then going on, looking around like a kid in a zoo. “Jesus, an underwear freak would have to die to get to a place like this,” I said. Jim didn’t say anything back, just kept looking around this closet, muttering to himself and making expressions of amazed disgust.
    â€œYou know what?” he said after a while. “You don’t see any coats or jackets or furs, so she must have an entirely different closet for that crap.”
    It was true. I made a comment about what you could do with money if you really tried, and Jim snorted. “Shit. We could run this show for about a month, with our combined incomes.”
    â€œDon’t be bitter,” I said.
    â€œI’m not bitter, I’m just dumbfounded and bored and sick of the whole shithouse mess.”
    We were out of the closet now, and Jim was putting on his clothes. A maid stuck her head in the door and then unstuck it. I waited for Jim to get dressed, and we went downstairs and made our goodbyes. While I was shaking hands with George diMorro, the Chinese