Ear to the Ground Read Online Free PDF Page B

had finally cut him off. “Get a job,” he’d said.
    â€œBut I’m a writer .”
    â€œAnd I’m a father, but nobody pays me for it.”
    It was hard for the literary artist in the twentieth century, Ian thought. Especially in this town, where screenplays came in waist-high stacks, and bus drivers along Santa Monica Boulevard pitched whole stories between Highland and La Brea. Any night of the week, if you sat at the bar at Chaya or Jones and closed your eyes, you’d hear the word script rollingback and forth across the room, like an auditory lava lamp. Be patient, Ian remembered, always patient. Keep the faith. In Hollywood, anything can happen.
    And happen it did. After a couple of hours, a friend of the woman’s arrived and she was breathtaking—a young Italian actress, quite on fire. She claimed she would have been the star of Fellini’s last film, if Fellini had lived, but Ian didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t have to, though. The waiters hovered and freshened her drinks, offering warm rolls at the flutter of an eyelash. She told a story to the skinny woman in breakneck Italian, and then, full of energy, translated it for Ian.
    â€œI just had my fortune told by a gypsy lady.”
    â€œUh-huh?” Ian was charmed.
    â€œMy palm.” She pronounced it PAL-lem. “Do you know what she telled me?”
    Ian shook his head.
    â€œDestiny await you.”
    Then she hit the back of her hand against the table, as Italians sometimes do, and made a gap-toothed smile so stupendous that Ian had to fight the urge to grab her by the waist.
    She played the saxophone, she told them, and then pulled one out of a suitcase she had lugged to the table. It was tarnished, but she sat holding it, with a reed in her mouth, smiling into Ian’s eyes. Someone turned down Perry Como, and she stood up.
    Sometime after midnight Ian and the actress ended up in Silver Lake, at his place. Leonetta was her name, and she blew her saxophone through the night while Ian fiddled with his trumpet. Actually, they weren’t bad together. What they lacked in technical skill, they made up for with chemistry. And as they inched toward that morning hour where spending the night becomes a foregone conclusion, Ian noticed the light blinking like crazy on his answering machine, while he played an unpleasant, abstract riff, and considered how to go about suggesting the sleeping arrangements.

SATURDAY NIGHT, PART TWO
    GRACE WAS PISSED. IAN’S RIDICULOUS AGENT HAD CALLED and harassed her—at home, for Christ’s sake—about Ear to the Ground. What a joker Michael Lipman was. Here it was, Saturday night, and he had set up some kind of meeting. Grace was so angry she hardly even looked up when Ian headed for the door. “I’ll call you,” he told her.
    Three hours later, though, Ian still hadn’t called, and Grace had moved toward the numb realization that she’d been taken for granted again. It was almost summer, and the days were languid, nearly tropical. As twilight settled over the city and fog began to drift across the Hollywood Hills, Grace found herself pacing the rooms of her apartment, imagining a man who wouldn’t leave her hanging on a Saturday, who would maybe buy her flowers once in a while, clean up the kitchen after himself, or at least replace the coffee when he’d used it up.
    She dialed Ian’s number, left a nasty message, and went to get her keys. Fuck him, she thought. She didn’t need Ian. She was an adult. She could take care of herself. There was that new place on Beverly they’d been wanting to try, where she could get a nice piece of fish, lightly grilled, and a glass of wine. And after that … well, she could always read a couple of scripts.
    Navaro was on the building’s front stoop when Grace reached the bottom of the stairs. Please don’t talk to me, she thought,and then: I don’t have to deal with