Along with scripts and treatments, the two young men also hammered out what would be for two decades, with only minor interruptions, Journeyman’s life situation. That was to say, Peter Todbaum talking and Journeyman typing, and eventually collecting a fair amount of money for it. For Jerome Kormentz hadn’t been totally groundless to call Journeyman “storyteller.” In that previous life, in the world before the Arrest, storytelling was the way Journeyman buttered his bread.
Todbaum and Journeyman sold none of what they made in the Starlet, though they did run those notions in and out of a great number of meetings. They excelled in near misses that may not have been near at all, involving follow-up conference calls and weeks of waiting, or requests for further work on spec that were rarely rewarded with more than a free coffee. Nonetheless, by the time their run was concluded, and Todbaum’s agent’s Rolodex exhausted, two things were apparent. The first was that Journeyman, the silent partner, the keyboard man, could bat out reams of more or less what was needed in this town, the fuel it all ran on, and that sooner or later he might be remunerated for it. Second, that Peter Todbaum had a different gift, for spinning rooms into a kind of visionary frenzy of promise on the pinwheel of his tongue, even if the rooms, in this early phase, quit spinning when he exited. More than one of the development executives the two met with joked to Todbaum, in so many words, “You should have my job!” Soon, he did. And Journeyman would spend the next decades working principally for him.
In the last of the five months the two men spent living at the Starlet, Journeyman’s sister graduated college. Madeleine Duplessis had attended Baginstock College, on the coast of Maine, a boutique liberal arts college she’d chosen, perhaps, in order to avoid Journeyman’s family’s legacy school. She was just two years younger than her brother, a difference in age that had evaporated in the subsequent decades’ atmosphere: her serious life and Journeyman’s unserious one. Yet his role as the older sibling might have mattered still, back when she took up the invitation to visit Los Angeles, and to stay with her brother and Peter Todbaum at the Starlet.
Maddy had accepted, Journeyman understood, in order to avoid landing back at “home,” on Fishers Island, the place where their parents had elegantly retired after shoving the kids off to college. Maddy had had enough of the Atlantic coast for a spell, perhaps. 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. She had no special purpose in Los Angeles, let alone in the entertainment industry, but what purpose was needed beyond curiosity, at twenty-two? And why shouldn’t the two young writers want a tall attractive sister to accompany them into the West Hollywood nightlife, to make them appear less like losers?
Maddy had attained her full height. Or perhaps she’d been encouraged by her communal friends to straighten and not be ashamed of her full height. She was taller than their parents (who’d begun shrinking), and taller, too, than Journeyman, and Peter Todbaum, when he rose to greet her. She and Peter hadn’t met during Journeyman’s Yale years, and when she came through the door of the suite, her only luggage a hiker’s backpack, dressed in a tank top and high-trimmed jean shorts, Journeyman felt Todbaum’s instant excitement at her presence.
“Well, fuck me in the heart,” he said. “Who’s this long drink of water?” Todbaum used his Cary Grant voice for this. Todbaum was a capable vocal mimic, though he typically dialed up hoary movie stars that sounded, by now, like impressions of impressions: Peter Lorre, John Wayne, and so forth. Other times he used a chesty, bullying voice Journeyman didn’t recognize, and which Todbaum explained was actually his father’s. Once or twice, he’d japed in an uncanny impersonation of Journeyman’s own voice, until Journeyman begged him to stop.
“Peter, Madeleine,” Journeyman said now, as if at a freshman mixer.
“Well, how do you do?” said Todbaum. “From what the Sandman here told me, I was picturing a little mud-hippie. Some kind of hairy-ankled garden gnome.” Todbaum was free with nicknames, and one of his for Journeyman was Sandman—a reworking of Journeyman’s given name and a joke about how Journeyman would often conk out in the middle of parties, or during one of Todbaum’s ceaseless sentences.
“A mud-hippie?” Maddy glanced at her brother. Journeyman recalled that he’d mentioned to Todbaum how Madeleine had cured herself of childhood ailments, including that of preppiness, through devotion to farming and the outdoors, to a macrobiotic diet and other alternative practices.
“Maybe there’s a secret Dutch gene lurking in the frog family lineage, eh?” He also liked to riff on Journeyman’s last name, Duplessis, and the suggestion that all of what he considered his pretensions—jazz, wire-rim eyeglasses, and red wine—were traces of French ancestry. “Someone must’ve took a walk on the Walloon side.”
“Sorry?” said Madeleine, even as she came out of a brief embrace with Journeyman to offer her hand to Todbaum. He lifted it to his lips and, weirdly, sniffed it. Maddy pulled it free.
“You look fresh off the Prinsengracht Canal,” he said. “Where’s your bicycle?”
Maddy jostled back at him, 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 Journeyman. “She walks, she talks, she—whaddayou frogs call it?—she ripostes.”
“Did my brother tell you I was mute?”
“He didn’t prepare me in any way,” said Todbaum.
“That’s good, I wouldn’t want him to. You’ll just have to roll with the punches.”
“Oh, I’ll roll!” said Todbaum delightedly.
“Good,” said Maddy, turning to Journeyman. “Can we get something to eat?”
What had Journeyman expected, introducing them? Not this—Todbaum’s open drooling, his sister’s “ripostes.” His kid sister—hand-holding toddler, mutual confidante and whisperer, agonizing nightly violin-practicer, and stricken sufferer of childhood psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis. The hours she’d spent smoothing lotion onto her arms and legs, sunning in hopes of a solar cure, that teenage prisoner of sore flaking knees. Though they’d drifted somewhat, in high school, Maddy was lodged in Journeyman’s somatic sense of himself. He felt as though the center of his chest might once have been fused to hers, as though they’d been separated conjoined twins with one multifarious heart.
Had Todbaum been aggressive with women at college? Todbaum, so far as Journeyman recalled, hadn’t been any way in particular. He’d been a reveler, a sophomoric provocateur—not a lover at all. Or maybe he kept that part of his life hidden. Perhaps his provocations of Maddy, now, were a display for Journeyman’s sake.
The rest of the night suggested so. The three went out to the Dresden and, after that initial flare of response, Todbaum back-burnered Maddy. The writers were caught up entirely in infatuation with their new toy, the science fiction movie. They drank and spun their pitch, and Maddy drank and watched. Three time zones behind, she tired early. The next morning, Todbaum appeared impatient to find her on the couch when he came out for morning coffee (the suite lacked a third bedroom), and seemed only grudgingly amused at their sibling familiarities.