The Jacaranda Tree
THE JACARANDA TREE
Where there’s a will, there’s a Rosen.
—HARRY ROSEN TO HIS DAUGHTER
August 1983
Beanie Rosen, answering to no one, divided her time between the casting offices on North Beverly where Jamie was closing out accounts, and the Light Agency two blocks away where Beanie was training a new secretary for her old job. At Rose Liu’s insistence, Carol Lesak, the girl Rose had hired to replace Beanie, was told to learn how to do everything just as Beanie did. The irony was not lost on Beanie that Rose had been trying to replace her and now suddenly Beanie was someone of value, not just in Rose’s eyes, but in the eyes of other employees who began to seek her out. Even if they didn’t know her by name, she was now Jamie’s girl, and that gave her a sense of purpose and import, a cog in the wheel of the Sylvan Light Agency.
As the conduit to all things Jamie Garland, Beanie had a temporary line installed in Personnel and had Carol Lesak answer when Beanie was running errands for Jamie, making Carol her de facto secretary.
“Beanie Rosen’s line,” Carol said one morning in September ’83, then covering the receiver, asked, “Do you know a Moze Goff? He says he met you at Berkeley.”
Beanie took the phone as the voice on the other line explained that they’d had classes together, and he’d heard that she was working there.
“This is she,” Beanie said, sounding officious, “but I don’t remember you. Are you not memorable?” she asked boldly.
Laughing, he said, “Apparently not.” He explained that they shared an English class, but never actually were introduced. “You read a story called ‘Love Less,’” he told her, “and I never forgot it.”
Neither had Beanie. It had been a wry, barely veiled story about Fish. “Did you like it?” she asked.
“No, but I liked you. I liked your confidence and your heart, and I liked that you wore them both on your sleeve.”
She twisted the phone cord around her finger and circumnavigated the backhanded compliment, demanding instead to know why he didn’t like the story.
“Because your conclusion that love was a lie was wrong. The asshole who’d hurt you was the lie. Love is everything,” he told her, and then said if she was ever free he’d love to meet up.
Beanie scheduled the appointment for the following week when she knew Rose would be off site. She chose a black power suit with shoulder pads and a pencil skirt that hit above the knee to show off her slender legs, adding a wide white belt to accentuate her waist.
She was nervous as Carol Lesak escorted Moze Goff, a tall glass of Brooklyn water, into the office where Beanie sat behind Rose’s small desk.
Moze was cocky, dimpled, smart, self-effacing, and, as she’d presumed, sexy. A cross between Tony Danza and Paul Michael Glaser, whom she’d always loved from Starsky & Hutch, Moze was earnest, funny, and whip smart.
“How did we not meet?” she asked, regretful that she had been so caught up in her heartbreak with one Fish, she’d failed to notice the others in the sea.
But Moze explained he’d only been there for a year before he had to go back to Brooklyn and attend Brooklyn College because his father was ill. “But I got out here as soon as I could,” he told her.
Presuming he wanted a job, she asked, “You’re interested in working in the industry?”
“I’m interested in a lot of things,” he said, smiling provocatively. It had been a minute since anyone had flirted with Beanie Rosen. Barry and she sometimes still got hot and bothered at lunch when she’d feel his cock and get them both worked up without release, but that was just Beanie keeping a toe—or in this case, a hand—in, as a reminder, primarily to Barry, of what could have been. She still resented the fuck out of Marci Goldklank, and whenever Barry invited Beanie to their Marina del Rey apartment with a crappy view of the dirty lagoon, she begged off with other plans.
Beanie and Moze spoke for an hour, about life, about jobs, about school, and then, afraid Rose might return, she offered to take him on a tour of the Beverly Hills Flats.
“Hold my calls,” she said to Carol as she and Moze left the building and walked the pristine streets of Beverly Hills. Immune to traffic noises, they strolled the white sidewalks as automatic sprinklers clicked on and off regardless of weather or water shortages, and Mexican gardeners tamed any leaf that dared to grow its own course, their faded red trucks the only momentary intrusions of life outside the wide empty streets.
Moze hadn’t seen the homes, the wealth, the scale, not up close. He marveled at the yawning oak trees kissing in the middle, offering shade and protection from harsh sun, and buried secrets.
“They’re transplants,” Beanie said, referring to the trees whose prehensile roots wrapped around the earth, defying anyone to challenge their right to claim it as their own. “Nothing you see is native,” she told him. “Even the palm trees, they came from somewhere else.” When she was little, she said, her teacher had told the class that the jacaranda tree outside their school, the one that dropped huge purple flowers every spring and left a line of sticky sap impossible to get off the car roofs, had been there for centuries, that they were native to Southern California, and people had no right to complain. “But that was a lie,” Beanie said.
Her father had told her they were from Brazil or somewhere tropical in South America, and her teacher had just made it up. She’d asked her father why the teacher would lie, and her father said that maybe the teacher didn’t want them to know the truth, which was that Los Angeles had all been a desert once. There were no fruit trees or exotic flowers, or deep green lawns all geometrically squared, just a vast wasteland with a bunch of cacti growing wild.
“Were you upset?” he asked, referring to the jacaranda tree.
“Hell no! I was excited,” she said. “It meant if they could turn a desert into a paradise… so could I.”
She smiled. He smiled.
“Where there’s a will… there’s a jacaranda tree,” he said.
“Exactly,” she responded, taking his arm, and adding pointedly that LA was a city of transplants. “Once you set down roots, a person can thrive here.”
They spoke with an ease neither had felt before, as if they’d known each other a lifetime instead of a few hours.
Moze told her that he had no idea what he wanted to do, he just had a hunch it would be away from the shtetl, as he called the Jewish community that had both embraced and raised him his whole life. But without a plan, his father was nervous. “Children of Holocaust survivors carry a unique burden,” Moze told her.
She nodded, not sure exactly what that burden was, but understanding there was a lot to unpack. His father, Moishe Goffenburg, a dentist, had lost his first wife and child in Auschwitz, and met his new wife, Moze’s mother, at a relocation camp after the war. They made their way across Europe, doing odd jobs until they could afford passage to America, where Moze was born ten years later in 1957.
All their hopes lay with their son.
It was a lot for him to carry.
He told her that he was temporarily staying with friends of friends in Studio City.
“South of the Boulevard?” Beanie asked, little bits of Miriam creeping in as she explained the line between the Hills and the Hills Not.
“Hills not,” he told her. “But lines are for people who keep score.”
“Like my mother,” she said bitterly.
“Don’t judge her too harshly,” he said pragmatically. “Just try not to be her.”
Jesus, she liked this guy, and though they’d just met, she thought about offering him the spare room in her apartment.
It had been Ella’s idea that she and Beanie continue to share a room while renting out the spare on a weekly basis to actors, actresses, directors, and anyone who came to town for a short stint. And if the landlord or any assignee were to show up, they’d say that so-and-so was a guest, a friend, a family member on holiday. Given their network of friends and associates—secretaries and assistants to people who knew people—they were quickly able to spread the word that a fully furnished room for rent, clean, safe, and close to the studios, was available, but only with references upon request. They put the condition less for security and more for exclusivity. Everyone wanted what few could have, and this little gem, a stone’s throw from the MGM lot, became a must-get for anyone who could get.
As soon as they rejected a few people, and waitlisted others, it seemed to be the room everyone wanted. It was, after all, a sweet setup, with a white lacquer platform queen-size bed, a color TV, and a mini fridge stocked with soda, snacks, and cream for the Mr. Coffee that sat on top. Six weeks after Mercedes left, they had a rotating group of regulars, charging as much as five to six hundred dollars per week when the tenant was flush, allowing them months when they had no need to rent it out at all.
This was one of those months.