1993 - The Blue Afternoon (3 page)

I sensed, immediately, that I was at some kind of watershed, now. You know that feeling, when you can almost see the two or several directions your life might take ahead of you, a moment when you know that the next choice you are about to make is going to be crucial and possibly final, that there is no going back, and that nothing will ever be the same again? I could tear the letter up, unopened, ignore the man in future and call the police if he continued to pester me. Or I could open the letter, read what it had to say and thereby allow myself to be drawn in even further to his curious world and his strange obsession about me and our relationship.

I opened the letter:

My dear Kay,

 

I know you must be wondering if you are dealing with a lunatic. Believe me, you are not. I am as sane as you are. We must talk properly without fear of interruption. I shall not bother you further but will let you know that I am staying at 105 Olive Street for the next ten days only. Please do communicate with me, there is so much to say.

 

Dr Salvador Carriscant.

I had made my choice.

I
emerged from the Third Street Tunnel and drove down Hill Street, swinging back up Fifth and up on to Olive Street high on Bunker Hill. From up here I could see the tower of the new City Hall, tall and white, shining in the crossbeams of its searchlights. Between the ancient houses and over vacant lots I caught glimpses of the glowing electric arrow of Wilshire Boulevard thrusting west its sixteen miles towards the ocean and the last cinnamon stripes of the setting sun.

105 Olive was an old Queen Anne mansion, probably built in the 1880
s
. It was nicely asymmetrical and not as over-decorated as some I had seen. It had a roof of fish scaled shingle and a big domed turret with a bent lightning conductor. Its verandah circled three-quarters of the house and its elaborate carved porch frieze was badly broken, looking like the tattered edge of a paper doily. A dusty pepper tree with a tyre swing stood in the patch of beaten earth that had once been a lawn. The old mansion was now doing humble duty as a boarding house for transient workers. A handwritten cardboard sign in the window said ‘rooms $1’. A few men sat and smoked on its front steps, small brown men in cheap but clean clothes. I assumed they were Japanese.

I pulled over to the kerb and settled down to wait—for what? I wasn’t exactly sure, but I felt that I needed to turn the tables momentarily, to observe Carriscant himself, covertly, as he had observed me, before we embarked on this momentous and earnestly entreated communication.

Carriscant appeared at the front door about forty minutes later. He was wearing a tight blue overjacket, with a naval cut, and had his homburg on. I left the car and followed him to the funicular railway that led down from the heights of Bunker Hill to Hill Street below. I felt relatively inconspicuous, almost masculine, in fact: I wore slacks and a trenchcoat and had a beret pulled down low on my brow.

Carriscant entered the little cream-coloured cable car and moved up to the front where he took his seat. I waited until it was about to depart and slipped in at the last moment and stood at the door. There was a small jolt and the car began to move down the gradient towards the busy streets below. It was a clear night, so clear I could see the lights of Huntington Park and Montebello and, over to the south, the glow of big orange flares burning at the Dominguez oilfields at Compton.

I followed Carriscant as he crossed Hill and walked over to Main Street. The sidewalks here were busy: on either side of the street were movie theatres, burlesque joints and dime museums, penny arcades and shooting galleries. There were many Mexicans among the passers-by and groups of sailors up from the naval yards at San Pedro. Carriscant paused at a second-hand bookseller and browsed a while through the boxes set out in front of the store. I turned to face the window of a steakhouse and concentrated my attention on a display of plank-steaks, unnaturally red against the bed of crushed ice upon which they were fanned out, like fat rubber playing cards. Eventually, Carriscant moved on and turned into an all–night lunch room, blazingly lit, and sat himself down at a rear table. I strolled to and fro past the window a couple of times and watched him place his order. I noticed he did not remove his hat from his head and as I turned to begin my third discreet trajectory I decided at once that any further delay would be foolish. I pushed open the glass door and went in to join him.

He did not seem at all surprised to see me, which made me irritated for a moment and made me regret my impulsiveness. He rose halfway from his seat and tipped his hat in a formulaic gesture of politeness. The act seemed to remind him he had the thing on his head and he removed it carefully, setting it down on the empty seat beside him, then he brushed his hair flat with the palms of his hands in two slow stroking movements. He looked fatigued, much older suddenly, and the bright lights of the lunch room cast sharp shadows across his face making the prominent lines deep, like gashes. I took the seat opposite him.

“I would offer you some food—” he began.

“No, no. I came to see you. Your letter…You said you needed help.”

“I do, indeed I do.” He smiled at me. “Did you follow me here?”

“Yes.”

He chuckled. “Dear Kay.”

I ignored this. “Are you in trouble?”

“Trouble?” He appeared to think about the word, as if pondering its semantics. “Not exactly, but I do need help. I am a total stranger, you see. Total.”

A waiter brought him his food, a large plate of dark pasty stew with mashed potatoes and what looked like squash. He ostentatiously searched for the meat and then cut the few cartilaginous strips deliberately into small cubes before beginning to eat.

“More meat on a wren’s shin,” he muttered, angrily. “This is disgraceful food,” he said. “There’s no excuse, in this country of all places. I would have cooked myself but there are no facilities at the lodging house.”

“Do you like to cook?” I knew I was making conversation, gauche conversation, and disliked myself for it, but I felt strangely awkward with him, as if in responding to his invitation I had somehow lost the advantage of our encounters. He, by contrast, appeared very relaxed and smiled patiently at me.

“I am a cook. I love cooking.”

“What do you mean? It’s your job?”

“Yes. At least it has been for the last fifteen years.”

“On your letter you signed yourself
Doctor
.”

“I was a doctor first, then a cook.”

He ate his meal with surprising speed, as if someone was likely to snatch his plate away, with a concentration and energy that were almost alarming. After he had finished he said he was tired and did not wish to talk further. We walked back towards the funicular—the ‘Angel flight’—that would take us back up to Bunker Hill. He was silent but I noticed he was looking about him at the city almost fearfully, awestruck by its scale and business, its din and brightness.

His skin under the diffused electric light of the street took on marked olive tones, to the extent that he might have passed for a Mexican or Latino, and I thought again of this gift of patrimony he had brought me and how preposterous it was. My own skin was pale and insipid beside his. Shared dark hair and brown eyes made a flimsy case in a paternity suit.

At the door of his lodging house we made an appointment to meet the next day. The little men sat on the steps up to the front door where we had left them an hour since: they stared at me curiously, with no malice or hostility.

“Why are there so many Japanese here?” I asked him quietly.

He turned and spoke to the men on the steps in a language I did not recognise. They all laughed, with genuine hilarity, it seemed.

“Japanese?” he said, reproachfully. “These men are Filipinos.”

I
sat with Salvador Carriscant on the slatted wooden bench of a red car as it rolled and rattled as we crossed over Pico Boulevard at Sawtelle and headed out westward through the beanfields towards Santa Monica. Here and there the boulevard was being widened and long stretches of the small one-storey shops had been flattened to take the new roadway. Soon everyone would be able to drive to the beach. The trolley car stopped at the Ocean Avenue depot and Carriscant and I wandered down to Ocean Park. Once again I noticed that the press of people, the noise and the vivid colours of the sunshades seemed both to attract and disarm him. We stood at the Japanese gambling galleries watching men and women gambling for merchandise rather than money, and strolled past the beach clubs and the many piers, the loop-the-loop and the ride-the-clouds attractions; the air jangling with the shouts of children and the fretful buzz of the speedboats carrying anglers from the shore to the fishing barges—old mastless schooners, and wooden-hulled clippers—anchored a hundred yards or so out in the ocean. Only the Monkey Farm seemed to upset him. The crowd around the cages was six deep and when we managed to push through to see what the lure was I saw the expression on his face change at once from curiosity to disgust when he contemplated the melancholy chimpanzees and the neurotic mangy gibbons in their close-barred pens. He took hold of my elbow and steered me away.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Those monkeys in the cages, I don’t like it…They remind me of someone.” He changed the subject. “Let’s eat,” he said. “I want to eat fish.”

We went to one of the new apartment hotels, the Sovereign, which had a public dining room. Carriscant ordered broiled Spanish mackerel which he ate with his usual concentration. “This is fresh,” he said, grudgingly, “the best food I’ve tasted in America.”

The success of the menu dispelled the anger caused by the Monkey Farm and I sensed he was beginning to enjoy himself.

“I could never get enough fish,” he said, “for all those years, even though we were not far from the coast. We sold all the fish we caught.”

I did not press him, or ask him what ‘those years’ were he was referring to. There would be time enough later for interrogation, and, besides, I thought he would tell me everything in his own good time, if he felt like it. I realised that this jaunt to the sea was just a means for him and me to become further acquainted—very much the father re-establishing his relationship with his long-lost daughter—and my silence, my reticence, encouraged this mood and that would please him, I knew.

And then I wondered why I should want to please him, why I was encouraging this—what?—this friendship, this evolving relationship. He knew my date of birth, but what did that prove? He knew what time of day I was born but that could have been an inspired guess, a lucky shot…But there was a quality of confidence about his dealings with me that seemed different, indicated a fundamental certainty of purpose that I felt no trickster or flim-flam man could simulate. It was not striven for, did not seek to impress. He appeared relaxed in my company—as if my company were all that he wanted—and that in turn relaxed me.

He looked up, now, from his meal and gave me a quick, strong smile, his broad face creasing momentarily. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps because Rudolf Fischer was so manifestly not my father, and Hugh Paget possessed all the substantiality of myth, I was seizing too firmly on to this new candidate, all attractive flesh and blood, all very much here and now? It was a form of temptation, I knew, a kind of seduction and, I realised as I contemplated this sturdy, handsome old man, it was one I was not as well equipped to resist as I thought.

When I asked him if he wanted a dessert he said he would prefer to eat another fish. He ordered a poached steak of yellowtail tuna which he consumed slowly and with much intense savouring of its flavours as I ate ice-cream and smoked a cigarette. After his second fish he ordered a cognac, the cheapest in the house. He discreetly picked his teeth with a quill tip (he carried a small packet of them with him) and then seemed to rinse his mouth with the brandy. I started to chatter—most uncharacteristically—to cover my mild embarrassment as this dental toilette, this boccal sluicing, went on. He listened politely as I told him about Santa Monica, Venice and the Malibu as I had known them over the years, but all the while I was aware of him sipping brandy and then, more disturbingly, I could hear the foamy susurrus in his mouth as he swilled and flushed the liquid between his teeth.

“—and the Roosevelt Highway didn’t exist,” I was saying. “I mean, now you can take it all the way up the coast to Oxnard, but I remember I came down here with Pappi once—I must have been about twelve—”

“Twelve?”

“Yes, I—”

He frowned. “That would be about 1916?”

“Thereabouts. Twelve or thirteen, I guess. Pappi had this client—it was J.W. Considine, in fact—who had a house at the Malibu and we had to catch a boat out there from the Santa Monica pier. It was real cut off in those—”

“Kay…”

I stopped talking at once. I realised he had not been listening to me.

“—If I was looking for a man in California,” he said, “how would I set about finding him?”

“It depends…Do you know his name?”

“He’s called Paton Bobby. All I know is he lives in California. He used to, anyway.”

I stubbed out my cigarette. “Paton Bobby. Have you got any more information?”

“He’s a little bit older than me. And I think he was a policeman.”

“That might help. Anything else?”

“That’s it.”

I looked at him. I knew that our business, whatever it would turn out to be, was beginning, now, irrevocably.

“May I know why you want to find him?”

He smiled a faint, dreamy smile. His mood had changed ever since I had mentioned my childhood trip to the Malibu, my age and the date. It had sent him back through time, perhaps to that place where he could never get enough fish, and his thoughts had stayed there.

“I’m sorry, my dear, what did you say?”

“Why do you need to find this Paton Bobby?”

He sighed, looked down at his empty plate, turned his fork so that its tines pointed downward, and returned his gaze to mine.