1993 - The Blue Afternoon (4 page)

“I suppose you could say,” he said, his eyes innocently wide, his expression bland, “that I’m looking for a killer.”

P
hilip wrote out the cheque with evident but ridiculously disproportionate pride and handed it over with a courtly flourish.

“Pay to the order of Mrs Kay Fischer, two hundred dollars,” he said, through his grin.

“So you got a job,” I said.

“And a bank account. I’ve got six weeks’ work with MGM. I’m the third writer on Four Guns for Texas.”

“Sounds fulfilling.”

“Sounds like money.”

We were sitting in my office on Hollywood Boulevard. From my office window I could see the top three storeys of the Guaranty Building and the dusty fronds of a palm tree. I rented three rooms above a clothing wholesaler—Tex-Style Imports Co.—who specialised in blue jeans, dungarees and work boots that were sold to the petrochemical industry. The room that faced the boulevard was my office, beyond that was a small corridor that led to a windowless cube which was the drawing room where my solitary assistant, Ivan Feinberg, worked. Off the corridor was the reception area with a view of the parking lot. Mary Duveen, my secretary, had her desk here, squeezed between two banks of filing cabinets. It was all a bit shabby, a little make-do, especially compared to what I had become accustomed to at Meyersen and Fischer, but since the great schism and the lawsuit I had been obliged to economise. I had heard from one of my former colleagues that Meyersen had moved into my old office. Perhaps that was what he had been after all the time?…

I took Philip’s cheque and folded it away in my pocket book. He had had his hair cut and was wearing a new sportscoat, cotton, a greenish plaid, and wide mushroom-coloured trousers. His short hair, I thought, made him look even younger, a superannuated college kid, and for a moment I felt a brief squirm of self-pity as I reflected on our short marriage and what I had lost when I kicked him out. I kept the appellation ‘Mrs’, not because it impressed my clients but because it made them relax, but joined it up with my maiden name. The conjunction seemed to me to reflect ideally my social and personal status. But Philip was offended and hurt: I was having my cake and eating it, he said truculently. But isn’t that what life’s all about, I replied, the goal we’re all chasing? A brief squirm of self-pity, but one that disappeared soon enough.

“Movies,” I said, breezily. “Going to get your name on this one?”

“There’s a chance.”

I laughed. “And pigs may fly one day, they tell me.” I stood up. “I’ll walk down with you, I’ve got to get some lunch.”

As we descended the two floors to the street I asked Philip if he knew any way of tracking down a man called Paton Bobby, who was in his sixties and might have been a policeman.

“Tried the phone book? Who’s Paton Bobby?”

“A friend of mine needs to find him. I thought you might know how.”

He shrugged. “You could hire a P.I., I guess…Or maybe I could ask the head of security at the studio.” He grinned. “Did you hear that?
At the studio
—I’m a natural, success simply cannot continue to elude me. This guy used to be a cop, he might have some idea.”

We sauntered down the sidewalk towards a street vendor. The sun was hot on the crown of my head and I undid the top button on my blouse. It was a fine day with a baby-blue sky up above and a few perfect dawdling clouds. A fresh breeze moved through the fronds of the new palm trees, still only half the height of the streetlamps. They made a sound of nail scissors snipping or of matches tipped on to a glass table. I put on my sunglasses as the sun bounced off the white walls of the buildings across the street. Too much Streamline Moderne for my taste these days. Curved walls, curved glass, mirrored panels set here and there, stringcourses picked out in red and black to emphasise the horizontals, canopies swooping round corners or ducking into forecourts whenever possible…What was going on here? It was all vitiated anyway by the garish lettering, shouting signs in primary colours hanging off buildings or else set on cantilevered wooden hoardings on the flat roofs, good chow! ham ‘n eggs, cameras, gifts, parking. We passed through a tangy waft of fried onion as we walked by harrold’s charcoal broiled steaks and made for the street vendor with his refulgent silver chariot. I ordered a super chile dog with mustard and extra onions.

Philip touched my arm. “Listen, you’re not in any kind of trouble, are you, hon?” He was sincere, and it was a kind thought. I realised I was still very fond of him.

“Of course I’m not,” I reassured him. “It’s some old fellow I know, needs to track this party down.” Philip looked at me shrewdly, not wholly convinced, as I paid for and received my food. I could see him wondering how many ‘old fellows’ I might know and why I might want to help them locate a missing person.

“Stop looking at me like that. You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to.”

“No, no, I’ll see what I can do.”

I could wait no longer. I bit avidly into my chile dog, my nostrils suddenly filled with pungent heat. With a finger I helped a stray ribbon of onion into my mouth. I chewed.

Philip looked at me fastidiously. “I was going to ask you to dinner tonight, but now I’ve seen your lunch I guess you won’t be hungry.”

“Ha-ha. Call me later, you may get lucky.”

When I returned to my office George Fugal was there waiting for me, a wide smile on his narrow face. George was a tall thin forty-year-old with a restless, jumpy demeanour that sat oddly with a professional manner that could only be described as the last word in pedantry. He had thinning brown hair, big watery eyes and a weak chin that always had a bluey, unshaven look to it. If I had not known he was a lawyer I would have placed him as a minor criminal on parole, or a debtor on the run from the IRS. George never stopped looking round whatever room he was in, or over his shoulder; in restaurants he insisted on sitting with his back to the door, the better to squinny round in his seat.

“So what’s the good news?” I asked him.

“We got a buyer for the house. I’m sure. A—” He checked his notebook. “A Mrs Luard Turner. Pleasant lady. I just showed her around.”

“I’m going to finish it first. I hope she realises that,” I said with some ungrateful belligerence. All at once I felt oddly sad. Someone was going to buy my house. Someone else was going to live in my carefully constructed volumes of air.

“She knows that, she knows that. But she loves the place. Classy, she said. Grade-A class, she said. Her very words, Kay, her very words.”

He chattered on, excited and pleased for me, his gaze leaping from me to Mary to the office door to the trash can. We needed the sale to make the profit to permit K.L. Fischer to survive and move on to bigger and greater things. But I was still feeling my loss keenly.

“We’ve done it, Kay,” George Fugal said. “You’re there.” I smiled at him. Somehow I did not believe it was ever that easy.

I
n architecture, as in art, the more you reduce the more exacting your standards must be. The more you strip down and eliminate, the greater the pressure on, the import of, what remains. If a room is only to have one door and one window then those two openings must conform exactly to the volume of space contained between the four walls, the floor and the ceiling. They must be shaped and styled with intense concentration and focus. One inch, half an inch, can make all the difference between something perfect and something botched. Without decoration, without distraction, proportion becomes the essential factor.

My aesthetic mentor, my inspiration, in all this was the German architect Oscar Kranewitter (1891–1929). He was a friend of Gropius and like him was heavily influenced by the austere ideologies of Johannes Itten. Kranewitter was one of the first members of the German Werkbund and taught occasionally at the Bauhaus between 1923 and 1925 (he departed, never to return, after a savage row—it came to blows—with Hannes Meyer). There is no doubt that had it not been for his tragically early death (in an automobile accident) Kranewitter would be regarded as one of the foremost German architects and leaders of the International Style. Because of his demanding temperament and the strictures he imposed on himself and his clients he built very little and his published work is confined to a few articles in obscure reviews such as Metall and Neue Europaische Graphik. And it was in these densely argued pieces that he introduced the concept of Armut into modern architecture—or ‘Poverty’. But the sense with which Kranewitter charges and loads this abstract noun is complex: for him the meaning of the word loses any negative or pejorative import and its implication is transformed into something more akin to ‘Purity’. The abstruse theorising behind Armut was given a physical dimension in Kranewitter’s masterwork, the Lothar House (1924-1929) in Obertraubling near Regensburg. It was here during the painstaking five years of construction that Kranewitter’s obsessiveness and fanatical attention to detail took on legendary proportions as his conception of Armut took on plastic form. When the house was all but completed he had the entire ceiling of the dining room torn down and rebuilt four centimetres higher. He designed all the furniture (teak, chrome and leather were the only materials used) and there were no carpets or curtains. The floors were made of a dark polished flint. The colour of the walls was white on the first floor and primrose yellow on the second (yellow is a ‘lighter’ colour than white, according to Kranewitter, and therefore suitable for rooms above ground level). All the door furniture was forged aluminium and unpainted, as were the massive and specially designed central heating radiators. The rooms were lit with naked light bulbs. It was destroyed by a stray stick of bombs during a raid on Regensburg in the Second World War.

The more I studied Kranewitter the more I came to admire the dedication of the man and the ruthless consistency of his ideas. Rigour, clarity and precision seemed to me attributes that were both admirable and practical. Kranewitter’s Armut is not something miserable and deprived: it has a liberating, purgative quality to it. The more the twentieth century advances and the more crassly complicated our lives become and the more the hectoring injunctions of the commercial world intrude—eat! buy! play! spend! enjoy!—and come to dominate our every waking moment, so do the calm and emptiness, the clean, unimpeded, untrammelled nature of the world Kranewitter tried to create grow ever more appealing. These were ambitions that I tried to realise and incorporate in my own work and they are manifestly embodied in the two completed buildings I designed—the Taylor house in Pasadena, and the Burbank shopping mart. Everything extraneous is stripped away. The interiors are ruthlessly plain, the only lines are vertical or horizontal. Even in such a temple of self-indulgence as a shopping mart—the American antithesis of Armut—Kranewitter’s ascetic philosophy is evident. And it works.

It worked so well it cost me my job. The success of the Burbank mart meant that Meyersen and Fischer were approached by Ohman’s Retail Group to design their new store and restaurant complex on Wilshire Boulevard. I did the initial drawings and plans, and had a scale model constructed. Shortly before the final contracts were signed, Eric Meyersen called me into his office and informed me that I was fired. When I asked him why, he said, equably, “No real reason, honey. I just don’t want to see your face around here any more, I guess.” Meyersen had, to put it simply, got what he needed from me—a body of work, a small but growing reputation, a style. Now, with the Ohman deal secure, he figured he could go it alone. Fugal looked at the document of partnership I had signed so avidly five years previously and duly unearthed the subclauses that granted Meyersen this unilateral power. I told him to sue the bastard in any case. Writs were served as the Ohman’s Building contract was signed by Eric Meyersen Architects Inc. The Taylor house and the Burbank mart records were similarly altered. My only course of action was to go out on my own and show the world who really was responsible for these buildings. 2265 Micheltoreno would be the first nail in Meyersen’s coffin.

P
hilip was renting a small clapboard cottage in Venice, one street back from the boardwalk and the ocean. I walked up the two steps to its sunblistered porch, tucked the flask under one arm, set down my grocery bag on an old cane rocker and rapped loudly on the frame of the flyscreened door. From inside I heard a couple of plaintive coughs and then Philip appeared in a creased and grubby robe, his hair lank and greasy. He had shaved recently, but it had made little difference, his eyes were dark, his face slumped and pasty-looking.

“Hello, sunshine,” I said. “Momma’s here.”

He had made up his bed—a navaho blanket and three pillows—on a winded davenport in the living room. From next door the sound of his neighbour’s radio, playing ‘American Dreamer’, was thinly audible. By the time I had poured the soup into a bowl and brought it through to him he was back on the couch under the blanket, his knees drawn up, his face set in an expression of stoical suffering.

“Potato soup and pastries, right? I got you pecan pie, lemon cheesecake and four assorted Danish.”

“Bless you.” He took the soup from me and started to slurp it up eagerly, like a starving peasant. “I haven’t eaten for forty-eight hours.”

I had seen the empty quart of bourbon in the kitchenette. “What’s wrong?”

“I got fired. After four fucking days, they fired me.”

“Well, it was a crappy movie—”

“—It was work, Kay. Four hundred dollars a week work.” His voice was sulky and heavy with self-pity. I sat and watched him finish his soup, whereupon he immediately started on the cheesecake. He took too large a mouthful and swallowed painfully. He coughed crumbs on to the davenport.

“Take it easy,” I said. “No one’s going to snatch it away. You want a coffee?”

“I think I got a tumour in my throat. Could you take a look?”

He gaped at me. I held his handsome, damaged face between my palms and tilted it so that the light from the window fell on his gullet. I saw nothing but pink pulsing gorge and a certain amount of lemon cheesecake but I knew Philip in these moods, he needed something to hold on to.