1993 - The Blue Afternoon (7 page)

“I’m sorry, Dr Carriscant,” I said abruptly. “I can’t help you on this, no.”

He stared at me balefully, sullenly, his eyes full of a new dislike and resentment. And then, all at once, the mood passed and his face brightened. He exhaled and let his shoulders slump and smiled weakly.

“Oh, well,” he said almost light-heartedly, “what can I do? I hope you won’t object if I try to change your mind—from time to time.”

“You can try,” I said, “but it won’t work.”

P
hilip’s thigh was still warm against mine. Too warm. I moved further away from him, very slowly, shifting myself along the mattress until I felt the moistness on my flank begin to cool. No portion of my body touched his, none of the calorific glow emanating from him warmed me: if it had not been for the surprisingly loud sound of his breathing I might have been alone in my bed. I spread my fingers and the tips touched a damp patch on the mattress—his semen, I supposed, and immediately my mind turned to the banal routines of housekeeping, of needing now to change my sheets even though they had been on the bed barely a day…

It had been a mistake to invite him to stay a night with me. We had made love, which of course was what I had wanted, a sudden and simple need for effective sex of some prolonged duration—so I could experience its visceral uncomplicated joys with none of its complicated personal preambles and aftermath. Philip was the only person who could furnish me with that, and he had, with, for him, an extra dimension of delight (it had been over a year since the last time), but he had fallen asleep, literally a minute after it was over, it seemed, his head heavy in the hollow between my shoulder and my breast, his legs against mine, a palm flat on my thigh. It had taken me ten minutes of small patient manoeuvrings to free myself from the various contacts with his body and I lay now, still and untouched in my small area of coolness, wishing he was home and trying not to feel cross with myself.

I met Philip in 1928 on the campus at UCLA where I was taking evening extension classes in German. Philip was studying German too, with a vaguely conceived view of going to work in Germany, in the film business there. I was keen to better understand and translate some of Kranewitter’s Metall articles whereas Philip only sought a basic conversational fluency. It had been one of his many passing fads; it lasted three weeks in this case but the enthusiasm survived long enough for us to note each other, find each other attractive and contrive oh so casually to meet.

We dined, we dated. I was much slimmer in those days and, I’m sure, much jollier company. Without much ado we began an affair. Some weeks later when Philip was between apartments he came to sleep over at my little house in Westwood village and discreetly stayed on. We married soon after that in the spring of 1929. Coleman was born a year later—blue and damned—and when he died all happiness left us. We divorced in Mexico that summer and it took us an awkward year to become friends again. I knew that Philip was still attracted to me but I had changed and could now see the conspicuous weaknesses in him, however much he amused me. It was a long time before I relented and we slept together. Tonight had been the fourth time. These occasions were becoming progressively less enjoyable.

I slipped out of bed but managed still to tug the sheet away from him. He did not move. In the shadowed screened dusk of the room I could clearly see his long thin penis curved over the swell of his thigh and the thin slugtrail gleam of his semen running from its tip on to my clean but crumpled sheets. I covered him and walked through to the bathroom, closing the door behind me before I switched on the light. I was startled, a regular occurrence this, at the pale solid size of the woman reflected in the mirror, the soft wide breasts, the firm belly creased below the navel…My mental image of myself remained trapped in 1926, the year I graduated from MIT, “Master in Architecture”, licensed to sign ‘Architect and Engineer’ after my name, never ageing, slim and enthusiastic with my big-lashed hopeful gaze. The hefty, haunchy reality always caught me unawares at moments like these. I switched the light off again, sat down and did my business in the dark, thinking suddenly, for no particular reason, of lanky, blurry Hugh Paget, my English father, and this dark maddening stranger who so brusquely wanted to frogmarch him out of my life and memories. Dr Salvador Carriscant, small and broad-shouldered, intense and emotional, absurdly quick to tears for an adult male, arrogant and impatient, strident in the pursuit of his own bizarre interests…Annoyingly, frustratingly, I was beginning to feel I had known him for years.

M
y mother and I ate lunch at the Spanish Kitchen, the one on Beverly Boulevard. There was nothing out of the ordinary in our meeting like this: we would lunch together every two months or so, often at her prompting. I am sure she was curious about me, about my life, but she was far too polite ever to ask direct questions. But often I sensed her scrutinising me, as if minute changes in my physical appearance—a different shade of lipstick, a new blouse, a wave in my hair—would provide her with clues as to who I was seeing, whether I was content or not, how life in general was going. They were amiable encounters these, as we were fond of each other and, more importantly, we respected each other, and in addition my mother seemed altogether more spirited and self-possessed away from Rudolf’s booming geniality. We passed our two hours together with no sense of strain or forced good manners. She liked spicy peppery food—which Rudolf could not stomach and which she never cooked at home—so we tended to eat in Spanish or Mexican restaurants where she would consume menudo or chiles verdes rellenos with evident pleasure. Not for the first time I wondered where she had acquired this taste—in the East perhaps? Along with me, a legacy of her short marriage to Hugh Paget?

Towards the end of our meal I asked her casually if she would do me a favour, nothing special, but one that might involve her sitting with me in the car for an hour of two. I was deliberately vague and unspecific.

“Well, sure,” she said. “Is it something to do with your lawsuit?”

“Yes and no,” I half lied. I had told her all about Meyersen and his devious ways over lunch, trying not to let too triumphant a note enter my voice. George Fugal had telephoned me at 11.30 that morning to say that the Turner contract had been signed and the sale had gone through. K.L. Fischer Inc. had made an operating profit of $21,058 on its first property deal and deeds were being drawn up for the next development on the new Silver Lake site we had found, a two-acre plot that, at a pinch, could take two houses or a bungalow court. I already felt my animus against Meyersen beginning to subside, diminishing, distancing itself in history.

We drove back down Beverly towards downtown and the tall white tower of the City Hall. On Olive I parked the car obliquely across the road from Carriscant’s lodging house and my mother and I each smoked a Picayune as we settled down to wait.

After about thirty-five minutes I saw Carriscant walking down Olive on our side of the road from the direction of the funicular. He was wearing a fawn raincoat I had not seen before and carried a brown paper parcel under his arm. I let him draw nearer and, as he was about to cross the road, I said to my mother in as idle a voice as possible:

“That man crossing the road…Have you ever seen him before?”

My eyes never left her face.

She peered at him.

Carriscant paused at the lodging house’s front steps, which had its usual complement of lounging Filipinos, and obligingly removed his hat while he chatted to them.

“No,” she said slowly, “I don’t think so. He looks a bit like that old actor fellow, you know the one.”

I saw nothing, not a tremor, not a blink, not a tautening anywhere. She turned to meet my gaze.

“Who is he?” she said.

“I think he might be a private detective, hired by Meyersen. I wondered if he had come by you, maybe, snooping around, asking questions…”

“No, definitely not.” She smiled. “Is that it? Can you drop me off at Bullock’s?”

I
stand inside 2265 Micheltoreno. It is built now, done, finished to all intents and purposes. The afternoon sun shines obliquely through the plate glass of the west wall casting a sharply defined shadow on the smooth ochre stucco. I sense the house’s space gather about me, its stacked and assembled volumes of air boxed and confined by their particular materials. The simple trellis on the yard, the planes of the walls of glass and abutting walls of stucco, the roof garden defined by its two oak beams, the way the corridor slides into the courtyard volume that in turn slips down the stairs to the gravel terrace below the western facade. Calmness and order. Absence of clutter, a cool world of clean edges, exact angles, and all designed by me. For a moment as I stand here in the empty room a peace descends on me. I think this is as close to happiness as I can manage these days.

My mother’s lie was good. In fact its skilfullness was nothing short of brilliant. What tremendous shock she concealed, what massive turbulence of emotion she hid beneath a surface of total calm and placidity. Her only mistake was to forget about natural curiosity. When your daughter informs you that a business rival may have hired a private detective to spy on her you do not immediately ask to be dropped off at a department store. And her unnatural insouciance had the effect of turning what had been instinct and suspicion into conviction and acceptance. Salvador Carriscant’s wild and incredible assertion was now taking on the lineaments of incontrovertible fact. With a strange mixture of reluctance and relief, of puzzlement and pleasure, I had to admit that what I had half suspected all along was now looking like a biographical certainty: Salvador Carriscant was my father.

L
arry Rugola, freshly but crudely shaved, the blood still gleaming on a bad razor nick below his ear, collected me from my apartment at 7 a.m. and we drove up to the new site at Silver Lake. The plot was another steep one (I could not afford flat ground, yet) and had a distant view of the reservoir. A short new concrete spur road had been laid to open up this flank of the hill and at its foot was a chainlink fence with a padlocked gate. There were lurid realtors’ placards tied to the fence advertising the lots for sale, declaiming
lake view
! in excited letters. It was true: in the clear morning light I could just see a stripe of grey water between the live oaks and the pepper trees,

Larry unlocked the gate and we paced about the two acres with the plans and a measuring tape. I turned and looked back up at the roadway: you would be able to step right off it on to the roof of any single–storey bungalow, such was the incline.

I called to Larry who was pacing solemnly about counting his big strides: “We could cantilever out, instead of cutting in.”

“It don’t come cheap.”

“Say, what about duplex? Duplex apartments, a row of three, maybe four?”

Larry wandered towards me, winding in his tape measure. “It’s a thought,” he said, “that way you could go with the gradient.”

“Living rooms on top, bedrooms below. Step it down and you’ve got a deck on top of the bedroom roof.”

“With a lake view, even.”

We set about measuring again with renewed fervour. The plot was an odd fan shape, splaying out at the foot of the hill. We pushed our way through the sage and wild laurel bushes to the bottom of the slope to where the ground dropped away into a vegetation-choked arroyo. The plots on either side were still vacant, but through a line of trees on the left came the echoey sound of hammering.

“You’ll get a lot of extra ground in front,” Larry said.

“So we landscape it, charge a premium.”

“Sounds good to me.”

We relocked the gate and drove up the spur to Ivanhoe.

“Our street got a name yet? How about Lakeview?” Larry said.

“Lago Vista’s better. The
Lago Vista site
. I like it.” I tapped Larry’s shoulder. “Turn right here, Larry, let’s go to Micheltoreno, I want to see the old house.”

We weaved west until we hit Angus and then turned south on Micheltoreno. I felt a pleasant shifting in my gut, an old unfamiliar sensation—happiness, excitement. The naming of the street, saying ‘the old house’: it spoke of progress, the development of a body of work, an avenue of bright tomorrows.

We came over a rise on Micheltoreno and there was number 2265. A thin crane stood above it and hanging from its arm was a flat section of roof being guided up and away by a gang of men in green overalls. A green bulldozer was backing away from the completely flattened porch area, snorting diesel fumes, and other men were collecting the solid timber spars from what remained of the roof trellis of the sheltered yard. Two dump trucks were parked at the kerb and on their sides was written “John Dexter Demo-Lition”.

“Holy shit!” Larry Rugola said, stopping the car, his eyes wide and uncomprehending. “Holy fuckin’ shit.”

We ran towards the house where a man in green overalls tried to stop us approaching as the roof section was swung over our heads towards the truck. From inside the house came the groaning rip of chainsaws and the tearing, nail-popping sound of jemmies being enthusiastically employed. Two men emerged from the opening where the front door had been carrying the bath and behind them followed three men in business suits and aluminium hardhats, handkerchiefs held to their noses against the dust. One man removed his helmet and a hank of thin blond hair was caught by a breeze.

“Ah, Mrs Fischer,” Eric Meyersen said. “Always premature. I wanted you to see the vacant lot. I was going to call. I hope you took a photographic record.”

The crane swung round to collect another roof panel.

“Where’s Mrs Luard Turner?” I said, staring at him, trying not to look around me.

“I think she’s up for a part at Metro,” Meyersen said. “Talented lady. Charges a modest fee.”

Then I stepped forward to take a swing at him, claw the pale eyes out of that smiling face, but Larry Rugola caught me by the elbow.