As Far as You Can Go (28 page)

He went back to the hotel, wrote briefly to Mr Dangerfield that there was no hope of recovering the miniature while Mrs Washburn lived, and that there was little chance of her dying in the near future. He said also that he would be returning to England in a few weeks, but wished to drive back across the continent to see more of the country. This was not what he really meant, and he knew it, but although he felt
defeated
, he still wished to study the conqueror, to try and probe its secrets. And there was no need to tell Dangerfield about Diane: a white lie would give him a little time.

He did not mention that the Dangerfield miniature, the small masterpiece that had once passed through the hands of Elizabeth the First, now dangled from a nail, driven into the wall of a house in Beverly Hills by an indomitable old woman.

He posted the letter, then watched television for a while. There was a comedian who made American jokes that Harold did not understand. He felt more isolated and alien than ever. But things weren’t all bad. It was a relief, in a way, to be able to forget his obligation to Dangerfield, to be free again. It had been a job that stretched him to a limit, in a sense: but it wasn’t a very interesting limit. One would have to be inhuman never to be defeated by another human being. And there was Diane: she understood, she would realize now that it was a choice between him and her
grandmother
. He was sure she would choose him: thinking of it, he felt a light euphoria, and he even laughed at one of the comedian’s jokes.

The phone rang.

“Hallo?”

“Harold, honey?”

“Diane. That was quite a demonstration we watched, wasn’t it? I’m sorry I left like that, but what else could I do?”

“Honey, I don’t know what to say. It was so awful of her to do that. She must have been planning it ever since I told her about Uncle Henry. It was the meanest thing I ever saw her do. She must—I don’t know. She must hate you, really hate you.”

“I came to take her picture,” said Harold, “and then I stayed to take her child. There’s no reason she should like me.”

“I’m not her child.”

“Well, I’m glad you feel that, darling. But she thinks you
are
her child. She calls you ‘child’. She depends on you. She needs you. She may even love you, the way tyrannical parents do, in a strange way, love their children.”

“You don’t make it any easier, Harold. I want to see you so much, God, I want to see you. When I said I was having my hair done tomorrow, you looked at me as though I was saying good-bye. But I wasn’t saying that, honey. I mean, I
do
have this appointment tomorrow morning. That was all.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to look like that. But we never did finish that conversation, did we? You have a question you have to answer.”

There was a pause. “It’s not the sort of question I answer on the phone, honey,” she said, eventually. “Besides, you make everything so dramatic. I don’t feel I really know you yet. I’m damned if I’ll answer you yet.”

“Spirited, eh?” said Harold. “We’ll see about that. You haven’t got long, you know.” He was full of confidence. He rather enjoyed the prospect of watching her struggling to make up her mind, certain what she would decide. He didn’t know why he was so certain, but the confidence was like a good dinner inside him, warm and relaxing. “I told you, Diane, I’ll have to start home soon.”

“Oh, honey.”

“What time will you be free tomorrow?”

“Oh, around lunch-time.”

“O.K. I’ll go to these Towers with Eddie, and be back about two, I should think. Where shall we meet?”

She named a drugstore in Beverly Hills.

“I can’t wait, darling. We’ll have the afternoon and
evening
for ourselves, shall we? And then maybe we’ll go to San Diego one day to see your mother?”

“Oh, that would be marvellous, honey.”

“We have a lot to say to each other,” said Harold. “But there’s just one word I really want out of you.”

“Patience,” she said, and laughed.

He felt very happy after the call, and went down to the bar. There was a different man working the elevator, but his name wasn’t Chuck, either. Nor, it seemed, did he know anyone called Chuck on the hotel staff.

The barman wasn’t called Chuck, nor were any of the waiters. It was probably that Chuck wasn’t really called Chuck at all. Even more likely, if he was a buddy of Eddie’s, that he had been sacked. He asked the man at the reception
desk, who raised his eyebrows and said as far as he knew there was no one called Chuck who worked there. Was there, he wondered, any special reason Harold wanted to know this non-existent person?

“No,” said Harold. “Someone said there was someone called Chuck who worked here, that was all, and I wanted to get in touch with the first someone, and I don’t know his number.”

“He’s not in the book?” said the clerk.

“It’s most unlikely,” said Harold. “Anyway, I don’t know where he lives.”

He had dinner in the hotel and went back to his room to watch more television. There was an old movie about Hong Kong, and on the little grey screen he couldn’t really tell which was villain and which hero, since they both wore the same kind of hat. He drowsed.

As he was thinking of going to bed and reading
The
Ambassadors
(he was now on page 120), there was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” he called, switching off the set. He always felt guilty watching television, as though it was a secret vice which it would be shameful to admit in public.

A young man came in, dressed in the uniform of the hotel, and at first he didn’t recognize him. Then he realized it was the waiter who had brought him the bartender’s hangover cure.

“Hallo,” said Harold. “I feel fine right now, that stuff worked like a charm. What do you want?”

“I’m Chuck,” said the man. “I heard someone was looking for a guy named Chuck, and then I heard it was you, so I thought I’d see what you wanted.”

“No one admits to your existence,” said Harold.

“My real name’s Walter. Walter Friedricksen. That’s a kind of dumb name. But I use it for work.”

“Oh, I see. Well, I didn’t really want you for anything, to be honest. I just wondered who you were. Eddie said you
worked here. You don’t happen to know a phone number at which he could be reached, do you?”

“I wish I did,” said Chuck, standing on one leg, then the other. “I don’t get to see him as often as I like.”

“Is he a great friend of yours?”

“Oh, sure,” said Chuck. “Hey, look, do you mind, I feel kind of awkward talking to you like this. I don’t want to lose a job fraternizing with the guests. The manager doesn’t like that too much. He says we should be friendly without being insinuating. If you know what that means.”

“Quite right,” said Harold. “Sorry you’ve been bothered. You showed a great deal of tact the other day about my hangover. The manager should be proud of you.”

“Oh, Eddie asked me to keep an eye on you,” said Chuck. “He said he didn’t want you getting into bad company. He’s real fond of you, I guess.”

“Well, I don’t think he actually dislikes you, come to that. We’re going to see the Watts Towers tomorrow. Have you ever been there?”

“Nope. Eddie talks about them. He wrote a poem about them. It’s kind of good in a funny way.” He shifted his weight again and said, “Look, I gotta go.”

“O.K. Good night. Sorry if I’ve caused you any
inconvenience
. I didn’t really want to see you at all.”

“That’s all right.” He went to the door, then he said, without turning round, “If you see Eddie, tell him I can’t get off tomorrow night. I have to be on call all night.”

“Certainly,” said Harold. “I’ll tell him when he comes tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” said Chuck, and left.

Harold thought about Chuck and Eddie for a minute or two, but it wasn’t his business, and he didn’t really want to know about it. It did, though, solve the problem of how Eddie ate. Chuck obviously ransacked the kitchen before he went off duty.

He yawned and went to bed.

T
HE WATTS TOWERS
were everything Eddie had said, and more. Made out of junk and rubble and seashells and steel, they rose high above the surrounding frame houses, which sagged and needed paint. They were multicoloured, decorated with pieces of coloured glass and anything their builder, Simon Rodia, had been able to lay hands on. They were open conical spirals, crazy and beautiful, absolutely without purpose, wholly engaging.

Harold gaped at them for a while, as Eddie pointed out various things to him, the heart motif, the builder’s initials, the great variety of materials. There was a wall round them, and beside them ran a railroad. They were at the end of a road, anonymous 107th Street. They were as gay as
butterflies
and as solemn as public fountains. They were absurd and poetic, they had no business in a run-down area of the city. They were freaks, sports, uncompromisingly there, soaring into the blue sky with as little sense of self-importance as of function.

They went in, paying at the gate, where a young negro was reading a textbook. He smiled at them, and sold them a guide-book, though Eddie said he didn’t want one. Then he went back to
Principles
of
Solid
Geometry.

Harold read in the guide-book that the Towers had been built by an immigrant Italian tile-setter. He was still alive, but had moved away to somewhere in the northern part of the state, apparently. He was over forty when he began his construction, and it took him thirty-three years, working entirely alone. Then he packed up and went away. It really was most extraordinary. He was quoted by the guide-book
as saying: “I wanted to do something in the United States because I was raised here, you understand? I wanted to do something for the United States because there are nice people in this country.” But that didn’t sound enough: you didn’t go and build a working model of the roof-tops of Samarkand (because that’s what the Towers looked like) just because you liked the country you happened to have been brought to when you were a child. No, there was a compulsive feeling about the structures, a sense that the man who built them was obsessed by some private imaginary heaven, and when you knew it had taken him thirty-three years, without any help from anyone, then you knew that Simon Rodia couldn’t have been altogether normal,
altogether
sane, or, come to that, altogether crazy. The
guide-book
quoted him again: “I had in mind to do something big, and I did.”

His neighbours had been Spanish-speaking, the guide-book said. To live alone in a community where you didn’t speak the language, to work out your extraordinary fantasies where practically no one could see them, this was, surely, what people meant by art for art’s sake. Yet there was no sense of conscious art about the Towers. They twined and twisted their elaborate open-work forms into the air without regard for proportion or form or volume or any of those things. And then he had just gone away, disappeared, when he was finished. The guide-book was rather coy about this: it said that some people thought that Rodia’s artistic needs were served in the act of building the Towers, and once they were built he no longer needed them. Others felt he went away because of some strong disappointment. “Discovered living in Martinez, California, in 1959, Simon was reluctant even to talk about the Towers. ‘If your mother dies and you have loved her very much,’ he said, ‘maybe you don’t speak of her.’” That wasn’t very helpful.

Harold looked up from the base of one of the two taller
towers and thought that maybe that was the answer, though. If there was one thing you could see at a glance, it was that the Towers were phallic imagery of a very refined order. “Nuestro Pueblo” was carved here and there, and the hearts flowed all over the structure, like a carpet, or rather, like a delicate net. So maybe it was deep mother-love: that could cause all sorts of things. But whatever it was didn’t explain the Towers, nor did it even matter. They were there, and they were the work of one man, and whatever reason he gave for building them, it was irrelevant now.

Harold then read about an attempt by the city council to have the Towers destroyed. Incredulously, he discovered that officialdom considered them dangerous: they were “unsafe structures built without a permit, using junk and inferior construction methods”. The same, no doubt, could be said for the Parthenon. There had been a legal battle, and then a test of the Towers’ strength, and the Towers had won. It was all rather inspiring for liberals.

Besides the two main towers, there was one smaller one, joined to them by curved bars, themselves linked by a single vertical bar, elaborated with hearts and other designs. Then there was a sort of garden made of stone and junk and
bottle-tops
and other material, with a tracery over it, like a pergola. The actual ground area was quite small, and at one end of it stood the remains of Rodia’s house that had burned down after he left, having deeded the lot to a neighbour.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” said Harold.

“It’s kind of crazy, right?” said Eddie. He stood hunched in his jacket, squinting through his dark glasses at the
pinnacles
above them. The tallest tower must be at least a hundred feet high. “I guess this is the kind of art I like,” he went on. “Stuff a man’s done for himself first, and the hell with anyone who wants to look, they don’t matter.”

“It’s beautiful and wild and—far out, I’d say.”

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “You want to read my poem about
it? It’s the only poem I ever wrote. It doesn’t rhyme or anything. I just sort of scribbled it down after someone brought me here one day, a couple of weeks back. I’ve been back a couple of times to look at it again. I feel all right here.”

Harold took the crumpled sheets of paper which Eddie offered him. His handwriting was surprisingly neat. Harold had expected it to be a scrawl.

The poem was headed “My first and only poem by EDDIE JACKSON.” It went:

*

Take
a
rainbow
and
stretch
it,
make
it
soar
straight
up,
up,
into
a
Babel
of
blue.
Now
coil
it,
like
a
sailor
coiling
a
rope,
make
it
pliable,
bend
it
a
bit,
then
coil
it
again,
as
though
you
were
coiling
a
spring,
spiralling
up
to
the
top.
Put
a
little
conical
hat
on
it.
That’s
the
Watts
Towers.

Or,
if
you
like,
make
a
wizard’s
hat,
one
hundred
feet
high,
but
before
you
put
on
the
covering,
the
black
stuff
for
the
night,
and
the
gold
stuff
for
the
sun
and
the
stars
—
stop.
Leave
just
the
framework
of
the
hat,
the
wire
and
the
spirals.
Then
cover
them
with
shells,
pieces
of
broken
plate,
smashed
Seven-Up
bottles,
splinters
of
stained
glass.
That’s
the
Watts
Towers,
too.

The
Watts
Towers
are
not
the
Towers
of
Watts,
they
are
the
Towers
of
Simon
Rodia,
who
left
Rome
at
ten
or
so,
and
later,
after
he’d
bummed
around
a
bit,
he
came
to
L.A.,
to
Watts,
a
neat
white
slum
where
the
Mexicans
live,
where
the
negroes
live,
where
the
poor
live.
And
he
lived
there
for
thirty
years
and
more,
and
built
his
Towers
behind
a
wall,
as
gay
and
crazy
as
the
Towers
themselves,
and
he
lived
alone
in
his
house,
with
his
Towers
beside
him,
building
in
his
spare
time.
And
all
over
his
Towers
he
wrote
“Nuestro
Pueblo”,
and
he
covered
it
with
hearts.

And
when
he
had
finished
he
went
away,
he
gave
the
land
to
a
neighbour,
and
later
the
house
burned
down,
but
the
Towers
stayed
straight,
right
by
the
railroad,
and
engines
whistled
as
they
passed.

And
then
the
kids
broke
in,
kids
from
the
block,
and
they
smashed
whatever
they
could
reach,
the
creation
of
fractured
things,
of
pots 
broken
and
glasses
cracked,
old
shoes,
and
tin-cans
and
twists
of
wire
and
seashells.
But
they
couldn’t
smash
much,
because
the
Towers
stood
so
high
above
them,
and
the
kids
were
scared
to
climb.

And
then
the
City
looked
in,
and
the
City
was
shocked
out
of
its
mind,
and
it
said,
These
are
dangerous
slums,
the
kids
might
break
their
little
necks,
playing
around
them,
and
anyway
we
don’t
like
rainbows,
not
in
our
neat
little,
white
little,
goddam
slum.
Those
Towers
have
got
to
come
down,
they
said.
All
the
wizards
are
dead,
anyway,
and
no
one
wears
a
hat
in
the
grave.
Those
Towers
have
got
to
come
down.

And
then
people
got
mad,
and
said,
The
hell
with
the
City,
and
Art
is
very
important,
and
the
Towers
are
Art.

And
the
City
said,
The
hell
with
Art,
kids
are
more
important
than
Art,
those
Towers
had
better
come
down
before
we
do
it
ourselves.

And
then
everyone
got
excited,
and
people
wrote
things
in
magazines,
and
experts
said
Art
was
Art
and
other
experts
said
Art
was
not
Art,
but
Simon
Rodia,
he
didn’t
care,
he
was
away
up
in
the
northern
part
of
the
state,
and
he
didn’t
want
to
be
bothered.

And
then
people
got
the
idea
they
might
ask
Simon
what
he
thought
about
things
like
art
and
kids
and
life
and
all
that
jazz,
and
they
tooled
around
and
they
found
him,
and
asked
him
for
interviews,
and
wrote
down
what
he
said.