Los Angeles (35 page)

It doesn’t matter. I was losing interest in physics at that point, anyway.

______

I came home from New York, and my father made grilled cheese sandwiches with tons of butter, which we ate at the vast stainless
steel island in the middle of his kitchen, and conspicuously did not mention that I had been gone at all. “I’m not supposed
to eat butter.” He laughed. “But I don’t care. It’s the only thing I can enjoy anymore.” He winked at Melanie. Dad hadn’t
bothered to cut any of the sandwiches in two, just plopped them down on the counter.

A member of the staff, a pretty girl with long black hair, rushed around behind him, trying to keep things clean. He finally
told her to get the hell out, so now it was just us, the Veroncheks, bizarre family that we were. Dad pushed a large bowl
of fruit over toward me with a greedy smile. He had always loved fruit, had always behaved as though it were some terrific
treat, a throwback, I suppose, to his underprivileged childhood.

I tried to remember if my father had ever made me anything to eat before, and he must’ve read my thoughts, because he said,
“Your mother was always around, overprotecting you. She wouldn’t let me take you anywhere. She always said it was your skin,
that you were too delicate, somehow I’d —”

“It’s all right, Dad.”

“And then everything happened with the doctor, and then Canada, that Vancouver place. The whole thing with the divorce and
your mother’s illness, and then, well, the thing in college…it just sent you over the edge.”

At some point the nanny brought Gabriel in, and now Melanie turned her attention to him.

“And what would you like, buster?” she said. “Are you hungry?”

The little boy ran to the refrigerator. He had become so skinny, I noticed, like a piece of string himself.

“Where are you going?” Melanie asked.

“Does he maybe want me to make him a sandwich, too?” My father was hopeful.

“Jesus, not one of those,” Melanie said with a sniff. She reached inside the glass refrigerator and found a plastic bowl.
She pulled off the lid and handed Gabriel a white, rubbery cube.

“Is that what you want?” Dad got off his stool and leaned down to look at him.
“Tofu?”

Gabriel looked up like a spaniel, his head cocked to one side. His little face contorted. He twisted his mouth and tried to
force out a word.

“What is it, sweetheart? Say what you want.”

The little boy continued to stare at my father. He was about to speak, I thought, but only revealed a mouthful of gooey white
mush.

Dad shook his head and placed a hand on Gabriel’s chin, gently closing his jaw.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

Melanie found a high chair, and I helped pick the kid up and put him in it, threading his scrawny limbs through the leg holes.
She arranged a small plate of tofu and broccoli. His eyes grew wide, from hunger, I guess, and from excitement to be eating.
Melanie poured herself a glass of juice and sat directly in front of him. She wasn’t as beautiful as my mother had been, not
even remotely as glamorous, but she was warm, natural, her body composed of a hundred circles, with brown hair and olive skin
and soft brown eyes and a face that had never been altered. Melanie had practical hands that were always moving, touching,
caressing, grooming. She had grown up wealthy, my father once told me, so none of his money meant anything to her. She must
have married him for love, he had said, because look at him, it wasn’t for looks. I hadn’t believed it, of course. Standing
there in their gigantic kitchen, I still didn’t. Money and power had to have somehow figured into Melanie’s decision to marry
my father, but I could see at that moment that she loved this little boy, and maybe, I thought, that was enough.

Right now both she and my father came around on either side of Gabriel and kissed his cheeks, making foolish, overly loud
smooching sounds. Gabriel’s face broke into a mushy, slobbery smile, and his eyes closed rapturously. He held a piece of broccoli
in one hand and a cube of tofu in the other, both of which oozed between his fingers, green and white.

My father looked up at me. “He loves this,” he said in his faint accent. “He’s like on drugs.”

______

In Los Angeles, the light finds its way into you. It tears at your oculus with its photoelectric teeth. You try to close your
eyes against it, but you still see it, a throbbing ball of incandescence, a splash of lava under your eyelids.

Red. Orange. Bright yellow. Burning.

It dances across your field of vision; it swims over the waxy leaves of the succulents like a school of glittering fish; it
licks your skin like a cat with an ultraviolet tongue and warms the streets of the city like a lamp in a tanning salon.

This is the light, the Los Angeles light. Gleaming radiantly off the chrome of the BMW ahead of you, it shines like a painful
metaphor for the truth. It traces an outline around the features of the beautiful people and radiates an aura of intensity
around their golden, faultless bodies. Daylight in Los Angeles is flashing chrome and metal, radios too loud in every car,
tanned arms lifting cigarettes to lipsticked mouths. It is BMWs, Mercedes, Jaguars, Porsches; it is resplendent hair, reflective
sunglasses, shining jewels dangling from perspiring ears; white-asphalt-and-blue skies, a fantastic, extreme-close-up sun,
crisp white shirts, gorgeous faces in flamboyant cars.

Imagine what it must have been like for the filmmakers of the teens and twenties, for Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and
John Ford, for those first cinematographers who came out here and stood on the sandy plateau to appreciate the uniform light,
what it must have been like to apprehend those long, golden sunrises and glorious sunsets. Day after day like this, hour after
hour of immaculate light and hard, filmable shadows. They set up their cameras and shot, exposing roll after roll, exposing
themselves, their bodies, their skin, and their souls, exposing the rest of the world, too, movie by movie, scene by scene.

But then the cars came, and the industries filled the Valley with factories, smokestacks, and assembly plants, and the city
grew more and more alluring, and the light of Los Angeles became more and more gorgeous because the film technology finally
advanced enough to capture its spectrum of tones and hues, its pinks and blues and golds and yellows, its Technicolor subtleties.
We waited for the sun to come to us, we invited it in, even seduced it when necessary, trying to capture it inside our little
black boxes, happy just to possess it for those few moments, to record it, to make use of it for our public fictions and our
private dreams, and when it left for the night, we stood there smiling — burnt, blistered, scorched, dying of skin cancer,
but intoxicated, in love.

Every morning I woke up earlier and earlier, until finally I found myself coming downstairs around six
A.M.
to help with Gabriel. It got to the point where I was even feeding him myself, sitting at the kitchen table with my mug of
black coffee and spooning breakfast goo into his hungry, inarticulate mouth. Even though he should have been talking in complete
sentences by now, and feeding himself, all my little brother wanted was to eat and murmur incoherently. There was something
else about him, too — there is something about small children, I guess, his smell, his soft cheeks, the drool permanently
glossing his chin — something that made me forget. I marveled at Gabriel’s fine, wiry hair, his brown skin and red lips.

After breakfast I would take him into the living room and lie on the floor, me in my waffled bathrobe, Gabriel in his pajamas.
My father always left the house by six-thirty, so it was only me and Gabriel and Melanie by then. I’d lie on the rug and curl
my body around his, letting his dark limbs squirm against my chalky chest. With his daily therapy, he was trying to learn
to talk. Every afternoon a specialist came over and sat with him, a young man with a receding hairline and wire-rimmed glasses
who laid out a series of simple images on the table — a cat, a house, a baby, a car. My little brother stared into space,
babbled, and twisted his hands.

It’s important to mention this, too:

One day not long after I returned from New York, Frank got up from his ornate desk in his Beverly Hills home office, walked
down through his kitchen into his four-car garage, removed the plastic tube from the bag that he had bought years ago at a
hardware store, and connected it to the exhaust pipe of his Porsche — the red Porsche he had been so embarrassed to tell me
about, because he wasn’t even allowed to drive it. He curled the tube around to the passenger side window, sat in the driver’s
seat, and engaged the ignition. I’m not sure how long these things take, but I imagine he sat there for a while before losing
consciousness, thinking over the complex events of his life. He had devoted himself to my family. He had been so dedicated
to my father, to my mother — and to me, too, I guess. Other than his wife, he had no family of his own. He left several notes.
There was one for my father, of course, which explained in detail the remaining legal issues regarding their upcoming feature
film, including completed drafts of contracts and casting recommendations. There was a letter for Gabriel, which was not supposed
to be opened until his twenty-first birthday and which was entrusted to me for safekeeping.

And there was also a letter for me, in which he said he was sorry about everything I had gone through, that he knew I’d had
a tough time of it. He said that he thought I should know about him and my mother, that it was only fair. He said he hoped
it wouldn’t hurt me, but he thought I should be aware of how much he loved her and that at one point in time, at least, she
had loved him. When he lost Monique, he wrote, his real life had ended. These past several years had only been to fulfill
his remaining obligations. He hoped he had done so, he wrote, and that I would forgive him someday. He understood completely,
however, if I couldn’t. These were his letter’s last words:
I may not have been a very good person, Angel, but I wasn’t a monster.

Every evening I would stay up after dinner and talk to my father, refusing even a glass of wine. He would drink his expensive
bourbon and smoke his black-market Cuban, puffing away until it was too cold to remain outside, and then he would amble off
to sleep. I’d go to my room and watch DVDs. I tried watching Dad’s movies sometimes, out of politeness if nothing else, but
I could never connect — the explosions, the sentimental romances, the melodramatic heroes launching into their hopeless missions.
In my father’s movies people are always themselves, the characters so flawlessly delineated, their goals so perfectly clear.
I’d always wanted that, to be purely myself, with a certain, unwavering mission, like a character in a movie. But I am perpetually
filled with uncertainty, a deviation from the character I set out to be. Particle or wave.

Most nights, I’d let the disc run down and I would lie in the television’s cerulean glow, still dreaming the movie’s dream.
Sometimes I’d open the window and listen to the loud Malibu surf, my arms spread wide, my eyes wide, too, staring at the ceiling,
but asleep, letting Dr. Silowicz’s psychotropic medication work its forgetful alchemy.

And I slept, dreamlessly, relentlessly, mindlessly, the sleep of a person attempting to recover from a long illness. I was
sleeping like that, I remember, lying in bed one morning, when I felt something tugging at my hand. I opened my eyes and saw
Gabriel. A little boy now, Jesus Christ, he was so tall, and he wanted to play, saying, “Angel,” he said, speaking as clearly
as if he had been speaking all his life, saying, “Angel, it’s time … its time to wake up.”

The following people deserve my gratitude: Asya Muchnick, my infinitely talented and patient editor, who worked even harder
on this book than I did and who knows far more about it than I ever will (with a special tribute to Sabrina, who probably
suffered some prenatal nightmares because of me); Zainab Zakari, Michael Pietsch, Heather Rizzo, Marlena Bittner, Pamela Marshall,
and everyone else at Little, Brown, all of whom have been so kind and respectful and
lenient,
especially about deadlines; Paul Sidey, my UK publisher; Jonas Axelsson, my Swedish publisher; all my other international
publishers whom I haven’t met but who, hopefully, will take me to dinner when I visit their countries one day; Mary Ann Naples,
my supportive and thoughtful literary agent, who never reminds me that it isn’t her job to listen to me whine (it’s her job
to listen to Josephine whine), her partner Debra Goldstein, and everyone else at The Creative Culture, Inc.; Matthew Snyder
at CAA; Ellen Pall, an early reader who tolerated my nonsense; Karin Slaughter, my friend in the trenches; my colleagues at
BBDO NY, especially my friend Mike Gambino; my friends in L.A., Lance and Claire O’Conner, Sandra Christou, and Steve Peckingham;
as always, E-ma and Grand-dad, Dad, Jul, and Val, Cal, Brett, and Liv; my wife, Brigette, about whom I will always be a little
crazy — okay, a
lot;
the real city of Los Angeles, as well as my imaginary City of Angels and all the Angels and Angelas who live there.

Finally, this book is dedicated with love and admiration to Anne Love Smith, whom I have tried all my life to be like. Thanks,
Mom.

Peter Moore Smith
is the author of
Raveling,
which was nominated for an Edgar Award. He has had stories selected for the Pushcart Prize and
Best Mystery Stories
collections. He lives in New York City.

"
Los Angeles,
like the city that provides its title, is blistering, complex, illusory, hard-boiled, decadent, and pioneering. Peter Moore Smith takes the rhythms of
Chinatown
and Ross Macdonald and marries them to a tale about quantum longing and regret. You won't soon forget the character Angel Veronchek or his noir quest for identity, memory, reality, love, and the last true story that can save us all. This book is both particle and wave, drug and dream, a fascinating meditation on desire and simulation, uncertainty and imagination. It's
The Long Goodbye
rewritten by Schrödinger after a nasty tequila binge. Smart, hip, and haunting, full of beguiling strippers, sinister psychiatrists, psychotic rock stars, and omnipotent patriarchs,
Los Angeles
is a dark gem of a story, and Peter Moore Smith is a brilliant writer."