This Must Be the Place: A Novel (11 page)

In Ruby Falls, Arthur dreamed all the time.

In Ruby Falls, Arthur couldn’t tell when he woke up or if he ever woke up at all.

The past week—the week that had been the source of such speculation among the other residents of the Darby-Jones—Arthur had spent dreaming of his Amy. He saw her. Once she was reading a book on the couch and the lower half of her body was a mermaid’s tail, a glittering mass of dark gray-green and blue scales that ended in two veined furls, waving slowly in an imaginary current, mesmerizing Ray Harryhausen.

Once he’d seen Amy lying next to him in bed at night, and when he reached for her he’d felt her—she’d been warm and real—and it wasn’t until he tried to kiss her that he understood he was making out with a
pillow, and Harryhausen was watching him in disgust from the windowsill. But then Amy walked out of the bedroom carrying the pink shoebox under her arm, and Arthur could swear that both Harry and he turned to look: they had both seen her, he wasn’t still dreaming, and maybe he never had been.

His eyes ached from trying to see her. His head hurt from
looking
so hard, all the time, at the pieces of Amy in the shoebox. At first he didn’t realize the systematic deification of the shoebox’s contents had any religious implications at all, but after days of scrutinizing, recombining, and installing them around his temporary home, it was hard to ignore that he had become a zealot. Scraps of magazine articles and photographs were taped to the wall in neat patterns: in steps and pyramids, wheels and sunbursts. A winding line of postcards—for Los Angeles, for New York, for Santa Cruz and the Mystery Spot—swooped above the red-curtained windows like a smoke trail. Fast-food toys and plastic mood rings slid back and forth on a red string clothesline stretched several times from wall to wall. He was an obsessive detective, embedding himself in his biggest case, plastering his periphery with as many obscure objects as possible—waiting, praying for the larger pattern to reveal itself. For the unseeable to be seen.

Amy showed herself in flashes, smelling of oranges and sunblock: turning a corner, walking away, absorbed in a book. Closing a door or pushing a curtain aside. She would move in and out of rooms, heedless of Arthur calling after her, to speak, to say anything, to please talk to him. If only she could tell him about the objects in the shoebox, Arthur knew he would understand.

She never said anything. She wouldn’t even look at him or stop whatever she was doing, and Arthur would lose himself for a moment, and when he opened his eyes again she would be gone and he would wonder when he’d woken even though he didn’t remember sleeping. He had to try harder; he knew that was the answer: he had to look deeper, he had to look more, he had the power to find what she’d left behind if only he wanted it enough. And he did want it, more than he’d ever wanted anything else. So every day he sat on the green love seat and blindly chose a clue from the shoebox and waited for Amy to speak to him, or through him, and teach him how to see.

In the box, Arthur found a small monkey made of pink plastic, looping tail like a giant question mark, that had been hanging from Amy’s margarita glass on their first real date. After lunch at the In-n-Out, Arthur had been the first to cave: he’d phoned that night, not caring how desperate it made him look. He
was
desperate—friendless, confused, and lonely—and Amy was his lighthouse, leading him back to land.

“You must think I’ve got a pretty free schedule, Rook.” Her voice crackled through a bad connection. “Calling for a date less than twenty-four hours in advance.”

“Yeah, you’re the social pariah here,” Arthur said.

Amy laughed. “Come on, who doesn’t love a guy with a social disease?”

Arthur, giddy, couldn’t stop himself from singing back to her,

“ ’Cause no one wants a fella with a social disease!”

The silence on the other end was sudden and painful, and Arthur panicked. “Sorry, that was . . . stupid, I just . . . I was in
West Side Story
in high school. I was a Jet.”

Then he realized she was laughing, a slow-build kind of laugh that was imperceptible over the phone: a full-body laugh that shook her shoulders and tipped her slowly forward at the waist. He would see her laugh like this many times in the coming years, would often be the cause.

She exhaled and laughed more audibly this time. “Oh, Rook,” she said, and then: “I just want you to know—it’s OK, I understand.”

Oh, God. “What?”

“When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way.
Hasta mañana
.”

The next night he picked Amy up at the apartment she shared with an actor named Desmond, who was eating Nutella out of the jar when Arthur knocked. Desmond was short and very handsome, and, Amy whispered close in Arthur’s ear as they descended the rickety back steps, desperately in love with Keanu Reeves. “All over his walls,” she said. “All over the ceiling, completely papered in magazines and pictures. It’s like a . . . a receiver, or an amplifier, that room. Like the sheer force of his desire will bounce around the walls, intensify, and emit a Keanu-seeking beacon that will summon him in the flesh.” She shrugged. “He’s completely insane, but you have to respect that kind of passion.”

They went to a dive bar in Burbank because Amy said it had the
best thin-crust pizza in town, and it did, something Arthur would only truly appreciate years later, after he had more of a basis for comparison. The pink plastic monkey had been dangling from Amy’s margarita glass, swinging from the salted rim by its tail. Over a huge pizza, margaritas, and a pitcher of beer, Amy told Arthur about the joy of bringing inanimate objects to life. Arthur told Amy about his parents worrying that his artistic ambitions meant he’d be living in their basement for the rest of his life; about David breaking his leg on Arthur’s thirteenth birthday—which David absolutely did on purpose, he was so jealous Arthur was getting a Nintendo—about his mother’s cancer, her chemotherapy.

Then Amy told Arthur about coming to LA with no money and no place to stay; living in a YWCA; temping, waitressing, building creatures late, late into the night, beasts of clay and wire grappling across her lumpy moonlit mattress; the window that barely opened; the cracked mirror.

Arthur told stories from school, about his classmate Roger, who took photographs of photographs and called it photographography; about Eva, his mentor and favorite professor, born in Russia and unapologetically Communist, who took a series of photographs of her students slapping each other with fake fish. He said she would have loved art school, would have loved the absurdity of the pretension, the inventive mire, the melodramatic gossip and politics of creative people. He asked to see her monsters, said he wanted to see them very badly, and realized, with the sudden impact of a meteor striking the earth, that the rest of his life would be completely different if he didn’t kiss Amy before the night was over.

“I need to kiss you tonight,” he said, drunk enough to think he ought to warn her. “If I don’t kiss you, you’re going to go away. Change into a pumpkin or a mouse with a little apron or something.”

“I think you’re the one who needs to get kissed tonight,” Amy replied, the slight slur in her voice making Arthur realize, with relief, that she was a little drunk, too. “You’ve been here
how
long and you haven’t been kissed? That’s what this town is all about, you know. Getting kissed, getting off, same diff.” She belched daintily. “We should go find someplace right for a big Hollywood kiss.”

“Where are we, Burbank? Which way’s Hollywood?” Arthur slid out of the booth and took Amy’s hand to help her. Her fingers were long and cool, and she curled them around his. “This isn’t what I thought Hollywood would be like.”

Amy held the door for him and they stumbled out of the bar together. “Nobody expects Hollywood,” she said, “to be a lot of crummy strip malls and adult video stores and car dealerships and ninety-nine-cent stores and parking lots and . . . and . . . fothermucker, I’m too drive to drunk. So you are. I mean, you, too.”

There was a Laundromat next to the bar, and Arthur leaned his forehead against the window. The bank of dryers hummed across from him, concentric circles rolling together, spinning merrily under the fluorescent haze. An overweight woman in a purple T-shirt folded a flat bedsheet.

“We can go down to Sunset or Hollywood, or maybe up to Mulholland. Mulholland is amazing. Totally lives up to the myth.” Amy wove her arm through Arthur’s, clasped his hand, and rested her forehead on the Laundromat’s glass beside him. “It’s dark and winding and so high up you can see the whole town at your feet. A million lights. It’s a black carpet of stars.” He felt her body expand and contract with a sigh. “Or we could watch these dryers all night.”

“So beautiful,” was all Arthur could add. Whereas before all he’d seen were the circles, now Arthur saw the colors swirling within—a blue smear, a pink comet, a yellow blur, roiling together like Roman candles, damped by heat, trapped behind glass. This was a new Hollywood to Arthur—this wasn’t the zombie city that had been slowly feasting on him for a month, up until two days ago. And it wasn’t the fairy-tale gloss, scored and production-designed and glowing with impossibility.

It was a Laundromat next to a bar. It was a beer in his blood and a woman, holding his hand, breathing beside him.

It was better than anything he’d ever known.

He pushed himself away from the glass and Amy followed. Arthur certainly hadn’t planned it to be so graceful, had never attempted anything of its kind before, but whether it was the fault of the alcohol or some vestigial Hollywood magic didn’t really matter. He swung Amy out the length of his arm and reeled her back, dipping her gently over
his extended knee, so that the tips of her hair were brushing the cement when he kissed her. Arthur heard violins and brass swell over the thrum of the dryers, and when they pulled apart, upright and breathless and unsteady, as much from the kiss as the beer, Arthur was filled with an overwhelming gratitude for having found Amy at all—and for not dropping her on her head and killing her.

“I can’t believe I did that,” he said.

“I can’t believe you did, either,” Amy said. “Let’s do it again.” And she went limp in his arms, curving her head and her neck away from Arthur with all the grace befitting a drunken mermaid.

Now the pink plastic monkey dangled by its curlicue tail on the red string clothesline.

In the shoebox, Arthur found a small purple pill that turned out to be a tablet of Easter egg dye (as determined during a highly scientific experiment in the kitchen late at night, when Arthur, seeking solitude, had nonetheless underestimated that lumberjack shop teacher’s desire for a nightcap). He found an old framed photograph of two teenagers, a boy and a girl, standing on the edge of the ocean, hands clasped, bodies forming an M, the surf running around their ankles in twin parabolas. He found a loop of anonymous ride tickets, old and blue and bent into perforated zigzags. He hung the tickets over the photograph like a piece of bunting and finger-painted the glass around the figures with red-purple dye. The strangers held hands and smiled and refused to tell him their names.

The objects in the pink shoebox—the things Amy left behind—told him to put them together like so many puzzle pieces. He was moved to make things with them, to take them apart and reassemble them in new configurations. He was a trained artist, for God’s sake—he could collage the clues. He just couldn’t create the solution.

Arthur had his bachelor’s degree in fine art, with a concentration in photography. He took all the required fundamental classes—figure drawing, design basics, and some torturous mixed-media classes taught by grad students who gave As to any kid who thought to juxtapose the sacred, the profane, and the commercial by stenciling the word
fuck
over an oil painting of Mickey Mouse—but Arthur had been miserable at creating anything that required the most basic level of hand–eye
coordination, had been inept with a brush and beyond awkward with charcoals. He had survived fundamentals by force of will alone, bought a camera and rented lab space, and never looked back.

The barely passing grades in drawing and painting made semester breaks less than pleasant during his freshman and sophomore years. Arthur came from a family of welders, overnight assembly-line foremen, typists, teachers, nurses, office managers, one podiatrist, one mechanic, and one cop. They were blue-collar Bostonians—Somervillians, specifically—and gave Arthur his first object lesson in loving those you didn’t really understand: namely, that it went both ways. Neither he nor his parents could pretend they really grasped the other, and Arthur, inspired by a lifetime of pawing through glossy
National Geographics
, shook like a leaf when he announced he wanted to go to school for photography. His parents were mystified but not terribly surprised and eventually agreed, setting one condition: that he go to State. They wouldn’t even consider helping pay for a private art education, something Arthur’s father referred to as “setting a pile of money on fire and trying to piss it out.” And when Arthur’s first set of grades rolled in—As and Bs in his required general ed courses, an A in Visual Theory, and two Cs and a D in Figure Drawing, Mixed Media, and Intro to Painting—his father had tugged on his chin, taken his firstborn son aside, and explained that if he wanted to see naked girls, he didn’t have to be an art student; he should just go to more parties. It wasn’t healthy for a young guy to see naked girls in class twice a week and then
draw
them, for chrissake. But Arthur held on (and kept to himself that he had, in fact, met one of the models from his figure drawing class at a party and had thus seen her naked in a purely social context), and as soon as he left behind the required charcoals, pastels, paints, and pencils, even his father was impressed.

The justification for his decision first revealed itself to Arthur while he was developing a roll toward the end of his first semester in Intro to Photography. The assignment had been to capture an everyday object in such close detail that it was rendered unrecognizable, transformed into its purest lines and shapes. At the time, Arthur had been dating a busty voice major named Beatrice who wore great smears of purple eye shadow and sang Madonna songs in the shower, a different one every
day. One morning, the chorus of “Like a Prayer” wafting over the whine of dormitory water pipes, Arthur had crawled out of her single dorm-issue bed, grabbed his camera, and gone on photo safari in her underwear drawer. They had only been together for half a week—the single dorm-issue bed had seen first and second base and was steadily rounding on third—but, in accordance with the whole Beatrice package, Arthur had expected her underwear drawer to be the undergarment equivalent of the Taj Mahal.