The Soul Thief (18 page)

They were emblems of four-star neglect. In front of me, and to the right of the front desk, was a brown Art Deco sofa that looked as if it could have used a thorough cleaning.

Scandalized, I saw stains. In the sofa’s dead center, a model with a high, soft laugh sat talking to a deeply tanned predatory type in a safari outfit who perched on an arm-rest. His teeth gave off a glare of whiteness, and his huge panopti-con eyeglasses—an
hommage
to Lew Wasserman—seemed to cover the upper half of his face. He had probably trapped the object of his attention out in the wilds of Malibu and would soon sell her to the slavers. Meanwhile, the half-lit lobby seemed to be recovering from a recent binge. The pale yellow stucco walls radiated the weltschmerz of hangover.

Perhaps, of course, all this feverish registry of impressions t h e s ou l t h i e f

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was just that—the fever I typically fell into when visiting L.A. I approached the front desk. The clerk sized me up instantly and smiled a shimmering, vacant smile full of patronizing friendliness. He would be polite, dealing with a nonentity such as myself, the smile proclaimed. My banal debaucheries (if I could rise to even that level) would be cosmically inane, however, and laughably conventional.

The universe was running down because of people like me.

He was already stupendously tired of my existence, and I hadn’t yet said a word. On his face was the blasé expression of a young professional who has exactly calibrated which drugs, and in what quantities, are required to get him through the day.

“Yes?” He gave me an affable thousand-mile stare.

“I’m checking in.”

The clerk impatiently examined his prizewinning watch.

“I’m sorry, sir, but no rooms are ready yet. Check-in time here is three p.m.” Well, yes: major-league fun leaves a big mess behind, and didn’t I know that? Coolberg would not be meeting me until three.

“Well,” I said, “maybe I could check in and turn my luggage over to the bell captain, and take a walk?”

Take a walk! What an idea! Now the clerk actually grinned. An enthusiastic happy disdain flared out of him like the scent of a strong cologne. One did not walk away from this hotel. One was
driven away,
after being loaded into a limo or a hearse. Although he had the random good looks of a would-be actor, the clerk’s overbite now protruded slightly when he smiled. Handsomeness gave way to his latent provincialism and failed orthodontics. He would never get more than one line per movie, if that, but what fun I was turning out to be. “Yes,” he said. “You
could
take a stroll.

Also,” he said, remembering his manners, “the hotel has a 174

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restaurant. We serve,” he said, then paused, unsure of how to finish the sentence, having lost the thread, before catch-ing his thought again, “all day.” He licked his upper teeth with his tongue.

“No,” I said, “I’ll take a walk. By the way, my reservation here was called in, possibly under the name Coolberg.

Jerome Coolberg.”

“Ah.” Sudden recognition; his face brightened slightly, as if a rheostat had been turned to about twenty-five watts.

“
American Evenings.
”

“Yes,” I lied. “I’m one of them. I’m one of the evenings.”

His lips tightened patronizingly, as if at last he had to acknowledge my minuscule somebody-ness. “Congratula-tions,” he said.

Outside the hotel, I walked in what I thought was a westerly direction.

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Actually, I knew perfectly well where I was going. I ignored the somnolent junkies on the sidewalk and got out of the way of the roller girls zipping past me in the opposite direction. I was intent on my destination. Tempted as I was by the neighborhood record store, still in business and, I could see, patronized by clueless middle-aged men who didn’t know how to steal music files from the Web, I nevertheless continued to stride at a soldierly pace, peering in quickly at the tattoo parlors and the magazine racks as I advanced toward the shrine. At last I found it.

Angelyne. There it was, the billboard, dedicated to totally meaningless celebrity. Just as historic literary Long Island had its eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, so L.A. had Angelyne. She was completely admirable. She had her blowsy showgirl beauty and had peddled it for years in these primary-colored billboards mounted on the roofs of the neighborhood buildings: and in this particularly characteristic one—traditional, just her picture and her name, angelyne—her hazardous giant breasts were on display, though miserably confined by a tight dress of plastic, or was it laminated vinyl? She sported 176

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black elbow-length evening gloves, a junk-jewelry bracelet, a cigarette holder, and her aging blond-bombshell hair tumbled on either side of the weather-beaten eyes. Supposedly, according to legend, she drove a chartreuse Corvette. She had once run for mayor.

No one I knew in L.A. had ever paid the slightest attention to these Angelyne billboards. But I loved them. I loved them more than the ocean, more than the Getty Museum, more than the canyons, more than Frank Gehry’s Walt Dis-ney Concert Hall. They spoke to the moralist in me. They were like Protestant cautionary tales to the supplicants and votaries of the dreamworld: here, presiding over the beautiful narcotic substances of the city, was this shopworn royalty figure, this majestic ruin, this queen without identity, this ex-beauty, this tautology (her full name was Angeline Angelyne) as powerful in her prodigious way as Ozymandias. She looked out at you, and if you dared, you looked back. You could ignore her; you could pray to her; you could decon-struct her; you could even bother to think about her; but whatever you did, she would continue being as blank and as melancholy as fading beauty itself, brooding down at you from this height, but, like the rest of us commoners, powerless against time.

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I returned to the hotel. On the way I bought some postcards and mailed off one to Laura (a picture of the Hollywood sign), another to Jeremy (Malibu volleyball-playing beach bunnies), and a third to Michael (smog). A toothless wizened African American guy approached me and asked me for bus fare. I walked right past him, afraid of a shake-down from a practiced con. Back in the hotel, behind the front desk, the clerk roused himself from his customary insolent ennui and smirked quickly at me before composing himself again. Finding the best seat in the lobby, out of the way of commerce, I sat down to wait until Coolberg arrived.

Moths fluttered around inside my stomach. Models and DJs and B-list Eurotrash movie stars came and went.

I felt myself dozing off.

I hate dreams. I hate them when they appear in litera-ture, and I hate them when I myself have them. I distrust the truth-value that Freud assigned to them. Dreams lie as often as they tell the truth. Their imaginary castles, kingdoms, and dungeons are a cast-off collection of broken and obvious metaphors. When you hold them in your hand, you 178

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do not hold the key to anything. No door will open. You can live an honorable life without them.

And yet in that lobby, I had a dream in which the two parts of my life were brought together at last. I walked down Sunset Boulevard and entered the People’s Kitchen. The place had been restored and spruced up. It was efficient and clean. The dispossessed and hungry who were fed there greeted me happily when I came in. Laura sat near the window and was conversing with Jamie, across from her. They gestured as they spoke. They were both beautiful. The two women leaned toward each other as women friends will, in the great intimacy of shared affections and interests. Jamie had been made whole again. The damage to her had been undone. Here, she was undestroyed. Theresa came by with a water pitcher and poured refills into their glasses. Nearby, my boys conversed with the street people, among whom I saw Ben the Burglar, smiling and laughing, and the old African American man on Sunset to whom I had just refused a handout. Once again I found myself caring for the victims of industrial decline, the poor and ill-fated. My history had been scrolled back and rewritten. I could love anyone and not be punished for it.

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Someone in my dream said, “Nathaniel, wake up.”

When I opened my eyes, I took him in. Standing before me in the hotel lobby was Coolberg, tapping my shoe to rouse me. On his face was the kindest expression I have ever seen on the face of a fellow human. It was angelic, if you could imagine a middle-aged man—balding, slightly overweight, dressed in baggy trousers, rumpled shirt, and unpressed tie stained with spilled food—as angelic. He had the undefended appearance of a middle-aged cherub with a five o’clock shadow and bad posture.

Time had humanized him. I could tell that nothing that he and I were about to do would develop as I had anticipated. The scenario I had foreseen—recriminations, blame, righteous anger—gave way to my sudden intense bewilder-ment.

“Jerome,” I said. I stood and shook his hand.

“Let’s get out of this place,” he said, glancing around the hotel’s lobby with disapproval. “This hotel terrifies me. I thought you might like it. I don’t know why I believed that.

Out-of-towners are sometimes impressed by it. But of 180

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course you wouldn’t be.” He sighed. “You were never an out-of-towner anywhere,” he said cryptically. “I’ve got a car here and a few errands to run. I drive now. I finally learned how. I learned
directions.
Then maybe we could go out to Santa Monica for dinner. What do you think?”

I nodded halfheartedly. “Seems fine.”

His car, a nondescript Toyota, was cluttered with books, DVDs, and plastic pint bottles of chocolate milk, a remedy, he told me, for the chronic sour stomach from which he suffered. He cleared off the passenger-side bucket seat, and within a few minutes we were on Hollywood Boulevard, passing the Walk of Fame. I noticed that Snow White and Darth Vader were circulating there, handling out discount coupons for local businesses. The sunburnt tourists seemed happy to have been given something, anything, by these mythic creatures; they clutched the orange coupons to their hearts. Snow White had been located in that same spot when I had brought my family here on vacation a few years ago. She had had a dotty expression on her face then, and she still had it. The job had deranged her, or perhaps she had suffered from heatstroke and the loss of her worldwide renown.

“Snow White should be institutionalized,” I said.

“Oh, she has been,” Coolberg knowingly informed me.

We drove for another few minutes, and he stopped in front of a supermarket. “I just have to get one thing here,” he said.

“A seasoning. Want to come in?”

“Oh, I think I’ll stay here in the car.” I didn’t want to find myself following him around.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

At the corner, someone with an odd, doughy face was t h e s ou l t h i e f

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hawking maps to the stars’ houses. Coolberg and I—it was unnerving—hadn’t really spoken. He had bragged that the day seemed unusually clear for L.A. (true) and that you could see the hills (also true). Maybe, he said, we should drive up to see “the vista” for ourselves. I had nodded. Sure, whatever. But he hadn’t asked me about myself, or my flight, or my past or present life, and I hadn’t asked him about
American Evenings,
or his health, or his personal arrange-ments—whether he was married or partnered or single. We hadn’t said a word about the period of antiquity in Buffalo we had shared. Buffalo possessed a drab unsightliness, a thrift-shop cast-off industrialism, compared to L.A., the capital of Technicolor representations. People were leaving there to come here. They were giving up objects for images.

Besides, it was as if neither of us had the nerve to start a real conversation.

I looked down at the books in the car. Luminaries: Paul Bowles, Goethe, André Gide, Kawabata, Bessie Head. Books from everywhere, it seemed, many of them old editions with yellowed pages. A notebook was also there on the floor. I picked it up.

The outside of the notebook displayed my name in my own handwriting,
Nathaniel Mason
, and the date, 1973. I dropped the thing back on the floor as if I’d been slugged.

Of course I was meant to see it; I was meant to toss it back onto the floor; I was meant to stare off into the distance, toward the maps of the stars and the brilliantly shabby street, lit by the perky late-afternoon sun.

On our way up one of the canyons—I think it must have been Beachwood, snaking upward just under the Hollywood sign—he kept his silence, but it was one of those 182

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silences in which you imagine the conversation that is simultaneously not occurring.

Where are we?

Oh, what a question! We are where we are.

Whose houses are these? Whose castles? What are these hairpin turns?

Don’t you admire the camellias? They bloom about this time of year.

Those bushes can be pruned into any shape. Note the rose-petal-like
flowers, in cream, white, red, or striated colors. Note how they’re surrounded by waxy green leaves?

Yes, very nice. We don’t have those at home in New Jersey.

What happened to you, Nathaniel? Whatever became of you?

My life changed, that’s what. What is my notebook doing on the floor of
your car?

Eventually we reached the end of Beachwood Drive, stopped, looked (yes yes, I agreed: an impressive view), turned around, and began to creep back down the canyon on the same hairpin turns. I noticed that he was a rather disordered driver, slow to react, a poor calculator of distance. He was also unobservant, and, I could tell, wearied by the sights.

The truth is that L.A. is a company town, and there isn’t all that much to show to tourists. Its arid provincial beauty quickly stupefies the innocent and bores the initiate.

“Shall we go to Santa Monica?” he asked, evidently bereft of other ideas. “Should we head out there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Let’s do that.”