The Teleportation Accident (21 page)

‘Jascha’! Could it really be Drabsfarben? Loeser pressed his ear to the door, but if there was a reply, it was too low to hear.

‘Well, you picked a fine time to tell me that,’ said Dolores Mutton after a while. ‘It’s crazy that we’re even talking like this. You’re always saying I need to be more discreet. Come here on Thursday morning, Stent’s going to be out at the
Herald
offices most of the day. Now go. I’ll follow you in a few minutes.’

Loeser heard the bedroom door open and close. Then the handle of the bathroom door turned until it clicked against the lock. ‘Is somebody in there? Hello?’ Loeser considered waiting until she went away, but that might turn into a siege. He unlocked the door. ‘Oh, hello, Mr Loeser,’ said Dolores Mutton. There was enough ice in her voice for a serviceable daiquiri. ‘Perhaps I should have mentioned that we prefer our guests to use the other bathroom.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Mutton, I was just changing my shirt.’

As he walked past her into the bedroom, she caught his arm, gripping hard. ‘I don’t know what you may have heard just now, but . . .’ She paused. Part of him was mindlessly excited that her warm skin was on his. ‘I don’t care for gossip, Mr Loeser, and neither does my husband. Not at our parties, not in our home. I hope you will think about that before you say anything you may come to regret.’ Then she released his arm, went into the bathroom, and slammed the door behind her. Loeser, shaken, decided to leave the party and walk down to the beach so he could think.

How could Jascha Drabsfarben have allowed himself to get tangled up with Dolores Mutton? In Berlin, a lot of girls had lusted after the composer, and, as far as Loeser could tell, it was because they knew that nothing they did could ever make him lust back. Hannah Czenowitz had once drunkenly confessed a fantasy in which she was on her knees sucking Drabsfarben’s cock while he was composing at a grand piano and he was so absorbed in some complex non-standard key signature that he didn’t even notice. There was some debate over whether he masturbated, and the consensus was that he probably did, about once a month, for reasons of psychological tidiness, but quickly, so he could get back to his music. Therefore occasional utilitarian intercourse didn’t seem out of the question – but a furtive affair with a married woman would be far too distracting. Drabsfarben would never tolerate the drain on his time.

Then again, Loeser had heard that a lot of foreign writers found themselves blocked when they came to Hollywood. So perhaps Drabsfarben had lost his inspiration out here too, and for the first time he was trying to use a woman as a muse. You could certainly write symphonies about Dolores Mutton; you could write at least a scherzo about her cleavage alone. And however implausible it all seemed, Loeser knew what he’d just heard. The real question was whether to tell Stent Mutton. Yes, the man was a loathsome fraud. He’d lied to Loeser, albeit in a way Loeser couldn’t really explain. But Loeser still loved his books. Knowing the truth about Mutton didn’t make Mutton’s characters feel any less real; in fact, maybe they seemed more real now, because if they couldn’t be understood as mere analogues of their creator, then they could only be spontaneous births with a sort of mystifying independent life. And there was no question about what a Stent Mutton hero would do about all this. He would just walk over. Say what had to be said. In very short sentences.

Loeser went back to the house and found Stent Mutton on the patio next to the big barbecue grill.

‘I see you found something to fit you all right.’

‘Yes. Look here, Mr Mutton, I need to talk to you in private.’

‘About what?’

‘It’s very important.’

Mutton followed him a short distance up the hill, away from the guests, into a forum of crickets.

‘Well?’

‘Just now, while I was changing, I overheard a conversation in your bedroom. It was between your wife and Jascha Drabsfarben, who’s an old friend of mine from Berlin. I think they’re having an affair.’

‘What?’

Loeser was already beginning to realise that this was going to cause even more trouble than the last time he’d eavesdropped on Drabsfarben, but it was too late to turn back. Also, there was something about a conversation of this kind that made him feel enjoyably authentic and masculine. ‘Your wife is being unfaithful to you with Drabsfarben,’ he said. ‘I heard enough to be sure and I thought you deserved to be told.’

‘Is this another comedy routine?’

‘No, Mr Mutton. I’m perfectly serious.’

Mutton sighed. ‘This is the trouble with marrying a girl like Dolores. Most men realise they wouldn’t know what to do if they had all that beauty to themselves, so they can’t believe I do, either. They think I must let her share it around a little. But actually, Mr Loeser, my wife is devoted to me. She’s not perfect and neither, goodness knows, am I. But we love each other as deeply today as we ever have. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could persuade her to betray me sexually with another man. If I know anything, I know that. You’re wrong. And I strongly suggest you leave this party before you do any more eavesdropping.’

Probably Wilbur Gorge was just as confident, thought Loeser, and meanwhile Rackenham was ploughing his wife. If life up to this point had taught him anything, it was that everyone else was having sex with anyone they wanted, all the time, and it was naive ever to hope otherwise. ‘If you’d heard what I heard—’

‘I don’t care what you think you heard. Please get off my property. I’m perfectly serious, too.’

Loeser hesitated.

‘What now?’ said Mutton.

‘It’s just that I don’t have a car and your wife said your butler could drive me back to the Chateau Marmont.’

‘Goodbye!’ Mutton growled. Then he turned and went back to his party.

It was nearly ten. Loeser knew he couldn’t walk back to Hollywood, unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life confined to a wheelchair, so he decided to go up to the corner of Sunset Boulevard and hail a cab. He’d left all his cash in his wet trousers, which were still hanging over the towel rail in the Muttons’ bathroom, but he could pick up some more at the Chateau Marmont. However, after a long wait, he still hadn’t seen a single vacant taxi, and anyway the traffic here was probably going too fast for anyone to see him and pull over. He would just have to cross the road to the diner he could see on the east side of Sunset Boulevard and ask them to telephone a cab company for him.

Loeser made several attempts at this, and each time he got less than halfway across the moat of tarmac before he saw some diesel-powered megalodon bearing hungrily down on him and he had to hurl himself back to safety on the shore. And of course there was no crossing visible in either direction. But what else was he supposed to do? Sleep under a bush? He was standing there on the grass, feeling a rising crepitation of despair, when he saw an unthreatening green car coming east up the perpendicular road. He stuck out his thumb and tried to look respectable.

The car stopped beside him, and the driver rolled down his window. ‘Need a lift?’

‘I’m trying to get to Hollywood.’

‘I’m going all the way to Los Feliz.’

The driver leaned over to unlock the door on the passenger’s side.

Loeser cleared his throat. ‘Actually, I need to sit in the back.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t ride in a private car unless I pretend it’s a taxi.’

‘Are you going to pay me?’

‘No.’

The driver shrugged. He had the cleftest chin that Loeser had ever seen. ‘Suit yourself, pal.’

So Loeser got in the back of the car. Even with this indulgence, he felt too uncomfortable to make conversation, so he just looked out of the window. They were soon passing the same roadside totems that Loeser had seen on the way here, great papier-mâché lemons and sausages and rabbits and candy canes and cowboy hats advertising various drive-in amenities for the easily pleased. In the afternoon sunlight they’d seemed flat, primitive, ridiculous, but now, at night, illuminated from below by bright bulbs, looming into view at forty miles an hour, they achieved a sort of fuzzy megalithic grandeur. Perhaps Achleitner had been right, Loeser thought with disgust. Kempinski’s Haus Vaterland really was the future. California itself was nothing but a Kempinski colony, an amusement complex propagated into a republic. But then it occurred to him that if all your potential customers were whizzing by in their automobiles, then of course you had to make sure that your function could be apprehended from a distance in an instant. Hence this childishness. He remembered what Wagner had written to his wife on a visit to Venice a hundred and fifty years after Lavicini’s death: ‘Everything strikes one as a marvellous piece of stage-scenery. The chief charm consists in its all remaining as detached from me as if I were in an actual theatre; I avoid making any acquaintances, and therefore still retain that sense of it.’

Cut-Rate Books

Loeser shut the door quickly behind him to avoid contaminating the shop with sunlight or fresh air.

‘You make it to Nickel’s yesterday?’ said Blimk.

‘No. I met Stent Mutton, however.’ Last night, by the time he got into bed, he’d been so tired that just closing his eyes had produced a plunging sensation, like the leg of a stool snapping beneath him. This morning he’d woken up late. He’d wanted to read for a while, but the only novel he’d brought with him to America was
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, and although after three hundred and nine pages it really felt like it might be about to get going, he thought he might need something more potent to distract him from the women around the swimming pool, so he’d come back to the shop.

‘What’s the guy like?’

Loeser was about to tell Blimk the awful truth about Stent Mutton when he noticed a pocket book on a pile near by and found himself drawn almost involuntarily to pick it up. It was called
Dames! And how to Lay them
by Clark Snable, and the cover had a childlike drawing of a woman lying naked in a bed, rumpled sheets exposing one enormous breast with a nipple that pointed upward and outward as if it were tracking the position of the moon. ‘Tired of feeling like a cast-iron chump?’ enquired the back cover. Loeser was definitely tired of feeling like a cast-iron chump. ‘Want to learn all the famous secrets of sexually romancing huge quantities of toasty eager dames with real class any night of the week even Monday like it was easy?’ Loeser definitely wanted to learn all the famous secrets of sexually romancing huge quantities of toasty eager dames with real class any night of the week even Monday like it was easy. He started to read. The paper stock was so cheap it felt almost moist, in the same way that dollar bills could feel moist, as if the book itself were gently sweating. After a while Blimk said, ‘You want to sit down with that?’

‘I promise I’ll pay for it,’ said Loeser.

‘Don’t mean to hassle you. Honestly, buddy, it’s just nice to have somebody in here who isn’t trying to jerk off all surreptitious.’

So Loeser sat down next to Blimk in his nest behind the counter. ‘Have you read this?’ Loeser said.

‘No,’ said Blimk.

‘It’s amazing. Apparently you can seduce any woman in under five minutes if you tell her a story about eating a peach on a rollercoaster, which makes her unconsciously think of sex, and then imply she’s fat while touching her knee.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘No, it’s proven. This man Clark Snable says he’s done it four hundred times.’

Blimk grunted. He sat with his elbows on the counter and his head resting so heavily in his palms that his whole face was smeared into a melty grimace of total engrossment, so Loeser asked what he was reading. Blimk held up a magazine. It was called
Astounding Stories
, and on the cover was a lurid painting of a big green blob with lots of eyes and tentacles chasing two explorers through an icy cave, above a banner advertising a serial called ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ by H.P. Lovecraft.

‘Who’s H.P. Lovecraft?’

‘Fella from Rhode Island. Writes stories about monsters from other dimensions. Cults. Human sacrifice. Alien gods. They’re pretty good.’

‘Really?’

‘Sure. And some people think it ain’t just fiction.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Some people think it’s all true.’

‘But he writes for a magazine called
Astounding Stories
.’

‘Yeah, but they think that’s ’cause what he says is so shocking no newspaper will publish it in case it causes a panic. So the only way to get the truth out is to dress it up in a cheap Hallowe’en costume.’

‘Who could possibly think that?’

‘People in high places, I heard. Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State. He trusts Lovecraft more than he trusts his best military intelligence. He really thinks America is being menaced by ancient beings from beyond Euclidean space. That’s the scuttlebutt.’

‘That is absurd.’

‘Yeah, maybe, but you can’t blame a fella for wondering if there ain’t more things in heaven and earth, et cetera et cetera. And I don’t mean what you read in a Bible. Other things. Worse things.’

Loeser thought of Lavicini and all the mysteries of the Teleportation Accident. ‘I suppose not.’