Double Solitaire

by Craig Nova

  The bench at the fountain was a good, private place. The temple of the Vedanta Society on a hill opposite the Bowl seemed out of place, but that was true for many things, although the temple still produced a tug, a slight gravity. The traffic on Highland had a serpentine movement, a starting and stopping like a snake slithering toward the kill. The cars were a perfect mixture of the ridiculously expensive and clunkers, Ferraris alongside old Pintos rusted into red lace. The odd thing is that the drivers of each were equally angry.

  “Yeah?” said Braumberg. “I’m all ears.”

  “I don’t know,” Farrell said. He swallowed just in time.

  “Just what don’t you know?” he said. “A lot of money is involved here. More than before. A lot more than before. So you think you understand, but you don’t,” Braumberg said. Then he stared at that traffic. Over Highland, a long cloud of smoke hung, which looked like an enormous yellow boa that stretched from the freeway down to the place where Highland turned to the east a little before it came to Hollywood Boulevard. The drivers in the cars were all wearing ear buds, all twitching differently to what they heard.

  Maybe, Farrell thought, as he looked across Highland at the temple of the Vedanta Society. He could check into their retreat in Santa Barbara for a month. No talking.

  “What do you think?” said Braumberg.

  “I think Terry is hiding in his own asshole,” said Farrell. “He is thinking about killing that girl.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What did I say?” said Farrell.

  He shook his head.

  “I tried to get her out of there,” said Farrell.

  “And?” said Braumberg.

  “She’s smart enough to know that staying right there gives her credibility.”

  “So, she wouldn’t leave?”

  “That’s right,” said Farrell.

  “Then take care of it,” said Braumberg. “That’s your job.”

  Braumberg wanted to look anonymous when he met Farrell and so he wore new jeans, a work shirt, Wolverine boots, and had a red bandana sticking out of his rear pocket. This was Braumberg’s idea of what a carpenter looked like, but it wouldn’t fool anyone.

  Still, Braumberg had the California Disease, just like everyone else. Or, maybe he had the condition more than others. Maybe this explained why Braumberg was getting more generous with the money he gave Farrell to fix something, although Farrell had to admit the problems were getting worse, too. Part of the California Disease was the belief that you could buy your way out of fraud. Braumberg surely believed this. After all, in California there wasn’t much you couldn’t get with cash.

  The Disease was the notion that you could invent yourself out of nothing, or out of TV advertisements, movie roles, posters, songs, country and western or punk styles, or any style, and that all you needed was a certain mood and a hint of mystery.

  It took Farrell a while to tease out the details, but Braumberg had grown up in Brooklyn, attended City College, and then came west, pretended he had gone to Harvard, although he was cagey about it, never saying so out right, just hinting around about having been in Porcellian. And, of course, he was cagey enough to refer to it as the Porc. The only better thing in Hollywood would have been Oxford, but Braumberg was smart enough to know that while he could pull off an accent that was Brooklyn by way of Harvard, he wasn’t adept enough to do so for Brooklyn by way of Trinity College, Oxford. The first time Farrell had met Braumberg to help with an actor’s trouble, Farrell was pretty sure Braumberg wasn’t what he seemed (a good bet in LA with just about everyone). Still, Braumberg gave money to some charities, although always careful not to give too much. He was now right where he wanted to be as a producer, at least socially, that is, he was legitimate but mysterious . . . which, in Los Angeles, meant he was “legit” but shy about some things that people could only imagine. And, of course, people did imagine things: an affair with a woman who was a French aristocrat, an illegitimate child by a beautiful woman in Buenos Aires. Really, the sky was the limit.

  “You look like you are getting windy,” Braumberg said.

  “No,” said Farrell.

  “So, what are we going to do?” said Braumberg.

  “Pay her,” said Farrell. “It’s too bad she wouldn’t let me drive her to the motel where she is staying.”

  “And you think she will go away?” said Braumberg.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” said Farrell.

  The odor of Braumberg’s new jeans mixed with the fish pond scent of the fountain.

  Braumberg, in spite of everything, was a religious man, and Farrell supposed in moments like this religion gave him comfort. It was one of the reasons Farrell really liked him. Neither one of the two men had ever planned on ending up at moments like these, and this surprise made them more empathetic with each other.

  “You shouldn’t have fixed Terry’s mess the way you did last time,” Farrell. “You guaranteed that there would be more trouble, and, this is it.”

  “I thought that giving a DNA sample to the cops would be a proof of innocence while I got the girl involved and her mother to take a slow boat to Australia . . .”

  Farrell swallowed and looked at the traffic.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” said Farrell.

  “I thought he had learned his lesson,” said Braumberg.

  “Sure, sure,” Farrell said. “That m-m-makes sense.”

  “You don’t have to get snooty about it,” said Braumberg. “What’s gotten into you?”

  Farrell thought about for a minute. What’s gotten into me? He craved dignity more than anything else. But how could you be dignified in a town like this? And he liked the girl from Alaska. He really did.

  “Did you ever read Kierkegaard?” Farrell said.

  “Who’s that? Sounds like a Danish director. Depressing movies about love gone wrong . . . or suicide pacts . . . or kids with cancer . . .”

  “You didn’t take philosophy at Harvard?”

  Braumberg winced and said, “Come on, Farrell. Something is eating at you. You aren’t your cheerful usual self.”

  “I don’t know,” Farrell said. “Kierkegaard said that the nature of despair is precisely not to know one is despairing.”

  “Maybe,” said Braumberg. “I bet he still makes shitty movies. Didn’t he make Dark Love? Those fucking Danes. And yet, you know, they have respectable box office. Or the Swedes do.”

  “I’ll have to look at one of Kierkegaard’s old movies again,” Farrell said.

  “All right,” said Braumberg. “Enough film 101.”

  “Here’s what we are going to do,” said Farrell. “I’m going to go to the bank and get the money she wants. Then I’m going to give it to her and drive her to the airport. With any luck she will be back in Anchorage by tomorrow.”

  Braumberg sighed.

  “Good. Good. You are one of the few people in this town I can trust.”

  “Trust,” said Farrell. He winced, bit his lip. “Okay. I’ve to go to the bank.”

  “The bank,” said Braumberg. “I’ve had it up to here with banks. A lot of people got hurt in the mortgage slump,” said Braumberg. “This town is all about mortgages, you know that?”

  “It makes the place look better than it is,” said Farrell.

  “And we’re just getting back to normal,” said Braumberg.

  “Normal,” said Farrell. “Yeah, sure.”

  “You know what a tranche is?” said Braumberg.

  “A piece of a security,” said Farrell. “A lot depends on which piece you have.”

  “You’re telling me?” said Braumberg. “A lot of people got hurt.”

  “You didn’t lose your house, did you?” said Farrell.

  “No,” said Braumberg.

  “So, you didn’t get screwed too bad,” said Farrell. “A lot of people lost a house.”

  “I thought things were going to get better,” said Braumberg. “Those fucking banks. And now this. Peregrin
e and that girl from Alaska.”

  “I’ll get the cash,” said Farrell.

  “I’ll reimburse you, and, of course, give you your fee,” said Braumberg.

  The Bank of America branch was at Sunset and Vine, and the place looked like a combination of an aircraft carrier and an ancient temple. Flat roof, two stories, cheesy columns going up forty feet, a neon sign with the bank logo. The teller, a middle-aged woman with the skin of a serious smoker, what Farrell thought of as a cancer tan, took Farrell’s check without blinking.

  Farrell considered a business he was buying, Coin-A-Matic, which he thought could explain why so much cash was flowing through his account without any reason. The closing was coming up, and Farrell could already feel the slight change that would take place in him, just by owning a vending machine company. Not quite the effect of a magic wand, but something nevertheless.

  “Hundreds?”

  “Please,” said Farrell.

  The woman pushed the envelopes with the bank’s logo on them across the counter, which was imitation marble, and Farrell put them in the pocket of his Patagonia vest. He looked like he worked in the front office for Outward Bound. Even these clothes left him aware of some attitude that made him speak in a slightly different way.

  “Thanks,” said Farrell.

  “Don’t spend it all in one place,” said the teller.

  “That’s good advice,” said Farrell.

  “Doesn’t look like you are going to take it,” said the teller.

  “No,” said Farrell. “I’m afraid not.”

  Farrell’s house was in Laurel Canyon, on a side street that came off the main road about halfway between Sunset and Mulholland. The house looked like it had been moved from the coast of Maine. It was a story and a half, a cape with a pitched roof, and its shingles were the color of fog. At the front door an arbor had been build and roses grew on it. Glowing Dawn was the variety, and they were in their last bloom of the fall.

  Upstairs, Farrell’s house had a bedroom, a bath, and a library. The library was an extravagance, but it was where he spent his evenings, when he read Tacitus, Xenophon, Herodotus, and, yes, even Kierkegaard. He had a complete Oxford English Dictionary, not the one that required reading with a magnifying glass, but twenty volumes. Using an online dictionary, as far as Farrell was concerned, was like taking a bath with his socks on. He didn’t want anyone to know, given his job, that he was bookish, and he reassured himself by asking how many bookish men have a Sig Sauer pistol, a P320 semiautomatic, in a drawer next to the book shelves. When he picked it up, out of the drawer, it had a valence that made him careful and then, for a while, the scent of Hoppe’s oil clung to his hand. Downstairs, the fireplace had a gas pipe with perforations to light eucalyptus logs, which were stacked in the backyard. On the wall of his kitchen, opposite the table where he ate alone, he had a framed map of the Paris Métro. The shapes of the lines were angular, but the colors of them were as bright and cheerful as tulips, daffodils, and the blue lines were the color of delphiniums. Between jobs, when Farrell had a week or a month or even more time, he went to Paris, which was as far away from Los Angeles as you could get. He often stared at the map for stops he used, Odeon, Rue du Bac, or Saint-Michel. He had a tutor there, a French woman who intimidated him, but he learned a little of the language, which was another way of escaping Los Angeles. No one would ever say in Hollywood, Je suis désolé. I’m sorry.

  Farrell’s solitary life had slowly become part of him, like a substance he had absorbed, but he accepted it as necessary, since most of what he did required discretion or outright silence, and in the past, sooner or later, a girlfriend would say, “Well, when are you going to tell me what you do?”

  So, he lived alone, cooked on his three-thousand-dollar culinary stove, read at night, and tried to be discreet.

  He avoided looking in the mirror. When he did, he felt the delicate sense of being in the presence of two people, the man in the glass and the interior sense of someone opposite the image. He had a bench and weights, and he stayed in shape, not so much as to look like a Navy SEAL, but enough to be able to take someone’s arm so that they knew he meant it. About five feet, eleven inches. Grayish hair, not from age, that was a sheet metal color, cut short. A scar in a left brow from someone’s right hand. Nose that hinted at a bird of prey. Greenish eyes, the color of money. He looked away, relieved to have that physical presence of another version of himself fall away like a sheet over a statue that is being unveiled. A cool relief to be alone again, without the emotional static.

  About a hundred feet away another house had been built. It was a lot like Farrell’s although it was a little bigger, still covered with those weathered shingles, but it didn’t have roses around the door. The house next door had been vacant for about two months, and the emptiness had left to Farrell in a mood that was like waiting for some unknown but compelling event. Both houses were behind a privet hedge that went along the road.

  He sat at the table in the kitchen with the envelopes from the bank filled with hundred-dollar bills, which, just by their weight, left Farrell considering how anonymous cash was and how oddly powerful. He took out his phone, scrolled down to Terry’s number, and when he was about to touch the call button the phone rang. Terry Peregrine.

  “I was just going to call you,” said Farrell.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Terry. “But it’s all set.”

  “Is that right?” said Farrell.

  “It’s all set,” said Terry. “She came to her senses. I gave her five thousand bucks and left her at the bus station.”

  “No kidding?” said Farrell.

  “Yeah,” said Terry. “She’s a smart kid. Just wanted to go home.”

  “H-h-home,” said Farrell.

  “Yeah. No problem. You can tell Braumberg to relax. All of this is a nonproblem problem.”

  Farrell let the silence between them linger, a sort of dark static.

  “She said she was going to send a postcard when she got home,” said Terry. “You know, a picture of the mountains or a bear.”

  “You better let me see it,” said Farrell.

  “What’s the big deal?” said Terry.

  “I’m going to want to see the card,” said Farrell.

  “Don’t give it a second thought,” said Terry. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “I’m going to be waiting,” said Farrell.

  “Calm down,” said Terry. “I’ll let you know. Sometime.”

  “Not sometime,” said Farrell.

  “Okay,” said Terry. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Farrell put the phone on the table.

  That card better come, thought Farrell.

  He sat at the breakfast table and looked at the hillside behind his house, but he kept seeing the odd, metallic colored hair and those peculiar eyes of Mary Jones. She was right about it being cold here, although it was of a different kind than in Alaska. There were things Farrell did and things he wouldn’t do. When he got an idea, he stuck with it. His friends, when he had had friends, called him Mad Dog, and now, when he sat there, he thought it was apt.

  He was alert to a slight tremor, which for a moment he thought was the beginning of an earthquake, a mild, almost impossible to apprehend shaking. And yet, it left him with a suspicion of something else, which was the item that had gotten him into trouble and that had caused him to make mistakes. And why should it occur now, like an almost impossible to perceive shaking of the ground? Anger, he thought. That’s anger. I’ve got to keep it under control, to get a better grip. Not let it emerge out of the shadows. And yet the temptation, almost sensual, to let it out was right there and a reason for him to be more concerned than ever.

  Mad Dog had been only one of the things he had been called. He didn’t mind this one so much, but some others had changed him. Or the word was an entrance to something so deep he only knew a door was opening when he heard it. Farrell’s father, now dead, had been an engineer at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. His orderly,
engineer way of thinking and of doing things, from parallel parking to balancing a checkbook, had made it difficult for him to warm up to Farrell’s late hours, defiance, or Farrell’s natural anger at being disliked because he wasn’t obviously on his way to engineering school.

  Farrell had left home at seventeen to move in with the family of a friend. The word that had finished whatever slender connection there had been between Farrell and his father had been used in the last argument. His father, who struggled with being inarticulate and unable to speak easily, aside from engineering jargon, had said, “You are nothing but a bum. A bum. You hear me?”

  The word was a summation of every devastating notion his father felt about Farrell and wanted to say, but couldn’t.

  The last thing Farrell had said, over his shoulder when he went out the door, was, “Don’t say that. Don’t. I’m not a bum.”

  Still, even now, in the hum of the refrigerator, he detected a slight, infuriating memory of the word. It wasn’t something anyone should say to him. Ever. The accusation left him with a fury that he kept tucked away. Or tried to. It infuriated him not because of the word, or the notion of being a man with a bottle of wine in a bag, but because it had been used as a complete indictment of him from someone who couldn’t understand.

  3

  IF SHE WENT BY BUS, that’s probably a couple of days, thought Farrell, and then it would take a while to go home to her parents’ house, if she spent any time with them, but after that she’d need time to find a place of her own and to get a job. Say, two weeks, and then there was the mail, which would probably take a week. Two to three weeks, Farrell thought.