The dialogue was good: subtle and nuanced. And Slade put in a top performance, managing to alternate soft -voiced, controlling, macho bossiness with sudden consternation when his character realises he’s being laughed at.
Lynx had made full use of the visual potential of the clothesline — there were dreamy shots of children whirling round, coloured clothes blowing in the wind, figures appearing suddenly behind sheets as the clothesline turned. A dark figure, the clothesline man watches the woman hanging out washing in the yard, the linen dancing around her. The tone was ambiguous: is the man charmed by the scene or is he all menace and thwarted male feeling?
Larry and his boss, Ezra, picked the film. Their favourite shot was of the clothesline man picking up one of the woman’s small children and walking towards her as she turned to face him, the linen blowing up into the air, as if the clothesline was throwing up its arms — in horror or celebration.
Ezra said, ‘It’s miles better than the others. And that fat kid can really act.’
He said, ‘Leanne will do the babysitting, but you can go too, and we’ll set up some meetings. You can look after business while she does the kids.’
On the plane the boys were subdued. They’d never been out of Auckland before. Leanne got them to relax. She had hit on the right way to deal with them: jolly but bossy. She was able to get their attention, call them to order. Larry was too shy; he could hear himself sounding strained and over-polite.
‘I thought your film was brilliant,’ he told them.
Slade puffed himself up, nodded, and made some sort of gangster gesture with four fingers. Lynx just ducked his head and grinned. Larry thought they were laughing at him. He was happy to let Leanne take control. She was a tough woman with a sharp face and a short crop of dyed red hair. Already she and the boys were laughing together, swapping food out of the airline meal, arguing about which films in the movie menu were crap and which were good. Having ripped through their dinner, the boys settled down to watch a big budget bloodbath, while Leanne sensibly donned earplugs and a mask, and dozed off.
Larry was trying not to drink.
He had a list of people he had to meet in Los Angeles. If he started drinking he wouldn’t be able to stop. Ezra would fire him. He had already had a serious warning; Ezra had made it clear that any repeat of last year’s incident would mean the end. Larry had got so drunk and stoned at the Christmas party that he had passed out, ripping down a line of coloured lights and knocking over a table laden with glasses. They called an ambulance for him. He was conscious but unable to stand. The memory was excruciating. Afterwards he pleaded exhaustion and overwork; he produced a doctor’s certificate to say that he’d been on antibiotics that had caused him to react badly to alcohol. Ezra knew this wasn’t true, but accepted it. And now he’d sent him to Los Angeles. It was a test. He couldn’t mess it up.
He’d watched Leanne drink her mini-bottle of chardonnay and then just switch her focus, to the boys, to the movie screen on the back of the seat. How was that done? He sighed and wriggled. Not drinking was as hard, as exhausting, as drinking. And how could he last without a joint to calm his nerves? He couldn’t show up at LA airport with a stash of dope in his bag. He felt a surge of anxiety. The trip seemed impossible, beyond his strength. He sipped his Coca Cola and tried to focus on a movie.
They landed at night, the great city spread out below them, static lights and the highways running through them like glittering veins. The terminal was chaos; whole sections of the airport were being renovated and they queued beside hardboard barriers, under temporary, hand-scrawled signs. There was a querulous, exasperated atmosphere. Those who strayed into the wrong place were herded back into a place by aggressive personnel: ‘Sir. Ma’am. Where you think you’re going?’ The security gates were undermanned, by two slow old guys who seemed to take pleasure in their slowness, the queues patrolled by snappish women who snatched up passports and rapped out orders and redirections. There was a mood of dull unease and dislike in the aliens’ queue, everyone feeling the atmosphere of American officialdom, American paranoia. A mother said to her sons, ‘Remember, no jokes. Don’t make any jokes.’
Larry arrived in front of one of the old guys, who took a long time before looking up. He asked laborious questions. Larry answered, dry-mouthed and shifty. The security man photographed him, Larry expecting the camera to jerk back affrontedly at the flaming condition of his eyeball. Slade and Lynx glowered and smirked and stared at the armed security guards. It was the land of guns and Americans, the real world of TV.
Outside the terminal a raddled black man with a clipboard loped up to them and said, ‘Where you going? I’ll take you. Leave those bags to me.’
Leanne mentioned a taxi. The man said, swaying, tugging on her suitcase, ‘I’ll take you. Ma’am, wherever you wanna go.’
‘No,’ Larry said.
The man looked up furiously, holding the clipboard against his hollow chest. The cords stood out in his neck, his expression was hyped up, frantic.
‘We’ll take the shuttle. Thanks.’ Larry pushed Leanne’s suitcase back towards her with his foot.
The man held onto the handle for a moment. Then he thrust it away. ‘Fuck yo. Hey, fuck yo, man. Take yo ass where you fucking like.’ He lurched away, waving the clipboard, veering up to another group.
They took the shuttle, gliding round the long airport strip as the automated robot voice announced the stops. They trundled in to the foyer of the Marriot. While Larry and Leanne waited at the desk, Slade and Lynx drifted away, checking out the Starbucks, the diner, the restaurant with the garish seventies-style lights, like a series of flying saucers. They were fascinated; it was all foreign, all familiar from TV.
The boys had a shared room, Larry and Leanne had one each. They dumped their bags in their rooms and went down for a meal in the foyer. The waitress was sexy, tiny, in a tight uniform. Her name tag said Molly. She was from Ecuador. Slade and Lynx mumbled their orders and stared. She brought the boys cokes with ice.
Leanne asked Larry casually, ‘Do you want something to drink?’
‘No.’ He wondered what Ezra had told her before they left.
Leanne ordered a gin and tonic. She drank it fast and a flush crept up her neck and into her cheeks. The food came in enormous portions, all fatty, creamy, slathered with mayonnaise. Slade ate all of his and half of Lynx’s. The boys ordered another coke each. Leanne asked for a second gin. She said to Larry, ‘Sure you don’t want a drink?’ The waitress paused, her notebook ready.
‘No.’
‘A wine, maybe?’
‘No.’
‘Well, there’s always the mini-bar in your room.’
A look swelled in her face. She put her hand lightly to her chest, as if at some secret pleasure. He tried to place her expression, to define it. The bitch. What was she was doing? He was tired; his head felt fuzzy and heavy. He glanced up and saw Lynx watching them. The boy sitting very still. Those noticing eyes.
They went to their rooms. Larry lay on his back, one arm over his face. He thought he was tense and wide awake, but then he was waking up. He drifted, remembering. Last week, in Auckland, he and Raine in the supermarket. There was a commotion in the aisle. A shoplifter had been collared by a store detective and was trying to argue his way out of it. He started to bluster and shout. Tins dropped out of his coat, and he tried to gather them up, pushing the woman aside. Then uniformed trolley boys and storemen were galloping into the aisle. The man fell over and struggled on the floor, hitting out. He was tall, raw and skinny. His glasses, strung on a plastic chain around his neck, got trodden on and bent out of shape. One of his sandals flew off. Larry looked at the skinny old ankles. There was a yellow puddle underneath him, and a dark patch on his jeans.
It was horrible, the skinny body writhing on the floor, the trolley boys in their sweaty serge kneeling over him, their faces lit up with excitement. Raine stood still and watched, her hand held lightly to her chest. The look in her eyes — avidit
y, heat.
He woke with a dry mouth. It was morning. He went to the window. Below, there were people lying on deckchairs around the pool. A uniformed black man was on his hands and knees reaching down into a manhole while another stood above him talking. The kneeling man sat back on his haunches and said something emphatic, the other went into a pantomime of hilarity, staggering and slapping his thigh. Behind the building, planes flashed past, the light catching their metal underbellies. Rings of light on metal. No sound but the sigh of the air-conditioning.
Larry went down to the foyer and checked his emails. There was one from Raine:
You’ve caused more trouble than you realise. Tim thinks I’ve put up with enough. I think he’s right.
He logged off.
Raine had been angry for a week. She’d refused to drive him to the airport. It was because of Evelyn.
Evelyn was Raine’s aunt. She’d been a successful businesswoman, a member of the city council, and still sat on the board of a few companies. Her husband was dead and she lived alone in a big villa in Herne Bay. Evelyn had a lot of money and no kids. She was going to leave her money to Raine, to Raine’s cousins the Westons, and a small percentage to Tracy, the Maori girl Evelyn had taken under her wing.
Tracy’s mother had been Evelyn’s cleaner. She had seven children to five different men. She lived in chaos, on welfare. She used to bring Tracy over to Evelyn’s while she did the cleaning. Evelyn took an interest in Tracy and eventually paid for her to go to a private school. When Tracy left school, Evelyn got her a secretarial job.
At a Sunday lunch at Evelyn’s, glazed and steadied by a joint beforehand and a series of drinks through the meal, Larry had joined Tracy out on the deck for a cigarette. She was a pretty, melancholy girl, with a round face and tangled hair.
She said, ‘I’m pregnant.’
He said, ‘Fuck, how’d you manage that?’
She looked at him. They both laughed.
They turned and leaned on the rail. Inside, Raine and Evelyn were sitting at the table. Raine’s churchy cousin, Tim Weston was holding forth.
Larry nudged Tracy’s shoulder. He liked her. They were outsiders. They both felt it, their separateness.
He said quietly, ‘You’ll be all right, mate. You know you’re going to inherit. Fifteen per cent of Evelyn’s pile.’
Tracy stared. She said, ‘No.’
This had been Larry’s crime.
He had disobeyed Evelyn’s edict, pressed upon Raine and through her, on Larry. Tracy was not to be told about the share she was getting from Evelyn’s will. Evelyn wanted Tracy’s affections to be sincere. She was emphatic about it. She didn’t want Tracy to act out of what she called ‘cupboard love’.
When he was given the order by Raine, ‘Tracy’s not allowed to know’, and the reason, Larry recoiled. He hated the expression, ‘cupboard love’. The low insult of it, the coldness. He expressed his distaste, clumsily, hopelessly. (He was completely pissed at the time.)
He blustered, trying to find his way to what he meant. ‘If it’s a gift it should be unconditional. Given out of affection. To honour someone. Why anticipate something squalid. “Cupboard love” — doesn’t that just partake of the squalid? I mean, if you want to give, to honour a lifetime’s association, isn’t everything that’s passed the reason for giving?’
He said these things, while Raine coldly ignored him. He thought to himself: Evelyn. The power-crazed old woman. All the secrets, the cold withholding. All that disgusting reverence for money. The elevation of it over everything, over love.
‘You’re drunk,’ Raine said. ‘Don’t you interfere. It’s none of your business.’ And added, ‘Just keep it to yourself.’
He had done, until that Sunday afternoon, a week and a half ago now. And he couldn’t remember, he honestly wasn’t sure, whether he’d told Tracy on purpose or whether it had just slipped out.
That same afternoon, Tracy mentioned the will to Evelyn. They were in the kitchen. Evelyn was making coffee. Tracy made a clumsy attempt at saying thank you. Evelyn looked over the girl’s head at Larry, just looked at him. Her eyes like stones.
You had no right.
Ah, to hell with you. That was what he told them, silently, in his head.
In the driveway Tim Weston made a sorrowful face.
‘Fuck off, Tim,’ Larry said.
Later, he said to Raine, ‘Evelyn has to forgive me. She’s said it herself: every time she thinks badly of someone she has to repent.’
‘Don’t be so sure,’ Raine said.
But now Larry couldn’t stop himself. Something had been let loose. He started raging again. ‘It’s like when you and Tim start talking about “Asians” and what a menace they are, Evelyn can’t tell you what racists you are, because then she’d have thought ill of you and she’d have to repent. She’d sit around while people were planning the Holocaust and not think ill of them, because then she’d have to repent. It’s the perfect moral cop-out. Say nothing, do nothing. Don’t think ill. Badness all around and she puts on that smiling, do-gooding face.’
‘You’re sick,’ Raine said. ‘No, you’re really sick.’
‘Why do you care about Evelyn’s bloody machinations? Maybe you’re all cupboard love.’
She threw him out then. Or rather, she threw things at him until he went to the pub, scored a lot of dope, and blasted himself out beyond caring.
He looked at the hot, gritty LA morning. He rang Leanne from his room. She sounded brisk and efficient. She’d been to the hotel gym and the boys were in the pool. She was going to take them to breakfast and then they were to be picked up and taken on one of their scheduled outings. She mentioned Disneyland. Larry wasn’t listening.
He located Slade and Lynx down there in the plastic blue pool. They were resting their elbows on the edge and watching a woman in a short dress who was unloading a trolley of towels. Behind the hotel, the planes flashed past. Bursts of metallic light. The sky was clear, with a hazy rim of brown.
He thought of Raine and Tim, discussing him. Raine’s email. Tim’s opinion (when did that prick lose an opportunity to offer it) that Raine had suffered enough. No doubt she had. For years he had up put a chemical barrier against her. Without it, she flayed him.
He shaved, checked his bag, got himself ready. He went downstairs, ordered a cab, and shouldered out into the blinder of the LA day.
The first meeting was in a house in Santa Monica. A maid showed him in and he waited by the pool. His contact emerged through a creeper-covered archway. They talked, and the maid served Coca Cola. Larry’s head was clear. He was doing well. The cold drink made his brain ache.
At lunchtime they cabbed downtown, and there was another meeting in an office tower, more difficult this time, Larry casting his eye down the list he and Ezra had drawn up, making sure he stressed what Ezra wanted him to say, and feeling a surprised thrill when, about two hours in, he got a concession that Ezra hadn’t expected him to get. And then the little breeze of doubt — were they letting him have this because they were going to deny him something else? These Americans were so friendly and casual they were inscrutable. They were all white teeth and veneer. Maybe there was something he hadn’t thought of.
He could see a highway jammed with cars, far below. The man opposite him, Ed Talley, had light grey eyes and brown, pockmarked skin. He never left off eye contact. There was something feral about him, a coiled quality. A shaft of cold air blew constantly down on the top of Larry’s head. He had to get over wincing at the sound of his own accent. He sounded strained, too polite. Behind a glass wall a girl in a tight pink top slouched back and forth, pushing a cleaning trolley.
The meeting finished. Larry sat back, absorbing the fact that he’d got what he’d come for. No one had come in at the last moment and taken it away. He felt triumphant, then superstitious. A twitch of anxiety. But he couldn’t think of anything wrong with the deal. It was what Ezra wanted. He’d stuck to the plan and pulled it off.
He was
left alone with Ed, the man with the grey eyes, and Don, one of the young vice presidents.
Don slapped Larry on the shoulder and said, ‘We could use a drink.’
Through the glass, Larry watched the girl in the pink top blow a balloon of gum out of her mouth. She was carrying a wastepaper basket. Outside, the city was all flash and glass and glancing afternoon light. Tiredlight. Whitelight. He felt how high up he was, how far away from home. There was a dark blot on the horizon, summer fires.
Use a drink. The words glowed in his head.
Ed put a bottle of white wine and three glasses on the table. Larry heard the ping as the glasses clinked together, and he saw the sound, a pure, sparkling droplet.
With the first chilled sip something went off in his head. There was a cool tide, a wash of sensation, and he was swept with it, marvellously free, his limbs light, his head full of soft sound. The world was a place of clarity, beauty.
‘Whoa,’ Don said. ‘Another, my friend?’
He was out in the street, clutching his bag to his chest. The hot blast of street air hit him. For a moment he looked back, down the tube of time. He had the memory of the day running smooth and clear through its hours, before the abrupt crumpling of the evening, when time compacted like a train smashed head-on into a wall. Jumbled fragments flew off the wreckage. Ed telling a story. The second bottle. Don throwing open a drinks cabinet. At some stage they were wedged into an office kitchen, leaning against the cupboards while Ed mixed cocktails over the sink.
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