Dead Time

by Stephen White

  I said, “You picked the orange for the wall inside the front door, didn’t you?”

  She looked at me sideways with softness in her eyes that I hadn’t seen before. “How did you know that?” she asked.

  “Same shade as the bird-of-paradise flowers. At least the ones that aren’t…dead.” I gestured toward her lap and the deconstructed bud. “I don’t think it’s a color most people would choose.”

  She smiled that lopsided smile again. We made eye contact for a second before she looked away. “I don’t think Mel’s working today. She could be out doing errands or something. That’s possible. But I would guess she’s at her…uh, boyfriend’s place. When she’s not here or at the studio, that’s usually where she is.”

  “Her boyfriend lives nearby?”

  “No,” she said. “Tarzana.”

  I knew Tarzana. I knew it as a freeway sign on the 101…My memory of Tarzana was of dusky green hills climbing up from the side of the freeway. Dense trees. As a child I’d always assumed that rich friends of Edgar Rice Burroughs lived there. His sprawling ranch and estate had once taken up much of the land where the current town sits. It had been named to honor the author’s iconic work.

  “It’s in the Valley,” she said.

  The flavor of voice she chose made the San Fernando Valley sound like a forsaken place. Across a great desert or a wide sea. The fiction was seductive. Her seasoning kicked me into Chinatown thoughts. A desolate reservoir. Orange groves split by dusty lanes. Jack Nicholson’s bloody nose.

  My childhood experiences offered two other occasional vantages of the Valley.

  One view was from a hard green seat on a hot yellow bus on school field trips to the La Brea Tar Pits or to some museum or factory in L.A. We’d see the Valley from the slow lane of the Ventura Freeway. The other was the view from the front seat of my father’s convertible as we sped through the Valley on our way to rare Dodger games in Chavez Ravine, or during visits to an old college friend of his whom my mother didn’t like.

  My father’s friend was divorced and gregarious. He lived on a big piece of rolling scrubland in Hidden Hills, near Calabasas on the far west end of the Valley. Although his house was much less elaborate than his neighbors’ homes, it was a much nicer house than ours. My father’s friend—my father instructed me to call him Mr. Thompson, even though Mr. Thompson told me he’d break my arm if I didn’t call him Bud—had a swimming pool shaped like a deformed peanut. He owned horses. He would set me up to ride in circles around his corral while he and my father sat in the shade of a deformed oak, drank stubby brown bottles of Mexican beer, and ate carnitas and tortillas prepared by the woman who cleaned his house. My father and Bud laughed a lot. They sprinkled cuss words into their conversation like seasoning on a steak.

  I thought Bud’s daughter was hot. She thought I was first cousin to the crap she scraped off her horse’s shoes. She rode sometimes during our visits, but she never stayed in the corral. I would watch her mount her huge white horse and urge him into a canter, not taking my eyes from her until she disappeared down the trail that snaked into the chaparral-dotted hills.

  The riding ring was for wimps like me. I rode in circles.

  Even as an adolescent, I recognized the power of the metaphor.

  Each time we visited Hidden Hills I prayed—I literally prayed—that I would arrive to find Bud’s daughter sunbathing by the pool. My fantasy had her in a red bikini.

  God apparently had more pressing prayers to answer than those related to my juvenile lust, though I couldn’t imagine what could possibly be more important.

  I was trying to convince myself that despite the tragedy that had changed my family when I was a fourteen-year-old in Thousand Oaks, north of the Valley, my California history didn’t have to be toxic, and that it was okay for me to admit to this stranger where I had grown up.

  Before I had a chance to come out of my fog, Cara’s roommate explained the geography. “Tarzana’s on the other side of the mountains. You can take the 405 or the 101.” She hooked a thumb over her right shoulder. “These are the Hollywood Hills. The Valley is on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, farther up the coast. Inland from Malibu. You’ve never been to the Valley?”

  “Have I missed something special?” I said. She found that funny. I said, “I grew up in Thousand Oaks, but I haven’t been to the Valley in”—I thought about it—“twenty years. Has much changed?”

  “Not really. I grew up in Orange County. Same story. More people.”

  I pulled out my phone to check the time. Cara was late. I didn’t want to leave, but I didn’t have a reason to stay. “I should let you go,” I said. She stood.

  THIRTY

  I walked most of the way down the steps toward my Camry before I stopped. I looked back up. I said, “I’m Alan, by the way.”

  “You said that already.”

  She was letting me know that my script was redundant. I took another step down the stairs, turned again. “You have a name?”

  She paused long enough that I wasn’t sure she was going to tell me. She tossed the flower bud into the ice plant. Finally, she said, “Amy.”

  Amy was the name of the girl from Hidden Hills. The one I never saw sunbathing by the pool. “Thanks for your help, Amy. Can I give you my number? If you hear from Cara?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Sure.”

  I thought she might make her own mobile phone materialize from somewhere. My younger patients did that whenever I imparted data they considered worthy of their recall. Data didn’t exist for them until punched into their phones.

  Amy didn’t move a muscle. A breeze pushed a wisp of hair from her forehead. A quick shaft of sunlight poked through the haze, and for a protracted moment we were both in sunshine. I started to fumble for my sunglasses, but the solar spotlight flashed off as suddenly as it had emerged.

  I asked, “You want to write it down?”

  “I’ll remember.”

  I gave her the number. Her lips moved as she committed it to memory, or perhaps as she allowed neurological gravity to roll it to the curb, like mental rubbish.

  “Colorado is three-oh-three?” she said.

  “It is.”

  “Good luck with Mel, Alan. Whatever errand you’re on sounds…complicated.”

  I made it all the way to the car before Amy spoke again. “When you see her? You should call her Mel. You won’t sound so old-friend-of-her-father-ish, you know?”

  “Thanks.” I decided to ask one more question. “Has she seemed depressed to you? Upset?”

  Amy’s expression suggested she was giving my question some thought.

  “Girls are moody, Alan. Hollywood girls are moodier than most. Mel’s…okay. She has issues. We all have issues.”

  “Yeah?” I hoped she’d tell me about their issues.

  “Compared to Kanyn? Mel’s a picture of mental health.”

  “In what way?”

  “Kanyn’s a doll, but she is the strangest person I’ve ever lived with. And that includes my family.”

  “Really?”

  “Mel gets down, has crying jags. Kanyn? She falls off cliffs. One minute she’s fine, the next…? Mel has stayed up all night with her, afraid she’ll slit her wrists or stick her head in the oven.”

  “It’s that sudden?” I said. I climbed a few stairs.

  “Yes,” she said. She lowered her voice. “She pulls her hair out when she’s alone, too. Not on her head. Her pubes. One at a time. I walked into her room once and saw a little pile of them on her nightstand. She told me what they were, said she’d been doing it since freshman year in high school.” She looked away for a moment. “I shouldn’t have told you that.” She bit her lower lip. “That was stupid.”

  I said, “It’s called trichotillomania.”

  “What?”

  “The hair-pulling. It’s called trichotillomania. It’s a psychological…condition.”

  She looked at me as though I’d just made a gerbil appear from her ear
. “How do you know that?”

  “I’m a psychologist,” I said.

  “Spell it,” she said.

  I did. Her lips barely moved as she silently repeated the progression of letters. It was like watching a ventriloquist at work.

  I said, “Nice meeting you, Amy.”

  I returned to the car and drove away. The Camry’s instrument displays were telling me things about the status of its batteries that I didn’t comprehend.

  I had questions.

  I wondered what the hell was going on with Kanyn. Trichotillomania—compulsive or impulsive hair-pulling—could present as an isolated symptom, but it could also be a complication for someone with the kind of severe dysthymia that Amy was describing about Kanyn. The pubic specificity was a variant I’d read about that I hadn’t run across before clinically. I suspected Kanyn pulled other hairs too, not just her pubes.

  If Cara was as good about keeping appointments as Amy suggested she was, why had she blown me off? Had Wallace gotten confused about the time? Or the date?

  I considered contacting Wallace first to confirm I understood the plans, but after a moment’s reflection I decided that leaving him in place as the intermediary between his daughter and me wasn’t working well. I also figured that Wallace would either be annoyed at Cara for spacing out our meeting, or worried about her well-being for the same reason. I didn’t see anything to be gained from aggravating what was already a difficult situation for father and daughter.

  I drove for a while, crossing under the Pasadena Freeway at a location that didn’t have any ramps. I knew I was lost. I pulled over to the side of the road and parked the car. I stared at the Hertz map long enough to know it wouldn’t be of any help.

  I tried Cara’s mobile. After a few rings it kicked me to voice mail. The recorded greeting was pleasant and precise. I wouldn’t have pegged the voice as belonging to her, though. People change. I said, “Cara? Alan Gregory. We must have had some confusion about the time of our meeting. I’m just leaving your place in Mt. Washington. Please give me a call so we can find another time.”

  I hit the speed dial for Jonas’s cell. He didn’t answer. The call rolled over to voice mail. I left him a message that I loved him and would call him back.

  It was too late to call Lauren.

  I considered my options. I could check into a motel somewhere in West L.A. and wait for Cara’s return phone call. Or I could drive toward Tarzana and hope that Cara returned my call before I got there. It made no difference to me if we had our meeting in the Valley or in Mt. Washington or someplace in between.

  I didn’t feel like sitting in a motel for the rest of the day. Going to the Valley had meaning for me. Not going to the Valley had even more meaning for me. I decided to go to the Valley. The Camry had an electronic GPS mapping device. I powered it up, punched in TARZANA CA, and waited a few seconds for the machine’s digital wisdom. A pleasant, confident, executive-assistant-type female voice suggested I embark on what seemed to me like an unnecessarily convoluted route to take me to an on-ramp to the 101 north—the necessary first step on my journey to the Valley.

  A convoluted route was better than my alternative, which basically would have involved driving aimlessly around whatever neighborhood I’d entered after venturing from Mt. Washington. I followed her spoken directions until I spotted the promised sign for the entrance ramp to the Hollywood Freeway North, the 101.

  That early success left me feeling optimistic about my decision to go the Valley.

  Then I reached the top of the ramp.

  I hadn’t counted on rush hour.

  On the way to Tarzana I had plenty of time to contemplate the ways L.A. had changed in the years since I had left Southern California behind.

  More cars. Lots more cars.

  I panicked for a couple of miles—since my average speed was less than fifteen miles an hour, my attack was almost ten minutes—as I approached the intersection of the Hollywood Freeway and the Ventura Freeway. The two freeways, both familiar from my youth, had the same number—the 101—but for some reason I couldn’t recall they had different names. It was a logistical conundrum that hadn’t been at all important to me when I was not yet driving.

  I settled in. The air in the Valley was cleaner than the air in the downtown basin had been—clear enough that I could see the silhouettes of the mountains rimming the Valley, the San Gabriel Mountains to the north, the Santa Monica Mountains to the south. The sun was starting its late-afternoon descent at almost twelve o’clock.

  From my vantage in the center lane on the Ventura Freeway, it appeared that most of what existed in between the two sets of mountains was little changed over the decades since I’d last been to the Valley. The buildings adjacent to the freeway were taller. The malls seemed bigger and more numerous, and many surface parking lots seemed to have been replaced by multistory garages. Much of what had been developed had been redeveloped.

  I recalled Bud’s daughter in Hidden Hills. The first Amy. I got lost in a memory of the impossible posture she managed while mounted on her horse’s back, her white-blond hair tickling the top of her perfect ass.

  The congestion on the freeway morphed as I cleared Sherman Oaks. The change, unfortunately, was that it got worse. Instead of crawling along at a snail’s pace, my fellow drivers and I were stopping for long periods of time and then driving for a hundred yards or so before stopping again. Some of the stops were fifteen seconds. Some of them were a couple of minutes. I never spotted anything that provided a clue as to why we were slowing or why we were going. I spent the dead time listening to songs from my youth on an oldies station and studying the paper Hertz map. I was certain that a good half dozen of the major roads I spotted on the map hadn’t even existed when I left Southern California.

  A sign indicated the approach of the interchange with the 405—the San Diego Freeway. I was just east of Tarzana.

  My phone rang. I glanced down. CARMEL POTEET read the screen.

  THIRTY-ONE

  “Cara, hi.”

  Shit, I should have called you Mel.

  “Dr. Gregory, I’m—I know I was supposed to meet you today but…” She sighed. “Jack was supposed to be here last night, but he didn’t show up. Nobody knows where he is…. I’ve been upset. I didn’t want to be by myself, so I—I am so sorry. I just…forgot. I am so, so sorry.”

  Something that psychotherapists—and 911 dispatchers—learn early in their careers is that upset people often omit crucial context in their descriptions of precipitating events. To wit: Cara hadn’t said who Jack was. Her boyfriend? Her cat?

  “Call me Alan. It’s okay,” I said. “Is Jack your boyfriend?”

  “What? No, no. Jack is an…old friend. Somebody I’ve known for a long time. I’m with my boyfriend now. In Tarzana.”

  “I’m sorry about Jack. Can I be of any help? I’m in the Valley, not too far from you, I think. I can be there in…” I was close enough to the former Edgar Rice Burroughs estate that I could see the hazy outlines of the Tarzana hills in the distance.

  At highway speeds I’d arrive in Tarzana in a few minutes. At rush hour? I didn’t know. I said, “Twenty minutes? Max.”

  She replied without hesitation. “No, thank you, no. I’m not…alone. I’m okay. I just don’t think I’m ready to talk to you about…You know, not today. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. Whatever’s going on with Jack is really…”

  Her voice drifted away. I thought I heard her say something to someone else, but the sound was muffled, as though she’d covered the microphone.

  “It’s fine. I understand,” I said. “Should I call you in the morning? See how you’re doing? Would that be okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ten o’clock?”

  “Eleven? I should be back over the hill by then.”

  “I’ll call after eleven. Maybe we can have lunch.”

  She didn’t reply right away. Then she said, “Maybe.”

  “You sure you’re all right, Cara?”<
br />
  “Yes.”

  “You would tell me if you weren’t?”

  It was a shrink question. Growing up with two shrink parents, she probably recognized it as familiar. She said, “Of course.”

  “Good luck with your friend,” I said. But she’d already hung up.

  I didn’t quite make it to Tarzana. I used an off-ramp and seconds later an on-ramp to reverse direction on the Ventura Freeway. I was pointed back into the snare of the interchange, this time with the descending sun in my mirrors instead of my eyes. I briefly considered opting for a respite from the traffic by choosing a motel room in the Valley—every possible chain lodging option seemed to be available alongside the 101. But since Cara and I would be meeting sometime the next day on the other side of the Hollywood Hills, I decided to endure the congestion a little longer and spend the night closer to Los Angeles proper.

  I had another option. Before I’d left Boulder, Merideth had sent me an e-mail with the address of her L.A. condo. She told me I was free to use it while I was in town to talk with Carmel. I knew my ex well enough to be certain her offer wasn’t an act of magnanimity. Merideth was hoping that I would display my gratitude by telling her whatever I learned in Los Angeles that might relate to her missing surrogate.

  I’d e-mailed her back my thanks, but let her know that I thought I’d just get a motel room. She immediately called my cell. The moment I answered the phone, she said, “It’s your money. The doorman has your name. Show him your driver’s license and he’ll give you a key. Jesus effing—” She hung up before she finished the profanity.

  She had pronounced Jesus, Hay-zeus.

  “You drove to the Valley?”

  The latest incredulous question tossed my way was from Cara’s bird-of-paradise roommate, the other Amy. I had just completed the transition to the Hollywood Freeway when she called.

  “I did. Cara told you?”

  “Mel, remember? You two are going to get together tomorrow?”

  “That’s the plan. A wasted trip to the Valley. Do you know her friend Jack?”