* * *
With an accompanying detective, Lowery drove down Wilcox to the edges of the Wilshire Country Club, then east on Rosewood to Rossmore and Fourth. Arden Boulevard, Lucerne Boulevard, Plymouth Boulevard: only in Hancock Park, Lowery thought, do shitty-assed little streets like these get called boulevards. They patrolled the park three hours without a single report on the radio. At two-thirty in the morning the lieutenant finally decided to post a unit outside the house that had been vandalized, leave another unit for all-night duty, and go home. The rest of the evening was quiet. The following evening Lowery went on patrol again and it was also quiet.
He’d nearly determined the Hancock Park trouble had run its course when another report came in the next night. Lowery and his detective got in the car and headed for Fifth Street between Windsor and Lorraine (both, of course, boulevards) where someone had seen the girl, not staring in a window but gliding across the grass. “Gliding” had been the caller’s word, and the officer who had taken the report repeated it. Lowery was fed up. “I presume,” he answered dryly over the unit radio, “you mean she’s on roller skates.” Next thing, he said to himself, they’ll be seeing stigmata. Then, when they got to Fifth and Lorraine and the lights of the car swung across an oceanic lawn, against a brick wall that ran through the yard he saw her too.
Rather he thought he saw her, at first. So did the detective at the wheel. “Got her, Lieutenant!” he said, and then stopped the car, the headlight beams staring into space. There was no one at all. What they had taken to be her eyes were simply the large fiery insects that buzzed among the bushes. What they had taken to be her mouth was simply the red wound of a departed animal. What they’d taken to be the form of her face was simply the bend of a bough. What they’d taken to be her hair was simply that part of the night where there was no moon.
“Sorry sir,” said the sergeant sheepishly, “thought we had something.” Lowery didn’t tell him he thought they’d had something too. “Well let’s look around,” he said, and they got out of the car. An hour later, driving back up Rossmore, they got another report of the girl over the box, and Lowery reached down and flicked it off.
* * *
In the downpour of the glass and the wax and the roar, Catherine walked across the room, up the steps and out the front door as though through a blizzard of arrows and jungle and fever. She left Eileen Rader’s house and started down the hill. In the dark she saw the fog rumbling in from the sea like a herd of white horses. They trampled a path through the middle of the city, separating its roots from the spires that rose from the back of the fog like hooded riders. The black stone rivers of the city stood dry and hopeless, stitching America to the rest of the plains. She got to the bottom of the hill and walked east. She crossed a lone river of lights and walked south. At one point she came to an abandoned fair, where the empty mechanical rides were poised in silhouettes. She went into a tent to sleep and caught the whine of the white herd from far away.
* * *
She slept in the tent nearly a week, venturing out each clay to pick fruit off people’s trees. Occasionally the people who owned the trees would run out of their houses, having glimpsed the theft; but they always wound up standing on their back porches deciding they’d seen nothing at all. Finally she resolved to head back to the border of America, via a final net of justice. In the middle of the night she came to the edge of the Hancock veldt. She followed a wall of fog around till she came to an opening where, inside, she saw the mansions in their gorges, elephantine and languid. She walked into the first valley and up the first hill and then into the second valley; balconies floated above her like boats, as though she were at the bottom of a lake looking up. The lawns were blue and cool. The air smelled of wine and clocks. In the days, she slept in a part of the maze no one knew.
She looked for his house, that she might inflict her final act of justice. She made her way up and down the gorges of the Hancock veldt; it’s a matter of time, she told herself, till I find him. Behind the windows of the mansions people danced like the cartoon characters of music boxes. Several times she peered in; often they saw her. She continued looking for his house but to no avail. Once she thought she’d found it, a red brick house with white edgings, but it was all wrong, all different, the windows and the door in the wrong places. She continued looking until she was beginning to recognize houses passed before; and when she came to the red brick house again, about a week and a half later, it was even more different. The faces of the houses were changing, she realized: caught up in an America where people knew their faces, she now attributed to those faces the very chameleonlike qualities that others attributed to hers. Before I leave America, she told herself, I’ll replace the face of my treason with the face of my destiny. Only when she saw her reflection one night in the window of another house did she understand both faces were one and the same. This was the window through which she hurled a rock, shattering glass and reflection and peace of mind and the patience of local law enforcement, everything but her futility.
Then she had a dream: she again walked a beach on a night of moon, a peculiar and vaguely felt city ribboning the edge of the earth, her hands filled with what she now knew to be the knife with which Coba peeled fruit on his boat. Down the beach in the light of the moon, just beyond the water, Llewellyn knelt on his knees in the sand. As usual he would not look at her as she came to him. As usual he would not look at her as she stood right before him. Had he raised his face to her, everything would have been different. Had he raised his face to her, she couldn’t have done it. Instead he turned away, and she said to herself, Your turning from me is more obscene than all the faces that never turned; it’s a denial by which you believed you might own me. It’s an ownership by which you believed you might save something. It’s a salvation by which you believed you never betrayed yourself. Not another moment will I be the sacrifice by which America pre tends its dreams have never changed. My knife chimes in the moon.
She was watching his head sail off into space when she saw a boat drifting by and on its deck another man watching. He looked rather like the man who lay at her feet. Before she woke she said to herself, My life, it’s nothing but sailors.
* * *
She wandered the Hancock veldt two months of nights. On the evening she decided to leave America she woke to a red sky alive with a thousand flesh spiders. From horizon to horizon they spun silver webs that shivered with pain. Beneath these strange skies she left the veldt and traveled the road east to the border. She crossed Western Avenue and soon came to the swirling map in the sky that read Ambassador Hotel, where she remembered the morning she met Richard. On this evening the hotel was bustling with more activity than usual: a line of limousines stretched along the northern wall, and near the lobby were the white holes of television lights and the chrome and black of cameras. Guests shuffled with hotel management. Several security guards dashed back and forth. Catherine walked up the long drive and resolutely through the throng, through the doors she had passed before.
* * *
She walked with the throng down a long corridor lined with shops: ticket agencies and barbers, boutiques and small post offices, rental services and magazine stands. She went up the stairs at the end of the corridor into the lobby, where many chandeliers glittered above a fountain of water in the middle. There were also two elevators, a dining hall and a lounge. At the front desk the management was coping with a flurry of check-ins. To the left was a cavernous ballroom. No one danced in the ballroom, and the sullen dark was scarred with candlelight; across walls that held no windows hung curtains that reached the ceiling. The bar in the corner aspired to near invisibility. Only a few people were present but more brushed past Catherine in the doorway, and as the room filled, nothing changed but the presence of silent faces; no laughter was raised or discussion exchanged; people groped for facsimiles of discretion. The candles were kept burning as though to mask the smell of decay. When a flame went out it was urgently relit by someone in
a hotel uniform assigned to no other purpose.
Catherine turned from the doorway and went back into the lobby. A number of people were noticing her and looking at her, including the manager behind the front desk. He kept his eye on her as she walked the entire length of the lobby toward the elevators. Madam, he finally said, a conceit meant to flatter the hotel more than Catherine, since in her plain dress and bare feet she appeared nothing like a madam. She answered him with a look of her own and stepped into an elevator; the door slid closed as she watched him come from behind the desk. She stared at the panel of lights to one side of the door, remembering how they had flickered the day Richard took her to his room; she tried to remember how many times they had flickered and which small map lit up when they stopped. Another couple was in the elevator with her. They moved to the other side. At the third floor Catherine got out.
She went to the place where she remembered Richard’s suite had been and found the door open. Inside a maid was changing some towels and turning down the bed; she stared at Catherine over her shoulder. It took Catherine a moment to realize this was not the room she was looking for. She went back to the elevator and waited with a man in a suit who whistled aimlessly; every few moments his eyes would rest on Catherine and he would stop whistling. He kept pushing the button on the wall. Finally he got into an elevator going down, and when he was gone Catherine pushed the buttons as she had seen him do. An elevator arrived, empty, and she got in and got out at the next place it stopped—the sixth floor. She went to the place where she remembered Richard’s suite had been and knocked. A strange man in a bathrobe answered the door. She backed away and returned to the elevator.
For an hour she traveled up and down in the elevator knocking on people’s doors. After a while she began to understand the numbers of the floors and took them systematically, one by one; rather than wherever the elevator randomly let her off, She had eliminated all the other floors when she decided to try the fourth. She went once again to the place where she remembered Richard’s suite to have been. There she heard a sound, like a baby crying. She knocked on the door and no one answered. She knocked on it again and the only response was the sound of the baby’s cry. Some people in the other rooms were peering out into the hall, aroused by the sound of her pounding. After a while a bellhop arrived to investigate a reported disturbance. When he came up the hall the guests were still leaning out their doors; the bellhop seemed a little uncertain how to handle it. He said something to Catherine. She grabbed the knob of the door and shook it.
He would have pulled her from the door except that he heard it too, the sound of crying. He took her arm and she shook him away, pointing fiercely at the door. The bellhop looked around at the other guests. She’s been making a racket for twenty minutes, said one lady. The bellhop nodded and listened to the sound in the room and sighed, then he took a key from his ring and put it in the lock. He opened the door.
Inside, the suite still displayed Richard’s fastidiousness. The only thing about it not fastidious was Richard. He was lying on the living room floor in his underwear. An open bottle of liquor sat on the table, a glass overturned in the midst of a stain. There was also an empty pharmaceutical bottle on the sofa. Catherine stood behind the bellhop, who softly called to Richard and then bent down to gently shake him. At the frigid touch of Richard’s body he jumped back. Oh shit, he said.
He nearly ran over her trying to get out of the room. Catherine remained staring at the body. She heard the sound like a baby from the other room and, not taking her eyes off Richard, she stepped around him. In the other room she made the discovery. Trapped in the window was something that had once been a white kitten. The kitten had been trying to get out the window; she was moving, animated, but not really alive, caught rather in a last nervous reflex, like something that continues to move several seconds after its head is cut off. The window in which the kitten was caught had several long horizontal panes of glass which opened to an angle by a latch on the side. At some point the kitten had maneuvered the latch, squeezing between the panes of glass and pushing herself toward a crack at the side of the screen. So desperate had she been to get out, so frustrated had she been by how securely the window was fastened, that she became determined to escape at any cost. Now Catherine saw the side of the kitten’s head pressed flat against the pane of glass and its emaciated body twisted in the window; she had no idea how long the kitten had been like this. She might have been this way before Richard’s death; she might have grown from a kitten into a cat within the panes of this window, and he might have sat on the sofa drinking and taking his evil medicine as he listened to her howl. The last sun of this June night was gleaming through the glass at this moment and the new angle of each pane cast a different hue while the trees of the Hancock veldt cried hideously in the distance. The cat was drowning in the colors of the glass and the noise of the trees, and when she moved, the glass moved and the colors changed. The more hysterical her capture, the more vibrant the light, until she was writhing in the dark red of the spidersky that was caught in the window with her. When Catherine put her hands on the cat, the creature was crushed in the light and din. Both girl and animal made a low and barely audible sound, this low hiss of refuge, like the familiar glint of refuge Catherine had seen in the animal’s eyes.
* * *
Dazed, she took the kitten in her hands and walked hack out into the other room where Richard’s body lay. Several of the guests from down the hall were standing there watching. The bellhop had not yet returned. Catherine moved toward the door with the kitten; the others moved out of her way. In the hall, momentarily disoriented, she began going in the wrong direction, then turned around and headed back. She got to the elevator and stepped into an empty one going down just as another arrived coming up with the bell hop, a security man and two medics.
In the lobby Catherine stepped out of the elevator, still holding the kitten. The manager behind the front desk saw her immediately and signaled to a man across the room. Catherine crossed the lobby toward the ballroom where it was shadowed and hushed and stung by candle fire. Two men came up on each side of her and grasped her arms. She flinched and they held her firmly. For a moment they were deciding which way to take her; they decided against the lobby and started her along the wall of the ballroom toward a back entrance.
Later, during the police investigation of the matter, the various accounts of what happened would all differ. It was agreed that there was a man, apparently in his thirties, with brown hair and a mustache, milling aimlessly around the ballroom. He had, according to those who noticed, gotten there some thirty minutes before, and those who watched him for any amount of time at all found him odd. He said odd things. He didn’t weave as though drunk or drugged, but he seemed lost and disturbed. At any rate the strange girl with the black hair stopped dead in her tracks when she saw him, and he dead in his tracks when he saw her. One of the security men tried to move him out of the way. The other security man insisted he heard the man speak to the girl in a way that was familiar even though it was prefaced by no sort of salutation or cordiality. I have this poem in my head, the security man heard him say.
You know this woman? the security man asked him.
I have this poem in my head, the strange man went on. Twenty years ago tonight I became a man who quoted poetry rather than write it, here in this place where they kill such men.
The security man placed his fingertips on the strange man’s chest. Uh, excuse us, buddy? he said, pushing him slightly.
Then, according to various accounts, the girl dropped something she held in her arms, tore control from the two men who held her, and seized from the wall one of the burning candles. She flashed it before her across the strange man’s throat as though to send his head soaring to the ballroom rafters. Of course the candle did nothing of the sort; the man touched his neck and looked at the cooling wax on his hands. The candle broke in two, its end flying behind them, where it fell at the foot of the curtains. For several mom
ents there was only a harmless flicker.
Everyone—the security men, the girl and the man with the mustache, men in dark coats and women in vanilla gowns—watched the flicker, immobilized. And then, like a wave very far on the horizon that rushes forward faster than anyone can imagine, the curtains were a wall of fire that stretched from one end of the ballroom to the other in a bare moment. The air was gauzed in smoke before anyone thought to even scream, and then, like the fire, the reaction was roomwide. Catherine looked around her and the men were gone. Llewellyn was gone. On the other side of the room the doors flew open, and the floor was a swamp of blue flames. In less than a minute the ceiling above became shimmeringly hot, like liquid. Beams of the ceiling began to collapse.
Rubicon Beach Page 19