by Nova Jacobs
Perhaps most spectacularly, there was Erwin Schrödinger, who, while married to his wife, Annemarie, had one affair after another, each romantic intrigue corresponding to a vigorous period of output and discovery. Schrödinger had done his best work on his quantum wave equation in December 1925 during an extended stay in an Alpine cabin with one mistress whose identity still remains a mystery. The equation he had produced so feverishly between their lovemaking sessions would later win him the Nobel in physics. Schrödinger’s good friend the mathematician Hermann Weyl—who, incidentally, was back home fucking Schrödinger’s wife during said stay in the mountain cabin—said of Schrödinger, “He did his great work during a late erotic outburst in his life.”
A late erotic outburst. That’s what he needed.
Philip’s gaze settled for a moment on Dick Feynman’s jaunty portrait across the room—a man who was remembered as much for his naughty, winking personality as for his physics. “Even I,” he seemed to be saying from his eight-by-ten-inch prison, “had a lifelong weakness for topless bars and Vegas showgirls. You think I moved to California for the academic prestige? Nah. It was the girls, Philip, the girls!”
“Do you want to share a Three Mile Island Iced Tea?” Anitka asked innocently.
“I think I’m set.”
“How about a Bloody Marie Curie?”
He stood abruptly. “I have to go.”
“But we haven’t gotten to my dissertation.”
“Yeah, well—”
“How will you get home?”
“I have a rocket ship outside.”
Anitka burst out laughing, nearly falling off her chair. “Oh God, how did we get so smashed?” She steadied herself by grabbing his arm.
He looked at her hand. “I have a daughter your age, you know.”
She slapped the top of the bar. “That’s so funny, because I have a second cousin who’s your age.”
And with that, he grabbed his jacket and lurched out of the Hayman.
* * *
On the considerable walk home, Philip would have heaps of time to think over all the stupid things he had said that evening. I have a daughter your age? You can’t say things like that to a woman you were going to have to see later in sober daylight. And why was he practically fleeing?
He wondered what Jane would think of his current three-martini state. (Or had it been four?) Just as he was calculating how much drunkenness he could walk off before he reached home, he noticed a car trailing him through the Athenaeum parking lot. This feeling of being followed so disturbed him that he flattened himself against a hedge to wait for the car to pass. When the dark sedan pulled alongside him and stopped, an irrational shudder of fear moved through him. The passenger-side window slid down.
“May I offer you a ride, Professor Severy?” a man asked from the driver’s seat.
The interior of the car was half in shadow, and Philip couldn’t make out the driver’s face. “Do I know you?”
“Ms. Stone thought you’d like to be seen home.”
“Ms. Stone?” The man wore a suit, maybe a chauffeur’s getup. “I don’t under—”
The driver started to explain, but as he spoke, his accent seemed to thicken, and Philip was having a hard time making any sense of it. He was also feeling alarmingly pinned between car and shrub.
“Sorry,” he said, holding up a hand. “I really don’t know what you’re saying. You’ll excuse me—”
He stepped through a serendipitous gap in the hedges, leapt onto the sidewalk, and headed swiftly in the general direction of his house. But the encounter—the whole night, really—unsettled Philip deeply, and in the forty-five minutes it took to walk home, he glanced behind him nearly a dozen times.
– 10 –
The Hotel
After the drama of Drew’s encounter with the four o’clock plant had run its course, Hazel returned to her dubious scavenger hunt. She explained to the family that she wasn’t quite ready to return to Seattle and the hassles of running her store, which was partly true. She tried to imagine walking into her shop the next morning, struggling to banter with customers while overdue notices collected daily on her counter. She imagined turning the store over to her employee, Chet, for the afternoon, asking him to tidy the displays or spruce up the store signage, knowing full well he’d just use her absence as an excuse to catch up on his reading. (And why not? Wasn’t that the whole point of working in a bookstore?) She knew that Chet’s reading wasn’t just reading, but research for an unnameable book he’d been working on for ages, one she pretended not to notice he was writing.
She’d then take a crisp walk to Bennet’s design studio. But she could only envision unhappy scenarios: Bennet so absorbed in the lines of a swivel chair that he barely registered her arrival. Or, worse, her boyfriend testing out a rocking-chair love seat with that cute assistant designer—the one with the bangs and sparkly tights—each pretending to evaluate the chair’s merits but secretly relishing their forced proximity to each other. And Hazel standing there, stupidly gripping a bag of Bennet’s favorite pastries.
She didn’t know why her mind insisted on imagining the worst, but the truth wasn’t so much that she was afraid to go home; it was that she couldn’t rid herself of the idea that she now had a purpose in Los Angeles. She finally had a function among the Severys, and an obligation to the man who had rescued her and her brother so many years ago.
Hazel spent much of the next two days holed up in Isaac’s study, poring over his letter, certain that the text was key to revealing the place where he’d hidden his work, perhaps somewhere in the house. Just in case, she called the Caltech math department to ask if there was a room 137 in their building. There wasn’t. Maybe 137 wasn’t an actual room but a code pointing to the text of the letter. But any permutations she tried—anagrams, wordplay, both vertical and diagonal acrostics—evaporated into nonsense. Not for the first time, she searched the internet for a John Raspanti but came up with the same results. There were several people with that name, none of them in the Los Angeles area, none of them with academic jobs or even a tenuous connection to her grandfather, and certainly none wearing herringbone.
After many hours of groping down blind alleys, Hazel returned to Tender Is the Night, refusing to believe that her grandfather had been out of his mind. She had to keep looking. The gift card for the now-defunct Book Circus seemed to her irritatingly unhelpful. The Hollywood bookstore had gone bankrupt years ago, and its multistoried complex now housed a combination gym and health food store. She quickly discarded the thought of haunting racquetball courts and bulk food aisles in search of camouflaged mathematics, and instead looked back through the novel. She scanned it several times but didn’t notice anything unusual, other than an underlined word on the second page, littoral, next to which was scribbled a definition in Isaac’s hand: “of or pertaining to the seashore.” Hazel had probably looked up that very word when she’d first read the book back in college, though she hadn’t retained its meaning. She scrambled the word for anagrams but could produce only tortilla and R. T. Lolita. She did the same for Raspanti’s name, but after a few hop ninja rats and no Japan shirts, she gave up.
A less nonsensical discovery came to her the second night as she lay in bed, weaving the gift card between her fingers and trying to recall Book Circus’s motto: “Run away with the Circus”? “Send in the Books”? As the lamplight caught the store’s clownish logo, she noticed that an edge was pulling away slightly from the black plastic. She went to her desk for a better look and realized that it was just a cheap sticker. She peeled it off to find a gold embossed script underneath: “Hotel d’Antibes, 5819 Foothill Drive, Los Angeles.” It wasn’t a gift card at all but a hotel key card. A large, proud, rose-colored hotel . . . Perhaps Isaac’s allusion to Fitzgerald’s first line was no literary coincidence. Is this where she would find room 137?
Hazel would have shouted an exclamation had it not been for Sybil, Jack, and Drew sleeping downstairs. She considered t
hrowing a coat over her pajamas and borrowing Isaac’s Cadillac, but she knew the sputtering engine would wake them. Instead, she called Bennet, suddenly craving the sound of his voice. She wanted to hear him say that he missed her, that his dog missed her, that he’d discovered this new restaurant with devastating crab cakes, and when was she coming home already? But his voice mail answered. Hazel listened to his deep, unhurried greeting asking her to leave a message, and hung up.
She couldn’t sleep, and for the next hour, she stared at the ceiling, pushing a swirl of negative thoughts about Seattle out of her mind. Instead, she tried to summon the constellations she and her brother had tried to create on their bedroom ceilings using strings of white Christmas lights and a box of pins, an ambitious compensation for their city’s lack of actual star cover. They had painted some of the bulbs black in order to get the intensity of each star just right, but succeeded only in making a mess. As her eyes eventually closed and she drifted toward sleep, Hazel imagined a reality in which their star project had been a success instead of a childish tangle, in which those white string lights were still suspended from their bedroom ceilings instead of having ended up in that bubbling water with Isaac.
* * *
At nine the next morning, after devouring a few pancakes left behind by Sybil and Jack, Hazel made the five-minute drive from the canyon to a hotel just up the hill from Hollywood’s Franklin Village. As she stepped from the Cadillac and squinted up at an imitation French chateâu that was neither proud nor rose-colored, she tried to imagine what Isaac could possibly have been doing here, so close to his own house. With its blue mansard roof and multiple stories of louvered shutters, the Hotel d’Antibes really must have been something in its day, but now it was merely clinging to old triumphs, waiting for an imaginative investor to come along. A few feeble rosebushes and bougainvillea adhered to its facade, a surface that must have once been creamy like cake icing but was now cracked and gray. The anemic lawn was flanked by a pair of shaggy fan palms, and enclosed on three sides by a malformed hedge.
A green information box on the sidewalk informed her that this was a “building of note,” which was, presumably, a notch or two below historical landmark.
Erected in the 1920s as a set of apartments, the property was transformed into a hotel during the Depression after tenants could no longer afford the rents. The new hotel quickly became a playground for the elite, and over the next two decades was the setting of myriad Hollywood legends—ruinous romances, overdoses, questionable accidents, and career sabotage—a place where those with means could check in for a few months and fashionably let themselves go.
At the bottom was a quote from a movie mogul:
If one is contemplating a mental breakdown in style, one need look no further than Hotel d’Antibes. Just don’t make a mess of the damask.
She started up the walk, already anticipating the dull stench of the lobby. As Hazel entered the reception area, passing beneath a low-hanging chandelier, the burgundy carpet sent its catalog of memories wafting up her nose. A family of four gathered at the concierge desk, the father in the process of interrogating a clerk about which sightseeing bus they should take.
As Hazel stepped across the lobby, taking in the balding furniture and old lamps recently invaded by compact fluorescents, she noticed a particularly tragic paw-footed sofa. She couldn’t help but think of Bennet and his hatred for all things antique and decomposing, even the stodgy charm of her bookstore. She pulled out her phone and sent him a text—I’m in a hotel you would loathe—along with a snap of the sofa.
The vacationing family didn’t appear to be coming to any decisions, and seeing no reason to announce her presence, Hazel headed straight down the first-floor hallway. Aside from the distant buzz of a vacuum, the building was silent, leaving her to wonder if anyone other than the family was staying here. The hotel had retained the snug feel of an apartment complex, and though it had been retrofitted with electronic locks, all the rooms had their original wood-paneled doors. She turned a corner, nearly bumping into a tiny Hispanic woman pushing a cart of linens, and watched the room numbers climb. The hallway came to an abrupt end at 129.
She retraced her steps, searching for a missed turn, but there was none. She could play dumb at the front desk, but remaining anonymous for as long as possible seemed the wiser move.
“One three seven,” she whispered aloud, mentally flipping the digits to form all six possible combinations. She called the elevator from the lobby. When the doors jerked open, she stepped into the mirrored car and found buttons for seven floors. She pressed 3, and the elevator began its whining climb. The mirrors around her were dark and spotted with age, but there was enough reflected light to make out an infinite chain of Hazels queued up within the car’s walls.
The doors opened onto the housekeeper she’d seen earlier, now polishing the plate for the call button.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’m fine, thanks,” Hazel said, stepping down the hall.
The woman stared after her. It occurred to Hazel that there was likely no one staying on this floor.
She found room 317 and waved the key card in front of the lock pad, but the light blinked red. For the benefit of her audience, Hazel threw up her hands in mock frustration.
“Wrong floor,” she muttered, returning to the elevator.
The tiny woman was already pushing her cart through the doors. “Up?”
“Yes, please.”
The maid, however, had not selected a floor—maybe she planned to polish the mirrors next—so Hazel pressed the top floor. For the next several seconds, the woman attacked the surrounding brass trim.
Hazel exited onto the seventh floor. After the elevator shut behind her, she started toward room 713, but a noise made her stop. It was the faint mechanical jerk of the elevator doors opening again, not below, but above. The sound was followed by the rattle of the cleaning cart. There was an eighth floor.
Hazel hit the only call button, and when the doors opened, she inspected the elevator’s panel. There were in fact eight buttons, four on each side, but the one next to 7 was blank. She pressed it. The button glowed, and the car ascended. When it stopped abruptly, and the doors creaked open, she found the surprised maid standing on the other side, still gripping her rag. The woman said nothing, just waited to see what Hazel would do.
This floor was not like the others. The carpet was the same, but the hall stopped short, with only a single unnumbered door at one end. She hesitated, staring back and forth between the maid and the door. Finally, the woman made a comic sweep of her rag for Hazel to pass.
“Thanks,” Hazel said, moving past her down the carpet. It was only when she was a few feet away from the door that she saw something was attached to it: a small, white tag taped below the peephole, like a label on an old library card catalog. In pencil, someone had written: 137.
The housekeeper cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Miss.”
Hazel turned.
“Are you with Mr. Diver?”
“Diver?”
Diver! Of course. Keeping with the theme, Isaac had taken his alias from Tender Is the Night’s charming but ill-fated main character.
“Yes, yes. Dick Diver,” Hazel said. “He’s my grandfather.”
“Then you probably know that Mr. Diver requested complete privacy and no maid service.” The woman said this in clear, unbroken English, as if she had been waiting to spring her fluency on Hazel. “But I imagine we’re overdue for some freshening and clean towels. You’ll let us know, won’t you, please?”
“Of course.”
“I’m Flor. Just ask for me at the desk.”
Flor turned back to her cart.
“Flor? Do you know how long Mr. Diver’s had this room?”
The woman frowned. “He didn’t tell you?”
“He’s not well.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. He’s been here many years. Five maybe?”
“Five years? Are you sure?”
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Flor nodded. “It’s a special room, you know. We rent it only by word of mouth—for people who wish a certain isolation. The story is that the original owner wanted a secret apartment where his wife couldn’t find him.”
Hazel looked back at the number on this secret door, imagining that it had been taped there quite recently for her benefit; the curl of the 3 seemed distinctly Isaac’s. She thought of asking Flor what she made of the improvised room number, but the housekeeper had already disappeared into the elevator, taking her cart with her.
Hazel waved the key card in front of the lock, and when the light blinked green, she swung the door wide and flipped on the light. A small chandelier came on, revealing a carpeted entry with a hallway breaking off to the right, a bedroom to her left, and a living room ahead. The hotel’s distinct odor had evaporated and was replaced with a stuffy though not unpleasant bouquet of leather, wood, dust, and card games, the smell of an extinct sort of bachelorhood. Clearly, someone hadn’t opened a window in a while.
Given Flor’s concern about the condition of the room, the place was, except for the dust, exceedingly tidy. She pushed open the hallway doors to find a king-sized bed under a creaseless quilt and a bathroom and second bedroom in the same unspoiled condition. If Isaac had slept here, he was careful to erase all evidence.
Hazel passed a kitchenette and entered a spacious living room decorated in a clubby bohemian fashion set off with modern Danish pieces. A shelf set into one wall held a collection of vintage liquor bottles. In front of it, a pair of leather-upholstered chairs confronted a baize-topped card table, where a suspended game of checkers awaited its next move.
At the far end of the living room, a computer monitor dominated a small wooden desk. Tacked to an adjoining wall hung an oversized map pocked with red adhesive dots. Hazel stepped closer and saw that it was a street map of LA and the surrounding area. The dots had chains of incomprehensible numbers written on them.