B ack in his office, door closed to the world, Ray gathered up the museum plans, breathing hard. Maybe he was having a heart attack, and his hand was puffing up.
His life was falling around him. First Leigh, and now his work, his refuge. Recalling Martin’s graphic sexual imagery, Ray shivered, thinking that Leigh was so unhappy she had let Martin-let him-damn Martin! And damn her!
Glad he had lied about having to leave early for a meeting, he tidied his desk quickly, stowing his current projects in one of the enormous flat drawers that held dozens more. Martin’s words replayed through his mind. They had gone to the movies like teenagers!
Oh, Martin was good, had slashed at him so accurately with words that were only now starting to bleed inside him. “Mimic” in particular, that hit hard. Ray wasn’t thinking so much about himself as an architect when he replayed the word. He thought about himself as a man.
He went to his window, the one he had sacrificed so much for. Every unhappy adult probably started off as an unhappy child. He must have had happy times. Esmé swore he did. What he remembered instead was taking one step forward and getting yanked back two steps, painfully. He would be a different person now, the man who could have held on to his wife if he hadn’t been ripped out of the soil over and over when he was young, until he’d lost track of who he was and where he was, rolled himself up like a bad set of blueprints, and stopped growing.
He closed the blinds and flipped off the light, trying to calm himself. Maybe Leigh and his mother had the definitive line on him: he had an unhealthy obsession with the past. Maybe he needed a good shrink to unload on for the next fifty years to work things out, inching toward a wholeness in minuscule increments.
He couldn’t wait for that.
Closing the door to his office behind him, he told Suzanne he would not be back. If she wondered why he wouldn’t be back, she didn’t say, keeping her head down over her desk, avoiding his eyes.
Martin, like any sneaking skunk, had slipped off to some dark place.
Ray was splintering. Nothing held him together anymore.
In the parking lot below the building, he ran his hand along the hood of Martin’s Ferrari, admiring the amazing custom paint job, duotone black and blue, so swank the vehicle could be framed and hung on a wall as art. These designers shaped cars like jungle predators, tight-haunched and ready to pounce. Martin kept his baby spotless.
Ray looked around; he was alone for the moment. He took a key from the immense collection in his pocket, choosing one that was particularly exotic and jagged, and then he ran it hard along the driver’s door, feeling a puerile burst of joy at the sight and sound of such destruction. It left an ugly metal scar, deep. Martin, with two children, a house in Brentwood, a beautiful wife, and many affairs under his belt, ought to appreciate the moronic gesture, since Martin frequently behaved moronically.
Ray’s own sleek Porsche welcomed him inside, its pleasant cool air blowing around his legs and over his overheated face. He opened the glove compartment; yes, the keys from his childhood were nestled there like old friends. Real friends, sheltering friends. His hand flexed okay, no broken fingers. Martin hadn’t even fallen down. The anger that had propelled the blow had been so powerful it was remarkable that the blow hadn’t sent Martin sailing through the window.
Ray drove through the dense maze of Los Angeles, along several freeways for forty-five minutes to reach the first address on his list. Ten keys on the ring gave him no indication which key fit what house, but he did have a certainty that each one meant something.
Norwalk, Bombardier Avenue. The name must have derived from World War II, he decided, plodding up the stark, hot sidewalk. Strange thing to name a street. The Santa Ana winds had been blowing for days, and today the wind blasted furiously and randomly, crazy-making, pricking at his skin, insinuating itself, burrowing disturbingly underneath like unclean parasites. He forged on, wiping dirt from his eyes, excited and fearful at the same time.
The block seemed deserted. The residents marched out to their cars at seven-thirty and drove through heavy traffic to office parks, where they would attempt to be productive. Then they drove home through heavy traffic to watch the hypnotic blue-lit object in the living room, where they attempted to forget their efforts of the day. The routine hadn’t changed since Ray was a kid. He looked at swing sets in the identical backyards, the scorched plots of grass in front, paint peeling along the gutters, roofs patched, an indescribable decrepitude in a place that must have seemed hopeful fifty years before.
The builders of these subdivisions hadn’t thought a half-century into the future. They had thought: how fast can we get these things built? The ranch houses showed their lousy construction ethos. Or maybe Ray just knew more now.
He didn’t know the exact number. As with so many houses in L.A. County, the numbers had changed over the decades. He tried to latch onto the right house based upon his memories of the place, but things had altered too much.
At the end of this street was the school he had attended in kindergarten. His mother had told him she always tried to move within walking distance of a school. He recalled his teacher, Mrs. Cangi. The five-year-olds called her Mrs. Candy, and thought themselves hysterical.
He walked on, remembering. He had come home from kindergarten, marched up to the porch, and knocked on the door to his new home. No one answered. His mother, usually reliable, had not opened the door. At first merely frustrated, he had sat down on the steps. Eventually, a neighbor walked by, staring hard at Ray, as if he didn’t belong. Several more minutes passed. No one else came by. The grown-ups were all gone. Planes and bugs buzzed in the stifling sky; otherwise, all was still and very hot.
Ray began to experience a hollowness that frightened him, as if the bravado was draining from him. Invisible, he only existed like one of the plants in the yard, waving in the wind, unnoticed. He had no way to get inside, no home to go to, no mother to greet him. She had left him, vanished. Reduced to nothing, a bubbling mass of fear by now, he had pounded on the front door.
He had screamed.
Moments later his mother, hands full of papers, had torn up to the porch and gathered him into her arms.
“Where were you?” he cried.
“Mailing letters.”
Was this house, on the right side of the street, with a small porch that didn’t look right, the correct place? What about this one?
Finally, he decided he spotted something familiar, that porch. The one he had screamed upon. Yes, here was the place, painted dirty adobe orange now, with yellow trim, closer to the school than he expected. On the right-hand side he could see the bedroom he had slept in as a little boy, its window covered by a flowered curtain. Recognizing the tiny tract house sent a pang of sorrow through him.
So it was real. He had not seen this place since they left it. The model he had built of this house was all wrong-the model made it look significant, too clean. The ordinariness-how could he capture that?
He took a position across the street to observe.
Nothing happened for some time. Heat waves rose, Hollywood-style mirages above the melting asphalt, unreal, strange. An ice cream truck tinkled in the distance. He remembered the tune. From behind a picket fence two houses down, a dog pricked up its ears, observing him. I don’t know what you’re up to, the dog’s eyes seemed to tell him, but I’ll swear you’re in the wrong.
At two-fifteen, two children drifted in single file up the road, much as he had done as a child, hot, unhappy, army privates on maneuvers, heavy backpacks already damaging their spines. Marching up to the house, they climbed the steps to the porch, looked around, collected the key from under a pot next to the front door, and entered the dark house.
Nobody home but the children.
Ray rattled the keys in his pocket. Probably one of them still matched that front door lock. In California, in suburbia, almost nobody changed locks when they moved into a new home. Why not? Well, people hated spending money. People never thought about trust, about fear. They loved buying a house. They loved getting the key to this new, at least to them, house.
The suburbs induced a kind of psychotic lethargy. The blandness, the sameness, made it hard to believe anyone would bother to rob you. In the same way, schools of fish flew around the sharks in their patterns, multitudinous, identical. What were the chances you would get picked for dinner?
These kids, well-trained, had put the key back into its hiding place. Ray watched them place it carefully there.
Hi-ho.
He could take their key, not even bother with his, go inside whenever he wanted. And he did want; he wanted badly to see what he would feel like on the inside. Dead, or alive?
He heard faint crashings and maniacal laughter from the living room. The kids were watching television.
He watched until another dog, this time right next door, came out for a walk, leading its sharp-eyed elderly owner, biting at its chain, not glancing Ray’s way. He retreated down the block to his car, which had probably reached a hundred twenty degrees by this point, furnace-level. Using his shirtsleeve to move the steering wheel, Ray turned the car engine on, drove around the block, let the a/c cool the vehicle, and returned to Bombardier Avenue, this time parking several houses beyond his old house.
Good. The big dog and vigilant owner had retreated back inside.
He approached. Although he didn’t need the key to this house because he knew where they hid it, he had an urgent desire to try his own old key. Would it fit?
Cartoons blared inside. He twiddled key one in the lock, then key two.
Etcetera.
Nothing moved on the street, no other beings stirred. Only the heat shimmered off the sidewalk and parked cars, and the smelly black tar mending cracks in the street melted.
The fourth key worked. A rush hotter than the weather stopped him. Wet and nervous but under the influence of a compulsion he could not control, he turned the key in the lock and pushed gently on the door.
He recalled that this house had no entryway, no gracious hello. It dumped visitors directly into the living room. He opened the door gently, locating the TV by its sound, aware that the two children inside were vulnerable and might get scared.
“Oh, hi!” he said, as if surprised to see them, exulting in his heart at gaining entrance so easily. The old key had worked!
He had the funniest feeling looking at the kids on the floor. He felt he belonged. So uncomfortable in his own skin lately, he had forgotten how fantastic that felt.
“Hi,” the oldest one, a boy maybe eight years old, said. “Who are you?” They were sprawled on the carpet facing away from him, and now they had both twisted around, their faces so similar with their blinking bug eyes that he resisted an impulse to laugh. He stayed at the door, harmless-looking.
His heart pumped out of control. “Where are your folks?” he asked.
“At work,” the younger one, a towheaded girl, ventured, then turned back to the television. On the screen, a pink character rode around in a vehicle that flew.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I must have gotten the time wrong. I thought they would be home by now.”
“Nope,” said the boy. “Mom works ’til four.”
“Nearly two more hours,” Ray said. “I’m really early.”
“Yeah.” The boy studied him, as if realizing he should be asking questions. He apparently couldn’t think of what those questions might be. His eyes flicked back toward the TV.
“Hot day,” Ray said, noticing the fan going, but no air-conditioning.
“Yeah,” the boy said again.
“You know, I used to live in this house.”
“You did?” Both children actually cared more about the cartoons. Any interest came out of sheer trained politeness.
“I had the room right off that hall there. On the left.”
“My room,” the boy said.
“And out back, we had a tetherball pole.”
They didn’t know what a tetherball pole was.
“There was a patio with a kind of-um-shade thing over it. Lattice.”
“Plants grow all over it,” the girl volunteered. “What a mess. Leaves all over the place,” she said, obviously quoting her harried parents.
“Mind if I look around?”
They didn’t. Certainly not properly advised about strangers by their parents, they turned their attention back to their cartoon while Ray wandered freely around the house. He made mental notes for his model-this window he had not remembered, that closet in a corner, not along the side.
Not much had changed, sad though, because what had been shiny and new in his childhood had turned shabby. Out back, the wooden lattice over the concrete patio had missing pieces, although, with a heavy, untrimmed wisteria, it actually appeared almost charming. Someone had tried painting the concrete below, but the paint was faded, chipped.
His bedroom, apricot-colored, no longer blue like he remembered it, now held a bunk bed. Apparently the boy had friends over, and an obsession with moving vehicles. Car stickers crawled randomly up and down the walls.
In the kitchen, blue Formica showed cracks from hot pans that should never have been set down on it. His mother used to shout at him if he came near the counters with something hot. He looked under the sink. She used to hide things there. Once she told him she kept twenty dollars in a can down there in case a crazed drug addict came knocking.
Bleach. Cleanser. Sponges in shreds.
But in the master bedroom, he found something that made this entire mad journey worthwhile. He easily discovered the wife’s stash of jewelry fatheadedly hidden at the back of her dresser. She had a few pathetic gold pieces, some mementoes worth nothing-really, if you judged people on such things you had to feel life was sad and paltry. But what caught his eye in that room was the crooked slat in the wide-planked flooring.
He recalled the slat, and his mother pushing on it.
She always had a hiding place. She called them her “safes.” Protectors, safes…he supposed it was common for single mothers to think this way.
He punched the unnailed side. The slat flew up.
Below, a dark, cobwebby hidey-hole exposed itself. He reached inside.
Back in the living room, he asked the children if they might want to go out for ice cream.
With pleasure he recognized as socially unacceptable, he pictured in his mind the fear their parents would feel, coming home and finding the children gone.
Sadistic, yes, but also just plain righteous.
He had come home to an empty house. He had known fear.
“No,” said the boy regretfully. “We’re not allowed to leave the house.”
He didn’t press and said his good-byes to the children, who appeared relieved to see him go. Did they somehow understand him to be an anomaly, not an acceptable part of a typical afternoon?
They seemed like nice kids, and he would have enjoyed teaching their parents a damn good lesson. Of course, the whole idea was nuts-he would have been caught. What on earth was wrong with him?
Pulling open the front door, since the children remained inert in front of the television, he felt satisfied with his activities of the day. He didn’t want undue attention. He pictured the parents coming home, their panic. It would be enough that he had come in, looked around, taken nothing, at least, nothing they knew they had.
“Who should I say came over?” the little boy asked as Ray prepared to leave.
Ray cracked the door open long enough to say, “Clint Eastwood.”
He did not have a cowboy hat to tip, so he merely nodded and let himself out, fingering the object he had found, which was now safe in his jeans pocket, and locked the door before pulling it shut.
On his way back home, he stopped in downtown Los Angeles, waiting patiently at a hydrant until someone on the street left a spot, then whipping into it, cutting off an Acura and an Infiniti, because unlike them, he didn’t give a damn if they scratched his car. What he gave a damn about was getting the goddamned space.
He breathed a few times, locking the doors remotely, ignoring the bitter invective spewing noisily from the Acura, accompanied by a hand pounding on the car door for emphasis. Two doors down, a dusty shop quaintly spawned in the days when even radios had sex appeal held a jumble of cheap electronics.
“Can I help you?” said the clerk in a three-piece suit, as unsuited to his surroundings as an arguing attorney at the beach instead of the bench.
“I need a cassette player.”
The clerk chewed his mouth. “Hmm.” He gestured for Ray to follow, and Ray did, down past aisles of plastic parts, earphones, wires, gadgets for every conceivable purpose, and some probably inconceivable.
He showed Ray car cassette decks.
“Portable,” Ray said.
The clerk’s brow furrowed. “Man, why you want one of them old things anyway?”
“You don’t have any?”
He put up a hand. “Of course we do. Just not much call for them these days. Wait a sec.” He turned his back to Ray and disappeared through a door at the back of the store.
Ray browsed the aisles, finding himself interested in a number of things that might be useful at some point, including miniature lighting fixtures for his models. He piled a few things on the counter. By the time the clerk returned with a very old-fashioned boom box that would run on batteries, he had managed to run up quite a bill.
“You’ll need headphones.”
“I have some.”
Outside the store, the Acura had disappeared. At Ray’s old hydrant spot, another car waited to fill another empty parking space, nature abhorring a vacuum. Ray put his purchases into the trunk of his car, slammed it shut, and drove off. The other car, with only inches to spare, slipped in behind him.
Back to Topanga, speeding, braking, tailgating, cursing. It was five in the afternoon and Ray was out of control, weeping and shouting in the car, not knowing what he was even shouting.
A cold shower. Ignore the phone messages and the computer. He pulled on running shoes and went outside and ran through the hilly neighborhood like the wind.
It worked. He came back to himself.
Calm now, walking back up the drive, he thought of the innumerable anonymous tenants who had lived on Bombardier Avenue over the past decades. Someone else must have found the loose board, used the opportunity it presented.
But he had proof they had not. He had seen his mother putting that board into place. He had been watching her. He always watched her with the jealous attention of the only child. That house hadn’t been renovated in thirty years. He had established that personally. The board merged with a thousand other rickety things that developed, and never merited special attention.
He went inside, found the museum plans where he had left them by the front door, and pulled a black cassette tape out of his pocket, turning it over and over in his hands, scrutinizing it. No label. Normal bias. Sony. At the bottom he could see where the white part of the slender tape met brown. Someone had rewound the thing, but the tape was loose.
In the kitchen, he located a pencil and wound the tape tight, using exaggerated care.
He kept headphones in the entertainment unit in the great room. Not wanting to be interrupted, he went around the house locking doors and even arming the alarm. He put the headphones on, adjusted them for fit, then plugged them into the cassette player. Static, then:
“You know why I’m calling,” what sounded like his mother’s voice, reedy, younger, said.
“Did I scare you?” said a male voice.
“Yes! Yes, you scared me. I looked outside-” She paused, sounding terrified, and said, “Please don’t do this. You’re ruining our lives. I’m begging you-”
“You can fix this. I’ll never call you again. Never follow you. You know what I want.”
“Next time I’ll call the police!”
“Oh, no you won’t.”
Click.
Ray listened all the way to the end of the tape, flipped it, and listened to the other side. Static.
He listened to it again. Then he stopped and started it, writing all the words down.