1993 - The Blue Afternoon Read online

  His skin under the diffused electric light of the street took on marked olive tones, to the extent that he might have passed for a Mexican or Latino, and I thought again of this gift of patrimony he had brought me and how preposterous it was. My own skin was pale and insipid beside his. Shared dark hair and brown eyes made a flimsy case in a paternity suit.

  At the door of his lodging house we made an appointment to meet the next day. The little men sat on the steps up to the front door where we had left them an hour since: they stared at me curiously, with no malice or hostility.

  “Why are there so many Japanese here?” I asked him quietly.

  He turned and spoke to the men on the steps in a language I did not recognise. They all laughed, with genuine hilarity, it seemed.

  “Japanese?” he said, reproachfully. “These men are Filipinos.”

  SEVEN

  I sat with Salvador Carriscant on the slatted wooden bench of a red car as it rolled and rattled as we crossed over Pico Boulevard at Sawtelle and headed out westward through the beanfields towards Santa Monica. Here and there the boulevard was being widened and long stretches of the small one-storey shops had been flattened to take the new roadway. Soon everyone would be able to drive to the beach. The trolley car stopped at the Ocean Avenue depot and Carriscant and I wandered down to Ocean Park. Once again I noticed that the press of people, the noise and the vivid colours of the sunshades seemed both to attract and disarm him. We stood at the Japanese gambling galleries watching men and women gambling for merchandise rather than money, and strolled past the beach clubs and the many piers, the loop-the-loop and the ride-the-clouds attractions; the air jangling with the shouts of children and the fretful buzz of the speedboats carrying anglers from the shore to the fishing barges—old mastless schooners, and wooden-hulled clippers—anchored a hundred yards or so out in the ocean. Only the Monkey Farm seemed to upset him. The crowd around the cages was six deep and when we managed to push through to see what the lure was I saw the expression on his face change at once from curiosity to disgust when he contemplated the melancholy chimpanzees and the neurotic mangy gibbons in their close-barred pens. He took hold of my elbow and steered me away.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Those monkeys in the cages, I don’t like it…They remind me of someone.” He changed the subject. “Let’s eat,” he said. “I want to eat fish.”

  We went to one of the new apartment hotels, the Sovereign, which had a public dining room. Carriscant ordered broiled Spanish mackerel which he ate with his usual concentration. “This is fresh,” he said, grudgingly, “the best food I’ve tasted in America.”

  The success of the menu dispelled the anger caused by the Monkey Farm and I sensed he was beginning to enjoy himself.

  “I could never get enough fish,” he said, “for all those years, even though we were not far from the coast. We sold all the fish we caught.”

  I did not press him, or ask him what ‘those years’ were he was referring to. There would be time enough later for interrogation, and, besides, I thought he would tell me everything in his own good time, if he felt like it. I realised that this jaunt to the sea was just a means for him and me to become further acquainted—very much the father re-establishing his relationship with his long-lost daughter—and my silence, my reticence, encouraged this mood and that would please him, I knew.

  And then I wondered why I should want to please him, why I was encouraging this—what?—this friendship, this evolving relationship. He knew my date of birth, but what did that prove? He knew what time of day I was born but that could have been an inspired guess, a lucky shot…But there was a quality of confidence about his dealings with me that seemed different, indicated a fundamental certainty of purpose that I felt no trickster or flim-flam man could simulate. It was not striven for, did not seek to impress. He appeared relaxed in my company—as if my company were all that he wanted—and that in turn relaxed me.

  He looked up, now, from his meal and gave me a quick, strong smile, his broad face creasing momentarily. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps because Rudolf Fischer was so manifestly not my father, and Hugh Paget possessed all the substantiality of myth, I was seizing too firmly on to this new candidate, all attractive flesh and blood, all very much here and now? It was a form of temptation, I knew, a kind of seduction and, I realised as I contemplated this sturdy, handsome old man, it was one I was not as well equipped to resist as I thought.

  When I asked him if he wanted a dessert he said he would prefer to eat another fish. He ordered a poached steak of yellowtail tuna which he consumed slowly and with much intense savouring of its flavours as I ate ice-cream and smoked a cigarette. After his second fish he ordered a cognac, the cheapest in the house. He discreetly picked his teeth with a quill tip (he carried a small packet of them with him) and then seemed to rinse his mouth with the brandy. I started to chatter—most uncharacteristically—to cover my mild embarrassment as this dental toilette, this boccal sluicing, went on. He listened politely as I told him about Santa Monica, Venice and the Malibu as I had known them over the years, but all the while I was aware of him sipping brandy and then, more disturbingly, I could hear the foamy susurrus in his mouth as he swilled and flushed the liquid between his teeth.

  “—and the Roosevelt Highway didn’t exist,” I was saying. “I mean, now you can take it all the way up the coast to Oxnard, but I remember I came down here with Pappi once—I must have been about twelve—”

  “Twelve?”

  “Yes, I—”

  He frowned. “That would be about 1916?”

  “Thereabouts. Twelve or thirteen, I guess. Pappi had this client—it was J.W. Considine, in fact—who had a house at the Malibu and we had to catch a boat out there from the Santa Monica pier. It was real cut off in those—”

  “Kay…”

  I stopped talking at once. I realised he had not been listening to me.

  “—If I was looking for a man in California,” he said, “how would I set about finding him?”

  “It depends…Do you know his name?”

  “He’s called Paton Bobby. All I know is he lives in California. He used to, anyway.”

  I stubbed out my cigarette. “Paton Bobby. Have you got any more information?”

  “He’s a little bit older than me. And I think he was a policeman.”

  “That might help. Anything else?”

  “That’s it.”

  I looked at him. I knew that our business, whatever it would turn out to be, was beginning, now, irrevocably.

  “May I know why you want to find him?”

  He smiled a faint, dreamy smile. His mood had changed ever since I had mentioned my childhood trip to the Malibu, my age and the date. It had sent him back through time, perhaps to that place where he could never get enough fish, and his thoughts had stayed there.

  “I’m sorry, my dear, what did you say?”

  “Why do you need to find this Paton Bobby?”

  He sighed, looked down at his empty plate, turned his fork so that its tines pointed downward, and returned his gaze to mine.

  “I suppose you could say,” he said, his eyes innocently wide, his expression bland, “that I’m looking for a killer.”

  EIGHT

  Philip wrote out the cheque with evident but ridiculously disproportionate pride and handed it over with a courtly flourish.

  “Pay to the order of Mrs Kay Fischer, two hundred dollars,” he said, through his grin.

  “So you got a job,” I said.

  “And a bank account. I’ve got six weeks’ work with MGM. I’m the third writer on Four Guns for Texas.”

  “Sounds fulfilling.”

  “Sounds like money.”

  We were sitting in my office on Hollywood Boulevard. From my office window I could see the top three storeys of the Guaranty Building and the dusty fronds of a palm tree. I rented three rooms above a clothing wholesaler—Tex-Style Imports Co.—who specialised in blue jeans, dungarees and work
boots that were sold to the petrochemical industry. The room that faced the boulevard was my office, beyond that was a small corridor that led to a windowless cube which was the drawing room where my solitary assistant, Ivan Feinberg, worked. Off the corridor was the reception area with a view of the parking lot. Mary Duveen, my secretary, had her desk here, squeezed between two banks of filing cabinets. It was all a bit shabby, a little make-do, especially compared to what I had become accustomed to at Meyersen and Fischer, but since the great schism and the lawsuit I had been obliged to economise. I had heard from one of my former colleagues that Meyersen had moved into my old office. Perhaps that was what he had been after all the time?…

  I took Philip’s cheque and folded it away in my pocket book. He had had his hair cut and was wearing a new sportscoat, cotton, a greenish plaid, and wide mushroom-coloured trousers. His short hair, I thought, made him look even younger, a superannuated college kid, and for a moment I felt a brief squirm of self-pity as I reflected on our short marriage and what I had lost when I kicked him out. I kept the appellation ‘Mrs’, not because it impressed my clients but because it made them relax, but joined it up with my maiden name. The conjunction seemed to me to reflect ideally my social and personal status. But Philip was offended and hurt: I was having my cake and eating it, he said truculently. But isn’t that what life’s all about, I replied, the goal we’re all chasing? A brief squirm of self-pity, but one that disappeared soon enough.

  “Movies,” I said, breezily. “Going to get your name on this one?”

  “There’s a chance.”

  I laughed. “And pigs may fly one day, they tell me.” I stood up. “I’ll walk down with you, I’ve got to get some lunch.”

  As we descended the two floors to the street I asked Philip if he knew any way of tracking down a man called Paton Bobby, who was in his sixties and might have been a policeman.

  “Tried the phone book? Who’s Paton Bobby?”

  “A friend of mine needs to find him. I thought you might know how.”

  He shrugged. “You could hire a P.I., I guess…Or maybe I could ask the head of security at the studio.” He grinned. “Did you hear that? At the studio—I’m a natural, success simply cannot continue to elude me. This guy used to be a cop, he might have some idea.”

  We sauntered down the sidewalk towards a street vendor. The sun was hot on the crown of my head and I undid the top button on my blouse. It was a fine day with a baby-blue sky up above and a few perfect dawdling clouds. A fresh breeze moved through the fronds of the new palm trees, still only half the height of the streetlamps. They made a sound of nail scissors snipping or of matches tipped on to a glass table. I put on my sunglasses as the sun bounced off the white walls of the buildings across the street. Too much Streamline Moderne for my taste these days. Curved walls, curved glass, mirrored panels set here and there, stringcourses picked out in red and black to emphasise the horizontals, canopies swooping round corners or ducking into forecourts whenever possible…What was going on here? It was all vitiated anyway by the garish lettering, shouting signs in primary colours hanging off buildings or else set on cantilevered wooden hoardings on the flat roofs, good chow! ham ‘n eggs, cameras, gifts, parking. We passed through a tangy waft of fried onion as we walked by harrold’s charcoal broiled steaks and made for the street vendor with his refulgent silver chariot. I ordered a super chile dog with mustard and extra onions.

  Philip touched my arm. “Listen, you’re not in any kind of trouble, are you, hon?” He was sincere, and it was a kind thought. I realised I was still very fond of him.

  “Of course I’m not,” I reassured him. “It’s some old fellow I know, needs to track this party down.” Philip looked at me shrewdly, not wholly convinced, as I paid for and received my food. I could see him wondering how many ‘old fellows’ I might know and why I might want to help them locate a missing person.

  “Stop looking at me like that. You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to.”

  “No, no, I’ll see what I can do.”

  I could wait no longer. I bit avidly into my chile dog, my nostrils suddenly filled with pungent heat. With a finger I helped a stray ribbon of onion into my mouth. I chewed.

  Philip looked at me fastidiously. “I was going to ask you to dinner tonight, but now I’ve seen your lunch I guess you won’t be hungry.”

  “Ha-ha. Call me later, you may get lucky.”

  When I returned to my office George Fugal was there waiting for me, a wide smile on his narrow face. George was a tall thin forty-year-old with a restless, jumpy demeanour that sat oddly with a professional manner that could only be described as the last word in pedantry. He had thinning brown hair, big watery eyes and a weak chin that always had a bluey, unshaven look to it. If I had not known he was a lawyer I would have placed him as a minor criminal on parole, or a debtor on the run from the IRS. George never stopped looking round whatever room he was in, or over his shoulder; in restaurants he insisted on sitting with his back to the door, the better to squinny round in his seat.

  “So what’s the good news?” I asked him.

  “We got a buyer for the house. I’m sure. A—” He checked his notebook. “A Mrs Luard Turner. Pleasant lady. I just showed her around.”

  “I’m going to finish it first. I hope she realises that,” I said with some ungrateful belligerence. All at once I felt oddly sad. Someone was going to buy my house. Someone else was going to live in my carefully constructed volumes of air.

  “She knows that, she knows that. But she loves the place. Classy, she said. Grade-A class, she said. Her very words, Kay, her very words.”

  He chattered on, excited and pleased for me, his gaze leaping from me to Mary to the office door to the trash can. We needed the sale to make the profit to permit K.L. Fischer to survive and move on to bigger and greater things. But I was still feeling my loss keenly.

  “We’ve done it, Kay,” George Fugal said. “You’re there.” I smiled at him. Somehow I did not believe it was ever that easy.

  NINE

  In architecture, as in art, the more you reduce the more exacting your standards must be. The more you strip down and eliminate, the greater the pressure on, the import of, what remains. If a room is only to have one door and one window then those two openings must conform exactly to the volume of space contained between the four walls, the floor and the ceiling. They must be shaped and styled with intense concentration and focus. One inch, half an inch, can make all the difference between something perfect and something botched. Without decoration, without distraction, proportion becomes the essential factor.

  My aesthetic mentor, my inspiration, in all this was the German architect Oscar Kranewitter (1891–1929). He was a friend of Gropius and like him was heavily influenced by the austere ideologies of Johannes Itten. Kranewitter was one of the first members of the German Werkbund and taught occasionally at the Bauhaus between 1923 and 1925 (he departed, never to return, after a savage row—it came to blows—with Hannes Meyer). There is no doubt that had it not been for his tragically early death (in an automobile accident) Kranewitter would be regarded as one of the foremost German architects and leaders of the International Style. Because of his demanding temperament and the strictures he imposed on himself and his clients he built very little and his published work is confined to a few articles in obscure reviews such as Metall and Neue Europaische Graphik. And it was in these densely argued pieces that he introduced the concept of Armut into modern architecture—or ‘Poverty’. But the sense with which Kranewitter charges and loads this abstract noun is complex: for him the meaning of the word loses any negative or pejorative import and its implication is transformed into something more akin to ‘Purity’. The abstruse theorising behind Armut was given a physical dimension in Kranewitter’s masterwork, the Lothar House (1924-1929) in Obertraubling near Regensburg. It was here during the painstaking five years of construction that Kranewitter’s obsessiveness and fanatical attention to detail took on le
gendary proportions as his conception of Armut took on plastic form. When the house was all but completed he had the entire ceiling of the dining room torn down and rebuilt four centimetres higher. He designed all the furniture (teak, chrome and leather were the only materials used) and there were no carpets or curtains. The floors were made of a dark polished flint. The colour of the walls was white on the first floor and primrose yellow on the second (yellow is a ‘lighter’ colour than white, according to Kranewitter, and therefore suitable for rooms above ground level). All the door furniture was forged aluminium and unpainted, as were the massive and specially designed central heating radiators. The rooms were lit with naked light bulbs. It was destroyed by a stray stick of bombs during a raid on Regensburg in the Second World War.

  The more I studied Kranewitter the more I came to admire the dedication of the man and the ruthless consistency of his ideas. Rigour, clarity and precision seemed to me attributes that were both admirable and practical. Kranewitter’s Armut is not something miserable and deprived: it has a liberating, purgative quality to it. The more the twentieth century advances and the more crassly complicated our lives become and the more the hectoring injunctions of the commercial world intrude—eat! buy! play! spend! enjoy!—and come to dominate our every waking moment, so do the calm and emptiness, the clean, unimpeded, untrammelled nature of the world Kranewitter tried to create grow ever more appealing. These were ambitions that I tried to realise and incorporate in my own work and they are manifestly embodied in the two completed buildings I designed—the Taylor house in Pasadena, and the Burbank shopping mart. Everything extraneous is stripped away. The interiors are ruthlessly plain, the only lines are vertical or horizontal. Even in such a temple of self-indulgence as a shopping mart—the American antithesis of Armut—Kranewitter’s ascetic philosophy is evident. And it works.