This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Lenny, Los Angeles, 1994

  ‘I … hate … LA,’ his boss gasps, between breaths. ‘I don’t know … how much longer … I can take it.’

  Lenny feels his head nod, like one of those toy dogs people have in the backs of their cars.

  ‘The air,’ his boss continues, as he runs beside him, limbs moving seamlessly, mechanically, ‘the traffic, the people who can’t get their asses out of their cars, the rivalry, the naked ambition of everyone, everywhere. I hate all of it.’

  Lenny, wobbling slightly on the bicycle, nods again. He isn’t required to do much else and he’s heard this speech – or versions of it – several times.

  ‘Have you ever been in a more self-obsessed culture, a more venal city than this?’

  Lenny swings his head back and forth, then has to straighten the handlebars of the bike and steer round a rollerblader, oblivious and sleek, as she slalems past them. Timou lets out a tchau of annoyance at her, as if he – in his biodegradable, organic cotton T-shirt, sourced from Scandinavian forests and dyed with the feathers of chickens fed on locally sourced grain or whatever the fuck it is he’s wearing today – and only he has the right to run in Venice Beach at nine in the morning, accompanied by his reluctant PA, who is meant to be taking notes, meant to be recording his every passing thought, but is currently concentrating only on not falling off the bicycle and wondering when they might be able to stop for breakfast.

  Bicycles are not within Lenny’s comfort zone; boardwalks are not places he has ever enjoyed; exercise is not something with which he is at ease, especially in public, and in particular when that public consists of nerve-frayingly attractive women in Lycra and running shoes or surfer dudes with rippling abs and low-slung shorts. Neither is he entirely happy with the idea of holding a Dictaphone while riding a bicycle, while dodging street-sellers and buskers and dozing down-and-outs, while trying to filter what is important from what is irrelevant in what Timou is saying.

  All in all, Lenny wishes he were back in New York. He would give anything right now to be waking up on the Upper West Side, three blocks away from where he grew up, six blocks away from where he went to kindergarten, with the noise of sirens threading up to his window, able to step out and buy a lox bagel from the corner deli before walking to Timou’s office, where he has a desk next to a window: there, he can take calls, put his feet up on the trashcan, hide those black and white milk cookies in a drawer to keep him going during the long hours of Timou’s conference calls.

  Instead Timou has decided to relocate to LA for a while. He told Lenny this last month as he passed through his nook, wearing – it pains Lenny to recall – a wetsuit, unzipped to the waist. As if it was no big deal for Lenny to uproot his life in New York, to sublet his apartment, to sift through his clothes to find something suited to the climate of California, to attempt (unsuccessfully, Lenny fears) to put on ice the girl he’s been tentatively dating, to trade in his Subway tokens for this: a bicycle, bafflingly referred to by Timou as ‘the hybrid’.

  When Lenny had asked why they needed to go to LA, Timou had snapped a pair of goggles down over his eyes. ‘Economic and creative practicality, my friend,’ he said. ‘Claudette is shooting that ghost movie there and the next script isn’t going to write itself. So, right now, where she goes, I go. And where I go, you go. Unless you want to start finding your replacement.’ He had grinned and yanked up the zip on his wetsuit. ‘I’m going to swim the East River. I will be back in one hour.’

  Timou has, over the last while, developed a thing for Ironman triathlons. Lenny had explained this to his almost-girlfriend that night over dinner. The obsession started after Claudette won an Oscar and began to get roles on big-budget studio projects. It seemed, Lenny had said to the girl, to be Timou’s way of coping with this unexpected development in their lives. Claudette only took those roles, he hastened to add, if they fitted between her projects with Timou. That was, of course, where her heart really lay.

  And so while Claudette was off filming elsewhere, Timou did a triathlon. Lenny knew the stats but didn’t reel them off for her: 3.86 kilometres of swimming, 180.25 kilometres of cycling, 42.2 kilometres of running. It was how Timou switched off between projects, Lenny told the girl. He and Claudette had just finished an indie about a woman and her elderly father and he was preparing for their next film – about a group of friends at a funeral – by training for the Ironman triathlon in Arizona. Timou was not a man, Lenny told the girl, who knew the meaning of ‘down time’.

  ‘Of course,’ Lenny had said, making an expansive, circling gesture with his wine glass, ‘the endorphins clear his head, pave the way for creativity.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said the girl, in a way that suggested she might require some convincing on this subject.

  ‘And Timou’s in the middle of securing some American co-financing for the next film, which is an exciting new step,’ Lenny had said, increasingly desperate, ‘so it’s important we show our faces in LA.’

  He had actually said that word: ‘we’. He’d leant on his elbow – debonairly, he’d hoped – his chin on his hand.

  The girl had toyed with her food, glancing at him from under her brow, as if she knew that Lenny was not, as he’d hoped, on his way to being promoted to assistant director but being kept firmly as assistant. Oh, that elusive compound noun: so easy to say yet so difficult to attain.

  ‘Also,’ Lenny had continued, ‘Claudette is working in LA for the next few months and …’

  The girl had perked up at the mention of Claudette. People usually did, since the Oscar, since all the heat about her in the press, about how difficult she was, how she walked out of interviews, argued with directors, stormed off set, refused to answer questions in press conferences. Claudette had, inadvertently perhaps, made her life more difficult than it had ever needed to be. Not that Lenny would ever say that to anyone, this girl least of all. But some part of him would have liked to call up Claudette, to speak with her over the phone, to explain how things worked from his perspective. It’s easy, he imagined himself saying during these telephonic chats, you just need to toe the line. Or even give the appearance of toeing the line. You need to smile for the cameras, you need to avoid leaving the house in eccentric get-ups, you need to stop fighting the paparazzi and use them instead to your advantage. Work them. Play nice. Be nice. Then they will stop hounding you. Nice doesn’t make the gossip pages; nice doesn’t sell.

  In the restaurant, the girl had actually put down her fork and sat up straighter, as soon as Claudette entered the conversation.

  ‘Do you have much to do with her?’ the girl asked, in a low, urgent voice, leaning forward over the table. ‘What’s she like? Is she as much of a nightmare as everyone says?’

  Lenny had paused, considering his options. To say that he had never met Claudette would make him seem at best ineffectual, at worst unimportant. Since he had started working for Timou, Claudette had been away almost all of the time, off round the world, either filming or promoting. She never seemed to come to the office; she’d been there, once or twice, but Lenny had always had the misfortune to miss her, left only with the tantalising trail of perfume laden with lime or musk or rose. He’d picked up a scarf she’d left behind – cashmere, by the feel of it, navy with white squares, again that distracting scent – and given it to Timou, who had tossed it onto a filing cabinet, where it had stayed for several months. He’d taken her calls, of course: the modulated British accent, the inhale on the cigarette, the careless ‘Is Timou there? No? Could you ask him to call me, please? Thanks, Lenny.’ Always addressed him by name, always remembered. Which is more than can be said for her spouse.

  ‘She’s …’ Lenny had circled his wine glass again ‘… much as you’d expect.’

  The girl’s face fell.

  ‘Very down to earth,’ Lenny hazarded. ‘And yet … amazing … like no one else you’ve ever met.’

  ‘And is it true that she scooped up her dog’s shit and threw it at that photographer? Did
she really do that?’

  Lenny swallowed hard, a long ribbon of pasta snaking whole down his throat. ‘I think reports of that were greatly exaggerated. That’s not … who she is. And you have to remember the pressure she’s under, constantly, all the time. They provoke her, because they know they’ll get a reaction, get a good photograph of … of …’

  ‘Of her losing it,’ the girl said, tossing down her napkin, ‘and looking like a total crazy psycho.’

  Lenny does not, as he pushes down on each pedal, one after the other, after the other, think the girl will take his calls when he gets back to New York, whenever that might be.

  ‘So I said to him,’ Timou is saying as he jogs beside the bicycle, ‘what do you think? I don’t know if I can use him. I mean, he’s had so much work done. His face doesn’t have the range of expressions it once did, yes?’

  ‘Mmm,’ Lenny says, to cover all bases. ‘I really—’

  Timou holds up a hand. ‘Here is where I sprint.’ He takes off, an arrow from a bow, shoes flashing on the path, legs moving like pistons, arms slicing through the air, shoulders powering. Just to watch makes Lenny feel exhausted. He wipes his brow, presses down on the pedals and the bike slowly responds. He passes under palm trees, under awnings advertising surfing meet-ups, past a grey-haired man mumbling a throaty song about trucking, past alternating clouds of incense–marijuana–incense, past open-fronted stores filled with clinking crystals and drifting tie-dye, the sea dragging a blue line through one side of his vision.

  Timou is in what he calls warm-down mode when Lenny catches up with him: finger to the pulse in his neck, one eye on his watch, running on the spot.

  ‘So, today,’ he says, without preamble, ‘we need to call that location guy in Rome and we need to fix a meeting with Rex at Paramount. Can you find me a pair of those swimming shorts? You know the ones I like. But first could you call Claudette, see if she will have a chance to get to the script today, ask her when—’

  ‘You want me to call Claudette?’

  ‘Yes.’ Timou fixes him with a frank gaze. ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘No.’ Lenny gets down off the bicycle and sees, with relief, with joy, that they are outside a café. A disappointingly granola-and-smoothie type place but a café all the same. ‘But you want me to ask her if she’s …’ Lenny flounders. He isn’t sure if it’s low blood sugar or something else.

  ‘To remind her to start her rewrites.’

  Lenny is having trouble processing this one. ‘Isn’t she shooting today?’

  ‘Yes.’ Timou drops to the ground and starts doing push-ups.

  ‘So she probably won’t have time to get to your script.’

  ‘Of course she will. There’s always lots of time on a set like that in between shoots. She can get some work done then.’

  Lenny thinks he understands but he cannot help having one more go at this conundrum. ‘You want me to ask Claudette if she can do her rewrites between takes of this other film? The ghost story?’

  Timou stops with the press-ups and springs upright. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Why not? It’s not as if this film takes up much mental space, whereas our film is—’

  There is a sudden noise, persistent and grating as a circular saw. Lenny jumps. ‘Oh,’ he says, in rather effeminate surprise, pulling Timou’s cell phone from where he has stowed it in his pocket. ‘That’s her now,’ he says. He holds the phone out to Timou.

  ‘Answer it, would you?’ Timou says, curling into an ab crunch.

  ‘Hello?’ Lenny says, feeling his heart start to gallop in his chest. He can’t help it. He still finds it a thrill to speak to her.

  ‘Timou?’ she says.

  ‘No, it’s Lenny.’

  ‘Oh. Hi, Lenny, how are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ Lenny says, then regrets it. But what else is there to say? ‘How are you?’ he tries.

  ‘Not too bad. Is he there?’

  ‘Er …’ Lenny waggles his eyebrows at Timou, indicating the phone.

  ‘Is he exercising?’ She sounds very near, as if she’s standing just at his shoulder.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I need to talk to him. Just hand over the phone, would you? I’ll talk to him while he jumps up and down or whatever it is he’s doing.’

  Mutely, Lenny holds out the phone to Timou. Timou lies back on the concrete, raising one leg then the other.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘… No, not yet … I’ll check with Lenny … Really? Oh, no, Cloudy … I’m so sorry … You’re not going in at all? How come? … Did you tell Matt already? Was he mad? … It will put back shooting … I don’t know, a week maybe … OK … OK … Sure … I will. Or maybe Lenny will. An hour or so. Maybe less. OK, see you.’

  Timou snaps the phone shut, leaping upright in one coiled movement. He sighs. ‘She wants a tofu steak,’ he says, in the manner of someone delivering bad news.

  The very words make Lenny feel nauseated.

  ‘Right now,’ Timou says.

  They stand, Timou and Lenny, on the sidewalk, for a brief moment united, as men baffled in the face of female caprice. The sea turns and turns behind them.

  ‘I don’t know why they call it morning sickness,’ Timou murmurs. ‘It seems to happen at any time of the day or night. She says she’s not going in today.’

  ‘Oh,’ Lenny says. ‘Oh. Claudette is …? I didn’t know. Congratulations, Timou. That’s … well, that’s great.’

  ‘You think?’ Timou looks at him, properly looks, not just seeing the face of another employee.

  Lenny swallows. When are they going to get some food, some water? How much longer does he have to wait? ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘It’s wonderful. We should celebrate.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Timou points his finger at him. ‘We can’t let it out – the press will be all over her.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘She’ll be mad I’ve told you.’ Timou scratches his head.

  ‘I won’t tell anyone. I promise.’

  ‘OK.’ Timou starts to stride towards the café. ‘Can you take a tofu steak up to the house?’

  Later in life, Lenny won’t recall much from his brief years working in the film industry but he will remember meeting Claudette Wells.

  Several months after he stands in Venice Beach, he resigns his post as Timou’s personal assistant. He spends some months drifting, living in his parents’ spare room, staring out of the window and wondering what to do and where to do it. Then he finds a job in the administrative office of a theatre. He lives once again in New York; he rides the subway, he carries papers and books and pencils in a canvas knapsack, he eats a lox bagel every morning for breakfast.

  He reads about Claudette’s disappearance while waiting on line in a deli. The man in front of him is holding a newspaper and Lenny happens to glance over his shoulder and there is her photograph on the front page, and his heart behaves as if assailed by a strong wind, swooping up, then down, when he sees the headline. The article contains the words erratic behaviour and devastated boyfriend and financial disaster for a major studio. For the next month, all he sees, when he picks up a newspaper or a magazine or turns on the TV, is her face looking out at him, as if to say: now you see me, now you don’t.

  Throughout the furore of her disappearance, he doesn’t tell anyone that he once worked for Timou Lindstrom – not the people in his office, not the actors rehearsing in the theatre, not the girl he is dating. He doesn’t tell anyone that he met Claudette Wells, that he stood in her living room, that he touched her hand, lightly and for a moment. He never tells anyone about it: not once. He keeps it to himself, not because he is afraid his new friends wouldn’t believe him, but because to speak of it would be betraying her in some inexplicable way. He met Claudette Wells and, a short time later, she was gone. Dead, some people suggested, drowned in the Baltic Sea; run away, said others. Either way, she vanished, slipped out of reach, never to be seen again.

  As the weeks slide past and she still isn’t found, he fi
nds himself thinking more and more about Claudette Wells, about the set of her shoulders, about her unwavering gaze, about how perfect she was, too perfect, surely, for the Swedish sea to claim her. She would have escaped, he tells himself, as he sits at his desk, folders, invoices and rehearsal schedules spread out in front of him; she would have found some exit, some rabbit hole, and wriggled through.

  The oddest thing, he thinks, as he gazes out over the air-conditioning units of the block opposite, as he watches the others around him answering phones and typing into their computers, was that he hadn’t wanted to go, had almost asked to be excused the errand, almost hadn’t gone at all. He’d been fed up when Timou had handed him the tofu steak and the keys to the car. He hadn’t wanted to steer that tank-sized vehicle through the molasses-slow LA traffic, down the twelve-lane highways, gripping the steering-wheel, letting the automated voice of the car’s electronic Ariadne issue him instructions, which he took, blindly, gratefully, as if his life depended on it. Which, in a way, it did. The tofu steak perspiring inside its brown-paper wrapping, the cell phone chirruping and shuddering on the dash – but he couldn’t answer it now, not now, as he counted off exits, scanned green signs, moved his foot on and off the accelerator, straining to hear the soothing tones of the car’s automated warnings.

  The house was up a long, winding road, high in the parched hills. The properties there were ringed by eight-foot walls, sealed up with electric gates. Security cameras turned their convex eyes towards him as he passed, driving so slowly that several times the engine nearly cut out.

  He could never have missed it. He hadn’t seen a pedestrian for miles but suddenly the road was filled with people. Black cars, people on stepladders, machinery, figures standing in groups. For a moment, Lenny thought he’d arrived in the middle of some crisis, some accident. But, disconcertingly, at the sight of his car, they all rushed towards him, en masse, a wall of black clothing. Lenny hit the brake, put his arms up to shield his face. He was convinced, for a moment, that he was about to get carjacked, assassinated, robbed.