As I had expected, I got to Beverly Hills a little early. Leaving the Hudson for the valets to take care of, I went into the lobby and spent twenty minutes or so browsing through the books in Brentano’s, which had an entrance door inside the hotel. At exactly three minutes to one I went back into the lobby and out the door onto Wilshire.
I crossed Wilshire on the traffic light, went two blocks down to Cañon, and up the street toward the restaurant. It was only about a half a block. When I was perhaps three doors from the restaurant I became aware that someone on the opposite side of the street had stepped out onto the pavement and was crossing it diagonally toward me. He was a lean but muscular individual a little taller than average, walking with a kind of pounce. He was wearing a safari jacket over a shirt open at the neck, knitted silver stretch pants, and suede loafers. His face was tanned and his hair was expensively styled, coming down to the collar in the rear and cut in a Dutch-boy fringe over the forehead. I, of course, wore my usual conservative coat and tie.
Our two courses intersected. I inspected him and he closed in briskly without meeting my glance, as though he had known me for a long time. Threading his way adroitly between two parked cars, he came up onto the sidewalk with a bound. Without introducing himself he said, “You’re just on time, Alys. Good boy.”
I was used to his patronizing manners from the phone conversation and paid no attention to them now. We went in. In the polished and reflecting gloom inside the door it was difficult to see anything until your eyes adjusted. He pronounced the single syllable “Ziff!” in the same barking way he had over the phone.
The captain, with the menus folded under his arm, bowed slightly and with dignity. “Mr. Ziff. A table for two.” With another bow he led us away through the tables set with white linen and silver to an alcove at the bottom of the room.
The tables in this part of the restaurant were arranged in a long row and fitted tightly together, so that a waiter had to pull ours out in order for me to get in behind it. Then the table was replaced, effectively sealing me in. Ziff sat down in the chair opposite me and reached down to adjust his trousers around his crotch. Then he stared at me intently.
The captain was middle-aged, bald, and rotund. He seemed to be Italian. He showed no disposition to surrender the menus to us yet.
“What would you like to drink, gentlemen?”
Ziff ordered a double Chivas Regal and water. I considered. “Something very light.”
“A Shirley Temple?” the captain suggested with polite sarcasm.
“No, that’s too light.” I paused. “A dry vermouth, on the rocks, with a twist. A Cinzano,” I added, wishing to he decisive.
“Dry Cinzano rocks and a twist.” The captain departed. Ziff and I were left to go on with our inspection of each other. At close range, and now that my eyes had adjusted to the dimly lit room, I saw that he wore a heavy but absolutely plain gold ring on the forefinger of each hand. On the third finger of his left hand he also had some kind of class ring. Around his neck, in the opening of his loosely woven net shirt, was a fine gold chain with a small golden Z hanging from it. An aroma of expensive cologne sifted across the table from him.
The interior of the Bistro was done in fake French décor, with painted decorations on the pillar glasses. The woodwork was dark polished mahogany, and the upholstery on the banquette where I was sitting was a black synthetic leather. The chairs were old-fashioned cane-bottoms with bentwood backs. Across the table Ziff teetered back and forth on his chair, in even rhythm, while he watched me thoughtfully. Our drinks came. Ziff brought his chair to the level, drained off half his Scotch, and set the glass down. Then he got down to business.
“You see, Alys, the thing is, you’ve been living as though you were a totally free and independent individual. But nobody is totally free and independent.”
“Not in the absolute sense, I suppose.”
“That’s what we’re talking about, Alys. The absolute sense.”
“Let’s be more specific. What exactly is it about my behavior that bothers you?”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“That you want to talk to me about.”
“We can’t be more specific at this point, Alys. We’re talking about the absolute. The absolute is the opposite of the specific.”
“All right,” I hazarded. “What is it absolutely about my behavior that bothers you?”
“It doesn’t bother me. It’s that you’re too free and independent, as I’ve said.”
“You don’t believe in free will?”
“In the metaphysical sense, yes. In the social sense, no individual can engage in total freedom of choice in an organized society. He’s limited by the specific mores of the society in which he finds himself.” While he talked he reached out and began rearranging the objects on the table in a mechanical way, as though he wasn’t aware of what he was doing. He moved the saltshaker an inch or two, adjusted the candle lamp in the center of the table, and shifted the ashtray slightly. “In the psychological sense,” he went on, “the individual is unable to engage in free choice because his every act is conditioned by his inner psychic processes, which are not accessible to his will. Is there something wrong with your drink?”
I sipped a little of my Cinzano. “But these things are true of everybody.”
“Yes, but in your case I’ve obtained professional opinion, and according to the psychiatrist I consulted these bizarre forms of behavior you’ve fallen into are all in your mind. All in your mind, Alys,” he repeated, staring at me with particular significance with these words.
I had no idea what he was talking about, except that evidently he or somebody else had been following my life more closely than I had realized. I decided to be amused. “You mean that I’ve been—under surveillance?”
He reached down behind the table to make an adjustment again. Evidently the silver trousers were a little too tight. “I have my responsibilities, and you have yours. I’ll take care of my responsibilities. It’s yours we’re talking about now.”
“I agree that your responsibilities are your business. But it seems to me that mine are my business.”
It was characteristic of our relation that Ziff called me by my first name, whereas I called him nothing in particular at all—if I had called him anything I would probably have called him Mr. Ziff. The reason was perhaps that for him, in his legal and professional capacity, I was forever a child—the child of my parents—the heir. Just as you say tu to little children and dogs in French, so Ziff called me Alys.
“Look, Alys,” he said, lowering his voice a note or two. “I know everything about you. Everything.” He rearranged a few more things on the table between us, putting the saltshaker back where it had been in the first place. “I won’t go into my methods. They don’t concern you. Just let me remind you that, according to the terms of the trust agreement embodied in your parents’ will, you are required to conduct an orderly life and not engage in acts of moral turpitude.”
I didn’t know whether he was referring to my engaging in onanism with mirrors, or taking in a roomer in violation of the rules of the St. Albans Place Homeowners Association. I glanced around the room. The tables were very close together and anything that was said in the room could be clearly heard by the other patrons. I remembered Ziff’s rather curious remark that if we met in his office too many people would overhear us, and I might prefer to meet in some place more “intimate.” The Bistro was intimate all right. Whenever I moved my elbow it touched that of the film-producer type who was sitting at the next table with a blond young woman.
I lowered my own voice a little. “So, although …”
The menus finally came. I ordered a quiche, and Ziff a filet mignon with pommes parmentières. “And a Chambertin ’78” he added. “A Clos Saint-Jacques if you’ve got it, but be sure it’s a ’78”. It was the right wine for a steak but not for a quiche, but I didn’t say so. The captain took the order and the waiter brought the wine immediately.
Most of the waiters were young Chicanos; they were handsome, elegant, and dexterous. Ziff ignored them and never spoke to them; he dealt only with the captain.
“So,” I went on in my lowered voice, “although you claimed we were discussing the absolute, you do have some specific objections to my conduct.”
In the middle of sampling the wine he stopped and stared at me. I was smiling lightly, since I still had difficulty taking the whole business seriously. However it was a little difficult to smile while Ziff’s eyes were fixed on you. They gave the impression, somehow, of a pair of telescopic rifle sights with cross hairs. Although he didn’t hold the eyes still long enough for me to tell for sure, it was even possible that there were tiny crosses in the pupils, as in the eyes of a cat.
He considered my question. After what seemed to me a good deal of thought he said, “No, I don’t.”
His steak came, and my quiche. He cut a precise cube of the steak, put it in his mouth, and chewed it methodically. When it was thoroughly masticated and swallowed he set down the knife and fork, one on either side of the plate.
“What we have to discuss are the absolute value systems of life, Alys, and the nature of reality. Now listen carefully. This is important.”
“All right.”
It was not so important, however, that it prevented him from cutting another cube of steak, putting it in his mouth, and chewing it in his methodical way. When he was finished with this he resumed.
“You’re interested in art, Alys.”
I thought for a moment before I responded. “What do you mean by art?”
“I mean the construction of beautiful and interesting, but useless artifacts.”
I didn’t contest this, although it seemed like a rather curious definition. “Is there anything wrong,” I asked him, “in being interested in art?”
Now he thought for a moment. “No,” he responded after a while. “Art has made a significant contribution to our civilization. I myself have a great but limited respect for its values. Many people are attracted to art and it is easy to see why. Ars longa, vita brevis. Art is eternal, and in art we are immortal. But.” He slowed down and stared at me even more significantly as he said what followed. “But. Art is artificial, art is not real. Life is temporal. In life we are mortal. But life is real.”
He picked up the knife and fork again, started to cut another piece of steak, and then set them down again to see if I was paying attention to what he was saying.
“Is everyone in your profession so profound?”
“I studied philosophy at UCLA before I went to law school,” he said.
“One can perhaps enjoy both.”
“Both?”
“Art and life. Why should they be mutually exclusive?”
“When I was talking with you on the telephone I took up the subject of ramifications, a term you were apparently not familiar with.” He shifted the candle lamp again, and even reached across the table to move my own plate a little to one side and line up my knife and fork. This compulsion of his to rearrange things on the table gave the impression that a part of him, a part of which he was not entirely in control, was playing some sort of elaborate rapid game like chess, using the table setting as counters, at the same time he was conducting his conversation with me. “As each life proceeds,” he went on, “it divides into branches like a tree. In time it develops so many ramifications that the individual is unable to follow them all. He has to decide, Alys”—and here he stopped and fixed me with an unusually meaningful glance— “whether he wants to follow one branch or the other. It’s like a kid,” he said, “climbing a tree. You can follow one branch or another, but not both. Some branches are sound and some are rotten.”
“You said that on the phone.”
“Yes, and now I’m saying it again. I’m telling you to come down off that branch, Alys.”
“You’re good on metaphors too. Did you study poetry at UCLA?”
“You’re damned right I did.”
There was a silence. I smiled a little. Then I said, “I haven’t asked very many questions, you may have noticed. There are a good many I could have asked. But now there’s one in particular I’d like to put to you, if you don’t mind.”
“Certainly, Alys.”
“Just who in the hell do you think you are?”
This caused him to adjust the silver trousers again. It was perhaps just an unconscious tic. “Why,” he said, “I’m nobody of any particular importance. Since you don’t have parents of your own, I’m just a friendly figure to hover around and be sure you don’t get into any trouble. In loco parentis, you know.”
“It was an odd family, but I don’t think they were crazy.”
“You know more Latin than that, Alys.”
“You know a lot about me, don’t you?”
“I already told you. I know everything. I have nothing to do night and day, Alys,” he said without a discernible trace of irony, “but follow you around the world to be sure you don’t get into trouble.”
The thought struck me that possibly he wasn’t a bank officer at all but an obscure relative of some kind. I tried to remember whether I had ever heard of a cousin Eldon. There had been scores of people around the house when I was a child, some of them rather bizarre, and I had never got them all straight in my mind. Perhaps he was some sort of uncle of mine who had been appointed executor by the court. Or perhaps, as he himself implied, he was only my guardian angel and had been appointed by God Almighty.
We had finished our lunch, he told the captain. (He didn’t ask me.) The check came almost immediately. Evidently Ziff had other places to go and had trained the Bistro to fit the pace of his life. When the captain came with the saucer with the check in it he set it correctly in the middle of the table, perhaps an inch closer to Ziff than to me. Ziff, reaching out to the center of the table, rearranged the salt and pepper and also the candle lamp, and, as though he were doing it only absentmindedly, he also displaced the saucer with the check on it so that it was closer to me than to him. This seemed fair enough to me. It was a good lunch and I had also enjoyed the conversation. He had a genuine gift for rhetoric, of a rather sinuous sort. I took out my billfold and set two twenties and a ten on the saucer. The bill was a little over forty dollars, and with the tip it was about right. The waiter pulled the table out into the aisle to set me free. I was still interested in Ziff’s discourse on art and reality; or at least I wanted to cat-and-mouse him a little more about it.
“Did you say that in art we are immortal?”
“It’s not worth it, Alys.”
That was all I could get out of him. When we were back out on the street he did his converging act in reverse: I set out down the sidewalk toward Wilshire on the shady side of the street, and he veered away and crossed Cañon on the diagonal, turning now and then to look at me, as though he wanted to be sure I was going back to my car and not engaging in some act of moral turpitude. I lost sight of him shortly before I got to the corner of Wilshire.
7.
For several days after that I didn’t know what to do with myself. My usual activities—playing records, reading’ books, tinkering with one of the cars—didn’t seem to distract me very much. I loafed around the house, drinking a little more than I usually did, picking up a book and setting it down, listening when I was in another part of the house for the telephone, although I didn’t know very clearly who it was that I expected would be calling me. I didn’t see much of Nesselrode in that time. He seemed to have his own affairs to attend to and was seldom in the house. I didn’t prowl around in his room any more either. At least one more object in the house turned up missing—an elaborately chased paper knife with Arabic inscriptions on the handle—but I didn’t regard it as very important. I opened the bills and other mail with a steak knife borrowed from the kitchen.
The disappearance of the paper knife, however, reminded me of something, and I found myself rummaging around in the programs for the silent film series at
UCLA and at the County Museum, not only the current programs but old ones going back a year or more. Some of them had stills from the pictures, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. The more I looked the more restless and curious I became. Finally I went back to the USC library. The two books I had consulted before were mainly about production and had very few references to actors. There were a number of other books on early films, some technical, some simply memoirs of stars, directors, and producers. I found nothing in them either. I began to wonder whether Moira Silver, Lord Muldoon, and the Charles Morton who played Lincoln had really existed or were only something I had dreamed, or some kind of Magic Theater evoked by that devious and slightly menacing sorcerer Nesselrode.
I consulted the reference librarian, a thin young man with an anxious sideways glance who looked something like Kafka. He didn’t seem to find my questions odd, although he didn’t say specifically whether he himself had ever heard of any of the people I was talking about. “Your best chance of finding something would be in old fan magazines,” he told me, still looking to one side as though he were afraid his supervisor would find him revealing all this to me. “As a university library we don’t acquisition popular periodicals.” (This piece of jargon reassured me; he was human after all.) “Why don’t you try the L.A. Public downtown.”
In the Public Library at Fifth and Hope, an interesting building in the shape of a Babylonian ziggurat, I quickly found what I wanted. There wasn’t room in the periodicals section for all the old popular magazines, and they were relegated to a storeroom in the basement. Everything was covered with dust and the lighting was poor. There was no index, no catalog, and no particular system to the way the materials were stored. Everything was stacked haphazardly on metal shelves, and in many cases the carelessly piled magazines had slid down and were scattered over the floor. When I did find the old movie magazines, however, they were all more or less in the same place, in a kind of cave or niche at the end of the storeroom. The nearest light was about twenty feet away. I turned it on and began looking through the stacks of old magazines, some of them yellowed and brittle with age.
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