Behind me—as I could see in the series of mirrors on the walls of the room—she began lazily pulling off her clothes. I too began undressing. In the mirrors I could see not only myself, multiplied a dozen or more times, but her own image from every possible direction, front, back, and sides. The costume jewelry came off, then the jersey skirt and sweater. She kicked off the flat-heeled sandals. Even through her slip I could see she didn’t wear a bra, and in any case I had felt this clearly when I embraced her. The slip came off, leaving her clad in a tiny fragment of bikini underwear. She was right; the reflector booth tanned her all over. I tried not to look as the triangle of nylon came off, since my degree of desire was already adequate, but this was difficult with so many mirrors in the room.
I was still facing toward the sideboard, unbuttoning the last button on my shirt. At that precise point my eye caught the picture in the silver frame on the sideboard. I stopped what I was doing as though frozen; it was as though the projector had jammed and left me fixed in that single frame, motionless and paralyzed. For a long time I stood that way without moving a muscle and without taking my eyes from the picture. My thoughts were utterly vacant except for the image of that paper-pale face with its dark eyes and its thin and sensitive mouth. After a long time, numbly, as though I were awakening from a sleep, I began re-buttoning the shirt again.
Belinda didn’t say much on the way back to her apartment. There was an odd little set about her mouth I had never noticed before. Yet she still seemed, in most ways, her usual blithe self. It was after midnight and there was almost no traffic. The big Hudson went down Vermont Avenue through a mainly black district of small shops and apartment houses. She was sitting on the far side of the front seat leaning against the door. After a while she said distantly, “Could you stop at a drugstore? I need to buy a vibrator.”
I glanced at her sharply. “There aren’t any open at this time of night.”
She only smiled. When I stopped in front of her apartment on Budlong she got out, said, “Bye,” and disappeared into the darkness of the doorway. I made a U-turn and started back, enveloped in my private thoughts and driving so slowly that on Vermont a police car pulled up and examined me for a few seconds before accelerating away ahead of me down the avenue. The lights of the city floated by, dreamily. I could hardly hear the whisper of the tires on the pavement. Perhaps, I thought, I had gone a little deaf. It was no doubt a functional condition that would disappear after the effects of the evening wore off.
I eased the Hudson into the garage and carefully shut the door. The lights were still on downstairs and I left them on. As I remember, I didn’t even bother to lock the front door. I went up to the bedroom and began unbuttoning my shirt again before the sideboard, going through exactly the same motions that I had a half an hour before. The picture frame was still in the same position on the polished ebony surface before me. When I was half undressed I stopped and stood there for a long time, staring at the face in the picture. After a while a very faint murmur, a whisper as though of a voice singing absentmindedly in an undertone with pauses between the phrases, seemed to come out of the past, out of the walls perhaps or out of the photograph I had thrust away into the drawer.
“Ain’t misbehavm’ …
I’m savin’ myself
For you …”
9.
I had to talk to Nesselrode. But for some reason he was ignoring me now. I hadn’t encountered him face to face for some time, and I caught only occasional glimpses of him in the house. I knew he was still there, because sometimes at night I would hear the stairway creaking as he went up to bed, and now and then in the morning, alerted by the sound of the front door closing, I would look out the window and see him hurrying away down the sidewalk in the direction of the rusted gate on Olympic. He generally went out in the daytime, some time between the middle of the morning and noon, and came back late at night. I left a note for him, and then another, thumb-tacked to the hat rack in the entry where he would see them when he came in. “Mr. Nesselrode, I have to see you.” And: “It’s about the rent.” (He still had never paid me anything for the room.) And: “Mr. Nesselrode, you cannot go on staying here under this arrangement. Please see me.”
These veiled references to the possibility of eviction, however, failed to move him, or perhaps he never saw the notes. I decided to lie in ambush for him. Now that the big oaken table was gone I had set up a card table in the dining room, and I sat there half the morning every day reading the newspaper and lingering over my coffee. With the door open I could clearly see through the living room to the stairway. He had no way to get out of the house without coming down the stairs. In spite of his extraordinary powers I didn’t believe him capable of levitation, or even of going out the window and clambering down the outside of the house. He was an old man after all. It shouldn’t be all that difficult to cut him off in some way and confront him.
A week passed and I hadn’t managed to catch him. He always eluded me in some way or another, or perhaps he sensed that I was lurking for him and didn’t go out. Then one morning, in the silence of the empty house, I heard the familiar sound of the stairway creaking. But he came down the stairs faster than I expected, and he was out the door and away down the sidewalk before I scarcely had time to get out of my chair.
I hurried out after him. To my surprise he turned left, toward the Wilshire entrance to the park with its guarded gate, rather than to the right toward Olympic. I could see him a block or so ahead, scuttling away down the sidewalk with his overcoat floating. When I got to the gate at Wilshire there was no sign of him and I couldn’t tell which way he had turned.
I went back to the guard in his small kiosk. The usual daytime guard was a young man who seemed to be a part-time college student; I never found out precisely. He seemed to be intelligent, because he was usually working on calculus assignments, as well as I could tell, when he had nothing else to do. But he was afflicted with a bad stammer, which probably disqualified him for any other sort of job.
“Did you see an old man …”
He looked up with a pleasant expression from his paper covered with hieroglyphic calculations.
“The old man who came out just now. In the overcoat. Which way did he turn?”
“M-m-m-man. C-c-c-came. No.” He smiled.
It was that same afternoon, as I remember, that I received a telephone call from a person who didn’t identify himself. When the phone rang the thought occurred to me for some reason that it was Nesselrode. There was no reason for him to call me, but nobody else ever called me in the daytime either, and if someone like Belinda called it was usually in the evening. I picked up the phone and a strange male voice said, “Alys,” not at all in a questioning tone, simply pronouncing the word as a matter of fact.
“Yes.”
“I’m calling for Mr. Ziff. He says to tell you that ice cream is bad for you.”
“It is?”
“Especially the richer flavors.”
“Richer flavors?”
“Like Tutti Frutti. And Nesselrode.”
“Tell him to mind his own business. I’m not a child any more.”
He didn’t contest the point. He simply hung up, having delivered his message. I wasn’t sure that what I had told him was true. I might have been an adult in the legal sense, but I wasn’t sure I was in the eyes of Ziff, or Nesselrode either, and I was beginning to have doubts about the matter myself. Such metaphysical questions aside, this telephone call annoyed me, and only fixed me in my resolve to run down Nesselrode somehow and—talk to him. “Mr. Nesselrode,” I prepared my speech, “I want to get back in pictures.” And: “Mr. Nesselrode, I’m not a child.” And: “Mr. Nesselrode, you’ve been eluding me. That isn’t fair, and you also stole my camel saddle and my oaken table and my toaster, and my Arabic paper knife.” Or, if I didn’t say these things to him, I would say something or other.
The cat-and-mouse game went on. I suspected that Nesselrode was playing with me, although he had nev
er shown any signs of a sense of humor. Perhaps he was merely sadistic. I remembered his cutting out and mutilating the paper dolls. The impulse to sadism was not so very different from comedy after all. They both involved disturbing the natural order and disorienting a person through treating him as an object rather than as a conscient being—for example when a comedian slips on a banana peel and is converted into nothing but a weight subject to the laws of physics. This would account for the extraordinary amount of violence in most silent comedies. People were always slapping each other or stepping on rakes that struck them violently in the back of the head. Comedy was the infliction of pain in a way not permanently damaging to the subject, and pleasing to the audience. Perhaps I could write a monograph on this subject, I thought, as soon as I got my other affairs straightened out.
Finally, a couple of days later (by this time I no longer drank coffee and read the newspaper; I sat in the chair with my hands on my knees, ready to leap), I managed to rush out of the house after him nimbly enough so that when I got to the sidewalk I was only a few yards behind him. I quickened my pace but so did he; it was astonishing and slightly uncanny to observe the speed he could accelerate to without breaking into a run. Neither did I run; I felt somehow that this would not be acceptable under the rules of our game. For me to run after him would be a kind of effrontery, a rudeness, which might well defeat my own purposes. I couldn’t imagine myself saying what I wanted to say to him if I caught up to him on the run and grabbed his shoulder, panting.
I followed on after him walking as fast as I could, my legs moving in the gestures of that curiously artificial and absurd-looking sport, the walking race. It was very tiring, I found. I passed the guard in his kiosk. He mouthed, “M-m-m-m …” and then gave up and smiled.
When I came out onto Wilshire I saw that Nesselrode had turned to the right in the downtown direction. He had gained a little on me while I was smiling at the guard and was a half a block away now, almost at the corner of Western. From all signs he hadn’t noticed that I was behind him. I walking-raced on after him down Wilshire, across Western on the light, through MacArthur Park, over a sunken freeway with traffic streaming by in both directions, and into the downtown district. Wilshire ended at Grand, and Nesselrode crossed over to Sixth Street. At Broadway, only a little farther on, he turned right and then crossed to the opposite side.
Broadway was a kind of colorful and tawdry bazaar, thronging with pedestrians like an Algerian souk, decorated with flashy tin signs and pulsing neon lights, lined with cheap restaurants, pawnshops, cut-rate clothing stores, and fruit-juice stands. Nesselrode threaded his way through the crowd. A half a block down the street—after a glance behind him that failed, I was sure, to notice me—he disappeared into Clifton’s Cafeteria.
I was familiar with this place. It had been there a long time; it dated from the epoch when Broadway was still the main thoroughfare of the city and the center of its shopping district. On the outside was a kind of Art Deco front with the name spelled out in neon letters. Inside it was a huge room decorated with plaster cliffs and boulders, with alpine terraces, running brooks, and waterfalls. There were two big redwood trunks with shaggy bark holding up the ceiling, and on one wall was a rustic shrine with a blue neon cross glowing over it. There was no sign of Nesselrode. I wasn’t worried because I was sure he was in the place somewhere. I walked through to the rear, took a tray, and threaded my way through the steamy labyrinth of the serving counters.
I emerged after a few moments with a Salisbury steak, so called, and a mound of mashed potatoes the size of a hat. With a cup of coffee it came to a dollar eighty-six. I remembered my lunch with Ziff at the Bistro, which had cost fifty dollars. Of course that included the wine. But it struck me now for the first time that there was at least one resemblance between the two establishments. They were both fake. The Bistro was a fake French café, and Clifton’s was a fake alpine landscape. Feeling pleased with myself for some reason at this discovery, I carried my tray off through the Alps.
It didn’t take me long to find Nesselrode. He was sitting at a little table half hidden behind a pillar camouflaged to resemble a tree. He raised his head and caught my eye at the same moment. He showed no sign of surprise.
I put down my tray on the table and sat down. He twitched his nose at me. Then he examined what I had on my tray. He made a kind of grimace. “How can you eat all that dead animal and starch?” he muttered. His own menu was austere: a plain lettuce salad with no dressing, a carton of yogurt, a pair of toasted rusks, and a large glass of what appeared to be vegetable juice.
I decided to take the offensive immediately, ignoring his comment on my own eating habits.
“I thought you told me you never ate.”
“I did?”
“I asked you to dinner once, and you said you never ate.”
He said evasively, “I eat here. I meant I never eat at home.”
“At home?”
“At your house,” he said, shifting even more uncomfortably in his chair.
I elected not to bring up the cabbages and carrots I had seen him carrying up the stairs, or the empty V-8 cans in the wastebasket.
“Why not?”
“No reason. In place of home, I eat here.” A silence. He put several forkfuls of the lettuce into his mouth, working his cheeks as he chewed. When he had swallowed he said, “I don’t eat much. An old man like me. A little keeps me alive.” Another attack on the lettuce, and more systematic mastication. He swallowed and said, “When I was only a boy just from Austria, Clifton’s gave me to eat for free.”
It was true that Clifton’s, from the time of the Depression, had a policy that if you didn’t have enough to pay for a meal, you could pay what you had. Of course Nesselrode wasn’t “a boy just from Austria” in 1929. Trying to get some information out of him was like unraveling a pair of copulating snakes. I went cheerfully chattering on. “The prices are still reasonable. And the decorations are interesting.”
“Oh, ya.” He wasn’t quite sure what I was up to.
“But that’s not what I want to talk to you about.”
“No. You’re like everybody else. You want to get into pictures.”
It seemed to me there was a light trace of sarcasm in his manner now, a thing I wouldn’t have thought him capable of. I waited for him to go on, but he said nothing. Having disposed of the salad, he started on the yogurt, which he alternated with bites of rusk. His cheeks worked rhythmically.
“Mr. Nesselrode, all I want is another chance.”
He stopped and peered at me narrowly. He swallowed what he was chewing. Still holding the half-eaten rusk in his hand, he embarked into what was for him a rather long and philosophical speech.
“Many another young man has said that. But life is pitiless. It doesn’t give to you another chance.” A pause. He seemed to evaluate me through his half-closed eyes, while at the same time behaving as though he preferred not to look at me directly, turning his glance to the side now and then or looking over the top of my head. He worked his mouth, then spoke again. “Just sometimes it does,” he said equivocally.
This slight encouragement was enough. I pressed him.
“Where are you going after lunch, Mr. Nesselrode?”
“I have business,” he said evasively.
“Do you mind if I go with you?”
My heart was in my throat. I tried to appear as casual and offhand as I could. He narrowed one eye and focused on me again. “The other time, you had a chance and you made an escapade.”
“Nothing happened. It was perfectly innocent.”
“When you are in pictures,” he advised, “it is better not to have attachments to people.” As though afraid that I wouldn’t follow this, he added, “Especially those of one sex or the other. I myself,” he said almost proudly, “have no friends.”
“Not even Reiter?”
He stared in alarm around the crowded cafeteria and lowered his voice. “What are you saying? Don’t speak. Somebody
might hear.”
“Let’s go, shall we?”
“What’s your hurry? So impatient. You young people.”
He drained his vegetable juice, in one long swallow in fact, as though he himself were in a hurry. He looked around for his paper napkin, found it on the floor, retrieved it, and wiped his mouth. “You’re all alike. You want to be a star already, when you don’t even know how to make a face.”
I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to acting technique or to the art of makeup. It didn’t matter. We stood up. My own lunch was almost untouched.
“Aren’t you going to eat all that dead animal and starch?”
“No, I’m not hungry.”
“Throwing away your money. Foolish. You young people. When I was a boy just from Austria …”
We threaded our way down the alpine slope, crossed a brook on a little stone bridge, and left.
10.
It was a long way from the downtown district out to Pico and La Cienega. But Nesselrode, with his mysterious pedestrianism, set out on foot down the sidewalk, although there were buses constantly going past us on both sides of the street. He immediately struck a pace so brisk that I had trouble keeping up with him. It was a warm day, and besides I was tired from chasing him all the way down Wilshire into town.
In spite of his rabbity way of bolting down the sidewalk, he too seemed a little less than his usual energetic self. He seemed to wheeze a little and suck the air as though he had difficulty getting it into his lungs. Once I saw him raise his arm and wipe furtively at his eye with the sleeve of his coat. If you exercised at all violently, this saffron-tinged air soon left your throat scratchy and your lungs began to get sore. I considered asking him to moderate his pace a little, but after all I was the one who had invited myself on this expedition and I could only try to keep up with him as best I could.
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