The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  I tell him I was advised to let the Ronnie Shedlo project go, which I did, and wait for the new people to make a move, as the secretive investors turned out to be a bunch of, indeed, pretty big-time drug dealers in Dallas, represented in their business ventures by a lawyer named—could it get any better?—Robin Hood, who had approached my publisher— nothing but nothing ever coming of that.

  He laughs.

  “Movies,” he says, the twin batons of bamboo chopsticks poised in his crossed fingers, smiling that white smile, shaking his head.

  Walking back to my motel, where he has parked the sleek black BMW coupe that seems to embarrass him some, there is a full moon in the inky blue night sky over empty Chinatown, with its pull-down steel shutters on shop fronts padlocked tight, the silhouettes of those horned pagoda rooflines all around us, and we both agree how much we’d enjoyed ourselves and we shouldn’t let so much time slip away between get-togethers like this.

  There in the parking lot, after more talk while we stand around—continued remembering of guys we knew from playing on sports teams and such back in college, wonderful old girlfriends back in college as well—he finally opens the BMW door there in the moonlight and is about to get into that beige-leather cockpit, the car new enough that the inside still smells like a luggage store. Soft-voiced, he tells me something along the lines of:

  “You know, I look in the mirror, Pete, I see me, and I say to myself—who the hell is that guy? I mean, I don’t feel that old.”

  I try to assure him he doesn’t look very old, which he doesn’t.

  7. The Transcendent Trailer

  OK, here goes, and let me see if I can at last put some of this together, because I have been thinking more and more about much of this, now that I am back in Austin.

  I am wondering about what seemed to be at the heart of those two movies of me there in L.A. during that week or so and if it does reveal that something bigger I’ve been trying to get at for a long time now, including well before this trip, something essentially metaphysical. I would like to say that it all fell whisperingly into place when I was confronted with those near symbols of the metaphysical, locales that in themselves cause you to just gaze and gaze and feel that crucial insight is imminent, you are about to finally understand (for instance, looking out at, mesmerizingly so and alone, the immense blue Pacific early one morning while walking on deserted Santa Monica Beach, with its bright white sands and clusters of palms, during the trip’s last couple of days I spend out there; or looking down at, equally mesmerizingly so and alone, the vast American desert from a plane, and there are the erosion-clawed chocolate mountains, the ongoing, seemingly endless orange sand flats, as seen from 30,000 feet up on my afternoon Southwest return flight, where the cabin is close to empty and I have the row of seats to myself, the engines droning on and on), sure, it would be somehow perfect if I could say it all came together for me at a moment such as one of those. But it didn’t. And even now as I sit writing this on a July morning in the back bedroom of my apartment at 1407 West 39th 1/2 Street and with the air conditioning laboring away here in Austin, where I’ve signed on again to teach every afternoon in a five-week summer session because of some hefty bills that really have to be taken care of, I can only try—but I will try—to piece it together. And if it is to be approached in terms of the transcendent, I might go right to the top and summon a quote from the literary master of matters transcendent and metaphysical, of course, Borges himself, who once pronounced: “We accept reality so readily perhaps because we suspect that nothing is real.”

  True, in the past dozen years I have been doing a lot of exactly what I did out in L.A., traveling to a place where a document of literature I love is set and rereading the book there, to see what happens. (Other trips have taken me to Buenos Aires and rereading Borges there, to Paris and rereading the French surrealists there, to Oxford, Mississippi, and rereading Faulkner there, to Cuernavaca and rereading Malcolm Lowry there, to Tunis and rereading Flaubert— specifically his Salammbô, about ancient Carthage—there.) While the time in Los Angeles was really about an attempt to clear my head out for a bit, get away from problems that had been closing in on me in my own shaky life in Austin and work on revising the long fiction manuscript, no distractions, I think that in the end there was an equal measure of this ongoing pursuit, too, the rereading of West there, contemplating The Day of the Locust. Still, what does taking all those notes mean, as I seek out the places in a writer’s work, this obsession I have—or any of us has—to do that sort of thing? And what does going to a library to look at an author’s actual manuscripts mean, touch what he or she has touched, see firsthand the machinations of the airy imagination as it composes and rephrases with cross-outs and inserts right there on the page? And does it indicate that in the consummate Borgesian inversion, paradox within paradox, we suspect the unreality of reality, while we also have a strong desire to affix some reality to unreality, as I suggested earlier? Which is to say, I confirmed in the world the place—that apartment house—where West’s conjured-up characters lived, and I confirmed in the world the supposed fictional happenings in the book with my somehow walking along Hollywood Boulevard and finding myself in that screwed-up scene of a pantingly blank crowd hungry for some definition of themselves in their own lives—either by proximity to celebrity or in this case the outright calamity of somebody else—something to give a measure of meaning, in fact, to themselves and their own presence on Hollywood Boulevard right then that sunny afternoon…and I…and…

  8. . . .

  (…and…and I…and I embarked on what seems like some dream journey out to a millionaire’s residence in a vast verdant park, evidence in itself of the fleetingness of the materialistic, to sit in a lamp-lit reading room and examine the yellowing few pages of fading type on onionskin for those revisions of The Day of the Locust—a guy at another table with a knit cap that said “Berlin” staring back at me every once in a while, now that I think of it, strangely dreamlike, too—and there was my folding up so carefully, so silently, a map, one flap over another over another of the thing, trying not to make any noise that might disturb anybody else working at the light-mahogany tables in the quiet library, that old 1967 Mobil map with the spots circled where West had once actually lived, Nathanael West whose work was painfully neglected during his own lifetime and who was killed much too young, and…and…)

  9. . . . continued

  (…and West was somebody who did conjure up with the magic of words, simple little black marks on a white pulp page, such beautifully crafted documents, two lasting novels that tell us of some of the biggest secrets of all in our lives, probe the essence of the underlying concept of a forever-dreaming America, too, and add to that the fact that The Day of the Locust is about Hollywood, where unreality is the defining reality of the place, because throughout the novel West plays with this premise, his main character Tod walks through the studio back lot with its false-front sets for Wild West towns and Manhattan neighborhoods, and there’s one scene where the re-creation of the Battle of Waterloo for a big-budget movie results in a flimsy back-lot set, constructed to resemble a hill, collapsing under the marching boots and pounding horse hooves of Wellington’s troops, and with that disaster the battle that determined a large part of the history of the Western World turns out altogether differently, altered by the imagination and somehow almost changing the entire course of history itself as facilely as that, as whimsically as that, while during the whole episode a somewhat crazed God-like director futilely keeps giving stage directions through his megaphone amid the hopeless total confusion—sure, add that, a note about history itself, which is time, even add what that in turn suggests, the element of the central elusive spookiness of time, above all, and there is my college pal forever standing in the moonlight of the little courtyard parking lot of the Royal Pagoda Motel beside his sleek black BMW wondering how he got so old, having no sense of it, he softly confesses, time as unreal yet real as anything else, and I…and I…
and…)

  10. Nowhere

  No, admittedly I’m getting nowhere, even as I find myself slipping into pseudo-Faulknerian parenthetical riffs on my Mac keyboard, almost a vaguely subconscious level and sort of a rapid, imagistic free-falling that’s pleasant enough (man, did you just see that happening? and what’s there above is pretty much undoctored, honestly, except to insert the italics, plus the numbers and evasive headings), but if nothing else, I have brought up what could be the telling conundrum, and when it comes to the purpose of a trailer (here’s a good dodge, and again excuse my running the risk of wearing very thin with use of these movie metaphors), it’s always supplied to give you just a glimpse, I’d say. There’s never the whole thing—a trailer merely gets you interested, and thinking.

  11. Thinking

  Thinking the way you do when you look down while flying at a never-ending desert in the stillness of a sun-struck afternoon, thinking the way you also do when on a beach alone and you silently gaze at the wide blueness of the ocean itself, tucked in by distant mountains on either side, with the level line of the horizon marred only by a white cruise ship, its cabins stacked high, heading to a destination surely un-known—that sense of your experiencing a major realization, but, on the brink of it, never quite there with that something you seem to already know.

  12. “Why Write Novels?”—As West Asked

  Or, look at it another way, and here is at least one thing I definitely know, a final point that’s hopefully trumping, for a solution: Why be crazy enough to write novels or embark on any work that aspires to be—and it takes a measure of daring to say this, seeing that it’s all but forbidden in English departments as well as plenty of other places nowadays—serious art?

  I’ll tell you why, and maybe this is it—because art itself, in any of its many variations and permutations, is one way of at least attempting to repeatedly convince ourselves that the illusory stay on this planet is something, that life is worthily and ultimately, though often heartbreakingly, wonderful, granting it does slip away altogether too fast—writing a novel does, in the end, let the novelist and readers believe at last the most absurd proposition and craziest premise of all: We are here.

  13. Even

  You know, even the schoolmarmish, rules-are-rules guy at the Huntington, who I never as much as saw or actually spoke to in our exchange of emails, never heard his voice, is here in this world, bless him, and I’ve proved it beyond any doubt he or anybody else might have just by my own writing about him. Also, don’t forget that wannabe songwriter, the overweight guy with a ponytail there on Hollywood Boulevard one very hot day in late May of 2010 dreaming of his “Hey, Lardass!” number being recorded, becoming a monster hit, and I’ve surely proved it when it comes to him, too, the lovable poor bastard.

  2012, FROM MEMOIR JOURNAL

  WALKING: ANOTHER ESSAY

  ON WRITING

  1. Roller Luggage

  Both times it had to do with walking, and both in what you might call “other places.” Not so oddly, I guess. In Paris I had been walking for about a half hour already that Sunday afternoon.

  I had no real agenda, other than getting out of my apartment in the Marais for a while in the good weather, heading up toward the Place de l’Opéra and the streets behind it with the big department stores. I wanted to see if I could maybe determine where the old Café Certa had been, the spot that figures prominently in what has to be one of the neglected masterpieces of French Surrealism, Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant. I was in Paris for a semester, teaching again at a university there, and at the moment I was immersing myself in a personal project of reading as much as I could Surrealist prose, which overall tends to get sold short at the expense of the movement’s poetry.

  I had logged enough long walks around the city already that I knew it was wise to always have a mini umbrella poked into the pocket of my zip-up jacket—in Paris in autumn the weather can often change, dramatically and fast. But this day the sky was so big and blue over the stately buff-stone buildings lining the empty thoroughfare of Boulevard de Magenta, the plane trees showing leaves as fiery as anything in New England, that I soon realized I definitely wouldn’t need it. I probably also realized, or assured myself, that wearing the springy, and basic, black-and-white nylon Reeboks had been a good idea, the essential bounce of them, even if they did look a little goofy. Actually, continuing along, I tugged off the jacket and carried it under my arm, eventually deciding the day wasn’t quite warm enough for that, and when I did put it back on, I spotted the Gare du Nord. Which is when I think it started.

  I hadn’t been in the Gare du Nord for a while, so I thought it might be worth taking a swing through it now on this walk. I headed that way.

  There was the cluster of cafés and hotels surrounding the station and then the façade of the impressive edifice itself. A central fan window rose almost the height of it, with sculpted toga-clad personages atop the entrance’s long row of heavy swinging doors. (While walking, I suppose that I was thinking of the woman I had been seeing before I came to France. I suppose I was thinking some about my classes, too, there in the university’s stark classroom building over by the Panthéon, the Sorbonne Nouvelle and a different university than the one in Paris where I had been a visiting faculty member years before; I had to teach only once a week, on Fridays. One class was in creative writing, this time delivered in English to sweet, hopeful first-year Anglo-American Studies students whose English really wasn’t very good and who probably weren’t ready for creative writing even in their own language; the other was in the theater department, a class on Tennessee Williams, where the equally sweet and hopeful students, budding actors and actresses, had next to no English for the most part and I often had to resort to conversing in French, despite the departmental powers that be repeatedly telling me that the whole idea was to stay tough and give them only English.) The concourse of the Gare du Nord within stretched enormous, a wide polished floor and the bright afternoon light coming through the lofty glass-and-cast-iron roof providing a pleasant glare to it all, like sunshine on a frozen pond, maybe; automated signs clicking-ly shuffled arrival and departure information. At the deadends of the platform tracks were the sleek, streamlined snouts of the high-speed TGV locomotives repeated one after another, massive silver machines, about a half dozen of them in a line facing that main lobby with its newsstands and coffee counters. And gathered before one locomotive, in the glare and amid a spread-out clutter of all sorts of bags and bulky suitcases, was a pack of young women, chicly dressed and very blond; they were chatting and laughing, occasionally looking up to the schedule announcements above. I told myself they must have been Dutch or Scandinavian—all strikingly blond like that, nearly uniformly so—and, of course, the Gare du Nord does serve northern European destinations.

  As I said, it started then, but I wasn’t sure of it yet.

  Farther on, it was admittedly strange to be walking through the pocket with the famous Parisian department stores, true Belle Époque landmarks, and seeing the streets thoroughly deserted. I passed the window displays and their many mirrors that tossed back moving images of me, and I even poked around the alleys behind the stores and the scruffy loading docks; it was cooler there in the shadows, but once out in the sun again, walking on the comfortable Reeboks, it became warm again, though not quite as much so now as an hour before when I’d first set out.

  Louis Aragon’s 1926 Paris Peasant is a long personal essay, much like a journal, about the author’s life and metaphysical imaginings at twenty-five. In the book, the Café Certa serves as the central meeting place for the group of then relatively unknown young writers and painters who are his close friends, an iconoclastic coterie that began with Dada interests and would eventually be celebrated worldwide as a bona fide movement, the Surrealists. The café also becomes for Aragon, when alone, a good nook for writing. There he works on his poems and essays. He rubs elbows with the habitués from the neighborhood, soon backing their struggle to try to keep the vi
ntage shopping arcade that houses the Certa from being demolished in the name of progress, before it belatedly falls prey to Baron Haussmann’s controversial master plan to rehab Paris that lingered well into the twentieth century. Why, at one point in Paris Peasant, Aragon goes as far as reproducing on the page, as part of the text, an exact facsimile of the café’s cocktail menu, a “Tarif des Consommations,” ranging from (untranslated) the “Kiss Me Quick” and the “Pick Me Hup” and the “Sherry Cobler” (one b) to what seems to be the very special, and undoubtedly extremely dangerous, “Pêle-Mêle Mixture” (prix 2 F.50).

  But walking now, it was tough for me to get a bead on exactly where the Café Certa had been, there in the vicinity of the big, open plaza in front of yet another of those full six train stations in Paris, this time the Gare Saint-Lazare. On the city’s western side, it serves the lines going to and coming from the U.K., via the old pre-tunnel ferry connection, and I told myself that the Certa’s menu with its endearing English might have been practical rather than affected when considered in that light, seeing that some of its customers would have been British. However, looking around, going up and down streets between the station and the Boulevard des Italiens, I knew that much had certainly changed, and I realized that many of the buildings were completely different now and sometimes also renumbered, so that for me it wouldn’t be, after all, a matter of at least seeing where the café had once been.

  I had looked up the address for the current Café Certa in the Bottin, the hefty Paris phone book, before I left my apartment, and it matched the information that Aragon himself had provided back in 1926. In a footnote he explains that at the time of his completing Paris Peasant the Café Certa was already gone, moved to a “new location” on Rue d’Isly and “near the old London Bar,” though he makes no mention of going there anymore. And on the other side of the station, deep in a nest of more Sunday-empty side streets, I did find the Rue d’Isly and I did see the current Certa. I would have gone in for a coffee, but for me the place looked too neat today, even after so many years of operation in this location— too upscale. There was a pricey dinner menu in the front window, and on the other side of the glass waiters in proper black trousers and crisp white shirts were preparing tables for what might have been the evening’s well-heeled dinner clientele—I understood why Aragon himself had perhaps kept his distance.