Charles Peet - The Twelve O'clock

The Twelve O'clock Chapters 1-17

2008-06-24T14:58:00.001-07:00

"What do you mean complicated?" Billie Cooper says, looking up from the electric typewriter she's been making sweet music on.

"I told you before," I say, "you use too many words, very long sentences, and sometimes it's hard to follow." I show her a sentence on the page I've been proofreading. "See, eight lines plus six words, including three 'ands' - one, two, three; two ‘buts’ - one, two; four 'which’s' - one, two, three, four; and a dangling participle, this is a dangling participle. You also left out at least two verbs, here and here, which really confuses me."

"I write too fast," she says, taking the page from me, peering at it intently.

"Then simplify. That's all you need to do," I say. "Break up this long sentence, make it into maybe three or four short sentences, and you don't have a problem."

"Okay, fine," she says, an obvious tightness in her voice. "I'll do it."

"You don't have to do it. I'll take care of it," I say, snatching the page back from her.

"No, I don't want you to take care of it," she says sharply, reaching for the page and grabbing it from me. "I'll do it myself."

We're sitting across from one another at the dining room table. For her economics class she's writing a paper that's due on Tuesday. Her conclusion that American-style socialism keeps American-style capitalism from falling into the ashcan I totally agree with. Why then, I ask myself, did I rub her nose in that lousy paragraph, when I should have been concentrating on its content and shortened the damn sentence myself, as I'm still willing to do, except now I'm afraid to mention it to her. Instead I stare gloomily at her, feeling guilty, wishing I could take back everything I’d said about the paper, while she, hunched over the typewriter, fingers flying across its keys, ignores me.

What extraordinary talent, I think, to be able to concentrate like that, putting thoughts into words in her head, as simultaneously typing at the speed of light. But in everything she does she's quick, focused, and energetic, so I'm not surprised. She's also a pleaser, burdened since birth with this irrepressible need to make other people happy. The next time she looks up at me, she's relaxed and clear, and smiling warmly. Turning off the typewriter, she reminds me she's promised we'd go to Dr. Minzeezi's fundraiser at the college. To get dressed and drive to the campus in less than an hour isn't a problem for her, but I can't move as swiftly as she does. While I'm still putting on my shoes, she's ready to head out the back door. "I hate to be late," she says, glancing anxiously at me, as if she thinks I'm conspiring to make us late, but I'm not, and we aren't.

When we arrive at the college center, Minzeezi's friends and supporters, as well as students from his anthropology classes, crowd the main meeting hall. Classmates Billie's been close to since she started school at night have saved seats for us. On the speaker's platform Dr. Minzeezi is arranging his notes and making nervous attempts to adjust the microphone. Flashing his irresistible smile at us, as the students, led by Billie, applaud noisily, he begins by reviewing why he and others in the audience have organized the Healthy Mouth Opportunities Group to raise funds to build a dental clinic in his native village in Sundazi.

"If we stick together, the clinic will be built, and the people in the village will get the kinds of modern, clean, safe dental services they so desperately need," he proclaims proudly, in his robust Sundazian-accented English. "What they have now, as I told you when we met in December and raised more than seven hundred dollars, thanks to your very great generosity, is outmoded, badly maintained, and under-staffed. Three or four or maybe five or more villages in Sundazi share one dentist, and the equipment he has is so inadequate it can be extremely dangerous to patients with diabetes or high blood pressure."

Describing in excessive detail how most of the villagers have major tooth and gum problems, he shows slides of sore mouths, blistered gums, and rotting teeth. Half of the audience holds their hands over their eyes. When the wrinkled face of a gray-stubbled man with a carbuncle on his chin, a nasty boil on his tongue, and no visible teeth, comes on the screen, the woman in front of me slumps back in her chair as if she can't stand looking at him and in self-defense has passed out.

Funds are desperately needed, Minzeezi says, stressing that Sundazians, badly damaged by European colonialism, don't produce enough nutritional foods to keep them healthy. Snapping off the projector to a mass sigh of relief from the audience, he announces that at least four of his students, including Billie, are thinking seriously about going with him to Sundazi. When he calls her name, she rises quietly to her feet, looking pleased with herself and also, I think, guilty. That she'd be willing to abandon me to run off to Sundazi with him is so unexpected I try to yank her down into her seat, but she squirms away from me.

Doesn’t she realize she's never once told me why she’s contemplating betraying me like this with a guy she hardly knows except for his being her anthropology teacher? It affects me directly, doesn't it? Can she possibly deny she has an obligation to discuss with me her going to Sundazi before he tells me about it? And hasn't it occurred to her that maybe I'd object, or feel ignored or put down, or resent being treated with such indifference and contempt? But how can I say anything to her about any of this without embarrassing her? She's among her friends. Minzeezi is standing beside her. His appeal has raised an additional $926 for the clinic. Hugging everybody he can get his arms around, he kisses Billie on both cheeks and gives me a vigorous handshake. If I didn't love the clinic and getting those people's teeth fixed so much, I would have walked out. When we get to the car, Billie's still excited, and I'm ready to blow up. I don't mean to yell at her but I can't help myself. "You should've told me! I didn't know a damn thing about it until he introduces you and says you're going to Sundazi with him. I couldn't believe it."

"I did tell you," she says.

"No, you didn't."

"Yes, I did."

"When?"

"When I got home after Thursday night's class," she says, "we had a long conversation about it."

"We didn't have a long conversation about it, I say. "I'd remember a long conversation, wouldn't I? And I don't remember."

"Because you don't listen. You never listen," she says. "You're so wrapped up in yourself you don't hear a word I say. But I did tell you. I guarantee I told you, and I don't want to talk about it, okay?"

No, it's not okay, but regardless of what I say, or how I plead with her, she refuses to talk about it, or anything else, or even look at me. Is that fair, when I'm so agitated? Don't I deserve a reply, if my question is reasonable? Yet the entire trip back to our West Hollywood apartment I don't get a single answer out of her. How frustrating, I think, and rude. While I'm pulling open the garage door, she disappears into the apartment.

The light in the upstairs bathroom comes on, as I'm hurrying across the backyard to the apartment's rear door. Maybe she's calmed down. At least she hasn't locked me out. Immediately I go upstairs. The bathroom door is shut. I hear water running. I call softly to her. She doesn't respond. I again call softly. Again she doesn't respond. The water is turned off. Knocking on the door, I jiggle its knob. "Don't come in," she says.

I apologize. "You're right," I say. "Sometimes I don't listen like I should." I offer to make her favorite black olive scrambled eggs. "You must be hungry." When she again doesn't answer, I go back downstairs, get an apple out of the refrigerator, munch on it furiously, then race upstairs to confront her as she exits naked from the bathroom, carrying what she'd worn to the fundraiser - jeans, underwear, and the tan cashmere sweater I'd given her two weeks ago on her twenty-eighth birthday.

Dumping her jeans and underwear on the bedroom's upholstered armchair, she gets a flannel nightgown from her part of the closet and quickly puts it on. She's carefully folding the cashmere sweater, when suddenly she bursts out laughing. "This is silly. I've done nothing I shouldn’t have done. I told you about Sundazi. I didn't make a secret commitment to Minzeezi. And I haven't tried to hide from you that I'm thinking seriously about helping him to get his clinic built. That's what we both want, isn't it?" she said.

“Of course, it's what we both want," I say.

Throwing her arms around my neck, she gives me the wettest, most eye-popping kiss I'd ever gotten from her, knocking both of us down on the bed. Stripping off our clothes, we make great, joyful, exhausting love and fall peacefully asleep in one another's arms. Then abruptly I wake up. Untangling myself from her, I go to the bathroom. She's awake, when I come back to bed. I glance at the clock. It's almost four-thirty. She can't keep her eyes open, she says. I can't fall back to sleep. "I'm worried about Minzeezi," I say.

"You're jealous," she mumbles, rolling against me, hooking her arm across my chest.

"I don't trust him," I say

Groggily she snorts something that doesn't sound defensive or annoyed, which gives me courage to tell her how humiliated I am that she's still debating whether to choose me over him. "Suppose the situation is reverse," I say, "and I have to decide between you and some other woman. How would you feel, if I couldn't make up my mind?"

"That's not what's happening," she says.

"It's happening to me," I say, "so I'm warning you I intend to do everything I can to prevent you from going anywhere with him."

Instantly she's wide-awake and making disapproving faces at me, despite my clumsy attempt to explain I didn't mean to insult her, that my tremendous panic about losing her is my fault not hers, that humiliated is an overstatement, and that disappointed is more accurate and less hurtful, because I'm deeply disappointed she hasn't talked openly to me about Sundazi, which, in an outraged voice, I blame on Minzeezi.

Pushing me roughly away from her, she bounces off the bed.

"This proves it," she screams. "You don't respect me. You don't respect me as a woman. You don't accept I can make decisions as a woman on my own. What you want to do is to control me, and don't try to deny it, because your only choice, if I do decide to go to Sundazi, and you sincerely want me to come back to you, is to stop telling me what to do. Is that too much to ask?"

Out of bed and on my feet, shouting so loud I shock both of us, I passionately remind her how splendid our days together have been, pointing out that she often jumps to the wrong conclusion about something I say or hope to do, that she's been too quick on too many occasions to condemn me if I even mildly disagree with her, and that I don't want to control her, have never wanted to control her, and wouldn't try to control her if I could, but I can't.

That we'd get ourselves into this bitter argument about Minzeezi and Sundazi doesn't make sense. We're in love with one another.

Certainly I'm in love with her.

Yet too much has changed between us I don't understand. Wasn't the first time I saw her, on that fantastic Tuesday night in downtown L.A. at the Ambrose Franklin Forum, a genuine miracle? Shouldn't we be grateful for it and stop acting as if it's no longer important to us?

2.

Keep in mind the Ambrose Franklin doesn’t have a proscenium, or a curtain, that its audience sits in semi-circular rows, that at twenty minutes-to-eight the auditorium was filling up rapidly, and that many of its seats were already occupied.

When I spotted Billie, she was coming toward me along the crowded aisle we both sere sitting in. Navigating around a group of early arrivals, she squeeze past a heavy-set man, who suddenly wined, pulled sharply back from her, and pointed down at his foot, which she’d apparently stepped on. Despite her obvious and immediate apology, he rocked irritably out of his seat, indicating with agitated gestures he’s gotten up to gie her more room, though his large belly was now blocking most of the aisle.

Looking radiantly beautiful, Billie towered over the heavy-set man. At five-ten and a half, was I tall enough for her? Would she tower over me? What about those long arms, her long neck? Was her height being accentuated by her tight-fitting, sleeveless, dark green dress and closely cropped golden hair? A rare beauty, I decided. Arriving at her seat, she lowered herself regally into it and smiled a gentle, embarrassed smile.

How significant was it that we were sitting in the same row, Row G, the lucky number seven row? Should I have taken seriously the unobstructed view I had of her as another favorable omen? Though she was on the far side of the Franklin’s stage that jutted out into the audience, only when a certain fidgety person, halfway between her and me, turned his oversized head in the wrong direction, did I have to stretch up in my seat to see what she was doing. Otherwise, I could look at her whenever I wanted, which was often.

Definitely not true was what my friend Al Kipper has been saying about the pink shaft of light that was supposedly shining on her head. There was no pink shaft of light on anybody’s head. I might have said I saw an aura from her, or an unusual radiance that seemed very mysterious to me but he’s exaggerated totally out of proportion what I told him, and a lot of people, many of whom we’ve both known for a long time, believe him over me, which is ridiculous, because I was in the Ambrose Franklin, and he wasn’t.

Important Questions about The Twelve O’clock’s Principal Characters:

Why does the narrator, an ambitious but uncompromising real estate appraiser, think a discontented press deputy / graduate student is perfect for him, when she’s tempted to run away to Africa with her anthropology teacher? Why is this teacher so eager for her to go to Africa with him? And why does someone attempt to intimidate the teacher by putting a baby rattlesnake in his pajamas? Also, why is the narrator’s neighbor, a stockbroker, trying to impregnate the two women he shares an apartment with? Why do these women want to get pregnant by the same man? And why have they been competing with one another to get pregnant first?

Why does the narrator’s best friend, a talented aspiring actor, who is unable to act on stage or in front of a camera, act so brilliantly in getting himself fired from his job as a parking garage attendant?

Why do four or more boys (young men) parade a 15-year-old girl through the neighborhood, mauling her enormous breasts, fingering her vulva, mindlessly taking advantage of her rebelliousness, desperate need for love, and misunderstood sexual desires.

Why has the narrator’s hoped-for client, a hugely successful shopping center developer, at age 56, after a 32-year-career as builder and manager of shopping centers, including the shopping center the actor gets fired from, lately concluded his centers have done more harm than good, putting major doubt in his head about the methods he’s endorsed to build, manage, and promote them? And, why, when the developer admits his company’s strategy toward low-wage, unskilled, untrained workers is designed to take advantage of and profit from even the harshest inequalities created by differences in class, culture, race, education, and gender, has he continued to insist class warfare doesn’t exist and is not inevitable?

The Twelve O’clock is a comic novel about the pursuit of sex, love, power and magic by the above-described cast of characters, unsuspecting victims of not only deader-than-a-doornail corporate capitalism but also politicians and lobbyists who claim to promote jusice and democracy and produce instead baby steps to class warfare.

3.

The play that night was called THE SERVANT OF or TO TWO MASTERS. The playwright's name, if I remember correctly, was Gondoli, somebody Gondoli, Gino or Mario Gondoli. The play's plot is what its title says it is. A rich guy has a servant. He doesn't know the servant is also working for another rich guy. Both rich guys abuse the servant outrageously. The servant survives by outfoxing the rich guys who are dumber than he is. One of the rich guys turns out to be a woman disguised as a man, who's been trying to track down her long-lost lover, the other rich guy.

A farce, played in the commedia dell'arte style, which meant lots of noise, movement, and surprises, it starred Ronnie Blatt, a talented and very funny actor, artist, musician, acrobat, and juggler. As the servant, he was all of the above, standing on his head, juggling dishes of various shapes and sizes, playing at least a half dozen musical instruments in a sensational, crowd-pleasing performance, except, as I think about it now, much of what he did with such ease and grace is extremely hazy in my mind, partly because my fascination with Billie in her dark green dress had completely overwhelmed me.

"The stage is that way," my date, Margaret Roland, whispered. She'd noticed me staring into the audience. "Who are you looking at?"

"Who?" I said, also whispering.

She nodded. "You're looking at somebody, aren't you? Who?"

I didn't reply. On stage the servant was doing cartwheels. I glanced toward Billie. She was watching him with a wonderful, innocent look on her lovely face. In a hoarse whisper Margaret said: "I'm going to get up and leave if you don't tell me. And you know I'll do it."

"No, please," I said. The woman sitting in front of us turned her head slightly as if she'd heard what we'd been whispering and was annoyed by it.

"Watch me," Margaret said, narrowing her heavily mascaraed eyes and peering at the audience. "Some woman, isn't it? You take me out, and look at somebody else. What kind of game is this? I have feelings. I've been hurt enough no matter what you think of me."

Again I didn't answer. The man in the next seat flicked a nervous smile at us. "If it's a woman, say so,” she said, “and that's it. I promise. All I'm asking is to know where I stand. Is that unreasonable?" Her whisper was stronger and more emphatic. One of the masters on stage was ordering the servant to do something for him. I glanced at Margaret. How can I distract her, get her to watch the play instead of me?

"See that guy?" I said finally, pointing toward the auditorium's rear rows that were shrouded in such serious gloom I couldn't make out anybody who was sitting so far way from us. The man to my right put his finger over his lips, warning us we were distracting him from the play.

"Which guy?" she said.

"Next to last row," I whispered forcefully as if I could actually see somebody in the next to last row, which I couldn't. "With the big hair and the bow tie." Noticing Billie was laughing along with the rest of the audience, I laughed.

"Where?" Margaret said. When I hesitated, she repeated in a loud whisper: "Where?"

"Two seats in. From the aisle." My whisper sounded strained.

She leaned forward, shook her head. "Too dark. Can't see him. Can't see anybody." When I tried to look puzzled as if I couldn't understand why she couldn't see him, she stared at me suspiciously. "I don't appreciate being treated like you think you're putting something over on me, which you're not."

I took a deep breath. "He owes me money," I said, barely able to get the words out of my mouth. Someone shushed at us.

"Oh?" she said, lowering her whisper, sounding calmer suddenly.

"A lot of money."

There was another huge laugh from the audience. "How much is a lot?" she said.

4.

During the six weeks I'd been dating Margaret she'd often talked to me about money. A dancer by profession with loads of stage, movie, and tv credits, she'd made up her mind, she said, to make a fortune before she was thirty-five and was investing whatever she could scrape together in the stock market. "I'm salting it away."

She also seemed to know everybody in showbiz, and that was very attractive to me. Too bad she always looked so disappointed when I arrived to pick her up as if she'd been expecting somebody else but instead was stuck with me.

A great looking woman, she had thick brown hair with natural red highlights in it. Her olive skin was smooth and, above her shoulders, unblemished. Her strong nose was straight and slender. Her mouth was definitely kissable, soft and full-lipped. She didn't smile too much around me but whenever we bumped into somebody she knew from having worked with them, especially if she thought they could get her a job, she unhesitatingly showed them what she rarely showed me, her brilliantly sparkling teeth.

I wish we hadn't been so formal and reserved with one another. I can think of only one time, for maybe three or four terrific hours, when we both were genuinely relaxed and spontaneous, the night I took her to dinner at Hayden-Gluck's on Hollywood Boulevard.

That morning Martin Longhi, the choreographer who'd been such a strong influence in Margaret’s life had called her from Las Vegas. "Out of the blue," she said. "I'm thrilled. It's been too long. Do you know Martin? Do you know Judi, his wife?"

"I've seen them on television," I said.

"Wonderful people. Very good to me."

Longhi's wife was Judith Mills Rosen, the documentary photographer, who'd made a sensation with a photographic expose of the garment industry in Mexico City. "Also took a million pictures of me," Margaret said. "A joke mostly, but they're marvelous and very flattering." She laughed. "Am I blushing? I should be."

A waiter arrived to take our order. She wanted pork chops. I couldn't make up my mind; finally decided on pot roast and red cabbage.

"Traveled with them for almost two years. His chief assistant on every show in South America and the two he did in Paris. Never should have split like we did. Could have worked it out if we'd tried harder, but we didn't."

Margaret's pork chops looked grand. "Perfect," she said, sniffing them. I told her I'd always been a big fan of red cabbage. She asked to taste it. I loaded my fork and held it out to her. Licking the fork clean, she began to chew slowly.

"You approve?" I said.

She grinned, revealing those gorgeous teeth, wiping away the solemn hurt she usually carried on her pretty face.

"Good choice," she said, winking at me. I gave her more of my red cabbage, which, along with the pork chops, a heaping mound of mashed potatoes, and a generous mixture of carrots and squash, she ate ravenously. Before I'd half-finished the pot roast, there wasn't a scrap of anything left on her plate. The waiter returned. I was on my last bite. She was sitting back in her chair, watching me, with pleasure, I think. As he started to clear the dishes, he asked if either of us wanted dessert. "Not for me," I said, looking to Margaret.

She glanced up at the waiter, then at me. "I'm not into sweets," she said, "but I would like something."

"Sure," I said. "What?"

"Another order of pork chops."

5.

The intensity and passion with which she devoured those pork chops she never again even hinted at on any of our subsequent, subdued, unemotional dates until that night, at the Franklin, when she became so incensed about the non-existent deadbeat who supposedly had borrowed money from me. "No telephone number for him, or address?" she asked, struggling to control the disapproval she was obviously feeling.

"None. He moved without telling me."

"That's so awful, to do something like that, when you have an obligation. Lend money, lose a friend. I've had the same experience," she said, again peering into the gloom of the Franklin's next-to-last row. "I still can't see him."

Meanwhile, I was taking quick peeks at Billie, who looked, from where I was sitting, as if she were completely engrossed in the play, laughing as hard as everybody else in the audience, as on stage Ronnie Blatt, the servant, was making extravagantly contemptuous gestures behind the back of one of his rich-guy employers.

At intermission Margaret insisted we rush to the lounge at the rear of the auditorium to track down the deadbeat. We also searched the inner and outer lobbies. Having invented him, I wasn't surprised we didn't find him. "Must've seen you coming," she said, glancing around the lobby. When she noticed the men's room was directly across from us, immediately I knew what she was thinking: that she'd discovered the villain's hiding place, and that I was elected to check it out.

The men's room was crowded. I had to wait before I could get to a urinal. Then I took extra time washing and drying my hands. When I returned to the lobby and told her what I'd found, that he wasn't in the men's room, she gave me such a disappointed look I felt bitterly ashamed. How can I continue doing this to her? I thought. I've lied. I'm still lying, which I hate to do, even in self-defense, except Billie is worth it, isn't she? Suddenly I realized I hadn't seen Billie since we'd left the auditorium. I began to worry that she and her escort - I haven't mentioned her escort before - had decided to skip the rest of the play. Then she'd be lost to me forever.

"I need to go," Margaret said, grinning uncomfortably. While I waited for her in the lobby, she hurried to the women's room. As chimes were being sounded, that the second act was about to begin, she reappeared, moving quickly toward me. A few steps behind her, smiling gloriously, looking impossibly gorgeous, also coming directly at me, was the golden-haired Billie.

Instantly my heart was pounding so loud I was sure Margaret could hear it. For about thirty seconds I couldn't breathe, my body stiffened so I couldn't move, and my stricken face, I knew, was showing in unmistakable detail the infatuation and massive guilt I was feeling. Margaret picked up both instantly, staring with disbelieving eyes at me, then at Billie as she walked swiftly past us, disappearing through the open lobby doors into the auditorium.

"It's her, isn't it?" Margaret snarled, pointing first to Billie, then at my nose. "That's who you were looking at, not some slob who owes you money. There's no slob, right? The whole thing is one hundred percent about her. Admit it. Tell me you don't give a damn what happens to me. I'm nothing to you and never will be. You can have her, and she can have you if she even knows you exist, which you can bet she doesn't because you're too small and insignificant for anybody who has half a brain in her head, which I do, and you don't." Tears were streaming down her cheeks. I tried to put my arms around her. She punched me in the stomach. "I'm getting out of here," she shouted.

"No, wait, you can't. There's one more act," I said, stumbling after her, as she stormed across the outer lobby into the street. "Where are you going?"

"Home," she shrieked, eyes blazing, "and you're taking me. Right now!"

6.

The trip in the car was dismal. Intermittently she screamed at me, calling me the worst, most selfish, self-centered, unfeeling person she'd known in her entire life. "Don't you realize how rotten and miserable you are?" She shook her fist at me. Trying not to provoke her, I purposefully didn't apologize because I knew she wouldn't believe anything I said. The only time I dared to open my mouth was when she started on Billie who, from my standpoint, was a completely innocent party and wouldn't have been involved with Margaret or me, if I didn't have such an overly stimulated imagination about falling in love with somebody who might be willing to fall in love with me.

Margaret lived in Beverly Hills, south of Wilshire. Her Monterey-style, two-story apartment building had full-length, covered balconies on each story, a thick, neatly trimmed lawn, and an outside staircase to the second balcony. Though she warned me, as we were both getting out of the car, to stay away from her, I followed her across the lawn and up the staircase. Her apartment door was at the far end of the balcony. Glaring fiercely at me, she unlocked the door, pushed it open, squeezed past it, then slammed it in my face. Mortified at being rejected so brusquely, even if I did deserve it, I was about to pound on the door to tell her how wrong and irresponsible I was, when suddenly it was yanked open from the inside, and Hector, her wildly affectionate Labrador, came bounding out of the apartment, pouncing on me ecstatically, as Margaret thrust his leash into my outstretched hand. "Walk him," she snapped, slamming the door shut again.

For twenty minutes Hector and I romped around the block. I couldn't have denied him what probably was the last chance for us to frolic together.

Demonstrating how delighted he was to see me, he kept leaping on my arms and shoulders, slobbering kisses on my face, getting his leash repeatedly entangled around my ankles, while grinning joyously as he hit every tree, bush, and blade of grass from one end of the street to the other.

When we got back to Margaret's apartment building, we sat on the bottom steps of the outside staircase and had an intimate conversation. While he whimpered grumpily, I told him the story of my life. I’m a total flop, I said. Look what I've done to Margaret. My pal Al says I'm not neurotic enough for women like her. Stick to your own kind, he says, somebody who doesn't know Freud from a pickle. Hector rubbed his head against my chest. Maybe I won't see you again. That could happen if she doesn't change her mind. Hector growled. It's not my choice so you shouldn't be mad at me.

Tail between his legs, head slumped, face depressed and minus its grin, he followed me up the stairs, then moped after me until we arrived at Margaret's front door.

Getting down on my knees, I hugged him, which seemed to revive his spirits slightly. Then I knocked on the door. Almost immediately it was pulled open.

Reaching out, showing only her right arm to me, Margaret grabbed the leash. Hector gave me one more sweet, unhappy look and walked dejectedly into the apartment, as Margaret, still concealed behind the door, began to close it again, this time easing it shut.

"I'll call you," I said lamely to the closed door. Inside the apartment Hector barked. I barked back, then, feeling dejected myself, quietly departed.

7.

My first idea, after getting into the car, was to stop at Schubert's Parlor, a late-night, meeting-and-eating place on Sunset Boulevard. I needed cheering up. My friend Alonzo (Al) Kipper, whose acting name was A. Lonzo Kipp, was a Schubert regular, which meant he showed up at Schubert's six nights a week. Schubert's was closed on Mondays.

As I started up La Cienega, I began to worry Al might say something nasty about Margaret that would make me even more depressed so I decided to go straight home.

Home for me was a courtyard apartment off Holloway Drive. In my section of the courtyard there were two buildings, facing one another, with two apartments in each building, and a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room downstairs and a bedroom and a bath upstairs in each apartment. I also had a small, fenced back yard and a narrow garage. I drove into the garage carefully.

Sometimes the back door lock got stuck, and the key couldn't unstick it. Tonight, when I was feeling so miserable after my disastrous date with Margaret, it happened. No matter what I did with the key, how much I wiggled it, how hard I pushed and shook it, the lock wouldn't budge. I considered walking around the building to the front door but that seemed too wishy-washy to me. Doesn't a key have the responsibility to get its door open? Am I, a strong, fundamentally reasonable man, supposed to roll over for a sticky lock? With these thoughts in mind, I slipped the key back into the lock, gave a gentle twist, and presto the door swung open.

The kitchen light I'd left on, and also the lamp beside the couch in the living room. I put some water up to boil, ran upstairs to the bathroom, came back down as quickly as I could, and made myself a cup of tea. Dousing the kitchen and the living room lights, I carried the tea up to the bedroom.

The brown tweed jacket I’d worn that night was too tight and pinched my shoulders, making me look as if I'd been stuffed into it. This may sound silly, but I think that jacket and the distorted way it made me look had contributed to my debacle with Margaret. I just didn't feel comfortable wearing it anymore. As I was hanging it up, I seriously considered exiling it to the back of the closet to which I'd already consigned my faded, moth-eaten maroon bathrobe and the much-too-big plaid mackinaw sent to me by my cousin Edgar Rubenstein, who owned and managed a mackinaw manufacturing company in Medford, New Hampshire.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I was having trouble unknotting my tie, when I noticed that the shade on the bedroom window behind the bed was only half pulled down. As I reached over my pillow to grab the shade, I glanced toward Mrs. Haber's apartment, diagonally across the courtyard from mine. Her living room windows were ablaze with light. Why did this seem so odd to me? It took me a couple of seconds to realize that the drapes and the shades had been stripped from the windows. I couldn't believe it. I also couldn't believe that two guys I'd never seen before were carrying Mrs. Haber's dining room table out of her apartment. "They're doing it again," I said aloud. "What nerve these people have!"

Six months ago somebody had backed a truck up to another tenant's apartment, while the tenant was at work, and cleaned out everything he owned, except an old pair of hiking boots that were too worn-out to steal. "They're not getting away with it," I said, also aloud.

Immediately I called the cops.

"How can I help you?" a voice said.

As I breathlessly described what was happening to Mrs. Haber's furniture, the same two men carried a second table from the apartment; then a woman appeared with a chair.

"Are you sure they're burglars?" the telephone voice said

"What do you mean?

"Well, they could be anybody, couldn't they?"

I described how the other tenant had lost his entire household, including every stitch of clothing, except his worn-out boots.

Apparently the voice wasn't impressed. "Look," he said, I thought, condescendingly, "this is a very busy place. We don't have people we can just send out unless we're absolutely certain a crime is being committed. That makes sense, doesn't it?"

"No."

"Are you telling me you know for a fact these guys definitely are burglars?"

"I didn't say that."

"Exactly," he said, "because you don't really know whether they're burglars, or some friends of the family, helping this woman to move."

"Then what should I do?" I said, trying to remain calm.

"Ask them."

"Ask them?"

"How else can you find out?"

"Let me get this straight," I said. "You want me to go to these people and ask them if they're stealing Mrs. Haber’s furniture?"

"No, absolutely not. What you have to do is talk to them, size them up. There could be a very logical explanation that has nothing to do with them stealing anything."

"Suppose they say yes."

"Yes, what?"

"That they are stealing her furniture?"

"Then there's no problem. Call me back."

"Call you back? Is this what you want me to say to Mrs. Haber when she gets home and sees what they've done to her apartment, that you won't send anybody to find out who they are unless they're dumb enough to tell me they’re stealing her furniture?"

"Best I can do," he said and hung up.

Now I was really worried about Mrs. Haber. It doesn't make sense, as far as I'm concerned, to ask these people if they're burglars. I'm not a cop, but I refuse to turn my back on what these people are obviously doing to her, no matter what that guy on the phone says about the cops being too busy to find out who they are and why they're taking her furniture.

Mrs. Haber was a widow. I'd had maybe a dozen conversations with her. She'd lived in the courtyard for over twenty years since shortly after her husband Izak died. Once she invited me to her apartment for coffee, muffins, and marmalade jam. She'd made both the muffins and the jam, but clearly wasn't a very attentive baker or jam-maker. Her coffee was also too bitter for me. As a talker, she was impressive and powerful. Even her gestures were intimidating. To stop me from interrupting her, she'd snap her fingers in my face, or whistle and hold up her hand like a traffic cop, or guffaw so loudly she'd permanently distract me from what I'd been trying to say to her.

Occasionally her son Stefan showed up. He'd studied at Oxford and taught for three semesters at Holmtwist College in Maine. Each time I saw him, he was drunk. They had terrible rows, shouting at one another, he threatening violence, she vowing noisily to have him locked up. One morning she appeared with a large bruise on her left cheek. "He did it," she said. "Get him started, and he doesn't stop." She also had a daughter, Lillian. A mathematics teacher at a community college in Anaheim, she'd been married four times and had children from each of her husbands, a grand total of six, two boys and four girls. The complete opposite of Stefan, she was quiet, smiley, thoughtful, and polite. I also noticed she blushed easily. "Can I depend on her? It’s not possible," Mrs. Haber said. Lillian had had two nervous breakdowns, both short-lived. "The children suffer. They always do."

8.

When Mrs. Haber went out of town, to Lillian's in Anaheim, or to her sister Brenda's in Newark, New Jersey, she'd knock on my door and ask me to keep an eye on her place, "if it's not too much trouble." Well, something was happening, these people were emptying out her apartment, and didn't I have a responsibility to fulfill my promise to her? Grabbing a sweater, slipping it over my head, I hurried downstairs to the front door, eased it open, and stepped out into the courtyard. From where I was standing I had a clear, deep view into Mrs. Haber's living room. Gone were her overstuffed, high-backed sofa, her cherry-wood coffee table, which she valued so much, the gold-trimmed side chairs she'd bought in Paris, and the tall, aquamarine Chinese vase she and Izak had brought back from Hong Kong.

To get a better look into the apartment, I started down the courtyard path toward the street. Moving slowly, as I passed the drapeless front windows, I could see three men and one woman, a mixed assortment of furniture, and numerous cardboard boxes of various sizes. The woman and one of the men were packing the boxes. I didn't recognize any of the men or the woman. She certainly wasn't Lillian, and none of the men was Stefan. Despite the strong advice I'd gotten from the police telephone dispatcher to talk to them, I couldn't bring myself to do it. How would I know if anything they told me was true? On the street, at the foot of the courtyard path, was a huge moving van, packed with Mrs. Haber's furniture, her dark blue refrigerator, her chopping-block table, and her shiny chrome stove. My heart sank. What do I do now? I asked myself.

Glancing up toward Sunset Boulevard, I saw at the corner, on the opposite side of the street from the courtyard, sitting on his parked motorcycle, apparently watching traffic on Sunset, was a uniformed County Sheriff. We're saved, Mrs. Haber, I said, also to myself, as I rushed up the block to the corner, waved excitedly at the Sheriff, then started across the street toward him.

He wasn't sympathetic. I could tell from the disinterested look on his face he'd already heard too many stories like Mrs. Haber's. When I'd finished describing the furniture that was being stolen, he said irritably: "Call the Police."

"I've already called them. They won't come."

"So what do you expect me to do about it?"

"See those guys," I said, pointing toward the two men who were loading Mrs. Haber's sideboard into the van. "And that woman?" A woman had arrived with a large box and was handing it to one of the men in the van. "Would you please go down there, on your bike, of course, and ask any one of them if what they're doing has been approved by Mrs. Haber? If they tell you she's told them to do it, then I'm completely satisfied, and you won't hear from me again."

His immediate answer was no, no, no, he was a County Sheriff, and it wasn't his beat to do something like that, but I persisted and pleaded and told him how desperate I was to fulfill my solemn obligation to Mrs. Haber. "Everything I've tried to do for her is a failure."

Reluctantly, very, very reluctantly, he gunned his bike and cruised slowly down Holloway toward the van, with me, crossing back to the courtyard side of the street, running as fast as I could after him.

I was halfway to the van, when he made a u-turn. Pulling up beside the van, he leaned toward the woman and said something to her.

Whatever she replied obviously was okay with him. Heading back toward Sunset, picking up speed as he roared past me, he gave me the index-finger-to-thumb, All Is Well/ Mind Your Own Business sign, and that was it. The deed was being done, and I was powerless to stop it.

9.

To avoid the van, and, more importantly, the people I was still convinced were stealing Mrs. Haber's furniture, I walked rapidly back to my apartment via the access road that ran behind the courtyard's buildings. I was pushing open the gate to my backyard, when I heard someone say in a mellow, English-accented voice: "Hi there, neighbor." It was Dora Spencer-Higgins. Recently Dora and her friend Lulu Bogg and the man they shared, Howard Neville, had rented the next-door apartment. "Lovely evening, isn't it?"

"Not for me," I said, explaining briefly what had happened to Mrs. Haber’s furniture and how frustrated I was not being able to do anything to stop the burglars from stealing it. "The police are useless," I said, "totally uncooperative."

Coming up behind us were Lulu and Howard. In the garage next to mine they'd parked Lulu's car. Giggling affectionately as she grabbed my hand and yanked me into their backyard, "I'm pregnant," Lulu said.

"You can have coffee with us," Dora said.

Howard made the coffee. "Found out I'm pregnant Friday night," Lulu said. "How do I feel? Fine, terrific, never better, except Dora is jealous, which I don't blame her for, because she's always wanted to be first."

"I'm not jealous. I'm envious. In case we can't afford two babies at one time, which is possible," Dora said, "I might have to wait."

Lulu took me upstairs to see the custom bed they'd just bought. It was the same length as a queen-sized bed, ten inches wider than a king. Pushing me down on the bed, throwing herself on top of me, she gave me such a remarkable kiss on my mouth I could barely breathe. Leaning back her head, she peered mischievously into my eyes. "You like it?" she said.

"I like the kiss."

"How about the bed?" she said, wriggling off me. Before I could answer about the bed, or push myself out of it, she turned abruptly away from me and headed downstairs. Scrambling to my feet, I was about to rush after her, when suddenly, from the kitchen, I heard a loud burst of laughter. What had she said about me that made them laugh like that? I certainly hadn't enticed her to jump on top of me, and the kiss she gave me was her idea, not mine.

Admittedly I'd had a small, physical response that was entirely unintentional and so mild it didn't seem possible she would have noticed it enough to ridicule me for being aroused without implicating herself. If I could have escaped out the second-story bedroom window and avoided seeing her again, I would have done it, gladly. Instead, expecting to be laughed at the instant I showed my face, I crept quietly down the stairs, arriving in the kitchen, as Howard was wiping up the floor, the legs of several chairs, the stove, and the cabinet under the sink. He'd accidentally knocked over a carton of milk, he said. Milk had splattered everywhere. "You must've heard them laughing at me."

"Laughing at you?" I said

"Of course, at him," Lulu said. "He did it, didn't he?"

"That's not funny," Howard said. "I didn't do it on purpose. You'd think I'd get some sympathy." Lulu got down on her knees beside him. Putting her arms around his neck, she gently hugged him. Then Dora asked my opinion of their new mattress.

"Howard hates it," Lulu said, pushing away from him.

"I don't hate it," he said.

"You don't like it," she said.

"Too soft," he said, looking to me. "It's breaking my back."

"But three adults in a queen-size bed didn't work," Dora said, "especially if one person refuses to relax."

"And I'm the person, right?" Lulu said.

"She doesn't like other people to sleep if she can't," Dora said.

"That's so untrue," Lulu said. "I may be nervous in bed, but I'm also neat and cuddly, and never in my life have I tried to stop anybody from sleeping if they wanted to sleep."

"Except Howard and me," Dora said.

"Oh, come on. You're much worse than I am," Lulu said, "and so is he." Howard was at the sink. He'd finished cleaning up the milk and was rinsing out the sponges he'd used. He began teasing Lulu about her more objectionable sleeping habits, which included, he said, eating, singing, and “jumping idiotically like she’s the only one in bed.”

"I don't jump in bed," Lulu said, grinning innocently. "Do I?"

The conversation switched to Lulu's pregnancy and the new responsibilities they were all going to have. He might need a second job, Howard said, especially if Dora also got pregnant. Dora said she had enough savings to pay for her share of their expenses for at least a year, and Lulu said she could probably get a loan from her brother in England. They'd definitely have to move, which wasn't a problem for any of them. They'd want two baths and three bedrooms, and a house would be preferable to an apartment. They all talked enthusiastically about buying a house.

These were such remarkable people. Discounting the kiss Lulu had given me, they seemed to love one another openly, casually, without guilt or regret, as if threesomes like theirs were a dime a dozen. "It's against my code to hide behind anything," Dora said, "no matter who disapproves of me or Lulu or the man of my dreams who's going to give me a baby tonight if possible."

Howard was smiling sweetly at her. "More coffee?" he said, filling my cup. Six-foot-two tall, slender as a string bean, bald as a cucumber, with dangling arms that reached below his knees, huge hands, huge feet, no neck, birdlike shoulders, intriguing buck teeth, and loving-cup ears, Howard possessed so much warmth and unpretentiousness he could charm anybody he turned his attention to.

What a catch for intense, ambitious, determined Dora and giggly, scatter-brained, manipulative, flirtatious Lulu. Both were barely five-foot-two. As Dora walked her jaunty walk, her thick, wavy, brown hair bounced rhythmically off the tops of her broad shoulders. Lulu was short-red-haired, green-eyed, and pasty-faced. A rapid, breathless talker, she did marvelous, sensual things with her thick-lipped, fleshy mouth, which caused me to smile excessively at her. Will I get another kiss? I wondered, as I was preparing to leave, having finished off my second cup of coffee. Dora pecked my cheek. Howard gave me an extravagant hug, while Lulu remained on the opposite side of the kitchen and wiggled her fingers at me.

10.

It was after midnight by the time I got back to my bedroom. The burglars, I saw, were gone. The lights in Mrs. Haber's apartment had been turned out, and her courtside windows were dark. Poor Mrs. Haber, I thought. She goes away without telling me she'd be gone, and look what happens. Imagine the shock she'll get, when she comes back. For my own sake, so I can sleep tonight, I was determined to put her out of my head, forget how the police had mistreated me, and accept that my failure to stop the burglary wasn't my fault. What else could I have done to prevent those people from stealing her furniture?

Pulling down the shade, I undressed quickly, took care of my bathroom needs, and got into bed. The soft light from the glass-shaded lamp beside the bed gave an eerie glow to the room. Lying on my back, I stared at the pale, textured ceiling and began to think about my next-door neighbors and the closeness and harmony they'd created for themselves. Lulu's kiss, I didn't understand at all. Actually I'd expected her to make a joke or tease me about it, but she didn't even mention it, or hint at it, or give me any indication it had ever happened, or could have happened, or that she would have wanted it to happen, which confused me. Should I be worried? If only I hadn't told her I liked the kiss, though I did like it, and I liked her mouth and the feel of her body on me, none of which I wanted to think about anymore.

That got me back to Margaret and how shamefully I'd treated her. Imagine being out with some person who spends the entire evening ogling somebody else. I'd be furious if it had happened to me. And then to have that person lie about doing it and claim to feel hurt and rejected, as I had done, when I clearly deserved having more than the door slammed in my face.

My excuse, of course, was Billie. Switching off the lamp, I lay in the dark, trying to bring her shadowy image into sharper focus. What I recollected most was her golden hair and fleeting shots of her in action, much more vague than I would have hoped for, which made me wonder if I'd even recognize her again. This sobering thought woke me from my dozing. Where should I start to look for her? To put an ad in a newspaper, pleading with her to contact me, sounded futile and dumb. I could ask, I suppose, at the Ambrose Franklin box office if they had the name and address and telephone number of the woman who that night had sat in a certain fifth-row seat, the number of which I didn't know. They'd think I was out of my mind, right? Like Mrs. Haber's furniture, Billie had vanished from my life. I get one microscopic, wafer-thin chance at what my heart tells me is true love, and immediately it disintegrates before I can take advantage of it. Maybe I should call Margaret and apologize. Instead I demonstrate my deep-rooted shallowness and insincerity by expunging her from my head to concentrate solely on Billie, as a distant voice that sounds like mine is singing softly:

I think I love you.
But don’t know your name.
What can I do
to find you again?
Where are you now?
O my, what a shame,
to lose you forever
and not know your name.

Zonk! Snore.

11.

The next morning the first thing I did was to open the front door, go out into the courtyard, and look into Mrs. Haber's apartment. Though I'd been expecting it to be empty, seeing it empty was a shock. Nothing whatsoever had been left behind, including her black and brown doormat with WELCOME written on it in Chinese.

Now I had to do a very sad duty on her behalf. Call Reggie at the Management Office. "Got rotten news," I said.

"Yeah?" he said. "What?"

"Someone took Mrs. Haber's furniture," I said.

"So?" he said, sounding unreasonably cheerful.

"You know about it?" I said.

"Of course, I know about it," he said. "She moved."

"Moved? Where to?"

"Daughter's in Anaheim."

“Daughter's in Anaheim?” I said. That she’d be willing to move to her daughter’s in Anaheim after she’d been so critical of her “undisciplined life style” shocked me. He gave me the daughter’s address and telephone number, but I was too annoyed at Mrs. Haber to copy it down. I also didn't appreciate his laughing nastily at my emotional description of the ordeal I'd gone through with the police, when I was so desperately trying to convince them the furniture movers were burglars who were stealing her furniture.

“She hired them,” he said. “Didn’t consult me, except I did agree to open the apartment for them, so she could get an early start on her vacation in Bermuda."

"Bermuda!," I said.

"Two weeks before she goes to Anaheim. Deserves it, doesn't she? Worn out from being alone so much since Mr. Haber died. Couldn't stand it anymore."

When finally I hung up the phone, I was outraged. While she was having fun in Bermuda, I was battling the police to save her furniture, which didn't need to be saved, because she'd hired somebody, without telling me, to move it to her daughter’s in Anaheim. Angrily I asked myself why hadn't she called or knocked on my door to wish me luck or say goodbye?

The possibility she might have moved hadn't even entered my head. How could I have overlooked that I didn't know all the facts? Was my ego so distorted I automatically presumed she would have talked seriously to me about wanting to move in with her own daughter?

Jumping to the wrong conclusion caused me to suffer intense upset and disillusionment with the cops that could have been avoided. I checked my refrigerator. At the back of the top shelf was one of Mrs. Haber’s walnut cookies. Throw it out, I said aloud, stamp on it, get rid of it, disrespect it as she'd obviously disrespected me.

Instead I decided to eat the cookie later.

12.

At eleven-thirty that morning I had an appointment downtown in the Dundee Pearl Building with Blackman and Blackman, insurance brokers. Built in the nineteen twenties, the six-story, tan-brick, narrow-windowed, flat-roofed Dundee Pearl was a handsome, sensitively designed, high-quality building. Waiting impatiently in its marble-floored, mahogany-paneled lobby outside one of its three elaborately sculptured, brass-doored elevators, I had this vivid premonition that something extraordinary was about to happen to me.

The floor-indicating arrow above the elevator's sliding doors was pointing at four. A half minute later it moved down to three. It took more than a minute before it dropped to two. Forty seconds later, it started down again, moving slowly past M for Mezzanine, stopping finally at L for Lobby, as the brass doors slid open, revealing an exceptionally crowded elevator. First off was a tall, orange-haired woman. She was followed by two men in gray, pin-striped suits, a priest, a man with a bushy black beard, a woman carrying a baby, another man wearing a tan raincoat, four smartly-dressed young women, among whom, looking as spectacularly gorgeous as she had at the Ambrose Franklin, moving with the same obvious calm and grace, not once glancing in my direction, was the golden-haired Billie I'd never expected to see again. Wow!

She was past me and halfway to the building's main exit before I got words enough to call out to her. "Miss! Miss! Please. Wait."

Turning toward me, she smiled quizzically. "Yes?" she said.

"Do you mind?" I said. "I'm sorry. I have to ask."

"Ask what?" she said, looking doubtful, her smile fading.

"Didn't I see you last night at the theatre?" I said.

Her eyes narrowed. "What theatre?" she said.

"The Ambrose Franklin."

"The Ambrose Franklin?" Her face instantly broke into a broad grin. "The Servant of Two Masters?" I nodded enthusiastically. "Wasn't it wonderful?" she said. "And isn't the servant great?"

"No matter what those bosses do to him, how much they try to beat him down, he's still the master of his own spirit. They're on one side, and he's
on the other, refusing to give up this terrific vision he has of himself." She laughed, wrinkling her lovely nose at me. "I love how he stood on his head so much."

"And twirled those batons," I said.

"And played the trombone with such fury. To prove he's better, smarter, shrewder, and more independent than they could ever hope to be." She laughed again. "Which is only my opinion, of course."

She gave me a pretty smile. "I'm late," she said. "I've got to run."

"Can we talk again?" I said, thick-voiced and sounding embarrassingly anxious. "I'm downtown a lot. We could have lunch if you're available. Maybe some time this week? Friday? I've got another appointment."

She dug a card from her purse. "Call me Thursday," she said, handing me the card. "About eleven. Okay?"

"Eleven," I said, with a large grin on my face.

Then she hurried off through the Dundee Pearl's main exit into the busy street. Not until she was out of sight did I look at her card. BILLIE COOPER, it said. Printed below her name was a telephone number. Later, after my meeting at Blackman and Blackman, I called Al Kipper from the Dundee Pearl's lobby, described in detail everything I knew about Billie, where I'd first seen her, how she'd walked out of that elevator practically into my arms, and why I was so convinced a miracle had happened to me. "I'm definitely in love," I said, then asked him to meet me at eight thirty at Schubert's Parlor.

"Can't wait," Al said.

13.

Schubert's Parlor was located in a domed building on Sunset Strip that until recently had housed an antique furniture dealer. In converting the dealer's showroom into the Schubert's dining room, maximum advantage was taken of the room's remarkable architectural features, including its curved, floor-to-ceiling, front window, its walnut-stained wood floor, its raised, wood-burning fireplace, and its arched, acoustically-hot ceiling, which sometimes allowed somebody's whispered conversation on one side of the room to be heard clearly by somebody else on the opposite side of the room.

It was said that one Saturday morning, Mimi Stutz, a New York stage designer went to Schubert's with a large pad and a couple drawing pencils and made a rough sketch of the room that became her final interior design. The long, marble-topped buffet, flanked at both ends by a towering concrete vase, containing a fanlike kentia palm, was the central focus of Mimi's original sketch. She put high-backed benches along the curved rear wall and upholstered them in black and tan striped mattress ticking. It was her idea to paint the room a soft, yellowish tan and to cover the wall behind the benches with a tan, marbleized wallpaper. The coffee bar was her design. She also designed the marble-topped, iron-based tables and chose the black director's chairs and the brass, frosted-globe chandelier that hung over the buffet. The only important feature in the entire room that didn't originate with her was the Italian-made, chrome-plated, 1903 espresso machine that John and Chip, the two guys who owned and operated Schubert's Parlor, had found in Greenwich Village and shipped back to L.A.

A showbiz hangout, Schubert's Parlor was almost always crowded and noisy. Many of its customers came regularly and often to meet friends and make business contacts. When I arrived that night, Al was waiting for me at one of the small tables that rimmed the benches along the rear wall. Immediately I could see from his sly, flirtatious expression he'd been attempting to work his magic on the twenty-year-olds at the next table. He already knew their names, Audrey Frost and Pam Bender, that they were both actors, that they'd each been in a low-budget movie, and that they earned their livings in the same profession as dental assistants.

"This guy," he said, introducing me, as I sat in the director's chair opposite him, "no matter what you think of how he looks, and he's not that great looking to begin with, is a world famous, enormously talented and skilled brain surgeon."

“Brain surgeon?” Instantly Pam was intrigued. "Where's your office?" she said, flashing a bright, inviting smile at me.

"Scanlon Building," Al said quickly. The Scanlon Building was Beverly Hills' most prestigious medical address.

"What floor are you on?" Audrey said.

"Third," Al snapped, winking inanely at me.

"Do you know Dr. Rockport?” she said, ignoring Al. “He's my mother's doctor. He's also on the third."

"Bosom buddies," Al said before I could reply.

"Hey," Pam said, thrusting her chin at Al, "she asked him. Let him speak for himself."

"Doesn't have a voice," Al said. "Too many operations in too few days. Dries up the vocal chords." Pam's eyes narrowed. "Is that true?" She was talking to me. Then she turned to Al. "If he can't talk, tell him to whisper something. That won't hurt his vocal chords."

"On the contrary," Al said, slapping his hand over my mouth. "Could ruin them forever. Even the slightest strain on his throat."

"I think you're making this up," Pam said. She glanced at Audrey who was staring at me suspiciously.

"Operated on me," Al said.

"Who did?"

"He did. Frontal lobotomy." Now both women looked suspicious "See that scar," Al said, pointing to a small scar above his left eyebrow that he'd gotten at age five when he walked into a flagpole. "That's where he drilled the hole." First Audrey, then Pam leaned forward to get a closer look at the scar. Audrey actually touched it.

"He took this instrument," Al said, "the size of a miniature button hook, poked it into the hole, grabbed the lobotomy, and yanked it out."

"How big was it?" Audrey said.

"Size of a coconut."

"A coconut? Are you telling us this guy put a button hook in your head and pulled out a coconut?"

"Didn't hurt," Al said. "No fuss. No bother. Not even one spot of blood." He looked to me. "Right, doc?"

"He's not supposed to talk. Remember?" Pam said, eyeing me skeptically, as Audrey was shaking her finger at Al. "I think you're crazy," she said, "that you've got a screw loose someplace, that you get some rotten kick out of insulting a person's intelligence.”

"Kid's got moxie," Al said, as she was pushing to her feet.

"And you need your head examined," Audrey said, making a nasty face at him. Then she paid their check, and they were gone. As soon as their dishes were cleared from the table, another couple, a nervous-eyed woman and a glowering man, replaced them.

14.

"Can we talk about Billie now?" I said.

"Not quite," Al said. He wanted a second cappuccino. I ordered a mocha frost, a specialty of the house. “This morning,” he said, “I started that new job.” He flexed his eyebrows mischievously. Not a good sign, I thought. "First of all,” he said, “I get there at nine o'clock. This guy, who says he's the boss that I don't know from Adam, asks what happened, didn't anybody tell me they start at eight, which is when he says he'd expected to see me. Now, he says, he has to take time out from his busy schedule, which I'm supposed to feel guilty about, to show me how to operate the machine. He sits me down, says okay, Al, just do what I tell you to do, and there won't be a problem. Then he shows me this foot pedal under the machine about three inches above the floor on the left. You push it with your left foot, he says, so I push it with my left foot, and some wheels turn. Then he shows me this lever also on the left and tells me to pull it with my left hand, which is what I do, and more wheels turn. Okay, he says, same with the foot pedal on the right, you push it with your right foot, and the lever on the right you pull with your right hand, and that's the rhythm you get into, push on the left, pull on the left, push on the right, pull on the right. Okay?

"Try it," he says, so I try it, and what I do is just the opposite of what he tells me to do. Instead of starting by pushing on the left, I start by pushing on the right. Wait a minute, wait a minute, he says, you got mixed up, and he goes through the routine again, push, pull, push, pull, first on the left, then on the right. Not too bad if you concentrate, he says. But how can I concentrate? There's no way. This machine's a monster, and I've already made up my mind I don't want anything to do with it. So every time he says left, I do right, and every time he says foot, I do hand, and I'm driving this guy nuts until finally he says, okay, you did your best, and you're just not suited, and he asks me to leave, which I'm prepared to do, except, as soon as he isn't watching me anymore, I sneak back to the machine and do left, left, right, right twenty times in a row to prove to myself I really can do it."

"And that's it?” I say. "Did you tell your sister?" His sister Rhonda's friend, Harry, had recommended him for the job. "He'll probably ask her what happened, won't he?"

"I quit, that's what happened," Al said sharply, his voice seething with anger. "Whatever he’s trying to do to me, I'm not taking it from him, okay? The guy's a creep. She should stay away from him, which is what I've already told her. How can she be that desperate?"

"You still have to talk to her," I said.

"No, no, it's not possible to talk to anybody," he said, suddenly clutching his right knee.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Cramp,” he said. “It's killing me. Can't sit this long. I've got to get out of here."

Schubert's, as usual, was mobbed. It took time to get a check from the waiter; then paying it took more time. Al's agitation seemed to increase. The cramp, he said, was now also in his left knee. With a terrible scowl on his face, he was vigorously rubbing both knees. "I'm in agony," he said. The woman at the next table identified herself as a nurse and offered to call an ambulance for him.

"He'll take care of me," he said, meaning I'd take care of him. Struggling to his feet, he grabbed my arm, leaned heavily against me. The nurse reached for his wrist and tried to feel his pulse. He shook her away from him.

"This could be serious," she said.

"Of course, it's serious. It's always serious, but I can manage," he said, limping with such an exaggerated limp I could hardly hold onto him. Almost magically, Schubert's bedlam hushed, the crowded aisles ahead of us cleared, as he maneuvered me through the dining room, the lobby, and out the front door. Like the star of a hit play, he waved goodbye to customers who were peering at him from the inside the restaurant’s front window. Was he putting them on? Was he putting me on? Were his knee cramps as severe as he claimed? Did they justify his outrageous limp?

15.

"I don’t normally give up my table this early," he groaned, squeezing my arm tightly. Then in less than a block of torturous limping he completely walked off the cramps. "I'm cured," he said, dancing a few fancy steps on his toes, “except they could come back, couldn’t they?” When I accused him of faking the cramps as well as the limp, he rolled his eyes at me, as if he was about to share some big, delectable secret.

“Acting,” he said, a triumphant smile spreading across his face, “to pay them back for what they’ve done to me.” “Them” were the Schubert’s showbiz clientele, “ the same kind of assholes who’ve been denying me a legitimate shot at demonstrating how talented I am.” He detailed his complaints against a producer and a casting director, Schubert’s Parlor customers, who, he said, had undercut him. I was sympathetic and didn’t interrupt, but I’d heard both stories before. He also told me again, for maybe the sixth time, about a guy who was president of one of the major movie studios. He’d met this guy at a party. The guy had said that as soon as he got to be top dog in the studio he didn’t hesitate to “dee-stroy” anybody who’d tried to stop him from getting ahead. “Exactly what I intend to do – ‘dee-stroy’ or give one helluva scare to all these birds who’ve refused to give me a chance to prove myself.”

We were heading east on Sunset Boulevard. It was almost ten-fifteen. The night was warm and clear. Traffic had started to thin out. Small shops lined the street on both sides. Their brightly-lighted windows were stocked with upscale, colorfully-displayed merchandise, most of which I couldn't afford.

Before we got to the next cross street, Al had completely changed his tune and was contrite, first about Audrey and Pam and how harshly he'd teased them, then about his fake limp and disrupting the Schubert’s business, then about the boss at the factory and the contemptuous way he'd rejected the job, then about his sister Rhonda and the frightening possibility he'd gone too far, and she'd kick him out of her apartment where he'd been staying for the past eight months, and finally about her boyfriend Harry, who'd been trying so hard to find him a job. "Maybe he thinks he's doing me a favor," Al said, taking my arm again. "You and Rhonda are my only true friends. Everybody else I don't trust, and they don't trust me."

He asked me about Billie. "Smart, isn't she?" he said. "That stuff she told you about the play makes sense. Shows she has strong opinions and isn't shy about making them known, which is okay, if that's what you want, somebody who's always ready to run circles around you."

"That's not how she is," I said.

"How do you know how she is?” he said heatedly. “Or who she is?"

"It's what I feel about her," I said, which provoked from him a big, noisy, bitter, discouraging laugh. He also gave me an impassioned lecture about finding a woman like his sister Rhonda to give meaning and substance to my life.

"Too bad she's too old for you," he said.

Rhonda was three years older than Al, who was two years older than me. "How about you finding a woman like your sister Rhonda to give meaning and substance to your life?" I said.

"That's a tricky subject," he said. "Namely this schnoz, right?" He tapped his strong beak-like nose, which fitted perfectly among his strong cheekbones, strong chin, strong jaw, strong forehead, and strong Adam's apple that protruded brashly from his short, ruddy neck. His entire, expressive, brown-eyed face was ruddy as if he'd been thrusting it into a gale for a week. They make storm-on-the-high-seas movies, don't they? Why hadn't he at least had a bit part or a walk-on in one of them?

It definitely wasn't his height, though he was slightly on the short side. It wasn't the stockiness of his muscular body. It wasn't his extra broad shoulders, which looked great in a sports coat. It wasn't his deep, sonorous voice. And it certainly wasn't that he lacked talent. In somebody's living room, at Schubert's Parlor, and always on the telephone, he was brilliant. But put him on the stage or bring him to an audition, and he froze up like an ice cube. I saw him in action twice, and both times he could barely move or speak or respond appropriately to what the other actors were saying to him, which may have been the reason he couldn't stop performing off stage and why he insisted on giving such a massive headache to Rhonda and everybody else he got involved with by constantly putting them on.

Even I was annoyed at his incessant teasing, especially when he turned it full-blast on me. What kind of friend was this guy that he’d do such a thing to somebody who’d spent so much time catering to him? Maybe I should have dumped him and concentrated on my own troubles for a change, regardless of how many great laughs we continued to have together.

16.

Thursday I couldn't sleep past four a.m. I'd awakened three times previously, once to go to the bathroom, twice to look at the clock. Exhausted and aching from too little sleep, I suddenly began to worry I was making a mistake, that it was wrong for me to pursue Billie, that she didn't need me to cause her heartache, and that I should take Al’s advice and stick with women I knew how to relate to, because she was obviously so different from them I couldn't possibly make her happy.

With only seven hours till my scheduled eleven o'clock telephone call, I had to get my mind on something other than why I wasn't good enough for her. I tried a variety of distractions from boiling an egg, which I overcooked, to meditating in the lotus position, which strained my back, to taking a bath in chlorine-smelling water that refused to get hot. I called my mother in New York, then remembered she was visiting my sister in Boston. I also attempted to rework the conclusion of an appraisal report on a defunct brewery and fourteen acres of prime, high-valued industrial land in East L.A., but couldn't concentrate enough to get it done.

It was light now and closing in on seven o'clock. I tried writing down what I was planning to say to Billie. I'd seen someone do that in a movie. It was funny in the movie but doing it myself seemed silly. Then I tried speaking aloud an imaginary dialogue with her, taking both parts, of course, and that seemed to relax me.

At eight-twenty I drove to Westwood. A friend of mine, Chuck Seebey, had asked me to check out a house he and his wife were thinking about buying. It was located on Apex Drive, a couple of blocks off Westwood Boulevard. I'd collected comparables. I looked first at the house my friend was interested in, a two-story, 1800 square-foot Spanish, which appeared from the outside to have a load of deferred maintenance. The comparables were in much better shape. When I got back to my apartment, I called another friend, a broker, Annie Muller, who'd sold a lot of properties in the area. She'd seen the house, hadn't liked it, thought it was overpriced, and told me to tell Chuck not to buy it. Chuck wasn't at his office so I called him at home.

The phone rang about six times before his wife Verna answered. Chuck had gone to the Post Office, she said. When I told her what Annie had told me about the house, she got so angry she began to scream at me I had no right to stick my nose in her business. "I want that house," she said and slammed down the phone.

17.

The time was now ten-forty-one. I went upstairs to the bathroom and brushed my teeth. At eight minutes to eleven I couldn't stand waiting any longer. I dialed Billie’s number. A woman answered: "Supervisor Klein's office." She also told me her name but I was too nervous to hear what she said. I asked if I could speak to Billie.

"She's not here," the woman said. "She's at a meeting with the Supervisor about the new hospital the County's building and won't be available all day to talk on the telephone."

"Oh," I said, sounding crushed.

"Are you the one she met at the play?" she said.

"We didn't exactly meet," I said.

"Well, she did leave a message. She'll be waiting tomorrow at the Fish Net Restaurant." My spirits shot up. "Do you know the Fish Net on Seventh Street?" she said. "Very fine food, particularly if you're out of your mind for prawns and lobster like I am." She gave me the Fish Net's address and described how to get there.

"What time?" I said.

"Noon sharp. And please don't be late. She's on a tight schedule," the woman said, sounding so concerned about me I apologized for not catching her name the first time she’d told it to me and asked her to repeat it. “Evelyn Von Hewger,” she said, carefully spelling Hewger for me. “My husband’s family, the Von Huggers, actually say Hugger, but Hewger is much more dignified, don’t you think, though none of them agrees with me, including my husband Ollie, who’s still a Von Hugger, Hugger.” She laughed. “Or as I always remind him: Ugher!”

That afternoon I made two quick stops to meet potential clients. A major shopping center developer needed an appraiser to do a market study on a large project in Riverside County. The other involved three partners who sounded serious about asking me to appraise some special properties for them in Canada, Hong Kong, and Japan. By the time I arrived at the Hollywood Public Library I was so excited I had to walk around the block to calm myself. What a glorious day I’d had. First, Billie agrees to have lunch with me, and then I’m told by these influential guys that my sales pitch makes sense to them. Can you imagine? Could hardly believe it!

The Library’s reference room was on the second floor. What I was looking for was information on the play, “The Servant of or to Two Masters,” and its author, Gino or Mario Goldoni, in case Billie wanted to talk about him or the play at tomorrow’s lunch. Certainly I’d feel more comfortable if I had something unique or especially interesting to contribute to our conversation instead of having to depend on her to do most of the talking for both of us.

Surprisingly it turned out that Goldoni’s first name was neither Gino nor Mario. It was Carlo. It was also surprising that the play had been known by both titles: “of two masters,” and “to two masters.”

Goldoni, who was born in Venice in1707 and died at age 86 in 1793, had had a successful career as a lawyer, when in 1745 he was commissioned to write a commedia dell’arte style play, which, as one of the articles points out, completely contradicted the commedia dell’arte tradition.

Until Goldoni commedia dell’arte actors had improvised their own plays within the established roles of their traditional stock characters. Once Goldoni imposed on these actors his scripted play, he undermined the spontaneity of their performances, and eighteenth century commedia dell’arte was dead.

Fascinating stuff to discuss with Billie, I thought, provided she understands I went to the library because I was curious about Goldoni, and not because I was trying to show off by exaggerating my meager knowledge of him or his plays, which I knew wouldn’t work with her. She’d certainly find me out, and I’d feel even more inadequate in expressing my opinions about the play than I already did.

So I made up my mind that tomorrow at lunch I definitely wouldn’t mention Goldoni. If she brought him up, then we’d talk about him, but to risk saying something dumb or inappropriate about my research at the library that might cause a misunderstanding between us made no sense whatsoever, when we could easily postpone talking about Goldoni and the play until we had more experience with one another, and I felt less anxious about making an upbeat impression on her, having already decided, based on what my heart was telling me, that we’d be perfect together.

The Twelve O'clock Chapters 34-51

2008-11-02T20:33:00.000-08:00

34.

The telephone was ringing again. This time it was my office mate, Eric Daly. “Help,” he said, "I don’t know what the bum wants from me.”

He’d just finished a three-hour session with a client, a guy who owned six apartment buildings in Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks. “I gave him what he asked for,” he said, “and still he isn’t satisfied.”

Dissatisfied customers are an occupational hazard for appraisers. Eric knows this, and so do I. I’ve had plenty of them.

When I worked for the bank, I had managers who said my values were too low to get them the high-dollar mortgages they thought they were entitled to. At the government agency I later worked for some taxpayers said my values were too high, that I was forcing them to pay more taxes to the government than they wanted to pay. Yet I was the same appraiser then as I am now, five years into my own business, using the same methods, the same principles, and the same approaches to value.

Most people who hire me say they’re pleased with my work. This doesn’t mean I don’t have dissidents to deal with, a few of whom say I’m pathetically untalented as an appraiser, especially those who seem determined to shift the burden of their money problems onto somebody else.

The worst example I can remember happened when a friend of mine, the managing partner of a small accounting firm, Doug Fetcher, asked me to do an appraisal on a lumber mill and warehouse complex in Piedmont, Oregon. Half of the substantial fee was up front, so I immediately told him yes.

The western regional office of Piedmont’s parent company, Rhode Island Pacific, was located in San Francisco on Sunderland Street. My contact at Rhode Island Pacific was a vice president in charge of parity solutions named Sanford Golub. A peppy, outgoing guy, he had a glass right eye and an ugly drinking problem. He welcomed me. “Does the eye bother you?” he said, pushing his face at mine and tapping his cheek under his right eye. “If you’re uncomfortable, I’ll wear my patch.” He produced a black patch from his jacket’s breast pocket and dangled it in front of my nose. “I like to warn people. I’m third generation glass-eyed.”

On a long table behind Golub’s desk were boxes of records, reports, and photographs that, he said, would give me a complete picture of the current condition of the company’s Piedmont plant. There was also a tall box of rolled-up maps. He pulled out one of the maps and spread it across his desk. “I can read this without my glasses,” he said, taking off his glasses. “Even the smallest print is clear as a bell. The other eye, the left eye, is very powerful, always has been. When I was born, the missing eye was a hole in my head. They had to pry open the socket to put in my first glass eye – a different shade, because the color of my left eye has changed.” He insisted I peer closely into both his eyes.

A young woman with dimples and stiff hair came into the room, carrying a box with an assortment of cards and papers. “The eye intimidates her,” Golub said, after the young woman exited from the office. “Does it make you feel uneasy? Have you noticed it’s blue?”

“It is blue,” I said, which seemed to elate him.

“Help yourself,” he said, motioning toward the boxes on the table. “You can have copies to take home if you need to study them.”

For the next three and a quarter hours the two of us sorted through piles of papers and index cards of various colors, which Golub eagerly retrieved from the boxes. The photographs he gave me to look at showed immense amounts of deferred maintenance throughout the Piedmont complex. Almost every building appeared to be heavily damaged. “Worn out,” he said. Neglected, I thought. “The value loss to the company,” he said, “is obvious in the photographs and easily detected at the site. I’ve surveyed it personally many times.”

At twelve-thirty sharp an alarm buzzer went off. “I’m taking you to lunch,” he said. “I’m ready to faint. You must be starving.”

“I hadn’t thought about eating,” I said. He excused himself, while he put a couple drops into his glass right eye. “Keeps the lids moist,” he said. “Very important.”

35.

Golub took me to the Voyager Restaurant on Broadway. “I come here whenever I can get away for lunch, which isn’t often,” he said. “Best asparagus soup in town.” We had to wait for a table, though he’d made a reservation for us. “Par for the course,” he said. The lobby and the bar area were crowded. There was barely room for us to squeeze in at the end of the bar. “What will you have?” he said.

“Water,” I said.

“Water?” Golub said. He looked surprised.

“Ice?” the bartender said.

“Lots of ice,” I said. To Golub I said: “I don’t drink alcohol. I’m sorry.”

Golub laughed. “Do you mind if I have something?” He ordered a double martini. “Keeps the blood moving,” he said.

The restaurant’s walls were lined with road signs. “From all over the world,” Golub said. “The entire fifty states, as well as Helsinki, Madrid, Paris, Johannesburg, Jakarta, Tokyo, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, the works, and most of them are autographed by somebody famous from each of these places.”

“I’ve only been to London once,” I said.

He pointed out the London sign to me. It said Piccadilly.

“Exciting,” he said, “to be in London.” He’d traveled extensively for the company in Europe and Asia. “Parity is an issue everywhere.” He explained how it was his responsibility “to make sure the company doesn’t get screwed. Whatever methods I decide to use are fine. I’ve got my one and only boss in the Empire State Building in New York, which is our international headquarters. Nobody else in the company knows what I’m doing, and they don’t ask me questions, because I’m under strict orders not to tell them anything. What the big boss wants from me is deniability, in case somebody from somewhere swoops down on us and starts pointing fingers at him. He can truthfully say he doesn’t know what this guy, namely me, is doing, which is perfect, because, otherwise, he’d cramp my style.”

When we finally got seated at a table, Golub ordered a second double martini. “I’m thirsty,” he said, grinning mischievously at me. We both had asparagus soup and a shrimp salad. Before we began to eat, he finished off the second martini, downing most of it in one long swallow. Red-faced, slurring his words, he said: “It’s been arranged. I’ve already selected the value that’s appropriate. The Assessor has agreed to change it.”

“The Assessor?” I said.

“Took his daughter out a couple of times, legitimately,” he said. “Too plain, but she interested me, and nobody was paying attention to her. She also was willing to take money from me. Not much, a couple of hundred, a couple of times. That got her daddy interested, which was my intention in the first place.”

“You paid him off?” I said.

“Not yet. It’s a delicate situation. The daughter gets it, and she passes it on, unless she prefers to run away to Honolulu without him.” He laughed again. “Meanwhile, all I need from you is a value to support the assessment I want.”

Shrugging, he took a large slurp of soup. “Business is business,” he said.

“Not for me it isn’t,” I said.

“Don’t talk nonsense,” he said. “The company has to defend itself, doesn’t it? These people take advantage, and all we want is to be treated like everybody else. It’s my job to deal with government agencies. What’s so bad about that? You’re much too sensitive.”

When we got back to his office, I told him I wouldn’t do the appraisal. He was outraged. “You knew the circumstance, didn’t you? Why did you waste my time?” He called Doug Fetcher in L.A. “You sent the wrong guy,” he said.

Doug asked to speak to me. I explained what had happened. “It’s fixed,” I said. “I won’t do it.” Doug was sympathetic. He apologized to me. “Would you mind returning the advance I gave you?”

I put down the phone. Golub was glaring at me. Slapping his hand over his good eye, he growled angrily: “Get out of my sight!”

36.

The next morning I put Doug Fetcher’s advance into an envelope and sent it back to him. That alone depressed me, because I could have used the money to buy a replacement for my broken-down refrigerator, or pay off the loan on my car. Rejecting Golub so abruptly made me realize I had a responsibility to warn the citizens of Piedmont that their Assessor was being bribed to cut back the assessed valuation on a high-tax-yielding property in their community. Did I do so? What proof did I have? My word against Golub’s, or my word against the Rhode Island Pacific. They’d skin me alive.

Eric was the only person I’d told about Golub and what he’d tried to do to me. Now Eric was in the same boat, with that rotten apartment house owner who was threatening to bite off his head. While I’m single and solvent and could probably survive being persecuted by the Rhode Island Pacific, Eric has a wife, three children, two cats, a Great Dane, and a monumental mortgage to take care of and couldn’t in a million years tell the apartment house owner to jump in the lake as I’d done with Golub.

Of course, Eric has a reputation as a low-ball appraiser, which makes him vulnerable to people like the apartment house owner, because he processes market value information from a conservative or pessimistic point of view that yields low and sometimes marginally provocative values that other appraisers, me included, disagree with.

When I was working for the bank, I had to take an appraisal-training course given by two guys who were local certified real estate appraisers. Market value, they kept pounding into my head, has four main elements: the highest price in terms of money, a willing buyer, a willing seller, and full knowledge of the uses of the property and the advantages and restrictions of the marketplace. This means, they said, that willing buyers and willing sellers have to be open and honest with one another for the market to succeed. Underhanded dealings are out, monopolies are out, secret payments like subsidies and tax breaks are out, lying is out, cheating is out, and phony advertising has to be out, or the entire market falls apart.

Also, appraising is an art, at least I think it’s an art, no matter how many numbers, comparable sales, rents, interest rates, building costs, square-footages, and maintenance deductions are involved with it. Three experienced appraisers like low-ball Eric, cautious me, and some high-baller who believes in his heart that the market has nowhere to go except up, can use the same market information on the same property and arrive at three completely different value conclusions, all of them legal, straight-forward, and sincere, depending on how each of us interprets the evidence we find in the market, how we estimate the market’s present condition and future growth, as well as the kinds of training and appraisal experiences each of us has had, how we slept last night, what we ate for breakfast, and whether somebody is giving us a hard time, like the overwrought property owner who is trying to shove a directed verdict down Eric’s throat.

“I’ve got to talk to Judy about it,” Eric said, sighing woefully. Judy was Eric’s wife. From long experience with them I knew she was an unpublicized full partner in his appraisal business. She also had a real estate broker’s license and sold real estate part-time.

Eric sounded stressed and angry. “Are you sure you’re okay?” I said.

“You bet your ass I am,” Eric said.

“Will you be coming to the office?” I asked.

“Don’t know yet,” he snapped, as if I were to blame for the mess he was in. “Stop poking your nose in my business,” he said irritably, then hung up the phone. For maybe ten miserable minutes I sat at my desk, staring into space and wondering why anybody would want to be a real estate appraiser and have so much hostility and disappointment to put up with:

What a way to make a living,
Plucking values from the air,
Claiming that you’re truly giving
Market values that are fair.

37.

The next time I looked at the clock it was almost three-thirty. I’d been making poor progress on my brewery appraisal. In three-plus hours I’d be on my way to Sherman Oaks to pick up Billie. I gathered together the brewery appraisal report and was clearing room for it in the filing cabinet, when the office door flew open, and Al’s sister, Rhonda, stomped in. She was furious. “I have needs,” she said, “and he doesn’t give a damn.” Al had told her he’d lost his job at the parking garage. I immediately made excuses for him.

”He was really trying,” I said. “He didn’t mean to get fired. I was there. I watched it happen. He was doing his best.”

“His best?, at somebody else’s expense, right? and I’m sick and tired of it.” Tears filling her eyes, she gave me a short, bitter history of how Al had taken advantage of their mother and how she and their mother had put up with his selfishness and irresponsibility. “It’s a disease he got from my father, who didn’t work a day in his life, as long as my mother was willing to hold down two jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table. I’ve had enough of Al doing that to me.”

Taking a deep breath, snuffling back her tears, she took my left hand, squeezed it gently, then guided by me, eased herself down onto my lap. “I miss my mama,” she said, resting her cheek against my forehead. “I’m very lonely.” Instantly I got an erection.

“Al thinks we’d make a great couple,” she said, laughing softly. “Did he tell you that?”

Indirectly, yes. What he’d told me was to find somebody who was uncomplicated like his sister Rhonda. He’d also said Rhonda was too old for me, so I shook my head no, wondering at the same time, as she kept shifting around on my lap, if she could feel how perversely erect I was and whether she was pleased or offended by it.

Frankly this was the first time I’d ever looked closely enough at her to notice what an attractive woman she was. I mean, I knew she had straight, blonde hair, but hadn’t realized it was a luminous shade of white-blonde and it was thick and long and cut stylishly. Same for her bright, pale skin, her mellow brown eyes, and her pink, moist-lipped mouth, out of which she was presently exhaling heavily garlicked breaths that were a major turn-off to me. My erection began to wilt.

“Harry’s been extremely good to Al,” she said, snuggling her cheek against my ear. “Does he appreciate it? Has he ever thanked Harry?”

Until now, I’d also overlooked her small, shapely breasts. I think she’d always worn loose blouses that concealed them. Suddenly I was tempted to ask her to have sex with me. We could do it here, I thought. I’d lock the door. I had a strong hunch Eric was so annoyed at me he wouldn’t be coming to the office this afternoon. We could take a chance, if she was willing. My erection started up again.

Then Billie’s face popped into my head. Hadn’t I been telling myself I was madly in love with her? In three hours weren’t we scheduled to have dinner together? How could I face her if I’d just had sex with Rhonda? Wouldn’t Billie spot my faithlessness? I’m an open book. She’d see my guilt as soon as I walked in the front door. Isn’t this proof I can’t be trusted? My erection abruptly drooped.

“It’s been very nice,” Rhonda said, squirming to her feet. “Don’t tell Al, okay?”

I promised not to tell him. “Can I have a rain check?” she said, puckering a kiss at me.

“When?” I said.

“Soon,” she said, as hurrying out of the office, she flashed a dazzling smile that got me going again. My erection had revived.

38.

Oh, was I depressed. By the time I got back to the apartment I could hardly look at myself in the mirror. True, hormones were probably the main culprits, but doesn’t such duplicitous conduct also say something nasty about my weak character? If Rhonda had given me the slightest encouragement, wouldn’t I have been all over her, despite my self-proclaimed love for Billie, and that’s reprehensible, isn’t it?

On the way home I did a couple of small errands: picked up my gray suit from Mr. Lopez, and my shirts from his next-door neighbor, Hop Sing. Lopez was a dry cleaner. Hop Sing and his family ran the hand laundry. I’d been a customer of both for almost six years, out of habit mostly.

When I first met Hop Sing, he and his wife had four kids. Now six years later they had eight. The oldest, an intense-eyed boy, age 15, was a senior in high school. The youngest, a seven-month-old girl, was named Li Lu whom Hop Sing was very proud of. Often, when I brought in shirts, or came to retrieve them, he’d ask his wife to hold up Li Lu for me to see how pretty and bright-eyed she was.

The hand laundry was located in a long, narrow store building that had a plate glass display window at its street entrance. In the front third of the store were the public counter as well as the ironing tables and Li Lu’s crib and playpen. Behind a partition that separated the public area from the remaining two-thirds of the store was where the family ate, slept, and studied. Mr. Lopez told me all of the kids were terrific students and big studiers and did whatever they had to do to earn a living and keep themselves healthy. The laundry, including my shirts, Mr. Lopez said, was washed in large, aluminum tubs and hung out to dry on clotheslines in the shallow yard behind the store building. Hop Sing and his wife were the chief ironers, and he (Hop Sing) and their sweet smiling thirteen-year-old, whose American name was Elaine, waited on customers.

Hop Sing’s laundry business obviously operated on a shoestring. Everything about it seemed dingy and pessimistic. The walls of the store desperately needed to be painted, the counter’s linoleum top was worn out, and the concrete floor in the public area, though I don’t think it was dirty, could have used a polish, or a cheap rug to cover it, if Hop Sing could have afforded to buy a cheap rug, which I doubted, until one afternoon when I confided to Mr. Lopez how worried I was about the Hop Sing family and its dismal existence.

“They’re thriving, aren’t they?” Mr. Lopez said. “And what about those kids? Smart as a whip, every one of them, including little Li Lu. I guarantee, by the time she gets to the first grade, she’ll do what all of them are willing to do, study hard and be the best student in every class she takes. You ask how Hop Sing’s going to pay for it? Thrift,” Lopez said.

“Thrift?” I said.

“Doing without, saving every nickel he can get his hands on, putting what he saves into something that’s going to make him more money than he started with.” Mr. Lopez motioned to me to follow him outside.

We stood at the curb in front of the hand laundry. Pointing to a small, two-story office building on the other side of La Brea past Lexington, he said: “Belongs to him.”

“Hop Sing?” I said.

He pointed to the service station at the corner of La Brea and Santa Monica. “His also,” he said.

“The service station?”

“Just the land.”

“I’m impressed,” I said.

“In addition,” Lopez said, wiggling his right index finger at me. “He owns a four-plex on Fountain and a duplex on Detroit.

“Unbelievable,” I said, glancing back into the laundry. Hop Sing and his wife were at adjoining tables ironing shirts, Elaine was at the counter making entries into an account book, and Owen, the oldest son, was at another table behind the counter, wrapping packages of finished laundry.

“Still think you need to feel sorry for them?” Lopez said.

Maybe not, I thought, because that kind of commitment, that single-mindedness, that long-term determination to sacrifice for a common goal was completely out of my league. In fact, I hardly understand it, especially when it involves an entire family of ten people who make up their minds to do what one guy, their husband and father, Hop Sing, says is good for all of them. I didn’t grow up like that.

The Hop Sings, I decided, had a special core and a secret music my family didn’t have. Compared to them, we drifted idly, on our own steam, without the togetherness that made them shine so uniquely.

Never once can I remember going after anything with the Hop Sings’ intensity, no matter how much I thought I wanted it. What I did instead was to wait for opportunity to come to me. Even with the women I seduced, my pose was to remain reticent, hanging back until some aggressive, frustrated female found me, then we’d have a disaster together.

That’s why meeting Billie as I did and pursuing her with such energy and purpose was so exciting to me. To risk losing her now to prove something ridiculous with Rhonda or anybody else, was not only unthinkable, it was also dumb, and I refuse to be dumb about women anymore, when I have this glorious chance, which may never come again, to be in love with a woman who, I think, is perfect for me.

39.

Brinnggggg. That was the telephone. From the bedroom closet, where I’d just hung up the suit Mr. Lopez had cleaned and pressed for me, I hurried to the phone beside the bed. Calling was Evelyn Von Heuger. “She’s going to be late again,” Evelyn said. “They’re at the new hospital. The Supervisor is doing a review of what’s been accomplished so far.”

The full message from Billie was that the Supervisor was trying to resolve a major dispute with the hospital’s chief administrator over construction costs, that because the dispute was more complicated and emotional than anybody had anticipated, Billie was going to be held up again, instead of my picking her up in Sherman Oaks, to give us more time together, she’d come directly to my apartment in West Hollywood, and that she’d probably arrive at seven o’clock, or at the latest, seven-thirty, if that was agreeable to me.

“Definitely okay,” I said.

Evelyn sounded relieved. “She’s a peach, isn’t she?” she said. “You’re very lucky. I hope you know that.”

“I do,” I said.

“I expect she told you,” she said, “I was her first friend in the office. Learned all the routines from me. Types like the wind. Can’t keep up with her. And if you ask the Supervisor, he’ll tell you how much he trusts everything she tells him. That’s why she’s at the hospital with him. Do you realize she was seventeen years old when she came to work for us? Never forget the outfit she was wearing and how scared she was. Could barely look anybody in the face, but didn’t stop smiling. Lit up the entire place, so we knew we had a winner.”

I asked her about the Supervisor’s meeting at the hospital.

“Trouble,” she said, her voice dropping an octave. “Too many contractors overcharge, don’t deliver what they promise, then squawk like hell if somebody asks them to account for what they claim to have done. Billie’s job is to listen to their arguments, and if the Supervisor needs more information, to get it for him. He’d go down the tubes without her. She’s very sharp.”

Evelyn described fondly how perceptive and analytic Billie was, how quickly she picked up detail and meaning other people didn’t see or understand, and how she has this extraordinary ability to recognize almost instantly what’s important in a situation and to organize a strategy to deal with it. She also described the light blue, jeweled-neck, slim-skirted dress Billie wore when she first came to work for the Supervisor. “Much too mature for her, though she always looked smart and youthful despite being stuck with a wardrobe her mother had made for her.”

I remembered, but didn’t mention, what Al had said about Billie, that she was probably too sharp and too strong-minded for me, and that I should keep away from her. Then Evelyn said her husband was arriving shortly. She was going with him to take back a pair brown shoes he’d bought that didn’t fit. “He can’t admit he’s made a mistake. I have to do it for him,” she said, laughing noisily. “I kind of like taking things back. Odd, isn’t it?”

40.

By the time we hung up, it was almost ten minutes to five. If Billie does show at seven, or even seven thirty, I had two hours plus to get ready. I decided first to take a shower and shave, if I needed to shave, which I did. Then maybe later, I could lie down and rest. I was peeling off my clothes, when suddenly I thought I could smell smoke, a very light smoky odor, but definitely smoke.

I pulled open the bedroom window, sniffed at the outside air. It didn’t smell smoky. I left the window open, then hurried downstairs to the living room, which did smell smoky. I opened the front door, stepped outside onto the front steps, took several deep breaths. No smoky smell. Has to be in the apartment, I thought. Where? The dining room smelled smoky, and so did the kitchen, but there was nothing on or in the stove, and the electric refrigerator, which could have shorted and produced smoke, I suppose, seemed fine.

In the rear hall off the kitchen the smoke smell was faint. Outside in the backyard as previously in the front yard there was no smoke smell at all. The area around the garages was also smoke-smell-free. Where was this sucker coming from?

Ah, I thought. Under the stairs behind the kitchen was a large storage closet that was accessed through a door in the rear hall. This was where I kept junk I couldn’t throw out, furnishings I had no use for, and a dozen or more cardboard shipping boxes filled with old newspapers, magazines, journals, and assorted other valuables I probably wouldn’t ever look at again. The light in the closet was a large, naked 100-watt bulb that was turned off and on by a long white string that dangled from the base of the light fixture.

Yanking open the closet door, I pulled the white string, snapping on the 100-watt bulb, then began to sniff vigorously among the discarded treasures. The smoke smell was even fainter than it had been in the kitchen and the rear hall. The closet floor contained a trapdoor that went down to the basement where the furnace was located. To get at the trapdoor I had to shift some of the boxes, a large picture frame, and a non-working vacuum cleaner. When I lifted the trapdoor and peered warily into the basement, the only light I could see came from the furnace’s flickering pilot light.

A narrow, straight ladder ran down from the closet to the basement’s concrete floor. On a post inches from the ladder was a black-toggled light switch. I flipped on the switch, lighting up the basement, which was empty, except for the furnace and some tools that didn’t belong to me. The air in the basement seemed clear. Nowhere could I smell smoke, though I carefully sniffed the basement’s corners, its posts, along the building’s foundation, giving special attention to all four sides of the furnace, even squeezing behind it, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything that might be the source of the smoke smell.

As I climbed back up the ladder to the closet, I was mystified. Was I hallucinating the smoke smell? Or was my nose playing tricks on me? Not knowing what else to do, I lowered the trapdoor, restored the picture frame, the vacuum cleaner, and most of the boxes to what I thought were their original positions, and exited into the rear hall, shutting the closet door behind me. What I forgot to do was to turn off the closet’s naked light bulb.

I had left the front and back doors open, which was probably the reason the smoke smell in the kitchen and the dining and living rooms now seemed much diminished to me, though at the time I didn’t consciously connect fresh air from the outside with the diminished smoke smell. Even after I’d closed both doors, the air in the apartment seemed improved, so I decided to forget about the smoke smell, as if I expected it to disappear miraculously, and hurried upstairs and took a shower.

Well, the miracle didn’t happen. When I came out of the shower, the smoke smell had increased. Throwing on my bathrobe, I rushed downstairs, through the living and dining rooms, the kitchen, and into the rear hall. Pulling open the closet door, I could hardly believe what I saw. The closet and everything in it were completely in flames!

Immediately, without hesitation, which I give myself credit for, I raced to the telephone in the dining room and dialed 911. An operator answered. I shouted FIRE! into the phone, gave her my address, one time only, before slamming down the phone and rushing back to the hall closet. Now the flames were from floor to ceiling. Somehow, despite my panic, I noticed that to my left, just inside the closet door, leaning against the wall, was a small, rolled-up carpet. Desperately I reached for the carpet. Grabbing it up, unrolling it simultaneously, I swung it over my head and slammed it flat-out onto the flames. The instant the rug hit the floor, by some great, extraordinary good-luck, the fire was snuffed out!

41.
.
Except that some of the debris was still smoldering. What do I do about it? Should I throw water on it, or try to stamp it out? I rushed back to the kitchen and was filling a pot with water, when I heard a siren coming toward me, only minutes after I’d called 911. Amazing! How was this possible? Then I also heard what sounded like a fire truck rumbling up the hill on Holloway and wheezing to a stop at the curb directly below my apartment. Seconds later my front door was being banged on.

The door-bangers I discovered, when I pulled open the front door, were four anxious-faced firemen, wearing boots, shiny black slickers, and traditional, clumsy-looking fire helmets. Two of them were carrying axes. “Where’s the fire?” the tallest guy said.

“It’s out,” I said.

“Out?” he said, looking at me skeptically.

“It was in the closet,” I said, pointing toward the rear hall. “I put it out.”

Led by the tall guy, the firemen brushed past me. I followed them, until the tall guy held up his hand. “Wait there, “he said. Waiting nervously in the kitchen, I heard lots of noises from the closet. It sounded as if the firemen were chopping or bashing the closet’s contents. Then stuff was being carried from the closet and dumped into the back yard. When the tall guy returned, he said: “You did okay. It’s taken care of.”

I told him the whole story, how I’d smelled smoke, how I’d searched the apartment and couldn’t find where the smoke smell was coming from, and how when I went down to look for it the second time, the whole closet was on fire. I also told him I had no idea how the fire had started, which wasn’t exactly true, because I did remember I’d forgotten to turn off the closet’s naked light bulb. After I’d closed the trap door, had I also carelessly pushed a cardboard box against the light bulb while I was shifting boxes back to what I’d thought were their original positions? Yikes!

I then told him about Billie. “It’s our first big date,” I said, a large whine in my voice, as if I’d decided I was being victimized by some outrageous tragedy beyond my control.

He made a sympathetic face at me. “When’s she coming?” he said.

“Seven or seven-thirty” I said, still sounding whiney.

He glanced at his watch. “Gives us two hours,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of everything. Won’t even know it happened, unless you tell her.” He laughed. “Then it’s your problem.”

Over the next two hours the tall guy and his crew emptied the closet, carting out to the back yard what remained of the boxes and all the junk I’d been storing. They also swept and dusted the closet, and also the rear hall and the kitchen. Then while two of the crew were inspecting the apartment, from the basement to my upstairs bedroom, looking for what might have caused the smoke smell, two other firemen brought in two large fans to blow out the apartment.

“She won’t smell a thing,” the tall guy said, grinning at me.

42.

Later, when the crew was packing up the fans and getting ready to take off, the tall guy said: “I think I’ve seen you someplace before. Schubert’s? You go to Schubert’s?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“We’re also in show business,” he said. “Four of us. We sing. Write songs. Clark’s drums, Manny’s sax, Hen’s guitar, I’m bass.” He introduced me to Clark and Hen. “Manny’s off today. We call ourselves the Picassos. We think we’re pretty good.”

“Very good,” Hen said, flexing his bushy eyebrows at me.

“Why Picassos?” I asked.

“Manny’s idea,” Clark said. “He paints - ”

“Who paints?” I said.

“Manny paints,” Clark said.

“What does he paint?” I said.

“Fire,” Hen said.

“Fire?” I said.

“What fire does to things that get burnt and how different something looks when it’s burnt from how it previously looked before it got burnt,” the tall guy said.

“Ashes,” Clark said.

“He paints ashes?” I said.

“The patterns ashes make,” Hen said.

“If Manny was here today,” the tall guy said, “he would photograph the fire damage in the closet. Then depending on what kinds of patterns he finds in the photographs, and whether the patterns make some kind of sense to him and how he sees them connected to one another, he makes a painting, which is what, he says, Picasso does, takes something, breaks it down, then reassembles it into a painting with a unique point of view.”

“It’s what we’re trying to do with our music,” Clark said, “break it down and give it a different structure and a different sound.”

“The Surreals is the first name Manny wanted for us, or the Surrealists,” Hen said. “Then he wanted Cubists, or Cubes.”

“I like Cubes,” Clark said.

“So do I,” Hen said.

“We originally did jazz only,” the tall guy said. “When we thought we were going to be the Cubes, we experimented with Cuban themes and a Latin beat, which we’ve kept, even after we switched from Cubes to Picassos.”

“Bill vetoed Cubes,” Clark said.

“Bill?” I said.

“Me,” the tall guy said. “Cubes, I thought, was confusing.”

Clark asked if I liked the name, Picassos.

I nodded yes.

“We can give you a sample, if you want,” Hen said, “of the kind of music we do.”.

“Now?” I said.

From a pocket in his overalls, Hen pulled out a small, black-covered notebook, which contained, he said, the lyrics of all the songs they’d written for themselves. “Manny writes most of the music, we all write the words, which is why I carry this notebook around, to jot down ideas I have for lyrics as well as changes to lyrics I think we should make, not that we always make them, because if anybody disagrees, we stick with what we have.”

What should we sing?” Bill asked. Their choice was quick and unanimous. “It’s called Untitled 7,” he said, “because, like Manny says, the overall meaning of everything connected to it, its ideas, its sounds, its rhythms, and even its title, depends strictly on the imagination of whoever listens to it.”

“You, for instance,” Hen said, a sly grin on his face, as Bill handed me the notebook. The page the book was open to contained the lyric for Untitled 7.

“Sing along, if you like,” Bill said.

“Nooo!” roared Clark. “In this small kitchen I don’t want him singing. How do you expect me to concentrate?”
Bill apologized. “The kitchen is small,” he said. “It might be distracting, if you did sing.”

“I won’t sing,” I said.

“And don’t laugh,” Hen said, which broke up everybody, including Clark, who produced a pitch pipe from inside his raincoat. “I’m always prepared,” he said, waving the pipe over his head, as he and the other Picassos huddled together at the rear of the kitchen. When he blew into the pipe, sounding a note, they all tested their voices against it.

“Nifty, isn’t it?” Hen said. Then he gave them a crisp downbeat: a one and a two and a…, that started me reading silently and them singing loud and clear:

Don’t ever be late on Wednesdays,
Said the possum to the lamb,
If I had wings, I’d fly there,
On an iceberg to Japan.

Don’t ever say no on Thursdays,
Is what I’ve always been taught,
Why is your sister missing
The sunshine she’s never brought.

Time for a coconut,
A blueberry tart,
A fly in the soup,
A horse and a cart,

A mustache that’s black,
A plum and a yam,
The advice I give
Is as good as I am.

Don’t ever fall down on Fridays,
If temptation isn’t your thing,
Sleep prettily, my darling,
Then up on your feet and sing:

Choo-choo-cha-chee,
Chee-cha-choo-cha-chee,
Choo-choo-cha-chee,
Chee-cha-choo-cha-chee.
A night transformed is a new day dawned.
Choo-cha-choo-cha-chee.

43.

What can I say? They were terrific, the three of them, singing with such confidence and uninhibited joy to me, their lone audience, in my cramped kitchen, their powerful voices their only instruments, no bass, no guitar, no drums to accompany them, and yet the performance they gave, I thought, was remarkable, which was exactly what I told them.

“We’re not that good,” Clark said, snickering sarcastically.

“Manny makes us sound much better, doesn’t he, Bill?” Hen said.

“Manny’s got a great voice,” Bill said, giving me an innocent look.

“You did like the song, didn’t you?” Clark said, winking at Hen, who, I thought, was staring oddly at me.

“Not your cup of tea, right?” Hen said.

“No, of course it is” I said, “I’m fascinated.”

“Why fascinated?” Clark said, making a snide face at Hen, which I assumed was meant for me. Both these guys were difficult to take. I couldn’t read either of them, mainly because I didn’t understand what they wanted from me.

“The words, the lyric,” I mumbled, determined to avoid an argument with them.

“Hen wrote most of it,” Clark said, a crooked smirk on his face, which I resented, but didn’t complain about, because I was too polite or too insecure to speak up to him. In contrast, Bill seemed open and relaxed and was easy to have a conversation with.

“Maybe you know somebody,” Bill said, “who could help us get work some place, anyplace, as long as we can play music together.”

“I’ll talk to Al,” I said, gulping hard, which apparently none of them noticed.

“Al?” Bill said.

“A. Lonzo Kipp,” I said, giving them Al’s showbiz name. “He knows everybody.”

“That’s great,” Bill said excitedly, whopping me on my back.

Clark dug a card out of his wallet and handed it to me. The card said Picassos and contained a telephone number. “The number’s mine,” Bill said.

“We need a break,” Clark said, “especially from somebody with clout who’s willing to listen to us perform.”

Hen agreed. “We’re star material,” he said, guffawing loudly.

They’d been appearing some weekends at a club in Torrance, Bill said.

“We also did two benefits for the fire department,” Clark said, “and maybe six weddings, and that birthday party in Hawthorne, right?”

“Exposure is important,” Hen said,”which we don’t get enough of.” They’d finished the clean-up. Hen and Clark were lugging one of the fans out of the apartment. I shouted thanks to them. Then Bill gave me a lecture on fire safety, warning me about the danger of a more destructive fire, “if somebody doesn’t find the source of the original smoke smell,” which, he said, could be as simple and easily replaceable as a wall plug or a junction box.

“I’ll call Reggie,” I said.

“Who’s Reggie?” Bill said.

“Rental agent at the management company,” I said.

“Good, but don’t put it off,” Bill said sternly. “You could be sorry.”

Bill was the last to leave. We were on the front steps, shaking hands, when Billie appeared, looking shocked, having seen fire trucks on the street and now a fireman at my front door.

“It’s okay,” I said. I introduced her to Bill.

“You’re Billie,” he said, a bright grin on his face, “I’m Bill.” Then turning to me, he said: “Don’t forget what you told me, that you’ll talk to Al about us.”

“Definitely, I promise, I will talk to him,” I said, which made me feel ashamed of myself. Al can’t get himself a job. What could he possibly do for them? I should never have mentioned Al. It was a dumb mistake. I’d betrayed the Picassos in advance.

We watched Bill walk slowly down the garden steps. When he reached the street, he turned and waved to us. “What a fantastic guy,” I said, waving back at him. “They’re all fantastic.” The fire trucks, we could hear, were rumbling and wheezing impatiently. Then we heard them move away from the curb and start up Holloway Drive, their sirens already chirping, as they turned down Mercer Street and headed for Santa Monica Boulevard, while (I imagined) the Picassos and everybody aboard the trucks, were singing merrily to a powerful Latin beat:

“Choo-choo-cha-chee,
Chee-cha-choo-cha-chee,
Choo-choo-cha-chee,
A night transformed is a new day dawned,
Choo-cha-choo-cha-chee.
Cha.”

44.

The smoke smell had persisted. Billie was on her knees, sniffing at the wall plug beside the couch in the living room. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Doesn’t smell.”

We talked about the 911 operator. “Imagine,” I said, “I yell Fire, give her my address, and slam down the telephone.”

“Great concentration. I couldn’t do it,” Billie said.

“Should send her roses or a box of candy or something,” I said. “How do I get her name, or is it against the rules to put her on the spot like that?”

“I’ll find out,” Billie said. She’d make a contact for me through the Supervisor’s office.

Billie had already decided we wouldn’t go out to dinner. “You need to keep the windows and doors open,” she said, “to let air circulate through the apartment.”

While I vacuumed the living and dining rooms, she made us tea and cheese sandwiches. We ate the sandwiches at the dining room table. “I’m not touching the closet or the back yard, till after I talk to Reggie,” I said.

“You could have been killed,” she said, reaching across the table and taking my hand.

“Burnt to a crisp,” I said, “except for my trusty rug which I owe my life to.” I told her about a guy I’d grown up with in Brooklyn, whose father was reading the paper at breakfast one morning. Spotting the name of a long-lost cousin who’d been killed when his house was destroyed by fire, the father called to his wife Anna, “Hey, Anna, guess who was ‘boint’ to a crisp?”

We did the dishes together. It was after midnight. Billie had a long drive over Coldwater Canyon to Sherman Oaks. She’d been up since five. She’d met the Supervisor in his district at seven-thirty and could hardly keep her eyes open. “Would you mind if I stayed?” she said.

“Here?” I said.

“I’m being too pushy, aren’t I?” she said.

“No, no, it’s fine, of course, you can stay,” I said.

“Not if you want me to go,” she said.

“What makes you think I want you to go?” I said.

“The way you act,” she said.

Which may have been true, but only because I was worried about us moving too quickly before we were together long enough to get to know one another. How can I possibly explain such a thing to Billie without making her think there’s something seriously wrong with me?

“I still think I should go,” Billie said.

“Look,” I said, “I was brought up a Catholic. I went to St. Rose of Lima grade school and St. Augustine’s high school, both of them in Brooklyn. I just think that the first thing I should be concerned about for the future of my life is making sure I don’t lose you.”

She laughed.

“I’m making you laugh?” I said.

“You’re not going to lose me,” she said.

“But that’s not my experience,” I said. “When I rush into something, it always turns out badly, and I don’t want that to happen to us.”

She laughed again.

“Will you stop laughing?” I said.

“You’re so sweet,” she said, slipping her arm around me. “Let me explain how I feel, okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“First of all, I don’t want to be in love, or to make a commitment about being in love. It’s much too soon for me. I’m not divorced yet. I hardly know what it means to be on my own without having somebody else to answer to. I’ve got a lot to think about. My parents want me to move back with them, which I’ve made up my mind I’m not going to do. I have too much to learn about myself. What do I do next? Where do I go from here? I’ve been in night school for nine years. Now I think I want to go to UCLA and get a degree in something that will get me a job and a career I can love. What I definitely don’t want to do is to kill myself by falling asleep while driving over that damn canyon to Sherman Oaks. You understand what I’m talking about?”

“Yes, okay, I said you can stay, didn’t I? I want you to stay.”

I then had a short debate with myself about who’d sleep on the couch and who’d sleep upstairs in the bed. “Don’t you want us to sleep together?” she said finally. “We don’t have to make love, if that’s your problem.”

“It’s not my problem. I want to make love,” I said.

She started to laugh again. “You’re a very complicated person,” she said.

45.

We made great love. Billie shook her head no. “It wasn’t love,” she said. “It was sex.”

“Same thing, isn’t it, if you love somebody?” I said, as she sat up in bed, shaking her head no again. For the next three quarters of an hour love/sex was what we argued about. She said sex, I said love, even though she’d already told me she didn’t want to get involved with love, because she wasn’t ready for it, and yet I persisted and made her talk about it. What did making her talk about love do to our glorious night together? Put a huge damper on it that we may never recover from, which was extremely serious to me, and embarrassing. How dumb can I get?

While she took a shower and got dressed, I made coffee and toast for her. She gulped down the coffee and passed on the toast. She was going back to her apartment in Sherman Oaks, she said, to change clothes and pick up some papers she’d been working on for the office. She was due to meet Supervisor Klein at eight-thirty at a tenants’ meeting in Inglewood. “I’ll just make it,” she said.

I walked her out to her car. Her Vanden Plas Princess was parked on the private road behind the buildings. It was a few minutes after six a.m. The morning sky was yellow. We hugged, exchanged kisses. I reminded her we’d slept less than two hours. “Take it easy on Coldwater,” I said.

Glumly I watched her climb into the Princess and start up its engine. Rolling down the driver’s window, she took my hand and kissed it.

“Don’t worry,” she said, fluttering her eyelids at me. “I’m wide awake.”

46.

For the next three hours, worrying the entire time about Billie and the trip she was making to her apartment over Coldwater Canyon, I re-swept and scrubbed the badly smoke-stained rear closet. I also cleared out the back yard, carrying most of the debris, in maybe two-dozen trips, to the trashcans at the back of the lot. This morning, I remembered, was pick-up time for the trash collector. By noon all evidence of my small tragedy would be history, except I did salvage a couple of boxes of magazines and books and some treasured junk I still couldn’t part with that I piled in the yard and covered with a plastic tarp.

At eight sharp I phoned Reggie at the management office. A half hour later he arrived to inspect the damage. A compulsive knuckle-cracker, he listened patiently to my story about the fire, probably because it reminded him of five stories of his own, involving fire and narrow escapes. “I myself was the luckiest,” he said, cracking his knuckles noisily as he spoke. One evening five weeks ago, on a Sunday, Reggie said, crack, crack, I was soaking in the bathtub, when suddenly I heard this terrible banging on the bathroom door.

What could that be? Reggie said, simulating the bang, bang, bang on his door by vigorously cracking the knuckles on both his hands: crack, crack, crack. His wife Louise, Reggie said, had gone to the movies with her sister Daisy. The front and back doors were locked, he said, because before he’d gotten into the tub, he’d carefully checked them. Had someone broken into the house? Was he about to be attacked? Crack, crack. Scrambling out of the tub, draping a towel around himself, he eased open the bathroom door. Immediately the banging ceased. Outside the door, bellowing frantically and making panicked eyes at him was Kahana the cat, a dark gray Abyssinian he and Louise had brought back from Maui.

Realizing from the desperate way Kahana was twisting her body at him that she wanted him to follow her, he cautiously did, crack, crack. When they reached the kitchen, he was startled to discover that the aluminum pot he’d been boiling kidney beans in and had completely forgotten about, as well as the gas burner under the pot, were enveloped in flames. Kahana, crack, crack, must have noticed that the pot was on fire, and deciding the fire needed to be put out, crack, crack, had banged on the bathroom door until she’d gotten his attention.

Only vaguely, Reggie said, did he remember turning off the gas burner. Stronger was his memory of snatching up the pot and precariously holding onto it as he stumbled to the sink, crack, crack. Dousing the flames with water he remembered clearly. Then when he glanced back at the stove, he remembered seeing that the fire around the burner was also out, crack, crack, as Kahana, looking pleased with herself, began to rub sensuously against his leg.

“Cats are smart,” I said.

“Smartest,” he said, crack, crack.

I told him that somebody had once told me cats are closer genetically to primates than any other animal. “Love cats,” he said, crack, crack, crack.

47.

By the time we’d finished discussing cats, including three of his and a red tabby named Squirtie, who was my best pal and shadow when I was a teenager, Reggie had sniffed most of the wall outlets in the apartment. “A couple of them are suspicious,” he said, crack, crack. He’d already talked to an electrician. “Soon as you called me I called him. Good guy, very thorough. Also I told him I want that fixture in the closet replaced. No more naked light bulbs. You should have informed me instead of waiting for disaster to happen, which is your responsibility but I’m not going to charge you for it, crack, crack, though I could, you know, and would, if you hadn’t acted so fast to notify the fire department.”

We discussed the 911 operator and how brilliant I thought she was.

Knuckle-cracking enthusiastically, Reggie said: “Great people. Very prompt and very responsive in any dealings I’ve had with them.” He then said he’d told the electrician what I said the fireman had told me about the smoke smell. He gave me the electrician’s card. “He should show up late this afternoon, or sometime tomorrow morning.”

“I might not be here,” I said.

“Then I’ll take care of it,” he said, crack, crack, pulling up the closet trapdoor and starting down to the basement, as the front doorbell rang.

It was Al. “What did you tell my sister?” he said, eyeing me disapprovingly, as if she’d told him I’d made a pass at her, or said something negative about him, which I might have, but didn’t remember.

I’m in trouble, I thought.

He burst out laughing. “I’m not complaining. I really like what you told her,” he said.

What had I told her, I thought, that he liked so much?

“Took the pressure off,” he said, ”she knows I’m trying to do my best at the parking garage, because she thinks you wouldn’t tell her something that wasn’t true. Not that I’d ever intended to make the garage my lifetime occupation, but it did feel good to have a job that gave me some satisfaction, not too much obviously, as long as I can take a check home once a week that put a smile on Rhonda’s face and made her understand I wouldn’t do something stupid on purpose to give the boss an excuse to get rid of me, which she says I always do, but I don’t, unless some guy puts me in a situation I can’t tolerate, then anything is possible.”

I told him about the fire in the hall closet. He was surprised but not too interested. The only thing he wanted to do was talk about Rhonda. “She’s not going to kick me out,” he said jubilantly. “I’m saved, and you did it.”

Reggie called to me from the closet. “Can we talk?” He’d decided, he said, to send a painter to paint the closet’s fire-scorched walls. “We’ll pay for it, crack, crack, which means I’m taking into consideration what a good tenant you’ve been and how I can trust you in the future to report to me when something needs to be done and not put it off until I’ve got an emergency to deal with, okay?” Then he asked me about the tools in the basement.

“Don’t belong to me,” I said.

“We’ll pick them up,” he said, closing the trapdoor.

I introduced him to Al. Instantly they didn’t hit it off. Both wanted my undivided attention. Al could wait, I decided, so I followed Reggie upstairs, where he resumed cracking his knuckles and sniffing wall plugs. “The one beside your bed is suspicious,” he said. He advised me to keep the bed lamp unplugged until after the electrician had completed his inspection. “Don’t worry, but you’ve got to be cautious, okay?” he said, crack, crack.

While Al was poking through my refrigerator, I went outside into the courtyard with Reggie. He asked about Al. “Actor, isn’t he?” he said, crack, crack “Can spot them a mile away. Always trouble.” He thought he remembered Al had tried to rent an apartment in a building he managed on Bellows Drive. “Slick, isn’t he, too slick. Almost had me fooled.”

Making a series of angry knuckle cracks and sour faces, he described some bad experiences he’d had with tenants who were actors. “Once you let them in, they’ve got rights, and no matter how much rent they don’t pay, or how much damage they do, or how many neighbors they don’t get along with, you can’t put them out. You have to follow a legal procedure that’s expensive and takes time, which is why I try to keep them, and everybody like them, out of my apartments, and why I didn’t rent to your friend.”

Wise move, I thought.

“This doesn’t mean I have animosity toward him. Personally I like actors,” he said, crack, crack. “A lot of them are very creative and pleasant people, but I don’t want them occupying my buildings, okay?”

Yet he was a movie fan. His favorite movies, Reggie said, were two Henry Fondas and three Cary Grants.

Al, we both noticed, was intermittently peeking at us through the dining room window. “He’s getting anxious,” Reggie said, crack, crack, the next time Al’s face appeared at the window. “I’ve got work to do. I’ll keep in touch, okay?” We shook hands. I watched him, as he hurried up the garden steps toward the parking lot.

When I returned to the apartment, Al said: “He recognized me, didn’t he? Whatever he told you about me is his version, not mine. I’m glad I didn’t get involved with him. Hates actors.”

“Says he’s a movie fan,” I said. I told him about the Henry Fondas and the Cary Grants he’d said were his favorites.

Al did his Fonda and Grant imitations.

“Terrific,” I said. I’d heard his Fonda and Grant before. Both were passable, more not bad than terrific, but terrific, I knew, would please him.

“Who’s this?” he said, droplets of sweat appearing on his forehead and upper lip. In a high, thin, scratchy, non-Grant voice he began to describe the plot of one of Grant’s movies. When I didn’t immediately identify whose voice he was imitating, he switched to a description of Reggie’s apartment building on Bellows Drive.

“Stop,” I said. “Say it more slowly.”

“Don’t you get it?” he said.

“Reggie?” I said.

“On the money,” he said.

“That’s remarkable,” I said.

“Needs practice,” he said, in his Reggie-sounding voice.

“Very close,” I said.

“Close?” he said, a puzzled look on his face.

“Clear,” I said.

“Clear?” he said. “You do recognize it’s him, don’t you?”

“Sure, absolutely,” I said.

He seemed relieved. Then tilting his head Reggie-like toward his left shoulder and speaking in his Reggie voice, he said: “Also cracks his knuckles a lot and flutters his eyelids when he gets stuck for a word or can’t quite come up with the sentence he wants to say, right?”

Then Al began to crack his own knuckles. Compared to Reggie’s powerful cracks, Al’s knuckle-cracking was feeble.

“Never learned properly,” Al said. “Quit too soon.” He explained that when he was ten years old, his mother had forbidden him to knuckle-crack, saying it would fracture his bones and if he didn’t stop before he was eleven, bring on incurable arthritis, so reluctantly, he said, he did stop, except sometimes, as he was growing up, he experimented with knuckle-cracking secretly, but not often enough to revive his original curiosity about it, until he went to rent that apartment on Bellows Drive, met Reggie, and saw and heard what an extraordinary knuckle-cracker Reggie was.

Al was giving me another sample of his knuckle-cracking, when he was interrupted by a loud, single knock on the front door that was suddenly thrust open, as an out-of- breath Reggie rushed into the living room. He’d forgotten his keys, he said, left them on the kitchen table. While I fetched the keys from the table, Al aimed an elaborate knuckle-crack at him, which he eagerly reciprocated. “A nasty habit,” Reggie said, “but I’m hooked.” He explained he came from a family of highly talented knuckle-crackers. “My Aunt Sheila, my father’s sister, was county champion nine years straight, retired undefeated.”

“I’m just learning,” Al said, as they exchanged combative-sounding knuckle-cracks.

“Duets are fun,” Reggie said, grabbing the keys from me In a robust voice he began to sing: “Yankee Doodle Went to Town, A-Riding on a Pony,” then Al and I joined in: “Stuck a Feather in his Hat, and Called him Macaroni,” then in an energetic knuckle-cracking duet, Reggie and Al knuckle-cracked alternately and in unison: Yank, Ee, Crack, Crack, Crack, Crack, Town, Crack, Crack, Crack, a Crack, Crack, Stuck a Crack, Crack, in his Hat, and Crack, Crack, Mac a Crack, Crack….

“In national as well as international competitions,” Reggie said, “contestants get points for style, execution, and the clarity of their cracking.” He showed us several crisp cracks were big point-earners in contrast to a couple of weak, muffled cracks, which he also demonstrated, that might actually cause a contestant to lose points. He then critiqued Al’s style and execution. “Hands too flat and stiff. Have to look delicate and pliable.” He suggested Al should cup his hands and hold his thumbs more toward his forefingers “And above all, relax, okay?” Al tried a few cracks, and they did sound sharper and, as Reggie said, “brighter.” He then treated us to a spectacular demonstration of fancy knuckle-cracking that clearly impressed Al who stopped sneering at him, and instead looked genuinely disappointed, when Reggie yanked open the front door and exited into the courtyard.

Glumly we watched as he walked past the dining room’s front and side windows back up the garden path toward the parking lot. As soon as we heard Reggie’s car start up, Al began to knuckle-crack again, and we both began to sing: Yank, EE, Crack, Crack, Went to Crack, A-Riding on a Crack, Crack, Stuck a Crack, Crack in his Hat, and called him Crack ARONI.

YANKEE DOODLE, KEEP IT UP
YANKEE DOODLE DANDY
MIND THE MUSIC AND THE STEP
AND WITH THE GIRLS BE HANDY.

FATHER AND I WENT DOWN TO CAMP
ALONG WITH CAPTAIN GOODING
AND THERE WE SAW THE MEN AND BOYS
AS THICK AS HASTY PUDDING.

YANKEE DOODLE, KEEP IT UP
YANKEE DOODLE DANDY
MIND THE MUSIC AND THE STEP
AND WITH THE GIRLS BE HANDY.

YANKEE DOODLE, KEEP IT UP
YANKEE DOODLE DANDY
MIND THE MUSIC AND THE STEP
AND WITH THE GIRLS BE HANDY

CRACK, CRACK!!

48.

The last time I talked with Eric was on Friday, when he phoned me at the office. You may recall he was upset, because he’d just finished a three-hour confrontation with some loud-mouthed apartment house owner who was pressuring him to change the market value on his (the loud-mouth’s) property. Stuff like “you bet your ass I am,” which Eric had shouted at me over the phone, I knew, was totally out of character for him. I also don’t remember his getting abusive, or raising his voice in any other conversation we’d had no matter how contentious it was. Normally he was mild-mannered and soft-spoken, and, I thought, shrunk up defensively in his five-foot-five, 128 lb., slope-shouldered body.

It was past three-fifteen, when I got to the office. Eric was sitting at his desk, making notes from papers stacked in front of him. He’d had a message from Billie, he said. She’d called to ask me to meet her at five o’clock at the Cinema Bright Spot restaurant at the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. She was inviting me to go with her to a meeting of the representatives of several peace organizations she belonged to that were planning a rally to welcome to Los Angeles Mbda La’aster, a thirty-eight year old East African peace activist and entrepreneur, who’d tripled her earnings from her water-delivery business by borrowing $100 from the Tall Tree Lending Foundation and buying an ox and a small wagon to replace the water cart she’d been dragging from village to village and customer to customer. The peace organizations’ meeting place, Billie told Eric, was Hool House, the private residence of L.A. County Library commissioner, Ned Alan Hool, the IVth, on Pritzer Street in the hills above Sherman Oaks.

When I invited Eric and his wife to join us, Eric said, glancing nervously at me, “Please understand we’re not against peace. In addition, there’s no question whatsoever that Judy and I are one hundred percent in favor of this African woman making money from delivering water, which I have no doubt is a noble occupation, but, irrespective of the cause, regardless of how worthy it is, neither of us is available to do meetings, or marches, or sit downs, or letter-writing campaigns. We both teach Bible study classes, and every Monday Judy takes baskets of food to poor families throughout Burbank and North Hollywood for the Charity Volunteer Association. “However, she believes as I do that our own family has top priority over any outside activity we might get involved with, which means we definitely don’t have time for more meetings, assemblies, or other types of commitments we can’t keep.”

Judy was Eric’s second wife. Two of their three children, the girls, Buttercup and Jewel, were from Judy’s first marriage “You know that, don’t you?” Eric said.

I nodded yes. They’d adopted, I also knew, their son, Shannon.

His voice hoarse and quavering, Eric said: “I told you, didn’t I, how I met Judy?”

”Yes,” I said.

“On a cruise,” he said.

“To Bermuda,” I said.

“Playing shuffle board,” he said. “Started a conversation and couldn’t stop, didn’t stop.” He blushed and laughed softly. “About life, love, family –“

“And the pursuit of happiness,” I said.

“Joy,” he said.

His left cheek had begun to twitch. Stress, I suppose, but why? And why was he so guilty-looking? He also seemed intent on averting his eyes from mine. Had he caved into that apartment house owner and couldn’t get up nerve to tell me about it?

“Six weeks after the cruise we were married,” he said.

“Six?” I said. “Wasn’t it eight?”

“Did I tell you eight?” he said.

‘You never said six,” I said.

“Peculiar,” he said. Then he laughed noisily. “Judy is the loveliest woman, a great friend and a great confidante. We’re of one mind about everything,” he said. “Including my profession and how I conduct it.”

Hey, I thought, he’s about to claim she gave him permission to cave, or advised him to cave, or talked him into caving.

His face was extra pale, and he was breathing heavily.

“Revising an appraisal,” he said, “is not a sin.”

49.

Which got me thinking about Moses on the mountaintop with his stone tablets, inventing sins, or at least defining them, and what a burden it’s been on my Catholic conscience, particularly since Billie had moved in with me.

“That’s such bull,” Billie said so sharply I jumped in self-defense, “as long as I was in my own apartment, we were fine, no matter how often I slept with you. I was your safety net, right, your wiggle room, in case you changed your mind about living together, regardless of how many times you invited me, begged me to move in with you, until finally I succumbed and gave up my apartment like you said you wanted me to, when that smile on your face disappeared, I hardly ever see it anymore.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, “stop exaggerating. I’m smiling now, aren’t I?”

“Barely.”

“It’s still a smile, isn’t it?” I said, but she does have a point. I’m not a big smiler, never have been, runs in my family to be serious-faced, because we’re doubters and second guessers, we just don’t smile a lot, whereas Billie can produce that big irresistible grin at the drop of a hat, a really great talent, I thought, making a quick comparison between Margaret who almost never smiled at me and Billie who doesn’t stop.

Certainly Billie was smiling now, when I walked into the Cinema Bright Spot. She was sitting in the main dining room at a small booth beside a window that looked out onto Laurel Canyon. Called the audience room, the dining room was crowded and noisy and featured high up on its inside wall a large movie screen on which were continuously playing scenes from 1910-20s silent comedies. As I hurried across the room toward Billie, I noticed Buster Keaton’s face on the movie screen, below which were three doorways to inner rooms (known as dens in the Bright Spot), one marked Actors, the second Writers, and the third Directors/Producers. All three dens also appeared to be crowded, which, I expect, happened on most days at the Cinema Bright Spot, because a significant proportion of the Hollywood/Studio City showbiz population considered themselves actors, writers, directors and/or producers, and networked regularly in places like Schubert’s Parlor and the Cinema Bright Spot, regardless of how small their reputations or little they worked professionally as actors, writers, directors and producers.

“We don’t have much time,” Billie said. “Are you hungry?”

I ordered a cup of chicken noodle soup. She had an English muffin and iced tea “The meeting starts promptly at six fifteen,” she said, glancing at her watch, as Al, followed by three high-schoolers (two boys, one girl) from his once-a-week improv session, emerged from the Actors’ den. Instantly spotting us, he directed the high-schoolers toward our table, obviously elated, dancing a few steps behind them, his eyes riveted on Billie. I could see from the rapt expression on his face he couldn’t believe (which he later told me was true) that she was so beautiful, projected so much vitality, and gave them, especially the high-schoolers, such a warm, open, enthusiastic greeting.

“I’m jealous,” he said, “she takes more notice of them than she does of me, because I’m already madly in love with her.”

This one-sided gag about his being in love with Billie he kept repeating, loudly proclaiming she would easily have chosen him over me, if he’d gotten to her before I did. “Watch yourself,” he said, eyeing me. “I’m ready to take over.”

Fortunately Billie was careful to do nothing to encourage him, or he might have tried “to take over,” which would have been an embarrassment to both of us, that is, to her as well as to me, and maybe to him also, because I knew he was a lot more sensitive than the overbearing suitor he pretended to be.

He introduced us to the high-schoolers, showing off for them with declarations of love for Billie and disdain for me. “He’s no match,” he said, reaching for Billie’s hand. She pulled it away from him, winking at the high-schoolers, who apparently thought Al was a crack-up and were guffawing noisily every time Billie rejected him and fluttered her eyelids at me.

She asked them about the improv sessions. “Fun,” the girl (Melba) said.

“How’s it fun?” Billie said.

“Improvisation,” Al said, “is venting your perception of your inner consciousness.”

“What we do is make up a story, then act it out, spontaneously, without a script,” one of the boys (Fritzie) said. He’d been in his high school’s production of “Carousal” and “Okalahoma” and was very serious about having a career in showbiz as a singer and dancer.

“We could do an improv for her,” the other boy {Bernard) said

Melba, who’d been in two shows at her high school (a different school) and firmly believed she was destined to become a famous actress, gave an example of the kind of improvisation they’d been doing in their improv sessions with Al. “I’m a girl with a problem who’s very sad and is crying,” she said. “Bernard and Fritzie have this improv to cheer me up and solve my problem.” She turned toward Al. “Or we could repeat what we did in today’s session, or if you’d give us a premise, we could try something different?”

“Sure,” Al said, nodding toward the crowded dining room, “but there are too many people, it’s too distracting. Would be better, wouldn’t it, if we invited her to one of our sessions?”

“Which one?” Bernard said in a deep, powerful-sounding voice. I knew from a previous talk with Al that Bernard at 17 was already an accomplished singer. “Great range,” Al later said. He also praised Bernard’s acting ability, stage presence, breath-control, personality, etc. “He can make it in showbiz if he wants to. Needs to concentrate more and commit himself.”

Al Fritzie said: “It’s up to Billie when she decides to come, isn’t it?”

“I’ll be there, whenever you invite me,” Billie said.

Looking enormously pleased with himself, Al glanced from Billie to Fritzie. “I’m inviting her. (then directly to Billie:) You’re invited. Yes, you are,” he said, grinning triumphantly at me, as if her willingness to come to his improv session was a warning I shouldn’t ignore.

Or at least, that was Billie’s opinion. We were in her Vanden Plas Princess. VIV we’d parked on a side street in Studio City a few blocks from the Cinema Bright Spot. We had twenty minutes to get to Hool House up a winding mountain road. “I still don’t understand Al,” Billie said, “or what he expects you to do for him.”

“It’s a game,” I said. “He’s cast me as his chief rival for your affection, the nasty villain of the piece, standing between you and his onslaught of charm that’s supposed to sweep you into his arms, though I guarantee he’d instantly vanish if you showed the slightest interest in him. That’s his pattern, he’s much too afraid of getting involved with a woman, any woman, regardless of how brilliant or loving she is, for more than a couple of months at a time, which is why he gets dumped so much. What woman is willing to be taken for granted at his convenience?”

“He’s very handsome,” Billie said.

“And loads of fun as long as you enjoy being teased and put down about everything,” I said.

“He does make me laugh,” Billie said.

“That’s no excuse for bad behavior,” I said.

“But what if you’re some unfortunate woman who thinks she’s in love with him and would rather tolerate his bad behavior than risk losing him?”

“Oh, come off it, that’s still no excuse,” I said. “In my opinion, being handsome is like acting for Al. He has loads of talent to be a fine actor, yet neither his good looks nor his talent is enough to give him confidence in himself, which he badly needs.”

“Badly,” she said, nodding sympathetically.

“I told you, didn’t I, or did I, about his membership in the Language Club at the Community College, and how he’s been passing himself off as a scholar from Berlin and speaking with an impenetrable German accent? You know how marvelous he is with accents, right, and German is a piece of cake for him. So here he is talking German-accented gibberish to a group of wise-ass students who probably think he’s a creep and a show-off, and what does he do next? With a straight face he asks me to translate for him. Me! Can you believe that? I go with him to a couple of meetings and I’m supposed to make sense out of something that makes no sense at all. Which is the story of my life with Al, isn’t it? He wants to be accepted, but on his own terms, and if he meets any resistance whatsoever, or suspects some one eventually is going to resist him, he comes on with such hostility, like this fake German crap, which he pretends is a big joke, and if you don’t understand the joke, you’re an idiot. Why? Why! One reason, and one reason only to cover up how insecure he is, even though he knows, as well as we know, that by pulling a stunt like this he’s ruining his chances to make friends and be taken seriously in the Language Club. I’ve talked to him about it, warned him against doing it, but he just laughs and tells me not to worry about him, which drives me nuts.”

“Poor sweetheart,” Billie said, taking my hand and kissing it, as the single-lane mountain road begins to narrow and directly ahead of us is Hool House.

50.

A seven bedroom, seven full-bath, two-and-a-half story tall, white-stucco Mediterranean-style mansion, with 17,386 square feet under its red-tiled roof, Hool House was built in 1931 by Ned Alan Hool, the First. Also containing a small theatre, a ballroom, and an indoor swimming pool, it was modeled after a manor house Ned the First and his bride, Bonnie Sewell, fell in love with on their honeymoon in Majorca. Situated on a bluff above the Baleric Sea, the Majorca house had a sweeping distant view of the golden Spanish coastline. Hool House, in contrast, was high in the California Granada Hills and had a peek-a-boo view of the San Diego-Ventura freeway. Its 22-acre site was covered with old-growth cedars and pines and surrounded by a tall wooden fence. At the property’s juncture with the road were wide iron-picketed gates between flagstone columns. Stationed at the gates were two uniformed private guards and two Los Angeles County sheriffs, also in uniform.

One of the sheriffs recognized Billie. Snapping a crisp salute at her, he sauntered over to the Vanden Plas Princess. “Love this baby,” he said, patting the Princess’ hood. “Soon as you decide to get rid of it, I’m your man.”

“Won’t happen,” Billie said.

“Someday,” he said.

“Never,” she said. “Keeping it till I die.”

That got a big laugh from both sheriffs and both guards.

“I’m due at the meeting,” Billie said.

His hand still on the Princess’ hood, the Sheriff shouted to the guards: “Supervisor Klein’s office. Billie Cooper.”

One of the guards was holding a clipboard with a roster on it. “Got her,” he said, waving to Billie to drive forward, while the other guard pushed open the gates.

Hool House’s parking lot was behind its eight–car garage. When we arrived, there were maybe three-dozen cars on the lot, not including four sheriff’s cars. Another uniformed guard directed us to enter the house through a rear door next to the garage. The meeting, he said, was in the movie theatre, one long flight down, in the basement.

The Hool family fortune had come from bookbinding. In 1910 the first Ned Alan Hool’s grandfather, Bendix Hool, had invented the reverse pinch, which revolutionized the book-publishing business and provided the Hools with mountains of royalties from its reverse pinch patents.

Since 1910, the Hools had invested their royalties extensively in California real estate that has zoomed in value, diamonds, gold, platinum, cattle, salmon fisheries, and choice stock market recommendations, all of which have ballooned the Hools’ gross assets and solidified their clout locally, in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., as well as internationally, in most foreign capitals and markets.

On the movie theatre stage was Ned Alan Hool, the IV. A short, wiry 42 year-old, with a round face, a baldhead, black-gray sideburns, and a thick black-gray mustache, he was standing behind a lectern that had a microphone attached to it, waving to the peace delegates as they came into the theatre. Billie went up to the stage and extended her hand to him. Bending down toward her, he took her hand in both of his and held it tightly. She congratulated him on going ahead with the meeting in the face of strong political opposition, then introduced me. Shaking my hand vigorously, he welcomed me to Hool House.

The eleven peace delegates, plus three guests, including me, were seated in two vertical rows at the far right of the auditorium. Then there were three or four vacant vertical rows. The remainder of the audience was composed of maybe twenty men in suits or police uniforms and two women, one of them in uniform, who were scattered among the vertical rows on the left section of the auditorium.

Leaning toward Billie, I asked: “Who are these people?”

“Tell you later” she whispered, putting her finger to her lips, as the overhead ceiling lights flickered.

At the rear of the stage behind Ned Alan Hool was a tall movie screen. On the screen was an enlarged photograph of a muscular-looking, overweight black woman with a billion dollar smile. Wearing a red-and-green flowered turban and a full-length red-and-green flowered dress that bulged prominently at her hips and belly, she was, of course, Mbda La’aster, the meeting’s soon-to-arrive-in-Los-Angeles guest of honor, whose trip to the United States was being sponsored by the Tall Tree Lending Foundation.

The ceiling lights were lowered to about half-strength, and a spotlight was turned on Ned Alan Hool. He apologized for starting the meeting a few minutes late, then gave a warm greeting to everybody in the auditorium. Pointing toward the enlarged photograph of Mbda La’ster, he described how he’d met her briefly in Geneva, Switzerland, at Tall Tree’s semi-annual convention of its participating lenders. “Lovely person,” he said, “Shy, but with obvious strength of character and determination.” He told how she’d gotten involved with Tall Tree, what her project had developed into, how successful it became, and why she was representing Tall Tree in its fund-raising campaign among peace organizations throughout the United States.

The enlarged photograph of Miss La’ster, we now learned, was the opening shot of a short film in which she addressed the audience directly, thanking us for coming to the meeting and asking us to be generous in our contributions to Tall Tree. She spoke in Swahili, her native language, which was translated almost simultaneously into English by a Canadian woman from Toronto.

Meanwhile, Billie was identifying some of the people on the other side of the auditorium. Pointing to two guys in suits in the rear row, she whispered: “F.B.I.” The guys, she said, spread out in the row in front of them were three agents from the C.I.A., an assistant attorney general, and, in uniform, four deputies from the County Sheriff’s Office. Also, seated in the rows below the deputies, she said, still whispering, were representatives of the State’s anti-espionage squad, the City Attorney, the City police, and the Mayor’s special security group.

Sally Kreiger Hool had replaced her husband at the lectern. She was outlining Mbda La’aster’s itinerary during her stay in Los Angeles. Three peace delegates, Sally said, naming the three delegates, had volunteered to pick up Miss La’aster at Los Angeles County airport and deliver her to the Century Plaza Hotel, where she would remain for six days. Tall Tree had arranged various fund-raising activities, including at least two black-tie dinners and a trip to the Ballet, and the Peace Group was sponsoring a march and rally that would take off from the parking lot of a large motel property the Hools owned on Santa Monica Boulevard, proceeding along Santa Monica Boulevard to Century Plaza Drive across from the Century Plaza Hotel.

“We’re trying to get permission from the hotel for Mbda to appear on a second-floor balcony so she can wave to the crowd,” Sally said. “Other peace groups from around California are planning to join us.” How large would the crowd be? She estimated 800-1000, “provided everybody comes.”

The Hools were now together at the lectern. I’d counted the law enforcement people Billie had identified. They totaled nineteen compared to the peace group’s 11 delegates plus the Hools, whom (according to Billie} the security forces were keeping under strict surveillance. Ned was asking the peace delegates if any of them had any questions. Amid much laughter several delegates wanted minor clarifications about time, place, responsibilities, other peace groups, routes, etc.

Then Ned, looking to the law-enforcement section, shouted: “Any questions?” For an answer he got complete, hostile or (I thought) embarrassed silence.

Later, on our drive in the Princess back to Studio City to pick up VIV, I asked Billie why none of the law-enforcers asked a question. “Already know everything about us,” she said, grimacing a worried smile at me.

51.

But first what had happened on that fateful Thursday, two months before Billie’s worried smile, and seven months before she’d moved in with me, when I met Kenneth the King Conrad at his office in Brentwood and talked to him about doing an appraisal on the property he owned and was contemplating developing in Peiwinkle, California? Remember?

Well, on Wednesday, the night before my momentous meeting with the King, I’d gotten into bed early, expecting I’d have my usual trouble settling down and sleeping, because I had such a huge day ahead of me.

Instead I dropped off to sleep within minutes of getting into bed and didn’t wake up till seven forty-five the next morning, with barely enough time to get to Brentwood by 9:30. Shiller had warned me against coming late.

So when I arrived Thursday morning exactly on time, he thanked me effusively. He was waiting for me in his small glassed-in office in the outer lobby of the company’s Brentwood Headquarters Building. “Do you tap?’ he said, tap-dancing clumsily in front of his desk.

“Tap?” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s the big thing here now, “he said, continuing his clumsy tap-dancing, while he explained to me that the King had decided to produce a musical extravaganza, with a cast of tap-dancing employees (working friends), as the perfect expression of the kind of individualism and togetherness the company needed to do its best and most creative work.

“Tap-dancing?” I said, as Miss Peg Peevy came tapping toward her desk in the reception area near outer lobby’s main entrance.

A stout, oblong-shaped woman in her mid-fifties, Peevy was King’s executive secretary and first ex-wife. Her tapping was even clumsier than Shiller’s.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’m learning fast.”

“Didn’t you take tap as a kid?” Shiller asked. “I did.”

“I didn’t,” Miss Peevy said, accidentally stepping on one of her own feet and flopping by some miracle, onto her desk chair, “but that won’t stop me.”

“Did you?” Shiller said, eyeing me skeptically, as if sizing me up as a tap-dancer trainee.

“Did I what?” I said.

“Take tap when you were a kid?”

“A few times,” I said.

“What means a few times?” he said, staring critically, I thought, at my flat feet.

“Is it important?” I said.

“Vitally,” Miss Peevy said.

“We’re collecting statistics,” Shiller said, “to assess what kind of training we need.”

“In tap-dancing?”

“In bringing cohesiveness to our long-term purpose,” Miss Peevy said.

“Which is what?” I said, sounding hostile, I suppose, instead of innocently curious, which was my true feeling.

“To become a stronger, healthier, and more versatile organization of working friends from all levels of the corporation, Miss Peevy said, who are committed not only to company growth but also to maximizing inner joy and satisfaction among ourselves and in one another.”

“Doesn’t affect me, does it?” I said, my heart pounding, anticipating an answer I didn’t want to hear.

“If you come to work for us,” Miss Peevy said, “why not?”

Shiller was grinning. “Talk to the King about it,” he said. He’d arranged for a tap-dancing clerk to escort me to the King’s private meeting room in the rear section of the building.

“Is it okay if I keep practicing?” the clerk asked. Poised and much more advanced than Shiller and Miss Peevy, she tap danced smoothly more complicated steps. As I hurried after her, I was tempted to try a couple of unsteady shuffle-offs, taught to me in the distant past by Hootie’s father, Norbert Gallagher, a water inspector by profession, who gave tap-dancing lessons on the side.

Who, you ask, is Hootie Gallagher? How exactly does she fit into the company’s tap-dancing extravaganza?

Well, hmmm.

The Twelve O'clock Chapters 61-74

2008-12-14T15:46:00.000-08:00

61.

The next morning when I reported for work, the King was waiting for me, obviously angry. “She (meaning Billie) told me off in front of my friends,” he said, his face twitching nastily, “Don’t ever let her do that to me again.”

“You were harassing her,” I said.

“My business, not yours,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I love her.”

His eyes narrowed. “You’ve got guts,” he said. “Which I admire.” Then acting as if he thought he was doing Billie and me a big favor: “I also intend to apologize to her.”

“Not necessary,” I said.

“My responsibility,” he said sharply. We stared at one another until I said I was sorry she’d embarrassed him. When his spirit seemed to brighten, I told him how anxious I was to get started on the Periwinkle feasibility study. ”Provided you still want me to do it?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t, did I?” he said, again sharply.

“How about tomorrow? Can I start tomorrow? Would it be okay if I drove down to Periwinkle tomorrow to look at the property? Is that okay?”

“Sure, it’s okay. Why wouldn’t it be okay?” he said sharply. “I’ll notify my father you’re coming.” He buzzed Shiller, asked him if the Periwinkle file was ready for me.

The briefcase I got from Shiller contained copies of Perwinkle deeds, soil analyses, drainage surveys, old and recent maps of cultivated areas, previous appraisals and feasibility studies, estimates of the purchasing power and buying patterns in the surrounding area, notes on housing stock, commercial and industrial availabilities, price ranges, plantings, farming yields, per capita income, etc.

There was also a thick file on Kenneth Leonard Conrad, the King’s father, tracing him from his birthplace in Sidney, Australia, to London to Philadelphia, where he met and married Mary Elizabeth Ryan, re-named Mary Joseph at the convent. Kenny, the King, was born in Trenton, New Jersey. He was nineteen months old, when the family moved to Connecticut and settled in a small clapboard house on Fourth Street in West Cayslip. Five and a half years later, as I’ve previously reported, nine weeks after Kenny’s seventh birthday, Leonard packed his clothes and taro charts and disappeared, breaking poor Mary Elizabeth’s heart, as I’ve also reported. In addition, Leonard’s file contained photographs of floral-clad Tahitian women, plus self-photographs taken in various countries as he toured the world, searching for his lost magic, which ironically he found at the end of his journey on a Periwinkle hill.

During my five-hour trip to Periwinkle Leonard’s reputation as a magic maker was hanging over my head. How can I compete with a guy who claims to be in regular contact with space ships? It’s a wonder my anxiety about meeting him didn’t distract me into a major car crash. The route south from Los Angeles was heavily-trafficked, with intermittent speed-ups and slow-downs that produced numerous traffic jams, the worst of which were a four-car collision and helicopter rescue outside Glendale and an Orange County police chase that backed up traffic for more than fifteen miles.

Within minutes after I arrived at Periwinkle and parked VIV on the narrow parking strip inside the property’s wood-picket gates, Leonard came limping out of his small house’s screened-in porch. A victim of feet-numbing neuropathy, he’d been sitting in a rocking chair, waiting for me. He was 76, he said, twenty-three years older than the King. None of the photographs I’d been given looked anything like him. The most recent, he told me later, he’d taken thirty-two years ago in India, at age 44, when he had long brown hair that he wore in a ponytail, typical of the era, as photographs of the1970’s show. In the most flattering photo of him he was as lean and trim as his son is today, had a slim, Errol Flynn moustache, and was wearing a narrow tie, a dark blue one-button sports coat, and gray or tan stove-pipe legged pants.

Now, on the day I met him, he was stooped and overweight, had a potbelly and a flabby double chin, his nose had thickened, and the corners of his crack-lipped mouth were damp with saliva. The thick hair on his head had been replaced by salt-and-pepper stubble across his scalp and down his long sideburns. A dense gray-black beard covered his chin, jaw, and portions of his neck. His formerly white, even teeth (as shown in the 1970 photographs) were chipped and stained, and his breath was intensely sour. He was wearing tinted bifocals and said a doctor had recently told him he needed a cataract operation. His hands were trembling. Did he have Parkinson’s? I asked. His answer was “maybe.”

Yet he hadn’t lost his big, very big, ingratiating grin. That grin, as soon as he turned it on, made friends and visitors like me smile and laugh with him, no matter how anxious we might feel about his poor physical condition.

You ask what kind of outfit he was wearing. Tattered jeans that were worn out from too many washings and a faded yellow tee-shirt under a brown tweed jacket with a wrinkled single vent at its back. Buttoned, the jacket was so tight Leonard winced every time he took a step, while his vent flapped up in a raised stabilizer position as if he was readying a spectacular magic trick to soar upward into the sky.

Living on the property in addition to him, he said, were four old guys with no other place to go. Two of them, Louie and Victor, he’d met in Las Vegas; Eddie he’d met in Palm Desert, and Olaf in Ojai. All four were homeless and broke, too old and weak to hold down jobs, and waiting for someone to come along to take care of them. Their heart-of-gold man was Leonard who said that often during his magic-seeking career he was dependent on people he didn’t know or hardly knew him, and yet they were kind and generous to him.

The four old guys were housed in two dilapidated shacks and shared an outhouse. In return for shelter and three meals a day they built large planter boxes, filled them with dirt, and grew vegetables for their dining table. It was a happy arrangement. If surpluses were produced, Leonard sold them to local food markets. The proceeds from the surplus sales paid some of Leonard’s planting expenses. The remainder was pocket change for his friends, Louie, Eddie, Victor, and Olaf.

We got into Leonard’s jeep. He gave me a tour of the mostly dry, mostly dusty, weed-covered acres. In the distance were mountains with broad swathes of greenery along their bases and thin veins of snow or ice at their summits. The air smelled sweet, and we both took relaxed, deep breaths. Leonard talked about his plans to switch his vegetable production to organic. “Future markets,” he said.

The last stop on our tour was the magic hill. Perhaps forty-feet tall, it appeared to be solid rock or hard slate-colored clay. Ladders, flimsy scaffolding, and various-sized platforms had been installed on all sides of it. “Me and my friends built them,” Leonard said. “Took us a year before we were able to climb on them. The platforms were the worst, but they’re stronger than they look. If you’re stuck someplace, you can always depend on them to keep you from breaking your neck. The ladders are okay, but we’ve got to do more to secure the scaffolding. Bring in somebody who knows how to design and construct it, for instance, which we didn’t, though Louie still claims he knew what he was doing, but we wouldn’t listen to him, or I wouldn’t listen to him, which isn’t true either.”

Leonard’s eyes shined with excitement, when he told me about the radiation. “Goes off the scale,” he said. He’d had some radiation experts from the Inter-Galactic Society check out the radiation’s intensity, and somebody by the name of Purtz or Turtz, who wrote a book about UFO sightings, make informal radiation measurements that exceeded Leonard’s wildest dreams. He showed me his logbook on the number of extra-terrestrial sightings the hill had attracted. Several steel cabinets were filled with Leonard’s space ship films and photographs, showing what he said were the lights and sky tracings of UFO’s approaching the hill.

“Staggering, isn’t it?” he said.

“Extraordinary,” I said.

“You’ll see for yourself,” he said. “Tonight, I hope.”

62.

Meanwhile, sometime during my five-hour drive to Periwinkle, the front doorbell rang at my Holloway apartment. Billie was home alone. She’d spent the afternoon writing a speech about global warming she was planning to make at the Forestry Club. “No breeze, no trees,” was the speech’s title. Two weeks ago a reporter from the L.A. Times had interviewed her. The Sunday after the interview the reporter’s article had appeared in the Times. Billie had received E-mails about the article from all over the country as well as England, Europe, and Israel. Aaron Meyerson, Israel’s most famous tree protector, had telephoned to congratulate her on her spirited defense of the forests.

The doorbell rang again. Damn,” Billie said she said, as she hurried to the front door.

“Hi, there,” the King said, smiling tentatively, as if he was expecting her to slam the door in his face, which she was tempted to do. Instead she politely welcomed him.

“I’ve come to apologize,” Billie said the King said, as he followed her into the apartment. His nervousness, she said, was so intense she could almost smell it over the slick after-shave lotion he was wearing. She intended to take a bath, and the tub water was running. She ran upstairs to turn off the water. “I just knew he’d try to overwhelm me with bath-taking jokes, when I came back down to the living room. I was wrong. He didn’t even smirk. Doesn’t that seem unbelievable to you, so out of character for him, which doesn’t mean he didn’t ask me questions about your career and experience as an appraiser.”

“I have great faith in him,” she said he said. “This is a strategic time for him to join the company. We’re in great need of professional help, and he’s the most talented guy I could find.”

Yet none of this questionable praise of me was recorded in his autobiography. In the chapter he devoted to apologizing to Billie, he stuck strictly to his outrage against her for humiliating him. “No excuse,” he said in the autobiography, “regardless of what she claims I did to her.”

The boyfriend (meaning me, I presume} was this close to getting sacked for defending her. And what about Miss Peevy,” he said, “wasn’t she pathetic? Getting a big laugh from the crowd by making cheap finger gestures at me, as if she was still expecting me to go to bed with her. Can you imagine having sex with such a woman? How did I ever do it? Now maybe somebody understands why I love fucking these damn teenagers so much, one of whom I actually married, didn’t I? Who would do something like that, if I weren’t sick in the head?

“Did I ever find true love, you ask? Sure, but I was too stupid and too selfish to take advantage of it. When was that? My mother, whom I rarely agree with, says I shouldn’t have run away from Lucy Spike, the mother of my daughter Hildie. Lucy loved me, Mama says, though she was so powerful and assertive she also frightened me. This I don’t deny, but what was I afraid of? Was she too determined and smarter than I am? I admit it was thrilling, when we won Roseland’s overall dance championship, but as soon as she told me she was pregnant, whatever love I was feeling for her vanished, which surprised me, and never again did I do anything I’m aware of to revive the strong feelings we’d had for one another.”

A tragic mistake, Mama says, and she blames me, which I agree with. Lucy was patient and forgiving, while I complained constantly about being trapped by the ordinary demands she made on me. Whenever we were alone, for example, where we should have been enjoying one another’s company, I was cranky or remote or both, until finally she told me she wasn’t willing to take such bullshit from me, and once Bruennhilde was safely and happily born, announced we didn’t have a future together, so we split, mindlessly, Mama says, because I preferred the financial agreement I’d concocted with company lawyers to the compromises I might have had to make if I’d persuaded Lucy to change her mind and marry me.
I’ve told you Mama also said it’s too expensive to tolerate poor people and then blamed me for the poverty they created for themselves, as if I had a choice to go against the free market, when the company wouldn’t last a minute, if I did. There’s no janitor in any one of our shopping centers who deserves a nickel more than what he contributes to the success of the organization. I admit Mama is right that poverty can’t be ignored. It has to be paid for. Either the company pays for it directly through un-free-market wages, or passes onto the community the costs of disease, poor health, substandard housing, crime, prison, abuse, tension, stress, which, in my opinion, was the most corrosive of all. Who then gets stuck with the bill? Mama as well as me and every other taxpayer who enjoys or takes advantage of this country’s fantastic benefits, unless you’re clever enough to do what’s necessary to reduce or eliminate the tax burden you suffer from. What was Mama’s reply to this self-serving crap? That she didn’t raise her boy to be a villain, but she did have a brother, my uncle, whom I considered the most brilliant person I’ve ever known. He managed to overcome this kind of conflict, didn’t he, by limiting the damage he did, while maximizing the good, and dammit, that’s my motto, regardless of how disappointed my mixed bag of accomplishments make Mama feel about me.

Of course, remember, I also had Wagner to contend with. Lucy, after all, was a faithful festival-chaser. This meant Hildie had sacrifices to make, when her mother’s scheduling conflicts occurred. Not that the King was required on such occasions to take over child caring duties, but, as he reported in his autobiography, he did feel obligated to be available to Hildie more often and for longer periods of time, no matter how busy he was with company business. In addition, during her first months in Brentwood, he quickly realized she was now more important to him than his commitment to his job, and that, he knew, was resented by some of his staff executives, who openly complained that she (Hildie) shouldn’t have been permitted to distract him from his corporate responsibilities.

These same executives also demanded the Siegfried twins be banned from the Brentwood estate. In the four days the twins stayed with Hildie before the King expelled them, the Siegfrieds’ transgressions the executives found most intolerable were not speaking when spoken to, sleeping, belching, and picking their noses in public, scribbling words like puke, shit, and snot on inside walls and other inappropriate places, shouting obscenities at security guards and other night workers, and whenever possible, which was almost always, ignoring what company elders told them to do. In short, they were acting like rebellious nineteen-year-olds with generational differences that seemed reasonable to them but contemptuous to the King and his executives. Hence, when the King asked for a vote, he got a unanimous verdict to run the Siegfrieds off the estate and forbid them to return. There also were ugly rumors (denied by the King in his autobiography} that the twins were seen having sex with Hildie in the King’s two-story swimming pool. Can you imagine such willful disregard of basic human propriety (if true, which the King says it isn’t). Was this the kind of arrogant conduct toward elders taught to students at Barkworth College? No wonder the King’s rapport with Hildie was deteriorating rapidly. Help!

Meanwhile, at my apartment on Holloway Drive, “the King was sitting on the couch. I’d just made tea,” Billie said, “when I heard a soft knock on the front door. Guess who? Lulu, of course, who’d spotted the King’s tomato-red Jaguar in the driveway and wanted to know if I knew who belonged to it.

“Me,” the King said, giving her a big little-boy grin. Her pregnancy was barely visible, but he commented on it immediately. “Very sexy. Turns me on.”

“The guy has no shame. She’s five-months pregnant, and she turns him on.”

Billie also said Lulu was giggling sensuously, and the King looked as if he was about to grab her and carry her upstairs to the bedroom.

To distract them, Billie said she poured second cups of tea. Signaling he wanted no more tea, the King pulled from his wallet a thin packet of photographs of his three youngest children, Jute and Morgan, age four, and Sumner, age six and a half.

“My treasures,” he said, eyes shining with pride. He then proposed taking Lulu for a spin in his tomato-red Jaguar. “She was delighted and borrowed a cardigan sweater from me,” Billie said.

They were gone two hours and came back, sporting satisfied smiles “Who knows what happened between them?” Billie said, “I suggest we don’t tell Dora or Howard.”

“Okay, with me,” I said. Which didn’t matter at all, as Lulu later told us, because as soon as she got back to their apartment she told Dora and Howard about her spin with the King.

“Fast driver,” Billie said Lulu said, “Scared I wouldn’t get home alive.” But she did, and immediately at Billie’s invitation Lulu brought Dora and Howard to our apartment to meet the King.

63.

“Remarkable guy,” Billie said the King said, throwing his arm around Howard’s shoulder. (Remember, I was still in VIV, heading south toward Periwinkle.)

“How do you keep these women happy?” Billie said the King said.

“Not easy,” Billie said Lulu said. “You love them. That’s the most important.“

The King reminded Dora she’d competed with Lulu to get pregnant first. “And you’re the loser, right?”

“Yes, but we’re still trying, aren’t we, Howard,” Dora said, “because that’s what we all want, isn’t it, for both of us to have babies as soon as possible.” Howard shook his head yes, as Dora leaned over and kissed him. “Does it embarrass anybody if I say we try to make a baby every night, and maybe five times on weekends, as long as Howard is willing, and he always is, aren’t you, Howard?” Howard’s face reddened.

“Five times?” the King said, flexing his eyebrows suggestively to signal he was making a joke. When nobody, except the King laughed, he began passing out the photos of his children, explaining who each of them was, how old they were, how often he saw them, etc., stuff, Billie said, he’d already told her.

Dora said: “Who took the photographs?

“I did,” the King said, expecting praise, I suppose, but getting none.

Lulu showed a photo of a boy to the King.

“That’s Sumner,” the King said. “Terrific kid.”

“We both want boys,” Lulu said. “Don’t we, Dora?”

“Wouldn’t mind a girl,” Dora said.

“A girl would be fine,” Lulu said.

“Fine with me,” Howard said, holding up a photograph of one of the King’s girls. “What’s her name?”

“Jute,” the King said, a big proud-daddy smile on his face.

“Jute?” Lulu said. “Odd name.”

“It is odd,” the King said. “Different. Celtic, I think, or Norwegian. Her mother picked it out, and I didn’t object. She has a cousin whose name is Jute.”

“This is Morgan, her sister,” the King said, handing Dora a photo of Morgan.

“Very beautiful, both are beautiful,” Dora said, passing the photograph of Morgan to Lulu who passed it to Howard, who compared it to the photograph of Jute.

“Lovely,” Howard said. “Wouldn’t mind a girl.”

“Girls are fun,” the King said, collecting the photographs of his children and putting them back into his wallet.

Howard scratched his baldhead that contrasted sharply with the King’s massive head of thick black hair. A skinny six-foot-two, Howard was two inches shorter and maybe fifty pounds lighter than the King.

“Hildie’s my other daughter,” the King said. “She’s 24 and lives with me on the estate. We’re not as good friends as we used to be. She’s a student at Barkworth College.”

“Barkworth College, never heard of it,” Dora said.

Lulu said: “You did tell me, didn’t you, (during the spin they’d taken in the red Jaguar) you have two ex-wives, right?”

“Right,” the King said.

“And that you weren’t married to Hildie’s mother?”

The King giggled. “Nobody told me about partnerships like you guys have,” he said.

“You need compatible people to have a partnership,” Dora said, “who are lucky and patient.”

Lulu said: “The genius who keeps us together is Howard.”

Howard grinned.

“You’re all geniuses,” Billie said she said, which got everybody laughing.

The King asked Howard about their apartment. “How big is it?”

“One bedroom,” Lulu said. “We’ll need at least two more, when the babies arrive.”

“We’d like to buy a house of our own, if we could afford it,” Dora said.

The King said: “How much down payment do you have?”

Dora’s face brightened. “You have a house to sell us?” she said.

“Maybe,” the King said.

Howard flashed a warm buck-toothed grin at the King, as Dora and Lulu laughed and clapped their hands, which, Billie reported, got everybody laughing again.

Then three days later, when I returned from Periwinkle, I sat down with the King to talk about the Periwinkle feasibility study and give him my preliminary conclusions about building a shopping center on the property.

“I’ve been considering alternative uses for the land in case the shopping center doesn’t work,” the King said, “which it may not, because as we both know it doesn’t have a large customer base to draw from, and there are already two successful shopping centers within how many miles?”

"Four,” I said.

“Doesn’t look good for us, does it?” the King said.

That was when he told me he’d been researching the possibility of starting a new town, getting a cast of cooperative-minded characters together to develop a chunk of Periwinkle’s outer acreage into a self-sustaining, farming community in which all or most of its members’ needs would be provided for by community members themselves. That is, the members would build their own houses, put in their own roads, dig their own wells, etc. The land plus the initial capital, the seed money to launch the project, the King said, would come from him.

Now this was a puzzle, wasn’t it? Here’s a guy who claims he’s a firm believer in the free market and corporate capitalism, devoting himself to milking wage earners at the bottom of the economic pile, because that is where, he says, corporate profits originate. Also, he’s fought to stop or delay even the smallest increase in the minimum wage, while advocating tax reductions, tax breaks, and subsidies for upper-income individuals and corporations.

Why, you ask, would such a guy now be saying he’s prepared to invest heavily in what sounds like a utopian, socialist scheme that could ultimately undermine his corporate capitalist philosophy?

“To make my Mama happy,” the King said, giving me a wily smile, knowing she’d complained to me about his lack of sensitivity toward people he didn’t understand. Poking his substantial index finger into my chest, he questioned me in detail about the threesome. He was anxious to find out, he said, if they’d be suitable to manage his new town project.

“The three of them?” I asked.

“Sure, especially the women,” he said. “They’re exactly the kind of people I’ve been looking for to make the project successful."

I reminded him Howard was a stock trader at the Los Angeles Stock Exchange. “You don’t expect him to commute from Periwinkle, do you?”

He gritted his teeth and glared at me. “How dumb do you think I am?” he growled. I mumbled another apology

The King said: “I have a proposition they might be interested in.”

“Oh?” I said.

“A house.”

“A house?” I said.

“Which is what they’re looking for, isn’t it?”

“You’d provide them a house on the Periwinkle property?” I said.

“If I decide I want them enough,” he said, “it’s possible.” He questioned me in detail about their backgrounds, families, education, birth places, how the women had gotten to the USA, their British accents, the jobs they’ve had, how much money they were making.

Suddenly I realized I knew a lot about Dora and Lulu, but not too much about Howard, other than he was devoted to Dora and Lulu, that he worked at the L.A. stock exchange, and that Portland, Oregon, was where he was born, or was it Seattle, Washington? “Do you want me to have him checked out?”

The King, who’d been taking notes in a small notebook, snapped the notebook shut and got to his feet. “Nope. I’ll take care of it,” he said and abruptly departed, while I had this nervous feeling in my gut I was in trouble with him again, reviving in my head my adolescent battles over signs, footsteps, negligence, ignorance, and abuse I’d fought with my frustrated parents who’d invariably shout at me some version of:

Keep off the grass,
You silly ass,
That sign is more than a token,
Keeping greenery green
Air and earth clean
A speedy Gulf Stream
Is a promise not to be broken?
It’s more than just here,
This fine plot of grass,
You dumb, silly ass,
Green has a right to be green,
Don’t trample or stamp or kick it around,
Or footsteps will turn it
Brown, brown, brown,
Footsteps will turn it brown.

64.

I almost forgot. Did Billie go to Sundazi? Yep. On schedule. Dr. Minzeezi, Billie, Annamarie Elk, and the two other students (Gladys and Vivian) who’d volunteered to go with Minzeezi to his native village in Sundazi were aboard Flying Swift’s African special at seven-forty-nine at the L.A. airport.

Billie and Annamarie Elk had been fast friends since age six.

The Elk family owned almost a duplicate of the Cooper’s 900 square-foot Valley Street tract house on the next street (Rose), though the Elks and the Coopers weren’t close as family friends, except for Billie and Annamarie, who’d graduated from John Burroughs High School in the same class.

In addition, Billie and her then-boyfriend (later husband) Tim, were bridesmaid and usher at Annamarie’s wedding to pipefitter and clarinet player, Barry Swango, who’d gotten his high school diploma from Burbank High, the year after Annamarie and Billie were graduated from John Burroughs.

Billie said Flying Swift’s African Special’s twenty-two hour flight to Sundazi’s capital city, Equerto Nantes, with brief stops in Vienna and Cairo, was tense but smooth. An Equerto Nantes airport bus transported the group to Chanleeki in Douze Province in south Sundazi. There they boarded vans that took them eighty-seven miles to Minzeezi’s native village, Reftani, where, Billie said, they received an enthusiastic hometown-type welcome.

Minzeezi, Billie said, was enormously popular among the villagers, having been born and raised in a large, supportive Reftani family, who were thrilled he’d escaped from Sundazi and gotten himself a fine education and a career as a teacher in America. When rising tensions between Sundazi’s Muslim and Christian communities put the volunteers in serious physical danger and prevented the dental clinic from being built, Minzeezi quickly revised his plans for the village, using the monies he’d collected to build the clinic to pay village debts, buy books for beginning-level students, supplement villagers’ diets with vitamins, acquire small pox and other vaccines, and provide special care for new-born babies with aggravated birth defects, while Billie and the other students continued to work among the villagers, doing whatever Minzeezi said was necessary to make his revised program successful. Billie had expected to stay in Reftani for four months, but at the end of sixty days, as tensions intensified among Sundazi’s rival factions, Minzeezi told her and the other volunteers to get ready to return to the United States. Two days later, Billie sent me a note, describing the growing crisis in Reftani and asking me to pick her up at the L.A. airport a week from Saturday.

On schedule I was waiting for her in the L.A. airport lobby. As soon as Billie was released from customs, like actors in some romantic movie we fell into each other’s arms, hugging and kissing, as we stumbled across the terminal. Our hearts thumping idiotically (by her testimony as well as mine), we continued to cling to one another, skidding and lurching toward the parking lot, where VIV was waiting for us.

And that night what great sex! We hardly slept, if we did sleep, in fact, I don’t remember sleeping at all. She wanted me hungrily, as I wanted her, so who could waste time sleeping? The next morning, we were surprised when, still locked in one another’s arms, we looked out the bedroom windows and saw the dawn softly lighting the sky.

Coincidently, the day Billie returned from Sundazi was the fifth-month anniversary of her moving into my Holloway apartment, if you also count the two months she’d spent in Reftani with Minzeezi. Contrary to my fears I’d lose her if she went to Sundazi, our two-month separation seemed to bring us more solidly together.

Of course, the King didn’t intrude into Billie’s life until after I took the appraisal job with Shopping Center Enterprises. Billie also didn’t remember introducing the King to Al, or Al to the King, but the next thing we heard was that Al had taken the King to Schubert’s Parlor and Nate Binders Delicatessen on Fairfax. That Al was such a hotshot among the celebrities in Schubert’s as well as Nate Binders was so impressive to the King he decided he needed Al to join his musical extravaganza, either in the cast as mc or off-stage as a production consultant.

“I’m available,” Al said. “However he wants me.” Al then asked me to represent him as an agent in negotiations for his services to the King.

“Pass,” I said.

“Aw, come on,” Al said. “What kind of friend are you?”

I reminded him the King was my boss. “Do you suppose I can suddenly announce I’m representing you against him?”

“Sure, why not? If you were a real friend, you’d do it without making such a fuss about it.”

“Spare me,” I shouted, meaning, in plain English, fuck off, which Al understood perfectly. With a pathetic look on his face, he slinked out of my back yard, never to be heard from again for at least forty-five minutes, when he called, without guilt or doubt in his voice, to borrow thirty-five bucks to buy an incense holder from a guy who might be getting a part on a sitcom.

I wasn’t sympathetic, especially when he threatened to call the King. “I’ll tell him you told me to do it,” he said.

Three weeks later, Al gave the King advice about hiring a director for the extravaganza. He recommended the guy who’d sold him the incense holder. “What could I do,” Al said. “He didn’t get the job on the sitcom, and he does have experience as a director. In high school, I think.”

“You’re nuts,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” Al said. “I’ll train him myself.”

Fortunately for the King he’d accumulated a roster of experienced musical comedy directors. Among them was Julian Sasspool who’d directed recent Broadway revivals of “Brigadoon” and “Bye, Bye, Birdie” and even more importantly, in case, over and above his powerful resume, he needed additional directing credit to influence the King, how about “Forty Second Street?”

Julian got the job. During the King’s two weeks of rigorous candidate screening, Julian’s qualifications had outstripped the competition, and because the King was convinced Al would be an asset to the extravaganza, Julian reluctantly promised to audition him to play the mc.

In six weeks Julian wrote the book for the show. He also brought four guys from New York to adapt the score, auditioned Al in the King’s office (not on stage) so Al was relaxed and charming and irritated Julian who was expecting him to choke up and eliminate himself. Two weeks later, Julian proclaimed to the King he’d had a great idea to energize the extravaganza. “The mc,” he said excitedly, “I’m making him a girl.”

“A girl?” the King said he said. “You mean a woman?”

“Sure, why not? Makes sense, doesn’t it? You’re not against women in the cast, are you?”

“We’ve got lots of women in the cast,” the King said,

“That proves it,” Julian said. “I know it’ll work.”

The book the King said he liked. He also liked the score. The adapters from New York hired an orchestra in L.A. to accompany and rehearse the extravaganza’s chorus. On a tip from me the King asked the Picassos to write special music for the show, another intrusion initially resented by Julian, but when he and the score adapters met the Picassos they were so pleased, particularly with Manny, they turned conducting the show’s orchestra over to him. In addition, the adapters brought from New York a high-priced stage choreographer and five dance coaches.

The question in my mind was who pays for all this expensive talent as well as their expensive travel back and forth from New York and elsewhere?

The taxpayers was the King’s answer, at least as much as possible, with an army of lobbyists, employed by Shopping Center Enterprises, appealing to local agencies, state and federal legislatures, for tax write-offs and other special treatment to shift the extravaganza’s production costs from the King and Shopping Center Enterprises to the general public.

When the Good Faith Foundation Against Corporate Favoritism protested to Congress against the federal advantages being granted to the King and Shopping Center Enterprises, a Congressional hearing was scheduled to investigate the Foundation’s opposition to the tap-dancing extravaganza.

To counter the Foundation’s claim that the extravaganza was a frivolous and self-aggrandizing publicity stunt that didn’t deserve tax write-offs or other special treatment from the federal government the King introduced a witness named Holyoke Tugfeld, the world’s leading expert, the King said, on international tap-dancing, who testified that the Babylonians had invented tap-dancing, that many Biblical characters, including Noah and Moses, were tap-dancers, that President Buchanan was a tap-dancer, that Simon Bolivar, Robert E. Perry, Alexander Bell, Saul before he became Paul, Lenin, Nero, DeGaulle, Socrates, Karl Marx, and Queen Victoria were all renown tap-dancers, and that tap-dancing and its protagonists, such as the King, deserved to be honored and rewarded as major contributors to world and American cultural history. To support this thesis, Tugfeld distributed to each of the Congressional panel members a copy of his extraordinary thousand-sixty-three page book, “Warm Hands and Itchy Feet,” that he’d taken fourteen years to write, after compiling a large warehouseful of data on the universal meaning and power of genuine, deep-seated, moralistic tap-dancing, that so traumatized the Congressional panel members they voted to give the King double the tax breaks he was asking for.

The driving force behind the King’s campaign to obtain tax breaks for the extravaganza was Miss Peg Peevy. She’d put the whole package together, the King says in his autobiography, after she discovered Tugfeld on the campus of Nibdock Tutorial College in downtown L.A. where his data warehouse was located. Phoning Tugfeld, she made an appointment to meet him late Wednesday evening, the only time, he said, he was available to meet with her. “Pretty spooky,” she said.

His office was in the bell tower on the warehouse roof. To get to it, per his instructions, she took a narrow staircase up to the warehouse’s loading platform. At the center of the platform were large double doors. Pressing the bell button on the left loading door, she waited until she got a signal from Tugfeld to enter the building.

The signal came promptly, and the left door swung open. Over the intercom he told her to follow the painted yellow line that ran from the left loading door through the central storage area to an elevator in the warehouse’s rear wall. The storage area contained stacks of boxes of various sizes that cast heavy shadows in the poorly lit room. “Very, very spooky,” she said.

The elevator, despite sounding sick and underpowered, safely delivered Peevy, still spooked, to Tugfeld’s bell tower office. “I’m sorry,” he said immediately. “Should have met you at the loading platform and escorted you here. The lighting is poor, isn’t it?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said irritably. “I’m fine.”

“I see that you are,” he said in a mellow, solicitous voice.

She laughed.

“Don’t know what I was expecting,” she later told the King. “Turned out to be a pussy cat.” She described Tugfeld as dark, thick-haired, pink-skinned, with a scruffy black beard and large, sunken, dark brown eyes. “Perfectly comfortable with him,” she said.

“How old?” the King asked.

“Says he’s thirty-eight,” she said. “Looks, in my opinion, much younger, and is obviously athletic. Played minor league baseball for ten years, part of one season, sixty-three games, in the majors.

“Which team?”

“Detroit, Detroit Tigers, right?” she said, apologizing for not knowing enough about baseball teams to talk sensibly about them, as she extracted from her briefcase a notebook containing the complete record of the places and positions Tugfeld had played, plus his batting and fielding averages during his ten years in baseball.

Also in the notebook was a detailed account of Tugfeld’s academic history. He’d gotten his B.A. at UCLA, his master’s from Oregon State, and his doctorate in comparative cultures at Idaho’s Snowdown University. This was his fourth year on the Nibdock’s faculty. His rank was assistant professor. He was teaching two courses in comparative cultures and one on arctic folklore. She’d talked extensively, Miss Peevy said, to the chairperson of Nibdock’s comparative cultures department, Olivia Roanoke, who rated Tugfeld topnotch as a teacher and researcher. His tap-dancing thesis, Roanoke said, was superb as were his earlier projects, “The Pigeon-toed Gavotte of Cooz’s Pieyard People” and “Inca influences on Peruvian Sway Dancing.”

The King says in his autobiography he was overwhelmed by the breadth and detail of the record Miss Peevy’d put together. “On such short notice,” he said, as he examined the notebook. “Who else but you would even think to do something as comprehensive as this? Unbelievable.” He took her hand and kissed it.

“She’s too much,” he said, describing in his autobiography the beautiful qualities in Miss Peevy’s character that she’d exhibited so brilliantly during her “spooky” meeting with Tugfeld – her willingness to take risks, her ability to think on her feet, her resourcefulness, her curiosity, and, above all, her determination to persevere until “she finds the best answer to the problem she’s made up her mind to solve.”

Miss Peevy also got full credit from the King for the defensive strategy she’d devised to track down Tugfeld and organize his tap-dancing testimony before the Congressional Committee. “She has such great talent for getting me out of deep trouble,” he said, recalling the strategy Miss Peevy had devised, when he first arrived in Los Angeles, to outmaneuver Claudia Titus and her parents who were threatening to have him arrested.

You may remember the seventeen-year-old candy maker who wanted to be a movie star whom the King drove across the country when he moved the company’s headquarters from Connecticut to California? Well, her name was Claudia Titus. That he’d nicknamed her Claudia Tits isn’t surprising, considering his record of insensitivity toward women as well as Titus’s spectacular bosom that she flaunted at anybody who even glanced casually at her.

When her parents announced they were demanding the King should marry Claudia, hinting she was actually 16 instead of 17 when he drove her across the country, or pay them $50,000 cash to compensate them and her for the injury he’d done to her person and reputation, the King complained to Miss Peevy that Claudia and her parents wouldn’t have a case against him if he’d listened to his mother who’d been telling him to find a woman to marry him. “What my mother says is true,” he said. “I need a wife to give me balance, to protect me from myself, after messing up like I did with Lucy.”

“Sounds risky,” Miss Peevy said, “unless you already have somebody in mind? Is Lucy available?”

He shook his head no. “She’d never agree to it. Wouldn’t be good for either of us.”

“Any other candidates?” Miss Peevy asked.

“How about you?” the King said.

“Me?” Miss Peevy said. “Why me?”

“Loyalty,” the King said.

“Loyalty?” Miss Peevy said.

“Who else is clever enough to show me how to get rid of these Tituses?” he whined. “They’re tormenting me.”

“Simple,” Miss Peevy said. “Pay them the fifty thousand.”

“Against my principles,” the King said, again shaking his head no, this time emphatically.

“Wait a minute.” Miss Peevy said. “Giving them fifty thousand is against your principles, but marrying me, based on your estimate of my loyalty to you, is okay?”

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” he said. “We work together, depend on one another, and I know from experience I can trust you. I can, can’t I?”

“As long as I’m doing what you pay me to do, sure,” she said.

“Compensation is not a problem,” he said. “You’ll continue to get your full salary, whether you marry me or not.”

“That’s very generous,” she said, smiling glumly.

The next morning Miss Peevy began an investigation of the Titus family. Through her contacts in Washington, D.C. she traced Dominick Titus’ career in the Army and discovered he’d been posted as a military attaché to the United States’ A.I.D. mission in Guatemala, where he met Yolanda Sarbo, then a credit consultant for the Wyoming Fruit Company. Dominick and Yolanda were married, after a passionate three-month courtship, in an elaborate ceremony at the A.I.D. mission. The Wyoming Fruit Company, Miss Peevy also learned, had paid the overall cost of the three-hundred-plus-guest wedding party. Eleven months later, Claudia was born, making her not 16, not 17, but 22-years-old, when the King brought her to California.

“You’re off the hook,” Miss Peevy reported to the King. “They can’t get you arrested for child molestation on the road or when you invited Claudia to the Beverly Wilshire, because she was already an adult and had the right to choose, of her own free will, to accompany you on the trip and visit you at the hotel, so you’re not guilty of any crime and you’re not obliged to pay them anything.”

“The Glendale house I gave Claudia, can I get it back?” the King asked greedily.

“They’re living in it, aren’t they?” Miss Peevy said.

“Yes,” he said, making an annoyed face.

“Could start them squawking again if you try to take it away from them.”

The King’s frown deepened. “This doesn’t change how I feel about you,” he said gloomily. “I still want you to marry me.”

“You do?” she said, staring quizzically at him, as if she couldn’t figure out what was going on in his head.

“I need you, and I need to be married.”

She attempted to smile, but couldn’t.

“Look,” he said, “ the $50,000 Claudia and her parents tried to extort from me is yours. You’ve earned it, and your job as my number one executive assistant you can have as long as you want. What do you say? Marry me, please.”

“This is so dumb,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

“Will you?” he said, kissing her on both cheeks.

“Don’t I at least get my lips kissed?” she said.

When he hesitated, she yanked his head toward her and kissed him on the lips. “Not too bad,” she groaned, putting her arms around him.

They hugged one another clumsily.

“And if you want to get rid of me at any time,” the King said, “I’ll go, I’ll disappear, I guarantee it, just dump me, no fuss, no protest whatsoever.”

“I don’t intend to dump you,” she said, not understanding why he’d be talking about dumping him, when she’d just agreed to marry him.

“My mother will be very happy,” he said, and she was.

65.

“At last an adult,” Mary Joseph said. A fan of Peg Peevy since Miss Peevy first came to work for the King, Mary Joseph had observed Peevy’s repeated displays of generosity and love toward the company staff, and hoped her son Kenny appreciated how lucky he was that an adult woman was willing to be his wife.

The rumor that the King and Miss Peevy were getting married swept the office. Within minutes the staff organized a party for them. The greeter and donator of a dozen bottles of champagne to the party was Mary Joseph. When the soon-to-be bride and groom arrived, Mary Joseph gave a speech thanking God for answering her prayers. She spoke about her three years in the convent, saying how privileged she was to have done God’s work among the nuns and priests at St. Veronica’s, who were so kind to her, giving her wise and comforting advice that enabled her to resolve strong conflicts in her heart between her love of God and her maternal duty to her son, Kenny, the King.

The power of prayer, she said, was the driving force of her life. Otherwise, without prayer, her connection to God would be jeopardized, and her hope for Peg Peevy and the King’s future together would be diminished or lost. She asked the group to pray for the success of the King/Peevy marriage. We had thirty seconds of silence, during which any one who knew a prayer, or was able to make up a prayer, or reconstitute a forgotten prayer, prayed, I presume, then we gave Mary Joseph a standing ovation, as Peevy and the King swept her into their arms, and all three began to laugh and weep.

“Hail to the groom! Hail to the bride!” Shiller shouted, tears streaming down his cheeks, as the King, Peg Peevy, and Mary Joseph got a standing ovation from the laughing/weeping crowd.

When the group’s ovation finally simmered down, the King announced he and Peevy would be married in mid-December. “We’ve agreed on December 16,” he said to another standing ovation.

Mary Joseph proposed that her favorite priest at St. Veronica’s, Father Duquette, be invited to perform the wedding ceremony. The King says in his autobiography he was positive Father Duquette was a great guy and would have been a fine asset to the wedding, but that he preferred to ask his tennis and pinochle playing chum, the Reverend Ozzie Brickmanski, founder and chief pastor of the West Los Angeles Gift From God Community Church, to officiate at the wedding. This was okay with the bride, the King said. At least she didn’t disapprove, though Mary Joseph had trouble hiding her disappointment. The King said he begged his mother to forgive him for preferring his long-time chum over Father Duquette and sent a large donation to St. Veronica’s on behalf of Mary Joseph.

The best man was Ed Shiller. The King’s daughter, Hildie, was Peg Peevy’s maid of honor. The Reverend Brickmanski’s ceremony, as requested by the King, was straightforward and simple, not much more than “do you take this man, do you take this woman, I now pronounce you husband and wife.” Over in about 16 minutes, the rush to husband-and-wifehood was a major disappointment to Mary Joseph. “No time for God’s grace,” she said. “That reverend should be ashamed of himself.”

At the church, after the ceremony, the first of many banners was unfurled, hailing Peevy as the Queen, the logic being if the groom’s the King, the bride must be the Queen. Wedding guests laughingly bowed and curtsied to the bride, addressing Peevy as Queen Peg, or your majesty, or your royal highness, as a blushing, overwhelmed Queen Peg tried futilely to stop “the Queen bit,” which, despite her protests, continued for two days until the King and the Queen departed on their honeymoon.

Honeymoon? The King had booked Peg and himself, with her consent, for six nights into the Horizon House, a handsome, lavishly furnished thirty-room hotel on the ocean in Laguna Beach. This was sweet time for both of them, and gradually Peg began to feel she was in love with the King. Early mornings as well as just before sunset they took leisurely walks along the beach, holding hands and nuzzling kisses at one another. They also swam a lot. The King, a nervous swimmer, jumped in and out of the shallow end of the hotel’s 120-foot swimming pool, while Peg, a powerful swimmer and multiple trophy winner, swam daily laps in the pool and most afternoons long distance in the ocean.

The King reports in his autobiography how much he admired Peg’s swimming prowess. Standing on the beach or beside the pool, he watched as she churned fearlessly in the water, contrasting her smooth stroke and confident style to his own feeble efforts to remain afloat.

Source of those feeble efforts? This, the King also reports on in his autobiography. He was six or seven, he says, when his father and his uncles, except for his sainted Uncle Floyd, took perverse pleasure in kidnapping him, carrying him kicking and squirming to the marsh waters off Gerritsen Beach, where they dunked him, forced him underwater past his ability to hold his breath, as he struggled desperately to free himself from them and get to the surface. Their excuse? To teach him to swim by making him confront his panic about drowning, when his real panic about drowning was being drowned by them. What did they accomplish? Permanently squelched his desire to improve as a swimmer, instilling in him a strong fear of swimming that kept him away from deep ends of pools and confined him to skipping, with trembling lips, in the last gasp of waves as they broke harmlessly against the beach.

The hotel’s pool manager, a young woman, no more than 20, tanned and talkative, and also a powerful swimmer, offered to give swimming lessons to the King, who describes in his autobiography how shy he felt about becoming her pupil. The manager’s first name was Leaf, and the King was quick to make jokes about her, calling her fig leaf and maple leaf and new leaf and relief, which he thought was very funny, embarrassing Peg, who asked him finally to knock off teasing Leaf, because, she said, he was being disrespectful to her (Peg) and his jokes at Leaf’s expense weren’t funny.

Why, you ask, would Leaf offer to teach the King to swim? Wasn’t his wife, the Queen, a champion swimmer, perfectly capable of giving him lessons? The drawback was the King’s ego and hot temper. He couldn’t take orders from anybody, especially from the Queen, and swimming instructions were a form of orders, weren’t they, so he reacted badly, provoking an argument anytime she told him to do something, and that included telling him how to swim. Peg was happy to turn his swimming lessons over to Leaf for the four days they had left at Horizon House. “I can start him in the right direction,” Leaf said, though she still had his super-sensitive ego to contend with and didn’t expect to accomplish much to overcome his fear of swimming in the few hours a day she was planning to spend instructing him.

Meanwhile, during Peg’s afternoon swims in the ocean, she often could see the King and Leaf on the beach, peering intently in her direction. Sometimes Leaf would make gestures as if she were explaining or commenting on Peg’s form or speed, or on the condition of the ocean, its swells or choppiness or current or drift.

Thursday, the third day of the King and Queen’s stay at Horizon House, the Queen and Leaf swam a stretch of the ocean side by side. On the beach, at the edge of the water, the King waited quietly for them. Occasionally he’d wave to them, swinging his arm in a wide arc over his head. At dinner that night he told them how thrilled he was watching them perform so skillfully in the ocean, while he continued to feel stifled by it.

“Mind over matter,” Leaf said. “What I hope to do is get him to look at swimming positively, without the burden of his childhood experience. Your father and those uncles who did such emotional damage to you should be ashamed of themselves. Today you could have them arrested for child abuse, and they’d deserve it, wouldn’t they?”

The King proposed inviting Leaf to come to Brentwood to set up a company swim clinic. Sounded like a terrific idea to Peg, and she eagerly endorsed it. Leaf was flattered and on the spot accepted his invitation. She was divorced, Leaf said, had no children, and most of her family, including her parents, resided in Bozeman, Montana. Six weeks later, Leaf arrived in Brentwood. Peg Peevy volunteered to get her settled in the community, introducing her to Ed Shiller and others on the staff she’d be working with, arranged for her to be signed up as a new employee, found her an inexpensive furnished apartment on Lilac Street, south of Pico Boulevard, and put her in charge of the employees’ Olympic-size swimming pool, located on a four-acre site in Westwood, five miles from the King’s Brentwood complex.

Taking over full responsibility for the King’s swim training, Leaf met with him daily in the executive swimming pool behind the garages on the main parking lot. She planned, she said, to make him a better swimmer by reorienting his attitude toward swimming, which the King responded to quickly, so quickly she was able to move him, in the third week of his swimming lessons, from the shallow to the deep end of the executive pool. A month later she had him cautiously swimming the length of the pool. Three weeks after that he was doing laps, not too confidently, but very determined to succeed. In four months he was no longer afraid to stick his head under water. The following week Leaf concentrated on teaching him to breathe properly. By six months she’d convinced him to trust himself as a swimmer, which brought enthusiastic congratulations from Peg Peevy to both him and Leaf.

The next month the South Seas aquarium, its kelp, vines, and fish, were cleared out of the two-story tank that was the back wall of the King’s office. As soon as the South Seas water was pumped out of the tank and replaced by fresh seawater, Leaf swam swiftly to the tank’s bottom, then Peg jumped in, taking the King with her. Though he lasted less than halfway to the bottom, he and Peg as well as Leaf were exhilarated by his bravery. Throughout the following weeks he swam in the tank with Peg or Leaf, until finally he had his breathing under control and was able to swim alone round-trip from the cupola on the office roof to the tank’s bottom, always under the supervision of Leaf or Peg. Two weeks and four days later, nine days before Christmas, Leaf assembled the management staff at the executive pool, told them she’d decided to graduate the King as a full-fledged, accomplished swimmer. When the applause for the King died down, she tapped her belly and calmly announced to the stunned crowd she was pregnant and that the father of the baby in her belly was the King, who got a confused gasp from the crowd, when he proudly confirmed he was about to be a daddy for the second time.

Well, first daughter Hildie was furious, Peg Peevy wasn’t surprised, and Mary Joseph grumbled about heading back to the convent, a complete failure. “He’s out of his mind, isn’t he?” Mary Joseph said.

Sensing the crowd’s sympathy surging toward Mary Joseph and away from the King, Shiller, ever the boss’s faithful protector, said: “Steady now. We can’t afford to make waves.”

Hildie said: “This is so unfair.”

Peg Peevy said: “Am I supposed to take off my crown and disappear? No, never, I’m not the type, no matter what he thinks of me, if he thinks of me at all, which I doubt, considering his newest distraction.” Already a line was being formed to shake the King’s hand, while he was circulating among the crowd, brazenly seeking out his mother, Mary Joseph. Slipping his arms around her, he surprised, dazzled, disarmed, entranced her with a single whispered word:

“Grandma!”

66.

That same night in Periwinkle was half-mooned. Frogs, in nearby ponds, were groaning. Crickets, on the dusty flats, chirped. Bats flapped across the cloudless sky. The air sizzled with magic. “And more importantly,” Leonard said, “ radiation, so thick I can taste it, but then I’m keener than most in being stimulated by atmospheric changes.” He glanced at me. “You understand what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“Not quite,” I said.

“Will come,” he said, “provided you concentrate, get from it what you give. No free passes.”

“Nothing’s free,” I said, taking a deep breath.

“You make an interesting point,” he said.

Louie appeared. Tall and emaciated, he had trouble looking me in the eye, until Leonard introduced him. “Meet Louie,” Leonard said. “Number one guy.” Hanging on to Louie’s arm, Leonard shuffled down from the screened-in porch and shook my hand. “Fiery hours ahead of us,” he said.

“I’m excited,” I said.

“The sky is prime, crackling, throbbing with tension,” he said, pointing toward the star-filled sky. “Can you feel it?”

“Perhaps,” I said, “I do feel something.”

“Good sign,” he said.

“Ah, yes,” I said, scanning the sky like a co-conspirator.

“True magic,” he said.

Louie said he also was feeling true magic. “Swells my heart, shrinks my breath,” he said, breathing heavily.

“Deep breaths for everybody,” Leonard said, as Eddie, Victor, and Olaf joined us.

We all breathed deeply.

“Again,” Leonard said.

I took several deep breaths and felt wobbly in my knees from the tension.

“Are you okay?” Leonard said. “Your face is pale.”

“I’m fine,” I said, though my knees did feel wobbly.

The six of us, following Leonard’s lead, shuffled toward the magic hill. Handicapped by his feet-numbing neuropathy, Leonard rocked sharply when he walked, while I, impeded by my wobbly knees, mostly stumbled. Louie, Eddie, Victor, and Olaf graciously kept propping us up.

“Don’t worry about me,” I mumbled, despite being worried about myself.

The forty-foot magic hill was impressive. When I told Leonard I thought I could feel its vibrations, he and his companions applauded me. “You’re opening up,” Leonard said, revealing he’d had a similar growth experience the first time he saw it. “I knew I was home.”

Then I noticed the ladders and the scaffolding Leonard and his friends had built on the magic hill. Whoops, I thought, how will I ever manage to climb that, and if I do climb it, what will prevent me from falling off? Spotting my sudden fright, or maybe anticipating it, Leonard assured me the scaffolding was sturdier than it looked. “No tumbles have been taken, and we’ve been on it collectively hundreds of times.”

With a small assist from Louie I swung onto the ladder and headed upward behind Leonard. His confident climb made me feel secure, and the ladder itself did feel more stable than it looked. “Holding on helps,” I said.

When we reached the highest platform, Leonard waved toward the distant mountains, zeroing my attention on the veins of ice at their summits. “See, they’re purple,” he said. That’s not normal, this time of the year, normally they’re blue or silver. Purple means UFO’s in the area. Better get settled. Could be up till dawn.”

As instructed by Leonard, I’d brought a large pad and green, red, and black pens. “We’ll each keep score according to a scale I’ll teach you as we proceed, okay?”

“Sure, okay,” I said.

“Make any additional notes that seem appropriate,’ he said, his large hands cupping both his ears. “They’re definitely on their way. Can you hear them?”

I strained to hear what he said he was hearing, and from his companions’ rapt faces, they must be hearing. In addition, all four of them were feverishly making notes.

“Space ships!” Leonard yelled, and damn it, seconds later, I thought I was seeing space ships, or if not exactly seeing them, knowing they had to be surrounding us. In any case, I forgot to make a record of what I thought I was seeing, and Leonard forgot to teach me how to do it. His pad and his companions’ pads were marked with wild scribbles that doubtless had meaning to them but looked like wild scribbles to me.

Leonard’s face was red and covered with sweat. “I’m parched,” he shouted.

From the platform’s built-in ice chest Louie snatched a bottle of beer, handed it to Leonard who popped off its cap and instantly guzzled it. Louie, Victor, Eddie, and Olaf each took a beer. Louie indicated I should help myself. “Do you have a coke?” I asked.

“A coke?” Leonard said. “Do we have a coke?”

“Have a beer,” Louie said, handing me a beer.

When I refused, Leonard said: “Don’t you drink beer?”

“I don’t drink alcohol,” I said.

“Beer’s not alcohol,” Louie said. “It’s beer.”

“It is beer,” Eddie said, flashing a crooked-tooth grin at me.

Leonard and the others were noisily toasting one another. “It’s beer! It’s beer!” they cheered drunkenly. By the end of the evening the ice chest was empty, and everybody, except me, had seen scores and scores and scores of space ships, while I was still hoping to see my first.

“Not one?” Leonard asked, thick-voiced and peering dazedly at me.

I shook my head no.

He apologized. “I’m very, very disappointed,” he said, swaying and rolling his eyes.

“Me too,” I said, as he sank slowly to his knees and passed out in a heap on the top landing.

I appealed to Eddie and Victor to carry Leonard down from the landing and out to the magic hill’s yard. Because the six-foot Leonard weighed more than three hundred pounds, they dropped him twice, but still managed to get him into the yard, without waking him.

They also untangled a passed-out Olaf from one of the ladders, where he’d been hanging upside down. Carrying him outside to the yard, they deposited him between Leonard and a loud-snoring Louie, who’d crawled from a lower platform in the house to the yard and had, like Leonard, collapsed into a deep sleep.

An hour later, the entire gang, all six of us, were asleep in the yard. My guilty conscience, I suppose, snapped open my eyes before dawn, at five after five. Much work to be done, I hazily realized. I can’t do it alone.

Fortunately I was able to wake Eddie, a relatively light sleeper, by jiggling an open beer bottle under his beer-sensitive nose. He was cheerful enough, had a face full of docile smiles, a pair of rubbery legs, and seemed to understand I needed him to help me.

How? By getting Leonard on his feet and walking him briskly around the yard, while I packed some clothes for him.

As soon as Leonard was awake enough to listen to me, I tried to convince him to drive back to Brentwood with me.

Leonard resisted, which I guessed he would, pleading he couldn’t leave the magic hill, while the energy from UFO’s was at such a high pitch. He was convinced, he said, he was on the verge of making direct contact with a space ship drawn into a powerful earthly orbit. “I may have a chance,” he said, “if conditions remain favorable, to find my true magic.”

And that was exactly what happened. Leonard, his friends, and I were on the magic hill. As we stared intently at the half-moon sky, an illuminated vehicle appeared, which could have been a plane, a helicopter, a missile, or a huge banana-shaped balloon, though Leonard immediately identified it as a space ship.

We watched tensely as it hovered overhead, then suddenly swooped down toward us, screeching to a terrifying stop at the top of the magic hill. Leonard didn’t hesitate, leaping aboard the vehicle, which instantly reversed its engines, and in a split second was gone, zooming Leonard to his ultimate fate, his long-sought, long-desired magic destiny.

67.

The rejected Peevy, dethroned in less than a year, banished from the royal court by the King who shipped her, his discarded Queen, not to the tower but to Reno, Nevada, with a generous allowance, specific instructions to file for divorce, and a strong reminder that his pre-marital dictum “to go, just dump me, no protest whatsoever” went, in fairness, both ways, and consequently he was expecting her to step aside cheerfully as he’d been prepared to do, had circumstances between them occurred in reverse.

A few days after his fourteen-month marriage to Peg Peevy was terminated by a Reno divorce decree, the King trooped his pregnant bride-to-be, Leaf Orlando and their small wedding party to Ozzie Brickmanski’s Gift From God Community Church in West Hollywood, which had grown in nine years from a backyard barn to a marble-and-bronze mini-cathedral, seating 1805 parishioners, its upscale congregation committed to extending the church’s as well as Brickmanski’s clout in the community. Having a reputation for being swift and dogmatic, Brickmanski stuck close to the scriptures and claimed he had direct contact with Jesus. “Regularly converse with Him,” Ozzie said, which amused the King, because he didn’t believe for a minute his tennis-pinochle-playing partner could be chatting with Jesus, and still play tennis and pinochle so poorly.

“I’m nothing if I’m not fast,” Ozzie said. The King/Leaf Orlando wedding ceremony lasted nine and a half minutes. “Speed gets you to God quicker. That’s my motto for all my services. Even my sermons are short and to the point. Wasted verbiage is the devil’s work and clearly against local ecumenical rules, as my parishioners will readily attest. “Ask them if you want confirmation.”

“Not necessary,” the King said. He was already worried about Leaf Orlando. Marrying him had changed her. She was no longer chipper and cooperative as she’d been her first months in Brentwood. The King acknowledged her pregnancy contributed heavily to her foul moods and extended depressions, but after the baby was born and she continued to be cranky and demanding, she was even more difficult to live with. Their relationship got worse, when her mother moved in with them, bringing with her the bald, non-talking parrot she’d adopted when her roommate in San Diego walked out on her. “How can you abandon a bald parrot?” she asked.

The bald parrot, whose name was Twiggy Ironside, had some terrible parrot disease that caused her to pull out her own feathers. “They say it’s rampant among orphaned parrots,” Leaf’s mother, Bess Ironside, said.

When Bess mentioned the name Ironside, Leaf glowered defensively. “I was never an Ironside,” she said. “He was my third step-father. I hardly knew him.” “Blame it on me,” Bess said. “I hated to be without a man, and now, since I’m alone, I’ve settled for a parrot, okay? Which gives me responsibilities.” She explained that the parrot, not having feathers, slept in bed with her. “Under the covers. Otherwise, she’d freeze to death.”

The King was sympathetic, until the parrot crawled into bed with Leaf, and Leaf couldn’t bring herself to dislodge her. “I can’t be rude,” Leaf said, which meant that the King who had no desire to sleep with a bald parrot, was forced to sleep on one of the couches in his office.

Without consulting the King, Leaf recruited a couple of porters to carry Bess’s bed and the baby’s crib into the bedroom, so four of them – Leaf, Bess, the baby Sumner, and the parrot – were clustered together in one room.

Fortunately for the King, Sumner was a dream-come-true. That his blue eyes and broad forehead resembled Bess more than anybody in the family was a drawback overcome by Sumner’s pug nose and winning smile. Ozzie baptized Sumner at the Gift from God church; Shiller and Hildie were the God-parent witnesses Though she continued to disapprove of Brickmanski, Mary Joseph, the proud grandma, attended the baptism, watching jealously, as Leaf and the other proud grandma, Bess, entered the church, Bess carrying Sumner, which really hurt, to feel deliberately left out, as the King was feeling daily, except for the hour in the morning and the two hours in late afternoon when Leaf brought Sumner to his office.

Leaf’s snippy attitude toward him was hard for the King to take. He didn’t mind being exiled to the couch as much as he did having to deal with her over his visiting hours with Sumner. In fact, she was consistently so nasty to him he tried to limit his contacts with her and concentrate his energy on corporate problems, some of which he attributed to challenges from Mary Joseph on wages for workers and union representation.

For instance, Uncle Floyd’s concept of unskilled wage payments was based strictly on the market, which he’d defined as the available supply of unskilled workers and the lowest price necessary to hire sufficient numbers to get the job done. Mary Joseph had raised the question of paying a worker a wage he/she could live on, or a living wage, as against Uncle Floyd’s market wage, to which the King was committed philosophically and practically. How could he abandon his belief in corporate capitalism when he was so heavily indebted to it, regardless of how much pressure he was getting from Mary Joseph and her pro-union allies, Nora Swift and Nellie Newton?

The portable stage was set up on the outdoor parking lot of the West Los Angeles shopping center. The director, Julian Sasspool, the four music adaptors from New York, Manny from the Picassos, the conductor, plus the choreographer and the five dance coaches Sasspool brought to L.A. to organize the dress rehearsal. With so much attention on them, the dancers responded energetically. The small audience assembled to watch the dress rehearsal was thrilled, vigorously applauding the dancers who took more than a dozen well-deserved bows. Even Leaf Orlando and her mother, Bess, were pleased.

Opening night was scheduled for Thursday a week later. Critics were invited from the New York Times, the Village Voice, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the L.A. Times. The King picked up the cost of bringing all of them to West Los Angeles.

On Wednesday, the night before the opening performance, Nora Swift, representing the minimum wage workers at the West Los Angeles shopping center, including twenty one of the tap-dancing extravaganza’s twenty four members, announced that the minimum wage workers were calling an immediate strike and that the cast, in solidarity with the company’s minimum wage workers, would not perform on opening night.

Panic! The critics were coming, and the cast won’t perform!

Nora Swift referred the King to Nellie Newton who said she recognized he had financial problems but so did the striking employees, which was why the union was anxious to work out a settlement with him. The union was not interested in punishing the company or endangering it. What Nellie wanted was a formula that would enable both sides to prosper. To show good faith, while the King and Nellie Newton continued to negotiate a long-term solution, the striking dancers agreed to dance in the extravaganza’s opening night performance.

Saved! The show can go on! Its near-shut down wasn’t revealed to the critics or the large audience at the hugely successful opening performance. The direction, the book, the score, the music, the choreography, the dancers, the singers, the orchestra, the conductor, all got praised, and the celebrity audience, mostly the King’s posh friends and supporters, was delighted with not only the opening performance but also the splendid opportunity each of them had to be seen by one another in their latest designer evening dress.

Yet having to accept union restrictions to open the show was a violation of the King’s image of himself as a staunch adherent of Uncle Floyd’s anti-union principles. Mary Joseph, he knew, was celebrating the union’s victory, while he, the King, was feeling humiliated about it, and still he had a painful negotiation ahead of him, though Nellie Newton, as he discovered, was gentle, unhurried, and easy to work with.

He told Nellie frankly what a disgrace it was for him to accept being dictated to by a union. “No one is to blame except me,” he said. “I’m a sell-out, aren’t I?”

“That’s bunk,” Nellie said. “You did what you had to do, and the outcome on stage was sensational, wasn’t it?”

“Sure, but look what a mess I’m in. I’ve got you and the union on my back, despite my solemn promise to Uncle Floyd, who founded this business, that I’d keep organizers out of the company and make no compromises involving unions under any circumstances. I apologize for sounding so harsh, and, believe me, there’s nothing personal in this as far as you’re concerned.”

“Of course, I believe you,” she said, “provided you understand my job is to assist you in developing a rightful place in the company for the union, which I assure you is here to stay and must be considered in all future negotiations, regardless of the strong feelings you apparently have that you’re failing to uphold company policy, or what your Uncle Floyd proclaimed was company policy, which may or may not be how he actually performed, when under pressure from an outside union.”

The King took Nellie to lunch at a restaurant in Westwood. They sat on the patio under a green umbrella, and for the next three hours he told her the story of his career in the company, holding back nothing, answering every question she asked, as well as the implications of some of the questions she didn’t ask. (All of this is contained in his autobiography.) They discussed Uncle Floyd’s hostility toward unions as well as Mary Joseph’s strong feelings on behalf of unions, which, he said, had put a heavy burden on him, because he’d tried to avoid disagreements that might damage what had always been a loving relationship between him and his mother.

Nellie was impressed. She hadn’t expected to hear such frank, self-critical talk from him. When he attempted to get personal information out of her, she clammed up. “I don’t do that,” she said, “This is your show.”

“True,” he said, “though being described as a show is slightly offensive, especially when you refuse to open up to me.”

“Sorry,” she said, “that’s my rules.”

“Which means you win, right?”

“Right,” she said, grinning like a winner.

But through private contacts the King already knew a lot about her. How old she was, for instance. Twenty-six. That she had two brothers and two sisters under nineteen and that she was their major financial support. That she was born and raised in Minnesota. That she had a master’s degree in social work. That her first job with the union was in the members’ health section That the deformity of her right hand occurred at age twelve when she fell on the ice. That several of her knuckles were shattered. That she’d had three complicated operations to repair the knuckles That she still had pain in her hand. That the fuzzy gloves and long-sleeved shirts and sweaters she wore were to hide the deformed hand to keep it from becoming a topic of conversation. That she blushed easily and had an infectious self-deprecating sense of humor. That she’d not been married, had had a couple of live-in partners, and once had had a love affair with a married man (her boss) that scandalized the union’s health section.

“Did your Uncle Floyd ever doubt his attitude toward unions?” she asked.

“No, never,” the King said, “at least not to me.”

“There must have been some time when he was conflicted about having to deal with us,” she said.

“If he was, he didn’t tell me about it,” he said. “What he did was teach me to be firm, to keep my emotions out of decisions I was responsible for, and not allow myself to get into situations I couldn’t control.”

“You have unionized suppliers and sub-contractors, don’t you? What do you do about them?”

“I don’t deal with them. They’re not my problem,” he said.

“No compromises? Is that how your Uncle Floyd handled them?”

He was watching her eyes. They seemed flirty to him.

“Is that how he handled them?” she repeated.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We didn’t discuss it.”

“Maybe you should think about it,” she said.

I am thinking about it, he thought. Her eyes were definitely flirty.

“I can probably help you,” she said.

“Do what?” he said.

“Find out what your uncle did when a supplier or sub-contactor had a strong union connection he had to contend with.

Flirty eyes, flirty eyes, flirty eyes, flirty eyes, the King thought. “Does that sound reasonable?” she said.

“Sure,” he said, his heart thumping foolishly, as she peered (he thought) flirty-eyed at him.

That evening his last managers’ meeting was over by seven forty-five. He had a tough time paying attention to the meeting’s agenda, being distracted by his intermittent speculation about the flirtyness of Nellie’s eyes. He had his two-hour visit with his beautiful boy, Sumner, and when he got back to the office, finished off some low-priority paperwork.

Lying down on the couch, he switched off the lights and prepared to sleep, but couldn’t close his eyes. Nellie’s flirty-eyed face kept whirling in his head. By morning, after a sleepless night, he realized he was feeling a sudden, powerful, irrepressible emotion he hadn’t expected to feel again.

“I’m in love,” he gasped.

68.

Mbda La’ster came to Los Angeles from Denver. Sponsored, as I’ve previously reported, by the Tall Tree Lending Foundation, she’d been touring cities throughout the United States to raise money for Tall Tree to support its program of small entrepreneur loans.

Three delegates from the Hools’ peace organization picked up Mbda La’ster at the L.A. airport and drove her in a caravan of five vehicles to the Century Plaza Hotel. Ned and Sally Hool were at the hotel to greet her. Prior to her arrival in the United States, Mbda had spent ten days touring Western Europe, making brief, profitable (for Tall Tree) stops in Stockholm, Vienna, Turin, Nice, Paris, Budapest, and Warsaw.

Her last European stop was London to participate in a week’s worth of meetings and rallies as well as celebrity dinners and gatherings, at which wealthy donors contributed more than a half million pounds to Tall Tree. Made her head spin.

Remember, as she kept reminding her audiences, Tall Tree had lent her $100, which she’d used to triple her earnings by buying an ox and a small wagon to replace the water cart she’d been dragging from village to village and customer to customer.

True, she expected the ox and wagon to be in her future after some unknown (to her) number of months of sweet living among big spenders in Europe and America. Yet she’d acquired tastes, hadn’t she, and estimates of her own worth, as well as a strong belief in the enduring value of her family and friends, which, in her opinion, more than compensated for the loss in luxury she would suffer, if she gave up, or was forced to give up, being Tall Tree’s poster person, though that didn’t happen until six months after she’d concluded her American tour and was back in East Africa.

On both her European and American tours her cousin BeBe Kwanda accompanied her. A comfort to Mbda, BeBe was a staunch supporter and wise advisor. They talked over in depth every decision Mbda had to make. While in Los Angeles, they conferred frequently with the Hools, who provided them relief and sometimes shelter from the upper class audiences Mbda was catering to on behalf of Tall Tree.

There was no question in Mbda’s mind she had a prime obligation to raise money for Tall Tree and to adhere to the schedule of meetings and appearances Tall Tree had arranged for her.

In addition, she had very important home village responsibilities to worry about. Her five children, for instance, ages 3 to 14. (During the past ten years two of her other children had died from malaria.) Mdba’s husband’s sixty-nine-year-old parents were the five children’s caretakers, while her husband, Amon, worked as a steel worker in India. Like Mbda, Amon was allowed two short vacations a year. On each vacation Amon met Mbda in their East African village, moved into his parent’s thatched-roofed house with the children and were amazed at how much each of them had grown and changed between visits.

Often Mbda was panicked during her negotiations with Tall Tree’s executives, members of its board of directors, and others with clout affiliated with the organization. Here she was an African third-grader standing up to Tall Tree’s big shots to convince them to grant concessions not only to her and her family but also to her village community to provide health and educational benefits, sharply augmented food allotments, plus improved housing and better transportation for the families of the village children.

Mbda was proud she and BeBe had been able to negotiate such favorable deals for the village, but also was worried the whole thing, every bit of it, could suddenly unravel. Why? Mainly because of cultural misunderstandings among the competing groups who’d drafted the basic agreement that had brought them together. The East Africans and the Europeans/Americans often used vocabulary the other side couldn’t understand. In addition, both sides made assumptions that prevented problems from being solved, or they didn’t recognize where their assumptions were leading them, or refused to admit their assumptions were taking them to wrong conclusions, or in wrong directions, or were unaware how their assumptions affected their judgment and influenced the outcome of decisions they were making based on information and assumptions unfamiliar to them.

“It can be a mess,” Mbda said.

“It’s always a mess,” BeBe said.

“We’re in it again, aren’t we?” Mbda said.

BeBe nodded yes, grinning innocently.

“But not like we assume they assume we are.”

“Or they assume we assume they are.”

“I agree,” Mbda said.

They stared gloomily at one another.

“We’ve got to talk,” Mbda said.

“Talk? To whom?”

“Them.”

“Them?”

“How else do we prove we’re not addicted to fancy hotels, dinners in our honor, or being told how great we are by people who clearly don’t give a damn about us?”

BeBe shrugged.

“What I love most about Tall Tree is standing on the hotel balcony and having the crowd cheer us, which gets my heart pumping, then being with the Hools and their friends, sneaking off to Hool house on Saturday afternoons, getting completely away from Tall Tree’s stress and tension, and feeling safe for a couple of hours. Meanwhile, I think I’m a fraud letting these people who apparently trust us to make assumptions about them making assumptions about us that seem ridiculous to me.

BeBe took Mbda’s hand and squeezed it.

“Shouldn’t we have conversations,” Mbda said, “with Tall Tree’s local sponsors who are open to having a conversation with us?”

Several women appeared approachable, including a forty-six year old professor who taught history and women’s studies at Memphis State. Called Shirl by her friends and colleagues, her full name was Shirley Caldwell Pink. She had two daughters, Rene, 16, and Cora, 21, and a husband, Elvis Pink, an ex-teacher, who operated a successful plumbers’ supplies business in East Memphis.

“Men are not swift like women,” Shirl said, addressing a student rally at the State College. “To keep from falling too far behind, they try to control women by dragging their feet and flexing their muscles. This is a problem in my own family. We have a truck, which my husband Elvis uses primarily in his plumbing business.” Standing up and waving, Elvis got a foot-stamping ovation from the crowd. “We also own a station wagon, which I drive,” Shirl said ”Knock wood, I’ve not had a ticket nor an accident and I’m not a liability on our auto insurance. Yet I guarantee this brilliant man I love and for twenty-two years have been happily married to, is convinced like most men I know, that he’s a safer, more dependable, and more skillful driver than I am, claiming he not only has the right but also the duty to demonstrate his masculine superiority, by taking the steering wheel from me and driving himself to keep me from wrecking the car, or worse, as if most women, including me, aren’t better, calmer, and less hysterical drivers than men.”

Throughout Shirl’s speech during which she giggled repeatedly and took affectionate peeks at Elvis who was jumping in and out of his seat, pumping his fists vigorously at whatever she said about him, making protesting faces, shouting at her, and laughing loudly, while she ignored him most of the time, talking over what he was saying or sharply contradicting it.

They were like a crack vaudeville team, breaking up the crowd with their stock comedy routine, which was obviously hilarious to them as well as to Mbda and BeBe, who were sitting directly in front of them, in row three’s center seats.

Elvis introduced Mbda and BeBe as “our collaborators from East Africa.” When Mbda and BeBe got to their feet and bowed, the student audience roared their approval of them. The next morning Mbda and BeBe met with Shirl in the college cafeteria and laughed until noon about male drivers, and how smug, irritating, and presumptive even Elvis was about his alleged superior driving abilities as compared to Shirl’s.

A week later, in L.A., Mbda and BeBe received a note from Shirl, containing a description, backed up by a clipping from a Memphis newspaper, about two righteous guys (neither of them Elvis), speeding on a freeway outside Memphis. One guy, driving a souped-up Chevie changed lanes, cutting off the other guy, also in a souped-up Chevie, provoking a hundred-mile-an-hour chase that ended up with both cars crashing into the rear of a school bus crowded with kids on their way home from school. Six kids and both Chevie drivers were killed, the newspaper clipping said. Shirl concluded her note with a couplet, its top line cribbed from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”

The couplet read:

“All the world’s a stage,
To act out his/his road rage.”

69.

What’s next for the King?

Well, first of all, the flirty-eyed stuff didn’t pan out, because flirty-eyes herself (Nellie Newton) had been flirty-eyes since age eight, when her flirty eyes earned her more attention and praise from her susceptible-to-flirty-eyes father than her three sisters and two brothers combined. That the King believed he was in love with Nellie, he soon realized, was his heart talking and not his head, while his tolerance of Leaf Orlando, her mother Bess, and the bald parrot, Twiggy Ironside, was rapidly growing thin.

The day after the King decided to pack the three of them off to Reno, with two lawyers, a wad of cash, and specific instructions to divorce him immediately, plus a bigger wad of cash to persuade them to leave Sumner at the Brentwood house with him, a housekeeper, and a baby-nurse, he received a call from his autobiography collaborator, Nancy Nightingale. She was in Monaco, where, financed by the King, she’d gone to get an abortion, which she’d changed her mind about, when she learned she was pregnant with twins. “Can’t take that much risk,” she said, telling him she’d made up her mind to return home, seven months pregnant.

Great! The unborn twins, the King knew, were his. Writing his autobiography together, they’d had frequent rest periods, which they’d mostly spent lolling in bed. He had a clear memory of the morning she’d said to him: “I think I’m pregnant, no, I definitely am.”

Nancy’s original plan was to make a clean break from the King and settle permanently in Monaco. She’d bought a condominium and a two-year-old Mercedes, quickly made new friends, and had started to write a book about casino gambling, but the prospect of aborting twins had stopped her cold. When the King offered to bring her back to California, so she could have the babies in L.A. and also said he was willing to take full responsibility for her as well as the twins, this seemed to Nancy the best and most reasonable recourse. That she’d be giving up her babies to the King broke her heart, but his resources were far greater than hers, and she knew the twins would be safer and better cared-for with him than they could possibly be if they remained with her, so Nancy returned to America and moved into the King’s house on the Brentwood estate shortly after Leaf Orlando, Leaf’s mother, and the bald parrot vacated it.

The twins were born at the Simon Griffin Pavilion, a maternity hospital in Beverly Hills The delivery took place in the hospital’s emergency room, with a full, highly trained staff, in case something unexpected and life-threatening had happened to Nancy and/or the babies.

Nancy’s labor lasted 39 hours and was extremely painful. Since arriving in Los Angeles, she’d been barely able to walk under the combined weight of the twins. The babies were kicking strenuously, as if they were trying to get out the womb, when her water broke. At two a.m. the King and Henrietta, one of the nursemaids the King had hired for Sumner, rushed Nancy to the hospital.

Nancy’s doctor, Dr. Pender, decided she’d arrived at the emergency room too soon to give birth and sent her home for 12 hours, during which her contractions became increasingly irregular. At midnight she, the King, and Henrietta hurried back to the hospital.

The next hour and a half Nancy pushed unsuccessfully to deliver the impatient babies. At five a.m. the next morning a cup was attached to the first baby’s up-facing head (Jute) and she was vacuum-sucked out of Nancy’s womb. The second baby (Morgan) followed quickly, though her head was turned sideways. Giving birth was a painful, frightening, and wonderful experience for Nancy. She’d given birth to two healthy, happy, beautiful babies. How would she bring herself to go back to Monaco and leave these babies behind?

Well, she did, heading home, seven weeks later, with a stack of the King’s conscience-relieving I. O. U.’s, a signed agreement covering her visitation rights, and a hold-your-breath pledge he would permanently keep away from her.

“Sounds good to me,” Nancy said.

70.

A week after Nancy flew back to Monaco, Harlow Finstone called to remind me about Florence’s Saturday night party. “You’re bringing Billie?” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “Who else would I bring?”

“That’s up to you,” he said. “We’re having a load of people, our friends, plus a couple of dozen teenagers Tinker and Bambi have invited.” He gave me the time of the party and their address on Wilshire Boulevard. “The tenants’ recreation room in the penthouse, don’t forget, not our apartment. We’re having snacks and a light meal at midnight, catered by Ebo’s Food-To-Go.”

“The bakery guy?” I said.

“Right,” he said. “We’re also having dancing and a band.”

“The Picassos?”

“Can’t afford them. Besides, the kids picked who they wanted, some group from school.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“Very noisy,” he said, sounding disapproving.

“Fun,” I said. We both laughed.

His wife, Florence, he said, was in San Diego, where, representing Blackman and Blackman, she was attending a statewide convention on land use and zoning. She was giving one of the prime speeches before the full convention and had spent two days researching the topics she was covering and writing her speech. “Couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights,” he said, “which is always a problem for her, when she gives a speech. Fortunately she zonked out on the flight from Los Angeles to San Diego. Practically had to be carried off the plane, but as soon as she woke up and got her energy flowing, she gave a helluva speech that wowed the convention as she always does, despite the exaggerated worries she’d had about speaking in advance.”

Harlow was also an accountant. “But ninety-six percent retired though I‘ve kept a half dozen clients,” he said, “who insist I represent them on certain issues that require little additional consultation, so they still have confidence in me and what we’ve already accomplished together.”

A year ago last May Harlow had had heart fibrillations “that knocked me out of the race permanently. Now all I do is walk and rest and sometimes ride my bicycle.” Organizing Florence’s party had been a big job for him. “Fortunately most of what I had to do has gone smoothly. Ebo was a pain in the neck, until I agreed to tomato (no meat) sauce for the pasta.” That damn sauce, Harlow said, was his only, or almost only, headache until the night of the party, when the building’s elevators suddenly stopped working.

We’re talking about an eight-story building, with the site of the party, the tenants’ recreation room on the ninth floor. The elevator outage didn’t happen till seven twenty, so if you arrived early, that is, before seven twenty, as maybe a dozen of us, including Billie and me, did, there was no getting-to-the-recreation-room problem, but if you showed up after seven twenty, you discovered that the elevators had quit at the sixth floor, and if you wanted to go higher to the ninth-floor recreation room, you had to walk three stories up a cork-tiled staircase in a narrow emergency shaft.

At first making such a climb seemed like a laugh, and most of the guests were amused by it, saying upbeat things such as “Will do me good,” “I need the exercise,” “Will give me an appetite,” though all of them arrived at the recreation room huffing and puffing and shaky on their feet. Some of the guests, of course, didn’t attempt the three-story climb, preferring to get back in their cabs and head for the nearest restaurant. “Good thinking,” even Harlow said.

The next big controversy occurred, when the building managers ordered Ebo to hoist the snacks and the midnight meal to the ninth-floor recreation room outside the building. Ebo protested that hoisting the food nine stories outside the building was too dangerous. The compromise both sides agreed to was that Ebo would hoist the food containers outside the building to a balcony at the sixth floor level, load the containers onto the balcony, then carry them up three floors to the roof’s recreation room via the inside staircase, the same staircase being used by the party’s guests.

“Would have been better, as it turned out, if we’d cancelled the food,” Harlow said, “but that would have disappointed Florence and maybe spoiled the party, which I was anxious to avoid, because I knew she was hoping to persuade her guests to support the Bright Beginning project she’d set up to raise funding and also develop political support to increase health and education benefits for children of low-income families.

Rumbling in the heads of the kids Tinker and Bambi had recruited for Florence’s party was as much mischief as they could get away with. While guests were laboring to climb to the recreation room, the kids lurked in the hallways off the emergency staircase plotting to scare the pants off them as well as the nervous, unsuspecting workers from Ebo’s. Guess who were the teenagers’ first victims?

Florence had arrived back from San Diego a few minutes before nine. She took the elevator to the sixth floor and walked up the inner staircase to the ninth floor recreation room where she not only got a huge hand but also a record number of donor pledges, totaling a record amount of money, more than twice the donations she’d received in her best previous years.

Then shortly after nine thirty, as Florence was making a second speech to the donors, thanking them for their generous contributions, two pair of Ebo workers were hoisting giant pots of tomato sauce to the sixth floor balcony. Loading the pots into sturdy, specially-designed, hard-wood carriers, the workers transported the pots across the balcony to the emergency staircase, entering the shaft that housed the staircase, each pair of workers carrying a large pot of thick, garlic-smelling tomato sauce. Moving cautiously, the workers were slowly approaching the seventh floor, when four teens, hiding in the hallway outside the staircase on the seventh floor, attacked them, shrieking wildly, causing them to drop the carriers, dumping the thick tomato sauce onto the staircase, transforming its cork tile into a slippery marsh of garlic-smelling tomato-sauce goo.

In addition, the teenagers’ music and dancing were total flops. The band they hired played three rock tunes badly, plus the Beatles’ “Let It Be” (you could at least recognize the tune), plus discordant versions of “I’m In the Mood For Love” and “Everything Comes up Roses,” almost too painful to listen to, but no one among the guests complained, or criticized, or threatened to cut off their contributions to Florence’s charity fund.

Remember, these were upper-class women, outrageously self-centered and snobbish, with financial resources of their own, or immediate access to somebody else’s financial resources, the snooty possessors of post-graduate degrees, who’d been remarkably cheery and cooperative during the four or more hours they’d remained in the recreation room until the school band’s awful music made them restive, and they asked Florence if she’d mind if they started home, where most of them said they had family or other important business to attend to.

Florence made another short speech, again thanking the women for their great generosity as well as their commitment and patience, unaware a group of ungrateful teenagers, hiding in the hallways on the eighth floor, were preparing to leap into the staircase, when the women began to descend, and that a second teenage group would do the same on the seventh floor, as they reached the quagmire of dumped tomato sauce, which sent them sliding and skidding and screaming down to the fifth floor, where a stunned Harlow and a crew of unprepared helpers tried futilely to rescue them.

Avoiding the teenagers, Florence traveled, via the fire escapes at the rear of the building, from the ninth-floor recreation room to her fifth-story apartment in about four minutes. Harlow was anxiously waiting for her. “We should have warned them about the tomato sauce,” he said.

“Sure,” Florence said, “but how?”

“What do you mean how?” Harlow said.

“We didn’t know about it, did we? And if we didn’t know, how could we have warned them?"

Harlow made a glum face.

“I didn’t know” Florence said.

“Nor did I,” Harlow said.
.
“Then why are these women blaming us?” Florence said.

“Ask them,” Harlow said, a large frown on his face.

“I did ask them,” Florence said.

“Oh?” Harlow said, his frown fading.

“Some of them, maybe all of them, act like they think we deliberately allowed them to get stuck in that damn goo,” Florence said.

“Why would we do that?” Harlow said.

“We wouldn’t,” Florence said, “but this has been a humiliating experience for them, so why not blame somebody for it, which is why they blame us.”

Harlow began to laugh. “It’s ridiculous,” he said.

“Please,” Florence said, suppressing her own giggles.

“Preposterous, isn’t it?” Harlow said.

“Sure,” Florence said, “but what do we do to convince them not to blame us, when apparently so many of them have made up their minds we knew in advance about the damn goo –

“And deliberately didn’t warn them?”

“As if we’d do such a thing,” Florence said.

“They’re ruining our apartment,” Harlow said. “All three bathrooms are a wreck.”

“They keep taking showers,” Florence said.

“Indiscriminately,” Harlow said.

“Which I don’t care about, as long as it calms them down,” Florence said.

“Could soak into the apartment below us,” Harlow said.

“Mrs. Wolfe? Oops. Didn’t think about Mrs. Wolfe.”

“Loves to sue people,” Harlow said.

“Double oops,” Florence said.

While Harlow remained in the hall, ready to scare off invading teenagers, Florence toured the crowded apartment, being confronted in every room by frantic, demanding, semi-clad women and piles of their goo-covered clothing

In her diary, a copy of which Florence later gave to me, she wrote: “Could see immediately I was in trouble with the women and that the pledges I’d gotten from them might already be dead. Most of them ignored me, but with such intensity I had to notice I was being ignored. Cissy Vandertook, a high-powered socialite, much written about in the fashion columns, was wrapped in our living room couch’s orange and green striped scarf.

Glaring nastily at me, Cissie hissed in a sullen voice: “Hope you’ve got a damn good excuse for not telling us about that crap in the staircase.”

“We didn’t know about it!” Florence shouted.

“Bullshit,” Cissy said, “You should have known about it.”

“But we didn’t, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay, no, no, no, no!”

“I’m sorry,” Florence said she said, which further infuriated Cissie, who bitterly lectured her on what she said was Florence’s indifference and carelessness and called Harlow stupid and unfeeling, which, Florence said, got her angry.

That’s when she said she shut up, turned cold toward Cissie, and didn’t say another word to her about anything.

Oh, Florence said, was Cissie pissed. (Pardon the crude expression.) Obviously my icy silence, Florence said, was more accusatory than anything I could have said to her, and the fierce look she gave me in return so disproportionate and silly that I started to laugh and soon everybody in the apartment, including Cissy Vandertook, was laughing and my funding crisis was over, because none of them, as I’d anticipated, cancelled the pledges they’d made. In fact, a week after the party I got a long note from Cissy apologizing for her short-sighted attempt to intimidate me, which, of course, she didn’t, barely.

By seven o’clock that night at least a dozen women had taken excessive, drenching, slippery-making showers in each of our three bathrooms. Clothes, sheets, draperies of various shapes and sizes were scattered throughout the apartment. Getting the mess cleaned up was our first priority. Harlow talked to the building’s super who sent up a couple of young Latino men plus an older Latino woman to scrub the floors and the walls. In three days they’d restored the apartment to tip-top shape. “Very expensive and very convenient,” Harlow said. He suggested we give the Latinos a bonus equal to half of what the Super had paid them. Instead of asking the Latinos if it was okay with them, Harlow asked the super.

Well, apparently that was bad form. The super was furious and accused Harlow of maliciously undercutting him. Then Sunday morning early, he rang our doorbell and snarled in an uptight voice: “If something idiotic like this happens again, count me out, get your own people to clean up, okay?”

Harlow didn’t reply.

71.

Also, on Sunday morning Mbda and Bebe met with Metro Reporter Rosalind Rountable, and told her their biggest thrill, since arriving in L.A., was watching the peace marchers gather in the parking lots across from the Century Plaza Hotel. The police estimated more than 3000 marchers showed up.

In most European cities, in London certainly, Mbda said, as well as many American cities, Chicago and Denver, for instance, crowds were larger than in L.A., and in a few cases, noisier. “But this one (meaning the L.A. peace march) had an unusual spirit most of the others didn’t have, even the best we witnessed in Europe, you agree?”

“Definitely,” BeBe said.

"Most of the groups in the march,” Mbda said, “came from Southern California, right?”

“Right,” Rosalind said.

“Which gave them unity and strength,” Mbda said.

“And a common point of view,” BeBe said.

“Maybe,” Rosalind said. “L.A. has a diverse population.”

“And not everybody on the Tall Tree board approves.” Mbda said.

Rosalind looked puzzled. “Of what?” she said.

“Of us,” Mbda said.

Bebe nodded gloomily. “Which hurts,” she said.

“Gives us negative feelings about ourselves,” Mbda said. Rosalind again looked puzzled.

“Doesn’t make sense, does it?” Mbda said, “but that’s how we feel.”

They were sitting in the garden behind the hotel. The main dining room was hosting a large wedding party. Some of the guests had gathered in the garden. Mbda and BeBe purposefully were staying clear of them. Seeing the Africans’ worried faces, Ned Hool hurried to them. When they introduced him to Rosalind, she reminded him she’d written an article on Hool House that was published in Brisk Magazine. Ned remembered the article. “Wasn’t very happy with it,” he said.

Rosalind admitted her principal sources for the article, other than the Hools, were the Mayor of Los Angeles, the police, and the district attorney, all of whom she knew were hostile to Hool House. “Have to go with what I’ve got,” she said.

“Well, I don’t,” Ned said testily.

“What can I say?” Rosalind said. “I’m a reporter.” She laughed nervously. “I depend on my sources.” She laughed again, again nervously.

“Were you at the preview we had for Mbda La’ster?” he asked. “You were, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, her smile fading. “You did invite me.”

“If you remember, in our audience we had about forty members of our peace group and at least double that from the city police and the Sheriff’s Office. I have a clear memory of you sitting among the police and the sheriffs, the State’s anti-espionage squad, the FBI, and the CIA, which doesn’t make me comfortable when I think about it.”

“That’s my job. I’m sorry,” she said, holding back her anger.

“We expect to have a follow-up meeting shortly for Mbda and BeBe,” he said. “You’ll be notified, provided you have time to talk to our peace delegates.”

“No problem,” she said.

Putting together the second conference for Mbda and BeBe, Ned said, “is risky and complicated. Both women have to approve. Won’t go ahead without their full cooperation. Also, asking them about problems they’re presently attempting to cope with seems too intrusive. I’d hoped they’d talk to us on their own, but they haven’t.” A couple of mutual friends suggested Mbda or BeBe might be too embarrassed to discuss their troubles, real or imagined, “until they’re confident they’ll get an unbiased hearing from you.”

“An unbiased hearing?” Sally said.

“From us?” Ned said.

Sally shook her head. “That’s so shocking,” she said.

To Ned and Sally Hool such a reaction, unspoken or not, was insulting, though they did manage to keep their hurt feelings to themselves. Instead they shifted their attention and energy to Billie Cooper’s proposal to set up a network of self-esteem learning centers. “At each center we’ll need a director,” Sally said. Hool House flyers were distributed to nine states announcing the locations of the learning centers and the duties of the director. In the next two weeks Hool House received more than a thousand applications. Ned and Sally agreed to co-chair a screening committee to select the locations of the new self-esteem in Los Angeles centers as well as the new directors.

Other screening committee members came from Hool House volunteers. Divided into five sub-committees they were invited to Los Angeles for in-house training under Sally’s supervision. Among the applicants was a fifty-six year old former Hool House staff member named Ida Le Harrow. Tall, blonde, cheerful, and efficient,
a widow with three adult children, Ida, born in Wichita, Kansas, was presently residing in Santa Cruz, California on a six acre plot, containing two three-car garages and a large, handsomely-furnished house.

“Perfect,” Ted Hool said.

“Same for Santa Cruz,” Sally said. “Also perfect.”

Ida, they knew, had retired two years ago.

“Could be three,” Sally said. “Was worn out.”

“And disappointed we didn’t send her to Caracas.“

“Bolivia, I think,” Sally said.

“Was Bolivia, wasn’t it?”

“We should call her,” Sally said.

Ida’s phone number was on her application. Sally dialed; Ida answered, as Ted picked up the extension. They were in Hool House’s basement office.

After much excited laughter and small talk, Sally asked, “How are you?”

“Excellent,” Ida said, apologizing for having quit Hool House so abruptly. “Needed a rest.”

“Knew you were wiped out,” Sally said.

“Recovered now,” Ida said cheerily.

Sally explained the learning center director’s duties. “You’ll have one paid assistant. Remainder of your staff you recruit on your own.”

“Santa Cruz ‘s no problem,” Ida said. “Lots of turned-on people who volunteer if you’ve got something interesting for them to do.” She laughed nervously. “Do I have the job?”

Sally looked to Ted, who was on the extension. “Up to her,” Ted said

“Up to you,” Sally said.

“When do I start?” Ida said.

“What about Murray?" Ted asked.

“Murray?” Ida said.

“Murray Favor,” Sally said.

“Gone” Ida said.

“Wasn’t he the main reason you moved to Santa Cruz?” Sally said.

“No, not the main reason,” Ida said.

“You were going to marry him, weren’t you?” Sally said.

“No, never,” Ida said.

“Never?” Sally said.

“Not what you told us,” Ted said. “Is it Sally?”

Sally said she remembered meeting Ida and Murray on the Santa Cruz beach. “Seemed very close.”

“We were very close,” Ida said. “He’s an attractive guy, and I loved him.”

“Loved him?” Sally said.

Ted frowned. “Don’t now?” he said.

“Buying that damn condominium,” Ida said, “and insisting I move to Costa Rica with him made everything different between us."

Her eyes filled with tears. “Got more to worry about than him, regardless of how important he thinks he is.”

72.

The following Tuesday Sally drove to Aptos from Los Angeles. Took her seven hours to get to Ida’s house on Peaches Street. Ida had a hot meal waiting for her. Briefly they discussed Ida’s ideas for the Santa Cruz learning center. “Been thinking a lot about it,” Ida said.

“Good,” Sally said. “May need revisions, based on recent changes we’ve made at Hool House.”

“What changes?” Ida said suspiciously.

“Let’s wait till Ned gets here, okay?” Sally said.

“Sure,” Ida said, again suspiciously.

They decided to walk to the beach, which, Ida said, was a half-mile below the Peaches Street bluff from which they had a narrow view of the ocean.

Access to the beach was a fifty-foot side road through a grove of eucalyptus trees, past a children’s playground and a sewerage processing plant, an eyesore (that smelled bad).

The beach itself was gorgeous, particularly now as the red-golden sun was beginning to set. The eucalyptus-grove road funneled into an empty stretch of cream-tan-gray sand, a thousand-feet wide, between two tracts of houses built in the nineteen seventies on twenty-foot sand berms. In the nineteen eighties heavy rains hit Santa Cruz, and the berms were reinforced with protective walls. An additional rock base was installed to support the north tract’s wall. Protecting the south tract was a thick concrete scoop-like barrier that propelled incoming ocean water away from the houses behind it. The distance from the sewerage plant to the shoreline, Ida estimated, was five hundred feet. The wind was strong, and fifteen-foot waves were breaking powerfully against the beach. Ida and Sally stumbled across the sand toward the ocean. Despite the vigorous surf and gusting wind the brilliant sun was keeping the sand and water warm. Ida, carrying her sandals, dragged her toes through the unusually tepid water. Sally suggested they make a quick stop at the south tract, which they did, before heading up the eucalyptus-grove’s steep hill to Townsend Avenue and Ida’s Peaches Street house. They arrived at Ida’s house worn-out from the strenuous walk. Ida made a salmon salad for dinner. They fell asleep, too exhausted to eat it.

73.

Two days later a caravan of six Hool House station wagons pulled into Ida’s driveway. Aboard were thirty-one Hool House employees and volunteers. They brought with them the latest revisions from Hool House’s governing board. Annoyed she hadn’t been consulted in advance, Ida was mollified when she was told not only could she critique the changes but also would have a major input into how they operated. Ida was pleased.

In 1929 the Seacliff Amusement Company purchased the SS Palo Alto, a concrete ship, from an Oakland shipbuilder and had it towed down the coast to where it now sits, a half-mile north of the Seacliff State Beach parking lot. Planning to convert the Palo Alto into an amusement and fishing ship, the Seacliff Company opened the Palo Alto’s seacocks, sinking it at what today is at least a thousand feet off shore, then built a pier from the beach to the ship’s prow, before extensively renovating the Palo Alto’s interior into a plush casino, which remained popular and profitable, until the ’29 Depression forced the company to shut it down.

By the time Ida and her first husband, Myron Levy, settled in Santa Cruz in 1983, the Palo Alto was classified as unsafe and was restricted in its public use to fishing, plus seagull and seal watching, while the pier remained intact and active, without restrictions.

Sally bunked in the main house with Ida. The following Tuesday Ida drove her over route 17 to the San Jose airport to pick up Ted who’d spent most of the previous day and a half in non-stop negotiations to finalize the locations of L.A.’s learning centers. This was Ted’s second trip to Santa Cruz. He knew from his own experience as well as from what Sally and others had told him that Santa Cruz was close-knit culturally and politically.

He also knew that housing and community services, crime rates, police protection, restaurants, movie theatres, etc. of many Santa Cruz neighborhoods from Davenport in the North, Aptos, Capitola, and La Selva on the Coast, and Watsonville in the South, were remarkably similar and that the residents - the rich guys, middle-classers, and bottom-of-the-pilers - had similar income and education backgrounds.

For instance, an electrician from Watsonville, with a 21-year-old daughter, who, the electrician said, was having serious personal problems. Based on her age, Ted presumed, boy problems, right? Nope, said the electrician; she’s a Harvard medical school graduate, had volunteered to work in Argentina, and now can’t get back to Watsonville due to a visa mix-up. Or take a second friend, this one from Capitola, a retired lawyer, whose beautiful wife, a teacher, lives and works forty miles to the East in San Jose. They see one another on weekends, holidays, and vacations, and own an apartment in London. Or a third important friend, a court reporter, who came to Aptos from Los Angeles, settled near UCSC, accumulated loads of University friends, and with Ted, started a Friday lunch group, that today, ten years later, still meets weekly, having added, after inevitable attritions, several replacements to the group as devoted to its success as its original members.

Like most golf courses Delavaega is beautiful, believe me. Located in an upper-class community north of Prospect Heights, maybe five miles west of UCSC and Western Drive where a mile below the university, a half mile above Mission Street and Route One three active lunch group members and their families reside in two-story, 2500 square foot, modest small-roomed condominiums (Seth, Martin, and Arnold. Another six of the eleven active members come from Aptos, the Monterey Coast, and Watsonville, while the remaining two members are from small cities and rural areas of Santa Cruz County.

So if you go to Front Street (the Downtown Mall) or the side streets off the Mall practically anytime of day you’ll meet or see a cross section of lunch group types, young, old, and in-between, looking as if they’re heading somewhere important, or waiting for something important to happen to them. Others play music, shop, buy books, check out the Gap, sit on the Mall’s benches and depending on the season of the year and time of day, gaze at the flowering cherry that line both sides of the street, while dreaming about being loved and getting laid.

74.

This chapter is about Billie Cooper and my (Nigel Woodie’s), wedding, two and a half years ago, on September 9, in Los Angeles, at the Santa Monica County Courthouse. Madly in love with one another, we picked up a marriage license at city hall (no blood test was required. I (Nigel) called Justice of the Peace Marcel Denver, spoke to his chief assistant, Sophie Mancuso, who instructed me to bring Billie and our wedding party at 10:30 a.m. to the Santa Monica Courthouse’s back door, where she would meet us.

In our wedding party were Billie (the bride) and I (Nigel, the groom), the bride’s mother and father, the bride’s two brothers, the bride’s sister-in-law, and the bride’s seven-year-old niece. No one from the groom’s family was present. They hadn’t been invited, and hadn’t asked to come.

Billie and I (Nigel) had been living together for almost four years, traveling openly to Boston, New York, and Florida to visit my relatives, while pretending to her parents that Billie was sharing an apartment with a woman friend, so her father wouldn’t discover that I (Nigel) was her true roommate and blame her mother for not stopping Billie from moving in with me.

We drove VIV to the Santa Monica County Courthouse, parked it in the employees’ temporary parking garage across the street from the Courthouse’s employees’ entrance where Sophie Mancuso met us (our wedding party) at the jail’s back door promptly at ten-thirty.

“Are you being married today?” Mancuso asked.

“Yes we are,” Billie replied.

“What time is the wedding?” Mancuso said.

Squeezing my hand Billie answered firmly, “We’re the twelve o’clock.”

The Twelve O'clock Chapters 29-33

2008-08-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

29.

Got out of bed, had a brisk shower, sang a couple of loud choruses of “O, What a Beautiful Morning,” shaved, got dressed, hurried downstairs to the kitchen, set a place for myself at the dining table and was in the process of delivering eggs and bacon to the table, when the front doorbell rang. Before I could answer, whoever was outside began to pound on the door with such urgency I knew immediately who it was: Lulu, right? Right.

She’d come to pick up Cotton Tail. “Sorry about last night.” she said, sweeping him into her arms and hugging him. “We had to get out of there. It was scary.”

“You didn’t look scared,” I said. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself.”

“In the beginning, yes,” she said. “It was very exciting, but you saw how those people were acting, screaming like that. Howard said we should get out, and so did Dora, and I agreed with them.” She said they’d seen me dancing with Florence. “We figured you’d get somebody to take you home.”

“I walked,” I said.

“You walked? No.” She began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” she said, snatching a piece of bacon from my plate. “Do you mind?”

“That’s rude.”

“You made toast, I hope?,” she said.

“I’ll make it.”

“And coffee?”

I made rye toast, two more scrambled eggs, and instant coffee.

“Instant?” she said.

“That’s all I’ve got.”

“I don’t think so. It’s not good for me.” She’d finished off my bacon.

“I’m out of bacon,” I said.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, as I set the toast and the new eggs I’d made on the table in front of her. “Do you have butter, and jam, if it’s not too much trouble?”

“Apricot?” I knew I had apricot jam.

“No raspberry? Or strawberry would be okay. Not my favorite, but it’s acceptable, much better than apricot or peach.” I brought her the apricot jam. She looked displeased but thanked me.

I’d given her two slices of toast. First she carefully buttered each slice, then, despite her objection to apricot, smeared both slices with a thick layer of jam. “Isn’t that pretty?” she said, licking the excess jam from the edges of the bread. Very pretty, I thought, staring dreamily at her adorable tongue in action.

Yet the whole of Lulu’s personality and manner wasn’t nearly as attractive or interesting to me as her impossibly sensual mouth, which was my problem and not hers. A brash, pregnant, twenty-six-year-old, she was much too spoiled and demanding for me to feel comfortable with. Her lisping, inelegant accent, out of Congleton, her mid-England birthplace, was cute enough, but sometimes so thick and peculiar I didn’t know what she was talking about.

From previous conversations with her as well as with Dora I’d learned that Dora, who’d been born and raised in Reigate, a London suburb, and spoke semi-posh, middle-class Londonese, had recognized Lulu’s neediness and panic the instant she sat next to her on that British Airlines flight they’d taken from London to New York. Repeatedly she was forced to listen to Lulu complain about the horrible mistake she’d made, when for airfare and three hundred dollars in advance, she’d agreed to come to America to take care of her Aunt Ella, her mother’s stone-deaf sister, who had a reputation in the family for being short-tempered and obstinate. No one had ever succeeded, Lulu said, in having an enduring relationship with Aunt Ella, including two ex-husbands, four cocker spaniels, and an undersized chimpanzee that did tricks to commands in Latvian, which Aunt Ella didn’t understand and stubbornly refused to learn.

Fortunately Dora, an exceptionally patient listener with an enormous heart for anybody like Lulu who was determined to take advantage of her, also had an enviable talent to listen intently without listening at all and didn’t feel ignored or offended if the advice she gave went totally unheeded. Though outwardly relaxed and cheerful, she, like Lulu, was frightened to death the plane they were on would shortly crash into the Atlantic Ocean and secretly welcomed Lulu’s unstoppable complaint against Aunt Ella, which distracted her from worrying not only that she wouldn’t survive if the plane did crash, but also that her cousin Mitchell and his wife Simone, who’d invited her to stay temporarily with them in their two-bedroom apartment in Queens, while she got settled in New York, had changed their minds about meeting her at New York’s International Airport.

Well, Mitchell and Simone did meet her at the airport as they’d promised, but after staying with them for four miserable days, during which Mitchell tried twice to climb into the bathtub with her, Dora moved out of their Queens apartment into a depressing, sparsely-furnished room in a cheap hotel on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan’s upper Westside. Six days later, Lulu, driven nuts by Aunt Ella’s jealous accusations that she was talking too much to the neighbors, got her own depressing room in the same cheap Manhattan hotel.

Over the next nine days, they explored New York together. Walking, bussing, and subwaying the length of Manhattan from the Battery to the Harlem River, touring places and neighborhoods recommended in the travel guides they’d bought, including the Aquarium, the Statue of Liberty, the Stock Exchange, Greenwich Village, Delancy Street, SoHo, Carnegie Hall, Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum, the Empire State Building, Broadway and Forty-second Street, Rockefeller Center, Fifth, Madison, and Park Avenues, Harlem, Grant’s Tomb, the U.N. Building, the Riverside Episcopal Church, and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They also took an “exhilarating” (Dora’s description) ferry ride to Staten Island, made several “disappointing” excursions into Queens and the Bronx, walked expectantly across the Brooklyn Bridge (“very exciting”), strolled through Prospect Park to the Brooklyn Museum (“very nice”), rode the subway to Coney Island (“noisy and fun”), wandered the narrow streets of Brooklyn Heights to find the Victorian brownstone Walt Whitman had lived in and the Brooklyn Eagle building where he’d worked (“historic and impressive”), then sat on a bench on the Brooklyn Heights’ promenade, as two powerful tugs maneuvered a large cargo ship into an East River dock.

Staring glumly across the river, past the tugs and the cargo ship, at the dazzling Manhattan skyline, they reluctantly decided neither of them could cope with New York. Stripped of its glamour and hype, it was too much of a failure for both of them. Not that all of New York doesn’t work; some of it succeeds brilliantly. But gigantic flops are everywhere. What makes them think that they, coming to New York so innocently from less aggressive, less competitive Britain, could tolerate the noise, congestion, filth, crime, racism, rudeness, indifference, poverty, pollution, bad housing, slums, excessive wealth, discrimination, and worse by far, being incarcerated eight hours a day, five days a week in one of those concrete skyscraper monstrosities that New Yorkers are so excessively proud of. Telling one another that night when they returned to the hotel they’d have to get out of this dangerous, fraudulent city, they immediately made reservations to fly to L.A., as if what they expected to find in L.A. would save them.

And it did! In L.A. they met Howard.

“Because I’d gotten plane fare and three hundred dollars in advance,” Lulu wrote in her diary, “I’m in heaven, and so is Dora. Coming to New York was such a fantastic dream for both of us. Except Dora’s cousin in Queens began to resent her, and my Aunt Ella on Sixty-eighth Street was jealous anytime I tried to have a conversation with anybody. So we talked about moving in together, Dora and I, but we didn’t have jobs and were panicked we’d be trapped eight hours a day, five days a week, in one of those concrete monstrosities Manhattan is covered with. Even worse were the awful guys we kept meeting that we couldn’t trust no matter what they told us. One morning, after I'd had a terrible argument with my aunt, and Dora’s cousin had given her a week to find another place to live, we decided to go to L.A.

Immediately, before we knew what kind of place L.A. is, a whole series of miracles happened to us. On Fountain Avenue we found a great apartment in a gorgeous Tudor building that’s exactly what we were looking for. We also got a couple of okay jobs that don’t pay too badly. Dora bought the Pontiac with money from her brother. Then we really got lucky, I mean luck, luck, luck, just poured in on us, changed our entire lives, beginning in the drug store where I work. I met this guy who wanted to buy something and needed to be waited on, so, of course, I waited on him. Turns out he - his name is Howard Neville - lives on Fountain Avenue in the same apartment building Dora and I live in. Isn’t that astounding? We’re on the second floor and he’s downstairs in apartment six. Also, Dora is working for a dentist, and Howard is a patient of the same dentist. What a coincidence, right? And marvelous for everybody, especially Lulu and me, because pretty soon we started sleeping together, making love, the three of us.”

She laughs softly. “Makes me proud to think about it, I mean, we’ve been absolute flops, Lulu and me. She’s twenty-five years old and has been divorced twice, twice! And I’ve had more rotten love affairs, I mean, seriously bad love affairs, where I get so hurt, I can barely bring myself to think about it. Eventually, it becomes painfully obvious that neither of us, neither Dora nor I, can handle a full-sized, breathing, walking, talking man so why shouldn’t we settle for half?”

Half of what?

“Half of a man,” Lulu says, staring intently at me. “Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

30.

When Lulu finally took off with Cotton Tail under her arm, I was relieved. An hour and forty-three minutes of resisting those awesome lips was enough. That she’s pregnant has kept me from coming on to her, I suppose, because I do feel obligated to respect her as well as her unborn baby and also Howard, who is obviously a decent guy. Deserting me at Tess is my only objection to how the three of them have treated me, which otherwise is fine.

At one-thirty that afternoon I’d promised to pick up my friend Al at the Olympic Public Parking Garage, where he was working as a parking attendant. This was another new job for him. Much to his annoyance his sister Rhonda’s boyfriend Harry had recommended him for it. Naturally Al had insisted on creating as much of a riot as possible at the garage to impress his twenty-three-year old Latino boss, Miguel Colon, that he was a free- thinking, independent operator who couldn’t be pushed around.

Al’s first crisis at the garage came when Miguel gave him the shift schedule for the upcoming weekend. “I don’t work weekends,” Al told me he told Miguel.

“It’s a rule,” Al said Miguel said. “New employees work weekends. Everybody has to do it.”

“I’m sorry,” Al said he said, giving me a sarcastic-sounding version of what he claimed had happened in his meeting with Miguel. “It’s an ancient tradition that nobody in my family has ever worked on weekends. They’d feel desecrated if I did, so you can hardly ask me to go against what my ancestors have fought so valiantly to preserve.”

“I think I can,” Al said Miguel said.

“Not unless you want to risk the wrath of the Czars,” Al said he said.

“Do you want this job or not?” Al said Miguel said.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Al said he said.

“Then you’re working Saturdays and Sundays, eight a.m. till two, okay?”

“Can we talk about it?” Al said he said.

That night Al called me. “Is this a democracy? Where have the choices gone?” Miguel, he said, had given him a five-day schedule. “I’m off Tuesdays and Wednesdays. The guy’s power hungry, but I didn’t flinch. I’ve got a strategy. He’ll soon be at my mercy. It’s just a matter of time. ”In addition, Al said, Miguel had given him a copy of the garage’s dress code: dark pants, black or brown, a white shirt, and black shoes, all of which Al said he’d strenuously objected to. “Why?” I asked, knowing he owned a pair of dark brown pants and more than one white shirt.

“Four white shirts,” Al said he said.

“And black shoes? Do you have black shoes?”

“Two pair,” Al said he said. “Both in reasonable shape.”

“So what’s the problem?” I said.

“The black bow tie,” he said. “The company supplies it. I don’t like anything around my neck.”

“You wear a shirt,” I said.

“A collar’s the limit. No bow tie.”

“You’ll get canned again,” I said.

He shook his head no. “I intend to survive.”

On Thursday he started at the garage. That night he called me from Schubert’s. “You should have seen the guy’s face,” he said. “There I was in all my glory, brown pants, black shoes, that damn bow tie in my back pocket, and the prettiest blue shirt he’d ever set his eyes on.’

“Blue? Not white like you were supposed to?”

“Definitely not white,” he said, clearly proud of himself. “The guy couldn’t believe it.”

“What guy?” I said.

“Miguel, who thinks he’s the boss.”

“He is the boss, isn’t he?”

“In some respects, of course, but not over somebody like me, with my experience, which he doesn’t have, okay? So when he sees me in the blue shirt, he says, Al, I guess you don’t understand you’re supposed to wear a white shirt. There are no exceptions.” Then he asked if I’d read the dress code he’d given me.

“I studied it,” Al said he said.

“You did?” Al said Miguel said. “Then why are you wearing a blue shirt?”

On Tuesday, his first day off, Al met me at the Pancake Palace for coffee. Each day, he said, since he began to work at the garage he’d worn a different colored shirt, never a white shirt, and the other parking attendants were complaining he was taking advantage of Miguel who, they said, was too soft-hearted for his own good. Al laughed, making an impatient face. “It’s still a tug-of-war between me and him.”

“That’s silly,” I said.

“But I’ve got a plan, don’t I? From blue I go to green, then to pink, then to purple, then to red, while the guy’s temperature keeps rising until he’s got to make a change.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“He’s exasperated, for which I apologize, because he’s a very sweet, nice, decent, good guy.”

“Then why are you tormenting him?” I said.

“To make him realize who he’s dealing with,” he said.

It was my turn to laugh. “But you’re pushing him too hard,” I said.

That got a big guffaw from Al. “You should have seen the guy Monday morning,” he said, “when I came in wearing black pants, black shoes, and a gold shirt.”

“A gold shirt?”

“Then finally, finally, finally, just in the nick of time, the guy says, Al, you’re on the edge. I’ve come to the conclusion that working in this garage isn’t what you want to do in life, even temporarily, so you’d do me a big favor, if you’d please (with emphasis by Al on the please) take the next half hour and decide whether you want me to fire you or not. And that was it.”

“What was it?”

“He’d said the magic word that I’m always a sucker for.”

“What word?” I said.

“Please.”

“Please?” I said. He laughed again.

“In a half hour I came back and told him, okay, I get the message. Give me twenty minutes, and I’ll run down to the shopping center and buy me a classy, pure white shirt, and from now on I’ll even wear that bow tie you want me to wear. Then like the great kid he is, he shakes my hand, and I feel I’ve done a good deed.”

“He didn’t fire you?” I said.

Putting his arm around me, he squeezed my shoulders.

“I beat him at his own game,” he said. “How could he fire me?”

That’s so great. Here’s a guy who hardly has a nickel to his name, has no friends except his sister Rhonda and me, can’t resist telling people off or putting them down, is perpetually contrary, difficult, uncooperative, sarcastic , and silly, mostly out of his distorted sense of humor that does more damage to him than anything else, and can seriously say to me, less than a baby’s breath away from being canned from his job, “I beat him at his own game,” and “how could he fire me?” Is this fearlessness or stupidity, contempt or escape from reality? Whatever it is, I’m constantly amazed he can talk such nonsense and get away with it, which, of course, he doesn’t.

In contrast, compared to Al, I’m predictable and uncomplicated. What you see and hear and anticipate in me is exactly what you get. At least that’s the kind of propaganda I prefer to put out about myself, in case somebody is contemplating asking me to stand up in front of the class to recite the pledge of allegiance. No question I’ve been a willing accomplice in many of Al’s teasing escapades, including that embarrassing episode at Schubert’s, involving Audrey Frost – poor Audrey, and her friend, Pam, which I’m still ashamed to think about, though his telling them I’d popped a lobotomy out of his head with a button hook was pretty fumy, wasn’t it? Or was it?

Funnier, Al said, was the Olympic Terrace Shopping Center. Almost a half-mile long, anchored in the middle as well as at both ends by major department stores, between which on two levels were double rows of shops, restaurants, and a food take-out plaza, “it’s a very hilarious place. Practically everybody connected with it is nuts.” He was talking about the center’s management, its retailers and suppliers, and also its customers. “All of them are competition crazy.”

Adjacent to each of the department stores was a three-story, inter-connecting parking garage. Entrances to the end garages were off the shopping center’s side streets, while the middle garage’s main entrance came directly from Olympic Boulevard. Drivers get confused, Al said, about which garage to park in. One of his duties, which he described to me in detail, was to direct people who were lost in the garage to a parking space that was closest to their destination in the center. “It’s a heavy responsibility,” he said. Then we both broke out laughing.

I’d promised to pick up Al at the garage at one-thirty. I arrived twenty minutes early. He was working at the street-level entrance off Olympic Boulevard in the middle garage’s information booth. Well, I saw immediately he was in a great mood. Giving me a big smile, he signaled me to park VIV in the employees' section in the middle garage's basement, which I promptly tried to do, despite being stopped by some guy, probably another parking attendant, who said I had to go upstairs to the public parking area, until I told him Al had sent me, which didn’t seem to make him happy.

31.

That Sunday afternoon, about an hour after Lulu and Cotton Tail had exited from my apartment, I went to the parking garage to pick up Al. Despite the nonsense he’d been telling himself and me, and, worse still, his sister Rhonda, about “beating him at his own game” and “how could he fire me,” Al was animated and upbeat, determined, as he told me later, to show those “dumb” people he worked with, as well as Rhonda and her “rotten” boyfriend Harry, who’d gotten him this “miserable job,” that he wasn’t “a useless flop, no matter what they say about me.”

“You’re transformed?” I said.

“Never!” he said sharply, a seldom-seen-by-me, uncynical grin on his face.

We were in the traffic control booth inside the garage’s Olympic Boulevard entrance. Most of the stores in the center were having “gigantic” sales, and traffic in and out of the garage was heavy. I’d arrived twenty minutes early and was sitting on a bench under the surveillance camera at the rear of the booth, watching Al perform, not as his difficult, combative self, but remarkably, I thought, in the role of devoted, energetic parking garage attendant, greeting shopping center customers, giving them directions, answering their questions, then sending them off happily after they’d done their shopping, until, maybe six minutes before his shift was scheduled to end, when this agitated, red-haired woman in a pink Mercedes pulled up to the booth’s in-lane window, apparently confused about which section of the huge, multi-tiered. three-entranced garage she was in, and shouted excitedly at him: “Young man, young man, where am I?”

“You’re in Disneyland, lady,” Al shouted back at her, in a booming, imperious-sounding voice, thinking, I suppose, he’d made a joke, but getting himself instead into big, big trouble, because the woman began to scream, claiming he’d insulted her, demanding to speak with his supervisor, and stubbornly refusing to move her car out of the in-lane, preventing new arrivals from getting into the garage.

Rushing to the control booth from his second-tier office, Miguel, the boss, who’d seen Al on his office’s camera monitor being screamed at by the woman, tried first to calm her, then to get Al out of her sight. “Would you please leave?” he hissed at Al, but Al didn’t leave, acting as if he thought he could tease the woman out of her anger, which also didn’t work.

“What does she want from me?” Al said, as Miguel was appealing to the woman to move her car out of the incoming lane, or allow somebody else to move it for her. She agreed finally to let one of the other parking attendants drive the car to a safe area, which an attendant did, while Miguel escorted her to Palmer Greig’s office. Palmer Greig was the garage’s boss of bosses.

“What a rotten sense of humor.” Al said, staring innocently at me. Then he burst out laughing. “How could I resist? She was asking for it, wasn’t she?”

When hostile-faced Steve Sissel, Al’s most outspoken critic at the garage, showed up for the next shift, he brought a message from Miguel. Al was wanted in Palmer Greig’s office.

“This is ridiculous,” Al said, shaking his fist at the surveillance camera. “I absolutely don’t intend to apologize.”

32.

Well, he did apologize. I’d parked VIV on a side street across from the garage. That’s where I waited for him, while he met with Palmer Greig. As soon as I saw him crossing Olympic, I knew from his morose face and droopy shuffle that something bad had happened to him. “They dumped me,” he said, as he got into the car. “Can you imagine? I’d apologized to her, because I felt sorry for her. She’d misunderstood what I was saying. That’s how convincing I was. My whole performance was exactly on the money, at least in my estimation.” I noticed his chin was trembling. “I was brilliant,” he said.

The woman, who’d accused him of insulting her was Rachel Veronica Obermacher. Three days a week she had a radio talk show called Conquering Fear. Her motto was Stay Cool. “First thing she does,” Al said, “is to ask me to forgive her for getting so upset at what, she says, was the rude way I’d yelled at her. Naturally I reciprocated, saying I’d meant no disrespect, and that I’m a regular listener to her radio program, which is a total exaggeration, because maybe I’ve heard it twice or less, except I had this idea in my head I’d seen her before. In Schubert’s, I think, a week ago Friday.”

“A week ago Friday? Where was I?” I asked.

“You didn’t show up,” Al said.

“I didn’t?”

“No, but that’s not important now. What I’m trying to tell you is that a week ago Friday she comes into Schubert’s with this other woman.”

“What other woman?”

“The woman she was with. How should I know?” he said, his voice rising impatiently.

“Do you have to talk to me like that?” I said.

“I’m just anxious to tell you about her.”

“Okay, tell me.”

“Which is what I’m trying to do,” he said, turning sharply toward me. “I’m sitting at that small table near the front door, okay? As they walk past me, I see they’re looking at me, I mean, really looking at me, both of them, like they can’t take their eyes off me, and I’m doing the same to them, until they get seated against the back wall. Then every time I look in their direction, they seem to be watching me, especially Rachel Veronica. This doesn’t mean I expected her to recognize me when she sees me again in the garage, right? Except a couple of times, while Greig is talking a blue streak at her, I notice she’s taking very slow, slightly smiley peeks at me, like she’s trying to figure out who I am and why I look familiar to her, if I do look familiar, which maybe I don’t?

“At the same time, I see, she’s beginning to back away from Greig like she’s already heard more than she can stand about the glories of the garage’s code of conduct that requires employees, he says, to be polite to customers, as if employees being polite to customers is so extraordinary he should get a medal for it. Not that I’m saying such a code doesn’t exist, though personally I’d never heard of it before. What Greig is hoping to do, I suppose, by claiming that enforcing the code is one of his top priorities, is to persuade Rachel Veronica that she shouldn’t blame him, or the garage, for what he says is my inexcusable lack of judgment that was insulting to her. He’s about to repeat himself for the fourth time, when suddenly she announces she’s decided to forgive everybody, including me, and including him. Twenty minutes later, as she’s getting ready to leave, she squeezes past Greig to shake my hand. I even get to kiss her cheek. That’s when she gives me her card with her autograph on it.”

“Nice,” I said.

Al shook his head no. “She’s up to something. Makes me nervous,” he said, stuffing the card into his shirt pocket.

We were heading east on Olympic Boulevard. At Fairfax Avenue I turned VIV north toward the Hollywood Hills. “The guy I feel sorry for is Miguel,” Al said. “He’s stuck with Greig, unless he does what I did and gets himself fired, which he can’t afford to do, when he’s got a wife, two kids, his mother, and his sister to take care of, and he’s the main breadwinner. They have to eat, don’t they?”

On Greig’s orders, Al said, “Miguel gets the duty to escort Rachel Veronica back to her car. As soon as they’re gone, Greig tells me he’s had her car washed. Better to surprise her, he says, than a lawsuit. Does he really think, if she did intend to sue him, she’d sell out for a car wash? Even worse is the stupid pep talk he gives me about being a team player. Then, in his weasel voice, sounding completely insincere, he congratulates me on not getting into an argument with Rachel Veronica. Immediately I begin to worry. Am I looking less dumb and more dependable to him? Is my ridiculous career at the garage about to skyrocket? That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid, isn’t it?”

"Remember, I’d put in a bunch of suggestions, gave them to Miguel in writing to give to Greig, which Miguel did, and when I ask Greig about them, he says he’s still considering whether it’s practical to have somebody in a jeep or on a bicycle (my number one suggestion), roaming through the garage and reporting back to the three control booths which floors and which sections of the garage have parking-space vacancies so that incoming customers can get to them as quickly as possible and not waste time looking for a place to park, when they could be shopping in some store on the mall, which, Greig says, is a fabulous idea, but might cause more confusion than it’s worth and would probably be too expensive to operate.

“Also too expensive, he says, is training parking garage attendants (my second suggestion) to give customers more personal, up-to-the-minute service. He reminds me about the guy in the white pickup truck, who’d stopped to shake my hand as he was exiting from the garage. I’d talked to this guy about some parking problem he had, and the reason he shook my hand was to thank me for being so patient with him. ‘Held up traffic, didn’t it?’ Greig says. This is why, he also says, I shouldn’t have been such a smart-ass with Rachel Veronica. ‘Do you realize,’ he says, ‘what damage she could do to us on her radio program, if she complains to the people who listen to her, that you, a representative of this garage, deliberately insulted her like you did?’

“I didn’t know she was Rachel Veronica, I said, and I didn’t mean to insult her.

“'That’s absolutely no excuse. It doesn’t matter what you meant,' he shouts at me. 'Nobody in this garage has the right to talk to a customer like you talked to her regardless of who she is. What you’ve done, by every standard in this business, is irresponsible and stupid.’ I agreed with him,” Al said. “Probably it did sound stupid, but all I’d wanted to do was to cheer her up, which he refused to give me credit for.”

“Then as soon as Miguel gets back to the office, Greig tells him he’s made up his mind to put me on some kind of indefinite leave, at least until the situation with Rachel Veronica blows over. This I don’t object to. Instead I thank them both, first because they’d given me a chance to practice some of my best showbiz moves, which, I have no doubt whatsoever, has improved my acting technique, given me more confidence, and opened me up as an actor who can think on my feet, and second because I honestly appreciate Greig pushing me out the door like he did, while I’m still enjoying myself too much to quit on my own.”

“Hey, you don’t have to quit,” Al said Greig said.

“I don’t?” Al said he said. “So I didn’t. That’s when he fired me.”

Again Al burst out laughing.

A half block above Melrose on Fairfax was Nate Binder’s Kosher Delicatessen, Al’s second favorite hangout and restaurant, behind Schubert’s Parlor, of course. Binder himself was making sandwiches, when we arrived. He gave Al a big greeting. “You look pale,” he said. “Are you pale?”

Al introduced me to Binder, then ordered a corned beef on rye, “with cold slaw, plenty of cold slaw, and a sour pickle.” I ordered the same, minus the pickle.

”Hot tea?” Binder said.

When Binder’s wife Thelma delivered two hot teas to our table, Al told her about his ordeal at the garage. “Got fired,” he said.

“Familiar story,” she said, rolling her eyes at me.

“Can’t help it,” Al said. “Nobody loves me.” He put two heaping teaspoonfuls of sugar into his tea, one into mine. “You want one, don’t you?”

“One’s better for you than two,” Thelma said. Al gave her a blow-by-blow description of what had happened to him in his meeting with Greig.

“Hard to feel sorry,” she said, glancing at me, “when he does it to himself.”

As Thelma headed back to the counter to get our sandwiches, Al said: “She knew my mother, and she knows Rhonda, believes every word Rhonda says, and doesn’t believe me.”

He’d told me about Rhonda and Thelma, and Rhonda and his mother (Rhonda’s mother also), and his mother and Thelma. “All of them originally were buddies,” Al said. “Then Mama got sick of Thelma siding with Rhonda against me. She used to complain to me about it, which doesn’t make sense, because Mama had said much worse things about me than Rhonda does, or Thelma, or both of them combined.”

In past laments about his Mama Al had told me what a hard worker she was. “Two shifts, daytime nine hours at the dress factory, then a couple of hours three nights a week and Saturday afternoon at Binder’s. This is why Thelma and Nate loved her so much. She had a soft heart. They took advantage of her.”

His father, Al said, had run away from home when he, Al, was eight. “I can still see him the night he left. We were sitting around the dining table, Mama, me, Rhonda, and him. He was teaching us to play poker. He also did card tricks, which were always a big hit, especially if he’d learned a new trick and was trying it out on us.” Al carried a photograph of his father in his bulging, imitation-alligator-skin wallet. The photograph was slightly faded, and one corner of it was broken off. The image of Pa in the photograph was a head-shot that looked like Rhonda, had Rhonda’s fair hair and fair skin, her dark eyes, slender nose, long neck, and dimpled chin. “Which amazes me,” Al said, “ that Rhonda looks so much like him, and I look like Mama.” His mother had died two years ago. I’d met her only once.

“I’d make a rotten-looking woman, wouldn’t I?” Al said.

“Poor Mama.”

But Mama wasn’t (he later told me)
Poor like I say
She was still a winner
In every kind of way
Sure, I could trust her
To put me number one
Too bad she broke my heart
And took away the fun
Of being together,
both at ease.
I blame Mama
Who never said please.
Instead she told
Me what to do,
Which I resented
Secretly,
In explaining
What a pain in the ass
I’d always been
to everybody (myself included).
Poor Mama, I said.

Amen

33.

Monday, the day after Al was fired, I was up bright and early, got dressed, had yogurt for breakfast, backed VIV out of the garage, and drove to the Jack Gordon Building on Beverly Boulevard, where another appraiser, Eric Daly, and I shared a small office. Eric, I knew, had an appointment downtown with a client and probably wouldn’t arrive till late afternoon. I had a lot of work to do on the brewery appraisal. I also couldn’t keep my mind off Billie. This was the magnificent day on which she and I were having our first dinner together. Pretty exciting, right?

Then, shortly before ten-thirty that morning, while I was still struggling to concentrate on the brewery instead of Billie, the telephone rang. It’s her, I thought. It’s got to be her. But how’d she get this phone number? Taking a deep breath, I picked up the phone. “Nigel Woodie Appraisals,” I said. “Nigel speaking.”

“Nigel,” a man’s voice answered. “This is Ed Shiller.”

“Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

Ed Shiller was the managing director of Kenneth King Conrad and Associates. I’d met with him in his office at the company’s Brentwood headquarters last Thursday afternoon, remember? He’d told me he was looking for an appraiser to do a market study on a project the company was developing in Riverside County.

We’d talked for maybe forty minutes, during which he continuously chomped on sunflower seeds, spitting the husks from the seeds into an ugly ashtray that he kept shifting around his desk. The resume I'd brought him contained a list of recent clients. “Is it okay if I contact these folks?” he asked, emptying the ashtray into a waste paper basket beside his desk.

“Never smoked in my life,” he said, “not one puff, showing, in my estimation, a total lack of curiosity, growing up, when every kid my age in the neighborhood, male and female, was taking puffs behind the garage, to prove they had guts enough to give the finger to people who were telling them what to do, like my mother, for instance, who smoked like a chimney, was the proud owner of this miserable ashtray, and guess what, died of lung cancer, having resisted everybody, including me, who pleaded with her to stop smoking.”

Hanging his head a beat, breathing erratically as if the wind had been knocked out of him, he apologized for spitting the sunflower husks into the ashtray. “Disgusting habit, isn’t it?”

Today (Monday) he was calling me, he said, to report that the replies he’d gotten from my clients were all positive and enthusiastic and to set up an appointment for me to meet the company’s CEO and president, Kenneth King Conrad, whom Shiller called the King.

“I thought he was three different guys,” I said. “I’m surprised.”

“That’s just the beginning,” Shiller said. “Wait till you meet him.”

What about the project?

“326 acres,” he said.

“Where?”

“Periwinkle, California.”

“Wow!” I said.

Billie and a fat Periwinkle fee!

Double Wow!

How lucky can I get?

We made an appointment for Thursday at 9:30 a.m. “King’s looking forward to it,” Shiller said.

Eagerly, maybe too eagerly, I thanked him.

He again reminded me of the time of the meeting: 9:30 on Thursday morning. I assured him I wouldn’t be late. Then we hung up. I had to take a half-dozen deep breaths before I could calm down. Periwinkle was a huge project, at least for me it was, and should mean a substantial fee.

To be summoned by Shiller to meet the “King” to talk about Periwinkle on the same day I’m having my first dinner with Billie is “fantastic,” isn’t, it?

How lucky can I get?

The Twelve O'clock Chapters 18 - 28

2008-06-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

18.

The Fish Net was mobbed when I arrived twenty minutes early. I'd already stopped at Blackman and Blackman and picked up the papers they'd prepared for me. Paul David, the Fish Net's maitre d', gave me a big smile and shook my hand. I told him I was looking for Billie. He said he knew who she was but hadn't seen her.

Mingling with the crowd, I waited outside the front door briefly, then in the lobby, and finally at the bar. I had a couple of short conversations with several people who looked familiar to me. Then Florence Finstone, a senior partner at Blackman and Blackman, got my ear. She invited me to a dinner party, gave me the address of the building she lived in on Wilshire Boulevard and said she'd call me when she and her husband had set the date, which she thought would be in about two weeks. It was now almost twelve twenty-five.

Billie still hadn't shown. I went to the lobby phone booth and called her office. I got Evelyn again. She'd been waiting for me to call, she said, because Billie didn't know how to get in touch with me. "She's going to be late. Well, you know that already, don't you?" Billie’s morning meeting had run past noon, and she hadn't been able to get away from it until the Supervisor decided to adjourn the meeting till Monday. "But she's on her way. Look for her in twenty minutes. Okay?"

The aquarium in the Fish Net's lobby was wide, tall, and sparkling. One of its residents, a yellow guy with a red stripe down its back, was eyeing me flirtatiously. He/she was shortly succeeded by a blue guy, then a pink guy, a green guy, a second yellow guy, two gold guys, a speckled guy, and finally a silver-skinned guy, with whom I was exchanging intense, impatient stares, when Paul David tapped my elbow.

"She's at the back door," he said.

"Is she coming in?" I said. He shrugged, shook his head. He didn't know. I’d have to ask her myself, which was okay with me, now that he’d told me she’d arrived.

The back door was at the end of a long corridor behind the bar. I’d skirted the bar and was hurrying down the corridor, when the door was yanked open from the outside by loud-talking new arrivals (I guessed, a busload of tourists), who pushed into the restaurant, clogging up the doorway and rudely trampling over me. Am I invisible? I thought. Who are these people? What right do they have to treat me as if I don’t exist? Then, because one hulking guy, almost twice my size, wouldn’t budge no matter what I did to squeeze past him, I was that close to poking him in the ribs, which, I admit, could have been doomsday for me, if he’d decided to retaliate.

Fortunately, while I was still resisting my rash impulse to slug him, Paul David, the maitre d’, distracted both of us by summoning the entire group to the dining room. The group’s sudden surge forward thrust me in the opposite direction, out into the Fish Net’s parking lot. Billie, her golden hair glistening in the mid-day sunlight, was crouched behind a silver Toyota sedan. That she didn’t look happy immediately alarmed me. Had she changed her mind? Or, did she have another meeting to go to and needed to postpone having lunch with me? Didn’t make sense, did it, that instead of coming to the lobby to tell me directly, she was apparently intending to give me the bad news on the parking lot, without regard to my intense feelings for her? Peering out from behind the Toyota’s windshield, she signaled me to come to her. "I'm sorry," she said, taking my hand, sounding as anxious and worried as the distressed expression on her lovely face. "We can't eat here. There's some one in the dining room. I don't want him to see me." She asked if it was okay for us to go to another restaurant. "The Shanghai Wok. Do you know it?"

I'd eaten at the Wok a couple of times. "Sure," I said, as we started toward it. Then abruptly, propelled by her long, slender legs, she began to run away from me with such an unexpected burst of speed I couldn't catch up to her until she slowed down as we were approaching the two-story, red-and-gold building, in which the Shanghai Wok was located. "None of them saw us," she gasped, holding her chest, breathing heavily.

What are you talking about?" I said. "None of who didn't see us?"

"In that car. The Cadillac."

"What car? What Cadillac?" I said, swiveling around, as I scanned the street and the parking lot.

Billie had already arrived at the Shanghai Wok's black enameled front door. "Wait here if you don't mind. I'll check." She was in and out of the Wok in less than thirty seconds. "Still no good. Sorry."

Around the corner from the Shanghai Wok in another red and gold building that used to be a Chinese restaurant was the Country Kitchen. A guy in a string tie and a blue and white checked shirt greeted us. "Two?" he said, taking a quick glance at Billie, as he held up two fingers, grabbed two menus from the counter. Indicating we should follow him, he hurried toward a small table at the rear of the crowded, narrow-aisled dining room. As he slapped the menus on the table, I turned to give Billie access to the chair I thought she'd be sitting on and was startled to see she’d vanished. She also wasn't anywhere in the dining room. Skirting through the aisles to the now-empty lobby, I peeked into the near-empty bar. Again I didn't see her. Must be outside, I decided, but when I exited to the street, she wasn't there either. Where could she have gone? Was she deliberately trying to get rid of me? And what about this ridiculous running we'd been doing from one restaurant to another? It didn't make sense. It also depressed me.

My Mustang convertible I'd left on the Fish Net's parking lot. Should I head back to it, or stick around the Country Kitchen to see if she showed up again? Then I began to worry that whoever she'd been attempting to avoid had grabbed her, that they'd hustled her off someplace, that she was in big danger, and that I should be doing something, notifying somebody, to keep her from getting hurt or killed or worse. I'd just about made up my mind to call the cops or Supervisor Klein, when I heard somebody on the other side of the street whistle at me.

"Is that you?" I said, peering hard toward a large, leafy bush behind which I thought I saw her crouching. When her head appeared, then her hand, beckoning me to come to her, I didn't hesitate, almost walking out in front of an oncoming truck, which I'd neglected to notice, because I was so intent on getting to her. Looking innocent and mysterious, she quietly apologized for deserting me in the restaurant. "Still want to take me to lunch?" she said.

19.

The Sacramento Dining Car was Billie’s next choice. Built in 1927 for the Sacramento-San Diego Railroad, the dining car was installed as a restaurant at the corner of Seventh and Dill by an L.A. entrepreneur. Very quickly a huge success as a dinner house, it also developed a hefty luncheon business that continued to grow until a year ago last January when the original owner sold out to a restaurant chain that immediately fired the head chef, drastically revised the menu, and cut back on food quality and service. "It's no longer ‘in,’" Billie said.

When we arrived, less than half of the tables were occupied. Fortunately among the diners there were no other nemeses of Billie so we didn't have to run again. As soon as we were seated, she apologized for the "ordeal" she'd put me through. "It wouldn't have been too bad," I said, "if I'd known what you were doing and why you were running me around like that."

I'm married," she said.

Married? I didn't blurt out, clamping my mouth shut instead.

"We're getting a divorce." I also didn't blurt out Divorce!

She then explained she'd been married four years, that neither she nor her husband was happy in their marriage, and that they both wanted a divorce. "The lawyer is in the Dundee Pearl Building. That's the reason I was there, to see her," she said. "Otherwise, I never would have met you, right?" She gave me a brilliant smile. "Everything's been settled. Tim is moving out on Sunday." Tim was her husband. "He and his friend Steve have rented a two-bedroom apartment in Sherman Oaks. Steve's the guy in the Fish Net I was trying to avoid. Not that it matters if he sees me with you but who knows what he might say to Tim and what kind of trouble that could start when so far we've managed to keep things from getting too complicated between us. Okay?

"The same with the people from my office in the Cadillac. They know about Tim and me, but only Evelyn knows about you, and I want to keep it that way and not get anybody else involved. Then seeing those two women in the Country Kitchen, one of them being Tim's mother's best friend, and the other his dentist's ex-wife, I figure why push it, when all I have to do is walk out the front door, which is exactly what I did, and what I also did at the Shanghai Wok." She began to giggle. "I just looked, thought I saw somebody I recognized, and got myself out of there. Twenty seconds flat, right?" When she put her left hand over her mouth to stifle the giggle, I noticed she wasn't wearing a wedding ring.

This is pure pleasure, I thought, to be sitting here, directly across from her, watching that beautiful, clear-eyed, determined, laughing, smiling, outgoing, shy, intelligent, caring, intensely serious face in action. When the waiter brought the drinks we'd ordered, iced tea for her, a coke for me, she was earnestly small-talking about her office, Supervisor Klein, two of Klein's deputies, Evelyn Von Hueger (Hugger), and several others on the office staff, all of whom might be tempted to gossip about her, which she didn't want to happen.

When our cups of clam chowder arrived, her small talk switched to her family and friends. Somewhere in the middle of our Cobb salads, it switched again, to my family, friends, birthplace, schooling, job, etc. While we were sipping coffee, and she was spooning down her hot fudge sundae, she began to question me in detail about my attitudes toward wages and working conditions, politics and politicians, religious philosophy and affiliation, civil rights, Martin Luther King, the unequal treatment of women, and the Vietnamese War.

Brought up Catholic in a mixed nationality neighborhood, I regularly go to mass, confession, holy communion, the works, I say, until a couple of months after my nineteenth birthday when I quit the Church without notifying either my mother or the Pope. I also attended Catholic grammar and high schools. My mom is Irish-German, or Irish-German Jewish. My dad is English-Australian. There were few girls my age in the neighborhood we lived in, many boys. Among my closest boyhood pals were four Italian-Americans, four Jewish-Americans, two Irish-Americans, one Portuguese-American, and one German-American. We played softball, stickball, wall ball, touch football, and roller skate hockey. We trooped to Sunday afternoon dances together and had secret club meetings in the basement of the apartment building at the corner of East Twelfth Street and Foster Avenue.

On the other side of Twelfth, across from the apartment building and next door to Irving's Fancy Food Market, was Mr. Zimmerman's newspaper and cigar store. Outside the store was a small stand on which Mr. Zimmerman displayed newspapers and magazines. Every day of the week a crowd of adults and kids hung out around the stand. Whenever the crowd got too dense, Mr. Zimmerman would say: "Don't block me up the stand," or too noisy, putting his finger to his lips, "Shush, baby sleeping." The adults were all men. Most were retired lefties, who loved to argue in strong, passionate voices about everything. Their favorite topics, which produced the biggest uproar among them, were economics and politics, socialism vs. capitalism, and the shortsighted, dumb, selfish, corrupt rich guys who ran the world to their own advantage.

The loudest, most emotional and boisterous lefty was an ex-longshoreman named Bingo Meyer. One Saturday Mr. Meyer took a bunch of us kids to Union Square in Manhattan. A huge rally was in progress when we arrived. The newspapers estimated the crowd at thirty-five thousand. There were mini-rallies all over the square. There were also marching, singing, dancing, band-playing, and loads of soap-box speakers haranguing anybody who'd listen on every subject under the sun.

For us the highlight of the day happened when Mr. Meyer was invited up to the main speakers' platform to make a speech about longshoremen and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We kids were thrilled, watching his face get red and the veins in his neck bulge up as he waved his arms and poked his enormous fists at the crowd who were cheering him so vigorously we couldn't hear a word Mr. Meyer was saying.

This was the life, I thought, unions, crowds, cheering, marching, making speeches nobody can hear, being uncritically recognized as an important, valuable, worthwhile human being.

A neat sparkle lit up Billie’s eyes. Isn't now, I thought, a great time to pop the question I'd been worrying about during most of the last hour of our Sacramento Dining Car lunch? "Dinner on Tuesday?" I said.

"Tuesday?" she said, looking as disappointed as I was about to feel. "Sorry. I can't. In school on Tuesday." She was taking an American History class at Valley College. "It's test night. I can't miss it."

"Wednesday?" I said, giving her a big, sympathetic smile.

"I picket on Wednesday," she said. Her father was a printer. For eighteen years he'd worked for a newspaper company. For the last two years he'd been on strike against the company. His shift on the picket line was every Wednesday from four to eight p.m. "He expects me at five-thirty. He's so shy, would even be worse, if I didn't show up."

"Thursday?" I said, this time not smiling.

"That's bad too," she said, "On Thursdays I baby-sit my three-year-old god-daughter while her mom and dad see a psychotherapist. They're under so much stress they don't know how to handle it"

"Friday?" I said, anticipating being turned down again.

"Fine," she said. "Friday's perfect."

"You sure?"

"Or Saturday."

"Saturday's better?" I said.

"No, not unless it's better for you."

"Makes no difference. You decide. It's your choice."

"How about Monday?" she said.

"Monday? I play basketball on Monday." I felt my heart sinking.

"Then Friday," she said.

"Saturday's also okay," I said.

"No, Friday. That's what you want, isn't it?"

"Any day but Monday."

"Can we make it Friday?" she said.

"Not Saturday?" I said.

"Saturday or Friday, but definitely not Tuesday," she said. "I can't miss school on Tuesday." Then, in a tense, clearly emotional voice, she described how she'd been struggling to get a college education without much encouragement from anybody. Even her parents, who were willing to help their sons, her brothers, to go to college, wouldn't help her, their daughter. "They actually told me college isn't for girls, especially if she has what they think is a wonderful job in Supervisor Klein's office. In the eight years I've been at Valley College I've accumulated half the units I need to get a degree. I've also made up my mind to transfer as a full-time student to a four-year college, as soon as the divorce is final, but that won't happen, the lawyer says, for at least another six months, which gives me time to stop worrying about a lot of things, including having dinner with you on Friday, unless you still prefer Saturday?"

"Only if Saturday is good for you," I said.

"Friday is better," she said. "I take my mother to the movies on Saturday."

Oh, no, I thought, doing a quick calculation in my head. Saturday she takes her mother to the movies, Tuesday she goes to school, Wednesday she pickets with her father, Thursday she baby-sits her goddaughter. What was left for me? Sunday? On Sunday, she said, she has dinner with her family in Burbank. “Can’t disappoint them.” Then it’s Friday or Monday, right? "Maybe we should consider Monday again," I said.

True, I'd told her I played basketball on Monday, but Monday made more sense, didn't it? First of all, I could switch basketball from Monday to Wednesday, when she was picketing with her father. Second, if I did see her on Monday, I'd have only three days to wait till our next date, while Friday meant an additional four days beyond the original three days, for a grand total of seven days without seeing her, which for me was a major consideration. Third, depending on how successful our dinner was on Monday, we could decide to meet again on Friday or Saturday, which would give us two, or possibly three days together in the same week, provided we could persuade somebody to take her mother to the movies on Saturday.

"I go shopping on Monday," Billie said, her voice suddenly sounding distant and stern, which totally confused me, until she began to giggle again, which got me giggling, which got us laughing so hard, with such obvious affection and trust, it wiped out whatever reservations I might have had about falling in love with her. Agreeing finally to have dinner on Monday, we exchanged home addresses and telephone numbers. When I told her I'd pick her up at seven thirty at her apartment in Sherman Oaks, she reminded me Tim wouldn't be moving out till Sunday.

Then casually she mentioned the Anthropology Club meeting she attended on Saturday mornings at nine thirty. "In Doctor Minzeezi's office. Just hearing Minzeezi's name, if I remember correctly, made me uneasy. "Great person. You'll like him," she said cheerily. No, I won't, I thought, which was awful, wasn’t it? To think such a thing about a guy I hadn't met is shameful. She described how accomplished and brave he was, provoking me to feel worse and more deceitful, because I had no interest whatsoever in having anything to do with him, wanting instead to concentrate on her and how she was reacting to me, which seemed mostly positive, with lots of meaningful eye contact and enthusiastic smiling, even as we exited from the restaurant and walked slowly to the parking lot.

Her MG Vanden Plas Princess and my Mustang convertible were parked on opposite sides of the Fish Net's parking lot. Billie was still worried about her friends seeing us together and asked whether I'd mind if we walked to our cars separately. Kissing her fingertips, she pressed them gently against my cheek. I waited until she’d reached the MG Princess, had started up its engine, then, with joy in my heart, hurried after her, as the Princess, with Billie at the wheel, headed jerkily into the lightly-trafficked Wendell Street, while on the far side of the parking lot, standing alone, sleek and serene, was my 289 V-8, lime green, black-topped Mustang.

20.

As I walked quickly toward the Mustang, I was convinced Billie was the most fabulous woman I’d ever met. Okay, I admit she shouldn't have been so frantic about our being seen together by her friends, and we did waste a lot of time running between restaurants, but it was also fun and intriguing and challenged me to consider seriously what was so beautiful about her and why she had such overwhelming appeal to me.

First of all, her beauty had dimension to it. Here, without question, was a beautiful person, inside and out. Purity of her heart and spirit radiate from her, and she didn't seem to have a competitive, mean, or cynical bone in her body.

Most women I went out with mistook my willingness to put their problems ahead of mine as a signal that they had some constitutional right to talk me under the table. Take Margaret, for instance. She knew nothing about who I was, what I felt, and where I wanted to go in life. Not one time had she asked me a single question about myself, and that was true of 98 percent of all the women I’d ever dated, whether I was sleeping with them, or not. And if the woman was in show business like Margaret, or aspiring to be in show business, she'd harangue me almost exclusively about her frustrations at not being a star, or missing out on a terrific part in a movie that would have made her a star, or being humiliated by some ruthless director, or producer, or big-time agent, or embittered by the terrible tragedy of being broke and desperately needing a job, an apartment, a loan, a car, a wig, or a week's vacation in Las Vegas, without ever showing the slightest interest in what was happening to me.

In contrast, Billie seemed wide-open to everything I told her. Not once had she cut me off, or abruptly changed the subject, or interrupted me to make a frivolous or self-centered comment, or act bored, impatient, or annoyed at being forced to listen to what I had to say. True, we'd only been together a relatively short time, but my intuition had already told me loud and clear that she was definitely the perfect person I'd been looking for.

Unlocking the Mustang, pulling open its driver's side door, I practically floated in behind the steering wheel. Restraining myself from chasing after her, I put down the Mustang's convertible top, which I rarely did, having this severe allergy to the California sun, which had already given me two basal cell cancers, one on each ear.

The Mustang's name, of course, came from the three letters on its license plate, V-I-V. Well, both VIV and I were in grand form. While VIV’s engine hummed contentedly, I belted out show tunes in a brash, unruly tenor that sounded terrific to me. We were heading for the beach at Santa Monica. When we arrived, it was almost four o'clock. The sun was waning, but the sand was still hot. Taking off my shoes and socks, I walked along the wet shoreline, just out of reach of the incoming waves.

How lucky can I be, I thought, to have met Billie. The odds against such an extraordinary thing happening to me were enormous. A remarkable sage and world-class prognosticator had once told me that if I stood tippy-toes anywhere along the Santa Monica beach on an ultra-clear day, eyelids narrowed, straining with every fiber of my body to see across the glistening, white-capped ocean, I might have the monumental good fortune of catching a rare, split-second glimpse of some exotic place like Hawaii, Japan, or the distant coast of China, which made no sense whatsoever and sounded completely preposterous, until now, when I became living proof that outrageous impossibilities can actually happen. There, deep into the horizon, at the top of a shimmering, unknown mountain, unfurling a banner that was obviously meant for me, were two black-clad figures. The message on their banner was hazy at first, but as my concentration intensified, I was finally able to read what it said: GO BILLIE GO!!

Then filling my head was this strange, thin, discordant tune, its heroic lyric croaked gruffly in a strident, unfamiliar rasp, hailing Billie Cooper, the golden-haired beauty of my dreams:

Go, Billie, go,
Helping friend and foe,
Doesn’t matter who you are,
She’ll be there and so
Go, Billie, go,
Doing what you know
In your heart is good to do,
Give love a chance to grow.
Be yourself
and do your best
and try to understand
what you want
and how you want it,
walking hand in hand.
So go, Billie, go,
Time for you to show
what it is we need to do
to fight the status quo,
Go, Billie, Go, Billie,
Go, Billie, Go!

21.

On Saturday at 8:12 p.m., when I was already sleeping soundly, the telephone rang. It was the threesome next door. They were inviting me to go with them to Rockaway Tess on Melrose. In ten minutes I was dressed and waiting for them in front of their garage. First out from their apartment was Dora. Despite her usual sunny smile, she was obviously unhappy. “I’m not dancing so don’t ask me,” she said. She was annoyed at Howard for giving into Lulu again, “after the three of us had already agreed to stay home to watch tv.” She was wearing a loose-fitting, full-length, multi-colored, flowered shift that had a large, dark stain below her left breast. “He won’t dance either,” she said irritably, as if she was resigned to having a rotten time at Tess. “He never does. He’s self–conscious about being so tall, and his legs get tangled up when he tries to move too quickly.”

“It’s not my legs,” Howard said, coming up behind her. “I just don’t dance. I’m not a dancer.”

“That’s so silly,” she said, taking a half-hearted swipe at him.

He turned toward me. “I’m always in trouble,” he said. “Every time they disagree about something, I get the deciding vote, so one of them ends up blaming me.”

“Nobody blames you,” Dora said, “though it is annoying when you don’t stand up to her.” But who can possibly stand up to Lulu, I thought, with that great, kissable mouth and those innocent, hurt, vulnerable, pale blue eyes? If I were in Howard’s shoes, I’d be a permanent pushover for her. Poor Dora wouldn’t stand a chance. I’d always be voting against her. Not that I was ever involved in a threesome as they are, or played one woman off against another as he apparently does, but I’ve known vamps like Lulu. All she has to do is gaze helplessly at me, or walk, jiggling her baby fat seductively, and I’m ready to melt, gulp, sweat, or perform her bidding regardless of how inconsiderate and irresponsible she might be.

And what did I do now, when I heard the door to their apartment slam shut, and she suddenly appeared among us? Dressed in tight black pants, a form-fitting black turtleneck sweater, and an embroidered silver vest, she was carrying a four-foot tall plastic walrus. As she strode toward Dora’s blue, four-door Pontiac, totally ignoring me, I could feel my throat tighten and heavy pressure spread across my upper chest. This is dumb, I thought. How can one single kiss make me feel so stupid about myself? Then Dora, who’d accused Howard of having caved in to Lulu’s unreasonable demands, blithely caved in herself, announcing, without embarrassment, that we’d be going to Tess in the Pontiac, that Lulu would be driving, and that Howard and I would be sitting in the back seat with the plastic walrus, which, he said, he’d bought at the Super Outdoor Flea Market in Culver City, when he went to the market looking for monkey wrenches.

The walrus’s one dollar price was an outstanding bargain, he said. He then described how he’d put the walrus on Lulu’s side of the bed, its head nestled on her pillow, and how later, when she arrived home in a foul mood after a hectic day at the office supplies wholesale house, where she worked as a stocker and part-time bookkeeper, she’d stomped through the apartment, without saying a word to him or Dora. “Should’ve heard her upstairs, the way she banged around the bathroom,” Dora said, “until she discovers this thing."

“It’s not a thing,” Lulu said from the driver’s seat, looking over her shoulder at Howard and me. We had squeezed the walrus between us on the rear passenger seat.

“Okay, it’s not a thing, it’s a walrus,” Dora said “A fake walrus."

“I still love it, even if it is fake,” Lulu said, giving us a stern lecture on loyalty and gratitude to inanimate objects “for what they can do to a person’s psyche. I’m a beneficiary. He’s brought me relief. What more can I ask?” Then to me, because I was trying to slip the walrus off the rear seat onto the floor into the space between my knees and the back of the front seat, she said: “Don’t push it down like that. It’s rude.”

“It is?” I said, feeling mortified she’d reprimanded me so bluntly.

“Of course, it is,” she said.

Restoring the walrus to its upright position between Howard and me, I apologized.

“You’ve still got it slumped,” she said. “I don’t want it slumped.”

This time Howard adjusted the walrus, until Lulu was satisfied it was standing up straight enough. “I can put it in the trunk,” Dora said.

“Will you please stay out of this?” Lulu said. “It’s done. It’s perfect where it is.”

“But they’re cramped. Aren’t you cramped, Howard?” Dora said, swinging open the passenger door. Lulu had started up the engine.

“What are you doing?” Lulu said.

“I need to change my dress, okay?” Dora said,

“Now?” Lulu said.

Getting out of the car, Dora turned toward us, planted her hand over the dark stain on her dress. “I didn’t notice how bad it is,” she said.

“You did notice,” Lulu said.

“No, I didn’t.”

“I told her,” Lulu said, looking to Howard and me. “I swear I told her, but she said she didn’t care how bad the stain was, the dress was good enough, and she was still was going to wear it.”

“We can wait, can’t we?” Howard said quietly.

“You see what he does?” Lulu said, directing her sexy mouth provocatively at me. “Takes her side. No matter what the argument is, I’ve got to fight both of them.” Dora was hurrying toward the backyard of their apartment.

“I’m not fighting anybody,” Howard said.

“What are we doing then?” Lulu said. I was watching her sexy mouth twitch.

“I’m trying to give you my personal opinion,” Howard said, as Dora, who was about to vanish into their backyard, held three fingers high above her head.

“Five minutes!” she shouted.

“Five! Five? Give her twenty. It won’t be less than twenty. That’s so damn selfish,” Lulu said, manipulating her lush lips with such irresistible emphasis I wanted to reach over and grab her.

“Would you mind turning off the engine?” Howard said. Lulu had left the engine on, and the car was vibrating squeakily. “We’re wasting gas, especially if she does take twenty minutes.” When Lulu’s only response was to glare fiercely at me, then at him, he said in a low, determined voice: “Turn it off, please.”

Spinning away from us, she grabbed the ignition key, and, as the engine went dead, yanked the key from its socket. “It’s off,” she said defiantly, dangling the key, as if she was about to hand it to Howard. Instead, even more defiantly, she threw it out the driver-door’s open window.

22.

Dora returned in seventeen minutes, not bad, considering Lulu’s estimate of twenty, during which Lulu groaned and sighed grumpily, got out of the car and threatened to abandon us twice, and eventually, climbing a third time from the car, poked among the bushes alongside the apartment building, searching for the ignition key she’d tossed out the window, while I continued to pay close attention to her fascinating mouth, as she bounced in and out of the car, and Howard, who was a trader at the Pacific Stock Exchange, described the disastrous week he’d had, when several of the stocks he traded-in had reported major earnings losses. He also was worried-sick, he said, because Lulu was angry so much of the time. “Until this damn competition started to see who’d get pregnant first, she never said anything against Dora. Now, no matter what Dora tries to do for her, she immediately wants to argue about it.” Lulu was walking slowly back toward the car. “I wish I could make her happy,” he said.

Lulu had found the ignition key. Showing the key to us, as she got back into the car, she pointed to a skinny bush at the top of the path beside the apartment building. “Skipped that far when I threw it,” she said, pursing her sexy lips, I thought, arrogantly, as if we were supposed to be grateful to her for finding the key, which she’d almost lost by throwing it out the car window.

Then the door to their apartment opened, and Dora came out. Immediately she headed toward the Pontiac, announcing in a loud voice how sorry she was for holding us up longer than she’d anticipated. “Had to take a shower,” she said.

“That’s so selfish,” Lulu said, glancing angrily at Howard. “Shouldn’t have waited for her.”

When Dora arrived directly in front of the car, Lulu snapped on the Pontiac’s powerful headlights. Completely transformed, in a pale green, ankle-length skirt, a bright gold, long-sleeved, collarless shirt, shimmering silver earrings, a thick silver chain around her neck, and a ton of silver and gold bracelets on her wrists, Dora grinned self-consciously. “Is this okay?” she said, stretching out her arms and swaying her shoulders awkwardly as if she didn’t feel confident about the impression she was making on us. When Howard and I shouted that she and her outfit were more than okay, Lulu didn’t look pleased.

Moving quickly to the passenger side door, pulling it open, Dora got into the car. “Ready at last,” she said, as she settled into the passenger seat.

The extraordinary perfume she’d put on sure smelled terrific. “Fabulous stuff,” I said, sniffing her, making her giggle, and getting Lulu even more irritated at me, which may have provoked her into giving us such a reckless, unnerving ride to Rockaway Tess that I seriously considered jumping out of the car. Or maybe this was how she always drove, and Howard and Dora were calm and uncomplaining, because what she was doing didn’t seem unusual to them. Deliberately I didn’t say anything critical about her or her driving, though much later I did mention to Howard that in my opinion everybody on the road, including Lulu, has an obligation to everybody else to obey the law and drive as carefully as possible in a reasonable manner that doesn’t confuse passengers like me, who depend on drivers like Lulu to keep them safe.

First of all, I didn’t appreciate that she drove in spurts that had nothing to do with traffic or other road conditions. That is, starting from the courtyard’s private street, she spurted out into Holloway Drive, cruised at a constant speed for a short distance, then abruptly spurted ahead again, then slowed down sharply as we approached La Cienega, before making a series of erratic spurts and slow-downs along Santa Monica Boulevard that had startled pedestrians scurrying to get out of her way. Also she tended to brake late and hard, which meant we’d get shaken up badly whenever she came to a full stop. On side streets she drove to the right as far as possible, narrowly missing parked cars, including, on Kings Road, a brand-new yellow Lincoln Continental. Stop signs she rolled through, barely hitting the brake pedal, and to make a left turn, as she did from Kings Road into Melrose Avenue, she first turned right, then left, sliding the tip of her tongue, which I could see clearly in the rear view mirror, in an inverse direction, from the left corner to the right corner of her magnificent mouth.

When we arrived at Rockaway Tess, its parking lot was crowded, cars overflowed into its aisles, and every time one of us spotted what appeared to be a vacant space, we were aced out of it by a combative driver, male or female, who seemed ready to crash into Dora’s Pontiac rather than to allow us to take the space away from him or her.

Then Dora announced she had this hunch, which Lulu tried to reject, but was talked into it by Howard, that we should look for a place to park on the far side of Tess’s building. Between the trash bins, Dora remembered, were three parking spaces. Miraculously backing out of one of them, as we turned into the far aisle, was a battered Dodge truck. Well, the sight of that truck, with a smiling driver at its wheel, and no one else around to challenge us for the space, got the four of us cheering excitedly. As soon as we were parked, Lulu and Dora grabbed and hugged one another, making such a big display of dependency and affection that Howard’s eyes, as well as mine, filled with tears. “That’s more like it,” he said, pounding my shoulder.

23.

Housed in an ornate, columned, three-story building that originally was a Perpetual Order of the Universe church and meeting hall, and still sporting the church’s pink-stucco Greek façade, its ornamental frieze of plaster-cast dancing angels, its Spanish-tiled peaked roof, and the lighted, hand-carved platform that once held its symbolic herald of good news, a gold painted, horn-blowing, faithful-summoning archangel Gabriel, Rockaway Tess was already packed.

“Bring Cotton Tail,” Lulu said.

“Cotton Tail? I said.

“The walrus,” Dora said. “That’s what she calls him.”

“A rabbit has a cotton tail, not a walrus,” I said.

“Talk to her about it,” Howard said, tucking Cotton Tail under his arm, as we started toward Tess’s main entrance. Hurrying ahead of us, Lulu quickly disappeared into the crowd that seemed as anxious as she was to join the former church’s new congregation. Shortly we too were swept into the defrocked hall’s lobby. Jammed together, hip-to-hip, on the oval-shaped dance floor that had displaced the church’s altar, intense-faced communicants were dancing ecstatically. On the choir loft above the dance floor were the ex-church’s new evangelists, the rock band, Five X’s, Three Y’s, and Ruby, whose strong beat and heavy brass sound instantly had my head bobbing. Even Howard, the self-proclaimed non-dancer, was twitching as if he was actually enjoying himself. “Great,” I shouted at him. Dora laughed and clutched his arm, hanging eagerly onto it. That she also had to stretch up on her toes as high as she could to kiss him was hilariously funny to both of them. Love is grand, isn’t it?

The next time we saw Lulu was after we’d paid our admission fees and were being hustled to a table on the second floor balcony. Squeezed against the far corner of Tess’s thirty-foot bar, Lulu was making spirited conversation with one of the bartenders and several eager-faced customers, all of whom seemed to have their hands on her. “She knows everybody, doesn’t she?,” Dora said.

“Well, I don’t like it. Look at them. Look what they’re doing to her. Doesn’t show respect,” Howard said, leaning over the railing. “Why can’t she sit with us?”

“She came here to dance, didn’t she?” Dora said. “Are you going to dance with her?”

“That’s not the question,” he said. “She’s being taken advantage of, regardless of what she thinks is happening to her.”

Turning toward me, Dora whispered: “He’s jealous.”

Of course, he’s jealous, I thought but didn’t say, and so am I. Can you imagine? One kiss, and I’m staking my claim on her. What a laugh. In my family we didn’t go around being jealous of one another. At least I wasn’t aware of it, but who knows what the rest of them had to contend with, especially considering my grandmother who completely dominated our household. Jealousy had to be somewhere, didn’t it?

Meanwhile, competing for elbow-and-hip room on the dance floor below us were Lulu and two manic-looking partners, whose dance styles were radically different from one another’s and also from hers. The tall guy was almost rigid, his arms straight down at his sides, his hips and feet barely moving. The other guy, the short guy, hunched his head forward and bounced a lot, while Lulu danced like the unforgettable kiss she’d given me, smoothly, sensually, totally coordinated in sinuous movement from top to bottom. Wow!

Then a waiter wanted to take the chair Cotton Tail was propped on. He had a customer, he said, who needed a chair. Howard tried to argue that the chair was really for Lulu who was on the dance floor and might be returning shortly, but the waiter insisted, saying he’d find another chair for Lulu, if and when she did return, because the customer who didn’t have a chair had been complaining bitterly to him. Finally Dora told the waiter he could take the chair, handing Cotton Tail to me, as Ruby, the band’s lead singer, was snarling in her grating, unpleasant voice one of the band’s most recent hits, either “Marmalade Pudding,” or “Chasing Bad, Bad Love,” I don’t remember which. Narrowing my eyes and peering hard through the foul air that was rising in pale blue clouds toward the balcony, I noticed a woman waving to me from a table at the edge of the dance floor. I recognized her immediately. It was Florence Finstone. Her husband, Harlow, I saw, was with her, and also two young women, who turned out to be their nieces, Bambi and Tinker Bloom, from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Getting down to meet them was a delicate business. I couldn’t desert Dora and Howard. Lulu had abandoned them on the parking lot, disappointing them enough. If I walked out on them now, wouldn’t they feel even more neglected? But when I explained who Florence Finstone was and that I’d been negotiating with her on behalf of a real estate appraisal client, Dora said: “Go, talk to her, we’re okay, and don’t worry about Lulu. This is what she always does. Isn’t it, Howard?”

Howard nodded glumly. He’d noticed, as I had, that the six women at the next table were making covetous eyes at Cotton Tail. Older than the typical Tess’ rocker, they were dressed as if they’d come directly from the office where they worked, which was almost true, as they later told us, because they’d stopped at a pizzeria for dinner before arriving at Tess. Two of them, a bright-eyed blonde in her mid-forties and a dark-haired, round-faced, powerfully-built over-fifty-year-old were the most animated in gesturing how eager they were to cuddle Cotton Tail.

Shaking my head no, I made the dumb mistake of flapping one of Cotton Tail’s flippers at them, which got them even more excited. When the band took a short break, and the roar of the audience had simmered down, the fifty-year-old yelled at me: “Why can’t we hold it?”

“Not possible,” I said, again shaking my head no, which was ridiculous, of course, and selfish. What harm can they do to it? I thought. Then Dora whispered she was willing to allow them to hold Cotton Tail, but Howard didn’t agree. He was suspicious, he said. They were drinking champagne and acting silly. Who knows how careful they’d be with Cotton Tail and whether they’d give it back to us?

“We have a responsibility,” he said. “I’m sorry.“

The blonde, in an earnest voice, barely audible above the crowd noise, said: “We only want to dance with it. What’s wrong with that?”

“Dance with it?” Howard said. “It’s a walrus, a plastic walrus. It doesn’t dance.”

“We’ll teach it,” the fifty-year-old said, getting a big laugh from the other women.

“Can’t do,” Howard said, as the women, all six of them, began to pound the table and chant: “Share the walrus, share the walrus, share the walrus…Very quickly most people in the auditorium were pounding and chanting “share the walrus,” or “spare the swordfish,” or “snare the cookie,” or “scare the horsefly,” or “glare the headlight,” or “blare the tuba,” whatever came to mind that had an “air” sound and a two-syllable noun attached to it, not having the slightest idea of what had transpired on the balcony, until Howard, leaping to his feet, grabbed Cotton Tail from my lap. Raising it high above his head so the entire audience could get a clear view of it, he shouted: “Plastic walrus!”

Instantly the crowd went wild, cheering and applauding thunderously, though obviously few among them knew that Howard was brandishing a plastic walrus at them. In contrast, Lulu, whom I could clearly see from the balcony, was stunned. Saucer-eyed and limp-mouthed, she stared up at us, flanked by her dance partners, now numbering five, who were pumping their fists on behalf, I suppose, of sharing, sparing, or snaring Cotton Tail, all of which she was vehemently against. Shoving aside a couple of her partners, Lulu elbowed her way across the dance floor,then up the stairs to the balcony, wresting Cotton Tail away from Howard, her exquisite mouth throbbing sensationally. Then abruptly, while she was squeezing Cotton Tail so tightly its plastic head came close to exploding, the audience’s attention switched from Cotton Tail and Lulu to Ruby and the Band, when the band burst into a raucous rendition of their latest hit, “Don’t Trust Those Guys.” The minute Ruby opened her mouth, the rockers, who’d been screaming their undying allegiance to Cotton Tail, apparently forgot completely about it, as they sang boisterously along with her:

Don’t trust those guys,
Their awful ways,
And scornful gaze,
Their scheming heads,
Avoid their beds,
Don’t trust those guys at all.

They are the worst,
The very first
In doing harm to others,
What brutes they are,
Most vile by far,
They even kill their brothers.

Don’t trust those guys
Who tell such lies,
Despite their cries,
Say no instead,
Take none to bed,
Don’t trust those guys at all,
At all.
Don’t trust those guys at all
Yeah!

24.

By the time I got down to Florence and her family they were getting ready to leave. The noise was too much for them, Florence said, the nieces hadn’t been asked to dance, and Harlow, her husband, was complaining the bad air and loud chanting had given him “a vicious headache that seemed to be getting worse.”

“What are they hollering about?” Harlow said, screwing up his tanned, thick-nosed face.

I explained about Cotton Tail, Howard, Lulu, and the women at the next table who wanted us to share Cotton Tail with them.

“Share it?” Harlow said. “What do you mean share it? I thought they wanted to spare it.”

“It’s a plastic walrus,” I said,

“A walrus?” Florence said. She laughed, poking her finger at Harlow. “That’s what I told you it is, didn’t I?”

“It’s not what you told me it is,” Harlow said. “You said it’s a frog, or an alligator. You never once mentioned a walrus.”

“I did, Harlow,” she said. “Of course, I did. Didn’t I, girls?”

The nieces looked embarrassed. Florence introduced them to me. “This is Tinker,” she said. “She’s my brother Jack’s daughter, right?” Tinker nodded, blushed, and flashed her pale blue eyes at me. Nice, I thought. “And this is brother Paul’s daughter, Bambi,” Florence said. “They’re with us for three weeks, actually nineteen days, not including arrival and departure, and want to keep busy every minute, don’t you, sweeties? I wish I knew more people they could spend time with. I’m looking for volunteers.”

Selfishly (self-protectively) I didn’t volunteer, but I did ask if it was okay for me to sit between them. “They’d love it,” Florence said. Looking even more embarrassed, the nieces reluctantly shifted their chairs to make room for me. “They’re such great kids,” Florence said, making proud faces at them, “good to their parents, good to their auntie (her), good to their uncle (Harlow), both of them top of their class and straight A students. Bambi has five brothers and two sisters, all of them as terrific as she is, and Tinker wants to be a dentist like her father.”

“Dental surgeon,” Tinker said, smiling brightly at me. She had great teeth.

“Tinker, poor dear, doesn’t have brothers or sisters,” Florence said, “but the house she lives in, you should see it. Magnificent. Three-story. Six bedrooms. Jack’s dream.”

“Bambi’s daddy washes windows for a living,” Harlow said.

“That’s so silly,” Florence said. “He’s got a window washing business, which is quite different from washing windows for a living.”

“Lots of clients,” Harlow said. “Two sons in with him. Bambi’s in college, aren’t you, honey? Wants to be a social worker.” Bambi smiled shyly at me. “I have a sister-in-law who has a brother whose wife used to be a social worker,” I said.

Ruby and the Band had come back on stage. They were about to play “Race Horse,” another of their big hits, and Ruby was telling how on a flight to Louisville, Kentucky she’d written the song’s lyric, in which an impulsive gambler pleads with a long-shot named Race Horse to win the Kentucky Derby and to do it for her. “Is that so remarkable?” Ruby growled into the microphone, as the crowd roared with laughter and the band played loud, cynical chords. Then complaining crankily to more crowd laughter and more cynical chords, she demanded an apology from everyone involved in the race, including the horse. Hadn’t the horse let her down by finishing a dismal fifth? “What kind of gratitude is that?” she whined, a mischievous grin spreading across her wild-eyed face. “I want my money back!” Again the crowd laughed uproariously.

Shouting over the chords and the crowd, Florence said: “Doesn’t anybody want to dance?”

“She does,” Tinker said, almost inaudibly, pointing at Bambi.

“So do you,” Bambi said. .

“Not as much as you,” Tinker said, smiling prettily, but sounding as if she’d rather be boiled in oil than forced to dance with somebody she didn’t want to dance with. When she glanced at me, I think I blushed. Certainly I felt self-conscious, and my stomach began to rumble noisily.

“Take your pick,” Florence said, nodding to me, then to the nieces.

I shook my head no. “It’s up to them,” I said, unreasonably convinced they’d already made up their minds I was too square and/or too old for them. Each, to me, looked no more than sixteen, or maybe seventeen. Much later Harlow told me they had identification with them, claiming they were twenty-one. He also said they’d been born eleven days apart.

Grabbing my hand, Florence pulled me to my feet, as the Band and Ruby broke into “Race Horse, Race Horse,” which goes: “Race Horse, Race Horse, Got your number, Race Horse, Race Horse, Got it good, Race Horse, Race Horse, Do me justice, Win that race, Like you should.”

Short and stocky, with loose hips and a powerful spring to her legs, Florence maneuvered me into a narrow space at the center of the crowded dance floor. To avoid being pummeled by the energetic couple rocking next to us I had to turn sideways and hold my elbows against my chest. Florence’s dance style was arms-and-legs-flailing-wildly electric eggbeater. Not knowing how to keep up with her, I stood flat-footed and grunted grimly in time to the Band’s heavy beat.

We lasted through “Race Horse” and “Got Me Guessin’, Baby,” which Ruby said she’d also written, before Florence announced she was exhausted and dragged me off the floor. Harlow was alone at the table. “They’re dancing,” he said.

Sure enough, the nieces were out on the floor with two young guys, probably in their very early twenties, who seemed to have more vitality than what I’d observed from any of Lulu’s former partners. “They’re loving it,” Florence said. Certainly they had a glow to them I hadn’t seen before. It also struck me how much alike they looked, though they were cousins, not sisters. In height there was little difference between them. I estimated five six, or possibly five seven. They had streaked, shoulder-length blonde hair that flipped at the ends. Their skins were fair, almost stark white, with faded pimple marks around their lopsided mouths. Their eyes were blue, Bambi’s deeper blue than Tinker’s. Slim-waisted, thin-shouldered, full-hipped, thick-legged, they were dressed in striped tops and purple mini-skirts that were strictly Scranton, Pennsylvania, definitely not showbiz West Hollywood.

Florence reminded me about her party. “Next Saturday,” she said. “Bring whoever you want. We’re having a Latin trio. That’s my kind of music.”

“I love salsa,” I said.

“And tango? Do you love Tango?,” she said. I nodded yes. She told me about a trip she and Harlow had taken to Rio de Janeiro. “Got professional lessons from this brilliant guy. What a teacher. It was like a dream every time he put his arms around me.”

“Obviously you’re too good for me,” I said.

“We’ll see,” she said, a flirtatious smile on her heavily made-up face, as the nieces were being returned to the table by their partners, who immediately disappeared.

The nieces looked disappointed and hurt. “Not a success?” Florence said. They shook their heads no. When I mumbled something that I thought was sympathetic but may have sounded insincere or stupid to them, they abruptly turned their backs on me, as if I’d insulted them, or didn’t understand how angry and humiliated they were feeling, or maybe they decided they’d seen enough of my face and didn’t want to look at it again, which was okay with me, if that was what they genuinely felt, but I was shocked they’d rejected me so sharply.

“I’ll get the car and meet you out front,” Harlow said. “Still have that damn headache.”

25.

The nieces were even more subdued, as we walked out to the car. “Don’t trust those guys,” Florence muttered off-key and tonelessly, imitating Ruby. The nieces stared coldly at her. “They’re not worth it. They’re creeps. Who cares about them?” Florence said. “To start with you’re much too good for them, so why give them the satisfaction?”

Walking more quickly, the nieces began to put distance between them and us. “I’m making it worse, aren’t I?” Florence said. “They’re so popular at home, and they’re gorgeous dancers. What more do guys like that want from them? I resent it, and I can’t help if I talk too much, but somebody has to stand up for them, don’t they?”

We had to wait at the curb, until Harlow arrived with the car. The nieces climbed into the back seat. I held the front passenger door open for Florence. “Don’t forget Saturday,” she said, giving me a worried look, “and call me, okay?”

As Harlow drove off, the nieces again ignored me. What had these guys done to them, and why were they taking it out on me? Not that I didn’t recognize that something humiliating and hurtful had happened to them. But what can I do about it? Should I find these guys and confront them, when I don’t even know what to accuse them of? Heading back into Tess’s lobby, I decided I had no choice but to forget about them, no matter how outraged I felt on the nieces’ behalf.

Then I got the next shock. Halfway up the stairs to the balcony, I saw that four other people were sitting at the table Dora, Howard, and I had occupied and that the six women who’d been harassing us about Cotton Tail were gone. And what could have happened to my friends? Where had they disappeared to? Certainly they wouldn’t take off without me, or would they? The parking lot, I thought. Maybe they were waiting for me on the parking lot. Racing down the stairs, across the lobby, and out the front door, I hurried to the far side of the building where we’d parked Dora’s Pontiac, which, I saw immediately, also had vanished. Help! I’m deserted! Alone! Left behind! How could they have done this to me?

Hoping to find somebody to give me a lift home, I rushed back to Tess’s crowded lobby. At first glance, as I surveyed the crowd, I didn’t see a familiar face. Then on the far side of the staircase I spotted a guy I thought I knew from the bank I used to work at. When I got up close, I realized it was somebody else who didn’t even look like the guy at the bank. Can you imagine? I should wear my glasses more often. Then a woman called to me from the bar. Hey, I know her, I thought. She was also getting ready to leave. Unfortunately she lived south of Pico, in the opposite direction from my apartment on Holloway, and said meanly, I thought, that she didn’t have time to take me home.

Well, rats, I’d struck out again, which wasn’t so bad, because I could walk home in maybe twenty- five minutes, and that was hardly a problem, right? Turning toward the door, I was about to head out of Tess, when my next big headache happened. Pushing into Tess through the incessantly noisy crowd were two haughty-looking guys, one of whom, Billie’s soon-to-be-ex-husband, I recognized instantly from that fateful night at the Ambrose Franklin Forum. And who do you suppose was with them, looking even more gorgeous than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams? Billie, of course.

Billie, Billie, Billie, I gasped. Before she had a chance to see me, I wanted desperately to get out of there. I’d hardly taken a step, when she turned and was staring straight at me. Her face, that beautiful face, looked shocked. Shocked! As quickly as I could move, I was gone, vanished, my aching heart irreparably broken. But not quite.

26.

Truthfully, outside on Melrose Avenue, breezing along in the crisp, mind-clearing night air, I felt both elated and relieved.

Free of her at last, I thought, though I’d known her for less than a week.

To pull a stunt like that on me took nerve, a lot of nerve, again proving, I suppose, that so-called human nature, despite infrequent surprises, is eternally duplicitous and dumb. Popping into my head, as I hurried toward La Cienega, was Ruby and the Band’s smash hit, “Chasing Bad, Bad Love,” and the huge ovation Tess’s crowd of adoring rockers had given it. Wasn’t it remarkable that at this critical time I should think of “Bad, Bad’s” depressingly appropriate lyric? I had to laugh at myself. How ridiculous can I be?

Chasing bad, bad love,
That’s all I ever do,
Where’s my pride,
The tears I’ve cried,
To save myself for you.

Yes indeed I do it,
Barely getting through it,
Always left to rue it,
Knowing I just blew it.

Chasing bad, bad love,
Sad story of my life,
Don’t have time
To get what’s mine
And chase bad love again

A half-block from La Cienega I saw there’d been a terrible accident. Two cars had slammed into one another on the Melrose Avenue center dividing line. Several people from both cars appeared to be severely injured. When I got near enough to the smashed cars, I recognized that among the injured was one of the young women Al had been teasing the night I’d met him at Schubert’s. Her name, if I remember correctly, was Audrey – Audrey Frost, I think. From where I was standing she looked as if she was bleeding badly. A couple of cops had arrived. I could hear the sound of a distant siren. My first reaction was to try to help somebody who’d been injured. Of course, what I actually did was to head for Audrey. Well, when she saw me coming toward her, she started to shake her fists at me and scream: “Don’t let him touch me. He’s not a doctor! He’s not a doctor!” Her panic instantly got the cops excited about keeping me away from her.

“Stop! Hold it!” one of them shouted, as another cop grabbed my arm and hooked it behind my back. Sobbing convulsively, tears streaming down her bloody face, Audrey described how I’d claimed to be a brain surgeon and how I’d told her I had an office in the Scanlon Medical Building, which I didn’t, she said, because when she’d gone to the Scanlon and tried to find me, “no one in the building had ever heard of him.” Warning me that impersonating a doctor at the scene of an accident was a serious offense, the cop, my cop, the one who was twisting my arm behind my back, threatened to lock me up if I tried to make trouble for her, or him.

“It was just a joke,” I said, as sweat broke out on my forehead.

“This is not a joke,” the cop shouted, twisting my arm even harder.

Then, fortunately for me, as I was attempting to explain to him that Al had been teasing Audrey and her friend and that my being a doctor was the joke, not the accident and certainly not the horrible injuries poor Audrey and the other victims had suffered, an ambulance and two fire trucks roared into Melrose Avenue. While attendants from the ambulance as well as the fire trucks were jumping off their vehicles and rushing to Audrey and the accident’s other victims, the cops, including my cop, who was apparently in charge of intimidating me, immediately turned their full attention to the injured and the rescue crew who were hurriedly examining them.

Feeling justified I’d be harming no one if I took advantage of the confusion the rescue workers had created, I quietly slipped away from my cop, when he unexpectedly released his grip on my arm to assist a medic who was attempting to lift one of the victims, a panicked grade-schooler with a nasty gash on her forehead, onto a stretcher. Following a fireman back to his truck, walking rapidly past him as he hopped aboard it, I escaped unnoticed up a side street, panicked every step I took that my entire vascular system was about to rupture.

27.

Having run uphill most of the nine long blocks between Melrose and Holloway Drive, I was so dispirited and weak I practically crawled into the yard behind my apartment. Cotton Tail was waiting on the back porch to greet me, propped against the porch’s railing with a note on his chest that said SORRY! Probably this was Lulu’s idea. “I’m not forgiving them!” I said aloud.

Sinking down cross-legged on the porch, I stared up at the smog-filled sky. The stars I could see were fuzzy and dim, except for one remarkable dazzler that seemed to be winking at me. Oh, was I thrilled. Am I about to be delivered by this lucky star from the rash of painful defeats I’d just endured? “Let’s hope so,” I said, again aloud, though I didn’t doubt some of the fault belonged to me. I’m asking for it, right? I’m sticking out my chin, and they’re connecting with haymakers, because I deserve what I get for being such a fool with a major flaw in my character.

Take Lulu, for instance, beginning with that infamous kiss through the unbearable snub she’d given me at Tess, when she’d denied me the opportunity to dance even one stupid dance with her. Instead I was forced to sit with Dora and Howard, who are good people, so I’m not complaining, as Lulu danced with five somebody-elses, while I was expected to guard with my life her plastic walrus. Now that was offensive, wasn’t it? Why does stuff like that keep happening to me?

Consider, in addition, that Florence’s nieces had also snubbed me. No question I’m older than they are, by at least ten years, and a lot less cool, as I’ve already admitted, but that was no excuse for them to be rude to me after I’d tried so hard to please them. Yet there I was, standing forlornly in my back yard, a skinny one hundred and forty-six pounder, with thick, left-parted black hair, bushy eyebrows, and freckles on the bridge of my undersized nose, dressed in a navy blue, boat-necked, light-weight, tight-fitting nylon sweater, narrow-legged tan poplin pants, and oxblood loafers with splayed leather tassels on them, attempting to masquerade as much younger than my twenty-nine years, which the nieces had probably spotted the first time they’d looked at me. But did this mean I deserved to be spurned by them, because I’m admittedly vain and insecure about myself? Naw, not if they have half a brain between them. Then why the sub-zero cold-shoulder? And why did my own pals, Howard, Lulu, and Dora, walk out on me without explanation or warning? Where, o where, was my lucky star, when I needed it to protect me from being abandoned by people I uncritically respected and trusted?

And what did this so-called lucky star do to shield me from being threatened by bloody-faced Audrey, while that sadistic cop was trying to break my arm? And unless I’m far luckier than I can possibly hope to be, that cop is going to remember who I am and what his beef is against me. That Audrey knows my name and wouldn’t hesitate to file heavy-weight teasing charges against me probably means he’s already on his way to confront me, considering how much he seemed to enjoy twisting my arm.

Now, as the L. A.smog was rapidly swallowing up my lucky star, I struggled to my feet, unlocked the back door. What should I do with Cotton Tail? Was he a gift, a peace-offering, or another slap-in-the-face by three self-centered exploiters who don’t give a damn about me? But how can I blame this poor plastic walrus for what I’d suffered from them? He was sweet and innocent, wasn’t he? Scooping him up, I carried him into the apartment through the kitchen to the living room, where I sat him on the couch. What’s so fascinating about him? I wondered. He certainly didn’t compare to a dog, especially a dog like Margaret’s Hector, who could run and jump and chase a ball or a stick. Now that was real fun. I began to think about Hector and also about Margaret. What a mess I’d made out of my miserable relationship with her. To see Hector again, I’d certainly have to apologize for the dumb way I’d treated Margaret. I could call her, I suppose, provided she was willing to talk to me, which I doubted. Or I could send her a note. Would a note work? Would she read it? Would she answer me? I’ll write her in the morning, I decided.

Woof! Woof!

28.

From shortly after one a.m., when I got to bed, to five twenty-three, the last time I looked at the clock before falling deeply asleep, I worried about losing Billie. The trapped-in look on that gorgeous face of hers had told me the whole story, that the husband was back in, and I was out, plain and simple, that I had no chance whatsoever to do anything to reverse her tragic choice of him over me, except to drop like a rock into unconsciousness, which I promptly did, remaining inert and disconnected, until suddenly I thought I heard a shrill ringing in my head that I stubbornly refused to acknowledge, even as I was fumbling to pick up the telephone on the dresser beside my bed. Despite stiff lips and a parched tongue, I managed to grunt an incoherent hello and was startled when I heard Billie’s lovely voice reply: “Did I wake you?”

Again I grunted. Apparently satisfied with what I’d grunted at her, she said cheerily: “Too early, isn’t it? Should I call back later?” I groggily checked the clock. It said seven sixteen, I think. I’d slept slightly less than two hours, was completely exhausted and totally unprepared to have a conversation with her about how great the husband was and why she’d decided to stick with him instead of getting involved with me. She began by saying: “I need to explain what happened last night at Tess. Okay?”

Well, talk about mixed emotions. There I was flat on my back, struggling to wake up long enough to chastise her for humiliating me at Tess, at the same time I was thrilled she’d called me. Her reason for being at Tess, as she described it, was aboveboard and uncomplicated. She and the husband’s new roommate, she said, had helped the husband move out of their Sherman Oaks apartment. When the move was completed, the three of them had gone to dinner together. After dinner the husband had suggested Billie and he should celebrate their amicable break-up by going dancing at Tess (the roommate was invited). “ If you hadn’t run away like you did,” Billie said, “I would have introduced you to them. We could have danced, the two of us, you and me. It would have been fun. I would have loved it.”

Feeling more awake and less tense, I sat up in bed. She reminded me we had a dinner date on Monday. I asked her about restaurants and what kind of food she preferred: French, Italian, Mexican, Chinese? “You choose,” she said, giggling softly. The remainder of our conversation was a breeze, full of lightness and laughter. What a woman, I thought. It’s great to be in love again.

The Twelve O'clock Title Page

2008-05-23T15:22:00.000-07:00

BILLIE COOPER AND NIGEL WOODIE (THE NARRATOR)

ARE

THE TWELVE O’CLOCK

By

Charles Peet

Baby Steps

2008-05-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

BABY STEPS
A SCARY JOURNEY
WHERE’RE WE GOING?
WHO’S TO BLAME?
TIME IS COMING
CAN’T AVOID IT,
LOSE THE PASSION,
BEAR THE PAIN,
BABY STEPS, REMEMBER,
IN CHALLENGING LIFE’S FLAME,
CAN TIP-TOE INTO HAPPINESS
OR EVERLASTING SHAME.

The Twelve O'clock

2008-05-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

Today I am starting to transfer my novel, The Twelve O'clock, to its blog.