Authors: Peter Moore Smith
Dr. Silowicz had dropped me off at the door, and my father had greeted me, wrapping an arm around my shoulders, and guided
me into the house.
I looked around.
The room was significantly larger than my entire San Raphael Crescent apartment had been, a long parallelogram-shaped space
with a king-size bed placed precisely in the middle. The floor was a mosaic of concrete, tile, see-through glass, and flat
beige carpeting. Along the opposite wall were built-in aluminum-and-wire bookcases, newly installed. On the shelves were all
of my books, placed in perfect alphabetical order. On the lower shelves were my stacks of colored paper, arranged in the same
spectrum of hues they had been in before. There were other books, too, books from the old house that I thought had been thrown
out or given away years ago. I walked to the shelves and placed my fingers on the spines of the
Great Books.
I wondered if Dad knew how much they meant to me or if it had just been an accident. On the bedside table were the digital
wave machine and an odd collection of random items, including a candle, a handful of coins, even the Leica, all arranged haphazardly
to create the illusion that someone had really lived here.
There was also a boomerang-shaped desk with a brand-new, flat-screen computer facing the wall-to-ceiling window — which, in
turn, faced the glassy water of the beach and the emerald Pacific beyond.
“And watch this,” my father said, barely able to contain his exuberance. He picked up a remote control from the bedside table
and pointed it toward the window. From the ceiling descended a sheet of amber Mylar, bathing the room in a soft orange glow.
“And now …” He pressed another button and a white blackout shade was lowered, too, reducing the room’s natural light to unqualified
darkness. He pushed still another button and a cool luminescence filled the air, the diffuse glow of recessed ceiling fixtures.
“We had them put in all over the house, in every room.” He threw the cardboard-thin remote toward me. “And this thing works
everywhere you go.” I fumbled to catch it. “You just carry it around with you and lower the shades,” my father said. “You
never have to worry about that bad light hurting your eyes again.”
“Isn’t it great?” Melanie enthused.
My father turned. “Just wait till you see the bathroom.”
I followed him in. Tiled in beige, white, and brown, it was perfectly round and contained a whirlpool tub and freestanding
shower. There were three metal sinks and a slanted skylight letting in the sun from above.
Dad noticed me glance up at it. “You can close that, too.” He indicated an electronic panel on the wall. He turned the lights
on and off, covered the skylight, and showed me how I could adjust the temperature of the water in Celsius or Fahrenheit.
“I tried to think of everything,” he said, “but if there’s something I forgot, you just do it. Don’t bother asking. Just tell
someone on the staff, and they’ll take care of it right away. There’s no reason —” He was about to say something else, I guess,
but cut himself off. “Well, there’s just no reason.” I noticed that all of my medication had been brought here, too, and the
little amber bottles had been neatly arranged on a glass shelf above one of the sinks, including the bottle of Reality, which
rose by a half inch above the rest.
We stepped back into the bedroom, Melanie following behind us. My father walked to the little suite and sat on the modernist
couch. He rubbed his brown head with his brown hands and took a heavy breath. It struck me that in his striped sweater he
looked like Picasso. I wanted to ask him what he thought he was doing, why he thought he could simply move my things here
without asking. But all I could think to say was, “You look like Picasso.”
Dad laughed. “That’s what Melanie told me. It’s this stupid sweater.”
“It’s cool,” Melanie offered.
“Cool?” He nodded his head to the chair across from him, indicating that I should sit. “I don’t know what cool is anymore.
I have to hire people to tell me what cool is.”
I sat down. Even from here I could hear his breathing, the air moving heavily in and out of his hairy, old-man nostrils.
“Angel, I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “I know you are angry. So I’m asking a favor. I’ll give you all the privacy
you need, whatever you want. Just stay here.
Please.
I want you to stay here until you get it all together, until you get it all figured out.” He cleared his throat. “I was not
a good father to you. I made stupid mistakes. I was too busy, self-absorbed. I let your mother raise you almost completely
on her own, and I know you loved her and she was a good mother …” He reconsidered. “Well, no, damn it, she was not a good
mother.” Then his face seemed to twist through the middle. “Ah … shit, I don’t know what she was. But I want to change things.
I want to see you. I want you to be a part of my new family, to get to know Melanie, to help with Gabriel. He’s adopted, but
he’s still your brother, your little brother, something you should have had all those years ago.”
I started playing with the remote control, sending the blackout shades up and down, up and down.
“Angel,” my father snapped, “I’m talking to you.”
Later that night, I turned on the electronic wave machine — it had been brought from West Hollywood with the rest of my things
— and wrapped myself in its comforting aural blur. But eventually I remembered there were actual waves outside, the entire
Pacific Ocean, so I raised the blinds and slid the window open. I slept with the sound of the rain and the surf loud in my
ears, a sound that seemed to cover everything, to smother my troubled thoughts, to surround my anxious dreams in a merciful
white noise and soften the discord of my subconscious like a blanket wrapped around a pistol.
In the morning I woke to the light, the wet reflection of the rising sun on the water shining down over the house from the
east. The sky had been washed clean. The digital clock announced like a beacon that it was six-fifteen. I reached for the
remote control and lowered the shades, first the Mylar, then the blackout. It was virtually lightless in the room now, and
I could have returned to sleep, to the world of dreams …
But I decided to get up. I stepped into the bathroom, where I found a new robe hanging on a hook; it was made of waffled cotton,
cream-colored, the kind they give you in an expensive spa. Then I walked across the alternating flat-pile carpet and marble
floor, through the long hallway, and over the artificial stream, and finally arrived in the kitchen, where Melanie sat at
the stainless steel island thumbing through an issue of
Architectural Digest
that featured this very house.
“Good morning,” she said. Her smile was affectionate, yielding, perhaps even genuine.
The light was soft in here, only a reflection off the western waves. “Hi.” I went to the coffeemaker and found it full of
fragrant kona. I poured myself a cup, then took a few sips, noting its strange flavor without my customary dollop of bourbon.
“Where’s Gabriel?” I said finally.
“He’s with Theresa.” She meant the nanny.
“Dad?”
“At work.” Melanie was accustomed to this, I thought, a house like this, cars, servants, money. I realized that I had grown
up wealthy, too. I was accustomed to this, too. Alone on San Raphael Crescent, I had grown unaccustomed to, had almost forgotten,
what it was like. I sat down next to her at the counter and examined my cup. It was white, cylindrical, another example of
the overall structure’s perfect geometry.
“The house is beautiful,” I acknowledged, nodding toward the magazine. I knew Melanie had overseen its design and construction,
its layout and decor.
She smiled a thank-you. “Were you up late?” She and my father didn’t sleep together anymore, if they ever had. He was too
old, he said, coughed too much, got up too often to pee.
“Not so late.”
“You must be tired.”
I shrugged. “I’m fine.”
“It was your father’s idea about the shades.” Her voice became slightly apologetic now, plaintive. “He wants you to stay.
He wants you to be comfortable, Angel, so you’ll stay with us for as long as you want.”
I took another sip of coffee, said, “I’m not going anywhere,” and took my cup and the
Los Angeles Times
into my room. I climbed into bed and read the entire thing, peering through the words and sentences and paragraphs for anything
that might get my attention. In the news were the usual worries, the international subterfuges, the wars and rumors of wars,
the attacks on freedom, embargoes on totalitarianism. In local news there were accidents and carjackings, convenience store
holdups and slow-speed chases. The world, as always, was coming to an end; serial killers were on the loose; madmen ruled
entire countries, especially ours; CEOs were petty criminals. It was the same old world, nothing had changed, nothing had
changed in years. I even looked at the ads, the large type announcing sales on everything from automobiles to tropical vacations,
the minuscule copy at the bottom explaining why the above offer wasn’t really true.
Nothing was true, I thought. There was no such thing as the truth.
Even Angela hadn’t been true.
Eventually I stepped into the shower, standing awkwardly in the middle of the large, open cylinder. I let the warm water gush
over me while I jerked off, conjuring mental images of Angela — on stage at the Velvet Mask, in bed with me in West Hollywood,
coming into the living room with that armful of blue and white hyacinths, that terrible, gorgeous light stinging my eyes.
I knew she wasn’t real, but I still thought of her. She still lived in my imagination.
My mind cleared of the pressing need for sexual release, I sought emotional release, too, sobbing pathetically there in the
architecturally perfect shower.
How could I miss someone so terribly if she wasn’t even real?
What was wrong with me?
As always, I remembered her fingers, those long glittery nails on my chest, and I wondered who’s they really were. Cassandra’s?
Jessica’s? Some escort’s?
Exhausted, I slipped into the waffled robe, then went down to find Melanie on the sundeck. She had changed into a black one-piece
bathing suit.
She smiled serenely, her hair pulled back, and peered up at me through a pair of dark Gucci lenses.
______
That day passed. And then others. Weeks, months. Nights, I borrowed one of my father’s cars and drove through the city. I
was still searching, I suppose, but now I didn’t know what for. I watched the taillights of automobiles create a red halo
over the blackened streets. I watched the hills darken, bright points of white and yellow flickering through the heavy branches
and the dense overgrowth like stars in a fallen firmament.
The Los Angeles night descends like a curtain over a stage. I have spent years observing its velvet draperies, its translucent
filters of blue, brown, and black. From Sunset Boulevard, the famous Hollywood sign glows atop Mount Lee, the letters gleaming
like beacons to the millions who come here every year to gawk or to become famous themselves. On warmer nights, torches are
lit, and L.A. burns. Great billboards of smoking cowboys and gleaming wedges of California cheese flare up like beacons in
the darkness. Gorgeous supermodels hover over intersections, their teeth beaming their toothpaste-white perfection. Two-story-tall
rock stars glare down insolently from building rooftops. Of course, nothing is brighter than the billboards advertising movies
— my father’s, in particular. In this one, Will Smith grins churlishly in a policeman’s uniform. Here, Cameron Diaz offers
a karate kick in a wedding dress. A gray-haired but still bright-eyed Jack Nicholson glowers mischievously at the waiting
traffic.
If you are high enough in the hills, you can see underlit pools radiating a cool blue like gems set randomly across a gown.
Televisions cast eerie blue illumination from bedroom windows.
For no reason at all, some houses are decorated for Christmas, which is months away.
At home, from my bedroom window at my father’s house, the darkness was general over Zuma Beach. Only a few lights were visible
from the houses hidden among the cliffs. The crests of waves caught the faint light of the moon. Sometimes, when the sky was
concealed in fog, there was only the sound of the churning ocean, so persistent that I often wondered why it didn’t put the
whole of California to sleep.
______
“I think I might like to get a job,” I told Melanie one morning.
“Like what?” She had moved an umbrella over the hot-tub portion of the pool so I could sit with her and now lowered herself
a centimeter at a time into the steaming water.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe in a bookstore, maybe a library.”
“Why not work for your father?”
“Doing what?” I put my legs in the warm water, too.
“A million things, are you kidding? Production, development —”
“No.” I shook my head and kicked my feet. “I’d always be the boss’s kid.”
“Yeah.” She leaned back, wetting her hair, and when she came out, her head was steaming. “That’s why I quit. I had become
the boss’s wife.” Melanie had worked in production for my father. She had even developed a couple of relatively successful
movies on her own. “People weren’t treating me the way they had before. They weren’t taking me seriously.” She shrugged. “Or
they were taking me too seriously. Or something.”
“Something during the day.” I pictured an office, a desk, a sheaf of colored papers, a computer screen.
“You could be a reader for the studio,” she suggested. “No one would care if you’re the boss’s kid. No one would even know.”
“A reader?”
“All you have to do is read screenplays and write a brief synopsis, then pass it along. You don’t even have to talk to anyone.
You could even do it here.”
“I was thinking I’d like to be around other people, at least a little bit.” This idea had come from Dr. Silowicz, actually.
He had suggested I get out into the world more, find something that was all my own.