Memento Park Page 8

  “You laugh at his shitty jokes.”

  “They’re no shittier than your shitty jokes.”

  I pushed the coffee mug away and slid deeper into the chair, as though it might somehow protect me. “He hasn’t been out here in … I dunno, ten years? More?”

  “I guess it’s a big show.”

  “It’s the same show they hold every year.”

  “Well, he seemed excited.”

  I laughed. Oh, Virgil, how I laughed. The idea of my father being excited to see me was so absurd, so obviously a construct of Tracy’s wishful thinking that I could not restrain myself. I laughed but I should have loved her for it. Her cheeks flushed.

  “What’s so damn funny?”

  “The idea of my father being excited to see me is funny. He hasn’t been excited since the night he conceived me. It’s this painting. It’s got to be.”

  “Well, whatever you think, he’s coming. Maybe you should be nicer to him,” she said, poking my chest.

  Tracy left me to prepare for her favorite gig—a bikini shoot at the beach for Harvest Moon, a catalog she’d been modeling for for five years—and I turned over this latest, distressing development. I wasn’t sure what troubled me more: that the old man would shortly be descending on me, bringing his own brand of Walpurgisnacht to town; or that he and Tracy were on cozier terms than I’d realized. What con, what scam, what new malefic angle was he working now? I felt the hair on my neck stir as it hadn’t in years. As soon as Tracy walked out the door for her shoot, I went up to the bedroom, pulled my talismanic list from the bedside drawer, and called him, though I had no idea what to say. It didn’t matter because he didn’t answer the call. I left no message, tossed my phone aside, defeated. First Brian. Now my old man. Everyone, it seemed, had a stronger claim on Tracy than I did.

  I hoped a long, hot shower might steam away my worries. But even after nearly a half hour beneath sizzling needles, I could still see that stubborn, familiar sadness in my eyes as I shaved away the night’s growth. As I was drying my face, I heard an urgent buzz from the armchair. Tracy’s phone was rattling away, forgotten where I had chucked it earlier. I was pleased at the thought of her forced disconnection from Brian, when my own phone jumped with an incoming text: Tracy, on a borrowed phone, asking me to run her BlackBerry over to the shoot, seeing as I was the one who had tossed it onto the chair. Okay, I tapped out, and picked up her phone. I looked at the screen. Missed call. Brian Bettersea. Really? Bettersea? Who makes these names up? It dawned on me that I hadn’t known his last name before this moment. I was tempted to look through her texts and messages, but I set the phone down, maintaining my reasonable facsimile of integrity. It would do for now.

  * * *

  NO MATTER HOW LONG I live here, I never lose the quiet thrill I feel exiting the McClure Tunnel at the end of the Santa Monica Freeway to find the Pacific Coast Highway unfurling before me. There’s something bracing about emerging from this brief stretch of darkness onto the dizzying ribbon of asphalt beneath cloud-streaked skies, alongside an opal seascape flecked with whitecaps. I open all my windows and my sunroof and let the salty tang of the Pacific envelop me as I luxuriate in the genius of my decision to leave New York.

  The road was wide-open as I sped toward Malibu, my thoughts drifting to Tracy, her BlackBerry on the seat beside me, tempting me with its secrets. She’d been typing into it the moment I first laid eyes on her, in an elevator in Beverly Hills. My film agents were located in the same building as her modeling agents, two floors apart. I held the door for her in the lobby as she stepped in, head down, typing. The door closed and she continued typing.

  “Floor?” I finally asked.

  “Twelve,” she answered without looking up. “Thanks.”

  I pressed twelve and ten, and regarded her with interest, waiting for the inevitable moment when her signal would be lost. It arrived, heralded by an irritated sigh. She looked up and I nodded in sympathy. I, who am so rarely at a loss for words, was dumbstruck by her beauty.

  “They need cell signal boosters in these things,” I finally managed.

  “That,” she said, “is a brilliant idea.” Then she paused, recognizing me. “I know you.”

  That was the year I was a regular on my ill-fated cable sensation, the only time in my life I’ve been recognized with any kind of regularity.

  “I love that show. You’re so good,” she said.

  I blushed. Yes, Virgil, I blushed. Even the tips of my ears lit up, a pink wash that quickly turned bright red. Thanks to the highly polished steel walls of the elevator, I was confronted with an infinite series of my crimson mug. Well, thank you very much, was the best I could muster. She smiled and touched my arm.

  “Don’t be embarrassed. It’s true.”

  The door opened at ten. My floor.

  I held my hand out. “Matt.”

  She took it. “I know. Tracy. Nice to meet you.”

  We stood together for a moment. “Your floor,” she said.

  I hesitated. Then: “It can wait.”

  I let the elevator door close.

  * * *

  I ASKED HER TO COFFEE on the spot, which was against type, for me. I am no fool, Virgil, I know when I am punching above my weight. But I was buoyed by my momentary fame, drawn to her friendliness and approachability, and I asked her with, I fear, little finesse. She demurred—she was meeting with a new client—and I was reconciling myself to rejection’s stinging embrace, when she proposed dinner that night instead. I felt like the man at the car rental counter who has just been told his reserved Honda is sold out but there’s a Jaguar waiting for him instead. I recommended a favorite sushi spot nearby.

  She thrilled me as she entered the restaurant. Heads did turn, then and now. My Tracy commands a room, it’s not so much a gift as a birthright, that same ease I saw in my Hungarian campmates.

  My Tracy. Old habits.

  She was late, always late, I would learn, her internal clock set at a permanent forty-five-minute delay. Even when I used the time-honored technique of padding departure times, Tracy maintained the forty-five minute window without fail, some inner gyroscopic mechanism inexorably attuned behind time’s flow. But I would forgive her lateness the moment I laid eyes on her. Her casual attire was unvarying and simple—white blouse and slim jeans. The only deviation would be in her black boots: ankle-high to knee-high. She would have been at home in Silver Lake or Milan, but somehow she had landed here in this cramped, noisy sushi joint in Beverly Hills.

  Amid the black lacquered dishes, moist towelettes, and vintage sake, she was expansive, open, and I admired that, even as it terrified me. She told me stories that night; the sociology professor who made a pass at her; the married law partner who’d courted her; her hippie parents, who still lived in the same house where she’d been born in Sedona, her mother’s placenta buried beneath a tree in the yard. She received the salmon sashimi on her tongue as though taking a communion wafer. No rice, and only a dab of low-sodium soy. We learned that we both enjoyed billiards, though I would discover, at considerable personal expense, that she was deadly, far more accomplished than I. She found the stories I told about my father entertaining.

  We kissed that first night, drunk on sake, on the grassy median dividing Santa Monica Boulevard as the evening traffic whizzed by. It’s an odd place, I have come to see, for a kiss, and although it seemed spontaneous at the time—I simply reached out for her as we were crossing back to our cars, my finger latching onto her belt loop—I think there was something of an announcement to it. Look at me here, kissing this goddess in the middle of the boulevard! How far this Santos has come. Saying it to the world. To my father. My implacable audience of one.

  Tracy’s ringing phone interrupted my coastal reverie. I glanced at it, irritated, expecting to see Brian’s name in the caller ID again. I was wrong. It wasn’t Bettersea.

  Look, my Lord, it comes. It will not speak; then I will follow it.

  * * *

  I SAT IN THE PAR
KING LOT commandeered by the photo shoot, my heart racing, a steel taste filling my mouth as I scrolled through Tracy’s calls. The expected calls and texts from Brian were there, some ending with “xo,” which caused flickers of jealousy. But I blurred past those as I tallied the number of calls between Tracy and my father. Almost half a dozen. Most calls were brief, just ten minutes or so. But one was nearly an hour. I was certain he and I had not talked that much since I’d moved here.

  The shimmering ocean and the wide green umbrellas marking the location of the shoot had fallen away before me and I could see nothing but gray. I was livid but also terrified, mistrustful. What were these two up to? Why had neither of them told me they were talking? My father’s unscrupulousness was a given but Tracy had always been honest with me. All at once, I felt on the outside of something. I scooped up her BlackBerry and made my way toward the makeup station and craft services.

  The setup was modest, the Harvest Moon catalog falling several notches below Victoria’s Secret, and a few above JCPenney. But they had always been reliable employers, and over the years Tracy had become their cover model. A temporary makeup station had been set up on the edge of the parking lot, not much more than a director’s chair, a large mirror, and a card table scattered with a bewildering assortment of brushes and pencils and powdered colors. A bored stylist with magenta hair and a dozen facial piercings lounged in the chair, absorbed by her phone. Another table offered a spread of bagels, fruit, and cottage cheese. Coffee and bottled water were also provided. I opened a bottle, picked up a copy of the latest catalog from the table, and glanced over at a straw-haired woman in a pantsuit who was watching the shoot. Abby, the client rep. She noticed me and gave me a rabbity smile and a small wave. I nodded back as I flipped without interest through the catalog.

  Tracy was about a hundred yards down the beach, with Antoine, her usual photographer, and his two assistants, who held up light reflectors. I watched her as I had many times before, admiring her focus, her unshakable professionalism. She seemed blissful, serene, unselfconscious, at once present and miles away, within her own little bubble. I once asked her what she thought about when the camera was clicking away. Her answer was disappointingly prosaic—that she was considering the angles, the light, thinking about how to make the shoot look good. But she also admitted that, with intense photographers, the world would sometimes fall away and she’d find herself locked in this electric, private communication. Tracy and Antoine had a long, storied history. They’d been lovers early in her career, and so that intensity would sometimes show itself and, of course, it bothered me. But not today. Not even the unexpected appearance of my rival could sway me from my purpose.

  My rival. Would you listen to me?

  But it was then that I noticed him, standing midway between our little encampment and the photo shoot. He belonged back here with the rest of us but he had approached the zone of intimacy, the edge of the bubble. He looked out of place on the beach, wearing a tailored dark suit. In my fevered imaginings, I’d always pictured him six-foot-something, blond hair and blue eyes. To my chagrin, the bastard looked just as I’d envisioned. Immaculately coiffed, broad-shouldered, all he needed was a brown shirt and he could have been a recruiting poster for the Wehrmacht. Antoine lowered his camera—even his tattooed muscularity was diminished in comparison—and Tracy headed back to the makeup stand for a wardrobe change. Brian, it had to be Brian, could only be Brian, walked alongside her and I was struck by how appropriate they looked together, how right they seemed. They were so engrossed in their conversation that Tracy didn’t notice me until she was in her chair and saw my reflection in the mirror.

  “There you are!”

  She held her hand out. I gave her the BlackBerry and she kissed me. A kiss I drew out for Brian’s benefit. Her stylist cleared her bored throat. Tracy nodded in her direction.

  “Right. A lot to do.” I retreated and a blur of assistants touched and prodded her, handing her outfits, wiping at her face, brushing her hair. “Matt, this is Brian. Brian, Matt.” She picked up her next bathing suit and disappeared behind a temporary changing screen.

  “Nice to meet you, Matt,” Brian said, holding out his hand. I took it, shaking it as firmly as I could, squaring my shoulders to try to close some of the inches of height between us.

  “Same here. I hear a lot about you.”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Yeah, sorry about that. I guess it can get a little tedious if you’re not in the thick of it.”

  It was only the fact of a man’s life at stake that choked the riposte on my lips. I noted Abby, the client rep, listening to us with a slight frown. I suspected we were impeding the day’s progress.

  “Well, God’s work and all that,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said. He seemed, to my great consternation, quite decent—well mannered, respectful, even likable. Infected by my father’s suspicious nature, I was certain he had to be hiding something.

  Tracy emerged in a maroon one-piece open-backed swimsuit and sat in her chair.

  “All good?” she asked.

  There was a brief awkward silence. Neither Brian nor I knew what to say. The silence stretched on and I broke it, turning to the business at hand.

  “Tracy, I need to talk to you.”

  “Sure, what’s up?”

  “Alone.”

  She looked up at me. This was an unusual request.

  “Babe, we’re all kind of right in the middle of things here. Can we do this later?”

  I know how to deliver a line with consequence, and I did. “No. We can’t.”

  The seriousness in my voice did the trick because she asked the stylist to give us a minute. Magenta sighed with irritation and stepped away. I turned to face Brian, who hadn’t moved.

  “Alone.”

  “Oh, of course. I’m sorry.” He turned to Tracy. “I’ll be in my car, making some calls.” He touched her arm as he left.

  Tracy turned her attention to me.

  “That was rude.”

  “Does the vigorous defense of Ricky McCabe require him to touch you quite so much?”

  I saw a smile fight to stay off her lips. “Are you … jealous … of Brian?”

  “Of course not. Why the hell should I be jealous of a six-foot-two blond Superman?”

  She found it in herself to be patient with me, threading her arms around my waist. “He’s married. To an ex–Miss Universe or something. Has three gorgeous kids. He’s living the dream. All of which is immaterial because I’m not available. So what are we talking about?”

  What, indeed. The other suitor. The other man. The one I actually was jealous of. I took a steadying breath and asked her about the calls with my father. Her forbearance faded, replaced by something darker, sharper.

  “You looked at my phone?”

  “No! Well, sort of. Yes. I looked at your phone. I mean, not at first. I was in the car, it rang, I assumed it was Field Marshal Bettersea over there but then I saw it was my dad.”

  “Jesus, Matt. I can’t believe you looked at my phone.”

  “I never have before. I never needed to, never thought of it.” A half-truth, at best.

  “You only had to ask. I don’t have anything to hide from you.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. Until I saw, what, a half dozen calls with my dad in two weeks? What the fuck did you two talk about for an hour? An hour?” I trailed off: “He doesn’t like talking on the phone…”

  “Well, he likes talking to me.”

  We sat in a long moment of silence, stewing. Tracy appeared to be torn. Abby continued to watch us with consternation but maintained a respectful distance. Finally, Tracy spoke, much of the anger gone from her voice, though a coolness remained. “He asked me not to tell you. We weren’t talking about anything important, Matt. I should have told you. Most of the time I think he likes to hear me talk. He’s just … I don’t know, he’s just lonely.”

  The word echoed in the space between us.

  “Lonely,”
I repeated. “He’s lonely.” How dare she humanize the old bastard. “And the painting?”

  “He’s never brought it up.”

  “Never? Three million dollars and he’s never brought it up.”

  “No, Matt. Never. I mentioned it once and he didn’t want to talk about it.”

  I leaned against the table, trying to absorb all this new information. I couldn’t put it together. It made no sense.

  “So, he’s lonely … okay … so you just talk to him? For hours and hours?”

  She touched my arm as I’d seen Brian touch hers earlier. “Yeah. Because he’s your father, you dope. Now can I get back to work?”

  I nodded, dumbly, and she kissed my cheek and made her way back down to the beach, back to sinewy Antoine and his tats. Brian got out of his car and walked along beside her, showing her some paperwork. Abby came over and stood beside me, watching them, her nose twitching.

  “I don’t like that one, Matt,” she said. “I don’t like him one bit.” I wanted to hug her, though I would only later learn how I had misread that remark.

  As I watched Brian and Tracy recede toward the horizon, I felt ever more like that small, hunched figure on the edge of the Budapest Street Scene, all dark and furtive and leering, aside and apart from the action. Up to no good.

  IT WAS RACHEL’S IDEA to visit the Kálmán bathers in the Norton Simon collection. She thought it might give me a better feel for the artist and his work. We agreed to meet on Saturday at the museum, another resplendent Southern California morning, and I walked through the jasmine-scented air thrilled, like a young boy on a date, which I suppose in some fashion I was. Rachel was waiting for me at the entrance, tickets in hand. It was, it turned out, a celebration. A date had been set to hear our case. Rachel was giddy at the speed of our progress, which she assured me was unprecedented.

  “My treat,” she said, taking my offered arm as we headed toward the galleries.

  I took in the guards in each room, deflated, bored creatures. They were not in your league, Virgil, I can assure you. They were dilettantes without your sense of purpose, your barnacle-like scrutiny. I could, I think, have lifted a painting off the wall and they would have held the door for me. The crowds were no better than their chaperones, mostly retirees and students, the occasional couple, hands clasped. They all seem to read the information plaques before looking at the pictures, have you ever noticed that, Virgil? Oh, the place is pleasant enough, all marble floors, track lighting and oracular skylights. But there’s something slightly unnatural about it all, isn’t there? I watched a young man wearing a porkpie hat and a T-shirt for a band called the Kooks, as a young woman in tight jeans and spiked boots explained a sculpture to him. He nodded, the same dutiful nods glazed tour groups offer the docents who tell them what they should be noticing. Was he thinking about anything other than removing those jeans?