“Come to bed,” Ray had said, worried. “Wrap me in your lovely arms.”
Her skin under the badly buttoned clothes glowed. Her eyes had a luster.
Ray recalled that look. Postcoital. He knew instantly. He stepped back from her.
She didn’t notice. “Okay, sweetie,” she said, needing transition time, grabbing a towel from the linen cupboard, running toward the bathroom. “Just let me take off the day’s grime.”
So, for ever after, he would think of Martin Horner as the day’s grime.
“No effect on our marriage, huh?”
For the first time that afternoon, Martin really looked at Ray. “That’s the last time we got together. I swear it.”
So, they went to the movies together, not just to creepy motels. The idea of them sharing such casual intimacy crushed Ray. “What did Leigh say?”
“About?”
“The future. Ours.”
Martin sucked unhappily on his wine. “She doesn’t like talking about you, okay? But this one time, she was crying. She broke down, said you’d changed lately. Got cold on her. Scared her sometimes, because you always seem angry lately.”
“You fucking asshole. You’re a bad friend, an unfaithful husband, an absent father, a lousy architect. I ought to walk out of here and never come back.”
“Oh, hey, Ray, no.” Martin looked around as if seeking a miraculous solution to his problem. “I screwed up, okay? I’m truly disgusted with myself. I took advantage of her when she was down and I-betrayed a friend. It’s unforgivable. Yes! But this is business, Ray! This is not about the sorry state of your marriage. This is important!”
Ray stood up to go. Now truly alarmed, Martin grabbed for his arm. “You’re overreacting! We’ve got legal obligations here, Ray! Clients I sold on you!”
Ray clenched his jaw, took his right fist and hurled it, enjoying the crack it made on contact with Martin’s chin, although it hurt his hand more than he could have dreamed. He might have actually broken bones. He stared at his hand, wondering if he had.
Martin staggered back. “You think you’re some big creative designer?” he shouted, rubbing his chin, eyes watering. “Let me tell you how it is, Ray. I sell product. You produce it. You’re a fucking technician. I’ve watched you for years stealing left and right from every genius who ever designed a building before. You’re a great mimic but that’s it. Ten years from now, I guarantee you, nobody’s going to be saying breathlessly, ‘Oh, there’s a Ray Jackson building.’ They’ll be saying, ‘Oh, after Louis Kahn. After I. M. Pei. After Frank Gehry or Michael Graves.’ After ever after.”
“To hell with you. Die, Martin.”
“You’re the one who’s dead! That’s just what she told me after we made love. Twice! I took her from the rear!” Martin shouted. Ray walked out into the hallway.
Where big-eyed Suzanne, holding a handful of letters, gulped. “I stayed in to finish his letters, Ray,” she said. “He told me to show some initiative or start looking for another job.”
Martin now stood in the doorway, still breathing hard. “Leigh told me she was afraid you followed her,” he said to Ray’s back as Ray walked toward his office. “I laughed it off. Called her paranoid.”
5
B ack in his office, door closed to the world, Ray gathered up the museum plans, breathing hard. Maybe he was having a heart attack, and his hand was puffing up.
His life was falling around him. First Leigh, and now his work, his refuge. Recalling Martin’s graphic sexual imagery, Ray shivered, thinking that Leigh was so unhappy she had let Martin-let him-damn Martin! And damn her!
Glad he had lied about having to leave early for a meeting, he tidied his desk quickly, stowing his current projects in one of the enormous flat drawers that held dozens more. Martin’s words replayed through his mind. They had gone to the movies like teenagers!
Oh, Martin was good, had slashed at him so accurately with words that were only now starting to bleed inside him. “Mimic” in particular, that hit hard. Ray wasn’t thinking so much about himself as an architect when he replayed the word. He thought about himself as a man.
He went to his window, the one he had sacrificed so much for. Every unhappy adult probably started off as an unhappy child. He must have had happy times. Esmé swore he did. What he remembered instead was taking one step forward and getting yanked back two steps, painfully. He would be a different person now, the man who could have held on to his wife if he hadn’t been ripped out of the soil over and over when he was young, until he’d lost track of who he was and where he was, rolled himself up like a bad set of blueprints, and stopped growing.
He closed the blinds and flipped off the light, trying to calm himself. Maybe Leigh and his mother had the definitive line on him: he had an unhealthy obsession with the past. Maybe he needed a good shrink to unload on for the next fifty years to work things out, inching toward a wholeness in minuscule increments.
He couldn’t wait for that.
Closing the door to his office behind him, he told Suzanne he would not be back. If she wondered why he wouldn’t be back, she didn’t say, keeping her head down over her desk, avoiding his eyes.
Martin, like any sneaking skunk, had slipped off to some dark place.
Ray was splintering. Nothing held him together anymore.
In the parking lot below the building, he ran his hand along the hood of Martin’s Ferrari, admiring the amazing custom paint job, duotone black and blue, so swank the vehicle could be framed and hung on a wall as art. These designers shaped cars like jungle predators, tight-haunched and ready to pounce. Martin kept his baby spotless.
Ray looked around; he was alone for the moment. He took a key from the immense collection in his pocket, choosing one that was particularly exotic and jagged, and then he ran it hard along the driver’s door, feeling a puerile burst of joy at the sight and sound of such destruction. It left an ugly metal scar, deep. Martin, with two children, a house in Brentwood, a beautiful wife, and many affairs under his belt, ought to appreciate the moronic gesture, since Martin frequently behaved moronically.
Ray’s own sleek Porsche welcomed him inside, its pleasant cool air blowing around his legs and over his overheated face. He opened the glove compartment; yes, the keys from his childhood were nestled there like old friends. Real friends, sheltering friends. His hand flexed okay, no broken fingers. Martin hadn’t even fallen down. The anger that had propelled the blow had been so powerful it was remarkable that the blow hadn’t sent Martin sailing through the window.
Ray drove through the dense maze of Los Angeles, along several freeways for forty-five minutes to reach the first address on his list. Ten keys on the ring gave him no indication which key fit what house, but he did have a certainty that each one meant something.
Norwalk, Bombardier Avenue. The name must have derived from World War II, he decided, plodding up the stark, hot sidewalk. Strange thing to name a street. The Santa Ana winds had been blowing for days, and today the wind blasted furiously and randomly, crazy-making, pricking at his skin, insinuating itself, burrowing disturbingly underneath like unclean parasites. He forged on, wiping dirt from his eyes, excited and fearful at the same time.
The block seemed deserted. The residents marched out to their cars at seven-thirty and drove through heavy traffic to office parks, where they would attempt to be productive. Then they drove home through heavy traffic to watch the hypnotic blue-lit object in the living room, where they attempted to forget their efforts of the day. The routine hadn’t changed since Ray was a kid. He looked at swing sets in the identical backyards, the scorched plots of grass in front, paint peeling along the gutters, roofs patched, an indescribable decrepitude in a place that must have seemed hopeful fifty years before.