‘When are you coming back?’
‘Oh, I have no idea, angel. For the time being I’m just taking things as they come. I’m sitting on my balcony now, in the sun. The first few days were very gray and somber, but the weather’s been beautiful lately. Maybe someday we can live here, I think you’d find it very special too. Of course, it’s still America, but. .’
A little later, after we’d hung up, I realized she had not answered the essential questions: where she was exactly, and what she was doing there. I thumbed back to calls received and punched the last number. A woman’s voice, with the enthusiasm of good news.
‘Loews Hotel, can I help you?’
I hung up and looked around the canteen. The windows were steamy, the walls seemed to bulge a bit from all the light and life inside there.
I tore my eyes off it, turned and walked towards the lighted edge of the village in the distance.
‘THE GREATEST COMEBACK
IN THE HISTORY OF PORN’
The triumph of that first journey! As though you were piloting the aircraft yourself and setting it down, light as a feather, on the black sheet of tarmac! A little later, carrying my old suitcase, I walked out the sliding glass doors and into the world. I had drawn dollars from the ATM in the arrivals hall, the banknotes called me a man of the world. Fully confident, one strolls through the screen version of one’s own life, no one can see your heart pounding like a puppy’s. Look at him climb into that taxi, the casual air of authority, a man who has pulled so many cab doors closed behind him and says, ‘Loews Hotel, please.’
The cab driver turns around.
‘Hotel what?’
‘Loews.’
The irony tugging at your lips shows him his proper place.
‘Where’s that, man? The Lois Hotel? Never heard of it.’
Well then, if this poor immigrant lives in such dark ignorance you’ll have to help out a little, serve as his missionary, a lamp unto his feet. You spell out the name of the hotel for him and lean back; now everything will go according to plan. But the man doesn’t know when to quit. Now he wants to know where it is, this Loews thing of yours. Suddenly you lose your composure, it shatters into a thousand pieces; he’s the driver, I tell him, but if he doesn’t know anything I’m perfectly willing to take the wheel. His indifference is like bedrock, he doesn’t even seem to have picked up on my slur. Los Angeles, he explains to me, is a multiplicity of towns: Beverly Hills, Compton, Venice, Santa Monica, Palisades. . And I have to listen to all this. I fall back in my seat and mumble Santa Monica. The taxi moves away from the airport, into dissolving sunlight. The afternoon is drawing to a close, the glory is a lie, the bitter taste in your mouth at the end of the binge.
The streets had something distinctly shabby about them. Sometimes in the distance you could see a bundle of skyscrapers, all in a clump, as though smelted together by thermonuclear heat. I looked at the screen on my cell phone, which didn’t work in these parts. The road beneath the cab rolled by in slow waves. Palm trees stood in blunt silhouette against the turquoise billboard of sky. Big black cars slid by, introverted chunks of steel with darkened windows. I lacked all curiosity about the life inside them. Between the houses I sometimes caught a glimpse of the ocean.
‘This must be it,’ the driver said at last.
I said nothing, simply handed him the fare from the backseat. There were long, drawn-out limos at the entrance and men in weird tailcoats. Once inside, the enormous space of the atrium came crashing down on me. I made my way between rows of life-sized artificial palms, a cathedral of light and openness, past the reception desk. Through the huge glass panels at the end of the colonnade you could see the quiet ocean. My tattered cardboard suitcase marked me as an intruder; ducking into the lounge, I tucked it away between the little table and the easy chair. A waitress served me a Budweiser and slipped the bill under the bowl of pretzels. When she left, I glanced at it. Eight dollars for a beer. Ten beers and I’d be broke. I was impressed. Never had I drunk anything so expensive. At the Loews, the balance between price and performance had vanished completely, the hotel was a discreet piece of machinery designed to shake as much money as quickly as possible from its guests’ pockets. The guests didn’t care much. The bronzed floozies in their gold slippers, the noisy middle-aged men with barrel chests and spindly legs, the elderly couples with failing bodily functions but a portfolio full of reduced-risk investments; the price of things was an abstraction on the statement from the credit-card company.
I had hoped to catch my mother at something, perhaps merely to catch a glimpse of her life without me, but after an hour I went to the reception to ask for her room number. A young man tore himself away from the crowd loitering behind the desk, his smile broad, his cordiality obscene. Mrs. Unger was not in her room. I went back to the bar. My chair had been taken, so I settled down beneath a giant TV screen showing a silent basketball game. Suddenly I felt nothing but disgust for Loews, this temple of whores and hucksters. The window dressing of the lie.
‘Ludwig!’
I looked up. The tight iron band of my thoughts pressed against my eyelids.
‘Ludwig, where on earth did you come from? How did you ever find this place?’
‘Vade retro.’
‘Who’s that?’ asked the man she was with.
‘Ludwig, darling, what happened to you?’
‘I came to see how you were doing,’ I say then.
She shakes her head. I see that she’s thinking about becoming annoyed, saying that it was stupid of me to come here, but you don’t say things like that to someone who has traveled halfway around the world for you.
‘Could I ask. .’ the man says.
She turns and looks at him, scowling in irritation.
‘This is my son,’ she says.
Her finger approaches the sutures on my brow, she tries to touch them but I turn my head away.
‘What have you got there, what is that?’
‘Ah,’ the man says, ‘so that’s it. How you doin’, Ludwig?’
His eyes shift from me to the game going on above me.
‘Say hello to Rollo.’
‘Hello, Rollo.’
‘Hello, Ludwig.’
‘Okay, but who’s this Rollo Liban?’ I shouted to her a little later, from the bathroom.
I was sitting on the toilet, but conversation remained a possibility. The bathroom was filled with the smell of her body, the perfumes with which she tried to mask it; lotions, oils.
‘An old friend,’ said the voice from behind the door.
‘What kind of friend?’
‘A friend-friend, never anything more than that. Perish the thought.’
‘So where did you meet him?’
‘Listen, grand inquisitor. .’
The smell was an intimacy, you inhaled someone. To smell her, the maternal scent, made me nauseous.
When I closed the bathroom door, the humming of the ventilation stopped. She was standing at the window. Below was the silent swimming pool. A flat, blue stone. A thin fog had moved in, along with the dusk.
‘Why don’t we take a little walk?’ she said. ‘The pier is lovely.’
In the distance I could see the Ferris wheel on the pier, bathed in shimmering light.
‘You can have your name written on a grain of rice.’
‘I’m not a little boy anymore.’
‘I know that, darling.’
‘You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.’