Madame de Roche no more resembled her guests than she did her garden or her cats, which she also cared for with grace and understanding.
+ Reduce it to a performance a tale. Artificial but one way of salvaging a rough hour. That I might be a murderer. Eight die that I might live five minutes to tell a tale that happened to me to all of us for we all knew Goldsmith. Accusations of not turning him in; knowing his need for therapy which I did not; I did not. Begin the story before she arrives. She will ask for it to be repeated then. Hear it all. Longer in the spot glare.
Richard shivered. + Jesus. I am a peaceful man. Forgive me but I have earned this story.
He walked two steps at a stride up the wide stone stairway ignoring cracked concrete lions of another age imitating yet another age, into the deceptively Spanish portico entrance of the mansion.
In a white enameled wrought iron cage a fine large red and blue bird preened its feathers and blinked at him, one chafed claw showing silver. + New addition. Forty years antique and very valuable; real birds much cheaper. Macawnical.
The door knew him. With a polite nod to its heavy wood face, Richard entered and was absorbed into a great commonality of the untherapied. Fourteen of Madame de Roche’s faithful pooled around the stairs, their slippers padding or hard plastic soles tapping on the cool red granite floor: three young long-haired collegiate women admiring an early Shilbrage in an alcove; two tuxedoed men discussing sharp trade transactions in the shadows banks; a ring of four denimed poets admiring each other’s hand printed broadsides. Dressed their best except where philosophy demanded less they cradled drinks in mannered fingers and nodded as he passed; Richard was not senior, not this month. + Friends but would not lift a digit if I fell. Petronius would know them. Lord spare me they’re all I have or deserve.
In a chair away from this spreading pool sat Madame’s appointed favorite this month, Leslie Verdugo of ancient family, a lovely white haired wraith whom Richard had never addressed out of shyness perhaps but more probably because she smiled all the time, ether-seeing, and this did not attract him. Sitting across a glass topped occasional table from her was Geraldo Francisco a New Yorker who specialized in printmaking using ancient methods. Approaching them diffidently was Raymond Cathcart who called himself an ecologist and wrote poetry that occasionally stirred Richard but more often bored him. Breaking away from the poets to join this new attractor was Siobhan Edumbraga, an exotic female in speech and manner but clumsy in all physical acts and occasionally sharply rude, an innocent of no talents he could discern. She had made up her name; he did not know her real name.
Richard found his place in the ring of poets and leaned over them, somber eagle face and liquid gray eyes betraying no eagerness, biding patiently. News of some late progressive insult to the arts nano or another outraging medium compelled them all to laugh, full of hate and envy. Resources of the combs made them look like children playing with Plasticine. They were individualists and they cherished their untherapied dishonesties or skewed perceptions; they thought natural blemishes necessary to art. Richard shared this belief but did not take it seriously. There was after all the majesty of accomplishment in the combs compared to a clutch of illmannered broadsides in the sweaty hands of low poets. + To love one’s self is to be therapied. Self-hatred is freedom.
“Richard’s not often so late in line,” said Nadine coming out of nowhere outside the circle and behind him, dressed in red. Nadine Preston was his age but only recently escaped by messy divorce from the privileges of the combs. Her smooth face and black hair wreathed a lovely child’s smile. He saw her slender body in flash memory. Sweet three quarters and one quarter mascaraed harpy. When sweet she was his last sexual solace, but Richard did not stay for her tantrums.
“I have had an adventure,” he said softly, gray eyebrows raised.
“Oh?” Nadine urged but the ring was not having it; their conversation rivered on.
+ Was this Nemesis, come to balance my books? Good line.
“Emanuel Goldsmith is missing,” he said deep voice still soft but clearly audible. “He is being sought by the LAPD.”
The poets turned their heads. He had seconds to hook them fast. “The public defenders spoke with me about him,” Richard said. “Eight people were murdered two nights ago. I came to Emanuel’s apartment in the third foot of East Comb One. The lift was blocked and pd were there and all manner of arbeiters. The room was being frozen. The most stunning—”
Madame de Roche came down the stairs in a quick saintly glide, blue chiffon trailing, red hair gentle on her shoulders. Richard paused and smiled showing his large uneven teeth.
“Such a lovely group,” she greeted, beaming. Without apparent discrimination she fixed her faithful with sapphire eyes wrapped in naturally acquired wrinkles in that motherly face, features arranged to show good humor and loving sympathy though she did not actually smile. “Always a pleasure. Pardon my lateness. Do go on.”
Nadine said, “Richard has been at the scene of a crime.”
“Really?” Madame de Roche said at the bottom, ivory hand on ebony wooden ball. Leslie Verdugo joined her and Madame beamed briefly on her then turned all attention to Richard.
“I was interrogated by the most stunning woman a pd in uniform, black as jet but not negroid. I think at first she wanted to accuse me of the crime, or at least of public recklessness for not turning Emanuel in. I wondered: was this Nemesis, come to balance my books?”
“Do start again,” Madame de Roche said. “I believe I’ve missed something.”
No pain, no gain. World’s a rough. All we learn comes of our own sharp go. We torment each other. Race is like acid in a tight metal groove; we etch. Hope?
3
In a lost time of myth the coast of southern California had been littoral brown and dusty desert populated by Indians Spaniards mestizos scrub and ancient twisted pines. Now from twenty kilometers below Big Sur to the tip of Baja it was a rambling ribbon of community linked by slaveways, fed by desalting plants and mountain melts gathered from as far as Canada, punctuated by the towers of Santa Barbara the immense diurnal mirrored combs of Los Angeles centipede segments of South Coast monuments and the sprawling rounded ceramic arches and spires of San Diego. Nestled between the desalting and fusion plants of San Onofre and San Diego, like islands in this coastal and inland battle of titans lurked the groundling enclaves of La Jolla and Del Mar, blanketed in shabby gentility and celebrated memory of years past.
Flanking the sprawl of the University of California at San Diego, these cities boasted hundreds of thousands of atavists who wished to live lives of past simplicity. The once ubiquitous doctors and lawyers and heads of corporations had decades before abandoned their beachside palaces to move into the central luxuries of the monuments; outmoded academics and scholars took their place.
Her Professor Doctor Martin Burke, O.V.F. & I.—Once Very Famous and Influential—had recently left the monuments and the bosom of highrise society to slum in the flatlands. He had found himself an old not ruinously expensive apartment in the inland hills of La Jolla and here he sat with barely enough energy to answer his chiming phone, trying to raise some enthusiasm for a scheduled public broadcast of the latest LitVid 21 AXIS report, history in the making.
He turned down the sound on the floating head and shoulders of an announcer and reached out on the third chime to make sure the phone’s vid was off. Then he said, “I’ll take it.” The phone opened a connection. “Hello.” Martin’s voice was hoarse and phlegmy. He sounded sixty; he had just earned forty five.