DOWN THE road now, on the other side of an overpass, Alexi saw blinking lights spelling out mo el. He pulled into the lot, grabbed their suitcases and led Benny to the lobby. It really wasn’t so bad. Moths flitted around a single bulb and the sofa was threadbare, but back issues of Time were fanned out attractively on the coffee table. There was an older woman behind the desk doing a crossword, and the radio was broadcasting a baseball game. Alexi paid his eight dollars and got the key and he and Benny walked back outside, around the rear of the lot and up the concrete steps to their third-floor room. It was carpeted and relatively clean. There were two single beds with a desert landscape framed between them, and he and his son put down their luggage and looked at each other.
“You want to play cards?” Alexi said.
“I’m not sure we know the same games.”
“You want to read, then?”
“I didn’t bring a book,” Benny said. “Do you want to read?”
Alexi shook his head. “Are you hungry?”
“Not really. Maybe a little.”
“Oh my God,” Alexi said. “It’s ten o’clock. I forgot about dinner.”
“It’s okay. We can eat tomorrow.”
“No,” Alexi said. “You wait here.”
He locked the door behind him and ran out to the thoroughfare. He could see his son watching from the window and wondered what he looked like from three stories above. There were car dealerships on either side of him but not a single restaurant, so he sprinted ahead to a filling station. He grabbed the first things he saw and brought them all to the register: two root beers, licorice, Hershey bars.
His stomach flipped just looking at the food, but when he returned to the motel and spilled the loot on the bed, Benny’s eyes bugged. “I never get root beer.”
Alexi couldn’t believe this was actually earning him points. “What’s your mom making these days?”
“Meat loaf, tuna casserole.”
“So she still has time to cook?”
“She does it on her day off, then freezes everything for the week.”
“She’s doing alright, then?”
“Yeah. Okay. Not great.”
Alexi could hear Katherine’s voice so clearly — even Benny’s intonation on that last word, as though her thoughts were being transmitted directly through their son. He’d spent the past year thinking about what he’d done, wishing he could fix it, knowing he couldn’t. Knowing, even, that he was capable of making it worse, of rubbing dirt in her wounds, like earlier that day outside the prison when he’d felt so nervous seeing her that Alexi realized now he hadn’t even thanked her for driving Benny up, probably taking time off work to do so. But it was only right then, sitting beside his son, that he understood, even without Katherine in the room, even with the Golden Gate Bridge between them, just how much he’d hurt her. And he knew it wasn’t just his arrest, or the affair with Julia Wexler. It was Katherine knowing that all her conversations, even the most painful, private ones, had been recorded. It was the shitty apartment in Palms. It was the fact, as she told him after his hearing in Washington, sitting together in the bar of the Sheraton Park Hotel, that he’d hidden this whole world from her. “The thing with Julia I can understand,” she’d said. “I hate it and it makes me want to run you both over, but at least it’s something I can wrap my head around. But you swore to me that working with a communist director didn’t mean you were getting caught up in that yourself. You kept a life from me, Alexi.”
And Alexi, at a loss, in a moment of desperation, feeling, for the first time, that the possibility of losing Katherine was so horribly real, had tried to reason that acting was his career, his livelihood, it was how he supported his family. That if she really thought about it, he’d simply been playing another part — and that was when Katherine had stood up, buttoned her coat and said, “You’re an idiot,” and left him sitting in the hotel bar.
Katherine Baker, one of the most politically mainstream people he’d ever met, one of the only people he’d ever known who had actually voted for Willkie. Katherine, from Burwell, Nebraska, who, when they first met, both in their early twenties and new to L.A., had told him he was the third Jew she’d ever talked to, and Alexi had found something sexy, even thrilling, in that admission, moving her hands jokingly through his hair to prove he didn’t have horns. Back then Alexi had been agentless, managerless, spending his days combing Backstage for casting calls — and even then, even when convinced of his own impending failure, he’d never doubted that things would pan out for Katherine. Right away she’d gotten a job as a receptionist at a furniture design studio, and though her dream wasn’t to answer phones but to be a designer herself, Alexi was certain the moment the company decided to hire a woman, Katherine would be the obvious choice. He used to love driving around with her, watching her point out things he’d passed a million times and never considered, how every lamppost, park bench, stop sign was someone’s aesthetic decision. He used to love, once they were married and living together in that bungalow off La Brea, walking out to their backyard and finding Katherine in a sleeveless shirt with a kerchief on her head, pulling apart some dilapidated chair she’d bought at a yard sale and stripping and reupholstering it herself, seeing potential for beauty in everything.
She was the one person he’d ever confided the whole Alexi-Alex-Alexi transformation to, and though she claimed she was impressed with him for coming up with it, Alexi knew, deep down, that she found the whole thing sort of silly. She found the whole industry silly: always asking how he could be so enthralled by people like Stella and Jack, who spent their weekends lounging by the pool, drinking expensive wine and discussing immigrants’ rights while one of their Mexican workers cleaned leaves from the filter. Katherine was, at her core, so inherently practical and stable and — Alexi found this stunning—happy, that he sometimes feared she didn’t really get him. His anxieties, while initially cute to her in an ethnic, anthropological sort of way, as if his tendency to expect the worst could actually be traced back to some pogrom, soon seemed to exhaust her. Her own parents, immigrants themselves, had suffered just as much, maybe more, than Alexi’s, coming from Norway to an equally harsh climate, the grocery they ran only recently recovering from the Depression, her father’s liver disease exacerbated by all those years he couldn’t afford a doctor.
That’s horrible, Alexi had said when she told him, when they were first together and swapping secrets late at night, more intimate, he had found, than the sex itself. Yeah, well, everybody’s fine now, she’d replied, as if there were nothing left to say. And he’d watched the reel of those difficult times flicker across her face for just a second longer before moving on to the next scene of her life story, where as girls she and her sister Ellen would fantasize about moving to California the first moment they could, and then — this was where Katherine’s voice went high and clear as a ballad — actually doing it.
Katherine was so skilled at blocking out the things she didn’t want to look at, and, only a few years into their marriage, she began telling Alexi that his worries seemed self-indulgent and overblown, as though he had the power to turn them off like a switch. Which was one of the reasons he found Julia Wexler so easy to be around. Another Jewish transplant from the outer boroughs, another person who vacillated between the highs and lows of fame and failure at an athletic, almost Olympic speed. Another person whose ambition was fueled by the same paranoia that whatever success she’d achieved could be rescinded at any moment — though in all truth, Alexi knew Julia, one of the only head female writers in the industry, had more to be worried about than he. Even Stella, whom he and Julia both respected, knew she was able to do more interesting work by leaving her name off the credits, giving her husband all the glory. And while Julia was smarter than anyone on the film — no one would argue that — she felt she needed to wear these tailored man-suits to fit in at studio meetings; to crack more jokes than any of the guys; sometimes, Alexi felt, taking the shtick a bit too far by lighting a cigar around the writers’ table. But even though, because they worked together, she had no idea about the Alex-Alexi thing, he knew, in his heart, that Julia would have understood that as well. The moment he saw her he felt like he was going home, that all his acts and defenses could be dropped, shrugged off as easily in the doorway of her bedroom as his jacket and shirt and slacks.