Obviously, I can’t join in. I’m as strong and supple as a pane of thin glass, I’ve got too many ailments — left shoulder, left elbow and left wrist, in fact the whole of the left arm — and I’m too old, but if I’d been here ten years earlier I would have joined in. I used to be able to reach up to a horizontal bar, hang there for a few seconds and then flip myself up and over it so that I’d end up either supporting myself with the bar at my waist or continue on over, so that I’d be back where I started. It’s not just that I used to be able to execute this little manoeuvre; I was always looking for opportunities to do so, especially if there were women around. The last time I managed it was in Goa in 2008. If I tried a stunt like that now I’d end up in a heap, like Dick Diver on the speedboat at the end of my favourite summer book, Tender Is the Night. So, when we leave and unlock our bikes to cycle back home, even though the experience of watching acro is always uplifting, I often feel somewhat cast down because I can’t do stuff like this anymore. I start to think how terrible it is that life is passing by so quickly, and, almost simultaneously, to think that I’m not sure I have the patience to sit through the rest of what life, with its gradually accumulating haul of ailments, injuries and infirmities, has to offer, however glorious it might be to be cycling — I can still do that — along the maddening bike path back to Venice in the ageless light.*
I wonder if Adorno watched the goings-on at Muscle Beach, if he stood with the other intellectual expats, transfixed by what a beautiful thing—schöne Sache—he was seeing through the muscular lenses of his spectacles: fleeting instants in which we catch a glimpse of a unified world, of a universe in which discontinuous realities are nonetheless somehow implicated with each other and intertwined so that there is momentarily effected a kind of reconciliation between the realm of matter and that of spirit. That’s not me, of course; it’s Freddy Jameson’s gloss on a passage from Philosophy of Modern Music, the writing of which probably meant that Teddy spent little time gawping at Muscle Beach, that he left his study at 316 South Kenter only reluctantly.
We were ready to leave in the sense that there seemed nothing else to notice when we noticed, through the window, a figure moving in the house, or in 318 at any rate. Jessica said we should knock on the door and speak to whoever it was. As we were climbing the steps, anxious that knocking on the door was somewhat intrusive, the door was opened by a young woman. Late twenties, wearing a singlet and sweat pants. She looked like she was about to go to a yoga or Pilates class even though she was only taking out the trash. We said hi, apologised for turning up like this, but she greeted us as warmly as if we had been invited for tea — and had shown up half an hour early, when she was still getting things ready. We were interested in someone who once lived here, I said. Theodor Adorno.
‘The writer? The philosopher?’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said.
She put down the trash and asked us in. It was a large apartment, dense with furniture, not at all contemporary-looking.
‘Sorry, it’s a little messy,’ she said. ‘I’m cleaning.’ It looked spotless.
‘No, not at all. We apologise for disturbing you. So this is your place?’
‘I’m a tenant. The landlords are, um, challenging.’
‘In what way?’ In the way that Adorno was challenging: the deliberately complex sentences, thought doubling back on itself and reaching forward, threatening to throttle the reader in an ever-tightening dialectical spiral? That was part of the attraction: the chance to prove that one was up to the challenge of reading Adorno, that one had earned the I’ve-read-Adorno badge in the way that a commando earns the green beret.
‘They don’t fix things.’
The door was still open; she forced it shut.
‘See? It’s little things like this, like the door not closing properly.’
‘And the real-estate person who rented it to you, did she sell it, in the sense of rent it, to you on the basis that Adorno lived here?’
‘No, she did not.’
‘And was it actually next door that he lived?’
‘I’ve lived here four years. I think there was a switch.’
She was not clear about when the house was divided in two. She thought maybe Adorno had divided it up, separating his living space from where he worked, but this seemed unlikely. That was the kind of home improvement Bert Lawrence might have undertaken, not Teddy Adorno. It was possible, she said, that the owners who lived next door at 316 might know more. We should knock on their door and ask them.
She tugged the faulty door open and picked up the trash, leaving us to look around. There was no sign of a lurking piano, no Adorno first editions or memorabilia. It was an unlikely place for a young woman to live on her own. I would have found it a bit depressing coming back here after a night out or even after a yoga class, knowing that whenever I wanted to go out again I’d have to clamber back into the waiting car, the second home that can end up being a first home. We stepped outside as she came back, thanked her for her time and help.
‘I must find out more,’ she said. ‘How do you spell “Adorno” again?’
I spelled it out and we said goodbye. There was no bell on the main door, the door to 316, so we had to rap on the wood assertively, like cops—‘Open up!’—come to check on German-speaking aliens. There was no answer. We had knocked hard, but it seemed possible that even if people were at home, sitting in a back room or upstairs, they might not have been able to hear us. This may have been deliberate, a response to having been disturbed too often in the past by unwanted pilgrims ringing the no-longer-there bell, asking about someone who no longer lived there.
We walked back to the car while other cars zoomed noisily by. Like so many other places in L.A., this was a place people drove past in order to get to some other place. We were people like that, people who had to get to some other place. I said at the outset that our pilgrimage wasn’t really a pilgrimage, especially if a pilgrimage has to be an end in itself. You can’t tag on a visit to Mecca at the end of a tour of the fleshpots of the Orient, but we had arranged our trip to South Kenter so that we could have coffee with Antoine Wilson, who also lives in Brentwood. Antoine is a novelist with a sideline as ‘the Slow Paparazzo,’ photographing spots where movie stars have sat, stood or walked minutes after they’ve left. It may look like an empty street with cars and parking meters, but Laura Dern had been here a short while before. The Hungry Cat is not just a restaurant (with the exit sign in bright green neon), it’s where Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner had just finished eating. Antoine works according to a tight set of rules. He can’t turn up after a friend has tipped him off about a sighting, he has to have been there and seen the celebrities himself. And he takes the picture within minutes of their having moved on.