That’s a thing about police work. It shows you the most heinous human shit, and then comes at you with outright human farce. I didn’t even try not to laugh. I exploded in their faces. “Yeah, I know some guys, but it’s because I’m a cop,” I said, and watched their eyes go panic stations. I took mercy. “Look, I’m not going to bust you or do anything except tell you that, at this hour, in this neighborhood, if you try to buy drugs you’ll get fucked or worse. I’m just a guy, OK? Be safe. Go to Universal Studios. Try to meet Steven Spielberg. Enjoy the city.”
I’d seen tourists who’d got themselves killed in just this way. On a gurney down at the county coroner’s they still looked young and alive, in their new Gap jeans and with the laces in their sneakers the way they’d tied them that morning; then there was the bullet hole, the wound from the knife. It made me wonder about human stupidity or optimism. They assumed they could handle a dangerous situation without knowing the rules. Sometimes they were right, they could; but they always invited the chance of wrong day, wrong guy, and ending up in block capitals on the first page of a murder book. When I first came on the job it amazed me, some people’s unceasing quest to get themselves killed. Then a part of me came to see the modern world as a hospital — most citizens unwell. So the hucksters step forward to put us together with drugs, with therapy, with sundry other glues or slogans, but they can never quite smooth away our feeling that, at heart, a human being is self-destructive, that in the heart’s innermost recesses there’s a secret urge just to be done with it.
I lived by the ocean, in an apartment I’d bought too quickly for too much money, part of a new complex at the marina that looked as though it’d been built to house a bunch of voyeurs or robots. The complex consisted of four crescent-shaped buildings in white concrete. Grouped together, facing each other, they formed a broken circle. From any apartment, when the weather was fine, you could spy on a hundred others. Consequently, about half of the residents kept their drapes drawn tight while the rest of us tried not to look, and tried to ignore the music, the coughs, the flushes and gurglings, all evidence of human activity, as well as the weird echoes and emanations that came from within the buildings themselves.
At one time, during the boom years of the 1980s, the marina had threatened to be a new Westwood or Montana Avenue. Bronzed yuppies had invested at the top of the market, bringing with them their Jeeps, their weights, and the hissing cappuccino machines, which were another contribution to the concrete symphony. Now, following the crash, the neighborhood hadn’t exactly gone on a downward slide, but it was poised. From the front I saw the ocean, the boats that sailed on it, and the purple and pearly skies that rose like shells from the horizon at Sunset. The view from my bathroom, however, at the back, was of swamp left undrained, ill-omened real estate, above which a floodlit sign showed a smiling young couple with the hopeful message: BRIGHT HARBOR DEVELOPMENTS — THE FUTURE IS YOURS.
An aging Toyota, a car of the type Drew Diamond referred to as a Border Brothers Cadillac, was in the building forecourt with a Domino’s Pizza bucket upended on its aerial like a tawdry lantern. Outside my apartment, way up on eleventh, the delivery boy pounded at my door. Seeing me, he grinned with relief. He’d been thinking no delivery, no tip, or maybe even that he’d have to pay for all those pizzas himself. He was a little Latino kid in a rustling nylon tracksuit that dripped all over the carpet. I told him to come in and he stood leaking there too, so I gave him a towel to dry off a little.
I had a living room, a walk-through kitchen, which I rarely used, and two bedrooms, the second for when Lucy slept over. After a year or so, when it began to be apparent that her mother and I weren’t about to rush back into each other’s arms, she’d started to make her own room cozy. As for the rest of the place, the carpets were clean, the plants watered, the twin black-and-white sofas arranged at a perfect right angle, and I might have moved in yesterday. I’d been there ever since Ellen and I split, though the only evidence of this passage of time was the slow filling of a stripped-pine bookcase. I bought four or five new books each month, mostly philosophy or fiction, and underlined in pencil any passages I thought pertinent, a help in life. I’d bought the bookcase unfinished, and, since I’d never got around to painting it, the shelves were starting to warp. The meaning of those passages I’d marked never seemed so urgent or true when I went back to them a second time; indeed, I was beginning to doubt the consolations of philosophy in general. A cripple goes by wheeled by his buddy in a supermarket trolley or a little girl is murdered by a charmer who blows air kisses to the jury. After that, I’m supposed to read Bertrand Russell?
I said to the delivery guy, “How d’you dig LA?”
His face lit up and he said, “Oh, man, I love it,” and I could see that he did. This, for him, was still the land of opportunity. He was young enough to be able to enjoy the weight that the struggle to survive made against his heart. Actually he looked young enough to be still living with his mother, but if he did, it was most likely in a one-bedroom apartment in Mar Vista or the Culver City projects with his own wife or girlfriend and children. The Latinos were the only ones who still believed in family through thick or thin, and they worked, they were America’s new blood; you didn’t see these guys holding out Burger King cups on Santa Monica Boulevard. “Hey, bro,” I said. “How about you take two of these pizzas? Just remember me when you’re mayor, OK?”
A little puzzled, bobbing nervously on black suede trainers that oozed, he said thanks, tucked the pizzas into an insulated delivery bag of red plastic, jammed his baseball cap over his eyes, and moved into the night with a squelching saunter, leaving me with a brief and absurd feeling of elation, as if I could win myself a little piece of redemption by making successful connection with the sprawl of the city beyond the window, with at least some of the millions who came here, urged by ambition and drawn by its irresistible magnetic dream.
I checked my messages: only one, from my grandfather, asking me to call. He was sick, that old guy, but he was tough. He’d discharged himself from a VA hospital six months previously, saying he wanted to die at home, a process — I was happy to say — that looked like occurring no time soon. He lived surrounded by medals and weaponry in an aluminum-sided bungalow in Culver City. Heaven help the homeboy who tried to rob the place.
I opened my mail, a depressing train of bills and final notices, until I was derailed by a letter from Ellen’s attorney about the sale of the house on Nowita Place, detailing the division of this last asset of the marital spoils.
I think it was Voltaire who said that nothing in a marriage is ever settled. Marriage is never a completed state, he said, so even after the divorce I’d clung to the fact that the house was still in both our names. Now this last knot was about to be untied, or not even that — cut. She’d found a buyer. I’d known, telling myself this could all fall through. Now my signature was required on a piece of paper, and then our house would be gone, and so would she.
I splashed more whiskey into the glass. Ellen’s big plan about Seattle: for months now I’d been trying to tell myself that everything was all right, that I’d still be able to check in every day and see Lucy whenever I liked, that everything was the same as it had always been, at least since the separation — but Ellen was moving on. Agreeing with her that the two of them should go was like an appointment I’d made way in advance and had never quite expected to have to keep. Now I was kicking against the day immediately at hand. I called her.
“Billy,” she said, with quickly restrained exasperation. She was patient, a little sad, too used to this. “It’s three in the morning. Don’t you have to be in court in a few hours’ time?”
“I’m tired, I want out, I want us to get back together.”
“Oh, Billy.” She sighed. “No, you don’t. And you know we won’t.”