California time, p.1
California Time, page 1
Frederic Raphael
California Time
Kavafy
(Penguin Book of Greek Verse
Poem 334, line 1 of second stanza)
Contents
California Time
A Note on the Author
California Time
It will be remembered that during his transatlantic flight Victor England watches a Western. The camera, panning the prospect, discovers a panning prospector. He shakes his sieve and there is the gleam of pay-dirt. He stops, stoops and picks out the gold on his palm. He looks round nervously. In the West, they collect percentages with a gun.
Now he is riding across desert. He enters a canyon at sunset and halts to make a fire and get some rest. He rolls himself in a blanket and lies down.
It is night. The ears of the prospector’s horse prick exclamation-marks against the moonlight. Two men are silhouetted at the mouth of the canyon. The bed-roll lies still. The two men converge and, on the nod, fire point-blank into the blanket. No red design badges the serape. They frown; and as they frown, shots flash from behind a boulder at the edge of the canyon. The prospector has taken advantage of the cut between sunset and moonrise to light out and leave a bundle of cactus to hide its toes under the blanket. One of the gunmen has indigestion from a bullet. The other dives headlong into rubber rocks and begins a duel with the prospector, whose billing promises victory. Who is paid ten per cent of the gross to get shot in the first reel?
The gunman (close-up of narrowed eyes) tries a subterfuge. He cries out as if he too has been nickel-nicked. The prospector’s hat rises, bold above the boulder, and the gunman rises too and does not miss; the crown is his, but only a hollow crown; the hat contains no head. Subterfuge has been met with subterfuge and, as the gunman holes the hat, the prospector holes the gunman.
Unscathed, the prospector steps out and climbs down his long shadow towards the two leaking gunmen. He uncorks his water-bottle and takes a cool swig. Killing dehydrates a man. Imploring eyes watch him from the stained sand. The prospector holds out the bottle to one of the dying men.
‘If you think you’ve got time.’
The gunman reaches up, stiffens and falls back. The prospector, recognizing a losing streak when he sees one, sticks his thumb through his drilled hat and shakes his insured head: ‘Rough.’
Victor England keeps his head-set to his ears, but he alters the channel from time to time (as he does his wristwatch, from Greenwich to California) and so enjoys Tombstone’s banjo band in a performance of the Choral Symphony and the corrupt judge speaking in the tones of the editorial staff of a News Weekly. His eyelids droop. The head-set falls from his ears and its thin arms caw and claw feebly, like an unfleshed lobster, at his neck.
At the airport, Victor is met by Praz, the Studio greeter. Due to a strike of handlers, he has had to carry his own luggage from under the plane, where a rectilinear mountain of suitcases has dwindled to a single moleskin molehill before his angry eyes. One of his cases is missing. An airline functionary comes up to him and points to the only remaining case.
‘Has to be yours,’ said the Passenger’s Friend, who was paid for a forty-hour smile.
‘That’s no bag of mine,’ Victor England said. ‘Mine all went through in London and now one’s missing. Where is it?’
‘You’re saying this isn’t it?’
Victor England, saying nothing, said just that.
‘Maybe you can trace yours on an exchange basis, sir.’
‘My name is Victor England,’ Victor England said.
‘I’ll tell you what, Mr England,’ said the Passenger’s Friend, ‘leave it with me.’
‘And when you find it, you can leave it with me.’
‘All I ask is – don’t allow a little thing like this to affect your travelling pleasure. If you have any kind of a problem, just come to me.’
‘I will, and I have, and here I am.’
‘Absolutely,’ said the Passenger’s Friend. His name was Dwight D. Hernandez and he was there to be shot at: his name was on a target pinned over his heart.
*
Praz tells Victor, as they take short cuts through the canyons, that he managed to smooth the way through customs with a few folded greenies – ‘That’s the kind of mail everybody still likes to get’ – and Victor, agreeably displeased, touches his wallet. Praz seems, at this stage, to be the incarnation of the reliable old Studio servant. He has escorted all the great stars in their time and he continues to live in the light of what may be extinct but still shines if you know which channel to choose. He has the pensionable agelessness of an elderly boy who has been doing the same job for longer than anyone can remember. Whatever his servile insolence, he seems far from the blue-chinned heavy at whose description gum-chewing Jack McLeish, Captain of Detectives, sucks in his peepermint cheeks. Yet already, before the limousine arrives at the hotel, pointing his loaded questions at every hold-up, he shows indications of becoming a garrulous menace.
‘Did you know Mr Carnap, Mr England, when he was on the Coast?’
‘This used to be an Italian restaurant,’ Victor England said.
‘Because I was in Europe in the Fall and I saw Mr Carnap. I guess you must know him in London.’
‘Frascati,’ Victor England said, ‘wasn’t that the name?’
‘I was in London. I was in Paris. Do you know Geneva, Mr England? Because I was in Geneva. Mr Carnap drove me personally round London. Now there’s a real gentleman. The Tower of London, Windsor Palace, Hampton Court. Only one city in the world cleaner than Geneva for my money and that’s Disneyland. But London gets my vote in the end, I don’t care what they say. Isn’t that some city? I was kind of impressed with Munich, if you know Munich.’
‘I don’t know Munich,’ Victor England said.
‘If you like a cold beer,’ Praz said.
They have to stop at a green light when a motorcycle cop flags them down. Praz slides his head out from under the metal shell of the limousine, tortoise wrinkles on his marine neck, and wants to know what gives, officer. The cop digs his spur in the road and answers with a thumb: an arrowhead of his colleagues is coming down the eleven-hundred block, yellow eyes blinking at the ends of their handlebars, jaundiced escort for a cortège in which veiled fame is travelling.
‘Looks like the big funeral,’ Praz said, ‘and I know some people who’re going to be pretty sore when they hear about this.’
‘I wonder what they did with Frascati,’ Victor England said.
‘The last bunch of mourners went to see a big-shot nailed down, they didn’t get no escort, and that included some considerable stock-holders in this town. They had to contend with a nose-to-tail situation on the freeway coming home, didn’t make the opening that night till it was closing. Are there going to be some questions!’
‘How about if we backed up?’
‘Officer, tell me something,’ Praz called out. ‘What kind of a cadaver do you have to be in this town before you can make a right?’
The cop fanned Praz down till he was three feet six inches high.
‘How about if we backed up?’ Victor England said.
‘I’ll tell you what they did with Frascati, Mr England,’ Praz said. ‘They buried him and built a bank on top of him. Who argues with the right price on his head?’ Praz leaned out again. ‘Because I want to get Mr England to his hotel,’ he told the cop. The cop shrugged. What did England mean to him?
When Victor first goes into the hotel, there is a girl sitting in the lobby, near a potted plant with black, fleshy leaves.
It was difficult to be sure of her age or status. Was she waiting for her big chance to become a chambermaid or was she a young actress resigned to a lifetime of stardom? She wore a long cotton dress and blood-brown ox-hide boots. The reddish material of her costume so closely matched the watered silk of the wall-covering that, for a moment, frowning from the sunshine, Victor England misread the lobby for empty. Until he blinked her into focus, she might have been a ghost designed by a clever young man. In the place of her eyes, egg-shaped sunglasses previewed the scene: two elevators and two entrance-ways alternated there. For an instant, Victor England saw a pair of himself in her yoked glance.
The girl’s mirrored lenses pan him across the lobby and up to the Reception Desk, where we now discover that he can write equally well with either hand. The two signatures are entirely different, however, and the one he offers first does not tally with his credit card.
‘Can there be another Mr England?’ the clerk asks.
‘Yes, of course,’ he replies, and then obliges with his other hand.
Meanwhile, he thinks of going up to the girl. A pressure urges him towards her; it reminds him of the leaned weight of the crew behind a dolly, pending the cue to move. Should he offer her help? Why should he, he wonders, when she has done him no harm? She waits, expressionless, electrically silent, like one of those modern clocks for whose tick one can spend a lifetime listening. She prompts some emotion in him, but he cannot say what it is. Gentleness, greed, desire, contempt?
She reminded him cruelly, because prematurely, with the remote and officious punctuality of an alarm call, of the old days. That look of docility guarded by ambition, he had seen it on a thousand girls and more, girls capable of warmth and sincerity and passion and loyalty, but capable also of shrillness, malice, frigidity and love. When they were grateful, you bought and sold them; when they were spiteful, you desired and indulged them and not infrequently you married them. He had seen a thousand such girls
Her transparent youth, flawed only by a shred of innocence as blanched as a hangnail, offers him a window on the past. Hecan see into a world he has assumed to be lost. If she appears to look through him, he can also look through her; each offers the other a kind of access, but for the moment their presents do not coincide. They are not living in the same time, nor celebrating the same feast. Is that why he finds that he cannot, for all the weight of inclination, go up to her?
Instead he turned and shared her vision. A silver screen of light hung over the entrance to the lobby. It shimmered like the molten mouth of an oven. People and cars, mute and heat-steeped, swam past, undulating flatly, specimens on a life-size slide. Victor England, tactful as treachery (he had seen it before), smiled at the same plot as the girl, and that was as much as he could do.
His luggage is now seen entering on a low trolley hauled by a grey bellboy with all the crouching solicitude of an ambulance man with a blue-cross basket case. The stiff suitcases are covered with flowers like stylized coffins embossed with floral tributes. A meticulous murderer might be transporting his victims en terrine. Victor goes out into the white afternoon to remind Praz to drive straight back to the airport and check on the missing bag. He finds himself passing dollar after dollar through the slot which Praz has pressed open at the top of his blue window. The greeter seems to have turned into a teller who will never tell without money in his hand. His chin has taken on the rounded, gun-metal form of a pre-war sedan. Victor feels that Praz has access to an underworld where his case has been cached and which cash alone can unlock. Praz does not even tear off a promise as a receipt for the money. Victor’s apprehensions are to prove justified. He never sees Praz again. When McLeish checks with the Studio, no one there has ever heard of him, ‘Don’t worry,’ says the detective, ‘it’s probably because he’s been there so much longer than anybody else.’ Victor England watches the car down the dry slipway and into the stream of traffic and then he returns to the lobby.
He did not look for her, but there was no sign of the girl. He frowned at the place where she had been sitting and found that the mere chair, every line of it warped to please, like a courtier of the Louis it aped, aroused in him the same questionable emotion as had the girl herself.
Her absence is a positive feature of the lobby. He goes up to her chair and plants his clean sole on the velvet seat, above gilded buds that will never know summer, and tightens tight laces. He is about to collect his key when he spies the girl’s basket tucked in a recess behind the spotted plant.
She could only just have abandoned it, for as he watched, it creaked and slumped forward, like an ungirdled stomach. Could it be that she had left her hands in it, those blunt-fingered hands which, when he reminded himself, he could see writhing on the burnt-sugar handles of her basket? Were they comforting each other, like papless puppies, in the bottom of the fibrous basket?
Why should Victor England have such a fantasy of mutilation? Are the girl’s hands memorable for their bluntness or detestable because of it? Meanwhile Victor’s own hand is poised to sign the register, a deckle-edged volume as heavy as the book of the dead. The owner of the hotel has come down specially to greet the distinguished director (as he is described on the secret list which the clerk allows everyone to see) and stands watching while Victor’s left hand undertakes the assignment. The owner’s name is Verdugo and he lives at the very top; Verdugo is, of course, the Spanish for executioner.
*
‘Mr England, sir, what a pleasure! What a privilege!’
‘Hullo, Ramon. How are you, Ramon?’
‘Very well, Mr England. Older, but very well.’
‘We’re all older, Ramon.’
‘Not you, Mr England, not you. All these years, you never age at all. I want the secret some day.’
‘No secret. I started early.’
‘And you never stopped. That’s the secret. You’ve seen our alterations? Nothing is too good for our friends. I have a new chef. He cooks everything you shouldn’t have better than anyone else in the world. So, things are better.’
‘Promise?’ Victor England said.
‘Promise. We had a whole bunch of people in the restaurant, in the Bonne Auberge, last night. Young, optimistic, go-ahead – they’ve got plans, they’ve got ideas –’
‘Any messages?’ Victor England said.
‘Upstairs.’ Verdugo pressed the elevator button.
‘Everybody still have to wear a tie?’ Victor wanted to know.
‘In the Bonne Auberge? Of course. Absolutely. As long as I’m alive. As long as La Mission belongs to me.’
Ramon Verdugo had, at that moment, the face of a president-in-exile. He wore the dented dignity of those who have come to power by the sword and have been docked of it by the pen. There were rumours, and they hummed in the silent air like unscreened flies, that the extensions had proved more expensive than Ramon’s hand-stitched pocket could afford. He had begun his career by being rewardingly involved in a racket, in another state and a lifetime earlier. It had been a complex business, as such businesses had better be, and nothing was ever proved against any angel who had wings broad enough for flight. (Only the small were fried.) Verdugo, so a ribbing columnist once said in the Rib Room, had been in it up to his ears: ‘Only luckily for him he had more hair in those days. He pulled himself out by his top-knot. And what’s more, nothing fell out of his pockets while he was doing it. You don’t start La Missy-own with a ten cent pack of seeds.’ One of the T-bones on the griddle spat in the columnist’s eye and he had to go home winking.
Now Verdugo stood, in black coat and striped trousers, and watched the one-handed elevator clock that told the storeys. He liked formality and he liked to impose it. He kept a spare cravat, already looped, under the Maître d’s lectern and he had been known to tighten the knot himself on a recalcitrant celebrity who banked on privilege. His employees dared a less formal style. A bearded black man, with ACME across his T-chest, was hauling a stertorous vacuum-cleaner back and forth over some new carpet like some blind and legless pet.
‘We also have a new pool,’ Verdugo said, ‘with waves. Special waves.’
‘Special waves, special trouble,’ Victor England said.
The elevator opens and four laughing people are disclosed. One of them is a woman. She is in the midst of a loud, particularly brazen laugh, the sort of bar-room bark which might once have apologized for itself by turning into a cough. Her vulgarity is redeemed, or compounded, by a pair of matchless eyes, fresh from the strong-box, which can belong only to one of those great names which have been criticized so much that they are beyond praise. The three men jostle for the position nearest to their Princess, jowled babies touching base. Even the least favoured (he had been closest in the night) manages to keep a finger on her arm, as a reader might keep a place in a book. The woman continues to laugh, although the sight of Verdugo, and Victor, induces the men to show the pursed propriety with which they might have greeted a casket.
The Princess flung the shards of her derision in the air and, like a jagged juggler, cared nothing for the broken peace and the broken pieces. Victor England seemed to be struck by some of her florid shrapnel; he winced a measure of brave pain. Her face, raddled with annual rejuvenation, rode past him while his eyes, dazzled by remembered rockets, ran a retrospective that saw her swaggering down an illuminated stairway, Cedric Gibbons’s decline leading to a breast-taking fall into a springing carriage of chorus boys’ hands. Whereupon she rode off, one arm raised in triumph at the close shave she had had, to a storm of applause from extras with their own evening clothes.
As the elevator doors smacked their rubber lips together to end the sequence, Victor said, ‘I almost didn’t recognize her. The Princess, and I almost didn’t recognize her.’
‘Only the eyes,’ Verdugo said, ‘that’s all she has left.’
‘I guess the rest went in taxes,’ Victor England said. ‘She looks like she was some Madame who’s bought the Princess’s eyes at the closing-out sale.’ He could imagine the great star, still secretly as exquisite as she had been in their youth, waking to remember that she was as blind as a Byzantine, ravished of her unique jewels and sentenced henceforth to weep from twin emptinesses. The truth was different. She still had her jewels, but she was walled up in a tower of flesh to which not even the needle could provide a key. The truth was always different. ‘That was really her?’
