60

The real estate agency where Kathy began her career was, like most of L.A.’s businesses (and most of its population, for that matter) image conscious. Since Kathy was coming to the firm with her broker’s license and fluency in French and German, she was supplied immediately with a leased Mercedes-Benz 240D. She was given to understand that the more expensive the properties she sold became, the bigger her Mercedes would get. And when they ran out of Mercedes, she’d be in line for a Rolls.

Hearing that, Kathy had told her boss Nathan, who drove a Comiche, “I’d be scared to death driving a car that expensive.”

“You’ll get used to it,” he said. “Besides, it’ll be leased. Like all the cars out here—and three quarters of the people.”

“It’s a wonder anybody buys houses,” Kathy had said.

“The studios buy them,” Nathan had replied. “Sometimes without even knowing it. And if you don’t have a house, you don’t have any community property. Getting divorced without having community property is like getting married and not having children.”

Kathy smiled ruefully. “I know, I’ve been there myself.”

In the beginning, when Kathy was showing a house to prospective buyers, she would just stand to one side in order to let the place speak for itself. She would point out all the amenities; she would answer any questions; she would agree that anything a customer liked was wonderful and terrific, and she would always remind the customer, if there was something he didn’t like, that you could change anything except the location.

As the months passed, and Kathy grew more comfortable with her work, she became more of a salesperson. She had decided in the end to remain plain old Kathy Lowenthal rather than try to remake herself in the image of Susannah Eastlake, but Kathy was something Kathy could improve upon, like a well-located property, and she didn’t hesitate to do it. She colored her hair, she had her legs waxed, she began to buy her clothes on Rodeo Drive. Her growing self-confidence in her appearance was matched by her professionalism in doing her job.

At first, Kathy had been a little intimidated by some of the rich foreigners who were her customers. Then, before she knew it, she was looking at even the wealthiest of them as shoppers for whom you could always find something on the racks, figuring out their taste the way some experienced clothing salespeople can guess a customer’s size. After she’d been with the agency for a year, Kathy was automatically handed the fusspots and the spoiled brats. She liked the challenge of dealing with them.

One day Nathan said to her, “I think we’ve got one for you. Herr Horch, from Munich. Evelyn says he’s a man of few words, but he’s got forty million in his U.S. bank account alone.”

“Why isn’t Evelyn taking him around?” Kathy asked.

“She showed him sixteen houses in three days and on the third day she went home crying. Herr Horch has a wife back in Germany. There wasn’t a single house Evelyn showed him that didn’t have something about it Herr Horch knew his wife wouldn’t like.”

“Sounds like fun,” said Kathy. “Just give me a list of the stuff Evelyn’s already scratched.”

Herr Horch was looking for a house that was roughly in the eight-to-ten-million-dollar range. Looking through the agency’s listings, Kathy quickly selected half a dozen houses. Of the six, three were “name” properties, having once belonged to celebrities. The others made up for what they lacked in history with additions of extravagance: a billiard room, a swimming pool that could be transformed into a huge Jacuzzi at the flick of a switch, a bar brought intact from an Irish pub, together with a soda fountain that had originally been in a drugstore in Dayton.

Using textbook realtor’s psychology, which was to save the best property for last, Kathy decided to make the house that came with the Rolls-Royce sixth on the list. What could be a nicer touch for a wealthy West German looking for a pied à terre in Beverly Hills than a house that came furnished even down to the car in the garage?

Kathy’s first impression of Herr Horch was that he looked like Santa Claus with a clean shave. He was pink in the face, and might have just emerged from a wrapping of hot towels. Since Herr Horch spoke good, if slightly clipped English, Kathy did not have to be thinking constantly about the right German expression, so her usual routine would probably come off even better. Kathy had developed what she thought of as her “routine” after she’d decided that it was better to dramatize a house than simply stand more or less in the wings while people poked around. She’d begun to use superlatives, and gestures. She would ooh and ah at stuff she’d seen ten times before. Having been an undergraduate actress had really come in handy. Real estate, it had turned out, especially here, was a kind of theater.

“I think the nicest thing about parts of Beverly Hills and Bel Air is the view,” Kathy began after shepherding Herr Horch into her Mercedes. “I’m not going to be showing you anything without the elevation. Houses where you can see the lights of the city twinkling at night, that’s what you want. A sense of drama.”

“Good, good,” Herr Horch said.

“What business did you say you were in?” Kathy inquired.

“Refrigeration,” Herr Horch replied.

“I’m sure you’re doing very well with that,” Kathy said. She doubted that it was much fun being in refrigeration, though. It was something what people would go through just to get rich: oil, insurance, women’s half sizes, Barry Manilow records. No wonder they all wanted to live in glamorous houses.

The first house she showed him had enormous closets. There were whole walls honeycombed with niches for shoes and belts and ties, and electrical revolving racks like a dry cleaner’s for dresses and jackets.

“Have you ever seen such stupendous closet space?” she asked Herr Horch. She didn’t mention to him the fact that she and her associates had for some time been referring to this particular residence as “the museum of clothing.”

Entering the living room, Kathy subtly threw her voice, the better to amplify the echo from the beamed ceiling that was not just high, but “cavernous.” Herr Horch wasn’t impressed, however.

“My wife wants a tennis court und an exercise room,” he said flatly.

Smiling as she eliminated property number one from her list, Kathy thought, Who’s your wife? One of those East German swimmers with the shoulders?

The second house was all on one floor, and Herr Horch did not like that, because, he said, his wife thought climbing stairs was good for the legs. The next house didn’t have enough land for Frau Horch’s weimaraner, and the one after that had a racketball court, whereas Frau Horch liked candlepin bowling.

As she drove Herr Horch up and down the hills, with their lavish houses, some of which looked as though they were about to lose their footing (and reminded Kathy of home), she tried to stir up a little enthusiasm in her client by pointing out some of the glories that they were coming upon even at intersections.

“Aren’t these walls wonderful?” she said to Herr Horch at one point. “Look at that one, with the bougainvillea just cascading over it.”

Herr Horch ignited a cigar and blew the smoke out the window, where it dispersed in the bougainvillea like an insecticide.

Whether or not they appealed to Herr Horch, the walls of Beverly Hills and Bel Air fascinated Kathy and had ever since she’d moved to L.A. To her they were like little stretches of the Roman Empire: overgrown aqueducts, the side of the temple still standing. These were not simply fences, these walls. No, they were often heroic, with miniature grottoes and bas-reliefs. Some of the bricks in these walls had been laid in patterns unknown even to the weavers of Scottish tweeds. Every combination of stones had been used, every pastel shade of stucco. In Kathy’s mind the walls were often metaphorical, like the wall around the burned-out Arab mansion on Sunset. Where the gray-black pebbles had fallen off that wall, Kathy could see, symbolically, the cream cheese beneath the caviar.

One night, driving home from a party in Bel Air, Kathy had seen in the middle of Stone Canyon Road a stray dog. But the dog had had no collar, and it had plodded along in an almost primeval skulk. By the time it had dawned on Kathy that this was no dog, the animal had overtopped a high white wall with one leap.

It’s a coyote, Kathy had realized. After garbage, no doubt. At that moment she’d understood why her heart now belonged to Los Angeles: for all its monumental walls, it was still wild. And one fine day the hills might shake their backs, the way dogs and coyotes do, and shed all the civilization.

But for now, before the walls became mere outlines…not even Herr Horch’s cigar smoke could sour the sweet and mysterious perfume of this place.

Thankful that she had saved the best property for last, Kathy turned into the driveway of the house that had everything. Telling Herr Horch a little white lie, she said that this house had once belonged to Jack La Lanne. Indeed it was a small health spa, perfect for Frau Horch. The stainless steel kitchen looked as though it had been shipped over, intact, from a Swiss clinic. The pool was Olympic size and had lanes painted on the bottom. The master bath had a mirrored wall fitted with a dancer’s barre. And off the laundry room was a fenced dog run for Frau Horch’s weimaraner.

The more he saw, the rosier Herr Horch’s cheeks became. Now for the pièce de résistance, Kathy thought. Leading Herr Horch outside, she showed him the hand-carved panels of the garage doors.

“Just like the door of a cathedral, isn’t it?” she said.

While Herr Horch adjusted his bifocals, Kathy reached into the Mercedes, retrieving a remote control.

“Now this house comes with a very special bonus,” Kathy said. “Something I think is ideal for a man in your position.”

As an acknowledgment of his position, Herr Horch relit his cigar. With a dramatic flourish, Kathy pressed the button on the black box, and the garage door rumbled open. There was the Rolls in its dehumidified boudoir.

“My wife will not want that,” Herr Horch said. “People scratch them, mit der keys.”

Oh, shit, Kathy thought.

“But she will like the house,” Herr Horch said.

Hooray! thought Kathy.

A month later, at the closing, Kathy met Frau Horch for the first time. Expecting Brunhilde, she was taken aback to be introduced to a woman around forty who looked like a rich JAP from Long Island. She looked like a rich JAP from Long Island, it turned out, because she was a rich JAP from Long Island. She’d gone to NYU, and she was fifty-six but looked forty because she exercised every single day. Also she never went in the sun.

“My mother told me I have white skin and I should appreciate it,” she said to Kathy. Along with her white skin and her nose job, Frau Horch had the hips of a sixteen-year-old boy. She was altogether unnatural—but then so were the workings of international high finance (Herr Horch’s refrigeration units had gone into Frau Horch’s father’s chain of steak restaurants). Only after all the papers had been signed did Kathy realize that Frau Horch had exactly the same nose as Paula Rubin. On her way home that night, Kathy parked her car briefly by one of her favorite walls. She looked up at it, in the hope that it might have something to reveal to her. It didn’t. All it seemed to say was that men had managed to build a few things awfully well, although life in general made absolutely no sense. Kathy drove on home thinking of the commission she’d made, and troubled herself no more about Frau Horch.

It wasn’t long, though, before a passion for fitness much like Frau Horch’s had taken hold of Kathy. She would ride an exercycle on her terrace, peddling furiously and drawing a bead with her eyes, like a motorcycle cop, on the fat kid who lived next door, while Alison watched from behind the draperies. One day while she was at the beach with Alison, Kathy was invited by an automobile salesman and a lifeguard to join their volley ball team. She did, and it became a regular thing. She wound up dating the automobile salesman and spiking the ball into the lifeguard’s washboard stomach.

After two years on the coast, she felt that she could say to herself, Hey, you really are turning into somebody. Not the kind of somebody Veronica Simmons was, of course. Kathy had never once run into her, but she had copied her recipe for meat loaf out of the Ladies’ Home Journal, and she’d watched the Academy Awards breathlessly the night Veronica won. Kathy had missed seeing her old flame David get his Emmy. She hadn’t ran into him either, but maybe that was just as well. What would they say to each other?

You sure were a wimp!

And you were such an asshole.

Probably you were meant to lose touch with some people, Kathy thought. It was like painting over the growth milestones your father had scratched in pencil on the wall.

Whenever Kathy visited New York she would see Melanie, who she was meant to see, and Melanie had told her that Veronica Simmons had ceased to be flesh and blood and was something that existed only in the public eye, and furthermore all the cooking she was supposedly famous for was done by public relations people. Kathy hadn’t been sure whether to believe Melanie or not. She suspected that Paula was still only human, like everyone else—but probably not as human as her meat loaf had come out.

Had Kathy remembered that L.A. was a company town, and a small one at that, she might not have been so certain that her path and those of her two old friends who had become such big deals would never cross.

Kathy was on her third Mercedes at the time, and she had to pick it up at the dealer’s, where she’d left it the night before to be serviced. Although this most recent car, a 450SE, was large and luxurious, it sometimes made Kathy feel claustrophobic: the way everything locked all at once, electronically, when you turned the key in a certain direction—even the gas cap. Kathy wasn’t at all sure what she thought about the idea of being sealed up in something so German—although after Frau Horch, she was more inclined to think that anything goes.

Aaron had married Dow Chemical. They were living in Bedford Hills and they had a Mercedes too. When Aaron flew out to visit Alison, he would rent a Mercedes. He took her in a rented Mercedes to Disneyland on three different occasions. After the third outing, when Kathy asked Alison if she’d had a good time, the child’s reply was, “You see one Parade of Lights, you’ve seen them all.” Alison had eventually befriended the little fat girl next door, whose name was Sesame, and Kathy had a feeling that her increasingly jaded attitude was the result of Sesame’s influence (her father was a straight hairdresser and her mother a loan officer at a Hollywood bank—it was a wonder they hadn’t produced something worse), but it was good for Alison to have a friend even if the friend liked to sit in your kitchen giggling and reading aloud from Rona Barrett’s column. There were some things about L.A. it was useless to resist, Kathy had learned, and she stood there watching philosophically the day Alison went off with Sesame to the private school her parents had raved about—in an air-conditioned Mercedes bus.

To pick up her own Mercedes, on that fateful day, Kathy had ordered a cab, which was to come by at nine-thirty. The cabdriver who picked her up was a would-be screenwriter. Kathy said that she wasn’t in show business, but that didn’t discourage the cabbie. On the way to the dealership he outlined his latest project. It was all about the adventures of a woman cabbie living in New York. He thought Veronica Simmons would be perfect in the role.

Kathy almost mentioned that she had gone to school with Veronica Simmons. She didn’t, though. She knew better. Any kind of connection with someone in Veronica Simmons’s league turned you into an outlet for the crowd with loose plugs dangling from them.

“I’d like to live in New York someday,” said the cabdriver as Kathy paid him. “I’d like to get myself one of those huge lofts in Soho and start writing plays.”

“I’m from New York originally,” Kathy confessed.

“Really? I grew up right here in L.A.,” the cabdriver said.

“I guess the grass is always greener, right?” said Kathy.

“Unless it’s Acapulco gold,” the cabbie replied.

“Right,” Kathy replied, and got out of the car.

The dealership that serviced Kathy’s Mercedes was located on Santa Monica Boulevard. Hung with Flemish tapestries, its showroom looked like a gallery, except that there were cars under the track lights where the classical torsos ought to have been. The dealership’s service area was almost medically spotless. Oil and grease were apparently administered to the cars by transfusion, and the staff was clothed in clinical white. The mechanics did not so much service automobiles as moniter heart-lung machines, plugging engines into computers that gauged their pulse and respiration.

The bill for the routine maintenance on Kathy’s 450SL was four hundred dollars and a few cents.

“What did you do? Root canal?” she asked the service manager.

“It was mostly the labor,” he replied. Putting Kathy’s American Express card through the wringer, he returned it to her. Kathy looked at the receipt to confirm the frightful total and then stuffed it in along with all the other American Express receipts that were now as numerous in her billfold as dollar bills once were.

“Bruce here worked on your car,” the service manager added. “He’s probably the best mechanic we’ve got.”

Kathy glanced at Bruce, who was getting himself a cup of instant soup from a machine. Bruce grinned at Kathy. He was wearing sunglasses with mirrored lenses and cowboy boots. It occurred to Kathy that he might be an actor waiting to be discovered, like Clint Eastwood working in the gas station. Of course it was one thing to pump gas and another thing to work on Mercedes Benz automobiles. So maybe this guy was a serious actor waiting to be discovered, or a very bad actor with a future ahead of him that California was going to alter in some bizarre way, like Ronald Reagan at the time he was doing “G.E. Theater.”

Facing off Bruce the mechanic’s enigmatic mirrored lenses with her own very expensive and very formidable Carrera design sunglasses, Kathy saw her own reflection on his face. For an instant, it seemed to her that the familiar infinity of mirror reflecting mirror finally had moved, along with all the other phenomena, to Southern California.

“Classy car you got there, lady,” Bruce said with a smile.

“It’s the company’s car,” Kathy pointed out. “I could never afford it on my own. And I wouldn’t want it even if I could.”

“I think the car is really you, though,” Bruce replied. “You know what I’m saying?”

“If you mean that as a compliment, thanks,” said Kathy. “But I’m not a native Californian, so I’m not really the car I drive. I’m from Queens, and at heart I am what I eat.”

Bruce drank off his cup of soup, letting a little of it dribble down his chin, and then wiping his chin with the back of his hand.

He’s closer to Clint Eastwood than he is to Ronald Reagan, Kathy thought.

“Seeya ’round,” Bruce said, and he turned and walked back out to the service bays.

“He’s something of a character, isn’t he?” Kathy said to the service manager when she was sure Bruce was out of earshot. “How does he see to work on cars with those sunglasses on?”

“A good mechanic is hard to find,” the service manager said. “I’ve learned not to ask too many questions. The last one we had who was as good as this guy used to travel with chickens.”

“Chickens?”

“Yeah. Hens. Six of ’em. And one rooster. He’d keep them in his car. With all the windows rolled up. He’d go out there and sit with them when it was time to eat his lunch. The boys said that the whole backseat was full of chicken shi—uh, droppings.”

“What does Bruce keep in his car?” Kathy asked. “Baby alligators?”

“No,” the service manager replied. “Bruce’s car is full of Reagan-Bush bumper stickers. He’s an absolute fanati—”

“Please,” said Kathy holding up her hand. “Don’t tell me any more. Can I have my keys now? I have to go check out a new listing.”

“Here you go,” said the manager, handing them to her. “Come back and see us again real soon.”

“I will.”

That Bruce was actually kind of attractive in his oddball way, Kathy thought as she started her car. Maybe I’m getting too used to it out here. She switched on the air conditioning, and her body was bathed immediately in its small, cool jet-streams. What a consolation this car was. If she didn’t talk to her mother twice a week, Kathy thought, she’d probably be able to rid herself of her lingering self-consciousness and stop parking it two blocks away whenever she took Alison to temple.

A moment later Kathy’s thoughts were interrupted by a tapping on her window. Startled, she turned and saw yet another pair of sunglasses staring her in the face.

Lowering the window, she heard her name spoken.

“Kathy? Kathy Lowenthal?”

“Oh, my God,” said Kathy.

It was David Whitman. Kathy couldn’t believe the change in him. His beard was gone, he was much thinner—he looked almost gaunt in the face, but that, Kathy assumed, was because she’d never seen him before without the beard—and his curly hair was no longer black. It was the same off-blond color one of Kathy’s aunts had switched to recently. David was wearing a silk sports jacket and a polo shirt of that variety so expensively made that each stitch, like a diamond, seems to have its own setting.

Recovering from her astonishment, Kathy turned off her car’s engine and leaped out of it, shouting, “David, David!”

They grabbed each other and whirled around and around in the parking lot, hugging and kissing.

“I knew you were out here, but I never dreamed I’d run into you,” Kathy said when their whirlwind of affection had settled down.

“What are you doing out here?” David asked.

“Selling real estate,” Kathy replied.

“You’re kidding.”

“Who would kid about a thing like real estate?”

“How long have you been out here?”

“Going on three years now. I got married. Then I got divorced. Then I came out here with my little girl, to seek my fortune. You know, the usual. Just like Veronica Simmons!”

“Trying to follow in Bigfoot’s footsteps, huh?”

“Don’t say that, you stinker. Paula was a size seven and a half and I’m an eight. You better be careful. If anybody heard you saying anything about Veronica Simmons. She is a star, and you’re just an agent.”

“You’ve got the facts right, Kath, but you’re twisting them around. I’m an agent, and she’s just a star. And I’m also a producer now.”

“Okay, okay, so you’re both on top of the heap. All kidding aside, I think it’s wonderful what’s happened to you guys. Wait’ll I tell my mother I saw you. She’ll plotz. No, come to think of it, she’ll ask me, ‘Is he married?’ Are you?”

“No, but I have a real commitment. I’ve been with the same woman for a long time now. Kath, she’s the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. Really. Seriously. We’re even working together, on a new movie project. It’s going to be incredible. And you won’t believe this, but we’re going to get you-know-who to star in it,”

“Not Paula…”

“No, Arlene Dahl.”

“David, this is just so fantastic—you and Paula making a movie together. When did you see her? I haven’t spoken to her in years, I’d love to know how she is, I mean, really—not what you see in the magazines.”

David sniffed a couple of times and rubbed his nose with his fingers, and Kathy was about to say, Ahah, the smog bothers you too, but before she could David said, “I haven’t actually seen her. I spoke to her manager on the phone, and I sent a copy of the screenplay out to her—she’s on location—but there’s no way she’s not going to want to do this. Any actress would want to do it. I’m so sure of this project in fact, that I’m pumping my own money into it.”

David went on for another five minutes about his movie while Kathy just stood there nodding and smiling. It seemed to her that he couldn’t get the words out fast enough in his enthusiasm. He kept remembering things about it that he had to pour out all at once. There was something in the way he was talking that made Kathy blink, something that flashed and almost moved before your eyes, like the sunlight glinting on the automobile bumpers all around them.

Through the rush of David’s words, though, Kathy could make out one thing pretty clearly. She kept listening to David, and she kept thinking, This stinks.