for this tanned city, repeats the inquiry: “
The store clerk scribbles himself a to-do note and lifts the stylus back to the start of “?Por que lloras blanca nina?,” lowers the needle onto shimmering black vinyl, and dreams of Jewish shepherd boys plucking their lyres on starlit Iberian hillsides.
23
Luisa Rey doesn’t see the dusty black Chevy coasting by as she enters her apartment building. Bill Smoke, driving the Chevy, memorizes the address: 108, Pacific Eden Apartments.
Luisa has reread Sixsmith’s letters a dozen times or more in the last day and a half. They disturb her. A university friend of Sixsmith’s, Robert Frobisher, wrote the series in the summer of 1931 during a prolonged stay at a chateau in Belgium. It is not the unflattering light they shed on a pliable young Rufus Sixsmith that bothers Luisa but the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people that the letters have unlocked. Images so vivid she can only call them memories. The pragmatic journalist’s daughter would, and did, explain these “memories” as the work of an imagination hypersensitized by her father’s recent death, but a detail in one letter will not be dismissed. Robert Frobisher mentions a comet-shaped birthmark between his shoulder blade and collarbone.
Builders are remodeling the lobby of Pacific Eden Apartments. Sheets are on the floor, an electrician is prodding a light fitting, an unseen hammerer hammers. Malcolm the super glimpses Luisa and calls out, “Hey, Luisa! An uninvited guest ran up to your apartment twenty minutes ago!” But the noise of a drill drowns him out, he has a man from city hall on the phone about building codes, and anyway, Luisa has already stepped into the elevator.
24
“Surprise,” says Hal Brodie, drily, caught in the act of taking books and records from Luisa’s shelves and putting them into his gym bag. “Hey,” he says, to hide a jab of guilt, “you’ve had your hair cut short.”
Luisa isn’t very surprised. “Don’t all dumped women?”
Hal clicks in the back of his throat.
Luisa is angry with herself. “So. Reclamation Day.”
“Just about done.” Hal brushes imaginary dust off his hands. “Is the selected Wallace Stevens yours or mine?”
“It was a Christmas present from Phoebe to us. Phone Phoebe. Let her decide. Or else rip out the odd pages and leave me the even. This is like a no-knock raid. You could’ve phoned.”
“I did. All I got was your machine. Junk it, if you never listen to it.”
“Don’t be stupid, it cost a fortune. So what brings you up to town, apart from your love of modernist poetry?”
“Location scouting for
“Starsky and Hutch don’t live in Buenas Yerbas.”
“Starsky gets kidnapped by the West Coast Triad. There’s a gunfight on Buenas Yerbas Bay Bridge, and we’ve got a chase scene scripted with David and Paul running over car roofs at rush hour. It’ll be a headache to okay it with the traffic cops, but we need to do it on location or we’ll lose any semblance of artistic integrity.”
“Hey. You’re not taking
“It’s mine.”
“Not anymore.” Luisa is not joking.
With ironic deference, Brodie takes out the record from the gym bag. “Look, I was sorry to hear about your dad.”
Luisa nods, feels grief rise and her defenses stiffen. “Yeah.”
“I guess it was .?.?. a release, of sorts.”
“I’m doing fine. And you?”
“Fine.” Luisa looks at the new gaps in her old shelves.
“Work’s good?”
“Work’s fine.”
Hal zips up his gym bag, fishes in his pocket, and drops the door key onto her palm. With a flourish, to underline the symbolism of the act. Luisa smells an alien aftershave and imagines
The door closes.
Luisa puts the chain on and replays the encounter. She turns on the shower and undresses. Her bathroom mirror is half-hidden by a shelf of shampoos, conditioners, a box of sanitary napkins, skin creams, and gift soaps. Luisa shunts these aside to get a clearer view of a birthmark between her shoulder blade and collarbone. Her encounter with Hal is displaced.
25
The Swannekke Island protesters’ camp lies on the mainland between a beach and a marshy lagoon. Behind the lagoon, acres of citrus orchards rise inland to arid hills. Tatty tents, rainbow-sprayed camper vans, and trailer homes look like unwanted gifts the Pacific dumped here. A strung banner declares: PLANET AGAINST SEABOARD. On the far side of the bridge sits Swannekke A, quivering like Utopia in a noon mirage. White toddlers tanned brown as leather paddle in the lazy shallows; a bearded apostle washes clothes in a tub; a couple of snaky teenagers kiss in the dune grass.
Luisa locks her VW and crosses the scrub to the encampment. Seagulls float in the joyless heat. Agricultural
