Not that anyone ever really said no in this city, he’d noticed. Probably even if you came right out and begged a girl to let you fuck her, she’d say, ‘I’m awfully sorry but right at this time we just don’t have a suitable vacancy. However, we’ll keep you in mind, and something may develop shortly. And we do appreciate your applying and are aware of your fine qualifications.’ As they paused for a minute at some traffic lights, he could see by the side of the road, just next to a school playground, a copse of oil derricks in those black wooden frames like lifeguard towers on the beach. They were everywhere in this city, always nodding, nodding, nodding, an endless dumb affirmation. Perhaps when the big earthquake was about to come, they’d all finally start shaking their heads.
Loeser was awoken by the telephone. Every night that he’d slept in California, his eyes had produced almost geological quantities of dried rheum, like a waste product of his body’s slow adjustment to the climate. He rubbed them clear and then reached for the receiver. ‘
‘This is Dolores Mutton.’
‘I have not been nowhere near of the house!’ screeched Loeser, so alarmed that his grammar started to tilt.
‘Yes, about that. I’m calling to apologise, Mr Loeser. I can’t tell you how rotten I’ve been feeling about how I behaved yesterday. You’d only come to pick up your clothes and take some pictures and I treated you like some sort of vagrant. And I was just as bad before that at the party. I can be a real ogress when I’m in the wrong mood, and I don’t come to my senses until it’s too late. You can’t imagine how many friends I’ve lost over it. Poor Stent bears the brunt, of course. If you’ll ever forgive me, then I want you to know that you’re welcome at the house whenever you like. It goes without saying that I’ll replace the camera and the clothes. By the way, I suppose you’re wondering why your friend Jascha was at the house that day. I should have explained. Jascha is on the board of the Cultural Solidarity Committee. We were having a little meeting over coffee. And in fact, Mr Loeser, your name had already come up that morning. There is an empty seat on the board, which we’d very much hoped to fill with someone of your race. Not to be too blunt about it, but most of the refugees coming to America are Jewish, and yet we don’t have one Jewish board member — it’s a real embarrassment. I don’t suppose you’d be interesting in joining the Committee? We can’t offer much money — just a token stipend, about thirty dollars a month — but the duties are very light and we’d be honoured to have such a distinguished artist among us. What do you say?’
Loeser was excited to realise he was being bought off. Evidently, Dolores Mutton had conferred with Drabsfarben, and they’d decided that bribes would be safer than threats. He hoped they wouldn’t go back to the threats when he turned down the bribe. ‘I’m grateful for the offer, Mrs Mutton, but I won’t be in Los Angeles nearly long enough to take up any kind of job.’
‘Are you quite sure?’
‘Yes. So let’s just consider the whole matter permanently closed, shall we? The whole matter,’ he repeated significantly.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘I see. Thank you, Mr Loeser. Goodbye.’
Loeser decided to have breakfast in the hotel restaurant. He dressed and went downstairs, picking up a copy of the
Flipping past the international politics and the Hollywood gossip, he came to an article by none other than Stent Mutton, who had a long account of his trip to the Soviet Union. The prose was so different to his novels that it was almost hard to believe that this was the author of
He finished his breakfast and went out on to Sunset Boulevard, where a hearse was inching down the street so slowly that it looked as if someone had merely forgotten to put on the handbrake. The air smelled of pasteurised honey. He planned to spend the day talking his way into casting agencies to find out if they had anyone matching Adele’s description on their books. If he hadn’t found her in thirty days, he would give up and go home. He couldn’t bear to stay here any longer than that. Nothing could be allowed to change his mind. One month, and then back to Berlin.
5. LOS ANGELES, 1938
When Loeser came inside and saw the lipstick on his writing table, it struck him that he had been living with his ghost for nearly three years now and, like the husband in an arranged marriage, he still didn’t really know her. He put down the three letters that he’d taken from the mailbox outside, picked up the lipstick, and took it over to the antique wooden chest where he kept everything the ghost left in his house. Only once had the ghost ever taken anything back: a pearl necklace that he’d found underneath the sofa. Perhaps she’d changed her mind about him keeping it — if, after all, these things were indeed gifts, and not, as he was coming to believe, merely droppings, secretions.
His ghost was making him gullible. Last year, wandering along the beach near the Muttons’ house before a party, he’d seen a strange white scattering in the distance like a flock of baby seagulls come to rest on the sand. When he got closer he saw that they were condoms, thousands of them, every one still slimily tumescent as if stretched around an invisible penis. Here was all the sex he ever hadn’t had in his life, he thought, the counterfactual rubber wraiths of every stolen chance and near miss, come here to haunt him, as mocking as the lingerie brought to him by the lodger in his house. Next time he tried to talk to a pretty girl, there they would be, squelching around his shoes, wriggling up his trouser legs, bellyflopping like giant maggots into his glass of wine. He stamped on one angrily and it collapsed with a fecal burp. Surely his domestic ghost didn’t look so ugly, if she had a form at all. Only later, at the party, did he find out from Stent Mutton that there was a sewage line hidden further up the beach, and every few months, after a Saturday night, a glob of used condoms would get trapped in a pipe then washed out all at once on to the sand, inflated by methane and ammonia. So in fact Loeser had only one prophylactic spectre in his entourage — the Trojan in his wallet that had expired the previous April. He decided to bury it in its wrapper.
No, Loeser still hadn’t got laid. He’d mostly given up hope. Time, like space, could rush so peremptorily past. The monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece, he had read, were supposed to be the holiest places in the world because no women had set foot on the island for a thousand years, and by that odd criterion he felt his penis should be venerated as a relic on a par with the incorrupt cadaver of Saint Athanasios the Great. In the Greek Orthodox Church to which those monasteries belonged, there were bishops who said that Hell was just being without God’s love; Loeser could never take seriously the idea of hell as a mere privation, but life without sex did feel like hell, and either way at this point he would have swapped an eternity of God’s love for one middling blowjob. He had developed a habit of clenching his left hand into a fist whenever he saw something that made his frustration jolt: a bare shoulder, a giggling couple, a swimwear advertisement in a magazine. Then one morning he was looking at himself in the mirror before getting into the bath and his left forearm seemed visibly more muscular than his right.
