Stages (37 page)

“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 thi
r
d 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.