This Must Be the Place: A Novel (2 page)

And now she could see the doorway, just a little down the road, waiting for her to walk through.

She sat up and grabbed her pen.

Anyway, I left you the best parts of myself
, she wrote.
You know where to look
.

There was nothing more to say.

1
The Runaway

Arthur Rook didn’t know.

He woke up on Friday morning when Amy rolled out of bed, but the running of the shower sang him back to sleep. When his alarm buzzed at seven he woke again, shaved and dressed and fed himself and Ray Harryhausen, the cat, and stood on the curb in front of his apartment complex in Toluca Lake, just north of Hollywood, waiting for a ride to work. Like every morning in Los Angeles, it was colder than Arthur, who grew up in Boston, thought LA was supposed to be. He squinted at the sun, hugging himself. He saw his breath on the air. He wished Max Morris would show up already, hopefully with coffee, or maybe those little homemade donuts Max’s boyfriend Manny made, that Max didn’t like and didn’t have the heart to admit. Manny put little notes in with the donuts—always a pun (
You’re my favorite in the hole world!
or
Donut what I’d do without you!
)—and Arthur felt a little guilty devouring sweets specially packed for another person. When Arthur asked Max why he let Manny go on thinking he liked the donuts—wasn’t he worried some day Manny would discover the truth and be hurt?—Max shrugged and said sometimes you let the people you love believe what they want to believe.

Why? Arthur had asked.

Because you love ’em, Max had said.

There. Right then.

That was the moment it happened, they would tell him: at 7:48, while Arthur was waiting for Max to show up in his stuttering silver Geo, thinking about Manny’s donuts.

Arthur got into the car when Max arrived—late, sans both coffee
and donuts—and the two of them headed down Cahuenga into Hollywood, creeping in a sludge of traffic. Max apologized for not bringing any breakfast, and Arthur lied and said he’d eaten at home, and when Max called him on it, they pulled into a gas station and Arthur ran inside for two cups of coffee and a box of Ho-Hos.

“You eat like a freaking teenager, Rook,” Max said. “One of these days your metabolism is going to implode, creating a black hole that sucks this entire universe into it.”

“I am the destroyer of worlds,” Arthur said. He was tall and thin and had a recurring nightmare in which he grew thinner and thinner until he was a skeleton holding a sword and shield, like the vengeful dead in Harryhausen’s
Jason and the Argonauts
. When he told Amy, she smiled and said she’d still love him if he were a special effect. She laughed—
I might even love you more
—and Arthur thought,
Of course you would
.

Max parked in the faculty lot of Hollywood High and they hauled their equipment into the front hall, just like they had last year on school picture day and the year before that. Then Max disappeared to speak with their office contact, and Arthur, chewing a Ho-Ho, unpacked the lights and the backdrops and the cables and cords. It was 8:45—8:43 was the time of the first missed call on his cell phone.

From 9:15 to 10:30, Arthur stood behind the tripod and told one hundred and fifty freshmen to smile like they meant it. This was his favorite part of the job. It was the reason he became a photographer: for love of the moment when his subjects showed themselves to the camera and to him. Arthur loved people. He didn’t really understand them or feel like he belonged among them, even, but he adored being a witness to their existence. He loved how various they were, how fragile and tough and strange and each his own universe: self-contained and whole. He was a Watcher. Amy told him, one afternoon six months after they met, that he would be unbelievably creepy if he weren’t so damned good.

“You think I’m good?” Arthur had asked. He didn’t care if Amy thought he was creepy—he
was
a little creepy, he knew that; anyone who goes through life preferring to watch than participate will trend that way—but he had been enchanted that she thought he was good. “You mean pure of heart?” he asked. “Valiant?”

“Not quite,” Amy said. They were in bed. “The truly pure don’t know how to do
that
.”

“Sometimes they do,” he said. “When they’ve been driven to it.”

Amy grinned at him. “What I mean,” she said, “is that you believe other people are basically worth living for, and it shows.”

“You mean I’m an optimist.”

“I mean you
see
people, you see people all the time, and you don’t get bored or tired of them. You don’t start to hate them. How do you manage?”

He remembered the weight of her hand on his face, the pressure of her thumb against his cheek.

“How do you do it?” she said.

“You give me too much credit,” he said. “I hate them plenty.”

“You are such a liar. Name one person you hate, one person.”

“Adolf Hitler. Douchebag.”

Amy laughed.

“Cigarette-Smoking Man.” Arthur counted on his fingers. “Iago.”

“I mean one
real
person—”

“Short people who recline their seats all the way back on airplanes.”

“—I mean who you
know
, personally, that you hate.”

Arthur kissed her to buy himself time to think. “That guy,” he said. “That guy at the restaurant the other day.”

“Which guy?”

“With the bad suit and the tacky tie.”

“Who yelled at the waitress and made her cry?”

“Yeah, him,” he said. “I
hate
that guy.”

Arthur couldn’t hate people, any more than he could hate water or grass or stone. Ordinary people, like the chubby freshman girl slumping on the padded stool in front of default Backdrop A (Mottled Blue Slate), were too magnificent and too oblivious to
hate
. He asked for her name and homeroom.

“Jennifer Graves. I’m in Mr. Woodbridge’s.” She was pale and had flat brown hair, pulled back in an unforgiving ponytail. There was an angry red spot on her chin.

“Jennifer, hi,” Arthur said. “I’m Arthur.”

“Hi,” she said.

“You don’t look like you want to get your picture taken.”

She crossed her arms and scowled. “What gave you that idea—oh, do you have eyes?”

Arthur smiled at her. “You know what they say about high school?” He ducked to look through the viewfinder.

“That they’re the best years of my life?” She had a truly scorching glare. He framed her in the camera sight. “These are my glory days?”

“Only the strong survive,” he said.

She twitched a smile. He saw it through the lens and captured it, plucked it out of time and space and made a digital copy in ones and zeroes. And in two months when Jennifer Graves’s parents opened the folio of their daughter’s freshman-year portraits, Arthur thought they’d see someone familiar in her eyes, her lips, the lift of her cheeks. Not the sullen unhappy girl who slammed her door and said mean things just to say them. They’d see the little girl who’d known the joy of running naked through a sprinkler. Who’d spent the better part of 1994 lumbering around the house after her delighted little brother, pretending to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex. They’d see a hint of the person Jennifer would grow up to be, after she’d bested this phase of her life simply by outliving it.

They’d see what Arthur Rook had seen.

Max took over for the sophomores. Arthur stepped outside with what was left of his cold coffee and watched the traffic roll by. It had never felt right to him to have a high school this close to so many cars, so much exhaust. There was a gas station down on the corner, and the Walk of Fame was only one street up. He could see the top of the theater where they held the Oscars. Growing up in Los Angeles was unfathomable to Arthur—Los Angeles period, as a place where people lived normal lives, was unfathomable. When he first arrived, it had felt like the city was teasing him, rubbing up against him in a way that felt embarrassing and unreal, like a stranger crowding him on an otherwise empty bus. Alien vegetation, spiny and thick-leaved, sprouted beside walkways and highway medians or waved their triffid fronds high above his head. The world smelled of fresh-turned earth, of wet dirt. The murals that lined Hollywood Boulevard—Bette Davis, Bob Hope, Marilyn Monroe—rippled like mirages on storefront security gates, disavowing anything
so pedestrian as death. There were a million pictures of corpses in Hollywood: eyes smoldering, cowboy hats tipped forward, skirts blowing up around their thighs forever. The city romanticized eternity by reminding you how many people were already dead, and in the presence of so many beautiful zombies, Arthur felt doomed.

Then he met Amy. He’d been in town for a month—a long dreadful month, with no job secured, no apartment rented, no friends met. No validation that his decision to come to LA—once so appealing for its diametrical opposition to Boston—had been anything other than a poor decision. He’d driven around the boulevards of North Hollywood aimlessly, refusing to get on the freeways (he had never owned a car, had never had to develop any quick instincts behind the wheel). When he accidentally turned onto Mulholland Drive, he was so frightened by the hairpin curves that he drove straight back to his motel and didn’t go out for three days. He didn’t speak to anyone in that time without the assistance of a telephone, and when his mother told him that no decision is absolutely permanent and he could come back to his old room any time, he didn’t say no. He said,
I’ll think about it
.

Fantasizing about flight yet refusing to leave Los Angeles before he’d properly seen it, Arthur mustered his courage and drove down to Hollywood. He passed the Chinese Theater and a man dressed as Dr. Frank-n-Furter stuck out a beautiful fishnetted leg and tried to wave him down. Arthur waved in return but didn’t stop. He passed the Roosevelt Hotel and the Chateau Marmont and the Viper Room, knew he would never be cool enough to step inside them, and was grateful for it.

In-n-Out Burger—now, that was more his speed. He pulled into the In-n-Out on Sunset and parked. In the lot there was a boy in a white paper cap holding a board in front of him like a cigarette girl, taking orders from the cars in the drive-thru line. It was a long line—it was lunchtime, he realized. He also realized he was hungry. He didn’t remember when he ate last, though he did know it had been something from the vending machine at the motel.