Tumbledown (2 page)

The nameplate on his desk read
James Candler.
He looked right at her and did not look away. His eyes were the green of spring leaves. His eyes were the green of a forest pond. His eyes were the green of a traffic light instructing her to go, get on with it,
move.

Over his car’s leather seat—Candler drove an absurd car—he placed a folded towel, setting the warm pan of brownies on top of it. Eggs or no eggs, they would have to do. The garage door climbed in clanking segments, revealing an indecisive spring sky the romantic color of candle smoke. He could not say why he owned this car. John Egri, the outgoing director, drove a sleek black Corvette, a vehicle he treated with such care that Candler had actually seen it only once, but he heard about it frequently. Candler had not envied the Vette until fate stuck its wet nose in his crotch. The parent of a bipolar teenager, strapped by the expense of enrolling his daughter in the Center, decided to ditch his car payment, and Candler unaccountably bought the metallic red Porsche Boxster. Something about Egri’s Corvette and the opportunity for a bargain led him to purchase it, trading his pickup as part of the transaction.

A bargain, but he had to reallocate monthly expenses from his checking account to his credit card or he couldn’t pay for the thing. He economized, quitting the gym, dropping cable television, forgoing the newspaper, shifting the thermostat out of the comfort range. All of which might have been worth it if he had liked the car, but he quickly discovered that he had no affinity for the beast. It seated two, unless someone was willing to crawl into the tiny space behind the seats, and came with a Tyvek cover, a giant windbreaker to be daily stretched over its glistening body, a chore roughly as difficult as dressing a dead man. Egri advised him that he was adding needless miles by driving the car to work. To which Candler responded, “How am I supposed to get there?”

Beth Wray didn’t have a satisfactory answer for his question. He wasn’t interested in her family, her youth, her past, her present job, how she was feeling, or the immediate circumstances that forced her to see him. He wanted to know what really brought her to his office. He was so insistent, she thought about the boy who had taken her virginity in the back of his VW van, that adamant little prick of his no larger than a wine cork.

A painting hung on the wall behind Candler’s desk, a crude depiction of a man with a transparent body.
What do you see when you see through a man?
Merely the wall behind him, evidently, bits of paper tacked to it. A weird piece of art, probably by some mental patient, but she understood why he liked it. At the same time she knew he would not let her talk about it.
What has brought you here?
She felt unbalanced, as if she were running on uneven ground, as if the earth were shuddering—all this while she was nestled in a chair. She actually looked up to the hanging lamp to be certain there wasn’t a literal earthquake.

His eyes were bloodshot. She thought he might be hungover. She liked that about him. It made him human. She had been arrested in the raid of a party. The cops had found her partially dressed and ridiculously stoked on cocaine. He would possess a folder with the details, and this embarrassed her. She wasn’t that kind of person. She had taken a job dancing to get by until she was cast in a movie, a play, a televised drama. Years inexplicably passed. She wound up turning a few tricks, but only with men she was attracted to. At least initially. Once she had done it a few times, the offer of good money became impossible to refuse. She had serviced two men the night she was arrested and might have done another. It didn’t mean anything.

She had told the lawyers from the district attorney’s office that she was a farm girl from Missouri, which was almost true, and that the guy who brought her to the party had disappeared, which was the gospel. People at the party had given her cocaine, she explained, and helped her off with her clothing. No one particularly believed her, but they dropped the prostitution charge and gave her probation for the drugs. She had to get a legitimate job, and she found one at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. Her shift ended at six, meaning she could still strip in the evenings. She was required to take a weekly drug test, and she gave up everything but booze. She had to see a counselor once a week for twelve weeks, which put her in James Candler’s office, just down the street from Bare Barracudas. The counseling center was in an old building, brick covered with countless layers of paint, and the patients in the lobby were just the same, lacquered in their troubles: poor and drug addicted and alcoholic and out of their minds. Neither she nor he belonged there. She had been mistaken for a real prostitute and drug user, and he? Something for his résumé, she guessed, as he had the unmistakable appearance of an up-and-comer—smart, well dressed, vaguely handsome, and unreservedly compelling. He filled a room merely by entering it. (This, she knew, was precisely the attribute she lacked as an actress.) And yet he had a hangover and a soft belly, and the light in his eyes wasn’t merely intelligence.

Candler felt obliged by the size of his monthly car payment to whip through county intersections and fly up the freeway ramp. The car filled with the smell of brownies.
Exit interstate in point five miles.
The Boxster’s navigation system seemed to have no
off
button. When he entered an address, it provided perfectly omniscient directions, but if he entered nothing it still wished to guide him, advising him to turn around, head in the opposite direction, seek a new destination. It had the peeved voice of a disgruntled librarian.

Zigging and zagging past a family in a hatchback, he caught sight of a primer-gray Plymouth Road Runner executing a comparable maneuver two lanes over. (To certain men, the red Porsche changing lanes was like the waving of a flag.) The Road Runner was flawlessly restored, missing only the final layer of paint, that frowning chrome grill and masculine automotive posture a product of the 1970s. (An emissary from the past trying to make its way in this brave new world in the only manner it knew how.) Candler ignored the car, accelerating ahead of a Pathfinder and a Civic. When he switched lanes, he found it impossible not to glance in the rearview. The Road Runner was passing the same Pathfinder, the same Civic.

This is ridiculous,
Candler thought and self-consciously slowed down. The Road Runner pulled even, and Candler felt an absurd urge to hide the brownies. The driver—another young, well-dressed man riding alone—offered a smug nod before zooming by.

That
fucking
nod. That arrogant fucking nod.

Candler cut in behind him and narrowed the gap. They flew in tandem, like migrating birds, down the freeway. Congestion at an exit slowed their pace until a seam materialized in the traffic, a diagonal gap from one side of the highway to the other. Candler slid the Porsche into the seam, angling effortlessly across the lanes, passing the Road Runner as if it were parked. (Despite the ultimate outcome of this action, Candler could never disown the glee he felt at this moment, the witless pride in recognizing opportunity and seizing it.)

Recalculating,
announced the omniscient librarian.

The Road Runner emerged in the side mirror several cars back, vanishing and reappearing in the rearview. Horns sounded, followed by an exclamation of brakes, as the car veered brazenly from lane to lane. That other well-dressed, solitary male driver did not know when to quit.

“I hear you,” he was saying, “and I have no reason not to believe you. You’re telling me that the circumstances that have led you to my office do not genuinely represent your character. I hear you and yet
here you are.
Why? What has brought you here?”

The hour ended on the same question with which it had begun. Beth Wray spent the next week working on it, jotting down ideas while she peddled T-shirts and compact discs, keeping the notebook in her locker at Bare Barracudas, hustling in to make amendments, trying to prepare an honest response instead of the usual bull. When Monday morning came around, she put on a simple black skirt that her mother had given her and an unrevealing white blouse. She spent an hour on her hair and makeup. It had rained during the night, and in the cleansed air the sunlight shone mercilessly, the scruffy street and moldering buildings ruthlessly exposed. The only open chair in the waiting room had a rusty stain. She stood with her back to the wall, her flopping heart like a fish that had outgrown its bowl.

She was given a different counselor. James Candler was out of town, a job interview, but he should be back for her next appointment. The new man had an utterly conventional approach, and she was reluctant to tell him all she had spent the week working to discover. He hadn’t earned it and he wasn’t particularly interested in it. Yet she told him more than she intended, and it had nothing to do with him. It was what James Candler would have wanted. She couldn’t spend the week trying desperately to be frank with herself and then drop it because he was out of town. That would be disrespectful of him. It would diminish the transformation she had begun—the raw ingredients of her soul finally beginning to simmer.

Some things in this life seemed like magic.

As Candler watched in his rearview, that stupid, speeding, swerving car lifted off the ground. The Road Runner took flight. Its chrome grill filled the rearview as the car spiraled through the air like a tossed football. The last Candler saw as he rounded a curve was the airborne car colliding with a light pole—a flyaway pole—which bounced high into the morning sunlight and down the freeway’s shoulder.

It was almost three miles to the next exit. Candler’s hands on the steering wheel trembled and his gut was gripped by an immense fist. He was incapable of thinking in words.
Exit interstate in point five miles,
the librarian commanded. He obeyed and circled back, retracing the drive. When words resumed their occupancy in his mind, they appeared singly:
fire, carnage, death, responsibility.

Beth Wray filled the notebook with thoughts and reasons and explanations. She put in her Amoeba hours and came to a decision: she would do whatever James Candler advised. She spent her day off repainting the kitchen in the apartment she shared with another actress. She bought a modest floral dress to wear to her next counseling session. On the Friday before her Monday session, she drove directly from Amoeba to Barracudas and changed into one of her outfits. She was fourth in the rotation, which gave her time to get a few happy-hour joes to buy her drinks or splurge for a private dance. When she saw James Candler at a table near the stage, she thought he might be a mirage. She slipped across the room before he spotted her. His going-away party was taking place at the bar. There were four men and three women in the group, dressed in their professional clothing, some of them enjoying themselves and some conspicuously uncomfortable. On their table a brightly decorated cake read SAN DIEGO OR BUST and showed a busty woman made entirely of icing. One of the dancers baked such cakes and embellished them elaborately, package deals for office celebrations. Unlike the other dancers, the cake girl was an ambitious woman. “One day I’ll own this place,” she had told Beth. “One day you’ll work for me.”

James Candler watched the naked women but he didn’t have the ugly hunger, the vapid glaze, or the macho anger of the usual customers, and yet he wasn’t feigning distaste like others in his group. He was better looking than she recalled, or was made attractive by sitting among his colleagues, surrounded by the Barracudas’ regulars. He hadn’t chosen to come there, yet he obviously appreciated women. She was reminded of the cottage belonging to bears, the porridge that tasted just right.

When it was her time to dance, Candler’s party had cut the cake but had not served the slices, the professionals tipsy now.
His eyes will be spiked with blood in the morning,
she thought. Her cue came and went. The first song of her selection—Madonna’s “Vogue”—bounced out over the speakers. If he had left the bar before her spot in the rotation, who knows? Maybe she would still live in Los Angeles. Maybe she would be a full-time whore by now, or perhaps she would have sweet-talked some millionaire into setting her up with a house. Instead, she kept the job at Amoeba and took a second job at a diner, waiting tables. She had the breast implants removed, quit bleaching her hair, and dropped the W from her name. After completing the requirements of her probation, she relocated what remained of herself to San Diego. She did not move there to pursue James Candler, though she entertained daydreams of running into him. She moved there to escape Beth Wray, that spectacular and hopeless teenage invention, that deadly beam of wonder.

There was no fire. The first evidence of Candler’s imbecilic actions was a liberated strip of tire in the passing lane, a knobby artifact, like a black egg carton. Not far beyond that dark shred of rubber, the Road Runner itself appeared, its ruined body resting on the shoulder of the interstate, hunched over its rims, the roof pancaked. From beneath the flattened car, liquid wings spread across the asphalt. Candler held his breath and lifted his foot from the accelerator. Two men stood just beyond the heap. The first was a highway patrolman, taking notes, and the second was the driver, his suit rumpled and torn but his body intact and erect. The driver recognized the Porsche. He offered an uncomfortable smile, a half shrug. When the highway patrolman turned to look, the driver mouthed something, motioning for Candler to keep going.

What could Candler do but obey?
No one was hurt,
he told himself repeatedly, while his gut worked to make him consider all that could have happened.

Recalculating,
the librarian reminded him.

Every month or two Lise searched online for James Candler. She was not obsessed with the idea of seeing him again; rather, she was entertained by it. An amusement. She followed her progress the way another person might track a sports team, a political candidate, a popular band. Although it was true that she had been celibate since meeting him. Three years, two months; 1,153 days: she tracked her celibacy the way an alcoholic measured his sobriety.