The Mirror Thief(49)
The smoke chafes Stanley’s throat, making him lightheaded. His damaged leg is unsteady, trembling, and he steps back to lean against the wall by the café’s entrance. Another man—potbellied, ginger-bearded, middle-aged, wearing black-framed spectacles and a tweed driver’s cap—is standing on the doorway’s opposite side. The two eye each other for a moment. Then they turn and stare across the room again, motionless as telamons, the bass drum pulsing lightly on their guts and faces.
Last night on Abbot Kinney Boulevard I met the archangel Sariel, Stuart is saying. Dead-ringer for Robert Ryan. Worn-out, in need of a shave. Up front, Lipton nods along to the music, punches his fist into the flesh of his palm. Alex has found Lyn along the left wall; his body eclipses her from view. Just ahead, Claudio sprawls between two hipster girls; he turns to give Stanley an easy grin. The kid has no recollection at all of why they came here tonight, Stanley realizes. Maybe he never really understood.
The blond girl is moving across the room now, headed Stanley’s way, drifting between the tables like a paper cup down a rocky brook. She keeps her flat stare trained on him till she’s within a few feet. Then she veers to take the arm of the ginger-bearded man. She leans in as Stanley watches, resting a hand on his stomach, standing on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. Her posture—waist bent, black-sheathed knees locked, ass angled out—reminds him of a cheesecake pinup, and he wonders if the performance is meant for him. Aside from a few rapid blinks, the bearded man’s face remains static, vacant.
When she’s done speaking she gives the man a peck on his ruddy cheek and returns to her spot at the far end of the crowded room. It takes her a while to get there. She doesn’t look back, at Stanley or at the bearded man. When she comes to a stop the man tips himself forward, turns, pulls open the café door.
Stanley watches him between the backward letters painted on the glass. The man stands at the curb, filling and lighting a pipe. Then he crosses the street. On the opposite side a small bowlegged dog is tied by its leash to an ashcan; the bearded man unhitches it, and they walk toward the beach. Wispy tendrils of fog reach in from the ocean, and the man and his dog vanish before they reach the boardwalk.
Inside the café the Negro trumpeter has stopped seeking openings between Stuart’s lines; he now plays an eerie looping riff under the poet’s chants, and the altoist follows suit with a moaning ostinato of his own. The bass drum hits grow more frequent and forceful until they merge into a great subterranean tremor, and now Stuart seems not to be speaking words at all, just a torrent of gibberish that sounds as if it should make sense but resolutely does not. Stanley’s eyes sweep the crowd—John standing on his chair, Alex sliding a hand under Lyn’s skirt, the blond girl sinking down the wall and disappearing—then close their lids. The music that comes across the room seems to pin him to the brick. He can no longer distinguish the sax from the trumpet, the trumpet from the drums, the drums from Stuart’s voice. And now all the sounds are gone, vanished into themselves, into a sheet of uniform noise that encompasses everything.
A moment later Stanley’s on the curb outside the café, gulping cool air, uncertain of how he got here. Music comes from behind him in a muffled blur, clarifying briefly whenever the door opens. His fingers are curled around his bandaged leg; the gash on his calf has opened again. A brown shadow streaks the middle of the white bandage, wider and darker at the bottom.
Dudley looks deserted all the way to the boardwalk. In the glow of beachfront streetlamps Stanley can see pedestrians in the gap between storefronts, none of them walking a dog. Fog spreads over the ocean, and the full moon slides behind it, smeared and haloed, as if wrapped in a nylon stocking. As Stanley watches, the promenade clears. No one is visible in any direction. The atmosphere is heavy, stagnant, like air trapped in an unlit room. Everything seems unreal: a movie set, built just for Stanley and the ginger-bearded man.
His head swims as he rises from the pavement. He shuts his eyes and waits for the colors that swirl behind his lids to dim and slow. Then he opens them, and begins to limp as quickly as he can toward the beach.
21
The tips of breakers wink in the dark, copper-tinted by the light from shore, and the waves sound like the breath of hidden sleepers. Stanley’s skin is filmed with sweat by the time he’s reached the boardwalk, but his legs are firm beneath him and he’s making good time. The streetlamps shine through the fog—a string of dull rhinestones linking Santa Monica to the oilfield—and beneath them the ginger-bearded man and his dog are nowhere to be seen.
Patchy crowds are gathered at Windward to the south and the Avalon Ballroom to the north, but this stretch of boardwalk is nearly empty. Two dismounted bikers in leather jackets and tight bluejeans come up on Stanley’s right, lapping at icecream cones, and one of them gives Stanley a long look as they pass. Fuck you, Stanley says.
The biker shrugs, walks on, and now Stanley is alone. He wonders what time it is. Late, he guesses: after midnight. He wonders whether he shouldn’t go back to the café. Shoreline Dogs are bound to be in the neighborhood, cruising for trouble, and it’d be ugly to run across them in his current shape. Besides, the ginger-bearded man is probably asleep at home by now.
Stanley takes a long look south, sifting figures on the boardwalk one by one to the limits of his vision. Dim green lights on the crowns of distant oil-derricks poke over the roofs of shops. Stanley hears the drone of twin engines, then sees landing lights angle toward the airport: backward comets streaking the fog. He watches the plane till it’s gone. Then he steps onto the beach, hooding his eyes to expand their pupils. The moon is a blue smudge high over the water, lighting up the whole western sky.