How could he?
I remained the ever-dutiful son.
I didn’t tell.
I’m not sure when I chose not to turn off to the 405, when I made the conscious decision to keep motoring straight into Santa Monica.
Maybe I wanted one more turn on the Ferris wheel-figuratively speaking. There’s 2 percent of your brain that can believe just about anything. I should know-I made liberal use of it in other people’s brains. The Children’s Protective Services caseworkers, for example, who somehow believed a 6-year-old boy could have a strange affinity for hard surfaces. My editor, for another, who swallowed stories about Jesus think tanks, con-men actors, and bomb-throwing pediatricians. It’s the same 2 percent that tells you that the beautiful woman who sat across from you in Violetta’s found you irresistible. Or at least mildly attractive. The 2 percent, in other words, where dumb hope resides.
I didn’t have a plan.
I was fairly sure I wasn’t going to fulfill my e-mail threat and park myself on the Third Street Promenade till she passed by. I had a general address and her cell number-I was kind of chicken to use it. The other 98 percent of my brain remembered her expression when I told her the good news-that she was dining with a famous liar. I remembered her good-sport attempt to keep the conversation rolling; it was more painful than silence.
I parked in the municipal parking lot on Fourth and strolled around for a while.
It was prime time on the promenade. Once, in the not-so-distant past, downtown Santa Monica had been a haven for America’s refuse-an army of strung-out, homeless, down-on-their-luck, just-released-from-a mental-asylum kind of people. After all, it was warm, and there was always a place under the piers to lay your head.
The Third Street Promenade had changed all that. It had turned downtown Santa Monica into a crowded outdoor mall, replete with street jugglers, musicians, and dinosaur topiaries.
I window-shopped, wondering who that disheveled middle-aged man was staring back at me through the window of VJ Records, and was only mildly surprised to discover it was me.
I escaped the crowds by ducking through an alley onto the next street, where there were still people milling around, but not as many. Where it was at least breathable.
I knew I was slowly working my way somewhere, even if I wasn’t exactly admitting it.
There was a coffee shop on Fifth called Java.
An Adidas store. A Blockbuster.
Two residential buildings connected by a single lobby, with wraparound terraces and what appeared to be an inner courtyard with a pool. I could just about sniff the chlorine.
On Fifth, she’d said, right off the promenade.
I stopped and took in the scenery. I admired the rhododendrons and bougainvillea fronting the buildings. I noted the new coat of black paint on the filigreed railing that lined both sides of the walkway.
The one I was strolling down toward a suddenly beckoning lobby.
It was lit by two banks of blue fluorescent lights.
There were mailboxes on either side-one per building. I casually perused them, doing a little window-shopping again, even though, okay, I might’ve, just possibly, you never know, been searching for one particular hard-to-find item.
The girl with Botticelli eyes. The one who’d made me tell the truth to her and then instantly made me regret it.
No Anna Graham listed.
For either building.
Fifth, she’d said, but Fifth stretched on for blocks.
I wandered out of the lobby, stopped short by the momentous decision of whether to turn left or right. I picked left, changed my mind, crossed the street, and drifted into Fatburger for something big and greasy.
No false advertising there. I walked out with half a cow.
I found myself in front of a playhouse. Or maybe I didn’t just find myself there. Maybe I was guided there.
It was a play called The Pier.
Evidently some kind of comedy, since the actors featured in several photos seemed to be mugging for the audience, one of the actresses holding up women’s lingerie in front of a man sporting an okay, you got me look on his bug-eyed face.
I was going to turn and keep walking. To where?
I didn’t know.
I’d walk until I couldn’t. Until I ran across her, the odds of which were slim to none.
But something caught my eye.
Caught is right.
Picture one of John Wren’s lake trout hooked right through its gut.
It was an ensemble shot-that moment where all the actors come on stage hand in hand to take their bows.
There were maybe eight of them.
I leaned in till my breath smudged the glass and I had to step back, wipe it clean, then crouch down to stare at it again.
I stood there transfixed. I might’ve been meticulously reading the review from Santa Monica Weekly, which promised a riotous night in the theater.
You’ll shake with laughter, it said.
Or with fear.
I BOUGHT A TICKET, CENTER AISLE, NINTH ROW.
I was right about it being a comedy. A sort of French bedroom farce, except most of the action took place on the Santa Monica Pier. It involved mistaken identities, mismatched lovers, lots of sexual innuendo. The funniest thing was the scenery-a painted backdrop of the pier that kept folding over. One actor or another would deviate from their marks in the middle of a scene in order to mosey over and casually push the Ferris wheel back into place.
Still, the audience seemed to like it well enough. It’s hard to tell with theater audiences, since they always seem to try so hard. It must be the proximity to the actors, who are not up on some celluloid screen but right there in front of you. No one wants to be impolite.
By the second act, all the mistaken-identity stuff basically worked itself out. With one exception.
He made his appearance at the end of act one.
He played a gay actor pretending to be his straight roommate in order to impress a female William Morris agent, who had the hots for his roommate who she thought was him. The William Morris agent kept having conversations on one of those invisible cell-phone speakers that various bystanders took to be directed at them. That was the running gag, leading to all sorts of mistakes and would-be hilarity.
He first appeared stage right, in tank top and running shorts, seconds away from bumping into the talent agent who was telling some producer-over her cell phone, of course-about some hot project, using words certain to be construed two ways.
I leaned forward in my chair, nearly planting my chin into the person sitting in front of me.
It was meant to be dusk, that twilight hour Shakespeare was so fond of. Magical things happened at dusk; people turned into donkeys, spells were cast and lifted, lovers parted and reunited. I leaned forward because the dimmed lights made it hard to see and I couldn’t be 100 percent sure.
By the time he appeared at the beginning of act two in the full, glaring sunshine of morning, all doubts were dispelled.
It was him.
THERE WASN’T A STAGE DOOR.
This was off-off-off-Broadway. The actors exited from the same door the audience did, the one in the front.
I had to wait them out, mingle with the handful of other theatergoers waiting for the actors to appear.
After ten minutes, they began straggling out, first an actress met by a middle-aged couple I imagined were her parents. They wrapped her up in a big hug and gushed on and on about how hysterical the play was, exhibiting the acting genes they must’ve passed on to their daughter.
Then one of the male actors, barging through the theater door and already yakking on his cell phone.
What d’ya mean, not right for the part… you tell them…
When he came out-his name was Sam Savage, according to the playbill-he was with two other members of the cast, a man and a woman. I was half-turned to the wall, undecided whether to go up and confront him or wait back for a while.