“Well, ‘lightning’ would be an unfortunate name for a pool service,” I suggested. “And it wasn’t your Hebrew word anyway. It had that Q at the end.”
“Like Arabic,” she said. “A lot of Arabic words have Q at the end, and a lot of Arabic words are very similar to Hebrew.” She grinned slyly. “They’re both Semitic languages, you know.”
“An Arabic pool-cleaning company in Beverly Hills,” I said. “Sounds unlikely.”
But the more I thought about it, and about the swarthy guys who’d been drop-kicking the Volvo, the more I wondered just how unlikely Barq Pool Service was. At home, after turning Doreen over to Robinson’s flinty care, I looked in the Yellow Pages under Swimming Pool Svc and was not surprised by Barq’s absence. Directory Assistance had never heard of them either.
That was when I remembered that Bly has, among her research tools, a book called The Concise Dictionary of 26 Languages. I phoned her and said I was looking forward to dinner tonight and then mentioned the 26 Languages book and asked her if “lightning” was among the thousand words therein. She went away and came back and said, “Yes. Number five forty-seven, in fact.”
“In Hebrew it’s barak, right?”
“What is this, a card trick on the phone?”
“No, just a little research help for a friend. Is Arabic one of your twenty-six languages?”
“Just a second.” A faint rushing, as of batwings, was followed by her suddenly saying, in a stretched-out nasal voice, “Naam.”
“What the heck is that?”
“‘Yes’ in Arabic. Number nine ninety-seven.”
“Hilarious. What about number five forty-whatever? Lightning.”
“Cat got your sense of humor? Here it is: Barq.” She spelled it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Do you know it’s éclair in French? Isn’t that wild?”
“Very,” I said.
“Let’s see, let’s see. Blitz. Bliksem, that’s the Dutch. Do you suppose that’s where Donder and Blitzen come from? Thunder and lightning? I like that!”
“Me too. See you at seven.”
“Wait, wait, you’ve got me interested. It’s salama in Finnish, or at least in Finnish delicatessens. Listen to this! In Japanese it’s denkoo, so if you’re in Japan and there’s lightning, you turn around and say, ‘You’re welcome.’”
“Good-bye, Bly, I’ll be there at seven.”
“I’m going to look up ‘thunder,’” she was saying as I hung up. Which is her great weakness and also her great strength; everything distracts her, but sooner or later she puts every bit of it to use.
Usually a conversation with Bly makes me smile, but not this time. I sat looking at the phone, remembering that scruffy van parked beside Ross’s house. The old name painted out, BARQ haphazardly painted on.
Lightning pool service.
And who’s going to be in the pool when the lightning strikes?
15
Bly Quinn is going to be thirty any minute now, and is dragging her feet. She would much rather be a kid with promise than a grown-up to be judged on accomplishment, and of course thirty is the big milestone between what you’re going to do and what you’re doing.
She came from somewhere in Maryland’s horse country to begin with, a smart, good-looking, athletic blond girl with a mean tennis forehand and a knack of knowing when people are lying. She went to New York to be a film student at NYU, dropped out, started writing brief ironic short stories, and became fairly successful at it, with appearances in Ms. and Harper’s and small literary magazines and even once The New Yorker. A small press in Chicago put out a collection of her stories called Hesitation Cuts, which led to a producer hiring her as a staff writer on one of the prime time soaps, to give an edge to the female villains, which was when Bly moved to Los Angeles. Her soap was one that didn’t make it to a second season, but by then Bly had fallen in love with Los Angeles and television and her entire life. She had always looked like a California girl, and now she is one, without the slightest regret. She has become rabidly anti-New York, anti-East Coast, even anti-Maryland. If she takes some time off and leaves town, she goes to Hawaii.
These days Bly works steadily and profitably as a sitcom writer. She does the episodes in which the teenagers run out of gas and get home late and the parents misunderstand, and the episodes in which father makes dinner, and the episodes in which the new next-door neighbors turn out to be black or Russian or homosexual or the husband’s now married college girlfriend or a free-love religious cult or (more recently) Hispanic. She has a true genius for the lines that go in front of the laugh track.
Bly makes fun of what she does, of course, even though she’s good at it, because she doesn’t think being a mere craftsman is a high enough goal. Her reasons for struggling against that thirtieth birthday have nothing — or very little — to do with the usual fears of growing old, losing one’s looks, running out of time, all of that. No; Bly now sees herself as a very promising person currently disguised as a sitcom writer, and I know — because she’s made several oblique references to it — that she’s afraid she’ll wake up on her thirtieth birthday to find it’s no longer a disguise.
She lives over the hills in Sherman Oaks, just beyond the pale into 818, high on the slope with a view northward over the great flat desert of the San Fernando Valley, that rigid-grid waffle iron where little white stucco houses and big black Pontiac TransAms fry where oranges once grew. For some reason, I didn’t feel like taking the San Diego Freeway for the second time that day, so I traveled a more circuitous route involving Beverly Glen Boulevard and some switch-backing among the ranch-styles-on-stilts up to Bly’s place, a small peach-colored stucco house tucked into a fold of the hill up near the crest; only three houses were higher than hers, up toward the DEAD END sign.
Bly’s house is actually bigger than it looks from the road, which is fairly common in these hills. The front shows a wide peach garage door and a broad expanse of little louvered windows, all under a flat white roof dotted with white stones. Behind the louvered windows is a small slate-floored porch Bly has converted to a library chock-a-block with all the books she’d had trucked out from the East, and beyond that and the garage is the living room, the full width of the house, with a gas-fired fireplace at one end. Beyond the living room the house narrows, so that its shape is like a lower-case d, with garage and porch and living room in the ball of the d, while kitchen, office, bedrooms, and baths are in the extended line. The last quarter of the area is dominated by her swimming pool, with glass door entrances from living room and office and master bedroom. Behind all this, on cunningly leveled land, is a tennis court, which she owns jointly with three neighbors.
She never locks her door. Does she think she lives in the countryside? I don’t know, but she never locks her door, so I went on in, through the library and into the empty living room. Was she in the pool? A sensible place to be, and the lights were on out there, it now being seven in the evening, but no; when I went out from the living room, the pool, too, was empty.
The office. I looked through the glass doors and there she was, in profile to me, in a cone of light, typing away, looking fierce. She scorns her work afterward, but she’s deadly serious about it when doing it.