Stanley aches all over, in his leg most of all, and his skin is raw and filmy from the sea. He can’t stop thinking about the fish outside, tapping their noses against the sides of the pails, sucking air off the top. Whatever moment he felt passing before has now definitely passed. He and Claudio slip outside as the moon sets, saying goodnight to no one, lugging their heavy buckets home.
44
Adrian Welles lives in a clapboard bungalow on Wave Crest, a big house for the neighborhood: two stories, custard-yellow eaves and siding newly painted, long second-floor deck ringed by a wrist-thick wisteria vine. The slab has settled unevenly over the years; from the street, the front door seems slightly off plumb, tilted at a funhouse angle. The house sits on its wide sandy lot like a lunatic on a parkbench, tricked out in his best suit, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but fix passersby with a silent crooked smile.
Stanley and Claudio have spent the day in a frenzy of primping, hauling their filthy clothes to the coin laundry, then hiking north along the beach into Santa Monica to shower and shave at the communal washroom there. By the time they got back to Horizon Court, the wrinkles had fallen from Stanley’s stolen clothes; Claudio slicked his hair back and donned a loud rayon shirt. Then they crowded together as Stanley held out his steel pocket mirror in an outstretched hand. The two of them could pass for horn-players in a hot hotel combo — or film stars, Claudio insisted. We are like two young stars of film.
They headed up Pacific as the sun began to sink, moving through the shadowed mercantile valley of liquor stores and shuttered warehouses and careworn Jewish bakeries, slowed by the weight of the buckets they bore and the risk of splashing seawater on their clean trousers. Stanley’s greatest fear — an encounter with the Dogs that would end, at best, with their catch spilled — did not come to pass, and as they made the corner onto Welles’s street they paused for a moment to relax, to flex their cramped fingers, to feed the gathering neighborhood cats with the handful of fish that died in the night.
Now they’ve come to the house. At this hour the light is exactly wrong for peeking in the windows: each pane is a mute sheet of reflected sun, shaded here and there by pale green clusters of unopened wisteria blooms. Beyond the low wooden gate, the flagstone path is edged with winter-green, infiltrating the patchy grass. Tall hibiscus grows beneath the windows, and a pair of fuchsias hangs in baskets over the stoop. On the left side of the lawn is a shallow birdbath; on the right is a sundial set on a concrete pedestal, its rusty iron blade adorned with a round laughing face. Text curves around the pedestal’s edge: but a name I snatched, it says. Stanley can’t read the rest. Somewhere inside the house a hi-fi plays a string-orchestra record; it’s hard to hear at first, but when it crescendos, it’s loud enough to rattle the windows in their frames. The music is discordant, keening, like nothing Stanley has heard. He has a hard time imagining why anybody would listen to it on purpose.
Stanley, Claudio says. Will we go in?
Stanley feels a gentle pressure on his ankle. He looks down. One of the bag-of-bones stray cats is rubbing the dome of its skull against his leg; another rears on its hind feet to tap the rim of his bucket with a cautious paw. Claudio is fending off three more.
The volume of the music increases; the front door has opened. A peal of laughter comes from the stoop, and then a woman’s voice. What on earth? it says.
Stanley and Claudio look up. The woman at the door is slender and very tall, dressed in a long flowered dress that looks homemade. Her winged wire-rimmed glasses and her long straight ponytail make her seem younger, and at the same time older, than she probably is. She wears no makeup, and her bronze hair is streaked with gray. Stanley figures her for about forty. Good afternoon, ma’am, he says, putting on his best little-boy-lost front. Is Mister Welles at home?
Yes, he’s here. Are you Stanley? You must be Stanley.
She swoops down the steps, along the path. Her gait is quick and athletic; it’s easy to imagine her playing tennis, or golf. She’s barefoot, and her tan forearms are speckled with what looks like white paint. She’s carrying a steaming cup of tea, and as she reaches the fence she shifts it to her left hand to shake with her right.
I’m Synnøve, she says. I’m Adrian’s wife. He was so happy to meet you! He couldn’t stop talking about you. Now, who is this?
I am called Claudio, Claudio says. I am greatly honored, señora.
Sorry for the mess on my hands. I’ve been all morning in the studio. My word, look at all these cats! What on earth are you carrying?
My friend and I, Stanley says, we went fishing last night, and—
Are those grunion? So early?
Yes ma’am. We wound up with more than we know what to do with, so we thought that maybe you and Mister Welles—
Well, aren’t you both dear! You’ve come at the perfect time, too. I hadn’t a notion of what to do for dinner tonight, and we simply adore grunion. Now, you must both come in at once, before these furry bandits devour you. Come, come! I still have hot water for tea.
Mrs. Welles — Synnøve? — has a funny accent: Scandinavian maybe, or German, or Dutch. She speaks English like she learned it in England. Adrian! she calls over the music as she opens the front door again. Stanley and Claudio are here! They’ve brought us fish for dinner!
If Welles responds, Stanley can’t hear him over the shrieking hi-fi. He and Claudio set their buckets on the kitchen floor — the fish make shadowy airfoils under the ceiling fixture’s light — and while Synnøve fixes the tea and chats with Claudio, Stanley takes a look around. The walls and the tabletops are cluttered with weird art: old planks splashed with hot lead, driftwood snared with yarn, burst ceramic eggs that something hatched from in a hurry. As Stanley pokes around, he hears a quiet precise male voice filter from the next room; at first he thinks it’s Welles. Then a second voice joins in, just as Stanley’s noticing the tinniness of the sound: it’s a radio program, coming through a loudspeaker. Why the radio and the hi-fi would be on at the same time he can’t begin to guess. From upstairs comes a creak of floorboards, a scrape of wood: someone moving just overhead.
Stanley, Synnøve calls, Adrian told me that you’ve come all the way from New York, and that you found his book of poems there. Is that true?
Yes, ma’am, Stanley says. I’m from Brooklyn. I picked it up in Manhattan.
Wonderful! I think it’s what every poet dreams of, in a way. It’s like putting notes into bottles and throwing them into the ocean. I am an artist — when I make something, I know where it goes — so I don’t really understand. Adrian says I don’t. But I must tell you this. Yesterday? When he came home from his office? He went upstairs to his study, and he closed the door. Now? Tonight? It is just the same. He has not written like this in years. Years! It is because of you. He will not tell you this, so I’m telling you. Would you like some milk in your tea? Or sugar?
No ma’am. Just plain. Thanks.