Radiance: A Novel Read online

  She checked her mirror and changed lanes. “The Internet has plenty. People with various opinions. As if I understood the first thing about theoretical physics.” Her hand lifted and made a rolling motion conjuring up all the mysteries of the universe as endless scarves in air to be tossed, and then she named one: “‘Fossils.’ Time and space are ‘fossils’?”

  The slit-hem dress on Sunset Boulevard was a picture always at the back of his mind. The bare arms. The teetery high heels on a curbstone.

  “That was points and instants,” he said. “I was against ‘the point.’ And I was against ‘the instant.’ I wanted to enlarge the dimensionless instant. And enlarge the dimensionless point. So …” Through the windshield he faced the coming flow. His own old work felt like it might have been something on an exam he’d taken long ago. “So the instant in time and the point in space are fossils, in something called the ‘block’ view of time. Time is a block.” He glanced. “We are all inside the big bang.”

  And he looked away. He had glanced to see if any of this was taking hold. Or mattered. During this drive Blythe’s hip at his left side—pithy, elfin, erotic, blue-jeaned—was blinkered from his sight, so as to magically avert the actual forfeiture of a daughter. He would not look at this woman so long as Lotta was in danger. Los Angeles kept parting for them as her little car slipped at top speed through green light after green light. One of his superstitious ceremonies had come back to comfort him: both hands were thrust deep in his pants pockets, knees together, heels together, elbows clamped to his sides, a method for a passenger to ward off, via personal symmetry, any possibility of an accident. At the bottommost corners in his pockets, his fingers discovered the day’s supply of ibuprofen, eight of the little brown pills divided evenly between his two pockets. It was how he loaded himself for any outing, indeed every morning, and he fingered the pills, symmetrically in unison, in both pocketed hands, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, a bracelet repeating itself in flowing over his fingers. Here in Los Angeles, all around was a city driven by ambition, every fiber of its soul afire with ambition, swarmed by newcomers, all with desires, desires for an answer from the world, desires to sing their song for the assembled many, or do their stand-up comedy routine and get laughs, or have their screenplay produced, or just write their screenplay, or to be beautiful, to be beloved, to get attention. Or just to have a nice house.

  This was the weekend of the annual physics meeting, tonight, right now this very minute in Karlsruhe, in Germany, and he hadn’t said anything about it. He wasn’t in Karlsruhe; he was here instead. He hadn’t mentioned anything to Lotta anyway. As for Audrey back home, he’d spoken of it only once with her, some time ago, and it was in a moment when she wasn’t listening. He didn’t even himself like to think of it. So why bring it up?

  “Here we are,” said Blythe, pulling up at a curb, to park in a dim lull between streetlights.

  HE LOOKED AROUND—FOR Something like a chain restaurant or a coffee shop, or some obvious meeting place. But there was none. They’d pulled up at the sidewalk beside a plain armored door. It bore a small, stenciled, faint old identification: STUDIO LOT, the pigment mostly bleached away by, perhaps, the sulfur dioxide of the eternal city. But there was a card taped up, which could only be the work of the Fantasy Vacations office, “Closed Tonight, for an EXCLUSIVE Private Party!” in the font of somebody’s office computer. It wasn’t even a card, it was a page of white printer paper—and the word EXCLUSIVE had been pinned at one corner by a starrytwinkle graphic, to bathe it in glamour, bathe it in limelight, bathe it in others’ envy, envy lifeblood of the economy, universal currency in this city stretching for miles all around. Lotta was still out somewhere. The fact that her phone had been busy—and the fact that the boy Bodie had set out alone into the night from the hotel—it all added up to the likelihood that the two of them were commencing some further intrigue.

  Mark was crabbing around in the Subaru’s bucket seat to search up and down along this dim section of Sunset. The only thing nearby was a storefront across the street whose display window was outlined in marquee lights selling frothy pink bikinis and “toys.”

  He got out his phone. “I think I’ll give her another try.”

  Blythe was standing outside the car while he still sat inside.

  He told her, “We should get that boy Bodie’s cell phone number.”

  “We’ll get it from Billie,” she said. She’d already thought of it.

  Sitting there inside the car while she watched him, he reached Lotta’s recording again, but immediately, with no rerouting click. She had turned her phone off. So she knew about his voice mail messages, and now she had turned her phone off to shut him out.

  THERE TO GREET them at the Studio Lot, when they came in, was fifteen-year-old Danny Banzinetti standing beneath his downpour of incapacitating hair, his electric guitar slung on. The guitar went with him everywhere, slung just like that. “Heard anything?” he said. He lifted himself up from against the wall, and he actually stood forward on his own two feet, which was a lot for Danny: people here were worried.

  Blythe said, “Hi, Danny. Is Billie here? Where is everybody?”

  “They’re all in there.”

  The Studio Lot was a twilight, shimmering place. At the far end of a concrete floor burnished glossy brown, there was a full bar, its backlit shrine crowded with flasks of colorful potions. Mark traveled in Blythe’s wake while she explained the place. “It’s a juice bar on our nights here. On our nights, they close to the public and put away the real liquor. So it’s for youngsters, but it’s made up to be as evil-looking as grown-up places.”

  She added, “Gee, I guess they sent the camera home.” It was a measure of how Lotta’s disappearance had changed the evening: the turtlenecked paparazzo wasn’t in evidence loitering with his big old-fashioned flashbulb reflector, probably always glad to be let off duty.

  Sitting around a little table were five Celebrities, the five who tonight hadn’t bolted from the fold: the lovebirds Rachel and Josh; David, the gay one from Chicago; Chang the Elvis impersonator from Vancouver, who was so shy offstage he never spoke; and Danny Banzinetti the seventeen-year-old glam-rock guitar hero in tight leather pants. Danny had been the closing act tonight, wincing, twitching, his finger delving in his guitar’s most sensitive sore spot high up, making it scream. The only other customers in the bar were the kids’ limo drivers. There were two of them—recognizable by the fancy chauffeurs’ livery they were obliged to wear as part of this particular gig—sitting on tall stools at the bar nursing their vitamin waters or smoothies. There was no chair for Mark, so the Muslim from La Jolla, Josh, sprang up smoothly and took a chair from the next table.

  Blythe said, “Where are the chaperones?” as she sat down among the Celebrities.

  “Getting a drink. They wanted a real drink,” said the Muslim’s girlfriend Rachel, with a nod indicating somewhere up the street. “But our drivers can babysit us.”

  These were a group of teenagers who could surely “babysit” themselves—David the gay one was a polite, top-of-his-class student; Chang, when offstage, took the world so seriously he had a tic of blinking and swallowing hard; and Josh was such a devout Muslim convert, he exemplified what Lotta’s generation was calling a Straight-Edge (he’d made a disapproving frown at the mention of the chaperones’ weakness for a “real drink”)—they all had such obvious integrity on display, and all radiated such a brightness of unopposed hope and belief and aspiration, an old grown-up like Mark knows to stay far clear from so pure a radiance, and not risk quenching it. Maybe only Danny Banzinetti could have any pretenses to corruption; but they would be pretenses only; he happened to be from Mark’s part of the world, Marin County, and Mark had a familiar picture of the kind of genial incontinent Marin will breed, innocent, artless, guilt-free scoundrels. He had watched such boys this year taking absolutely no interest in his daughter, as if she were invisible to them, or as if she passed along in a separate, alternate dimensi
on of space-time. As a lazy father, he was slightly grateful for that state of affairs in its holding pattern.

  “You know …” he spoke up at the table in his paternal voice.

  The young Celebrities had been excluding him, from their vision and from their circle of communion naturally, because he’s The Father; and it’s an axiom: when fathers enter the scene, the fun is over, all fairy-tale problems are going to be squarely addressed, all drama and make-believe will have fallen rumpled to the floor. Instinctively kids will sense a grown man’s more sagacious hopelessness, disguise it how he may.

  “You’re all being very solicitous, but Carlotta is smart, and I’m not worried about her. I understand she’s upset. But she’s smart.” This he said. But it was in contradiction to the steady, visceral pinching. The pinching was there. It wouldn’t stop until he found her. She was out on Sunset Boulevard in her red chanteuse dress. But then as he looked at the five faces around the table, he had a funny realization: he realized that they weren’t genuinely worried about her. There was no true anxiety here. He realized they saw Lotta’s adventure tonight from some better-informed perspective.

  “Lotta has a guru,” explained Rachel dryly.

  She looked at David then.

  And everybody looked at David. David was the spokesman, the arbiter of the group, the articulate one, the Ivy League–bound one. He tilted his head to one side, in a sort of elaborate apology for the news he was about to impart, and his long, beautiful hands made shrugging motions, explaining all this to the new-arrived Mr. Perdue. “She has started subscribing to Bodie’s … influence. Bodie is … complicated.”

  Danny Banzinetti confided, “This is Bodie’s second year here”—darkly, as if that were evidence of a louche sophistication. Having said it and drawn attention to himself, Danny looked pained. He readjusted his guitar and jerked his hair. It was awkward for Danny with that guitar strapped on at all times. Especially whenever it came time among people to sit down, he had to keep adjusting it as the neck thrust up from below and needed to be squashed and suppressed or thrust aside. The boy’s hair, too, menaced him. It was hard being Danny Banzinetti just at this age.

  “One aspect of Bodie,” said David, while his octave-span hands began the spectacle of pouring out this aspect of Bodie before them all, and then kneading it up, stroking it taller, into a little lumpy icon of a personality, “is that he has had to adapt, you know, adapt to life, as a quote disabled person unquote. And grow into that. Bodie has all the natural desires, and drives, and wishes. But he will always be limited, physically. That must be a very difficult thing to face at a young age. To face the wrongness of it.”

  So spoke David. At his young age. Whenever Mark encountered the other Celebrities—in a studio control booth, or at the soundstage rehearsals, or just waiting in the hotel lobby for the cars to come around—he got to see what Blythe claimed she loved in this job: they were always a peculiar group of young people who got off the planes at LAX, every two weeks a new small crop. But at the moment he was sitting here talking about his own Celebrity daughter, who had gone missing, and the stomach knot, which he was not focusing on, consisted in the fact that his own girl was somewhat ostracized—perhaps self-ostracized, but nevertheless—because everybody at this table had a distinct visual image of some specific sexual charity she had performed in the back seat of a car. Mark’s own mind, there, was an unvisitable dark well, knowing as he did her characteristic daughterly diligence.

  David—who was facing, if not “disabilities,” certain social injustices of his own, in the form of homosexuality amid a society that honestly would never altogether tolerate it—continued in his analysis of Bodie’s personality. Which he described as “Napoleonic.” He also used the adjective compensatory. Mark knew something of David’s neighborhood, too. Because he himself had grown up in the Chicago suburbs near David’s. David was born in Skokie, and then his family had moved to Winnetka. So Mark had a picture of the kind of solid house, the Midwestern seriousness, the vast safety, yet the anxiety too, the general Midwesternness that never lifts, anxiety largely over social visibility and prosperity and ambitions for the children, but it was still a liberal place back there, and David would do very well indeed. One doesn’t worry about the Davids. As he went on, he was portraying Bodie Lostig as a boy who was “really highly intelligent” (somehow a euphemistic expression, here), a boy who was even powerful and effective in the world, but who had learned to extract his rewards from the world by exerting an intellectual dominance. To be a companion to Bodie required agreeing with his ideas. Bodie was “a philosopher,” he said. And you had to “go along on his little philosophical trip.”

  The guru comment, back there, was slightly troubling. Mark tried to recall the songs Bodie had sung during the weekend in rehearsals. Bodie’s philosophy, from the bits he could recall, was that you have to live every minute of your life with passion and commitment. Savor every experience, et cetera. Be all you can be. Every moment is golden.

  Mark said, “As in the songs he writes?”

  “Well, ah, yes, exactly,” said David, his eyes tender with an ambitious young artist’s standard forgiveness of mediocrity in a fellow artist.

  Rachel beside him added, in her hair-curtained gloom, “Yep, that Bodie. He’s intense.” Her head was dropped forward so her smothered voice spoke straight into her collarbone.

  Intense? They were making a two-wheeled singer of bland pop songs into a Svengali requiring submission and adulation. It would be unlike Lotta to humor a bully. To all pretension, his daughter gave instant, dispelling poof-and-shrug.

  “He’s holy,” said Danny Banzinetti. “He won’t even eat honey. And everything has to be raw. He won’t eat anything cooked above a temperature of … ?” he looked around the circle.

  “Fifty degrees centigrade,” said Blythe, as a Fantasy Vacations staffer providing the information levelly without mockery or sarcasm, over the rim of her glass of wine. Somehow she had coaxed a glass of wine out of the bartender for herself.

  “Yeah, and he turns the lights off!”

  “In the Future Perfect Society,” Danny Banzinetti used a reverberant fascist baritone, “Nobody Will Ever Leave Their Property.”

  It seemed to be a slogan. Something to do with Bodie’s philosophy.

  Bodie Lostig was starting to seem not like a threat but rather more like a big bore, an oddball bore.

  “Yeahmp,” said Rachel, still mumbling into her collarbone. “That Bodie.”

  “Does anybody, by the way,” said Blythe, “know Bodie’s cell phone number?”

  No. Nobody did. But approving looks were passed around the table: calling Bodie was a good idea. They should have thought of it. If anybody’d had his number.

  The door to the street swung open. A businesslike woman who had to be Billie came in while poking and weeding deep in her open purse. She seemed to know who Mark was without lifting her glance from inside her purse as she addressed him, speaking down into its open jaws, “Mr. Perdue, hi, let’s talk over here at the bar. I’m Billie Ahrsatz.”

  BILLIE AHRSATZ WAS making a place for herself on a stool at a smaller bar nearer the door, a bar dark and shut-down. At her arrival, Blythe’s manner of rising to her feet made the power relationships clear: Blythe was a parttimer closer to the bottom of the Fantasy Vacations hierarchy. Also, Blythe had distanced herself rather quickly from her glass of wine. She’d probably had to exert her wiles to get it, but when Ms. Ahrsatz’s back was turned she downed it and left the wet glass behind, and she and Mark went over to take tall stools with Billie at the smaller bar. This all felt as if the two of them were now facing justice. He reminded himself, whatever he and Blythe had desired that night, or even thought of desiring, it was none of Billie Ahrsatz’s business. They hadn’t even done anything. That was a saving fact, to be borne in mind. Mark had a wife at home. And Blythe had the ghost of the boyfriend Rod to answer to. They were adults, and all their personal moral choices were free of Billie Ahrsatz’
s censure.

  She continued not looking up at them—or at anything in the bar or anywhere—taking the whole world for granted as those in authority do, while she sought in her purse for a ballpoint pen and a small pad, testing the pen on the pad to make sure it worked.

  There was no bartender here at this side-bar and the overhead lights were off, so the conference felt clandestine. If the saloon could support two full bars, plainly there were nights when the Studio Lot was packed, nights when it wasn’t leased out to a handful of children and stocked only with fruit juices and energy drinks. Mark began by proposing, “It would be nice if we can go on not involving the police. If we can find Lotta soon enough on our own …” He shrugged.

  “And find Bodie,” Billie corrected him, and she lifted her dark, big-as-chestnuts eyes, to focus all her attention at last on Mark.

  Slight asymmetry to that face. One eye was mounted a little differently than the other. Brown hair. Coiffed in the manner of the one called Moe among the Three Stooges, the bossy one. Her suit coat had padded shoulders, so she was as big and powerful as a jumbo box of cereal.

  “Yes, by all means, Bodie too,” Mark agreed. “Blythe said you’d have his phone number.”

  “Yes, but first of all, I gather this means nobody has notified the police,” she said, while again reaching for her purse, this time stirring for a cell phone.

  Mark said, “No police yet. As father, I want to decree that.”

  Billie Ahrsatz glanced up—at Mark and his “decree”—then she dug out her phone and opened it.

  He persisted, “I’m sure Lotta will get in touch. She’s just embarrassed. She’s just been … bamboozled by a boy with a lot of passivetype manipulation involving a made-up ‘terminal illness.’”

  Maybe right now he wasn’t so even-tempered as he thought. Billie Ahrsatz pressed her cell phone to her heart and looked at Mark steadily. “Bodie’s condition isn’t made-up. Bodie’s condition is congenital.”