Radiance: A Novel Read online

  She hung up. He knew her phone would go straight back to off and he’d been shut out again.

  BLYTHE SAID AS she swung the car through a left turn, back toward the hotel, “I guess I’ll just … drop you off?” She made it sound like a forlorn prospect. “And I guess that’s the whole weekend?”

  As if they might do anything else.

  It was the wrong thing to say—she knew it too—and Mark fled straight to the topic of his daughter. “So she claims she is reordering her priorities,” he complained.

  He had been watching the streets go by. He just kept on doing that.

  “She has decided that selfishness is an evil everywhere. She’s not going to be selfish anymore. She’s going to be humble. Does Bodie have some kind of … cult he’s in?”

  As they came to a cross street, a midnight L.A. Rollerblader with powerful thighs, elevated by his skates to the stature of the god Mercury, flashed through the boulevards at top speed. Maybe they’re a common sight in Los Angeles, frequent as neutrinos, and just as safe. If the city is safe for a rollerblader, in his tight shorts, it would be safe for a sixteen-year-old in a red dress and a yellow cardigan, under the protection of a boy in a wheelchair.

  Blythe mused, “And she didn’t say where they were?”

  “She said they’re near a big billboard. A Hollywood sign.”

  “Oh!” Blythe was cheered. “The Hollywood Sign,” she gestured out at the omnipresent monument in the American night, and it connected in his head—his doubtless naive, professorial head—above Los Angeles there’s a famous row of giant letters staggering along a hillside spelling out HOLLYWOOD. “Do you know how to get there?”

  Yes she did: she had poked her elbows out at angles, and she’d begun checking over her shoulder, pecking in all her mirrors, looking for a chance to hang a U.

  However, on second thought, she pushed herself back down in her seat, holding the steering wheel at the length of her straight arms, she had such a darling little form. “I do know how to get there. But there’s no ‘there.’ You don’t reach the actual sign. You get nowhere near. It’s fenced off with, like … fencing. It’s got different neighborhoods. Some properties back up to it. An open space backs up to it. But you just view it from different places. Like different vicinities. You never actually get there.”

  Mark watched her chipmunk profile, all the wisdom of Los Angeles behind that green gaze. A life he would never know. Lip he would never kiss. Apartment-loft he would never visit. She was born here—saw some of the East Coast in college—but then came back here. She had a beautiful knack for hitting every green light, like a sparrow, native of these woods, who threads the dense branches at top speed.

  She said, “We could go there and drive around.”

  She looked over at him. We’re all doomed to our own singular, unique, unrepeatable lives: he had spent his years as husband to Audrey, physicist at Berkeley, owner of a semidetached in Cobblestone Hearth Village Estates. Now his daughter was going to move in with her cousins in Connecticut, and at work, he secretly couldn’t comprehend the new gauge-symmetry theories.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Why not. Go there and drive around.

  In fact, he wasn’t sure.

  Blythe seemed doubtful, too. She kept on going without turning. “There’s nowhere to ‘drive around’ exactly. I would hardly know whether to go to Griffith Park? Like Los Feliz? Or up on Mulholland? The problem is, each approach you’d try, each has its own complicated, separate way of getting there. The land all around it is chopped up in slanty ways. There is no place called Hollywood Sign. Not on Earth. It’s just a thing that can be viewed from places on Earth.”

  Mark stayed settled deep in the passenger seat. “I’ll tell you frankly: I’m just not worried about her, because she really does have good judgment.” When he’d remembered her black canvas high-top sneakers, it did something to restore his confidence in Lotta’s toughness and her agility in situations.

  But Blythe didn’t exactly believe him. After a while she said, “Wanna go drive around?” She checked on him with a glance.

  These were their last minutes together alone, they both knew it, and she wasn’t making it any easier.

  “No. She’s got her cell phone. She said she’d be back soon. She implied I might even still be awake at the hotel when they come back.”

  All this was really about the imminent scene under the marquee of the hotel at the curbside, where they would say good night—which, because tomorrow was busy, would be their personal farewell—under the broad overhang where the light was so theatrical and the brass glinted. Rather than stopping in at the bar. Rather than coming up to his room for a nightcap. This had been their main collaboration all this weekend: to close off avenues, to baste quickly over any opening possibilities.

  In that general effort, he added, “Lotta was funny. She told me to get a good night’s sleep. Reverse roles, for father and child.”

  “Well, you’ll have my number. If she calls. If you do want to go out and get her. My place is about ten minutes.”

  Efficiently they had put away the possibilities again.

  The postmidterm lull at Berkeley would be succeeded by the little annoying crisis of finals. Soon Lotta would escape to a private school and she would begin the fall semester on the East Coast. And from there on out, there would be only the threat of Dodd. What empty nesters do is get a dog. He’d always been glad not to have a dog, to have to walk, to feed, to bend over and pinch up the craps of, on people’s lawns. All pets had been barred from the house, by Lotta’s allergies. Maybe there were breeds of dogs that didn’t cause sneezing, so Lotta could still visit—little ugly-type dogs, stubby-type dogs, hairless little dogs. Instead of a daughter.

  The Subaru swung around a left turn, and then another sudden left, and there was the hotel, his L.A. hotel, not the big plain Novotel in Karlsruhe on Festplatz with the row of fountains out front, where right now the world’s physicists were separating out into affinity groups. “Mark Perdue” was absent from that scene. “Mark Perdue” might not even be mentioned. All the people from his department who were now in Germany, they all wanted to be there. Mark had years ago lost interest in the experimental side because the “facts” it produces are so fictitious and so promiscuous, too often merely artifacts of an experimental design. Supposing a critical-mass “black hole” really does get generated accidentally in the new Collider in Switzerland, it would begin by swallowing the pretty little suburban villages of Geneva—Saint-Genis-Something—with its garden café—just at the season when the fields all around would be coming up green. Calculations were, it wouldn’t suck in the entire solar system. According to calculations, the baby black hole would be born pinhole-sized among the huge Swiss magnets, and within a nanosecond it would swallow the sun and the inner planets, but wouldn’t get the outer planets. Before the hole grew monstrous enough, there would be one instant, theoretically, when the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune could be flung out into space, fleeing the new empty center eternally, yo-yos released from their strings.

  At the hotel entrance Blythe pulled the car up too short, in the dim margin of curbside space outside the blaze of lightbulbs. She put it in park and she cut the engine, and with a sigh, she turned and threw herself back against the driver’s-side door, freed one thigh from under the steering wheel, cocked her knee against the gearshift console, and she said, “Rod—” shaking her head, rolling her eyes, “he used to snarf water up in his nostrils all the time.”

  —Which had nothing to do with anything.

  —Or it was supposed to lead somewhere. Mark mirrored her, leaning back against his own door, pulling an ankle up, grateful for this.

  They looked into each other’s eyes. They both knew there would be no nightcap. Maybe they were both smiling a little over that shared knowledge. She would see him to the hotel door, but then there would be only a goodbye under the marquee, separated by a gap, standing each on his separate tectoni
c plate.

  For a minute he actually hadn’t quite placed the Rod reference. That might be Lyme disease disorientation. If it were a bit of lymebrain, it didn’t throw him off. He said, “A lot of people do that. Nasal irrigation. Healthy for the sinuses. They sell special solutions. And a little squirty bulb.”

  But she was undergoing a transformation. A tired expression had been coming up in her face, and now he scarcely recognized his Blythe there, she looked so haggard. She was coming out of a decade-long tunnel, the tunnel of Rod’s prolonged death scene, crawling on the sidewalks, the opera of it. She answered with only a straying of the head, which meant: no, in Rod’s case, it was no such dainty health regimen. Probably nasal irrigation would have had something to do with a cocaine habit. The damage it does to the nasal septum.

  She had slipped into staring off to one side, into history. Mark kept his mild smile on her, and then he closed his eyes—signifying that he was fine, she could say more if she wanted. Plainly this discussion was the reason for stopping here and turning off the engine. On the topic of Rod she would have lots to unburden herself of. There would be regrets, old anguish piling up, things that can’t be discussed with friends and family. Friends and family are too close for complaints or confessions, whereas he, for this weekend, was transient enough and alien enough to seem a perfect confessor.

  In fact, however, watching Los Angeles textile appraiser Blythe Cress’s concise, vulnerable body across from him—the pulse point at her throat, her skin all over salty with incipient freckles—Mark Perdue was aware he was no mild priest-confessor: her jacket lay open, and her thin sweater fabric was hammocked between the promontories of nipples and a drifted hip. A necessary base of male desire is that it’s fundamentally impolite, it’s fundamentally a very rude, very bad idea. What it wants to do to a female is to literally get on top and reduce her to mindlessness, maybe that’s not the deliberate intention, but it’s what happens in the end, and you have to want to undertake to do this to somebody with her own dignity and sensibilities and rights. It didn’t feel the least bit amazing that, as a husband and father, far from home in a Los Angeles hotel, he could want to kindle the wonderful little cheap bonfire, the same old bonfire any two people can kindle; it was plain she would allow it, if he started something, she would comply, and if he proposed yet further adventures, she would comply. All that was in her languor, decked out for him. And if this were the end of it, too, she would comply; because she was compliant. That’s why a life with her would be so erotic, and so endless. Sitting here toying with the Mr. Hyde personality in himself, it was probably time to pop the door and get his body out into the chill of the Los Angeles air. Go upstairs and wait up, awake, for his daughter to come home from her outing. If the days of kindling that easy bonfire were in his past now—and if it was true his daughter was such an independent operator now—and if he indeed considered it as irrelevant whether the Swiss supercollider could scare up a Higgs boson—then what was there for him, from here on out, but his Famous Mulligatawny? The apron and ladle. And twenty more years of intro courses in the 401 lecture hall. Once, this spring, he’d had a kind of sad nightmare. He’d dreamed he stood at the little podium, and in the dream, his lecture notes for the intro courses had become so smudgy over the years with erasures and interpolations, and the notebook paper had grown so tender in disintegration, he had actually had his lecture notes permanently laminated, between panes of heavy clear plastic, like five-mil acrylic, so they were outsize cards, as stiff as Denny’s menus in a little stack on his lectern, indestructible, so that he might spill on them, or drop them on the floor, or drool on them, or whatever, and they’d be easy to clean up, good as new. They could even, after his own retirement, be passed on to another professor. And in the nightmare, that too was one more clever little economy.

  Blythe said, “It wasn’t just morning and evening. It got where it was every twenty minutes. Every twenty minutes, get up and stick his whole face in the basin, and snarf like a water buffalo.”

  She then said, “We were both waiting for him to die,” and she brought her eyes to his. “And kind of working on it. On that. That probably isn’t unusual for people. But this was years. This was for years. He knew it, too. He knew it was his job. It was an agreement. It just took forever. And then you realize you always did have this agreement, even back when you were innocent, that agreement was there. Or thought you were innocent. Can you imagine that? The whole …” she lifted her arms in an embrace, to create fanfare around this whole scene he was to imagine.

  So Mark backed up and tried, then, to picture such a situation. She must mean, essentially, that Rod had been a kind of guy who dramatized himself and that “death” was always the promised ending of his drama. A dark romanticism. Before the HIV infection. Well, if the man had always been using Blythe as a player in his personal opera, it would have involved a terrible form of vanity on his part. Maybe it was a kind of love of disappointment. That’s all Mark could imagine. This man Rod should have had a lot to live for. He had prosperity in his record store, and he had his own musical talent, whanging away on the pedal steel guitar. And of course Blythe, most of all, he had her, a woman he apparently squandered somehow—mistook somehow—unable to quite see the actual woman outside the blur of his own gestures.

  “Was it used records?”

  She stared into the bright applause of the hotel marquee, then nodded her head. “Exclusively. Used.”

  She believed she’d failed. Failed in love or attentiveness.

  “This ‘agreement’ you apparently had … ?”

  “Oh, years, way early, we were totally collaborating.”

  She saw these collaborations of theirs as evil, from the beginning collaborating in euthanasia. She tugged the halves of her jacket together. A little twitch of a smile: she was thankful, while also she was ashamed, or at least embarrassed, to be recruiting him suddenly to hear all this, at the end of the visit, their last time together. The Celebrity Vacation would end tomorrow afternoon when she would take him and Lotta to the airport on their last ride. They would never see each other again like this. So, in any intimacy, an efficiency would be necessary. There seemed in her some urgency moreover to leave a particular mysterious stain here.

  Mark said, “He was a talented musician. He had a lot to live for.”

  She’d been staring away into the light. “He didn’t like anything,” she said, turning back again, catching his gaze. “He loved himself, I guess you could say. But not really. He didn’t love himself. He was selfish, yes, definitely, he was basically dominated by that. He was a total schemer that way. But he hated himself. He was a monster. Everybody loved him.”

  “Everybody loved him …” Mark was leading her on.

  “Oh, he was a shining star. He was wonderful.”

  “You knew him since high school.”

  She didn’t answer.

  With sidelong eye, she was looking back.

  He said, “Hard on you, though. The appointed executioner.”

  She seemed a little startled, or even threatened, by his having jumped so far forward, so fast. They had plunged steeply into an oversimplification, sucking in everything, all of her Southern California, too steep and too fast. But then she granted him the point, tentatively, standing at the rim of the oversimplification, “Ah so,” with possibly a little amusement, possibly a little gratitude. (She, after all, was the one who’d gone in and used the word monster.)

  “Hard for you. Easy for him,” he said.

  Then right away, he corrected himself.

  “That is, of course, dying is hard work for him or for anybody, to go through the dying thing, even with all the anesthetic he might have had. But you had the moral hard part, and still have it, if you were the one who was supposed to help it happen.”

  She was trying to take a new view of her story as it was being, here, trimmed into a certain shape. But maybe it was exactly the shape she herself wanted.

  At last she said, “Little
by little,” grimly.

  She meant Little by little killing him; but that wasn’t Mark’s invention, not really; she was the one who’d implied it, the enabler described in addiction literature, from the very beginning standing to one side, holding the vial. No doubt it was hard. A human body is a hard thing to kill in the end. Even if it’s in poor health, the body is such a wellbuilt, well-evolved vital organism, built to withstand batterings and expel poisons. That was the only way to picture the man’s and the woman’s existence together in their arty loft with a pedal steel guitar standing in the corner. The body, in its survival throes, does turn into a monster, and so the homicidal nurse, too, is transformed, inhuman in the mirror image of her victim, so Blythe didn’t recognize herself, as she wrestled. It would have required a transcendent effort, even in this case, even with the steady collaboration of the victim. And Blythe, she’d been young. Young to be involved in all that. They’d started as high school sweethearts.

  He went on, “Rod could help hasten the process, but … Those are the rules, I guess.”

  “Mm … Those were the rules.”

  There is no silence like the silence of a parked car.

  She was certainly being frank, about a strange and disturbing part of her life. It was almost unrealistic, this whole conversation. In some sense it was possible that this conversation “wasn’t really happening.” In the sense that it would be filed under irrelevant. Or filed under preposterous . Or filed under nonactionable. Mark’s whole personal future lay ahead of him. And you only keep what’s relevant.

  Far down the street, a figure in a hooded sweatshirt jaywalked across the empty boulevard, carrying an old paper shopping bag. If one judges people by their shoes, then he didn’t seem homeless or poor. They looked like bright new athletic shoes. He crossed the street and, while Mark watched, the man dwindled along the sidewalk, at last to be swallowed where the streetlamp light failed. One more apparition who is, to all appearances, alive. And alive in his own reckoning, too. Like everybody. And carrying a personal “history.” Which accounts for his evident “personality.” His gait, crossing the street, implied you couldn’t call him crazy and, so, “depersonalize” him. He walked like one who was whatever normal is. What’s in the shopping bag. Possibly gym clothes. Possibly ingredients for a meal. His favorite thing: Hamburger Helper. Probably he’s headed for the place he calls home.