The Orange Curtain (6 page)

“What was his first name?” he asked.

“Mister,” she said. “That’s enough for a lifetime.”

A young brown-skinned woman with a single black pigtail opened the door with an Exacto knife in her hand. She was startlingly beautiful in jeans and a blue work shirt, and she had a turquoise belt buckle the size of a toaster.

“Yeah?” she challenged.

“I’m sorry. I thought this was Mike Lewis’ place.”

“Mike!” she yelled and she opened wide and walked away.

A pinch hitter for Siobhann, he thought. He guessed she was a student. Soon, Mike showed up in a shorty bathrobe with a fat book in his hand.

“Jack! Maeve! How engaging. I want you to meet my friend Anna Cochise Preciado. She’s almost one hundred percent Chiracahua Apache.” He craned his neck but she’d left the short hallway, and he shrugged. “Anon.”

They came in off the runway balcony. It was a 1950s stucco apartment building with all the doors off a landing like a motel, and a spiky carriage lamp like a big exploded insect above the half-sunk garage. It was a real comedown from his place on the Arroyo in Pasadena.

Anna Cochise Preciado was kneeling in the living room in the midst of a dozen cardboard and balsawood models of buildings, and he introduced them. She was at the architecture school, about to graduate, and she already had a commission to work on a school auditorium in San Carlos on the Rez. Maeve took to her immediately and squatted down to ask about the maquettes she was working on.

Even here the TV was on faintly, with a cheerleader dancing and kicking.

“You into football, Mike?”

“In a way. You realize American football is by far the best spectator sport in the world. Unlike soccer, it stops and starts so you can match your strategy against the coaches’, like watching a war and second-guessing Patton. Every series builds up dramatically to success or failure. And it’s a decisive game. No penalty kick-offs to decide 1-to-1 games. The best team on that day wins.”

“In some cultures I suppose that would all be considered normal. Can we go for a walk, Mike?”

“Sure.” He threw on jogging pants and they left Maeve chit-chatting happily with Anna Cochise Preciado and strolled out into the neighborhood. Mar Vista was a no-man’s-land between Venice and Culver City, with no real center and no identity other than as another tattered corner of L.A. where poor whites and poor Latinos shared their fears of an uncertain future. Toppled tricycles and shaggy aloes lined their path as a familiar gloom emanated off Mike Lewis.

“How’s the thing with Siobhann?”

“The ‘thing’ is probably fine, but
we’re
not so hot. I guess you can tell I’m not counting on her coming back soon. Anna’s great but she won’t be here very long.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “That’s life in the big city. And Marlena?”

“The jury’s still out, but I didn’t come to talk about that. I’ve got a job down in Orange County. New job—I always need an edge, it’s what I count on. Your work on L.A. has always helped me sort out which one’s the big dog and which one’s going to go hide under the porch.”

Mike Lewis sidestepped a buzzing radio controlled racecar that a little boy was aiming at their feet and he smiled. “That’s so like you, Jack, reduce all social history to dick-waving contests. Watch out, kid.”

The toy car spun around nimbly and headed away.

“Orange County,” Jack Liffey said. “All I know about it is it’s a big white-flight bedroom for L.A.”

“All you know about it is wrong. It may have started that way after the war but it graduated a long time ago. I might even write about it one of these days because it’s become a really fascinating new social formation. It’s not a city in the old sense and it’s not a suburb, either. People have been trying to make up names for it like ‘technoburb,’ and ‘edge city’ for ages, but most of the names are off-base. There are maybe 20 of these strange entities scattered around the country, all outside the bigger cities, like Suffolk County in New York, Oakland outside Detroit, Broward in Florida and Silicon Valley up north.”

The buzzing swelled again and Mike Lewis glanced back as the tiny racecar bore down on them. “This is folly, son,” he said darkly, keeping his eye square on the car.

“Dig it,” the kid called, and the car swung away and leapt off the curb to spin around in the street a couple of times.

“It couldn’t have done us much harm,” Jack Liffey said.

“Unless it was full of C-4,” he said. “I don’t trust children. Where was I? Oh, yeah, the post-suburbs. They’re nowhere near as bedroomy and whitebread and family-heavy as first-generation suburbs, and they’ve got centers. It’s just, they’ve got more than one. The traditional city tries to stuff all its cultural and financial wonders in one place, but these things have several cores spread around, like the lumps in plum pudding. In fact, I’m thinking of calling them plum-pudding cities.

“Take the big Orange. It’s got the old government center in Santa Ana, a new cultural center with a theater bang on the border between Santa Ana and Costa Mesa, education centers in Irvine and Fullerton, a sports center in Anaheim with the Angels park and the Pond, all the amusement parks up in Buena Park and North Anaheim, a financial center in Newport along the freeway and, believe it or not, one of the world’s biggest light industrial complexes squashed in between Irvine, Santa Ana and Newport. And this is just off the top of my head. I’m no expert.”

“False modesty becomes you.”

A faint cheer rose on the air, ghostly and ill-defined, apparently from TVs in several houses on the street. Somebody at the football game must have scored.

“Look, all of this has been debated for years. Where you been?”

“While you were writing
The Underground History of L.A.
I was busy pedaling the corporate hamster wheel, writing things like
The Deposition of Rare Earths on Silicon Substrates
.”

“Sounds super. Did you actually know that stuff?”

“I was always a bit over my head. The trick was leaving your prose just exactly murky enough. If you made it too lucid, the engineers assumed you couldn’t possibly know what you were talking about.”

“Look at this.” Mike Lewis pointed to a small stucco house. In perfect silhouette within, there was a man sitting in a lounger trying to watch TV and a woman standing between him and the TV waving a frying pan. “It’s a wildlife short. The American Working Class.”

Jack Liffey laughed. “Too emblematic for belief.”

“Yeah. Like an Irish drunk or a German bully, it puts the fork right in the oyster for you.”

“Can you tell me anything else?”

They resumed their measured stroll. “I can tell you that the other characteristics of the plum-pudding city revolve around a lot of high-tech jobs, mostly in information and medical technology, a really galloping consumer culture with malls every few miles and a me-me-me display of goods like exotic old cars or boats. There’s also a rejection of any public life at all—you can see that in the way the design of the houses has shifted, with the big porches contracting into little stub slabs and the living rooms all facing the back yard now. Oh, and strangely enough there’s a bit of cosmopolitanism diffusing through it all. They’ve got a lot of immigrants scattered around and all the new restaurants, Indian, Thai, Greek, Afghan. But that’s all abstract stuff, typical of my long-range view and my limited info on the ground. What you really want to know, I can’t tell you. You want to know whose ox is getting gored and who’s really running the show.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Talk to my pal Marty Spence who teaches at Irvine. He knows Orange County like I know L.A. And there’s one other guy you ought to meet. You know, the most amazing people turn up in L.A. Did you know Wyatt Earp lived for years just off Slauson?”

“No, Mike, I didn’t know that. You’re not going to tell me to go see Wyatt Earp, are you?”

“He died in ’29. No, but it’s almost as amazing. Up one of the canyons in Orange County is the most famous detective L.A.’s ever had. He’s 93 and long retired but he always keeps a finger on the pulse. Philip Marlowe.”

“Thanks, Mike. That’s exactly what I need, a mythical old fart.”

Back at the apartment, Maeve was lying flat on her stomach holding two thin stringers of balsa wood against a model as Anna applied the glue. The TV game whickered and hissed in the background, then it roared suddenly, a strange roar that didn’t sound anything like the reactions of a sports crowd.

“Who’s winning?” Mike Lewis asked.

“Frank Lloyd Wright,” Anna said.

No matter what he did she wouldn’t tell him anything more about his father. The clamor in the corner had stopped and when he finally looked up, the picture on the television was gone, to leave only an even blue and a band of type scrolling across the bottom.

PICTURE
INTERRUPTED
AT
POLICE
REQUEST
.
USC
QUARTERBACK
BUDDY
HARRIS
HAS
APPARENTLY
BEEN
SHOT
FROM
THE
STANDS
.
PLEASE
STAND
BY
.

“How come you had this on anyway?”

“Don’t you know? USC has more Romany kids enrolled than any other college in the country. It’s our school.”

He held back the big rectangular metal block called the receiver and poked out the locking lever to release the whole assembly. One twist and the 9mm barrel was out. He explained it all as he did it, so his Martian friend would understand. He sniffed at the barrel and then set it on a newspaper on his red desk, wrinkling up his nose. You could sure tell it had been used. It was only a crummy Spanish-made Star auto that he had bought years ago at the unofficial swap meet in the alley behind the Santa Ana gun store, after working up his courage on a dozen dry runs. It had been very cheap because the alley was mostly a Latino marketplace and Latinos really only wanted revolvers, maybe from seeing all the posters of Pancho Villa.

Billy Gudger screwed the handle onto the jointed cleaning rod and then threaded a little square of cotton into the hole at the top end. He told the Martian that it would take five or six of the patches doused with Hoppe’s Powder Solvent before one came out clean. If you didn’t clean up after you had to use a pistol, the barrel would start to corrode from the residue of the gunpowder gases. His friend always appreciated lucid explanations.

For years Billy Gudger had been offering his Martian friend explanations of everything, from how the muscles of the body worked as you walked along to the store, to the characteristics of the post-modern in architecture, to how an internal combustion engine sucked in a fuel-air mixture when the intake valve opened. His friend was attentive, polite and unfailingly grateful for the explanations. Of course, Billy Gudger knew perfectly well there wasn’t actually a Martian visitor floating alongside him to keep him company—he wasn’t crazy—but it was a comfort nonetheless.

I wish people would stop making me use the pistol, he told his friend. It makes things complicated.

Or were you enamour’d on his copper rings,

His saffron jewell, with the toad-stone in’t.

—Ben Johnson,
Volpone
(1605)

He had left his mother snoring away on the sofa and covered her with the threadbare quilt that she said her mother had made for her. He figured it was probably just another of her bogus memories. It was hard to tell when she was spinning out one of her fibs. Denny at work had said, “Women, man—when the lips are moving, that’s how you can tell they’re lying,” and he had pretended to like the joke more than he did. Lies were never a good thing, he knew that, even when they were necessary. They just never went away once you sent them out into the world. Lies were like wild animals running in all directions. You couldn’t tell who they’d stir up.

One day soon he’d go check on the tiger-man at Phillipe’s and see about that.

On his way east on Bolsa, an Asian woman driving a brand new Toyota did a left turn right across his path from the far right lane at about ten miles an hour, and he had to cram on the brakes. Jack Liffey tried very hard not to think in stereotypes for the next minute or two. He tried, instead, to imagine the fears that beset a woman who had grown up in a rural Asian village and had never directed a big chunk of steel machinery along an urban street, learning one day to her horror that it was the only way to get to the store to buy what she needed for dinner. The rest of the cars seemed to be driving at normal speeds and making the accustomed maneuvers.

That morning he’d got Maeve home in one piece, only a few minutes late, and he had even had a few pleasant words with Kathy at the door. It reminded him a little of what it had been like caring for her at one time, and then the question of money came up and he was reminded of the rest, the whole grand opera.

The little stucco building fronting Bolsa had two tenants, at least judging by the parts of the sign he could read.
Frank Fen, General Contracting and Engineering, Fast Track Work a Specialty was one, and the other was Sleepy Lotus Import-Export, Tien J. Nguyen, prop.
Both parts of the sign were duplicated, or maybe amplified, by Vietnamese phrases that didn’t do him any good at all.

There was one big room inside the door with a number of rooms off it, but it was not immediately apparent which related to general contracting and which were import-export. Five desks sat out in the middle and a dozen hard chairs along the walls were inhabited by an exactly equivalent number of patient Vietnamese women of various ages. A couple of the women wore loose cotton trousers, but most wore Western skirts. Only one desk had an occupant, a young Vietnamese woman so over made-up she looked like she was headed for a Kabuki play.

“Hello,” Jack Liffey said. “I’m here to see Mrs. Nguyen. I was sent by Mr. Minh Trac, about his daughter.”

The young woman finished putting nail polish on a pinkie and looked up but made no indication she had heard him. It was a neutral reaction he remembered well from the service—as if by simply waiting out anything unusual you could make it go away. It was a simple enough method that in his experience had come very near paralyzing an entire alien administration.