A Simple Scale Page 9

  “But why?”

  “Because it’s sad if that’s all anyone is looking for. If we’re all just looking for someone to…”

  “Fuck?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  Nick laughs. You flinch.

  “So you went to the square,” he says. “And then what?”

  “Nothing. Drove around the square. Saw you. But you were talking to someone. You called him ‘Bill’. Just like you did the night we met.”

  “I did? What night was this?”

  “I don’t know. It was three, maybe four months ago now. Do you even remember?”

  “No.”

  “And that’s what I’m talking about. You don’t remember. Did you go with him? Did he come home with you? Did you drive up into the hills, find some place to park?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “I was probably high.”

  “And the night we met?”

  “Not then.”

  “So you remembered me?”

  “I came here, didn’t I?”

  “When you had no other place to go. Cheaper to do this, I guess, than check into Sunset Towers. Come here, offer yourself to me, get a place to stay for the night. Is that it?”

  “No.”

  “Then why now? Why me?”

  “Because I liked you. You’re different from the others.”

  “You make it sound like there are so many. Well. Are there?” You close your eyes. “I’m sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”

  “I know what you think of me,” says Nick. “The kind of person you think I am. And you’re probably right. I don’t remember what happened with that guy. I don’t recall his name. Did I fuck him? Who knows? Who cares? This is a lonely world, Sol. I don’t think I knew that until I came here. Back home, oh boy, it might be a bad place for people like you and me, but people there know each other. Here, you’re just another grain of sand. And with you… I don’t know. I thought I mattered. You didn’t just throw me down on the couch and tell me to drop ’em. Some guys, they ain’t even that polite. They’ll cum and then they’ll kick you out of the car. Stick a five dollar bill in your hand for the cab ride home. You weren’t like that. But I’m here now, and if you want to treat me that way, you can.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “But you could. I ain’t going nowhere.”

  Nick rises from the couch, blocking the light from a corner lamp. His shadow falls over you, covering you. Your pulse quickens, the familiar stir of fear and lust. The sense that anything could happen.

  “You don’t have to do that,” you say, your voice catching in your throat as if the words were dry.

  “Well, I’m here now,” he says, removing his jacket and throwing it to the floor. He lifts off his t-shirt. Against the dim light his body looks like something chiselled into being.

  “Please, don’t,” you tell him.

  You want him more than anything in the world.

  “And if I want to?” he says, taking another step closer and unbuckling his belt. “Because I want to.”

  **

  You wake alone. The mattress cold and a dented pillow in the place where Nick slept. Every chance he ransacked the place and left. Anything of value, anything on display, gone. The Franz Kline sketch or Ron’s Rolex or the Dutch vase Ron brought back from Amsterdam. That’s if the kid even knows how much those things are worth.

  You hurry downstairs and everything is where it was last night. You find Nick on the terrace, wearing only his shorts; gazing up at the mountains with his back to the house, like something from a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.

  “Good morning,” you say, ironing out the last traces of worry from your voice.

  Nick turns, and for a moment it’s as if he’s looking at a stranger.

  “Nick?”

  He snaps out of it and says, “Good morning.”

  “You okay?”

  “Sure, I guess.” He looks back at the mountain. “I tell you what… I never realised how far away this is.”

  “It’s not so far. You walked here, remember?”

  “Not distance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought I heard something, when I came out here, like a wildcat.”

  “Probably a cougar.”

  “In Los Angeles?”

  You stand next to him and point to the lawn, or what’s left of it.

  “See that? Raccoons. We’re not far from the city, but we are on the edge of wilderness.”

  “We’re on the edge of something, alright.”

  He has that look again, the same expression as when he listened to the music and experienced something. A kind of fearful ecstasy, overcome by the vastness of the world. If you could only read his thoughts.

  “Don’t pay me any notice,” Nick says. “I talk bullshit sometimes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My thoughts. These thoughts I have. It’s like they’re someone else’s. And my dreams. They’re just crazy.”

  “Everyone has crazy dreams.”

  “Not like these. Did I wake you?”

  “I had to get up, anyway. I have to go to work.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Downtown, I guess. I have folks I can call. People I couldn’t call on last night. I’ll probably find a place to stay. Might be a little easier, now the sun’s up.”

  You tell him he could always come here, if he needs to, and he smiles with genuine surprise. He kisses you on the mouth, tenderly at first, but with a growing urgency, as if to stop would mean the end of something vital.

  **

  You drop him off on Melrose; the parking lot of a hardware store that hasn’t yet opened for the day. You get out with him, as if to hug or kiss him goodbye, though you both know this can’t happen.

  You reach for your wallet and he grabs you by the wrist.

  “Please, don’t.”

  “I insist.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. Not this time.”

  The space between you becomes taut. You hate this sort of goodbye. You always have. Always that hope, often beyond reason, beyond experience, that you might see him again. Whoever that “him” might be.

  “I guess I’ll see you around,” he says, and you tell him you’d like that, and remind him that if he needs somewhere to stay…

  He cuts you off: “Say, what’s that?”

  He’s pointing to the car’s rear bumper, and to the white rag fastened to its chrome. The sensation is like a half-dream in the first moments of sleep, when it feels as if you’re falling.

  Crouching, you begin untangling rag from chrome, but it’s held on tight. No mistaking the intention behind it. It didn’t just get picked up, caught on a breeze and stuck. This thing was tied on with purpose.

  “It’s nothing,” you tell him. “Probably some kid’s idea of a prank.”

  “Kind of a dumb prank.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Breathlessly, you search the parking lot and Melrose, searching, searching…

  Nick knows something is wrong but says nothing more except a final goodbye. Then you’re back in the car and driving along Melrose, and it’s a bright and sunny day, but the city looks somehow different. A menace behind the cream walls; every building a façade, another movie set. Los Angeles feels impossible. A temporary town set up in the desert, the kind of place that could be levelled by a stiff breeze.

  You spend the day in Room 01B waiting for Henderson, but he doesn’t come. The pile of work you’d hoped to finish by 5pm remains untouched by the day’s end. Someday soon they’ll invent a machine that can write these cues and stings to order. You want sinister? I’ll give you sinister. Just key in the code for “sinister”, and out it comes. Sinister. Slapstick. Haunting. Romantic. Just pull the arm down and see what you get, like a slot machine.

  What is music if it means nothing to you, if the melody i
s something you could have written in your sleep? If all you’re doing is taking somebody else’s melody and moulding it into something only slightly different? If you write like a machine, churning out short pieces on demand, can you still call yourself a composer?

  Ron once played you the andantino from Shostakovich’s piano suite; the one written when he was just sixteen. This was at Juilliard. Ron asked what state of mind you thought the composer was in when he wrote it.

  “Agony,” you replied, blurting it out, forgetting for one moment that Ron was your tutor, then worrying that your answer was too sentimental, too subjective. You half expected him to clip you around the head with the score, but instead he smiled.

  “Exactly right,” he said. “His father had died a few months before it was written. Now, it may be a little obvious in places, and it’s clearly a sophomore piece, but the emotion is all there, isn’t it? There’s nothing false, nothing deceptive about it. This is a sixteen-year-old boy who, so far as I’m aware, spoke no English, telling you, a lad more or less the same age as him, who speaks no Russian, exactly how he feels. Through sound alone. Don’t you find that remarkable?”

  And you did find it remarkable. He played it for you again, asking that this time you think about a boy who’d lost his father, at a time when people were literally starving to death all around him.

  “Music is a magic trick,” Ron said. “But one to which no-one, not even the magician, knows the secret. I can’t explain why something in a minor key makes one feel sad, or why something in a major key makes one happy. And I don’t trust anyone – any musicologist or psychologist or neurologist – who says otherwise. It’s magic, Sol. Alchemy. It’s that line which gets attributed to everyone, from Debussy to an old Zen proverb. Music is the space between the notes. It’s like Mahler said. If one could say it with language, one wouldn’t write music.”

  What would Ron say about the music you’re writing now? If he listened to your most recent work – provisionally titled 2m3 (Ship Enters Harbor) – would he find something meaningful in those silences between the notes? Does the music say anything you couldn’t say in words?

  It says a ship has entered the harbour. But then, so does the image of a ship (albeit a model) entering the harbour (the Capitol water tank and its painted backdrop of sky). The words in the script describe a ship entering a harbour just as successfully. Your music is little more than a ribbon on the gift wrap.

  In the absence of good news from Henderson you sit and stew in your own thoughts. There’s a white rag on the front passenger seat of your car, a torn strip of soiled white cotton that served no purpose other than to mark your car out in traffic. How long was it there? How often did they follow you? Are they following you still?

  You would have noticed it, if it had been placed there any earlier. You always park right up behind the tall hedge facing out onto Melrose, the car’s tail end facing the studio. If someone put it there yesterday afternoon, you would have seen it when you got back from the Chateau Marmont. You even checked for a rag. You know you did. Those sneaky sons-of-bitches must have come up the driveway in the middle of the night and tied it on while you and Nick were together.

  Some coincidence, for it to happen last night. Months with no sign of them, the men in the Buick, and in one night the kid shows up and there’s a rag tied to your car. You were distracted long enough for them to do this. Some coincidence.

  You drive home in a mood, listening to no more than a few seconds of radio – Teresa Brewer singing Music, Music, Music – before turning it off again. Funny how a song that was just background noise for so long can turn into something so aggravating, like a piece of grit in your shoe.

  Once home you pour yourself a scotch – you’re nearing the end of the bottle – and you sit in silence. It takes a moment for the residual noise, the pools of melodies unfinished, to evaporate like the last puddles after a June rainstorm, and for your mind to clear.

  Blank canvas. Empty concert hall.

  When the doorbell rings it takes a second for you to react. You must have been sitting in silence for an hour, maybe two. The shadows in the lounge are waxing, swallowing up the room, but you hadn’t noticed.

  You step out into the hall. A familiar shape on the other side of the glass. The doorbell rings again.

  “Hey, Sol. It’s Nick. Remember what you said, about me coming here, if I needed to? Well. I came.”

  Of course he did. This morning it was all ifs and maybes. Said he’d find somewhere to stay. That was before he spoke to them, of course. His handlers. Before they sat him down in some diner off Melrose, scolding him for pointing out the white rag before they gave him his next orders.

  “Go to him again. Ask him questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “About his friends. Get him talking about politics.”

  How did the kid get himself mixed up in this kind of mess? And when did they get to him? Perhaps after that first night. You drove him back into town in the morning, left him on the corner of Sunset and Fairfax, and as he was walking back to wherever he was staying they pulled up in that Buick of theirs and called him over.

  “Hey. Hey, kid. How’d you like to make a few bucks?”

  He hesitated. It wasn’t even half eight, and here were a couple of johns in funny-looking hats inviting him to go where exactly? And do what? Maybe they said something to put him at ease. Maybe they just came out with it, told him they were agents and showed him their badges. Then they took him to a diner, bought him breakfast. And while he was wolfing down his pancakes they told him you were the very worst kind of person. The kind who endangers American values, American lives.

  “Sol. Please. I know you’re there.”

  And now he’s back with his rehearsed questions and his distractions and tomorrow there may not be another white rag tied to the bumper, but there’ll be something.

  “Sol? Listen. I don’t know anyone else in Laurel Canyon, so could you please let me in?”

  He raps his fist against the door three times, as if maybe you didn’t hear him. He holds down the door bell, so that it keeps ringing.

  You can’t move.

  “Sol, please. Don’t be like this. You got someone else in there? Is that it? Your boyfriend come home from the Navy? Well. Thanks for nothing. I guess I’ll just have to walk all the way back to Sunset. Fucking asshole.”

  The shape of him melts away behind the reeded glass, but you still can’t move. You wait for something to happen, for a rock to come crashing through the window, or for Nick to return, begging and pleading you to let him in, but he’s gone.

  Chapter 9:

  INTA, NOVEMBER 1940

  Even at midday the taiga is dark, darker still when they’re far from base camp and the more well-trodden paths. By the time Sergey joined the railroad the more accessible areas had already been felled. To find fresh supplies of wood, they are sent out in pairs to search the uncharted stretches in the east.

  Today he’s been partnered with Orlov, a petty criminal from Novgorod. Even after months of working out here, Orlov is still a plodding barrel of a man, and this makes him a slow partner when trekking through the hills and forests. He stops regularly to catch his breath and complains, almost incessantly, about his clothes chafing or his boots letting in snowmelt. He doesn’t complain much about the cold, but perhaps that’s because he’s so much fatter than anyone else.

  For Sergey, and for most of the men on the logging teams, the cold is the most unbearable thing of all, and it will only get worse as they sink further into winter. He has never known a cold like it. Even as a boy, during those bitter winters of the Civil War, when there was never much fuel, he doesn’t remember a cold this relentless; a cold that seems intentional, malevolent.

  Orlov’s resistance to it only makes the man more annoying. And he never complains about having been sent here in the first place, not like the others. The other prisoners make sarcastic toasts to “that bastard in the Kremlin”, and eithe
r the guards don’t care or they pretend not to have heard. The other prisoners become wistful, talking about life back home, wondering aloud if they’ll ever see their families again, but never Orlov. To Orlov, this is just a job, not so different to those he had in Novgorod, whenever there was work. If anything, the railroad has been kinder to him than home.

  “There were times when I didn’t know if I would earn enough to survive,” he once told Sergey. “That never happens out here. Here, there’s always work to do, and a roof over my head, all year round.”

  Orlov said those words a while ago, but lately he’s begun complaining about the rations. They’re giving him less than the next man, he’ll say, pointing to a line on the inside of his soup can which only he can make out.

  “See? The balanda used to come up to there, and now it comes up to here. Do you see?”

  Sergey told him they all get the same, more or less; two ladles of balanda from the vat.

  “Then they must be using smaller ladles,” Orlov said. “That’s it. Moscow have sent up smaller ladles. Smaller ladles means smaller rations. Smaller rations means less money being spent on the likes of us.”

  At least when they’re hiking Orlov doesn’t speak quite so often – he’s too short of breath for proper conversation – but whenever he does it’s another complaint.

  “This left boot is letting in water again. I only had it fixed last week. That bastard Koplowitz is a lying, cheating Jew bastard. I gave him five cigarettes to fix these and he didn’t fucking fix them.”

  “Maybe they broke again,” says Sergey.

  “Then he didn’t fix them properly.”

  Sergey wishes Orlov would shut up. Still, if there’s any justice in the world, Koplowitz will have done a substandard job on purpose, just to spite the fat bastard.

  By rights Orlov should be the one carrying most of this stuff; the felling saws and the ropes and so on. That’s just about all he’s good for, as a human pack mule. Strong and dumb, just how the camp chiefs like them.

  It still grates that out here men like Orlov are treated with greater respect. It makes no sense. Orlov is a cretin, but a cretin follows orders and he never strikes. Not that striking does much good. There is a trail, stretching back hundreds of miles, of bodies buried beneath the crossties. And not just those who strike, but almost everyone who steps out of line. The Kotlas-Vorkuta railway, scheduled for completion in the coming year, is built on a foundation of dead strikers, thieves, malcontents and masterschyks – the self-maimers. Better to keep your mouth shut and your head down.