The Mirror Thief (20 page)

Behind Stanley the Negro plays scales on his muted trumpet; the saxophonist sucks the reed of his alto. The blonde and a few of the other hipsters crowd around the counter and sit on the floor, their backs pressed to the walls. Lipton beckons to Stuart, a wrinkled sheaf of foolscap fluttering in his other hand. Uh oh, Stuart says. Showtime.

Stuart rises, pulls a notebook from his back pocket, and takes his place in front of the drumkit. Afoot, he’s shorter than Stanley would have guessed: not much taller than Stanley himself. Lipton claps Stuart on the back, moves to take his empty seat.

Stanley gets up, pushes past the old man, taps Stuart on the shoulder. Stuart, he says. I need your help. How do I find Welles?

Stuart flips through his notebook, doesn’t look up. If he stops in tonight, he says, I’ll introduce you.

Can you tell me where he lives? Or where he works? Do you have a phone number for him?

I don’t know about any of that, man, Stuart says. He sighs, closes the notebook, and looks Stanley in the eye. Listen, he says. I gotta do this thing now. I’ll help you find Welles later. Just cool it, okay?

Stanley looks at the floor. A few feet to his left, the blond girl is staring up at him. Her eyes—dun-colored, kaolin-pale, a doll’s eyes—are open wide. The sight of them makes Stanley uneasy, and he blinks. Then he shoves his hands in his pockets, turns, and crosses the room to stand by the entrance.

Claudio is at a table on the other side of the aisle, among a younger group: three girls, seated, and two guys, leaning on the backs of the girls’ chairs. Claudio’s doing his bashful act, sheepish and shrugging, in the middle of some story, recounting his wetback adventures in the Arizona desert, probably. The two guys have their ears cocked to hear him better,
and the three skirts look like they’re all set to take him home, bake him cakes, dress him up in fancy outfits.

Someone sidles up on Stanley’s right: the beak-nosed man. As he draws close a wariness comes over Stanley, sharp and not unpleasing, a feeling he hasn’t known since he left the city: this guy clicks as a true grifter. The familiarity feels good, even if it’s apt to mean trouble. Stanley plays it cool, doesn’t meet the man’s gaze.

You’re a fresh face, the man says. I’m Alex.

Stanley.

Alex nods his big head in Claudio’s direction. That handsome bugger’s got the run of the place, he says. Wastes not a minute, does he?

Stanley smiles, says nothing.

Your partner, Alex says. Is he a good man to work with?

Stanley takes a second to remember that Alex just walked in, has never seen the two of them together. Not that Stanley knows of, anyway. Stanley turns to face him.

Alex is giving him his old-man-of-the-mountain profile, staring into space. You and your friend are down and out, he says. Is that not so? You’re on the street.

His accent is foreign: English but not English, Irish or Scottish, Stanley can never tell the difference. There’s no shame in it, Alex continues. Though it can be very hard. I’ve been down and out myself. More than once. Each time because I’ve
chosen
it. You understand, I’m sure. Tell me, your friend—is he working as trade?

Stanley feels a jolt of anger, but keeps it out of his face, his voice. No, he says. He ain’t. How come? You in the market?

He could do very well, Alex says. Not here, of course. But I know many places.

He ain’t interested.

Alex glances over at Stanley for a second. His eyes narrow to slots. You’re from New York, he says. I hear it in your voice. What borough?

Brooklyn.

Flatbush? Borough Park?

Williamsburg.

You’re a Jew?

Yeah, Stanley says. Sure.

Done a bit of wandering, have you?

No more than you, I guess.

True enough. What brings you to California?

Business.

And what business is that?

Stanley gives him a deadpan look. Batboy for the Dodgers, he says.

Alex seems confused; then he begins to laugh loudly, and now the whole place is looking at them. Stanley hadn’t planned on getting this kind of attention. He keeps his eyes lowered, his face blank, until the stares scatter and fade.

Alex’s laugh gutters. He’s quiet for a second. Over there’s my wife, he says. Lyn’s her name. Common law; no ceremony. But we are married, nevertheless.

He doesn’t point, doesn’t even look at her. She’s leaning against a wall at the far end of the room next to three seated women; the women talk among themselves, ignoring her, as if she’s invisible.

We’re leaving town in a few days, Alex says. Going to Las Vegas. Have you ever been there?

I don’t think so.

Lyn will find work there as a dancer. A stripteaser, I should say. For extra cash she’ll turn tricks. There is no shame in it. All of us, we can only do as we’re doing. Always.

What’ll you do?

I am a writer, Alex says. I intend to write.

Across the room Lipton is waving his papers around, belting out some kind of introduction. Stuart stands next to him, his arms at his sides, his eyes closed, his nose aimed at the ceiling. A hairy white kid is seated at the kit, working brushes across the ride cymbal and the snare. The blond girl rises to her feet, sliding up the wall. A slanted line of black text above her head reads
ART IS LOVE IS GOD
.

Alex speaks softly; Stanley strains to hear him even as he feigns disinterest. Provisions for our journey, Alex says, have been difficult to find. You seem a wise and capable fellow. I think we can help each other. I have connections that could be useful.

I don’t have a connection here, Stanley says. You’re wasting your time on me.

You are welcome in this place, Alex says. Everyone who is not small-minded and conventional is welcome here. But this is not your world. It never can be. Likewise, your world is not mine. You are called a juvenile delinquent. It’s a stupid label, it insults and inters a treasure-house of undocumented human experience, and it cannot easily be put aside. I don’t offer you my understanding. I know you don’t want it. But I do offer you my respect. We can help each other. Of that I am certain.

Alex’s words are all but drowned out by a short fanfare from the two horns; he claps a heavy hand on Stanley’s back, tips the brim of an invisible cap, and slouches off toward the music. The drummer scrapes a lurching stutter from his kit, and Stuart—his eyes still closed, his notebook sweeping the air before him—begins to shout across the room.
Silver!
he says.
Darkness! Echo! Ocean! Gather up the things that are yours, O Lady! I offer my voice for the gathering
. The room seems to contract, the air to grow more dense, and the shaved hairs on the back of Stanley’s neck rise up like ghosts.

Stuart’s language is plain, almost conversational, but his voice is melodic, incantatory, completely transformed, and Stanley catches almost nothing of what he says. His rhythms sometimes follow the drums, sometimes strain against them. The horn players are off-balance, at a loss, bleating awkward figures between his pauses for breath. A passing phrase snags Stanley’s attention—
I reach for the hot coal, and suck my burned fingers
—and dredges up the memory of a story his grandfather often told about the young Moses in Egypt. Stanley imagines Stuart bathed in light, hauling stone tablets down from a sacred mountain, and he smirks at the thought.

The smoke chafes Stanley’s throat, making him lightheaded. His damaged leg is unsteady, trembling, and he steps back to lean against the wall by the café’s entrance. Another man—potbellied, ginger-bearded,
middle-aged, wearing black-framed spectacles and a tweed driver’s cap—is standing on the doorway’s opposite side. The two eye each other for a moment. Then they turn and stare across the room again, motionless as telamons, the bass drum pulsing lightly on their guts and faces.

Last night on Abbot Kinney Boulevard I met the archangel Sariel
, Stuart is saying.
Dead-ringer for Robert Ryan. Worn-out, in need of a shave
. Up front, Lipton nods along to the music, punches his fist into the flesh of his palm. Alex has found Lyn along the left wall; his body eclipses her from view. Just ahead, Claudio sprawls between two hipster girls; he turns to give Stanley an easy grin. The kid has no recollection at all of why they came here tonight, Stanley realizes. Maybe he never really understood.

The blond girl is moving across the room now, headed Stanley’s way, drifting between the tables like a paper cup down a rocky brook. She keeps her flat stare trained on him till she’s within a few feet. Then she veers to take the arm of the ginger-bearded man. She leans in as Stanley watches, resting a hand on his stomach, standing on tiptoe to whisper in his ear. Her posture—waist bent, black-sheathed knees locked, ass angled out—reminds him of a cheesecake pinup, and he wonders if the performance is meant for him. Aside from a few rapid blinks, the bearded man’s face remains static, vacant.

When she’s done speaking she gives the man a peck on his ruddy cheek and returns to her spot at the far end of the crowded room. It takes her a while to get there. She doesn’t look back, at Stanley or at the bearded man. When she comes to a stop the man tips himself forward, turns, pulls open the café door.

Stanley watches him between the backward letters painted on the glass. The man stands at the curb, filling and lighting a pipe. Then he crosses the street. On the opposite side a small bowlegged dog is tied by its leash to an ashcan; the bearded man unhitches it, and they walk toward the beach. Wispy tendrils of fog reach in from the ocean, and the man and his dog vanish before they reach the boardwalk.

Inside the café the Negro trumpeter has stopped seeking openings between Stuart’s lines; he now plays an eerie looping riff under the poet’s
chants, and the altoist follows suit with a moaning ostinato of his own. The bass drum hits grow more frequent and forceful until they merge into a great subterranean tremor, and now Stuart seems not to be speaking words at all, just a torrent of gibberish that sounds as if it should make sense but resolutely does not. Stanley’s eyes sweep the crowd—John standing on his chair, Alex sliding a hand under Lyn’s skirt, the blond girl sinking down the wall and disappearing—then close their lids. The music that comes across the room seems to pin him to the brick. He can no longer distinguish the sax from the trumpet, the trumpet from the drums, the drums from Stuart’s voice. And now all the sounds are gone, vanished into themselves, into a sheet of uniform noise that encompasses everything.

A moment later Stanley’s on the curb outside the café, gulping cool air, uncertain of how he got here. Music comes from behind him in a muffled blur, clarifying briefly whenever the door opens. His fingers are curled around his bandaged leg; the gash on his calf has opened again. A brown shadow streaks the middle of the white bandage, wider and darker at the bottom.

Dudley looks deserted all the way to the boardwalk. In the glow of beachfront streetlamps Stanley can see pedestrians in the gap between storefronts, none of them walking a dog. Fog spreads over the ocean, and the full moon slides behind it, smeared and haloed, as if wrapped in a nylon stocking. As Stanley watches, the promenade clears. No one is visible in any direction. The atmosphere is heavy, stagnant, like air trapped in an unlit room. Everything seems unreal: a movie set, built just for Stanley and the ginger-bearded man.

His head swims as he rises from the pavement. He shuts his eyes and waits for the colors that swirl behind his lids to dim and slow. Then he opens them, and begins to limp as quickly as he can toward the beach.

The tips of breakers wink in the dark, copper-tinted by the light from shore, and the waves sound like the breath of hidden sleepers. Stanley’s
skin is filmed with sweat by the time he’s reached the boardwalk, but his legs are firm beneath him and he’s making good time. The streetlamps shine through the fog—a string of dull rhinestones linking Santa Monica to the oilfield—and beneath them the ginger-bearded man and his dog are nowhere to be seen.

Patchy crowds are gathered at Windward to the south and the Avalon Ballroom to the north, but this stretch of boardwalk is nearly empty. Two dismounted bikers in leather jackets and tight bluejeans come up on Stanley’s right, lapping at icecream cones, and one of them gives Stanley a long look as they pass. Fuck you, Stanley says.

The biker shrugs, walks on, and now Stanley is alone. He wonders what time it is. Late, he guesses: after midnight. He wonders whether he shouldn’t go back to the café. Shoreline Dogs are bound to be in the neighborhood, cruising for trouble, and it’d be ugly to run across them in his current shape. Besides, the ginger-bearded man is probably asleep at home by now.

Stanley takes a long look south, sifting figures on the boardwalk one by one to the limits of his vision. Dim green lights on the crowns of distant oil-derricks poke over the roofs of shops. Stanley hears the drone of twin engines, then sees landing lights angle toward the airport: backward comets streaking the fog. He watches the plane till it’s gone. Then he steps onto the beach, hooding his eyes to expand their pupils. The moon is a blue smudge high over the water, lighting up the whole western sky.

When the sand feels firm and damp beneath his feet he sinks to his knees and sights up and down the shore, scanning the pattern of light at the sea’s edge: the white sand, the black water, the reflections splintered in the waves. This is a trick he has taught himself. As he kneels, he thinks of his long trip across the country, of a simple game he’d play to pass the time in boxcars. He’d look through the narrow gap of the sliding door and try to keep a count of what he saw: bridges, roads, barns, roosting hawks. At first, he played in competition with other bored hobos—it was something everybody did—but the game soon became frustrating, awkward. No one was ever any match for him. In fact, the other tramps were often unwilling to concede that things he spotted with little effort were possible to see at all.
Stanley kept playing, but kept the game to himself, and over time he grew more ambitious, trying to count telephone poles, doves startled into flight, bathtub gondolas on passing trains—even, during one particularly slow stretch, all the crossties from Winslow to Flagstaff. The trick was to synchronize his vision to the rhythm of light as it flashed between objects. That pulse became a kind of code for Stanley. With it he could read just about anything.