that everything was about three times the price of Trader Joe’s. Her place was relatively modest, all things considered, a small and finely restored Cal bungalow on the outer edges of Hancock Park. Or, as he and Rebecca pointed out gleefully to one another when they found real-estate flyers rubber-banded to the doorknob from time to time, “Hancock Park Adjacent. ” Hancock Park was old-money LA, full of true mansions, like great out-of-place Tudor baronials, but you could tell exactly where even adjacent ended. Three blocks east of Rebecca’s house you were into Latino apartment houses, the streets jammed with Chevies and junkers, and the brand-new high-density Korean high-rises, with a lot of angles and earth tones and balconies the size of postage stamps.
Taunton School, where she was headmistress, was only a short drive away—in Hancock Park proper —but he knew she would probably be late home. There were always problems to attend to, it seemed. He had trouble mustering very much sympathy for the problems of very rich young girls, and he occasionally wondered aloud what these unspecified problems could be—an unexpected rumple in the Armani skirt, a drop of a quarter percent on a stock certificate. He thought of his father, and realized that his own prejudices against the relatively innocent children of the rich were parallel to his father’s against people of color, at least in the sense that they both relied on stereotypes. But all in all, he just didn’t feel that guilty about resenting the affluent and comfortable.
He let himself in Rebecca’s handsome front door, which was varnished white oak below and leaded glass above, a bright design of a spreading fruit tree. Rebecca said she had heard that the place had actually been designed—first draft, anyway—by the great Charles and Henry Greene, though taken over and completed by an apprentice. Inside he was struck as always by the resonances of money—the real Kandinsky over the mantel and the little Goya drawing beside it. He didn’t like Kandinsky all that much, but you couldn’t help being impressed by what it meant, a single oil painting worth more than all the money he had earned in his lifetime, all the way back to his newspaper route as a boy.
It was her family’s house—her father had been some bigwig at a film studio—and she was an only child, so she had inherited it all: real Persian carpets, Picasso litho in the bathroom, signed Edward Weston print of a gnarled green pepper in the hall, and even the Lipshitz bronze on a granite pedestal. The only thing she had that he really and truly loved was a portrait of her father on the steps of Angel’s Flight by Millard Sheets.
No, he thought, there was another item he loved, tucked away and forgotten in the unused guest room. An LA surrealist piece from the 1960s by Joe Steuben, a kind of kiosk that portrayed an immensely sad view out the back window of a forlorn little house, seen through torn lace curtains. If you plugged the kiosk in and activated it, the taillights of a car passed from time to time in the alley, in some kind of inexplicably heartbreaking depiction of loneliness. It prodded a finger at something deep inside him.
He chopped leeks and sautéed them in olive oil, then added sun-dried tomatoes, a bit of cooked chicken, garlic, and mint. Finally he set the penne boiling. The nice thing about the meal was he could put it aside and the microwave wouldn’t wreck it on reheating.
In the living room, he sat in the leathery mission-style chair and started to read a Cormac McCarthy he was fighting his way through. But he found he just wasn’t in the mood for that dense, fierce prose, and he let the book fall and sat with his eyes closed, listening to the rattle of the fridge shifting itself into some other mode. Maeve’s doubts about Rebecca were hard to shake, and his mind turned to the dissimilarities between them.
They’d gotten past the newness and the excitement of
Taunton School, where she was headmistress, was only a short drive away—in Hancock Park proper —but he knew she would probably be late home. There were always problems to attend to, it seemed. He had trouble mustering very much sympathy for the problems of very rich young girls, and he occasionally wondered aloud what these unspecified problems could be—an unexpected rumple in the Armani skirt, a drop of a quarter percent on a stock certificate. He thought of his father, and realized that his own prejudices against the relatively innocent children of the rich were parallel to his father’s against people of color, at least in the sense that they both relied on stereotypes. But all in all, he just didn’t feel that guilty about resenting the affluent and comfortable.
He let himself in Rebecca’s handsome front door, which was varnished white oak below and leaded glass above, a bright design of a spreading fruit tree. Rebecca said she had heard that the place had actually been designed—first draft, anyway—by the great Charles and Henry Greene, though taken over and completed by an apprentice. Inside he was struck as always by the resonances of money—the real Kandinsky over the mantel and the little Goya drawing beside it. He didn’t like Kandinsky all that much, but you couldn’t help being impressed by what it meant, a single oil painting worth more than all the money he had earned in his lifetime, all the way back to his newspaper route as a boy.
It was her family’s house—her father had been some bigwig at a film studio—and she was an only child, so she had inherited it all: real Persian carpets, Picasso litho in the bathroom, signed Edward Weston print of a gnarled green pepper in the hall, and even the Lipshitz bronze on a granite pedestal. The only thing she had that he really and truly loved was a portrait of her father on the steps of Angel’s Flight by Millard Sheets.
No, he thought, there was another item he loved, tucked away and forgotten in the unused guest room. An LA surrealist piece from the 1960s by Joe Steuben, a kind of kiosk that portrayed an immensely sad view out the back window of a forlorn little house, seen through torn lace curtains. If you plugged the kiosk in and activated it, the taillights of a car passed from time to time in the alley, in some kind of inexplicably heartbreaking depiction of loneliness. It prodded a finger at something deep inside him.
He chopped leeks and sautéed them in olive oil, then added sun-dried tomatoes, a bit of cooked chicken, garlic, and mint. Finally he set the penne boiling. The nice thing about the meal was he could put it aside and the microwave wouldn’t wreck it on reheating.
In the living room, he sat in the leathery mission-style chair and started to read a Cormac McCarthy he was fighting his way through. But he found he just wasn’t in the mood for that dense, fierce prose, and he let the book fall and sat with his eyes closed, listening to the rattle of the fridge shifting itself into some other mode. Maeve’s doubts about Rebecca were hard to shake, and his mind turned to the dissimilarities between them.
They’d gotten past the newness and the excitement of
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