Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

“Well, they do scream at that age,” I said. This was a lie: Jeremy and Michael had never screamed in this infant-sadistic manner; their cries had always been pointed and specific. The child screamed again, an infant Pavarotti bellowing up to the third balcony.

“Do you have kids?”

“Two sons,” I said. “Mostly grown.”

The flight attendants pushed the drink carts up the aisle. I kept my attention on the ice cubes. “What did you do with your boys when they were crying?” she asked. “You must have done something. Back then? Men always seem to know about these things. The fun things. How did you make them stop?” I assumed she meant the child’s outraged cries.

“Oh,” I shrugged. “The usual. I dandled them. I bounced them on my knee. I did some peekaboo. I did some bleeump-bleeump.”

“What’s that?”

“Bleeump-bleeump? Oh, what you do is, you hum the William Tell Overture and you bounce them on your knee like they were the Lone Ranger, on Silver.”

“Show me?” She lifted up her son and dropped him into my lap. So surprised was this child at finding himself in a stranger’s care that his face took on an expression of shock, and he instantly grew silent. I took his hands, positioned him on my knee, and began bouncing him.

To the side, his mother watched this dumb show with admiration. I wondered whether she was pretty. I hadn’t really looked at her. I played with her wicked toddler for another few minutes, and when I glanced over at her, I saw that, out of sheer exhaustion, she’d fallen asleep on me.

ALTHOUGH MOST AIRPORTSseem to have been designed by committees made up of subcommittees, and are inevitably unattractive and unsightly, Los Angeles International has an exuberant ugliness all its own. The atmosphere of non-invitation is quite distinctive, as if the city’s first representative, its airport, is already disgusted, perhaps even repelled, by the traveler. The recent arrival might well imagine that he has landed on the set of a low-budget futuristic film, most of whose main characters will die horribly within the first forty minutes. The pods, as they are called, are carelessly maintained, and an odor of perfumed urine wafts here and there through the bleary air.

My fellow passengers trudged out of the plane, blinking like moles exposed to sunshine. The demon-child I had entertained slept, now, in his mother’s frontpack. One woman, clearly a tourist, pulled her luggage-slop (beach bag, reticule, cosmetics kit) out of the overhead bin and staggered toward the exit. As soon as she reached the gate, she uttered a disappointed “Huh?” at the ceiling.

It was a common response; several of my fellow passengers sighed with dismay. The airport’s unwelcoming skeletal failed postmodernism put most outsiders into a condition of uneasiness. All this way to the end of the continent, all the trouble we went to, for this? In every interior nook and cranny, TV sets, hanging like huge spiders from the ceiling, boomed down disinformation from the Airport Channel. You stumble toward your luggage. Downstairs, attendants just past the baggage claim flash expressions of carnivorous appetite at you, estimating the size of your wallet. If you are not a native, the message is, Welcome to L.A. You’re in for it. If you are a native, the message is, Ah, one of us. Welcome back.

Having been to L.A. once on business and once with the family on a vacation, I had armored myself against the ritualistic hostility of LAX. I grabbed my suitcase, made my way past the carnivores to the rental car lot, fumbled with the map, and poked my way out into the hot prettiness of a Los Angeles morning.

Quickly I was drowsy and lost on the freeway, but my disorientation made no difference to anyone. Behind the wheel, I enjoyed a Zen indifference to destinations. Everyone else in L.A. seemed to suffer from a form of permanent distraction anyway, as if, just above the horizon line of their attention, they were all watching a movie in which they played the starring role as they meanwhile meandered about their actual humdrum earthbound lives. Imaginary qualities of actual things predominated here. The spectacular golden sunshine, the hint of salt air and the morning mist rolling in from the Pacific, the occasional views of the hills and mountains upon the lifting of the smog, and the omnipresent aura of dreamy stoned hopefulness — you might as well have been lost on the freeways or caught in traffic, because you were half dead and dazed with it all, the hot petulant loveliness. What possible goal could you have had that might have been better than where, and who, you were now?

And then there were the cars, alongside of which you could ignore the speed limits or sit waiting for the jams to clear. The captains of industry zoomed past in their pink Bentleys, blue Maseratis, and white Porsches, or in their smoked-glass limos with vanity plates (SILKY was one, DIRECTOR another), and the upper-level drones sported about in their ordinarily luxurious Audis and BMWs. Lower-level types, at the bottom of the food chain, drove the humiliated Fords and humble Chevys, mere shark bait. The street stylists had their lowriders and their bass-driven hubbub. But there was also this museum aspect to L.A. traffic: sitting in a seemingly full-stopped backup, I noticed in front of me a perfectly maintained candy-apple green AMC Gremlin, clown car par excellence, and behind me a blindingly white ’64 Ford Mustang. This city, after all, was the North American capital of whimsicality, and if Angelenos wanted campy remnants from the ridiculous past, they would find them. Here you could spot antique Peugeots and Citroëns and Fiats, Kaisers and Frasers and Morris Minors, Austins and Vauxhalls, rescued from junkyards and given a shine.

The Gremlin, engaged in serious multitasking, talked on his cell phone with his right hand while he electric-shaved his neck hairs with his left. Behind me, the beautiful blond Mustang read the paper and applied lip gloss.

Eventually I found my way to Sunset Boulevard and proceeded toward the Fatal Hotel, where I had arranged to meet Coolberg later in the afternoon. I had always liked the twists and turns of Sunset, its deluxe corridors like roped-off walkways outside of which you might spy distant palazzos whose turrets peeked up above the tactically planted topiary that no drudge was permitted to approach. After living for so long in New Jersey, I simply stared at the palm trees, the bougainvillea, the nature-conservatory greenhouse luxuriance, as I motored past. I didn’t want any of it. I just wanted to look, from a safe distance.

When I reached the hotel, a bored valet removed my luggage, gave it to an equally bored bellman, and sped off somewhere in my contemptible rental car. I was ushered into the lobby. For such a famous place, known for its hospitality to louche celebrities of every stripe, the Fatal seemed rather drab, even seedy. It advertised its own cool indifference to everything by means of dim Art Deco lamps and shabby antique rugs. Indifference constituted its most prized form of discretion. To the left of the entryway sat an ice plant. A dusty standing pot with a sunlit cactus in it, close to the elevators, matched the ice plant for pure floral forlornness. They were emblems of four-star neglect. In front of me, and to the right of the front desk, was a brown Art Deco sofa that looked as if it could have used a thorough cleaning. Scandalized, I saw stains. In the sofa’s dead center, a model with a high, soft laugh sat talking to a deeply tanned predatory type in a safari outfit who perched on an arm-rest. His teeth gave off a glare of whiteness, and his huge panopticon eyeglasses — an hommage to Lew Wasserman — seemed to cover the upper half of his face. He had probably trapped the object of his attention out in the wilds of Malibu and would soon sell her to the slavers. Meanwhile, the half-lit lobby seemed to be recovering from a recent binge. The pale yellow stucco walls radiated the weltschmerz of hangover.