“Just to pick up Milo.”
“Came out great, our water consumption’s way down. .. the sago palms–do you know what they are?”
“Squat things with leaves that look like fan blades?”
“Exactly. I’ll leave the key under the branches of the smaller one–the one on the right. Milo would kill me if he knew.” More laughter. “We have a new alarm code, too–he changes it every couple of months.”
He rattled off five numbers. I copied them down and thanked him again.
“Pleasure,” he said. “This should be fun, we’ve never had a I packed my carry-on and Robin packed hers. We took the dog for a walk around the property and played with him, and finally he got sleepy. We left him resting and drove into town for an early dinner, taking Robin’s truck.
Cholesterol palace on South Beverly Drive: thick steaks and home-fried potatoes served in lumberjack portions at prices no lumberjack could afford.
The food looked great and smelled great, and my taste buds told me it probably tasted great, too. But somewhere along the line the circuitry between my tongue and my brain fizzed and I found myself chewing mechanically, forcing meat down a dry, tight throat.
At seven, we cleaned the house on Benedict, picked up the dog, locked up, and drove over to West Hollywood. The key was where Rick had said it would be, placed on the ground precisely at the middle of the palm’s corrugated trunk.
The rest of the yard was desert-pale and composed, drought-tolerant plants spread expertly around the tiny space. The walls were higher and topped with ragged stone.
Inside, the place was different, too: whitewashed hardwood floors, big leather chairs, glass tables, gray fabric walls. The guest room was pine. An old iron bed was freshly made and turned down. A single white rose rested on the pillow and a bar of Swiss chocolate was on a dish on the nightstand.
“How sweet,” said Robin, picking up the flower and twirling it. She looked around. “This is like a great little inn.”
Sheets of newspaper were spread on the floor next to the bed. On them were a white ceramic bowl filled with water, a plasticwrapped hunk of cheddar cheese, and a shirt cardboard lettered in fountain pen, in Rick’s perfect, surgeon’s hand: POOCH’S CORNER.
The dog went straight for the cheese–nosing it and having trouble with the concept of see-through plastic. I unwrapped it and fed it to him in bits.
We let him explore the yard for a while, then went back inside. “Every time I come here, they’ve done something else,” Robin said.
“They? I don’t think so, Rob.”
“True. You know, sometimes I have trouble imagining Milo living here.”
“I bet he loves it. Refuge from all the ugliness, someone else to worry about the details for a change.”
“You’re probably right–we can all use a refuge, can’t we?”
At eight, she drove me to LAX. The place had been rebuilt a few years ago, for the Olympics, and was a lot more manageable, but incoming arteries were still clogged and we waited to enter the departure lanes.
The whole city had been freshened up for the games, more energy and creativity mustered during one summer than the brain-dead mayor and the piss-and-moan city council had come up with in two decades. Now they were back to their old apathyand-sleaze routine, and the city was rotting wherever the rich didn’t live.
Robin pulled up to the curb. The dog couldn’t enter the terminal, so we said our good-byes right there, and feeling lost and edgy, I entered the building.
The main hall was a painfully bright temple of transition. People looked either bone weary or jumpy. Security clearance was slow because the western-garbed man in front of me kept setting off the metal detector.
Finally, someone figured out it was due to the metal shanks in his snakeskin boots, and we started moving again.
I made it to the gate by nine-fifteen. Got my boarding pass, waited a half hour, then stood in line and finally got to my seat. The plane began taxiing at ten-ten, then stopped. We sat on the runway for a while and finally lifted off. A couple of thousand feet up, L.A. was still a giant circuit board. Then a cloud bank. Then darkness.