Darkroom Page 5

  ‘Forty years my uncle Giovanni lived here,’ said Vinnie, bounding up the front steps and pushing open the heavy oak doors. ‘He was old and he was sick, and his apartment was way too big for him, but he absolutely refused to move. He said he had to live here until he died. He never told us why, silly old coot.’

  As the oak doors swung shut behind them, Jim was overwhelmed by the sudden silence. It was total. He listened and listened, but he couldn’t even hear a TV playing or the sound of the traffic outside. ‘It’s like a church,’ he said, stepping forward into the hallway. His footstep echoed, and re-echoed.

  The hallway looked like a church and it even smelled like a church. It was octagonal, with pillars of streaky red marble, and a matching marble floor. The walls were paneled in decoratively carved oak, with bunches of grapes and wild roses and human faces, all of them Italian-looking men with hawk-like noses and highly disdainful expressions. Even the elevator doors were covered in bas-reliefs of trees and brambles and pictures of distant castles.

  At one side of the hallway stood a creamy-colored statue of a naked man, about three-quarters of life size, with one hand raised in front of his eyes as if he were trying to stop himself from being blinded by the sun. In his other hand he was holding a square box, about four inches along each side.

  ‘Interesting statue,’ said Jim. ‘Any idea what it’s supposed to be? Michelangelo’s David is Deeply Disappointed with his Bar-Mitzvah Present?’

  ‘I don’t have any idea. All I know is that my mother always kept her back to it when we were waiting for the elevator. I think she was embarrassed by the size of his schlong.’

  ‘Well, he is pretty well endowed, isn’t he? But there’s an inscription on the side here. LIGHT SNARETH THE SOUL. What does that mean?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Vinnie. ‘I asked Uncle Giovanni about it once, and all he said was “don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to.”’

  ‘How were you supposed to know you didn’t want to know the answer unless he told you what it was?’

  ‘That’s what I said. But all he said was “shut up, kid, and eat your linguine.”’

  The elevator arrived with a startling bang, and the doors shuddered open. Inside, the elevator car only had room for three or four people, but it was mirrored on all sides, so that it appeared to be crowded with dozens of Jims and Vinnies.

  ‘It’s the fourth floor,’ said Vinnie. He pressed the button but nothing happened. ‘It’s old, this building,’ he apologized. ‘But – you know – it’s cramful of character.’ He pressed the button again, and this time the doors shuddered shut, and they were winched unsteadily upward. Jim was sure that he could hear the cable pinging, strand by strand.

  They walked along the fourth-floor corridor for what seemed like miles. The carpet had once been maroon, but now it was mostly string and holes and rumpled-up hillocks. When they reached Uncle Giovanni’s apartment, Vinnie fumbled for the key and eventually unlocked the massive oak front door. They groped together into a gloomy lobby area which smelled strongly of shoes. Eventually Vinnie found the light switch and said, ‘Presto!’

  On the right-hand side of the lobby stood a large mahogany hall stand which was clustered with more than two dozen men’s hats – fedoras, trilbies, skimmers and derbies. There were probably six or seven overcoats hung up, as well as scarves for every conceivable occasion, from motorcycling to the opera, and a thicket of walking sticks and umbrellas.

  The left-hand side of the lobby was a mountain range of discarded footwear – sandals, two-tone Oxfords, patent-leather evening pumps, tasseled loafers, bedroom slippers. It looked as if Uncle Giovanni had kept every pair of shoes that he had worn since he came to California.

  ‘Sorry about the whiff,’ said Vinnie. ‘My mom used to call him Gorgonzola feet.’

  He led the way through to the living room, and Jim could see that he hadn’t been exaggerating about the size of the apartment. It was vast, almost baronial, but it was shabby and airless, and thick with dust. The living room was still decorated with the original 1935 wallpaper – faded green with wavy brown patterns – although there were so many pictures hanging everywhere that the wallpaper was barely visible. At the windows, nearly twenty feet high, moss-green velvet drapes hung rotting on their rails. The room was dominated by a huge marble fireplace, its grate overflowing with half-burned letters and documents. Assembled around it was a yard-sale collection of furniture: sagging couches covered with sun-faded brocade; 1930s Lloyd Loom chairs, painted turquoise; antique Spanish side tables and studded leather stools. In one corner stood a tall-backed chair that looked more like a throne, and on either side of it stood two torchères, those tall twisty pillars for statuettes or trailing plants.

  Over the fireplace hung a large, dark oil painting of a man in evening dress. He was standing in front of a mirror, but he had a black cloth draped over his head. The painting needed cleaning, which made it look yellowish and even more sinister than it was probably supposed to be. It reminded Jim of the surrealist paintings of René Magritte – portraits of men looking into mirrors and seeing nothing but the backs of their heads.

  ‘That is seriously creepy.’

  ‘Yeah … that used to scare three colors of shit out of me when I was a kid. I never knew why he had to have that cloth over his head. Was he so homely that he didn’t want anybody to look at him? If he was, why have his picture painted at all? I always wanted to know what he looked like, under that cloth, and I used to rest my head against the painting and try to peer up underneath it.’

  ‘You asked your uncle?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And he said “eat your linguine”?’

  ‘No, surprisingly, he didn’t.’ Vinnie put on a thick, Neapolitan accent. ‘“You watch out for dis fellow, kid. You ever see dis fellow, you don’t talk to him, you don’t look at him, you don’t stand still for one-a second. You come run to me, so fast you shoes catch fire.’

  ‘Didn’t he tell you who he was?’

  ‘Nope. But I always felt that he had hung up this picture like one of those wanted posters. He used to sit in that chair and smoke cheroots and just stare at it.’

  Jim approached the fireplace and peered at the signature in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting. Sebastian Della Croce, 1853. ‘Well, whoever this guy was, it’s pretty certain that he’s gone to higher service.’

  Vinnie held up his left hand against the side of his face so that he wouldn’t have to look at the painting directly. ‘I really hate that painting, you know. I should smash it up, or burn it, or throw it in the nearest dumpster. The nightmares it used to give me! I would be lying in bed, right, and I’d imagine that my door was suddenly thrown open, and this guy would be standing in the hallway, with that black cloth over his head. I would be so frightened that I couldn’t even scream. I would just lie there and stare at him. Then he would step into my room, and as he came nearer, his legs would get longer and longer, like telescopes, and he would be leaning over my bed and I just knew that he was going to kill me.’

  Jim stepped back. The picture was eerie, but it was so well painted that he could almost see the black cloth moving up and down, as if the man beneath it breathed.

  ‘No, you shouldn’t destroy it, Vinnie, it’s a good piece of art. Let me find out more about it. A friend of mine works in an auction house. She can tell you how much it’s worth, and she can probably sell it for you, too, if you don’t mind paying commission.’

  Vinnie pulled a face. ‘Be my guest. But if it turns out that it isn’t worth nothing, you’d be doing me a favor if you burned it.’

  Jim looked around. Although the walls were so crowded with pictures, the man over the fireplace was the only painting. All of the rest of them were photographs, mostly black and white, except for half a dozen hand-tinted in a very faded color. All of them were either framed in ebony or tarnished silver. They were strange photographs for anybody to hang on their living-room walls. Disturbing,
even. Ramshackle barns, somewhere in the mid-West, with frowning farmers standing beside them. Three cyclists on a deserted road in Iowa, one of them wearing an ill-fitting suit apparently made out of brown paper. A plump young woman in nothing but a tightly laced corset, her breasts bulging, standing by a window in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background, its upper levels hidden by fog. A cross-eyed boy with bare feet sitting in a ditch next to a dead, half-rotted dog, its stomach teeming with maggots.

  ‘Pretty unusual taste, your uncle,’ said Jim.

  ‘I know. But I guess they meant something to him.’

  Jim walked down to the far end of the living room. There were double doors here, metal-framed, which gave out on to a narrow balcony. It looked as if the doors hadn’t been opened in years, and the balcony was cluttered up with dead eucalyptus leaves. The only furniture out there was a cast-iron table and a deckchair with no canvas.

  The balcony overlooked a central courtyard, in which there was a dried-up fountain and five or six old-fashioned bicycles, all stacked together. He was reminded of Italian art movies of the 1960s. The Bicycle Thief, 8½.

  ‘This place is in a time warp.’

  ‘Yeah, it is, in a way. It still belongs to the Benandanti Trust, the people who originally built it. They’re based in Italy – Piedmont, I think – so I guess they don’t bother about it too much, except to collect the ground rent. There’s a super, who can unblock your toilet if you bribe him enough, and a Lithuanian woman comes around twice a week to beat up all the dust which has settled since the last time she beat it up.’

  Vinnie led Jim through to the dining room, where there was a dining table with twelve mismatched chairs, and an oak sideboard that was almost a building in itself. The dining table was stacked high with books – some of them old and bound in leather, some of them dog-eared paperbacks. There were also two battered boxes marked DAGUERROTYPE PLATES. The room smelled sour, like a second-hand bookstore, although there was another smell, too, like chemicals, which reminded Jim of something but he couldn’t immediately think what.

  Jim picked up one of the books and took off his glasses to read the cover. Extinct Tribes of Southern California, by Charles Oppenheimer and Leonard Flagg. He flicked through to the middle, where there was a section of photographs. The Serrano tribe, 1851; the Luiseño tribe, 1854; the Daguenos, date unknown. The Indians were all in their finest traditional dress, and the Luiseños were proudly displaying their hand-woven baskets. Most of them were smiling at the camera, but some of them looked dubious and bewildered, while a few of them had their hands raised to shield their faces.

  Jim lowered the book with a frown. He couldn’t help thinking of the naked statue in the hallway downstairs, with its hand raised in just the same way. LIGHT SNARETH THE SOUL.

  ‘You want to see the bathroom?’ asked Vinnie. ‘The bathroom, believe me, is something else.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Jim, putting the book down on the table.

  Vinnie was right. The bathroom was like a green-tiled cathedral, with a frieze of dolphins all the way around the ceiling. The windows were glazed in green, too, so that Vinnie and Jim looked as if they had been dead for weeks.

  ‘What do you think of the shower?’ asked Vinnie. ‘My mother used to call it the Iron Maiden.’ Jim could see why. The shower enclosure was like an antique torture chamber, constructed of chrome and dusty glass, with a bewildering array of handles including ‘Monsoon’, ‘Bracing’ and ‘Arctic.’ The bathtub itself had feet like bears’ claws. The enamel was stained with rust, as if the faucets had been steadily dripping blood, but the tub was large enough for five people to share, or for two people to drown in.

  The toilet stood on a plinth, three steps up, and was flushed by an elaborate handle which reminded Jim of the gearshift in his grandfather’s 1948 Packard.

  The bathroom, like everywhere else, was utterly silent, except for the plink-plink-plink of a leaky washer.

  ‘Terrific room for singing opera,’ said Vinnie. The toilet cistern gurgled as if it agreed with him. ‘Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma-a-ah!’

  ‘You’re sure I can stay here for seven fifty?’

  ‘Absolutely. You can see how much remodeling it needs. Try it for six months and if you don’t like it we’ll simply call it quits.’

  Jim held out his hand. ‘OK, it’s a deal. I’m going to feel like Miss Havisham, living here. Or Dracula. When can I move in?’

  Vinnie held up the keys, dangling on a key fob in the shape of a miserable clown’s mask. ‘Why not today? No time like the present.’

  Jim drove to Sherman Oaks to pick up his cat, Tibbles Two. He had arrived back from Washington last Saturday afternoon, and since then he had been staying at the Grand Studio Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, which was very much less than grand, and had nothing to do with any of the movie studios, and which didn’t allow pets. He could have stayed with friends. He could even have stayed with Karen, he supposed. But he needed time to think about the way that his life had suddenly broken into pieces, and so he didn’t think he would be very amusing company at the moment.

  He parked outside the neat yellow suburban house belonging to his friend Dennis Washinsky. On and off, he and Dennis had kept in touch since they were freshmen at college together. In those days, they had both been convinced that they were going to be the greatest screenwriters of the twentieth century. Watch out, William Goldman! Eat your heart out, Joe Eszterhas! To be fair, Dennis had written three episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and a made-for-TV thriller called X Marks the Spot. But now he was teaching screenwriting over the Internet to housewives whose chances of having a script accepted by a major studio were only marginally better than being struck by a meteorite, while Jim was teaching Special Class II, and the twentieth century was something you watched on the History Channel.

  Jim rang the door chimes and Dennis’s wife Mary snatched the door open as if she had been standing there waiting for him. She was pale and flat-faced and she was always worried about something, so that she had a habit of stopping in her tracks – screech! – and about-turning like Olive Oyl, because she thought she might have left her house key dangling in the front door or forgotten to put the ice cream back in the freezer or turn off the gas under the saucepan of milk.

  ‘Jim! How nice to see you! Come on in! I’m just about to start supper. You like meat loaf, don’t you? Meat loaf?’

  ‘I can’t stay,’ Jim told her. ‘Wish I could. I came to collect Tibbles, that’s all.’

  ‘Won’t you have a beer? Oh, dear!’ Screech! About turn! ‘I don’t think I put any more beer in the fridge. Or maybe I did! Did I?’ She opened the icebox and the bottom shelf was stacked with at least two dozen cans of Pabst Blue Label. ‘There! I thought I must have done! You’ve come for Tibbles? Have you found yourself someplace to live?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve really lucked out. One of the teachers at West Grove has a vacant apartment on Saltillo Street.’

  ‘That’s Venice, isn’t it? Venice? You like Venice. Will you be sharing?’

  ‘Only with the ghost of the previous occupant. You should see this place. It looks like a set from The Haunting.’

  Jim saw Tibbles’s bowl on the floor in the laundry room, and it was licked clean, so she must have been eating well. ‘Tibbles give you any trouble?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say trouble exactly. But she’s a very queer cat, isn’t she? For a cat, I mean. For a cat.’

  ‘She’s idiosyncratic, I’ll give you that.’

  Mary blinked, and Jim realized that she probably didn’t know what idiosyncratic meant. ‘Quirky,’ he added.

  ‘Quirky! You can say that again! Look, I’d better find her for you. Come on out back. Dennis has his screenwriters’ chat room at six, so he’s making sure that he’s well prepared.’

  She led Jim through to the small back yard, which had a red-painted picket fence all around it, a single row of sunflowers and a lawn covered with that bright green dichondra that used to be popular in the ’60s. It looked
like a child’s drawing of a back yard rather than a real one. Dennis was sitting on the sun deck, apparently asleep, with his hands folded over his belly. His face was covered with a floppy cotton hat, like a wilted cabbage, and he was wearing a red and yellow striped shirt.

  ‘Dennis!’ called Mary. ‘Look who’s here!’ Screech! About-turn! ‘Did I put the washing on? Dennis has to have a white shirt for tomorrow.’ She hurried back into the house.

  Dennis raised the hat off his face and sat up. ‘Jim! How’s things?’ He was a bulging, overweight man with sun-reddened cheeks and a Jimmy Durante nose and wildly overgrown eyebrows. But his eyes were so intensely blue that Jim always felt there was a mischievous child hiding inside him, peering out.

  ‘Come to take Tibbles off your hands,’ said Jim.

  ‘Hey – soon as you like. Gives me the willies, your cat.’

  Jim sat down and took a mouthful of cold beer. ‘She hasn’t been misbehaving herself, has she? Hasn’t made any mess?’

  ‘Oh, no, she’s a very clean cat, I’ll have to admit that. But she’s a very strange cat, isn’t she?’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You won’t believe this. Sunday night we were sitting in the parlor watching TV when she walks in, takes a sniff around, then jumps up on to the table where we keep all the family photographs.’

  ‘I’m sorry. She didn’t break anything, did she? She’s not allowed to jump on the furniture.’

  Dennis held his stomach for a moment, and burped. ‘Sorry. Too much beer. But I can never do that chat room thing unless I’m halfway drunk.’ He adopted a monotonous, nerd-like voice. ‘“Dear Mr Washinsky, I’ve written a terrific new action-adventure movie, Dead From The Neck Upward, especially for Bruce Willis. Please give me Mr Willis’s address so that I can deliver it to him personally in a brown-paper bag. I just know that once Mr Willis has had the chance to read it he’ll insist on starring in it.”’

  Jim smiled. ‘Come on, Dennis. You have to let people have their dreams. They know as well as you do that they’re never going to come true.’