Valparaíso (4)
4.
It was a hot, airless Friday night near summer’s end, a few days before my return to Boulder. Dad was off at the movies with Jeanette and I was in my room above the garage when I heard Alex call up from below.
“Hey, Garth. You want to come?”
He was down in the driveway, loading his instruments into the Ford. Rehearsals had lately shifted to Maddie’s cousin’s house where she was staying, and I’d seen ever less of Alex, who sometimes didn’t come home until noon the next day. There’d been precious little time together, and none of our adventures of the summer before.
In my solitude, I’d begun writing little stories off the books I’d been escaping into. They’d made us read Animal Farm in school, and so I’d pulled Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London off Dad’s shelves. Dad, deep in his L.A. boosterism, had tipped me off to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, with its muted erotics of crime. Then there was Henry Miller. Drawing from my three favorite writers of that time, I’d invented Henry Orlowe, a gumshoe who spent most of his time having sex with broads in waterfront dives and little of it solving crimes.
“You coming?” Alex called up.
Flattered and excited, I laced up my sneakers, hurried downstairs, and hopped in the car.
The house was in a narrow, wooded canyon above Sunset Boulevard, a large mock Tudor just visible through tall iron gates at the foot of the driveway. Alex reached his arm out the window and pushed a silver button on a speaker box. A crackling spat forth but no voice followed. We waited in the moonless dark, the windows rolled down, a warm breeze shivering the foliage. After a while, Alex turned off the engine. “They’re probably out by the pool,” he said to Harry Winter, who was sitting in the other front seat. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I noticed a video camera on the gate post, scanning us.
We’d been listening to a cassette of Glenn Gould’s performance of Bach’s The Goldberg Variations on the way up, Harry Winter carving the air with his huge hands, shaggy head and lantern jaw, elucidating the crystalline cascade of piano notes which sounded to my rude ears like aural snowflake showers. Harry, Alex’s earliest LA friend and his classical informant, attended Hollywood High’s Performing Arts program and was first chair in the California State Youth Symphony Orchestra. Alex, in one of his eclectic leaps, had recruited Harry for the new band with Maddie Haden. As Harry didn’t drive, we’d picked him up at the little apartment off Pico south of Beverly Hills where he lived with his father, an émigré violinist who worked in the studio orchestras.
We sat in the deepening silence before the guard gate, Alex drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He seemed edgy, hyped. He’d been staying up late for rehearsals, and I’d come upon him a couple of mornings in Dad’s kitchen, jaws grinding, pupils the size of dimes, wired on something, furiously inscribing pages of sheet music.
A car started up somewhere in the canyon below, echoed by a dog’s baleful moan. Hunkered in the back seat next to Harry’s cello, I felt suddenly small and afraid. Harry, as if sensing this, turned and cracked his wide, benign grin. “You okay back there, Garth?” Harry had just been awarded a fellowship to go to Puerto Rico and take a master class with the ancient cello maestro Pablo Casals. A prodigy, Harry’s path in life seemed assured: a concert career. I couldn’t imagine being so good at something so young that you already knew where you were going.
Lights came on in the house above. Alex punched the button again. This time Maddie Haden’s honeyed voice emerged through speaker static: “Hi, come on up.”
A buzzing erupted and the gates swung open.
Alex edged the car up the steep driveway and parked beneath a stand of eucalyptus. We clambered out and mounted broad stone steps to a wide, west-facing veranda. A door opened, and Maddie Haden floated into view, barefoot in a bright print skirt and blouse, a pink hibiscus behind her ear. “Hey, Garth,” she said, looking both surprised and welcoming, her cool lips on my cheek an anointment. A quick hug for lumbering Harry, who we all must have sensed by then preferred the company of men. Then a long, entwining kiss with Alex I tracked out of the corner of my eye. How perfectly they seemed to meld together. I could only envy my brother’s rich enamorment and wonder what in it so disturbed my father.
We trailed Maddie through a tall front door into a lit, spacious, white-walled entry room. Harry lugged his cello in its fiberglass case to a corner, his scuffed, oversize Bass Weejuns squeaking on the white marble tiles, and propped it there. The room, bare but for a lone divan, more resembled the foyer of a public building or a museum, I thought, than a home. Through sliding plate glass doors, a lap pool’s dark waters glimmered by amber light.
Suddenly a pair of black Dobermans lunged into the room, fangs bared, straining at short leashes gripped by a blond youth in a silk bathrobe and slippers. Instinctively we all jumped back.
In my haunted recollection of that first sighting of Dryden Poe, it is always the bathrobe, not the Dobermans, that arrests me. Nobody I knew wore one, certainly not any men, let alone teenage boys, and definitely not in public. I’d never even seen such a robe except maybe in photos of Hugh Hefner or in old Myrna Loy movies. Worse, the robe was monogrammed: DP. It suggested some corny magazine ideal of hedonism, the good life. A pipe, slippers, and a glass of Scotch would have completed the picture.
We waited, expectant and shaken, while Dryden Poe dragged the snarling hounds out through the glass doors, their butts skidding on the marble floor. He tied them up somewhere beyond the pool then strode back in.
“Sorry,” he said, smiling. “My father’s new guard dogs.”
Then Maddie said: “Dryden, this is Alex’s brother, Garth. Garth, this is my cousin Dryden.”
As Dryden Poe came quickly towards me, I braced for a steely handshake but instead received a soft, almost tender one, and a smile that both instilled and robbed confidence. I saw quickness, and a measuring in the pale eyes. Such preternatural charm and composure in a boy of eighteen was eerie. Smooth, tailored, preppy. How unlike the rest of us he seemed.
Dryden’s family had come out that spring from Bethesda, Maryland, Alex had told me. His father did something in the government and now was doing research at a place in Santa Monica called The RAND Corporation which Alex had described as a think tank. I didn’t know what that was but wasn’t about to admit it to Alex, who’d been teasing me about being such a big reader of late. Dryden’s mother drank, according to Alex, and her sister, Maddie’s mother, drank even more and was frequently institutionalized - one of the reasons Maddie had come out to stay with her cousin’s family for the summer and “pursue her musical interests.” Dryden had just graduated from a private high school and was heading to Stanford in the fall, planning to become a doctor. Where, I’d asked Alex, did Dryden get the money to pay for the upcoming demo sessions. He’d shrugged and said, “Maddie says he deals in things.”
We followed Dryden deeper through the house to a large, lit space hung with piano movers’ blankets to deaden sound. Instruments, folding chairs and mikes lay about. Alex’s keyboards and playback equipment were already set up among a tangle of speakers, plugs, power cords and consoles. Clogged ashtrays, dirty glasses and pizza cartons bespoke the disarray of recent rehearsals. Tonight was to be a last vocal runthrough before the recording sessions began with a full band Sunday night.
I hovered near the door, uncertain where to place myself. Alex and Maddie stood against the wall, heads close together, speaking softly. Alex seemed concentrated, alert, intense; Maddie by contrast looked sleepy, heavy-lidded, resting her head on his shoulder. Harry had taken a seat and was unsheathing his cello from its case. Dryden had disappeared somewhere in the house.
Slowly the room came alive, random sounds congealing into snatches of song. Watching my brother bend over his keyboards - gaunt, absorbed, his hair long and untended, black silk shirt hung loose, a young wizard in faded chinos – a thrill ran through me. New intensities and hauntings traced his quick gaze, his summer duet with Maddie nearing its climactic etching. The songs, written by Alex and Maddie, sounded urgent, fresh. As Maddie’s silvery voice and fleet phrasing drove her body and heart to Alex, how could I not love her too? Harry Winter, classical geek on loan to their world, tendered affinities from between his gangly legs with lyric bowings. At one point Harry motioned for me to sit on the floor beside him, next to a tumbler of whiskey he’d poured.
A white room in a white house in a dark canyon, auguries and presentiments annihilating time, fusing youth and beauty, love and art. A sense of things to come, things not yet to be whispered. All this I knew I’d have to cede when I returned to Boulder in a few days. But tonight, enveloped by the music, I felt soldered to their hopes. With no such song to sing myself, I’d attend worshipfully upon theirs.
Oddly, when I try to remember the music I heard, it always slips away. I could surround it with reference - say “Ruby Tuesday,” or Kurt Weill, or Velvet Underground; Annie Ross’s “Twisted,” or Hank Williams; Yma Sumac or Laurie Anderson. Some neo-scat pre-punk swing modality, with chamber echoes provided by Harry Winter, Maddie’s voice a lazy summer swing hung from a tall magnolia tree. Yet none of this. They’d found a seam in the curtain and slipped through it, presaging music that has come since or not yet arrived. I would retain from that rehearsal the title of a song, “Fate’s Angels” - also a candidate for the name of the band – and the words, “The angels of fate seldom announce their coming”, Maddie bending her voice through the sinuous phrase of teen portent against Alex’s astringent piano line.
Once years later I’d ask Alex about that song. Then I’d never mention it again.
Now the rehearsal begins to appear in a soundless montage of flared, floodlit vignettes: Dryden Poe in his silk bathrobe, spilling purple and white pills from a vial onto Alex’s black piano top. Alex looking up from his keyboard at Maddie. Maddie going to her cousin, putting her hand on his shoulder, leaving the room with him. Harry looking down at me over the whiskey glass with his sad spaniel eyes. Maddie sidling back in the room, dreamy and alone, hands to her chest, mantis-like. Alex looking at her stone-faced. Dryden standing in back, arms crossed, watching.
Now, little quarrels, mistakes. Alex jumpy, pushing things. Maddie nodding on a stool. Magic draining from the room. Then Dryden again, dressed in pressed slacks, sport shirt and loafers, saying he is going off to get pizzas.
As the rehearsal settled into the tedium of fragments and repetitions, I slipped away and wandered deeper into the house.
I followed a long, white hallway to a half-open door. Slipping through, I found myself in a wood-paneled den. There was a fireplace stacked with fake logs, a wet bar with a glassed liquor cabinet, built-in bookshelves, polished parquet floors. A custom music system had been mounted in the wall, black quad speakers hung from the corners, a half dozen LPs stacked beside the tuner. Broadway show tunes, greatest classical hits, Herb Alpert - music for unmusical people, chosen, I thought, mainly to show off the sound system. A black leather couch, glistening and uncreased, was stationed in front of a large television monitor. The room felt bloodless, expensive, correct, a theater set awaiting actors to occupy it. Like Dryden Poe’s silk bathrobe, a considered artifact of the well-appointed life.
The fireplace mantel bore a lone photograph, mounted in a silver frame. A broad-shouldered man in tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses sat at a garden patio table, a meerschaum pipe in his hand, looking, curiously, like Raymond Chandler in a photo I’d seen. Behind him, Dryden, at around fifteen, stood in shorts and a jersey, smiling, holding what looked to be a lacrosse stick. The father’s name, Alex had told me, was Russell Poe. On the other side of the table, coiffed and permed, sat the mother, in a matching pale yellow suit and pillbox hat: tight-lipped, knees clamped, hands locked in her lap, appearing detached from the two males in the photo. There was little else left to read in the picture but a bank of tall firs at garden’s end behind them.
The few books on the den shelves were generic, slightly out-of-date: Winston Churchill’s collected memoirs, Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate, John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a leather-bound Don Quixote, a few fashionable nonfiction books on contemporary history - and the curious inclusion of Gaylord Hauser on health, Dale Carnegie on building confidence, a popular aerobics guide. The books, like the music, seemed placed by impersonal hands to accommodate arriving residents, the way one might stock a fishpond.
I entered a bathroom with a black marble floor and stood among folded hand towels, beveled mirrors, and little heart-shaped soaps, pissing into a pink bowl, my bright yellow stream merging with the blue water. Flushing released some kind of rose-scented air freshener. I rinsed my hands at a stone washstand set on a carved plinth, then walked back out into the white hallway.
Alone in the cold, deserted space, I felt suddenly anxious, frightened, a lurker in alien territory. To stave off my fear, I invoked the identity of hard-boiled private dick Henry Orlowe, and an almost pleasurable shiver of transgression ran through me. My heart racing, I opened another door.
I would retain that image of Dryden Poe’s room as seen from the doorway: A bed made with military precision. A large Charlie McCarthy puppet propped in a chair, wooden jaw agape. A table arrayed with the implements of common sleight-of-hand magic: silver egg cup, handkerchief, coins, black hat, fake rabbit. Framed wall mountings of bright, brilliant butterfly specimens pinioned on cotton: orange and black monarchs, giant blues, small yellow-tipped white ones, pupae and larvae. Propped in a corner, the vestigial lacrosse stick I’d seen in the family photo - and as if in concession to the new California reality, a shiny, resined surfboard. On Dryden’s bedstand, a syringe, an ampule, a spoon, a box of matches, and a little tin box.
I stood irresolutely on the threshold, drawn forward into the room yet certain my intrusion would be detected. Finally I backed out and shut the door. Across the corridor, a window looked out upon the lap pool below. Floodlights lent an ochre tint to the vapors rising off the water in the cooling night. The Dobermans, tethered to the trunk of a pepper tree, whimpered and paced, their beady eyes red in the reflected light.
What had Henry Orlowe seen on his little mystery tour? Objects as props. Intimations of damage. The beset, strained woman in the photograph. An icy, evacuated world, fenced and guarded at its perimeter by dogs, video cameras. Less a home than a reinforced bunker, devoid of affect or esthetics, stripped of personality. How could Maddie Haden, angelic thrush, abide such a place, if only for a summer? It all represented some amorphous threat, more than I, at fourteen, could begin to absorb or quantify.
Suddenly I longed for the imperfect clutter of my own life - Dad’s disorderly duplex, Alex’s tuneful tangle of albums and instruments, Mom’s silly textured world of madras, wind chimes and baked bread. Was this the real world I’d glimpsed, or just one coexistent with my family’s quirky, earnest, naïve one? I sensed that the Poe family’s chill realm, whatever it was, would, if set against mine, crush it.
In the house behind me, I heard Maddie’s voice ascend to a plaintive, keening wail, then plummet into silence. Car lights swept the trees outside. Hurrying back through the house, I lost my way and ended up in a huge, gleaming kitchen. Harry Winter was standing at an aluminum sink, blending tap water into a fresh glass of whiskey.
“Been taking a look around, Garth?”
I reddened. “Where are the parents?”
“Out of town for the weekend.” The hum of a massive metal refrigerator filled the silence. Harry leaned towards me and said, in a stage whisper: “They’re spies, you know.”
My eyes widened, this revelation firing up Henry Orlowe.
Then Harry leaned towards me and recited, in a stage whisper: “The man that hath no music in himself/Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds/Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.” He giggled. “It’s time for you to acquaint yourself with the Bard, young Garth.”
Music arose in playback, Maddie’s earthy tremolo threading the air. Harry cocked his head. “Goodness,” he sighed. “Rima the Bird Girl.”
He looked at me to see if the reference registered, then said, “Garth, you’re just not reading enough.”
Then he said, with such wistful tenderness that I realized he loved Alex too: “Oh, your dear, dear brother.”
A car door slammed outside. The music stopped.
“Pizza,” Harry said, shrugging.