rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter Fifty
Paul is dead. Call home.
Peter Russell, stocky and graying, stood on the sidewalk and squinted at the text message on his cell phone, barely visible in the afternoon sun on Ventura Boulevard.
He lifted his round glasses above small, amused eyes, and brought the phone closer to see the display more clearly.
Paul is dead. He flashed on his youth, when for a week he had sincerely believed that Paul was dead: Paul McCartney. I am the walrus. But he had misread the phone’s blocky letters. The message was actually Phil is dead.
That shook him. He knew only one Phil. Peter had not talked with Phil Richards in a month, but he refused to believe that the message referred to his best friend of thirty-five years, the kinder, weaker and almost certainly more talented of the Two P’s. Not the Phil with the thirty-two foot Grand Taiga motor home, keeper of their eternal plans for the World’s Longest Old Farts Cross-country Hot Dog Escapade and Tour.
Please, not that Phil.
He hesitated before hitting callback. What if it was a joke, a bit of cell phone spam?
Peter drove a vintage Porsche 356C Coupe that had once been signal red and was now roughly the shade of a dry brick. He fumbled his key and almost dropped the phone before unlocking the car door. He did not need this. He had an important appointment. Angrily, he pushed the button. The number rolled out in musical beeps. He recognized the answering voice of Carla Wyss, whom he had not heard from in years. She sounded nervous and a little guilty.
‘Peter, I just dropped by the house. I took the key from your bell and let myself in. There was a note. My God, I never meant to snoop. It’s from somebody named Lydia.’ Lydia was Phil’s ex-wife. ‘I thought I should let you know.’
Peter had shown Carla the secret of the bronze Soleri bell, hanging outside the front door, after a night of very requited passion. Now, upset, she was having a sandwich and a root beer from his refrigerator. She hoped he didn’t mind.
‘Mi casa es su casa,’ Peter said, beyond irritation. He tongued the small gap between his front teeth. ‘I’m listening.’
Carla’s voice was shaky. ‘All right. The note reads “Dear Peter, Phil died. He had a heart attack or a stroke, they aren’t sure which. Will let you know details.” Then it’s signed very neatly.’ She took a breath. ‘Wasn’t he another writer? Didn’t I meet him here in the house?’
‘Yeah.’ Peter pressed his eyes with his fingers, blocking out the glare. Lydia had been living in Burbank for a few years. She had apparently made the rounds of Phil’s LA friends. Carla rattled on, saying that Lydia had used a fountain pen, a folded sheet of hand-made paper, a black satin ribbon, and Scotch tape.
Lydia had never liked telephones.
Phil is dead.
Thirty-five years of kid dreams and late night plans, sitting in the back yard in old radar-dish rattan chairs on the dry grass between the junipers. Shooting the bull about stories and writing and big ideas. Phil hanging out on movie sets and model shoots – not so selfless – but also helping Peter carry his bulky and unsold wire sculptures to the dump in the back of the old Ford pickup they had often swapped.
Only the truck, never the women, Phil had lamented.
Slight, wiry Phil with the short, mousy hair who smiled so sweetly every time he saw a naked lady. Who longed for the female sex with such clumsy devotion.
‘Are you okay, Peter?’ Carla asked from far away.
‘Heart attack,’ Peter repeated, lifting the phone back to his mouth.
‘Or a stroke, they aren’t sure. It’s a very pretty note, really. I’m so sorry.’
He visualized Carla in his house, locked in her perpetual late thirties, leggy as a deer, dressed in pedal pushers and a dazzling man’s white dress shirt with sleeves rolled up and tails pinned to show her smooth, flat tummy.
‘Thanks, Carla. You better leave before Helen comes over,’ Peter said, not unkindly.
‘I’ll put the key back in the bell,’ Carla said. ‘And Peter, I was looking through your files. Do you have some glossies of me that I can borrow? I have a new agent, a good guy, really sharp, and he wants to put together a fresh folio. I’m up for a credit card commercial.’
All of Carla’s agents had been good guys, really sharp; all of them had screwed her both ways and she never learned. ‘I’ll look,’ Peter said, though he doubted cheesecake would help.
‘You know where to find me.’
He did, and also what she smelled and felt like. With a wave of loose guilt, Peter sat on the old seat in the car’s sunned interior, the door half open and one leg hanging out. The hot cracked leather warmed his balls. A cream-colored Lexus whizzed by and honked. He pulled in his leg and shut the door, then rolled down the window as far as it would go, about half way. Sweat dripped down his neck. He had to look presentable and be in Malibu in an hour. His broad face crinkled above a close-trimmed, peppered beard.
Peter was fifty-eight years old and he couldn’t afford to take ten minutes to cry for his best friend.
One hand shielded his eyes from sun and traffic. ‘Damn it, Phil,’ he said.
He started the car and took the back road to his home, a square, flat-roofed, big-windowed fifties rambler in the Glendale hills. Carla was gone by the time he arrived, leaving only a waft of gardenia in the warm still air on the patio. Helen was late, or maybe not coming after all – he could never tell what her final plans might be – so he took a quick shower. He soon smelled of soap and washed skin and put on a blue-and-red Hawaiian shirt. He picked up his best briefcase, a maroon leather job, and pushed through the old French doors. The weedy jasmine creeping over the trellis had squeezed out a few flowers. Their sweetness curled up alongside Carla’s gardenia.
Peter stood for a moment on the red tiles and looked up through the trellis at the bright blue sky. He pressed his elbow against a rough, sun-battered post, breath coming hard: The old anxiety he always found in tight places, in corners and shadows. When events fell outside his control or his ability to escape. A minute passed. Two minutes. Peter’s gasping slowed. He sucked in a complete breath and pressed the inside of his wrist with two fingers to check his pulse. Not racing. The hitch behind his ribs untied with a few solid pushes of cupped fingers under the edge of his sternum. He had never asked a doctor why that worked, but it did.
He wiped his
