The Blue Afternoon

'Oh, yeah. That old geezer was here again looking for you. Least I figured it was you.'

'What do you mean? What old geezer?'

'He was just here. He asked if your name was, ah, let me get this right… Carriscant – I think. Yeah. Miss Carriscant.'

'Carriscant?'

'I said he must be mistaken. There was a Mrs Fischer, but no Miss Whatever. Always had been Fischer too. Far as I was – ' He paused and peered at my taut frowning face with, for Larry, some genuine concern.

'I hope I didn't – I mean -'

'No. Strange, I just… No, fine. Absolutely no problem.'

TWO

My name is Kay Fischer. My name is Kay Fischer and at the time of this story I was thirty-two years of age, divorced and by profession an architect. I was five feet six inches tall (I still am) with dull brown hair and bright brown eyes. I had a pretty round face and a keen intellect. And, like most people who know themselves to be cleverer than the vast majority of their fellow human beings they encounter as they go through life, my intelligence inclined me to be a little cruel, sometimes. In those days I smoked too much and I drank and I ate too much as well, because, I suppose, because at the time I was more often sad than happy, and as a result my once neat figure had become plump and haunchy. But I didn't care, really. I didn't care.

I drove back from the lumber yard where, after enjoying years of trouble-free credit facilities, I had to pay 200 dollars down in order to open another account. Clerks who had dealt with me since I began to practise now sorrowfully quoted rules and regulations and referred me to the young manager in his glassed-in office. 'You don't understand,' I said to this blinking, grey person, 'Meyersen is the bankrupt one, or at least he will be when I'm through with him.' Bravado made my voice boom. Rules is rules, the manager said, skilfully avoiding my eye, and in the end I meekly paid.

At my home, a small apartment in a newish apartment court off Laurel Avenue in West Hollywood called, shamelessly, the Escorial Apartments in tribute to its Spanish Colonial roots, I brewed myself a pot of coffee, potent and viscous, and brooded again on betrayal and Eric Meyersen. The Taylor house in Pasadena, the shopping mart in Bur-bank… Three years of work, my work, now belonged to Meyersen and his glossy new firm. In a sudden, squally rage I called my lawyer, George Fugal, but his answering service said he was out of town for the weekend. Still, the coffee tasted just fine, scalding and aromatic, and I smoked three Picayunes one after another just to keep my dander up and paced vengefully about my neat room.

There was not much I had been able to do with the sturdy functionality of the Escorial. I had reduced my furniture needs to a minimum and had had the whorled featured plasterwork of the interior walls smoothed flat and painted white. Two Breuer leather and chrome armchairs faced each other across a glass coffee table which was set upon a blue and yellow Gertrud Arndt rug. The only other furniture in the room was my drawing table. There were no pictures on the walls, either, and I kept my books in my bedroom. The result was as spare and soothing as could be achieved in a Los Angeles bungalow court, I maintained. My watchword had been borrowed from Ha

The Escorial Apartments were knocked down in 1963 by a realtor and three ugly new houses were built in its place. When I lived there the choicer apartments – mine not included – surrounded a small aquamarine swimming pool. If I leaned out of the corner of my kitchen window (which I did as I rinsed the coffee pot) I could make out a bright triangle of the shallow end. The afternoon sun lit the tiled roofs and the tangerine stucco of the apartment walls and sent jostling rigmaroles of light from the water shuddering along the glass fascias of the balconies. I heard the splash of water and the delighted laugh of a girl – deep in her throat-and I felt a powerful urge to swim, to immerse myself in that over chlorinated blue, and wash Meyersen and the small humiliations of the lumber yard away. In my bedroom I selected a swimsuit and stepped out of my dress, but then caught sight of my thighs and buttocks in the square of mirror on the dressing table and decided instead to do some work. The larger humiliations of disrobing in front of the residents of the Escorial were an unignorable disincentive.

So I sat at my drawing board, adjusted the lamp and unrolled the interior elevations of 2265 Micheltoreno. My credo as an architect was the simplest I could devise: what space did I require, or my client require, and how was it to be confined. The great liberation bestowed by the new materials of the twentieth century had re-emphasised the architect's priorities: the space enclosed became more important than what enclosed the space. Others have put it more eloquently than I but for me stucco sheathing, glass tricks and reinforced concrete, bakelite and chrome, plywood and aluminium were blessings in so far as they served the space they were to contain. My second criterion was simplicity. The task was to design the space and employ the minimum to construct it. The house on Micheltoreno had been conceived, if you like, as an assemblage of blocks of air. Some of these blocks were to be found between stucco walls, some were bounded transparently by sheets of glass, some by beams and wood battens and balcony outriggers and some by the organic shapes of the trees that I had ordered left when the site was first cleared.

My current dilemma was that I needed a closet in the main bedroom but to build one in would mean diminishing the square footage of the bedroom. Not too grievous, in the scale of the world's problems, you might think, but if I did so the bedroom would no longer possess exactly the same square footage as the wide balcony porch on to which it gave – the space I had designed, and the harmony I wanted, would be compromised. I toyed with the dimensions a while and made a few sketches before a solution presented itself. Build in the closet and then echo it on the porch by placing two wooden struts as offcentre 'supports' to the shade trellis. Their function would be notional but the symmetry would be maintained, the wind landing would remain a spatial replica of its neighbouring room. So much, so perfect. Now I began to worry what a bed would do to my empty blocks of air…

The concierge called up from reception.

'There's a gentleman here to see you, Mrs Fischer.'

I checked my watch: Philip Brockway (my ex-husband) was early. I knew he wanted to borrow money. I had accused him of this when he telephoned and he denied it with such vehemence that I knew I was right. He merely wanted to see me, he said, and added some lame tosh about 'old times'.

All the same, I strolled along the walkway towards reception thinking not too unkindly of Philip-he was so pretty, with his pretty handsome weak face, his small girl's nose and his thick tawny hair. I would play with him a while, make him take me out for a cocktail, before I gave in and paid him to leave me alone once more.

I pushed through the swing doors into the lobby and saw the man from the site, the man who had asked for Miss Carriscant. He was old, grey-haired, but broad-shouldered and stocky, dressed in black as he had been at the house. He clutched his homburg in front of him like a steering wheel and took three paces towards me, staring at me intensely, as if searching for some sign of recognition. His own manifest apprehension put me at some ease.

'What do you want?' I said. 'Why are you-'

'Miss Carriscant?'

'No. No, I am not Miss Carriscant.'

He reached out and touched my bare arm, fleetingly, as if to reassure himself. His fingers felt dry, abrasive, heavily calloused.

'Peter?' I called the concierge. 'This gentleman is leaving.'