The Usual

 

            We had chased the building for twenty city blocks, on foot, in a chain formation: one of us would take it for a block or two, and then leave it up to the guy ahead of him to carry on.  This was useful for a number of reasons, the first and most important of which was that the building would be less likely to know it was being sought if, from block to block, it did not recognize the same face.  This might cause the building to relax, and if it relaxed it might let down its guard for a moment, allowing us to catch it unawares.  But since there were only five of us—and one of us had to drive the car to move us up to our next station—there were only four left to pound the pavement.  By the time we had covered a mere dozen blocks, we were repeating.  Three of us had already shown our faces twice.

            The building in question was a lush piano bar called The Oasis, from the 100 block of Albuquerque Avenue in Los Angeles.  We had a physical address—122—but naturally it did us no good.  120 was a skinny tattoo parlor and 124 sold antiques; there was nothing between the two, not even an alley—our piano bar had made a clean split.  When questioned, some of the neighboring proprietors would still offer directions: “122?  Oh sure, everyone has trouble finding that address.  But if you go around the corner and down the alley to your left…”  But these leads never panned out.  Were the other proprietors covering for The Oasis?  Perhaps they had taken a sinister hand in the building’s disappearance.  Nothing could be ruled out in a case such as this one, and everyone was a suspect.

            This had all began when Marlene Schrumper walked into our office one Friday morning, wearing a smart dress with some kind of Frank Lloyd Wright design worked into the left side of it.  She looked like half of a stained-glass window, caught in the brandy sunlight that shot directly at her from the large bay window behind us on the third floor of the Monrovia Building.  She seemed surprised to see five of us: five silhouettes behind five black desks, some of us with our feet up, some of us rifling through 8 by 10 black and white glossy photographs, and at least one of us taking a long, measured pull from a bottle of Chivas Regal.  She asked who was in charge, and we told her there were no flunkies here, we were all associates—“Matthews, Et Al., Special Consulting Investigators,” just as it was stenciled on the pebble-glass door.

            “I want to find my husband,” said the beautiful Mrs. Schrumper.  We were forced to regretfully inform Mrs. Schrumper—we all despised her husband for giving her such an absurd last name—that we did not handle missing persons, but we could recommend someone quite good for that.  One of us reached for the Rolodex while another explained, “You see, we only handle peculiar cases: conspiracies, sightings, curses.”  “The stuff of tabloids,” offered the most acerbic among us.

            Mrs. Schrumper insisted.  “I know just where my husband is, gentleman,” she said.  “It’s where-he-is that I don’t know the whereabouts of.”

            “Have you tried the phone directory?” we asked, because sometimes people are just lazy or don’t think of simple solutions.

            “I know the address,” she assured us.  “But it’s not there.  The building’s gone missing.”

            Well that piqued our interest, indeed.  We drew up the necessary documentation and negotiated our fee and expenses, to which she agreed without hesitation.  We conducted an interview to glean a few basic facts, such as the nature of the building, when she noticed it missing, and her husband’s habits and peculiarities.  On the subject of her husband, she became helpless.  We must be delicate in these matters, so we advised her to go home and rest, and we set a lunch appointment with her for the next day to continue the interview.

*   *   *

            She picked the place, Vespuci’s, an expensive and trendy luncheon café in Beverly Hills.  The five of us and Marlene Schrumper sat out on the patio table six feet from the street, with only lattice and ivy to block the sound of passing traffic.  We drug out our yellow legal pads and pocket notebooks and gnarled green pencils.  There were fresh pink carnations on the table.

            A waitress came by to take our orders.

            Marlene Schrumper said, “I’ll have the usual, please.”

            “And that would be?” the waitress countered, sounding bored with us all.

            Marlene’s eyes smoldered, but the rest of her remained absolutely motionless.  Finally, with an ice-cold tongue, she said, “An Oriental chicken salad, of course.  With the balsamic dressing on the side.  And hold the Mandarin oranges.”

 

            That had been a week ago.  Now, as Matthews and Lunt had finished covering their blocks, they stopped at a lunch counter with sawdust on the floor—A La Carte, in the heart of downtown.  A handsome, hard-working Puerto Rican man took their orders.  When he came to Lunt, Lunt ordered what he typically ordered at lunch counters: “A three cheese sandwich, please.”

            The Puerto Rican looked at Lunt funny.  It was the kind of look Lunt got wherever he ordered food.  The Puerto Rican began slicing three sandwich rolls, about to make Lunt three cheese sandwiches.  Lunt stopped him, and said it again, carefully.

            Matthews said, “You’d think they’d learn English around here.  It’s like we’re in a foreign country or something.”

            “No mayonnaise,” Lunt told the Puerto Rican.  Lunt said the problem was that he just wanted his food a lot simpler than everyone was used to making it.  He couldn’t get the episode with Marlene last week out of his head.

            “You know,” Lunt said, “my dream is to find a place where it wouldn’t matter what language anyone spoke.  No one would have to speak at all.  When I walked in, they would all know me, and there would be a table where I always sat, that they always kept open for me.  And all I would have to do is say, ‘The usual,’ and they would bring me exactly what I wanted, no fuss.”

            The Puerto Rican placed a sandwich in front of Lunt and went away.  Lunt lifted the top of the sandwich and used a fork to scrape off the mayonnaise.

 

            We visited the Hall of Records for blueprints, and papered the office walls with them.  We found out who the architect was, but when we tried to pay him a visit we learned that he had passed away five years ago, just after completion of The Oasis.  His photograph—along with photographs of the 100 block of Albuquerque Avenue—was also stuck on the wall.  Having never seen The Oasis for ourselves, we thought it might help to get into the head of its architect.  We had never had a case quite as unusual as this, and our attention to other projects began to diminish.  It bothered us hardened professionals that we had nothing to scribble on our pads next to “M.O.”  We felt like rookies again, cutting our teeth on divorce cases and insurance claims and bank security jobs.  We were out of our element here, and were left to cling to our sundry theories.

            In particular, Lunt thought about the Schrumper case constantly.  He wondered—as we all did—what makes a building hitch up its foundations and run away.  Lunt thought surely a building must begin to dream of mobility, in some form: a new address, a more upscale neighborhood, a change of pace.  After all, we were never satisfied to remain fixed—it’s why we got out of missing persons to begin with.  Lunt thought it must be the same for a building.

            During our interview with Mrs. Schrumper, she mentioned that it had been a foggy night that she first noticed The Oasis was missing, and oddly enough we received most of our leads during foggy nights.  The Oasis seemed perfectly capable of movement in broad daylight.  It had a chameleon-like nature, and could take on the appearance of picture windows, façades, and stoops as needed, leading us on wild goose chases through city streets.  But it particularly liked to move in the fog.  Why, we were uncertain; perhaps fog caused a sort of madness in buildings, not unlike the restlessness wrought within men and wolves during the full moon.

            It was just such a foggy night that Lunt caught up to The Oasis.

            He was wandering the streets, trying to think like a building.  He paused beneath a haloed streetlamp on the corner, and waited for a walk signal.  To his left, he saw a man get out of his Lincoln, parked curbside.  The man approached a street door and brandished a ring of keys.  He pressed up to the door and struggled for a moment with the knob.  Then the man took a few steps backward, as though his wife had just said, “Frank, I don’t love you anymore.”  He peered up at the brass numbers.  He peered down at the keys in his hands; they winked back at him.  The man stepped into the doorway and tried again.  This time, he disappeared inside.

            Lunt forgot about the walk signal and went instead along the street down which he had just been looking, his suspicions raised.  It hadn’t been a lot—plenty of people have difficulties with locks.  They don’t put the key in all the way, or the knob sticks, something like that.  But what if, in that one moment, that building hadn’t been the man’s office at all, but the missing Oasis Piano Bar posing as another building?  Alarmed by the man poking keys into it, The Oasis might have slipped away, just in time for the man to try his key again and meet with success.  It wasn’t much, but it was a hunch, and sometimes in this line of work, that’s all we’ll get and all we need.

            The street Lunt had come from was, though the fog had muted it considerably, brightly lit and affable, bustling with Thursday night crowds.  But the street he went down now seemed to hold itself aloof from the main action.  Many outsiders might never even notice it.

            Steam roiled out of a street grate and mingled with the fog.  Somewhere in the shadows, a lost man coughed.  Lunt’s slow footsteps echoed damply off the masonry around him.  The bricks were black and glistening as moist rum cakes.

            Up ahead was a tall office building, solemn and bland.  One of its gilt doors swung open and briefly caught the light from a dim security lamp.  Three people in eveningwear came out, falling on each other and laughing: a man and two women.  He puffed on a long cigar.  The women wore glittery dresses, and their hair was shellacked.  They laughed and stumbled, staying close to the oozing walls, feeling their way along like blind mice, their shadows thrown up huge and grotesque.  They didn’t notice Lunt as they passed him, but Lunt got a snout-full of perfume and champagne fumes.  It was 9:37 as Lunt entered the solemn office building.

            The lobby was elegantly tiled and quiet, like a mosque.  No one was around—even the night man had gone home.  Lunt nosed around, looking for a clue, but found little of interest.  Someone had left an empty pop bottle near a standing ashtray, that was all.  At 9:42, Lunt wedged his hands in his pockets and turned to leave.  Just as he pressed his shoulder to the door, he heard the elevator ping in the lobby.  The gate rattled open.  Lunt looked over his shoulder and watched two older men help each other off the elevator.  They wore gray flannel three-piece suits.  Lunt was probably about to dismiss them as workaholic bankers, when his focus deepened and he caught sight of a woman in a black gown with a soft, pale yellow collar folding around her neck like a fortune cookie.  From where Lunt stood, the woman looked like Mrs. Schrumper.

            Lunt moved away from the door, staring intently into the elevator.  The woman shrank back into the corner.  The dim overhead light made her features difficult to discern, especially from such a distance.

            “Mrs. Schrumper?” Lunt asked.  Louder, he called, “Hold that elevator, please!”  A husband and wife reached forward from within the elevator to hold it open, but the woman in the corner was quicker: she reached forward and jabbed a button, hurrying the doors shut.  Lunt had broken into a trot, but had only gotten to the middle of the long corridor before the elevator door chimed and began to rise.

            We can guess what Lunt was feeling now.  His nerves were huddled at the surface of his skin and his senses were raging.  His heart began to shake him, and he heard his own blood rushing.

            Lunt watched the iron arrow above the elevator turn slowly: 1…2…3…It paused at 4.  Lunt took off to his right and crashed gracelessly through a metal door and into the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time, using the handrail to fling his body around each corner until he saw a dingy black “4” painted on the yellowed cinder blocks.  He shouldered the metal door open—

            And fell into sapphire, piano-laced darkness.  Aqua cigarette smoke eddied and looped in the turquoise ceiling lights.  The mouths of bottles whispered their clinking erotic poetry into the ears of glasses.  A raven-blue grand piano stretched lazily in the back, large as a swimming pool.  Here, people spoke in hushed cocktail voices with a samba rhythm.  Men wore vests and women’s gowns were spangled.  Lunt had found The Oasis.

            The elevator chimed—Lunt had outrun it on the stairs—and spilled a pool of golden light into the blue haze.  The married couple stepped out first, and then Mrs. Schrumper.  A congregation of suits and evening gowns stood between her and Lunt, and by the time Lunt had threaded through them, Mrs. Schrumper was seated at a small round table with a pale blue tablecloth.  Lunt stood at the table’s edge.  Mrs. Schrumper looked at the knot of his tie, no higher.  “Hello,” she said.

            “May I sit here, please?”

            She nodded and Lunt sat.  “So,” Mrs. Schrumper said, “you’ve found me out.”

            Lunt opened his mouth to say something when a waiter in a navy tuxedo approached the table, bent at the waist, and said, “How very good to see you again, Miss Sonntag.  Will you be having the usual?”

            “Yes, Victor,” she said.

            “Monsieur?”

            Lunt said, “A gin and tonic, please, Victor.  Oh.  And would it be possible to have a cheese sandwich, Victor?”

            “Certainly, sir.”  The waiter dissolved into the sparkling blue.

            Lunt leaned forward.  “Oriental chicken salad, no Mandarin oranges, balsamic on the side.”

            Marlene’s face softened and she smiled.  She looked down at the tablecloth.  “Yes,” she said.  “You must understand—here, I feel like my own person.  I know who I am.  Out on the street, I lose myself.  But in here…”

            She gave up trying to qualify it, and merely cast her gaze around the room.  So did Lunt, truly appraising it for the first time.

“Then, there is no husband—Miss Sonntag?”

            “Please.  Marlene.  I’m terribly sorry, but which one are you again?”

            “Benjamin Lunt,” Lunt said.  “I must admit, Marlene, I am a bit embarrassed that you found The Oasis before we did.  This is The Oasis, isn’t it?”

            “Accept no substitutes,” she said.

            “But I don’t understand.  Why the false name, and the story about the husband?”

            Marlene’s cheeks flared purple.  “I—I didn’t think I could find it on my own.  So I hired you.  I spared nothing to find this place.  But it meant too much to me to just stand aside and wait…I had to look for myself, too.  I only caught up to it three days ago.  I’ve been meaning to call and explain, but—I guess time just got away from me, Ben.”

            We can only suppose that Lunt liked the way she called him “Ben.”  Perhaps it had the ring of familiarity and fixedness that Lunt had always been searching for.  When Victor politely set a cheese sandwich—no mayo—before him, it was as though someone had nailed a gleaming brass address plate to Lunt.  Here is where you would find Lunt, and here Lunt would always be.  You could expect certain things.

            Anyway, we never saw him again.

            We could chase buildings until we are too old to walk, and we might never know what makes them run.  Lunt was just looking for a place to stop.  We can only say that buildings are born with foundations, and men are born with legs.

            Each wants what the other has.