Melting Clock

10

We took Highway 1, stopped at San Luis Obispo for coffee. Dali wouldn’t leave the car. He got out clinging to the clock so I could slide out, and then he jumped back in the car, closing the door behind him as I ran into a place called Little Al’s and Big Mary’s Diner. I brought the coffee out along with three hot dogs, one with mustard, two with ketchup, all with onions.

“Hot dogs,” said Dali, looking at the one with mustard, “are obscene.”

He ate it obscenely and washed it down with coffee.

“When I came to this country I had the ship’s baker make a baguette three yards long,” he recalled excitedly. “What I should have had the cook make was a hot dog three yards long.”

I was on my second dog and losing my appetite.

“Yes,” he said, sitting back and finishing his coffee, “an enormous, obscene hot dog.”

Then, suddenly, the excitement was gone, and he whispered softly, “Find my painting, Toby Peters. Find my painting.”

Several miles farther along I pointed out the road to San Simeon, but he wasn’t interested. Since it was dark, there wasn’t much to see and not much traffic. Dali closed his eyes and I listened to a band playing live on an all-night Fresno radio station. Over the music I could hear the surf along the beaches except when we passed through Lucia and Big Sur, where the hills blocked the sound. We hit Carmel just before midnight. I touched Dali’s shoulder.

Without opening his eyes he gave directions to the house and added, “If one does not shave, one turns into an animal that soils his pants.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said, driving down the road toward the sea.

The house was smaller than I expected, but I could tell from the noise of the ocean nearby that in the morning when the sun came up the view would be better than I had imagined.

A light was on.

“Do not park in the back,” Dali directed.

“I don’t want anyone to see my car from the road.”

“Let me off at the door and then go to the back,” he said, then turned to me and whispered, “Here there are … grazhoppers.”

With that explained, I drove to the front of the house and slid out after him, reaching back for the clock and the briefcase. He hurried, being careful to stay on the stone path. The door opened before we could knock and there stood Gala and the massive figure of Jeremy Butler.

“Salvador Dali is here,” said Dali.

“Salvador Dali is here,” Gala repeated, taking his arm and touching his face to see if he had a temperature.

“There is a giant behind you.” Dali pointed at Jeremy.

“This is Jeremy,” said Gala. “A poet.”

Then she saw what I was carrying and sighed with relief. “Put him inside. I’ll welcome him later.”

We went in and Dali said, “This is a night of Lord Byron; he is the poet of this night. Terrors, creatures with tentacles all around us, and no comfort of the moon. I will not make such a voyage again without Gala.”

“Escargot,” Gala said comfortingly. “Snails with butter and garlic. Come.” She led Dali away by the hand.

“Thanks for coming, Jeremy. Everything all right?” I asked, passing off the clock before I dropped it.

“Yes,” he said, taking the heavy clock in one hand. “I read her some of my poetry, but she hears only one voice, that of Dali. She is very concerned that the costume party they are planning for tomorrow will be a failure and Dali will be ridiculed by the press.”

“Is there a place for us to sleep here?”

“Bedroom, downstairs. Two beds. Dali’s bedroom is upstairs.”

Jeremy led me into a small but comfortable living room with thick, soft furniture. There were three paintings on the wall with their backs turned to us.

“Picasso’s,” Jeremy explained, putting the clock on a small table near the window. “Do you expect us to be here long?”

“Can’t say,” I said, sitting in one of the chairs and sinking in. “Three people are dead because of the missing painting and three clocks. Dali thinks the killer’s dead. I think he’s got Dali’s painting and may not be too happy with Salvador.”

“Do you have any …?”

“I think his name is Gregory Novak, but beats the hell out of me where to find him.”

“I will call Alice and tell her that I may be delayed.”

“I’m sorry, Jeremy.” I walked to the wall and pulled the first Picasso out so I could take a look at it.

“Alice is an admirer of Dali’s work. She’ll understand.”

The Picasso painting, what I could see of it, since I didn’t want to take it down from the wall, was a blue and yellow eye on a sea of something that looked like little question marks without the dots under them.

“Jeremy, what the hell does this stuff mean?”

“It means nothing,” said Dali, coming into the room. “Nothing and everything. Picasso is a fraud. Dali’s work escapes, goes beyond meaning into the eternal and mysterious unconscious. My Gala tells me you are a poet. Is what I have said not true of all art?”

Dali had changed quickly and shaved. He wore a tiger-skin robe from beneath which peeked the collar and the pants legs of pink silk pajamas. In his right hand was a glass with a stem about a foot long. The liquid in the glass was orange.

I let the Picasso drop back against the wall. Jeremy mused aloud: “Each artist, with rare exceptions, is his own Cassandra, doomed to tell himself the truth and doomed never to understand it. Surrealists say that their work has no meaning. The truth is that they are incapable of seeing what it means, and certainly they are incapable of saying what it means.”

Dali had been sipping his orange drink when Jeremy began, but stopped almost immediately and then looked at Jeremy without expression.

“And who shall tell us what it means?” he asked softly.

“There are many who will tell you, but each has his own key-the Freudian, the Jungian, the Catholic, the Jew, the Marxist. Each has a key to the enigma we create and each is right yet each is only partly right because we ourselves are the only ones who can comprehend the meaning of our work, without words, if we will just look at it.”

“And why do we not look at it?” asked Dali.

“Because we are afraid of what we will see,” answered Jeremy. “Sometimes I think artists create so that others may see and the artist need not look.”

“You are a romantic,” exclaimed Dali, holding his glass up to toast Jeremy.

I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, so I said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about and I need some sleep.”

“Tomorrow we shall be busy,” Dali announced. He placed his now-empty glass on a wooden table with a little round platform. The glass just barely fit. “Tomorrow is the celebration of the setting sun, and we shall all be in pagan costume to welcome the first devil’s night of the new year.”

With that, Dali raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide. His mustaches twitching, he turned and disappeared into the hallway.

“Where’s the kitchen?” I asked.

“I’ll show you,” said Jeremy.

There wasn’t much in the refrigerator that appealed to us after we finished the chilled shrimp and each had a large helping of orange juice in mugs shaped like babies’ heads. Jeremy led me to the bedroom after we made the rounds and were sure the house was secure. Locked doors and windows wouldn’t keep a killer out, but they would probably make it a little noisy to break in. We agreed to sleep in shifts, three hours each. Jeremy said he had some reading and wanted to stay up first, pointing out that I looked too tired to take the first shift. He was right.

There were two beds in the guest room. I washed my face, brushed my teeth with my finger and some Dr. Lyon’s tooth powder Jeremy let me use, took all the stuff out of my pockets and put it on the low dark dresser against the wall, and then took off my clothes and hung them in the closet. Jeremy, fully clothed, sat on one of the beds reading.

“What’re you reading?”

“Theodore Spencer,” said Jeremy, “Listen:

The pulse that stirs the mind,

The mind that urges bone,

Move to the same wind

That blows over stone.”

“Sounds nice,” I said, scratching my thigh through my underwear.

“I’ll read it to Alice tomorrow,” he said. “It’s part of a longer work. If you like, I’ll go in the other room to read.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll be asleep in a minute. My problem’s not getting to sleep, it’s staying there.”

And I was right. All I had to do was close my eyes and try to make sense out of what had happened in the last three days. I thought about Gregory Novak. I might even have said the name, but that was about all I did think or say before I fell asleep.

I dreamed of Gala in the kitchen singing “The World Is Mine Tonight” and making flapjacks on the griddle. She was wearing a frilly apron and doing her best to look like Betty Crocker. I was waiting for the flapjacks when Dali came in wearing overalls, a plaid shirt, and a straw hat.

“They’re almost ready to harvest,” he said, sitting at the table and grinning at me. He pointed to the window.

I got up and looked over the shoulder of the busy, singing Gala. The sun was white bright but I could see the shore-along the beach, in the sand, clocks were in bloom, black clocks just like the one in the other room. Music was coming from inside the house, dark music.

“Blood makes them grow,” Dali said behind me.

And now I could see that the sand around each clock was red.

I woke up. Jeremy was sitting in the same position, still reading, but he was at the end of the book.

“Time is it?” I asked blearily.

“Four-thirty,” he said. “I’ve checked the doors twice. I wasn’t sleepy.”

“I’m up now.” I sat up. “Get some sleep.”

I was awake but I could still hear the dark music.

“What is that?”

“Bach,” said Jeremy. “A fugue for organ. I think Dali uses it for background music while he paints.”

“Why not?” I got out of bed and almost crashed into the wall when my leg refused to hold my weight. I managed to steady myself by grabbing hold of the headboard.

“Would you like the book?” asked Jeremy.

“No, thanks,” I said, making it to the closet. “I’m going to see if I can find some coffee.”

Jeremy took off his shoes, removed his clothes, and put on a pair of clean pajamas that had been folded neatly in the small suitcase he had brought.

“Wake me no later than nine,” he instructed, lying back and closing his eyes.

“We’ll see how it goes,” I said, slipping on my shoes. “You can turn off the light.”

And he did.

I made my way into the kitchen. It was empty but I could still hear the organ. In fact, it made the floor reverberate under my feet. I didn’t find coffee or cereal. There was a loaf of bread. I went into an enclosed deck on the sea-side of the house, opened the window so I could hear the surf, and sat in a straightbacked chair with the bread and glass of water. The sun rose somewhere over the Rockies and hit the shore. The view was great. We were on a ridge about fifty yards from the beach. The weeds were below the ridge and a sandy path led down just outside the window. Gulls swooped and sat on something near the shore that looked like a big chair.

“It’s a throne,” said Dali, looming up behind me. “I shall tell my guests tonight that it is the throne of Cleopatra’s father.”

I jumped up, my heart beating like a combination by Henry Armstrong.

“You scared the shit out of me,” I remonstrated.

“It is the fate of man since clothing was invented to embarrass us that we should soil ourselves,” he said. “In fear, in passion, in disgrace. It is a concern that only humans have, particularly fathers.”

Dali was wearing the same tiger-skin robe and pink silk pajamas. He had one of those long-stemmed glasses in each hand. He handed me one.

“Orange juice,” he said. “From my cache of fruit.”

I took it and drank.

“Good stuff,” I said.

“Today we find my stolen painting,” he affirmed.

“Could be,” I hedged.

“I saw it in a dream,” he said.

“When did you sleep?”

“Here, there, a moment an interrupted dream. I do not need light to paint. The light is in here.”

He pointed to his head.

“Like a Mazda bulb,” I said.

“Precisely. The Impressionists need light from outside, from nature, from the gods. Surrealists get light from inside themselves. They need no gods.”

“Pretty weighty stuff for dawn,” I said. “This is more Jeremy’s line. Mind if I use the phone?”

“It is not chilled,” he complained. “There is a phone in the kitchen but I cannot bear to touch it. It sticks to the fingers. Phones should be chilled.”

“I’ll try not to be too disgusted,” I said.

It was almost six on a Monday morning. I called the boarding house, hoping for Gunther. I got Mrs. Plaut on the second ring.

Before I could say anything, she shouted, “Early, but I don’t care. I had to feed the bird.”

“Mrs. Plaut, it’s me, Toby Peters. Can you get Gunth-?”

“Mr. Peelers, the police are an interesting lot, Lord knows, but they spend entirely too much time here looking for you.”

“The police were there?”

“Have you been killing people again, Mr. Peelers? I have asked you to stop that manner of behavior.”

“I’ve never killed anyone, Mrs. Plaut,” I objected. “Can I please speak to-”

“They asked me about a clock,” Mrs. Plaut went on. “I showed them the Beech-Nut clock on the wall of your room, the grandmother clock in my sitting room, but they were not interested.”

Dali was now standing in the doorway to the kitchen, empty glass in hand.

“Gunther Wherthman,” I said loudly, emphatically, to Mrs. Plaut, to no avail.

“They talked to Mr. Gunther Wherthman also,” she said. “I informed them that if they wanted to apprehend you for murdering more people they would be well advised to go search for you instead of indulging in hobbies.”

“Allow me,” said Dali, reaching for the phone.

He had a clean new handkerchief in his hand and took the phone carefully, like a hot-shot evidence man at a crime scene.

“Senora Plaut?” he asked into the phone. And then he began to jabber away in Spanish, with appropriate pauses to listen. Finally, he said, “Esta bien, gracias.”

He handed the phone to me and cleaned his hands.

“She’s getting your Mr. Wherthman,” he said. “I must dry my hands.”

“Mrs. Plaut can’t speak Spanish,” I said as he threw into the corner the offending handkerchief that had touched an unchilled phone.

“Her Spanish is flawless,” said Dali. “A bit of the Andalusian but perfect.”

And he was gone.

“Toby?” came Gunther’s voice over the phone.

“I’m here, Gunther.”

“Police were here. Sergeant Seidman.”

“Did they see the painting?”

“No, it is in my room, under the bed. They would not say why they were looking for you.”

“Fleeing the scene of the crime, absconding with evidence, possibly suspicion of murder.”

“That is less serious than last time,” he said. “They wish you to come see them immediately. I believe that a police automobile with a red-haired man inside is waiting across the street.”

“Thanks, Gunther,” I said. “Here’s my number. Don’t write it anywhere.”

“Be cautious, Toby,” he counseled.

“I will,” I said. “Did you know Mrs. Plaut speaks Andalusian Spanish?”

“Yes,” he said. “And a very acceptable French.”

“Why didn’t I know that?”

“Toby, you are my closest friend, the closest friend I have ever had and yet you have an inclination to close yourself off from that which will alter your perception of others. Mrs. Plaut is an enigma, not a joke.”

“I hate art and philosophy, Gunther. And I don’t care all that much for literature.”

“I know that you believe that, Toby. Please, I did not intend to agitate you.”

“I’m sorry, Gunther. I don’t really hate art and literature.

“I know that. Did you get enough sleep last night?”

At that instant, Gala, a twig in a purple dress reaching to the floor, washed into the room.

“No,” I said.

“Off the phone,” Gala ordered.

I turned my back on her. I had been about to end the conversation, but now I was more than a little inclined to engage Gunther in discussion of Da Vinci, Debussy, or Frankie Sinkwich.

“Recommend some reading for me, Gunther,” I said.

“I have a party to arrange for Dali and only twelve hours to complete it,” Gala said. “The phone is required.”

“I will gladly make a list and let you borrow my books,” said Gunther, “but I would prefer that you not remove them from Mrs. Plaut’s premises.”

“I’ll talk to you, Gunther,” I said.

“Be more concerned for your safety,” he answered, and I hung up.

Gala took the phone from me and motioned for me to get out of the way and out of the kitchen. I left.

The rest of the day, Jeremy-after I woke him at nine-and I took turns watching the street. A couple of truckloads of caterers arrived around three and took over most of the house. The caterers were all women.

“This,” declared Dali, who had changed into a white tuxedo with black tie and had come down to tilt his head back and watch the preparation, “must be a night of triumph. The press of the world will be here and I shall find new ways to offend.”

“Sounds like fun for all,” I said.

“I must retire to my rooms now.” Dali refused to acknowledge my sarcasm. “It is fatiguing to watch people work and to create offenses.”

At five, with food everywhere and tables on the beach around the throne, the first guests arrived. No one came to the house. Dali had painted a sign that Gala had personally put up in the sand. The sign read:

TO THE BEACH FOR SIGHTS DENIED MOST MORTALS

These first guests, a man and a woman, were wearing clown costumes.

From the window, Dali observed to me, “No imagination. I shall be dressed from the neck down as a rabbit-a trickster who hops, deceives, and refuses to be contained. And from the neck up, I shall be Sherlock Holmes, who claims to operate from reason and the logic but is really an artist.”

“Have fun,” I said.

“And you shall be dressed as …?” Dali inquired.

“I shall be dressed as Toby Peters, Detective.”

“There is only room for one detective at this party, and it shall be Salvador Dali. There is a costume for you in your room and one for the poet. Gala picked them. She can see through to the soul.”

I was about to say no again, but Dali wouldn’t let me get started.

“No one goes to the shore without wearing a mask of the gods.”

Depending on what torture Gala had laid out on the bed, it wasn’t such a bad idea to be in some kind of disguise. There wasn’t much chance of the L.A. cops showing up, but there was a chance the killer would come. That chance became a near certainty about ten minutes after the thought hit me.

The phone rang in the kitchen. Nobody paid attention. I picked it up. Over the clattering of the caterers and Gala’s shouting, a falsetto voice said, “Peters: Tonight, when the sun goes down, the painting will be revealed and Salvador Dali will face his punishment.”

Whoever it was hung up. I looked around to see if Dali was there or Gala was paying attention. They weren’t.

I went looking for Jeremy to tell him about the call and found him in the bedroom. He was wearing a toga with a gold rope around his waist.

“I am to be Plato.”

“You don’t have to do it, Jeremy.”

“I don’t mind. When I wrestled, I learned to accept costume and performance.”

I looked at the other costume on the bed. It was brown with leather shorts and with a little feathered hat, boots and a bow, and a quiver full of arrows.

“What’s that?”

“William Tell,” said Jeremy. “You have been honored. William Tell is Dali’s favorite character.”

“Why?”

Jeremy shrugged. Somehow, his shrug looked more meaningful in a toga.

“Tell is the archetypal father whose child’s life is in his hands. The child is dependent on the skill and courage of the father. Life and death, skill and faith. The child’s fate is in the hands of the father.”

“My knees’ll show,” I said, picking up the shorts.

“When you wear a bathing suit, they show,” Jeremy said gently.

“I don’t wear a bathing suit. I don’t go to the beach.”

“Tonight you will,” he reminded me, and I told him about the phone call.