The High Window

For the first few years in Los Angeles, we lived with empty rooms. Empty rooms. The luxury of it says something about why we came here, or maybe what we found. When we learned my wife was pregnant, I moved my desk out of the second bedroom into the unused breakfast room. That room was a turret, a conical chamber with a high-arched ceiling reminiscent of the converted silo in my grandparents' Connecticut farmhouse where we used to gather for meals. All these echoes, all these resonances, all the gestures lost but not yet misremembered, so close I could almost touch them, if they were not already past. In that sense, I am walking less a set of streets than a set of memories. From Pico-Robertson, I cross Olympic, and then a little later Wilshire, turn into the Fairfax District, past where Raymond Chandler lived (no, really) from 1944 to 1946. I have little in common with Chandler except that we both write about Los Angeles, but it thrilled me when I discovered this had been his neighborhood. Once, I tried to rent his house, but it was too small, or unavailable, I can't recall. No matter: To walk these streets is to excavate the layers of a thousand other walks, stretching back to when the world felt more contained, as if it were a secret loosely held. Our son was small. We used to push him in his stroller on summer evenings, after the swelter had abated, or at least enough that we could go outside. I remember his little face, his shorts and light-up shoes. I remember bringing his sister home to this apartment, knowing that we'd have to move. From the street, I gaze up at the balcony for signs of who lives there now; I see a table, and behind it curtains in the window of the dining room. No other trace, but I don't want to know about them, really. That's not why I'm here; I'm just walking. This is not my place anymore.