Still Night in L.A. by Aram Saroyan

Author:Aram Saroyan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Three Rooms Press

25

ROOM 612 HAD A WESTERN EXPOSURE and it had taken me the rest of the afternoon to arrange to have a telescope with a semi-X-ray capacity for certain window treatments up on a roof on Western. I had access to the roof because of a business eviction case I’d worked for the landlord several years back.

Laura Fonseca was on my mind while I got the scope—from a trade rental service on Westin—assembled. A classic soap ad of a blond, if Marilyn Chambers hadn’t forever altered the concept. Perfect complexion and she and Val Raven had once been an item. Somehow or other you cared about Raven, a volatile adolescent in his first film, Bronx Bingo, who never seemed to shake that image and grow into adulthood. He had a wounded, sexually ambiguous persona and the liaison with Fonseca may have been studio hype.

I had the scope aimed several blocks east. Along with its western exposure, room 612 had the straight white vertical blinds that deflect the light this way or that, or close it off. The blinds were about half open and one of the features of the scope was that it did some kind of digital reimaging if the view was only partial. This brought me into the room.

There was a lamp on and a couple of people, one standing and one sitting on the sofa. The one standing might have been Mrs. Ryan. She was wearing bikini underwear and I couldn’t tell whether she had on a bra or not. I had a booster lens, which I put on and looked again. It was Mrs. Ryan, and she was wearing one of those flesh-toned bras. She had the kind of body that small thin women can keep longer, the body of a teenager with an extra fullness. Then I got a glimpse of the guy because he stood up. He was naked and looked disoriented and I had to do a double take. It wasn’t the guy from the bar. It looked to me like it was Robbie Robins, who had been in and out of jail and rehab for the last year or so, looking sadder and more pathetic each time People covered the story.

I imagined there was some kind of conversation taking place, but there was no direct eye-to-eye exchange. Robbie Robins could have been saying something as he looked in one direction, or Mrs. Ryan saying something looking in another. Two people, one naked and the other almost, standing in a room in East Hollywood. It was getting chillier, and the light wasn’t going to last much longer. I would pack up in a little while. I had something to report to Mr. Ryan, although a situation like this is ambiguous and dangerous enough so that I’d have to sort it out after a night’s sleep.

When I looked back into the telescope Robins slapped Mrs. Ryan across the face. She went down onto the sofa. A car dealer in Westlake told me that Robins had

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