Free And Sons by David Gilbert Page B

grin. Was there smugness in that grin? Richard hoped not, he despised smugness, but here was this Curtis guy, smart and successful and seemingly conjured from a world that finally understood just how special Richard Dyer was. “Yeah,” Richard said, “that would be ama—”
    Without warning, the office door flew open and in came Rainer Krebs, the head of Aires Projects. Meeting Rainer was the obvious goal. Curtis was all talk, but Rainer was the action, and Richard was ready. Last night he had practiced the pitch with his wife and thirteen-year-olddaughter (his sixteen-year-old son found Dad, the scriptwriter, to be its own lame sort of a movie). Richard had even rehearsed the small talk and was willing to reach back and go down the unpleasant road of growing up in Manhattan and how he always passed the Dietmar Krebs Gallery on 76th and Madison, with all those Schieles and Klimts inside—just spectacular—and from there maybe he’d ask Rainer where he went to school—Collegiate, he believed—and then might fish up a few names they had in common—his cousin, Henry Lippencott—even if Rainer was a few years older and part of that Euro crowd who cared more about clothes and clubbing than baseball, who even in eighth grade reeked of sexual boredom. They all ended up at Brown, it seemed.
    Richard rose to his feet with East Coast propriety, but Rainer had company, a boyish man expertly casual in Converse sneakers, a machinist union T-shirt, and a baseball cap pulled tight to the brow. This guise belonged to a familiar species of L.A. duck. One could imagine all the young white males in this city migrating from the wetlands of various Midwestern malls, flying west when the weather turned boring and gray. Rainer and his guest were in mid-conversation, oblivious to anything but the room itself.
    “So …,” Rainer said, pleased.
    The young man froze with stagey admiration.
    “Amazing, huh?”
    “You took the paneling too?”
    “The paneling is Prouvé; so is the door.”
    “Of course, the portholes.”
    “I liberated them from a technical school in Algiers.”
    “Fucking insane.” The young man continued with the drama, pressing his palms and face against the wood as if his touch could transduce the grain. “When I get to the right age I want to play Le Corbusier. I already have the perfect Charlotte Perriand in mind.”
    “Actually that would be a good project,” Rainer said.
    “Hell yeah it would. Bring in Pierre Jeanneret and we have
Jules et Jim
but with an architecture, French Resistance vibe. Total slam dunk. I even have Le Corbusier’s glasses, like his actual glasses glasses. Costme a hundred grand. I’m told it’s the second-most-expensive pair of modern eyewear ever sold at auction.”
    “Very nice.”
    Richard stood there, at first annoyed, smiling like a photograph waiting to be taken, but then the young man, his voice, his face—think of the three phases of matter, of a solid heating into a liquid heating into a gas—finally conveyed the steamy presence of Eric Harke, the actor, the movie star, the teen heartthrob. Richard tried to act nonchalant within these strange thermodynamics of celebrity, but being the lesser actor, his posture stroked into a stiff approximation of cool. Eric Harke was taller than expected and less pretty, thank goodness, since onscreen he appeared summoned from the baby pillows of a thousand pubescent girls, including Richard’s own daughter, who was presently screaming Oh-my-Gods in his head.
    “You remember Curtis,” Rainer said to Eric.
    “Oh-yeah-sure-absolutely-hey.”
    Rainer then turned toward Richard and smiled like an oven revealing a loaf of bread. “And it’s really nice to finally meet you,” he said, taking Richard’s hand. “I think our mothers know one another, from the Chamber Music Society or the Cos Club or something small-world like that.” Rainer was huge without being fat, his six-foot-eight bulk belonging to an antiquated class of male