As yet the new city seemed forbidden to me, and the strange unpersuadable landscape darkened as though I didn’t exist. Even the nearest Things didn’t care whether I understood them. —RAINER MARIA RILKE, “The Vast Night” I WAS DANCING WITH the cleaning woman when the doorbell rang. “I’ll get it, Harry. You look like heart-attack city.” Frances Place moved across my living room floor like a panther on ball bearings. She didn’t walk so much as glide, and when she glided, you didn’t seem to see any moving parts—she just was here and then she was there and you had to think about how she did it. Like Lucia, the beautiful parking attendant at the Westwood Muse Hotel, Frances came to Hollywood to become famous but ended up cleaning apartments to tide her over between jobs as a dancer. She was only a so-so cleaner, but in the months she’d worked for me, she’d taught me dances like The Razorblade and The Horse’s Neck, which I thought was fair trade for some dust mice under the bed or mysterious crust on a kitchen shelf.
