2 x 4 HOUSE

A timber facade raised against the dimming air.

The distant verticals touched by the last light of sunset.

It stands at one corner of the crossroads.

All that’s left is the screen. The desert eat up all the rest years ago. But it stands out there, just south of the old road like some big tombstone for everything that’s beat up, whipped down, over with and done.

Imagine that - Happiness everyday.

The dining room has been equipped with small metal chairs and tables, set with plates, cutlery and bowls of tiny flowers.

Venetian blinds screen the windows from the hot sunlight.

Walls of mirror reflect morning banks of pacific clouds.

There are windows cut down one side, square holes sealed over with translucent plastic.

Chip has done a lot of cutting, and welding the summer the first come to Palos Verdes. He’s cut roof panels away, installed struts where needed, covered the holes with sheets of rigid plastic, caulked the resulting skylights with silicone.

Its terraces are covered with tiles, and the columns of the loggia beside the swimming pool seem to topple into the basin.

She wakes on the sofa by the picture window, the darkening floor of the desert below, aware of the dissolving boundaries.

At night she sometimes lights the floods mounted beneath the deck. The deck itself she leaves in darkness, and the sunken living room behind her. She sits on a chair of plain plastic.

The solar reflectors are still faintly visible, drinking in the last glow of the sunset.

Brilliant climbing plants, lobster-clawed clematis and honeysuckle with pink and yellow flowers, entwine themselves around the struts, the vivid blooms illuminating this memorial of decay.

She walks through the dim light, seeing her reflection in the burnished cellulose and waxed leather.

The bathroom’s shuttered windows are unglazed, strung with a fine green mesh of plastic. She peers out between softwood slats, wincing at the hot clean sun, and sees a dry fountain of flower painted tiles.

Green plants in heavy brass pots, the corridors tiled like worn marble chessboards.

A single tall window overlooks the avenue, the kind of window you can actually open. An armchair whose plush fabric contrasts comfortably with the muted Belgian carpet.

At the far end, through an open door paneled with dusty pebble-glass, was a courtyard, its tiles shiny with damp.

The house has grown, sprouting wings and workshops, but she has never painted the clapboard of the original structure.

I like that whole part a lot. That is real. The rest is bullshit.

The perspective of the street, the muddle of the unrelated buildings and tangle of overhead wires, the signs that sprout in profuse variety at the slightest opportunity, all seem entirely new.

The house crouches like its neighbors, on fragments of ruined foundations. Involved attempts at archaeological fantasy. She tries to imagine a past for the place, other houses, other voices.

We are up on the lounge deck looking out at the sand reefs and pools of the golden ocean glowing in the false dusk, the great 250 foot steel pylon humming faintly in the air above us. The water is as smooth as silk.

The architects as if in recognition of eternal processes, have encouraged a degree of rust; wooden railings along the deck have been eaten wrist-thin by years of sand blowing across the area.

Kind of a rough place, but it’s OK.