With the Sound Off

From the courtyard, Magda Laskowski's glass booth looks like a lantern somebody forgot to hang. It sits against the east wall where the tiles run out, a glass box the size of a parking space, lit warm from inside by the desk lamps and the green glow of the board. The string lights loop overhead from the iron balconies, tungsten bulbs on a sagging wire, and they put a gold sheen on its roof. Lemon trees stand around it in terracotta pots. The jacaranda over the wall has been dropping all evening, and the purple petals lie on the tiles and on the step up to the booth door, as if somebody has dressed the set and gone home.

The blinds are down. All of them, to the sill. From out here the booth is a lit shape with nobody in it.

Magda stands at the edge of the string lights with her headphones round her neck and looks at it as if it were a room she has been asked to sleep in.

She is white, twenty-seven, Polish-American, from Van Nuys, where her parents ran a dry cleaner's on Victory for thirty years and she did her homework behind the counter under the plastic-wrapped suits. For five years she has been the overnight voice on Radio Laurel. Midnight to four, Sunday through Thursday. Half the city has fallen asleep to her and almost none of it knows her face. The station's site has no photograph. The promo card in the lobby at work shows a woman's silhouette against a lamp, a braid over one shoulder, a microphone. Bianca chose the silhouette. Magda has never once asked her to change it.

"It's smaller than the drawings," she says.

"Everything is smaller than the drawings," Cosima Treadwell says beside her. "That's the first thing they teach you on Broadway, and the second is not to tell the designer."

The Solenne's managing director is a trim woman of about sixty with a silver bob tucked behind one ear and reading glasses on a chain. An old headset hangs round her neck, its wire tucked into her collar and running to nothing at all. She has the walk of someone who has spent a lifetime crossing a stage in the dark without bumping into scenery.

"Come and meet your room," she says.

They cross the tiles. A fountain in the middle of the courtyard dribbles into its basin with the sound of a tap someone hasn't quite shut off. Two members sit at an iron table under the lemon trees with a bottle between them, and a man in a pale linen suit reads at another, a candle in a glass at his elbow. None of them look up. That, Magda already understands, is the house manners.

Inside the booth it is warmer and smells of new carpet and the plastic of new equipment. The desk is a long slab of walnut. Her microphone stands on its arm, the pop filter clipped on. Bianca has set the board up exactly as it is at the station, faders labeled in her small square capitals on strips of white tape, and the log is clipped open on the desk with tonight's first hour already ruled.

"The blinds," Cosima says, and puts a hand on the cord. "These are yours. Nobody else touches them. Not my staff, not your producer, not me. If you want them down for the whole month, they stay down for the whole month, and I will still have had a lovely time building you a box."

"Bianca will have opinions."

"Bianca may have as many opinions as she likes. The cord is yours." Cosima lets go of it. "Three more things, and then I'll leave you to your show. Nobody films in the courtyard. Not the hotel, not the members. Phones stay in pockets out here, and anyone who forgets that doesn't come back. Every member and every guest in this building is twenty-one or older, and the desk checks. And everybody who drinks in this courtyard knows the booth is here. They've known for a month. Some of them wrote in asking which nights."

"Asking which nights to listen."

"Asking which nights you'd be in." Cosima's mouth tucks at one corner. "I told them it's radio. I'm not sure they heard me."

Magda looks out through the slats. The candle on the linen suit's table makes a small bright point between two blades of the blind.

"And the last thing," Cosima says. "Suite Four. It's across the courtyard, on the north side. When the hotel doesn't need it, it's your greenroom. Somewhere to lie down between shows that isn't a room with a bed and a view of the parking structure. The glass in there stays frosted unless you decide otherwise. Nobody will decide it for you."

"I know what the glass rooms are," Magda says.

"I'd have been surprised if you didn't." Cosima unclips a key card from a ring and sets it on the walnut beside the log. "It's a greenroom. That's all it has to be."

The door opens behind them and Bianca Ferraro comes in backward, a tray of coffees in one hand and her laptop bag swinging from the other. She is thirty-four and small and quick, with a black bob cut sharp at the chin and red-framed glasses she pushes up her nose with a knuckle. She wears the station hoodie over good jeans, and the hoodie has a coffee stain on the cuff that she will deny is there.

"Ms. Treadwell," she says. "It looks unreal out there. It looks like a jewelry box."

"Cosima, please. Ms. Treadwell was a woman who ran a fly system." Cosima steps past her toward the door. "Break a leg, both of you. I'll be listening from my office with a drink I shouldn't have."

The door swings shut. The booth goes quiet in the particular way a treated room goes quiet, the courtyard sounds cut off at the glass, the fountain and the clink of a bottle reduced to nothing.

Bianca sets the coffees down and looks at the blinds.

"No," Magda says.

"I didn't say anything."

"You looked at them."

"I looked at them because they're the only thing in here I can't fix." Bianca drops into the producer's chair and swings it toward her. "Mags. They built a glass booth. They didn't build a radio studio in a courtyard by accident. The whole residency is the window. The members out there paid to have you in the window."

"They paid to have the show in the courtyard. The show is a sound."

"The show is you."

"The show is my voice," Magda says, "and my voice doesn't care what it looks like."

She sits down at the desk and lifts the headphones from round her neck. They are her own, not the station's, the leather of the ear cups worn soft and a little pale where they rest against her jaw. She pulls her braid over her left shoulder, as she does every night, so the band will sit right. In the black glass of the switched-off monitor she catches herself for a second: a fair face, pale eyes, dark honey-blond hair, the soft shoulders of a men's blazer she bought at a Pasadena flea market because it made her feel like a director. Under it she wears a close cropped black knit and high-waisted wide-leg trousers, and nobody at the station has ever seen her in either, because nobody at the station sees her at all after eleven at night.

She looks away from the monitor.

"Twenty minutes," Bianca says, and turns to the board.

At midnight the red light over the door comes on and Magda opens her microphone.

"This is The Small Hours," she says, low and close, as if she is sitting on the end of one person's bed. "It's midnight on Sunday, and for the next four hours I'm not at the station. I'm somewhere in West Hollywood with a lemon tree outside my door and the jacaranda coming down like somebody's emptying a pillow. Wherever you are, I hope you're comfortable. If you're driving, I hope the lights are green. If you're working, I'm sorry, and I'm here. Let's start with something that knows what time it is."

She brings up the first record and closes the microphone. Bianca gives her a thumbs-up without looking round.

It goes as it always goes, and that is the relief of it. The board, the log, the clock on the wall. She back-announces in her own easy rhythm and takes a call from a night nurse in Torrance who wants something with a horn section, and she reads out a text from a man in a truck stop on the 5 who says the lemon tree line made him miss his exit. She laughs on air, a real laugh, and the dimple on the left side of her face shows to nobody.

From the courtyard, she knows, the booth is a lit box with the blinds drawn and a soft sound leaking from it if you stand close. The members out there can hear her on their own radios, or on the little speaker Cosima has hidden in a lemon tub by the fountain. They can hear her breathe on the microphone. They can't see her mouth do it.

That is the deal, and she has always liked her side of it.

At ten past one she puts on a long record, a slow, wide piece of strings and hand drums that she plays when she needs to stand up and stretch her back. It runs a long time. She closes the microphone and pushes her chair away from the desk.

Bianca is bent over the laptop with her headphones on, answering the request line in writing.

Magda stands at the blinds.

She tells herself she only wants to see if the man in the linen suit is still reading. She tells herself it's professional, that she ought to know what the courtyard looks like with a show coming out of it. A lighting designer walks the house before doors. She tells herself this and puts her hand on the cord.

The cord is cool and slightly rough. She pulls it.

The blinds rise a hand's width off the sill, no more, and the courtyard comes in under them in a long narrow strip.

The string lights first, gold, swinging a little in a breeze she can't feel. The lemon leaves, very dark, the fruit picked out in yellow. The fountain basin catching the bulbs. The two members at the iron table, bent toward each other now, the bottle lower. The linen suit has gone. His candle is still burning in its glass.

And on the far side of the courtyard, on the stone bench under the north balconies, a man sits alone.

He is tall. Even sitting down, she can tell he is tall: the long line of his legs, his knees well up from the bench, his shoulders above the back of it. He is dressed dark, and the string lights touch only the edges of him, a cheekbone, a shoulder, the rim of a glass he holds on one knee. He doesn't drink from it. She watches long enough to be sure. The glass stays where it is, and he stays where he is, facing the booth.

She can't see his face. He is a shape at the edge of the frame, the figure a camera operator leaves in soft focus at the back of a shot so the room looks lived in.

He could be listening. Half of the courtyard is listening.

He could be looking at the window.

Magda keeps her hand on the cord. She doesn't lower the blinds, and she doesn't raise them.

In the booth's glass, in the strip above the sill, her own reflection lies over the courtyard. The desk lamps behind her throw her up faintly on the inside of the pane: the curve of the blazer's shoulder, the braid, the pale oval of a face she has kept out of every frame. Through it, faint and gold, the string lights. Through it, the dark bench, and the tall man on it, and the glass he doesn't drink.

The record has a long way still to go.

She stands at a hand's width of window and lets the courtyard see the little there is to see.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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