A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher Page A

quietstreets. We passed ranch houses with sleek lawns and ironwood trees, Spanish villas with terra-cotta roofs, Tudor mansions with serpentine driveways, and even a mock-Roman temple flanked by a pair of brightly lit horseshoe swimming pools. Then we entered a long road paved with silvery asphalt on which there were no houses. Eventually it tapered into a single broad driveway through an iron gate that ended in a cul-de-sac. There, at the very edge of the desert, a startlingly large, white building with many lighted windows loomed before us. In a courtyard in front of the building, there was a marble fountain, adorned with a statue, from which a plume of water rose high in the air, glittering under spotlights.
    “Welcome,” Samax said, smiling, holding the car door open for me.
    Carrying her typewriter in its black case, swinging her hips, Desirée again wore an abstracted look as she smiled at me and walked up the marble steps to the building’s entrance. A doorman in a white jacket opened one of the darkly tinted glass doors for her, and then I heard her heels clicking rapidly away.
    “This is my home,” Samax said simply. “The Hotel Canopus. Now it is your home, as well.”
    My first look at that building, which was to figure so prominently in my life, has always remained sharply etched. Though I had traveled through many American cities, and lived in New York, where there were hundreds of far larger buildings, the Hotel Canopus, framed by a vast desert expanse, backdropped by the forbidding silhouette of the Spring Mountains, seemed enormous looming there under the starlit sky. In fact, it was ten stories high, and about one hundred feet across. (Eventually I would come to learn all its specifications intimately, including the 290 windows, 110 doors, thirty bathrooms, three basement levels, and the tunnel that ran from one subbasement to a large greenhouse.) Purely rectangular, the building was constructed of limestone and white brick and had a slightly sloping, tiled gray roof. The design was straightforward but elegant, with baroque touches. It was detailed, for example, with fine masonry work, such as the figures of wild (and extinct) animals below window ledges and elaborate Islamic decorations—labyrinths, mandalas, and geometrical designs on brightly colored tiles set into the eaves and cornices. The entrance-way was flanked by imposing, plainly fluted marble columns and there was a small arcade to the left, leading to a large circular terraceringed with shade trees. The building’s foundation was rimmed by yucca shrubs like thick fans and concentric circles of mesquite trees flowing away from the courtyard, beyond which were some outbuildings. I could also faintly make out the maze of a large garden, heavily shadowed, the equally large greenhouse, and a swimming pool. But, even as I took all this in, what most caught my eye was that fountain at the center of the cul-de-sac, which was more complicated than it had appeared as we came up the driveway.
    I stood not ten feet from it now and saw that the plume of water was actually six jets of water from the mouths of six bronze dolphins that conjoined in midair. The dolphins were arrayed below a marble statue so supplely carved it appeared to be alive, in motion, beneath the umbrella of spray. The statue was of a woman wearing a necklace of stars who was sitting on a starfish throne. That is, it had five arms like a starfish, four of which were the legs of the throne while the fifth served as its back. She was young, with wavy hair cascading over her shoulders. A light robe clung to her body and her slender feet were sandaled. I thought I saw a smile glimmer through the veils of water, on an open, beautifully balanced face which was fixed on the heavens. In her hand she held a small bowl, from which water, rainbow-tinged, was overflowing in a steady stream.
    As we ascended the steps, Samax saw me staring at the fountain. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” he