Malory Top Apartment of the Century Building

The Century Towers penthouse is Abigail Mallory’s condominium, where Robert Mallory lives and where Bret visits him before Terry Schaffer’s party. Its elevated, immaculate rooms make the apartment feel at once private and impersonal: a place where Bret imagines Robert’s ordinary routines and hidden intentions, and where Robert confirms that Susan may come to stay. The penthouse thus becomes a setting for intimacy and suspicion, its apparent domestic calm set against the troubling story Bret is constructing around Robert.

Setting and Arrival

On Halloween night, Bret drives to Century City to collect Robert for Terry’s party. The Century Towers rise ahead as he approaches along Avenue of the Stars. After passing the white brick wall with the building’s name in gold cursive, he checks in at the lobby desk, although Robert is expecting him and the elevator bank is plainly visible. The orderly arrival establishes a distinction between the building’s formal public face and the private space above it.

Abigail’s condominium occupies the top of the twenty-eight-story tower. As Bret rides up, he feels an unexpected calm with an erotic charge: entering the home where Robert sleeps, eats, dresses, and does homework seems to offer access to a version of him unavailable at school. But this imagined intimacy is already shadowed by Bret’s suspicion that Robert plans abductions and constructs what the Trawler calls remakings. The penthouse is therefore not simply a home Bret wants to enter; it is a place where attraction and fear converge in his imagination.

An Interior Without Signs of Permanence

The living room is large and spare, with marble flooring, subdued recessed lights, and a window wall overlooking West Hollywood and the distant hills of Sunset. A sliding glass door opens onto a balcony furnished with a chaise longue and a small table. From there, the Hillcrest Country Club and Rancho Park lie below; lit tennis courts border a dark golf course beside Pico Boulevard. The height makes the world beyond the balcony seem far away, giving the apartment a sense of separation from ordinary life.

The minimalism continues inside. A light-gray sectional, a white granite fireplace, and a glass dining table surrounded by eight gray-cushioned chairs leave little sign of comfort or frequent use. A print of David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist supplies the room’s most vivid colors: the blue pool, green hills, and pink blazer. The kitchen is equally uncluttered, with a knife rack, blender, and a few tangerines on a wooden board. The furnishings suggest a place arranged to look complete but scarcely inhabited.

Robert’s bedroom intensifies that impression. A bulky television plays Night of the Living Dead, its black-and-white images fitting the gray room, but the queen-sized bed, desk, drawers, and nightstand remain plain and anonymous. There is no phone, no stereo, and no posters; the only book is a folded-open paperback of Slaughterhouse-Five, assigned for American Fiction, and a boom box sits with a few scattered cassettes. The absent phone catches Bret’s attention because he wonders where the number he found in Matt Kellner’s drawer is located; his mind immediately places it at Benedict Canyon. Even within this controlled interior, details lead Bret away from what he can see and toward the suspicions he carries elsewhere.

Robert’s Private World and Bret’s Suspicion

When Bret finds Robert, he is standing in a walk-in closet, tying a crimson tie before a full-length mirror. Robert wears a simple black suit and white shirt, while Bret compares his own assembled outfit unfavorably with Robert’s clean, restrained look. The moment captures the penthouse as a stage for self-presentation: Robert is preparing to make an impression at the party, while Bret notices both his appearance and the distance between them.

The rooms also feed Bret’s effort to imagine Robert’s life in private. He wonders about Robert’s habits and routines, then overlays those ordinary possibilities with a darker imagined account involving Susan and the Trawler’s language of alterations and remakings. The contrast matters: nothing in the sparse bedroom proves Bret’s fears, yet its lack of personal traces leaves space for him to project them. The apartment’s blankness makes it difficult to distinguish what Bret knows from what he fears or invents.

The Condo as a Setting for Disclosure

Robert explains that he asked Abigail to go to Santa Barbara for the weekend so he could have the condominium to himself. Bret understands the practical reason and, in an inward exchange with the writer he imagines addressing, recognizes the unasked question of why Robert would not take his aunt to the Benedict Canyon house. Robert then confirms that Susan might stay over, though he presents it as only a possibility, and asks Bret to keep the information between them. The apartment becomes a site of disclosure: it gives Bret a concrete reason to suspect that Robert and Susan’s connection may be more than he had been told.

After Terry falls at the party and is taken to the hospital, Susan and Robert leave together, while Bret returns alone to the empty house on Mulholland. Bret imagines that Robert will take Susan back to the condominium and comfort her there. The penthouse itself is not shown again in that aftermath, but it remains the destination around which Bret’s jealousy and uncertainty gather. Its role is less that of a conventional home than a secluded setting where Robert can control access, where Susan may join him, and where Bret’s interpretations of their relationship acquire force.

Narrative Significance

The penthouse’s height, spare design, and thin evidence of personal occupation give physical form to the story’s tension between surface and concealed life. It offers Bret the intimate access he desires, but that access reveals less than he wants: rooms and objects become prompts for conjecture rather than reliable explanations. The building’s separation from the city below parallels the secrecy surrounding Robert’s weekend plans, while the contrast between domestic routine and Bret’s imagined violence makes the apartment feel unstable without establishing that his suspicions are true.

Years later, Bret recalls that his book became more deeply concerned with desire, memory, and the people whose lives shaped it than with a simple account of the attacks. In that retrospective frame, the penthouse scene belongs to a wider pattern in which physical places gather meanings imposed on them by longing and recollection. The condominium’s decisive significance lies in this double function: it is Robert’s actual residence and, for Bret, a private interior onto which attraction, rivalry, and fear are projected.