Children of Light (16 page)

“Let’s go for a walk,” Drogue said.

They walked in a wide circle among the trees, hand in hand, Lu Anne wearing the thin white beach robe over her underwear.

“The most important question to me,” Drogue told her, “is whether you want to do it tonight. If you don’t, we’ll wrap.”

She said, after all, it was just walking in the water. She told him she would do it and that was what he wanted to hear.

Back at the trailer Vera Ricutti asked her if there was anything she wanted. Darkness was what she thought she wanted. Cool and darkness.

“Just to put my feet up awhile,” she told Vera.

When she was in the cool and dark the Long Friends emerged and began to whisper. She lay stiff, her eyes wide, listening.

Malheureuse
, a Friend whispered to her. The creature was inside her dresser mirror. Its face was concealed beneath black cloth. Only the venous, blue-baby-colored forehead showed and part of the skull, shaven like a long-ago nun’s. Its frail dragonfly wings rested against its sides. They always had bags with them that they kept out of sight, tucked under their wings or beneath the nunnish homespun. The bags were like translucent sacs, filled with old things. Asked what the things were, their answer was always the same.

Les choses démodées.

She turned to see it, to see if it would raise its face for her. Their faces were childlike and absurd. Sometimes they liked to be caressed and they would chew the tips of her fingers with their soft infant’s teeth. The thing in the mirror hid its face. Lu Anne lay back down and crossed her forearms over her breasts.

Tu tombes malade
, the creature whispered. They were motherly.

“No, I’m dead,” she told it. “Mourn me.”

In the next moment she found herself fighting for breath, as though an invisible bar were being pressed down against her. She turned on the light and the Long Friends vanished into shadows like insects into cracks in the walls; their whispers withdrew into the hum of the cooler. Delirium was a disease of darkness.

Her pills were on a shelf in the trailer lavatory. She went in and picked up the tube. Her body convulsed with loathing at the sight of the stuff.

Outside, the sun was declining, almost touching the uppermost layer of gray-blue storm cloud over the ocean. Wrapping the beach robe around her, she stood for a moment close to panic. She had no idea where to go, what to do. In the end she went to the nearest trailer, which was George Buchanan’s.

Buchanan rose in answer to her knock; he had set his John D. MacDonald mystery on the makeup counter.

“George,” she said breathlessly. “Hi.”

“Hi, Lu Anne.” He looked concerned and cross. He was a stern-faced man, a professional villain since his youth in the fifties. “I’m not here, you know. I’m hiding out.”

“Are you, George?”

“My son is with his girlfriend back at the bungalow. I came out here to give them a little … what shall we call it?”

“George,” she said in a girlish whine, “do you have a downer? Please? Do you?”

He looked stricken. He was so shocked by her request that he tried to make a joke of it.

“For you, Lu Anne, anything. But not that.”

“It was just a shot,” she said.

“Hey,” Buchanan said, “this is me, Buchanan. I’m into staying alive. I mean, Christ’s sake, Lu Anne, you know I don’t use that stuff. It tried to kill me.”

She shook her head in confusion.

“I mean, I can’t believe you asked me.”

She slammed his door shut, turned and saw Dongan Lowndes, the writer, apparently on the way to her trailer. He had seen her coming out of Buchanan’s quarters. He did a little double take to let her know that he had seen it.

“Mr. Lowndes,” she said. “I’m sorry but I can’t remember your first name.” She bit her lip; she could not seem to lose the whininess in her manner.

“Forget it,” Lowndes said. “Call me Skip.”

“Skip,” she said, “Skip, you wouldn’t have a downer on you? Or maybe back at your room?”

He stared at her. Had he taken the reference to his room for a proposition?

“No,” Lowndes said. “Or uppers or anything else.”

“Oh dear,” Lu Anne said. She smiled disarmingly for Lowndes. “I was hoping for a little something.”

“Sorry,” Lowndes said, looking as though he were. She saw that he was anxious to please her.

“Even liquor would do,” she said. “I don’t usually drink when I work, but now and then a small amount can prime a person.”

“Right,” Lowndes said, “well, I don’t drink anymore myself. I can’t. But can’t you send out to the hotel for it?”

She shifted her eyes from side to side broadly in a comic parody of guilt.

“I don’t want people to know.” She paused and sighed. “Dongan, could you?”

“Skip,” Lowndes said.

She looked at him impatiently.

“Skip,” he repeated. “Call me Skip.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” she said. “I can just see why your folks called you that. Could you get us a bottle, Skip, so we can sneak a slug down here?”

“I have trouble handling it,” Lowndes said. “I’m off the stuff.”

For a little while he looked at her, a faint fond smile playing about his thick lips.

“I guess I could, though.”

She opened her eyes wide and swallowed bravely. So go and do it, she was telling him, you shit-eating bird. The Long Friends cackled admonition.

“Scotch?” he asked. His gaze was sad. Whether he was begging for her favors or simply disillusioned, she could not tell and did not care.

“Yes,” she said, sounding absurdly eager, “that’d be nice.”

“I’ll go up and get a bottle,” he said. His voice wavered as he said it, like an adolescent’s.

Lu Anne did not feel particularly like drinking liquor but it seemed important that there be something to take.

“Oh great, Skip,” she said. “Now, you remember the car we came in, huh? Well, you just go back to that car and get him to take you up the hill and you can get us a jug. Only carry it in something, will you, because I don’t want people to think we’re a couple of old drunks.”

“Right,” Lowndes said. “I’ll brown-bag it.”

“And when you’re up there,” she said as he started for the car, “you ask them if a Mr. Walker has arrived, O.K.?”

“Mr. Walker,” Lowndes repeated. “And a plain brown wrapper.”

Across the clearing, Lu Anne saw Jack Glenn, the actor playing Robert Lebrun, in conversation with Joe Ricutti. She went over to them. A few years before, she had heard an agent describe Glenn—a natural who could fence, juggle, swing from vines and play comedy—as too small to be big. Whenever she repeated the story she got her laugh and people said it was a voice from Vanished Hollywood. But the agent had not vanished and Jack Glenn, at five feet nine inches, worked irregularly. Someone had told her it was because he was fair-skinned; a fair-skinned actor had to be taller. It was a matter of semiotics, the person had said.

He turned to her approach. “Ah,” he said with his hand over his heart, “
Les Douleurs d’amour.
” He kissed her hand, correctly, with the appearance of a kiss. Glenn was nice-looking and bisexual but for whatever reason she had never been attracted to him. Perhaps because he was fair and short.

“I don’t suppose,” Lu Anne said, “that since we talked you’ve come into any … you know, into possession of …”

“What a coincidence that you should ask.”

“You have!” she exclaimed joyfully.

“No,” Jack Glenn said. “But I was just thinking about it myself. I was thinking of asking that guy.”

He pointed to a middle-aged Mexican in a safari jacket who was holding one of the trolley horses with a twitch, examining its leg. As he worked, he was humming “The Trolley Song” from
Meet Me in St. Louis.

“Who is he?” she asked.

“The vet,” Glenn said.

“What?” she said.

“The vet,” Joe Ricutti told her. “For the horses. So they shouldn’t get sick.”

Lu Anne turned to watch him work.

“I never thought of Mexican locations as having vets.”

“I always thought they shot the horses,” Jack Glenn said archly. “Don’t they?”

“This is No Help City,” Lu Anne said. “I mean, it’s a very bad situation.”

“This unit doctor,” Glenn said, “you tell him you can’t sleep, he tells you how many gringos are locked up in Baja Norte. ‘One hundred twenty U.S. citizens in jail.’ That’s the only English sentence he knows. So I was just thinking, like hmm—there’s the vet. Maybe he has something nice for us.”

“Oh God,” Lu Anne cried in exasperation, “like horse tranques? How about an STP trip? Or some angel dust?”

“Get him to give you a shot,” Joe Ricutti said. “You’ll go off on the rail at Caliente and finish first at Del Mar.”

“Well,” Lu Anne said, “we’ll have to tough it out, won’t we? Everything will have a clear black line around it, like a death notice.”

Jack Glenn laughed. “You’re so weird, Lu Anne.”

“That’s why we’re all here,” she told him. “You included.”

“I don’t know how people can joke about drugs,” Glenn said in mock sadness. In fact, as Lu Anne well knew, Glenn was mainly indifferent to drugs. He was only trying to amuse. “We should get someone to score for us in L.A.,” he said. “Bring shit down with the dailies.”

“Maybe Joy got hold of some,” Lu Anne suggested.

Glenn shook his head.

“Well,” she said, “I’m going to lie down and die again.”

She went back across the field to her trailer and there was Lowndes, sitting on the three little metal steps with a brown bag beside him. He stood up and presented the bag.

“Got any ice?”

But of course she did not want Lowndes, only the liquor. Or something.
She opened the trailer door, trying to think how she might get rid of him. He followed her into the trailer and closed the door behind them.

She had some weeks-old ice in the trailer. She smashed the tray repeatedly against the miniature sink to get the cubes free, brushing aside Lowndes’s gestures of assistance. There were two plastic glasses on her makeup table; she filled them with ice and whiskey and passed one to Lowndes.

“We’ll have to make this a quick one, Skip, O.K.? Because I’m not really through working, you see.” She could not keep her words from running together, so intensely did she want the drink and Lowndes out. “I just wanted something … you know, when I get out of the water to dry me out. Well,” she said, “I guess dry’s the wrong word, isn’t it? I just wanted something to keep me wet between takes, aha.”

He was a magazine writer, she reminded herself, an important one, and he was there to write about the picture. With fascinated horror, she watched his upper lip draw back to expose a line of unhealthy red gum. “Not,” she laughed gaily, “that I’m planning to play the scene loaded, because that’s not how I work. Hell no, why …” She broke off. The man in front of her seemed to grow more and more grotesque and she was no longer confident about the reality of what she was seeing. There was something familiar about him, familiar in a most unpleasant way. It might be that he reminded her of someone. Or it might be worse.

“It’s been a very long time since I had a drink,” Lowndes told her.

“Is that right?” she asked. “Well, here’s how.”

When they drank, Lowndes’s features puckered with distaste. His eyes watered.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said to Dongan Lowndes, “when I’m through this evening we’ll have a proper drink. We’ll set around and drink and talk. How’s that?”

“I thought it would be all gnomes and agents and flacks,” Lowndes said. “I’d love to see you later.” He finished what was in his glass in a swallow and turned pale. “Shall we have dinner?”

“Yes, yes,” Lu Anne said, standing up. “Dinner it is.”

She gave him the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree smile. He was a starfucker, she thought, a cheap starfucker who wanted to get her in bed and then brag to all his colleagues about it and then, without fear or favor, humiliate her before all of with-it, literate America. Not, she thought, that it hadn’t been done before.

“Yeah, that’s great,” Lu Anne told him. “After work.” She put a hand on his arm to shove him toward the door. Then she realized that she must not shove, so the hand on his arm was transformed into something like an affectionate gesture. She plucked an imaginary thread from his shirt. After work—it was just like waiting tables again, only they knew where you lived.

“Are you working late?”

“Sundown. After six.”

“Well,” Lowndes said, “I’ll be in the bar around seven-thirty. I’ll see you there.”

“Is he here?”

“Who?”

“Gordon. Gordon Walker.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry. I forgot to ask. He’s the screenwriter, isn’t he? Is he a friend of yours?”

“Yes. Yes, an old friend. Hey, thanks for the scotch,” she called as he went out. “Skip.”

He had brought a full bottle of Dewar’s. The only problem was that it was whiskey and it would smell up her breath and the trailer, so she would have to rinse her mouth and spray evil-smelling deodorants around.

She sipped her first drink slowly. It changed things for her; changed the trailer from a ratty piece of aluminum machinery into a cool, well-appointed refuge. She turned the overhead lamps down a few degrees of intensity and found that she had created a happy kind of light. It was all so much nicer.

When she had finished her first drink, she poured a second into her plastic glass, half filling it. She wet her face with a cool towel, turned the air conditioning up and shivered comfortably.

Her copy of the script was on the makeup counter beside her chair,
face down, open to the scene that was to follow. After a moment’s hesitation she picked it up, not at all sure if she was in the mood for work or Edna, Kate Chopin or Gordon Walker’s take on things in general. She had read it many times before.

The scene was the novel’s climax, her walk into the sea; if she opened her trailer door she would be able to hear the grips at work on the setup for it.

She moves life Cleopatra
, Walker had written,
as though impelled by immortal longings.
The lines of direction were addressed only to her, a part of their game of relentless Shakespearianizing, half purely romantic, half higher bullshit. He meant he wanted Edna going out like the Queen in
Antony and Cleo
, Act V, scene 2.