Children of Light (2 page)

He leaned in the doorway and watched her. She lay facing him, her red-blond hair partly covering her eyes, her lips parted over long
cowgirl’s teeth. She slept on, or pretended to. A deep blue silk sheet was gathered about her naked body; she was sheathed in it.

Bronwen was a writer, a midwestern girl honed smooth by early success and the best of California. Observing, or rather ogling, her at rest, Walker was stirred in equal measure by lust and resentment.

Basically, they disliked each other. They were both, in their diverse ways, performers, comics; much of their companionable humor turned on mutual scorn.

She had written three short novels, witty, original and immensely pleasurable to read. Bronwen was nothing if not funny. Each of her novels had been received with great enthusiam by reviewers and by the public; she had become famous enough for Walker, to his deep inward shame, to take a vulgar satisfaction in his liaison with her. She was intelligent and coldhearted, a spiky complex of defenses mined with vaults of childish venom and hastily buried fears. Kicked when she was a pup, Walker would say behind her back. The game they played, one of the games, was that she knew his number. That his stratagems to please, his manner of being amusing, the political sincerities that remained to him were petty complaints to which she was immune. Others might take him seriously—not she, the hard case, worldly-wise.

He ran his eyes over her long frame and wondered if she knew he knew about the pistol she kept in the wicker chest beneath her bed, wrapped in a scarf with her Ritalin tablets. Or whether she knew his number well enough to imagine the measure of his rage, or the murderous fantasies that assailed him—of destroying her, transforming her supple youth to offal, trashing it.

He was immediately stricken with remorse and horror. Because he liked her, really, after all. He must, he thought; there had to be more than perversity. She was funny; he enjoyed her wit and her high spirits. And she liked him—he was sure. She could speak with him as with no other friend; she respected his work, she had said so. It occurred to him suddenly how little any of this had to do with the terms of the heart as he had once understood them; love, caring, loyalty. It was just a random coupling, a highbrow jelly roll. Might
she imagine that violent fantasies beset him with herself as their object? She might well. She was very experienced and knowing; she had his number. And the Lord knew what fantasies she spun round him.

Back in the living room, he found his wallet on the sofa where he had been sitting. It was thick with bills, jammed in haphazard. He remembered then, having almost forgotten it in his malaise, that he had won a great deal of money at Santa Anita the day before. He had gone with Bronwen; it was a glorious day and they had lunched at the clubhouse. Walker had scored on the double, a perfecta and an eight-to-one winner. His take was over a thousand dollars, the largest amount of money he had ever won at the track. It had paid for dinner at the San Gabriel Ranch and it would pay a week’s rent at the Chateau. He had been living at the Chateau Marmont since the closing of
Lear
, having rented his house in Santa Monica. He did not care to be alone there.

Walker caressed the disorderly wad between thumb and forefinger. The touch of the wrinkled bright new bills gave him a faint feeling of disgust. He took out a hundred, examining the lacy engraved illumination at its border. Then, on an impulse, he rolled the bill into a cylinder, laid out a line of his coke and blew it. Nice. He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. Confidence. A little surge for the road. Immediately it occurred to him that in the brief course of his waking day he had consumed Valium, alcohol and cocaine.

We need a plan, he thought. A plan and a dream, somewhere to go. Dreams were business to Walker, they were life. Like salt, like water. Lifeblood.

He touched the tip of his index finger to the surface of the coffee table, capturing the residue of cocaine that remained there, and rubbed it on his gum.

Go, he thought. It seemed to him that if he did not go at once death would find him there. He stood up and packed his suitcase, leaving the small fold of cocaine on the table as a house present. He had plenty more in the case.

Stacked on the mantel above the fireplace were Bronwen’s three novels; Walker found that each was engagingly inscribed to him. The
drill was for him to take them and leave a note. He turned the topmost book to the back jacket and looked at Bronwen’s picture. Her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, her lips were slightly parted, her cheekbones high and handsome, her chin dimpled. She looked hip and sympathetic and fingerlickin’ good. He placed the book back on the mantelpiece and left it there. Then he put on his sunglasses, picked up his bags and went forth into the morning.

As he drove the freeway, KFAC played Couperin, the
Leçons de Ténèbres.

Walker thought of himself as a survivor. He knew how to endure, and what it was that got you through. There was work. There were the people you loved and the people who loved you. There were, he had always believed, a variety of inner resources that the veteran survivor might fall back on; about these he was no longer so sure. The idea of inner resources seemed fatuous mysticism that morning. He had drugged and drunk too much, watched too many smoky reels of interior montage to command any inner resources. It was difficult enough to think straight.

As for work—after weeks of living on his nerves it would take nearly as much time of disciplined drying out before he could begin to face a job. And love—love was fled. Gone to London. The thought of her there and himself abandoned made his blood run cold. He put it out of his mind, as he had trained himself to do since Seattle. He would deal with it later, he would do something about it. When he was straightened out. A dream, he thought. That’s what we need.

He left the freeway at Sunset and parked in Marmont Lane behind the hotel. At the desk he bought the morning’s L.A.
Times
and
Variety.
He rode up to the sixth floor in the company of a famous German actor and two stoned young women.

The air in his apartment held a faint scent of stale alcohol and undone laundry. He opened the leaded bedroom windows to a tepid oily breeze. Below him were the swimming pool and the row of bungalows that flanked it. Dead leaves floated on the surface of the dark green water. The pool gardens smelled of car exhaust and eucalyptus.

This time it was not going to be easy to get straight. He would
have to go about it very skillfully. Above all he would have to want to. There would have to be a reason, and Walker knew that inquiry into his reasons for surviving would bring him into dangerous territory. The world in general, he had conceded at last, required neither him nor his works. His wife was gone—for good as far as he knew; his children were grown. He was going to have to pull out for his own reasons, alone and unrequired, in a hotel in West Hollywood. The taste of death and ruin rose in his throat again.

He decided not to think about it. In order to postpone thinking about it he opened his suitcase, took out the tubular talcum container that held his cocaine and tapped out a small mound of the stuff onto the smooth dark marble of his bedside lamp table. He did it up with the hundred-dollar bill. Fine, he thought. For the moment he had obviated motivation; he was the thing itself again. The thing itself shortly came to self-awareness in the kitchen pouring out a shot of vodka. Perplexed, Walker looked at the drink he had prepared. He sniffed, drew himself erect and emptied the glass into the sink drain. He had made a luncheon engagement with his agent and keeping the appointment was all he owned of purpose. He must at least postpone the next drink until lunch. A small gesture toward renewal, nothing ambitious.

Drinkless, he went into his living room, turned the television set on, turned it off again and began to pace the length of the room.

This is where we begin, he told himself. We reinvent ourself. We put one foot in front of the other and we go on.

In a moment he went back to the bedroom and did another line. Then he leaned back on the bed and stared through the balcony windows at the still surface of the pool five stories below.

From somewhere amid the damp greenery of the garden, a mockingbird was trilling away, sounding a little fife march. For a fraction of a second Walker was beguiled by a shard of memory, the tiniest part of an old dream. It was gone too quickly to be pinned down.

He got to his feet and went to stand at the window. The bird song came again, under the rush of traffic, stirring recall.

He had gone away from the balcony and was sitting on the bed with the telephone in his hand when the memory surfaced. He put the receiver down and turned to the window. The bird trilled again.

He was remembering Lu Anne Bourgeois, whom the greater world called Lee Verger. She had been half on his mind all the previous spring, but Seattle, the show and the dreadful events of the summer had swept everything away.

Years before, when he and Lu Anne were young and fearless, in the days of mind drugs and transfiguration, they had invented a game together for bad nights. In fact, it was not so much a game as a state of mind to be indulged and they had called it Bats or Birdies.

Bats or Birdies was played in the worst hours before dawn. Winning entailed holding your own until morning, making it through the night with your head intact to the moment when bird song announced the imminence of first light and day. That was Birdies. Losing was not making it through, losing your shit. Bats. Mockingbirds, with their untimely warbles at ungodly hours, upset the game, making you think that it was morning and you had won through when in fact you were still fast in the heart of night.

He thought of Lu Anne and his heart rose. She was pale. She had dark blue saintly eyes and a smile that quivered between high drollery and madness. Nine years before, she had been nominated for an Academy Award in a supporting role; her subsequent career, like Walker’s, had been disappointing.

Long ago, during their time together, Lu Anne had given him Kate Chopin’s novel
The Awakening.
Its setting was Louisiana in the late nineteenth century; Lu Anne was a Louisianan, Chopin’s book had been a favorite of hers. He had written a script, and every day of its writing she had been with him or in his expectation, so that when the principal character of Edna Pontellier was defined in scene and dialogue, Lu Anne inhabited it utterly. In those days they had dreamed of doing it together but it had not turned out that way.

Time passed. The book was discovered by academics and declared a feminist document. Lu Anne had acquired a new agent, who was
vigorous, female and literate. About a year and a half before Walker committed for the Seattle
Lear
, ten years after his last revision of the script and six since his last conversation with Lu Anne, a package had been put together.

A young director named Walter Drogue had been engaged.
The Awakening
would be Drogue’s fourth picture; he was generally accounted intelligent, original and aggressive. His father, also named Walter Drogue, was one of the industry’s living Buddhas. A director himself for almost fifty years, Drogue senior had been publicly caned, fired upon by sexual rivals, blacklisted, subpoenaed and biographied in French. The father’s name, it was felt, added luster to his son’s project, and the son’s price, like Walker’s and Lu Anne’s, was not immoderate.

A producer of some probity took the picture over. One of the majors was induced to finance and distribute. It was all perceived as prestigious, timely and cheap. There was a real possibility that the interests involved might find themselves in control of a well-made picture that would generate good reviews, awards and, with the right handling, a favorable profit line. A vestigial social impulse was being discharged. Somewhere, deep within the Funhouse, they had opted for a calculated risk.

After shooting most of the summer in New Orleans, the production had moved, for convenience and economy, to the Drogues’ favorite Baja location at Bahía Honda. The elder Drogue had been filming there for many years and had bought hotel property through a nominal Mexican owner. Thus he was able to serve as factor to his own productions.

As far as Walker was concerned, it was a little late. He had been asked down and declined. Probably, he thought, to their relief. There was also the matter of Lu Anne, his dark angel. They had survived their last outing but it had been close. They had survived because they were both young then and married and motivated and skilled survivors. It would not be the same now.

But stoned, abandoned, desolate—Walker found himself listening
to birdcalls and thinking of her. His heart beat faster. It had not been quite six years, he thought. She had kissed him casually. He imagined that he could recall her touch and when he did it was the woman he had known a decade before who presented herself to his recollection.

She was married again, to a doctor; she had children. His business now was to save himself and his own marriage, restore his equilibrium. What we need here is less craziness, he told himself, not more.

Then he thought: A dream is what I need. Fire, motion, risk. It was a delusion of the drug. The production’s location office number was in his black book. He found himself with his hand on the phone.

Yours in the ranks of death.

Trapped within some vertiginous silence, he dialed the far-off number. At the first ring he hung up in terror.

A few minutes later, it seemed to him that he was perfectly well again. When he picked up the telephone it was to confirm luncheon with his agent’s office.

At the agency, he got Shelley Pearce on the line. She was Al’s assistant, a Smithie who had gone through the Yale Rep some years after Lu Anne. She had been a student of Walker’s at an acting workshop; he had gotten her her first job, as a gofer on a production at U.A. He had introduced her to Al.

“Hello, Gordon,” Shelley said. She sounded glad to hear from him and he felt grateful.

“Where were you?” he said. “Every night I searched that sea of pale immobile faces. No Shelley.”