Children of Light (22 page)

“Was he real mad?” Lu Anne asked.

“Yes, he was,” Bly said.

“He broke a pot, didn’t he?”

“Probably just knocked it over. Climbin’ down.”

“Honestly, Pig, I’d do it for you. I’ll make it up to you. You know there’s always a day and there’s always a way.”

“Just so you know, Lu Anne. It’s the same as if …”

“Pig,” she said earnestly, “I realize that, you know. I’m not so insensitive. Gosh, I hope you were … like … done.”

Bly shrugged. He was standing by the mirror taking his shirt off, checking his pecs.

“I never really feel done,” he said.

He was a serious man and not given to humor. It was Lu Anne’s delight to make him laugh. She rushed to him.

“I’m so happy now,” she said, “and I was so scared before.” On the counter she saw a cluster of amyl nitrate caps. She went over and stirred them affectionately with her forefinger as though they were a litter of pet mice.

“You want a Quaalude?” Bly asked.

“I can’t think of anything nicer,” she said brightly.

Bly’s tanned face reddened, he pursed his lips. It took Lu Anne a moment to realize that he was laughing. She hugged him.

“You smell so nice,” she said.

As he went into the bathroom for some Quaaludes, she realized that in the moment of their embrace she had felt him tense very slightly and that the moment of resistance to her body’s pressure constituted a discreet discouragement of any notions she might be cultivating
of fun and games. It would not have been unconscious. Bly was as free of involuntary physical responses as a person could be.

They lay down on the unmade bed together and had their Quaaludes with ice water from a pitcher that sat on a silver salver on the floor.

“I could give that boy some money,” Lu Anne suggested. “I feel so bad about it.”

“He don’t want money. You know,” Bly added after a moment, “we get the wrong idea. Lots of these Mexican people—they don’t want money.”

“Forgive me,” she said.

“No problem. This time.”

The room was chill with air conditioning and the windows were closed. No breezes came from the mountainside. She snuggled next to Bly, put her hands on his muscular shoulders, then guiltily withdrew them.

“You know how it gets.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Now don’t think I have it mixed up, Pig. I mean, I always understood that you and me was a one-time thing. It wasn’t going to go on and all. Because of how we both were.”

“One of them bells,” Bill said, “that now and then rings.”

“How nice Quaaludes are,” she said. “The world is possible with art.”

He turned over, looked at her eyes and lay back on his pillow.

“What’d you tell Drogue about me?” she asked him. “You tell him I was O.K.?”

“You are as far as he’s concerned, Lu Anne. He doesn’t care how you really are. He’s just worried about his ass. Like Charlie’s worried about budget and insurance and all that.”

“How do you think I really am?”

“I don’t know. I can’t always tell because I ain’t as smart as you.”

“I was a quiz kid, Pig. Did you know that?”

Bly yawned.

“Lu Anne,” he said, “if you was half the things you claim you been you’d have to be seventy-five years old.”

“I’m older than people think,” she said sadly.

“I mean,” Bly told her, “I don’t know why you lie. I don’t understand it. You’re a great star, what more do you want? What are you trying to prove?”

She bit her finger and looked at him. Billy Bly believed in never borrowing money to gamble with, that it cost a fortune to erase tattoos, in reincarnation and in Great Stars. The Greater they were, he believed, the easier they were to get on with. Lu Anne was hot really a Great Star in Bly’s order of precedence but he afforded her an honorary inclusion.

“I want you to tell me location stories,” she said. “Then I’ll tell you some.”

Bill Bly loved location stories about high-rolling, monster fuck-ups and partying with Great Stars. He loved show business stories of all sorts. So did Lu Anne. Who didn’t?

“Hell,” Bly told her, “I told you all my good location stories a couple of times.”

It was a stylized demurrer. He told her about the Western director, mortally behind in a heavy poker game, who had heaved the once-in-a-lifetime pot into a bunkhouse fireplace. About the actor who had started shooting lights out from his Vegas hotel room. About misassignations, absurd love affairs, fights, comedians and local good-wives. Suits of armor pissed in, motel rooms filled with dirigible-sized polka-dotted water bags, child actors poisoned, chimpanzees released.

Lu Anne told Bill about Werner, the stunt bunny. The concept of Werner evoked his silent laughter.

“We had a stunt mule one time in Durango,” Bill said. “We had to pull his legs out from under him every time he got shot.”

“Werner was a European hare,” Lu Anne told Bill. “He was always wonderfully dressed and he had perfect manners. We met him at the airport and showed him his fall. It was down the south face of the Jungfrau. He looked that old mountain up and down. ‘Zo,’ he says.
‘Ach, zo.’ You’d a been scared, Pig. We said, ‘Can we get you anything, Werner?’ ‘Chust show me my marks,’ said Werner.”

Bly laughed again, his eyes closed. Lu Anne made a little man with her fingers and walked them along Bill’s chest.

“Werner had the nicest luggage you ever did see,” she told Bly. “He knew how to fold his napkin. You could take him anywhere. You could take him to Le Cirque.”

“Where the fuck’s that?”

She fingered a circle on his chest.

“Ever turn a trick, Pig?”

The sleepy smile on his face vanished. He opened his eyes but did not look at her.

“I guess you know the way I come up, Lu Anne. I guess you know the answer to that.”

“I’m sorry,” Lu Anne said, and shivered. “I was thinking about something. I was wondering about something. Hey, Pig, could I have another half a Quaalude?”

Bly stirred himself and put his feet on the floor.

“How come you asked me that?”

“I wanted to hear about it.”

“Well, it’s ugly as catshit,” he said. “It’s dirty and scary. It smells. Sometimes you dig it. You know yourself there’s plenty of people around here can tell you more about it than me.”

He staggered as he walked and turned on her.

“I mean,” he asked in a foggy voice, “you want to hear about the men’s room in the Albuquerque bus station? What you wanna hear?”

“I’m sorry, Pig.”

He brought her her half pill and she took it and he climbed into bed with her. They both got under a decorative Mexican quilt to shelter from the air conditioning.

“I did once,” Lu Anne said. “In New Haven. After the show. It was winter. We were doing
As You Like It.
I played Rosalind.”

“You told me a thousand times about that night, Lu Anne, and you never told me that. I think that’s foolishness.”

“No,” she said. “No, it’s true. A man offered me two thousand dollars. He was a depraved Shakespeare scholar. He would stop at nothing to have me and I suspect he was a Jesuit. ‘Top it off with harlotry,’ he said, ‘you’ll feel like a million and you’ll make an old man very happy.’ ”

“Bullshit, man,” Bly murmured. His eyes, half open, stared into his pillow.

“He took me down Stoddard Street,” Lu Anne told Bill. “The cast was holding one of those Communist-inspired parties we used to have in those days with drugs and promiscuity but I didn’t stay for it. I snuck right out of that green room. I was wearing my fake rat fur coat and he took me down Stoddard Street. I remember the Valle’s steak house with all the red snowflakes. He said, ‘It’s Ganymede I’m after’—I said no foolin’? Because they always are, I assure you. I mean, he wasn’t telling me a thing I didn’t know myself.”

“So,” Bly struggled to ask, “did he buy you a steak?”

“He took me to a house on a hill. Greek revival. It belonged to another century. The furnishings were exquisite and all the walls were glass. Old glass. From every room you could see all the others, you could see rainbows and tropical fish, everything crystal, Pig, and firelight in the mirrors and outside the glass walls the red snow was falling. In every room there were little glass bells, they shined and they tinkled. Of all the rooms, Pig, there was one into which a body could not see. And do you know why that was?”

“Well, sure,” Bly said. His eyes closed. “Why?” he asked.

“Because it was curtained off in furs. And that was where we went. And the man said, ‘You are the finest Rosalind that ever was, my dear child.’ He says, ‘I’ve traveled the world,’ he says, ‘I’ve seen them all, Stratford and the Aldwych, forget ’em all,’ he says. ‘Your voice is dulcet and you know your blocking and your moves are neat.’ ”

Bly roused himself slightly. “Hot shit for you, Lu Anne. Did he give you two thou?”

“Better,” Lu Anne said. Bly smiled and she stroked his neck.

“Better than two? Three?”

“Better,” she whispered. His eyes closed but the happy smile lit his lean face.

She leaned her head on his shoulder. Great silly Quaalude tears like Disney raindrops were rolling down her cheeks.

“If you can hustle, Billy,” she whispered to Bly, “you don’t have to go home. You need never. You can’t ever.

“Pig?” she asked. “You hear my little ’lude poem, home?”

His smile had drained away into sleep. It looked to her like dying. “You get to have a few laughs,” she told the aging boy asleep beside her, “but your head will fucking kill you.”

E
arly the next morning, Walker was treading water in the lukewarm Pacific. He felt less driven after his sedated sleep. His face was turned toward the beach and the dry mountains that rose above the coastal cliffs. The peaks outlined against the morning sky formed a contrast of surfaces so pure and unambiguous that it was literally joy to behold. As he basked in the day’s matutinal innocence, his hangover salved with cocaine, he became aware of a disharmony. On the beach itself, still half in shadow, he saw a small man in the resort’s livery struggling with a second man twice his size. Walker set out toward shore and as he swam he recalled Joy McIntyre’s story of rained-out romance. Two animals fighting on the beach.

He picked up his towel, threw it over his shoulders and walked toward the scene of conflict. Winkles.

One of the hotel’s bellmen was attempting to bring a drunken man to consciousness by standing him upright. Having attempted several mechanical strategies to accomplish this, he had fallen back on the old heave-ho and was pulling on the man’s arm.

“You’ll dislocate his shoulder,” Walker told the bellman. Together
they took the drunken man by his underarms and balanced him on his heels. Walker saw that it was Dongan Lowndes.

“I never seen him,” the bellman said. “I don’t think he’s from the movies.”

Walker saw Jon Axelrod descending a coral stairway toward the beach. A black-haired girl of singular beauty whom Walker had never seen before stood watching from the lowest turreted landing, a princess in a tower.

“Lookit the fucking guy,” Axelrod said. “Mr. Class. His first drink in three years, he says. Then has about twenty of them.”

“In the sun,” the bellman told them, “he can die.”

“Listen,” Axelrod told the servant, “this isn’t your job. Go get Mr. Bly—you know who I mean?”

The youth nodded.

Axelrod, gripping Lowndes by the one arm, took a loose bill from his pocket.

“Go get him. Wake him up if you have to.”

The bellman pocketed his bill and ran off up the stairway. As he passed the girl on the landing he paused to bow and smile deferentially before bolting on up the higher stairways.

“In the sun,” Axelrod said in imitation of the bellman, “he can die. Because he already fuckin’ dead. And he no make it home to his coffin.”

“What are you looking for?” Walker asked. “A weapon?”

“I wanna see if he’s wired. Some of these fucks, you say something dumb and they write it down. You sue them and next thing you find out they were wired. I’m gonna get Billy to go through his room for a video camera.”

“You think he’d do that?” Walker asked. “He’s the correspondent of
New York Arts
, not
Confidential.
”

“Some of these writers are the lowest scum that ever walked the earth,” Axelrod explained. He looked thoughtfully at Walker. “Then there’s some that are O.K.”

The smell of Lowndes’s sweating body was making Walker sick. He turned his face to the wind.

“Who’s the lady?” he asked Axelrod.

“That’s Helena,” Axelrod told him. “She’s our valued assistant. She’s going to show you around. Come down, doll,” he called up to Helena. “Help us hold up this guy.”

Helena descended the last flight of steps. She was blue-eyed and lightly freckled. The expression of condescending concern with which she regarded Lowndes made Walker feel like a zookeeper displaying a sick seal.

“Is he drunk?” Helena asked in the British interrogative.

“He’s in deep alpha state,” Axelrod said, “from trying to meditate with his clothes on. Helena, this is Gordon Walker.”

“Ah,” Helena said brightly.

Walker braced his legs to adjust his leverage on Lowndes and reached out to take her hand.

“Helena will show you around,” Axelrod told Walker. “She’s been wanting to meet you.”

“Oh,” Walker said. “Well.” He looked at the young woman to see if such a thing might be true and saw quickly that it was not.

“Your script is wonderful,” Helena said. “It’s going to be a marvelous film.”

Lowndes pulled himself free of their hold and immediately lost consciousness again. Walker and Axelrod just managed to catch him.

“You know what I think?” Axelrod said after a moment. “I think fuck this.” He let go of Lowndes and Walker did the same. The author collapsed in a heap at their feet.

“We should bury him in sand up to his neck,” Axelrod said, “as a warning to assholes.”

Bly came jogging along the beach toward them. When he saw Walker he drew up short and approached at his stealthy, carefully centered amble. He looked down at the crumpled form of Dongan Lowndes, then at Walker.

“Come on, Bill,” Axelrod told Bly, “let’s get this turkey on ice.”