The Deer Park (21 page)

Woman’s vanity. He wanted to crush it like a roach, and was wistful he had taken too much tea. When he was on tea it was impossible to make love, his body was numb. A pity, because it would have been exactly right to burn into her brain the seed of what she had never possessed: one grain of honesty. She had never loved Eitel, Eitel had never loved her, not for thirty seconds. No one ever loved anyone except for the rare bird, and the rare bird loved an idea or an idiot child. What people could have instead was honesty, and he would give them honesty, he would stuff it down their throats.

It occurred to him that he had missed a perfect chance with Bobby. What he should have done, what he had never thought of doing, was to ask her to stay. There was a business she claimed was loathsome, and he could have kept her at it for ten or twenty minutes while nothing happened, nothing at all. Why hadn’t he thought of that sooner? and knew it was his pride that held him back. There was the danger of Bobby talking.

Suddenly, he decided to be without pride. He could do it. He could be impregnable if sex was of disinterest to him and that was how to be superior to everybody else. That was the secret to life. It was all upside down, and you had to turn life on its head to see it straight. The more he thought of what he could have done with Bobby, the more frustrated he became. There was still time to call her, he could call her back, he smiled at the idea of the baby sitter who would be hired for the third time.

Yet, thinking of the lesson he should have given Bobby, he found to his surprise that no matter the marijuana, he was no longer numb, and so it was now ridiculous to phone her, he would only teach the opposite; Bobby would decide she loved him instead. Faye didn’t know if he wanted to smash his fist through a wall or burst out laughing.

“Hey, Marty, how you doing, kid?” a voice said.

He realized he was standing in the middle of the floor with his eyes closed, his fists pushed with all their force into the pockets of his dressing gown. “Well, Paco, what do you say?” Faye asked quietly.

“I’m flying, Marty, I’m flying.” Paco looked at him like a foundling come out of the storm, a skinny Mexican boy of twenty or twenty-one with a long face and large eyes. They were feverish now, and Marion knew why he had come. Paco needed a fix. He strutted, he was jaunty, he waved his hands, he was holding himself together by the most intense effort of will.

“You know what I was thinking,” Paco went on in the same bright voice, “I haven’t seen Marty in a while, tail-hound Marty, the kid who helps out a kid.…”

“What are you doing down here?” He knew Paco from the capital; there had been a time when he went around with the club to which Paco belonged.

“Here? Here? I been here a day. This town is for birds.”

“It’s a town,” Faye said.

Paco had been the sad one in the club. He was worth nothing in a fight, he was funny-looking, he was a natural to play patsy and punk. Still, nobody bothered him for he was considered a little crazy. That was the thing about Paco. He was the only one in the club who would do things no one else would ever think to do. Once he picked up a scissors and stabbed the club leader because the club leader had been talking about Paco’s sister.

Marion had not seen him in a long time. Paco had been picked up in a robbery and had lived a term in state prison. The fact he dropped in like this after an absence of two years did not startle Faye. Such things were always happening to him.

“I hear you’re peddling gash,” said Paco, “you got some gash for me?”

It was weird. Paco was neurotic, Faye thought, a pimply dreamy kid, begging for dough. In his family his mother hounded Paco, he used to call her dirty names; in the clubhouse he would lie around for hours reading comic books; once he announced he wanted to go to the South Seas. Even at the age of seventeen, tears came into his eyes at a harsh word. And now he was a junkie, and he needed a fix. Sudden compassion for Paco burned Faye’s eyelids. The poor slob of a
pachuco
.

“You’re on horse, aren’t you?” Faye asked.

“Marty, I kicked the habit, so help me, but I’m sick now, this boy’s sick, it’s part of the cure, I need a little.” Paco
beamed. “Fifty bucks, Marty, and I got enough for a week. I sail, and then I kick the habit.” When Faye didn’t answer immediately, Paco went on. “Twenty-five, that holds me. Marty, I got to get out of this town. It disgusts me. I’ll go nuts here.”

He could give him a hundred, and then Faye caught himself thinking of the pistol he kept in his bureau drawer, and the automatic in the glove compartment of his car. From the judge Faye could never escape, there came the decision: “Give him nothing at all.” His compassion was not pure; he was a little afraid of Paco. Even of Paco! he told himself.

“No,” Faye said, “no loan.”

“Ten bucks. I need a fix. Marty!”

“
Nada
.”

“Five bucks. Jesus God.” Paco had begun to come apart. He sweated abominably and his poor sad pimply face was unbelievably ugly. In another minute he might faint or throw up.

Faye was almost sick with pain and excitement. He fought his compassion with the fury of a man looking for purity. “Get out, Paco,” he said gently.

Paco sat down on the floor. He looked as if he were ready to chew on the rug, and from what seemed an infinite distance, Faye remembered Teddy Pope and the Joshua tree, and thought with a pang that to make it, maybe one had to be a slob and suffer like Pope or Paco. Was that why he had tried to get on main-line? So that he could crawl on his hands and feet and bark like a dog?

“
Chinga tu madre
,” Paco was singing at him.

He had to get the
pachuco
out of here. But where? There was only the police station. Faye shrugged. A month from now, two months from now, it was possible he could be beaten up by Paco’s friends for leaving a junkie with cops. Of course, he paid the police protection, they could handle it quietly. But the police themselves would give Paco a fix, they would have to. They would send him to the county farm of the capital all fixed up. So, no matter what, Paco would get his horse.

For an instant Faye thought of killing him. Only that was killing a zero, and if he were to kill somebody there should be a score. However, he had to do something with Paco. But what? He could take him in his car and leave him on the road. People would find him, they would drop him at a hospital, they would fix him there. Whichever way he considered it, Paco was going to get his fix.

Now, Paco was threatening to kill him. Only a junkie would tell you he would kill you while he lay flat on his face.

“Why don’t you knock over a store?” Faye said.

“What store?” said Paco hoarsely.

“You don’t think I’m going to have it on record that I told you the store?”

This thought revived Paco. If he robbed a store there was money, and with money there was horse. So Paco got to his feet and staggered to the door. Possibly he could hold himself together for another hour. In his own body, Faye felt how Paco’s head was bursting.

“I’ll kill you soon, Marty,” Paco said from the door with his swollen tongue and his aching mouth.

“Come around and we’ll have a drink,” said Faye.

Once the sound of Paco’s footsteps had disappeared down the sidewalk of the empty street with its modern homes and its cement-brick fence, Faye went into the bedroom and put on a jacket. He felt as if he were close to bursting. There was no pressure in all the world like the effort to beat off compassion. Faye knew all about compassion. It was the worst of the vices; he had learned that a long time ago. When he was seventeen, he had spent a day out of curiosity begging money on the street. There had been nothing to it; the only trick was to look people in the eye and then they could never turn you down. That was why bums made so little; they couldn’t look people in the eye. But he could, he had stared into a hundred faces, and ninety had blanched their little bit and given him back some silver. It was fear, it was guilt; once you knew that
guilt was the cement of the world, there was nothing to it; you could own the world or spit at it. But first you had to get rid of your own guilt, and to do that you had to kill compassion. Compassion was the queen to guilt. So screw Paco, and Faye burned for that sad pimply slob.

It was impossible to sleep. Instead, he went to the garage, got into his little foreign car, and raced it down the street, cashing a tight smile at the thought of how he might be waking people. To the east, ten miles perhaps, there was a small rise; it was nothing, but on all those roads which were laid in lines across the mesa of the desert it was the only one which had a view. There was a dirt track over the mountains, but he could never reach that summit in time. The dawn would be coming very soon and he wanted to see it and look into the east. There was Mecca. Faye raced his car until its light chassis quivered like a bird whose wings are clipped, giving all of himself to the task, looking for the peace which comes from curious contests, the ice-cream-eating derby, the public-speaker’s symposium, the apple-polisher’s jubilee.

He made the rise in time to see the sun lift out of the table of the east, and he stared into that direction, far far out, a hundred miles he hoped. Somewhere in the distance across the state line was one of the great gambling cities of the Southwest, and Faye remembered a time he gambled around the clock, not even pausing at dawn when a great white light, no more than a shadow of the original blast somewhere further in the desert, had dazzled the gaming rooms and lit with an illumination colder than the neon tube above the green roulette cloth the harsh dead faces of the gamblers who had worn their way through the night.

Even now, there were factories out there, out somewhere in the desert, and the tons of ore in all the freight cars were being shuttled into the great mouth, and the factory labored, it labored like a gambler for twenty-four hours of the day, reducing the mountain of earth to a cup of destruction, and it
was even possible that at this moment soldiers were filing into trenches a few miles from a loaded tower, and there they would wait, cowering in the dawn, while army officers explained their purpose in the words of newspaper stories, for the words belonged to the slobs, and the slobs hid the world with words.

So let it come, Faye thought, let this explosion come, and then another, and all the others, until the Sun God burned the earth. Let it come, he thought, looking into the east at Mecca where the bombs ticked while he stood on a tiny rise of ground trying to see one hundred, two hundred, three hundred miles across the desert. Let it come, Faye begged, like a man praying for rain, let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink, let it come for all of everywhere, just so it comes and the world stands clear in the white dead dawn.

E
ITEL
did not go to sleep after the telephone call from Marion Faye. Elena had stirred just long enough to ask who was on the phone, and when he gave the answer Faye had been considerate to provide—that it was a tip on a horse, no more, no less—Elena grumbled drowsily, “Well, they have some nerve. My God, at this hour,” and fell back to sleep. In the morning she would not remember, he knew, for she often had such conversations in the dark.

So it was hardly the fear of Elena learning about Bobby which kept Eitel awake now. Still, the longer he thought about it the more convinced he became that Bobby must have been with Marion while they talked. He knew Faye; Faye would not have called otherwise, and Eitel thinking of how he had groaned, “Oh, God, never!” was sick at the thought Bobby might have overheard. In a day or two he could have paid the girl a visit, he would have known how to tell her that he would not see her again. He could even have left a present, not five hundred dollars this time, but something.

Abruptly, Eitel decided that he must have been out of his mind. After all these months of trying to remember that he was not rich any more, he had seen fit to throw away five hundred dollars on a ridiculous, sentimental, and sickly impulse, and thinking of that, Eitel knew no matter how long he lay in bed, the next day was ruined for work. Pressed next to Elena, trying to soothe himself by the warmth of her body, his memory, like a battered drunk at the end of a spree, groped over the events of the last six weeks.

Was it just so short a time ago that he had started work on his movie script? He had been in the state of mind of the gambler who puts all he owns on a single bet, so desperate to win that he comes to believe the longer the odds against him the better his chance. Yet, now, remembering that confidence, he thought that he had not had such very good luck. Finally, it was his own fault, finally it was always one’s own fault, at least by Eitel’s standards, but still things could have gone a little better. Six weeks ago, just the day before he was ready to begin writing, the world did not necessarily have to come knocking on his door, he did not have to be paid an unexpected visit.

Yet the world had come. It came in the shape of a man named Nelson Nevins who had worked as Eitel’s assistant for several years, and now had his own reputation as a director. Eitel despised Nevins’ work; it was tricky, dishonest, and with pretensions to art—in short all the blemishes he found in so much of his own work. What irritated him most about the visit was that Nevins had come to gloat.

Eitel and Elena spent an hour with him. Nevins had been in Europe for a year, he had made a picture there, it was the best he had ever done he assured Eitel. “Teppis cried when he saw it,” Nevins said. “Can you believe that? I didn’t believe it myself.”

“I never used to believe it when Teppis would cry over my pictures,” Eitel said languidly, “and I was right. He calls them degenerate now.”

“Oh, I know,” Nevins said. “He always cries. But that’s not what I mean. He really cried. You can’t fool yourself on something like that.” Nevins was plump, he wore a gray flannel suit and a knit tie. He smelled of expensive toilet water and his nails were manicured. “You should have been over in Europe, Charley. What a place. The week before the Coronation was fabulous.”