The Deer Park (22 page)

“Oh, was there a coronation?” Elena asked. Eitel could have throttled her.

“You know the princess is just fascinated by movie stars,” Nevins went on, and Eitel had to listen. Nevins had been here, he had been there, he had slept with a famous Italian actress.

“How is she?” asked Eitel with a smile.

“There’s nothing fake about her. She’s beautiful, intelligent, alive. One of the wittiest women I ever met. And in the hay, oh, man, she’s genuine.”

“I think it’s terrible how men talk about women,” Elena offered, and by an effort Eitel kept himself from saying, “Don’t feel obliged to join every conversation.”

Minutes went by and Nevins continued to talk. He had had a most marvelous twelve months. It was the best period of his life, he would admit. There had been so many people he had met, so many fantastic experiences he had had; there was the night he got drunk with a distinguished old boy from the House of Lords, the week he spent with the highly placed American statesman who wanted Nevins’ advice on the delivery of his speeches; all in all it had been a diverting year. “You ought to get to Europe, Charley. Everything’s happening over there.”

“Yes,” said Eitel.

“I hear you expect big things from this movie you’re on.”

“Little things,” Eitel said.

“It’s going to be marvelous,” Elena said in a dogged voice.

Nevins glanced at her. “Oh, I’m sure,” he said. It chafed Eitel to see how Nevins looked at Elena. He was polite and rarely talked to her. Nevins seemed to be saying, “Why do you have
to go to such lengths, old man? There are all those amazing women in Europe.”

When he left, Eitel walked him to his car. “Oh, by the way,” Nevins said, “don’t mention I was here. You know what I mean.”

“How long are you going to be in town?”

“A couple of days only. That’s the worst of it. I’m very busy. I guess you are, too.”

“The script will have me working.”

“I know.” They shook hands. “Well,” said Nevins, “give my regards to your lady, what is her name again?”

“Elena.”

“Very nice girl. Give me a ring and maybe we can find the right sort of place to have lunch.”

“Or ring me.”

“Of course.”

After Nevins had driven away, Eitel hated to go back in the house. He was met by Elena in a tantrum. “If you want to go to Europe, you can go right now,” she said in a loud voice. “Don’t think I’m holding you back.”

“How you talk. At the moment I can’t even get a passport.”

“Oh, so that’s it. If you could get a passport, you’d take off in five minutes, and tell me to kiss your ass.”

“Elena,” he said quietly, “please don’t shriek like a fishwife.”

“I knew it,” she said between her sobs. “It was just a question of time, just waiting for the trigger to explode.”

He could be distantly irritated by her use of metaphor. “All right, what are you so upset about?” he said in a weary voice.

“I hate your friend.”

“He’s not worth hating,” Eitel said.

“Only you think he’s better than you are.”

“Now, don’t be ridiculous.”

“You do. That’s what’s so awful. You call me a fishwife cause you can’t screw a princess the way he did.”

“He didn’t screw a princess. It was just an actress.”

“You’d like to be over in Europe right now. You’d like to be rid of me.”

“Stop it, Elena.”

“You stay with me cause I’m somebody you can feel superior to. That’s how you get your opinion of yourself. By what other people think of you.”

“I love you, Elena,” Eitel said.

She did not believe him, and all the while he comforted her, all the while he said that a thousand Nelson Nevinses were not so important to him as even one unhappiness for her, he hated himself that it was not true, hated the pang of jealousy, call it more properly the envy he felt that he was being forgotten, and men who had been his assistants went to coronations and slept with women who were more famous than any he had known in a long time. “Will I never grow up?” he asked himself in despair.

It was such bad luck. For the first time in several weeks, he was in a serious depression, and over and over he would complain to himself, “Did Nevins have to come today? Just when I was ready to begin?” All that evening he studied Elena, studied her critically, and when she could feel his attention on her, she would look up and ask, “Is anything the matter, Charley?” He would shake his head, he would murmur, “Nothing’s the matter. You look beautiful,” and all the time he would be telling himself that she was such poor material, she had such a distance to go. He knew by a dozen signs she gave that she was inviting him to make love again tonight, and he dreaded it a little and proved to be right, for afterward he found himself more depressed. It was the first time Elena had failed for him, and yet it was at that moment she said, “Oh, Charley, when you make love to me, everything is all right again.” And with eyes that longed for the safety of innocence, she asked him timidly, “Is it really the same for you?”

“Why more than ever,” he was obliged to say, and so with quiet and private defeat upon defeat, his mood turned on him still again and he felt lonely indeed.

Next day, by an act of will, he set to work. It was the third time he had started this script in fifteen months, not to mention the half-dozen occasions over the last ten years, and he was hoping that he was finally ready for the task. He had spent so many years thinking about this story, and in the last weeks at Desert D’Or since he had been living with Elena, he had outlined every scene, he knew exactly what he wished to do. Yet as he worked, he found that he kept seeing his movie as someone like Nelson Nevins might see it. No matter how he tried, and there were days when he drove himself into exhaustion, sitting before his desk twelve and fourteen hours, the work would always turn into something shoddy or something contrived, into something dull, into something false. Afterward, tired and irritable, he would lie inertly beside Elena, or rouse himself long enough to take her perfunctorily, no more he often thought than a quick coup to stun his brain.

Certain nights with his desire to understand himself, he would draw even more deeply from his depleted energy, he would gamble for knowledge by taking several cups of coffee and drugging them with sleeping pills, until like a cave explorer he would be able to wander into himself, the thread of his escape a bottle of whisky, for with the liquor he could always return when what he learned about himself became too large, too complex, too directly dangerous. And next day he would lie around, dumbed by the drugs. “I even compete with the analysts,” Eitel would think, “how competitive I am.” and feel that no one could help him but himself. For the answer was simple, he knew the answer. This movie of his was dangerous, he had so many enemies, they were real enemies—no analyst could banish them. Had he been so naïve as to think he could make his movie while men like Herman Teppis sat by and applauded? He needed energy for it, and courage, and all the wise tricks he had learned in twenty years of handling the people who worked for him, and to do that, to do all of that, perhaps a young man was needed, someone so strong and simple as to believe the world was
there for him to change it. With rage he would think of all the people he had known through the years, and their contempt for the film. Oh, the film was a contemptuous art to be sure, a fifteenth-century Italian art where to do one’s work, one had to know how to flatter princes and lick the toes of
condottieri
, and play one’s plots and intrigue one’s intrigues, and say one’s little dangerous thing, and somehow delude them all, exaggerate one’s compromises and hide one’s statement until if one were good enough, one could get away with it, and five centuries later, safe in a museum, the tourists would go by and say obediently, “What a great artist! What a fine man he must have been! Look at the mean faces of those aristocrats!”

No, the work would not go well, and the more he tried to exercise his will, the less the story would return him. Each day, despite himself, he would find that he was weighing the consequences of every line, thinking of all the censors in all the world, and so he could not get rid of the technique he had spent fifteen years in learning. He could only work in that technique, choosing a bag of tricks one day, floundering in a bog of blunders for the next. During three weeks Eitel spent all his energy on the script and in certain ways they were the worst three weeks of his life. They seemed more than a year, because all his experience told him that the script was very bad: the little surprises, the bonuses, the unexpected developments of plot and character were simply not coming to him, and he had been so certain his work would go well. Somehow he had never believed that this script would be beyond his courage, no more than a boy expects his future to be made of defeat and failure.

One way or another he had had the idea that this picture was going to be his justification. Back perhaps so far as the Spanish Civil War, certainly through all of the cocktail parties and the jeep rides and the requisitioned castles which had been the Second World War to him (excepting that visit to a concentration camp which had terrified him deeply because it matched
so exactly his growing conviction that civilization was capable of any barbarity provided only that it be authoritative and organized), along all of that uneven trip from one beautiful woman to another, there had been the luxury of looking at his life as wine he decanted in a glass, studying the color, admiring the corruption, leaving for himself the secret taste: he was above all this, he was better than the others, he was more honest, and one day he would take his life and transmute it into something harder than a gem and as imperishable, an art work. Had he been afraid to try, he would think, for the fear that his superiority did not exist? The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful. So, in brooding over his past, he came to remember the unadmitted pleasure of making commercial pictures. With them he had done well, for a while at least, despite all pretenses that he had been disgusted, and looking back upon such emotions, concealed so long from himself, Eitel felt with dull pain that he should have realized he would never be the artist he had always expected, for if there were one quality beyond all others in an artist, it was the sense of shame, of sickness, and of loathing for any work which was not his best.

Yet he knew his situation was a little unreal to him. That was true of all his life, all of it was unreal to him. Could there possibly have been a time when he had been so young as to break his nose trying out for the college football squad because he wished to demonstrate to himself he was not a coward? Had there been that other time in Spain when he had volunteered as a rifleman, and for three disastrous weeks had lived in a shelled village on the bank of a river with an exhausted Anarchist brigade, discovering that he was braver than he thought, for he had held himself together even after the front had collapsed, and it had been necessary to make a sad escape across the Pyrenees into France. Where had it all gone, the good along
with the bad? It was not true, he would think, that as one grew older the past grew clearer. The past was a cancer, destroying memory, destroying the present, until emotion was eroded and the events in which one found oneself were always in danger of being as dead as the past.

Still, the time had come to face himself, to take account, and go on into new work. Only Eitel could not think of other work to do. Most remarkable cancer! It not only erased the past and stunned the present but it ate into the future before he could create it. So for days after he stopped believing in his script, he continued to work at it, carrying a quiet depression to dull his work and even his effort and move him from one day into the next.

Under such a burden, he was growing critical of Elena’s faults. He would wince as he watched her eat, for she waved her fork, her mouth often full as she spoke. He had tried to correct her. She would listen with sullen eyes these days, she would promise to try, and with her stubborn insight would never learn at all, as if she were saying to him, “If you really loved me, I would learn everything.”

It was maddening to him. Didn’t she realize how much he wanted her to learn, did she desire no more than that the son of the junk dealer marry the daughter of the candy store keeper? His parents were dead now, but there had been years when he was young and had to fight his battles against them, against the bonds of his mother’s love and the force of his father’s contempt that he had a son who wasted time in the theater and was supported by his wife. So, all the while, he would suffer at her clumsiness.

Since he had been in Desert D’Or, particularly since the party at the Laguna Room, the number of people who sent him invitations had become fewer and fewer. Socially, his life was now all but empty, and he found Elena and himself restricted to a small group whom he called the
émigrés
. They were writers and directors and actors and even a producer or two who had
refused, as he had refused, to co-operate with the Subversive Committee. Years ago many of them had bought winter homes in Desert D’Or, and like Eitel they had come here now for refuge. The social life he was obliged to share with them, since they were invited nowhere else in Desert D’Or, was hardly satisfying to him, however, and he hated the thought of being classed with the
émigrés
.

Elena liked them no better. “Boy, are they pompous,” she said to him once.

“You’re right on the nose,” he smiled.

“Pompous men are always full of self-pity.” she added now that he had encouraged her.

Eitel agreed. Most of the
émigrés
he found dull, one or two were pleasant, but as a group they bored him. Eitel was always bored by people who could enter a discussion only so far, and then could go no farther, because to continue would mean that they would have to give up something they had decided in advance they would continue to believe in. Besides, he knew them so well; even years ago they had bored him when he had belonged to their committees. And these days he found them so eager to believe he was a great artist who refused to compromise with the vultures—exactly the modest picture they had of themselves.